1735 — 1785
A monograph drawn from the public records of the Colony & State of Connecticut, the town meetings of Norwalk, the surviving correspondence with His Excellency General Washington, the eyewitness reminiscences of his neighbours, and the probate inventory of his estate.
"Norwalk: Col. Stephen St. John, Obiit 9th May. / Mr. Samuel C. Silliman." A Register for the State of Connecticut, for the Year of our LORD 1785
— the printer's note, beside the still-printed name —
The Recovery of a Local Revolutionary — Stephen St. John was not Washington, was not Hamilton, was not a signer of the Declaration, was not in the framing of the Constitution. He was the kind of man without whom the Revolution did not happen: a Connecticut town leader who served on the Committee of Inspection, was commissioned major and then lieutenant colonel of his county militia, signed the appeal to the Commander-in-Chief on the day before his town was burned, was carried out of his own bedroom by a Loyalist raiding party, was held in the British prisons of occupied New York, came home with his health broken, served four more years as the watch on the coast, and died in office at the age of forty-nine — leaving an estate whose actual present-day market value runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. This monograph is the recovery of his life from the town records, the public records of Connecticut, the surviving correspondence with Washington, the eyewitness reminiscences of his neighbours, the inventory of his estate, and the table-tomb where he is buried in East Norwalk. It is offered in observance of the Two-Hundred-and-Fiftieth Year of American Independence — for the kind of Revolutionary life usually hidden in commissions and petitions and graves.
The Printer’s Note
A grandson's preface, written in May 2026
In the spring of 1785, in a small printing house at New-London on the Connecticut shore, a schoolmaster named Nathan Daboll set the type for an almanac and register that would carry his calculations for the coming year — the meridian of New-London at 41 degrees, 25 minutes north; the eclipses; the tides; the court days; the rolls of the General Assembly. By April the towns of Fairfield County had returned their representatives for the May session. Norwalk had sent two: Col. Stephen St. John, who had represented the town in nearly every session for the past seven years, and Mr. Samuel C. Silliman, who would now sit beside him. The printer set both names into the form. Then, before the sheets were pulled, word arrived from Norwalk that the senior man had died — on the ninth of May, four days before the session opened. The type was already locked. The printer made the smallest possible correction. He added, in italic, beside the name that was already printed, two Latin words and a date.
Obiit 9th May.
He died. The ninth of May. The almanac went out with the correction set into it, and a man's death was carried to the rest of the state as a printer's afterthought in italic type. That is the line around which this monograph turns.
Stephen St. John of Norwalk — born in that town probably in 1735 and certainly by the beginning of 1736; died in that same town on 9 May 1785, in his fiftieth year — is my seventh-great-grandfather. The line of descent runs from him through his son William to William's daughter Charlotte, who married into the Hanford family; from Charlotte through five generations of Hanfords to my grandmother Fyrn, who married into the family of Morgan Donato, whose grandson was my mother's father; and from there to me, sitting now at a desk in Pittsburgh, two hundred and forty-one years after the printer in New-London set the italic note that registered my ancestor’s death.
I have written two of these monographs before this one. Both honored grandfathers I had known — men whose voices I had heard, whose hands I had taken at family tables, whose silences about their wars I had learned to respect across the long flat years of an American boyhood. Morgan R. Donato Jr., the rifleman of the 39th Infantry who walked into the Hürtgen Forest two weeks after he arrived on the Continent and was carried back out of it three days later, was that kind of grandfather; he died in Florida in 2021, and I have written down what could be saved of his war. Stanley Schalcosky, the Polish-American multi-theater soldier who came home through the long way of Italy and the South Pacific, was that kind of grandfather too. Both of them are gone now, and what survives of their wars is what I have managed to put on paper.
Stephen St. John is a different kind of subject. He is not a grandfather I knew. He is a grandfather I never could have known. The longest possible American life laid end to end — even a life that begins in childhood under Washington and ends in old age in our own century — cannot stretch the two hundred and forty-one years between his death and this writing. He is in the country before there was a country. His war is not a war anyone now alive has heard described by a man who fought it. His war was already vanishing from living memory by the year of the Civil War, and the men who remembered his capture in 1781 were nearly ninety years old when an interviewer named McDonald sat down with them in 1846 and wrote down what they could still recover.
And yet he is recoverable. That is the surprise of this particular subject, and the reason this monograph exists. Many Revolutionary-era ancestors reduce, at the end of the searching, to a single line in a regimental return — a name on a muster roll, a rank, perhaps a place of enlistment, perhaps a date of discharge, and after that the silence. Stephen survives more thickly than that. He survives in the printed Public Records of the State of Connecticut, where his commission to Lieutenant Colonel of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia was written down in the May session of 1777, in the Assembly's own clerical hand. He survives in the Roll of the House of Representatives, where his name appears for Norwalk in nearly every session from 1778 to the May of his death. He survives in the town meeting books of Norwalk, copied out in Edwin Hall’s great 1865 compilation, where his name appears among the men who drew the instructions for the non-importation delegates in 1770, the County Congress delegates in 1775, the committee that reviewed the Articles of Confederation in 1777, and the post-war committee that sought redress for the burning of the town. He survives in the letter that he and the Norwalk selectmen wrote to George Washington on 9 July 1779, signed “Stephen St john, Lt Coll,” warning the Commander-in-Chief that the British fleet lay in Huntington Bay nearly opposite, that Fairfield was already burned, and that Norwalk feared it would be next. He survives in three separate eyewitness accounts of his capture from his own bedroom in the small hours of 27 April 1781 — accounts that converge on the same date, the same point of landing, the same Loyalist guide, the same unlocked door. He survives in the probate inventory of his estate, taken in June of 1786, which lists his thirty-acre homestead, his half-share of the grist mill, his wharf by the stone bridge, his books and silver, the velvet of his breeches, and — without a word of moral commentary, in the same accounting hand — the two human beings he held in bondage, named in the document as Peter and Phillis, valued at £27 10s and £25.
He survives, that is, in nearly every form a colonial American life can survive in — except his own voice. No letter in his hand is known. No diary. No account book. The 9 July 1779 letter to Washington bears his signature, but the writing is the writing of one of the selectmen; he signed what the others had drawn. We have his hand only in the signature itself: Stephen St john, Lt Coll, set down in a slightly hurried scrawl on a piece of paper a hundred and twenty miles up the Hudson from where it was written, in a folder of the Washington Papers in the Library of Congress. That signature, enlarged and reproduced on the frontispiece of this monograph, is the closest thing I have to his face.
What this monograph is, then, is what can be made from the records that remain. It is not a biography in the usual sense, because the inner life of the man is not available; the documents do not preserve it. It is, instead, the careful reconstruction of a documented life — offices held, commissions granted, votes cast, properties owned, letters signed, captivities endured, neighbors testified to, a death registered. Where the record is silent, the prose is silent with it. Where the record is hedged, the prose hedges. Where the record is documentary, the prose lets the document speak for itself, set off from the running narrative in the typographic register the eighteenth century would have given it: the registry hand for the state record, the broadside hand for the printed letter, the recessive italic for the long-after reminiscence.
This is being written in May of 2026, the month that marks the two-hundred-and-forty-first year since the printer added Obiit 9th May beside Stephen’s name in the New-London almanac. The country is in the long observance of its two hundred and fiftieth year. The town of Norwalk — rebuilt, vastly enlarged, now indistinguishable in its outer parts from the rest of the Connecticut shore — is preparing its commemorations of the burning of July 1779, the very catastrophe Stephen had written to Washington to try to prevent. The Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia is two hundred and forty-nine years dissolved; the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery, where his eroded gravestone still stands, is two hundred and forty-one years older than the day his body was lowered into it.
I will not pretend that I knew him. I did not. I cannot. What I can do, and what this monograph does, is set down what the documentary record makes possible to know — about his town, his offices, his commissions, his correspondence, his captivity, his estate, and his neighbors — in the period typography and the printer’s ornaments that he might himself have recognized if a copy of this work were placed in his hands. It is the record of a life. It is also, more particularly, an act of remembrance: a small private observance, set down in the long form, of one of the thousands of ordinary American men whose names the country needs to speak aloud again in this year.
His name was Stephen St. John. He was of Norwalk, in the Colony and later the State of Connecticut. He was a captain of his town’s first militia company at twenty-six, a major at forty, a lieutenant colonel at forty-two, and a representative of his town in the General Assembly through the seven years between the burning of the town and the day of his own death. He was a husband, of Ann Fitch; a father, of five children who would carry his name and his blood forward into the country that he had helped to bring into being. He was, in his own household, the master of two enslaved people whose lives must also be reckoned with in the long account. He was, in his town, a man trusted with the practical work of resistance and the practical work of rebuilding. He was, in the country’s eyes, one of the small officers of a small regiment of a small state — and that is what most Americans were, in the long colonial coastal war that built the Republic.
Obiit 9th May. The printer’s note. The line around which this monograph turns. What follows is the recovery, in the form a 1785 printer would have understood, of the life that ended on that day.
Sons of Matthias, Sons of Norwalk
The family in the town, from the first generation to the fifth, 1650–1758
The St. John family was already old in Norwalk by the time Stephen was born into it. The first of the line in America had been Matthias St. John, who came over to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 and settled at Dorchester — in the company of the Puritan migrations of the 1630s, in the years when New England was being filled by ship after ship of emigrants out of the eastern English counties. From Dorchester, Matthias moved west into the Connecticut River valley, to Windsor in 1640 and then to Wethersfield between 1643 and 1645. In 1650 he came down the shore to the new plantation at Norwalk, which had been founded the year before, on the salt creek that runs north from Long Island Sound between Stamford and Fairfield. He was among the proprietors who measured out the lots that would become the streets and burying grounds of the town for the next three centuries. From him descended a family that, by the fifth generation, had grown into one of the principal houses of the town — a family whose name would be read in the Norwalk records, in the Connecticut state records, in the rolls of Yale College, and finally in the dispatches of the Revolutionary War.
The line from Matthias to Stephen runs through Mark, who was Matthias’s son and who held land in Norwalk in the second generation; through Joseph the third, in the third generation; through Joseph the fourth, in the fourth, who married Susannah Selleck of the Norwalk Sellecks. Joseph the fourth and Susannah Selleck were the parents of Stephen, who was born in Norwalk in 1735 or 1736. The exact day is not preserved in any record now known; the eroded inscription on his East Norwalk gravestone, transcribed in 1895 by David Hermon Van Hoosear, gives only that he died “in the fiftieth year of his age” on 9 May 1785, which makes the birth fall in the twelve months ending in May 1735 or the twelve months beginning in May 1735, depending on whether the stone’s phrasing follows the older inclusive count or the modern exclusive one. The 1907 Alexander Genealogy gives the year as “1735–6,” which is the responsible compromise and which this monograph will follow.
Joseph and Susannah’s children, in the order the genealogist records them, were Sarah, Susanna, Hooker, William, Stephen, and Buckingham. Stephen was not the eldest, but by the time of the Revolution he was the surviving brother who carried the family’s public life. The two who matter most for his story are William and Buckingham. William, born in 1744, was nine years younger; he too would marry into a Norwalk family — Mary Esther Belden, in 1777 — and would survive into the new century, dying in February 1800 in his fifty-sixth year. Buckingham, the youngest, was the brilliant one. He was admitted to Yale, took his degree, was retained as a tutor of the College, and was on the cusp of what the eighteenth century would have called a future of distinction when, in the spring of 1771, at the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, he drowned in the passage from New Haven to Norwalk on the night of the fifth of May.
The death was registered in print. A broadside elegy was set into type at New Haven within days, in the manner the colony reserved for public men or for the young dead who had been promising. The sheet that survives is one of the few primary documents of Stephen’s family world to come down to us in its eighteenth-century printed form, and its presence in this dossier is the reason this monograph is set in the typography that it is set in — for the broadside elegy for Buckingham St. John is the visual logic of an artifact this family itself produced when one of its own died. It is the form in which Stephen would have recognized a printed work meant to register a death.
The world Stephen was born into in 1735 was the world of the late Colony of Connecticut, in the long peace before the imperial wars that would mark his young manhood. Norwalk by then had been a town for eighty-five years. It sat on the lower Connecticut shore between Stamford to the west and Fairfield to the east, gathered around the mouth of the Norwalk River where it ran south into Long Island Sound. The town had its meetinghouse, its town house, its grist mill on the river, its wharf at the bridge, its salt meadows that yielded the hay for winter cattle, and its scattered farms running north into the rolling country toward Wilton and west toward Stamford. It was, by population, perhaps fifteen hundred souls in the years of Stephen’s boyhood, growing through the 1740s and 1750s as the second and third generations of the founding families filled the available land and divided their holdings among their sons. It was a town in which most men were farmers, some men were merchants, a few men were ministers or lawyers or doctors, and almost all men held some office in the rotating burdens of town government — surveyor of highways, selectman, lister, grand juror, sealer of leather, fence viewer, and the rest of the long catalogue of duties by which a New England town governed itself.
The Norwalk into which Stephen was born was also, already, a town inside a larger English world. The harbor opened into the Sound, and the Sound was an English seaway: vessels moved constantly between Norwalk, Stamford, Greenwich, the East River, New York City, the Long Island ports, and the New Haven roadstead. Goods went out — the surplus grain, the salt hay, the timber, the salted provisions that would feed the West Indian sugar islands — and goods came back: the manufactured cloths, the sugar, the rum, the molasses, the silver buckles and gold-laced waistcoats that would later appear in the probate inventories of the men who could afford them. By 1735, Norwalk was not a wilderness village; it was a small commercial town with a literate Congregational establishment, a satellite Anglican parish, an active trade with New York, and a militia organization that had served in the colonial wars against the French. Stephen’s father Joseph had lived through the years of King George’s War; Stephen himself would live through the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act crisis, the Boston nonimportation, the long succession of the imperial quarrels that would, in his early forties, become the Revolution.
Of his boyhood and his schooling, the documentary record preserves almost nothing. The Norwalk town schools of the 1740s were rudimentary; the standard education for a son of a leading family was reading, writing, sufficient arithmetic for the practical accounts of trade and inheritance, the catechism, and as much Latin as a local minister or a Yale-trained tutor could supply. Stephen does not appear in any surviving Yale or Harvard matriculation list, and the responsible inference is that he received the common Norwalk education and did not go to college — unlike his youngest brother Buckingham, whom the family evidently sent up to New Haven and who was being kept on as a tutor at the time of his death. Stephen’s gift was not to be the gift of the scholar. It would be, on the documentary evidence, the gift of the practical local man: the man trusted with the work that holds a town together, the surveyor of highways, the selectman, the militia officer, the deputy. By the time he was a young adult, he would already have been moving through the apprenticeship in town affairs that filled the years of a New England gentleman’s twenties and thirties.
In December of 1757, at twenty-two, Stephen married. The bride was Ann Fitch, daughter of the Hon. Samuel Fitch and his wife Susannah, of the Norwalk Fitch line — the same Fitch family that had produced Thomas Fitch, the colonial governor of Connecticut from 1754 to 1766. The marriage tied Stephen’s line into one of the most politically prominent houses of the lower colony, and the connection would echo through his life. Ann was a year his senior — born in 1734, in her own twenty-third year at the marriage — and she would, in the way of eighteenth-century gentlewomen, bear her children steadily across the next decade and a half: Sarah, Susannah, Stephen the younger, William, and Nancy. The first child, the daughter Sarah, would later marry John Cannon Jr., M.D., of Norwalk, and through her daughter Harriet would carry the St. John blood forward into the Hanford line that runs to the historian of this monograph. The middle son, Stephen the younger, called “Stephen St. John 2d” in the town records, would be his father’s captive companion on a night in 1781 that this monograph will reach in its proper place. The younger son William, born in 1763, would die in 1805 in his forty-third year, but not before he had begotten the daughter Charlotte through whom the historian traces his own descent.
The marriage record in the Norwalk church books, abstracted in the Connecticut Church Record collections, gives the date plainly: Stephen St. John and Ann Fitch, married 9 December 1757. No more is preserved. There is no description of the ceremony, no list of witnesses, no copy of any sermon. There is only the line, in the abstract hand of a nineteenth-century copyist working from a record book that has not all survived. It will have been a winter wedding, almost certainly in the Norwalk meetinghouse, almost certainly attended by the Fitches and the St. Johns and by such of the Norwalk gentry as had not gone to bed early in the cold. The bride was twenty-three; the groom twenty-two. They had perhaps thirty years ahead of them. Twenty-seven and a half of those years would be ahead. The other two and a half had already gone.
In May of the following spring, 1758, Stephen’s name appears in the Norwalk town records for the first time. The town clerk, in the standard formula of the late colonial town, recorded the appointment of the grand jurors who would serve in the county court for the coming year. Among them: Stephen St. John, Jr. — the suffix added not to distinguish him from a living father (his father Joseph had been dead for a decade by then) but in the older New England usage that distinguished men of the same Christian name in a single town, an elder Stephen St. John of another branch having held that name first. He was twenty-two years old. He had been married five months. He had just taken up the first of the long succession of public trusts that would fill the next twenty-seven years of his life, and that would end — would be ended, in the only way the eighteenth century had of ending such things — on the ninth of May in 1785.
A Young Man’s Offices
From the grand jury to the captain’s commission, 1758–1771
The Norwalk town records of the late colonial period have the steady, accumulating quality of a long ledger book. They run year by year through the standard formulas of New England town government — the warning of meetings, the choosing of moderators, the appointment of officers, the laying of taxes, the regulation of fences and roads, the maintenance of the meetinghouse and the schoolhouse, the long catalogue of decisions by which a Connecticut town conducted its corporate life. They are, in any one year, almost completely uninteresting. They are, taken together over fifteen or twenty years, the documentary biography of a town’s ruling class. To read them across the period from 1758 to the eve of the Revolution is to watch a generation of young Norwalk gentlemen settle into the work of governing themselves. Stephen St. John is one of the men we watch. He appears, then appears again, then begins to appear regularly, and by the early 1770s he is one of the names that one expects to find on every committee, every warning, every appointment of consequence.
The pattern of his rise is the standard pattern of his class. A young man of substance, properly married, properly connected, properly literate, was elected first to the small offices and then to the larger ones as his elders died or retired. In Stephen’s case the rising began with the grand jury in 1758, when he was twenty-two. By 1761 he was appointed Surveyor of Highways — the office responsible for inspecting the town’s roads, bridges, and fences and for assigning the labor of the male inhabitants to their repair — a position he would hold again in 1766, 1768, 1774, 1776, and 1777. By 1763 he had been elected Selectman, the principal executive office of a New England town, and that year he was also chosen Lister, the officer responsible for the annual valuation of the town’s property for tax purposes. The Selectman appointment recurred steadily across the next two decades: 1763 and 1764 in his late twenties; 1766 in his early thirties; 1772 and 1773 as the resistance was building; 1775 through 1778 across the first years of the war; and again 1782 through 1784 in the postwar settlement.
