Author: St. John, Peter
Biography:
ST. JOHN, Peter (1726-1811: ancestry.com)
He was the third son in a large family that had been settled for some generations in Norwalk CT; his parents were Daniel St. John (1693-1757) and his first wife, Grace Sherman. Family history affirms that he was educated at Yale, but he did not graduate from there. He himself was married twice, first to Mary Cook (d 1759) and then, in 1761, to Rebecca Crofoot, who died in New Canaan CT in 1792. There appear to have been fifteen children, three of whom died in infancy. St. John was a schoolteacher and patriot, possibly the author of the song "British Taxation of North America," which circulated as a broadsheet during the Revolutionary War. In 1781 he was one of the worshippers in the Congregational Church in Darien CT who were taken prisoner along with the pastor, Moses Mather, forced to walk to Long Island Sound, and kept imprisoned in New York for five months. He commemorated the event in an eight-page poem, Poetical Relation of the Capture of the Congregation at Middlesex (Danbury CT 1791). His Death of Abel was inspired by but is not a translation of Gessner's work (q.v.), which he read in German. St. John died in New Canaan CT. (ancestry.com 24 Aug. 2020; "Peter St. John," Wikipedia 24 Aug. 2020; Orline St. John Alexander, The St. John Genealogy [1907]) HJ