Background
Samuel Augustus Foot the seventh child of John and Abigail Flail Foot. His father was a Yale graduate and minister of the Congregational church in Cheshire. Samuel proved to be a rather precocious child.
governor of Connecticut representative senator
Samuel Augustus Foot the seventh child of John and Abigail Flail Foot. His father was a Yale graduate and minister of the Congregational church in Cheshire. Samuel proved to be a rather precocious child.
Entering Yale at the age of thirteen, he graduated in 1797.
For a few months after graduation, he read law in an office in Washington, Connecticut, and then attended the noted law school in Litchfield, Connecticut. Handicapped by a delicate constitution, he was so plagued by headaches that he was unable to continue his studies more than a few months.
Abandoning the law, he moved from Litchfield to New Haven, and found employment in the shipping trade that centered around the famous Long Wharf. By 1803 he had built up a business of his own, trading chiefly with the West Indies.
To strengthen his none too robust health, he took occasional voyages on his own vessels. When New England shipping was all but ruined by the Embargo and the War of 1812, Foot gave up the New Haven enterprise in 1813, and retired to his father’s estate in Cheshire. For the remainder of his life he was a farmer and politician.
He was elected to the lower house of the state legislature in 1817, and again the following year. For two years thereafter he was a member of Congress from Connecticut.
In 1822 and 1823 he was once more in the state Assembly, and then in Congress for another term. Returning to the Connecticut Assembly in 1825, he was chosen speaker. The following year he was elected United States senator, to succeed Henry W. Edwards. Upon the expiration of his senatorial term in 1833, Foot was elected a member of the House of Representatives, but he resigned his seat in 1834 to become governor of Connecticut.
He was not reelected and retired from politics, save for a single appearance in 1844, when, having changed his former party affiliations, he was a presidential elector on the Henry Clay ticket (Hartford Daily Courant, November 4, 1844).
Because of his shift in party affiliations, just before his death, obituary notices were markedly brief and apologetic. Though Samuel Augustus Foot, his father, and grandfather spelled the name without a final e (transcripts of records in the Connecticut State Library), their descendants have adopted the longer form.
He took an active part in the movement to secure a new state constitution, becoming one of the Tolerationists, as members of the reforming party were called. In terms of national party politics, Foot was an Anti-Federalist, or Republican.
He died at his home in Cheshire on September 15, 1846, survived by his widow, Eudocia Hull, daughter of General Andrew Hull of Cheshire, and three sons, one of whom, Andrew Hull Foote, became a famous naval officer in the Civil War.