Signers of the Declaration:
Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings 157
Huntington Birthplace, Conn. 164
Huntington House, Conn. 165
Williams Birthplace, Conn. 166
Williams House, Conn. 168
Wolcott House, Conn. 169
The White House, D.C. 170
College Hill, Ga. 173
Meadow Garden, Ga. 175
Tabby Cottage, Ga. 176
Whipple Birthplace, Maine 177
Carroll Mansion, Md. 179
Carrollton Manor, Md. 180
Chase-Lloyd House, Md. 181
Deshon-Caton-Carroll House, Md. 183
Doughoregan Manor, Md. 185
Habre-de-Venture, Md. 186
Paca House, Md. 188
Peggy Stewart House, Md. 189
Adams (John) Birthplace, Mass. 191
Adams (John Quincy) Birthplace, Mass. 192
Adams National Historic Site, Mass. 193
Elmwood, Mass. 195
Gerry Birthplace, Mass. 197
Hancock-Clarke House, Mass. 198
Bartlett House, N.H. 199
Moffatt-Ladd House, N.H. 201
Thornton House, N.H. 203
Hopkinson House, N.J. 204
Maybury Hill, N.J. 206
Morven, N.J. 207
President’s House, N.J. 208
Tusculum, N.J. 209
Floyd Birthplace (Fire Island National Seashore), N.Y. 210
General Floyd House, N.Y. 212
Iredell House, N.C. 213
Nash-Hooper House, N.C. 214
Independence National Historical Park, Pa. 216
Parsons-Taylor House, Pa. 226
Shippen-Wistar House, Pa. 228
Summerseat, Pa. 229
Taylor House, Pa. 230
Governor Hopkins House, R.I. 231
Heyward-Washington House, S.C. 233
Hopsewee-on-the-Santee, S.C. 234
Middleton Place, S.C. 236
Rutledge House, S.C. 237
Berkeley, Va. 239
Elsing Green, Va. 240
Menokin, Va. 242
Monticello, Va. 243
Mount Airy, Va. 246
Nelson House (Colonial National
Historical Park), Va. 247
Poplar Forest, Va. 249
Stratford Hall, Va. 251
Tuckahoe, Va. 253
Wythe House, Va. 255
Appendix
The Declaration and Its History 257
Text of the Declaration 259
History of the Document 262
Suggested Reading 268
Criteria for Selection of Historic Sites of National Significance 270
Acknowledgments 272
Art and Picture Credits 274
Index 281
Map: Signers of the Declaration—Historic Sites of National
Significance 162–163
_All photographs are indexed._
Part One
Signers of the Declaration:
Historical Background
At Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, the Delegates to the Continental
Congress courageously signed a document declaring the independence of
the Thirteen American Colonies from Great Britain. Not only did the
Declaration of Independence create a Nation, but it also pronounced
timeless democratic principles. Enshrined today in the National
Archives Building at Washington, D.C., it memorializes the founding of
the United States and symbolizes the eternal freedom and dignity of Man.
* * * * *
By the time the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration in July
1776, the War for Independence had been underway for more than a year.
Failing to obtain satisfactory redress from the mother country for
their economic and political grievances during the previous decade, the
colonists had finally resorted to armed conflict. These grievances had
come to a head shortly after the French and Indian War (1754–63). Long
and costly, the war depleted the royal treasury and added the financial
burden of administering the vast territory acquired from France.
Britain levied new, direct taxes in the Colonies and tightened customs
controls.
The colonists, accustomed to considerable economic freedom, resented
these measures. A number of Americans also felt that some sort
of conspiracy existed in England to destroy their liberties and
self-government. They believed that the mission of the large force of
redcoats assigned to the Colonies actually was internal suppression
rather than protection from a nonexistent external threat, especially
since the French had been expelled. Particularly aggravating was the
realization that the new tax levies supported the force. Some of the
discontent was regional in nature. Indebtedness to British creditors
irritated Southern planters. Commercial interests in the Middle
Colonies disliked the prohibition on manufacturing certain products.
Frontier settlers and speculators were irked at restrictions on
westward expansion and the Indian trade.
[Illustration: George III, King of England during the War for
Independence, was the focus of colonial hatred.]