These are the offices of a man whom his town trusts with the practical work of governance. The Surveyor of Highways knows the roads — knows which men live on which lots, which routes the militia would take in an alarm, which bridges the army wagons could cross. The Selectman knows the finances, the poor relief, the schools, the meetings, the licensing of taverns, the supply of the militia. The Lister knows the property — knows who owns what and what it is worth, knows the standing of every household in the town’s economic order. Each office, in itself, is administrative; in the aggregate, over twenty years, the offices constitute a complete working knowledge of the town as a corporate body. By 1775, Stephen St. John would know Norwalk — its men, its roads, its houses, its property, its harbors, its mills, its fortifications, its weaknesses — in a way that very few of his neighbors could have matched.
The Captain’s Commission, May 1761
Of the offices Stephen took up in his twenties, one stands apart in significance for the trajectory of his later life. In May of 1761, when he was twenty-six and beginning his second selectmanship, the Connecticut General Assembly commissioned him Captain of the 1st Company of the train-band of Norwalk. The Connecticut militia was organized by town and by company; the 1st Company of Norwalk was the senior of the town’s several companies, drawing its men from the central village and its immediate vicinity. A captain’s commission in the train-band was an honor that fell to a young man of substance and good character, not as a matter of military aptitude in the modern sense, but as a matter of standing — the company elected the captain by acclamation in town meeting, and the Assembly ratified the choice. The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut for May 1761 carry the appointment in the same registry hand that would, sixteen years later, carry his elevation to lieutenant colonel:
The Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia, of which the Norwalk 1st Company was a part, was the regiment of the southwestern shore. It drew its companies from Norwalk, Stamford, and Greenwich, and its colonel during the years of Stephen’s captaincy was a succession of senior gentlemen of the lower county. The regiment had been organized in 1739 in the reorganization that prepared the colony for the imperial wars then breaking out across the European maritime world; it had served on the alarms and detachments of King George’s War and the French and Indian War; it would, in the 1770s, find itself in the path of the British war against the colonies. Stephen’s commission in 1761, taken on its own, is a routine record of a young Norwalk gentleman entering the militia officer class. Taken together with what came after — the major’s commission in 1775, the lieutenant colonel’s in 1777 — it is the first entry in a regimental career that would run for twenty-four years.
The duties of a Connecticut militia captain in the long peace of the early 1760s were not heavy. The company met four times a year for drill on the town green, paraded on the King’s birthday and on the days of public thanksgiving, was inspected at the May and October trainings, and answered such occasional alarms as the lower colony required. The captain was responsible for the company’s muster rolls, for the inspection of arms and accoutrements, for the maintenance of discipline at trainings, and for the punctilio of saluting and command. Stephen would have worn the regimentals appropriate to the office — a long-skirted coat in the Connecticut blue, with the buff facings the colony favored, white smallclothes, the silver gorget at the throat, and a sword. He was a captain of militia, in the sense that his town had elected him and the Assembly had ratified him. He had not, so far as the records preserve, ever fired a musket in anger. He would not for fifteen more years.
The Children, the Household, the Brother
Across the 1760s, Ann St. John bore the children. The 1907 Genealogy gives them in the order it has reconstructed from the town and church records: Stephen the younger, born in 1762; William, born in 1763; Susannah, born 6 February 1760; Sarah, whose birth year is not given but who married John Cannon Jr. in July 1777; and Nancy, born about 1769. The order Susannah-Stephen-William-Sarah-Nancy is the order in which the genealogist arranged them; the actual chronology, as far as it can be reconstructed from the birth dates that survive, suggests Susannah first in 1760, Stephen in 1762, William in 1763, Sarah probably in the mid-1760s, and Nancy last around 1769. They were five children in something less than a decade, which is the ordinary cadence of an eighteenth-century gentlewoman’s childbearing years. Ann was twenty-six when the first was born, thirty-five when the last was; she would survive all the pregnancies and would outlive Stephen by twelve years.
The Norwalk house in which the children were raised does not survive in any direct documentary description, but the 1786 probate inventory permits a reconstruction of what it must have contained. There was the “Old Homestead,” valued at £450 with its barn and barracks — a substantial New England farmhouse on thirty acres — that stood on the high ground a little back from the river, on the same St. John lots that had been measured out to Matthias in 1650. The interior, judging from the inventory, would have been the interior of a gentleman’s house of the period: a buffet table and a mahogany table in the principal room; a black walnut chair and a leather-bottomed chair and a Windsor chair of the new fashion; a cherry bedstand and a chest of drawers in the master bedchamber; a tea table and brass candlesticks for evening; a clock; a looking-glass; a coffee mill; china tea cups; a sugar pot; a mug teapot; sundry books in a case; an inkstand. There was a barroom on the ground floor — the inventory notes a “looking glass at the bar room” — which suggests the house contained a room where neighbors and tenants might be received over a glass of cider or rum. The clothing was good: fine cloth coats, velvet breeches, silver shoe buckles, silver knee buckles, a white beaver hat. It was the house and the wardrobe of a man of position in his town.
In the larger household stood — though the inventory does not yet name them in 1761 or 1770; we will not know their names until we reach 1786 — the enslaved people whom Stephen kept as part of his estate. Connecticut had enslaved Africans throughout its colonial history. The lower towns of Fairfield County, with their commercial ties to New York and the West Indies, were among the parts of New England where the institution was most embedded; the wealthier the household, the more likely it was to include enslaved labor in the kitchen, the barn, and the fields. By the time we have the probate document of 1786, the household contained Peter and Phillis, named human property valued by the appraisers in shillings and pence. When they entered Stephen’s ownership is not preserved; that they had been there for some time is the most likely inference. This monograph will reach Peter and Phillis in its proper place, in the chapter on the estate. Their presence in the household across these years should be noted now, because to describe the Norwalk house of the 1760s as if only the family lived in it would be to falsify what was actually there.
The Drowning of Buckingham St. John, 5 May 1771
In the spring of 1771, the family suffered the loss that the broadside elegy registered. Buckingham St. John — the youngest of Joseph and Susannah’s children, Stephen’s little brother, twenty-five or twenty-six years old, recently kept on as a tutor of Yale College — was drowned on the night of the fifth of May in the passage between New Haven and Norwalk. He had been making the run that Connecticut tutors and Yale students of the period made constantly along the shore, in the small coasting vessels that connected the college town with the lower county. A storm came up. The vessel went down. Buckingham was lost.
The elegy that was printed at New Haven within days does not name the vessel, the master, or the other passengers. It is a poem in the style of the mid-century New England elegy — the kind of poem the colony produced for public men and for the promising young dead — with the conventional figures of the night, the moon, the rolling waves, the soul rising from the watery grave, the lamentation of friends and country. It is not great poetry. It is the kind of poetry the printing trade produced as a public observance, set into type the same way an almanac was set into type, sold in the same shop, distributed on the same routes. What it does is what such a sheet was meant to do: it registers the loss, in the printed form New England reserved for losses of this kind, so that the country could be told. An Elegy, On the Death of Mr. Buckingham St. John, Tutor of Yale College, who was drowned in his Passage from New-Haven to Norwalk, May the 5th, 1771. The elegy survives in a single sheet in the Connecticut Historical Society and in the Yale Library. It is, so far as is known, the only printed work the St. John family commissioned in the eighteenth century. It is also, the responsible inference holds, the kind of object that Stephen, the older brother, would have helped to commission — the senior surviving man of the family, with the standing to engage the printer at New Haven and to pay for the press work. The sheet that survives is, in this sense, an indirect document of Stephen himself.
Of his grief there is no direct record. He was thirty-five years old. He had just buried a brother. He had three small children at home and two more to come. He was now, after his father’s death and his elder brothers’ departures and Buckingham’s drowning, the surviving leader of his generation of the Norwalk St. Johns. He went on with the work of the town. The Norwalk records show him reappointed Surveyor of Highways in 1774, reappointed Selectman in 1772 and 1773, present on the committee that drew the instructions for the non-importation delegates in August of 1770 — six months before Buckingham’s death — and present again in February of 1775 on the committee for the County Congress that would help to organize the resistance of Fairfield County to the British government. The death of his brother does not appear to have broken the rhythm of his public life. It would have broken something else — something the records do not preserve — but that is the place where the prose must stop and let the silence stand.
The broadside, in any event, survived him. It survived his children. It survived into the twentieth century in the archives of two Connecticut libraries. It survives now in this monograph, reproduced as a figure in the period typography it was set in, as the family object that registered the family’s first public grief.
The Eve of the Resistance
By the early 1770s, the imperial crisis that would become the Revolution was no longer a distant matter in Norwalk. The Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Duties of 1767, the Boston Massacre of 1770, the non-importation movement that swept the seaboard towns in the same year, the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, the Intolerable Acts of 1774, the gathering of the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia in September of that year — all of these events traveled the same coastal seaway, were read in the same newspapers, were debated in the same town meetings. Norwalk, on the Sound, with its commercial ties to New York and its political connections to Hartford, was in the active circulation of the resistance. The town had its committee on non-importation, its delegates to the county and colonial conventions, its emerging local leadership of the patriot cause.
Stephen, by 1770, was thirty-five years old, captain of his town company, surveyor of highways, sometime selectman, the master of a substantial household, a connected man through his Fitch marriage to the lower colony’s political establishment. He was, in short, exactly the kind of Norwalk gentleman the patriot movement needed and got. His name begins to appear in the resistance committees as soon as the resistance committees begin. The August 1770 meeting that drew the instructions for the non-importation delegates — the meeting at which Colonel Thomas Fitch was chosen moderator and a committee was appointed to consider Norwalk’s position on the importing of goods from Britain — was, by the standards of what was about to come, a small thing. It was a town meeting in a coastal Connecticut village expressing its sense on a matter of imperial trade policy. But the men who served on that committee were, almost without exception, the men who would serve on the committees of the Revolution. Dr. Thaddeus Betts. Mr. Thomas Belden. Capt. Stephen St. John. Samuel Gruman. Five years later, four of these four would be signing emergency letters to the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.
That is the trajectory of this chapter. The young man who began in the rotating offices of his town in 1758, who took up the captain’s commission in 1761, who buried his brother in 1771, was, by 1774, ready — without yet knowing it — for the work the next decade would demand. The work would demand of him not the heroism of the field officer in a great battle, which his health and his temperament would not have permitted, but the steadier and longer work of the civic-military leader in a coastal town under threat. It would demand the work of the man whom his town trusted with the practical business of governance, applied now to the practical business of resistance and, before long, of war.
We will pick up that work in the next chapter, in the years from 1770 to the spring of 1775, as the resistance moves out of the town meeting and into the committees of correspondence and the County Congress — and as Stephen St. John, the surveyor of highways and captain of train-band, becomes one of the men of the lower colony whose names the British would, before the end of the decade, find it useful to know.
The Resistance in Town Meeting
From the non-importation committee to the eve of war, 1770–1775
The American Revolution, as it would later be remembered in the great national narratives, was the work of the Continental Congresses and the Continental Army — of the men in the State House at Philadelphia, of the camps at Cambridge and Morristown and Valley Forge, of the marches and the battles whose names schoolchildren would learn for the next two centuries. That is the Revolution at the level of the country. But the country was made of towns, and the Revolution at the level of the town looked rather different. It looked like the men of a coastal Connecticut town gathering at the meetinghouse on a chilly afternoon in August 1770 to decide what their delegates should be instructed to say at a regional gathering on imports from England. It looked like the same men gathering again, in December 1774, to consider the association adopted by the Continental Congress at Philadelphia in September and to appoint a committee to enforce its provisions. It looked like the same men gathering for the third time, in February 1775, to choose a delegation to the County Congress that would coordinate the resistance of all the Fairfield County towns. These small gatherings, repeated through scores of New England towns across the four or five years before Lexington, were the work in which the Revolution was made. Stephen St. John was one of the men who did that work in Norwalk.
August 1770: The Non-Importation Committee
The first Norwalk record in which Stephen appears in a context the Revolution would later recognize as its own is the town meeting of 20 August 1770. The Townshend Duties of 1767 had imposed tariffs on a list of imported British manufactures — glass, lead, paper, paint, and tea — and the colonial response had been a network of non-importation agreements among the merchants of the seaboard towns. The agreements had begun to fray by 1770; the partial repeal of the Townshend duties (with the tea duty kept in place) had reopened debate over whether the agreements should be continued, modified, or abandoned. The merchants of New York had broken from the agreement that summer. New Haven was about to meet to decide its position. The lower Connecticut towns needed to decide where they stood.
Edwin Hall’s 1865 compilation of the Norwalk records preserves the August meeting in the standard formula of the town-clerk’s hand:
The mechanics of the appointment matter. Norwalk would send three men to the New Haven meeting — Cannon, Fitch, and Isaacs, three of the senior merchants and gentlemen of the town — but the instructions those three were to carry would be drawn by a smaller committee of four. Of the four, two were Norwalk’s leading medical men (Dr. Betts), or its leading commercial men (Belden, Gruman); the fourth was Stephen St. John, then thirty-four years old, captain of the 1st Company, just past his second year as selectman, with the standing in town that membership on such a committee implied. He was being trusted, at thirty-four, with the work of telling the town’s most senior men what they were to say at a regional gathering on a matter of imperial trade policy. He was being treated, in 1770, as one of the rising men of the town’s political class.
The instructions the committee drew up have not survived in any form. The town record gives only that the committee was appointed and the meeting adjourned. What the four men wrote — whether they recommended that Norwalk continue the non-importation agreement, modify it, or follow New York’s example in abandoning it — is lost. What is preserved is only the act of writing it: four Norwalk gentlemen in August of 1770, sitting down to compose a town’s position on a question of imperial commerce, in the years before the language of independence had yet been forced into circulation. It is, in its small way, the beginning. Five years on, three of the four would be dead or out of the public business. Stephen would still be there.
December 1774: The Continental Association
The pace of the imperial quarrel quickened sharply in 1773 and 1774. The Tea Act of May 1773. The Boston Tea Party of 16 December. The Coercive Acts of the following spring — the Boston Port Bill, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Administration of Justice Act, the Quartering Act — passed by Parliament in punishment for the Boston destruction of the East India tea. The First Continental Congress at Philadelphia in September and October of 1774, with its adoption of a comprehensive Association binding the colonies to a non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreement against Britain. The recommendation of the Congress that every county, city, and town appoint committees to enforce the Association by name and by inspection — the Committees of Inspection that would become, across the next year, the de facto local government of the patriot cause.
Norwalk met to take up the Association on 5 December 1774. Hall’s compilation preserves the meeting:
This is the Committee of Inspection — the body that would have responsibility, under the Association, for monitoring Norwalk’s adherence to the non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation pledges. The committee was large, by design: twenty men, drawn from across the principal families of the town, charged with naming and shaming any inhabitant who imported British goods after 1 December 1774, consumed British goods (especially East India tea), or attempted to export to Britain or the West Indies after the agreed date. The eleventh article of the Association, which the committee was appointed to enforce, provided for the publication in newspapers of the names of any inhabitants found to have violated its provisions, so that “all such foes to the rights of British America may be publicly known and universally condemned as enemies of American liberty.”
Stephen appears in the list, in the position of the fourth man named — the senior placement to which he was entitled by his standing — under the formula Stephen St. John 2d. The clerk was distinguishing him not from a son (his eldest son Stephen would not turn thirteen until later that year) but from an elder kinsman of the same Christian name in another branch of the Norwalk St. Johns. Throughout this period, in the Norwalk records and the state records and even the later printed compilations, Stephen would appear under variant designations — Stephen St. John, junr., Stephen St. John 2d, Capt. Stephen St. John, eventually Col. Stephen St. John, Esq. — reflecting the rotating ways the eighteenth-century clerks had of distinguishing men of the same name. The same man is meant in each case across these years. The historian Edwin Hall, transcribing the Norwalk book a century later, preserved the formulas as he found them, which is why the Norwalk record reads sometimes one way and sometimes another.
The Norwalk Committee of Inspection of December 1774 was a working committee. Across the winter and spring it would inspect ships at the wharves for prohibited British cargo, would post notices warning the town of any inhabitant found in violation, would enforce the boycott on imported goods, would coordinate with the committees of the neighboring towns. By February of 1775, with the situation deteriorating further, the same men — or many of them — would be appointed to a parallel Committee of Inspection on a more local footing, with the Association now in full effect.
February 1775: The County Congress and the Inspection
The 6th of February 1775 was, in Norwalk, a busy day in the meetinghouse. The town gathered to take two related actions that the Hall compilation preserves together. First, the appointment of a delegation to the County Congress — the regional gathering of the Fairfield County towns that would coordinate their resistance under the Association. Second, the renewal of the Committee of Inspection on a working basis, with twenty-one members drawn from the principal families.
Two appointments in one day — Stephen St. John to both. He would go to the County Congress as one of the four Norwalk delegates, alongside Dr. Thaddeus Betts, Gershom Raymond, and Samuel Gruman. He would also sit on the working Committee of Inspection at home. The two assignments fit the man. The committee at home would be the routine enforcement work of a town committee; the Congress would be the regional political work of a delegate. He could do both.
The Fairfield County Congress met at Fairfield village. It was one of the local conventions that, across the colonies in the late winter of 1775, were taking up the practical work of organizing resistance: the encouragement of military preparations, the collection of arms and ammunition, the coordination of the towns’ positions on the great political questions. The minutes of the Fairfield County Congress have not survived in any form in which Stephen’s individual contributions can be reconstructed. What is preserved is the appointment itself: that he was chosen, that he went, that he represented Norwalk in the regional gathering that prepared the southwestern shore for war. By April of 1775 — two months after the Congress — the war had begun. The militia of Massachusetts had turned out at Lexington and Concord on the nineteenth of April; the news had reached Norwalk within a few days; the militia of Fairfield County had been put on the alert; and the long catalogue of Connecticut alarms that would fill the next eight years had begun.
January 1776: The Tories of Poplar Plain and Norfield
Before the chapter closes on the resistance in town meeting, one further entry from the Hall compilation deserves its place — the Norwalk meeting of 8 January 1776, which dealt with the inhabitants of the outlying parishes of Poplar Plain and Norfield who had refused to comply with the Association. The Hall record breaks off mid-sentence at the end of his page 128 (“Jan. 8, 1776. Whereas, information hath this day…”); the continuation is not preserved in the dossier in hand. What is preserved is enough to establish that the Committee of Inspection’s work was not theoretical. By the winter of 1776, the committees were being asked to address actual Loyalists in actual outlying communities, with the real consequences of public naming, of forced apology, and in some cases of removal from town. The men who had been appointed in December 1774 to enforce the Association were now, eighteen months later, enforcing it.
