Like most successful politicians, however, Jefferson created his

share of enemies and felt the sting of failure. Inability to

reconcile his contradictory traits of idealism and pragmatism

resulted in inconsistencies that rendered him vulnerable. He lacked

the aggressiveness and charisma of many leaders. To compensate for

his basic shyness and his deficiencies as a speaker, he mastered

written expression and learned to exercise administrative power. His

governorship ended ignominiously. And his vision of an agricultural

America, peopled by well-educated and politically astute yeomen

farmers was never to be realized. Yet none of these factors diminishes

his stature or undermines his achievements.

The eldest of two sons in a family of ten, Jefferson was born in 1743

at Shadwell, a frontier plantation in Goochland (present Albemarle)

County, Va. But 2 years later his father, Peter, a self-made

surveyor-magistrate-planter who had married into the distinguished

Randolphs, moved his family eastward to Tuckahoe Plantation, near

Richmond. His reason for doing so was a promise he had made to his

wife’s newly deceased first cousin, William Randolph, to act as

guardian of his son, Thomas Mann Randolph. Young Jefferson passed most

of his boyhood in the Randolph home, beginning his elementary education

with private tutors. In 1752, when he was about 9 years old, the family

returned to Shadwell. His father died 5 years later and bequeathed him

almost 3,000 acres.

In 1760, at the age of 17, Jefferson matriculated at the College of

William and Mary, in Williamsburg. An incidental benefit was the chance

to observe the operation of practical politics in the colonial capital.

Jefferson graduated in 1762, studied law locally under the noted

teacher George Wythe, and in 1767 was admitted to the bar.

At Shadwell, Jefferson assumed the civic responsibilities and

prominence his father had enjoyed. In 1770, when fire consumed the

structure, he moved to his nearby estate Monticello, where he had

already begun building a home. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles

Skelton, a widow. During their decade of life together, she was to bear

six children, but only two daughters reached maturity.

Meanwhile, in 1769 at the age of 26, Jefferson had been elected to

the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. He was a member continuously

until 1775, and alined himself with the anti-British group. Unlike his

smooth-tongued confreres Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, Jefferson

concentrated his efforts in committee work rather than in debate.

A literary stylist, he drafted many of the Revolutionary documents

adopted by the House of Burgesses. His _A Summary View of the Rights of

British America_ (1774), one of the most influential essays of the era,

disavowed parliamentary control of the Colonies and contended that they

were tied to the King only by their own volition and recognition of

mutual benefits.

[Illustration: First page of Thomas Jefferson’s pamphlet _A Summary

View_ (1774), one of the earliest and most influential Revolutionary

tracts.]

Jefferson utilized the same working methods in the Continental Congress

(1775–76), where his decisiveness in committee contrasted markedly

with his silence on the floor. His colleagues, however, rejected

several of the documents he drafted his first year because of their

extreme anti-British tone. But, by the time he returned the following

May, after spending the winter in Virginia, the temper of Congress had

changed drastically. The very next month, though only 33 years old, he

was assigned to the five-man committee chosen to draft the Declaration

of Independence, a task his colleagues assigned to him. In September,

not long after Congress had adopted the draft with modifications and

most of the Delegates signed it, Jefferson returned to Virginia—anxious

to be nearer home and feeling he could make a deeper political mark

there.

A notable career in the House of Delegates (1776–79), the lower house

of the legislature, followed. There Jefferson took over leadership of

the “progressive” party from Patrick Henry, who relinquished it to

become Governor. Highlights of this service included revision of the

State laws (1776–79), in which Jefferson collaborated with George Wythe

and Edmund Pendleton; and authorship of a bill for the establishment of

religious freedom in Virginia, introduced in 1779 but not passed until

7 years later.

Although hampered as Governor (1779–81) by wartime conditions and

constitutional limitations, Jefferson proved to be a weak executive,

even in emergencies hesitating to wield his authority. When the British

invaded the State in the spring of 1781, the situation became chaotic.

On June 3, while the legislature was meeting in Charlottesville

because the redcoats held Richmond, Jefferson recommended the

combining of civil and military agencies under Gen. Thomas Nelson,

Jr., and virtually abdicated office. The next day, British raiders

almost captured him and a group of legislators he was entertaining at

Monticello. Although later formally vindicated for his abandonment of

the governorship, the action fostered a conservative takeover of the

government and his reputation remained clouded for some time.

Jefferson stayed out of the limelight for 2 years, during which time

his wife died. In 1783 he reentered Congress, which the next year

sent him to Paris to aid Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in their

attempts to negotiate commercial treaties with European nations. During

his 5-year stay, Jefferson succeeded Franklin as Minister to France

(1785–89), gained various commercial concessions from and strengthened

relations with the French, visited England and Italy, absorbed

European culture, and observed the beginnings of the French Revolution.

[Illustration: The University of Virginia in 1826, the year of the

death of founder Jefferson.]

In the years that followed, interspersed with pleasant interludes

at Monticello, Jefferson filled the highest offices in the land:

Secretary of State (1790–93), Vice President (1797–1801), and two-term

President (1801–9). Ever averse to political strife, he occupied these

positions as much out of a sense of civic and party duty as personal

ambition. Aggravating normal burdens and pressures were his bitter

feuds with Alexander Hamilton on most aspects of national policy, and

the vindictiveness of Federalist attacks. Jefferson took considerable

satisfaction, however, from his many accomplishments. Among these was

the cofounding with James Madison of the Democratic-Republican Party,

which in time drove the Federalists out of power.

Physically and mentally exhausted, in 1809 Jefferson retired for the

final time to Monticello. He retained his health and varied interests

and corresponded with and entertained statesmen, politicians,

scientists, explorers, scholars, and Indian chiefs. When the pace of

life grew too hectic, he found haven at Poplar Forest, a retreat near

Lynchburg he had designed and built in 1806–19. His pet project during

most of his last decade was founding the University of Virginia (1819),

in Charlottesville.

Painfully distressing to Jefferson, however, was the woeful state of

his finances. His small salary in public office, the attendant neglect

of his fortune and estate, general economic conditions, and debts he

inherited from his wife had taken a heavy toll. He lived more frugally

than was his custom in an attempt to stave off disaster and sold off as

many of his lands and slaves as he could. But when a friend defaulted

on a note for a large sum, Jefferson fell hopelessly into debt and was

forced to sell his library to the Government. It became the nucleus of

the Library of Congress.

Jefferson died only a few hours before John Adams at the age of 83

on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the

Declaration of Independence. For his tombstone at Monticello, ignoring

his many high offices and multitudes of other achievements, he chose

three accomplishments that he wanted to be remembered for: authorship

of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for

Religious Freedom and the founding of the University of Virginia.

Francis Lightfoot Lee

VIRGINIA

[Illustration]

No less a patriot than his dynamic elder brother Richard

Henry and his gifted younger brothers Arthur and William,

Francis Lightfoot Lee preferred the uneventful life of a

country squire to the public spotlight and chose to follow

rather than to lead. Despite his shyness and weakness as

a speaker, he exercised extensive political influence,

took an active part in the Revolution, and signed both the

Declaration and the Articles of Confederation.

Lee, a member of one of the most famous families in Virginia and U.S.

history and the sixth son and eighth child of planter Thomas Lee, was

born in 1734 at the family estate, Stratford Hall, in Westmoreland

County, Va. He was educated by a private tutor and never attended

college. In 1750, upon the death of his father, he inherited Coton,

an estate in Fairfax County. Seven years later, newly created Loudoun

County absorbed Coton. At that time, the colonial legislature nominated

him as Loudoun lieutenant. The next year, he moved to Coton and became

trustee of the newly incorporated village of Leesburg, named after

him or his brother Philip Ludwell, both local landowners. For the

next decade, Francis Lightfoot represented the county in the House of

Burgesses.

In 1769 Lee married socialite Rebecca Tayloe of Richmond County. The

newlyweds resided at Mount Airy estate with Rebecca’s parents for a

few months until Menokin, a new home that Colonel Tayloe was building

nearby for them, was completed. From then until 1774, Lee sat again

with the burgesses.

Lee had joined the Revolutionary movement at an early date. From the

time of the Stamp Act (1765) until the outbreak of war a decade later,

he participated in most of the Virginia protests and assemblies. He

rarely debated on the floor in Congress (1775–79), but often opposed

the position of his brother Richard Henry, and served on the military

and marine committees as well as that charged with drafting the

Articles of Confederation.

In 1779, weary of office and longing for the peace and quiet of

Menokin, Lee left Congress. Except for a few years in the State

legislature, he abandoned public service altogether and lived quietly.

In 1797, only a few months after the death of his childless wife, at

the age of 62 he succumbed. Burial took place in the Tayloe family

graveyard at Mount Airy.

Richard Henry Lee

VIRGINIA

[Illustration]

Richard Henry Lee, brilliant orator and fiery Revolutionary

leader, introduced the independence resolution in

the Continental Congress, served for awhile as its

President, and later became a U.S. Senator. Fearing undue

centralization of power, he fought against the Constitution

and led the campaign that brought inclusion of the Bill of

Rights. Throughout his life, he strenuously opposed the

institution of slavery. He and Francis Lightfoot Lee were

the only brothers among the signers.

Fifth son and seventh of 11 children, Lee was born in 1732 along the

Potomac shore at Stratford Hall. His initial tutorial education was

supplemented by extensive study at Wakefield Academy, in Yorkshire,

England, and a tour of northern Europe. He sailed home about 1751 at

the age of 19, the year after his father’s death, and resided with

his eldest brother Philip Ludwell at Stratford Hall. In 1757 Richard

Henry married. About this time, he began building and soon occupied

Chantilly, about 3 miles to the east on land leased from his brother.

In 1768 Richard Henry’s wife died, leaving four children; the next

year, he remarried, a union that yielded five more offspring.

Lee meantime, following family tradition, had committed himself to

politics. In 1757, at the age of 25, he became justice of the peace

for Westmoreland County. The following year, he moved up to the House

of Burgesses and sat there until 1775. One of the first to oppose

Britain, he early allied with Patrick Henry. As a protest against the

Stamp Act (1765), Lee drew up the Westmoreland Association (1766), a

nonimportation agreement signed by some of the citizens of his county.

The next year, he denounced the Townshend Acts. And a year later

he proposed in a letter to John Dickinson of Pennsylvania that the

individual colonies set up committees to correspond with each other—an

idea that did not come to fruition for 5 years.

In 1769, when Lee and Henry penned an address to the King protesting

several actions of Parliament, the Royal Governor disbanded the House

of Burgesses. Lee thereupon met with other patriots at Raleigh’s Tavern

and helped frame the Virginia Association, a nonimportation agreement.

Many other colonies formed similar associations, but in 1770 Parliament

repealed most of the duties and the protest spirit subsided.

