Author: Dennis Erroll Boyer
Caleb Wallace was born in 1742 and raised in the vicinity of one of the western (Charlotte County/Prince Edward County) Virginia Presbyterian colonies known variously as “Caldwell Colony” (after one of the founding families) and “Cub Creek Colony” (referring to its location). He was the son of Samuel Wallace and Ester Baker; his mother was the daughter of another of the early families in the settlement, that of Caleb and Martha Brooks Baker. There has been debate over the ancestry of Samuel Wallace; he came to the Cub Creek Colony as either the son of a long-settled Quaker family from eastern Virginia, or as the son of the deceased Peter Wallace, whose widow, Elizabeth Woods Wallace, came from Ireland with her brother Michael Woods and their families to settle in the valleys of western Virginia. Circumstances such as Caleb’s later alliances with other descendants of the Woods family and his first marriage to a young lady, Sarah McDowell, who would have been a Woods cousin, strongly favor the latter connection.
Judge Wallace, as a Presbyterian minister, was among the protagonists in the struggle for religious freedom in late-colonial Virginia whose writings on the subject had a now-little-known but far-reaching influence in the development of provisions for freedom of religious choice, especially in Virginia, through the influence of Thomas Jefferson. While it does not appear that Wallace enjoyed Jefferson’s favor, it is likely that his work reached Jefferson through a mutual acquaintance with James Madison.
Caleb Wallace graduated among a class of twenty-two from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1770. In the year preceding his graduation he was among the founders of the American Whig Society (“Life and Times of Judge Caleb Wallace”, Whitsitt, William H., 1888, p. 18). He continued, after his graduation, in the study of theology, was licensed to preach (“Life and Times”, etc., p. 26) on May 28, 1772, and was ordained (“Life and Times”, etc., p. 27) on October 13, 1774.
As the conflict with Great Britain grew toward open revolution, the young minister, having eventually returned to his childhood home, became, at the direction of his Presbytery, active in the causes of both religious freedom and education. The association of his name with the advancement of education continued throughout his life; Wallace was among the founders of Prince Edward Academy (which has become Hampden-Sidney College); of Liberty Academy at Lexington, Virginia (now Washington and Lee University); and, in Kentucky, of Transylvania Seminary (Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky). He has been remembered as the “Father of the Academy System” in Kentucky, having conceived and brought to fruition an early version of land-grant subsidized education in that state. It is also probable that he was the author of the enabling legislation which provided for the establishment of these “academies”, supported by conveyance of ownership of public lands, in each of the counties in existence at the time (1798) within the new state.
After the death of his first wife, daughter of his (probable) cousin and mentor Samuel McDowell, Sarah McDowell Wallace, he married Rosanna Christian, daughter of Israel and Elizabeth Starke Christian, whose brother, William, married Anne, sister of Patrick Henry. Caleb and Rosanna named their first-born for Caleb’s first father-in-law - Samuel McDowell Wallace.
Wallace left both the ministry and Virginia for an appointment (for which he had sought the intercession of another of the “characters” in this western-Virginia-frontier drama, Stephen Trigg) to the “Commission for the Adjudication of Western Accounts” in September of 1782, at about which time he moved his family to Trigg’s Station (near Harrodsburg) to Kentucky. This evolved into appointment to the “Virginia Supreme Court of the District of Kentucky” (“Life and Times”, etc., p. 108) on July 2, 1783. He also served briefly as a Kentucky representative in the Virginia legislature in 1783. With the attainment of statehood in 1792, the Kentucky Court of Appeals was constituted, composed of “Harry Innes, Chief Justice; Benjamin Sebastian, Second Judge, and Caleb Wallace, Third Judge.” (“Life and Times, etc., p. 146). Wallace remained in this position until his resignation was pressed in 1813, the year before his death.