Chauncey Lee

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The Reverend
Chauncey Lee
Born(1763-11-09)November 9, 1763
Salisbury, Connecticut Colony, British America
DiedDecember 5, 1842(1842-12-05) (aged 79)
Hartwick, New York, United States
Alma materYale College
Occupation(s)Pastor, writer
Spouses
Abigail Stanton
​
(died 1805)​
Olive Spencer
​
​
(m. 1807; died 1818)​
Rebecca Haines
​
​
(m. 1818; died 1841)​
Children7

Chauncey Lee (November 9, 1763 – December 5, 1842) was an American Congregationalist preacher and writer who ministered in churches across New England and New York for nearly 50 years, though he was most associated with the church at Colebrook, Connecticut.

Born in Salisbury, Connecticut in 1763, Lee was a Patriot and Federalist who believed divine providence would guide America's independent destiny. As part of this, he wrote an accountancy book in 1797, which proposed decimalized weights and measures and includes an early sketch of the dollar sign (Dollar sign with two vertical lines); he also penned a moderately popular poetic rendition of the Book of Job. A New Divine in the tradition of Edwards and Emmons, Lee vocally opposed the separation of church and state and dismayed New England's disestablishment in the 1810s. His views were increasingly at odds with the emerging liberal Taylorist movement, and he died without a post in 1842, aged 79.

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Chauncey Lee was born in Salisbury, Litchfield County, Connecticut, on November 9, 1763.[1][2] He was the ninth child fathered by the popular preacher Jonathan Lee of Coventry, and the first by Jonathan's second wife, the also-widowed Love née Graham Brinckerhoff.[3][4] At the time, most New England provinces, including Connecticut, had the established religion of Congregationalism. However, Jonathan was a New Light evangelist who opposed the Saybrook Platform of government because it forbade irregular preaching. Thus, he founded and served as first minister of a church at Salisbury that, with the town's support, broke communion with the ecclesiastical county council (consociation).[1][4][5] By contrast, Love's father was John Graham of Edinburgh, an austere preacher in Southbury who served as the registrar for Litchfield County's consociation.[6] Both Graham and Lee were pamphleteers and served as chaplains for the colonial troops during the expeditions against Crown Point in the French and Indian War.[5][6]

1806 engraving of John Cotton Smith. After Smith was elected Connecticut's last Federalist governor in 1813, Lee delivered the annual sermon before the General Assembly.

Jonathan graduated from Congregationalist Yale College in 1742 and personally prepared his and other neighborhood boys to attend as well, with supplementary education in classics, prosody and arithmetic.[4] On July 3, 1780, Chauncey passed the entrance exam delivered directly by President Ezra Stiles and formally matriculated.[4][7] He studied at Yale four years and joined the Connecticut Alpha of Phi Beta Kappa in 1784.[8] After graduating,[a] Lee began reading law under John Canfield, a politician and deacon at Sharon, Connecticut.[12] Lee's fellow student was John Cotton Smith, the 23rd Governor of Connecticut. In 1788, Lee was admitted to the bar of Litchfield County and opened a private practice in Salisbury.[4]

Preachership

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Lee disliked law almost immediately, and, despite being recently married, he closed his office to learn theology under the moderate New Divine Hopkinsian minister Stephen West, of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.[1][13] On June 3, 1789, Lee was licensed to preach by the ministerial association of Litchfield County and filled for a time ad interim in Salisbury the vacancy left after his father's death the previous year. Lee served there ably and there was a movement to seat him on a permanent basis, but Lee was apparently personally ambivalent.[1][4]

Vermont and New York

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Instead, Lee joined the swarm of Connecticuters moving to Vermont for cheap land, including his father-in-law, Revolutionary War Green Mountain Boys Captain Joshua Stanton, who was from Burlington.[3][14][15] Lee sold the 35 acres of Connecticut land he inherited and preached independently for a while before being ordained as pastor of Sunderland on March 18, 1790.[4] Sunderland then had two Congregational churches on opposite sides of the town, and allocated a lot of land to support whichever pastor was the earliest to settle there. That year both churches had a vacancy and raced to install a pastor first, but their ceremonies were held so close that both made competing claims to the land. Only after long deliberation in the County Court (and the consultation of many clocks) was it found that Jacob Sherwin, of the south side, had beaten Lee by two minutes.[1][16] The protracted dispute had discredited both parishes, and Lee resigned after about five years due to the low salary.[1][7] He spent the remainder of 1796 in Burlington, taught school as the first principal of Lansingburgh Academy near Troy, New York from 1797 to 1798, and then preached in Hudson, New York before returning in the autumn of 1799 to his home town of Salisbury.[7][17]

