James De Lancey (17)

Elected to the original American Philosophical Society.

James De Lancey (27 November 1703–30 July 1760) was a lawyer, judge, and politician and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1744. Born into a prominent New York City family and educated in England at Lincoln’s Inn and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, De Lancey returned to America in 1725 as one of its leading legal thinkers. He served, in rapid succession, on the Provincial Council, on the committee that drafted New York City’s Montgomerie Charter, and as Second Justice and then Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court. When allies of the former chief justice, Lewis Morris, engaged John Peter Zenger to print attacks on Governor William Cosby in the New York Weekly Journal, De Lancey presided over Zenger’s widely publicized trial for seditious libel, actively seeking indictment and disbarring Zenger’s lawyers, APS members James Alexander and William Smith. After his relationship with Governor George Clinton soured, the exceptionally well-connected De Lancey became lieutenant governor (1747) and then acting governor (1753). His tenure focused on the French and Indian War; in 1754, De Lancey hosted the Albany Congress to promote intercolonial wartime unification. He was also involved in the founding of King’s College that same year. A deft practitioner of the patronage system, he is held to have founded one of the first political factions in New York. (PI, ANB, DNB, DAB)