Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 1).djvu/224

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BAYARD
BAYARD

dependence in Philadelphia. His firm, Hodge & Bayard, was engaged in furnishing arms to congress, and the privateer that took one of the first valuable prizes was fitted out by him and a friend. In September, 1 776, he was appointed a member of the council of safety by the constitutional convention, and was continued in that place by the assembly the following year. When three regiments of infantry were raised in Philadelphia in 1775, he was chosen colonel of the second. In the winter of 1776-'7 he was in the field. He was present at the battles of Brandywine, Germantown, and Princeton, and for his gallantry in the last action was personally complimented by Gen. Washington. On 18 March, 1777, Col. Bayard was appointed a member of the state board of war, and on 17 March was elected speaker of the house of assembly, to which office he was re-elected the year following. He removed his family for safety to a farm at Plymouth, on the Schuylkill, before the capture of Philadelphia by the British in September, 1777. When Princeton college was broken up, his son, James Asheton (b. 5 May, 1760; d. at sea in June, 1788), was arrested while returning home and committed to prison in Philadelphia, but was released as being a non-combatant. When a British detachment passed over the Schuylkill at Swede's Ford, they plundered Bayard's house at Plymouth. In 1780 Col. Bayard was appointed on a committee to inquire into the causes of the falling oflf in the revenue of the state. In 1781 he was a member of the supreme executive council, and in 1785 he was elected to the continental congress, then holding its sessions in New York. In 1780 he lost his wife, Margaret Hodge, and in 1781 married the widow of John Hodgson, of South Carolina. His second wife died suddenly in 1785, and two years later he married Johannah White, sister of Gen. Anthony W. White, of New Brunswick, N. J. In 1788, having retired from active business in Philadelphia, and having been compelled to part with his estate in Cecil co., Md., in consquence of his patriotic sacrifices during the war, he removed to New Brunswick, and built there a handsome house, in which he entertained many distinguished guests. In 1790 the citizens elected him mayor of New Brunswick. A few years later he was appointed presiding judge of the court of common pleas of Somerset co. He was interested with his friend Alexander Hamilton, Judge Patterson, his brother-in-law, and others, in a company organized in 1791 to manufacture cotton in Paterson, but it was dissolved in 1795. Col. Bayard was a firm federalist, with strong aristocratic predilections. Bancroft says that he was "a patriot of singular purity of character." See "Col. John Bayard and the Bavard Family of America," by Gen. Jas. Grant Wilson (New York, 1885).


BAYARD, Nicholas, colonial official, b. in Alphen, Holland, about 1644; d. in New York city in 1707. He accompanied his widowed mother, sister of Gov. Stuyvesant, to America, landing in New Amsterdam on 11 May, 1647. His father, Samuel Bayard, of Amsterdam, who died a wealthy merchant in that city, was the grandson of a Huguenot clergyman, Nicholas Bayard, who signed the articles of the Walloon synod in 1580, and fled from France to escape religious persecution. Mrs. Bayard, who was highly accomplished, practical, and energetic, instructed her three sons in the useful branches of education. The old Bayard mansion stood on the west side of the Bowery, and, with the surrounding premises, was. in 1798, con- verted by a Frenchman named Delacroix into a popular resort, known as "Vauxhall Garden." The Astor Library is built on a part of the estate, originally consisting of some two hundred acres. The only other residences within sight in pre-revolutionary days were the DeLancey home, on the west side of the Bowery, and the residences of the Stuyvesants, to the north. Not far distant rose "Bayard's Mount," or, as it was called after 1776, " Bunker's Hill," from the fortifications on its summit. It was the highest elevation near the city, and afforded an extensive prospect. In its neighborhood were also groves, the relics of what in Madame Bayard's time were known as Bayard's woods. The Dutch family Bible, a massive folio with clasp and corner-pieces brought from Holland, is in the possession of her descendent, Mrs. Jas. Grant Wilson, of New York. In 1664 Nicholas was appointed to the clerkship of the common council, and soon afterward he became private secretary to Gov. Stuyvesant, and received the additional appointment of surveyor of the province. On 28 May, 1666, he married Judith Verlet, who in 1662 had suffered imprisonment as a witch at the hands of the Puritans of Hartford, Conn., and whose brother was married to his mother, widow of Samuel Bayard. After the re-conquest of New York by the Dutch in 1673, Nicholas Bayard became secretary of the province. Under the second English regime, in 1685, when Dongan was governor. Bayard was mayor of New York and a member of the governor's council, and drew up the Dongan charter that was granted in that year. In 1688 he received, at the head of the regiment of militia of which he was colonel, the restored Gov. Andros. As one of the three resident members of the governor's council, and commander-in-chief of the militia of the province, he was the object of Leisler's hatred, and when the insurrection headed by the latter was in progress he fled to Albany to escape assassination. Returning to attend an only son on his sick-bed, he was arrested and thrown into prison. He was nominated, with Nicolls, a councillor of Gov.Sloughter, appointed by William III., and both were released upon the arrival of the new governor. When Lord Bellomont, who became governor in 1698, and several of the jn'ominent men of the colony, were suspected of complicity in the piracies of Capt. Kidd, Col. Bayard went to England to clear himself of the imputation. Accused by the Leisler faction of a scheme to introduce popery and slavery into New York, as well as of piracy, he was tried for high treason before Chief-Justice Atwood and sentenced to death ; but after the death of King William and the flight of the vindictive judge who had sentenced him, the proceedings were annulled by an order in council, and he was reinstated in his property and honors. A rare brochure, of which but two copies are known—one in the British Museum, the other included in the valuable Americana of Mrs. John Carter Brown, of Providence—was published in London in 1693. It is a "Journal of the Late Actions of the French at Canada," Col. Bayard and his friend Lieut.-Col. Charles Lodowick being the joint authors. The work was reprinted in New York in 1866.


BAYARD, Richard Henry, statesman, b. in Wilmington, Del., in 1796 ; d. in Philadelphia, Pa., 4 March, 1868. He was the eldest son of James A. Bayard, the federalist leader, was graduated at Princeton in 1814, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and practised in his native city. On 20 June, 1836, he entered the U. S. senate as a whig, having been elected to supply the vacancy caused by the resignation of Arnold Naudam. He served till September. 1839, when he resigned to accept the office of chief justice of Delaware, but was