[Illustration: The Revolutionaries utilized this exaggerated version
of the Boston Massacre (1770) by Paul Revere to nourish resentment of
British troops.]
[Illustration: “The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man or Tarring &
Feathering,” a British cartoon satirizing colonial methods of protest.]
In various places, peaceful protest and harassment of tax and customs
collectors gave way to rioting and mob violence. In New York and
Massachusetts, clashes with British troops culminated in bloodshed.
Realizing that some of these disturbances stemmed from agitation in
the colonial assemblies, which had enjoyed wide autonomy, the Crown
tightened its control over them. Disputes between legislators and
the King’s officials, once spasmodic, became commonplace. In some
instances, notably in Virginia and Massachusetts, the Royal Governors
dissolved the assemblies. In these and a few other provinces the Whigs
separated from their Tory, or Loyalist, colleagues, met extralegally,
and adopted retaliatory measures. Nearly all the Colonies formed
special “committees of correspondence” to communicate with each
other—the first step toward unified action.
[Illustration: In retaliation for the Boston Tea Party (1773), the
Crown imposed rigid limitations on the freedom of Massachusetts
citizens.]
In May 1774, in retaliation for the “Boston Tea Party,” Parliament
closed the port of Boston and virtually abolished provincial
self-government in Massachusetts. These actions stimulated resistance
across the land. That summer, the Massachusetts lower house, through
the committees of correspondence, secretly invited all 13 Colonies
to attend a convention. In response, on the fifth of September, 55
Delegates representing 12 Colonies, Georgia excepted, assembled at
Philadelphia. They convened at Carpenters’ Hall and organized the First
Continental Congress.
[Illustration: A rare contemporary engraving of the British-American
clash in 1775 at North Bridge, near Concord, Mass.]
Sharing though they did common complaints against the Crown, the
Delegates propounded a wide variety of political opinions. Most of them
agreed that Parliament had no right to control the internal affairs
of the Colonies. Moderates, stressing trade benefits with the mother
country, believed Parliament should continue to regulate commerce.
Others questioned the extent of its authority. A handful of Delegates
felt the answer to the problem lay in parliamentary representation.
Most suggested legislative autonomy for the Colonies. Reluctant to
sever ties of blood, language, trade, and cultural heritage, none yet
openly entertained the idea of complete independence from Great Britain.
After weeks of debate and compromise, Congress adopted two significant
measures. The first declared that the American colonists were
entitled to the same rights as Englishmen everywhere and denounced any
infringement of those rights. The second, the Continental Association,
provided for an embargo on all trade with Britain. To enforce the
embargo and punish violators, at the behest of Congress counties,
cities, and towns formed councils, or committees, of safety—many of
which later became wartime governing or administrative bodies. When
Congress adjourned in late October, the Delegates resolved to reconvene
in May 1775 if the Crown had not responded by then.
[Illustration: Headlines of a broadside showing American alarm over the
Battle of Concord. The two rows of coffins at the top represent slain
militiamen.]
In a sense the Continental Congress acted with restraint, for while
it was in session the situation in Massachusetts verged on war. In
September, just before Congress met, British troops from Boston had
seized ordnance supplies at Charlestown and Cambridge and almost
clashed with the local militia. The next month, Massachusetts patriots,
openly defying royal authority, organized a Revolutionary provincial
assembly as well as a military defense committee. Whigs in three other
colonies—Maryland, Virginia, and New Hampshire—had earlier that year
formed governments. By the end of the year, all the Colonies except
Georgia and New York had either set up new ones or taken control
of those already in existence. During the winter of 1774–75, while
Parliament mulled over conciliatory measures, colonial militia units
prepared for war.
[Illustration: Continental Army recruiting poster.]
The crisis came in the spring of 1775, predictably in Massachusetts.
Late on the night of April 18 the Royal Governor, Gen. Thomas Gage,
alarmed at the militancy of the rebels, dispatched 600 troops from
Boston to seize a major supply depot at Concord. Almost simultaneously
the Boston council of safety, aware of Gage’s intentions, directed
Paul Revere and William Dawes to ride ahead to warn militia units and
citizens along the way of the British approach, as well as John Hancock
and Samuel Adams, who were staying at nearby Lexington. Forewarned, the
two men went into hiding.
