Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 4).djvu/280

244 and was engaged at the siege of Vera Cruz and the battle of Cerro Gordo, becoming captain of en- gineers on 24 April, 1847. Subsequently he was present at the capture of San Antonio and the battles of Contreras, Churubusco, and Molino del Rey, receiving wounds that prevented his return to active service until 1850. Thereafter he served as superintending engineer of Fort Marion and Fort Clinch, Fla., and in the construction of the defences at Fort Point, San Francisco, Cal. For his services in Mexico he received the brevets of major and lieutenant-colonel. Besides various mili- tary and scientific memoirs and reports, he pub- lished •' An Analytical Investigation of the Resist- ance of Piles to Superincumbent Pressure " (1850).

MASON, John, soldier, b. in England in 1600 ; d. in Norwich, Conn., in 1672. After serving in the Netherlands under Sir Thomas Fairfax, he came about 1630 to Dorchester, Mass., whence in 1635 he removed to Connecticut, and aided in founding there the town of Windsor. The slaugh- ter of a party of whites at Wethersfield by Pequot Indians in April, 1637, called for retaliatory measures, and Mason was commissioned by the general court to descend the Connecticut with ninety men and attack the savages at tlie mouth of Pequot (now Thames) river. Accompanied by seventy friendly Mohegan Indians, he reached the English fort at Saybrook in the middle of May, and put off into Long Island sound, intending to follow the coast to the Narragansett country, and fall upon his enemies by a retrograde march along the shore. On the 23d he landed in Narra- gansett bay, near Point Judith, secured the co- operation of 200 Narragansetts, and, having sent back his boats to meet him at the mouth of the Pequot, proceeded by quick marches to Mystic river, in the neighborhood of which were the enemy's two principal forts. Although his Indian allies were now swelled in numbers to about 500, such was their terror of the Pequots that Mason was compelled to begin the attack almost unaided. Before daybreak on the 26th he surprised the nearest fort, and, gaining an entrance within the palisades, fell, sword in hand, upon the enemy. Finding it difficult to dislodge the Indians, he set fire to their wigwams, the wdiites and their allies forming a circle around the fort to prevent escape. Between 600 and 700 Pequots perished, seven were captui-ed, and seven escaped. Of the English, two were killed and twenty wounded. He then marched to the mouth of Pequot river, into which his ves- sels sailed soon afterward. They were attacked on the way by 300 Indians from the other fort, who soon retired. Mason, putting his wounded aboard the vessels, marched with a small detachment by land to Saybrook. Aided by a party from Massa- chusetts, he then pursued the remnant of the Pe- quots toward New York, killed and captui'ed many more, and divided the few who remained in Con- necticut between the Mohegans and Narragansetts, stipulating that the very name of Pequot should become extinct. By these prompt measures a hand- fnl of whites was within a few weeks enabled to annihilate a powerful native tribe and to secure a general peace with the Indians, which remained unbroken for forty years. After the Pequot war he settled at Saybrook, at the request of the inhabi- tants, for the defence of the colony, whence in 1659 he removed to Norwich. He was major of the colonial forces more than thirty years, and be- tween 1660 and 1670 he was deputy governor of Connecticut. He was also a magistrate from 1642 till 1668. At the request of the general court of Connecticut he prepared an account of the Pequot war, published by Increase Mather in his " Relation of Trouble by the Indians " (1677), and republished, with an introduction and notes, by the Rev. Thomas Prince (Boston, 1736). See his " Life," by George E. Ellis, in Sparks's " American Biography " (Bos- ton, 1844). — Jeremiah, senator, fifth in descent from Maj. John Mason, b. in Lebanon, Conn., 27 April, 1768 ; d. in Boston, Mass., 14 Oct., 1848, was the son of Jere- miah, a colonel in the Revolutionary army, who com- manded a com- pany of minute- men at the siege of Boston. The son was graduated at Yale in 1788, admitted to the bar in 1791, and began to practise at Westmoreland, N. H. He removed to Walpole in 1794, and to Ports- mouth, N. H., in 1797, and ere long became engaged in an extensive practice. In 1802 he was appointed attorney-general of New Hampshire. In 1807 Daniel Webster came to Portsmouth, and he and Mr. Mason were on opposite sides in most of the important cases in New Hampshire. He was elected to the U. S. senate as a Federalist, serving from 13 June, 1813, until 1817, when he resigned to resume the practice of his profession. While in the senate he took an active part in debates on subjects that grew out of the war of 1812. Pie was with difficulty induced to prepare any of his speeches for the press. Those that were written out most fully by him are on the "Embargo" and on the Conscription bill, and were delivered respectively in 1814 and 1815. He was for several sessions a member of the New Hampshire legislature, in which he took an active part in the revision of the state code. He drafted the report of the legislature on the Virginia resolutions referring to the Missouri compromise. In 1829 Mr. Mason was the involuntary cause of the repeal of the charter of the U. S. bank. He had been appointed president of the Portsmouth, N. H., branch of that institution, and by his skilful management and legal acumen had saved the bank a large amount of money, with the loss of which it was threatened through the operations of a defaulter. Isaac Hill, of New Hampshire, then second comptroller of the treasury, and other adherents of Jackson in that state, were anxious to secure Mason's removal, and based a movement looking to that end on some slight dissatisfaction caused by Mason's vigor in enforcing the payment of certain protested notes, and generally by the prompt and uncompromising discharge of his official duties. It was also charged that Mason owed his appointment to political influence, and especially to being the friend of Daniel Webster, and two petitions were forwarded to the parent bank urging his removal. These led to a correspondence, lasting from June till October, that finally resolved itself into a passage-at-arms between Nicholas Biddle, president of the U". S. bank, and Samuel D. Ingham, secretary of the treasury, which resulted in President Biddle's refusal to entertain the protests. On the contrary, the bank, by way of answer, re-elected the implicated official. The victory, however, was short-lived, as in his message