Three Rivers
Hudson~Mohawk~Schoharie
History From America's Most Famous Valleys
ORDERLY BOOKS of
The Fourth New York Regiment 1778-1780
The Second New York Regiment, 1780-1783
by Samuel
Tallmadge and Others
with Diaries of Samuel Tallmadge, 1780-1782 and John Barr, 1779-1782
Prepared for publication by Almon W. Lauber PH.D. of The division of Archives
and History
Albany, The University of the State of New York, 1932.
INTRODUCTION
SKETCH OF LIFE OF CAPTAIN SAMUEL TALLMADGE
THE TALLMADGE FAMILY
Page 5
In the year 1630 Robert Tallmadge emigrated from Old England to New England and became one of the earliest inhabitants of the colony of New Haven. In 1648 he married Sarah Nash, and after her death in 1658 he was united in matrimony a second time to Margery Baker. To the first union were born six children of whom the fourth, J ohn Tallmadge (b. 1654; d. 1690), continued the line to which the writer of most of these Orderly Books belonged. John's son, James Tallmadge (b. 1689; d. 1728), was the grandfather of Samuel Tallmadge.(1)
Among the eight children of Captain James Tallmadge was Benjamin Tallmadge. who was born in 1725 in New Haven, Conn. After having been graduated from Yale College in 1747 he served as a teacher a few years, then studied theology, and in 1750 was licensed as a Congregational minister. The same year he married as his first wife Susannah Smith(2) of White Plains, N. Y., and located in Rye township, Westchester county, N. Y. During the winter of 1751-52 he preached in Stratfield parish (later Bridgeport), Conn., but resigned in April. The next month he was invited to the pastorate of the Presbyterian Church in Setauket, town of Brookhaven. Long Island, and accepted the call. He was ordained there on October 23, 1754 as minister at large.(3) The sermons delivered on that occasion by the Rev. Ebenezer Prime and the Rev. Samuel Buell, both Yale graduates, were printed.*
For 33 years (1752-85) he served the church of Setauket as pastor supplementing his meager salary by tutoring private pupils for college. He was the father of five sons: William (b. Oct. 17, 1752; d. 1776); Benjamin (b. Feb. 25. 1754; d. Mar. 7. 1835); Samuel (b. Nov. 23. 1755; d. Apr. 1, 1825); John (b. Sept. 19. 1757; d. Feb. 24. 1823); and Isaac
(1) See Arthur White Talmadge, The Talmadge,
Tallmadge and Talmage Genealogy.
(2) Her uncle was the eminent Judge William Smith of the Province of New York.
See a sketch
of his life in Yale Biographies and Annals, v. II.
(3) Memoir of Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, p. 5 gives the date 1753.
(4) Mary Tallmadge Root, History of the Tallmadge Family. (Unpublished
manuscript in State Historian's Office, Albany, N. Y.)
(b. Feb. 25, 1762; d. in infancy). 5 After the death of his wife, April 21. 1768, he married for his second wife Zipporah Strong, of Oakwood, near Setauket, on January 31, 1 770" After the death of her husband, February 5, 1786, she remarried twice and died in Huntington, Long.lsland, June 13, 1835.
Of the five sons, all native New Yorkers, four served in the American Revolution:
1 William, the eldest, enlisted in 1775, served as a sergeant in Captain Hubbel's Company of Colonel Huntington's Connecticut Continental Regiment, was at the siege of Boston in 1775-76, was captured at the battle of Long Island in 1776, and died of starvation the same year at the age of 24 in a British prison ship in New York harbor.
2 Benjamin, the second son, a Yale graduate in 1773, was a high school principal at Weathersfield, Conn., at the outbreak of the War of Independence. Commissioned lieutenant and adjutant by Connecticut, June 20, 1776, he served through the whole war. On December 14th of that year he was promoted to a captaincy and on April 7, 1 777 he received a major' s commission. From 1778 until the conclusion of the war he was honored with the supervision of General Washington's confidential correspondence and with many important military missions. When peace was made. he retired from the army with the rank of colonel and looated at Litchfield, Conn., in 1784. He married (1) in 1784 Mary, the daughter of the Honorable William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and (2) in 1808 Marie Hallett of New York City. In 1800 he was elected to Congress from Connecticut and served continuously until 1817. The rest of his life, until his death in 1835, was spent in Litchfield.(6)
3 John, the fourth son, was only 18 years old when on June 8, 1775, he signed as an "associator" at Brookhaven, Suffolk county, N. Y.(7) He may have served in the 8th Regiment of Albany County Militia,(8) and possibly in the 1st and 4th New York Regiments.(9) Little is known about his subsequent life except that he located at Warren, Conn., where he was a successful merchant and prominent citizen.
(5) Thompson, History of Long Island,
2.1 ed. N. Y., 1843, v. I, p. 425.
(6) See Dexter, Biographies of Yale Graduates, and Memoir of Colonel Benjamin
TalImadge 1776-83. N. Y. 1904. Ed. by Henry Phelps Johnston.
(7) Calendar of New York Historical Manuscripts, v. I, p. 53. Another John
Tallmadge, a distant relative, signed an "association" at Easthampton.
Suffolk county, N. Y., in May 1775. Ibid., p. 56. He was a man above
50 in 1776 with a family of four children. Ibid., p. 402.
(8) New York in the Revolution, v. I, p. 115.
(9) Mather, The Refugees of 1776, p. 590.
z
