Wooster, David

WOOSTER, DAVID. (1711–1777). Continental general. Connecticut. Born at Stratford, Connecticut, on 2 March 1711, the son of a mason, Wooster was graduated from Yale College in 1738. He was appointed lieutenant of the Connecticut armed sloop Defense in 1741 and the next year was promoted to its captain. In 1745 Wooster was one of eight captains in the Connecticut regiment on the Louisburg expedition, and on 4 July he sailed for France with French prisoners for exchange. He was commissioned on 24 September 1745 as a captain in the new British provincial regiment of Sir William Pepperrell, in garrison at Louisburg, but retired on half pay in 1748 when the fortress was returned to the French at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. He married the daughter of Thomas Clap, the president of Yale College, in March 1746, became a merchant at New Haven, and in 1750 helped to organize one of the first lodges of Free Masons in Connecticut. During the French and Indian War, he was colonel of a Connecticut provincial regiment in 1756 and again in 1758–1760, taking part in the attack on Ticonderoga in 1758 and in later operations under Jeffrey Amherst. In 1763 he became customs collector at New Haven.

In April 1775 the General Assembly appointed this sixty-four-year-old veteran of two colonial wars as its major general of the six regiments to be raised for "the safety and defence of the colony." In conformity with Connecticut practice, he was simultaneously colonel of the First Regiment (raised in New Haven County) and captain of the regiment's first company. At the request of the New York assembly, the Connecticut governor's council ordered Wooster on 19 June to march with his regiment and Colonel David Waterbury's Fifth Regiment (raised in Fairfield County) to New York City. During the summer of 1775 he commanded Connecticut troops on Long Island and at Harlem. Congress named Wooster as the fourth brigadier general of the Continental army on 22 June. He was the only major general of militia not given the equivalent rank in the Continental army and was piqued at being passed over by younger men with less military experience, as well as by Israel Putnam, formerly subordinate in Connecticut rank but who was now a Continental major general. Ordered to report to Major General Philip Schuyler in the Northern Department, he left New York City on 28 September. Although Wooster quarreled with Schuyler during the Canada invasion, he took part in the siege and capture of St. Johns and remained commandant at Montreal when Richard Montgomery moved against Quebec. On Montgomery's death on 1 January 1776, Wooster assumed command in Canada. On 2 April, Wooster reached the outskirts of Quebec, where he quarreled with Benedict Arnold, but was succeeded on 1 May by John Thomas.

Wooster's service in Canada confirmed his incapacity for high command. "A general … of a hayfield," is Justin H. Smith's characterization of him (vol. 2, p. 230). He was "dull and uninspired, garrulous about his thirty years of service … tactless, hearty rather than firm with his undisciplined troops who adored him, at times brutal towards the civilian population of Montreal" (Stanley M. Pargellis in DAB). The death of Thomas on 2 June 1776 again left Wooster as senior officer in Canada but Congress, informed by its commissioners in Montreal of his incompetence, recalled him immediately. An official inquiry exonerated him of misconduct and kept him on the rolls as a brigadier general without employment—he was given no further assignment in the Continental army.

He was reappointed major general of Connecticut militia on 23 October 1776 and that winter commanded a small force on the border with New York. He joined William Heath for the mismanaged diversion against Fort Independence, New York, on 17-18 January 1777. Mortally wounded on 27 April at Ridgefield while opposing William Tryon's Danbury raid, he died on 2 May at Danbury. Congress voted him a monument but never got around to having it built. The Masons erected a monument to Wooster at Danbury in 1854.

SEE ALSO Canada Invasion; Danbury Raid, Connecticut; Fort Independence Fiasco, New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Smith, Justin H. Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony: Canada, and the American Revolution. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907.

                               revised by Harold E. Selesky