Author: SMITH, James
Biography:
SMITH, James (1738-1812: ancestry.com)
One of fourteen surviving children of Mary (Het) and William Smith (1697-1769), he was most likely born in New York City (the obituaries refer to his as a "native" of that place), although no record has been traced. His father, an immigrant from England, was a learned lawyer who became the Chief Judge of the Supreme Court for New York State. (One of Smith's brothers, William, wrote a history of the state.) James Smith graduated from Princeton in 1757 and went to study medicine in Britain and on the Continent; his DM was from Leyden. From 1767 to 1770 he was professor of materia medica and chemistry at King's College, Columbia College, in New York. About this time he married a widow, a Mrs. Atkinson, who had some property in the West Indies. They seem to have had at least one son. They lived in Jamaica for a few years, then moved to England, where he practised medicine for a time. He was already contributing anonymous articles and possibly verse to periodicals. In 1778, the Smiths were in France at the same time as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, later the US President (he and Smith disliked one another and were politically at odds). Smith's movements are shady, with some suspicion that at that time he might have been a spy for someone. He returned to America after 1785. In 1798, he was co-proprietor of a republican newspaper, the Time Piece, in New York together with the firebrand John Burk (q.v.), when Adams prosecuted both of them for libel. They were released on bail, at which point Smith quarrelled with Burk and left the Time Piece, which then ceased publication. Burk agreed to be deported (but instead went to Virginia under a false name); Smith was released. He served as a trustee of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1807 to 1811 and lived quietly and respectably in New York for the rest of his life. (ancestry.com 25 Sept. 2020; James McLachlan, Princetonians, 1748-1768 [1976]; "To Thomas Jefferson from John Daly Burk, [before 19 June 1801]," Founders Online 25 Sept. 2020)