Samuel Vaughan

[4] He sent his five sons to Warrington Academy,[5] Benjamin and William being taught by Joseph Priestley, with whom a strong family connection was forged.

[9] It was a trust giving financial support to Wilkes, and the treasurers were Vaughan, Richard Oliver and John Trevanion (1740–1810).

[10] Vaughan belonged to what Benjamin Franklin fondly called the Club of Honest Whigs, which met at St Paul's Coffee House in the cathedral churchyard[11] (see English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries).

When Shelburne became Prime Minister, the Vaughan family influence reached foreign policy, trying to split the United States from their French allies in some ultimately unsuccessful moves of 1782.

In 1769 Vaughan then offered the Duke of Grafton, a government minister, a sum of £5000 to secure a reversion, to hold this official place in the family for three of his sons.

The prominence of the issue led the campaigning writer Junius to expose a previous sale of office by Grafton.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a family friend, wrote a poem complimenting his wife Sarah as a gesture of support.

[35][36][37] As Vaughan explained to Humphry Marshall, he planned to plant the State House Yard with a representative collection of American trees and shrubs.

[38] The ambition was a political statement, on the unity of the newly United States, and was shared by Washington and Thomas Jefferson as gardeners.

[39] In Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787, Vaughan paid a visit in July to William Bartram's nursery, from which he ordered 55 species of plants.

[33][40] The State House project's greater scope was abandoned, but Vaughan saw to the publication of Marshall's Arbustum Americanum, in 1785.

[44] Sarah Vaughan had inherited property on the Kennebec River, from her father, who was a "Kennebeck Proprietor", and also a congregationalist supporter of the Brattle Square Church.

[45][46][47] Two of the Vaughan sons (Benjamin and Charles) settled there, and another (John, a business partner of Robert Morris) at Philadelphia.