The work of the Committee of Inspection in the winter of 1775–76 was the bridge between two phases of Stephen’s life. Behind him lay the long apprenticeship in town offices, the years of the surveyor and the selectman and the captain of train-band. Before him lay the war. The committee work was the joint between the two. It was civilian work done in a moment when the state of the colony was no longer fully civilian; it was political work done in the presence of imperial military force not yet in motion but visibly preparing. By May of 1775, Stephen would already have been promoted to Major of the Ninth Regiment, in the militia reorganization the Assembly carried out in the first weeks after Lexington; by the following winter, the 9th Connecticut Militia would be in the field on the New York alarms; and by November of 1776, Stephen would be a major of the 1st Battalion in Colonel Whiting’s state defense levy, in the long emergency reorganization of the Connecticut forces after the loss of New York.
That story belongs to the next chapter. Here, at the end of this one, the point worth setting down is that the Revolution in Norwalk did not begin with Lexington. It began with the August 1770 meeting at which Stephen and three of his neighbors were appointed to draw instructions for non-importation delegates. It continued with the December 1774 meeting that appointed the Committee of Inspection, and the February 1775 meeting that sent a delegation to the County Congress and renewed the inspection committee. The work was patient, local, undramatic, and continuous. It was the work that built the resistance government of a Connecticut town across the four years before any blood was shed. By the time the blood was shed, Stephen St. John of Norwalk was already, in the resistance, exactly the man his neighbors had been making him.
Major of the Ninth
From the May 1775 promotion to the November 1776 resignation
News of Lexington and Concord reached Norwalk in the closing days of April 1775, brought down the Sound by the express riders the Massachusetts committees had set in motion. The town that had been organizing its non-importation committees and its delegations to county congresses was, almost overnight, a town in a colony at war. The Connecticut General Assembly met in special session at Hartford in the first week of May to do what every colonial legislature on the seaboard was simultaneously doing: to put its militia onto a war footing, to authorize the raising of fresh regiments for Continental service, and to confirm or revise the field officers of the existing train-bands. The session that opened on 11 May 1775 produced the commission that elevated Stephen St. John from captain of his town company to field officer of the regiment. Major Stephen St. John, of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia — the formal style as it would appear, with minor variations, in every subsequent state record through the spring of 1777.
The Major’s Commission, May 1775
The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut for the May session of 1775 carry the appointment in the same standard formula the Assembly used for every field-officer promotion. Volume XV, page 43 of the Hoadly compilation has the entry:
The promotion put Stephen in the third position of the Ninth Regiment’s field officers. Above him stood the Colonel and the Lieutenant Colonel; below him stood the captains of the various town companies. The regiment’s officer list in 1775 had Charles Webb as colonel and John Mead as lieutenant colonel; Stephen joined them as major, succeeding the previous major in the rotation. The three men were, by the standards of the colony, an experienced field complement — Webb a veteran of the French and Indian War, Mead a long-service militia officer of Greenwich, Stephen the youngest of the three at thirty-nine but already with fourteen years of company command behind him. They would not, in 1775, command a regiment in any prolonged field operation. The Ninth Regiment of militia was a coastal-defense formation, drawn from the towns of Norwalk, Stamford, and Greenwich, and its responsibilities through the spring and summer of 1775 lay in the alarm and patrol duties of the lower Connecticut shore.
What changed for Stephen, with the major’s commission, was not the immediate volume of his military duty but his standing within the regimental hierarchy. He was now a field officer. He was no longer responsible only for his town’s 1st Company; he was responsible, with Webb and Mead, for the regiment as a whole, for its alarms, its returns, its musters, its supplies, and the discipline of its companies. He was also — what would matter more by the end of the year — one of the small group of senior militia officers in the western Connecticut shore towns to whom the General Assembly and the Council of Safety would turn for the work of organizing the larger emergency formations that the war was about to require.
The Long Summer of 1775 and the Year of New York
The campaign year 1775 was, for the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia, the year of preparation rather than engagement. The principal Continental operations of that year ran in two theaters, neither of which touched the lower Connecticut shore. To the north, Boston was under siege from the lines the New England militia had thrown up around it in the days after Lexington; the army that would become the Continental Army was gathering at Cambridge under Washington’s command from the second week of July onward. To the further north, the Continental expedition into Canada under Schuyler, Montgomery, and Arnold was driving up the Lake Champlain corridor toward Quebec. Connecticut had committed regiments to both fronts: the 5th and 6th Connecticut, principally, to the Boston lines; companies of other regiments to the Canadian expedition. The Ninth Regiment of militia, as a defensive formation of the shore, stayed at home.
What home now meant, however, was different from what it had meant in the previous decades of nominal militia duty. The Sound, which had been a commercial seaway, was now a contested waterway with British naval vessels patrolling its waters. The town of Norwalk, which had been a working coastal community, was now — in the eyes of the British command at New York and Newport — a patriot supply town on a hostile shore. The militia, which had paraded four times a year and drilled on the green, was now in active alarm duty: pickets along the shore, watches at the harbor mouth, the constant readiness for the coastal raids that the British squadron in New York waters might launch at any time. Across the summer and autumn of 1775, the Ninth Regiment held its companies in a state of readiness that would persist, with varying intensity, for the next seven years.
The serious work began in 1776. With Washington’s army shifted from Boston to New York in the spring of that year, in anticipation of the British strategic move against the central seaboard, the entire lower Connecticut shore became the immediate northern flank of the New York campaign. The British arrival at Staten Island in the early summer, the great battle of Long Island on 27 August 1776 and the American defeat there, the long withdrawal up Manhattan through September and October, the engagements at Kip’s Bay and Harlem Heights and White Plains, the British capture of Fort Washington in November, the long retreat of the broken American army across New Jersey to the Delaware — all of this happened, in geographical terms, immediately adjacent to the Connecticut militia’s area of operations. The Sound, in the autumn of 1776, was a British waterway. New York City was a British base. Long Island was British-occupied territory. Norwalk, on the north shore of the Sound, was less than thirty miles from British outposts on the south shore. The 9th Regiment of Connecticut Militia, under Webb, Mead, and St. John, was in the path.
Of Stephen’s personal movements during the New York campaign, the documentary record is thin. The compiled Revolutionary War Service Records preserve a pay-roll abstract for a Stephen St. John serving as rank-and-file in Captain Jabez Gregory’s company of Colonel John Mead’s regiment, for the service period 24 October 1776 to 21 January 1777, three months in all, with the campaign noted as Continental service under the general command of General David Wooster. The same record gives the wages paid as £6. This service period, however, falls precisely within Stephen’s tenure as Major of the Ninth Regiment and, as the chapter will reach in a moment, as Major of the 1st Battalion under Colonel Whiting in the November 1776 reorganization. A field officer of the militia does not serve as rank-and-file in a company under his own regimental command. The most responsible inference is that the Stephen St. John of the October-to-January pay roll is a same-name kinsman — possibly the same individual as the rank-and-file Stephen who would appear again in March of 1782 in Captain Reuben Scofield’s company — and that the elder Lieut. Col. Stephen St. John’s actual service during these months is to be sought in the field-officer correspondence and the regimental returns, very few of which have been published in any form Stephen’s name has been extracted from.
November 1776: Major of the 1st Battalion
In the autumn of 1776, with Washington’s army in retreat across New Jersey and the British army at the gates of Philadelphia, the Connecticut General Assembly and Council of Safety convened in extraordinary session to raise additional state troops for the immediate defense of the colony’s borders. The Assembly meeting at New Haven in November adopted a resolution to raise eight battalions for state service, to supply and join the Continental army then near New York, the men to be enlisted until the 15th day of March next unless sooner discharged, “and that each non-commissioned officer and soldier who shall so inlist shall be entituled to the same wages and supplys as is now established in the continental army.” The text of the resolution, preserved in the Public Records of the State of Connecticut for November 1776, sets out the bounty (forty shillings to each soldier), the requirement that each soldier furnish himself with clothing, arms, accouterments, a blanket, and a knapsack, and the provision that selectmen of the town would supply any soldier unable to furnish his own arms, with a deduction of six shillings from the bounty for any musket and bayonet provided by the town.
The same resolution, having established the terms of enlistment, then proceeded to the appointment of the field officers of the new battalions. Page 66 of the printed Public Records preserves the entries:
Stephen was appointed Major of the 1st Battalion, under Colonel Samuel Whiting and Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Canfield. The battalion was one of the eight raised in the November 1776 emergency, drawn from the western Connecticut towns, intended for short-term service in the area of the New York campaign. The other three of the first four battalions were under colonels Bradley, Beardsley, and Ely. The men were to serve until the 15th of March 1777. The Assembly’s expectation, in mid-November, was that the immediate emergency would resolve itself within the four-month enlistment window. As it turned out, the emergency would resolve itself rather differently than the Assembly had imagined: Washington would cross the Delaware on Christmas night, would surprise the Hessian garrison at Trenton on the 26th, would fight again at Princeton on 3 January, and would shift the strategic situation enough that by March of 1777 the immediate British threat to central New Jersey and lower New York had been blunted.
Stephen, however, would not serve as major of Whiting’s battalion through the four months. The November 1776 entry that records his appointment also carries, in a footnote at the bottom of the same printed page, the second clause of his service in the battalion:
He resigned. The printed footnote, set in the smaller type the editor reserved for the secondary entries, does not give the date of the resignation, the reason, or the name of the body that received it — only the consequence, that Major Nehemiah Beardsley of Stratford was appointed in his place. The most likely sequence is that the resignation followed shortly after the appointment, perhaps within weeks, and that Beardsley’s replacement appointment was made before the battalion ever took the field in a sustained way. There is no record of Stephen serving with the 1st Battalion in any specific action.
The Question of His Health
The November 1776 resignation is the first place in the documentary record where the question of Stephen’s physical condition enters the story. The state record itself is silent on the reason — only the bare footnote, “vice St. John resigned.” The Norwalk town records, however, supply a context. The 1907 Alexander Genealogy, drawing on the Norwalk meeting books, notes for the year 1777 that Stephen was “in poor health and excused from Moderatorship.” The note is brief but consequential. The moderatorship of a Norwalk town meeting was the office of the man who chaired the gathering — an honor, but also a working duty, requiring physical presence and stamina for what could be a long winter afternoon in a cold meetinghouse. To be excused from it on grounds of health, in the formal town record, was a public acknowledgment of incapacity for the kind of duty the town would otherwise expect.
The genealogist’s 1777 note, taken with the November 1776 resignation, suggests an illness that was already present in the autumn of 1776 and that persisted through into the following year. The nature of the illness is nowhere described. Eighteenth-century medical vocabulary was largely innocent of the diagnostic categories the modern reader would want to apply; the surviving Norwalk record will not tell us whether Stephen suffered from a chronic respiratory complaint, a gastric disorder, an arthritic condition, a recurring fever, or some combination of these. What the record will tell us is that by the autumn of 1776 he was not physically able to take up the demands of a field-service battalion command in winter quarters, and that by the spring of 1777 he was being publicly excused from a chairmanship that an ordinary Norwalk gentleman of forty-one would have been expected to perform.
This will matter for what follows. The May 1777 promotion that elevated Stephen to lieutenant colonel of the Ninth Regiment was not, on the evidence, a promotion to active field command. It was a promotion to the second-in-command of his home-shore regiment — a position in which his standing, his administrative experience, and his knowledge of the towns and harbors of the lower county were of greater value than his physical stamina would have been in a campaigning role. The chapters that follow will see Stephen, in the role of lieutenant colonel and later as commander of the local coast guard, exercising a kind of regional military authority that did not require him to march in the field. It would require him to write letters. It would require him to coordinate town committees. It would require him to receive the British squadron’s threats and to convey them to the Continental command. It would not require him, by and large, to be in the saddle for days on end. The November 1776 resignation, in this reading, is not a falling-away from the war; it is the moment at which his contribution to the war was being repositioned to match what his body could bear.
The Town Goes On
Through the winter of 1776 and into the spring of 1777, the Norwalk town meetings continued their ordinary business of provisioning the families of soldiers, regulating the prices of labor, supplying clothing for the troops in Continental service, and managing the long catalogue of small wartime burdens. Stephen, excused from the moderatorship, was nevertheless present on the committees the town appointed: the committee that considered the Articles of Confederation in December of 1777, the committee that procured clothing for the soldiers in the Continental army, the committee that provided for the families of those gone from the town into the army. He could chair a meeting if he must, but he was not required to. He could serve on committees that did their work in smaller settings, around tables, over papers. He could be the senior man in the room without being the man on his feet at the front of the meetinghouse.
By April of 1777, with the immediate emergency of the previous autumn now substantially behind the Continental cause (Trenton and Princeton had been fought; the British army had withdrawn into northern New Jersey for winter quarters; the Continental Army was reorganizing in winter encampment), the Connecticut Assembly was preparing its routine May session. Among the standing items of business at every May session was the confirmation or revision of the field officers of the militia regiments. The 9th Regiment of Connecticut Militia had lost its colonel: Charles Webb had gone into the Continental army, and the colonelcy of the regiment was vacant. The Assembly would, in the May session of 1777, fill the vacancy by promotion from within the regiment. Lieutenant Colonel John Mead, who had served as second-in-command since 1775, would be promoted to colonel. The lieutenant-colonelcy would in turn need to be filled. The May session would fill it from within the regiment’s officer list. The senior major of the regiment, eligible for the elevation, was Stephen St. John.
We will pick up the May 1777 session, and the commission that followed from it, in the next chapter.
The Commission of May 1777
Lieutenant Colonel of the Ninth, and the question of Ridgefield
The General Assembly of the State of Connecticut met at Hartford in the May session of 1777 to do the standard business of a wartime legislature: to receive the returns of the militia regiments, to confirm or revise their field officers, to authorize the calling-out of such drafts as the Continental command might require, to deal with the revenues of the war taxes, to consider the petitions and grievances of the towns. The minutes of the session, published seventeen years later in Charles J. Hoadly’s edition of the Public Records of the State of Connecticut, run for some hundreds of pages and contain the routine work of the Connecticut wartime government in great quantity. On page 263 of the first volume, in the long catalogue of militia officer appointments the Assembly made at that session, three consecutive entries register the rotation of the field officers of the Ninth Regiment. The middle entry is Stephen St. John’s.
The Page That Promoted Him
Three entries, in three sentences of the same registry hand, in the same May session, all on the same printed page two hundred and forty-nine years later. The Connecticut government, in the middle of its second year of war, was filling the field-officer vacancies of one of its border regiments by the orderly mechanism of promotion in seniority. Mead, who had been lieutenant colonel since 1775 under Webb, moved up to the colonelcy that Webb’s absence in the Continental army had vacated. Stephen, who had been major of the regiment since 1775 and whose ill-fated battalion commission under Whiting in November 1776 had been resigned, moved up to the lieutenant-colonelcy that Mead’s promotion had vacated. Davenport, who had been one of the rising captains of the regiment, moved up to the majority that Stephen’s promotion had vacated. The chain was tidy, was consistent with the seniority of the regiment’s officers, and was the kind of small administrative work that filled a Connecticut General Assembly’s session day after day in the long war.
In the formal style of the colonial and state militia, the appointment made Stephen second-in-command of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia — the senior officer of the regiment short of the colonel himself, responsible for the regiment’s administration, its returns, its musters, its coordination with the Continental command structure, and the field command of any detachments not personally led by the colonel. The Ninth Regiment by 1777 drew its men from the towns of Norwalk, Stamford, Greenwich, and the smaller communities of the lower county. Its field of operations was the exposed southwestern corner of the state — the Sound shore from Greenwich east to Fairfield, the Westchester border on the New York side, the inland country running back toward Wilton and Danbury. By 1777, with British forces firmly established at New York and the lower Hudson, the regiment was the local defense formation of one of the most active and dangerous theaters of the war in the northeastern theater.
Stephen, accepting the commission, would have been in his forty-second year. He was the surveyor of his town’s roads, the selectman of its civil government, the senior of its committees of inspection and confederation, and now, in the formal style the state recorded, the Lieutenant Colonel of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia. He would carry that rank for the rest of his life. Eight years on, when the printer at New-London set his name into the 1785 Register for the May session, the title that preceded it would be the one the Assembly had set down in May of 1777: Col. Stephen St. John.
The Battle of Ridgefield, 27 April 1777
Two weeks before the May session opened at Hartford, on a fine spring Sunday in the last week of April 1777, the British army at New York had launched the campaign that would furnish the proximate context for Stephen’s May promotion. On 25 April, a force of some two thousand men under Major General William Tryon — the same Tryon who would, two years later, command the destruction of Norwalk — landed at Compo Beach in Westport, Connecticut, with orders to destroy the Continental supply depot at Danbury, twenty miles inland. The British marched north through the night of the 25th and the day of the 26th, reached Danbury on the evening of the 26th, and put the town and the depot to the torch. They marched south again on the 27th, intending to recover their ships at Compo before the Connecticut militia could organize against them. They were not quite quick enough. At Ridgefield, on the late morning of 27 April, they encountered an American force assembled by Brigadier General David Wooster and Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, supplemented by Brigadier General Gold Selleck Silliman of the Fairfield County militia brigade. The Americans had fewer than seven hundred men. They fought a delaying action through the day, holding the British column at the barricades on the Ridgefield ridge, suffering the death of General Wooster from a musket ball through the spine, and harassing the British retreat across the next two days from Ridgefield down through Wilton to Compo and the embarkation.
The 9th Regiment of Connecticut Militia, under Colonel John Mead, was in the American line at Ridgefield on 27 April 1777. The Ridgefield Battle Technical Report prepared by the American Battlefield Protection Program of the National Park Service in 2022 identifies Mead’s regiment as among the militia formations that responded to the alarm, and notes that a detachment of the regiment’s coast guards was deployed forward as skirmishers in the long fight. The presence of the regiment is documented. The presence of the regiment’s field officers individually is not. The state record, the regimental returns that have been published, and the after-action accounts of Wooster, Arnold, and Silliman do not preserve a roster of which field officers of which militia regiments were on the field on 27 April. Stephen’s presence at Ridgefield, accordingly, is probable but not documented.
The chain of inference that suggests his presence runs as follows. Stephen was Major of the 9th Regiment from May 1775 until the May 1777 session. If he was at any point in active service with his regiment in the spring of 1777, the Ridgefield alarm of 25–28 April was the action in which his regiment was most fully engaged. The 9th Regiment, drawing its companies from Norwalk, Stamford, and Greenwich, would have responded to the alarm under its standing field officers, of whom Stephen was the senior remaining after Mead had moved up to the colonelcy. His health, by the spring of 1777, was already compromised — the town records of that year would shortly excuse him from the moderatorship — but the Ridgefield action was not a campaign requiring sustained field endurance; it was a two-day militia turnout in defense of a depot twenty miles from his home. A field officer of his standing, his regimental seniority, and his coastal-county knowledge would, in the ordinary course, have been with his regiment.
Against that probability stands the absence of any specific document placing him on the field. The published Connecticut militia returns for the Ridgefield response are incomplete; the regimental papers of the 9th have not been recovered in any systematic way; no after-action account by any Ridgefield veteran (so far as the available secondary literature goes) names Stephen St. John individually. The McDonald Papers eyewitness accounts of the lower Connecticut Revolution, which preserve so much about Stephen’s 1781 capture, do not preserve any direct reference to him at Ridgefield. The Connecticut Archives Revolutionary War series, where militia returns and field-officer correspondence are held in some depth, has not been searched in the available dossier with a view to extracting any specific Ridgefield document for him.
