WATTS, Stephen, lawyer, born about 1743 ; died in Louisiana in 1788. He was the son of Stephen Watts, of Southampton, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and was graduated at the College of Philadelphia (now University of Pennsylvania) in 1762, becoming a tutor while still a student. In 1766 John Sargent, a member of the British parliament, offered to the college a gold medal for the best English essay on the "Reciprocal Advantage of a Perpetual Union between Great Britain and her American Colonies." Young Watts competed for the medal, and his essay on the subject was published (Philadelphia, 1766). The medal was won by John Morgan, who shortly afterward became the founder of the first medical school in America. Watts was elected on 8 March, 1768, a member of the American philosophical society. He studied law, and in 1769 was admitted to the bar in Philadelphia. In 1774 he settled in Louisiana, and afterward became recorder of deeds of the English settlement on the Mississippi. His wife was a daughter of Ralph Assheton, a provincial councillor of Pennsylvania, and his daughter, Margaret Cyrilla, became the wife of Don Manuel Gagoso de Lemos, who was brigadier-general and governor of the Spanish colony at Natchez until 1797, when he succeeded the Baron de Carondelet as governor of Louisiana. Mr. Watts contributed to John Beveridge's "Epistolae Familiares" (1765).