[Illustration: Title page of _Common Sense_, the anonymously written
and widely distributed pamphlet that converted thousands of colonists
to the Revolutionary cause.]
About 77 militiamen confronted the redcoats when they plodded into
Lexington at dawn. After some tense moments, as the sorely outnumbered
colonials were dispersing, blood was shed. More flowed at Concord and
much more along the route of the British as they retreated to Boston,
harassed most of the way by an aroused citizenry. What had once been
merely protest had evolved into open warfare; the War for Independence
had begun.
[Illustration: Thomas Paine, author of _Common Sense_, did not emigrate
to America from England until 1774, but he became an ardent patriot.]
[Illustration: Sir William Howe, British commander in chief in America
from 1776 until 1778.]
The Second Continental Congress convened in the Pennsylvania State
House at Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. Burdened by wartime realities
and the need to prepare a unified defense, it created a Continental
Army, unanimously elected George Washington as commander in chief,
appointed other generals, and tackled problems of military finance and
supply. Yet, despite these warlike actions, many Delegates still hoped
for a peaceful reconciliation.
[Illustration: Robert R. Livingston of New York, the most conservative
member of the drafting committee, neither voted on independence nor
signed the Declaration.]
In July Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition, a final attempt
to achieve an understanding with the Crown. The petition appealed
directly to King George III to cease hostilities and restore harmony.
But, unwilling to challenge the supremacy of Parliament, he refused to
acknowledge the plea and proclaimed the Colonies to be in a state of
rebellion.
During the winter of 1775–76, as the war intensified, all chance for
accommodation vanished. Congress, for the first time representing all
Thirteen Colonies because Georgia had sent Delegates in the fall,
disclaimed allegiance to Parliament, created a navy, and appointed a
committee of foreign affairs. Nevertheless the patriots, despite their
mounting influence in the provincial assemblies, felt they needed more
public support and hesitated to urge a final break with the Crown.
The turning point came in January 1776 with publication in Philadelphia
of the pamphlet _Common Sense_, authored anonymously by the recent
English immigrant Thomas Paine. Attacking the “myth” of an evil
Parliament and a benevolent King, he denounced George III for creating
the Colonies’ miseries, condemned the British constitution as well
as monarchy in general, and exhorted his fellow Americans to declare
independence immediately. The pamphlet, widely reprinted, was purchased
by many thousands of people and read by thousands more. It created a
furor. From Georgia to New Hampshire, independence became the major
topic of discussion and debate. The Revolutionaries won thousands of
converts.
In May Congress took a bold step toward political freedom by
authorizing the Colonies to form permanent governments. Those that had
not done so began to oust Crown officials and draft constitutions.
Independence, though not yet officially declared, was for all practical
purposes a reality.
* * * * *
The official movement for independence took root in the provincial
assemblies. The North Carolina assembly in April 1776 instructed its
congressional Delegates to vote for the issue should it be proposed.
The next month, on May 4, Rhode Island announced its independence
publicly—the first colony to do so. But it was Virginia that prodded
Congress to action. On May 15 a Williamsburg convention declared
Virginia independent and authorized its delegation at Philadelphia to
propose a similar course for the Colonies. On June 7 the delegation’s
leader, Richard Henry Lee, introduced the following resolution:
That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and
independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance
to the British Crown, and that all political connection between
them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally
dissolved.
The resolution also incorporated proposals to form foreign alliances;
and to devise a plan for confederation, which would be submitted to the
Colonies for their approval.
Despite the enthusiastic response of many Delegates, some of them,
though they foresaw the inevitability of independence, objected to the
timing. They believed the decision should reflect the desires of the
people as expressed through the provincial assemblies and pointed out
that the Middle Colonies, not yet ripe for freedom, needed more time
for deliberation. On June 10 the moderates obtained a postponement of
consideration of the Lee resolution until July 1.
On June 11 the Revolutionaries, undaunted by the delay and convinced of
their ultimate victory, persuaded Congress to appoint a committee to
draft a declaration of independence. Three of its five members, John
Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, were Revolutionaries.