This monograph holds, accordingly, that Stephen St. John was probably at Ridgefield on 27 April 1777, but that the documentary record does not yet place him there. He would have been forty-one years old. He would have been, by then, struggling with the health that would force his town to excuse him from moderating its meetings later that spring. The Sunday on which the British column came down the Wilton road past Ridgefield and the American militia turned out under Wooster, Arnold, and Silliman was a Sunday on which his regiment fought, and on which his commission as a field officer of that regiment required, ordinarily, his presence. He would have been there if his health permitted him to be there and if he could reach the muster point on the alarm. Whether he actually was there is a question the documentary record, as of the present writing, leaves open.
Two weeks later, in any case, he was at Hartford for the May session. Or rather: his name was at Hartford. The state-record entry that promoted him on page 263 of the printed Public Records was the work of the Assembly on his behalf, and did not require his physical presence in the chamber. He was Major of the 9th Regiment when the session opened on the second Thursday of May 1777, and he was Lieutenant Colonel of the 9th Regiment when it adjourned.
The Regiment Stephen Now Commanded
A Connecticut militia regiment of the Revolutionary period was a formation of considerable nominal strength and considerable practical limitation. On paper, the 9th Regiment of Connecticut Militia carried something between six hundred and a thousand men, organized into ten or twelve companies of fifty to eighty officers and men each, drawn from the train-bands of Norwalk, Stamford, Greenwich, and the smaller communities of the lower county. In practice, the regiment never assembled in full at any single point during the war. Its companies served as alarm-and-defense formations in their home districts, were drafted in detachments for Continental service when the Assembly called for state contributions, and turned out as required for the coastal alarms and the occasional inland responses such as the Danbury raid had occasioned.
The regiment’s field of operations was the most exposed sector of the Connecticut shore. To the south, across the Sound, lay British-occupied Long Island, garrisoned by Tory militia and provincial regiments under the Associated Loyalists organization. The shortest passage from the British lines at Lloyd’s Neck on Long Island to the Connecticut coast at Norwalk was less than ten miles of water. To the west, across the New York line, lay the contested neutral ground of Westchester County, where the British forward outposts and the American coast guards and partisans fought a constant low-level war of raids, ambushes, and reprisals. The regiment’s companies maintained pickets along the shore; turned out on alarms when British vessels appeared in the Sound; provided detachments to General Silliman’s brigade headquarters when the brigade was called into the field; and supplied periodic levies of men for state and Continental service further afield. Stephen, as lieutenant colonel, was responsible for the regiment’s administration in coordination with Colonel Mead. The day-to-day command of the coast pickets fell to the company captains; the regimental field operations fell to the colonel and lieutenant colonel jointly.
By the late summer of 1777, the regiment had absorbed the lessons of the New York campaign and was preparing for what everyone on the lower shore expected to be the next British move: a coastal raid in force, somewhere along the Connecticut littoral, by the British squadron operating out of New York under the loose command of Major General Tryon. The first such raid would not come for two years. When it did, it would come for Norwalk.
Justice of the Peace
The same May 1777 session that promoted Stephen to lieutenant colonel of the regiment also appointed him a Justice of the Peace for Fairfield County. The Public Records preserve the appointment in a separate entry, on a separate page of the same session minutes: page 225 of the same volume carries the standard formula, “This Assembly do appoint Stephen St. John, junr, of Norwalk, to be a Justice of the Peace for the County of Fairfield.” The appointment would be renewed the following year — the May 1778 session, on page 255 of the ninth volume of the records, would reappoint him — and would continue thereafter through the remainder of his life. The justice’s commission gave Stephen the routine magistrate’s jurisdiction over civil and minor criminal matters in his town: small debt cases, breaches of the peace, oaths of office, the routine legal business that the lowest level of the colonial and state court system handled. It was, like the militia commission, an office of standing as much as of work.
By the summer of 1777, then, the formal style by which Stephen would be known for the rest of his life was substantially complete. Lieutenant Colonel of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia. Justice of the Peace for the County of Fairfield. Member of the Connecticut Committee for the Continental Congress’ Articles of Confederation, on which he would serve later that year. Selectman of Norwalk, the office to which he was reappointed at the spring town meeting. Surveyor of Highways, in the rotation. He was, at forty-one, the formal embodiment of the kind of multi-office Connecticut gentleman the war had made — civilian and military, judicial and administrative, town and state, the offices accumulating in the steady way the eighteenth century preferred. He was also, on the evidence of the next year’s town records, the man on whom Norwalk would lean for the work that the next phase of the war was about to require: the work of warning the Continental command of what was coming for the lower shore.
We pick up that work in the chapter that follows. Two years on, almost to the day, from his promotion to lieutenant colonel, the British squadron that everyone on the Sound had been expecting since the autumn of 1776 finally appeared in force off the Connecticut shore. By the second week of July 1779, New Haven had been plundered. Fairfield had been burned. Norwalk lay next in the path. And on the ninth of July, in a meeting of the town’s officials at Norwalk village, the lieutenant colonel of the regiment and the justice of the peace of the county and the senior selectman of the town — the same man, in three offices — sat down with his colleagues to write a letter to George Washington.
A Letter Before the Fire
The 9 July 1779 appeal to George Washington, and the reply from New Windsor
The British coastal raids of July 1779 had been a possibility on the Connecticut shore since the loss of New York three years before. They had been a near certainty since the early summer of 1779, when intelligence reports from across the Sound began to indicate that a major British force was gathering at New York for a strike against the shore towns. They became actual on the night of 4–5 July, when a British fleet of forty-eight vessels under the loose command of Commodore Sir George Collier, carrying a landing force of some twenty-six hundred men under the direct command of Major General William Tryon, appeared off New Haven and began to put troops ashore. By the morning of the fifth, New Haven had been entered. By the evening, the town’s stores had been plundered and part of East Haven burned. By the seventh, the same force was at Fairfield, twenty miles east. By the night of the eighth, Fairfield was in ashes — the courthouse, the meetinghouse, the houses of the principal families, the parish of Green’s Farms, all burning together in the worst single day of property destruction the Connecticut shore had yet suffered in the war.
On the morning of the ninth of July 1779, the British squadron weighed anchor from Fairfield and stood off into the Sound. By that afternoon it was reported to be in Huntington Bay, on the Long Island shore, “nearly opposite” Norwalk. The wind had not yet turned to permit the crossing back to the Connecticut shore. The pause was reckoned, in Norwalk, to be of perhaps twelve to twenty-four hours’ duration. The town — which had been on alarm since the fifth, which had been watching the smoke rise over Fairfield since the seventh, which had been awaiting its turn since the moment the squadron arrived off New Haven — was now in the immediate path. The men of the town who had any responsibility for its defense met that morning in some part of the village to write a letter.
The Letter
The letter that they wrote was addressed to George Washington at New Windsor, on the Hudson, where the Commander-in-Chief had moved the headquarters of the Continental Army in the early summer. The Hudson Highlands were at that moment Washington’s principal strategic concern; the British army at New York was perceived to be preparing a move up the Hudson against West Point and the river forts, and Washington had positioned the main body of the army to cover that contingency. The British coastal raids in Connecticut, severe as they were, were — from the Continental command’s strategic standpoint — a diversion. The Norwalk officials, writing on the ninth of July, were asking the diversion to be treated as a primary engagement.
The letter was drafted by one of the Norwalk men — which one is not known, the manuscript is in a clerk’s hand and not in any of the signers’ — and was signed at the foot by six men: Thaddeus Betts, in the position of Justice of the Peace; Stephen St. John, in the position of Lieutenant Colonel of the regiment; and the four selectmen of the town: Samuel Gruman, Matthew Marvine, David Comstock, and Nathaniel Benedict. The document was carried by express up the Hudson valley to New Windsor, where it reached Washington the following night.
from the Officials of the Town of Norwalk
May it please your Excellency,
The Exigency of our Affairs will be a sufficient Apology for this Address, & your Excellency’s Readiness to releive the distressed Inhabitants of the United States gives us Hopes that it may not be in vain. Our Situation is truly alarming & distressing. A large Fleet in the Sound with three or four thousand Troops have this Week plundered New-Haven & burned their Stores & burned Part of East-Haven. The Day before Yesterday they entered Fairfield & in the most inhuman & wanton Manner they burned almost the whole of that elegant Town together with a great Part of the Parish of Green’s farms, not sparing the sumptuous Houses dedicated to the Worship of God; & gave out that Yesterday we should share the same Fate; & we beleive they would have executed their Threats but the Wind would not permit them, & this Morning they have come to in Huntington Bay nearly opposite.
This Morning Col. Hooker, Commandant at Horseneck, sent Express that the Enemy were at Rye-Neck marching this Way; that they were six thousand Foot & one thousand Horse, & we have no Force any Way adequate to oppose them. We have sent to his Excellency the Governor but there has not been Time for an Answer. The Militia are collecting but will by no Means be sufficient to oppose such an Army. We must therefore suffer our Houses & Substance to be plundered & burned unless we can obtain Assistance from your Excellency.
This County has afforded great Quantities of Provision for the Continental Army, & now We have a fine Harvest but cannot gather it. Should the Enemy succeed it will be an Accession to them. We entreat your Excellency to commiserate our distressed Condition, & afford us such Relief as Your Excellency shall judge consistent with the general Good.
In Behalf of the Inhabitants, your Excellency’s most obedient & humble Servants,
Founders Online · Papers of George Washington, Rev. War Ser., vol. 21, pp. 403–406
Read at the distance of two and a half centuries, the letter has a clarity and a register that the modern reader is unlikely to mistake. It is not the language of an army officer reporting tactical dispositions; it is the language of the political leaders of a town addressing a national commander on behalf of the inhabitants. The signers are the men who can speak for the town — the justice, the militia field officer, the four selectmen — and the body of the letter is written in the conventions of an eighteenth-century petition to a superior. The opening apology for the address (“The Exigency of our Affairs will be a sufficient Apology”). The factual recitation of what has been done to the neighboring towns. The geographical situation report (a large fleet in the Sound, troops at Huntington Bay, an enemy column reported at Rye Neck marching east). The acknowledgment that the local resources are insufficient (“the Militia are collecting but will by no Means be sufficient”). The plea, in the formal language of the petition, for relief “consistent with the general Good.” The whole is a working political document of the kind the towns of the seaboard produced in considerable quantity in the worst moments of the war.
Stephen’s signature on the document is the second of the six — placed below the Justice of the Peace, above the four selectmen, with the rank designation “Lt Coll” appended. His name in the formal style of the militia is added to the names of the town’s civilian leaders not as an alternative to their voice but as a reinforcement of it — the lieutenant colonel of the regiment signing alongside the magistrate and the selectmen, lending his military rank to a fundamentally civilian appeal. He is, in the document, a signer not a drafter; the prose is the prose of the town, not of any one of the men whose names appear under it. The voice is the voice of Norwalk in its corporate capacity, registered at the worst hour of its war and addressed to the highest authority in its country.
What the Letter Asked, and What It Got
The letter asked for help. It did not specify what kind. It did not name a regiment, a number, a deployment, a route; it asked, in the language of the petition, for “such Relief as Your Excellency shall judge consistent with the general Good.” The signers were not requesting a particular military response; they were placing the situation before the Commander-in-Chief and trusting his judgment to apply such resources to it as the larger strategic situation permitted. What they did make clear was the local stakes: the fine harvest that could not be gathered; the houses and substance that would be plundered and burned; the great quantities of provision the county had already supplied to the Continental Army that would, if Norwalk fell, become an accession to the enemy. It was a letter that asked for help by describing what would be lost without it.
The express that carried the letter reached New Windsor on the night of 10 July, perhaps in the early hours of the eleventh. Washington dictated his reply almost at once. The draft is in the hand of Robert Hanson Harrison, his military secretary; the Varick transcript in the Washington Papers preserves the text in its final form. It is the formal acknowledgment of the Norwalk appeal, expressed in the cool and restrained language Washington reserved for petitions he could not fully honor.
at New Windsor, to the Norwalk Officials
Gentlemen,
I had last night the Honor to receive Your Letter of the 9th Instant. The depredations and ravages of the Enemy upon your coast give me great concern, and I sincerely regret that the means of protection in my power are not equal to my wishes. You may be assured that whatever I can do to afford relief shall be done — and to this end I ordered a body of Troops to march Yesterday, which perhaps was doing more than a regard to the general interest & circumstances of the Army would justify.
I have the Honor to be with great respect Gentn Yr Most Obedt sert,
Founders Online · Papers of George Washington, Rev. War Ser., vol. 21, pp. 441–442
The reply is brief, sympathetic, restrained, and honest. Washington had received the letter; the depredations on the coast gave him great concern; the means of protection in his power were not equal to his wishes; whatever he could do, he would do; he had already ordered a body of troops to march, on the previous day — that is, on 10 July, before the Norwalk letter had even reached him, but in response to the general news of the coastal raids that had been reaching New Windsor since the fifth — and that the dispatch of those troops was “perhaps… more than a regard to the general interest & circumstances of the Army would justify.” That last clause is the diplomatic admission. The main strategic concern of the Continental Army in July of 1779 was the security of the Hudson Highlands against a major British move up the river. To detach troops to defend the coastal towns was to weaken the river defense. Washington had done it anyway, partially, but he was admitting, even as he wrote, that he had stretched the deployment beyond what the wider situation could comfortably support.
The troops he had ordered to march — a brigade under Major General William Heath, drawn from the Continental forces in the Hudson Highlands — moved toward the Connecticut shore through the next several days. They did not arrive in time to defend Norwalk. The wind that had held the British squadron in Huntington Bay on the afternoon of the ninth shifted within hours of the Norwalk letter being dispatched. On the night of the ninth, the squadron stood across the Sound; on the morning of the tenth, it began to land troops on the Norwalk shore at Calf Pasture and Wilson Point; and through the day of the tenth and into the eleventh, the British landing force under Tryon advanced on the town from two directions and burned it to the ground.
What the Letter Did
The letter did not save Norwalk. The chapter that follows will describe what happened to the town in the days the letter was traveling. But the letter did something that should be set down clearly before the chapter ends, even though it accomplished nothing of what its signers had asked.
It placed Stephen St. John, by his own signed hand, in the documentary record of the Continental high command at the precise moment of the worst day in the history of his town. The letter survives because Washington received it, read it, replied to it, and filed it — and because Washington’s papers, kept first in his own care and then transferred to the new national archive after his death, eventually came down to the Library of Congress, where they were catalogued, microfilmed, scanned, and made publicly accessible. The Norwalk appeal, in consequence, is one of perhaps a dozen documents from the lower Connecticut shore that registered the catastrophe of 1779 in the papers of the Commander-in-Chief. Stephen’s signature at the foot of that document is the closest thing the documentary record preserves to his having spoken, in his own voice and over his own name, on a matter of the country’s direction. He spoke, with his five colleagues, at the worst possible moment in the local history; he was answered, by the highest possible authority, with the most honest possible refusal. The exchange is, in its restrained and futile way, one of the most moving small documents the Revolution produced on the Connecticut shore.
The letter also did something internal to the Norwalk community. It registered, in the formal corporate voice of the town’s leadership, what the town believed about itself in the hour before its destruction. The signers said, in the document, that Norwalk was a town that had “afforded great Quantities of Provision for the Continental Army” — that is, that it had been a contributing community to the war effort. They said that its inhabitants were people whose “distressed Condition” deserved the commiseration of their general. They said that they were “your Excellency’s most obedient & humble Servants.” They were not, in the document, asking for unearned protection; they were asking, in the language of dignified petition, for the country to recognize them as part of itself. The petition was, in this register, a statement of identity as much as a request for relief.
Two days later, when Norwalk was a smoking ruin and the British squadron was already standing east toward New London for the raids that would close the campaign, what the town had said about itself in the letter was the formal record of what the town had believed itself to be when it still believed it would stand. The letter is, in this sense, also the last document of Norwalk before the burning.
We turn now to what happened on the tenth and eleventh of July 1779.
The Town Burns
10–11 July 1779, and the family in the woods at East Rocks
The British landing at Norwalk began in the late afternoon of Saturday, 10 July 1779. The wind that had held the squadron in Huntington Bay shifted in the early hours of the day; by midday the vessels were standing across the Sound under sail, and by four or five in the afternoon they were anchoring off the Norwalk shore at the Old Wells and Calf Pasture, the long sandy stretches east of the harbor mouth. The landing force was divided into two columns. The first column, under Brigadier General George Garth, came ashore at the Old Wells about five in the afternoon and began to move inland along the road that led north into the village. The second column, under Major General William Tryon himself, came ashore the following morning, at first light on Sunday the eleventh, at Calf Pasture, and moved up the eastern side of the river to join Garth’s column at the village. The combined force numbered something between two and three thousand men — British regulars of the 23rd, 27th, 54th, and 64th Regiments of Foot; Hessian jägers and grenadiers; and provincial Loyalist battalions of the King’s American Regiment and Fanning’s Regiment. They had come, in the formal orders Tryon had received from Sir Henry Clinton, to “chastise” the Connecticut coast, and they were doing so on the published Tryon manifesto warning the inhabitants of the rebellion that resistance would be met with the destruction of their property.
The Town as It Stood
The Norwalk into which the British column marched on the evening of the tenth was the town that this monograph has been describing. It had perhaps two hundred dwelling-houses along the river and on the surrounding higher ground, a Congregational meetinghouse on the village green, an Anglican (Episcopal) chapel of the establishment Mr. Leaming served, a town house in which the militia and the courts conducted their business, a grist mill on the river, a wharf at the stone bridge, scattered barns and outbuildings on the small farms running back toward Strawberry Hill and East Rocks. The principal commercial streets were laid out along the river bottom, where the wharves and warehouses stood; the residential streets ran along the higher ground to the east and north. The St. John Old Homestead, with its barn and barracks, stood on the rising ground a little back from the river, on the lots the family had occupied since the seventeenth century.
By the late afternoon of the tenth, the town knew what was coming. The British squadron had been visible offshore through the morning; the militia had been on alarm since the news from Fairfield three days before; the company of the 9th Regiment of Connecticut Militia that drew its men from the central village had been ordered into position to cover the roads from the landing places; and the families of the town had been doing what every Connecticut family in the path of a British raid did, in the practical terms of the moment: gathering up what they could carry, hitching the horses to the carts, driving the cattle into the back lots, and preparing to evacuate toward the wooded ground north and east of the village, where the British column would be slowest to reach them. The evacuation was already in motion when the landing began.
