Boudinot, Elias, Lld

Boudinot, Elias, LL.D., a distinguished Christian philanthropist, was born in Philadelphia, May 2, 1740. He early gained a great reputation as a lawyer, and was appointed, in 1777, commissary general of the prisoners. In the same year he was elected to Congress, and became its chairman in 1782, in which capacity he signed the preliminaries of peace with Great Britain. In 1789 he was again called to Congress, where he served for six years in the House of Representatives. In 1796 Washington appointed him superintendent of the mint, an office which he held until 1805. In 1812 he became a member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and in 1816 the first president of the American Bible Society (q.v.). These two, as well as many other religious societies, received from him rich donations. He died Oct. 24, 1821, at Burlington. He wrote: Age of Revelation, or the Age of Reason an Age of Infidelity (1790):-Second Advent of the Messiah (1815) :-Star in the West (1816). In the last work he tried to show that the North American Indians are the lost tribes of Israel. He also published (anonymously in the Evangelical Intelligencer for 1806) a memoir of the remarkable William Tennent (q.v.).