David Jamieson (1659-1739)
David Jamieson was born in March 1659 in Linlithgow, West Lothian, to David Jamie and Bessie Tod. He grew up in a Covenanter household and learnt the tailoring skills of his father’s business.
The authorities accused him of being a member of the Covenanter army at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge on 22 June 1679. The following January, he was declared an outlaw and his belongings confiscated for failing to appear on a charge of treason and rebellion. Regarded as able by his peers, he may briefly that year have studied in Utrecht, Netherlands, supported by Covenanter funds raised at conventicles or in other ways.
By 1681, however he was back in West Lothian and a leading member of a Covenanter sect known as the Sweet Singers, or Gibbites (as named after their leader, John Gibb). In May that year, he and others were arrested near Wolf Craigs in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh and imprisoned in Canongate Tolbooth. They had rapidly developed notoriety for their extreme views, not only in the eyes of magistrates but also fellow Covenanters for whom their rejection of the formal church and its ministers was anathema. They led very austere lives and took to periodic fasting, which led them to be accused of manic behaviour.
Despite being one of the authors of an extremely radical religious manifesto produced at the end of May, David and other Sweet Singers were subsequently released. However, he was again in prison in November for failing to pay a fine for absenting himself from parish church services. He appears again in the penal records on 4 January 1683, amongst Linlithgow residents accused of religious disorder.
In early May 1684 David was arrested, having been on the Fugitive Roll, and on 16 May he was formally banished by the Privy Council and ordered to be transported “to the Plantations in America”. He could have been shipped to South Carolina with other merchants but ended up the responsibility of Dr George Lockhart, the New York merchant with a property interest in East Jersey who also agreed to take two other Sweet Singers, John Gibb and Alexander Montgomery (or Monteith), along with six other prisoners. Lockhart’s ship, the Seaflower left Leith on 21 August 1684 heading for New York.
There David was sold as an indentured servant to Josiah Clarke, Anglican chaplain of the New York Fort. Clarke regarded him with promise and he was allowed “to teach school to redeem himself”. He began to train in law and in 1690 was a legal clerk to Matthew Clarkson, Secretary of New York Province. It was not long before he was appointed Clerk to the Council of New York, 15 April 1691. He held the post until 1698 when he was dismissed by Governor Lord Bellomont, who accused him of having been condemned to death in Scotland and of atheism and bigamy.
This was not, however, to be the end of his career in public office. In June 1701, he was appointed deputy provincial Surveyor-General and in 1711 he became Chief Justice of New Jersey, serving until 1723. In June 1712, he also became Recorder of New York City with significant legal responsibilities. In January 1720 he was sworn in as New York Attorney General.
He practised independently as an attorney and was one of the founders of the New York Bar Association. In 1707, he was one of three attorneys defending Francis Makemie, a Scots-Irish minister, for preaching without a licence, a case notable in the annals of Presbyterianism in the USA. David himself was no longer Presbyterian, having become Anglican and been chosen as a vestryman (like an elder in the Church of Scotland) in the Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan.
David was active in the property market mainly in New York. In June 1696, he was a partner in a land patent in Harrison, Westchester County and the following year in a consortium which secured what became known as the Great Nine Partners Patent in Dutchess County, though the latter investment he never saw fully realised. Later in 1697 he was party to a land grant of 1,200 acres in Deerpark, Orange County. On 11 November 1703, he sold land in Piscataway, New Jersey, to Scottish immigrant Thomas Grubb and his wife.
David married Anna Maria Hardenbroeck on 7 May 1692 at the Collegiate Church in New York. Anna Maria was niece of Margarete Hardenbroek, a leading merchant in New York in her own right as well as partner to her second husband, Frederick Philipse. Philipse was involved in slave trading and privateering including as a sponsor of William Kidd’s piratical activities with the Adventure Galley in the Indian Ocean in 1695.
David and Anna Maria had two children: Elizabeth and William. After Anna Maria’s death he married Joanna Meech on 16 January 1703. He died on 26 July 1739 in Manhattan and was buried there.