The Family in the Woods
The most vivid surviving description of the burning of Norwalk from inside a St. John household comes not from Stephen’s own family but from his sister-in-law — Mary Esther St. John, the wife of his younger brother William, who in 1779 was thirty-four years old and the mother of small children. She lived, in her own words in the long reminiscence the Norwalk minister Edwin Hall took down from her in November 1846, “on the old St. John place, nearly opposite Gov. Bissell’s,” in a house that stood between the site of the post-1779 St. John house and the widow Buckingham St. John’s place at the foot of Grumman’s Hill. Mary Esther was, by that 1846 interview, ninety-four years old. She had been twenty-seven on the day of the burning. The account she gave the minister, sixty-seven years later, preserves the small domestic textures of the day in a way no military report ever would.
When Fairfield was burnt, her father was harvesting down in the Neck. Expecting the British to come here immediately, they left the harvest; but when the British crossed to Long Island, her father rallied hands and went down to his harvesting. Saturday, near night, the alarm guns fired. Her husband rode down to the Neck, and returned; his horse was wet with sweat, as though he had been in the water.
She was about putting some bread in the oven. A woman who lived with Mr. Belden (where Gov. Bissell now lives) came running in and asked, “Are you going to stay?” “No, I am going out of the way.” “Well,” said the woman, “I shall stay; I will go to Gov. Tryon, and plead for the house. When he was Governor he stayed with us one night, with his attendants and horses. I will tell him of that, and we are friends to the government.” Mrs. St. J. said, “If you are going to stay, take my dough.”
She took it, and presently came running for the ovenwood. Mrs. St. J. and her husband and family, with what effects they could carry, went up into the woods, at the East Rocks. They had a bedstead, which they set up; milked the cows which they drove with them, drank the milk, and stayed there that night.
In the morning, the guns were firing; the smoke of the burning houses rose. Her husband said, “The work is begun; they are burning the town.”
Mrs. Mary Esther St. John, aged 94 · interviewed November 1846 · Hall, p. 179The detail in the recollection is the texture of an actual evening, recovered across two-thirds of a century of subsequent life: the alarm guns at near night on Saturday; the husband riding down to the Neck and returning with a sweat-soaked horse; the bread that was about to be put in the oven; the neighbor who came in to ask if they were staying; the dough handed over to a Tory woman who would invoke a former hospitality of Governor Tryon’s in the hope of saving a house; the family driving the cattle up into the East Rocks woods, setting up a bedstead in the open, milking the cows for what they could drink in the night; and in the morning, the smoke from the village across the river, and the husband’s flat sentence: “The work is begun; they are burning the town.”
This is not Stephen’s family. It is William’s. But it is a St. John household, on the St. John lots, in the same village, on the same night, fleeing to the same East Rocks high ground where — the probate inventory of seven years later would record — Stephen himself held thirty acres of pasture valued at £270, his largest single landholding outside the homestead. The two brothers’ families would have been hiding in the same woods, on land that the two of them between them substantially owned. The cows that Mary Esther’s family milked in the East Rocks that night were grazing on ground that ran into the St. John family’s combined holdings. The smoke they saw in the morning was the smoke of the town in which the family had lived for five generations.
The Burning
The British columns moved through Norwalk village on the morning and afternoon of Sunday the eleventh of July. Garth’s column had come up the west side of the river through the evening of the tenth; the Connecticut militia, in numbers wholly inadequate to the British force, had fought a delaying action on the high ground north of the village and had been pushed back. By morning, the British were in possession of the town. Tryon’s column came ashore at Calf Pasture and moved up the east side. The two columns joined at Grumman’s Hill, the rise of ground south of the village center that commanded the harbor and the lower town. Tryon, by the testimony of the Mary Esther St. John reminiscence, sat himself with chairs and a table on the hill, attended by his staff, and wrote his orders for the destruction of the town.
The burning proceeded systematically through the day. The Anglican chapel was spared (Tryon was an Anglican; the chapel had been the establishment church and most of its congregation Loyalist or at least neutral in sentiment); the Congregational meetinghouse was burned. The town house, which had served during the war as a guard-house for the Connecticut militia, was burned. The houses of the principal patriot families were burned; the houses of known Tory families were, by the published Tryon manifesto, to be spared, though in practice the discrimination was uneven. The mills, the wharves, the warehouses, the public stores were destroyed. The fires moved north through the village in the course of the morning and afternoon. By late in the day on the eleventh, the British columns were withdrawing toward their landing places to re-embark; by the morning of the twelfth, the squadron was standing east toward New London. The fleet would not, in the event, raid New London. The campaign was wound down. Norwalk was the last of the Tryon raids of 1779.
The numbers, as the town later compiled them for the claims of compensation, were severe. The town later represented to the General Assembly that something between 130 and 140 dwelling-houses had been burned in the village proper, together with the two churches (the Congregational meetinghouse and the parish at Green’s Farms had both gone), the town house, eighty-seven barns, twenty-two storehouses and shops, four mills, and five vessels in the harbor. Several lives had been lost, though the casualty count was small by comparison with the property destruction; the militia had been outnumbered and had given ground rather than stand for a general engagement. By the morning of the twelfth, when the families came down from the East Rocks and the Strawberry Hill and the other hiding-grounds and looked at what was left, the town of Norwalk — the town of the St. Johns and the Fitches and the Bettses and the Grumans, the town in which Matthias St. John had measured out his first lots in 1650 and Stephen St. John had grown to manhood and raised his children and signed his name to the appeal that had reached Washington at New Windsor two days before — was a smoking ruin.
The Letter and the Fire
Two and a half days separated the writing of the Norwalk letter from the burning of the town it had been written to save. The letter was signed at Norwalk on the morning of the ninth. Norwalk was on fire on the eleventh. The express that carried the letter reached New Windsor on the night of the tenth or the very early morning of the eleventh; Washington dictated his reply on the eleventh, with the smoke of Norwalk already rising at the very hour his secretary set down the words of his answer. The exchange is, in its temporal architecture, almost intolerably exact. The town had asked for help, by the country’s highest authority, in the formal language of petition; the country’s highest authority had answered, in the formal language of regret, that the means in his power were not equal to his wishes; and the town had been burned on the very day the answer was written.
This is the moment in the story at which the long preparation of the earlier chapters — the town offices, the militia commissions, the resistance committees, the May 1777 elevation to the lieutenant colonelcy — pays its principal documentary dividend. Stephen St. John, in July 1779, was not at Hartford voting on the state’s defense legislation. He was at Norwalk, standing in the village, signing the letter that registered the town’s appeal in the records of the Continental high command. The signature he set down on the ninth survives still in the Washington Papers at Washington, ten miles from where these words are being written in May of 2026. The town the letter could not save was rebuilt in the years after the war, on the same lots, with the same families, under the same town government, and is now a city. The fire was real and the rebuilding was real and the letter is real — and what the letter said, when Norwalk still believed it would stand, is what survives now as the formal record of what Norwalk had been on the day it stopped.
Stephen had four years and ten months of life ahead of him on the day Norwalk burned. The work the next four years would ask of him was the work of the lieutenant colonel of the regiment and the selectman of the town and the representative of the town in the General Assembly — the work, now, of the man who would oversee the rebuilding, who would pursue the redress of the damages, who would sit in the legislative chambers at Hartford and ask for the state’s and the country’s acknowledgment of what the town had suffered. And before he could fully begin that work, in April of 1781, the war that had burned his town would come for him personally, in his own bedroom, on a different kind of night.
That is the next chapter.
Taken from His Bedroom
The night of 27 April 1781, the crossing to Long Island, and the months in New York
The British raid on Norwalk village in July 1779 had been the work of a regular landing force, in the daylight, under flag, with a published manifesto and a brigadier general at the head of the columns. The British operation against Lieutenant Colonel Stephen St. John in April 1781 was of a different kind altogether. It was a night raid by a small whaleboat party of Associated Loyalists from the British base at Lloyd’s Neck on Long Island, carried across the Sound under cover of darkness, landed on the west side of Norwalk Harbor, guided up to a particular house by a man who had lived in that house, and conducted with the precision of an operation that had been planned with inside information. The object of the raid was not the destruction of property; it was the taking of three named men. The party got all three out of the house without sounding any alarm. By the following day they were in confinement on Long Island, and within weeks they were in New York, where they remained as prisoners on parole, or in stricter custody, until their exchange in the late summer or early autumn of 1781. Stephen, when he returned to Norwalk, was a different man — not in his official capacities, which the records show resuming substantially as before, but in the way that any man is altered by having been seized from his own bedroom in the middle of the night by men with bayonets, and held for some months in the hands of an enemy that had reason to keep him.
The Three Eyewitnesses
This is the chapter of the monograph in which the documentary record is, by chance and by good preservation, the richest. The capture of Stephen St. John on the night of 27 April 1781 is preserved in three independent eyewitness accounts taken down in the autumn of 1846 and the winter and spring of 1846–47, by an interviewer named McDonald, from three of the surviving men who had been alive in Norwalk in 1781 and old enough then to remember it. The interviews are in what the Norwalk historical community calls the McDonald Papers; they are reproduced in the late-nineteenth-century compilations of Norwalk history. The three witnesses are Thaddeus Bell of Darien, aged 89 at the time of his interview; Seth Seymour of Norwalk, aged 84; and Henry Chichester of Norwalk, aged 84. The three accounts converge on the same date, the same point of landing, the same Loyalist guide, the same unlocked door, the same three captives, and the same crossing to Long Island. They diverge on small details — the precise spelling of names, the exact location of the landing, the role of one or another Norwalk inhabitant — in the way that three independent eyewitness accounts taken sixty-five years after the event will naturally diverge. The convergence on the principal facts is the documentary anchor.
The accounts deserve to be read in their own voices, as the eighteenth-century-style reminiscence the nineteenth-century interviewers preserved. They are set out here in the typographic register the monograph has reserved for the voice of the long-after eyewitness.
On the 27th of April, 1781, Captain Hubbell and others landed on the west side of Norwalk Harbour, near or at Raymond’s or Belden’s Neck, and marched up through the woods to the house of one Saunders, a Loyalist. Here they got the information they wanted. One of the parties had lived in Colonel St. John’s house, and knew a door that was not closed at night, so that they got into Colonel St. John’s bedroom without any alarm, and took him, his son, and Mr. Isaacs, the father of Benjamin and Charles. They retreated by the same route, taking with them, as I have heard, a quantity of valuables, dishes and silverware. Colonel St. John was a very respectable man, and was held in great esteem by his townsmen.
Thaddeus Bell, of Darien, aged 89 · McDonald interview, November 1846In the spring of 1781, a party of refugees and Tories from Long Island, under one Hubbell, came over in whale-boats in the night, and landed at Raymond’s Neck or in that vicinity. They had a guide who knew the country, and knew Colonel St. John’s house. They went in without raising the alarm; one of them had been a servant in the house, and the doors were not all fastened. They took the Colonel and his son, who slept in the same room, and Mr. Isaacs, who lodged in another part of the house, and got them down to their boats and across to the Island before the alarm could be given. The Colonel was carried to New-York, where he was kept several months. His son and Mr. Isaacs were paroled. The Colonel was a man much beloved in this town. After his return, he was never the same in his health.
Seth Seymour, of Norwalk, aged 84 · McDonald interview, January 1847Colonel St. John had the general command of the coast, from the time of the burning of the town until his death. He was taken from his bed in the night by a party from Long Island, and carried off with his son and old Mr. Isaacs. The party came in a whale-boat across the Sound, and landed at Belden’s Neck. They had with them one who had lived in the house and knew it well, and they got the Colonel and the others out before the family was alarmed. The Colonel was kept in New-York several months. He was a man of substance, and was always treated with respect, but the confinement and the bad water broke down his health, and he did not live many years after.
Henry Chichester, of Norwalk, aged 84 · McDonald interview, March 1847The three accounts, read together, give the documentary outline of the night. The date was 27 April 1781 (so Bell, with the firmest dating; the other two agreeing on the spring of that year). The raiding party came across the Sound from Long Island in whaleboats, under the command of a captain named Hubbell — almost certainly Nehemiah Hubbell of the Associated Loyalists, a name attested elsewhere in the lower shore raid literature. They landed on the west side of Norwalk Harbor, at or near a point variously called Raymond’s Neck or Belden’s Neck (the two names refer to adjacent parcels of land on the west side of the harbor mouth). They marched up through the woods to the house of a Loyalist named Saunders, who supplied or confirmed their information. From Saunders’s, they went to Stephen’s house, guided by a man who had lived in the house and knew it well — whom Seymour describes specifically as “a servant” in the household. They entered by a door that was not closed at night. They took Stephen from his bedroom, his son Stephen the younger from the same room, and a third man, Mr. Isaacs — Isaac Scudder Isaacs, Stephen’s son-in-law, who had married his daughter Susannah, and who is identified by Bell as “the father of Benjamin and Charles,” the merchants Isaacs of the later New York Jewish-American mercantile families — from another part of the house. They carried the three down to the boats. They were across the Sound and on Long Island by the next morning.
The Identity of the Guide
The identity of the man who had “lived in” or “been a servant in” Stephen’s house, and who guided the party to the unlocked door, is a question on which the eyewitness accounts converge without quite resolving. Bell says only “one of the parties had lived in Col. St. John’s house, and knew a door that was not closed at night.” Seymour says “one of them had been a servant in the house, and the doors were not all fastened.” Chichester says “one who had lived in the house and knew it well.” The three accounts do not name the man.
The possibilities are several, and none is documented. A former hired servant of the household, dismissed or self-removed at some point in the years before the war, who had gone over to the Loyalist side and joined the refugee community on Long Island: this is the most straightforward reading of the eyewitness language, and is consistent with the pattern of the lower-shore raids generally, which depended on Loyalist refugees with personal knowledge of the patriot communities they came from. A former apprentice or journeyman: less likely on the face of it, but not impossible. The possibility that the guide was someone formerly enslaved in the household — that the “servant” of Seymour’s account was a person Stephen had owned — is a possibility raised by the period’s usage of the word “servant,” which in eighteenth-century Connecticut could refer to free hired labor, indentured servitude, or enslavement. The probate inventory of 1786 names Peter and Phillis as the people Stephen held in slavery at the time of his death. It does not name any others. Whether there had been others, in the years before 1781, who had been sold, who had run away, who had been freed in some manner not yet recovered — the documentary record is silent. The most responsible position is to note that the question exists, to refuse to resolve it without evidence, and to set down what the eyewitnesses said, which is that one of the raiding party had lived in the house and knew its doors.
This monograph will return, in the chapter on the estate, to Peter and Phillis and to what can be known of the institution of slavery in the Norwalk of Stephen’s lifetime. Here, in the chapter on the capture, the relevant fact is that the British raiding party had inside information about the layout and the routines of the Norwalk house in which Stephen slept — information that came from a person who had been part of the household. That is what the three accounts independently say, and that is what the monograph will say in turn.
The Crossing
The raiding party recrossed the Sound during the dark hours of 27–28 April with their three captives in the whaleboats. The distance was perhaps fifteen miles by the most direct line from Belden’s Neck to Lloyd’s Neck or one of the other Loyalist bases on the north shore of Long Island, and would have taken some hours under oars. The men in the boats would have been silent through the crossing — the Connecticut coast guard vessels patrolled the Sound at night precisely against this kind of operation, and the success of the raid depended on getting the captives away before the alarm could carry. By daylight on the twenty-eighth, the boats would have been on the Long Island shore, and Stephen, his son, and Mr. Isaacs would have been in Loyalist hands.
Stephen was forty-five years old. He had been in his bed at the time of the seizure; the inventory of his clothing in the 1786 probate gives no sign that he had time to dress before being taken, and the eyewitness accounts give the same impression. His son Stephen, then nineteen, had been sleeping in the same room; the two of them had been taken together. Mr. Isaacs, his son-in-law, had been in another part of the house, and was taken separately but as part of the same operation. None of the three was armed. None of the three was, in any meaningful military sense, a combatant at the moment of their capture; they were political prisoners taken from a civilian setting because of the offices their senior member held and the standing he represented. Stephen, as lieutenant colonel of the regiment and as the man who had signed the 1779 letter to Washington, was the principal target. His son and Mr. Isaacs were taken as the available adult males of the household.
The Loyalist treatment of the captives on Long Island, in the first days, is not described in detail by any of the three eyewitnesses. The standard handling of patriot officers taken in such raids was confinement in one of the British or provincial garrisons on the island — Lloyd’s Neck, Setauket, Huntington, Oyster Bay — for the few days required to arrange transport to New York City and entry into the formal prisoner system there. Stephen and the other two would have been processed in this manner. By the second week of May, almost certainly, the three of them would have been at New York.
The Months in New York
Of Stephen’s confinement in New York the eyewitness accounts give us the basic outline. Seymour: “The Colonel was carried to New-York, where he was kept several months. His son and Mr. Isaacs were paroled.” Chichester: “The Colonel was kept in New-York several months. He was a man of substance, and was always treated with respect, but the confinement and the bad water broke down his health, and he did not live many years after.” Bell does not give the length of confinement but is consistent in the framework. The picture, drawn from the three together, is of Stephen held at New York from late April through some point in the late summer or early autumn of 1781, with the two younger men paroled earlier, and with the conditions of his own confinement severe enough to be remembered, sixty-five years later, as having “broken down his health.”
The precise place of his confinement in New York is not preserved in the eyewitness accounts. The British prisoner-of-war establishment in New York City in 1781 included several principal facilities. The Provost Jail, on the east side of present-day City Hall Park, was where the most important political and military prisoners were held under the harsh administration of Provost Marshal William Cunningham. The sugar-houses — converted refineries on Liberty Street, on Crown (Liberty) Street, and on Rose Street, used as overflow facilities — held larger numbers of common prisoners. The prison ships moored in Wallabout Bay off Brooklyn, of which the Jersey was the most notorious, held thousands of captured sailors and soldiers in conditions of catastrophic mortality. Officers of Stephen’s rank, taken in irregular operations from civilian settings, were customarily placed in one of the sugar-houses or, if held under stricter conditions, in the Provost. Whether Stephen was in the Provost or in a sugar-house, the record does not preserve. The eyewitness language — “the confinement and the bad water” — is consistent with the conditions at any of the principal facilities. The death rate at the Provost and the sugar-houses through 1781 was severe; the water supply across British-occupied New York was notoriously bad, with the city’s wells contaminated and the river water unfit; the food supply for prisoners was limited and often poor. Stephen, in his middle forties and already in compromised health from the earlier years, would have been a poor candidate to endure the conditions of British New York for months.
His son and Mr. Isaacs were paroled relatively early — Seymour’s account makes this clear. The standard parole arrangement, in such cases, was the release of the prisoner on his oath not to take up arms or to give intelligence to the American cause until exchanged. The younger Stephen would have returned to Norwalk under parole some weeks after the capture. Mr. Isaacs would have done the same. There is a Norwalk town document — a letter dated 22 September 1782, in some part of the dossier — signed by Stephen St. John 2d, that is, by the son; the surviving signature of the father’s actual hand is on the 1779 Washington letter alone, while the son’s later signing of town documents reflects his own emerging role in the postwar town. The son was alive, was at Norwalk, and was conducting town business in the late summer of 1782 — consistent with his having been paroled in 1781 and returned home well before the father’s eventual exchange.
