TRUMBULL, JOHN (1750-1831), American poet, was born in what is now Watertown, Conn., where his father was a Congregational preacher, on April 24, 1750. At the age of seven he passed his entrance examinations at Yale, but did not enter until 1763; he graduated in 1767, remained at the college study ing, and in 1771-73 was a tutor. He spent a year in Boston in the office of John Adams, and after 1774 practised law in Con necticut. He was State's Attorney in 1789, a member of the Con necticut assembly in 1792 and 180o, a judge of the superior court in 1801-19, and finally a judge in the supreme court of errors. The last six years of his life were spent in Detroit, Mich., where he died on May 1o, 1831. While studying at Yale he had contributed in 1769-70 ten essays, called "The Meddler," imitating The Spectator, to the Boston Chronicle, and in 1770 similar essays, signed "The Correspondent" to the Connecticut Journal and New Haven Post Boy. While a tutor he wrote his first satire in verse, The Progress of Dulness (1772-73), an attack in three poems on educational methods of his time. His great poem,
which ranks him with Philip Freneau and Francis Hopkinson as an American political satirist of the period of the Revolutionary War, was ill`Fingal, of which the first canto, "The Town Meet ing," appeared in 1776 (dated 1775). This canto, about 1,500 lines, contains some verses from "Gage's Proclamation," published in the Connecticut Courant for Aug. 1775; it portrays a Scotch Loy alist, M`Fingal, and his Whig opponent, Honorius, apparently a portrait of John Adams. This first canto was divided into two, and with a third and a fourth canto was published in 1782. After the war Trumbull was a rigid Federalist, and with the "Hartford Wits," David Humphreys, Joel Barlow and Lemuel Hopkins, wrote the Anarchiad, a poem directed against the enemies of a firm central government.
See the memoir in the Hartford edition of Trumbull's Poetical Works (182o) ; J. H. Trumbull, The Origin of '"M`Fingal" (Morrisania, New York, 1868) ; and the estimate in M. C. Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution (New York, 1897).