Roger Sherman disliked extremism but had recently backed the
independence movement. The most unlikely member, Robert R. Livingston,
had stood in the front ranks of opposition to Lee’s resolution.
Possibly he was appointed to exert a moderating effect on its
supporters or, conversely, in the hope that his membership would help
swing over the conservative New York delegation.
At the time Lee had introduced his resolution, seven of the
Colonies—New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia—favored independence. New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Carolina, and Maryland were
either opposed or undecided. Throughout the month, Revolutionaries in
those provinces labored to gain control of the assemblies. Delaware
and Pennsylvania, unable to reach a decision, instructed their
representatives to vote in their colonies’ “best interests.” New
Jersey issued similar directions, but also elected an entirely new
and Whig-oriented slate of Delegates. The Maryland assembly, largely
through the persuasion of Samuel Chase, Charles Carroll of Carrollton,
and William Paca, voted unanimously for independence and so charged
its Delegates. The South Carolinians, though they had been authorized
months before to cast their lot with the majority, vacillated. The New
Yorkers impatiently awaited instructions.
[Illustration: First page of Jefferson’s rough draft of the
Declaration.]
July 1 was the day of decision. The Revolutionaries, overconfident from
their progress of the preceding month, anticipated an almost unanimous
vote for independence. They were disappointed. Following congressional
procedure, each colony balloted as a unit, determined by the majority
of Delegate opinion. Only nine of the Colonies voted affirmatively;
Pennsylvania and South Carolina, negatively; New York abstained; and
the two Delegates present from Delaware deadlocked. Technically the
resolution had carried, but the solidarity desirable for such a vital
decision was missing. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, hinting his
colony might change sides, moved that the vote be retaken the next day.
That day proved to be one of the most dramatic in the history of
the Continental Congress. John Adams of Massachusetts exerted an
overwhelming influence. South Carolina, its Delegates swayed by
Rutledge, reversed its position. Two conservatives among the seven
Pennsylvanians, Robert Morris and John Dickinson, though unwilling to
make a personal commitment to independence, cooperated by purposely
absenting themselves; the remaining Delegates voted three to two
in favor. The most exciting moment of the day occurred when Caesar
Rodney, Delaware’s third Delegate, galloped up to the statehouse after
a harrowing 80-mile night ride from Dover through a thunderstorm and
broke the Delaware tie. Home on a military assignment, the evening
before he had received an urgent plea from Thomas McKean, the
Delawarean who had voted for independence, to rush to Philadelphia. In
the final vote, 12 Colonies approved Lee’s resolution, New York again
abstaining. Congress declared the resolution to be in effect.
* * * * *
For the remainder of July 2 and continuing until the 4th, Congress
weighed and debated the content of the Declaration of Independence,
which the drafting committee had submitted on June 28. Its author was
young Thomas Jefferson, who had been in Congress about a year. The
committee had chosen him for the task because he was from Virginia, the
colony responsible for the independence resolution, and because of his
reputation as an excellent writer and man of talent and action.
[Illustration: Facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, engraved
in 1823 while the document was still in relatively good condition.]
Laboring in his rented rooms on the second floor of a private home at
the corner of Seventh and Market Streets, Jefferson had completed a
rough draft in about 2 weeks. Apparently Franklin and Adams made some
minor changes, and Livingston and Sherman expressed no reservations
so far as is known. To Jefferson’s irritation, however, Congress
altered the final draft considerably. Most of the changes consisted of
refinements in phraseology. Two major passages, however, were deleted.
The first, a censure of the people of Great Britain, seemed harsh
and needless to most of the Delegates. The second, an impassioned
condemnation of the slave trade, offended Southern planters as well as
New England shippers, many of whom were as culpable as the British in
the trade.
* * * * *
The first official document of the American Republic and one of the
most influential in human history, the Declaration expressed the spirit
of human freedom and affirmed Man’s universal rights. Jefferson’s goal
in drafting it was not, he said, to invent “new ideas” but to compose
“an expression of the American mind” in a tone and spirit suitable
for the momentous occasion. Stylistically, the Declaration resembled
his own preamble to the Virginia constitution and contained an almost
identical list of grievances. Its political philosophy, reflecting
the Lockean concepts espoused by many intellectuals of the day, was
certainly not new. Jefferson himself had touched on the basic points in
previous writings, and in essence he echoed George Mason’s “Declaration
of Rights,” which some of the Philadelphia newspapers had published
early in June. In other words, the Declaration assimilated existing
concepts into a concise statement of national doctrine.
