John Sargent (Loyalist)

John Sargent (24 December 1750, Salem – 24 January 1824) was an American Loyalist during American Revolution.

A Methodist merchant from Salem, Massachusetts, he was the second son of Colonel Epes Sargent, by his second wife, the widow Katharine Browne (a granddaughter of Governor John Winthrop and governor's Thomas Dudley and Joseph Dudley), brother to one distinguished Revolutionary war soldier, Paul Dudley Sargent, and uncle to another, Winthrop Sargent. He is the very first signatory among the Salem Addressers of Governor Thomas Gage on his arrival in Salem in 1774, and thus during the American Revolution he was proscribed and exiled in the Banishment Act of the State of Massachusetts in 1778. He went to Barrington, Nova Scotia, where he had three sons and a daughter (having married the widow Margaret Barnard in Boston in 1784) and attended the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th General Assemblies of Nova Scotia.

Sargent died in Barrington at the age of 73.

His sons John, William Browne and Winthrop also served in the assembly.

References

• Address Presented to his Excellency Governor Gage, June 11th, 1774, On His Arrival at Salem. — signed by Sargent
• Banishment Act of the State of Massachusetts, 1778
• John Sargent in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography