Early Life and Education
James Lanman was the eldest of the seven children of Peter Lanman Jr., of Norwich, Connecticut and Sarah Coit Lanman. The first of many generations of Lanmans who attended what is now known as Yale University, James Lanman pursued classical studies and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale College in 1788. Lanman studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1791, beginning his practice in his hometown of Norwich "where he acquired great local distinction for his eloquence and general ability". We get an interesting glimpse of James Lanman as a young man of 20 through the diary of John Quincy Adams, who was two years his senior and rode with him on a stage from Boston to Providence on September 8, 1789: "I had two companions; one a Mr. Wright from North Carolina, and the other a young man from Connecticut by the name of Lanman. We were tolerably sociable. Lanman sung a number of songs of his own accord, and sung very well. But, upon being requested by Mr. Wright to continue, he altogether denied that he could sing at all." When his father, shipping magnate Peter Lanman, died in 1804, James inherited and moved into his childhood home, the now historic "Peter Lanman House" on Main Street, for the rest of his life. A nearby tavern (now the Norwich Savings Society) at "Peter Lanman's Corner", at Main and Broadway in Norwich, is of interest because George Washington stayed there in 1775.
James Lanman married Marian Chandler on May 18, 1794 and had four sons and eight daughters. Widowed in 1817, Lanman married his second wife, Mary Judith (Gall) Benjamin, on October 26, 1826. He had no children by his second marriage.
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