Part Two
Signers of the Declaration:
Biographical Sketches
Liberally endowed as a whole with courage and sense of purpose, the signers consisted of a distinguished group of individuals. Although heterogeneous in background, education, experience, and accomplishments, at the time of the signing they were practically all men of means and represented an elite cross section of 18th-century American leadership. Every one of them had achieved prominence in his colony, but only a few enjoyed a national reputation.
The signers were those individuals who happened to be Delegates to Congress at the time. Such men of stature in the Nation as George Washington and Patrick Henry were not then even serving in the body. On the other hand, Jefferson, the two Adamses, Richard Henry Lee, and Benjamin Rush ranked among the outstanding people in the Colonies; and Franklin had already acquired international fame. Some of the signers had not taken a stand for or against independence in the final vote on July 2. For example, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania had purposely absented himself. Others had not yet been elected to Congress or were away on business or military matters. Some were last-minute replacements for opponents of independence. The only signer who actually voted negatively on July 2 was George Read of Delaware.
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The signers possessed many basic similarities. Most were American-born and of Anglo-Saxon origin. The eight foreign-born—Button Gwinnett, Francis Lewis, Robert Morris, James Smith, George Taylor, Matthew Thornton, James Wilson, and John Witherspoon—were all natives of the British Isles. Except for Charles Carroll, a Roman Catholic, and a few Deists, every one subscribed to Protestantism. For the most part basically political nonextremists, many at first had hesitated at separation let alone rebellion. A few signed only reluctantly.
[Illustration: Fervid Revolutionary Patrick Henry numbered among those patriots of national reputation who were not Members of Congress at the time of the signing of the Declaration.]
The majority were well educated and prosperous. More than half the southerners belonged to the planter class and owned slaves, though Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and others heartily opposed the institution of slavery, as did also several of the signers from the North. On the other hand, William Whipple, as a sea captain early in his career, had likely sometimes carried slaves on his ship.
Although the signers ranged in age at the time from 26 (Edward Rutledge) to 70 (Benjamin Franklin), the bulk of them were in their thirties or forties. Probably as a result of their favored economic position, an amazingly large number attained an age that far exceeded the life expectancy of their time; 38 of the 56 lived into their sixties or beyond and 14 into the eighties and nineties.
[Illustration: George Washington inspecting his troops at Valley Forge. Busy serving as commander in chief of the Continental Army, he did not sign the Declaration.]
With few exceptions, those who subscribed to the Declaration continued in public service under the new Federal and State Governments. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson became President; they and Elbridge Gerry, Vice President. Samuel Chase and James Wilson won appointment to the Supreme Court. Others served as Congressmen, diplomats, Governors, and judges. Six of the signers—George Clymer, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, George Read, Roger Sherman, and James Wilson—also signed the Constitution. Sixteen of them underwrote the Articles of Confederation. Only two, Roger Sherman and Robert Morris, affixed their signatures to the Declaration, Constitution, and Articles.
Caesar Rodney and Joseph Hewes were the only bachelors in the group. All but five fathered children. Carter Braxton sired no fewer than 18, but 10 others each had at least 10 offspring. The average number was about six. Some of the sons of the signers attained national distinction. John Adams’ son John Quincy became President; the son of Benjamin Harrison, William Henry, won the same office, as did also Benjamin’s great-grandson with the same name. Other male progeny of the signers served as U.S. Congressmen, Governors, and State legislators.
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Yet the group manifested diversity. Each man tended to reflect the
## particular attitudes and interests of his own region and colony.
Fourteen represented New England; 21, the Middle Colonies; and 21, the South. The largest number, nine, came from Pennsylvania; the least, two, from Rhode Island. All those from three Colonies (Georgia, New Hampshire, and North Carolina) were born elsewhere. About half of the men received their higher education in colonial colleges or abroad; most of the others studied at home, in local schools or private academies, or with tutors. A few were almost entirely self-taught.
[Illustration: Harvard College, about 1725. Indicative of the favored economic circumstances of the signers, about half of them enjoyed a higher education. Eight, including all five from Massachusetts, attended Harvard.]
In wealth, the signers ranged from Charles Carroll, one of the wealthiest men in the Colonies, to Samuel Adams, whose friends supplied money and clothes so he could attend Congress. About one-third were born into wealth; most of the others acquired it on their own. Some were self-made men. A few were of humble origin; one, George Taylor, had come to America as an indentured servant.
Many pursued more than one vocation. More than half were trained in the law, but not all of them practiced it. Some won a livelihood as merchants and shippers. Roughly a quarter of the group earned their living from agriculture, usually as wealthy planters or landed gentry, but just a few could be called farmers. Four—Josiah Bartlett, Benjamin Rush, Lyman Hall, and Matthew Thornton—were doctors. Oliver Wolcott also studied medicine for awhile, but never entered the profession. George Taylor’s occupation was ironmaster. Of the four trained as ministers—Lyman Hall, William Hooper, Robert Treat Paine, and John Witherspoon—only the latter made it his lifetime vocation. William Williams received some theological training. Samuel Adams followed no real occupation other than politics.
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For their dedication to the cause of independence, the signers risked loss of fortune, imprisonment, and death for treason. Although none died directly at the hands of the British, the wife of one, Mrs. Francis Lewis, succumbed as a result of harsh prison treatment. About one-third of the group served as militia officers, most seeing wartime
## action. Four of these men (Thomas Heyward, Jr., Arthur Middleton,
Edward Rutledge, and George Walton), as well as Richard Stockton, were taken captive. The homes of nearly one-third of the signers were destroyed or damaged, and the families of a few were scattered when the British pillaged or confiscated their estates.
Nearly all of the group emerged poorer for their years of public service and neglect of personal affairs. Although a couple of the merchants and shippers among them profited from the war, the businesses of most of them deteriorated as a result of embargoes on trade with Britain and heavy financial losses when their ships were confiscated or destroyed at sea. Several forfeited to the Government precious specie for virtually worthless Continental currency or made donations or loans, usually unrepaid, to their colonies or the Government. Some even sold their personal property to help finance the war.
Certainly most of the signers had little or nothing to gain materially and practically all to lose when they subscribed to the Declaration of Independence. By doing so, they earned a niche of honor in the annals of the United States. Whatever other heights they reached or whatever else they contributed to history, the act of signing insured them immortality.
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_The following biographical sketches are arranged alphabetically by last name. Readers interested in signers for a certain State should consult the Index under the appropriate State._
John Adams
MASSACHUSETTS
[Illustration]
Few men contributed more to U.S. Independence than John Adams, the “Atlas of American Independence” in the eyes of fellow signer Richard Stockton. A giant among the Founding Fathers, Adams was one of the coterie of leaders who generated the American Revolution, for which his prolific writings provided many of the politico-philosophical foundations. Not only did he help draft the Declaration, but he also steered it through the Continental Congress.
The subsequent career of Adams—as a diplomat and first Vice President and second President of the United States—overshadows those of all the other signers except Jefferson. Adams was also the progenitor of a distinguished family. His son John Quincy gained renown as diplomat, Congressman, Secretary of State, and President. John’s grandson Charles Francis and great-grandsons John Quincy II, Charles Francis, Jr., Henry, and Brooks excelled in politics, diplomacy, literature, historiography, and public service.
Adams, descended from a long line of yeomen farmers, was born in 1735 at Braintree (later Quincy), Mass. He graduated from Harvard College in 1755, and for a short time taught school at Worcester, Mass. At that time, he considered entering the ministry, but decided instead to follow the law and began its study with a local lawyer. Adams was admitted to the bar at Boston in 1758 and began to practice in his hometown. Six years later, he married Abigail Smith, who was to bear three sons and a daughter. She was also the first mistress of the White House and the only woman in U.S. history to be the wife of one President and the mother of another.
Adams, like many others, was propelled into the Revolutionary camp by the Stamp Act. In 1765 he wrote a protest for Braintree that scores of other Massachusetts towns adopted. Three years later, he temporarily left his family behind and moved to Boston. He advanced in the law, but devoted more and more of his time to the patriot cause. In 1768 he achieved recognition throughout the Colonies for his defense of John Hancock, whom British customs officials had charged with smuggling. Adams later yielded to a stern sense of legal duty but incurred some public hostility by representing the British soldiers charged with murder in the Boston Massacre (1770). Ill health forced him to return to Braintree following a term in the colonial legislature (1770–71), and for the next few years he divided his time between there and Boston.
A 3-year stint in the Continental Congress (1774–77), punctuated by short recuperative leaves and service in the colonial legislature in 1774–75, brought Adams national fame. Because he was sharply attuned to the temper of Congress and aware that many Members resented Massachusetts extremism, he at first acceded to conciliatory efforts with Britain and restrained himself publicly. When Congress opted for independence, he became its foremost advocate, eschewing conciliation and urging a colonial confederation.
Adams was a master of workable compromise and meaningful debate, though he was sometimes impatient. He chaired 25 of the more than 90 committees on which he sat, the most important of which dealt with military and naval affairs. He played an instrumental part in obtaining Washington’s appointment as commander in chief of the Continental Army. Adams was a member of the five-man committee charged with drafting the Declaration in June of 1776, though he probably made no major changes in Jefferson’s draft. But, more directly involved, he defended it from its congressional detractors, advocated it to the wavering, and guided it to passage.
The independence battle won, exhausted by the incessant toil and strain and worried about his finances and family, Adams in November 1777 retired from Congress—never to return. He headed back to Braintree intending to resume his law practice. But, before the month expired, Congress appointed him to a diplomatic post in Europe—a phase of his career that consumed more than a decade (1777–88).
Adams served in France during the period 1778–85, interrupted only by a visit to the United States in the summer of 1779, during which he attended the Massachusetts constitutional convention. Independent-minded and forthright, as well as somewhat jealous of the fame and accomplishments of others, he frequently found himself at odds with fellow diplomats Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee, as well as French officials, whose policies toward the Colonies he mistrusted. He joined Franklin and John Jay, however, in negotiating the Treaty of Paris (1783), by which Britain recognized the independence of the United States.
Meanwhile, during the preceding 3 years, Adams had persuaded the Dutch to recognize the Colonies as an independent Nation, grant a series of loans, and negotiate a treaty of alliance. As the first American Envoy to Great Britain (1785–88), he strove to resolve questions arising from the Treaty of Paris and to calm the harsh feelings between the two countries.
Back in the United States, Adams was soon elected as the first Vice President (1789–97), an office he considered insignificant but in which he emerged as a leader of the Federalist Party. During his stormy but statesmanlike Presidency (1797–1801), he inherited the deep political discord between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians that had taken root during Washington’s administration. Adams pursued a neutral course without abandoning his principles. He kept the United States out of a declared war with France and achieved an amicable peace. But he proved unable to unite his party, divided by Hamilton’s machinations and the ramifications of the French Revolution.
The Jeffersonians drove the Federalists out of office in 1800, and Adams retired to Quincy, where he spent his later years quietly. The death of his wife in 1818 saddened him, but he never lost interest in public affairs and lived to see his son John Quincy become President. John died at the age of 90 just a few hours after Jefferson, on July 4, 1826—dramatically enough the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration. Except for Charles Carroll, who was to live until 1832, Adams and Jefferson were the last two surviving signers. The remains of John and Abigail Adams are interred in a basement crypt at the United First Parish Church in Quincy.
Samuel Adams
MASSACHUSETTS
[Illustration]
“Firebrand of the Revolution,” Samuel Adams probably more than almost any other individual instigated and organized colonial resistance to the Crown. A talented polemicist and agitator-propagandist who relied more on his facile pen than the podium in behind-the-scenes manipulation of men and events, he religiously believed in the righteousness of his political causes, to which he persistently tried to convert others. He failed in business, neglected his family, gained a reputation as an eccentric, and demonstrated as much indifference to his own welfare as he did solicitousness for that of the public. His second cousin John Adams, more of a statesman, eclipsed him in the Continental Congress, though Samuel signed both the Declaration and the Articles of Confederation. In his later years, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts bestowed on him many high offices, capped by the governorship.
Adams was one of 12 offspring of a prosperous and politically active brewer and landowner. He was born at Boston in 1722 and enjoyed an excellent education at the Boston Latin School and Harvard College. Upon his graduation in 1740, he first demonstrated his lifelong aversion to normal employment. He studied law for awhile and then skipped from job to job, working for a time in his father’s brewery as well as in a counting house and dissipating a paternal loan in an unsuccessful business venture.
When his father died in 1748 and his mother soon afterwards, Adams inherited a sizable estate, including the family home and brewery. By 1764, when the colonial quarrel with Britain began, he had long since lost the latter. And, during the previous 8 years as city tax collector, he had fallen in arrears about £8,000 in his collections. At the age of 42, unable to support a new wife and two children from his first marriage and residing in his rundown birthplace, he was destitute and besieged by creditors. He subsisted mainly on gifts and donations from loyal friends and neighbors.
Adams was a failure by most standards, but he had long before found the only meaningful “occupation” he ever pursued. For almost two decades he had been active in local political clubs, where he earned a reputation as a writer and emerged as leader of the “popular” party that opposed the powerful conservative aristocracy controlling the Massachusetts government. As clerk in the colonial legislature (1765–74), he drafted most of the body’s official papers and quickly seized the tools of power. He pounced on the taxation issue raised by the Sugar and Stamp Acts (1764–65), and within a year he and his party fanned popular hatred of the conservatives and gained control of the legislature. He also spurred organization of the militant Boston Sons of Liberty, a secret society. As time went on, the stridency of his anti-British harangues escalated and sometimes became shrill enough to distress John Hancock and John Adams.
The Townshend Acts (1767), imposing a series of taxes on imports, provided Adams with a new cause for dissent. He urged merchants not to purchase goods from Britain, fomented opposition toward customs officials, inflamed the resentment toward British troops stationed in the colony that led to the Boston Massacre (1770), and humiliated the Royal Governor so much that he was recalled. Adams also authored a circular letter protesting British taxation and advocating united opposition. When, in 1768, the Massachusetts legislature sent it to the 12 other colonial assemblies, the Royal Governor dissolved the legislature, soon a common British practice in America. All these
## activities, coupled with authorship of scores of newspaper articles and
extensive correspondence with prominent persons in the Colonies and England, brought Adams fame.
The conservative reaction on the part of merchants, the legislature, and the populace that surfaced after the repeal of practically all the Townshend Acts in 1770 failed to stifle Adams, though his popularity and influence declined. Relentlessly, in perhaps his chief contribution to the Revolution, he kept the controversy alive by filling the columns of the Boston newspapers with reports of British transgressions and warnings of more to come. Furthermore, in 1772 he began constructing the framework of a Revolutionary organization in Massachusetts. Drawing on a similar scheme he had proposed for all the Colonies 2 years earlier but which had come to naught, he convinced Boston and other towns to create committees of correspondence. The next year, he was appointed to the Massachusetts committee, formed in response to a call from the Virginia House of Burgesses.
Passage of the Tea Act (1773) provided the spark Adams was seeking to rekindle the flame of rebellion. He helped to incite and probably
## participated in the “Boston Tea Party,” which engendered a series of
rebellious incidents throughout the Colonies and pushed them closer to war. Parliament retaliated the next spring by passing a series of acts designed to punish Massachusetts.
Adams, recognizing that the other Colonies would only adopt non-intercourse measures in concert, urged an intercolonial congress to discuss mutual grievances and plan a united course of action. Subsequently, in June, the Massachusetts house of representatives, meeting behind locked doors to prevent interference by the Royal Governor, resolved to invite the other 12 Colonies to send representatives to Philadelphia in September and also appointed five Delegates, including Adams. That same day, the Royal Governor disbanded the legislature for the last time. Before heading for Philadelphia, outfitted in new clothes supplied by friends, Adams helped organize the convention that adopted the Suffolk Resolves, which in effect declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion.
Adams served in the Continental Congress until 1781, longer than most other Delegates, but his role was less conspicuous than his preceding career augured. In the early sessions, most of the time he shrewdly stayed in the background with his fellow Massachusetts Delegates, whose radicalism offended most of their colleagues. And, throughout the Congress, he walked in the shadow of John Adams, who dominated the proceedings.
But nothing in the latter’s career could match the drama of an episode involving Samuel in the interim between the First and Second Continental Congresses. Back at Lexington, Mass., one night in April 1775, he and Hancock had barely escaped the British force seeking to capture the colonial supply depot at Concord. The outbreak of armed conflict the next dawn—a “glorious morning” for Adams—marked the beginning of the War for Independence.
While still in Congress, in 1779–80 Adams participated in the Massachusetts constitutional convention. He returned to Boston for good the next year and entered the State senate (1781–88), over which he presided. He refused to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787 because of his objection to a stronger National Government, and the following year unenthusiastically took part in the Massachusetts ratifying convention. A lifetime of public service culminated in his election as Lieutenant Governor (1789–93), interim Governor in the latter year upon Hancock’s death, and Governor (1794–97). Still living in “honest poverty,” he died at Boston in 1803 at the age of 81 and was buried in the Old Granary Burying Ground.
Josiah Bartlett
NEW HAMPSHIRE
[Illustration]
Thanks to the voting order in the Continental Congress, Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire was probably the first Delegate to vote for independence, the second to sign the Declaration (after President John Hancock), and the first to ballot for and pen his name to the Articles of Confederation. He also has the distinction of being one of several physician signers. His State service, more extensive than the National, included the governorship.
Bartlett was born in 1729 at Amesbury, Mass. At the age of 16, equipped with a common school education and some knowledge of Latin and Greek, he began to study medicine in the office of a relative. Five years later, in 1750, he hung out his shingle at nearby Kingston, N.H. He quickly won a name not only as a general practitioner but also as an experimenter and innovator in diagnosis and treatment. Marrying in 1754, he fathered 12 children.
During the decade or so preceding the outbreak of the War for Independence, Bartlett held the offices of justice of the peace, militia colonel, and legislator. In 1774 he cast his lot with the Revolutionaries. He became a member of the New Hampshire committee of correspondence and the first provincial congress, which came into being when the Royal Governor disbanded the colonial assembly. Bartlett was elected that same year to the Continental Congress, but tragedy intervened and kept him at home. Arsonists, possibly Loyalists, burned his house to the ground. Discouraged but undeterred, he immediately constructed a new one on the very same site.
While in Congress (1775–76), Bartlett also served on the New Hampshire council of safety. Although he rarely participated in congressional debates, whose seeming futility vexed him, he sat on various committees. He was reelected in 1777, but was too exhausted to attend. He nevertheless managed in August to lend his medical skills to Gen. John Stark’s force of New Hampshire militia and Continental troops. They defeated a predominantly German element of Gen. John Burgoyne’s command in the Battle of Bennington, N.Y.—one of the reverses that helped force him to surrender 2 months later at Saratoga, N.Y. Bartlett’s last tour in Congress was in 1778–79, after which he refused reelection because of fatigue.
Bartlett spent the remainder of his life on the State scene. Despite his lack of legal training, he sat first as chief justice of the court of common pleas (1779–82), then as associate (1782–88) and chief (1788–90) justice of the Superior Court. Meantime, in 1788, he had taken part in the State convention that ratified the Federal Constitution, which he strongly favored. The next year, probably on account of his age and the weight of his judicial duties, he declined election to the U.S. Senate. The following year, he became chief executive, or president, of the State. He held that title for 2 years, in 1793–94 being named the first Governor, as the newly amended constitution redesignated the position.
Despite all his political activities, Bartlett had never lost interest in the field of medicine. In 1790 Dartmouth College conferred on him an honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine. The next year, he founded the New Hampshire Medical Society and became its first president. In 1794, the year before he died in Kingston at the age of 65, ill health forced his retirement from public life. His remains lie in the yard of the Universalist Church in Kingston.
Carter Braxton
VIRGINIA
[Illustration]
Carter Braxton, an aristocratic planter and probably the most conservative of the seven Virginia signers, originally opposed independence but later changed his mind and signed the Declaration. His tour in the Continental Congress lasted less than a year, but he held State office for most of his life. His two wives bore him 18 children, more than any other signer fathered.
Braxton was born in 1736 at Newington Plantation, on the Mattaponi River, in King and Queen County, Va. His father was a wealthy and politically influential planter. His mother, who died at his birth, was the daughter of Robert “King” Carter, a prominent landowner and politician.
In 1755, the same year Braxton graduated from the College of William and Mary, he married. His bride died in childbirth 2 years later. The following year, he left for an extended visit to England. He returned to Virginia in 1760 and moved into Elsing Green, an estate overlooking the Pamunkey River, in King William County, that his brother George had apparently built for him in 1758 during his absence. At the age of 25, in 1761, Carter remarried and entered the House of Burgesses. He served there, except for a term as county sheriff in 1772–73, until 1775. Meantime, in 1767, he had erected a new home, Chericoke, a couple of miles northwest of Elsing Green.
When the trouble with Great Britain erupted, Braxton, like many other conservatives, sided with the patriots, though he did not condone violence. In 1769 he signed the Virginia Resolves, a document protesting parliamentary regulation of the colony’s affairs, and the Virginia Association, a nonimportation agreement. During the period 1774–76, he attended various Revolutionary conventions. In 1775, upon dissolution of the royal government, he accepted a position on the council of safety, the temporary governing body.
In the spring of that year, Braxton was instrumental in preventing the outbreak of war in Virginia. On April 20, the day after the clashes at Lexington and Concord, Royal Governor Lord John M. Dunmore seized the gunpowder in the Williamsburg magazine. Several colonial militia units prepared to retaliate, but moderate leaders such as George Washington and Peyton Randolph restrained them. Patrick Henry, however, refusing to be pacified, led a group of the Hanover County militia into Williamsburg and demanded the return of the gunpowder or payment for it. Before any hostilities occurred, Braxton, as spokesman for Henry, met with crown official Richard Corbin, his father-in-law, and convinced him to pay for the powder.
In the fall of 1775 Braxton was selected to fill a vacancy in Congress caused by the death of Peyton Randolph. Arriving at Philadelphia early in 1776, he at first sharply criticized the independence movement, but eventually yielded to the majority and backed the Declaration. That same year, apparently both in writing and in a speech at a Virginia convention, he urged adoption of a conservative form of State government and expressed such a mistrust of popular government that he lost his congressional appointment. The conservatives, however, elected him to the new State legislature, in which he sat for the rest of his life. For many years, he was also a member of the Governor’s executive council.
The War for Independence brought financial hardships to Braxton. At its beginning, he had invested heavily in shipping, but the British captured most of his vessels and ravaged some of his plantations and extensive landholdings. Commercial setbacks in later years ruined him. In 1786, though he retained Chericoke, he moved to Richmond, where he died in 1797 at the age of 61. He was buried in the family cemetery adjacent to Chericoke.
Charles Carroll
MARYLAND
[Illustration]
As one of the wealthiest men in America, Charles Carroll III of Carrollton risked his fortune as well as his life when he joined the Revolutionaries. Possessing one of the most cultivated minds of any of the signers, he achieved remarkable success as planter, businessman, and politician. He was the only Roman Catholic signer, the last to survive, and the longest lived.
