PETERS, SAMUEL (1735-1826). Au Ameri can clergyman, the author of a well-known his I tory of Connecticut. He was born in Hebron Conn., graduated at Yale in 1757, and in 175' was ordained in London as a minister of tit: Church of England. Returning to Connectieu• in 1760, he was placed in charge of the churche of Hebron and Hartford. In the pre-Revolu tionary controversies he embraced the Tory cause and was so pronounced in his loyalty to the Crown that in 1774 he was forced by the of Liberty' to abandon the colony and take refuge in England. Ilere in 1781 he published anony- ' mously his celebrated General History of Con neetient, from Its First Settlement Under Genera Fenwyek, Esq., to Its Latest Period of Amity with Great Britain (republished in New York, 1877). in which lie gave a code of so-called `blue laws' which attracted widespread atten tion. These laws were formerly supposed to have been pure forgeries and fabrications, but recent investigations have shown them to have been taken in part from an earlier writer (Neal) and in part (with modifications) from actual laws, only two or three of the forty-five having been apparently invented out of hand. In 1805
Peters came to New York. In 1817 he visited the Falls of Saint Anthony, taking up a large claim there, hut again settled in New York (1818) and died there in great poverty eight years later. Ile published a number of books and pamphlets, characterized by a slovenly and un critical scholarship, and by a general uniformity of misstatement and reckless assertion. Con stilt: Trumbull, The Rev. Samuel Peters, His Defenders and Apologists (Hartford, 1877) ; id., The True Blue Lames of Connecticut and New Haven (Hartford, 187(i) ; and "Examination of Peters's Blue Laws," by Prince, in Annual Re port of the American Historical Association for 1898.