Henry Moore Ridgely (1779-1847)

Henry Moore Ridgely was born in Dover, Delaware on August 6, 1779. His father, Charles, was a doctor and Delaware colonial and state legislator who had been a delegate to the first state constitutional convention in 1776. His mother, Ann Moore, his father's second wife, kept a large and strict household that included her four step-children along with her own five. Ridgely studied at New Ark Academy, in Newark, Delaware in 1794 and left for Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania a year later. While at the College he was active in the then fledgling Union Philosophical Society. He graduated in 1797 and studied law, first in Lancaster under Charles Smith and then with his elder step-brother Nicholas in Dover. He was admitted to the Delaware bar in 1802.

In April, 1803, he was involved in a duel that nearly resulted in his death. He was a messenger for a doctor friend named Barratt who another man, William Shields of New Castle, had insulted. Ridgely, acting as second, brought the message to duel, but Shields refused and in turn challenged Ridgely to a duel. Ridgely accepted and was severely injured with an arm wound. After his recovery, he became president of Farmer's Bank in Dover in 1807. In 1811, he was elected as a Federalist to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was reelected in 1813 and also served as Secretary of State of Delaware from 1817 to 1824. He became a U.S. Senator in 1827 after he filled the seat left vacant upon the death of Nicholas Van Dyke. After becoming a voice for protectionism in the Senate, he retired at the end of that term and returned to farming at Linden Farm in 1832, maintaining only his bank presidency.

Ridgely married Sally Banning in November 1803. They had seven children, Charles George, Elizabeth, Ann, Henry, Nicholas, George, Willamina Moore, and Edward, who was to become a Civil War Secretary of State for Delaware. In 1837, Sally died of tuberculosis. Henry married his second wife, Sally Comegys, daughter of his friend Governor Cornelius Parsons Comergys in 1841. In March 1847, he suffered a paralytic stroke. Henry Moore Ridgely died on his sixty-eighth birthday on August 6, 1847.