In March 1773, when anti-British feeling flared once again, Lee,

Henry, and Jefferson, who had entered the House of Burgesses in 1769,

organized a Virginia committee of correspondence and invited the other

colonies to do likewise. Learning of the British closing of Boston

Harbor in May 1774, they persuaded their colleagues to declare, as

a protest, a day of fasting and prayer. The Royal Governor again

dissolved the burgesses. The Revolutionaries reconvened at Raleigh’s

Tavern, drew up a new nonimportation agreement, and resolved to appeal

to the other colonies for an intercolonial congress. But, before

such action could be taken, Virginia received an invitation from

Massachusetts to send representatives to a congress to be held in

September at Philadelphia—the First Continental Congress. Virginia’s

first provincial assembly met in August and designated seven Delegates,

including Lee and Henry.

Lee’s outstanding congressional act was the introduction on June 7,

1776, of the resolution for independence from Britain, seconded by

John Adams. This document, Lee’s condensed redraft of one forwarded

him by a convention that had met in Williamsburg on May 15, proposed

severing relations with Britain, the forming of foreign alliances, and

preparation of a plan for confederation. On June 13, or 2 days after a

committee was appointed to draft the Declaration, Lee journeyed back

to Virginia, apparently because of illness in the family. He did not

return and sign the Declaration until sometime subsequent to the formal

ceremony on August 2. Like his brother Francis Lightfoot, in 1777 he

also subscribed to the Articles of Confederation. After 1776, however,

his influence in Congress waned, and 3 years later ill health forced

his resignation.

As a State legislator (1780–84) Lee joined the conservative faction,

which represented the interests of the large planters. A Member of

Congress again in the period 1784–89, he served in 1784–85 as its

President. In 1787, though elected to the Constitutional Convention, he

refused to attend and led congressional opposition to the Constitution,

especially because of the absence of a bill of rights. Although he

was well aware of the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation,

he and others feared a stronger Central Government. Lee’s “Letters of

the Federal Farmer to the Republican,” the collective title for two

pamphlets outlining his objections to the Constitution, epitomized

antifederalist sentiment.

In 1789 Lee entered the U.S. Senate, but because of failing health

resigned in 1792, the year after the Bill of Rights was incorporated

into the Constitution. He died in 1794, aged 62, at Chantilly. His

grave is in the Lee family cemetery near Hague, Virginia.

Francis Lewis

NEW YORK

[Illustration]

Few other signers felt the tragedy of the War for

Independence more directly than Francis Lewis, whose wife

died as a result of British imprisonment. To further the

cause, he also expended a considerable portion of the

fortune he had acquired as a merchant.

Lewis was the only child of a minister. He was born in 1713 at

Llandaff, Glamorganshire, Wales. Orphaned at an early age and raised

by relatives, he studied at Westminster School in London and then took

employment with a local firm. In 1738, deciding to go into business for

himself, he set up branches in New York and Philadelphia and for a few

years shuttled between those cities and northern European ports. In

1745 he married a New York girl, his partner’s sister.

During the French and Indian War, in 1756, while functioning as a

clothing contractor for British troops at Fort Oswego, in present New

York, Lewis was taken captive and sent to France for imprisonment. Upon

his release, apparently in 1763, as a recompense the British Government

awarded him a large land grant in America. He returned to New York

City, reentered business, and quickly earned a fortune. In 1765 he

retired to the village of Whitestone (now part of Flushing), on Long

Island, but in 1771 he temporarily returned to New York City to help

his son enter the business world, even probably making a voyage to

England with him.

Back home, Lewis devoted most of his energies to the Revolutionary

movement, which he had joined in 1765 by attending the Stamp Act

Congress. He was also likely one of the leaders of the New York Sons

of Liberty. In 1774 he became a member of the New York Revolutionary

committees of fifty-one and sixty, the next year attended the

provincial convention, and subsequently helped set up the State

government.

In the Continental Congress (1775–79), Lewis rarely took the floor but

served on the marine, foreign affairs, and commerce committees, as

well as sitting on the Board of Admiralty and engaging in troop supply

matters. He defended Gen. George Washington from the attacks of the

Conway Cabal. Because of Tory dominance in New York, Lewis and the

other Delegates were instructed not to vote for independence on July 1

and 2, 1776, but Lewis signed the Declaration on August 2.

That same year, when the British invaded Long Island, they destroyed

Lewis’ home in Whitestone and took his wife into custody. She was

eventually released in an exchange for wives of British officials, but

the hardships she had endured ruined her health and brought about her

death in 1779. The grief-stricken Lewis immediately left Congress,

but remained on the Board of Admiralty until 1781, at which time he

abandoned politics altogether. He lived in retirement with his sons,

and died in 1802 at the age of 89 in New York City. He was buried there

in an unmarked grave in the yard of Trinity Church.

Philip Livingston

NEW YORK

[Illustration]

A member of the landed gentry, merchant Philip

Livingston lived a princely life and devoted much energy

to civic affairs and philanthropic enterprises. He

was a conservative in politics, and at first opposed

independence. On the other hand, despite wartime business

reverses, he contributed generously to the Revolutionary

effort and continued in public service until the day he

died.

Livingston was the fifth son of Philip Livingston, second lord of

Livingston Manor, of Scotch descent, and Catherine Van Brugh, of Dutch

lineage. Young Livingston was born in 1716 at his father’s townhouse in

Albany and spent most of his childhood there or at the family manor at

Linlithgo, about 30 miles to the south.

Upon receiving a degree from Yale in 1737, Livingston entered the

import business in New York City. Three years later, he married and

moved into a townhouse on Duke Street in Manhattan; he was to sire

five sons and four daughters. As time went on, he built up a fortune,

particularly as a trader-privateer during the French and Indian War

(1754–63). In 1764, though retaining his Duke Street home, he acquired

a 40-acre estate on Brooklyn Heights overlooking the East River and New

York Harbor.

While prospering as a merchant, Livingston devoted many of his energies

to humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors. Among the organizations he

fostered, financially aided, or helped administer were King’s College

(later Columbia University), the New York Society Library, St. Andrew’s

Society, the New York Chamber of Commerce, and New York Hospital.

Livingston was also a proponent of political and religious freedom.

As a New York City alderman (1754–63), he identified with the popular

party that opposed the aristocratic ruling class of the colony. In

a decade of service (1759–69) in the colonial legislature, he stood

behind the Whigs in their quarrel with the Royal Governor and attended

the Stamp Act Congress in 1765. But, a believer in the sort of

dignified protests mounted by lawyers and merchants, he resented the

riotous behavior of such groups as the Sons of Liberty.

[Illustration: The Brooklyn home of Philip Livingston from 1764 until

his death in 1778. When the British occupied New York, they used it as

a hospital. In 1811 fire destroyed it.]

In the 1769 elections the Tories gained control of the legislature. In

his bid for reelection, Livingston, fearful of the rise of extremism

among the populace, attempted to unite the moderate factions. Defeated

in New York City, which from then on was Tory-dominated, he managed to

obtain reelection from the Livingston Manor district. The new assembly,

claiming he could not represent an area in which he did not reside,

unseated him.

In 1774 Livingston became a member of the committee of fifty-one,

an extralegal group that selected New York City Delegates to the

Continental Congress, one of whom was Livingston. He also served on

the committee of sixty, formed to enforce congressional enactments.

The next year, he won election to the committee of one hundred, which

governed New York City temporarily until the first provincial congress

of the colony met later that year.

Between 1774 and 1778 Livingston divided his time between the

Continental Congress and the New York provincial assembly/legislature.

In Congress he sat on committees dealing with marine, commerce,

finance, military, and Indian matters. He was absent on July 1–2,

1776, perhaps on purpose even though the New York Delegates abstained

from voting on the independence issue, but on August 2 he signed the

Declaration.

After their defeat in the Battle of Long Island (August 27, 1776),

Washington and his officers met at Livingston’s residence in Brooklyn

Heights and decided to evacuate the island. Subsequent to the ill-fated

peace negotiations at Staten Island in September between Admiral Lord

Richard Howe and three representatives of the Continental Congress, the

British occupied New York City. They utilized Livingston’s Duke Street

home as a barracks and his Brooklyn Heights residence as a Royal Navy

hospital, as well as confiscating his business interests. He later

sold some of his remaining property to sustain public credit. With the

advance of the British, Livingston and his family had fled to Esopus

(later Kingston), N.Y., where the State capital was temporarily located

before moving to nearby Poughkeepsie.

Livingston passed away at the age of 62 in 1778, the third earliest

signer to die (after John Morton and Button Gwinnett). At the time,

though in poor health, he was still in Congress, then meeting at York,

Pa. He is buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in that city.

Thomas Lynch, Jr.

SOUTH CAROLINA

[Illustration]

Like two of the three other South Carolina signers, Heyward

and Middleton, Thomas Lynch, Jr., was an aristocratic

planter. But, despite his wealth and social position,

he experienced one of the most tragic lives of all the

signers. He was stricken by illness in the midst of his

political and military labors for his State, never fully

recovered his health, and perished at sea in his 30th year.

He died at a younger age than any other signer, though a

couple succumbed at an earlier date. He was also the second

youngest in the group, next to fellow South Carolinian

Edward Rutledge.

The only son of Thomas Lynch, Sr., a rich rice planter, Lynch was born

in 1749 at Hopsewee Plantation, located at Winyaw on the North Santee

River in Prince George’s Parish (present Georgetown County), S.C.

After attending the Indigo Society School at nearby Georgetown, from

1764 until 1772 he studied abroad at Eton and Cambridge and read law

in London. Upon his return home, deciding not to engage in the law, he

married and settled at Peach Tree Plantation. A gift from his father,

it was situated in St. James Parish (present Charleston County) on the

South Santee River about 4 miles south of Hopsewee.

As the heir of one of the most fervent Revolutionaries and influential

men in the colony, Lynch naturally took a deep interest in politics and

enjoyed strong support from the electorate. During the years 1774–76,

while his father served in the Continental Congress, he labored on

the home front, attending the first and second provincial congresses

as well as the first State legislature and sitting on the State

constitutional committee.

In 1775, however, fate dealt Lynch a cruel blow. He accepted a

captaincy in the First South Carolina Regiment of Continentals—to the

dismay of his father who had hoped to use his position to obtain a

higher rank for him. On a recruiting trip to North Carolina, young

Lynch contracted bilious fever. This ended his military days and

rendered him a partial invalid for his few remaining years.

Early in 1776 at Philadelphia the elder Lynch suffered a stroke that

virtually incapacitated him for further public service. In the spring,

his concerned colleagues in South Carolina elected his son to the

Continental Congress, probably so that he could care for his father

and act officially on his behalf. Although ill himself, Lynch made the

onerous trip to Philadelphia. He stayed there throughout the summer,

long enough to vote for and sign, at the age of 27, the Declaration

of Independence. His father was unable to take part in the ceremony.

