MOMENTS IN HISTORY
Three Moments That Define This Family
Abraham Davenport · Samuel Sewall · Robert Carter III
MOMENT
The Dark Day of 1780
★ ★ ★
On the morning of May 19, 1780, the sky across New England turned inexplicably black at noon. Birds stopped singing. Farm animals returned to their barns. Connecticut legislators fell to their knees, convinced the Day of Judgment had come. Someone moved to adjourn. Abraham Davenport (Yale 1732, judge, legislator, your direct ancestor) rose to his feet.
Candles were brought. The session continued. The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier immortalized the moment in his poem "Abraham Davenport" (1866). During his 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy referenced the Dark Day directly in a speech at Charlotte, North Carolina. The cause of the darkness, not understood for centuries, was eventually traced to a massive forest fire whose smoke had drifted hundreds of miles south. Abraham Davenport died in 1789 of a heart attack while presiding over a court case, doing his duty to the very end.
‘I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought."
ABRAHAM DAVENPORT, MAY 19, 1780
MOMENT
Samuel Sewall's Public Apology
★ ★ ★
Samuel Sewall was one of the nine judges who condemned people to death in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. He was the only judge who ever publicly accepted personal blame. Five years after the trials, he stood in his pew at Old South Church while his written confession was read aloud to the congregation, and stood in silence while every word was heard. The same Samuel Sewall wrote The Selling of Joseph in 1700, one of the first anti-slavery pamphlets published in America. He argued directly that enslaved Africans were fully human and that the slave trade was a moral abomination. He was publicly ridiculed for it. He published it anyway.
MOMENT
The Deed of Gift
★ ★ ★
Robert Carter III was the grandson of Robert "King" Carter, the most powerful planter in colonial Virginia history and a direct ancestor in this family tree. In 1791, after a religious conversion, Carter quietly filed a legal document arranging for the gradual manumission of 452 enslaved people, the largest single act of private emancipation in American history before the Civil War. He did this without fanfare and without seeking credit. Virginia society largely shunned him for it. He died in relative obscurity. The 452 people he freed have descendants alive today.
The Counterpoint Within the Family
The Deed of Gift matters because it came from within the family that built the system. A direct descendant of "King" Carter looked at the same inheritance and chose to do something entirely different with it. That tension, and that choice, is part of the honest history of this family.
Samuel Sewall's public apology, Abraham Davenport's refusal to adjourn, Robert Carter III's Deed of Gift: these are the moments where members of this family looked at the world they had inherited and pushed back against it at real personal cost. That pattern, repeated across generations and across both family lines, is one of the things worth carrying forward.
SPECIAL FEATURE
Rev. John Davenport:
Founding New Haven
1597–1670 · Coventry, England to New Haven, Connecticut
In April 1638, Rev. John Davenport and a company of Puritan settlers came ashore at what would become New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven Colony was one of the most deliberately designed communities in early American history. Davenport designed the town on a grid of nine squares, modeled on his understanding of the encampment of the Israelites in the wilderness. The Fundamental Agreement of 1639 declared the colony to be governed by scripture, with voting rights restricted to church members. He also helped found Hopkins School in 1660, still operating today as one of the oldest schools in America.
Davenport envisioned a college for the colony from early on. That vision was realized in 1701, thirty years after his death, when Yale College was founded in New Haven. Yale's Davenport College is named in his honor. His portrait, one of the earliest American portraits painted from life, hangs in Yale's collection.
"New Haven Colony began in the conscience of John Davenport." (Francis J. Bremer, John Davenport: The American Career of an International Puritan, 2005)
In 1661, two of the regicide judges, Whalley and Goffe, who had sat on the court that condemned Charles I to the scaffold, came to Davenport for refuge. He hid them in his house before they were forced to flee to a cave on West Rock, outside the city. Davenport risked everything for them.
"Borne into Port, Living, the Ornament of New England and the Church; Dead, an Irreparable Loss to Both." (Cotton Mather's epitaph for Rev. John Davenport)
The Land and Its People: The founding of the colony displaced the Quinnipiac people from their homeland, a consequence the historical record is clear about, even where the historical actors were not. Thomas Stanton, also in this family tree, spent decades as the most important interpreter between English settlers and Native nations in Connecticut, and was trusted by some Native leaders as a relatively honest broker in a world that offered very little space for that kind of trust.
SPECIAL FEATURE
William Byrd II:
Founding Richmond
1674–1744 · Westover Plantation to the Falls of the James River
William Byrd II was born in Virginia in 1674 but spent much of his early life in England. He was educated at Felsted School in Essex, trained in commerce in London and Rotterdam, called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1695, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1696. He moved between England and Virginia multiple times, accumulating one of the largest private libraries in the colonies (approximately 4,000 volumes).
In 1737, Byrd surveyed the falls of the James River, the natural head of navigation, where oceangoing ships could travel no further, and laid out the city of Richmond.
Accomplishment and Accountability
The cultured portrait, the Royal Society fellowship, the 4,000-volume library, the beautiful Westover Plantation, coexisted with a reality the historical record does not allow us to ignore. Byrd's diaries, written in shorthand cipher and not decoded until the 20th century, reveal the system of enslaved labor that made all of it possible. Westover Plantation still stands today as one of the finest examples of Georgian colonial architecture in America, approximately 45 minutes from Richmond and open for tours. Both things are true.