Stephen’s own exchange or parole came later. The eyewitness phrase “several months” is the only direct evidence available, and is best interpreted as somewhere between four and six months — that is, an exchange or release in the late summer or early autumn of 1781, returning him to Norwalk by perhaps September or October. The next dated documentary appearance of Stephen in the Norwalk records is in the autumn town meeting business of 1781; from the autumn of 1781 forward, he is present in the records again in his customary roles. The military activity of the Continental cause that autumn — the Yorktown campaign, the surrender of Cornwallis on 19 October — was conducted without his participation, but the news of it would have reached him at Norwalk before or shortly after his own return.
The Cost to the Body
Of the three eyewitness phrases describing the lasting effect of the confinement, Chichester’s is the most direct: “the confinement and the bad water broke down his health, and he did not live many years after.” Seymour’s is gentler in framing but conveys the same fact: “After his return, he was never the same in his health.” Bell, who is silent on the question of long-term health effects, nonetheless preserves the framework in which the question arises — that Stephen was held for some time in New York, that he was returned to his town, and that the town considered him to have suffered in the confinement.
The medical question of whether the months in New York directly contributed to Stephen’s death in May of 1785 cannot be resolved on the documentary record. He was already in “poor health” as of the spring of 1777, by the testimony of the genealogist’s note on his being excused from the moderatorship. He had resigned his 1776 battalion commission, the most consistent explanation being the same chronic condition. He was forty-five at the time of the capture, forty-nine at his death. He survived the captivity by something under four years. The eyewitness convergence on the framework — that the confinement “broke down” or “changed” his health — is the testimony of the men who knew him and who saw him in the years after his return. It is not medical evidence in any modern sense. It is the eyewitness testimony of his neighbors that he came back from New York changed.
This is the most that the documentary record will sustain. The capture contributed to the death, in the sense that the eyewitnesses who saw both ends of it believed it did. Whether it would have done so in the absence of the underlying chronic condition that was already present, no one in 1785 was equipped to say, and no one in 2026 can say. What can be said is that the night of 27 April 1781 entered Stephen’s body in some way the eyewitnesses thought was real, and that the body did not last very long after.
The Door That Was Not Closed
One last thing remains to be said about the night of the twenty-seventh of April, and it is the small narrative detail that the three accounts converge on most exactly. Bell: “a door that was not closed at night.” Seymour: “the doors were not all fastened.” Chichester implies the same in his account of the party getting in “before the family was alarmed.” The Norwalk household of Lieutenant Colonel Stephen St. John, in the spring of 1781, with its master in his middle forties and ill in health and the lieutenant colonel of the regiment that defended the lower coast against precisely this kind of operation, slept at night with one of its doors unlocked. A man who had lived in the house knew which door it was. He had been on Long Island. He came back across the Sound with his new comrades. He showed them the door.
The detail is small. It also tells, in its small way, the larger story of what a coastal Connecticut town under continuous threat from a Loyalist enemy across the Sound was actually like. The town did not, in 1781, live with all its doors fastened all the time. Households of substance, in the country, slept with their doors as they had always slept — locked enough to keep out the casual passerby, not locked enough to keep out a man with knowledge of the locks. The war that had come for Norwalk in July of 1779 had come for it again, eighteen months later, through a door of its own household that was not closed at night. The lieutenant colonel of the regiment that had failed to keep the town from being burned was now the lieutenant colonel of the regiment that had failed to keep its own commanding officer from being seized from his own bed.
He came back. The chapter that follows will pick up that return, and the four years of postwar service that ended on the ninth of May 1785.
The General Command of the Coast
Return from captivity, the late-war service, and the petition for redress, 1781–1783
Stephen returned to Norwalk in the autumn of 1781. The exact date is not preserved in any document, and the eyewitness convergence on “several months” in New York gives only the broad window of late summer or early autumn. What is preserved is the first dated appearance of his name in the Norwalk records after the capture: he is back in town meeting business by the closing months of 1781, and from the spring of 1782 forward he resumes the office of selectman, the office of representative to the General Assembly, and the working command of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia. The body that returned to Norwalk in the autumn of 1781 was, by the testimony of his neighbors, not the body that had been seized in April. The offices were the same. The man inside them was harder used.
What the General Command Meant
Henry Chichester’s testimony, from the 1847 interview, opens with the formulation that has anchored the chronology of the postwar period in this monograph: Colonel St. John had the general command of the coast, from the time of the burning of the town until his death. The phrase is the eyewitness’s, not the state’s; the formal style of the state commission remained “Lieutenant Colonel of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia,” and Stephen continued to be styled either “Lieut. Col.” or “Col.” in the rotating Norwalk usage. What Chichester’s phrase records is the working reality of the late-war period in the lower county: that the senior field officer present in Norwalk village, with the regimental seniority to coordinate the local coast defense, was Stephen St. John. Colonel John Mead, the regiment’s nominal commanding officer, was largely absent from the day-to-day defense work after 1781 — his health, his age, and the political demands of his Greenwich obligations all pulling him out of the regimental routine — and the practical authority of the regiment in the field fell to its lieutenant colonel.
The work was not, by 1782, the high-intensity work of the years between New York’s loss and the Norwalk burning. The grand strategic situation of the war had shifted after Yorktown in October of 1781. Cornwallis’s surrender at the head of the York River had not, technically, ended the war — the British still held New York City, Charleston, and Savannah; the British navy still controlled the Atlantic seaboard waters; the British command in North America had not yet abandoned the hope of restoring some part of the southern colonies to imperial allegiance — but the principal British field army in the Atlantic theater had been removed, and the political will at Westminster for the prosecution of the war had collapsed within months. Lord North’s ministry fell in March of 1782. The Rockingham ministry that succeeded it began the negotiations that would lead, two years later, to the Treaty of Paris.
For the Connecticut shore, this meant that the threat of major British operations had substantially receded by 1782. What remained was the persistent low-level coastal warfare of the whaleboat raids out of Lloyd’s Neck and the other Loyalist bases on Long Island. These raids continued through 1782 and into the spring of 1783, principally as small-scale operations: kidnappings of prominent Whigs from their houses (of the precise kind Stephen had himself suffered), thefts of livestock, plundering of isolated farms along the shore, occasional encounters between whaleboat parties of opposite sides in the Sound. The general command of the coast, in this period, was the work of coordinating the militia’s response to such raids — maintaining the pickets along the shore, organizing the coast-guard whaleboats, responding to the alarms when British vessels were sighted, and managing the prisoner exchanges that the constant low-level capture-and-counter-capture warfare generated.
Stephen, in this period, was the man on whom these duties fell. He coordinated with the Connecticut Council of Safety on the militia drafts; he conducted such limited correspondence with the Continental command as the regimental returns required; he sat as justice of the peace for the cases that his magistracy required; he served on the Norwalk selectmen’s committee that managed the long aftermath of the burning. The work was not glamorous. It was the constant, low-grade, attritional work of a coastal-defense officer in a long war that was substantially over but had not yet been declared so. It was the work that filled his fortieth-sixth, fortieth-seventh, and forty-eighth years, the years between his return from captivity and the formal end of the war.
The Letter of September 1782 — Signed by the Son
Among the surviving Norwalk papers of the late war is a document dated 22 September 1782, signed at the foot by “Stephen St. John 2d.” The document is a routine town business letter, dealing with one of the local matters the selectmen handled in the autumn of that year. What makes it relevant to the larger record of the family is not the content of the letter, which is unremarkable, but the signature. By 1782, the “Stephen St. John 2d” of the town records was no longer the father (whom the clerks had styled in that way from the mid-1770s onward, to distinguish him from an elder kinsman); it was the son, now twenty years old, who had emerged from his own captivity and parole and was beginning to take up the public business of the family. The father, in the records of 1782, is increasingly styled simply “Col. St. John” or “Lieut. Col. St. John, Esq.,” the senior usage that his regimental commission had earned him. The son, now an adult of some standing, takes over the “Stephen St. John 2d” designation that the eighteenth-century town clerks rotated among men of the same name.
This is the moment at which the two Stephens, father and son, become the parallel public figures of the Norwalk St. John family. The father is the senior officer, the magistrate, the selectman, the representative to the Assembly. The son is the rising young man of the town, taking up the small offices that begin the same kind of public career his father had begun at his age. The two of them will, in the postwar period, occupy positions in town government and in the militia in parallel — not in competition, but in succession, with the son following the path the father has laid. The letter of September 1782 is the first document this monograph can find in which the son’s public name appears in a working capacity. The signature is the rising one. The father’s name, in that same autumn, appears in the militia returns and the selectmen’s minutes in his own established style.
The Representative for Norwalk: The Long Run in the Assembly
The most continuous postwar role of Stephen’s life was his service as the representative of Norwalk in the Connecticut General Assembly. The lower house of the Assembly — the House of Representatives — was the legislative chamber to which each Connecticut town sent one or two deputies for each annual session. The Assembly met twice a year, in the May session at Hartford and the October session at New Haven, with the deputies elected by their towns shortly before each session. Stephen first appears in the Roll of the House for the October session of 1778, when he was sent as one of Norwalk’s two representatives along with his colleague David Comstock, the same selectman who would be a co-signer of the 1779 Washington letter the following summer.
From October 1778 forward, Stephen’s name appears in the Roll of the House for nearly every session through the May session of 1785, the session at the opening of which he died. The seven-year run is, by the standards of Connecticut wartime and postwar service, an unusually long and unusually continuous representation. Most towns rotated their deputies, sending different men to different sessions to spread the burden of the journey to Hartford or New Haven and the time away from home and business. That Norwalk sent Stephen, again and again, across thirteen consecutive sessions, is the documentary measure of the town’s reliance on him in these years.
The Assembly’s work in these sessions ran across the long catalogue of wartime and postwar legislation: the supply of the Continental Army; the regulation of the militia; the levying of state taxes; the issue and management of the state’s wartime emissions of paper money; the settlement of confiscated Loyalist estates; the petitions of towns and individuals for relief from the war damages; the regulation of trade with the British-occupied port of New York; the negotiation of the state’s position on the Articles of Confederation; and, in the postwar years, the settlement of the boundary disputes with neighboring states, the management of the public lands, and the long unwinding of the wartime financial obligations. Stephen, as a representative through this entire period, would have voted on substantially all of this legislation. His individual votes are not preserved in any form that would allow them to be reconstructed; the Assembly’s minutes record the body’s actions but rarely the individual roll calls. What is preserved is his presence, session after session, in the Roll of the House. He was there. He was sent. He went.
The political coloration of Stephen’s service in the Assembly, so far as it can be inferred from the towns that returned him and the men with whom he served, was consistent with the moderate Whig majority of the Connecticut wartime legislature. Norwalk was a town that had supported the Continental cause from the early committees of inspection forward; it was not, in the postwar period, a center of either the radical-democratic agitation that would surface in some western Massachusetts towns or the high-Federalist establishment politics that would dominate the lower colony’s later political alignments. Stephen was a moderate, in the sense of his class and his town — a gentleman of substance and standing, committed to the patriot cause, untouched by either democratic radicalism or counter-revolutionary sentiment. He would not, in the event, live to see the framing of the Federal Constitution. He died two years before the Philadelphia Convention met. His sons would live into the period of party politics that followed; he himself was a man of the Revolutionary war and its immediate aftermath, and his Assembly service belongs entirely to that period.
The Vote of January 1783: Agent for Redress
Of all the Norwalk town meetings of the postwar years, the one that bears most directly on Stephen’s standing in his community is the meeting of January 1783, at which the town appointed him its agent to seek redress for the damages of the 1779 burning. The meeting was held some four months before the Treaty of Paris would be signed; the war was substantially over; the time for the town to begin the formal process of seeking compensation for what it had lost in July of 1779 had arrived. Edwin Hall’s 1865 compilation preserves the vote:
The vote is, in its small way, the most concentrated documentary statement of Stephen’s standing in the town in the closing year of the war. The town had been burned three and a half years before. The work of seeking redress — from the state, from the Continental Congress, from the British government in the eventual peace negotiations, from any other source that might be available — would require correspondence, legal preparation, and political access at multiple levels. The town meeting, voting in January 1783 on whom to appoint as its agent for this work, chose Stephen. The vote was not a routine appointment to a small office. It was the town’s formal commission to its most senior surviving leader to represent its claim for compensation in whatever venue and to whatever authority that work might require.
The phrase used in the vote — “Col. Stephen St. John, Esq.” — is the formal Norwalk usage of the period. The military title (Colonel, in the working courtesy that had long since collapsed the lieutenant-colonelcy of the regiment into the customary “Colonel” of his town’s address). The personal name. The civil title (Esquire, in the eighteenth-century usage that denoted his standing as a gentleman and a justice of the peace). The town clerk who wrote the entry knew his man. The formal style was the style by which Stephen would be addressed for the rest of his life, and by which he would be set down in the Connecticut Register of 1785 when the printer at New-London came to typeset the rolls of the May Assembly.
Of the work Stephen actually did as the town’s agent for redress between January 1783 and his death in May 1785, the documentary record is thin. He would have prepared, with the selectmen, a schedule of the town’s damages — the burned houses, barns, mills, churches, public buildings, vessels, and stores — and submitted it through the appropriate channels. The General Assembly received various petitions from the burned towns of the Connecticut shore in the postwar years; Norwalk’s would have been among them. The Continental Congress was meanwhile addressing, on the larger scale, the question of compensating the war losses of the states, and the Treaty of Paris negotiations were taking up (without ever fully resolving) the question of British compensation for the destructive operations conducted in the colonies. Stephen’s individual contributions to this larger work cannot be reconstructed from the documentary record. The appointment is preserved. The vote is on the page. The town’s confidence in him is recorded. What he did with the commission, in the two and a half years of life remaining to him, is largely lost.
The Closing Year: 1784
Of the year 1784 in Stephen’s life, the surviving record gives the appearances and the absences both. The May 1784 session of the General Assembly: he is on the Roll of the House for Norwalk. The autumn town business: he is on the selectmen’s committee. The militia returns of the regiment: he is the lieutenant colonel, with the working command of the coast still attached to his office in the manner Chichester’s account preserves. The Norwalk town meetings: he is present in the records, attending to the long unwinding of the war.
Of his health in 1784, the record is silent in any direct testimony. The eyewitness convergence is on the framework that he was “never the same” after the captivity, and that the conditions of his New York confinement “broke down his health.” Whether the chronic illness of 1776–77 had returned in altered form, whether the captivity had introduced or exacerbated some particular condition, whether the long fatigue of seven years of continuous officeholding had simply worn out a body that had not been robust in the first place — the documents do not say. What the documents say is that he continued in his offices through 1784. He went up to Hartford for the May session. He sat on the committees at home. He commanded the regiment, in the working sense of the phrase. He served as justice of the peace for the small cases that the magistracy brought him. He was, in his town and in his state, exactly what he had been since 1777: the lieutenant colonel of the regiment, the justice of the county, the selectman of the town, the representative of his town in the Assembly. He was forty-eight years old.
The town reelected him in April of 1785 to the Assembly seat for the May session. The election would have been at the regular annual town meeting in early April, in the standard formula by which Norwalk chose its two deputies. He was sent again, with Samuel Cook Silliman as his colleague. The May session would open at Hartford on the second Thursday of May — the twelfth, in the calendar of that year. The deputies would have begun their journey up the post road in the first week of May, traveling by horseback or by carriage the eighty miles from Norwalk to Hartford. Stephen, however, would not make the journey. On the ninth of May 1785, at Norwalk, three days before the session would open, he died.
The next chapter takes up the closing year, the death, the printer’s correction in the Register, and the eroded gravestone in the East Norwalk burial ground. But first, this monograph turns to what the probate inventory of June 1786 revealed about the household and the estate that Stephen left behind — the house by the bridge, the lands of the family, the books and silver, and the two enslaved human beings he had owned at his death.
The House by the Bridge
An estate in 1786 — the lands, the goods, the books, and the two people he held in slavery
The probate inventory of the estate of Lieutenant Colonel Stephen St. John was taken in Norwalk on 19 June 1786, thirteen months after his death, by three appraisers appointed by the Norwalk Probate Court: Stephen Betts, Daniel Belden, and Eliphalet Lockwood, three of the senior men of the town, each himself a substantial landholder, each known to Stephen across the decades. They went through the house, the barn, the barracks, the outbuildings, the wharves, and the lands; they made entries in the careful hand the probate appraisers of the period used; they totaled their columns; and at the foot of the last page they entered the sum. The total of Stephen St. John’s estate, as inventoried in the summer of 1786, was £2,924 9s 7¼d in Connecticut money. This was, by every contemporary measure, an enormous estate. It places Stephen, by inventory size, in the upper tier of late-eighteenth-century Connecticut wealth — the highest decile of Fairfield County probate, comparable in scale to the estates of the colonial governors of the lower county and well above the average of the merchant-and-landholder gentry of the Sound shore. The document deserves to be read carefully. It is the most complete portrait we have of the world inside Stephen’s house, and of the institution he held inside it.
The Scale, in Modern Terms
Before going further into the contents of the inventory, the scale itself requires a moment of comment. Eighteenth-century Connecticut currency is not intuitive to the modern American reader, and figures expressed in pounds, shillings, and pence in a 1786 document tend to suggest, at first reading, a modesty that the actual purchasing power and wealth relations of the period sharply contradict. A few rough comparisons set the scale.
A skilled tradesman in late-1780s Connecticut — a carpenter, a cooper, a wheelwright — earned something on the order of three to five shillings a day for a day’s work, working perhaps two hundred and fifty days in a year; an annual income for such a man would run between £35 and £65. An unskilled laborer earned less, perhaps half that. A successful merchant of moderate trade might clear £100 to £200 a year above expenses. A Connecticut minister’s salary, in a substantial parish, ran around £100. A working farm of a hundred acres, with house and outbuildings, was commonly inventoried at between £300 and £700 in the records of the period.
Stephen’s inventory at £2,924 is, against these benchmarks, the inventory of a man whose estate represents something on the order of fifty years’ income for a skilled tradesman, twenty-five years for a Connecticut minister or moderate merchant, or perhaps fifteen years’ for one of the wealthier farmers of the town. The conversion into modern dollars is famously uncertain — the four standard methods (consumer price indexing, unskilled-wage parity, average-wage parity, and per-capita GDP scaling) generate widely divergent figures — but the most useful comparison for a landed estate of this kind, in this writer’s view, is the wealth-relative one: the question of what it would take, in 2026 American terms, to constitute a comparable position within the local society. By that measure, an estate of £2,924 in 1786 Connecticut money corresponds to a 2026 American estate in the upper-middle seven figures — somewhere in the range of three to four million dollars in pure purchasing power, but considerably more if one accounts for the much smaller scale of the late-eighteenth-century American economy and the relative position the estate occupied within it. By the wealth-relative measure that tracks position rather than purchasing power, Stephen’s estate would be the rough equivalent of fifteen to twenty million dollars in 2026 American wealth. By either standard, the man who died on 9 May 1785 was, in the language of his time, a man of large fortune; in the language of ours, he was a man of substantial wealth at the level of the upper professional and entrepreneurial classes of his own town. This was not a yeoman’s estate, nor the modest holdings of a middling country gentleman. This was the estate of one of the wealthiest men in late-eighteenth-century Norwalk.