The two were the only father-son team that served concurrently in the

Continental Congress.

By the end of the year, the failing health of both men compelled them

to start homeward. En route, at Annapolis, Md., a second stroke took

the life of the senior Lynch. His son, broken in spirit and physically

unable to continue in politics, retired to Peach Tree. Late in 1779 he

and his wife, heading for southern France in an attempt to regain his

health, boarded a ship bound for the West Indies that foundered. The

couple died childless.

Thomas McKean

DELAWARE

[Illustration]

Lawyer-jurist Thomas McKean stands out from the other

signers in a variety of ways. He was the last to pen his

signature to the Declaration, sometime after January 18,

1777. Although many Delegates simultaneously took part in

State affairs, none did so as extensively as McKean—and he

figured prominently in not one but two States, Delaware and

Pennsylvania. He was also the only signer to be the chief

executive of and concurrent officeholder in two States.

Furthermore, he numbered among those who also subscribed to

the Articles of Confederation, and he served a long tour in

Congress.

Of Scotch-Irish ancestry, McKean was born in 1734. He was the second

son of a farmer-tavernkeeper who lived in New London Township, in

Chester County, Pa., near the New Jersey and Delaware boundaries. After

studying for 7 years at Rev. Francis Alison’s academy at nearby New

London, McKean read law with a cousin at New Castle, Del. In 1754, at

the age of 20, he was admitted to the Delaware bar and soon expanded

his practice into Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

During the next two and a half decades, McKean occupied an array of

appointive and elective offices in Delaware, some simultaneously: high

sheriff of Kent County; militia captain; trustee of the loan office

of New Castle County; customs collector and judge at New Castle;

deputy attorney general of Sussex County; chief notary officer for the

province; and clerk (1757–59) and member (1762–79) of the legislature,

including the speakership of the lower house (1772–73). In 1762, he had

also helped compile the colony’s laws.

McKean’s Revolutionary tendencies had first revealed themselves

during the Stamp Act (1765) controversy. He was one of the most

vociferous of the delegates at the Stamp Act Congress. In 1774, a year

after the death of his wife, whom he had wed in 1763, he remarried

and established his home in Philadelphia. He nevertheless retained

membership in the Delaware legislature, which that same year elected

him to the Continental Congress. Except for the period December

1776-January 1778, when conservative opposition unseated him, he stayed

there until 1783 and served as President for a few months in 1781.

He played a key role in the Revolutionary program, at the same time

fostering the establishment of governments in Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Furthermore, it was McKean who was responsible for breaking the

Delaware tie in the congressional vote for independence. On July

1, 1776, date of the first vote, the two Delaware representatives

present, McKean and George Read, deadlocked. McKean, who had balloted

affirmatively, dispatched an urgent message to the third Delegate,

Caesar Rodney, who was at his home near Dover, Del., on military

matters, to rush to Philadelphia. Rodney, making an 80-mile horseback

ride through a storm, arrived just in time to swing Delaware over to

independence on July 2.

During the hiatus in his congressional career, from late 1776 until

early in 1778, McKean had remained in the lower house of the Delaware

legislature, of which he became speaker once again. In that capacity,

in September-November 1777, he temporarily replaced the president of

Delaware, whom the British had captured. In vain they also pursued

McKean, who was forced to move his family several times. Meantime, in

July, he had been appointed chief justice of the Pennsylvania Superior

Court, a position he was to hold for 22 years.

After 1783, when his congressional service ended, McKean focused his

political activities in Pennsylvania. As a Federalist, in 1787 he was

instrumental in that State’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution. In

the State constitutional convention of 1789–90 he demonstrated mistrust

of popular government. During the 1790’s, disenchanted with Federalist

foreign policy, he switched to the Democratic-Republicans.

While Governor for three terms (1799–1808), McKean was the storm

center of violent partisan warfare. Although he exercised strong

leadership and advanced education and internal improvements, his

imperiousness infuriated the Federalists, alienated many members of

his own party, and resulted in an attempt to impeach him. Especially

controversial were his rigid employment of the spoils system, including

the appointment of friends and relatives, and his refusal to call a

convention to revise the constitution. As a result, he won reelection

only with the support of members of both parties who opposed the

revision.

McKean lived out his life quietly in Philadelphia. He died in 1817 at

the age of 83, survived by his second wife and four of the 11 children

from his two marriages. He was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery. His

substantial estate consisted of stocks, bonds, and huge tracts of land

in Pennsylvania.

Arthur Middleton

SOUTH CAROLINA

[Illustration]

Despite long years of study in England, exceptional wealth,

and social eminence, Arthur Middleton evolved into an avid

Revolutionary. Because of preoccupation with State matters,

particularly military defense, his attendance in Congress

was spasmodic. The British captured him during their attack

on Charleston and ravished his estate.

Middleton was born in 1742 at Middleton Place, the family estate on

the Ashley River near Charleston. His father, who owned a score of

plantations comprising 50,000 acres and employing some 800 slaves,

ranked among the wealthiest and most politically active men in the

province. While still a young boy, Arthur sailed to England for an

education. He attended Hackney School, graduated from Cambridge

University, and studied law in London. In 1764, the year after his

return, he wed the woman who was to bear him nine children, and

embarked on a career as justice of the peace and colonial legislator.

In the years 1768–71, however, he and his wife made an extended tour of

Europe.

Reelected the next year to the legislature, Middleton joined the

Revolutionaries in their campaign against the Royal Governor. While

sitting in the first and second provincial assemblies (1775–76),

Middleton aided in organizing a night raid on public arms stores at

Charleston before the Governor could seize them, raised money for

armed resistance, recommended defense measures for Charleston Harbor,

served on the council of safety, and urged tight enforcement of the

Continental Association. An extremist, he advocated the tarring and

feathering of Loyalists and confiscation of the estates of those who

had fled the country.

In 1776, while engaged in helping draft a State constitution, Middleton

was chosen to replace his more conservative father in the Continental

Congress. Two years later, when young Middleton declined reelection,

he also rejected an offer of the governorship of South Carolina by the

legislature, which had enacted a new constitution that he opposed. In

1779 and 1780, though reelected to the Continental Congress, Middleton

failed to attend, probably because of concern over the British threat

to his State. While serving in the militia during the siege of

Charleston in 1780, along with fellow signers Heyward and Rutledge he

was captured by the British and imprisoned at St. Augustine, Fla.,

until July 1781.

Two months later, Middleton returned to Congress and served throughout

1782. He then retired to Middleton Place, which had been ravaged by

the British. He rehabilitated it, resumed his life as a planter, sat

intermittently in the State legislature, and accepted assignment as one

of the original trustees of the College of Charleston. He died in 1787

at the age of 44. His remains rest at Middleton Place.

Lewis Morris

NEW YORK

[Illustration]

Although Lewis Morris was a wealthy landowner who enjoyed

the prestige of the social elite, he represented the

patriot element in Tory-dominated New York. The British

sacked his estate during the war, and his three eldest sons

fought under Washington.

Born in 1726, Morris was the eldest son of the second lord of the vast

manor of Morrisania, in Westchester (present Bronx) County, N.Y. Upon

graduating from Yale College in 1746, he helped manage the estate.

Three years later, he married, siring 10 children. In 1762, when his

father died, he inherited Morrisania and became its third lord. About

this time, he gained an interest in local politics, and in 1769 served

a term in the colonial legislature.

As time went on, though residing in a pro-Loyalist county, Morris

became increasingly critical of British policy. In 1775 he helped

organize a meeting at White Plains that overcame strong opposition and

chose county delegates, including Morris as chairman, to New York’s

first provincial convention. It elected him to the Continental Congress

(1775–77), where he specialized in military and Indian affairs. For

most of 1776, he was absent from Philadelphia, serving as a brigadier

general in the Westchester County militia. During the British invasion

of New York that year, the redcoats ravaged Morrisania, and forced

Morris’ family to flee.

When his career in Congress ended, Morris rose to the rank of major

general in the militia and became a county judge (1777–78) and State

senator (1777–81 and 1784–88). After war’s end in 1783, when he

was able to return to Morrisania, he devoted much of his time to

rehabilitating it. In 1784 he sat on the first board of regents of

the University of New York. And 4 years later, at the State ratifying

convention in Poughkeepsie, he strongly supported Alexander Hamilton’s

successful drive for approval of the U.S. Constitution.

Morris died in 1798 at Morrisania at the age of 71. His grave is in the

family vault in the yard of St. Ann’s Church in the Bronx.

Robbert Morris

PENNSYLVANIA

[Illustration]

Merchant Robert Morris was a man of many distinctions.

One of the wealthiest individuals in the Colonies and an

economic wizard, he won the accolade “Financier of the

Revolution,” yet died penniless and forgotten. He and Roger

Sherman were the only signers of all three of the Nation’s

basic documents: the Declaration of Independence, Articles

of Confederation, and Constitution. Morris, who turned down

appointment as the first Secretary of the Treasury, also

served as a Senator in the First Congress.

Morris was born in or near Liverpool, England, in 1734. At the age of

13, he emigrated to Maryland to join his father, a tobacco exporter at

Oxford, Md. After brief schooling at Philadelphia, the youth obtained

employment with Thomas and Charles Willing’s well-known shipping firm.

In 1754 he became a partner, and for almost four decades was one of the

company’s directors as well as one of Philadelphia’s most influential

citizens. Marrying in 1769 at the age of 35, he fathered five sons and

two daughters.

During the Stamp Act turmoil in 1765, Morris had joined other merchants

in protest, but not until the outbreak of hostilities a decade hence

did he fully commit himself to the Revolution. In 1775 the Continental

Congress contracted with his firm to import arms and ammunition; and

he was elected to the Pennsylvania council of safety (1775–76), the

committee of correspondence, the provincial assembly (1775–76), the

State legislature (1776–78), and the Continental Congress (1775–78). In

the latter body, on July 1, 1776, he voted against independence, which

he personally considered premature, but the next day purposely absented

himself to facilitate an affirmative ballot by his State.

Morris, a key Member of Congress, specialized in financial affairs and

military procurement. Although he and his firm profited handsomely,

had it not been for his assiduous labors the Continental Army would

probably have needed to demobilize. He worked closely with General

Washington, wheedled money and supplies from the States, borrowed

money in the face of overwhelming difficulties, and on occasion

even obtained personal loans to further the war cause. Immediately

following his congressional service, Morris sat for two more terms in

the Pennsylvania legislature in the period 1778–81. During this time,

Thomas Paine and others attacked him for profiteering in Congress,

which investigated his accounts and vindicated him. Nevertheless, his

reputation slipped.