Jefferson began the preamble with the oft-quoted and stirring words,
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one
people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with
another....” He then listed a series of “self-evident” truths—that “all
men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights,” particularly “life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” Governments, “deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed,” are instituted by men to insure
these rights. When they fail to do so, it is the “right of the people
to alter or to abolish” them and to institute new governments. Men
should not carelessly change governments, but should only take such
action after a long series of abuses and usurpations lead to “absolute
despotism.” Then it becomes their duty to do so. The longest portion
of the Declaration is a list of colonial grievances and examples of
the King’s tyranny. The final section includes a restatement of Lee’s
resolution and a pledge by the signers of their lives, their fortunes,
and their sacred honor to the cause of independence.
[Illustration: The Declaration first appeared in newspapers on July 9,
the day after the official announcement in Philadelphia.]
[Illustration: The New York City Sons of Liberty celebrated
independence by pulling down a statue of George III, which they later
melted and molded into bullets.]
* * * * *
On July 4 all the Colonies except New York voted to adopt the
Declaration. Congress ordered it printed and distributed to colonial
officials, military units, and the press. John Hancock and Charles
Thomson, President and Secretary of Congress respectively, were
the only signers of this broadside copy. On July 8, outside the
Pennsylvania State House, the document was first read to the public.
During the ensuing celebration, people cheered, bells rang out, and
soldiers paraded. At other cities, similar celebrations soon took
place. Yet many citizens—the Loyalists, or Tories—could not accept
independence now that it had been declared any more than previously
when it had been merely a concept. Some of them would continue to
dream of reconciliation. Others would flee from or be driven out of
the country. In addition, another sizable group of citizens remained
noncommittal, neither supporting nor opposing independence.
[Illustration: Artist’s rendition of the Battle of Germantown (October
1777).]
Four days after obtaining New York’s approval of the Declaration on
July 15, Congress ordered it engrossed on parchment for signature.
At this time, indicative of unanimity, the title was changed from “A
Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America
in General Congress Assembled” to “The Unanimous Declaration of the
Thirteen United States of America.”
* * * * *
Contrary to a widespread misconception, the 56 signers did not sign
as a group and did not do so on July 4, 1776. The official event
occurred on August 2, 1776, when 50 men probably took part. Later
that year, five more apparently signed separately and one added his
name in a subsequent year. Not until January 18, 1777, in the wake of
Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton, did Congress, which
had sought to protect the signers from British retaliation for as long
as possible, authorize printing of the Declaration with all their names
listed. At this time, Thomas McKean had not yet penned his name.
The most impressive signature is that of John Hancock, President of
Congress, centered over the others. According to tradition, Hancock
wrote boldly and defiantly so that King George III would not need
spectacles to identify him as a “traitor” and double the reward for
his head. The other Delegates signed in six columns, which ran from
right to left. They utilized the standard congressional voting order,
by colony generally from north to south: New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and
Georgia.
Those who signed on August 2 undoubtedly did not realize that
others would follow them and thus allowed no room to accommodate
the signatures of the later six men. Two of them, George Wythe and
Richard Henry Lee, found ample room above their fellow Virginians.
One, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, crowded his name into the
space between the Massachusetts and Rhode Island groups. Two of the
others—Thomas McKean and Oliver Wolcott—signed at the bottom of columns
following their State delegations. Only Matthew Thornton of New
Hampshire needed to add his name separately from his colleagues—at the
bottom of the first column on the right at the end of the Connecticut
group.
* * * * *
Independence had been declared; it still had to be won on the field of
battle. The War for Independence was already underway, but 5 more years
of struggle and bloody campaigning lay ahead. In 1781 the Colonies
achieved military victory, and 2 years later Britain in the Treaty of
Paris officially recognized the independence they had proclaimed in
1776. The building of the Nation could begin.
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
_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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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.