What £2,438 3s 2d Actually Was — and Is
The probate appraisers in June 1786 set Stephen St. John's real estate at £2,438 3s 2d in Connecticut lawful money, with the total estate including personal property approaching £2,924. The figure is unintelligible to the modern reader without conversion. Two conversions are necessary, and they give two very different answers.
£2,438 3s 2d Real Estate, Norwalk · 19 June 1786At the exchange rate of £1 Connecticut money ≈ $114.44 in 2026 purchasing power, the estate inflation-converts to ~$279,000 — a figure that radically understates the truth. For the actual modern market value of the lands he held, see below.
The Norwalk in which Stephen St. John held land in 1785 is, in 2026, one of the highest-value coastal real estate markets in the United States. The thirty-acre Old Homestead. The thirty acres at East Rock. Twenty-one acres near Fitch's Point. Eighteen acres at Saugatuck Plain. The wharf at the stone bridge. Chimon Island. Betts Island — recently re-listed at $3.5 million. Forty-one and a half acres at Abbot's Farm. Roton (now Rowayton). Fruitful Spring at what is now Marvin Beach. Pimpewaug. Ransom Ridge. By the methodology of present-day Norwalk land comparables, his lands are worth — at the conservative low — about $195 million today, and at the high — closer to half a billion.
The difference between $279,000 and $195–495 million is the difference between asking "what would the 1785 money feel like today?" and asking "what is the actual land worth today?" For Stephen, the second answer is the one that lands. He was not merely a substantial Connecticut gentleman; he was, in the lands of his town, a man whose real estate portfolio — if preserved into modern Norwalk and Rowayton and Saugatuck — would have placed him among the largest landholders of present-day Fairfield County.
The Real Estate
The estate consisted, in the structure familiar to any reader of late-eighteenth-century Connecticut probate, of three principal categories: real estate, livestock and farm implements, and household goods. The real estate alone accounted for some £1,800 of the £2,924 total. The appraisers itemized the parcels in the order the family used in the management of the property — beginning with the Old Homestead, then moving through the outlying holdings.
| Parcel | Extent | Appraised Value |
|---|---|---|
| The Old Homestead, with barn and barracks | 30 acres | £450 |
| Land at East Rocks, pasture and woodland | 30 acres | £270 |
| Land at Saugatuck Plain | 16 acres | £160 |
| Land at Strawberry Hill | 10 acres | £100 |
| Land at Chestnut Hill | 11 acres | £88 |
| Store lot and wharf, at the stone bridge | — | £180 |
| Half share, grist mill on the Norwalk River | ½ share | £150 |
| Chummons (Chimon) Island, in Norwalk Harbor | — | £120 |
| Lots in the Norwalk village, miscellaneous | several | £205 |
| Salt meadow at the Neck | — | £80 |
| Approximate total, real estate | — | £1,803 |
The character of the holdings deserves attention. The Old Homestead, valued at £450 with its thirty acres, its barn, and its barracks (a New England term for an outbuilding for storage and farm operations), was the principal residential and agricultural property — the family seat that descended from the lots Matthias St. John had been granted in 1650. The thirty acres at East Rocks, valued at £270, were the second-largest single holding, and were the same East Rocks woodland to which the families of the town had fled on the night of the burning in July 1779 — Stephen’s own pasture land had served, in that catastrophe, as the refuge of his brother’s family, of his own family by reasonable inference, and of an unknown number of his Norwalk neighbors.
The store lot and wharf at the stone bridge were of particular significance. They placed Stephen at the commercial heart of Norwalk village: the stone bridge was the principal crossing of the Norwalk River at the village center; the wharf was one of the working landings of the harbor; the store lot beside them was the kind of commercial property a man of substance would lease to a merchant or operate himself for trade. This was not a working farmer’s estate but the estate of a merchant-gentleman with substantial commercial interests in the town’s trade. The half-share of the grist mill, the third major property item, similarly placed Stephen in the small group of Norwalk men who controlled the milling capacity of the town — a politically and economically significant position in a community whose daily flour and meal supply depended on the mills along the river.
Chimon Island, the eighty-acre island in Norwalk Harbor inventoried at £120, was a salt-meadow and pasture holding of the kind New England gentlemen accumulated for the hay and grazing the meadows produced. The smaller outlying parcels at Saugatuck Plain, Strawberry Hill, and Chestnut Hill, were the working agricultural lands of the estate — pasture, tillage, woodland, and salt meadow, in the proportions a substantial Norwalk farm of the period required.
The real estate, in aggregate, was the estate of a man who held land across most of the principal districts of Norwalk: the village center (the homestead, the store lot, the wharf), the woodlands of the surrounding hills (East Rocks, Strawberry Hill, Chestnut Hill), the agricultural plain to the east (Saugatuck), and the islands and salt meadows of the harbor (Chimon Island, the salt meadow at the Neck). It was an estate that, in its physical extent, mapped onto the town itself.
The Household Goods
The interior of the house at the Old Homestead, as the appraisers inventoried it room by room, was the interior of a substantial Connecticut gentleman’s house of the 1780s — not a great mansion in the manner of the Boston or New York patrician houses of the period, but a working country gentleman’s house furnished with the appointments his station required and his means permitted. The principal rooms held the furniture of the period in the woods and fabrics that the inventory specifies: mahogany table, black walnut chair, leather-bottomed chair, Windsor chair (the newer fashionable form of the postwar period), cherry bedstand, chest of drawers, buffet table, tea table, brass candlesticks, looking-glass (specifically, “a looking glass at the bar room” — the entry that suggests the ground-floor reception space where neighbors and tenants were received over a glass of cider or rum), clock, china tea cups, sugar pot, mug teapot, silver tankard, silver porringers, silver spoons. The clothing was good: fine cloth coats, velvet breeches, silver shoe buckles, silver knee buckles, a white beaver hat — the wardrobe of a gentleman who attended sessions of the General Assembly at Hartford and the May trainings of the regiment in Norwalk village. A coffee mill. An inkstand.
The books are listed in the inventory but not enumerated by title — the appraisers simply noted “sundry books” and a case to hold them, valued in the lower tens of shillings. The library of a Connecticut gentleman of Stephen’s class and time would have included the Bible (certainly), a psalter, the standard works of Calvinist devotion, perhaps Bunyan and Baxter and Watts, perhaps a volume or two of Hume or Robertson if the inclination ran toward history, almost certainly a copy of the laws of Connecticut and of the public records he had himself helped to make, perhaps some classical authors in translation, and the practical works on agriculture and household management a gentleman of his class would consult. The library was the library of a literate practical man, not a scholar; it does not appear to have been a notable collection in the way of the libraries of some of his Yale-trained contemporaries.
The kitchen and the farm-yard implements are inventoried in the usual late-eighteenth-century catalogue: kettles, pots, skillets, andirons, tongs, fire-shovels; plows, harrows, scythes, sickles, axes, hoes; carts, sleds, wagons. The livestock holdings were substantial: oxen, milch cows, young cattle, sheep, swine, horses (riding and draft), in numbers consistent with the working agricultural side of the estate. The combined value of the household goods and the farm equipment ran to several hundred pounds; the precise total is not preserved in the extracts of the inventory available in the dossier, but the typical proportion in such estates would suggest something in the range of £400 to £600 between the two categories.
The inventory of Stephen St. John's estate, taken at Norwalk on the nineteenth day of June 1786, runs to several pages of carefully ruled columns: real estate, household goods, silver, books, livestock, farm implements, clothing. The columns are exact; the appraisers were the kind of men who did this work seriously, and they accounted for the difference between a pewter porringer and a silver spoon, between a cow in milk and a cow dry. Two lines among the others, set in the same hand and weighed by the same standard, identify two human beings as the property of the deceased:
Peter at £27 10s. Phillis at £25. Together £52 10s, of an estate that totaled £2,924. This is the form in which they enter the documentary record of the Norwalk household. The documents preserve their names, the year their owner died, the amount the appraisers thought they were worth in the currency of the moment. The documents do not preserve their ages, their birthplaces, their family ties, their voices, their thoughts, their consent or refusal, their lives after the estate was settled. They cannot be recovered as Stephen can be recovered, because the records that would have preserved them — beyond these two valuations — were not kept by the people who owned them.
This monograph is the recovery of Stephen St. John of Norwalk. The recovery must include the fact that two of the lives the inventory accounted for were lives he held as property. Stephen's Revolutionary service, his civic offices, his captivity, his estate, and the two enslaved people in his household are all part of the same record. They are set down here together because the record set them down together. The detailed history that follows is the documentary attempt to honor Peter and Phillis as honestly as the surviving documents will allow.
Peter and Phillis
Among the items inventoried by the appraisers on 19 June 1786, in the same hand and on the same pages as the cattle and the silver and the household furnishings, were the two human beings whom Stephen had held in slavery at the time of his death. They are named in the inventory:
Two lines on the page. Two names. Two valuations in pounds and shillings, entered in the same hand the appraisers had used for the silver tankard and the oxen. This is the form in which Peter and Phillis enter the documentary record of the family that owned them. It is the only form the estate inventory gave them. They appear nowhere else in the documents this monograph has been able to consult — not in the Norwalk town records preserved by Hall, not in the church records as far as the available abstracts run, not in any letter or memorandum among Stephen’s surviving papers. The probate entry is what survives. It is what we have.
The inventory tells us their names — Peter and Phillis — in the form the eighteenth-century white American written record gave African names. These were almost certainly not the names they had been born with; the names attached to enslaved people in white-kept records were the names the slaveowners or their predecessors had imposed, often biblical (Peter, Phillis, Jenny, Caesar, Cato, Pompey were common in the lower-county records), often classical, very rarely the names of African origin the people themselves might have used in their own communities. Of Peter’s and Phillis’s actual histories — where they had been born, when they had come into Stephen’s ownership, whether they had been purchased or inherited or born into the household, whether they were married to each other or had children, whether they were in their twenties or forties or sixties at the time of the inventory, what work they had done in the household, what they thought, what they hoped, what they remembered, what they suffered — the documentary record this monograph has been able to consult preserves nothing whatsoever. The lines in the inventory are the lines.
The valuations — Peter at £27 10s, Phillis at £25 — are at the lower end of the range for adult enslaved people in Connecticut probate of the period, which suggests one or both were either older (their working years past their peak), or in poor health, or held under terms that limited their salability. In the late 1780s, in fact, a younger and healthier enslaved adult in the lower colony commonly inventoried at £50 to £80, with some at £100 or more. That Peter and Phillis appraised at half those figures suggests, with some confidence, that they were past middle age — possibly elderly, possibly worn from years of labor, possibly carrying conditions that reduced their value in the appraiser’s estimation. They had been part of Stephen’s household, on the most likely reading, for many years. The inventory does not say when they had arrived. It does not say what would become of them after the estate was settled.
Slavery in Norwalk: The Wider Picture
To set Peter and Phillis in the world they actually lived in requires a small departure from the narrative of the inventory into the wider context of slavery in late-colonial and post-Revolutionary Connecticut. Connecticut had been a slaveholding colony throughout its history. The institution was not the agricultural-plantation slavery of the Chesapeake or the Lowcountry; it was the smaller-scale household and farm slavery typical of the northern colonies, in which most slaveowners held one or two or at most a handful of enslaved people, principally for domestic work, farm labor, and skilled trades. In the 1774 census, Connecticut had perhaps 6,500 enslaved people in a total population of around 200,000 — about three percent of the colony’s inhabitants. The institution was concentrated in the lower county, where the commercial ties to New York and the West Indies had given it the strongest foothold; Norwalk and the other Fairfield County towns held proportionally more enslaved people than the upcountry. The wealthiest families of Norwalk — the Fitches, the St. Johns, the Bettses, the Grumans, the Hanfords — were among the slaveholders.
The work of an enslaved person in a Norwalk household of Stephen’s position would have been the work of the household and the farm: cooking, washing, child-care, dairy work, gardening, kitchen-garden labor in the women’s sphere; barn work, fieldwork, woodcutting, hauling, the heavy outdoor labor of the property in the men’s. The enslaved people lived, in the typical northern arrangement, in the same house or in an attached outbuilding (a “barracks” of the kind Stephen’s inventory mentions); they ate the food the household kitchen produced, in some form; they wore the clothing the household provided; they had, in the legal sense, no property of their own, no liberty of their own, no marriage rights enforceable by law, no protection against sale, separation from family, or transfer by inheritance.
Connecticut began the legal dismantling of slavery in 1784, the year before Stephen’s death. The Gradual Emancipation Act of that year provided that every Negro or mulatto child born in the state after 1 March 1784 should become free upon reaching twenty-five years of age. The act did not free a single living enslaved person at the moment of its passage; it began only the slow process by which the institution would, over the following half-century, be eliminated. Peter and Phillis, both alive and held in slavery in 1785 and 1786, were unaffected by the act. Their status at Stephen’s death was the same as their status had been before it: enslaved persons, the property of his estate, subject to the disposition of his executors and the inheritance terms of his estate. What became of them after 1786 is not preserved in any document this monograph has been able to consult. They may have been transferred to one of Stephen’s sons or to his widow. They may have been sold within the lower county. They may have been freed by some private manumission in the years that followed — the late eighteenth century in Connecticut saw a slow trickle of private manumissions, particularly of older enslaved people whose working years were past. The most that can be said is that they appear in the inventory; that they are not visible in any further document; and that what happened to them in the years after 1786 is, on the present state of the documentary record, lost.
This monograph cannot recover their lives. It can only mark, in the place where the inventory marks them, that they existed; that they had names — even if the names were not the names they had chosen; that they were human beings, not property in any morally meaningful sense, regardless of what the appraisers’ columns asserted; and that the wealth of Stephen St. John’s estate — the lands, the silver, the books, the half-share of the mill, the wharf at the stone bridge, the white beaver hat and the velvet breeches and the £2,924 9s 7¼d that totaled at the foot of the inventory — was, in some part, the wealth that the labor of Peter and Phillis and the others who may have preceded them had built. To set down the estate without setting down their names would be to falsify the record. The monograph sets them down. Peter. Phillis. Whatever names they had given themselves in whatever language they had carried into Connecticut, or what their mothers had given them before they were taken, are lost. The white-kept names are what remain. They are now also, in this monograph, set down.
The Total
The total of the estate, as the appraisers entered it at the foot of the inventory: £2,924 9s 7¼d in Connecticut money. The figure stood as the formal record of what Stephen St. John of Norwalk had accumulated in fifty years of life. It included the land of five generations of his family in the town. It included the commercial holdings he had built up — the wharf, the store lot, the mill share — in his own working career. It included the household goods of a gentleman’s establishment maintained at the level his station required. It included the library, the silver, the clothing, and the personal effects of a man of substance. And it included — in two lines on the page, in the same hand as everything else — the two human beings whose labor had been part of the wealth, and whose names appear in the document for the first and last time.
The administration of the estate fell, in the conventional manner, to Ann Fitch St. John as widow and to one or more of the children as co-administrators. The post-mortem distribution would have followed Connecticut probate practice: the widow’s dower of one-third of the real estate for her lifetime, with the remainder divided among the surviving children according to the law of intestate succession or the terms of any will Stephen may have left. (The available dossier does not preserve a will; he may have died intestate, or the will may simply not have been recovered into the present collection.) The estate’s settlement was a process of years — the records of the Norwalk Probate Court show partial distributions in 1787, further distributions through the early 1790s, and a substantial final division entered in 1794, when the widow Ann was named in the document as “Ann St. John, widow and relict of Col. Stephen St. John, dec’d.” She would outlive her husband by twelve years, dying at Norwalk on 28 April 1797, in her sixty-fourth year. The Old Homestead would descend, in some form, into the next generation, where William’s daughter Charlotte would carry one strand of it forward into the Hanford line that runs to the historian of this monograph.
But all of this came after. The work of this chapter has been to set down what the inventory of 1786 actually showed — the lands, the goods, the slavery, and the scale — in the same way that the appraisers themselves set it down, with the same care for what is present in the document, and the same refusal to invent what is not. The next chapter takes up the last year of the man whose estate this was, and the day on which the printer at New-London marked the page beside his name.
Obiit 9th May
The closing year, the day, the printer’s note, and the eroded stone
The town of Norwalk held its annual election town meeting on the second Monday of April in 1785. The meeting’s business included, among the other standard items, the choice of the two deputies who would represent the town in the May session of the General Assembly. The town chose, as it had chosen in nearly every session since October 1778, Stephen St. John, Esq., for the senior place; and as his colleague, Samuel Cook Silliman, who had served alongside him in several earlier sessions. The May session was scheduled to open at Hartford on Thursday the twelfth of May. The deputies would, by custom, begin the journey up the post road in the first week of the month, traveling the eighty miles to Hartford in two or three days by horseback, putting up at the country inns along the route. Stephen, in the ordinary course of his ten-year representation, would have been at his preparations for the journey in the closing days of April and the first days of May. He did not, in the event, make the journey. On the ninth of May 1785, at Norwalk, three days before the session would open, he died.
The Day
The documentary record preserves the date of his death precisely: 9 May 1785. The eroded inscription on his gravestone in the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery, transcribed in 1895 by the antiquarian David Hermon Van Hoosear and recorded in the published transcripts of the burial ground’s inscriptions, gives the date. The Connecticut Register for 1785, set into type at New-London by the schoolmaster-printer Nathan Daboll and published in late April or early May of that year, was already in print with his name listed for the Norwalk seat when the news of his death reached the printer; Daboll’s correction — the italic Obiit 9th May. set beside the printed name — is the second documentary attestation of the date. The two records agree. The day was a Monday, three days before the opening of the May session.
Of the manner of his death the surviving record is silent. There is no will preserved in the available dossier (though one may exist in the unconsulted Norwalk Probate records). There is no death notice in any contemporary newspaper that the dossier has recovered. There is no medical document, no minister’s account, no eyewitness reminiscence from a deathbed observer. The death occurred at Norwalk, in his fiftieth year, almost certainly at his own home; the appraisers who would inventory the estate the following June would have known the room in which he had died, as would his neighbors and the men of his town who attended the funeral, but they did not write any of it down in a form that survives.
What can be said is what the previous chapters have established. He had been in poor health since at least 1777. The captivity of 1781 had, by the testimony of the men who had seen him before and after, “broken down his health” or rendered him “never the same.” The four years between his return from New York and the day in May 1785 had been years in which he had continued to serve in his offices — the lieutenant colonel of the regiment, the justice of the peace, the selectman, the representative in the Assembly, the agent for the town’s redress — but in which the body that had been compromised in the 1770s and harder used in the 1780s had been continuing its slow decline. He was forty-nine years old. He died in office.
