Daniel Horsmanden, chief justice of colonial New York, was born to Reverend Daniel Horsmanden and Susanna Boyer in Purleigh, Essex, England, June 4, 1694. In his early twenties, Daniel Horsmanden moved to London, where he studied law. In 1721, he was admitted to the Middle Temple, and in 1724 he was admitted to the Inner Temple. He practiced law in London and engaged unsuccessfully in some high-stakes business dealings, acquiring substantial debt by 1729. That year Horsmanden moved to Virginia, likely to escape creditors, staying first in Williamsburg with his cousin, William Byrd of Westover, who had lived much of his youth in the Horsmanden household.
Some time after 1730, Daniel Horsmanden moved to New York. Through Byrd, He received introductions extending to Thomas Pelham Holles, Lord Newcastle; Newcastle recommended Horsmanden to William Cosby, the newly appointed Governor of New York. Admitted to the Bar in 1732, Horsmanden took a seat in the New York city council the following year.
Emerging during a period of factious strife in New York politics, Horsmanden traveled between leading parties, allying eventually with William Cosby's ruling party. For his services on the committee charged with identifying seditious statements in John Peter Zenger's New York Weekly Journal, Cosby granted the struggling Horsmanden a license to purchase a substantial estate near Albany. From Cosby's successor, William Clarke, he received appointment as judge in the Vice Admiralty Court of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut; by 1737, he achieved the rank of the third judge in New York's Supreme Court of the Judiciary.
While rising through the ranks of the judiciary, Daniel Horsmanden maintained his post on the city council, as well. Serving as legal counsel and as city recorder, he initiated investigation into a series of robberies and fires in the winter of 1741, promoting the theory that the fires stemmed from a plot raze the city of New York. Horsmanden accepted the suspect accusations made by sixteen year-old Mary Burton, an indentured servant promised her freedom and starting cash for unveiling the plot. He prosecuted the cases as they spiraled from an innkeeper and the slaves to whom he illegally sold liquor, to free blacks, to Catholic radicals. He sentenced four white men and seventeen slaves to hangings; thirteen other slaves were burned at the stake. Hundreds of accusations, which were provided in lieu of facing execution, stirred the city in to a frenzied state, and Horsmanden rose in social and political prominence for his handling of this so-called "Negro Plot." Defending his actions he published in 1744 A Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for burning the city of New-York in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants. When George Clinton ascended to the gubernatorial seat, Daniel Horsmanden again allied himself with whomever he saw as the colony's most powerful of politicians: his fellow supreme court justice, James De Lancey. As De Lancey and Clinton reached political loggerheads, Horsmanden became the focus of Clinton's ire. The governor removed Horsmanden from his post on the Supreme Court and from his role as city recorder; however, Horsmanden retained his seat on the city council. Shortly before leaving office in 1753, George Clinton returned Horsmanden to the Supreme Court. He remained there until his death, serving as justice until James De Lancey's demise in 1760, and as chief justice thence forward. Remaining a malleable politician throughout his career, the judge shifted his allegiance to William Livingston's party in the mid-fifties. In 1755 he received appointment to the governor's council under Thomas Hardy.
As a jurist in the pre-Revolutionary decades, Daniel Horsmanden struggled to maintain a fine line between his duties to the Crown and his place in colonial New York. During the Stamp Act Crisis, he kept the courts closed; however, called on to investigate the 1772 sinking of the revenue schooner Gaspee off the coast of Rhode Island, Horsmanden suggested combining Rhode Island and Connecticut under one Royal government. His final term as justice came in 1775, after which Royal courts in New York closed.
In 1748, Daniel Horsmanden married Mary Reade Vesey, the widow of the rector of New York's Trinity Church. The couple had no children together. Mary Horsmanden died in 1760, and in 1764 the seventy year-old Horsmanden married Ann Jevon of New York. She, too, predeceased him, dying in 1777.
Daniel Horsmanden died at his Flatbush, New York home, September 23, 1778. Dying without issue, he stipulated in his will that much of his estate be sold and the proceeds donated to St. Paul's Chapel, King's College and Trinity Church, where his body was laid to rest.
Source: Source: Judd, Jacob. "Horsmanden, Daniel." In American National Biography, vol. 11. Edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, 228-30. Oxford University Press, 1999; Spenser, Charles Worthen. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC?vrsn=149&OP=contains&locID =pwpls_remote&srchtp=name&ca=1&c=1&AI=1178215&NA=Horsmanden&ste=12&tbst=prp &tab=1&docNum=BT2310010966&bConts=33 .Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan: The Gale Group, 2004. (July 7, 2004); Ferguson, R. Brian. http://hnn.us/articles/1571.html . History News Network, 2003. (July 7, 2004).