Page:Lamb - History of the city of New York - Volume 3.djvu/28

358 native State in public matters of a financial character. Since 1788 he had been Comptroller of Connecticut. He belonged to that line of remarkable men of whom it was said that "none other in America were more honored and trusted." Indeed, as a matter of history, no family on this continent has preserved through all its generations a purer fame.

There was yet no recognized cabinet; and, strictly speaking, no cabinet meetings, according to the usual ministerial consultations at the courts of Europe. The secretaries were the President's auxiliaries rather than counselors. He called them together in council at intervals, but it was chiefly to give them instructions; for the cabinet as an advisory body was unknown to the Constitution and the laws of Congress. The President was made responsible for the administration of the departments, and although he drifted into the habit of consulting with the secretaries, such a course was wholly at his option. In England, according to long-established usages, if the ministers, being the heads of the governmental departments, failed to command the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, a ministerial disruption immediately followed, and the sovereign intrusted the formation of a new cabinet to a person in favor with that majority. Such change defeated one system of politics and established another. But Congress, although in the

Matthew Griswold of Lyme, and was the mother of Governor Roger Griswold—the lady who had eleven governors among her own immediate family connections and descendants, with at least thirty judges, and numerous lawyers and clergymen of prominence. The Wolcotts have intermarried with many New York families, and their descendants are nearly as numerous in the New York of to-day as in Connecticut.

Oliver Wolcott, the financier, and third governor in the Wolcott family (born 1760, died 1833), was the son of Governor Oliver Wolcott, senior, and a graduate from Yale in 1778. He married Elizabeth Stoughton. He was the Comptroller of the U. S. Treasury from 1791 to 1795, and Secretary of the Treasury from 1795 to 1800, when he was appointed Judge of the United States Circuit Court. In 1802 he removed to New York City, and soon after commenced an extensive manufacturing enterprise at Wolcottville, near Litchfield, in connection with his brother Frederick, who married Betsy Huntington of Norwich; among the children of the latter is Frederick Henry Wolcott of Astoria, Long Island. Mary Ann Wolcott, the youngest sister of Oliver and Frederick, was the distinguished beauty who married Chauncey Goodrich. The wife of Oliver Ellsworth, the chief justice, was Abigail Wolcott, cousin of the governor. Nearly all the Wolcott ladies were celebrated for personal beauty. None more so, however, than Jerusha Wolcott, daughter of Samuel, the brother of Governor Oliver Wolcott, senior, who married Epaphras Bissell, a descendant of John Bissell, one of the founders of Windsor, and projector of the first ferry across the Connecticut River; her sister Sophia married Martin Ellsworth, son of the chief justice. Edward, eldest son of Epaphras and Jerusha Bissell, married Jane Ann Maria Reed in 1823, whose second son, Dr. Arthur Bissell of New York, married Anna Browne, daughter of Judge Browne of Rye, New York, a descendant of Thomas Browne of Rye, England, one of the original founders of the town of Rye, New York, himself a descendant from Sir Anthony Browne, standard-bearer of England, whose wife was daughter of Marquis of Montague—brother of the Earl of Warwick.