William Bradford was an American jurist. He is noted for his service as a Revolutionary War Continental Army officer and a Presidential Cabinet secretary.
Background
William Bradford was born on September 14, 1755 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the great-grandson of William Bradford, who introduced printing into the American middle colonies and the son of William Bradford the so-called "patriot-printer of 1776, " and his wife Rachel Budd.
Education
The younger Bradford began his formal education at the Philadelphia Academy , where he was a student from 1762 to 1765. He then continued his studies in Princeton, first under the tutelage of Reverend Richard Treat and then as a student at Princeton College for three years. After graduating from Princeton with an A. B. degree in 1772, Bradford pursued further studies of history and morality to receive his A. M. degree in 1775.
He studied law under Edward Shippen, afterward chief justice of Pennsylvania, writing prose and verse with Addison and Shenstone as his models, while he read his Coke.
Career
Volunteering as a private in 1776, William Bradford soon became major of brigade to General Roberdeau and later a captain in Colonel Hampton's continental regiment.
He was elected by Congress, April 10, 1777, deputy muster-master general with the rank of colonel in the Continental Army. After serving during the critical years 1777-79 at Valley Forge, White Plains, Fredericksborough, and Raritan, his broken health forced him to resign April 1, 1779.
Returning to his legal studies he was admitted to the bar of the supreme court of Pennsylvania and made his home at Yorktown, Pennsylvania, in 1779. At the early age of twenty-five, and but a year after he began to practise law, he was appointed through the influence of the president of the state, Joseph Reed, to succeed Jonathan D. Sergeant as attorney-general of Pennsylvania.
For eleven consecutive years and under different administrations he retained this office.
With Joseph Reed, James Wilson, and J. D. Sergeant, he pleaded and won the case of Pennsylvania against Connecticut before the Congressional Commission in the Wyoming land titles contention in 1782.
Promoted, August 22, 1791, by Governor Mifflin, to be justice of the supreme bench of Pennsylvania, he attracted the notice of Washington, who, on January 28, 1794, made him the second attorney-general of the United States in the place of Edmund Randolph, promoted to the secretaryship of state. Washington valued Bradford as a personal friend and as a lawyer, and it was upon his report as one of the commissioners appointed by the President to attempt an amicable settlement of the "Whisky Insurrection" by conferences at Pittsburgh that Washington issued his proclamation of force "to secure the execution of the laws" when these peaceful efforts failed.
Secretaries Pickering and Wolcott sought Bradford, ill at his country home, to aid them in formulating the letter which brought Washington from Mount Vernon to consider the indiscretions of Edmund Randolph as secretary of state in his dealings with the French minister Fauchet. It was from the exhaustion of dealing with this controversy and from the arduous trips at night to "Rose Hill, " the country seat of his father-in-law, that Bradford contracted the fatal fever that led to his unexpected and untimely end.
Bradford died on August 23, 1795 and was buried in St. Mary's Churchyard at Burlington, New Jersey.
Achievements
Politics
William Bradford was a member of the Federalist party.
Views
Bradford's tastes were for civil rather than for military life, but like his father William Bradford patriotically answered the call of America in the Revolution.
Membership
In his student days, Bradford was a member of the Washington circle, the so-called "Republican Court". In 1785 he became a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Connections
In 1784, William Bradford married Susan Vergereau Boudinot, the only daughter of Elias Boudinot. Boudinot, who had also attended the Academy of Philadelphia, had been a New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress and would be elected as a New Jersey representative to the U. S. Congress from 1789 to 1795.
Bradford and his wife Susan were intimates in the Washington circle, the so-called "Republican Court, " and Bradford had formed in his student days a warm friendship with James Madison.