Robert Smith
(1757-1842)
BIRTH
November 3, 1757
PLACE
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
DEATH
November 26, 1842
PLACE
Baltimore, Maryland
FAMILY
FATHER
John Smith
(1722–1794)
MOTHER
Mary Buchanan Smith
(1729–1782)
BROTHER
Samuel Smith
(1752-1839)
HOMES
RELIGIOUS VIEWS
CHRISTIAN
DENOMINATION NOT DOCUMENTED
MEMBERSHIPS
AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY BRANCH PRESIDENT, MARYLAND AGRICULTURE SOCIETY PRESIDENT
AWARDS
Robert Smith (1757–1842) was a Maryland lawyer and statesman who briefly served in the Continental Army and fought at Brandywine. After graduating from Princeton, he built an admiralty-law practice in Baltimore and entered state politics. Thomas Jefferson appointed him secretary of the navy in 1801, a post he held through the war with Tripoli. He became secretary of state under James Madison in 1809, resigning in 1811 after disagreements with the president.
EARLY LIFE
Robert Smith was born on Nov 3, 1757 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 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.
The available biographical record identifies Robert Smith with work or public activity as a lawyer, soldier, statesman. Those roles provide the clearest documented basis for including this person in the database and should be read in the political, military, professional, or household context of the period. Robert Smith died on Nov 26, 1842 in Baltimore, Maryland. Additional claims about employment, public service, or accomplishments have been omitted where the consulted source did not support them.
CAREER
DEATH
Robert Smith was a Maryland lawyer and statesman who briefly served in the Continental Army and fought at Brandywine. After graduating from Princeton, he built an admiralty-law practice in Baltimore and entered state politics. Thomas Jefferson appointed him secretary of the navy in 1801, a post he held through the war with Tripoli. Robert Smith died on Nov 26, 1842 in Baltimore, Maryland. The available biographical account does not describe a continuous final medical course. It gives no dependable sequence of treatment and last symptoms from which to reconstruct a more detailed bedside narrative.
POPULAR BIOGRAPHIES
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