John Wells was born in Cherry Valley, Otsego County, N. Y. , and spent his early childhood in that frontier region. His grandfather, John Wells, an emigrant from Ireland, had settled there in 1743. The younger John was the son of Capt. Robert Wells, whose wife was a daughter of the Rev. Samuel Dunlop. In the Cherry Valley massacre of 1778, when a mixed band of Loyalist rangers and Indians devastated the countryside, all of the Wells family were murdered with the exception of John. It was many years before Wells recovered from the shock of this tragedy, and when a young man he was dissuaded with difficulty from taking the life of the Indian leader of the raid, who had returned to New York. Until 1783 young Wells remained in Schenectady with an aunt, removing later to New York City and subsequently to the vicinity of Jamaica, Long Island. Having prepared under the Rev. Leonard Cutting and the Rev. Alexander MacWhorter.
Education
He attended the grammar school in Schenectady. He was admitted to the College of New Jersey, where he was graduated in 1788.
Career
He then entered upon the study of the law as clerk in a New York law office, and was admitted to the bar as attorney in 1791, and as counselor in 1795. As editorial associate of William Coleman on the Federalist Evening Post, he frequently crossed swords with Hamilton's opponent, James Cheetham and the opposition sheet known as the American Citizen. When William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of President John Adams, sued Cheetham for libel in 1805, the defendant, by way of tribute to his opponent's legal talents, employed Wells as counsel. After 1804 he shared with Thomas Addis Emmet the bulk of the commercial law practice which had hitherto gone to Hamilton and Burr, and was frequently engaged as special counsel by the city of New York. In the celebrated case of Gibbons vs. Ogden, involving the right of the state of New York to grant a monopoly of the navigation of its waters by steam, Wells was associated with counsel for Gibbons. He argued unsuccessfully before Kent in 1819 a motion to dissolve the injunction restraining Gibbons from bringing his boat into New York harbor, on the ground that such a grant was unconstitutional since Congress alone had the right to regulate commerce. The court of errors sustained Kent the next year. Wells's death in 1823 prevented his appearing before the Supreme Court when the case was appealed, but in that tribunal, Webster and Wirt, pursuing the same argument, were able to secure a reversal. Emmet, who had had a wide experience, and was Wells's rival at the bar, said that Wells's argument in Griswold vs. Waddington was the most able and finished he had ever heard. He contracted yellow fever, from which he died, while on a visit of mercy to the poor.
Achievements
A Federalist in political sympathies, he revised for publication the collected papers known as The Federalist, bringing out the fifth edition in 1802.
Personality
Wells was a man of much ability, and possessed characteristics that made him greatly beloved.
Connections
In 1796 he married Eliza, daughter of Thomas Lawrence of Newtown, Long Island, and three years after her death in 1812, Sabina Huger of South Carolina. By his first wife he had one son; by the second, two sons and two daughters.
