Born on 21 Nov 1778 while his father, Moses Scott, was serving as a Physician and Surgeon in the Hospital Department of the Continental Army, Joseph Warren Scott holds the distinction of becoming the first hereditary member of the New Jersey Society to serve as its president following the death of Ebenezer Elmer, the last surviving original member.

Joseph Warren Scott himself had an impressive military record, being commissioned a Lieutenant in the 3rd Regiment Middlesex County, NJ Militia 24 May 1808. On 24 Jun 1811, he was promoted to Captain, serving during the War of 1812 and beyond. He would subsequently serve as Lieutenant Colonel and Deputy Adjutant General of the 3rd Division, from 21 May 1818, and was made Colonel of an Independent Battalion in the Middlesex Brigade on 20 Feb 1829.

In the civil sphere, Scott served as Prosecutor of Pleas for Middlesex County, NJ, and was a Presidential Elector in 1824, where he cast his vote for Andrew Jackson in en election won ultimately by John Quincy Adams.

Graduating from Princeton in 1795, and earning his MA Degree in law 1798 and an Honorary LLD in 1869, Scott studied law under General Frederick Frelinghuysen, and was admitted as an attorney in 1801, as a counsellor in 1804, and as a serjeant-at-law and master in chancery in 1816. Scott founded the Bank of New Brunswick in 1819.

He purchased the “White House” in New Brunswick (in which fellow New Jersey Cincinnatus Anthony Walton White had been born) in 1821 and renamed it Buccleuch. The home was donated to the city by his grandson Anthony Dey in 1911.

A Freemason, Scott held the position of Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New Jersey from 1831-1834.

He married Jane Griffiths in 1804, and died 27 Apr 1871, in his ninety-third year.

Rev. H. D. L. Jewett, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Brunswick in which Scott had served as an elder since 1822, described him in his funeral oration as “one who looked upon and was familiar with the forms of generals, statesmen, and theologians, men whose names are sacred to American and the world… one who served in the War of 1812… one who stood by the bedside of the dying Hamilton.”

The Hon. Hamilton Fish, President-General of the Society of the Cincinnati, was equally effusive, remembering Scott as “one of the most attractive talkers and agreeable companions whom it has been my fortune to meet.”

Sources

“The Biographical Encyclopaedia of New Jersey of the Nineteenth Century”, 1877;
Find A Grave Memorial.
Picture from: “The Flag of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey, Rare Etchings” by James Campbell, 1926.