Of Irish descent, Carroll was born in 1737 at his father’s townhouse, Carroll Mansion in Annapolis. Jesuits educated him until he reached about 11 years of age. He then voyaged to Europe and studied the liberal arts and civil law at various schools and universities in Paris, elsewhere in France, and in London.
Carroll sailed home in 1765 at the age of 28, and built a home at Carrollton Manor, a 10,000-acre estate in Frederick County newly deeded to him by his father. At that time, he added “of Carrollton” to his name to distinguish himself from relatives of the same name. For most of his life, however, he preferred for his country residence the family ancestral home, Doughoregan Manor, in Howard County; when in Annapolis, he usually resided at his birthplace. For almost a decade after his return from Europe, barred from public life by his religion, he lived quietly. During that time, in 1768, he married. His offspring numbered seven, three of whom lived to maturity.
In 1773 Carroll became a champion of the patriots through his newspaper attacks on the Proprietary Governor. The latter was opposing reforms in officers’ fees and stipends for Anglican clergy that the lower house of the legislature had proposed. From then on, Carroll took a prominent part in provincial affairs. In the years 1774–76 he supported nonimportation measures, attended the first Maryland Revolutionary convention, and served on local and provincial committees of correspondence and the council of safety. In 1776 he and his cousin John, a priest—chosen because of their religion and knowledge of French—traveled to Canada with Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase on a congressionally appointed committee that sought but failed to obtain a union of Canada with the Colonies.
Carroll and Chase arrived back in Philadelphia on June 11 that same year, the day after Congress had postponed the vote on Richard Henry Lee’s independence resolution (June 7) until July 1. Maryland had refused to commit herself. Carroll and Chase rushed to Annapolis, recruited William Paca’s aid, and conducted a whirlwind campaign that persuaded the provincial convention to pass a unanimous independence resolution. It reached Congress just in time to put the colony in the affirmative column on July 1, the day of the first vote. Three days later, Carroll himself became a Delegate and functioned in that capacity until 1778.
Two years before, Carroll had also been elected to the State senate, a seat he retained until just after the turn of the century. Along with fellow signers Chase and Paca, he was a member of the committee that in 1776 drafted Maryland’s constitution. Elected to but not attending the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he nevertheless allied himself with the Federalists and helped bring about his State’s ratification of the Constitution. In the years 1789–92, while also in the State senate, he served as a U.S. Senator, one of Maryland’s first two.
Not reelected to the State senate in 1804, the 67-year-old Carroll retired from public life and concentrated on managing his landholdings, consisting of about 80,000 acres in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, and his business interests. The latter included investments in the Patowmack (Potowmack) Company, which established a canal system in the Potomac and Shenandoah Valleys, and its successor the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company. Carroll was also a member of the first board of directors of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
In his final years, revered by the Nation as the last surviving signer of the Declaration, Carroll spent most of his time at Doughoregan Manor. But he passed the winters in the home of his youngest daughter and her husband in Baltimore. There, in 1832, he died at the age of 95. His body was interred in the family chapel at Doughoregan Manor.
Samuel Chase
MARYLAND
[Illustration]
Fervid Revolutionary Samuel Chase led the campaign that crushed conservative opposition and alined his colony with the others in the independence struggle. Labeled the “Demosthenes of Maryland” for his fancy albeit effective oratory, he also demonstrated skill as a writer. But his independent attitude, stormy disposition, and outspokenness diluted his political effectiveness. As an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, he became a controversial figure.
Chase was the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was born in 1741 at the farmhouse of his mother’s parents on Maryland’s Eastern Shore near the city of Princess Anne. His mother had come there from her home at nearby Allen for a visit. She died at or soon after the birth. Likely Chase’s grandparents cared for him at least a few years, until about the time his father took over a parish in Baltimore. The latter provided the youth with his initial education, mainly in the classics.
Between the ages of 18 and 20, Chase read law with an Annapolis firm and joined the bar in 1761. The next year, he married; his wife bore at least two sons and two daughters. Two years after his marriage, he entered the colonial/State legislature and retained membership for two decades. From the beginning, he opposed the royal government. Annapolis officials denounced him for his participation in the violent protests of the Sons of Liberty in 1765 against the Stamp Act. In 1774–75 he took part in the Maryland committee of correspondence, council of safety, and the provincial convention.
In the former year, Chase had joined the Continental Congress. He advocated an embargo on trade with Britain, showed special interest in diplomatic matters, early urged a confederation of the Colonies, defended George Washington from his congressional detractors, and in 1776 journeyed to Montreal with a commission that tried but failed to achieve a union with Canada. When he returned to Philadelphia around the middle of June, Congress had just postponed the vote on the Lee independence resolution. Realizing that Maryland was straddling the fence on the issue, Chase rushed home. Along with Charles Carroll of Carrollton and William Paca, he labored for 2 weeks to overcome opposition and won a committal to independence from the convention. The Maryland Delegates registered it in time for the first congressional vote, on July 1. In 1778 Chase lost his office because of adverse publicity generated by the advantage he had taken of knowledge gained in Congress to engage in a profiteering scheme.
In 1783–84 Chase traveled to London as a State emissary on an unfruitful mission to recover Maryland stock in the Bank of England from two fugitive Loyalists. Upon his return apparently, his first wife having died, he remarried; resumed his law practice; and engaged in various unsuccessful business enterprises that led to bankruptcy in 1789. Meantime, he had reentered politics. In 1785 he had represented Maryland at the Mount Vernon (Va.) Conference, forerunner of the Annapolis Convention. The next year, he moved his family from Annapolis to Baltimore, where he soon became chief judge of the Baltimore County criminal court (1788–95). As a delegate to the Maryland ratifying convention in 1788, he strongly opposed the Constitution, though he later became a staunch Federalist. From 1791 until 1794, while still a county judge, he also held the position of chief justice of the Maryland Superior Court.
Chase achieved his greatest fame as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1796–1811). He was one of the ablest jurists in the body prior to Chief Justice John Marshall (1801–35), and delivered many influential opinions. His inability to control his political partisanship while on the bench—a trait he shared with some other judges of his time—led to various judicial improprieties and impeachment proceedings against him in 1805. But Congress acquitted him.
Still a Justice, Chase died in Baltimore 2 months after he celebrated his 70th birthday. His grave is in St. Paul’s Cemetery.
Abraham Clark
NEW JERSEY
[Illustration]
Abraham Clark—farmer, surveyor, self-taught lawyer, and politician—typifies those signers who dedicated most of their lives to public service but never gained national renown.
An only child, Clark was born in 1726 at his father’s farm in what is now Roselle, N.J. In his boyhood, he was too frail for farmwork. He received only a minimum of formal education, but in his independent study demonstrated a bent for mathematics. When he reached manhood, besides farming his father’s land, he took up surveying and informally read law to aid in mediating land disputes. Although probably never admitted to the bar, he gained a reputation as the “poor man’s counselor” for his willingness to dispense free legal advice or accept produce or merchandise in lieu of a fee. He married in 1749, and fathered 10 children.
Clark followed his father’s example by taking an active part in civic affairs. For many years, he served the Crown as high sheriff of Essex County and as clerk in the colonial legislature. The exact date of his entry into the patriot ranks is not known, but in the period 1774–76 he became a member and secretary of the New Jersey council of safety, attended several Revolutionary conventions, and won election to the provincial assembly. In June of the latter year, he and four other men replaced the existing congressional Delegates, who were opposing independence.
Despite poor health and deep concern for the welfare of his family and the safety of his home, located not far from an area of British occupation, Clark stayed in Congress throughout the War for Independence and sometimes sat concurrently in the State legislature. He suffered additional anxiety when the British captured his two soldier sons and incarcerated them for a time on the prison ship _Jersey_, where hundreds of captives perished.
[Illustration: Thousands of American soldiers, including two of Abraham Clark’s sons, endured the agonies of captivity on the British prison ship _Jersey_.]
At the end of the war in 1783, Clark resumed his life back in New Jersey. The next year he began a 3-year tour in the State legislature, which he represented at the Annapolis Convention (1786). The following year, ill health prevented his attendance at the Constitutional Convention. He subsequently opposed the Constitution until it incorporated the Bill of Rights. In 1787–89 he returned to the Continental Congress, but in 1789–90 remained in New Jersey as commissioner to settle his State’s accounts with the Federal Government. In 1791–94 he climaxed a long career of alternating State-National service as a Representative in the Second and Third Congresses.
Clark was stricken with a sunstroke in 1794 at his birthplace in Roselle, where he had lived all his life except when political duty called him away. He died a few hours later, at the age of 68, in the nearby town of Rahway and was buried there in the Presbyterian Cemetery.
George Clymer
PENNSYLVANIA
[Illustration]
George Clymer, a leading Philadelphia merchant, rendered long years of service to his city, State, and Nation. He signed the Constitution as well as the Declaration, and applied his commercial acumen to the financial problems of the Colonies and the Confederation.
Clymer was orphaned in 1740, only a year after his birth in Philadelphia. A wealthy uncle reared and informally educated him and advanced him from clerk to a full-fledged partner in his mercantile firm, which on his death he bequeathed to his ward. Later, Clymer merged operations with the Merediths, prominent businessmen, and cemented the relationship by marrying his senior partner’s daughter.
Motivated at least partly by the impact of British economic restrictions on his business, Clymer early adopted the Revolutionary cause and was one of the first to recommend independence. He attended patriotic meetings, served on the Pennsylvania council of safety, and in 1773 headed a committee that forced the resignation of Philadelphia tea consignees appointed by Britain under the Tea Act. Inevitably, in light of his economic background, he channeled his energies into financial matters. In 1775–76 he acted as one of the first two Continental treasurers, even personally underwriting the war by exchanging all his own specie for Continental currency.
In the Continental Congress (1776–77 and 1780–82) the quiet and unassuming Clymer rarely spoke in debate but made his mark in committee efforts, especially those pertaining to commerce, finance, and military affairs. During and between his two congressional tours, he also served on a series of commissions that conducted important field investigations. In December 1776, when Congress fled from Philadelphia to Baltimore, he and fellow signers George Walton and Robert Morris remained behind to carry on congressional business. Within a year, after their victory at the Battle of Brandywine, Pa. (Sept. 11, 1777), British troops advancing on Philadelphia detoured for the purpose of vandalizing Clymer’s home in Chester County, about 25 miles outside the city, while his wife and children hid nearby in the woods.
[Illustration: George Clymer lived in this Philadelphia townhouse during the Revolutionary period.]
After a brief retirement following his last tour in the Continental Congress, Clymer was reelected in the years 1784–88 to the Pennsylvania legislature, where he had also served part time in 1780–82 while still in Congress. As a State legislator, he advocated reform of the penal code, opposed capital punishment, and represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention (1787). The next phase of his career consisted of service as a U.S. Representative in the First Congress (1789–91), followed by appointment as collector of excise taxes on alcoholic beverages in Pennsylvania (1791–94). In 1795–96 he sat on a Presidential commission that negotiated a treaty with the Indians in Georgia.
During his retirement, Clymer advanced various community projects, including the Philadelphia Agricultural Society, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Bank. At the age of 73, in 1813, he died at Summerseat, an estate a few miles outside Philadelphia at Morrisville that he had purchased and moved to in 1806. His grave is in the Friends Meeting House Cemetery at Trenton, N.J.
William Ellery
RHODE ISLAND
[Illustration]
One of a small group of lesser known signers whose achievements were comparatively modest, William Ellery gained little fame beyond his hometown—in sharp contrast to fellow Rhode Island signer Stephen Hopkins. The office of Delegate to the Continental Congress was the only significant position, State or National, to which Ellery ever won election, but he occupied it for a far longer period than most other Members.
The second son in a family of four, Ellery was born in 1727 at Newport, his lifelong residence. He followed in the footsteps of his father, a rich merchant and political leader, by attending Harvard. On his graduation in 1747, he returned home. During the following two decades or so, he tried his hand at several occupations, eventually taking up the study of law, which he began practicing in 1770. Meantime, he had married twice and was to rear two sons and three daughters. Among his grandchildren were William Ellery Channing, influential theologian and apostle of Unitarianism, and Richard Henry Dana, Sr., noted poet and essayist.
By May 1776, when the colonial legislature sent Ellery to the Continental Congress, he had already earned a reputation for his work on local patriotic committees. Tradition records that, at the formal signing of the Declaration on August 2, he placed himself beside the Secretary and observed “undaunted resolution” on every face as the Delegates subscribed to their “death warrant.” The next year, Rhode Island initiated popular election of congressional Delegates, and Ellery’s Newport constituency maintained him in office until 1786 except for the years 1780 and 1782. In 1780 he remained in Philadelphia as an ex officio member of the board of admiralty, on which he had been sitting. His other committee assignments included those dealing with commercial and naval affairs. On occasion, to entertain himself and others, he wrote witty epigrams about various speakers. In 1785 he turned down the chief justiceship of the Rhode Island Superior Court to remain in Congress, where he had attained commanding seniority.
The very next year, Ellery terminated his congressional career to accept an appointment as commissioner of the Continental Loan Office for Rhode Island (1786–90). Probably the need to straighten out his finances compelled him to accept. British troops in 1778, during their 3-year occupation of Newport, had destroyed his home and property, and he had been too busy to rebuild his fortune. In 1790 President Washington appointed Ellery as customs collector for the district of Newport, a position he held for three decades. Although he was a Federalist, he managed to retain office during the Democratic-Republican administrations, probably because of his Revolutionary record and competence.
In his later years, Ellery prospered. He kept active in public affairs and spent many hours in scholarly pursuits and correspondence. Living to 92, a more advanced age than all the signers except Charles Carroll, he died in 1820 at Newport. His remains rest there in the Common Ground Cemetery.
William Floyd
NEW YORK
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William Floyd, a wealthy landowner-farmer, belongs to the category of signers who played only a peripheral part in the Revolution. Nevertheless, he suffered anguish when British troops and Loyalists ravaged his estate during the war and drove his family into a 7-year exile in Connecticut. He also climbed to the rank of major general in the State militia, and served in the U.S. First Congress.
Floyd was born in 1734 at present Mastic, Long Island, N.Y., in Brookhaven Township. He was the second child and eldest of two sons in a family of nine. His father, a prosperous farmer of Welsh ancestry, kept the youth busy with chores. As a result, his education consisted only of informal instruction at home. When Floyd reached his 20th year, his father and mother died within 2 months of each other, and he inherited a large estate along with the responsibility of caring for his brothers and sisters. Six years later, he married. His bride helped care for the family and assisted in managing the farm, for which slaves supplied most of the labor. A community stalwart, Floyd also devoted considerable time to the affairs of the Brookhaven church, occupied the position of town trustee (1769–71), and moved up in the ranks of the Suffolk County militia to a colonelcy in 1775.
The Revolutionary movement in New York was much less fervent and started later than that in the other Colonies. The spirited Massachusetts opposition to the Tea Act in the later half of 1773 and in 1774 created the first major ferment in New York. One of the scattered focal points was eastern Long Island, where Floyd lived. He and many of his neighbors attended meetings that extended sympathy and aid to Massachusetts and protested the closing of the port of Boston by the British. Despite such local outbursts, by the end of 1774 New York was one of only two Colonies, Georgia being the other, in which the patriots did not control the government. For this reason, the Revolutionaries operated mainly on a county basis.
In 1774 Suffolk County sent Floyd to the Continental Congress. He remained there until 1777, returned in the period 1779–83, and in the interim served in the State senate and on the council of safety. Yielding the floor of Congress to the other New York Delegates, he labored without special distinction on a few committees. But worry about the welfare of his family presented a major distraction. In 1776, when British forces occupied Long Island, his wife, son, and two daughters fled northward across the sound and took refuge in Middletown, Conn. His wife died there in 1781. To make matters worse, the redcoats used his home at Mastic for a barracks, and Loyalists plundered his lands and belongings. When he brought his children back in 1783, he found the fields and timber stripped, the fences destroyed, and the house damaged.
After the war, Floyd sat for several terms in the State senate, attended the constitutional convention of 1801, supported the Federal Constitution, won election in the years 1789–91 as a Representative in the First Congress, served as presidential elector on four occasions, and became a major general in the New York militia. His second wife, whom he had married in 1784, bore him two daughters.
About this time, Floyd acquired an interest in western lands. The year of his marriage, he purchased a tract in central New York at the headwaters of the Mohawk River in the environs of present Rome; he supplemented this 3 years later by obtaining a State grant of more than 10,000 acres in the area. He spent most of his summers visiting and developing the acreage.
In 1803, in his late sixties, at a time when most men possess lesser ambitions, Floyd deeded his Long Island home and farm to his son Nicoll, and set out with the rest of his family to make a new life on the frontier. During the first year, he built a home at present Westernville, N.Y. There he succumbed, at the age of 86 in 1821, and was buried in the Presbyterian Cemetery.
Benjamin Franklin
PENNSYLVANIA
[Illustration]
Benjamin Franklin, elder statesman of the Revolution and oldest signer of both the Declaration and the Constitution, sat on the committee that drafted the Declaration, attended the Constitutional Convention, and distinguished himself as a diplomat. But he was a self-made and self-educated intellectual colossus whose interests far transcended politics. He won international renown as a printer-publisher, author, philosopher, scientist, inventor, and philanthropist. On both sides of the Atlantic he mingled with the social elite, whom he impressed with his sagacity, wit, and zest for life.
Franklin was born in 1706 at Boston. He was the tenth son of a soap- and candle-maker. He received some formal education but was principally self-taught. After serving an apprenticeship to his father between the ages of 10 and 12, he went to work for his half-brother James, a printer. In 1721 the latter founded the _New England Courant_, the fourth newspaper in the Colonies. Benjamin secretly contributed to it 14 essays, his first published writings.
In 1723, because of dissension with his half-brother, Franklin moved to Philadelphia. He spent only a year there, and then sailed to London for two more years. Back in Philadelphia, he rose rapidly in the printing industry. He published _The Pennsylvania Gazette_ (1730–48), which had been founded by another man in 1728, but his most successful venture was annual _Poor Richard’s Almanac_ (1733–58). It won a popularity in the Colonies second only to the Bible, and its fame eventually spread to Europe.
Meantime, in 1730 Franklin had taken a common-law wife, who was to bear him a son and a daughter, as was another woman out of wedlock. By 1748 he had achieved financial independence and gained recognition for his philanthropy and the stimulus he provided to such worthwhile civic causes as libraries, educational institutions, and hospitals. Energetic and tireless, he also found time to pursue his deep interest in science, as well as enter politics.
Franklin served as clerk (1736–51) and member (1751–64) of the colonial legislature, and as deputy postmaster of Philadelphia (1737–53) and deputy postmaster general of the Colonies (1753–74). In addition, he represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress (1754), called to unite the Colonies during the French and Indian War. The congress adopted his “Plan of Union,” but the colonial assemblies rejected it because it encroached on their powers.
During the years 1757–62 and 1764–75, Franklin resided in England, originally in the capacity of agent for Pennsylvania and later for Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. During the latter period, which coincided with the growth of colonial unrest, he underwent a political metamorphosis. Until then a contented Englishman in outlook, primarily concerned with Pennsylvania provincial politics, he distrusted popular movements and saw little purpose to be served in carrying principle to extremes. Until the issue of parliamentary taxation undermined the old alliances, he led the conservative Quaker party in its attack on the Anglican proprietary party and its Presbyterian frontier cohorts. His purpose throughout the years at London in fact had been displacement of the Penn family administration by royal authority—the conversion of the province from a proprietary to a royal colony.
It was during the Stamp Act crisis that Franklin evolved from leader of a shattered provincial party’s faction to celebrated spokesman at London for American rights. Although as agent for Pennsylvania he opposed by every conceivable persuasive means enactment of the bill in 1765, he did not at first realize the depth of colonial hostility. He regarded passage as unavoidable and preferred to submit to it while actually working for its repeal. His nomination of a friend and political ally as stamp distributor in Pennsylvania, coupled with his apparent acceptance of the legislation, armed his proprietary opponents with explosive issues. Their energetic exploitation of them endangered his reputation at home until reliable information was published demonstrating his unabated opposition. For a time, mob resentment threatened his family and new home in Philadelphia until his tradesmen supporters rallied. Subsequently, Franklin’s defense of the American position in the House of Commons during the debates over the Stamp Act’s repeal restored his prestige at home.
[Illustration: Benjamin Franklin being arraigned in 1774 by a committee of Lords of Parliament for disloyalty to the Crown. The following day, he was dismissed as deputy postmaster general of the Colonies.]
Franklin returned to Philadelphia in May 1775, and immediately became a Member of the Continental Congress. Thirteen months later, he served on the committee that drafted the Declaration. According to a traditional anecdote, when he finished signing he declared, “Gentlemen, we must now all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately,” He subsequently contributed to the Government in other important ways, and took over the duties of president of the Pennsylvania constitutional convention.
But, within less than a year and a half after his return, the aged statesman set sail once again for Europe, beginning a career as diplomat that would occupy him for most of the rest of his life. In 1776–79, one of three commissioners, he directed the negotiations that led to treaties of commerce and alliance with France, where the people adulated him, but he and the other commissioners squabbled constantly. While he was sole commissioner to France (1779–85), he and John Jay and John Adams negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the War for Independence.
Back in the United States, in 1785–87 Franklin became president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. At the Constitutional Convention (May 1787), though he did not approve of many aspects of the finished document, he lent his prestige, soothed passions, and compromised disputes. In his twilight years, working on his _Autobiography_, he could look back on a fruitful life as the toast of two continents. Active nearly to the last, in 1787 he was elected as first president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery—a cause to which he had committed himself as early as the 1730’s. His final public act was signing a memorial to Congress recommending dissolution of the slavery system. Shortly thereafter, in 1790 at the age of 84, Franklin passed away in Philadelphia and was buried in Christ Church Burial Ground.
Elbridge Gerry
MASSACHUSETTS
[Illustration]
During an extended and controversial career, Elbridge Gerry experienced many triumphs and disappointments. A prosperous merchant who worked alongside the two Adamses and John Hancock in the cause of independence, he integrated personal interests with public service and translated them into wartime profits. In the course of his long tenure in the Continental Congress, he signed both the Declaration and Articles of Confederation. But throughout his years in office, which crested in the U.S. Vice-Presidency, his inconsistencies, ambivalence, and truculence stirred up animosity among his colleagues—though he usually managed to muster enough party and popular support to win reelection.
Gerry was born in 1744 at Marblehead, Mass., the third of 12 children. His mother was the daughter of a Boston merchant; his father, a wealthy and politically active merchant-shipper who had once been a sea captain. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1762, Gerry joined his father and two brothers in the family business, which consisted of exporting dried codfish to Barbados and Spain. In 1772–74 he entered the colonial legislature, where he came under the influence of Samuel Adams, and took part in the Marblehead and Massachusetts committees of correspondence. In June of the latter year, when Parliament closed Boston Harbor and Marblehead became a major port of entry for supplies donated by patriots throughout the Colonies to relieve the Bostonians, he aided in the transshipment.