[Illustration: In 1794 Robert Morris began building this palatial

townhouse in Philadelphia. After his imprisonment for debt in 1798, the

unfinished house came to be known as “Morris’ Folly.” It stood until

1800.]

Morris embarked on the most dramatic phase of his career by accepting

the office of Superintendent of Finance (1781–84) under the Articles of

Confederation. Congress, recognizing the perilous state of the Nation’s

finances and its impotence to remedy it, granted him dictatorial

powers and acquiesced to his condition that he be allowed to continue

his private commercial enterprises. He slashed all governmental and

military expenditures, personally purchased Army and Navy supplies,

tightened accounting procedures, prodded the States to fulfill quotas

of money and supplies, and when necessary strained his personal credit

by issuing notes over his own signature or borrowing from friends.

To finance Washington’s Yorktown campaign in 1781, in addition to

the above techniques Morris obtained a sizable loan from France. He

used part of it, along with some of his own fortune, to organize

the Bank of North America, chartered that December. The first

Government-incorporated bank in the United States, it aided war

financing.

Although Morris was reelected to the Pennsylvania legislature in

1785–86, his private commercial ventures consumed most of his time.

In the latter year, he attended the Annapolis Convention, and the

following year the Constitutional Convention, where he sympathized with

the Federalists. In 1789, declining Washington’s offer of appointment

as the first Secretary of the Treasury, he took instead a senatorial

seat in Congress (1789–95).

During the later years of his public life, Morris speculated wildly,

often on overextended credit, in lands in the West and at the site

of Washington, D.C. To compound his difficulties, in 1794 he began

constructing on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street a palatial townhouse

designed by Maj. Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Not long thereafter, Morris

attempted to escape creditors by retreating to The Hills, the country

estate along the Schuylkill River on the edge of Philadelphia that he

had acquired in 1770.

Arrested at the behest of creditors in 1798 and forced to abandon

completion of the townhouse, henceforth known in its unfinished state

as “Morris’ Folly,” Morris was thrown into the Philadelphia debtors’

prison, where he was well treated. Nevertheless, by the time he was

released in 1801, under a Federal bankruptcy law, his property and

fortune had vanished, his health deteriorated, and his spirit been

broken. He lingered on amid poverty and obscurity, living in a simple

Philadelphia home on an annuity Gouverneur Morris had obtained for his

wife. He died in 1806 in his 72d year. He was buried in the yard of

Christ Church.

John Morton

PENNSYLVANIA

[Illustration]

John Morton, one of the nine signers from Pennsylvania,

is better known there than in the Nation, but he rendered

meritorious service to both. He cast the decisive ballot

that swung his State over to an affirmative vote for

independence in the Continental Congress. He was the first

signer to die.

Morton was born of Finnish-Swedish descent in 1725, shortly after the

death of his father, on a farm in Ridley Township, Chester (present

Delaware) County. John Sketchley, an Englishman who subsequently

married the widowed mother of the youth, reared and educated him. Their

relationship was apparently close, for Morton later named his eldest

son Sketchley. The stepfather, learned in mathematics, taught the boy

the three R’s as well as surveying. He practiced that profession on and

off all his life, as well as farming, politics, and jurisprudence. He

married in his early 20’s, in 1748 or 1749, and fathered five daughters

and four sons.

At the age of 30, Morton entered politics, which from then on absorbed

most of his energies. From 1756 until a few months before he died in

1777, he served 18 terms in the colonial/State legislature (1756–66

and 1769–76), which he presided over during the last year and a half.

In 1774 he won appointment as an associate justice of the Pennsylvania

Supreme Court.

Meantime, despite his rise in State circles, Morton had always

maintained strong ties with his own county. He resided there all his

life, remained active in civic and church affairs, and stayed close

to the people. Between terms of office as county justice of the peace

(1757–64 and 1770–74), he worked in a tour as sheriff (1766–69).

Morton’s service to the Nation began in 1765, while he was a member of

the Pennsylvania legislature. He and two colleagues represented the

colony at the Stamp Act Congress in New York. His most dramatic act as

Delegate to the Continental Congress (1774–77), in which he numbered

among the moderates, was his sudden and crucial switch on July 1, 1776,

to the side of his friend Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson in the

vote for national independence. On the final vote the next day, these

three ballots outweighed those of Thomas Willing and Charles Humphreys.

Robert Morris and John Dickinson being purposely absent, Pennsylvania

registered a “yea.” Less glamorously, Morton was a member of many

committees, in 1777 chairing the committee of the whole on the adoption

of the Articles of Confederation, finally ratified after his death.

Within a year of signing the Declaration, in the spring of 1777, Morton

fell ill and died on his farm at the age of 51. A few months earlier,

he had bequeathed his land and property, including a few slaves, to

his wife and five daughters and three surviving sons. But he could not

will them security; shortly after his demise they had to flee from

their home in the face of an imminent British attack. Morton’s grave is

located in Old St. Paul’s Cemetery in Chester, Pa.

Thomas Nelson, Jr.

VIRGINIA

[Illustration]

Thomas Nelson, Jr., a rich planter-merchant who at one

time owned more than 400 slaves, was one of the most

active of the Virginia patriots. Mainly because of health

problems, however, his career in Congress was brief and

undistinguished, though he made great financial sacrifices

during the war and won fame as a militia commander and

State politician.

The eldest of five sons, Nelson was born at Yorktown, Va., in 1738.

At the age of 14, he sailed to England to supplement his initial

tutorial education. In 1761, after graduating from Hackney School and

Cambridge University, he returned to Virginia to help his father manage

his plantation and mercantile business. The next year, young Nelson

married; he and his wife were to have 11 children.

In 1764 Nelson became a justice of the peace for York County and

entered the House of Burgesses. He served in the house until May 1774,

when Royal Governor Lord Dunmore, provoked at its protests over the

Boston Port Act, dissolved it. That year and the next, Nelson attended

three of the Virginia provincial assemblies, where he worked closely

with Patrick Henry. The last assembly elected Nelson to the Continental

Congress, at which time he resigned his colonelcy in the Virginia

militia.

In Congress, Nelson was outspoken in his desire to sever the bonds

with England. He journeyed to Virginia in the spring of 1776. At a

convention held in Williamsburg in May, he introduced and won approval

for a resolution recommending national independence, drafted by

Edmund Pendleton. Nelson carried it to Philadelphia and presented it

to Richard Henry Lee, who redrafted and condensed it into his June

7 resolution. Not long afterward, Nelson’s health began to decline.

Subsequently, he divided his time between Philadelphia and Virginia,

and in the spring of 1777 resigned from Congress.

Back in Virginia, Nelson was awarded the rank of brigadier general in

the militia and was elected to the lower house of the legislature. In

the spring of 1778 Congress appealed to men of means in the Colonies

to form troops of light cavalry. Nelson, partially at his own expense,

raised, outfitted, and trained such a unit. In July he marched it

northward to Philadelphia. The next month, Congress decided it was not

needed and it returned home.

Nelson served in Congress again for a short time in 1779, but poor

health forced him to retire once more. Nevertheless, the next year he

obtained munitions and supplies for the militia, commanded troops,

attended the legislature, and raised money to help subsidize the

war. He was particularly effective in soliciting funds from wealthy

plantation owners, to whom he pledged to repay the loans personally if

the State should fail to do so.

When the British invaded Virginia in 1780–81, civilian control

seriously hampered Nelson’s effectiveness as a militia commander.

Consequently, in the latter year the legislature elected him as

Governor and granted him powers approaching those of a military

dictator. Although still bothered by bad health, he kept the government

intact and strengthened defenses. In September-October 1781, while

taking part in the Yorktown siege, according to family tradition he

ordered troops to shell his own mansion when he learned it was a

British headquarters. Soon after the victory at Yorktown, overwhelmed

by the burdens of office and still in poor physical condition, he

resigned the governorship.

[Illustration: This painting commemorates one of the highlights of

the siege of Yorktown (1781). Thomas Nelson, Jr., commander in chief

of Virginia troops, took an active part.]

That same year, Nelson partially retired to Offley Hoo, a modest estate

in Hanover County that his father had willed to him on his death in

1772. In financial distress from his wartime sacrifices, the younger

Nelson lacked money to renovate his Yorktown home, where he had lived

since 1767. Except for occasional tours in the legislature and visits

to Yorktown, he devoted the rest of his life to his business affairs.

He died at Offley Hoo in 1789 at the age of 50. His grave is at

Yorktown in the yard of Grace Episcopal Church.

William Paca

MARYLAND

[Illustration]

William Paca was one of the earliest Revolutionaries in a

conservative colony. A wealthy planter and eminent lawyer

and judge, he held numerous State offices, including the

governorship, but his role in national affairs was limited.

The second son of a prominent planter-landowner, Paca was born,

probably of Italian descent, in 1740 at Chilbury Hall, near Abingdon in

Harford County, Md. He received his early education from private tutors

and at the age of 15 matriculated at the College of Philadelphia (later

part of the University of Pennsylvania). Upon graduating, he studied

with an attorney in Annapolis and read law in London. In 1763, the year

before initiating his practice in the former city, he married a local

girl from a wealthy family and began building a home, completed 2 years

later. When in the country, he resided at Wye Plantation, in Queen

Annes County, which he had purchased about 1760.

In 1768 Paca won a seat in the colonial legislature, where he soon

alined himself with Samuel Chase and other Whigs in protesting the

powers of the Proprietary Governor. In the early 1770’s Paca joined

other Maryland patriots in urging governmental regulation of fees

paid to civil officers and in opposing the poll tax, used to pay the

salaries of Anglican clergy, representing the established church. In

1773 he became a member of the Maryland committee of correspondence.

The following year, along with Samuel Chase and Thomas Johnson, he

acted as counsel for fellow legislator Joseph H. Harrison, who had

been jailed for refusing to pay the poll tax. All three men also

attended the first provincial convention that same year and received

appointments to the First Continental Congress. About this time, Paca’s

wife died.

Although he sat in Congress until 1779, Paca’s most noteworthy efforts

were on the State level. In the spring and early summer of 1776, the

provincial convention, a relatively conservative body, refused to

authorize its congressional Delegates to vote for independence. Paca,

aiding Chase and Carroll, drummed up enough support on the home front

to persuade the convention to change its mind and bring Maryland into

the affirmative column in the congressional voting on July 1–2, 1776. A

few months later, he helped draft a State constitution. The next year,

he began a 2-year term in the Maryland senate and saw militia duty. In

addition, he sat on the council of safety and spent large amounts of

his own money outfitting troops.

Between the years 1778 and 1782, Paca distinguished himself first as

chief justice of the State Superior Court and then as chief judge of

the circuit court of appeals in admiralty and prize cases. During that

time, in 1780, a few months after the demise of his second wife, whom

he had married 3 years earlier, he sold his home in Annapolis and moved

permanently to Wye Plantation. In 1782 he raised funds for Washington

College, founded that same year in Chestertown as the first institution

of higher learning in Maryland, and served on its board of visitors. As

Governor of Maryland (1782–85), he concerned himself with the welfare

of war veterans and other postwar problems.

