Background
Samuel Fitch was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, the son of Joseph and Anne (Whiting) Fitch, the grandson of Rev. James Fitch, first minister of Norwich, and great-grandson of John Mason of Pequot fame.
Samuel Fitch was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, the son of Joseph and Anne (Whiting) Fitch, the grandson of Rev. James Fitch, first minister of Norwich, and great-grandson of John Mason of Pequot fame.
Samuel was graduated from Yale in 1742, received the M. A. degree and was ranked socially sixth in a class of seventeen which included Joseph Hawley, later a prominent Whig of western Massachusetts, and Jared Ingersoll of Stamp Act notoriety.
Admitted to the bar in Connecticut, he was courting Elizabeth Lloyd of the manor of Queen’s Village on Lloyd’s Neck, Long Island, when in 1750 at the suggestion of her brother Henry who was a merchant in Boston, he started to practise in that town.
In 1761 or 1762 he was one of the first group elevated to the begowned and bewigged class of barristers, and in 1766 Harvard gave him the M. A. ad eundem. Evidently the law was his chief if not only interest: there is no record of nonprofessional activity except membership in the Fire Club, and an invitation four times repeated to inspect schools, the last betokening prominence in the community. John Adams was an intimate, and at Adams’s suggestion in 1768 Fitch was made acting advocate general in the Court of Admiralty, serving until 1776.
According to Adams, he never received a royal commission; but in this last statement Adams may have been mistaken, since there is in the Public Record Office a commission dated November 1769. Holding this office probably determined Fitch’s political attitude, though his Loyalist brother-inlaw, who had married into the Hutchinson family, may have been influential.
Fitch was an addresser to Hutchinson on the governor’s departure in 1774 and to Gage on his arrival and leaving, was a protester against the Solemn League and Covenant, and remained in Boston during the siege, departing for Halifax at the evacuation.
He was proscribed and banished by the Act of September 1778 and his property confiscated the next year, but there is no record of action under the law. His party to Halifax numbered seven, which probably did not include his son William, who became an ensign in the 65th Regiment, then in Boston, on August 16, 1775» and who remained in the army until he was killed by the Maroons in Jamaica on Sept. 12, 1795, as colonel of the 83rd Regiment which he had raised in Dublin in 1793.
Fitch had a pension for four children, probably including a daughter who predeceased him in England. He did not remain in Halifax but seems to have been in Ireland in September, and reached London on December 7, 1776. Hutchinson presented him to Lord North on January 23, 1777, and Samuel Quincy speaks of him as being in residence in February. Except for casual mention in the papers of fellow Loyalists, little is known of his last years.
Fie was one of the Loyalist addressers to the King in 1779. He received from the British government a pension of £260, and during the war £550 a year for the loss of his professional income. Before his death he received further compensation to the amount of £5, 000.
The family was intimate with the Copleys and the artist made a painting of Colonel William and his two sisters, probably begun about 1794 but not finished until 1801.
Fitch died in London and was buried in the graveyard of St. Mary’s Church, Battersea. His wife survived him less than five months.
He was a member of the Fire Club.
The ladies were described as “fond of company and gaiety, but with scanty means of gratifying their taste” (Martha B. Amory, Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley, 1882, p. 196).
In March 1753 he married Elizabeth Lloyd .