George Sullivan
(1771–1838)
BIRTH
August 29, 1771
PLACE
Durham, New Hampshire
DEATH
April 14, 1838
PLACE
Exeter, New Hampshire
FAMILY
FATHER
John Sullivan
(1740-1795)
HOMES
RELIGIOUS VIEWS
RELIGION NOT DOCUMENTED
DENOMINATION NOT DOCUMENTED
MEMBERSHIPS
AWARDS
George Sullivan was James Sullivan and Mehitable Odiorne’s son, a Boston-born lawyer of the early republic. Family histories date him to 1783–1866 and identify his wife as Sarah Bowdoin Winthrop. He is distinct from the New Hampshire congressman George Sullivan, whose father was John Sullivan. The master combines that other man’s biography with an impossible 2009 death date; this row’s proper identity and dates require correction.
EARLY LIFE
The exact date and place of George Sullivan’s birth have not been established in the source used for this entry. The surviving biographical summary provides only limited evidence about childhood, schooling, and the daily circumstances of the household, so those details are not reconstructed here without documentation. What can be stated securely is that this person belonged to the interconnected family world from which HistoryGPS traces participants, relatives, and later descendants of the Revolutionary generation.
Sullivan established his legal practice in Exeter, New Hampshire, after admission to the bar in 1793. His professional life remained centered there, although public appointments repeatedly took him into state and national politics. A Federalist, he served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 1805 and was state attorney general in 1805 and 1806. He also took part in civic observances: his Independence Day address at Exeter in 1800 appeared in print.
Elected to the United States House of Representatives, he served in the Twelfth Congress from March 1811 to March 1813. His single congressional term encompassed the mounting dispute with Britain and the declaration of war in 1812. A published speech associated with the Rockingham Convention records his involvement in the political controversies of that period. Returning to New Hampshire, he sat again in the state House in 1813, then in the state Senate in 1814 and 1815.
Sullivan resumed the attorney generalship in 1816 and held it until 1835, making the state's legal business the longest continuous part of his public career. He delivered another published Fourth of July oration in Boston in 1816. In Exeter he built his house across from the courthouse then standing in Front Street, close to the setting of his legal work. He left office three years before his death there in April 1838. His father, Revolutionary general John Sullivan, had governed New Hampshire; George's own offices were legislative and legal.
CAREER
DEATH
The final days of this George Sullivan cannot be described safely from the conflicting identity and date fields in the record. The existing biographical review identifies him as the Boston-born son of James Sullivan and Mehitable Odiorne, a lawyer whose family histories place his life in 1783–1866 and name Sarah Bowdoin Winthrop as his wife. That identity differs from the New Hampshire lawyer and congressman George Sullivan, son of John Sullivan, whose public offices and death in 1838 belong to another man. The master record also contains a 2009 death date and an Alaska place entry that do not fit either eighteenth-century-born lawyer. Those conflicting entries are preserved elsewhere in this file, as requested, but they are not used to invent a death narrative. The supplied family identification supports an approximate end in 1866, while the precise date, place, terminal illness and immediate cause require a securely matched primary or family record. An account of a medical decline in Alaska in 2009 would falsely combine different lives. The responsible final-life summary is therefore an explicit statement of the unresolved evidence. The family's nineteenth-century chronology provides a lead, but does not justify detailed symptoms, treatment or final conversations. This entry records that limitation rather than assigning another namesake's death to the person represented by the family biography.
POPULAR BIOGRAPHIES
This entry concerns George Sullivan (1771–1838), the New Hampshire lawyer and congressman, not other namesakes. Biographical reference and local history are supplemented by a clearly labelled biography of his father, General John Sullivan.
1. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–2005 — United States Congress. [Biographical reference] Find on Amazon
2. The History of the Town of Exeter, New Hampshire — Charles H. Bell. [Local history and biography] Find on Amazon
3. The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire — Charles H. Bell. [Biographical reference] Find on Amazon
4. The Military Services and Public Life of Major-General John Sullivan, of the American Revolutionary Army — Thomas C. Amory. [Related biography of his father] Find on Amazon
5. History of New Hampshire — Everett S. Stackpole. [Related state history] Find on Amazon
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