Skip to main content

Author: Richards, George

Biography:

RICHARDS, George (1755?-1814: ancestry.com)

His origins are uncertain, but he was probably born in or near Newport RI and his father may have been a lawyer named David Richards. He appears to have been privately educated. He led a busy and varied life as a schoolmaster, a navy chaplain, a contributor to newspapers and magazines, and a leader both in the Universalist Church and among the Masons. He also married and buried three wives and fathered twelve children. He advertised his first school in Newport in 1774 but the Revolutionary War interrupted his teaching career. He served on several ships in non-combatant roles as quartermaster or purser or chaplain from 1776 to 1780 and again 1781-3. In 1781 he married Jane Day (d 1785). In 1784 he advertised a new evening school for tradesmen in Boston, but after his marriage to a widow named Sarah Wallace in 1786, he opened a day school for girls at the same address. About this time he also became increasingly active with the Masons and began his calling as a preacher in the recently founded Universalist Church, for which he eventually produced several hymnals and a Creed. (Of his original hymns, only collections including more than ten pages of his work are included in this bibliography.) In 1794 the family left Boston for Portsmouth NH, where Richards opened another girls' school and was ordained as pastor of the Universalist congregation, but where his wife died suddenly "of the mortification." In 1796 Richards married Alice (Ayres) Simes, with whom he had four more daughters. He was elected Grand Chaplain of the Grand Lodge of New Hampshire in 1806. Richards prospered in Portsmouth but could not resist a call to Philadelphia in 1809 when he was invited to be the minister of the First Independent Church of Christ. In 1812, however, along with over a hundred members of the congregation, he joined a secessionist movement and established a rival church. The strains of internal conflict compounded by family problems led to a mental breakdown which became acute after his wife died in Dec. 1813. Richards was admitted to hospital but committed suicide early in Mar. 1814. His friend Hosea Ballou preached his funeral sermon on the text, "He was a man of sorrow, and acquainted with grief." He was buried in the Universalist Burial Ground in Philadelphia. An anonymous account of his life on the Continental Navy website, written with the assistance of a descendant, is a masterpiece of circumstantial detail. (continentalnavy.com/archives/2012/george-richards; ancestry.com 28 Jul. 2020; Benson; Appleton; H. Ballou, A Sermon . . . [on] the Death of the Rev. George Richards [1814])

 

Books written (6):

2nd edn. Dover NH: printed by Samuel Bragg, Jr., 1806