Between 1774 and 1776, Gerry attended the first and second provincial congresses; served with Samuel Adams and John Hancock on the council of safety, which prepared the colony for war; and, as chairman of the committee of supply, a job for which his merchant background ideally suited him, raised troops and dealt with military logistics. During the night of April 18, 1775, he barely eluded capture by the British troops marching on Lexington and Concord. Following the adjournment of a meeting of the council of safety at an inn in Menotomy (Arlington), on the road from Cambridge to Lexington, he had retired for the night but responded to the alarm and fled.
Gerry entered the Continental Congress in 1776 and voted for independence in July, but his absence at the formal ceremonies on August 2 necessitated his signing the Declaration later in the year. His congressional specialties were military and financial matters, in both of which he demonstrated a duality of attitude that was to become his political trademark. He earned the nickname “soldiers’ friend” for his advocacy of better pay and equipment, yet he vacillated on the issue of pensions. Despite his disapproval of standing armies, he recommended long-term enlistments. Although mistrustful of military officials, he befriended both George Washington and Thomas Conway, two generals who were implacable enemies.
Until 1779 Gerry sat on and sometimes presided over the congressional treasury board, which regulated Continental finances. An Army procurement agent as well as a merchant-supplier, he utilized information he obtained in Congress to benefit his lucrative business. On the other hand, he denounced profiteering and personally adhered to a fair-price schedule. In 1780, as wartime financial problems mounted, however, the Delegates resolved to revise the schedule. Gerry’s vehement objections led to a quarrel, and he stormed out of Congress. Although nominally a Member, he did not reappear for 3 years. During the interim, he engaged in trade and privateering and saw duty in the lower house of the State legislature.
Back in Congress in 1783–85, Gerry numbered among those Representatives who had possessed talent as Revolutionary agitators and wartime leaders but who could not effectually cope with the painstaking task of stabilizing the National Government. He was experienced and conscientious, but created many enemies with his lack of humor, suspicion of the motives of others, and obsessive fear of political and military tyranny. In 1786, the year after leaving Congress, his fortune well established, he retired from business, married, and took a seat in the State legislature. The next year, he moved from Marblehead to Cambridge and purchased a confiscated Loyalist estate, where he was to reside for the rest of his life.
Gerry was one of the most vocal of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He antagonized practically everyone by his inconsistency and, according to a colleague, “objected to everything he did not propose.” At first he advocated a strong Central Government, but ultimately rejected and refused to sign the Constitution, especially because it lacked a bill of rights and because he deemed it a threat to republicanism. He led the drive against ratification in Massachusetts. In 1789, when he changed his mind and announced his intention to support the Constitution, he was elected to the First Congress, where to the chagrin of the Antifederalists he championed Federalist policies.
Gerry left Congress for the last time in 1793 and retired for 4 years. During this time, he came to mistrust the aims of the Federalists,
## particularly their attempts to nurture an alliance with Britain, and
sided with the pro-French Democratic-Republicans. In 1797 President John Adams appointed him as the only non-Federalist member of a three-man commission charged with negotiating a reconciliation with France, on the brink of war with the United States. During the ensuing XYZ affair (1797–98), Gerry tarnished his reputation. The French foreign minister duped him into believing that his presence in France would prevent war, and he lingered on long after the departure of the other disgusted commissioners. Finally, the embarrassed Adams recalled him, amid Federalist vituperation.
In 1800–03 Gerry, never very popular among the Massachusetts electorate because of his aristocratic haughtiness, met defeat in four bids for the Massachusetts governorship, but finally triumphed in 1810–12. Near the end of his two terms, scarred by partisan controversy, the Democratic-Republicans passed a devious redistricting measure to insure their domination of the State senate. In response, the Federalists heaped ridicule on Gerry and punningly coined the term “gerrymander” to describe the salamander-like shape of one of the redistricted areas.
Despite his advanced age, frail health, and the threat of poverty brought on by neglect of personal affairs, in 1813 Gerry accepted the Vice-Presidency in James Madison’s Democratic-Republican administration. In the fall of 1814, the 70-year-old politician was stricken fatally while on the way to the Senate. He left his wife, who was to live until 1849, the last surviving widow of a signer, as well as three sons and four daughters. Gerry is buried in Congressional Cemetery at Washington, D.C.
Button Gwinnett
GEORGIA
[Illustration]
Tempestuousness and ill-fortune marked the destiny of uniquely named Button Gwinnett, whose forename is that of a branch of his mother’s family. The second signer to die, he met a tragic end in a duel while only in his forties. The only highlight of his brief tour in the Continental Congress was signing the Declaration. Even in Georgia, where he rose to the acting governorship, controversy and failure usually dogged him. Financial misfortunes were continual distractions, and he found that his paltry rewards as a merchant and planter matched his disappointments in politics.
Gwinnett was likely born in 1735, at the village of Down Hatherly, Gloucestershire, England. The second male in a family numbering at least seven, he was the son of an Anglican vicar of Welsh ancestry and a mother with English ties. He probably learned trade and finance from an uncle, a Bristol merchant, and in 1757 moved to Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. He married a grocer’s daughter, who was to bear three girls, and for a time he joined her father in a partnership. In 1759, however, Gwinnett entered the export shipping business and built up an extensive trade with the American Colonies, possibly sometimes visiting them himself.
The date of Gwinnett’s emigration to Savannah, Ga., is not known but in 1765 he purchased a store there. Later that same year, for some reason, he sold it and abruptly switched vocation. Apparently dazzled by visions of a planter’s life on a great estate but undeterred by his lack of capital, experience, and training, he borrowed £3,000 and purchased large St. Catherine’s Island. It was located off the Georgia coast not far from the busy mainland port of Sunbury, a rival of Savannah. At this time, he probably erected a home on the island. Before long, though already deep in debt, he also purchased some coastal lands on credit and received grants of others from the colony; and bought large numbers of slaves to work his holdings. Poachers aggravated his problems by raiding the island’s livestock.
[Illustration: Fanciful depiction of Button Gwinnett’s duel with Gen. Lachlan McIntosh in 1777 that resulted in the former’s death.]
Gwinnett’s land, slaves, and other possessions were soon gobbled up by creditors. Finally, in 1773, they took over the island, but allowed Gwinnett to maintain his home there. He did so for the rest of his life. During the war, however, the approach of British vessels, who replenished their food supplies from the livestock on the exposed island, sometimes forced him and his family to scurry over in their boat to Sunbury for temporary refuge.
Meantime, Gwinnett had long since entered politics. In 1768–69 he had been designated as one of His Majesty’s justices of the peace and as a local pilotage commissioner. In the years 1769–71 the voters of St. John’s Parish elected him to the colonial assembly at Savannah, but he attended only spasmodically because of his financial woes. When they worsened, he left public office for 5 years.
Gwinnett returned on the national level. Unlike the other two Georgia signers, Lyman Hall and George Walton, he belatedly joined the patriot side—apparently held back for some time by his English birth and close family connections in England. His friend Hall, a Sunbury resident and fellow member of the Midway Congregational Church, swung him over, probably beginning in the summer of 1775. The next February, the provincial congress named Gwinnett to the Continental Congress, though he did not arrive in Philadelphia until May. He attended for only about 10 weeks. Right after he signed the Declaration on August 2, he trekked back to Georgia, where he hoped but failed to win at least an Army colonelcy in one of the units the State was forming.
In October Gwinnett was reelected to the Continental Congress, but chose not to attend. Instead, during the next 5 months, he played a key role in drafting the State’s first constitution, in the course of which he helped thwart a proposed union of South Carolina and Georgia. Upon the death of the Governor, or president of the Executive Council, in March 1777 the council commissioned Gwinnett as Acting Governor for 2 months, but he failed to achieve reelection. Before leaving office, he had clashed with controversial Gen. Lachlan McIntosh, an old rival. The result was a pistol duel in May just outside Savannah. Both men suffered wounds, but Gwinnett died a few days later of a gangrenous infection in his leg. Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah contains a grave reputed to be his.
Lyman Hall
GEORGIA
[Illustration]
Lyman Hall was one of the four signers originally trained as ministers. He eventually found his pulpit in politics, though he had to preach vigorously to inspire the “congregation” of Georgia. He enthusiastically sparked the slow-developing independence movement there with George Walton and recruited Button Gwinnett, the third Georgia signer. Somehow Hall also managed to pursue careers as doctor, planter, and Governor.
A native of Wallingford, Conn., Hall was born in 1724. He graduated from Yale College in 1747 at the age of 23, returned home, and heeded a family call to the Congregational ministry. An uncle, Rev. Samuel Hall, trained him in theology. In 1749 he began preaching in Bridgeport and adjacent towns. Young and immature, he probably entrapped himself in the middle of a liberal-conservative schism and in some way alienated his congregation, but repentance brought quick reinstatement from dismissal in 1751, and for a couple of years he temporarily filled vacant pulpits.
During this period, in 1752, Hall married, but his wife lived only a year; about 2 years later he remarried, a union that was to bring forth a son. Meantime, Hall had become disillusioned by his ministerial experiences. He studied medicine with a local doctor,
## partially supporting himself by teaching. When his medical training was
completed, he moved back to Wallingford and hung out his shingle.
In 1757 the 33-year-old Hall, seeking brighter fields, emigrated to Dorchester, S.C., a settlement of New England Puritans not far from Charleston. Within a few months, he joined some of the residents in a relocation that had been underway since 1752. They were pushing southward to Georgia’s coastal Midway District, in St. John’s Parish (present Liberty County). This area provided more land and a healthier climate.
In 1758 the colonists finished their emigration and founded Sunbury. It evolved into the thriving seaport-hub of the surrounding slave-based, rice-indigo economy. Like many other planters, Hall maintained a home there, where it was healthier than inland, as well as at Hall’s Knoll, the plantation just north of the present town of Midway that he had purchased shortly after arriving in the area. Because its plantations skirted malarial swamps, Hall kept busy providing medical treatment, as well as managing his estate.
St. John’s Parish became the wealthiest in Georgia. This was not its only uniqueness, for the populace was steeped in the New England tradition of independence. When the trouble with Britain erupted in the mid-1760’s the parish, guided by Hall, stood apart in its opposition from virtually all the rest of the colony except for another cluster of Revolutionaries at Savannah led by George Walton and others. Georgia, which was to be the last of the Colonies to join the Continental Association, was the youngest, most remote, and most sparsely settled. Also the poorest, it felt less the impact of British economic restrictions. The Loyalist ruling aristocracy of Georgia, regarding the tiny band of Revolutionaries with contempt, resisted their every move.
Hall was appalled by the poor representation of the parishes as a whole and the indecisiveness of Revolutionary conventions he attended at Savannah in the summer of 1774 and the next January, especially by their failure to send Delegates to the Continental Congress. He dejectedly returned to St. John’s Parish. It was ready to secede from the colony, and proposed an alliance to South Carolina, which refused. Not to be denied, in March 1775 the parish held its own convention and sent Hall as its own “delegate” to the Continental Congress.
Two months later, Congress admitted Hall as a nonvoting member. In July, Georgia, finally coming into the fold, sanctioned Hall’s presence in Congress and appointed four other Delegates. Hall served until 1780. Two years earlier, he had moved his family somewhere to the north just before British troops ravaged and conquered the Georgia coast. In the process, they destroyed Hall’s Knoll and Hall’s Sunbury residence and confiscated his property.
When the British evacuated Savannah in 1782, Hall settled there and resumed his medical practice to mend his fortune. The next January, St. John’s Parish, where he had maintained ties, elected him to the State legislature. That body, in turn, awarded him the governorship (1783–84). His reconstruction-oriented administration, though marred by his purchase of and speculation in lands confiscated from Loyalists, rehabilitated the wartorn State and laid foundations for future growth.
In Hall’s final years he acted for a time as a judge of the inferior court of Chatham County and as a trustee of a proposed State university (to be called first Franklin College and later the University of Georgia). But his duties as executor of Button Gwinnett’s tangled estate required years of legal wrangling. In 1785 he sold his Hall’s Knoll land. Five years later, he moved from Savannah to Burke County and purchased Shell Bluff Plantation, on the Savannah River about 25 miles below Augusta. A few months hence he died and was buried there. His remains are now interred at the Signers’ Monument in Augusta.
John Hancock
MASSACHUSETTS
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One of the fathers of U.S. independence, John Hancock helped spearhead the pivotal revolt in Massachusetts, presided as President of Congress during the voting for independence and adoption of the Declaration, and boldly penned the first signature on the document. Subsequently he served as the first and longtime Governor of his Commonwealth. Despite all these achievements and the persistent loyalty of his constituents, whom he wooed with lavish expenditures for public projects, his vanity, ostentation, and regal way of life irked many of his professional associates.
Hancock, born in 1737 at Braintree (present Quincy), Mass., lost his father, a Congregational pastor, at the age of 7. He spent the next 6 years with his grandparents at Lexington before joining his guardian, Thomas Hancock, a childless uncle who was one of the richest merchant-shippers in Boston. After studying at Boston Latin School and graduating from Harvard College in 1754, John began working as a clerk in his uncle’s business and learned it rapidly. In 1760–61, while visiting London to observe the English side of the business, he attended the funeral of George II and the coronation of George III, who apparently granted him an audience. In 1763 he became a partner of his uncle, who died the next year and willed him the firm, a fortune that was probably the greatest in New England, and a luxurious house on Beacon Street.
Hancock allied with other merchants in protesting the Stamp Act (1765), and the next year inaugurated a long legislative career. But he did not strongly identify with the patriots until 2 years later. At that time, British customs officials, their courage bolstered by the arrival of a warship in Boston Harbor, charged him with smuggling and seized one of his ships. During the ensuing riots, the terrified customs officials fled to an island in the harbor. A few months later, the first major contingent of British troops sailed into port and created a tense situation that resulted in the Boston Massacre (1770). John Adams ably defended Hancock in court until the British dropped the smuggling charge, but the episode made him a hero throughout the Colonies.
Other factors tied Hancock to the patriots. Samuel and John Adams, shrewdly perceiving the advantages of such a rich and well-known affiliate, welcomed him into their ranks, encouraged his idolatry by the populace, and pushed him upward in the Revolutionary hierarchy. When the first provincial congress met at Salem and Concord in 1774, he acted as its president as well as chairman of the vital council of safety. The second provincial congress, convening the next year at Cambridge and Concord, elected him to the Continental Congress.
On April 18, only 3 days after the provincial congress adjourned, British troops marched from Boston to seize rebel stores at Concord. Warned of their approach during the night by Paul Revere, Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were visiting at nearby Lexington, escaped. But the British-American clashes at Lexington and Concord marked the outbreak of war. The two men avoided Boston and hid at various places for 2 weeks before proceeding to Philadelphia. Later that summer, Hancock married, siring a daughter who died in infancy and a son, John George Washington Hancock, who lived but 9 years.
From 1775 until 1777 Hancock presided over the Continental Congress. The very first year, his egotism, which regularly aroused the antipathy of many Members, created personal embitterment as well. Blind to his own limitations, particularly his lack of military experience, he unrealistically entertained the hope that he, instead of Washington, would be appointed as commander in chief of the Continental Army. Hancock also provoked ill will among his fellow New Englanders, especially Samuel Adams, by courting moderates such as John Dickinson and Benjamin Harrison. Hancock believed that Samuel Adams was responsible in 1777 for blocking a congressional vote of thanks for his services and never forgave him.
Only Hancock and Charles Thomson, the President and Secretary of Congress, signed the broadside copy of the Declaration, printed the night of its adoption, July 4, 1776, and disseminated to the public the following day. At the formal signing of the parchment copy on August 2, tradition holds that Hancock wrote his name in large letters so that the King would not need spectacles to recognize him as a “traitor.” After resigning as presiding officer in 1777, he remained a Member of Congress until 1780, though he spent much of his time in Boston and for the rest of his life solidified his political position in Massachusetts. In 1778, as a major general in the militia, he commanded an expedition that failed to recapture Newport, R.I., from the British. He made a more tangible contribution to the war by accepting Continental currency from his debtors, even though his fortune had already been dented by wartime-induced reverses.
In 1780, the same year Hancock gave up his seat in Congress and attended his Commonwealth’s constitutional convention, he was overwhelmingly elected as first Governor (1780–85). He won reelection in 1787–93. In the interim (1785–86), he once again sat in Congress. In 1788 he chaired the Massachusetts convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution, which he favored.
While still Governor, in 1793 at the age of 56, Hancock died at Boston. His funeral, one of the most impressive ever held in New England, culminated in burial at Old Granary Burying Ground.
Benjamin Harrison
VIRGINIA
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Benjamin Harrison, the most conservative of the Virginia signers except for Carter Braxton, was a member of one of the most prominent planter families in the South and was the fifth in a line of active politicians bearing the same name. Because of his rotundity, joviality, love of good foods and wines, and fondness for luxury, he acquired the nickname “Falstaff of Congress.” His son, William Henry, and his great-grandson, Benjamin, served as the ninth and 23d Presidents of the United States.
Harrison was born in 1726 at his father’s estate, Berkeley, in Charles City County, Va. He matriculated at the College of William and Mary, but left before graduating in 1745 upon the death of his father in order to assume management of the family plantation. Shortly thereafter he married; seven of his children were to survive infancy. In time, his landholdings grew to include eight plantations and other properties, and he also expanded into shipping and shipbuilding. Following the precedent set by his forebears, about 1749 he gained admission to the House of Burgesses. He sat there, frequently as speaker, until 1774, when the Royal Governor disbanded the body.
Harrison’s conservatism manifested itself early in the Revolutionary movement. In 1764 the burgesses, learning about the Stamp Act, impending in Parliament, named a committee to draw up a protest. As one of the committeemen, Harrison helped pen the document. The very next year, however, when the act went into effect, he refused to endorse Patrick Henry’s resolutions urging civil disobedience as a countermeasure. Forced to take a stand as the rift with the Crown widened, Harrison cast his lot with the patriots. Between 1773 and 1776, he shared in the tasks of the Revolutionary conventions, the committee of correspondence, and the provincial congresses.
Meantime, in 1774, Harrison had been appointed to the First Continental Congress. Although usually silent on the floor, he made valuable contributions on the foreign affairs, marine, military, and financial committees. As chairman of the committee of the whole (1776–77), he chaired the deliberations leading up to the adoption of the Declaration and the early debates on the proposed Articles of Confederation.
In 1777, the same year Harrison withdrew from Congress, he entered the lower house of the Virginia legislature, where he presided as speaker in the years 1778–81. His three terms as Governor (1781–84) reflected the ascendancy in Virginia of the conservatives, who included in addition to Harrison and Braxton such former extremists as Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee. Succeeded by Henry, Harrison rejoined the legislature (1784–91), holding the speakership part of the time. In 1788 at the Virginia ratifying convention he objected to the Federal Constitution because it lacked a bill of rights. Once ratification had occurred, however, he supported the new Government. Three years later, Harrison died in his mid-sixties at Berkeley and was buried there in the family cemetery.
John Hart
NEW JERSEY
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Signing the Declaration represented John Hart’s one significant act during an ephemeral tour in the Continental Congress, his only role in national politics. Yet, like most of the signers, he was dominant in community and State affairs. And he and his family directly experienced the tragedy of the war. Unfortunately, he died before the attainment of victory.
The year after Hart’s birth in 1711 at Stonington, Conn., his parents emigrated to New Jersey and settled on a farm in the Hopewell vicinity. Hart was to live there and till the soil all his life. In 1740 he married and began raising a family of 13. In time, while gaining the sobriquet “Honest John,” he acquired considerable property, including grist, saw, and fulling mills, and emerged as a civic leader. From the 1750’s until the outbreak of the War for Independence in 1775, despite a paucity of education, he worked his way up the political ladder in Hunterdon County and the State. He held the offices of justice of the peace, county judge, colonial legislator (1761–71), and judge of the New Jersey court of common pleas.
In the legislature’s dispute with the Royal Governor, Hart opposed parliamentary taxation and the stationing of British troops in the colony. During the years 1774–76, he attended the New Jersey provincial congresses, where he achieved the vice-presidency, and won appointment to the council of safety and the committee of correspondence. In June 1776 he and four other Delegates were chosen to replace the incumbent conservatives in the Continental Congress. The new delegation arrived at Philadelphia just a few days before the votes for independence on July 1 and 2 and cast affirmative ballots.
In August 1776, just after Hart signed the Declaration, he departed to accept the speakership in the lower house of the New Jersey legislature. That winter, during the British invasion of the province, the redcoats wreaked havoc on his farm and mills and drove him into hiding among the hills surrounding the Sourland Mountains. When he ended his exile in the wake of the American victories at Princeton and Trenton, he discovered that his wife, ill at the time of the attack, had died and his family scattered. In 1777–78 he sat again on the council of safety, but failing health forced his retirement. He died the next year, at the age of 69, on his Hopewell farm. He is buried in the yard of the First Baptist Church at Hopewell.
Joseph Hewes
NORTH CAROLINA
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Even in an age and land of such unlimited opportunities as 18th-century America, few men attained such success as merchant Joseph Hewes. He was rarely thwarted in his ambitions and enjoyed wealth and social prestige, reflected in political conservatism.
Born in 1730 at Maybury Hill, an estate on the outskirts of Princeton, N.J., Hewes was the son of a pious and well-to-do Quaker farmer. He received a strict religious upbringing, and studied at a local school. After learning trade from a Philadelphia merchant, he entered business for himself. About 1760, anxious to expand his modest fortune, he moved to the thriving seaport town of Edenton, N.C. There, where he was to reside for the rest of his life, he founded a profitable mercantile and shipping firm and gained prominence. Only one fateful event marred his life. A few days before his intended wedding date, his fiancée suddenly died. Hewes remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.
As a member of the North Carolina assembly (1766–75), the committee of correspondence (1773), and the provincial assemblies (1774–75), Hewes helped the Whigs overthrow the royal government. Elected to the Continental Congress in 1774, he vigorously supported nonimportation measures even though it meant personal financial loss. By the time of the outbreak of the War for Independence, the next year, anathema to the pacifistic Quakers, he had rejected the faith altogether—culminating a trend that had been evolving because of his love of dancing and other social pleasures, as well as his Revolutionary activities.
[Illustration: Joseph Hewes sponsored the American career of his friend John Paul Jones, who became the most famous naval officer of the Revolution.]
Hewes was one of those who originally opposed separation from Great Britain. Thus it was a disagreeable task for him, in May 1776, to present the Halifax Resolves to the Continental Congress. Enacted the month before by the provincial assembly, they instructed the North Carolina Delegates to vote for independence should it be proposed. Hewes, who considered the resolves premature, ignored his State’s commitment and at first opposed Richard Henry Lee’s June 7 independence resolution. According to John Adams, however, at one point during debate a transformation came over Hewes. “He started suddenly upright,” reported Adams, “and lifting up both his hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, ‘It is done! and I will abide by it.’”
One episode involving Hewes illustrates the recurring problem of sectional rivalries among the Delegates. As key members of the marine committee, Hewes and John Adams were instrumental in establishing the Continental Navy. When the time came to appoint the Nation’s first naval captains, the two men clashed. For one of the positions, Hewes nominated his friend John Paul Jones, an experienced seaman who had recently emigrated to Virginia from Scotland. Adams, maintaining that all the captaincies should be filled by New Englanders, stubbornly protested. New England had yielded to the South in the selection of a commander in chief of the Continental Army and Adams had fostered the selection of the able Virginian George Washington, so he was not now about to make a concession on the Navy. Hewes, sensing the futility of argument, reluctantly submitted. Jones, who was to become the most honored naval hero of the Revolution, received only a lieutenant’s commission.
