Stephen Ward links the St. Paul's community to the wider story of the American Revolution. Like many local leaders, he helped win independence and carried the everyday business of government across the break from colony to republic. He died in 1797 and lies under a marble gravestone with a stirring epitaph at St. Paul's Church National Historic Site.
A steady hand
Ward was elected Supervisor of the Town of Eastchester — the equivalent of mayor — in the last four colonial elections, every year from 1772 to 1775, and again in 1787, 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792 and 1794. Through the hardships of the war and the leap from monarchy to republic, he gave local government continuity.
He was born in 1730, one of several children of a prominent English family that had settled in Eastchester, about 20 miles north of New York City, in the late 17th century. He was baptized in 1732 in neighbouring New Rochelle rather than Eastchester — a sign of the tension between his parents' Puritan tradition and the town's Church of England minister. His father sat in the colonial assembly and his older brother Edmund was active in town life. The top of New York politics belonged to the great Hudson River landowners and New York City merchants, beyond Ward's reach; he was instead the kind of capable man from a respected family that townspeople trusted with office. He farmed, owned land, traded, speculated in land, and owned at least one enslaved African.
Choosing the Patriot side
First elected supervisor at 42, Ward sided with the Patriots in 1774 and 1775, when many leading men hesitated. He was a delegate to the New York convention of April 1775 that chose the colony's delegates to the Second Continental Congress. In 1776 he sat on a provisional committee governing New York when British victories in Brooklyn and Manhattan drove the Continental Army north into Westchester; he told Continental officers about the half-built stone church at St. Paul's, which the army used as a field hospital.
Southern Westchester became the "neutral ground," a no man's land between the British in northern Manhattan and the Continental camps beyond the Croton River. Civil government collapsed and most residents fled. Ward kept the title of supervisor, though there was effectively no town, and took on duties local government would have handled; he was also elected to the state assembly.
- As a sequestration officer, he seized and managed the property of Loyalists who had fled. His own older brother Edmund sided with King George III and, when the British invaded, was arrested by a local vigilance committee that included Stephen.
- As a commissary, he seized cattle for the Continental troops.
His wife, Ruth (Gedney), and some of their younger children fled north, probably to Fishkill in Dutchess County, near the shifting state capital where he served.
His house burned
Ward's large two-story house on the busy Road to White Plains was a landmark: General William Heath used it to fix his troops' position in a letter to Washington in January 1777, and in 1778 Alexander Hamilton warned General Horatio Gates that if the enemy advanced past "Ward's house," the troops should be put under arms. It also made him a target. In November 1778 British forces under orders from General William Tryon, royal governor of New York, burned the house to punish Americans for refusing to negotiate with the Carlisle Commission, sent from England to seek a settlement. Ward's angry report to John Jay survives:
"My dwelling house and other buildings in Westchester County were consumed by fire, by an express order (if not with his own hands) of General Tryon, the inveterate opponent to the rising glory of these States, and whose highest ambition is to spread havoc and desolation in every part thereof…"
He added that on the same day, November 13, troops from the same force had killed James Brundige of Rye and another man after they surrendered.
After the war
The town elected him supervisor six more times, including four one-year terms in a row. He served as a state senator and a state judge, and on the vestry of St. Paul's. His pew — the large one at the right front, beside today's American flag, in the 1942 restoration of the 1787 layout — and his 1787 subscription of 42 shillings, the highest in the parish, show his standing. In 1795 he arranged the church's formal incorporation as St. Paul's Protestant Episcopal Church, replacing the colonial "church at Eastchester."
The Ward family's large pew was at the right corner, beside the American flag, in the 1787 arrangement shown in the 1942 restoration. NPS.
The 1790 census lists him as owner of three enslaved people — like many wealthy New Yorkers, he did not reconcile republican ideals with slavery. He and Ruth, who lived until 1809, lived just north of the church. Their son Stephen rebuilt the family home to its original size in the early 1790s; it still stands on White Plains Road in today's Tuckahoe, New York.
Ward's last success was election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1796, but he died on December 8, 1797, aged 67, before taking his seat. His gravestone reads:
Sons of America Mourn for your country, she has lost a friend / Who did her rights and liberties defend. / May rising patriots keep those rights secure, / And hand them down to latest ages pure. / Mourn too, ye friends and relatives who knew / His worth, his kindness, and his love to you. / But duty bids us all resign, and say, / Thy will be done who gave and took away.
Sources
- National Park Service, St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, "Stephen Ward: A Local Revolutionary Leader who guided the town's transition from colonial times to the early republic." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/stephen-ward-a-local-revolutionary-leader-who-guided-the-town-s-transition-from-colonial-times-to-the-early-republic.htm
- Corrected: the page calls the British peace commission of 1778 the "Carlyle Commission"; it was the Carlisle Commission.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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