Youth and Family Life
Ellsworth was born in Windsor, Connecticut, to Capt. David and Jemima (née Leavitt) Ellsworth. He entered Yale in 1762, but transferred to the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) at the end of his second year. He continued to study theology and, while attending, helped found the American Whig–Cliosophic Society along with Aaron Burr and William Paterson. He received his A.B. degree, Phi Beta Kappa after 2 years. Soon afterward, however, Ellsworth turned to the law. After four years of study, he was admitted to the bar in 1771 and later became a successful lawyer and politician .
In 1772, Ellsworth married Abigail Wolcott, the daughter of Abigail Abbot and William Wolcott, nephew of Connecticut colonial governor Roger Wolcott, and granddaughter of Abiah Hawley and William Wolcott of East Windsor, Connecticut. They had nine children including the twins William Wolcott Ellsworth, who married Noah Webster's daughter, served in Congress and became the governor of Connecticut ; and Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, who became the first Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, the mayor of Hartford, president of Aetna Life Insurance and a large benefactor of Yale College.
Read more about this topic: Oliver Ellsworth
Famous quotes containing the words youth, family and/or life:
““I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundred pound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get ‘em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among ‘em as nothing should equal it!””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them,—to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one’s life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when one’s official duties are at an end.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)