Elisha Williams

The Reverend Elisha Williams (26 August 1694-22 October 1755) was a Congregational minister, legislator, jurist, and rector of Yale College from 1726 to 1739.

The son of Rev. William Williams and his wife Elizabeth, née Cotton (daughter of Seaborn Cotton), he was educated at Harvard, graduating, at the age of seventeen, in 1711.

His first wife, and mother of his seven children (only two of whom survived him), was Eunice Chester, They were married in 1714; she died in 1750.

After his marriage he studied law, and was a member of the Connecticut legislature from Wethersfield for five sessions, the first in 1717; he studied divinity with his father and was ordained a clergyman in 1722, and served the church at Wethersfield until 1726, when he became fourth Rector of Yale College, serving in that capacity for thirteen years. He entered the position during a troubled period of Yale's history; by the time of his resignation, for reasons of health in 1739, he left the college firmly established.

He was again a member of the Connecticut legislature from 1740 to 1749, and was appointed Judge of the Superior Court. He was a Colonel of Militia, and served as Chaplain in the expedition sent against Cape Breton in 1745. He was appointed to the command of a regiment of one thousand men raised for the reduction of Canada; when they were not paid, he was sent to go to England to entreat for their pay. While he was there, his wife died, and he married Elizabeth, daughter of Rev. Thomas Scott, of Norwich, England. Returning home, he narrowly escaped shipwreck, and spent some months in Antigua before reaching Connecticut.

He was a delegate to the Albany Congress in 1754.

He died at Wethersfield, Connecticut and is buried there.

Works

*"Divine grace illustrious, in the salvation of sinner" - 1727
*"Death the advantage of the godly." – 1728
*"A Seasonable Plea for the Liberty of Conscience and the Right of Private Judgment in Matters of Religion Without any Controul from Human Authority" (also known as "Essential rights and liberties of Protestants") - 1744

"As reason tells us, all are born thus naturally equal, with an equal right to their persons, so also with an equal right to their preservation . . . and every man having a property in his own person, the labour of his body and the work of his hands are properly his own, to which no one has right but himself; it will therefore follow that when he removes anything out of the state that nature has provided and left it in, he has mixed his labour with it, and joined something to it that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. . . . Thus every man having a natural right to (or being proprietor of) his own person and his own actions and labour, which we call property, it certainly follows, that no man can have a right to the person or property of another: And if every man has a right to his person and property; he has also a right to defend them . . . and so has a right of punishing all insults upon his person and property."

References

*Roberts, Gary Boyd & William Addams Reitwiesner, American Ancestors and Cousins of The Princess of Wales, Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, Maryland, 1984, p. 59; #242.
*“New England Historical and Genealogical Register (NEHGR).” v. 8; p. 323.