Colonel William Ledyard, merchant of Groton Bank, was part of a family of merchants who established a small shipping dynasty of sorts, built through business acumen, politics and marriage.

William Ledyard’s father John Ledyard first settled in a home on Thames Street in Groton in the 1720s. By 1740, he had established an adjacent wharf, warehouse and shop on the banks of the Thames River, close to where the Avery-Copp House Museum sits today, strategically located near the old ferry that transported people, livestock and goods across the Thames to New London.

John Ledyard’s account books, now at the Connecticut Historical Society, show the Ledyards handled all the common imports and exports of their day: tea, molasses, sugar, salt, lumber, horses, rum and much more. Like other Connecticut merchants, they traded in the Caribbean ports of Barbados, Antigua, Jamaica, Tortuga, Guadaloupe, Dominica and others.

John was a savvy businessman who, in 1742, began serving in the Colonial Assembly in Hartford, a move that would wisely expand his business ties, increase his wealth and propel him upward in Connecticut society.

When John’s wife Deborah died in 1747, he quickly married the wealthy widow of Hartford merchant John Ellery. Besides acquiring her deceased husband’s many assets, Mary was also the only child and heir to the estate of her father, prominent Hartford businessman John Austin, who had died in 1743.

John and Mary’s was the first of at least three strategic marriages that strengthened the Ledyard domain.

After a few years in Groton, John and Mary moved to Hartford in the early 1750s, where Ledyard formed a new trading company on the Connecticut River, leaving the Groton company in the hands of sons John Jr. and Youngs Ledyard, both ship captains, and Ebenezer and William, who ran the onshore operations necessary for a bustling West Indies trade with multiple ships.

Besides his political career, John Ledyard also became a judge, establishing strong connections throughout eastern Connecticut. Among his other enterprises, Ledyard eventually purchased a half-interest in “Ellery’s Mills,” a group of four production mills in Hartford. He was one of the richest men in Connecticut, and he never hesitated to use his positions for personal gain.

John Ledyard’s influence and connections increased the strength of the Ledyard mercantile network, for both father and sons, soon bolstered by more mercantile marriages.

In an era when first cousins often married, John Ledyard’s stepson, William Ellery, now a successful Wethersfield merchant, married Experience Ledyard, his own stepsister (William Ledyard’s sister).

The Groton Ledyards traded with both their father’s company and with their stepbrother William Ellery’s firm.

Then, in 1765, William Ledyard’s sister Sarah married prominent New York City merchant Pieter Vandevoort, further expanding the Ledyard family business ties to a major port.

William Ledyard and the Vandevoorts were obviously close, as he and his wife Anne would name their son, born in 1775 just two months after the battles of Lexington and Concord, Peter Vandevoort Ledyard, after Sarah’s husband.

After his mother’s death in 1790, Peter Vandevoort would join his Aunt Sarah and the Vandevoorts in New York City, where he married Maria Van Tuyl, the daughter of a New York merchant, continuing the pattern of Ledyard mercantile marriages.

Such marital unions helped the Ledyards build a small dynasty that, along with the lucrative West Indies business, traded at Hartford, Newport, Providence, Boston and New York City, one of the fastest-growing ports in the world.

But, just as merchant William Ledyard suffered under the punishing Parliamentary trade laws that targeted merchants for over a decade and eventually led to war, so did his extended family endure the chaos created by the Crown.

It’s a matter of conjecture whether the family dynasty and the good life it provided crossed the colonel’s mind as he marched across the Fort Griswold parade ground on his way to surrender to the British victors on Sept. 6, 1781.

Yet, along with thoughts of his wife and seven children, one would think it must have, for it was as much for economic freedom as it was freedom from tyranny, that William Ledyard and all merchants were fighting for.

Perhaps he thought the barbarians might show him mercy and take him prisoner, and he would one day return home to his family, his shop and ships on the Thames River.

But any such hope was shattered when, upon conceding the fort to the enemy, a long steel blade unexpectedly shocked his body in anger, passing completely through his torso left to right, sending him mortally wounded to the ground.

William Ledyard, a trader by occupation, had finally bartered his most valuable possession, his life, for American independence.

John Steward lives in Waterford. He can be reached at tossinglines@gmail.com.