Robert Yates
Robert Yates was born in Schenectady, New York, on January 27, 1738. He was an active member of the first Provincial Congress of New York and chairman of the committee to organize the military. He did much towards producing a concert of action against the invading enemy. In 1777, he was an efficient member of the Convention that framed the first constitution of his native state. Under that constitution, he was appointed a Judge of the Supreme Court.After the close of the Revolution, Messrs. Robert Yates, Alexander Hamilton, and Chancellor Livingston represented New York in the Convention that framed the Federal Constitution. Yates opposed some features of that sacred instrument but voted for its adoption before his state's Convention. When it became the supreme law of the land, he was one of its firmest supporters. In his first charge to the grand jury, he used the following language after it was legally sanctioned: I implore the reader to ponder well and let come home with all the force of living truth proclaimed from the tomb of a departed patriot.
" The proposed form of government for the Union has at length received the sanction of so many States as to make it the supreme law of the land. It is no longer a question of whether its provisions are as they ought to be in all their different branches. We, as good citizens, are bound implicitly to obey them. The United Wisdom of America has sanctioned and confirmed the act. It would be but little short of treason against the Republic to hesitate in our obedience and respect to the Constitution of the United States of America. Let me, therefore, encourage you gentlemen, not only in your capacity as grand jurors but in your more durable and equally respectable character as citizens, to preserve and inviolate this Charter of our national Rights and safety, a Charter second only in dignity and importance to the Declaration of our Independence. We have escaped, it is true, by the blessing of divine Providence, from the tyranny of a foreign foe, but let us now be equally watchful in guarding against worse and far more dangerous enemies, domestic broils and intestine divisions."
Judge Yates was one of the Commissioners to settle the boundary question between New York and the States of Massachusetts and Connecticut. He was subsequently employed to prosecute claims of his native State against Vermont. In 1790, he was appointed Chief Justice of the Empire State. He presided with great dignity until January 27, 1798, when his age reached the constitutional limit and closed his long, useful, arduous, and brilliant judicial career. He had been an ornament to the Bench for twenty-one years.
Robert Yates died September 9, 1801.