st year of the presidency of George Washington. She was a
descendant from Robert Sedgwick, major-general under Cromwell, and
governor of Jamaica. Her father, Theodore Sedgwick, was a country boy,
born in 1746, upon a barren farm in one of the hill-towns of
Connecticut. Here the family opened a country store, then added a
tavern, and with the combined industries of farm, store and tavern,
Theodore, most fortunate of the sons if not the favorite, was sent to
Yale college, where he remained, until, in the last year of his
course, he managed to get himself expelled. He began the study of
theology, his daughter suggests, in a moment of contrition over
expulsion from college, but soon turned to the law for which he had
singular aptitude. He could not have gone far in his legal career
when, before the age of twenty-one, he married a beautiful girl whose
memory he always tenderly cherished, as well he might considering his
part in the tragedy of her early death. He had taken small pox, had
been duly quarantined and discharged but his young wife combed out the
tangles of his matted hair, caught the disease, and died, within a
year after marriage.

Marriage was necessary in those days, his daughter suggests, and the
year of conventional widowhood having expired, Mr. Sedgwick, then at
the age of twenty-three, married Miss Pamela Dwight, the mother of his
four sons, all successful lawyers, and his three daughters, all
exemplary women. The second Mrs. Sedgwick was presumably more
beautiful than the first; certainly she was more celebrated. She is
immortalized by her portrait in Griswold's "American Court," and by a
few complimentary lines in Mrs. Ellet's "Queens of American Society."

Theodore Sedgwick rose to distinction by his energies and talents but,
as we have seen, he was of sufficiently humble origin, which could not
have been greatly redeemed by expulsion from college; while at the age
of twenty-three, that must have been his chief exploit. Social lines
were very firmly drawn in that old colonial society, before the plough
of the Revolution went through it, and there was no more aristocratic
family than the Dwights, in Western Massachusetts.

Madame Quincy gives an account of a visit, in her girlhood, paid to
the mother of Miss Pamela, Madame Dwight, in her "mansion-house," and
says that her husband, Brig.-Gen. Joseph Dwight, was "one of the
leading men of Massachusetts in his day." Madame Dwight was presumably
not inferi