A delegate to the State convention to ratify the Federal Constitution

in 1788, Paca urged its adoption if amended and helped draw up a list

of proposed amendments. In 1789 President Washington appointed him as

Federal district judge. He held this position until 1799, the year

of his death at the age of 58, at Wye Hall, on Wye Island across the

narrows from his own home, Wye Plantation. The former was the home of

his son John, probably the only one of his five children from his two

or possibly three marriages who reached maturity. At first interred at

Wye Hall, Paca’s remains now rest in the family burial ground near Wye

Plantation.

Robert Treat Paine

MASSACHUSETTS

[Illustration]

A clergyman turned lawyer-jurist, Robert Treat Paine spent

only a short time in Congress but enjoyed considerable

political prestige in Massachusetts. His second son

(1773–1811) and great-grandson (1835–1910), both bearing

exactly the same names as he, gained fame respectively as

poet and businessman-philanthropist.

Among the ancestors of Paine, who was born at Boston in 1731, were

many New England religious and political leaders. His father was a

merchant who had once been a clergyman. Young Paine led his class at

Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard in 1749. He then taught

school for a time before yielding to family tradition and entering the

ministry.

In 1755, during the French and Indian War, he served as chaplain on

a military expedition to Crown Point, N.Y. To improve his health, he

made a voyage to the Carolinas, England, Spain, and Greenland. About

this time, he decided to forsake the ministry for the law, in which he

had become interested during his theological studies. Admitted to the

Massachusetts bar in 1757, he opened an office in Portland but in 1761

moved to Taunton.

Paine, a friend of John Adams and John Hancock, early became involved

in the patriot movement. As a result, he was chosen in 1770 as one of

the prosecuting attorneys in the Boston Massacre trial and thus gained

recognition throughout the Colonies. That same year, he married, siring

eight children. Between 1773 and 1778, except in 1776, he served in the

Massachusetts legislature, in 1777 being speaker of the lower house.

He was one of the first five Delegates sent by Massachusetts to the

Continental Congress (1774–76), where he specialized in military and

Indian affairs. He gained the nickname “Objection Maker” because he

argued against so many proposals.

Although reelected to Congress in 1777, Paine chose to stay in

Massachusetts. In addition to his legislative speakership, he was

elected as the first attorney general, a position he held until 1790.

Between 1778 and 1780 he played a prominent role in drafting the

Massachusetts constitution. From 1790 until 1804, appointed by his old

friend Hancock, he sat as an associate justice of the Superior Court.

Meantime, in 1780, Paine had moved from Taunton to Boston and become

active in civic affairs. Indicative of his lifelong interest in

science, that same year he was one of the founders of the American

Academy of Arts and Sciences. In religion, he broke away from Calvinism

and embraced Unitarianism. Politically, he alined himself with the

Federalists. In 1804 increasing deafness brought about his retirement

from the Superior Court, and he died a decade later at the age of 83 in

Boston. He was buried in the Old Granary Burying Ground.

John Penn

NORTH CAROLINA

[Illustration]

Like fellow signers Joseph Hewes and William Hooper, John

Penn adopted North Carolina as his home. Except for a

5-year stint in the Continental Congress and a brief career

in State service, he passed the years peacefully as a

country lawyer far from the clamor of the public forum.

Penn was born in 1740 or 1741 in Caroline County, Va. His father was a

well-to-do farmer, and his mother the daughter of a prominent county

judge. Despite the family’s social position, Penn received only a few

years of formal schooling. At the age of 18, when his father died, he

inherited a sizable estate. But he was dissatisfied with the prospects

it offered, and decided to continue his education. Encouraged by a

relative, Edmund Pendleton, a well-known lawyer who made available his

personal library, Penn studied law on his own and within 3 years gained

admittance to the bar. Soon thereafter he married; he and his wife

reared three children.

In 1774, at the end of more than a decade of successful law practice in

Virginia, Penn journeyed to Granville County, N.C., and made his home

near Stovall. The next year, he was elected to the provincial assembly

and only a few weeks later to the Continental Congress (1775–80).

In 1777, upon the retirement of Hewes and Hooper, he inherited the

leadership of his State’s delegation. He was one of the 16 signers of

the Declaration who also signed the Articles of Confederation.

Unobtrusive and unassuming but remarkably efficient, likeable, and

discreet, Penn quickly won the respect of his congressional colleagues.

He rarely disputed with others, but when he did his good humor and

peaceful manner saved the day. On one occasion, he feuded with

President of Congress Henry Laurens of South Carolina over a personal

matter. He accepted Laurens’ challenge to a duel, but en route to the

proposed site convinced Laurens that they should bury their differences

and drop the matter.

Late in 1780 the Governor of North Carolina recalled Penn from Congress

to sit on the emergency Board of War, created by the legislature in

September to share with the Governor responsibility for military

affairs. The three-man board, of which Penn became the leading

member, in effect soon assumed control of all military matters. The

Governor and military officials, resenting the infringement upon their

prerogatives and their loss of authority, persuaded the legislature to

abolish the board in January 1781.

His health declining, the following July Penn declined an appointment

to the Governor’s Council. With the exception of a short tour in 1784

as State tax receiver for the Confederation, he apparently devoted his

last years to his law practice. In 1788, only in his late forties,

he died at his home near Stovall. Originally buried in the family

graveyard adjacent to his home, his remains now rest in Guilford

Courthouse National Military Park near Greensboro.

George Read

DELAWARE

[Illustration]

Conservative lawyer George Read was the only signer who

voted against independence in the final congressional vote

on July 2, 1776. In addition to attaining many prominent

State offices, he attended the Constitutional Convention,

where he defended the rights of the smaller States, and

subsequently served as a Senator in the First Congress.

Read’s mother was the daughter of a Welsh planter, and his Dublin-born

father a landholder of means. Soon after George’s birth in 1733 near

North East in Cecil County, Md., his family moved to New Castle, Del.,

where the youth grew up. He attended school at Chester, Pa., and Rev.

Francis Alison’s academy at New London, Pa., and about the age of 15

began reading law with a Philadelphia lawyer. In 1753 he was admitted

to the bar and began to practice. The next year, he journeyed back to

New Castle, hung out his shingle, and before long enlisted a clientele

that extended into Maryland. In 1763 he wed the widowed sister of

future fellow signer George Ross, and she bore him four sons and a

daughter.

While crown attorney general (1763–74) for the Three Lower Counties

(present Delaware), Read protested against the Stamp Act. In 1765 he

began a career in the colonial legislature that extended for more than

a decade. A moderate Whig, he supported nonimportation measures and

dignified protests. His attendance in Congress (1774–77) was irregular.

Like his friend John Dickinson, he was willing to protect colonial

rights but was wary of extremism. He balloted against independence on

July 2, 1776, apparently either bowing to the strong Tory sentiment in

Delaware or believing reconciliation with Britain was still possible.

That same year, Read gave priority to State responsibilities. He

presided over the Delaware constitutional convention, in which he

chaired the drafting committee, and began a term as speaker of the

legislative council, which in effect made him vice president of the

State. When the British captured Wilmington the next fall, they

captured the president, a resident of the city. At first, because

Read was away in Congress, Thomas McKean, speaker of the lower house,

took over as acting president. But in November, after almost being

captured himself while he and his family were en route to Dover from

Philadelphia, newly captured by the British, Read assumed the office

and held it until the spring of 1778.

During 1779, in poor health, Read resigned from the legislative

council, refused reelection to Congress, and began a period of

inactivity. In the years 1782–88, he again sat on the council, and

concurrently held the position of judge of the court of appeals in

admiralty cases. Meantime, in 1784, he had served on a commission

that adjusted New York-Massachusetts land claims. In 1786 he attended

the Annapolis Convention. The next year, he participated in the

Constitutional Convention. He later led the ratification movement in

Delaware, the first State to ratify.

In the U.S. Senate (1789–93), Read’s attendance was again spasmodic,

but when present he allied with the Federalists. He resigned to accept

the post of chief justice of Delaware. He held this office until his

death at New Castle 5 years later, just 3 days after he celebrated his

65th birthday. His grave is located there in the Immanuel Episcopal

Churchyard.

Caesar Rodney

DELAWARE

[Illustration]

Self-educated Caesar Rodney climbed to high State and

National offices, but his military-political duties

in Delaware spared him little time for the affairs of

Congress. He is noted mainly for his emergency ride to

Philadelphia that broke his State’s deadlock in the vote

for independence, but he was also one of two bachelor

signers and the only native of the three from Delaware.

Rodney was born in 1728 on his father’s 800-acre plantation, Byfield,

near Dover in Kent County. In 1745, as the eldest child, he inherited

the plantation. Despite a lack of formal and legal education, a decade

later he accepted the first of a series of county offices: high

sheriff, register of wills, recorder of deeds, clerk of the orphans’

court, justice of the peace, militia captain, and cotrustee of the loan

office.

On the provincial level, for most of the period 1758–76 Rodney

functioned as a justice of the Superior Court for the Three Lower

Counties (present Delaware) and as a legislator in the lower house,

including many tours as speaker. Between 1765 and 1774, he owned and

occupied a townhouse that he used while in Dover. He and Thomas McKean

compiled the colony’s laws, and they both attended the Stamp Act

Congress (1765). Three years later, the two of them and George Read,

all three later to sign the Declaration, drafted a protest to the King

concerning the Townshend Acts. In 1774, after Parliament closed Boston

Harbor, Rodney usurped the prerogative of the Proprietary Governor by

calling a special meeting of the legislature at New Castle, the first

Revolutionary convention in the State. Rodney, McKean, and Read were

sent to the First Continental Congress.

Although a congressional Member for 2 years, Rodney was often absent

in Delaware, sometimes presiding over the legislature and sometimes

meeting military responsibilities. In May 1775 he was elected a colonel

in the militia, and in September moved up to brigadier general. Late

the next June, while the independence resolution was pending in

Congress, he was investigating Loyalist agitations in Sussex County.

On the evening of July 1, after his return to Byfield, he received

McKean’s dispatch pointing out that Read had voted against independence

that day and pleading with Rodney to hurry to Philadelphia to break

the tie. Riding all night through a thunderstorm and stopping only

to change horses, he completed the 80-mile trip just in time to make

possible an affirmative vote for Delaware.

This brought down the wrath of the Kent County conservatives on

Rodney, who was not reelected to Congress nor to the legislature and

not appointed to the State constitutional convention. Out of office,

that fall and the next year he turned to military affairs, recruiting

troops and taking part in minor actions in Delaware and New Jersey.

In September 1777 acting State president McKean commissioned him as a

major general.

