Columbia Library columns (v.32(1982Nov-1983May))

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  v.32,no.3(1983:May): Page 15  



The District Attorney and His Family                15

Amsterdam, which he renamed New York. On his paternal side,
Richard's grandfather Francis Harison came to New York in 1709
in the entourage of its new governor, John, Lord Lovelace, to
whom he was distantly related.

Richard was the fifth of nine children of George and Jane
Nicholls Harison. He was baptized in Trinity Church, of which
his father, a merchant and Custom House official, was a member
of the Vestry. Richard studied law after college, obtaining law
licenses in both New York (1769) and New Jersey (1771). He
was in practice in the pre-Revolutionary years, relying on his ex¬
tensive family connections for clients; as a member of the select
New York law society, the Moot, he debated points of law with,
among others, his King's College classmate John Jay. At the start
of the Revolution he was settled on Long Island, humorously writ¬
ing to his brother-in-law, Dr. John Jones, two months after the
adoption of the Declaration of Independence; "I reap no small
consolation in the course of my Labour from considering that
other great Men have retired to the Plough. I thought their dignity
not impaired by rural occupations." In 1778 he refused to take the
oath "to the rebel cause," and thus was "banished" behind British
lines by the patriot New York Commission for Detecting and De¬
feating Conspiracies. In 1780 he secured appointment as a New
York City public notary from the British military Governor James
Robertson, and he entered into law partnership with his cousin
Robert Nicholls Auchmuty. The Harison family genealogical
notes record that Harison had married Maria Jones, daughter of a
NewYork medical doctor, Evan Jones, probably in 1774. A^'hen
jMaria died from childbirth complications in 1782, Richard be¬
came a widower with three small children. A year and a half later,
on September 4, 1783, he posted bond to marry seventeen year old
Frances Duncan Ludlow "of Queens County, spinster."

Frances was one of two daughters of Frances Duncan and
George Duncan Ludlow, who were cousins and whose English
ancestors had settled in New York in 1694. The Ludlows became
  v.32,no.3(1983:May): Page 15