Robert Field Stockton (August 20, 1795 – October 7, 1866) was a United States Navy commodore, notable in the capture of California during the Mexican–American War. He was a naval innovator and an early advocate for a propeller-driven, steam-powered navy. Stockton was from a notable political family and also served as a U.S. senator from New Jersey.
Biography
Robert F. Stockton was born at Morven, Stockton Street, Princeton, New Jersey, into a political family; his father Richard Stockton was a U.S. senator and representative, and his grandfather, Judge Richard Stockton was attorney general for New Jersey and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Robert F. Stockton was of English descent, and his family had been in what is now the United States since the early colonial period. On March 4, 1823, he married Harriet Maria Potter in Charleston, South Carolina. Ten children were born to this marriage.
Early naval service
Stockton was appointed a midshipman in the U.S. Navy in September 1811, shortly after his 16th birthday, and served at sea and ashore during the War of 1812. After that conflict, Lieutenant Stockton was assigned to ships operating in the Mediterranean, in the Caribbean and off the coast of West Africa. He was the first naval officer to act against the slave trade and captured several slave ships. In December 1821, while commanding the U.S.S. Alligator along the African Windward Coast, Lt. Stockton along with Dr. Eli Ayers of the American Colonization Society, negotiated a treaty that led to the founding of the state of Liberia. One source describes that he "leveled a pistol at King Peter's head and thereby convinced the latter to sell some of his territory". Though this story of coercion is now being severely challenged by Smithsonian Magazine as being fraudulent propaganda with the recent discovery of the original contract, records, and contemporary press articles which show that Liberia was founded when "the two men [Ayers & Stockton] spent four days ashore negotiating a contract with local leaders to purchase a narrow tract of land that scholars estimate covered about 140 acres. Payment would come in the form of trade goods... together worth roughly $7,000 in today's money. Both parties also pledged to live in peace and friendship for ever. Ayers recorded the deal in careful script on the front and back of a single sheet of paper. He signed it along with Stockton and six local leaders, who referred to themselves as Peter, George, Zoda, Long Peter, Governor, and Jimmy. They were called "kings" in the contract, although they were not monarchs in the European sense... American Newspapers published accounts of the purchase and transcripts of the contract...". Fourteen years later, in 1835 the Contract, which had been brought to the U.S. under safekeeping of the American Colonization Society, mysteriously went missing and "over the ensuing decades that loss [of the original document] contributed to the myth that the contract had never existed at all - that the Americans had simply seized the land by force or fraud... Because Ayers kept a detailed journal of the 1821 journey to Cape Mesurado [now Liberia], and newspapers printed the text of the agreement, we now know much of what happened that December. But the absence of the original document left an enormous hole in the historical record". But that myth has been exploded by the August 2021 re-discovery of that Contract at the Chicago History Museum among the donated papers of Elias Caldwell, clerk for the Supreme Court during the tenure of George Washington's nephew Justice Bushrod Washington who was a co-founder of the American Colonization Society. The Contract hadn't gone mysteriously missing, it had merely been among the co-founder's papers and, while "out of sight/out of mind", it was forgotten.
Business affairs
During the later 1820s and into the 1830s, he primarily devoted his attention to business affairs in New Jersey. In addition, Stockton owned and operated the Tellurium gold mine in Goochland County, Virginia and Fluvanna County, Virginia, purchasing it in 1848, after its discovery in 1832 by G.W. Fisher. The birth of his son John P. Stockton, later also a U.S. senator representing New Jersey, occurred during this time.
In 1835, he purchased a property in Monmouth County, New Jersey, called "Sea Girt". The property was purchased in 1875 by a group of land developers, with the name of Stockton's estate ultimately leading to the choice of the name Sea Girt, New Jersey, when the borough was established in 1918.