That spring, the legislature had designated Rodney as an admiralty

judge. In December it reelected him to the Continental Congress. The

next year, it nominated him as State president (1778–81), in which

capacity he stimulated the Delaware war effort. When he left office,

he belatedly sought medical treatment in Philadelphia for a cancerous

growth on his face, which had been bothering him for a decade and which

he had covered with a green silk veil. In 1783, though a dying man,

he entered the State senate and accepted the speakership, but passed

away the next year at the age of 55. Interred originally at Byfield

Plantation, his remains are now buried in the yard of Christ Episcopal

Church in Dover.

George Ross

PENNSYLVANIA

[Illustration]

A few of the signers, such as George Ross, were latecomers

to the Revolutionary cause. Like many others, he exerted

more influence in State than national affairs.

The oldest son of an Anglican clergyman who had immigrated from

Scotland, Ross was born in 1730 at New Castle, Del. After a preliminary

classical education, he read law with his stepbrother John at

Philadelphia and in 1750 entered the bar. Settling the next year at

Lancaster, Pa., where he married and fathered two sons and a daughter,

he built up a successful law practice and served as crown prosecutor

for Cumberland County (1751–63). A member of the colonial legislature

from 1768 until 1775, he sometimes joined in its disputes with the

Proprietary Governor and demonstrated an interest in Indian affairs.

Meantime, in 1774, despite his Loyalist leanings, a provincial

convention to which Ross had been elected sent him to the Continental

Congress. The next year, by which time he had for some reason

decided to affiliate with the Revolutionaries, he also served on the

Pennsylvania council of safety and held a militia colonelcy. In 1776 he

assisted in negotiating a peace treaty with the Indians in northwestern

Pennsylvania, and acted as vice president of the State constitutional

convention, for which he helped draft a declaration of rights. Not a

Member of Congress during the voting for independence on July 1–2,

1776, he received his appointment soon enough to sign the Declaration

on August 2. He won a reputation among his colleagues for his

eloquence, wit, and conviviality, but made no noteworthy contributions

to congressional proceedings. Illness brought about his resignation in

January 1777.

In 1778, while Ross was acting as admiralty judge in Pennsylvania,

a congressional court of appeals overruled his decision in a case

involving a dispute between a citizen of Connecticut and the State

of Pennsylvania. Ross, refusing to acknowledge the authority of the

higher court to counter State decisions, initiated a dispute between

Pennsylvania and the Central Government that represented an early

manifestation of the States rights controversy and did not subside

until 1809. But Ross did not live to see the outcome, for he died in

Philadelphia in 1779 at the age of 49. He was buried in Christ Church

Burial Ground.

Benjamin Rush

PENNSYLVANIA

[Illustration]

Doctor, medical educator, chemist, humanitarian,

politician, author, reformer-moralist, soldier, temperance

advocate, abolitionist—Benjamin Rush was all of these. One

of the younger signers, only 30 years of age at the time,

he was already a physician of note.

Rush, the fourth of seven children, was born in 1745 at Byberry (“The

Homestead”), near Philadelphia. At the age of 5, his farmer-gunsmith

father died. The youth obtained a sound education at West Nottingham

Academy, in Rising Sun, Md., operated by an uncle, and graduated from

the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). Returning to

Philadelphia in 1760, he apparently first considered studying law

but chose medicine. In 1766, at the end of a 5-year apprenticeship

to a local physician, he sailed to Scotland, where 2 years later the

University of Edinburgh awarded him a medical degree.

While there, assisted by a fellow college alumnus and one-day fellow

signer, Richard Stockton, Rush helped overcome the objections of John

Witherspoon’s wife and persuaded Witherspoon to accept the presidency

of the College of New Jersey. In 1769, after further training in

London, where Rush made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, and a

short visit to Paris, he came back to Philadelphia and set up practice.

Before the year was out, he obtained the first professorship of

chemistry in the country at the College of Philadelphia, and wrote the

first American textbook on the subject.

While prospering as a physician, Rush cultivated the friendship of such

men as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine. In fact, Rush

suggested to the latter that he write his famous tract _Common Sense_

(1776), supplied the title, and aided in its publication. He also

contributed political articles to the press. That same year, he married

Stockton’s eldest daughter, Julia.

Rush’s tour in the Continental Congress was brief. In June 1776 he

attended a Pennsylvania conference of patriots and helped draft a

declaration of the colony’s support for national independence. In

recognition of these services, the following month the provincial

convention sent him to Congress—after the adoption of the Declaration.

In December, Philadelphia threatened by British invasion, the

Government fled to Baltimore. Rush apparently, however, did not spend

much time there. That same month, he relocated his wife at the home of

a relative in Cecil County, Md., and took part in General Washington’s

New Jersey campaign as a surgeon in the Philadelphia militia.

In April 1777, not reelected to Congress because of his opposition to

the Pennsylvania constitution of the previous year, Rush accepted the

position of surgeon general in the Middle Department of the Continental

Army. Abhorring the deplorable conditions prevailing in the medical

service, in a complaint to Washington he accused his superior, Dr.

William Shippen, of maladministration. Washington referred the matter

to Congress, which vindicated Shippen. In January 1778 Rush angrily

resigned. His subsequent criticisms of Washington and his participation

in the Conway Cabal, a movement to replace General Washington, ended

his military and, for a time, his political career. He resumed his

medical practice in Philadelphia.

[Illustration: Benjamin Rush long served on the staff of Philadelphia’s

Pennsylvania Hospital, shown here in 1799. Founded in 1751 and still in

use today, it is the oldest hospital in the United States.]

In 1787 Rush wrote tracts in the newspapers endorsing the U.S.

Constitution. In the Commonwealth ratifying convention that same year,

he aided James Wilson in the struggle for its adoption. In 1789–90 Rush

attended the Pennsylvania constitutional convention. From 1797 until

1813 he served as Treasurer of the U.S. Mint.

Meantime Rush, through his writings and lectures, had become probably

the best known physician and medical teacher in the land, and he

fostered Philadelphia’s ascendancy as the early medical center of

the Nation. His students, who idolized him, came from as far away

as Europe to attend his classes at the College of Philadelphia, and

its successors the University of the State of Pennsylvania and the

University of Pennsylvania (1791). He also served on the staff of the

Pennsylvania Hospital from 1783 until the end of his life, helped found

the Philadelphia College of Physicians (1787), and held office as first

president of the Philadelphia Medical Society. In 1786 he founded the

Philadelphia Dispensary, the first free medical clinic in the country.

His work among the insane at the Pennsylvania Hospital resulted in

_Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind_

(1812), which to some degree foreshadowed modern psychiatric techniques.

Rush won much less favor from his professional peers than he did from

his students. His critics particularly attacked his theory of bleeding

and purging for the treatment of disease. Although he was one of the

few doctors who remained in Philadelphia during the devastating yellow

fever epidemics of 1793 and 1798, his opponents criticized his methods

of treatment.

Aroused by the idealism of the Revolution as well as the plight

of the poor and sick he encountered in his medical practice, Rush

helped pioneer various humanitarian and social movements that were to

restructure U.S. life in the 19th century. These included abolition of

slavery and educational and prison reform. Rush also condemned public

and capital punishment and advocated temperance. Many of his reform

articles appeared in Essays: _Literary, Moral, and Philosophical_

(1798).

Finally, Rush helped organize and sat as a trustee of Dickinson College

(1783); aided in founding the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the

Abolition of Slavery (1787) and later served as its president; enjoyed

membership in the American Philosophical Society; and was a cofounder

and vice president of the Philadelphia Bible Society, which advocated

the use of scripture in the public schools.

A typhus epidemic claimed Rush’s life at the age of 67 in 1813.

Surviving him were six sons and three daughters of the 13 children

he had fathered. His grave is in Christ Church Burial Ground at

Philadelphia.

Edward Rutledge

SOUTH CAROLINA

[Illustration]

Edward Rutledge, at the age of 26, was the youngest of the

signers. Despite his youth, he had already made a name

for himself in South Carolina as a lawyer-politician and

had assumed leadership of his congressional delegation.

A moderate, he at first fought against the independence

resolution but finally submitted to the majority and voted

for it. His later State career, which included combat

action in the militia, culminated in the governorship.

The fifth son and youngest child of an Irish immigrant and physician,

Rutledge was born in 1749 at or near Charleston, S.C. Like Middleton,

Lynch, and Heyward, the other South Carolina signers, as a young man he

studied law in England. In 1773, during his first year of practice on

his return to Charleston, he won Whig acclaim by obtaining the release

of newspaper publisher Thomas Powell, who had been imprisoned by the

Crown for printing an article critical of the Loyalist upper house

of the colonial legislature. The next year, the grateful Whigs named

Rutledge as one of five Delegates to the First Continental Congress;

and he married Henrietta Middleton, his colleague’s sister. The

Rutledges were to have three children.

Rutledge spent his first congressional term in the shadow of the more

experienced South Carolina Delegates, among them his older brother,

John, and his father-in-law, Henry Middleton. During 1775–76, however,

both in Congress and in two South Carolina provincial assemblies, his

increasing self-confidence and maturation of judgment brought him the

esteem of his associates. In the latter year, two of the senior South

Carolina Delegates, Christopher Gadsden and Henry Middleton, retired

from Congress and Thomas Lynch, Sr., suffered an incapacitating stroke.

Rutledge, his brother absent on State business, found himself the

delegation leader.

On June 7, 1776, when Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed national

independence, Rutledge led the moderates in securing a delay in

the voting. He knew that independence was inevitable. In March his

colony, preceded only by New Hampshire, had adopted a constitution.

Moreover, that same month the provincial assembly had empowered its

Delegates to vote for independence if they so desired. Yet Rutledge

firmly believed that the Colonies should first confederate and nurture

foreign alliances to strengthen themselves for the perilous step they

were about to take. When the vote on independence came up on July

1, he refused to yield and South Carolina balloted negatively. But

nine of the Colonies voted affirmatively. Rutledge, realizing that

the resolution would probably carry anyway, proposed that the vote

be recast the following day. He persuaded the other South Carolina

Delegates to submit to the will of the majority for the sake of

unanimity, and South Carolina reversed its position.

Rutledge’s last important assignment occurred in September, when he

accompanied John Adams and Benjamin Franklin on a vain peace mission

to Staten Island to negotiate with British Admiral Lord Richard Howe,

who in union with his brother, Gen. William Howe, was belatedly and

idealistically trying to resolve the differences between the Colonies

and the mother country. Two months later, Rutledge departed from

Congress in order to resume his law practice in Charleston.

In 1778 Rutledge accepted a seat in the State legislature and the next

year won reelection to Congress, though military duties prevented his

attendance. As a militia captain, in February 1779 he took part in Gen.

