David Daggett

He was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, December 31, 1764, the son of Thomas Daggett. The history of Daggett's family in Massachusetts is a distinguished one. The original Daggett, John, came over from England with Winthrop's company, in 1630, and settled in Watertown. At the age of 16, David enrolled at Yale College, entering the junior class two years early. It appears likely that he entered Yale rather than Harvard, which was closer, because his father's cousin had been an officer at Yale. He graduated with high honor in 1783 and then earned a master's degree. Daggett was in the same class with Samuel Austin, Abiel Holmes and John Cotton Smith. Dagget was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1815. In November 1824, Daggett became an associate instructor of the New Haven Law School under Samuel Johnson Hitchcock; and in 1826, he was appointed Kent Professor of Law at Yale. He held these positions until health conditions forced him to resign. In the autumn of 1826, he received from Yale the honorary degree of LL.D. In May 1840, Daggett married Mary Lines, who was with him at the time of his death. He died in New Haven, Connecticut, and was interred at Grove Street Cemetery. ==Politics==

Daggett was admitted to the bar and entered into public life two years before the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. As did most of the people of New England, at that time, Dagget aligned himself with the Federalist Party. In May 1826, at age 62, he was chosen an associate judge of the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. He was appointed to that office by a Legislature in which a decided majority was opposed to him in political principles and preferences, and yet the respect he had garnered as a public official and lawyer swayed their vote in his favor. ==Daggett and race issues==

In 1831, Simeon Jocelyn and others proposed establishing a college for negros in New Haven; there was none in the United States, and the admission of blacks into existing colleges was rare. Daggett led the opposition to this plan, which was scuttled at a town meeting when a resolution against it that Daggett helped draft was passed by a vote of a 700 to 4. At the same meeting an anti-abolitionism resolution he also helped draft was passed: "The propagation of sentiments favorable to the immediate emancipation of slaves in disregard of the civil institutions of the States in which they belong, and as auxiliary thereto the contemporaneous founding of Colleges for educating colored people, is unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States, and ought to be discouraged." ==References==