Josiah Bartlett (1729-1795) Essay, Research Paper
physician, Revolutionary patriot, chief justice and governor of New
Hampshire, was born in Amesbury, Mass. He was educated in the
common schools, and studied medicine. He opened practice in 1750 in
the town of Kingston in southern New Hampshire. He was married on
Jan.15, 1754, to his cousin, Mary Bartlett of Newton, N. H. They had
twelve children. He was elected to the Provincial Assembly in 1765. In
1767 he was appointed by the royal governor, John Wentworth, a justice
of the peace and soon after a colonel of a regiment of militia, but when he
took the side of the patriots he was dismissed from these offices, in
February 1775. Previously, in 1774 he was recognized as an active
patriot by his appointment on the important Committee of
Correspondence of the Provincial Assembly and by his election to that
Assembly’s Revolutionary successor, the first Provincial Congress, which
chose him as one of two delegates from New Hampshire to the first
Continental Congress. Although he was unable to accept this election,
because of the recent destruction of his house by fire, believed to have
been set because of his activity in the popu
again chosen as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and in the latter
year was the first to vote in favor of the adoption of the Declaration of
Independence, to which his name was duly affixed. In I778-79 he was the
first to vote for the proposed Articles of Confederation and Perpetual
Union which took effect Mar. 1, 1781. In 1779 New Hampshire appointed
him chief justice of its court of common pleas. In 1782 he was promoted to
be associate justice of the superior court, and to chief justice in 1788. He
ended his service on the bench in 1790. Tradition and his own reported
statement make it probable that his decisions, like those of other lay
judges of that period, were based upon equity. Some of the ablest lawyers
of that time declared that justice was never better administered in New
Hampshire than when the judges knew very little law. In 1790 and each of
the two following years he was elected to the highest office in the State,
that of president. In June 1793, he was chosen as the first governor of the
state. At the close of his term of office in 1794, because of ill health he
withdrew from politics. He died at his home in Kingston on May 19, 1795.