Oliver Ellsworth (April 29, 1745 – November 26, 1807) was a Founding Father of the United States, attorney, jurist, politician, and diplomat.

In 1777, he became the state attorney for Hartford County, Connecticut, and was selected as a delegate to the Continental Congress, serving during the remainder of the American Revolutionary War.

[4][5][6] Beyond this, Ellsworth's ancestry can also be traced to Edward Heath, a collarmaker who was born in 1525 in Little Amwell, Hertfordshire, England (a settlement near Ware).

Henry became the first Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, the mayor of Hartford, president of Aetna Life Insurance and a major benefactor of Yale College.

Henry was also instrumental in the creation of the U.S. Agriculture Department and oversaw the forced relocation of Cherokee Indians from Georgia to the Oklahoma Territory.

Ellsworth was also active in his state's efforts during the Revolution, having served as a member of the Committee of the Pay Table that supervised Connecticut's war expenditures.

Ellsworth participated in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a delegate from Connecticut along with Roger Sherman and William Samuel Johnson.

More than half of the 55 delegates were lawyers, eight of whom, including both Ellsworth and Sherman, had previous experience as judges conversant with legal discourse.

Ellsworth took an active part in the proceedings beginning on June 20, when he proposed the use of "the United States" to identify the government under the authority of the Constitution.

Three weeks earlier, on May 30, 1787, Edmund Randolph of Virginia had moved to create a "national government" consisting of a supreme legislative, an executive, and a judiciary.

Along with James Wilson, John Rutledge, Edmund Randolph, and Nathaniel Gorham, Ellsworth served on the Committee of Detail, which prepared the first draft of the Constitution, based on resolutions that had already been passed by the Convention.

Though Ellsworth left the Convention near the end of August and did not sign the complete final document, he wrote the Letters of a Landholder to promote its ratification.

It seems more than a coincidence that both he and Wilson served as members of the Committee of Detail without mentioning judicial review in the initial draft of the Constitution but then stressed its central importance at their ratifying conventions just a year preceding its inclusion by Ellsworth in the Judiciary Act of 1789.

[citation needed] Along with William Samuel Johnson, Ellsworth served as one of Connecticut's first two United States senators in the new federal government.

[Brown, 231] Aaron Burr complained that if Ellsworth had misspelled the name of the Deity with two D's, "it would have taken the Senate three weeks to expunge the superfluous letter."

[Brown, 224–225] What seems to have bothered McClay the most was Ellsworth's emphasis on private negotiations and tacit agreement rather than public debate.

Years later Madison stated, "It may be taken for certain that the bill organizing the judicial department originated in his [Ellsworth's] draft, and that it was not materially changed in its passage into law.

However, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1865, seventy-five years later, the Bill of Rights could be brought to bear at all levels of government as interpreted by the judiciary with final appeal to the Supreme Court.

Ellsworth was the principal supporter in the Senate of Hamilton's economic program, having served on at least four committees dealing with budgetary issues.

On March 3, 1796, Ellsworth was nominated by President George Washington to be Chief Justice of the United States, the seat having been vacated by John Jay.

(Jay's replacement, John Rutledge, had been rejected by the Senate the previous December, and Washington's next nominee, William Cushing, had declined the office in February.).

However, four cases the Court issued rulings on were of lasting importance in American jurisprudence: Hylton v. United States (1796) implicitly addressed the Supreme Court's power of judicial review in upholding a federal carriage tax; Hollingsworth v. Virginia (1798) affirmed that the president had no official role in the constitutional amendment process; Calder v. Bull (1798) held that the Constitution's Ex post facto clause applied only to criminal, not civil, cases; and New York v. Connecticut (1799) which was the first use by the Court of its original jurisdiction under Article III of the United States Constitution to hear controversies between two states.

Ellsworth instead encouraged the consensus of the Court to be represented in a single written opinion, a practice which continues to the present day.

[21] President Adams appointed Ellsworth United States Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of France in 1799, and tasked with settling differences with Napoleon's government regarding restrictions on U.S. shipping that might otherwise have led to military conflict between the two nations.

He resigned after just four years due to his "constant, and at times excruciating pains," sufferings made worse by his Europe travels, as special envoy to France.

[28] In 1847, John Calhoun praised Ellsworth as the first of three Founding Fathers (with Roger Sherman and William Paterson) who gave the United States "the best government instead of the worst and most intolerable on the earth.