CHAPTER XXXIII.

The Wedding of William Duer and Lady Kitty StirlingPrinceton College in the Revolution-The Famous Raid of the Queen's Rangers Through the Raritan Valley.

When the continental army marched northward to the Hudson it did not altogether deprive Somerset from being a locality on which public interest centred. Before the close of the year 1779 several events transpired in the county which were important enough to attract much attention.

On the twenty-seventh of July there were great festivities at Basking Ridge, the occasion being the marriage of William Duer to Lady Kitty Stirling. The spacious Stirling mansion was filled with guests, including many prominent officers of the army, and civil and social magnates from New York and New Jersey. Family traditions aver that the soldiers from a near-by camp assembled in front of the house and clamored loudly for a view of the bride. Whereupon, the dainty Lady Kitty, in full bridal array, stepped in her satin slippers out on the lawn, and there received the congratulations of her father's fellow-campaigners. This is about the last mention we have of this family in our state, for in a few years their handsome seat, with its broad surrounding acres, passed into the hands of strangers. A writer who had visited Lady Stirling's household at the time it counted General Greene among its number, and who returned to Basking Ridge ten years later, speaks in a pathetic way of the scene of neglect and decay that met her eye. The great house stood

"In faded majesty, as if to mourn

The dissolution of an ancient race."

Its grand hall and decorated drawing-room were used as a store-house, and piled with sacks of corn and wheat. Pigs and

poultry roamed at will in the paved quadrangle, and its surrounding stables and coach-house were fast going to ruin. Through the unhinged door of the latter was to be seen the great family coach; its glory had departed, for the medallions, coronets, and gilt were bespattered and stained, hens made their nests on its formerly sumptuous cushions, and roosted at night on the high dash and huge leathern springs. As has been said before, Lord Stirling's earthly reward for his valuable services to the country was an early grave, and the affectionate and grateful remembrance of his countrymen. To his family he left an honored name and—adversity. At the outset of the war his landed property in New York and New Jersey was estimated to be worth one hundred thousand colonial pounds, above encumbrances. When public tranquillity was first disturbed he at once recognized that he should be forced to neglect his private affairs while discussing with his sword the great questions at issue. "To meet with a failure is one thing, but to commit one is another," and Lord Stirling's poverty at the time of his death was not due to want of forethought. The unhappy condition of his affairs was the outcome of the general prostration of the country at the close of the war, and the great changes in currency values. On entering the army he obtained from the legislature an act which empowered commissioners to sell the most of his New Jersey lands, and, after paying indebtednesses, to invest the proceeds for his benefit. The properties were sold while the continental money was yet a lawful tender, but before the debts could be paid the tender act had been repealed. The currency rapidly depreciated, and before his death, in 1784, he had to face the fact that his efforts to provide for the future of his family had resulted in his being left without his estates,-without any value to the proceeds of their sales, and without his debts being paid. Creditors within the British lines attached and sold his New York property, his obligations soon swallowed up the homestead, and he was thus stripped of everything.

Although Lord Stirling left his family without fortune, his daughter was not forced to become acquainted with poverty. Her marriage brought wealth, and gave her a social setting which secured all the enjoyments flowing from the possession of superabundant personal luxuries, and the companionship of culti

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vated and distinguished people. Manasseh Cutler, in his journal of 1784, mentions having dined with Colonel Duer that summer in New York. He found him living in the style of a nobleman, displaying on his table fourteen different kinds of wine before a large company of guests. Mr. Cutler speaks of his hostess, Lady Kitty, as an accomplished, sociable woman, who most gracefully performed all the honors of the board, attended by two servants in livery.

Another occasion of that year, sufficiently important to be noticed on these pages, was the college commencement held in September at Princeton, when six students received their diplomas. These were the first graduates since 1775, as until this year there had been no classes since early in 1776, although partial instruction had been given to a few students by the president and one of the professors in the summer of 1778. Previous to 1779 Nassau Hall had been used as a barrack by both armies, which, of course, left it in a very dilapidated and polluted condition. We have already learned of Washington having been forced, on that frosty morning of the third of January, 1777, to train his own guns on the walls of this building, in order to dislodge a detachment of the 40th British regiment that had there sought refuge from the victorious Americans. A cannon ball is said to have entered the chapel, and to have passed through a portrait of George II. which occupied the same frame in which is now Peale's noted picture of Washington. This chapel, together with the library, was stripped of furniture and ornaments, Governor Belcher's portrait was stolen, and all the books disappeared, some of them being afterwards found in North Carolina, where they had been left by Cornwallis's men. The Presbyterian church had also been in use by the troops, and much mutilated. A fireplace was built against the wall, the chimney being carried up through the roof. But little was done towards repairing either the church or college building until the summer of 1783, when preparations were made for the autumn commencement, which was by far the most important one held for eight years. General Washington and continental congress, by being present, gave an unusual dignity to the occasion, the sittings of the national legislature being then in the library-room of Nassau Hall. The members, and their president Doctor Elias