In 1777 Hewes lost his bid for reelection to Congress, one of the few failures in his life, and in 1778–79 he found solace in the State legislature. In the latter year, despite health problems, he accepted reelection to the Continental Congress. A few months after arriving back in Philadelphia and not long before his 50th birthday, overworked and fatigued, he died. His grave is in Christ Church Burial Ground there.
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
SOUTH CAROLINA
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An aristocratic planter, lawyer, and jurist, Thomas Heyward, Jr., sat in the State legislature and the Continental Congress and commanded a militia battalion. He was one of three South Carolina signers captured and imprisoned by the British.
The eldest son of one of the wealthiest planters in South Carolina, Heyward was born in 1746 at Old House Plantation, in St. Helena’s Parish (later St. Luke’s Parish and present Jasper County) near the Georgia border about 25 miles northeast of Savannah. In 1771, following 5 years of study in London, he began practicing law. The next year, his parish sent him to the colonial legislature (1772–75), which was feuding with the Royal Governor over parliamentary taxation. During that period, in 1773, he married and settled down at White Hall Plantation, only a couple of miles from the residence of his father.
While a legislator, Heyward apparently joined the Revolutionaries, for in the summer of 1774 he attended a provincial convention that chose Delegates to the Continental Congress. During 1775–76 he was active in the first and second provincial congresses and on the council of safety and the committee that drafted a State constitution. In the Continental Congress (1776–78), he signed the Articles of Confederation as well as the Declaration. At the end of his tour, he journeyed to Charleston and took up residence in the townhouse he had inherited from his father the year before. He became a circuit court judge; represented Charleston in the State legislature, which convened in the city; and held a militia captaincy.
In 1779 Heyward was wounded during Brig. Gen. William Moultrie’s repulse of a British attack on Port Royal Island, along the South Carolina coast near Heyward’s home. The following year, the British plundered White Hall and carried off all the slaves. When they took Charleston, they captured Heyward, who was helping defend the city. He was imprisoned at St. Augustine, Fla., until July 1781. Shortly before his release, he celebrated Independence Day by setting patriotic verses to the British national anthem. “God save the King” became “God save the thirteen States,” a rendition that soon echoed from New Hampshire to Georgia.
From 1782 until 1789 Heyward resumed his position of circuit court judge, concurrently serving two terms in the State legislature (1782–84). In 1785 he helped found and became the first president of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina. The following year, his wife passed away and he remarried; apparently only one child from his two marriages reached maturity. He devoted most of his remaining days, except for attendance in 1790 at the State constitutional convention, to managing his plantation; he sold his Charleston townhouse in 1794. The last to survive among the South Carolina signers, he died in 1809 at the age of 62 and was interred in the family cemetery at Old House Plantation.
William Hooper
NORTH CAROLINA
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The ambivalence of William Hooper’s convictions prevented him from ever carving a solid niche in the field of politics. His youthful choice of occupation and political affiliation brought estrangement from his family and emigration from Massachusetts to far-off North Carolina. Motivated sometimes by self-interest and sometimes by intense patriotism, he flourished in law and politics. He originally supported the royal government, but became a Whig leader during the Revolution. After the war, his aristocratic leanings caused him to lose favor among the electorate.
Hooper was born in Boston, Mass., in 1742, the first child of William Hooper, a Scotch immigrant and Congregationalist clergyman who 5 years later was to transfer to the Anglican Church. Groomed for the ministry in his youth, Hooper undertook 7 years of preparatory education at Boston Latin School. This qualified him in 1757 to enter Harvard College in the sophomore class. He graduated 3 years later, but much to the chagrin of his father rejected the ministry as a profession. The next year, he further alienated his Loyalist father and isolated himself from his family by taking up the study of law under James Otis, a brilliant but radical lawyer.
## Partly to ameliorate family strife and partly to better his legal
opportunities, about 1764 Hooper sought his fortune at Wilmington, N.C. Three years later, he married the daughter of an early settler, by whom he was to have two sons and a daughter. He resided either in Wilmington or at his nearby estate, Finian, about 8 miles away on Masonboro Sound, rode the circuit from court to court, and built up a clientele among the wealthy planters of the lower Cape Fear region. Ambitious, he harbored political aspirations and by 1770–71 had obtained the position of deputy attorney general of North Carolina.
In this capacity, protecting his own economic interests and political goals, Hooper sided with Royal Governor William Tryon in a conflict between the government and a group of North Carolina frontiersmen known as the Regulators. They were rebelling against governmental corruption and oppression and high legal and other fees. Hooper urged the use of force to quell the rebellion, and in 1771 accompanied the government forces that defeated the rebels in the Battle of Alamance.
Within a few years, Hooper’s allegiance to the royal government waned. At the time of his election to the colonial assembly (1773–75), the act providing for the colony’s court system was about to expire. The assembly attempted to attach to the new court act a clause by which the colony could confiscate American property owned by foreign debtors, including inhabitants of Great Britain. When the Royal Governor blocked the bill, a 4-year struggle for control of the colony ensued. Hooper, though deprived of a source of income as a lawyer and dependent upon his wife’s small fortune for subsistence, championed the cause of the assembly.
Hooper rose to a position of leadership among the Whigs, though he disapproved of extremism. In a letter dated April 1774 to his friend James Iredell, he prophesized the Colonies’ break with Great Britain—the earliest known prediction of independence, which won for Hooper the epithet “Prophet of Independence.” In the summer, after the Royal Governor had dissolved the colonial assembly, he helped organize and presided over an extralegal conference at Wilmington. It voted to convene a provincial assembly, which met in August at New Bern and elected Delegates, one of whom was Hooper, to the Continental Congress. Later that same year, he became a member of the committee of correspondence.
During the period 1774–77, Hooper divided his time between Congress, where he gained a reputation as an orator, and the North Carolina provincial assembly, in which he labored to set up a State government. In 1777, however, the financial difficulties with his law practice and a desire to be near his family prompted him to resign from Congress and return to Wilmington. He was immediately elected to the State legislature and served there almost continuously until 1786.
In 1780 the British invaded North Carolina. Hooper moved his family from Finian into Wilmington for safety, but in January 1781, while he was away on business, the city fell to the enemy. Separated from his loved ones for more than 10 months and often destitute, he depended upon friends in Edenton and vicinity for shelter and food. On one occasion, taken violently ill with malaria, he was nursed back to health by Iredell’s wife. Upon the British evacuation of the Wilmington area, in November, Hooper returned to find most of his property, including Finian, in ruins. Shortly thereafter he rejoined his wife and children, who had fled to Hillsborough, which he made his home for the rest of his life.
During the aftermath of the Revolution, Hooper, despite continuing political aspirations, lost favor with the public. Unable to adjust to the rise of republicanism in the State, he adopted a conservative stance. His aristocratic pretensions, forgiving attitude toward Loyalists, and lack of faith in the common people undermined his popularity. In 1788 he strenuously campaigned for State ratification of the Federal Constitution, which occurred early the next year. By this time, he was in ill health and despondent, but lingered on for nearly 2 years. He died in 1790 in his late forties. His remains, moved from the Hillsborough town cemetery in 1894, rest today at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park near Greensboro.
Stephen Hopkins
RHODE ISLAND
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This signer, the second oldest next to Benjamin Franklin, is noted for his tremulous signature. Aged 69 and afflicted with palsy, according to tradition he declared, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not!” Before, during, and after a comparatively brief stretch of congressional service, he occupied Rhode Island’s highest offices and fostered the cultural and economic growth of Providence.
Hopkins attained success purely by his own efforts. Born in 1707 at Providence and equipped with but a modicum of basic education, he grew up in the adjacent agricultural community of Scituate, earned his living as a farmer and surveyor, and married at the age of 19. Five years later, in 1731, when Scituate Township separated from Providence, he plunged into politics. During the next decade, he held the following elective or appointive offices: moderator of the first town meeting, town clerk, president of the town council, justice of the peace, justice and clerk of the Providence County court of common pleas, legislator, and speaker of the house.
In 1742, about 2 years after he and his brother Esek founded a mercantile-shipping firm, Stephen moved back to Providence. For the next three decades, he built up his business and would probably have acquired a fortune had he not at the same time supported a variety of civic enterprises and broadened his political activities. He continued in the legislature, served as assistant and chief justice of the Superior Court and ten-time Governor, and represented Rhode Island at various intercolonial meetings. At the Albany Congress (1754), he cultivated a friendship with Franklin and assisted him in framing a plan of colonial union that the congress passed but the Colonies rejected. The next year, 2 years after the demise of his first wife, who had given birth to five sons and two daughters, he remarried.
About this time, Hopkins took over leadership of the colony’s radical faction, supported by Providence merchants. For more than a decade, it bitterly fought for political supremacy in Rhode Island with a conservative group in Newport, led by Samuel Ward, a political enemy of Hopkins.
Hopkins was a man of broad interests, including humanitarianism, education, and science, and exerted his talents in many fields. About 1754 he helped set up a public subscription library in Providence. He acted as first chancellor of Rhode Island College (later Brown University), founded in 1764 at Warren, and 6 years later was instrumental in relocating it to Providence. He also held membership in the Philosophical Society of Newport. Strongly opposing slavery, in 1774 he authored a bill enacted by the Rhode Island legislature that prohibited the importation of slaves into the colony—one of the earliest antislavery laws in the United States.
Long before, Hopkins had sided with the Revolutionaries. In 1762 he helped found the influential _Providence Gazette and Country Journal_. Two years later, he contributed to it an article entitled “The Rights of the Colonies Examined,” which criticized parliamentary taxation and recommended colonial home rule. Issued as a pamphlet the next year, it circulated widely throughout the Colonies and Great Britain and established Hopkins as one of the earliest of the patriot leaders. He also sat on the Rhode Island committee of correspondence and carried on with his duties in the legislature and Superior Court while a Member of the Continental Congress (1774–76). He served on the committees that prepared the Articles of Confederation and that created the Continental Navy and appointed Esek Hopkins as its commander in chief. Ill health compelled Stephen to retire in September 1776, a month after he signed the Declaration.
Hopkins declined subsequent reelections to Congress, but sat in the State legislature for a time and took part in several New England political conventions. He withdrew from public service about 1780 and died 5 years later in Providence at the age of 78. He was interred in the North Burial Ground.
Francis Hopkinson
NEW JERSEY
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The literary and artistic talents of this versatile signer brought him more acclaim than his political and legal
## activities. Although a lawyer and judge by profession, he
achieved more eminence as an essayist, poet, artist, and musician. His verse and satirical essays rank among the better literary efforts of the Revolutionary and early Federal periods, and he was one of America’s first native composers. His eldest son, Joseph (1770–1842), wrote “Hail Columbia” and won distinction as a lawyer, jurist, U.S. Congressman, and patron of the arts.
Hopkinson was born at Philadelphia in 1737, the eldest of eight children. His father, who died when he was 14, was a prominent lawyer-jurist, politician, and civic leader. Upon graduation from the College of Philadelphia (later part of the University of Pennsylvania) in 1757, young Hopkinson studied law under Benjamin Chew, attorney general of the province, and 4 years later joined the bar. In 1763 he obtained the position of customs collector at Salem, N.J. Three years hence, after failing in business, he sailed to England to seek an appointment as colonial customs collector through the influence of friends and relatives. During his yearlong stay, though unsuccessful in his vocational quest, he visited Benjamin Franklin, Lord North, and other prominent people, and may have studied under artist Benjamin West.
Back in Philadelphia, Hopkinson operated a store and married in 1768. Four years later he became the customs collector at New Castle, Del. About 1774 he took up residence at the home of his father-in-law in Bordentown, N.J., practiced law, and began a 2-year tour in the legislature. As a Member of the Continental Congress for only a few months in 1776, he relieved his ennui by drawing caricatures of his colleagues. His later offices included: chairman (1777–78) of Philadelphia’s Continental Navy Board, treasurer of loans (1778–81), judge of the admiralty court of Pennsylvania (1779), and Federal circuit judge for the eastern district of the State (1789–91).
During his busy public career, the ambitious Hopkinson managed to leave his stamp on the fields of music, art, and literature. His “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free” (1759) probably represents the first American composition of secular music; his “Temple of Minerva” (1781), the first American attempt at opera. In art, he was noted particularly for his crayon portraits and his work on heraldic emblems. But his literary attainments surpassed all his others.
Between 1757 and 1773, Hopkinson contributed numerous poems and essays, many of them in a humorous and satirical vein, to various periodicals. The following year, he began advancing the patriot cause. A profusion of widely read and influential pamphlets, essays, and letters, often presented in an allegorical style, derided and ridiculed the British and the Loyalists, outlined colonial grievances, and encouraged the colonists. _The Prophecy_, written in 1776 before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, predicted that event. After the war, Hopkinson continued to treat political and social themes, and became one of the best known writers in the United States.
While a Federal circuit judge, Hopkinson died in Philadelphia at the age of 53. He was laid to rest in Christ Church Burial Ground. Surviving him were his widow and five children.
Samuel Huntington
CONNECTICUT
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Several of the signers were self-made men. One of the most successful of them was Samuel Huntington. Reared amid humble surroundings, he educated himself in the law and, despite recurring health problems, climbed to the pinnacles of the State and National Governments.
Born into a large family in 1731 at Windham (present Scotland), Conn., Huntington grew up on a farm, received a limited education, and at the age of 16 began work as a cooper. But his ambition soon pushed him onward. He independently studied borrowed legal tomes, won admittance to the bar about 1758, and set up practice. Two years later, he moved to nearby Norwich. The next year, he married; he and his wife, who were to be childless, later adopted three children. As time went on, he prospered in the law and became a community leader.
In 1764 Huntington began his public career, in the Connecticut legislature. The next year, he was appointed as King’s Attorney of the colony and won election as justice of the peace for New London County. He occupied these positions for practically the entire decade or so prior to the outbreak of the War for Independence, in 1775. Meantime, 2 years earlier, the colonial legislature had named him as a judge of the Connecticut Superior Court, an appointment renewed annually for a decade.
In 1774 Huntington, registering his growing sympathy for the Colonies in their struggle against the Crown, resigned as King’s Attorney and joined the front ranks of the Revolutionaries. The next year, he became a member of the upper house of the legislature (1775–84), and entered national politics when he became a Delegate to the Continental Congress. His committee assignments included those dealing with Indian affairs, ordnance supply, and marine matters. In the fall of 1776, fatigue and health worries caused him to return to Connecticut. Between then and 1783, plagued with spells of illness, he attended congressional sessions intermittently (1778, 1779–81, 1783), often returning home to recuperate. Despite this burden, he assumed the heavy responsibilities of President of Congress (1779–81), presiding on March 1, 1781, when the Articles of Confederation were adopted.
Huntington’s well-earned “retirement” when he returned to Connecticut in 1783, after 8 years of service to the Nation, turned out to involve 12 years of vigorous activity—despite his waning health. Even while he had been in Congress, he had served his State in various other ways, and all his legislative and other positions had been held open for him. A succession of appointive and elective offices followed: chief justice of the Superior Court (1784), Lieutenant Governor (1785), and Governor (1786–96). In the latter capacity, he led the battle for Connecticut’s ratification of the Federal Constitution and improved the educational system. As one of Connecticut’s seven first presidential electors, in 1789 he won two “favorite son” votes for the Presidency.
Ever interested in education, despite his own lack of a college degree, in the 1780’s Huntington received honorary degrees from Princeton, Yale, and Dartmouth; and was appointed one of the original trustees of Plainfield (Conn.) Academy. Before that time, he had acted as adviser to the president of Yale.
In 1796 at the age of 65, still Governor, he died at his home in Norwich and was interred in the Old Burial Ground.
Thomas Jefferson
VIRGINIA
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An intellectual and political titan who ranked among the most brilliant men of his time, Thomas Jefferson richly contributed to his State and Nation—as statesman, diplomat, scientist, architect, author, and educator. Graced with a wide-ranging and probing mind, he also delved into linguistics, law, art, geography, ethnology, music, agriculture, paleontology, botany, meteorology, geology, parliamentary practice, and invention.
As author of the Declaration of Independence, influential political theorist, cofounder of the Democratic-Republican Party, Virginia legislator and Governor, first U.S. Secretary of State, second Vice President, and third President, Jefferson has left an indelible impression on our political system and philosophy. Beyond that, he laid the basis for the westward expansion of the Nation; and two of his disciples, Madison and Monroe, followed him into the White House.
Like most successful politicians, however, Jefferson created his share of enemies and felt the sting of failure. Inability to reconcile his contradictory traits of idealism and pragmatism resulted in inconsistencies that rendered him vulnerable. He lacked the aggressiveness and charisma of many leaders. To compensate for his basic shyness and his deficiencies as a speaker, he mastered written expression and learned to exercise administrative power. His governorship ended ignominiously. And his vision of an agricultural America, peopled by well-educated and politically astute yeomen farmers was never to be realized. Yet none of these factors diminishes his stature or undermines his achievements.
The eldest of two sons in a family of ten, Jefferson was born in 1743 at Shadwell, a frontier plantation in Goochland (present Albemarle) County, Va. But 2 years later his father, Peter, a self-made surveyor-magistrate-planter who had married into the distinguished Randolphs, moved his family eastward to Tuckahoe Plantation, near Richmond. His reason for doing so was a promise he had made to his wife’s newly deceased first cousin, William Randolph, to act as guardian of his son, Thomas Mann Randolph. Young Jefferson passed most of his boyhood in the Randolph home, beginning his elementary education with private tutors. In 1752, when he was about 9 years old, the family returned to Shadwell. His father died 5 years later and bequeathed him almost 3,000 acres.
In 1760, at the age of 17, Jefferson matriculated at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg. An incidental benefit was the chance to observe the operation of practical politics in the colonial capital. Jefferson graduated in 1762, studied law locally under the noted teacher George Wythe, and in 1767 was admitted to the bar.
At Shadwell, Jefferson assumed the civic responsibilities and prominence his father had enjoyed. In 1770, when fire consumed the structure, he moved to his nearby estate Monticello, where he had already begun building a home. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow. During their decade of life together, she was to bear six children, but only two daughters reached maturity.
Meanwhile, in 1769 at the age of 26, Jefferson had been elected to the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. He was a member continuously until 1775, and alined himself with the anti-British group. Unlike his smooth-tongued confreres Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, Jefferson concentrated his efforts in committee work rather than in debate. A literary stylist, he drafted many of the Revolutionary documents adopted by the House of Burgesses. His _A Summary View of the Rights of British America_ (1774), one of the most influential essays of the era, disavowed parliamentary control of the Colonies and contended that they were tied to the King only by their own volition and recognition of mutual benefits.
[Illustration: First page of Thomas Jefferson’s pamphlet _A Summary View_ (1774), one of the earliest and most influential Revolutionary tracts.]
Jefferson utilized the same working methods in the Continental Congress (1775–76), where his decisiveness in committee contrasted markedly with his silence on the floor. His colleagues, however, rejected several of the documents he drafted his first year because of their extreme anti-British tone. But, by the time he returned the following May, after spending the winter in Virginia, the temper of Congress had changed drastically. The very next month, though only 33 years old, he was assigned to the five-man committee chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence, a task his colleagues assigned to him. In September, not long after Congress had adopted the draft with modifications and most of the Delegates signed it, Jefferson returned to Virginia—anxious to be nearer home and feeling he could make a deeper political mark there.
A notable career in the House of Delegates (1776–79), the lower house of the legislature, followed. There Jefferson took over leadership of the “progressive” party from Patrick Henry, who relinquished it to become Governor. Highlights of this service included revision of the State laws (1776–79), in which Jefferson collaborated with George Wythe and Edmund Pendleton; and authorship of a bill for the establishment of religious freedom in Virginia, introduced in 1779 but not passed until 7 years later.
Although hampered as Governor (1779–81) by wartime conditions and constitutional limitations, Jefferson proved to be a weak executive, even in emergencies hesitating to wield his authority. When the British invaded the State in the spring of 1781, the situation became chaotic. On June 3, while the legislature was meeting in Charlottesville because the redcoats held Richmond, Jefferson recommended the combining of civil and military agencies under Gen. Thomas Nelson, Jr., and virtually abdicated office. The next day, British raiders almost captured him and a group of legislators he was entertaining at Monticello. Although later formally vindicated for his abandonment of the governorship, the action fostered a conservative takeover of the government and his reputation remained clouded for some time.
Jefferson stayed out of the limelight for 2 years, during which time his wife died. In 1783 he reentered Congress, which the next year sent him to Paris to aid Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in their attempts to negotiate commercial treaties with European nations. During his 5-year stay, Jefferson succeeded Franklin as Minister to France (1785–89), gained various commercial concessions from and strengthened relations with the French, visited England and Italy, absorbed European culture, and observed the beginnings of the French Revolution.
[Illustration: The University of Virginia in 1826, the year of the death of founder Jefferson.]
In the years that followed, interspersed with pleasant interludes at Monticello, Jefferson filled the highest offices in the land: Secretary of State (1790–93), Vice President (1797–1801), and two-term President (1801–9). Ever averse to political strife, he occupied these positions as much out of a sense of civic and party duty as personal ambition. Aggravating normal burdens and pressures were his bitter feuds with Alexander Hamilton on most aspects of national policy, and the vindictiveness of Federalist attacks. Jefferson took considerable satisfaction, however, from his many accomplishments. Among these was the cofounding with James Madison of the Democratic-Republican Party, which in time drove the Federalists out of power.
Physically and mentally exhausted, in 1809 Jefferson retired for the final time to Monticello. He retained his health and varied interests and corresponded with and entertained statesmen, politicians, scientists, explorers, scholars, and Indian chiefs. When the pace of life grew too hectic, he found haven at Poplar Forest, a retreat near Lynchburg he had designed and built in 1806–19. His pet project during most of his last decade was founding the University of Virginia (1819), in Charlottesville.
Painfully distressing to Jefferson, however, was the woeful state of his finances. His small salary in public office, the attendant neglect of his fortune and estate, general economic conditions, and debts he inherited from his wife had taken a heavy toll. He lived more frugally than was his custom in an attempt to stave off disaster and sold off as many of his lands and slaves as he could. But when a friend defaulted on a note for a large sum, Jefferson fell hopelessly into debt and was forced to sell his library to the Government. It became the nucleus of the Library of Congress.
Jefferson died only a few hours before John Adams at the age of 83 on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. For his tombstone at Monticello, ignoring his many high offices and multitudes of other achievements, he chose three accomplishments that he wanted to be remembered for: authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the founding of the University of Virginia.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
VIRGINIA
[Illustration]
No less a patriot than his dynamic elder brother Richard Henry and his gifted younger brothers Arthur and William, Francis Lightfoot Lee preferred the uneventful life of a country squire to the public spotlight and chose to follow rather than to lead. Despite his shyness and weakness as a speaker, he exercised extensive political influence, took an active part in the Revolution, and signed both the Declaration and the Articles of Confederation.