Lee's proposed notation for the mill, cent, dime, dollar and eagle. The American Accomptant was one of many textbooks after 1792 teaching the new "federal arithmetic" as accountants transitioned from using pounds, shillings and pence to the decimal-based U.S. system.[18]

During this itinerant time, Lee began to write. He had already some misgivings about the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1789, namely that it has "not the smallest recognition of the government being of God".[19] However, his first works at Lansingburgh reflected the idea of American exceptionalism. First, he published a pro-Administration oration for the town's 21st Fourth of July celebration, wherein he declared that God had electrified the Patriot cause and independence was "manifest the distinguishing favor and goodness of Heaven", and predicted that by 1847 there would be millions of Americans in fifty states.[20] Also in 1797, Lee produced a guide for teaching schoolchildren practical, and in some cases distinctly American, methods of arithmetic.[21][22] However, The American Accomptant only sold one edition, as Lee's demand that Congress follow the innovation of decimal coinage by introducing all-decimal "American weights" never caught on.[23][24] Lee did, however, propose (though he was not the first to do so) the use of an "S" with two diagonal marks to represent the dollar, which endures as an alternative (Dollar sign with two vertical lines) rendering of the dollar sign.[25]

Service at Colebrook

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The Colebrook Congregational Church in 2023

On February 12, 1800, Lee succeeded the younger Jonathan Edwards as pastor in Colebrook, Connecticut—in this post he stayed the longest, nearly twenty-eight years, and was most associated.[7][26][27] He gained repute as an evangelist who employed serious but clear and striking language.[23] He was chosen to deliver the 1813 Connecticut election sermon before the General Assembly, in which he invoked the Lord's Prayer to say, "religion is the only sure foundation of a free and happy government. It is the great palladium of all our natural and social rights ... if God be not in the camp, we have not reason to tremble for the ark".[28][29] This speech would be cited in 1874 by the unsuccessful campaign for an amendment to the preamble that recognizes the primacy of God.[30]

But short th' illusion—ere one summer's day,
The charm is fled, the ice dissolves away,
The waters swiftly glide, the dream is o'er,
The riv'let dries, and friendship is no more.
Hope, fair deceiver, downward to the deep,
Floats with the tide and "leaves the wretch to weep."

Chauncey Lee, "The Trial of Virtue", p. 27

Most of his works Lee published at Colebrook, including a poetic paraphrase of the Book of Job (1806) entitled "The Trial of Virtue" (and compared in style to Milton and Pope), with annotations and commentary.[9][26][23] This was his most known work, and the one "most esteemed by himself"".[27] Lee also published funeral orations and collections of sermons and hymns he composed for revival meetings (1824).[23]

I found three dollars inclosed from you. Oh, sir, when a minister gives to me, my heart aches. It is the greatest present I ever received from an individual. I feel as though I was doing wrong to take it. Oh, it makes me feel little, it makes me feel ashamed, to live on the charity of others. I suppose I inherit too much of my father's independency of character, pride. Till I see you, thanks, tears, prayers. Adieu.

John Todd to Chauncey Lee, 1820

Lee was intelligent and musical (could sing and play accordion) and worked supplementarily as an inspector of schools and a tutor, including for his son, Chauncey Graham.[1][31][32] He also rendered aid to the son of his late friend Timothy Todd, the future Massachusetts minister John Todd.[1] Todd wrote Lee while he was a penniless and sickly student at Yale, trying to get letters of recommendation for a free coach-ride to see his sisters in Malone, New York, rather than walking all the way from New Haven. In response, Lee not only furnished him the letters, but also his home to stay, money for the road and the care of their family physician. So grateful and pathetic were Todd's replies that their correspondence was unwittingly published in 1821 to encourage charitable donations to the American Education Society.[7][33] In 1823, Lee was made an honorary Doctor of Divinity by Columbia College.[34]

Marlborough and final days

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Through his career, Lee's views crystallized around the teachings of Nathanael Emmons, and as a conservative Calvinist, he vigorously opposed the "New Haven theology" of Nathaniel William Taylor.[1][7] Though witty and humorous off the pulpit, Lee's sermons carried an evangelical urgency.[1][23] In 1818, after Smith was defeated by the Toleration Party and Connecticut finally disestablished,[35] Lee believed New England Congregationalism to be imperiled.[1] His final work, Letters from Aristarchus to Philemon (1833), recalled the Calvinist–Arminian debate and denounced the men "of great pretensions to reasoning powers", whose "specious and flattering doctrines" were becoming popular over the likes of Edwards and Hopkins.[36]

