Oliver Ellsworth was born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1745 and transferred from Yale to Princeton, where he co-founded a debate society. He married Abigail Wolcott in 1772, and they had nine children. During the Revolution he led militia, served as state attorney for Hartford County, and sat on Continental Congress committees. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention he replaced the phrase national government with the United States, and with Roger Sherman he engineered the Connecticut Compromise, pairing a House based on population with a Senate of equal state representation. He voted for the Three-Fifths Compromise while also speaking for abolition and noting he owned no slaves.

As one of Connecticut’s first U.S. senators, Ellsworth led the Federalists in a chamber that met in secret for its first five years. He largely wrote the Judiciary Act of 1789, whose Section 25 let state supreme court rulings on federal questions be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he steered the Bill of Rights through the Senate. George Washington named him the third Chief Justice in 1796 after John Rutledge was rejected and William Cushing declined. John Adams sent him to France in 1799 during the Quasi-War, and the resulting treaty was unpopular though it avoided war. Too ill to return, he resigned in 1800 and died in Connecticut in 1807.

• Aaron Burr complained that Ellsworth would stall the Senate for weeks over a single misspelled word.
• Senator William Maclay accused him of avoiding open debate in favor of private deals.
• As Chief Justice he ended seriatim opinions in favor of a single opinion for the majority.
• He received 11 electoral votes in 1796 without campaigning and administered the oath of office to John Adams.
• John F. Kennedy’s only encyclopedia contribution was the biographical entry on Ellsworth.