Boudinot, together with General Washington and the ministers of France and Holland, occupied seats in the church and listened to the valedictorian, Ashbel Green-afterwards president of the college-who was highly complimented for his effort by the general. At the close of the proceedings Washington handed to the college trustees a purse of fifty guineas as a contribution toward the repairs of Nassau Hall. The college dons, however, appropriated the sum to the securing of Peale's famous portrait of the American Fabius.

I wonder how many of the undergraduates and alumni of the "College of New Jersey" are aware that their being able to sing of the glories of "Old Nassau," on campus and at annual banquet, is due to the humility of a colonial governor In 1756, one year before the death of Governor Jonathan Belcher, that dignitary presented his library to the college. In gratitude for the gift the trustees requested that they might be allowed to give his name to the now venerable building, then being erected, which for so many years has housed the faculty and students of this ancient seat of learning. His excellency declined the proffered distinction. He requested that it should be named to 66 express the honor we retain," to quote his words, "in this remote part of the globe, to the immortal memory of the glorious King William III., who was a branch of the illustrious house of Nassau, and who, under God, was the great deliverer of the British nation from those two monstrous furies-Popery and Slavery." And so it was that the trustees decided that the new collegiate building, "in all time to come," should be called "Nassau Hall."

This was not the "beginning of things" for the College of New Jersey. The sturdy oak of alma mater, whose vast circumference of shade now shelters some six hundred students and fifty professors and officers, is the one hundred and forty years' growth from a little acorn that was planted in Presbyterian soil in Elizabethtown in the year 1746. Its founder and first president was the Reverend Jonathan Dickinson, for forty years the pastor of the First Presbyterian church of that town, whose congregation was the earliest organized in the colony for the worship of God in the English language. An old academy which occupied the site of the present lecture-room of the First

ous.

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Presbyterian church, and which was burned by the enemy during the Revolution, contained the class recitation-rooms of the new college, while the students, twenty in number, boarded with families in the village. President Dickinson's duties were many and variHe and an usher were the only teachers of the college, and his ministerial work was severe, as the members of his large congregation were scattered over the country as far as Rahway, Westfield, Connecticut Farms, and Springfield. In addition to the labors of so extended a parish the pastor was compelled, owing to his meagre salary, to cultivate a farm. He also practised medicine, and obtained a high reputation as a physician. The Massachusetts Historical Society possesses a copy of a pamphlet published by him in 1740, in which he gives his views of the "Throat Distemper," a disease since known as diphtheria. It was not uncommon in colonial days for the clergy to attempt the healing of the bodies of the people as well as their souls; indeed, early in the last century the ministers were almost the only physicians in the New Jersey province.

President Dickinson was spared to serve the college but for one year, as he died in October, 1747. The loss of this godly man was greatly deplored by the entire community-he having even won the esteem and affection of those in the communion of the church of England. This circumstance is worthy of note, as in the last century there was little sympathy between the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians. St. John's Episcopal church in Elizabeth had been organized in 1704 by the Reverend John Brooke, a missionary of the London "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." Extracts from the correspondence between this society and its New Jersey missionaries will show the sentiment prevailing among churchmen at that time as to dissenters. The Reverend Edward Vaughan, in a letter written in 1709, speaking of the great number of Independents, Baptists and Quakers in New Jersey, thus wrote:

From which absurdities Mr. Brooke brought a considerable number of them to embrace our most pure and holy Religion, and I hope that my labors will be attended with no less success, and observe that those late converts are much more zealous than those who sucked their milk in their infancy.

Writing again in 1711, he speaks of the mission at Woodbridge, and of several families in that village as displaying a