On January 31, 1827, Lee resigned from Colebrook "in consequence of representations that he had lost his influence with the young people of the parish."[7] On November 18, 1828, he was installed as pastor of the church in Marlborough, Connecticut, but here too due to the "discouraging state of things among his people" and his declining health he resigned on January 11, 1837.[1] Lee moved in with his eldest daughter, Abigail Eliza, in Hartwick, New York and died after a brief illness aged 79 on November 5, 1842.[1][7]

Marriages and children

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Lee was thrice married. As a poor, young lawyer, he clandestinely married Abigail Stanton, daughter of the judge Joshua Stanton of Burlington, Vermont, which caused Mrs. Abigail Sacket Stanton to disown her daughter.[31] Abigail's only brother was Joshua Stanton, Jr., who served as a county judge and representative of Colchester to the Vermont General Assembly.[7]

With Abigail, Lee had four children, of whom three survived:[6][31]

  • Abigail Eliza (b. about 1788), the wife of Daniel Beebe of Guilford, New York
  • Chauncey Graham (May 13, 1790–December 10, 1794)
  • Chauncey Graham (July 4, 1795–February 2, 1871), a Connecticut pastor
  • Theodore Stanton (February 27, 1799–March 15, 1885), who allegedly deserted his wife and children to marry a much younger woman, and later claimed to have served as a Colonel in the Texas Revolution

Abigail Stanton Lee died on October 20, 1805.[6] In February 1807, he married Olive Harrison Spencer of Amenia, New York, the widow of Alexander Spencer. They had three children, who were all living by 1878:[3][31]

  • Juliet Love (b. November 28, 1808), the wife of physician Gardner M. Dorrance of Attica, New York
  • Frederick Albert (b. December 5, 1810), a dry goods merchant
  • Oliver Harrison (b. June 1, 1814), a dry goods-turned-metal merchant

Olive died on June 5, 1818[6] and Lee married a final time on October 5 to the widow Rebecca Green Haines of New London. She also predeceased him, dying on March 27, 1841—together, they had no children.[1][31]

