Uriah Tracy
Uriah Tracy was an eighteenth-century American lawyer and politician from Connecticut. He served in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.Biography
Tracy was born in Franklin in the Connecticut Colony. In his youth he received a liberal education. His name is listed as amongst those in a company from Roxbury responding to the Lexington Alarm at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. He later served in the Roxbury Company as a clerk
Tracy subsequently graduated from Yale University where his contemporaries included Noah Webster in 1778. He was admitted to the bar in 1781 after which he practiced law in Litchfield for many years. He served in the state legislature in 1788-1793, and in the United States House of Representatives from April 8, 1793- October 13, 1796, having been chosen as a Federalist.
He resigned his seat when he was elected to the United States Senate in place of Jonathan Trumbull Jr., who had resigned. Tracy served until the time of his death in Washington, D. C.. He has the distinction of being the first member of Congress interred in the Congressional Cemetery. His descendants include the mathematician Curtis Tracy McMullen and the author Jeanie Gould.
In 1803, he and several other New England politicians proposed secession of New England from the union due to growing influence of
Jeffersonian democrats and the Louisiana Purchase which they felt would further diminish Northern influence.
His portrait, painted by Ralph Earl, is in the collection of the Litchfield Historical Society in Litchfield, Connecticut.