William Moultrie’s defeat of the British at Port Royal Island, S.C. But

in May, 1780, during the siege of Charleston, the redcoats captured

Rutledge, as well as Heyward and Middleton, and imprisoned them at St.

Augustine, Fla., until July 1781.

From 1782 until 1798 Rutledge sat in the State legislature, which

on three occasions designated him as a presidential elector. During

this period, his mistrust of unbridled republicanism reinforced his

conservatism and brought him into the Federalist Party. In private

life he flourished, his wealth increasing through his law practice

and investments in plantations. In 1792 his first wife died and he

remarried. To crown his achievements, 6 years later the people of

South Carolina chose him as Governor. But, his health poor, he died at

Charleston early in 1800 at the age of 50, nearly a year before the end

of his term. The yard of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church is the site of

his grave.

Roger Sherman

CONNECTICUT

[Illustration]

By dint of self-education, hard work, and business acumen,

Roger Sherman soared above his humble origins to prominence

in local, State, and National political affairs. He was

a member of the committee that drafted the Declaration

of Independence. He and Robert Morris were the only men

to sign the three bulwark documents of the Republic: the

Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and

Constitution. Twice married, Sherman fathered 15 children.

In 1723, when Sherman was 2 years of age, his family relocated from his

Newton, Mass., birthplace to Dorchester (present Stoughton). As a boy,

he was spurred by a desire to learn, and read widely in his spare time

to supplement his minimal education at a common school. But he spent

most of his waking hours helping his father with farming chores and

learning the cobbler’s trade from him. In 1743, or 2 years after his

father’s death, Sherman joined an elder brother who had settled at New

Milford, Conn.

Purchasing a store, becoming county surveyor, and winning a variety

of town offices, Sherman prospered and assumed leadership in the

community. Without benefit of a legal education, he was admitted to the

bar in 1754 and embarked upon a distinguished judicial and political

career. In the period 1755–61, except for a brief interval, he served

as a representative in the colonial legislature and held the offices

of justice of the peace and county judge. Somehow he also eked out

time to publish an essay on monetary theory and a series of almanacs

incorporating his own astronomical observations and verse.

In 1761, abandoning his law practice, Sherman moved to New Haven, Conn.

There he managed a store that catered to Yale students and another one

in nearby Wallingford. He also became a friend and benefactor of Yale

College, functioning for many years as its treasurer.

[Illustration: Residence of Roger Sherman, in New Haven, Conn., from

1768 until his death in 1793.]

Meanwhile, Sherman’s political career had blossomed. He rose from

justice of the peace and county judge to an associate judge of the

Connecticut Superior Court and to representative in both houses of the

colonial assembly. Although opposed to extremism, he early joined the

fight against Britain. He supported nonimportation measures and headed

the New Haven committee of correspondence.

Sherman was a longtime and influential Member of the Continental

Congress (1774–81 and 1783–84). He won membership on the committees

that drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of

Confederation, as well as those concerned with Indian affairs,

national finance, and military matters. To solve economic problems,

at both the National and State levels, he advocated high taxes rather

than excessive borrowing or the issuance of paper currency. While

in Congress, Sherman remained active in State and local politics,

continuing to hold the office of judge of the Connecticut Superior

Court, as well as membership on the council of safety. In 1783 he

helped codify Connecticut’s statutory laws. The next year, he was

elected mayor of New Haven (1784–86).

Sherman could not resist the lure of national service. In 1787 he

represented his State at the Constitutional Convention, in which he

played a major role. He conceived and introduced the Connecticut,

or so-called Great, Compromise, which broke a deadlock between

the large and small States by providing for a dual legislative

system—representation by proportion of population in the lower house

and equal representation in the upper house. He was also instrumental

in Connecticut’s ratification of the Constitution.

Sherman capped his career by serving as U.S. Representative (1789–91)

and Senator (1791–93), espousing the Federalist cause. He died at

New Haven in 1793 at the age of 72 and is buried in the Grove Street

Cemetery.

James Smith

PENNSYLVANIA

[Illustration]

James Smith, a lawyer who had emigrated from Ireland to

the Colonies, represented the Pennsylvania back-country in

Revolutionary conventions and the Continental Congress. He

also helped draft the Pennsylvania constitution.

Smith, the second son in a large family, was born in northern Ireland

about 1719. When he was around 10 years old, his father emigrated to

America and settled on acreage west of the Susquehanna River in York

County, Pa. James studied surveying and classical languages at Rev.

Francis Alison’s academy in New London, Pa., and then read law in the

office of his elder brother at Lancaster. He was admitted to the bar

in 1745 and moved westward to the Shippensburg vicinity in Cumberland

County. A lack of clients and surveying work caused him about 1750 to

relocate eastward to York, where he married a decade later. Although he

was the only lawyer in town until 1769, he experienced difficulty in

recruiting clients. Probably for this reason, during the years 1771–78

he undertook iron manufacturing, but the venture failed and he lost

£5,000.

Smith early emerged as a local Whig leader. In 1774, at a provincial

convention in Philadelphia, he supported nonimportation measures

and advocated an intercolonial congress. That same year, at York

he raised a militia company, in which he served as captain and

later honorary colonel. At two provincial meetings in 1775–76, he

championed the interests of the western counties and helped formulate

resolutions calling for independence, the strengthening of defenses,

and establishment of a new provincial government. During the latter

year, he sat on the drafting committee in the State constitutional

convention. Elected to Congress (1776–78) on July 20, 1776, after the

vote on independence had been taken, he arrived in Philadelphia in time

to sign the Declaration. Among his colleagues he gained a reputation as

a wit, conversationalist, and eccentric.

During the period 1779–82 Smith held various State offices: one-term

legislator, judge of the Pennsylvania high court of errors and appeals,

brigadier general in the militia, and State counselor during the

Wyoming Valley land dispute between Pennsylvania and Connecticut. In

1785 he turned down reelection to Congress because of his age. His

major activity prior to his retirement in 1801 was the practice of law.

Smith died at about the age of 87 in 1806 at York, survived by two

of his five children. His grave is in the First Presbyterian Church

Cemetery.

Richard Stockton

NEW JERSEY

[Illustration]

Circumstances of the times draw some men into public life

who otherwise might avoid its burdens—and sorrows. One of

these was Richard Stockton, whose wartime detention by the

British contributed to his untimely death.

Stockton, son of a wealthy landowner and judge, was born in 1730 at

Morven, the family estate and his lifelong home, at Princeton, N.J.

After a preparatory education at West Nottingham Academy, in Rising

Sun, Md., he graduated in 1748 from the College of New Jersey (later

Princeton University), then in Newark but relocated 8 years hence at

Princeton. In 1754 he completed an apprenticeship with a Newark lawyer

and joined the bar. The next year, he wed poetess Annis Boudinot, by

whom he had two sons and four daughters. By the mid-1760’s he was

recognized as one of the ablest lawyers in the Middle Colonies.

Like his father a patron of the College of New Jersey, in 1766 Stockton

sailed on its behalf to Scotland to recruit Rev. John Witherspoon

for the presidency. Aiding in this endeavor, complicated by the

opposition of Witherspoon’s wife, was Benjamin Rush, a fellow alumnus

then enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. In 1768, the year after

Stockton’s departure, Witherspoon finally accepted.

Stockton resumed his law practice, spending his spare hours at Morven

breeding choice cattle and horses, collecting art objects, and

expanding his library. Yet, though he had some time before expressed

disinterest in public life, in 1768 he began a 6-year term on the

executive council of New Jersey and then sat on the provincial Supreme

Court (1774–76).

Stockton became associated with the Revolutionary movement during

its initial stages. In 1764 he advocated American representation in

Parliament, but during the Stamp Act crisis the next year questioned

its right to control the Colonies at all. By 1774, though dreading

the possibility of war, he was espousing colonial self-rule under the

Crown. Elected to Congress 2 years later, he voted for independence and

signed the Declaration. That same year, he met defeat in a bid for the

New Jersey governorship, but rejected the chance to become first chief

justice of the State Supreme Court to remain in Congress.

Late in 1776 fate turned against Stockton. In November, while

inspecting the northern Continental Army in upper New York State

with fellow Congressman George Clymer, Stockton hurried home when he

learned of the British invasion of New Jersey and removed his family

to a friend’s home in Monmouth County. While he was there, Loyalists

informed the British, who captured and imprisoned him under harsh

conditions at Perth Amboy, N.J., and later in New York. A formal

remonstrance from Congress and other efforts to obtain his exchange

resulted in his release, in poor physical condition, sometime in

1777. To add to his woes, he found that the British had pillaged and

partially burned Morven. Still an invalid, he died at Princeton in 1781

at the age of 50. He is buried at the Stony Brook Quaker Meeting House

Cemetery.

Thomas Stone

MARYLAND

[Illustration]

By the time the Continental Congress voted for independence

from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, only a handful of

conservatives remained in the body. Included in this

group were Thomas Stone of Maryland, Carter Braxton of

Virginia, George Read of Delaware, and Edward Rutledge of

South Carolina—erstwhile opponents of independence who,

except for Read, submitted to the will of the majority and

balloted for it. Stone, a rich planter-lawyer of retiring

disposition, preferred to stay in the background during his

long but limited political career.

Stone was born in 1743 at Poynton Manor, his father’s plantation

near the village of Welcome in Charles County, Md. He enjoyed all

the advantages that accrued to the eldest son. Following tutorial

instruction in the classics as a youth, he apprenticed himself to an

Annapolis lawyer and in 1764 joined the bar. For the first 2 years he

practiced at Frederick, Md., and then settled in his home county. He

married 2 years later. Apparently with part of his wife’s dowry, he

purchased land a few miles to the northeast of his birthplace. There,

near Port Tobacco, in 1771 he built Habre-de-Venture, his home and

principal residence for the rest of his life.

Stone entered politics in 1773 as a member of the Charles County

committee of correspondence. The next year, on behalf of the

Proprietary Governor, he helped prosecute Joseph H. Harrison, a

Maryland legislator who had refused to pay the poll tax for the support

of the Anglican clergy. This action, despite its legal ethicality,

did not endear Stone to the patriots. His opponents, counsel for

the defense, consisted of Thomas Johnson, Samuel Chase, and William

Paca—all three of whom later became his congressional colleagues.

That same year, 1774, Stone won appointment to the provincial

convention, which the following year sent him to Congress. A far less

enthusiastic Revolutionary than most Congressmen, he heartily favored

reconciliation almost up to the time of the vote on independence and

was one of the few Delegates who favored peace negotiations with

Britisher Lord Richard Howe in September 1776, some 2 months after the

adoption of the Declaration. A poor speaker, Stone rarely participated

in debates but sat on the committee that drafted the Articles of

Confederation, though he did not sign the document. He remained in

Congress until 1778.

