Samuel Tudor

Samuel Tudor IV, Esq. (1769–1862) was a nineteenth-century American entrepreneur, business and civic leader of Hartford, Connecticut. He was a founding director of Aetna Insurance Company, the Phoenix National Bank and the Society of Savings Bank of Hartford, as well as a founding trustee and major early benefactor of Trinity College. Tudor was also connected with the establishment of many of the leading institutions of that city. He was a director of the American Asylum School for the Deaf, the oldest permanent school for the deaf in the U.S., and a co-founder of the Hartford Academy.

Background and family

Tudor was born in East Windsor, in Connecticut Colony, in 1769, son of Samuel Tudor, III, and Naomi Diggens. a founder of Hartford who was in Connecticut by 1645 and who made unsubstantiated claims to be related to the British monarchs.

Samuel IV, who was also commonly known as Samuel Tudor, Jr., married Mary Watson, daughter of John Watson, a wealthy Windsor, Connecticut, merchant, and Ann Bliss. John Watson was a second cousin of Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., and of his brother, the celebrated Revolutionary War painter, John Trumbull. With Watson, Tudor had 2 sons, William Watson, who married Mary Dalrymple Bruce, great-granddaughter of General Samuel Barwick II, Governor of Barbados; and Henry Samuel Tudor, who married Mary Rowe Bradley, daughter of U.S. Senator Stephen Rowe Bradley, and sister of William Czar Bradley, U.S. Representative, both of Vermont.

Merchant and founder of banks and insurance companies

Samuel was a prosperous importer and wholesale and retail dry goods merchant, with interests in several firms, including Tudor, Woodbridge & Co, established in 1805, one of the largest in Hartford. In 1814 he joined with 2 other partners to found the Phoenix Bank, and he later remained as a member of Trustees from 1825 until 1858. Tudor was one of the founding member of Trinity, who helped this institution to collect and secure fundings to thrive its first decade. He was also a very generous and continuous donor to the college until his death in 1862.

Tudor and slavery

Samuel Tudor was a slave owner according to the 1810 United States census, and the twelfth column of the chart indicates he owned a slave. The later 1820 United States census suggests he no longer own a slave.

In 21st century, Aetna confessed that they sold slave policies to the slave owners after 1853, when Tudor had been serving as the director of the company for over thirty years from 1819. Samuel Tudor should be one of the responsible parties of Aetna to sell the policies of slaves.

Philanthropy

Tudor was for 47 years a member of the vestry of and a major financial contributor to Christ Church in Hartford. Of him she wrote:

... And so, for more than ninety years Flow'd on his cloudless span, In love of Nature, and of Art, And kindred love for man, Our oldest patriarch, kind and true, To all our City dear, His cordial tones, his greeting words No more on earth we hear. . .