The Coggeshall Dynasty: Pillars of the Patent

By marrying Mary Coggeshall, Ephraim Bull connected our lineage to the absolute political elite of the colony. The Coggeshalls were arguably the most organized administrative family of early Rhode Island.

1. President John Coggeshall I (1591–1647)

• The Silk Merchant Dissenter: A wealthy merchant from Essex, England, John immigrated to Boston in 1632. He quickly rose to power, serving as a selectman and a deputy to the General Court of Massachusetts.
• The Hutchinson Exile: Like Henry Bull, John refused to bow to the Puritan ministry during the Antinomian Controversy. When Anne Hutchinson was exiled, John boldly stood up in court and declared that if she was banished, they would have to banish him too. The court obliged.
• The First President: He co-founded Portsmouth (1638) and Newport (1639). When the towns unified under Roger Williams's first parliamentary patent, John Coggeshall was elected the first President of the Colony in 1647, serving as the executive head of the entire Rhode Island settlement.

2. Major John Coggeshall II (1624–1708)

• The Crown Charter Receiver: John II took over the political mantle during Rhode Island’s most critical structural shift. When King Charles II granted the famous Rhode Island Royal Charter of 1663—which legally secured their unique religious freedom from neighboring colonies—John II was one of the elite corporators named right in the text of the document.
• The Political Anchor: He went on to serve as Deputy Governor of the colony three separate times and acted as the provincial Treasurer, personally managing the financial stability of the colony during King Philip's War.

📜 The Lancets of Statehood: The Armed Peace of the Narragansett country

The story of Rhode Island is often framed as an abstract intellectual experiment—a debate over freedom of conscience conducted by philosophers in safely locked rooms. But the physical reality of keeping that experiment alive required an entirely different level of execution. It required families who could write constitutional law with one hand while cleaning the pan of a flintlock musket with the other. In the convergence of the Bramans, the Bulls, and the Coggeshalls, our lineage demonstrates exactly how that balance was struck.

The foundation was poured by the Coggeshalls. John Coggeshall I was a man of immense wealth and status who chose to throw his entire career away in Boston rather than watch his neighbors' religious liberties be dismantled by an authoritarian court. He didn’t just seek shelter; he took the reins of leadership, becoming the very first President of the unified Rhode Island towns. His son, Major John II, further fortified that legal framework, securing the King’s own signature on a royal charter that guaranteed their way of life. For the Coggeshalls, the law was a shield to be forged.

But laws are only as strong as the citizens willing to stand on the border to enforce them. A century after John Coggeshall took the executive oath, the British Empire returned to reclaim the territory. In the tense autumn of 1776, as enemy sails crowded the horizon of Narragansett Bay, the abstract legal theories of the founding fathers transformed into an immediate, localized emergency.

Our fifth great-grandfather, William Braman, did not hesitate. Stepping into the enlistment office in Exeter, he put his signature alongside his neighbors, committing himself to a raw, short-term militia mobilization under Colonel Cooke. While the Continental Congress was busy debating in Philadelphia, William Braman was standing guard in the wind-swept marshes of the Rhode Island coast, watching the enemy fleet, and holding the border lines of the secular republic his Coggeshall ancestors had engineered.

Through this shared bloodline, we inherit both halves of the American revolutionary spirit. We carry the high-level constitutional defiance of the Coggeshalls, who built the sanctuary of Rhode Island from nothing, combined with the immediate, boots-on-the-ground patriotism of William Braman, who stepped out of his farmhouse to guarantee that the sanctuary would survive.

Thank you for the enlightenment and history of our Coggeshall lineage. -- Drifting Cowboy