Lee, a member of one of the most famous families in Virginia and U.S. history and the sixth son and eighth child of planter Thomas Lee, was born in 1734 at the family estate, Stratford Hall, in Westmoreland County, Va. He was educated by a private tutor and never attended college. In 1750, upon the death of his father, he inherited Coton, an estate in Fairfax County. Seven years later, newly created Loudoun County absorbed Coton. At that time, the colonial legislature nominated him as Loudoun lieutenant. The next year, he moved to Coton and became trustee of the newly incorporated village of Leesburg, named after him or his brother Philip Ludwell, both local landowners. For the next decade, Francis Lightfoot represented the county in the House of Burgesses.
In 1769 Lee married socialite Rebecca Tayloe of Richmond County. The newlyweds resided at Mount Airy estate with Rebecca’s parents for a few months until Menokin, a new home that Colonel Tayloe was building nearby for them, was completed. From then until 1774, Lee sat again with the burgesses.
Lee had joined the Revolutionary movement at an early date. From the time of the Stamp Act (1765) until the outbreak of war a decade later, he participated in most of the Virginia protests and assemblies. He rarely debated on the floor in Congress (1775–79), but often opposed the position of his brother Richard Henry, and served on the military and marine committees as well as that charged with drafting the Articles of Confederation.
In 1779, weary of office and longing for the peace and quiet of Menokin, Lee left Congress. Except for a few years in the State legislature, he abandoned public service altogether and lived quietly. In 1797, only a few months after the death of his childless wife, at the age of 62 he succumbed. Burial took place in the Tayloe family graveyard at Mount Airy.
Richard Henry Lee
VIRGINIA
[Illustration]
Richard Henry Lee, brilliant orator and fiery Revolutionary leader, introduced the independence resolution in the Continental Congress, served for awhile as its President, and later became a U.S. Senator. Fearing undue centralization of power, he fought against the Constitution and led the campaign that brought inclusion of the Bill of Rights. Throughout his life, he strenuously opposed the institution of slavery. He and Francis Lightfoot Lee were the only brothers among the signers.
Fifth son and seventh of 11 children, Lee was born in 1732 along the Potomac shore at Stratford Hall. His initial tutorial education was supplemented by extensive study at Wakefield Academy, in Yorkshire, England, and a tour of northern Europe. He sailed home about 1751 at the age of 19, the year after his father’s death, and resided with his eldest brother Philip Ludwell at Stratford Hall. In 1757 Richard Henry married. About this time, he began building and soon occupied Chantilly, about 3 miles to the east on land leased from his brother. In 1768 Richard Henry’s wife died, leaving four children; the next year, he remarried, a union that yielded five more offspring.
Lee meantime, following family tradition, had committed himself to politics. In 1757, at the age of 25, he became justice of the peace for Westmoreland County. The following year, he moved up to the House of Burgesses and sat there until 1775. One of the first to oppose Britain, he early allied with Patrick Henry. As a protest against the Stamp Act (1765), Lee drew up the Westmoreland Association (1766), a nonimportation agreement signed by some of the citizens of his county. The next year, he denounced the Townshend Acts. And a year later he proposed in a letter to John Dickinson of Pennsylvania that the individual colonies set up committees to correspond with each other—an idea that did not come to fruition for 5 years.
In 1769, when Lee and Henry penned an address to the King protesting several actions of Parliament, the Royal Governor disbanded the House of Burgesses. Lee thereupon met with other patriots at Raleigh’s Tavern and helped frame the Virginia Association, a nonimportation agreement. Many other colonies formed similar associations, but in 1770 Parliament repealed most of the duties and the protest spirit subsided.
In March 1773, when anti-British feeling flared once again, Lee, Henry, and Jefferson, who had entered the House of Burgesses in 1769, organized a Virginia committee of correspondence and invited the other colonies to do likewise. Learning of the British closing of Boston Harbor in May 1774, they persuaded their colleagues to declare, as a protest, a day of fasting and prayer. The Royal Governor again dissolved the burgesses. The Revolutionaries reconvened at Raleigh’s Tavern, drew up a new nonimportation agreement, and resolved to appeal to the other colonies for an intercolonial congress. But, before such action could be taken, Virginia received an invitation from Massachusetts to send representatives to a congress to be held in September at Philadelphia—the First Continental Congress. Virginia’s first provincial assembly met in August and designated seven Delegates, including Lee and Henry.
Lee’s outstanding congressional act was the introduction on June 7, 1776, of the resolution for independence from Britain, seconded by John Adams. This document, Lee’s condensed redraft of one forwarded him by a convention that had met in Williamsburg on May 15, proposed severing relations with Britain, the forming of foreign alliances, and preparation of a plan for confederation. On June 13, or 2 days after a committee was appointed to draft the Declaration, Lee journeyed back to Virginia, apparently because of illness in the family. He did not return and sign the Declaration until sometime subsequent to the formal ceremony on August 2. Like his brother Francis Lightfoot, in 1777 he also subscribed to the Articles of Confederation. After 1776, however, his influence in Congress waned, and 3 years later ill health forced his resignation.
As a State legislator (1780–84) Lee joined the conservative faction, which represented the interests of the large planters. A Member of Congress again in the period 1784–89, he served in 1784–85 as its President. In 1787, though elected to the Constitutional Convention, he refused to attend and led congressional opposition to the Constitution, especially because of the absence of a bill of rights. Although he was well aware of the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, he and others feared a stronger Central Government. Lee’s “Letters of the Federal Farmer to the Republican,” the collective title for two pamphlets outlining his objections to the Constitution, epitomized antifederalist sentiment.
In 1789 Lee entered the U.S. Senate, but because of failing health resigned in 1792, the year after the Bill of Rights was incorporated into the Constitution. He died in 1794, aged 62, at Chantilly. His grave is in the Lee family cemetery near Hague, Virginia.
Francis Lewis
NEW YORK
[Illustration]
Few other signers felt the tragedy of the War for Independence more directly than Francis Lewis, whose wife died as a result of British imprisonment. To further the cause, he also expended a considerable portion of the fortune he had acquired as a merchant.
Lewis was the only child of a minister. He was born in 1713 at Llandaff, Glamorganshire, Wales. Orphaned at an early age and raised by relatives, he studied at Westminster School in London and then took employment with a local firm. In 1738, deciding to go into business for himself, he set up branches in New York and Philadelphia and for a few years shuttled between those cities and northern European ports. In 1745 he married a New York girl, his partner’s sister.
During the French and Indian War, in 1756, while functioning as a clothing contractor for British troops at Fort Oswego, in present New York, Lewis was taken captive and sent to France for imprisonment. Upon his release, apparently in 1763, as a recompense the British Government awarded him a large land grant in America. He returned to New York City, reentered business, and quickly earned a fortune. In 1765 he retired to the village of Whitestone (now part of Flushing), on Long Island, but in 1771 he temporarily returned to New York City to help his son enter the business world, even probably making a voyage to England with him.
Back home, Lewis devoted most of his energies to the Revolutionary movement, which he had joined in 1765 by attending the Stamp Act Congress. He was also likely one of the leaders of the New York Sons of Liberty. In 1774 he became a member of the New York Revolutionary committees of fifty-one and sixty, the next year attended the provincial convention, and subsequently helped set up the State government.
In the Continental Congress (1775–79), Lewis rarely took the floor but served on the marine, foreign affairs, and commerce committees, as well as sitting on the Board of Admiralty and engaging in troop supply matters. He defended Gen. George Washington from the attacks of the Conway Cabal. Because of Tory dominance in New York, Lewis and the other Delegates were instructed not to vote for independence on July 1 and 2, 1776, but Lewis signed the Declaration on August 2.
That same year, when the British invaded Long Island, they destroyed Lewis’ home in Whitestone and took his wife into custody. She was eventually released in an exchange for wives of British officials, but the hardships she had endured ruined her health and brought about her death in 1779. The grief-stricken Lewis immediately left Congress, but remained on the Board of Admiralty until 1781, at which time he abandoned politics altogether. He lived in retirement with his sons, and died in 1802 at the age of 89 in New York City. He was buried there in an unmarked grave in the yard of Trinity Church.
Philip Livingston
NEW YORK
[Illustration]
A member of the landed gentry, merchant Philip Livingston lived a princely life and devoted much energy to civic affairs and philanthropic enterprises. He was a conservative in politics, and at first opposed independence. On the other hand, despite wartime business reverses, he contributed generously to the Revolutionary effort and continued in public service until the day he died.
Livingston was the fifth son of Philip Livingston, second lord of Livingston Manor, of Scotch descent, and Catherine Van Brugh, of Dutch lineage. Young Livingston was born in 1716 at his father’s townhouse in Albany and spent most of his childhood there or at the family manor at Linlithgo, about 30 miles to the south.
Upon receiving a degree from Yale in 1737, Livingston entered the import business in New York City. Three years later, he married and moved into a townhouse on Duke Street in Manhattan; he was to sire five sons and four daughters. As time went on, he built up a fortune,
## particularly as a trader-privateer during the French and Indian War
(1754–63). In 1764, though retaining his Duke Street home, he acquired a 40-acre estate on Brooklyn Heights overlooking the East River and New York Harbor.
While prospering as a merchant, Livingston devoted many of his energies to humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors. Among the organizations he fostered, financially aided, or helped administer were King’s College (later Columbia University), the New York Society Library, St. Andrew’s Society, the New York Chamber of Commerce, and New York Hospital.
Livingston was also a proponent of political and religious freedom. As a New York City alderman (1754–63), he identified with the popular party that opposed the aristocratic ruling class of the colony. In a decade of service (1759–69) in the colonial legislature, he stood behind the Whigs in their quarrel with the Royal Governor and attended the Stamp Act Congress in 1765. But, a believer in the sort of dignified protests mounted by lawyers and merchants, he resented the riotous behavior of such groups as the Sons of Liberty.
[Illustration: The Brooklyn home of Philip Livingston from 1764 until his death in 1778. When the British occupied New York, they used it as a hospital. In 1811 fire destroyed it.]
In the 1769 elections the Tories gained control of the legislature. In his bid for reelection, Livingston, fearful of the rise of extremism among the populace, attempted to unite the moderate factions. Defeated in New York City, which from then on was Tory-dominated, he managed to obtain reelection from the Livingston Manor district. The new assembly, claiming he could not represent an area in which he did not reside, unseated him.
In 1774 Livingston became a member of the committee of fifty-one, an extralegal group that selected New York City Delegates to the Continental Congress, one of whom was Livingston. He also served on the committee of sixty, formed to enforce congressional enactments. The next year, he won election to the committee of one hundred, which governed New York City temporarily until the first provincial congress of the colony met later that year.
Between 1774 and 1778 Livingston divided his time between the Continental Congress and the New York provincial assembly/legislature. In Congress he sat on committees dealing with marine, commerce, finance, military, and Indian matters. He was absent on July 1–2, 1776, perhaps on purpose even though the New York Delegates abstained from voting on the independence issue, but on August 2 he signed the Declaration.
After their defeat in the Battle of Long Island (August 27, 1776), Washington and his officers met at Livingston’s residence in Brooklyn Heights and decided to evacuate the island. Subsequent to the ill-fated peace negotiations at Staten Island in September between Admiral Lord Richard Howe and three representatives of the Continental Congress, the British occupied New York City. They utilized Livingston’s Duke Street home as a barracks and his Brooklyn Heights residence as a Royal Navy hospital, as well as confiscating his business interests. He later sold some of his remaining property to sustain public credit. With the advance of the British, Livingston and his family had fled to Esopus (later Kingston), N.Y., where the State capital was temporarily located before moving to nearby Poughkeepsie.
Livingston passed away at the age of 62 in 1778, the third earliest signer to die (after John Morton and Button Gwinnett). At the time, though in poor health, he was still in Congress, then meeting at York, Pa. He is buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in that city.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
SOUTH CAROLINA
[Illustration]
Like two of the three other South Carolina signers, Heyward and Middleton, Thomas Lynch, Jr., was an aristocratic planter. But, despite his wealth and social position, he experienced one of the most tragic lives of all the signers. He was stricken by illness in the midst of his political and military labors for his State, never fully recovered his health, and perished at sea in his 30th year. He died at a younger age than any other signer, though a couple succumbed at an earlier date. He was also the second youngest in the group, next to fellow South Carolinian Edward Rutledge.
The only son of Thomas Lynch, Sr., a rich rice planter, Lynch was born in 1749 at Hopsewee Plantation, located at Winyaw on the North Santee River in Prince George’s Parish (present Georgetown County), S.C. After attending the Indigo Society School at nearby Georgetown, from 1764 until 1772 he studied abroad at Eton and Cambridge and read law in London. Upon his return home, deciding not to engage in the law, he married and settled at Peach Tree Plantation. A gift from his father, it was situated in St. James Parish (present Charleston County) on the South Santee River about 4 miles south of Hopsewee.
As the heir of one of the most fervent Revolutionaries and influential men in the colony, Lynch naturally took a deep interest in politics and enjoyed strong support from the electorate. During the years 1774–76, while his father served in the Continental Congress, he labored on the home front, attending the first and second provincial congresses as well as the first State legislature and sitting on the State constitutional committee.
In 1775, however, fate dealt Lynch a cruel blow. He accepted a captaincy in the First South Carolina Regiment of Continentals—to the dismay of his father who had hoped to use his position to obtain a higher rank for him. On a recruiting trip to North Carolina, young Lynch contracted bilious fever. This ended his military days and rendered him a partial invalid for his few remaining years.
Early in 1776 at Philadelphia the elder Lynch suffered a stroke that virtually incapacitated him for further public service. In the spring, his concerned colleagues in South Carolina elected his son to the Continental Congress, probably so that he could care for his father and act officially on his behalf. Although ill himself, Lynch made the onerous trip to Philadelphia. He stayed there throughout the summer, long enough to vote for and sign, at the age of 27, the Declaration of Independence. His father was unable to take part in the ceremony. The two were the only father-son team that served concurrently in the Continental Congress.
By the end of the year, the failing health of both men compelled them to start homeward. En route, at Annapolis, Md., a second stroke took the life of the senior Lynch. His son, broken in spirit and physically unable to continue in politics, retired to Peach Tree. Late in 1779 he and his wife, heading for southern France in an attempt to regain his health, boarded a ship bound for the West Indies that foundered. The couple died childless.
Thomas McKean
DELAWARE
[Illustration]
Lawyer-jurist Thomas McKean stands out from the other signers in a variety of ways. He was the last to pen his signature to the Declaration, sometime after January 18, 1777. Although many Delegates simultaneously took part in State affairs, none did so as extensively as McKean—and he figured prominently in not one but two States, Delaware and Pennsylvania. He was also the only signer to be the chief executive of and concurrent officeholder in two States. Furthermore, he numbered among those who also subscribed to the Articles of Confederation, and he served a long tour in Congress.
Of Scotch-Irish ancestry, McKean was born in 1734. He was the second son of a farmer-tavernkeeper who lived in New London Township, in Chester County, Pa., near the New Jersey and Delaware boundaries. After studying for 7 years at Rev. Francis Alison’s academy at nearby New London, McKean read law with a cousin at New Castle, Del. In 1754, at the age of 20, he was admitted to the Delaware bar and soon expanded his practice into Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
During the next two and a half decades, McKean occupied an array of appointive and elective offices in Delaware, some simultaneously: high sheriff of Kent County; militia captain; trustee of the loan office of New Castle County; customs collector and judge at New Castle; deputy attorney general of Sussex County; chief notary officer for the province; and clerk (1757–59) and member (1762–79) of the legislature, including the speakership of the lower house (1772–73). In 1762, he had also helped compile the colony’s laws.
McKean’s Revolutionary tendencies had first revealed themselves during the Stamp Act (1765) controversy. He was one of the most vociferous of the delegates at the Stamp Act Congress. In 1774, a year after the death of his wife, whom he had wed in 1763, he remarried and established his home in Philadelphia. He nevertheless retained membership in the Delaware legislature, which that same year elected him to the Continental Congress. Except for the period December 1776-January 1778, when conservative opposition unseated him, he stayed there until 1783 and served as President for a few months in 1781. He played a key role in the Revolutionary program, at the same time fostering the establishment of governments in Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Furthermore, it was McKean who was responsible for breaking the Delaware tie in the congressional vote for independence. On July 1, 1776, date of the first vote, the two Delaware representatives present, McKean and George Read, deadlocked. McKean, who had balloted affirmatively, dispatched an urgent message to the third Delegate, Caesar Rodney, who was at his home near Dover, Del., on military matters, to rush to Philadelphia. Rodney, making an 80-mile horseback ride through a storm, arrived just in time to swing Delaware over to independence on July 2.
During the hiatus in his congressional career, from late 1776 until early in 1778, McKean had remained in the lower house of the Delaware legislature, of which he became speaker once again. In that capacity, in September-November 1777, he temporarily replaced the president of Delaware, whom the British had captured. In vain they also pursued McKean, who was forced to move his family several times. Meantime, in July, he had been appointed chief justice of the Pennsylvania Superior Court, a position he was to hold for 22 years.
After 1783, when his congressional service ended, McKean focused his political activities in Pennsylvania. As a Federalist, in 1787 he was instrumental in that State’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution. In the State constitutional convention of 1789–90 he demonstrated mistrust of popular government. During the 1790’s, disenchanted with Federalist foreign policy, he switched to the Democratic-Republicans.
While Governor for three terms (1799–1808), McKean was the storm center of violent partisan warfare. Although he exercised strong leadership and advanced education and internal improvements, his imperiousness infuriated the Federalists, alienated many members of his own party, and resulted in an attempt to impeach him. Especially controversial were his rigid employment of the spoils system, including the appointment of friends and relatives, and his refusal to call a convention to revise the constitution. As a result, he won reelection only with the support of members of both parties who opposed the revision.
McKean lived out his life quietly in Philadelphia. He died in 1817 at the age of 83, survived by his second wife and four of the 11 children from his two marriages. He was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery. His substantial estate consisted of stocks, bonds, and huge tracts of land in Pennsylvania.
Arthur Middleton
SOUTH CAROLINA
[Illustration]
Despite long years of study in England, exceptional wealth, and social eminence, Arthur Middleton evolved into an avid Revolutionary. Because of preoccupation with State matters,
## particularly military defense, his attendance in Congress
was spasmodic. The British captured him during their attack on Charleston and ravished his estate.
Middleton was born in 1742 at Middleton Place, the family estate on the Ashley River near Charleston. His father, who owned a score of plantations comprising 50,000 acres and employing some 800 slaves, ranked among the wealthiest and most politically active men in the province. While still a young boy, Arthur sailed to England for an education. He attended Hackney School, graduated from Cambridge University, and studied law in London. In 1764, the year after his return, he wed the woman who was to bear him nine children, and embarked on a career as justice of the peace and colonial legislator. In the years 1768–71, however, he and his wife made an extended tour of Europe.
Reelected the next year to the legislature, Middleton joined the Revolutionaries in their campaign against the Royal Governor. While sitting in the first and second provincial assemblies (1775–76), Middleton aided in organizing a night raid on public arms stores at Charleston before the Governor could seize them, raised money for armed resistance, recommended defense measures for Charleston Harbor, served on the council of safety, and urged tight enforcement of the Continental Association. An extremist, he advocated the tarring and feathering of Loyalists and confiscation of the estates of those who had fled the country.
In 1776, while engaged in helping draft a State constitution, Middleton was chosen to replace his more conservative father in the Continental Congress. Two years later, when young Middleton declined reelection, he also rejected an offer of the governorship of South Carolina by the legislature, which had enacted a new constitution that he opposed. In 1779 and 1780, though reelected to the Continental Congress, Middleton failed to attend, probably because of concern over the British threat to his State. While serving in the militia during the siege of Charleston in 1780, along with fellow signers Heyward and Rutledge he was captured by the British and imprisoned at St. Augustine, Fla., until July 1781.
Two months later, Middleton returned to Congress and served throughout 1782. He then retired to Middleton Place, which had been ravaged by the British. He rehabilitated it, resumed his life as a planter, sat intermittently in the State legislature, and accepted assignment as one of the original trustees of the College of Charleston. He died in 1787 at the age of 44. His remains rest at Middleton Place.
Lewis Morris
NEW YORK
[Illustration]
Although Lewis Morris was a wealthy landowner who enjoyed the prestige of the social elite, he represented the patriot element in Tory-dominated New York. The British sacked his estate during the war, and his three eldest sons fought under Washington.
Born in 1726, Morris was the eldest son of the second lord of the vast manor of Morrisania, in Westchester (present Bronx) County, N.Y. Upon graduating from Yale College in 1746, he helped manage the estate. Three years later, he married, siring 10 children. In 1762, when his father died, he inherited Morrisania and became its third lord. About this time, he gained an interest in local politics, and in 1769 served a term in the colonial legislature.
As time went on, though residing in a pro-Loyalist county, Morris became increasingly critical of British policy. In 1775 he helped organize a meeting at White Plains that overcame strong opposition and chose county delegates, including Morris as chairman, to New York’s first provincial convention. It elected him to the Continental Congress (1775–77), where he specialized in military and Indian affairs. For most of 1776, he was absent from Philadelphia, serving as a brigadier general in the Westchester County militia. During the British invasion of New York that year, the redcoats ravaged Morrisania, and forced Morris’ family to flee.
When his career in Congress ended, Morris rose to the rank of major general in the militia and became a county judge (1777–78) and State senator (1777–81 and 1784–88). After war’s end in 1783, when he was able to return to Morrisania, he devoted much of his time to rehabilitating it. In 1784 he sat on the first board of regents of the University of New York. And 4 years later, at the State ratifying convention in Poughkeepsie, he strongly supported Alexander Hamilton’s successful drive for approval of the U.S. Constitution.
Morris died in 1798 at Morrisania at the age of 71. His grave is in the family vault in the yard of St. Ann’s Church in the Bronx.
Robbert Morris
PENNSYLVANIA
[Illustration]
Merchant Robert Morris was a man of many distinctions. One of the wealthiest individuals in the Colonies and an economic wizard, he won the accolade “Financier of the Revolution,” yet died penniless and forgotten. He and Roger Sherman were the only signers of all three of the Nation’s basic documents: the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution. Morris, who turned down appointment as the first Secretary of the Treasury, also served as a Senator in the First Congress.
Morris was born in or near Liverpool, England, in 1734. At the age of 13, he emigrated to Maryland to join his father, a tobacco exporter at Oxford, Md. After brief schooling at Philadelphia, the youth obtained employment with Thomas and Charles Willing’s well-known shipping firm. In 1754 he became a partner, and for almost four decades was one of the company’s directors as well as one of Philadelphia’s most influential citizens. Marrying in 1769 at the age of 35, he fathered five sons and two daughters.
During the Stamp Act turmoil in 1765, Morris had joined other merchants in protest, but not until the outbreak of hostilities a decade hence did he fully commit himself to the Revolution. In 1775 the Continental Congress contracted with his firm to import arms and ammunition; and he was elected to the Pennsylvania council of safety (1775–76), the committee of correspondence, the provincial assembly (1775–76), the State legislature (1776–78), and the Continental Congress (1775–78). In the latter body, on July 1, 1776, he voted against independence, which he personally considered premature, but the next day purposely absented himself to facilitate an affirmative ballot by his State.
