Three Secretaries 161 



over the Scotch colonists, who were slow to abandon their 

 allegiance to the British Crown a man whose eloquence 

 rendered him so conspicuous that a reward was offered for 

 his head. Her sister's husband, Jonathan Dickinson Ser- 

 geant, was a member of the Continental Congress. As a 

 young lady at Trenton she talked with General Mercer just 

 before he marched to his death at Princeton, and on Christ- 

 mas night in 1776 saw Washington depart for the crossing 

 of the Delaware. Her father was the brother of General 

 Joseph Spencer of the Revolution, second cousin to Timothy 

 Edwards, the great New England theologian, and own cousin 

 to John and Edward Brainerd, missionaries to the Indians; 

 she was aunt to John and Thomas Sergeant, of Philadelphia, 

 eminent lawyers, the former a candidate for Vice-President 

 with Clay in 1832, the latter judge of the Supreme Court of 

 Pennsylvania. Through her mother, Joanna Eaton, she was 

 descended from Thomas Eaton, one of the earliest American 

 Quakers, who came to Rhode Island in 1761, and also from 

 Thomas Wardell and Isaac Perkins, first-comers to Massa- 

 chusetts Bay (i63O-'35), who, as disciples of Anne Hutchin- 

 son in the Antinomian controversy, were banished from the 

 colony as heretics, and went with the Reverend John Wheel- 

 wright beyond the limits of the colony into the forests of 

 New Hampshire. Among her nearest of kin, the children 

 and grandchildren of her aunts, were all the LeContes, emi- 

 nent in science as zoologists, geologists, and chemists ; John 

 McPherson Berrien, of Georgia, the "American Cicero," 

 early Attorney- General of the United States and Regent of 

 the Smithsonian Institution; as well as Admiral Montgomery 

 and Commodore Berrien, of the United States Navy. 



These were all representative men and women, leaders in 

 the communities in which they lived, a group even more re- 

 markable for their abilities than for their diversity in origin 



