Author: Sawyer, Lemuel
Biography:
SAWYER, Lemuel (1777-1852: WBIS)
Lawyer, congressman, and writer, he was born in Camden County NC, the son of Lemuel Sawyer and his first wife, Mary Taylor. From the local schools he went on to Flatbush Academy on Long Island NY, then in 1796 took some classes at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia PA. Having inherited farmland and slaves in Camden County, he tried farming for about two years, then graduated from the University of North Carolina (1799) and was called to the bar (1804). He preferred politics to legal practice, however: served first in the state legislature (1800-1) and was then elected as the state representative to Congress (with a few gaps) for eight terms between 1807 and 1829. Sawyer wrote a comedy (Blackbeard, 1824) and a tragedy for the New York stage, a novel (Printz Hall, 1839), an unfriendly Life of John Randolph (1844), and an autobiography (1844). He married three times but the three children from the first two marriages did not survive infancy. His first wife, Sarah Snowden, died two years after their marriage in 1810. In 1820 he married Camilla Wertz (d 1826), and in 1828 a wealthy widow, Diana (Rapalye) Fisher. They lived in Brooklyn until Sawyer's notoriously extravagant habits reduced them to poverty. In the last two years of his life he held a position as a clerk in Washington DC, where he died of "a heart condition." He was buried in the family burying ground in Lambs Ferry, North Carolina. (ancestry.com 1 Sept. 2020; Appleton; Dictionary of North Carolina Biography 5 [2000]; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress 1774-2005 [2005])