John Carter,[1][2] (October 30, 1748 – April 27, 1818), was an English born businessman and supplier of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.

[4] To escape his creditors he went to America, where he became one of three commissioners appointed by the Continental Congress in July 1776 to audit the accounts of the army in the northern department.

In 1780, along with his business partner, Col. Jeremiah Wadsworth of Hartford, Connecticut, he secured a contract for provisioning the French forces in America, becoming Commissary General.

[6] Prior to his election, he was involved with the Marquis de la Luzerne, the French ambassador in some unsuccessful stock speculation during the Nootka Crisis,[3] a dispute between Great Britain and Spain.

[7] In December 1790, during his time in Parliament, he voted to approve Prime Minister William Pitt's plan to pay off the debts incurred in rearmament, after having previously been against the government on the Spanish convention.

After his vote, he suggested the government should investigate the great amount of money held by trustees of public lands, himself included, not being utilized rather than interfere with unpaid Bank dividends.

In December 1792, he voted against his fellow Whig, and party leader, Charles Fox's Libel amendment, but opposed the French war.

[3] In 1795, Church was described part of "a party of English Jacobins" who if acted upon their statements, would be "compromised to the extreme," by Gouverneur Morris, the former American minister to France.

Church was known for his hospitality of French émigrés after the Reign of Terror, paying for Talleyrand's journey and tour of America, and being involved in an attempt to free the Marquis de Lafayette from prison.

In 1806, the Churches began construction on a thirty-room mansion near the village of Angelica, called Belvidere, which still stands as a privately owned home on the banks of the Genesee in Belmont, New York.

It is not clear when her parents learned of their new son-in-law's actual name, as General Schuyler complained, "Carter and my eldest daughter ran off and married on the 23rd inst.

"[24] Together, John and Angelica had 8 children: Belvidere, the Church family estate in rural western New York,[13] was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 as a prime example of Federal style architecture.