Rev. Elisha Williams

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/20583921/elisha-williams

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Williams

Elisha Williams (August 26, 1694 – July 24, 1755) was a Congregational minister, legislator, militia soldier, jurist, and rector of Yale College from 1726 to 1739.

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He graduated from Harvard 1711, ordained at Newington, Conn., Oct. 22, 1722; he was chosen President of Yale College 1726, and served thirteen years and resigned on account of ill health July 25, 1766.

HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF STONINGTON, county of New London, Connecticut, from its first settlement in 1649 to 1900, by Richard Anson Wheeler, New London, CT, 1900, p. 664

[following downloaded 2009 from Wikipedia]

The Reverend Elisha Williams (26 August 1694-22 October 1755) was a Congregational minister, legislator, jurist, and rector of Yale College from 1726 to 1739.

The son of Rev. William Williams and his wife Elizabeth, née Cotton (daughter of Seaborn Cotton), he was educated at Harvard, graduating, at the age of seventeen, in 1711.

His first wife, and mother of his seven children (only two of whom survived him), was Eunice Chester, They were married in 1714; she died in 1750.

After his marriage he studied law, and was a member of the Connecticut legislature from Wethersfield for five sessions, the first in 1717; he studied divinity with his father and was ordained a clergyman in 1722, and served the church at Wethersfield until 1726, when he became fourth Rector of Yale College, serving in that capacity for thirteen years. He entered the position during a troubled period of Yale's history; by the time of his resignation, for reasons of health in 1739, he left the college firmly established. Rector Williams hosted a visit to Yale by Thomas Jefferson when the future President came to view the College's scientific collections

He was again a member of the Connecticut legislature from 1740 to 1749, and was appointed Judge of the Superior Court. He was a Colonel of Militia, and served as Chaplain in the expedition sent against Cape Breton in 1745. He was appointed to the command of a regiment of one thousand men raised for the reduction of Canada; when they were not paid, he was sent to go to England to entreat for their pay. While he was there, his wife died, and he married Elizabeth, daughter of Rev. Thomas Scott, of Norwich, England. Returning home, he narrowly escaped shipwreck, and spent some months in Antigua before reaching Connecticut.

He was a delegate to the Albany Congress in 1754.

He died at Wethersfield, Connecticut and is buried there.

The Reverend Elisha Williams (26 August 1694-22 October 1755) was a Congregational minister, legislator, jurist, and rector of Yale College from 1726 to 1739.

The son of Rev. William Williams and his wife Elizabeth, née Cotton (daughter of Seaborn Cotton), he was educated at Harvard, graduating, at the age of seventeen, in 1711.

His first wife, and mother of his seven children (only two of whom survived him), was Eunice Chester, They were married in 1714; she died in 1750.

After his marriage he studied law, and was a member of the Connecticut legislature from Wethersfield for five sessions, the first in 1717; he studied divinity with his father and was ordained a clergyman in 1722, and served the church at Wethersfield until 1726, when he became fourth Rector of Yale College, serving in that capacity for thirteen years. He entered the position during a troubled period of Yale's history; by the time of his resignation, for reasons of health in 1739, he left the college firmly established.

He was again a member of the Connecticut legislature from 1740 to 1749, and was appointed Judge of the Superior Court. He was a Colonel of Militia, and served as Chaplain in the expedition sent against Cape Breton in 1745. He was appointed to the command of a regiment of one thousand men raised for the reduction of Canada; when they were not paid, he was sent to go to England to entreat for their pay. While he was there, his wife died, and he married Elizabeth, daughter of Rev. Thomas Scott, of Norwich, England. Returning home, he narrowly escaped shipwreck, and spent some months in Antigua before reaching Connecticut.

He was a delegate to the Albany Congress in 1754.

He died at Wethersfield, Connecticut and is buried there.

Another source: http://consource.org/document/the-essential-rights-and-liberties-of... has more information on his writings (below copied from this source):

Elisha Williams (1694–1755). As the son of Reverend William Williams (1665–1741), a great-grandson of John Cotton and of Governor Simon Bradstreet, and the younger brother of William Williams, Jr., Elisha Williams was a member of an outstanding and devout New England family. Born in Hatfield, Massachusetts, he was graduated from Harvard in 1711, studied theology with his father, read law, preached to seamen in Nova Scotia, tutored Yale students at his home for several years (including Jonathan Edwards the elder), and, in 1722, settled as pastor of a Congregational church in Wethersfield, Connecticut. There Williams remained only four years before becoming Yale University rector, a position he held until 1739. Ezra Stiles, a future Yale president who was graduated there during Williams's tenure, called him "a good classical scholar, well versed in logic, metaphysics, and ethics, and in rhetoric and oratory [who] delivered orations gracefully and with animated dignity" (John H. Harkey, American Writers Before 1800).

His departure from Yale was attributed to poor health, but Williams, who had also been in the Connecticut General Assembly, served there again from 1740 to 1749. Politically ambitious, he was thought to be interested in becoming governor of Connecticut. He also served as a judge on the Connecticut Supreme Court, was a chaplain during the 1745 expedition that captured Louisbourg, was appointed colonel and commander-in-chief of forces organized to invade Canada (a plan that was abandoned), and was a delegate to the Albany Congress in 1754, which devised the first American plan of union under Benjamin Franklin's leadership.

Signed "Philalethes," The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants (1744) is Williams's most famous work. It was occasioned by a 1742 Connecticut statute prompted by Standing Order clergymen's resentment of Great Awakening revivalists. It prohibited ministers from preaching outside their own parishes, unless expressly invited to do so by resident ministers. Punishment for violating this law was deprivation of support and authorization to preach, a prohibition and punishment that Williams argued violated scripture, natural rights, the social contract, and the Toleration Act of 1688. These views had so antagonized people as to prevent his reelection to the Supreme Court in the previous year, and he was abused by both Old Lights and New Lights. But the pamphlet is a triumph of political theology and theory. In "Williams's dazzling assault," John Dunn has written, "Locke's notions of toleration were fused with a brilliant presentation of his theory of government, and a doctrine of startling originality appeared. . . . When the cool epistemological individualism of the scholar's closet was fused with the insistent Puritan demand for emotional autonomy, the two became transmuted into a doctrine which in the radicalism of its immediate and self-conscious social vision could not have been conceived anywhere else in the eighteenth-century world" (Political Obligation in Its Historical Context [Cambridge, 1980]).

Elisha Williams was invoked on June 15, 2018 in the media after AG Jeff Sessions quoted from the 13th chapter of the New Testament book of Romans, which says “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

As one journalist noted, that passage "has been read as an unequivocal order for Christians to obey state authority, a reading that not only justified Southern slavery but also authoritarian rule in Nazi Germany and South African apartheid."

Further, the journalist referred to Elisha Williams' 1744 writings, in which he remarked that the text was “often wrecked and tortured by such wits as were disposed to serve the designs of arbitrary power.”