The opening reception for Patriots of Hudson in the Revolutionary War, an exhibition commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country, is less than two weeks away, on Thursday, March 5. As a preview, Gossips reproduces here two panels from the exhibition. The first tells of Samuel Mansfield, one of the Proprietors of Hudson. The second tells of his grandson, Samuel Mansfield Bay. (Click on the images to enlarge. The main text of each panel is transcribed beneath the image.)
Samuel Mansfield
Soldier, Entrepreneur, Hudson Proprietor
Captain Mansfield was an officer in the Connecticut Line as early as 1776 and, there is some evidence that he served with his sister Margaret’s husband, Benedict Arnold, when Arnold participated in capturing Fort Ticonderoga and later while invading Quebec.
On May 10, 1775, Benedict Arnold, with a commission from Massachusetts, and Ethan Allen, leading the Green Mountain Boys, captured Fort Ticonderoga. Though the fort was not strategically important at the time, when the cannons and ammunition were brought by Henry Knox to a promontory on Boston Harbor, this ended the Siege of Boston by the British. The battle also led to the competition between Allen and Arnold that eventually contributed to Arnold’s betrayal of his nascent country.
Benedict’s wife and Charles’s sister, Margaret Mansfield Arnold, died shortly after capture of the fort in June 1775.
On January 1, 1777 Mansfield officially enlisted as a captain in Colonel John Lamb's 2nd Continental Artillery Regiment remaining through November 7, 1778. Mansfield would volunteer one final time during the war, serving as an aide-de-camp to Georgia governor George Walton in the fall of 1779 during the Siege of Savannah.
Mansfield, a Hudson Proprietor, was among the first generation of Hudson merchants, co-owning Green & Mansfield, dealers in dry goods. He married Elizabeth Greene and they had three daughters. He died suddenly traveling on the road between Albany and New York City.
Samuel Mansfield Bay
One of Samuel and Elizabeth Mansfield’s daughters, Harriet, married prominent Claverack lawyer, John Bay, with whom she had eight children. . . .
Samuel Mansfield Bay, the son of Harriet and John, went on to become Missouri Attorney General from 1839-1845.
Bay defended Dred Scott in the 1847 Scott vs. Emerson case at the Missouri State Circuit Court level. Dred Scott and his wife Harriet sued for their freedom and that of their two children, claiming that because they had lived for four years in the territory of Wisconsin, in which slavery was illegal, they were free. The case went on to the Supreme Court in 1857. Deciding against Scott, the Court’s decision was a blow to the anti-slavery movement in the country. The Court decreed that slavery was legal in United States territories, black people had no right to citizenship, and that the Missouri Compromise, which declared all territory west of the Missouri free from slavery, was unconstitutional.
The opening reception for the exhibit takes place on Thursday, March 5, at 6:00 p.m., in the Community Room at the Hudson Area Library, 51 North Fifth Street. Registration is required to attend the opening. To register, email brenda.shufelt@hudsonarealibrary.org.
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