William E. Tillinghast

William E. Tillinghast (1777-1817) was a partner of Benjamin Gorton (1765-1822) in a Providence shipping business; the former may be the same Captain Tillinghast (or the Captain’s son) whose ships were used by William Rogers, Baptist minister in Philadelphia and professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, to transport books and papers from America and back via the Paternoster Row bookshop of the London Baptist minister, William Button. Mullett’s letters reveal the surprising interconnectivity of Baptist ministers and laypersons involved in transatlantic trade at this time. See Thomas Mullett, London, to Henry Wheaton, Providence, 31 March 1807, Wheaton Papers, MA 995, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York; also William Rogers, Philadelphia, to William Button, London, 3 July 1799, in Timothy Whelan, ed., Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1845 (Macon: Baptist History Series, Mercer University Press, 2009), 79-82.