Whitehead Hicks, 42nd Mayor of New York

Loyalist, Whitehead Hicks, born 1703, Hempstead NY - died October 1780 at Flushing New York. He studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1750 and attained note in his profession. He was clerk of Queens County from 1752 - 1757, and the last colonial Mayor of New York city from 1766-1776. Six weeks before the mayor took his oath of office, the first blood of the approaching Revolution was shed on the Commons when a British Regiment cut down the city's "Liberty Pole" and the people reacted with mob violence against the perpetrators.

In early 1776, during the short occupation of the city by forces of the Continental Army of Commander in chief George Washington, under his Major General Charles Lee, the loyalist mayor, Whitehead Hicks was forced to flee the city to Long Island which was, at that time, presently occupied by the British forces.

After the retreat of the Continental Army from the Battle of Long Island, and New York in August 1776, the British Army occupied the city and installed a military governor during that occupation until its evacuation on November 25, 1783. 

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See additional history and family information, Ref.: RootsWeb's World Connect, < http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=j-m-hicks... >

The Hicks family first came to America in 1641. Whitehead Hicks, son of Judge Thomas Hicks, was born in Bayside, Long Island on August 24, 1728. He studied law in the office of William Smith, the elder, and was admitted to practice in 1750. In October 1766, he became the forty-second Mayor of New York, a position he was to hold for ten years. He supported independence and by early 1776, the office of Mayor in British-held New York became untenable, and he resigned from office. On February 14, 1776, he was appointed a Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature. He was a member of the court that decided Crown v. Prendergast, the treason trial of Anti-Rent Movement leader William Prendergast. He resigned from the bench shortly afterward and retired to Jamaica, Long Island. Upon his father's death, he inherited the Bayside, Long Island, property where he was born and where he died on October 4, 1780.

SOURCES

Dunlap, William. History of the New Netherlands, Province of New York and State of New York. 1839.

Wilson, James Grant. The Memorial History of the City of New-York. 1892.

http://www.nycourts.gov/history/legal-history-new-york/legal-histor...
Loyalist Claim

http://politicalstrangenames.blogspot.com/2013/09/whitehead-kluttz-...