Paine Wingate

Paine Wingate

Paine Wingate (born May 14, 1739 in Amesbury , Essex County , Province of Massachusetts Bay , †  March 7, 1838 in Stratham , New Hampshire ) was an American politician who represented the state of New Hampshire in both chambers of Congress . He had previously attended the Continental Congress as a delegate from New Hampshire .

Paine Wingate was born in the colonial Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1739 ; his father was a pastor there. In 1759 he graduated from Harvard College . Four years later he was ordained as a clergyman in the Congregational Church himself , after which he took a pastorate in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.

In 1776 Wingate resigned from his church office. He moved to Stratham and worked as a farmer there. In the course of the American Revolution he took part in the New Hampshire Constitutional Convention in 1781. As a result, he became a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 1783 and a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1788, which at that time held its meetings in New York .

After the establishment of the US Congress as a bicameral parliament, Paine Wingate and John Langdon were elected as the first representatives of New Hampshire to the United States Senate. Wingate fell to the class 2 seat with a four-year term from March 4, 1789 to March 3, 1793. When this expired, he did not run again, but instead applied for one of his state's seats in the House of Representatives . Here Wingate completed a two-year term from March 4, 1793 to March 3, 1795. He was part of the anti-administration faction, from which the Democratic Republican Party later emerged.

As a result, Wingate returned to New Hampshire. He sat there in 1795 again in the state parliament and served from 1798 to 1809 as a judge on the Superior Court (now the Supreme Court ) of New Hampshire. Then he withdrew from politics and went back to his agricultural activities. At the time of his death in March 1838, he was the last living delegate to the Continental Congress. All of the US senators who had attended the first Congress with him had also died earlier.

Web links

• Paine Wingate in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Paine Wingate in the database of Find a Grave (English)