Male

July 6, 1777

March 1, 1855

New Preston, CT

Hartford, CT

Sarah Coit Day (March 18, 1813)

Thomas Day was a sixth generation descendant of Robert Day of Hartford, Connecticut, born in England in 1634 and one of the first settlers of Massachusetts as well as an early settler of Hartford with Rev. Thomas Hooker. Thomas Day's parents were Rev. Jeremiah Day and his third wife Abigail Osborne Day.

Day's education began with instruction in Latin and Greek by his father and brother. He studied at an academy in New Milford and then graduated from Yale College in 1797. Day then attended the Litchfield Law School. After leaving the law school, he took his brother's place as a tutor at William's College for one year and read the law with Daniel Dewey. He then moved to Hartford in September of 1799 where he studied further under Theodore Dwight.

In 1805, Day began to attend ...sessions of the Connecticut Supreme Court and took notes to report on decisions. This experience would later lead to his appointment as the first reporter of the Supreme Court of Connecticut in 1814, a position he held until 1853. Consequently, Day published Reports of Cases, Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Errors, of the State of Connecticut, an extensive work consisting of two series of 26 volumes published between 1802 and 1853. He also published a digest of this work from 1786 to 1838 and well as an 1813 digest of cases in several courts of the United States. Day also worked as an editor of the Public Statues of Connecticut in 1808, 1821 and 1824 as well as several English law books. Finally, Day was the author of the Concise History of the Judiciary of Connecticut published by the Connecticut Historical Society.

In 1821, at the May session of the General Assembly of Connecticut , members passed a revised "Crimes and Punishments" law. Zepheniah Swift, Lemuel Whitman, and Thomas Day, the three legal scholars who drafted the act at the legislature's request, had placed in section 14 a miscarriage clause that was without precedent in the United States. This clause was the first time that an American legislature had addressed the question of abortion in statute form, and it declared illegal the particular method of poisoning to induce abortion.

Despite his busy political and legal career, Day was involved with many charitable institutions, largely in relation to education. He served as a trustee at the Hartford Female Seminary, the Hartford Grammer School, the Retreat for the Insane, and the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. Day also worked as the Director of the Connecticut Bible Society and as the president of the Hartford County Missionary Society, the Connecticut Branch of American Education Society and the Goodrich Association. Day also established a scholarship at his alma mater, Yale, in 1832 for the descendants of the Rev. Jeremiah Day.

Day was also the founder of the Connecticut Historical Society in 1825 and became the President when it was reorganized in 1839. Several years later, Day received an honorary degree from Yale in 1847.

He and his wife had eight children. Day died in Hartford, CT.
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"The studies of the Lawyer are every day and uninteresting. If every case in law were to be studied upon the basis of reason and justice, the .... lisation (?) would be more pleasant, but a great part of our law is founded, not in the nature of things, nor on any positive statute of the legislature, but merely upon the narrow, technical notions of judges who sat on the English bench some centuries ago. After one sett of errors was introduced, another sett was soon found necessary as order to preserve the symetry of the legal system. As error is always crocked, that very chinck stone which was put in to stop one gape in the wall soon pushed out of its place, and made a hole the other side. Fictions (?) were then thrown in, like shrub oak bush, to repair the break. Now as Courts of Law are regulated ...by precedents, all these matters must necessarily be attended to. The Lawyer must follow the Courts, and in this may spend his life in collecting triffles that load the memory without pleasing the fancy, or improving the understanding." Thomas Day, March 19, 1798.


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http://books.google.com/books?id=0moyq1cxDV0C&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=%22lemuel+whitman+abortion&source=bl&ots=SyN2uwDbUy&sig=5AafKhwbEqiQs_64dm2tzgSwuqA&hl=en&ei=8kC7TJeKPI36swOK5aSfBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22lemuel%20whitman%20abortion&f=false

On April 3, 1798, William Smith wrote to Day regarding a sexual affair between a domestic worker and a Litchfield Law Student: he can “kiss” a “certain lady that works at Mr. Deming’s once in a few weeks by name of Miss P.L.”

1797

Tutored by Barzzilai Slosson of Sharon, CT and in 1793 attended the New Milford Academy. He graduated from Yale College in 1797.

Lawyer; Editor; Political Office

Hartford, CT in December 1799

Secretary of State (CT) 1810-1835

Associate Judge of County Court (Hartford County, CT) 1815-1823
Chief Judge of County Court (Hartford County, CT) 1823-1833
Judge of City Court (Hartford, CT) 1818-1831

"Moothall Society Record Books." Litchfield Law School Collection, Series 1, Subseries 3, Litchfield Historical Society.; Handwritten list of names on loose papers titled "prior to 1798," inside Catalogue of Litchfield Law School (Hartford, CT: Press of C

A Genealogical Register of the Descendants in the Male Line of Robert Day. New Haven: William Storer, Jun., 1840; Chapman, A.M., Rev. F.W.

The Coit Family. Hartford: The Press of Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co., 1874.

New England Historic Genealogy Society. Memorial Biographies of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Vol. 2. Published by the Society, 1881.

Putman, E. Some Chronicles of the Day Family. Riverside Press, 1893.

Cothren, William. History of Ancient Woodbury from the First Indian Deed in 1659 to 1879. Woodbury, CT, 1879.

Day, Thomas & James Murdock. Brief Memoirs of the Class of 1797. New Haven, CT: Yale College, 1848.

Mohr, James C. Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy. Oxford University Press, 1978.