Joseph Dudley - Early Life

Early Life

Joseph Dudley was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts Bay Colony on 23 September 1647. His mother was Katherine Deighton Hackburne Dudley, and his father was Thomas Dudley, one of the founders and leading magistrates of the colony. His father was elderly (seventy) when he was born, and he was raised by his mother and Reverend John Allin, whom she married after his father's death in 1653.

He graduated from Harvard College in 1665, and was admitted as a freeman in 1672. He became a member of the general court representing Roxbury in 1673, and was elected to the colony's council of assistants in 1676. In 1675, when King Philip's War broke out, Dudley was a commissioner who accompanied the colonial troops into the field against the Indians. He was present at the Great Swamp Fight, in which the Narragansett tribe was decisively defeated. He served for several years as a commissioner to the New England Confederation, and was sent by the administration on diplomatic missions to neighboring Indian communities. He also served on a committee that negotiated the boundary between Massachusetts and the neighboring Plymouth Colony.