on this errand being the diarist Pepys. In 1684 Trumball was knighted by Charles II. and in 1685 he was sent as envoy to France, where he worked hard on behalf of the English Protestants there who were threatened by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1685 he became a member of Parliament, in 1687 he went as ambassador to Constantinople, and in 1694 he was made a lord of the treasury. From May 1695 until December 1697 he was a secretary of state under William III. He died on the 14th of December 1716. His son, William Trumball (1708-1760), had an only daughter, who became the wife of the Hon. Martin Sandys. She was thus the ancestress of the later marquesses of Downshire.
Many of Trumball's letters are in the British Museum and in the Record Office, London. Trumball was on friendly terms with Pierre Bayle and with Dryden, whom he advised to translate Virgil. He was also very intimate with Pope, whom he influenced in several ways, especially in urging him to make a translation of Homer.
TRUMBULL, JAMES HAMMOND (1821-1897), American
scholar, was born in Stonington, Connecticut, on the 20th of
December 1821. He studied at Yale, but ill-health prevented
his graduation. He was state librarian in 1854-1855, assistant-secretary of state of Connecticut in 1847-1852 and in 1858-1861,
and secretary of state in 1861-1866; and was a prominent
member of the Connecticut Historical Society, of which he
was president in 1863-1889, the National Academy of Science,
to which he was elected in 1872, and of other learned societies.
He died in Hartford on the 5th of August 1897. He wrote
Historical Notes on some Provisions of the Connecticut Statutes
(1860-1861) and The True Blue Laws of Connecticut (1876),
and edited The Colonial Records of Connecticut (3 vols., 1850-1859). He is better known, however, as a student of the Indian
dialects of New England.
He edited Roger Williams's Key to the Language of America (1866), and wrote The Composition of Indian Geographical Names (1870), The Best Methods of Studying the Indian Languages (1871), Indian Names of Places in ... Connecticut with Interpretations (1881) and other works on similar subjects.
TRUMBULL, JOHN (1750-1831), American poet, was born
in what is now Watertown, Connecticut, where his father was a
Congregational preacher, on the 24th of April 1750. At the
age of seven he passed his entrance examinations at Yale, but
did not enter until 1763; he graduated in 1767, studied law there,
and in 1771-1773 was a tutor. In 1773 he was admitted to the
bar, in 1773-1774 practised law in Boston, working in the
law-office of John Adams, and after 1774 practised in New Haven.
He was state attorney in 1789, a member of the Connecticut
Assembly in 1792 and 1800, and a judge of the Superior Court
in 1801-1819. The last six years of his life were spent in
Detroit, Michigan, where he died on the 10th of May 1831.
While studying at Yale he had contributed in 1769-1770 ten
essays, called “The Meddler,” imitating The Spectator, to the Boston Chronicle, and in 1770 similar essays, signed “The
Correspondent” to the Connecticut Journal and New Haven
Post Boy. While a tutor he wrote his first satire in verse, The
Progress of Dulness (1772-1773), an attack in three poems on
educational methods of his time. His great poem, which ranks
him with Philip Freneau and Francis Hopkinson as an American
political satirist of the period of the War of Independence, was
McFingal, of which the first canto, “The Town-Meeting,”
appeared in 1776 (dated 1775). This canto, about 1500 lines,
contains some verses from “Gage's Proclamation,” published
in the Connecticut Courant for the 7th and the 14th of August
1775; it portrays a Scotch Loyalist, McFingal, and his Whig
opponent, Honorius, evidently a portrait of John Adams. This
first canto was divided into two, and with a third and a fourth
canto was published in 1782. After the war Trumbull was a
rigid Federalist, and with the “Hartford Wits” David
Humphreys, Joel Barlow and Lemuel Hopkins, wrote the Anarchiad,
a poem directed against the enemies of a firm central government.
See the memoir in the Hartford edition of Trumbull's Poetical Works (2 vols., 1820); James Hammond Trumbull's The Origin of “McFingal” (Morrisania, New York, 1868); and the estimate in M. C. Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution (New York 1897).