Morris, a key Member of Congress, specialized in financial affairs and military procurement. Although he and his firm profited handsomely, had it not been for his assiduous labors the Continental Army would probably have needed to demobilize. He worked closely with General Washington, wheedled money and supplies from the States, borrowed money in the face of overwhelming difficulties, and on occasion even obtained personal loans to further the war cause. Immediately following his congressional service, Morris sat for two more terms in the Pennsylvania legislature in the period 1778–81. During this time, Thomas Paine and others attacked him for profiteering in Congress, which investigated his accounts and vindicated him. Nevertheless, his reputation slipped.
[Illustration: In 1794 Robert Morris began building this palatial townhouse in Philadelphia. After his imprisonment for debt in 1798, the unfinished house came to be known as “Morris’ Folly.” It stood until 1800.]
Morris embarked on the most dramatic phase of his career by accepting the office of Superintendent of Finance (1781–84) under the Articles of Confederation. Congress, recognizing the perilous state of the Nation’s finances and its impotence to remedy it, granted him dictatorial powers and acquiesced to his condition that he be allowed to continue his private commercial enterprises. He slashed all governmental and military expenditures, personally purchased Army and Navy supplies, tightened accounting procedures, prodded the States to fulfill quotas of money and supplies, and when necessary strained his personal credit by issuing notes over his own signature or borrowing from friends.
To finance Washington’s Yorktown campaign in 1781, in addition to the above techniques Morris obtained a sizable loan from France. He used part of it, along with some of his own fortune, to organize the Bank of North America, chartered that December. The first Government-incorporated bank in the United States, it aided war financing.
Although Morris was reelected to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1785–86, his private commercial ventures consumed most of his time. In the latter year, he attended the Annapolis Convention, and the following year the Constitutional Convention, where he sympathized with the Federalists. In 1789, declining Washington’s offer of appointment as the first Secretary of the Treasury, he took instead a senatorial seat in Congress (1789–95).
During the later years of his public life, Morris speculated wildly, often on overextended credit, in lands in the West and at the site of Washington, D.C. To compound his difficulties, in 1794 he began constructing on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street a palatial townhouse designed by Maj. Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Not long thereafter, Morris attempted to escape creditors by retreating to The Hills, the country estate along the Schuylkill River on the edge of Philadelphia that he had acquired in 1770.
Arrested at the behest of creditors in 1798 and forced to abandon completion of the townhouse, henceforth known in its unfinished state as “Morris’ Folly,” Morris was thrown into the Philadelphia debtors’ prison, where he was well treated. Nevertheless, by the time he was released in 1801, under a Federal bankruptcy law, his property and fortune had vanished, his health deteriorated, and his spirit been broken. He lingered on amid poverty and obscurity, living in a simple Philadelphia home on an annuity Gouverneur Morris had obtained for his wife. He died in 1806 in his 72d year. He was buried in the yard of Christ Church.
John Morton
PENNSYLVANIA
[Illustration]
John Morton, one of the nine signers from Pennsylvania, is better known there than in the Nation, but he rendered meritorious service to both. He cast the decisive ballot that swung his State over to an affirmative vote for independence in the Continental Congress. He was the first signer to die.
Morton was born of Finnish-Swedish descent in 1725, shortly after the death of his father, on a farm in Ridley Township, Chester (present Delaware) County. John Sketchley, an Englishman who subsequently married the widowed mother of the youth, reared and educated him. Their relationship was apparently close, for Morton later named his eldest son Sketchley. The stepfather, learned in mathematics, taught the boy the three R’s as well as surveying. He practiced that profession on and off all his life, as well as farming, politics, and jurisprudence. He married in his early 20’s, in 1748 or 1749, and fathered five daughters and four sons.
At the age of 30, Morton entered politics, which from then on absorbed most of his energies. From 1756 until a few months before he died in 1777, he served 18 terms in the colonial/State legislature (1756–66 and 1769–76), which he presided over during the last year and a half. In 1774 he won appointment as an associate justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Meantime, despite his rise in State circles, Morton had always maintained strong ties with his own county. He resided there all his life, remained active in civic and church affairs, and stayed close to the people. Between terms of office as county justice of the peace (1757–64 and 1770–74), he worked in a tour as sheriff (1766–69).
Morton’s service to the Nation began in 1765, while he was a member of the Pennsylvania legislature. He and two colleagues represented the colony at the Stamp Act Congress in New York. His most dramatic act as Delegate to the Continental Congress (1774–77), in which he numbered among the moderates, was his sudden and crucial switch on July 1, 1776, to the side of his friend Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson in the vote for national independence. On the final vote the next day, these three ballots outweighed those of Thomas Willing and Charles Humphreys. Robert Morris and John Dickinson being purposely absent, Pennsylvania registered a “yea.” Less glamorously, Morton was a member of many committees, in 1777 chairing the committee of the whole on the adoption of the Articles of Confederation, finally ratified after his death.
Within a year of signing the Declaration, in the spring of 1777, Morton fell ill and died on his farm at the age of 51. A few months earlier, he had bequeathed his land and property, including a few slaves, to his wife and five daughters and three surviving sons. But he could not will them security; shortly after his demise they had to flee from their home in the face of an imminent British attack. Morton’s grave is located in Old St. Paul’s Cemetery in Chester, Pa.
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
VIRGINIA
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Thomas Nelson, Jr., a rich planter-merchant who at one time owned more than 400 slaves, was one of the most
## active of the Virginia patriots. Mainly because of health
problems, however, his career in Congress was brief and undistinguished, though he made great financial sacrifices during the war and won fame as a militia commander and State politician.
The eldest of five sons, Nelson was born at Yorktown, Va., in 1738. At the age of 14, he sailed to England to supplement his initial tutorial education. In 1761, after graduating from Hackney School and Cambridge University, he returned to Virginia to help his father manage his plantation and mercantile business. The next year, young Nelson married; he and his wife were to have 11 children.
In 1764 Nelson became a justice of the peace for York County and entered the House of Burgesses. He served in the house until May 1774, when Royal Governor Lord Dunmore, provoked at its protests over the Boston Port Act, dissolved it. That year and the next, Nelson attended three of the Virginia provincial assemblies, where he worked closely with Patrick Henry. The last assembly elected Nelson to the Continental Congress, at which time he resigned his colonelcy in the Virginia militia.
In Congress, Nelson was outspoken in his desire to sever the bonds with England. He journeyed to Virginia in the spring of 1776. At a convention held in Williamsburg in May, he introduced and won approval for a resolution recommending national independence, drafted by Edmund Pendleton. Nelson carried it to Philadelphia and presented it to Richard Henry Lee, who redrafted and condensed it into his June 7 resolution. Not long afterward, Nelson’s health began to decline. Subsequently, he divided his time between Philadelphia and Virginia, and in the spring of 1777 resigned from Congress.
Back in Virginia, Nelson was awarded the rank of brigadier general in the militia and was elected to the lower house of the legislature. In the spring of 1778 Congress appealed to men of means in the Colonies to form troops of light cavalry. Nelson, partially at his own expense, raised, outfitted, and trained such a unit. In July he marched it northward to Philadelphia. The next month, Congress decided it was not needed and it returned home.
Nelson served in Congress again for a short time in 1779, but poor health forced him to retire once more. Nevertheless, the next year he obtained munitions and supplies for the militia, commanded troops, attended the legislature, and raised money to help subsidize the war. He was particularly effective in soliciting funds from wealthy plantation owners, to whom he pledged to repay the loans personally if the State should fail to do so.
When the British invaded Virginia in 1780–81, civilian control seriously hampered Nelson’s effectiveness as a militia commander. Consequently, in the latter year the legislature elected him as Governor and granted him powers approaching those of a military dictator. Although still bothered by bad health, he kept the government intact and strengthened defenses. In September-October 1781, while taking part in the Yorktown siege, according to family tradition he ordered troops to shell his own mansion when he learned it was a British headquarters. Soon after the victory at Yorktown, overwhelmed by the burdens of office and still in poor physical condition, he resigned the governorship.
[Illustration: This painting commemorates one of the highlights of the siege of Yorktown (1781). Thomas Nelson, Jr., commander in chief of Virginia troops, took an active part.]
That same year, Nelson partially retired to Offley Hoo, a modest estate in Hanover County that his father had willed to him on his death in 1772. In financial distress from his wartime sacrifices, the younger Nelson lacked money to renovate his Yorktown home, where he had lived since 1767. Except for occasional tours in the legislature and visits to Yorktown, he devoted the rest of his life to his business affairs. He died at Offley Hoo in 1789 at the age of 50. His grave is at Yorktown in the yard of Grace Episcopal Church.
William Paca
MARYLAND
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William Paca was one of the earliest Revolutionaries in a conservative colony. A wealthy planter and eminent lawyer and judge, he held numerous State offices, including the governorship, but his role in national affairs was limited.
The second son of a prominent planter-landowner, Paca was born, probably of Italian descent, in 1740 at Chilbury Hall, near Abingdon in Harford County, Md. He received his early education from private tutors and at the age of 15 matriculated at the College of Philadelphia (later part of the University of Pennsylvania). Upon graduating, he studied with an attorney in Annapolis and read law in London. In 1763, the year before initiating his practice in the former city, he married a local girl from a wealthy family and began building a home, completed 2 years later. When in the country, he resided at Wye Plantation, in Queen Annes County, which he had purchased about 1760.
In 1768 Paca won a seat in the colonial legislature, where he soon alined himself with Samuel Chase and other Whigs in protesting the powers of the Proprietary Governor. In the early 1770’s Paca joined other Maryland patriots in urging governmental regulation of fees paid to civil officers and in opposing the poll tax, used to pay the salaries of Anglican clergy, representing the established church. In 1773 he became a member of the Maryland committee of correspondence. The following year, along with Samuel Chase and Thomas Johnson, he acted as counsel for fellow legislator Joseph H. Harrison, who had been jailed for refusing to pay the poll tax. All three men also attended the first provincial convention that same year and received appointments to the First Continental Congress. About this time, Paca’s wife died.
Although he sat in Congress until 1779, Paca’s most noteworthy efforts were on the State level. In the spring and early summer of 1776, the provincial convention, a relatively conservative body, refused to authorize its congressional Delegates to vote for independence. Paca, aiding Chase and Carroll, drummed up enough support on the home front to persuade the convention to change its mind and bring Maryland into the affirmative column in the congressional voting on July 1–2, 1776. A few months later, he helped draft a State constitution. The next year, he began a 2-year term in the Maryland senate and saw militia duty. In addition, he sat on the council of safety and spent large amounts of his own money outfitting troops.
Between the years 1778 and 1782, Paca distinguished himself first as chief justice of the State Superior Court and then as chief judge of the circuit court of appeals in admiralty and prize cases. During that time, in 1780, a few months after the demise of his second wife, whom he had married 3 years earlier, he sold his home in Annapolis and moved permanently to Wye Plantation. In 1782 he raised funds for Washington College, founded that same year in Chestertown as the first institution of higher learning in Maryland, and served on its board of visitors. As Governor of Maryland (1782–85), he concerned himself with the welfare of war veterans and other postwar problems.
A delegate to the State convention to ratify the Federal Constitution in 1788, Paca urged its adoption if amended and helped draw up a list of proposed amendments. In 1789 President Washington appointed him as Federal district judge. He held this position until 1799, the year of his death at the age of 58, at Wye Hall, on Wye Island across the narrows from his own home, Wye Plantation. The former was the home of his son John, probably the only one of his five children from his two or possibly three marriages who reached maturity. At first interred at Wye Hall, Paca’s remains now rest in the family burial ground near Wye Plantation.
Robert Treat Paine
MASSACHUSETTS
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A clergyman turned lawyer-jurist, Robert Treat Paine spent only a short time in Congress but enjoyed considerable political prestige in Massachusetts. His second son (1773–1811) and great-grandson (1835–1910), both bearing exactly the same names as he, gained fame respectively as poet and businessman-philanthropist.
Among the ancestors of Paine, who was born at Boston in 1731, were many New England religious and political leaders. His father was a merchant who had once been a clergyman. Young Paine led his class at Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard in 1749. He then taught school for a time before yielding to family tradition and entering the ministry.
In 1755, during the French and Indian War, he served as chaplain on a military expedition to Crown Point, N.Y. To improve his health, he made a voyage to the Carolinas, England, Spain, and Greenland. About this time, he decided to forsake the ministry for the law, in which he had become interested during his theological studies. Admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1757, he opened an office in Portland but in 1761 moved to Taunton.
Paine, a friend of John Adams and John Hancock, early became involved in the patriot movement. As a result, he was chosen in 1770 as one of the prosecuting attorneys in the Boston Massacre trial and thus gained recognition throughout the Colonies. That same year, he married, siring eight children. Between 1773 and 1778, except in 1776, he served in the Massachusetts legislature, in 1777 being speaker of the lower house. He was one of the first five Delegates sent by Massachusetts to the Continental Congress (1774–76), where he specialized in military and Indian affairs. He gained the nickname “Objection Maker” because he argued against so many proposals.
Although reelected to Congress in 1777, Paine chose to stay in Massachusetts. In addition to his legislative speakership, he was elected as the first attorney general, a position he held until 1790. Between 1778 and 1780 he played a prominent role in drafting the Massachusetts constitution. From 1790 until 1804, appointed by his old friend Hancock, he sat as an associate justice of the Superior Court.
Meantime, in 1780, Paine had moved from Taunton to Boston and become
## active in civic affairs. Indicative of his lifelong interest in
science, that same year he was one of the founders of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In religion, he broke away from Calvinism and embraced Unitarianism. Politically, he alined himself with the Federalists. In 1804 increasing deafness brought about his retirement from the Superior Court, and he died a decade later at the age of 83 in Boston. He was buried in the Old Granary Burying Ground.
John Penn
NORTH CAROLINA
[Illustration]
Like fellow signers Joseph Hewes and William Hooper, John Penn adopted North Carolina as his home. Except for a 5-year stint in the Continental Congress and a brief career in State service, he passed the years peacefully as a country lawyer far from the clamor of the public forum.
Penn was born in 1740 or 1741 in Caroline County, Va. His father was a well-to-do farmer, and his mother the daughter of a prominent county judge. Despite the family’s social position, Penn received only a few years of formal schooling. At the age of 18, when his father died, he inherited a sizable estate. But he was dissatisfied with the prospects it offered, and decided to continue his education. Encouraged by a relative, Edmund Pendleton, a well-known lawyer who made available his personal library, Penn studied law on his own and within 3 years gained admittance to the bar. Soon thereafter he married; he and his wife reared three children.
In 1774, at the end of more than a decade of successful law practice in Virginia, Penn journeyed to Granville County, N.C., and made his home near Stovall. The next year, he was elected to the provincial assembly and only a few weeks later to the Continental Congress (1775–80). In 1777, upon the retirement of Hewes and Hooper, he inherited the leadership of his State’s delegation. He was one of the 16 signers of the Declaration who also signed the Articles of Confederation.
Unobtrusive and unassuming but remarkably efficient, likeable, and discreet, Penn quickly won the respect of his congressional colleagues. He rarely disputed with others, but when he did his good humor and peaceful manner saved the day. On one occasion, he feuded with President of Congress Henry Laurens of South Carolina over a personal matter. He accepted Laurens’ challenge to a duel, but en route to the proposed site convinced Laurens that they should bury their differences and drop the matter.
Late in 1780 the Governor of North Carolina recalled Penn from Congress to sit on the emergency Board of War, created by the legislature in September to share with the Governor responsibility for military affairs. The three-man board, of which Penn became the leading member, in effect soon assumed control of all military matters. The Governor and military officials, resenting the infringement upon their prerogatives and their loss of authority, persuaded the legislature to abolish the board in January 1781.
His health declining, the following July Penn declined an appointment to the Governor’s Council. With the exception of a short tour in 1784 as State tax receiver for the Confederation, he apparently devoted his last years to his law practice. In 1788, only in his late forties, he died at his home near Stovall. Originally buried in the family graveyard adjacent to his home, his remains now rest in Guilford Courthouse National Military Park near Greensboro.
George Read
DELAWARE
[Illustration]
Conservative lawyer George Read was the only signer who voted against independence in the final congressional vote on July 2, 1776. In addition to attaining many prominent State offices, he attended the Constitutional Convention, where he defended the rights of the smaller States, and subsequently served as a Senator in the First Congress.
Read’s mother was the daughter of a Welsh planter, and his Dublin-born father a landholder of means. Soon after George’s birth in 1733 near North East in Cecil County, Md., his family moved to New Castle, Del., where the youth grew up. He attended school at Chester, Pa., and Rev. Francis Alison’s academy at New London, Pa., and about the age of 15 began reading law with a Philadelphia lawyer. In 1753 he was admitted to the bar and began to practice. The next year, he journeyed back to New Castle, hung out his shingle, and before long enlisted a clientele that extended into Maryland. In 1763 he wed the widowed sister of future fellow signer George Ross, and she bore him four sons and a daughter.
While crown attorney general (1763–74) for the Three Lower Counties (present Delaware), Read protested against the Stamp Act. In 1765 he began a career in the colonial legislature that extended for more than a decade. A moderate Whig, he supported nonimportation measures and dignified protests. His attendance in Congress (1774–77) was irregular. Like his friend John Dickinson, he was willing to protect colonial rights but was wary of extremism. He balloted against independence on July 2, 1776, apparently either bowing to the strong Tory sentiment in Delaware or believing reconciliation with Britain was still possible.
That same year, Read gave priority to State responsibilities. He presided over the Delaware constitutional convention, in which he chaired the drafting committee, and began a term as speaker of the legislative council, which in effect made him vice president of the State. When the British captured Wilmington the next fall, they captured the president, a resident of the city. At first, because Read was away in Congress, Thomas McKean, speaker of the lower house, took over as acting president. But in November, after almost being captured himself while he and his family were en route to Dover from Philadelphia, newly captured by the British, Read assumed the office and held it until the spring of 1778.
During 1779, in poor health, Read resigned from the legislative council, refused reelection to Congress, and began a period of inactivity. In the years 1782–88, he again sat on the council, and concurrently held the position of judge of the court of appeals in admiralty cases. Meantime, in 1784, he had served on a commission that adjusted New York-Massachusetts land claims. In 1786 he attended the Annapolis Convention. The next year, he participated in the Constitutional Convention. He later led the ratification movement in Delaware, the first State to ratify.
In the U.S. Senate (1789–93), Read’s attendance was again spasmodic, but when present he allied with the Federalists. He resigned to accept the post of chief justice of Delaware. He held this office until his death at New Castle 5 years later, just 3 days after he celebrated his 65th birthday. His grave is located there in the Immanuel Episcopal Churchyard.
Caesar Rodney
DELAWARE
[Illustration]
Self-educated Caesar Rodney climbed to high State and National offices, but his military-political duties in Delaware spared him little time for the affairs of Congress. He is noted mainly for his emergency ride to Philadelphia that broke his State’s deadlock in the vote for independence, but he was also one of two bachelor signers and the only native of the three from Delaware.
Rodney was born in 1728 on his father’s 800-acre plantation, Byfield, near Dover in Kent County. In 1745, as the eldest child, he inherited the plantation. Despite a lack of formal and legal education, a decade later he accepted the first of a series of county offices: high sheriff, register of wills, recorder of deeds, clerk of the orphans’ court, justice of the peace, militia captain, and cotrustee of the loan office.
On the provincial level, for most of the period 1758–76 Rodney functioned as a justice of the Superior Court for the Three Lower Counties (present Delaware) and as a legislator in the lower house, including many tours as speaker. Between 1765 and 1774, he owned and occupied a townhouse that he used while in Dover. He and Thomas McKean compiled the colony’s laws, and they both attended the Stamp Act Congress (1765). Three years later, the two of them and George Read, all three later to sign the Declaration, drafted a protest to the King concerning the Townshend Acts. In 1774, after Parliament closed Boston Harbor, Rodney usurped the prerogative of the Proprietary Governor by calling a special meeting of the legislature at New Castle, the first Revolutionary convention in the State. Rodney, McKean, and Read were sent to the First Continental Congress.
Although a congressional Member for 2 years, Rodney was often absent in Delaware, sometimes presiding over the legislature and sometimes meeting military responsibilities. In May 1775 he was elected a colonel in the militia, and in September moved up to brigadier general. Late the next June, while the independence resolution was pending in Congress, he was investigating Loyalist agitations in Sussex County. On the evening of July 1, after his return to Byfield, he received McKean’s dispatch pointing out that Read had voted against independence that day and pleading with Rodney to hurry to Philadelphia to break the tie. Riding all night through a thunderstorm and stopping only to change horses, he completed the 80-mile trip just in time to make possible an affirmative vote for Delaware.
This brought down the wrath of the Kent County conservatives on Rodney, who was not reelected to Congress nor to the legislature and not appointed to the State constitutional convention. Out of office, that fall and the next year he turned to military affairs, recruiting troops and taking part in minor actions in Delaware and New Jersey. In September 1777 acting State president McKean commissioned him as a major general.
That spring, the legislature had designated Rodney as an admiralty judge. In December it reelected him to the Continental Congress. The next year, it nominated him as State president (1778–81), in which capacity he stimulated the Delaware war effort. When he left office, he belatedly sought medical treatment in Philadelphia for a cancerous growth on his face, which had been bothering him for a decade and which he had covered with a green silk veil. In 1783, though a dying man, he entered the State senate and accepted the speakership, but passed away the next year at the age of 55. Interred originally at Byfield Plantation, his remains are now buried in the yard of Christ Episcopal Church in Dover.
George Ross
PENNSYLVANIA
[Illustration]
A few of the signers, such as George Ross, were latecomers to the Revolutionary cause. Like many others, he exerted more influence in State than national affairs.
The oldest son of an Anglican clergyman who had immigrated from Scotland, Ross was born in 1730 at New Castle, Del. After a preliminary classical education, he read law with his stepbrother John at Philadelphia and in 1750 entered the bar. Settling the next year at Lancaster, Pa., where he married and fathered two sons and a daughter, he built up a successful law practice and served as crown prosecutor for Cumberland County (1751–63). A member of the colonial legislature from 1768 until 1775, he sometimes joined in its disputes with the Proprietary Governor and demonstrated an interest in Indian affairs.
Meantime, in 1774, despite his Loyalist leanings, a provincial convention to which Ross had been elected sent him to the Continental Congress. The next year, by which time he had for some reason decided to affiliate with the Revolutionaries, he also served on the Pennsylvania council of safety and held a militia colonelcy. In 1776 he assisted in negotiating a peace treaty with the Indians in northwestern Pennsylvania, and acted as vice president of the State constitutional convention, for which he helped draft a declaration of rights. Not a Member of Congress during the voting for independence on July 1–2, 1776, he received his appointment soon enough to sign the Declaration on August 2. He won a reputation among his colleagues for his eloquence, wit, and conviviality, but made no noteworthy contributions to congressional proceedings. Illness brought about his resignation in January 1777.
