Born in Derby, Connecticut, David Humphreys was educated by his clergyman father and at Yale University, where he earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War (1775-83), he was a tutor at Philipse Manor in New York, but in 1776 he joined the Continental army as a captain. In 1778 he became an aide to Israel Putnam and was promoted to major. Two years later he joined the staff of George Washington, with whom he developed a very close personal relationship, remaining with the general until he returned to Mount Vernon at the end of 1783.

In 1785 Humphreys acted as secretary to the European commission--Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams--in Paris. After returning to the United States the next year, he visited Washington and then joined the general as his private secretary in 1787, a position he held through Washington's election as president until 1790, when he was sent to Europe as a special diplomatic courier. In 1791 Washington appointed Humphreys as the first U.S. minister to Portugal, where he had to negotiate with Algiers for the release of captured seamen. Inspired by the plight of the captives, Humphreys wrote a private appeal for donations and a lottery for ransom, an act that violated protocol. Although he received a mild reprimand for his unorthodox appeal, he successfully completed the negotiations.

In 1796 the president appointed Humphreys as minister to Spain, a position he retained under John Adams, but because of his strident support of the Federalist Party, Thomas Jefferson dismissed Humphreys after the election of 1800. He returned to New England with merino sheep from Spain and began a new career as a wool producer and manufacturer. In 1806 he established a model industrial village in rural New England that used child and female labor. He died in New Haven, Connecticut, on February 21, 1818.

In addition to his military, political, diplomatic, and business career, Humphreys was also an author and poet and one of the group of writers called the Connecticut Wits. He was one of the coauthors, along with Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins, of the Anarchiad (1787-88), which decried popular unrest and democratic government as seen in the lines:

Survey the State, behold the flame that draws

Chiefs, mobs, conventions, to support thy cause.

See where the frogs' loquacious realms extend,

Instructions on their deputies attend.

Bibliography:

Frank Landon Humphreys, Life and Times of David Humphreys: Soldier-Statesman-Poet, "Belov'd of Washington" (1917; Reprint, St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholary Press, 1971).

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