WHEN GENERAL DAVID HUMPHREYS TAUGHT GEORGE WASHINGTON ABOUT RACIAL EQUALITY

'The delivery of the surrendered British flag by General David Humphreys
to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, November 1781.

    It is not possible to overstate the part Connecticut played in the early stages of fomenting sentiment forindependence from Britain.
    Yale, at New Haven, was a hot-bed of revolutionary sedition from 1765. Timothy Dwight, a die-hard radical who went on to become one of Yale’s greatest presidents, had two great friends  from Connecticut in his student days at Yale, Nathan Hale, from Coventry, and David Humphreys, from Darby. Everybodyknows about Nathan Hale, but fewhave ever heard about David Humphreys who, as Washington’s chief aide-de-camp and good friend held a powerful and diverse influence on the one who is recognizedto this day as“The Father of His Country.”

    Humphreys enlisted as a volunteer adjutant in the Second Connecticut Regiment in July, 1776, then with Washington’s army in New York. In 1780, he was made an aide-de-camp of Washington’s headquarters camp. The two men struck up a close friendship and shortly Humphreys became Washington’s chief aid-de-camp.After the surrender atYorktown,Washington selected Humphreys from all his officers in the Continental Army to officially represent the army and its Commander-in-Chief before the representatives of the new-born nation.

    After the war, Humphreys went to live at Mount Vernon with Washington where together they organized Washington’s papers. Humphreys wrote Washington’s first presidential inaugural address and stood by him while he delivered it.  All these years since they met on the battlefield, Humphreys had been preaching abolition to the slave owner Washington, to some effect, as history records. By the end of their relationship, in the last years of Washington’s life, Washington was quoted as saying that if there were a civil war over slavery, he would “decamp to theNorth,” an oddly prophetic utterance.

    In the first years of the 19th century, Humphreys returned to Derby and became the founder of the New England factory village. “His became the first large and successful woolen mill in the country,” Historian Leo T. Molloy tells us, “and he is regarded as the founder of the woolen industry which has meant so much to the industrialization of America.” Humphreys keynote interest in industry was workers safety.

   The house where General David Humphreys was born in 1752 was built in 1699. Originally in Darby, it is now part of Ansonia. Today it functions as a house museum operated by the Derby Historical Society. It is a place that slows down your thinking and allows you to approach the mental mood of a long-ago and all-important time. Children from area schools come here to hear staff in period garb talk about what life was like when General David Humphreys was a boy. The costumed docents go out to elementary schools for frequent scheduled programs.