The Printer’s Correction
Nathan Daboll’s Register for the State of Connecticut, for the Year of our LORD 1785 was the work of a particular Connecticut printing tradition. Daboll — mathematician, schoolmaster, almanac-maker — had been calculating and publishing the New England almanac for two decades by 1785, and had taken over the Connecticut Register franchise as part of his publishing operation at New London. The Register was an annual reference work that combined the standard almanac features (calendar, sunrise and sunset, tides, eclipses) with a directory of the state government — the executive officers, the judges, the militia field officers, and the rolls of the House of Representatives by town. It was, in its small way, the state’s self-portrait in print: who held what office in what session, for the year ahead.
The composition of the 1785 Register would have been under way through the early spring. The deputies’ names for the May session would have been set from the returns the towns made after their April elections; the form would have been locked in by late April or the first week of May, in time for the Register to be available at the opening of the session. Stephen’s name was already set into the form for the Norwalk seat. When news of the ninth-of-May death reached the printer — perhaps within a day or two, by the ordinary course of post on the shore — the printing was already too advanced to recompose. Daboll did what a careful printer could do at that stage: he made the smallest possible amendment, adding in italic, beside the already-printed name, the Latin abbreviation and the date. Obiit 9th May. “Died, the ninth of May.” The Register went out, with Stephen’s name still listed for the seat he no longer held, marked by the printer’s italic with the date he had left it.
The printer’s correction is the documentary moment around which this monograph has built itself, from the first paragraph of the Prologue forward. It is the gesture of a Connecticut printer in the spring of 1785 doing the minimum that fidelity to the truth required — not removing the name (the type was locked), not pretending the man was still alive (the name carried the italic correction), not making any larger statement than the document’s form permitted. He marked the line. He marked the day. The Register, distributed across the state through May and June of 1785, carried the correction to wherever the printed work was read. And the line that had been set into the form in April, with the Latin marker added in May, is now — two hundred and forty-one years later — the title-line of the monograph the historian has built.
The Funeral and the Stone
Stephen’s funeral was held at Norwalk, almost certainly within a few days of the death, in the manner of a New England burial of a man of his standing. The Congregational meetinghouse had been burned in July 1779 and would not be fully rebuilt until later in the decade; the funeral may have been conducted at the temporary replacement structure the parish had erected, or at the home, or at graveside. The procession from the village to the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery, where the family had its burying lots, would have gathered the principal men of the town — the selectmen, the militia officers, the justices, the deputies, the merchants and farmers and ministers of the lower county whom Stephen had served and worked with across the long decades. The minister would have preached the funeral sermon in the manner of the Connecticut Calvinist tradition: a text from Scripture, an exposition of the doctrine of mortality, an application to the life of the deceased, a closing exhortation to the living. The sermon was not, so far as the documentary record preserves, published as a memorial; many such sermons were, but Stephen’s appears not to have been.
His grave is in the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery, on East Avenue in the present-day East Norwalk section of the city. The stone, when it was transcribed in 1895 by Van Hoosear, was already worn by a century of New England weather; the present condition of the inscription is poor. The text the antiquarian recovered preserved the essentials:
Lt. Col. Stephen St. John, Esq.
Who departed this Life
May 9th, 1785
In the 50th Year of his Age.
The stone gives him the formal style of his commission — Lt. Col. Stephen St. John, Esq., with the military rank and the civil honor both — and the year-of-age phrase that places his birth in the twelve months ending May 1735 or the twelve months beginning May 1735 (depending on the inclusive or exclusive count, which the inscription does not clarify). The form is the standard form of late-eighteenth-century New England gravestone composition. The lettering, by the photographs and rubbings that survive, was the work of one of the regional stonecutters of the lower county, in the cherub-and-soul-effigy style that the period reserved for prominent men.
A Note on the Burial Index
The Family Continues
Ann Fitch St. John, the widow, was fifty-one years old at her husband’s death. She would live another twelve years at Norwalk, dying on 28 April 1797 in her sixty-fourth year. The estate administration would occupy her, in cooperation with her sons and the appointed co-administrators, through the late 1780s and into the 1790s. The 1786 inventory, taken in June, was the opening document of the long administrative process; partial distributions were entered through 1787; a substantial division of the real estate was recorded in 1794, with Ann named as “Ann St. John, widow and relict of Col. Stephen St. John, dec’d.”
The five children of Stephen and Ann survived him by varying lengths. Stephen the younger, the elder son who had been seized with his father in April 1781, lived until 27 August 1828, dying at sixty-six; he had married Sarah Fitch, of the Norwalk Fitch line, and had carried forward the elder branch of the family into the next century. William, the younger son, lived until February of 1805, dying at forty-one; he had married Mary Esther Belden in 1777, and had begotten the daughter Charlotte (born 1789) through whom the line descends to the historian of this monograph. Sarah, who had married Dr. John Cannon Jr. of Norwalk, lived into the next century; her daughter Harriet would marry into the Hanford line as well. Susannah, who had married Isaac Scudder Isaacs (whose father was the third captive of the April 1781 raid), lived to a substantial age and left descendants in the merchant Isaacs families of New York. Nancy, the youngest, married Matthew Marvin of Norwalk.
The branch of the family that descends to the historian runs through William, who died young, and through Charlotte, his daughter, who married into the Hanfords. Through five generations of Hanfords — Daniel, Charles Edward, Charles Edwin, Jack, Fyrn — the line carries down to the historian’s mother’s mother. The Coda of this monograph will trace the descent in fuller detail.
What Remained, and What Did Not
Stephen St. John died on a Monday in early May, four days before the May session of the General Assembly was scheduled to open at Hartford, in the room where he had probably been ill for some weeks or months. The town of Norwalk had to fill his seat in the Assembly before the session opened; the records suggest that Samuel Cook Silliman went up alone to serve the May session for Norwalk, with a replacement chosen for the following session. The Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia had to fill the lieutenant-colonelcy; the May session of the Assembly attended to the appointment in the regular course of its militia business. The justice-of-the-peace commission for Fairfield County had to be filled; the same session attended to that. The selectmen’s seat at Norwalk would be filled at the next town meeting. The agent for the town’s redress for the burning would need to be reappointed; the town would meet later that year and would so appoint.
All of the offices were filled. The work of the town and the state went on. The Ninth Regiment continued; the Assembly continued; the town meetings continued; the redress for the burning continued (and was, in the eventual outcome, partially obtained, in the form of state grants of confiscated Loyalist lands to the burned towns under the post-war settlement legislation). What stopped was the particular life of the particular man. The printer at New-London, locking up the type for the Register that would be distributed across the state for the year, made the italic correction beside the name that was already set. The town of Norwalk reorganized its offices around the vacancy. The widow began the long work of estate administration. The body was carried to the East Norwalk burying ground and laid in the family lot. The stonecutter, in some workshop of the lower county, prepared the inscription that would mark the grave.
And the line, the printer’s line, in the Register set at New-London in the spring of 1785 — Obiit 9th May. — was carried out across the state in the printed Register and into every household and office that subscribed to the work. It is the line around which this monograph has turned. It is the documentary marker of the end of the life. The Coda that follows takes up what came down the line in the centuries that followed.
What Came Down the Line
A grandson's postscript, the line of descent, and the closing in May 2026
Two hundred and forty-one years have passed between the morning the printer at New-London set the italic note in the Register and the morning in May 2026 at which this monograph is being closed. In the year of Stephen's death, his estate was being assessed by the appraisers in shillings and pence; the United States was four years short of its Constitution; the Great Seal that opens this Coda had been adopted by the Continental Congress on the twentieth of June, 1782, three years before he died, and would have been the seal of the country he served. Across the centuries between, the blood that ran in him has run on through nine intervening generations, in three principal family names, into a Pittsburgh study where a man who has spent thirty years researching his family's past now sets down the close of a documentary biography of his seventh-great-grandfather.
The Year Charlotte Was Born
The line that descends to the historian runs first through Stephen's younger son William, born at Norwalk in 1763, who married Hannah Marvin in 1788. Their daughter Charlotte was born in 1785 — in the year of her grandfather's death. Stephen died on the ninth of May. Charlotte was born sometime in the same year, by the most consistent records. She came into the world the same year he left it. The line passes through one generational handover, and the year is the same.
Charlotte married into the Hanford line — the line of Rev. Thomas Hanford whose name is set on the Founders' Stone in Chapter I — and bore Daniel Hanford in 1803. From Daniel through five generations of Hanfords, the line runs forward into the twentieth century: Charles Edward Hanford, born November 1830 at Tarrytown, who married Mary Elizabeth Banker and brought the line into the New York mercantile world; Charles Edwin Hanford, the actor, playwright, and Irish-comedy songwriter of the New York stage, born in Manhattan in 1865, who is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; Jack Charles Hanford, born 1893, who lived and worked in Pittsburgh; Fyrn Jacqueline Hanford (1925–2011), who married into the Donato family; Sherry Ann Donato, born 1948, who married into the Schalcosky family and is the mother of the historian.
The historian himself, John D. Schalcosky, born 1982 in Perrysville, Ross Township, Pittsburgh, is the founder of Odd Pittsburgh, a public-history project that has spent the past several years recovering the stories of soldiers and ordinary people from the city's long industrial past. This monograph is the third of his ancestral biographies. The first two — The Fighting Falcon for Morgan R. Donato Jr., the rifleman of the Hürtgen Forest, and The Long Way Home for Stanley Schalcosky, the multi-theater World War II soldier — were the histories of two grandfathers he had known personally. This third one is the history of a man he could not have known, whose grandson he is at the seventh remove, whose offices and signature and capture and estate the documentary record permits him to recover, but whose face is unknown and whose voice survives only in the signature on the 9 July 1779 letter to George Washington at the Library of Congress.
The Closing
This monograph is being written in the second year of the long observance of the United States Semiquincentennial — the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which falls on 4 July 2026. The town of Norwalk, rebuilt over the centuries since the burning, is preparing its own commemorations of July 1779, the very catastrophe Stephen had written to Washington to try to prevent. The Connecticut Historical Society, the Daughters and Sons of the American Revolution, the National Park Service, the local historical societies of the Fairfield County towns are all engaged with the work of marking the period to which Stephen's life belonged.
This monograph is the historian's private contribution to that observance. Stephen St. John of Norwalk lived through the years in which a country was being made out of the colonies of his upbringing. He did not live to see the framing of the Constitution, the inauguration of the first president, or any of the political constructions that would follow from the war in which he had served. He died two years before the Philadelphia Convention met, four years before Washington took the oath at Federal Hall. He was one of the thousands of small officers of small regiments in small states whose accumulated work was the substance of the Revolution. The Great Seal at the head of this Coda was the seal of the country he served. He was the husband of one wife, the father of five children, the master of two enslaved human beings whose names the record preserves but whose lives it does not, the captive of a Loyalist raiding party, the signer of a letter to Washington, the agent of a town for the redress of its burning, the holder of an estate so substantial that its modern market value runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The printer at New-London made the italic correction in the spring of 1785. Obiit 9th May. The line is the close. It is also, in this monograph, the opening. He was Stephen St. John of Norwalk, in the Colony and State of Connecticut, Lieutenant Colonel of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia. The recovery is partial. The recovery is provisional. The recovery is the best the surviving documents permit. It is what this monograph offers in honor of his memory, in the year of America's Two-Hundred-and-Fiftieth.
May the line carry forward.
This biography is built from primary documents wherever the surviving record permits, with explicit hedging where it does not. The principal source-categories are these:
Historical Tables
A summary register of the offices, family, real estate, and descent
I. Military Service Record
| Date | Rank / Office | Unit / Authority · Source |
|---|---|---|
| May 1761 | Captain, 1st Company | 1st Company (train-band) of Norwalk, 9th Regt. CT Militia · Public Records of CT, vol. XI, p. 552 |
| May 1775 | Major | 9th Regt. CT Militia · Public Records of CT, vol. XV, p. 43 |
| Nov 1776 | Major (briefly) | 1st Battalion of state defense levy, Col. Samuel Whiting commanding · Public Records of State of CT, vol. I, p. 66 |
| Nov 1776 | Resigned | Resignation noted in footnote; Nehemiah Beardsley appointed in his stead |
| 27 Apr 1777 | Major (in regiment) | Battle of Ridgefield — 9th Regt. CT Militia engaged. Stephen’s personal presence on the field is probable but not directly documented. |
| May 1777 | Lieutenant Colonel | 9th Regt. CT Militia, in the room of Lt. Col. John Mead promoted · Public Records of State of CT, vol. I, p. 263 |
| Jul 1779 | Lt. Col. (in command of local response) | British raid on Norwalk, 10–11 July; signer of 9 July letter to Washington as “Stephen St john, Lt Coll” |
| 27 Apr 1781 | Lt. Col. (captured) | Taken from his bedroom by Loyalist raiding party from Long Island; held in New York several months |
| 1781–1785 | Lt. Col. / “general command of the coast” | Working command of the coast defense of Norwalk per H. Chichester eyewitness testimony (McDonald, 1847) |
| 9 May 1785 | Obiit | Died in office; commission vacated by death |
II. Civil Offices Held
| Office | Years | Source / Note |
|---|---|---|
| Grand Juror | 1758 | Norwalk Town Records · first town office |
| Surveyor of Highways | 1761, 1766, 1768, 1774, 1776, 1777 | Norwalk Town Records · recurring rotation |
| Selectman | 1763, 1764, 1766, 1772, 1773, 1775–1778, 1782–1784 | Norwalk Town Records · multiple terms across two decades |
| Lister | 1763 | Norwalk Town Records |
| Committee to draw instructions, non-importation | Aug 1770 | Hall, p. 127 · with Betts, Belden, Gruman |
| Committee of Inspection (Continental Association) | Dec 1774 | Hall, p. 127 · 20-member committee |
| Delegate to County Congress | Feb 1775 | Hall, p. 128 · with Betts, Raymond, Gruman |
| Committee of Inspection (working) | Feb 1775 | Hall, p. 128 · 21-member committee |
| Excused from Moderatorship (poor health) | 1777 | 1907 Genealogy · Norwalk Town Records |
| Committee on Articles of Confederation | Dec 1777 | Norwalk Town Records |
| Justice of the Peace, Fairfield County | May 1777; reappointed May 1778 | Public Records of State of CT, vol. I, p. 225; vol. II, p. 255 |
| Representative for Norwalk, General Assembly | Oct 1778 — May 1785 (13 sessions) | Roll of the House · nearly continuous through 7 years |
| Town Agent for Redress of the Burning | Jan 1783 | Hall, p. 144 · styled “Col. Stephen St. John, Esq.” |
III. Real Estate — from the Probate Inventory, 19 June 1786
| Parcel | Extent | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Old Homestead, with barn and barracks | 30 acres | £450 |
| East Rocks — pasture and woodland | 30 acres | £270 |
| Saugatuck Plain | 16 acres | £160 |
| Strawberry Hill | 10 acres | £100 |
| Chestnut Hill | 11 acres | £88 |
| Store lot and wharf, at the stone bridge | — | £180 |
| Half share, grist mill on the Norwalk River | ½ | £150 |
| Chimon Island, in Norwalk Harbor | — | £120 |
| Lots in Norwalk village (misc.) | several | £205 |
| Salt meadow at the Neck | — | £80 |
| Total real estate (approximate) | — | £1,803 |
| Plus household goods, livestock, books, silver, slaves, etc. | — | ~£1,121 |
| GRAND TOTAL OF ESTATE | — | £2,924 9s 7¼d |
| 2026 Comparative Scale (approximate): ~ $3.5M–$4M in pure purchasing power; ~ $15M–$20M by wealth-relative measure. Among the largest estates in late-eighteenth-century Norwalk. | ||
IV. Principal Sources Consulted
The documentary record on which this monograph is built consists of the following principal sources. The list is not exhaustive of the secondary literature on the Connecticut Revolution or on the burning of Norwalk; it is a record of the primary documents from which the present account was reconstructed.
| Source | Description · Use in this Monograph |
|---|---|
| Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, ed. Hoadly | State commissions of 1761 (Captain) and 1775 (Major); appointments of Justices of the Peace |
| Public Records of the State of Connecticut, ed. Hoadly — vols. I–II | November 1776 battalion commission and resignation; May 1777 promotion to Lieutenant Colonel (vol. I, p. 263); Justice of the Peace appointments; Rolls of the House of Representatives 1778–1785 |
| Ancient Historical Records of Norwalk, Edwin Hall (1865) | Norwalk town meeting records: non-importation committee 1770, Committee of Inspection 1774, County Congress delegation 1775, agent for redress 1783; reminiscences of Mary Esther St. John on the 1779 burning |
| 9 July 1779 letter to George Washington · Washington Papers, Library of Congress | The central documentary moment; Stephen’s signature “Stephen St john, Lt Coll” |
| Washington’s 11 July 1779 reply · New Windsor, in Robert Hanson Harrison’s hand | The reply from the Continental high command |
| McDonald Papers eyewitness interviews, 1846–47 | Thaddeus Bell, Seth Seymour, Henry Chichester accounts of the 27 April 1781 capture; Chichester’s testimony of “general command of the coast” |
| Norwalk Probate Inventory, 19 June 1786 | Estate contents; total £2,924 9s 7¼d; Peter and Phillis |
| A Register for the State of Connecticut, 1785, Nathan Daboll, New London | The italic correction “Obiit 9th May.” beside the Norwalk seat |
| St. John Genealogy, Alexander (1907) | Family pedigree from Matthias St. John (1634) through fifth-generation Stephen |
| Van Hoosear, Norwalk Burying Grounds Inscriptions (1895) | Gravestone transcription, East Norwalk Historical Cemetery |
Died at Norwalk, State of Connecticut, on the Ninth Day of May, 1785
In the Fiftieth Year of his Age — in office, in his town, in his own house
Captain, 1st Company, 1st Train-band of Norwalk, 1761
Major, 9th Regiment of Connecticut Militia, 1775
Lieutenant Colonel, 9th Regiment of Connecticut Militia, 1777
Justice of the Peace, County of Fairfield, 1777
Representative for Norwalk in the General Assembly, 1778–1785
Agent for the Town of Norwalk in the Redress of the Burning, 1783
— Obiit 9th May —
founder of Odd Pittsburgh,
a monograph in honor of his seventh-great-grandfather,
Lieutenant Colonel Stephen St. John of Norwalk,
in observance of the Two-Hundred-and-Fiftieth Year of American Independence.
In memoriam Lieutenant Colonel Stephen St. John,
of the Ninth Regiment of Connecticut Militia · 1735 — 1785.
Selectman of Norwalk · Representative in the General Assembly.
Captive of the Associated Loyalists · April 1781.
Signer of the appeal to His Excellency General Washington · July 1779.
Husband of Ann Fitch · Father of five.
In honor also of Peter and Phillis,
whose names appear in the inventory of his estate,
and whose lives the record has not preserved.
In the long line of those whose names this country is asked to speak aloud
in the year of its Two-Hundred-and-Fiftieth.