John Teunis Bergen

John Teunis Bergen (1786 – March 9, 1855) was an American politician, soldier, law enforcement officer, and newspaperman who served one term as a United States Representative from New York from 1831 to 1833. A member of the prominent Bergen family of Brooklyn, he was associated with the Jackson Party and was one of the last slave owners in New York. His single term in Congress occurred during a significant period in American political development, when Jacksonian democracy was reshaping national institutions and party alignments.

Bergen was born in 1786 in Gowanus, then a rural section of what is now Brooklyn, New York. He was the son of Teunis Hans Bergen and Antje Cornelius Vanderve, members of an established Dutch American family that had long been prominent in Kings County affairs. Through this lineage he was a second cousin of Teunis Garret Bergen, who would later serve as a U.S. Representative from New York and gain recognition as a local historian. Bergen married Margaret Donald McLeod, who died in 1814, and later married her relative Maria F. McLeod as his second wife. His early life unfolded in the agrarian and maritime setting of Kings County, where longstanding Dutch families such as the Bergens held land, local offices, and social influence.

Bergen’s public career began with military service during the War of 1812. Appointed a lieutenant in the New York State Militia in 1812, he was promoted to captain in 1815. In this capacity he participated in the state’s defense during the conflict with Great Britain, part of a broader mobilization of New York’s militia forces to protect the harbor and approaches to New York City. His militia service helped establish his standing in local affairs and provided him with experience in organization and leadership that would later support his civil and political roles.

Following his military service, Bergen entered law enforcement and county administration. He served as Sheriff of Kings County, New York, from 1821 to 1825, and, after a brief interval out of office, again from 1828 until 1831, when he resigned. As sheriff he was responsible for enforcing court orders, overseeing the county jail, and carrying out various judicial and administrative functions at a time when Brooklyn and the surrounding towns were beginning to grow more rapidly. In addition to his law enforcement duties, Bergen became involved in the emerging local press. In 1829 he purchased the Long Island Patriot, a newspaper that served the political and commercial community of the region. Under subsequent ownership and editorial development, the paper’s name was changed to the Brooklyn Advocate and ultimately evolved into the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which became one of the most influential newspapers in Brooklyn in the nineteenth century.

Bergen’s prominence in Kings County and his alignment with Jacksonian politics led to his election to the United States House of Representatives. Elected as a Jacksonian to the Twenty-second Congress, he represented New York’s second congressional district from March 4, 1831, to March 3, 1833. During his single term in the House of Representatives, he participated in the legislative process as a member of the Jackson Party, supporting the broader program of President Andrew Jackson and the emerging Democratic Party. While in Congress he served as chairman of the Committee on Accounts, a position that placed him in charge of overseeing the House’s internal financial and administrative matters. In this role he contributed to the management of congressional expenditures and the supervision of the House’s institutional operations, representing the interests of his New York constituents while also helping to administer the legislative body itself.

Bergen was not a candidate for renomination in 1832 and returned to private life after the close of the Twenty-second Congress. He initially engaged in agricultural pursuits near Bay Ridge in the town of New Utrecht, then part of Kings County and now within the borough of Brooklyn. After this period of farming, he moved into Brooklyn proper and entered the grocery business, reflecting the growing commercial opportunities in the expanding city. By 1837 he had diversified his activities further, joining with his sons to conduct a planing mill in New York City, an enterprise that connected the family to the city’s building trades and industrial development. Later, he moved westward within the state to Genesee County, where he again took up agricultural pursuits, continuing the pattern of landholding and farming that had characterized his family’s history.

In his later years, Bergen resided in western New York, where he lived until his death. He died in Batavia, Genesee County, New York, on March 9, 1855, at about 68 years of age. He was interred in Batavia Cemetery in Batavia, New York. Throughout his life, Bergen’s activities as a militia officer, county sheriff, newspaper proprietor, and Jacksonian congressman reflected both the local prominence of the Bergen family in Brooklyn and the broader currents of political and economic change in New York during the early nineteenth century.