1728-1780
Associate Justice of the New York Supreme Court of Judicature, 1776
The Hicks family first came to America in 1641. Whitehead Hicks, son of Judge Thomas Hicks, was born in Bayside, Long Island on August 24, 1728. He studied law in the office of William Smith, the elder, and was admitted to practice in 1750. In October 1766, he became the forty-second Mayor of New York, a position he was to hold for ten years. He supported independence and by early 1776, the office of Mayor in British-held New York became untenable, and he resigned from office. On February 14, 1776, he was appointed a Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature. He was a member of the court that decided Crown v. Prendergast, the treason trial of Anti-Rent Movement leader William Prendergast. He resigned from the bench shortly afterward and retired to Jamaica, Long Island. Upon his father’s death, he inherited the Bayside, Long Island, property where he was born and where he died on October 4, 1780.
Sources
Dunlap, William. History of the New Netherlands, Province of New York and State of New York. 1839.
Wilson, James Grant. The Memorial History of the City of New-York. 1892.