Background
Dudley Marvin was the son of Elisha and Elizabeth (Selden) Marvin. He was born on May 29, 1786 in Lyme, Connecticut, where his ancestor, Reinold Marvin who emigrated from Essex County, England, before 1638, finally settled and died.
Dudley Marvin was the son of Elisha and Elizabeth (Selden) Marvin. He was born on May 29, 1786 in Lyme, Connecticut, where his ancestor, Reinold Marvin who emigrated from Essex County, England, before 1638, finally settled and died.
He attended the Colchester Academy in Connecticut and then followed the path of New England pioneers westward into New York and settled in Ontario County at Canandaigua. With a general education such as was afforded by a small New England academy of that time he studied law and was admitted to the bar, probably in 1811.
At the outbreak of war with Great Britain the following year he took active military duty with the state militia and served as lieutenant. After peace had been declared he continued to take a prominent part in the militia, rising eventually to the rank of major-general. In 1822 he was elected to Congress, as an Adams Democrat, and was reelected in 1824 and in 1826. He came under the influence of Henry Clay's leadership and espoused the Whig cause. In Congress he advocated with distinction the dominant interests of the rising industrial power of the North, a protective tariff and the limitation of slavery. During his first term he became a member of the committee on manufactures and was an ardent advocate of a protective tariff. The fact that two-thirds of the cotton crop was consumed abroad did not in his mind disturb the logic of the Northern position. After completing his third term in Congress, he went to Maryland and to Virginia for a time and then removed to New York City to practise law there and in Brooklyn. About 1843 he again removed to the outlying districts of the state and settled in Ripley, Chautauqua County. In 1847 he returned to Congress as a Whig and served for one term. The right of the federal government to exclude slavery from the territories he declared to be derived from the sovereign rights of the nation, the territories having been acquired in the first place "by the act of war an act of sovereignty in which the respective sovereign States in the Union neither were nor could be known". The remainder of his life was spent in Ripley.
In the debate over the celebrated tariff of 1824 he defended against Southern opposition the cause of the Northern manufacturing interests, then slowly developing. He maintained that the tax that falls in the first instance upon the cotton planters "is paid back again by all other States, in the various proportions in which they are consumers of cotton". The stirring controversy over slavery in the territory newly acquired from Mexico brought him once more into the sectional debate. "It will not be denied, " he asserted, "that the introduction of slavery equally excludes from a participation in the enjoyment of these acquisitions the free laboring men of the North".
Marvin interested himself in community affairs, was active in the temperance movement, and in the Presbyterian Church.
He was married on January 31, 1818, to Mary Jepson Whalley, the daughter of Joseph and Hannah (Saltonstall) Whalley of Canandaigua. They had one child.