Notes

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  1. ^ Some of Lee's works are self-credited A.M.[9] However, Yale did not offer graduate education until 1847,[10] and Lee is not listed as a recipient of an honorary master's degree on the Yale website.[11]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Sprague, William Buell (1859). Annals of the Pulpit: Trinitarian Congregational. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers. pp. 288–291.
  2. ^ Herringshaw, Thomas William (1909). Herringshaw's National Library of American Biography. Vol. 3. Chicago: American Publishers Association. p. 517.
  3. ^ a b c Lee, Sarah Marsh (1878). John Lee, of Farmington, Hartford County, Conn. and His Descendants. Norwich, Connecticut: The Bulletin Company. pp. 8–9, 119–20, 129–30.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Pettee, Julia (1937). The Rev. Jonathan Lee and His Eighteenth Century Salisbury Parish. The Salisbury Association, Inc. pp. 11–12, 87–88, 146–47, 190, 192.
  5. ^ a b Dexter, Franklin Bowditch (1885). Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History. Vol. 1. New York: Henry Holt and Company. pp. 716–17.
  6. ^ a b c d e Carpenter, Helen Graham (1942). The Reverend John Graham of Woodbury, Connecticut and His Descendants. Chicago: The Monastery Hill Press. pp. 1, 39–41, 108.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i Dexter, Franklin Bowditch (1907). Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History (PDF). Vol. 4. New York: Henry Holt and Company. pp. 351–55, 617.
  8. ^ Catalogue of the Connecticut Alpha of the ΦΒΚ. New Haven: Treadway and Adams. 1826. p. 6.
  9. ^ a b Lee, Chauncey (1806). The Trial of Virtue, a Sacred Poem. Hartford: Lincoln and Gleason. p. 27.
  10. ^ "The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences". Bulletin of Yale University. Retrieved October 13, 2025.
  11. ^ "Honorary Degrees Since 1702". Office of the Secretary and Vice President for University Life. Retrieved October 13, 2025.
  12. ^ Sedgwick, Charles F. (1842). History of the Town of Sharon, Lichfield County, Conn (PDF). Hartford: Case, Tiffany and Co. pp. 67–68.
  13. ^ McClintock, John; Strong, James (1891). Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature (PDF). Vol. 10. New York: Harper & Bros. p. 958.
  14. ^ Gerlach, Larry R. (July 1966). "Connecticut, the Continental Congress, and the Independence of Vermont, 1777-1782" (PDF). Vermont History. 34 (3): 188–93 – via Vermont Historical Society.
  15. ^ Stanton, William A. (1891). A Record, Genealogical, Biographical, Statistical of Thomas Stanton, of Connecticut and His Descendants. Vol. 1. Albany: Joel Munsell's Sons. p. 30.
  16. ^ Dexter, Franklin Bowditch (1896). Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, with Annals of the College History. Vol. 2. New York: Henry Holt and Company. pp. 611–12.
  17. ^ Broderick, Warren F. (May 15, 1999). Early Schools: Rural and Urban (PDF). Rensselaer-Taconic Land Conservancy. p. 4.
  18. ^ Cohen, Patricia Cline. "Arithmetic and Numeracy". www.encyclopedia.com. Encyclopedia of the New American Nation. Retrieved October 10, 2025 – via Encyclopedia.com.
  19. ^ Wood, James E. (1988). "EDITORIAL: The Prophetic Role of Religion in Society". Journal of Church and State. 30 (2): 219–225. ISSN 0021-969X.
  20. ^ Lee, Chauncey (1797). An Oration, Delivered at Lansingburgh, on the Fourth of July, A.D. 1797, in Celebration of the Twenty-First Anniversary of American Independence. Lansingburgh: R. Moffitt and Co. pp. 5, 8, 15.
  21. ^ Wessman-Enzinger, Nicole M. (January 2014). "An Investigation of Subtraction Algorithms from the 18th and 19th Centuries". Convergence – via George Fox University.
  22. ^ Jones, Emily (1960). "Historical Conflict—Decimal Versus Vulgar Fractions". The Arithmetic Teacher. 7 (4): 186. ISSN 0004-136X.
  23. ^ a b c d e Goodenough, Arthur. The Clergy of Litchfield County. Litchfield County University Club. pp. 85–88.
  24. ^ Clements, M. A. (Ken); Ellerton, Nerida F. (2015), "Decimal Fractions and Federal Money in School Mathematics in the United States of America 1787–1810", Thomas Jefferson and his Decimals 1775–1810: Neglected Years in the History of U.S. School Mathematics, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 119–21, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-02505-6_5, ISBN 978-3-319-02505-6, retrieved October 11, 2025
  25. ^ Kolpas, Sidney J. (September 2019). "Mathematical Treasure: Chauncey Lee's American Accomptant". Convergence – via Mathematical Association of America.
  26. ^ a b Lee Family Quarter-Millennial Gathering (PDF). Meriden: Republican Steam Print. 1885. p. 35.
  27. ^ a b Kilbourn, Dwight C. (1909). The Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, Connecticut 1709–1909. Litchfield: Dwight C. Kilbourn. p. 31.
  28. ^ Vail, R. W. G. (October 1935). "A Check List of New England Election Sermons". Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. 45 (2): 242.
  29. ^ Sassi, Jonathan D. (February 28, 2002), "Grassroots Changes and Regional Ideology 1800–1815", A Republic of Righteousness (1 ed.), Oxford University PressNew York, pp. 121–144, doi:10.1093/019512989x.003.0005, ISBN 978-0-19-512989-2, retrieved October 10, 2025
  30. ^ Proceedings of the National Convention to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution of the United States (PDF). Philadelphia: Christian Statesman Association. 1874. pp. 44–45.
  31. ^ a b c d e Holman, Winifred Lovering (1960). The History of My Grandmother Sacket-Stanton (PDF). Alice Darling Secretarial Service. pp. 8, 84–87.
  32. ^ Colebrook School Accompt Book (PDF). Colebrook School Society. 1800.
  33. ^ Todd, John (1876). Todd, John E. (ed.). John Todd: The Story of His Life (PDF). New York: Harper Brothers. pp. 67, 76–78.
  34. ^ "Columbia University Honorary Degree List". Columbia University Libraries. Retrieved October 10, 2025.
  35. ^ Janis, Mark Weston. "Connecticut 1818: From Theocracy to Toleration". Connecticut Law Review. 52 (5): 1708.
  36. ^ Lee, Chauncey (1833). Letters from Aristarchus to Philemon. Hartford: Hanmer and Comstock. pp. iii.