Peter Hercules Wendover (1768–1834), sailmaker and public official, held several local offices in New York City and was a delegate to the state constitutional conventions of 1801 and 1821. He served in the New York legislature in 1804 and in the United States House of Representatives, 1815–21, where he led a successful effort to alter the nation’s flag to its current design of thirteen stripes and a star for each state. Wendover was also sheriff of New York County for four years during the 1820s, a founder of the American Colonization Society, and a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. He died at his home in Greenwich, New York (Biog. Dir. Cong. description begins Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–1989, 1989 description ends ; History of the School of the Collegiate Reformed Dutch Church in the City of New York from 1633 to 1883, 2d ed. [1883], 101; Charles Z. Lincoln, The Constitutional History of New York [1906], 1:609, 631; Edgar L. Murlin, The New York Red Book [1913], 393; Marc Leepson, Flag: An American Biography [2005], 77–83; Henry Noble Sherwood, “The Formation of the American Colonization Society,” Journal of Negro History 2 [1917]: 227; New York Daily Advertiser, 10 Sept. 1791; New York Evening Post, 24 Sept. 1834).

The author of the enclosed defense of the administration’s war policy, an adopted citizen who had emigrated from the Scottish island of Mull in 1792, was pastor of the First Reformed Presbyterian Church in New York City (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ).