The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

1 | The Gortons and Slades
It wAs the winteR of 1637. Rubber-legged and shivering, Samuell
and Mary Gorton and their young son, Samuell Jr., disembarked in
America 140 years before the Declaration of Independence. Samuell
had long since declared his own. Within months he was pushing the
feudal Massachusetts establishment to grant independence to the Rhode
Island colony. They called him cantankerous, even “crazed.” Some said
there was the glint of a messiah in his blue-gray eyes. In defending freedom
of conscience, Gorton was unquestionably obstreperous; a genuine
legend in his own time, whipped and banished but undaunted. Samuell’s
progeny were prolific, patriotic and bright, but he set the bar, especially as
a fisher of men. “He was a real rebel,” his great-great-great-great-greatgreat-great-grandson
says with an approving smile. 1
Slade Gorton’s American roots run 10
generations deep, starting with Samuell,
who was born into a pious, prosperous
family in the village of Gorton in the parish
of Manchester in Lancashire County,
England, in 1593. Of Saxon stock, the Gortons
were first recorded there “well before
the Norman Conquest of 1066 A.d.” Tutored
in Greek and Hebrew, Samuell likely
memorized the Bible. The name of his
fourth child, Mahershalalhashbaz, is from
the Book of Isaiah.
Samuell grew tall and lean, a dominant
attribute in the Gorton gene pool. Apparently
apprenticed to a cloth merchant as
a teenager, he established himself as a
clothier in London and in 1628 married
Mary Maplett, the daughter of a well-to-do haberdasher. Sixteen years his
junior, she too was well educated, unusual for a girl in that era. Mary was
9
Samuell Gorton, an iconoclastic
reformer, arrived
in America in 1637. Gorton
family album