Author: Dwight, Theodore
Biography:
DWIGHT, Theodore (1764-1846: ANBO)
The son of Mary (Edwards) and Timothy Dwight and brother of the Timothy Dwight (q.v.) who became President of Yale, he was born on the family property in Northampton MA. Unable on account of an injury to take over the farm after his father's death, he turned to law and was called to the bar in New Haven CT in 1787. He established a successful practice in Hartford. In 1792 he married Abigail Alsop, with whom he had one child. Along with his brother-in-law Richard Alsop (q.v.), he was one of the "Hartford Wits" who carried out a campaign of poetic satire against Jeffersonian democracy in the 1790s. Most of their work appeared in one of the two newspapers edited by Dwight, the Connecticut Courant and the Connecticut Mirror. He was elected to Congress in 1806-7 and then served in the state council 1809-15. In 1815 he moved to Albany NY to found a Daily Advertiser, but soon moved on to New York City to publish the New York Daily Advertiser. There he stayed until 1836, when he retired to Hartford. He published a hostile study of Jefferson "as exhibited in his writings" in 1839. From 1843 until his death he lived in New York, where he died, after a short illness, at his son's house in Manhattan. (ANBO 10 May 2020; ancestry.com 10 May 2020)