William Bayard Jr.
William Bayard Jr (1761–1826) was a prominent New York City banker and a member of the Society of the New York Hospital. He was a close friend to Alexander Hamilton and it was to Bayard's Greenwich Village home located at what is today 80-82 Jane Street where the mortally wounded Hamilton was taken after his famous duel with Aaron Burr. Hamilton died in Bayard's home the next day.
Bayard was a member of the prominent Bayard family of French Huguenot ancestry who descended from Balthazar Bayard, a French Protestant, who had taken refuge in the Dutch Republic where the Huguenots found sanctuary from their religious persecution in France. The first Bayards in the New World arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam with the newly appointed Governor-General Peter Stuyvesant. In the early 18th century the Bayards became among the largest landowners in the New York-New Jersey area. Bayard was also a descendant of Stephanus Van Cortlandt and the Schuyler family.
His father, William Bayard Sr., was elected as a delegate to the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, and was assigned to the committee that drafted language opposing taxation without representation. However, when the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, the father remained loyal to the crown, assisting the British troops that occupied New York City in 1776.[1] Although Bayard Jr. remained in New York after the war, other members of the family had fled, and many of its properties were confiscated.
In 1783 Bayard married Elizabeth Cornell, a descendant of Thomas Cornell. Elizabeth was the daughter of Loyalist Samuel Cornell and Susannah Mabson. Samuel Cornell died in 1781 in British controlled New York, having moved there from North Carolina after 1777 after refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance to the new United States. Samuel Cornell had transferred a share of his North Carolina property to Elizabeth, however in 1779 the North Carolina Legislature voted to retroactively seize all property of Loyalists back to 1776. In November 1784 Mrs. Bayard sued to have her property returned to her but was unsuccessful. [2]
William Jr. and Elizabeth had seven children. Catherine and Maria were each married to Duncan P. Campbell. Susan married Benjamin Woolsey Rogers, son of Moses Rogers, a wealthy New York merchant who owned Shippan Point, and Sarah Woolsey, and a distant cousin descended from Thomas Cornell. Harriet Elizabeth married General Stephen Van Rensselaer, a distant cousin through the Van Cortlandt family. [3]
William and Elizabeth are both buried in the Churchyard Cemetery of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan.
References
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- ↑ Murphy, Elizabeth Burbank. Bayard, Elizabeth Cornell. NCPedia. 1979. http://ncpedia.org/biography/bayard-elizabeth Accessed April 5, 2015
- ↑ Murphy, Elizabeth Burbank. Bayard, Elizabeth Cornell. NCPedia. 1979. http://ncpedia.org/biography/bayard-elizabeth Accessed April 5, 2015