In 1778, while Ross was acting as admiralty judge in Pennsylvania, a congressional court of appeals overruled his decision in a case involving a dispute between a citizen of Connecticut and the State of Pennsylvania. Ross, refusing to acknowledge the authority of the higher court to counter State decisions, initiated a dispute between Pennsylvania and the Central Government that represented an early manifestation of the States rights controversy and did not subside until 1809. But Ross did not live to see the outcome, for he died in Philadelphia in 1779 at the age of 49. He was buried in Christ Church Burial Ground.
Benjamin Rush
PENNSYLVANIA
[Illustration]
Doctor, medical educator, chemist, humanitarian, politician, author, reformer-moralist, soldier, temperance advocate, abolitionist—Benjamin Rush was all of these. One of the younger signers, only 30 years of age at the time, he was already a physician of note.
Rush, the fourth of seven children, was born in 1745 at Byberry (“The Homestead”), near Philadelphia. At the age of 5, his farmer-gunsmith father died. The youth obtained a sound education at West Nottingham Academy, in Rising Sun, Md., operated by an uncle, and graduated from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). Returning to Philadelphia in 1760, he apparently first considered studying law but chose medicine. In 1766, at the end of a 5-year apprenticeship to a local physician, he sailed to Scotland, where 2 years later the University of Edinburgh awarded him a medical degree.
While there, assisted by a fellow college alumnus and one-day fellow signer, Richard Stockton, Rush helped overcome the objections of John Witherspoon’s wife and persuaded Witherspoon to accept the presidency of the College of New Jersey. In 1769, after further training in London, where Rush made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, and a short visit to Paris, he came back to Philadelphia and set up practice. Before the year was out, he obtained the first professorship of chemistry in the country at the College of Philadelphia, and wrote the first American textbook on the subject.
While prospering as a physician, Rush cultivated the friendship of such men as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine. In fact, Rush suggested to the latter that he write his famous tract _Common Sense_ (1776), supplied the title, and aided in its publication. He also contributed political articles to the press. That same year, he married Stockton’s eldest daughter, Julia.
Rush’s tour in the Continental Congress was brief. In June 1776 he attended a Pennsylvania conference of patriots and helped draft a declaration of the colony’s support for national independence. In recognition of these services, the following month the provincial convention sent him to Congress—after the adoption of the Declaration. In December, Philadelphia threatened by British invasion, the Government fled to Baltimore. Rush apparently, however, did not spend much time there. That same month, he relocated his wife at the home of a relative in Cecil County, Md., and took part in General Washington’s New Jersey campaign as a surgeon in the Philadelphia militia.
In April 1777, not reelected to Congress because of his opposition to the Pennsylvania constitution of the previous year, Rush accepted the position of surgeon general in the Middle Department of the Continental Army. Abhorring the deplorable conditions prevailing in the medical service, in a complaint to Washington he accused his superior, Dr. William Shippen, of maladministration. Washington referred the matter to Congress, which vindicated Shippen. In January 1778 Rush angrily resigned. His subsequent criticisms of Washington and his participation in the Conway Cabal, a movement to replace General Washington, ended his military and, for a time, his political career. He resumed his medical practice in Philadelphia.
[Illustration: Benjamin Rush long served on the staff of Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital, shown here in 1799. Founded in 1751 and still in use today, it is the oldest hospital in the United States.]
In 1787 Rush wrote tracts in the newspapers endorsing the U.S. Constitution. In the Commonwealth ratifying convention that same year, he aided James Wilson in the struggle for its adoption. In 1789–90 Rush attended the Pennsylvania constitutional convention. From 1797 until 1813 he served as Treasurer of the U.S. Mint.
Meantime Rush, through his writings and lectures, had become probably the best known physician and medical teacher in the land, and he fostered Philadelphia’s ascendancy as the early medical center of the Nation. His students, who idolized him, came from as far away as Europe to attend his classes at the College of Philadelphia, and its successors the University of the State of Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania (1791). He also served on the staff of the Pennsylvania Hospital from 1783 until the end of his life, helped found the Philadelphia College of Physicians (1787), and held office as first president of the Philadelphia Medical Society. In 1786 he founded the Philadelphia Dispensary, the first free medical clinic in the country. His work among the insane at the Pennsylvania Hospital resulted in _Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind_ (1812), which to some degree foreshadowed modern psychiatric techniques.
Rush won much less favor from his professional peers than he did from his students. His critics particularly attacked his theory of bleeding and purging for the treatment of disease. Although he was one of the few doctors who remained in Philadelphia during the devastating yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1798, his opponents criticized his methods of treatment.
Aroused by the idealism of the Revolution as well as the plight of the poor and sick he encountered in his medical practice, Rush helped pioneer various humanitarian and social movements that were to restructure U.S. life in the 19th century. These included abolition of slavery and educational and prison reform. Rush also condemned public and capital punishment and advocated temperance. Many of his reform articles appeared in Essays: _Literary, Moral, and Philosophical_ (1798).
Finally, Rush helped organize and sat as a trustee of Dickinson College (1783); aided in founding the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (1787) and later served as its president; enjoyed membership in the American Philosophical Society; and was a cofounder and vice president of the Philadelphia Bible Society, which advocated the use of scripture in the public schools.
A typhus epidemic claimed Rush’s life at the age of 67 in 1813. Surviving him were six sons and three daughters of the 13 children he had fathered. His grave is in Christ Church Burial Ground at Philadelphia.
Edward Rutledge
SOUTH CAROLINA
[Illustration]
Edward Rutledge, at the age of 26, was the youngest of the signers. Despite his youth, he had already made a name for himself in South Carolina as a lawyer-politician and had assumed leadership of his congressional delegation. A moderate, he at first fought against the independence resolution but finally submitted to the majority and voted for it. His later State career, which included combat
## action in the militia, culminated in the governorship.
The fifth son and youngest child of an Irish immigrant and physician, Rutledge was born in 1749 at or near Charleston, S.C. Like Middleton, Lynch, and Heyward, the other South Carolina signers, as a young man he studied law in England. In 1773, during his first year of practice on his return to Charleston, he won Whig acclaim by obtaining the release of newspaper publisher Thomas Powell, who had been imprisoned by the Crown for printing an article critical of the Loyalist upper house of the colonial legislature. The next year, the grateful Whigs named Rutledge as one of five Delegates to the First Continental Congress; and he married Henrietta Middleton, his colleague’s sister. The Rutledges were to have three children.
Rutledge spent his first congressional term in the shadow of the more experienced South Carolina Delegates, among them his older brother, John, and his father-in-law, Henry Middleton. During 1775–76, however, both in Congress and in two South Carolina provincial assemblies, his increasing self-confidence and maturation of judgment brought him the esteem of his associates. In the latter year, two of the senior South Carolina Delegates, Christopher Gadsden and Henry Middleton, retired from Congress and Thomas Lynch, Sr., suffered an incapacitating stroke. Rutledge, his brother absent on State business, found himself the delegation leader.
On June 7, 1776, when Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed national independence, Rutledge led the moderates in securing a delay in the voting. He knew that independence was inevitable. In March his colony, preceded only by New Hampshire, had adopted a constitution. Moreover, that same month the provincial assembly had empowered its Delegates to vote for independence if they so desired. Yet Rutledge firmly believed that the Colonies should first confederate and nurture foreign alliances to strengthen themselves for the perilous step they were about to take. When the vote on independence came up on July 1, he refused to yield and South Carolina balloted negatively. But nine of the Colonies voted affirmatively. Rutledge, realizing that the resolution would probably carry anyway, proposed that the vote be recast the following day. He persuaded the other South Carolina Delegates to submit to the will of the majority for the sake of unanimity, and South Carolina reversed its position.
Rutledge’s last important assignment occurred in September, when he accompanied John Adams and Benjamin Franklin on a vain peace mission to Staten Island to negotiate with British Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who in union with his brother, Gen. William Howe, was belatedly and idealistically trying to resolve the differences between the Colonies and the mother country. Two months later, Rutledge departed from Congress in order to resume his law practice in Charleston.
In 1778 Rutledge accepted a seat in the State legislature and the next year won reelection to Congress, though military duties prevented his attendance. As a militia captain, in February 1779 he took part in Gen. William Moultrie’s defeat of the British at Port Royal Island, S.C. But in May, 1780, during the siege of Charleston, the redcoats captured Rutledge, as well as Heyward and Middleton, and imprisoned them at St. Augustine, Fla., until July 1781.
From 1782 until 1798 Rutledge sat in the State legislature, which on three occasions designated him as a presidential elector. During this period, his mistrust of unbridled republicanism reinforced his conservatism and brought him into the Federalist Party. In private life he flourished, his wealth increasing through his law practice and investments in plantations. In 1792 his first wife died and he remarried. To crown his achievements, 6 years later the people of South Carolina chose him as Governor. But, his health poor, he died at Charleston early in 1800 at the age of 50, nearly a year before the end of his term. The yard of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church is the site of his grave.
Roger Sherman
CONNECTICUT
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By dint of self-education, hard work, and business acumen, Roger Sherman soared above his humble origins to prominence in local, State, and National political affairs. He was a member of the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence. He and Robert Morris were the only men to sign the three bulwark documents of the Republic: the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution. Twice married, Sherman fathered 15 children.
In 1723, when Sherman was 2 years of age, his family relocated from his Newton, Mass., birthplace to Dorchester (present Stoughton). As a boy, he was spurred by a desire to learn, and read widely in his spare time to supplement his minimal education at a common school. But he spent most of his waking hours helping his father with farming chores and learning the cobbler’s trade from him. In 1743, or 2 years after his father’s death, Sherman joined an elder brother who had settled at New Milford, Conn.
Purchasing a store, becoming county surveyor, and winning a variety of town offices, Sherman prospered and assumed leadership in the community. Without benefit of a legal education, he was admitted to the bar in 1754 and embarked upon a distinguished judicial and political career. In the period 1755–61, except for a brief interval, he served as a representative in the colonial legislature and held the offices of justice of the peace and county judge. Somehow he also eked out time to publish an essay on monetary theory and a series of almanacs incorporating his own astronomical observations and verse.
In 1761, abandoning his law practice, Sherman moved to New Haven, Conn. There he managed a store that catered to Yale students and another one in nearby Wallingford. He also became a friend and benefactor of Yale College, functioning for many years as its treasurer.
[Illustration: Residence of Roger Sherman, in New Haven, Conn., from 1768 until his death in 1793.]
Meanwhile, Sherman’s political career had blossomed. He rose from justice of the peace and county judge to an associate judge of the Connecticut Superior Court and to representative in both houses of the colonial assembly. Although opposed to extremism, he early joined the fight against Britain. He supported nonimportation measures and headed the New Haven committee of correspondence.
Sherman was a longtime and influential Member of the Continental Congress (1774–81 and 1783–84). He won membership on the committees that drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, as well as those concerned with Indian affairs, national finance, and military matters. To solve economic problems, at both the National and State levels, he advocated high taxes rather than excessive borrowing or the issuance of paper currency. While in Congress, Sherman remained active in State and local politics, continuing to hold the office of judge of the Connecticut Superior Court, as well as membership on the council of safety. In 1783 he helped codify Connecticut’s statutory laws. The next year, he was elected mayor of New Haven (1784–86).
Sherman could not resist the lure of national service. In 1787 he represented his State at the Constitutional Convention, in which he played a major role. He conceived and introduced the Connecticut, or so-called Great, Compromise, which broke a deadlock between the large and small States by providing for a dual legislative system—representation by proportion of population in the lower house and equal representation in the upper house. He was also instrumental in Connecticut’s ratification of the Constitution.
Sherman capped his career by serving as U.S. Representative (1789–91) and Senator (1791–93), espousing the Federalist cause. He died at New Haven in 1793 at the age of 72 and is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery.
James Smith
PENNSYLVANIA
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James Smith, a lawyer who had emigrated from Ireland to the Colonies, represented the Pennsylvania back-country in Revolutionary conventions and the Continental Congress. He also helped draft the Pennsylvania constitution.
Smith, the second son in a large family, was born in northern Ireland about 1719. When he was around 10 years old, his father emigrated to America and settled on acreage west of the Susquehanna River in York County, Pa. James studied surveying and classical languages at Rev. Francis Alison’s academy in New London, Pa., and then read law in the office of his elder brother at Lancaster. He was admitted to the bar in 1745 and moved westward to the Shippensburg vicinity in Cumberland County. A lack of clients and surveying work caused him about 1750 to relocate eastward to York, where he married a decade later. Although he was the only lawyer in town until 1769, he experienced difficulty in recruiting clients. Probably for this reason, during the years 1771–78 he undertook iron manufacturing, but the venture failed and he lost £5,000.
Smith early emerged as a local Whig leader. In 1774, at a provincial convention in Philadelphia, he supported nonimportation measures and advocated an intercolonial congress. That same year, at York he raised a militia company, in which he served as captain and later honorary colonel. At two provincial meetings in 1775–76, he championed the interests of the western counties and helped formulate resolutions calling for independence, the strengthening of defenses, and establishment of a new provincial government. During the latter year, he sat on the drafting committee in the State constitutional convention. Elected to Congress (1776–78) on July 20, 1776, after the vote on independence had been taken, he arrived in Philadelphia in time to sign the Declaration. Among his colleagues he gained a reputation as a wit, conversationalist, and eccentric.
During the period 1779–82 Smith held various State offices: one-term legislator, judge of the Pennsylvania high court of errors and appeals, brigadier general in the militia, and State counselor during the Wyoming Valley land dispute between Pennsylvania and Connecticut. In 1785 he turned down reelection to Congress because of his age. His major activity prior to his retirement in 1801 was the practice of law. Smith died at about the age of 87 in 1806 at York, survived by two of his five children. His grave is in the First Presbyterian Church Cemetery.
Richard Stockton
NEW JERSEY
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Circumstances of the times draw some men into public life who otherwise might avoid its burdens—and sorrows. One of these was Richard Stockton, whose wartime detention by the British contributed to his untimely death.
Stockton, son of a wealthy landowner and judge, was born in 1730 at Morven, the family estate and his lifelong home, at Princeton, N.J. After a preparatory education at West Nottingham Academy, in Rising Sun, Md., he graduated in 1748 from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), then in Newark but relocated 8 years hence at Princeton. In 1754 he completed an apprenticeship with a Newark lawyer and joined the bar. The next year, he wed poetess Annis Boudinot, by whom he had two sons and four daughters. By the mid-1760’s he was recognized as one of the ablest lawyers in the Middle Colonies.
Like his father a patron of the College of New Jersey, in 1766 Stockton sailed on its behalf to Scotland to recruit Rev. John Witherspoon for the presidency. Aiding in this endeavor, complicated by the opposition of Witherspoon’s wife, was Benjamin Rush, a fellow alumnus then enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. In 1768, the year after Stockton’s departure, Witherspoon finally accepted.
Stockton resumed his law practice, spending his spare hours at Morven breeding choice cattle and horses, collecting art objects, and expanding his library. Yet, though he had some time before expressed disinterest in public life, in 1768 he began a 6-year term on the executive council of New Jersey and then sat on the provincial Supreme Court (1774–76).
Stockton became associated with the Revolutionary movement during its initial stages. In 1764 he advocated American representation in Parliament, but during the Stamp Act crisis the next year questioned its right to control the Colonies at all. By 1774, though dreading the possibility of war, he was espousing colonial self-rule under the Crown. Elected to Congress 2 years later, he voted for independence and signed the Declaration. That same year, he met defeat in a bid for the New Jersey governorship, but rejected the chance to become first chief justice of the State Supreme Court to remain in Congress.
Late in 1776 fate turned against Stockton. In November, while inspecting the northern Continental Army in upper New York State with fellow Congressman George Clymer, Stockton hurried home when he learned of the British invasion of New Jersey and removed his family to a friend’s home in Monmouth County. While he was there, Loyalists informed the British, who captured and imprisoned him under harsh conditions at Perth Amboy, N.J., and later in New York. A formal remonstrance from Congress and other efforts to obtain his exchange resulted in his release, in poor physical condition, sometime in 1777. To add to his woes, he found that the British had pillaged and
## partially burned Morven. Still an invalid, he died at Princeton in 1781
at the age of 50. He is buried at the Stony Brook Quaker Meeting House Cemetery.
Thomas Stone
MARYLAND
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By the time the Continental Congress voted for independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, only a handful of conservatives remained in the body. Included in this group were Thomas Stone of Maryland, Carter Braxton of Virginia, George Read of Delaware, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina—erstwhile opponents of independence who, except for Read, submitted to the will of the majority and balloted for it. Stone, a rich planter-lawyer of retiring disposition, preferred to stay in the background during his long but limited political career.
Stone was born in 1743 at Poynton Manor, his father’s plantation near the village of Welcome in Charles County, Md. He enjoyed all the advantages that accrued to the eldest son. Following tutorial instruction in the classics as a youth, he apprenticed himself to an Annapolis lawyer and in 1764 joined the bar. For the first 2 years he practiced at Frederick, Md., and then settled in his home county. He married 2 years later. Apparently with part of his wife’s dowry, he purchased land a few miles to the northeast of his birthplace. There, near Port Tobacco, in 1771 he built Habre-de-Venture, his home and principal residence for the rest of his life.
Stone entered politics in 1773 as a member of the Charles County committee of correspondence. The next year, on behalf of the Proprietary Governor, he helped prosecute Joseph H. Harrison, a Maryland legislator who had refused to pay the poll tax for the support of the Anglican clergy. This action, despite its legal ethicality, did not endear Stone to the patriots. His opponents, counsel for the defense, consisted of Thomas Johnson, Samuel Chase, and William Paca—all three of whom later became his congressional colleagues.
That same year, 1774, Stone won appointment to the provincial convention, which the following year sent him to Congress. A far less enthusiastic Revolutionary than most Congressmen, he heartily favored reconciliation almost up to the time of the vote on independence and was one of the few Delegates who favored peace negotiations with Britisher Lord Richard Howe in September 1776, some 2 months after the adoption of the Declaration. A poor speaker, Stone rarely participated in debates but sat on the committee that drafted the Articles of Confederation, though he did not sign the document. He remained in Congress until 1778.
Meantime, a couple of years earlier, Stone had begun a tour in the State senate that was to last for practically the remainder of his life. In 1784 he also returned to the Continental Congress, where he served for a few days as acting President but resigned before the year expired to resume his law practice. His last act of public service occurred the following year, when he and two others represented Maryland at the Mount Vernon Conference.
In 1787 Stone’s wife, whose health had been failing for more than a decade, passed away at the age of 34. The grief-stricken Stone abandoned his work, declined to attend the Constitutional Convention to which he had been elected, and decided to visit England. A few months later, though only in his mid-forties, he died suddenly while awaiting a vessel at Alexandria, Va. Three of his children survived him. Stone is buried in the family graveyard adjacent to Habre-de-Venture.
George Taylor
PENNSYLVANIA
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Surmounting the poverty that forced him to come to the American Colonies from Ireland as an indentured servant to an ironmaster, George Taylor climbed to the top of the industry. In the process, merging politics with commerce, he gained enough distinction in county and State affairs to win election to the Continental Congress—his only service on the national level. Even then, he attended only a few months, just long enough to sign the Declaration. He contributed more directly to the cause of liberty as an ironmaster, producing ordnance for the Continental Army.
When Taylor was about 20 years of age, he indentured himself and emigrated from northern Ireland, where he had been born in 1716, to Pennsylvania. He began as a laborer and then became a clerk at Warwick Furnace, in Chester County, and within 3 years rose to bookkeeper-manager of nearby Coventry Forge, another enterprise of his employer. In 1742, the year after the latter died, Taylor acquired his business when he married his widow; she bore him a son and daughter.
In the mid-1750’s Taylor moved northeastward to Bucks County, where he and a partner leased Durham Furnace, about 2 miles south of the Northampton County line and 10 miles south of Easton. Apparently after 1763 Taylor lived much of the time at or near Easton and acquired property there. In 1768 his wife died; he subsequently sired five children by his housekeeper out of wedlock. The year of his wife’s death, he built a home about 15 miles west of the city on a 331-acre tract he had purchased the year before. In 1771 he leased most of the land out as a farm, and 5 years later sold the house and land.
Taylor had begun his public life in 1747, when he took a commission as a captain in the Chester County militia. In 1761 he was appointed as justice of the peace for Bucks County, but devoted most of his energies to Northampton County, which he served as justice of the peace (1764–75) and representative in the colonial legislature (1764–70). In 1774 Taylor, a political moderate, became a member of the Northampton County committee of correspondence. The next year, he attended a provincial Revolutionary convention, was elected to the provincial assembly, served on the council of safety, and became a colonel in the Bucks and Northampton County militias.
In July 1776 the Pennsylvania assembly selected Taylor as one of its new Delegates to the Continental Congress. His only noteworthy action there was signing the Declaration. The next January, however, he and fellow signer George Walton of Georgia negotiated a peace treaty with the Six Indian Nations (Iroquois) at Easton, Pa., but Congress did not ratify it. In March the voters of Northampton County elected Taylor to the new Supreme Executive Assembly of Pennsylvania, but illness and financial difficulties restricted his participation to only 6 weeks, at the end of which he retired from public life.
By this time, Taylor’s Durham Furnace was turning out grapeshot, cannonballs, bar shot, and cannon for the Revolutionary army—for which Taylor was ill-compensated. In 1778 the State dispossessed him of his lease on the Durham Furnace, owned by the Philadelphia Loyalist John Galloway and confiscated by the State. Taylor then moved to Greenwich Township, N.J., and leased Greenwich Forge, which he operated until his death at the age of 65 in 1781. The year before, his health failing, Taylor had returned to Easton and leased a home. Originally buried in the yard of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church at Easton, his body was later moved to the Easton Cemetery.
Matthew Thornton
NEW HAMPSHIRE
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Probably six of the 56 signers belatedly penned their signatures, eight of them were foreign-born, and four were physicians. Matthew Thornton belongs in all three categories. Less exclusively, he ranks among the substantial number of signers whose national service was brief or relatively insignificant.
Thornton was born in Ireland about 1714. Approximately 4 years later, his Scotch-Irish parents emigrated with their family to America, settling first at Wiscasset, in present Maine, and then near Worcester, Mass. Young Thornton, after attending common schools, undertook the study of medicine with a local doctor. In 1740 he began what proved to be a thriving practice in the Scotch-Irish town of Londonderry (present Derry Village), N.H. Five years later, as a surgeon in the New Hampshire militia during King George’s War (1740–48), he participated in the British expedition from New England that captured Louisbourg, the French fortress in Nova Scotia.
By 1758 Thornton was representing Londonderry in the colonial legislature and stayed there until 1775. During the long interim, about 1760 he married and began a family of five; and throughout the period he figured prominently in New Hampshire politics and Revolutionary activities. In 1775–76 he held the offices of president of the provincial assembly and constitutional convention, chairman of the council of safety, and member of the upper and lower houses of the legislature, as well as speaker of the former. Although he did not enter Congress until November 1776, or 3 months after the formal signing of the Declaration, he was granted permission to affix his signature.
