Thomas Stanton

Interpreting, trading and negotiating

Thomas Stanton appears in the documentary history of Connecticut in July 1636, interpreting during a conference at Saybrook, at the mouth of the Connecticut River, involving the Pequots. His origins before New England are less securely established. His English parentage is uncertain.

Language work became a sustained part of his public employment. He interpreted in the aftermath of the Pequot War, including the 1638 Hartford negotiations, and subsequently served the United Colonies. A Stanton family history also credits him with arranging a ceasefire during the 1637 fighting near Fairfield that allowed noncombatants to leave.

His livelihood also involved trade. In 1650 he received permission to establish a trading house on the Pawcatuck River, along today’s Connecticut–Rhode Island border, with an exclusive trading privilege there for three years. Wheeler's Stonington history places this enterprise within the same unsettled jurisdictional landscape encountered by William Chesebrough. Trade, land grants and the extension of colonial government were closely connected in the place where Stanton established himself.

Stanton and his wife Ann Lord had ten children. Their household's movements included Hartford on the Connecticut River, coastal New London, and the Pawcatuck area. He continued to be called on when negotiations depended upon language and familiarity with Native leaders. The history identifies his involvement in the unsuccessful Rhode Island boundary negotiations of 1668 and his writing of a will for Uncas in 1670.

He died on December 2, 1677. His record is unusually visible because interpretation brought him into meetings and transactions that colonial authorities chose to preserve. Those documents establish repeated employment and influence. They offer much less access to how the people whose words he translated understood his role.

The family account dates the marriage probably to 1636 and names Dorothy Stanton among their children. It places the moves to New London and the Pawcatuck area in 1651 and 1657 respectively.

The burial listing places Thomas Stanton at Wequetequock Burial Ground, Stonington, New London County, Connecticut, United States.