First Lieutenant Thomas Humphrey Cushing, 1st Regiment, Massachusetts Continental Line, Original Member
He was born in Pembroke, Massachusetts, December 1755 (baptized there February 1, 1756), son of Nathaniel and Sarah (Humphrey) Cushing. He died at New London, Connecticut, October 19, 1822, unmarried. He was sergeant, 6th Continental Infantry, January-December 1776, and was in Arnold’s naval battle on Lake Champlain; 2nd Lieutenant, 1st Massachusetts, January 1, 1777; 1st Lieutenant, January 12, 1778; taken prisoner May 14, 1781; exchanged; Brevet Captain, September 30, 1783; retained in Colonel Henry Jackson’s Continental regiment, November 1783, and served to June 20, 1784; Captain, 2nd Infantry, United States Army, March 4, 1791; assigned to 2nd Sub Legion, September 4, 1792; Major, 1st Sub Legion, March 3, 1793; Inspector of the Army, February 27, 1797-May 22, 1798; Lieutenant Colonel, 2nd United States Infantry, April 1, 1802; Adjutant and Inspector-General, March 26, 1802-May 9, 1807; Colonel, 2nd United States Infantry, September 7, 1805; Brigadier General, United States Army, July 2, 1812; commanded at Stonington, Connecticut, when the attack of the British squadron under Admiral Hardy was repulsed in 1814; honorably discharged, June 15, 1815. In 1817 he fought a duel with a Virginia Congressman. He was Collector of the Port of New London from January 15-22.
Abstracted from James Archer O’Reilly III, Memorials of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati (Boston 2004), p. 98. Cushing’s duel was mentioned in a recent article, Cordell L. Bragg III “A Fratricidal Affair of Honor,” Cincinnati Fourteen, 54 (2018) No. 2: 20-21, which included the above portrait by James Peale at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Thomas Humphrey Cushing has been represented in the New Hampshire Society since 2017.