About a year later, Thornton left Congress to devote his time to his duties as associate justice of the State Superior Court. Despite a lack of legal education, he had acquired this position in 1776. He held it until 1782, some 2 years after he retired from his medical practice in Londonderry and settled on a farm he purchased near Merrimack, N.H. Later, in 1784–86, he completed a tour in the State senate. He spent his last years farming and operating a ferry—Lutwyche’s (later Thornton’s) Ferry—across the Merrimack River.
Thornton died in 1803 at about the age of 89 while visiting his daughter in Newburyport, Mass. His grave is in Thornton’s Ferry Cemetery, near the site of his Merrimack home.
George Walton
GEORGIA
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Like signers Button Gwinnett and Lyman Hall a nonnative of Georgia, George Walton fought hard to win independence for his adopted State and his Nation—both in the political arena and on the battlefield. He was wounded in the British siege of Savannah late in 1778 and endured captivity for almost a year. He evinced the same kind of tenacity in all his other endeavors and conquered a string of adversities in his ascent from humble origins to the highest National and State offices.
Born sometime in the 1740’s near Farmville, Va., Walton was orphaned early and reared by an uncle, who apprenticed him to a carpenter. Walton supplemented extensive independent study with some formal schooling. In 1769 he moved to Savannah, Ga., read law under a local attorney, and 5 years later joined the bar.
That same year, Walton plunged into politics. Rallying Revolutionaries at Savannah as did Lyman Hall in St. John’s Parish—the two Whig hotbeds in a lukewarm colony—Walton helped organize and played a key part in meetings at Savannah in July and August 1774 and the first provincial congress the next January. But these meetings, to which only a few parishes sent representatives, hardly set the dissent in motion. The divided delegates, aware of their limited constituency, failed to send Delegates to the Continental Congress, as had all the other Colonies, and thus alienated St. John’s Parish. Except for creation of a committee of correspondence, to which Walton was appointed, the conferees for the most part substituted patriotic talk for action. During this period, Walton, blending political activism with romance, took a bride. She later gave birth to two sons.
By July 1775, when the second provincial congress convened and designated Walton as secretary, apathy in the Revolutionary ranks had given way to aggressiveness. The congress dispatched four Delegates to the Continental Congress to join Hall, already an unofficial “delegate” from St. John’s Parish. The next year, the third provincial congress elected Walton, by this time chairman of the council of safety, as a Delegate (1776–81). In this capacity, he sat on committees dealing with western lands, national finance, and Indian affairs. His only lapse in attendance occurred in 1778–79, when the military defense of his own State took precedence over his congressional obligations. As a colonel in the Georgia militia, he was wounded and captured during the siege of Savannah in November-December 1778—the beginning of the British invasion of the South. He was imprisoned until the following September, when he was exchanged for a navy captain.
Right after his release, at Augusta Walton became involved in a factional dispute between two groups of Revolutionaries. Walton’s group, irritated because their conservative opponents had taken advantage of the confusion generated by the British occupation of Savannah by putting their own “governor” into office without benefit of a general election, countered by selecting Walton as its “governor” (November 1779-January 1780). In January the new legally elected legislature picked a Governor, another anti-conservative. Walton returned to the Continental Congress in 1780–81, after which he headed back to Georgia.
Walton’s subsequent career suffered no diminution. His offices included those of chief justice (1783–89) and justice (1790–95 and 1799–1804) of the State Superior Court; delegate to the State constitutional convention (1788); presidential elector (1789); Governor (1789–90); and U.S. Senator (1795–96), filling out an unexpired term. Meantime, he had been elected as a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention (1787), but did not attend. An advocate of higher education, he was also a trustee and founder of Richmond Academy, in Augusta, and Franklin College (later the University of Georgia), in Athens.
About 1790 while Governor, changing his residence from Savannah to the capital of Augusta, Walton built “Meadow Garden” cottage on the northern edge of the city on confiscated Loyalist lands he had acquired. He lived in the cottage for 5 years, when he moved to College Hill, a country estate he erected on the western outskirts. He died there in 1804. Assigned first to the Rosney Cemetery in Augusta, his remains now rest at the Signers’ Monument in that city.
William Whipple
NEW HAMPSHIRE
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William Whipple, a sea captain turned merchant, retired from business to further the Revolution. In addition to sitting in Congress, he commanded New Hampshire militia in two major campaigns and held various State offices.
Whipple, the eldest of five children, was born in 1730, at Kittery, in present Maine. He attended local schools and went to sea while still a boy. In his early twenties he became a shipmaster, and later probably sometimes engaged in the slave trade. About 1760 he gave up the sea and founded a mercantile firm at Portsmouth, N.H., with his brother Joseph. In 1767 he married the daughter of a wealthy merchant-sea captain; their only child died in infancy.
By the outbreak of the Revolution, Whipple had become one of the leading citizens of Portsmouth. In 1775, his fortune well established, he left business to devote his time to public affairs. That year, he represented Portsmouth in the provincial assembly at Exeter, and served on the New Hampshire council of safety. The following year, he won seats in the upper house of the State legislature and in the Continental Congress. His congressional tour, interrupted intermittently by militia duty, lasted until 1779. He concerned himself mainly with military, marine, and financial matters. A tough-minded, independent individual, he recommended military aggressiveness in the war instead of diplomacy and favored severe punishment of Loyalists and speculators.
In the fall of 1777 Whipple, a brigadier general in the New Hampshire militia, led four regiments to upper New York State and helped encircle and besiege the British army at Saratoga. He was present on October 17 at the surrender of Gen. John Burgoyne; signed the Convention of Saratoga, ending the New York campaign; and helped escort the British troops to a winter encampment near Boston to await embarkation for England. In 1778 he led another contingent of New Hampshire militia into Rhode Island on a campaign that sought but failed to recapture Newport from the British.
During his last years, Whipple held the offices of State legislator (1780–84), associate justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court (1782–85), receiver of finances for Congress in New Hampshire (1782–84), and in 1782 president of a commission that arbitrated the Wyoming Valley land dispute between Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Ill the remaining few years of his life, he passed away in 1785 at the age of 55 at Portsmouth, where he was buried in Union Cemetery. His wife survived him.
William Williams
CONNECTICUT
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Merchant William Williams was prominent in Connecticut politics, but never won national fame except for signing the Declaration.
A Congregational pastor’s son, Williams was born in 1731 at Lebanon, Conn., his lifelong home. After graduating from Harvard in 1751, he began studying for the ministry under his father. Four years later, during the French and Indian War (1754–63), he accompanied a British expedition to Lake George, in northeastern New York, that won a victory. Back home, he became a merchant. In 1771 he married a daughter of Jonathan Trumbull, Royal Governor of Connecticut; they had three children.
During his long political career, Williams held a myriad of local, provincial, and State offices: town clerk (1752–96) and selectman (1760–85); member, clerk, and speaker of the lower house of the colonial legislature (1755–76); State legislator (1781–84); member of the Governor’s council (1784–1803); judge of the Windham County court (1776–1805); and probate judge for the Windham district (1775–1809). He also represented Connecticut at various New England meetings, and attended the 1788 convention that ratified the Federal Constitution, of which he approved.
Upon the outbreak of the Revolution, Williams threw his weight behind the cause. Besides writing tracts for the press expressing the colonial viewpoint, he prepared Revolutionary state papers for Governor Trumbull. Williams also raised money for and personally contributed to the war effort. Between 1773 and 1776 he held a colonelcy in the Connecticut militia and served on the provincial council of safety. In Congress (1776–78 and 1783–84), he sat on the Board of War and helped frame the Articles of Confederation, though he did not sign them. During the winter of 1780–81, while a French regiment was stationed in Lebanon, he moved out of his home and turned it over to the officers.
Williams died at the age of 80 in 1811. His grave is in the Trumbull Cemetery, about a mile northeast of town.
James Wilson
PENNSYLVANIA
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Brilliant yet enigmatic James Wilson possessed one of the most complex and contradictory personalities of all the signers. Never able to reconcile his strong personal drive for wealth and power with his political goals nor to find a middle road between conservatism and republicanism, he alternately experienced either popularity or public scorn, fame or obscurity, wealth or poverty. Yet his mastery of the law and political theory enabled him to play a leading role in framing the U.S. Constitution and to rise from frontier lawyer to Justice of the Supreme Court.
Wilson was born in 1741 or 1742 at Carskerdo, near St. Andrews, Scotland, and educated at the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. He then emigrated to America, arriving in the midst of the Stamp Act agitations in 1765. Early the next year, he accepted a position as Latin tutor at the College of Philadelphia, but almost immediately abandoned it to study law under John Dickinson.
[Illustration: From 1778 until 1790 James Wilson resided in this Philadelphia residence, which became known as “Fort Wilson” in 1779, when a mob of citizens and militiamen attacked it.]
In 1768, the year after his admission to the bar, Wilson set up practice at Reading, Pa. Two years later, he moved westward to the Scotch-Irish settlement of Carlisle, and the following year took a bride. He specialized in land law and built up a broad clientele. On borrowed capital, he also began to speculate in land. In some way he managed, too, to lecture for many years on English literature at the College of Philadelphia.
Wilson also became involved in Revolutionary politics. In 1774 he took over chairmanship of the Carlisle committee of correspondence, attended the first provincial assembly, and completed preparation of _Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament_. This tract circulated widely in England and America and established Wilson as a Whig leader. It denied Parliament’s authority over the Colonies, though it did not question their allegiance to the Crown, and recommended a reorganization of the imperial structure similar to the later British Commonwealth of Nations.
The next year, Wilson was elected to both the provincial assembly and the Continental Congress, where he sat mainly on military and Indian affairs committees. In 1776, reflecting the wishes of his constituents, he joined the moderates in voting for a 3-week delay in considering Richard Henry Lee’s resolution of June 7. On July 1, however, Wilson dissented from the majority of the Pennsylvania delegation and balloted with John Morton and Benjamin Franklin for independence. On July 2 the three men, representing a majority of the Commonwealth’s Delegates present, voted the same. Wilson’s strenuous opposition to the republican Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, besides indicating a switch to conservatism on his part, led to his removal from Congress the following year. To avoid the clamor among his frontier constituents, he repaired to Annapolis during the winter of 1777–78, and then took up residence in Philadelphia.
Wilson affirmed his newly assumed political stance by closely identifying with the aristocratic and conservative republican groups, multiplying his business interests, and accelerating his land speculation. He also took a position as Advocate-General for France in America (1779–83), dealing with commercial and maritime matters, and legally defended Loyalists and their sympathizers.
In the fall of 1779, during a period of inflation and food shortages, a mob, including many militiamen and led by radical-constitutionalists, set out to attack the republican leadership. Wilson was a prime target. He and some 35 of his colleagues barricaded themselves in his home at Third and Walnut Streets, henceforth known as “Fort Wilson.” During a brief skirmish, several people on both sides were killed or wounded. The shock cooled sentiments and pardons were issued all around, though major political battles over the Commonwealth constitution still lay ahead.
During 1781 Congress appointed Wilson as one of the directors of the Bank of North America, newly founded by Robert Morris with the legal advice of Wilson. In 1782–83, by which time the conservatives had regained some of their power, he was reelected to Congress, as well as in the period 1785–87.
Wilson reached the apex of his career in the U.S. Constitutional Convention (1787), in which he was one of the leaders, both in the floor debates and the drafting committee. That same year, overcoming powerful opposition, he led the drive for ratification in Pennsylvania, the second State to ratify. The new Commonwealth constitution, drafted in 1789–90 along the lines of the U.S. Constitution, was also primarily Wilson’s work and represented the climax of his 14-year fight against the constitution of 1776.
For his services in the formation of the Federal Government, though Wilson expected to be appointed Chief Justice, in 1789 President Washington named him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. He was chosen that same year as the first law professor at the College of Philadelphia. Two years hence, he began an official digest of the laws of Pennsylvania, a project he never completed, though he carried on for awhile after funds ran out.
Wilson, who wrote only a few opinions, did not achieve the success on the Supreme Court that his capabilities and experience promised. Indeed, during those years he was the object of much criticism and barely escaped impeachment. For one thing, he tried to influence the enactment of legislation in Pennsylvania favorable to land speculators. Between 1792 and 1795 he also made huge but unwise land investments in western New York and Pennsylvania, as well as in Georgia. This did not stop him from conceiving a grandiose but ill-fated scheme, involving vast sums of European capital, for the recruitment of European colonists and their settlement on western lands. Meantime, in 1793, a widower with six children, he had remarried; the one son from this union died in infancy.
Four years later, to avoid arrest for debt, the distraught Wilson moved from Philadelphia to Burlington, N.J. The next year, apparently while on Federal circuit court business, he arrived at Edenton, N.C., in a state of acute mental stress and was taken into the home of James Iredell, a fellow Supreme Court Justice. He died there within a few months. Although first buried at Hayes Plantation near Edenton, his remains were later reinterred in the yard of Christ Church at Philadelphia.
John Witherspoon
NEW JERSEY
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Rev. John Witherspoon, the only active clergyman among the signers, achieved a greater reputation as a religious leader and educator than as a politician. Emigrating from Scotland to America in the midst of the controversy between the Colonies and the Crown, he took part in the Revolution, lost a son during the war, and signed the Articles of Confederation as well as the Declaration. He is better known, however, for his role in the growth of the Presbyterian Church and for his distinguished presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University).
The son of a Calvinist minister, Witherspoon was born in 1723 at the village of Gifford, near Edinburgh. He attended grammar school at the neighboring town of Haddington and won master of arts (1739) and divinity (1743) degrees from the University of Edinburgh. In 1743 the Haddington Presbytery licensed him to preach. He was ordained 2 years later at Beith, where he occupied a pulpit until 1757. He then transferred to Paisley, not far from Glasgow. Meantime, in 1748, he had married; only five of his ten children survived childhood.
Over the years, Witherspoon attained leadership of a group of conservative clergymen who were engaged in a prolonged struggle with a group of their colleagues to maintain the “purity” of orthodox Church doctrine. Witherspoon penned a stream of sermons and tracts attacking the opposition and denouncing moral decay in Scotland. He also defended the traditional prerogative of the people to choose their own ministers, a right ecclesiastical authorities had taken from them.
In 1768 Witherspoon channeled his energies in a new direction. He gave up his post at Paisley and accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey, after two representatives of the college had visited him and finally at the end of 2 years of effort overcome the objections of his wife. He sailed to America with his family. The college bloomed under his direction. He increased the endowment, instituted new methods of instruction, and broadened and revitalized the curriculum. Continuing also as a minister and church leader, he patched up a major schism in the Presbyterian Church; stimulated its expansion, especially in the Middle Colonies; and worked closely with the Congregationalists.
[Illustration: The College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1764. Rev. John Witherspoon served as its president from 1768 until 1794. The main building, Nassau Hall, is on the left; the President’s House, on the right.]
The Revolution fanned Witherspoon’s hatred of the English, which had originated in Scotland. By 1770 his students were openly demonstrating in favor of the patriot cause. In a commencement oration he advocated resistance to the Crown, which became his favorite theme in sermons and essays. In 1774–76 he represented his county in the New Jersey provincial assemblies, and sat on local committees of correspondence. In the latter year he figured prominently in the agitations that led to the removal from office and imprisonment of the Royal Governor, and then received an appointment to the Continental Congress.
On July 2, 1776, in a congressional speech urging independence, Witherspoon declared that the Colonies were “not only ripe for the measure but in danger of rotting for the want of it.” In November, when the British invaded New Jersey, he closed the College of New Jersey. The redcoats occupied its major building, Nassau Hall, burned the library, and committed other acts of destruction. The next year, Witherspoon’s son James lost his life at the Battle of Germantown, Pa.
Witherspoon stayed in Congress until 1782. His main committee assignments dealt with military and foreign affairs. He also
## participated in the debates on the Articles of Confederation, aided
in setting up the executive departments, and argued for financial stability. Meantime, in 1779, he had moved from the President’s House at Princeton to Tusculum, a country home he had earlier built nearby. He left the Rev. Samuel S. Smith, his son-in-law and the college vice president, in charge of the nearly defunct institution.
Witherspoon devoted most of his effort during the postwar years to rebuilding the college, which never fully recovered its prewar prosperity during his lifetime. In addition, during the years 1783–89 he sat for two terms in the State legislature, attended the New Jersey (1787) convention that ratified the Federal Constitution, participated in the reorganization of the Presbyterian Church, and moderated its first general assembly (1789). In 1791, at the age of 68, Witherspoon took a second wife, a 24-year-old widow, who bore him two daughters. Blind his last 2 years, he died in 1794, aged 71, at Tusculum. His remains rest in the Presidents’ Lot at Princeton Cemetery.
Oliver Wolcott
CONNECTICUT
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Oliver Wolcott, as much a soldier as a politician, helped convert the concept of independence into reality on the battlefield. He also occupied many local, provincial, and State offices, including the governorship. One of his five children, Oliver, also held that position and became U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
Wolcott was the youngest son in a family of 15. Sired by Roger Wolcott, a leading Connecticut politician, he was born in 1726 at Windsor (present South Windsor), Conn. In 1747, just graduated from Yale College at the top of his class, he began his military career. As a militia captain during King George’s War (1740–48), he accompanied an unsuccessful British expedition against the French in New France. Back home, he studied medicine for a time with his brother before deciding to turn to law.
In 1751, when Litchfield County was organized, Wolcott moved about 30 miles westward to the town of Litchfield and immediately took over the first of a long string of county and State offices: county sheriff (1751–71); member of the lower house (1764, 1767–68, and 1770) and upper house (1771–86) of the colonial and State legislatures; and probate (1772–81) and county (1774–78) judge. By 1774 he had risen to the rank of colonel in the militia.
The next spring, the legislature named him as a commissary for Connecticut troops and in the summer the Continental Congress designated him as a commissioner of Indian affairs for the northern department. In that capacity he attended a conference that year with the Iroquois (Six Nations) at Albany, N.Y., that temporarily gained their neutrality in the war. Before the year was out, he also aided in arbitrating land disputes between Pennsylvania and Connecticut and New York and Vermont.
Wolcott sat in Congress from 1775 until 1783 except for the year 1779. In June 1776 illness caused him to return to Connecticut. Absent at the time of the voting for independence the next month and at the formal signing of the Declaration in August, he added his signature sometime after his return to Congress in October. Throughout his tour, Wolcott devoted portions of each year to militia duty, highlighted by participation as a brigadier general in the New York campaigns of 1776–77 that culminated in the surrender of Gen. John Burgoyne in October of the latter year at Saratoga (Schuylerville). During 1779, as a major general, Wolcott defended the Connecticut seacoast against the raids of William Tryon, Royal Governor of New York.
Wolcott’s postwar career was varied. On the national level, he helped negotiate two Indian treaties: the Second Treaty of Fort Stanwix, N.Y. (1784), in which the Iroquois ceded to the United States some of their lands in New York and Pennsylvania; and another (1789) with the Wyandottes, who gave up their tract in the Western Reserve, in present Ohio. On the State level, Wolcott continued his long period of service in the upper house of the legislature (ended 1786); enjoyed a lengthy stint as Lieutenant Governor (1787–96); attended the convention (1788) that ratified the U.S. Constitution; and, like his father before him and his son after him, held the office of Governor (1796–97).
While occupying the latter position, Wolcott died, aged 71, at East Windsor. His remains rest in the East Cemetery at Litchfield.
George Wythe
VIRGINIA
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Virginia’s George Wythe spent only about a year in the Continental Congress, never aspired to any other national office, and played a minor part in the Constitutional Convention. But he made a deep impress on legal education in the Nation and strongly influenced the government and jurisprudence of his State. A brilliant classical scholar and the first professor of law in an American college, he instructed scores of young lawyers. Included among them were Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, John Marshall, and Henry Clay.
Wythe was born in 1726, the second of three children, on his father’s plantation on the Back River in Elizabeth City County, Va., within the confines of present Hampton. He lost his parents at an early age and grew up under the guardianship of his older brother, Thomas. George acquired a knowledge of the classics from his well-educated mother before her death, and he probably attended for a time a grammar school operated by the College of William and Mary.
Wythe’s brother later sent him to Prince George County to read law under an uncle. In 1746, at the age of 20, he joined the bar, moved to Spotsylvania County, and became associated with a lawyer there. In December 1747, he married his partner’s sister, but she succumbed the next year. In 1754 Lt. Gov. Robert Dinwiddie appointed him as
## acting colonial attorney general, a position he held for a few months
and which likely required that he spend some time in Williamsburg. The next year, Wythe’s brother died and he inherited his birthplace. He chose, however, to live in Williamsburg in the house that his new father-in-law, an architect, designed and built for him and his betrothed, whom he married about 1755. Their only child died in infancy.
At Williamsburg, Wythe immersed himself in further study of the classics and the law and achieved accreditation by the colonial Supreme Court. Like his father, he served in the House of Burgesses (mid-1750’s until 1775), first as delegate and after 1769 as clerk. During this period, in 1768 he held the mayorship of Williamsburg, and the next year sat on the board of visitors of the College of William and Mary. He also had found time during the years 1762–67 to train youthful Thomas Jefferson in the law. The two men, at first as mentor and pupil and later as political allies, maintained a lifetime friendship.
Wythe first exhibited Revolutionary leanings in 1764 when Parliament hinted to the Colonies that it might impose a Stamp Tax. By then an experienced legislator, he drafted for the House of Burgesses a remonstrance to Parliament so strident that his fellow legislators modified it before adoption. Wythe was one of the first to express the concept of separate nationhood for the Colonies within the British Empire.
Although elected to Congress in 1775–76, Wythe exerted little influence in that body. He spent considerable time helping draft a State constitution and design a State seal, and was not present at the time of the formal signing of the Declaration in August 1776. Furthermore, within a few months, Wythe, Jefferson, and Edmund Pendleton undertook a 3-year project to revise Virginia’s legal code. In 1777 Wythe also presided as speaker of the lower house of the legislature.
An appointment as one of the three judges of the newly created Virginia high court of chancery followed the next year. Sitting on it for 28 years, during 13 of which he was the only chancellor, Wythe charted the course of Virginia jurisprudence. In conjunction with these duties, he was an ex officio member of the State Superior Court.
Wythe’s real love was teaching. In 1779 Jefferson and other officials of the College of William and Mary created the first chair of law in a U.S. institution of higher learning and appointed Wythe to fill it. In that position, he educated America’s earliest college-trained lawyers, among them John Marshall and James Monroe. To supplement his lectures, Wythe introduced the use of moot courts and legislatures, in which students could put their knowledge into actual practice. In 1787 he also demonstrated his love of the classics and literature by offering free to anyone interested a class in Latin, Greek, and English literature. That same year, he attended the U.S. Constitutional Convention, but played an insignificant role and did not sign the Constitution. The following year, however, he was one of the Federalist leaders at the Virginia ratifying convention.
In 1791, the year after Wythe resigned his professorship, his chancery duties caused him to move his home to Richmond, the State capital. But he was reluctant to give up his teaching and opened a private law school. One of his last and most promising pupils was a teenager named Henry Clay.
In 1806, in his eighth decade, Wythe died at Richmond under mysterious circumstances—probably of poison administered by his heir, a favorite grandnephew. Reflecting a lifelong aversion to slavery, Wythe emancipated his slaves in his will. His grave is in the yard of St. John’s Episcopal Church at Richmond.