TRUMBULL, JOHN (1756-1843), American artist, was born
at Lebanon, Connecticut, on the 6th of June 1756, the son of
Jonathan Trumbull (1710-1785), governor of Connecticut.
He graduated at Harvard in 1773, served in the War of
Independence, rendering a particular service at Boston by sketching
plans of the British works, and was appointed second aide-de-camp
to General Washington and in June 1776 deputy adjutant-general
to General Gates, but resigned from the army in 1777.
In 1780 he went to London to study under Benjamin West, but
his work had hardly begun when the news of the arrest and
execution of Major André, who was deputy adjutant-general in
the English army, suggested the arrest of Trumbull as having
been an officer of similar rank in the Continental army; he was
imprisoned for seven months. In 1784 he was again in London
working under West, in whose studio he painted his “Battle
of Bunker Hill” and “Death of Montgomery,” both of which are now in the Yale School of Fine Arts. In 1785 Trumbull
went to Paris, where he made portrait sketches of French
officers for “The Surrender of Cornwallis,” and began, with
the assistance of Jefferson, “The Signing of the Declaration
of Independence,” well-known from the engraving by Asher B.
Durand. These paintings, with “The Surrender of Burgoyne,”
and “The Resignation of Washington,” were bought by the
United States government and placed in the Capitol at
Washington. Trumbull's “Sortie from Gibraltar” (1787), owned by the Boston Athenaeum, is now in the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts, and a series of historical paintings, the “Trumbull Gallery,” by far the largest single collection of his works (more than 50 pictures), has been in the possession of Yale College since 1831, when Trumbull received from the college an annuity of $1000.
His portraits include full lengths of General Washington (1790)
and George Clinton (1791), in the city-hall of New York —
where there are also full lengths of Hamilton and of Jay; and
portraits of John Adams (1797), Jonathan Trumbull, and Rufus
King (1800); of Timothy Dwight and Stephen Van Rensselaer,
both at Yale; of Alexander Hamilton (in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City, and in the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts, both taken from Ceracchi's bust) ; a portrait of
himself painted in 1833; a full length of Washington, at Charleston,
South Carolina; a full length of Washington in military
costume (1792), now at Yale; and portraits of President and
Mrs Washington (1794), in the National Museum at Washington.
Trumbull's own portrait was painted by Stuart and by many
others. In 1794 Trumbull acted as secretary to John Jay in
London during the negotiation of the treaty with Great Britain,
and in 1796 he was appointed by the commissioners sent by the
two countries the fifth commissioner to carry out the seventh
article of the treaty. He was president of the American Academy
of Fine Arts in 1816-1825. He died in New York on the 10th
of November 1843.
See his Autobiography (New York, 1841); J. F. Weir, John Trumbull, A brief Sketch of His Life, to which is added a Catalogue of his Works (New York, 1901); and John Durand, “John Trumbull,” American Art Review, vol. ii. pt. 2, pp. 181-191 (Boston, 1881).
TRUMBULL, JONATHAN (1710-1785), American political leader, was born at Lebanon, Connecticut, on the 12th of October 1710. He graduated at Harvard in 1727, and began the study of theology, but in 1731 engaged in business with his father. He next studied law, was elected to the Assembly in 17733, and held public office almost continuously afterward. He served for seven years in the Assembly, being Speaker for three years, for seventeen years as county judge of Windham county, for twenty-two years (after 1740) as governor's assistant, for two years as deputy-governor (1767-1769), and for three years (1766-1769) as chief justice of the colony. In 1769 he was elected governor and continued in office until his voluntary retirement in 1784. During the War of Independence he was a valued counsellor of Washington. The story that the term “Brother Jonathan,” a sobriquet for the United States, originated in Washington's familiar form of addressing him seems to be without any foundation. After the war Trumbull was a strong Federalist. He died in Lebanon on the 17th of August 1785.
