♂John Dudley

John Dudley (9 April 1725 – 21 May 1805) was a grocer and farmer of Exeter and Raymond, New Hampshire, who sat as a judge of the New Hampshire Superior Court from 1785 to 1797. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844).

Early life and marriage

A family history published in 1886 makes him the third son of James Dudley and Mercy Folsom of Exeter, and a great-great-grandson of Thomas Dudley^W, governor of Massachusetts Bay. According to its sketch of his life, he could do little more than read when he went to work as a hired man for Colonel Daniel Gilman, a cousin of his father, and he later credited the talk at the Colonel’s fireside with his first knowledge of public affairs. According to the family history, John Dudley and Elizabeth Gilman, a daughter of Caleb Gilman of Exeter, were married at Exeter on 22 June 1749. The same account says he set up as a grocer in Exeter, lost his first property to a fire, and recovered. A history of Raymond published in 1875 prints a deed of 4 July 1751 by which his brother Samuel sold “John Dudley of Exeter … trader” a quarter share of a sawmill at the place called Freetown, then within Chester.

The family history lists eight children born to the couple at Exeter, two of whom died as infants, and the family moved to a farm at Raymond in 1766. There, according to both books, he farmed and dealt in lumber, and in 1768 the royal governor, John Wentworth^W, commissioned him a justice of the peace for the Province of New Hampshire^W; the Raymond history copies the commission in full. He was head of a household at Raymond in both the 1790 and 1800 federal censuses.

The Revolution

Both books tell that on hearing of the fighting at Lexington in April 1775 he called for his horse, would not wait for it, and set out on foot to raise the militia of Raymond and the towns around it, sending the men toward Boston. The Raymond history says he represented the town in the legislature through the whole war and was its Speaker in 1782 and 1783, and dates his membership of the committee of safety^W, which ran the state’s affairs while the legislature was not sitting, from 2 May 1776 to 29 May 1784. A footnote in the family history, citing a history of Concord, names him on the committee chosen on 11 June 1776 to draft a declaration of independence for the New Hampshire assembly. Both books say that by his own reckoning the war cost him half of his property, and that he was elected to the state Senate in the mid-1780s but declined the seat.

Judge

He was appointed a justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1776 and moved up to the Superior Court in 1785, although, as both books stress, he had no legal education. Both repeat the charge to a jury remembered by William Plumer^W, in which he told the jurors that “it is not law that we want, but justice” and gave them “Be just and fear not” as the whole law of the case, and both quote Theophilus Parsons^W calling him “the best judge I ever knew in New Hampshire.” According to the family history, he resigned in 1797 at the age of seventy-two.

Later life and death

The family history says he spent his last years at home, reading his Bible, and that his son Nathaniel remembered him turning late in life to the Universalist teaching of John Murray^W, whom he had heard preach at Portsmouth. He died on 21 May 1805 after an illness of eighteen hours, and was buried in the family burying ground on his farm at Raymond, under a stone reading “HON. JOHN DUDLEY, died May 21, 1805, AE. 80”. His widow died the following May. Six of their children survived him, four sons and two daughters.