Author: Sewall, Lewis
Biography:
SEWALL, Lewis (1760-1833: ancestry.com)
Born in Charles County MD to Charles and Ann (Goodrich) Sewall, he married Elizabeth Howard Wailes in 1797 and emigrated with her (and eventually eight children) in 1801 to settle in the eastern part of the newly formed Mississippi Territory. Within a few years, boundaries and names shifted and the area that the Sewalls lived in both expanded and split off from the western portion to become the Alabama Territory (1817) and then the State of Alabama (1819). Sewall was a Register for the Land Office with personal responsibility for distribution and sale of public lands. He acquired land for himself and was suspected of taking bribes, though there is no sign of action against him on that account. The poem in which he satirizes a former friend, Col. John Caller, as Falstaff the Second was his way of hitting back against such a charge. Though the poem was published anonymously, he acknowledged it when he reprinted it in his Miscellaneous Poems in 1833. (There appears to be no extant copy of the first edition of that work.) He died in Washington County AL. (ancestry.com 8 Sept. 2020; Ben P. Robertson, "Lewis Sewall," Encyclopedia of Alabama, encyclopediaofalabama.org 8 Sept. 2020) HJ