Meantime, a couple of years earlier, Stone had begun a tour in the

State senate that was to last for practically the remainder of his

life. In 1784 he also returned to the Continental Congress, where he

served for a few days as acting President but resigned before the year

expired to resume his law practice. His last act of public service

occurred the following year, when he and two others represented

Maryland at the Mount Vernon Conference.

In 1787 Stone’s wife, whose health had been failing for more than

a decade, passed away at the age of 34. The grief-stricken Stone

abandoned his work, declined to attend the Constitutional Convention to

which he had been elected, and decided to visit England. A few months

later, though only in his mid-forties, he died suddenly while awaiting

a vessel at Alexandria, Va. Three of his children survived him. Stone

is buried in the family graveyard adjacent to Habre-de-Venture.

George Taylor

PENNSYLVANIA

[Illustration]

Surmounting the poverty that forced him to come to the

American Colonies from Ireland as an indentured servant

to an ironmaster, George Taylor climbed to the top of the

industry. In the process, merging politics with commerce,

he gained enough distinction in county and State affairs

to win election to the Continental Congress—his only

service on the national level. Even then, he attended only

a few months, just long enough to sign the Declaration. He

contributed more directly to the cause of liberty as an

ironmaster, producing ordnance for the Continental Army.

When Taylor was about 20 years of age, he indentured himself and

emigrated from northern Ireland, where he had been born in 1716,

to Pennsylvania. He began as a laborer and then became a clerk at

Warwick Furnace, in Chester County, and within 3 years rose to

bookkeeper-manager of nearby Coventry Forge, another enterprise of his

employer. In 1742, the year after the latter died, Taylor acquired his

business when he married his widow; she bore him a son and daughter.

In the mid-1750’s Taylor moved northeastward to Bucks County, where

he and a partner leased Durham Furnace, about 2 miles south of the

Northampton County line and 10 miles south of Easton. Apparently after

1763 Taylor lived much of the time at or near Easton and acquired

property there. In 1768 his wife died; he subsequently sired five

children by his housekeeper out of wedlock. The year of his wife’s

death, he built a home about 15 miles west of the city on a 331-acre

tract he had purchased the year before. In 1771 he leased most of the

land out as a farm, and 5 years later sold the house and land.

Taylor had begun his public life in 1747, when he took a commission

as a captain in the Chester County militia. In 1761 he was appointed

as justice of the peace for Bucks County, but devoted most of his

energies to Northampton County, which he served as justice of the peace

(1764–75) and representative in the colonial legislature (1764–70). In

1774 Taylor, a political moderate, became a member of the Northampton

County committee of correspondence. The next year, he attended a

provincial Revolutionary convention, was elected to the provincial

assembly, served on the council of safety, and became a colonel in the

Bucks and Northampton County militias.

In July 1776 the Pennsylvania assembly selected Taylor as one of its

new Delegates to the Continental Congress. His only noteworthy action

there was signing the Declaration. The next January, however, he and

fellow signer George Walton of Georgia negotiated a peace treaty with

the Six Indian Nations (Iroquois) at Easton, Pa., but Congress did not

ratify it. In March the voters of Northampton County elected Taylor to

the new Supreme Executive Assembly of Pennsylvania, but illness and

financial difficulties restricted his participation to only 6 weeks, at

the end of which he retired from public life.

By this time, Taylor’s Durham Furnace was turning out grapeshot,

cannonballs, bar shot, and cannon for the Revolutionary army—for which

Taylor was ill-compensated. In 1778 the State dispossessed him of his

lease on the Durham Furnace, owned by the Philadelphia Loyalist John

Galloway and confiscated by the State. Taylor then moved to Greenwich

Township, N.J., and leased Greenwich Forge, which he operated until his

death at the age of 65 in 1781. The year before, his health failing,

Taylor had returned to Easton and leased a home. Originally buried in

the yard of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church at Easton, his body

was later moved to the Easton Cemetery.

Matthew Thornton

NEW HAMPSHIRE

[Illustration]

Probably six of the 56 signers belatedly penned their

signatures, eight of them were foreign-born, and four

were physicians. Matthew Thornton belongs in all three

categories. Less exclusively, he ranks among the

substantial number of signers whose national service was

brief or relatively insignificant.

Thornton was born in Ireland about 1714. Approximately 4 years later,

his Scotch-Irish parents emigrated with their family to America,

settling first at Wiscasset, in present Maine, and then near Worcester,

Mass. Young Thornton, after attending common schools, undertook the

study of medicine with a local doctor. In 1740 he began what proved

to be a thriving practice in the Scotch-Irish town of Londonderry

(present Derry Village), N.H. Five years later, as a surgeon in the New

Hampshire militia during King George’s War (1740–48), he participated

in the British expedition from New England that captured Louisbourg,

the French fortress in Nova Scotia.

By 1758 Thornton was representing Londonderry in the colonial

legislature and stayed there until 1775. During the long interim,

about 1760 he married and began a family of five; and throughout

the period he figured prominently in New Hampshire politics and

Revolutionary activities. In 1775–76 he held the offices of president

of the provincial assembly and constitutional convention, chairman

of the council of safety, and member of the upper and lower houses of

the legislature, as well as speaker of the former. Although he did

not enter Congress until November 1776, or 3 months after the formal

signing of the Declaration, he was granted permission to affix his

signature.

About a year later, Thornton left Congress to devote his time to his

duties as associate justice of the State Superior Court. Despite a lack

of legal education, he had acquired this position in 1776. He held it

until 1782, some 2 years after he retired from his medical practice

in Londonderry and settled on a farm he purchased near Merrimack,

N.H. Later, in 1784–86, he completed a tour in the State senate. He

spent his last years farming and operating a ferry—Lutwyche’s (later

Thornton’s) Ferry—across the Merrimack River.

Thornton died in 1803 at about the age of 89 while visiting his

daughter in Newburyport, Mass. His grave is in Thornton’s Ferry

Cemetery, near the site of his Merrimack home.

George Walton

GEORGIA

[Illustration]

Like signers Button Gwinnett and Lyman Hall a nonnative

of Georgia, George Walton fought hard to win independence

for his adopted State and his Nation—both in the political

arena and on the battlefield. He was wounded in the British

siege of Savannah late in 1778 and endured captivity for

almost a year. He evinced the same kind of tenacity in all

his other endeavors and conquered a string of adversities

in his ascent from humble origins to the highest National

and State offices.

Born sometime in the 1740’s near Farmville, Va., Walton was orphaned

early and reared by an uncle, who apprenticed him to a carpenter.

Walton supplemented extensive independent study with some formal

schooling. In 1769 he moved to Savannah, Ga., read law under a local

attorney, and 5 years later joined the bar.

That same year, Walton plunged into politics. Rallying Revolutionaries

at Savannah as did Lyman Hall in St. John’s Parish—the two Whig hotbeds

in a lukewarm colony—Walton helped organize and played a key part in

meetings at Savannah in July and August 1774 and the first provincial

congress the next January. But these meetings, to which only a few

parishes sent representatives, hardly set the dissent in motion.

The divided delegates, aware of their limited constituency, failed

to send Delegates to the Continental Congress, as had all the other

Colonies, and thus alienated St. John’s Parish. Except for creation

of a committee of correspondence, to which Walton was appointed, the

conferees for the most part substituted patriotic talk for action.

During this period, Walton, blending political activism with romance,

took a bride. She later gave birth to two sons.

By July 1775, when the second provincial congress convened and

designated Walton as secretary, apathy in the Revolutionary ranks had

given way to aggressiveness. The congress dispatched four Delegates to

the Continental Congress to join Hall, already an unofficial “delegate”

from St. John’s Parish. The next year, the third provincial congress

elected Walton, by this time chairman of the council of safety, as a

Delegate (1776–81). In this capacity, he sat on committees dealing with

western lands, national finance, and Indian affairs. His only lapse in

attendance occurred in 1778–79, when the military defense of his own

State took precedence over his congressional obligations. As a colonel

in the Georgia militia, he was wounded and captured during the siege

of Savannah in November-December 1778—the beginning of the British

invasion of the South. He was imprisoned until the following September,

when he was exchanged for a navy captain.

Right after his release, at Augusta Walton became involved in a

factional dispute between two groups of Revolutionaries. Walton’s

group, irritated because their conservative opponents had taken

advantage of the confusion generated by the British occupation of

Savannah by putting their own “governor” into office without benefit

of a general election, countered by selecting Walton as its “governor”

(November 1779-January 1780). In January the new legally elected

legislature picked a Governor, another anti-conservative. Walton

returned to the Continental Congress in 1780–81, after which he headed

back to Georgia.

Walton’s subsequent career suffered no diminution. His offices included

those of chief justice (1783–89) and justice (1790–95 and 1799–1804)

of the State Superior Court; delegate to the State constitutional

convention (1788); presidential elector (1789); Governor (1789–90); and

U.S. Senator (1795–96), filling out an unexpired term. Meantime, he

had been elected as a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

(1787), but did not attend. An advocate of higher education, he was

also a trustee and founder of Richmond Academy, in Augusta, and

Franklin College (later the University of Georgia), in Athens.

About 1790 while Governor, changing his residence from Savannah to

the capital of Augusta, Walton built “Meadow Garden” cottage on

the northern edge of the city on confiscated Loyalist lands he had

acquired. He lived in the cottage for 5 years, when he moved to College

Hill, a country estate he erected on the western outskirts. He died

there in 1804. Assigned first to the Rosney Cemetery in Augusta, his

remains now rest at the Signers’ Monument in that city.

William Whipple

NEW HAMPSHIRE

[Illustration]

William Whipple, a sea captain turned merchant, retired

from business to further the Revolution. In addition to

sitting in Congress, he commanded New Hampshire militia in

two major campaigns and held various State offices.

Whipple, the eldest of five children, was born in 1730, at Kittery, in

present Maine. He attended local schools and went to sea while still a

boy. In his early twenties he became a shipmaster, and later probably

sometimes engaged in the slave trade. About 1760 he gave up the sea and

founded a mercantile firm at Portsmouth, N.H., with his brother Joseph.

In 1767 he married the daughter of a wealthy merchant-sea captain;

their only child died in infancy.

By the outbreak of the Revolution, Whipple had become one of the

leading citizens of Portsmouth. In 1775, his fortune well established,

he left business to devote his time to public affairs. That year,

he represented Portsmouth in the provincial assembly at Exeter,

and served on the New Hampshire council of safety. The following

year, he won seats in the upper house of the State legislature and

in the Continental Congress. His congressional tour, interrupted

intermittently by militia duty, lasted until 1779. He concerned himself

mainly with military, marine, and financial matters. A tough-minded,

independent individual, he recommended military aggressiveness in the

war instead of diplomacy and favored severe punishment of Loyalists and

speculators.

In the fall of 1777 Whipple, a brigadier general in the New Hampshire

militia, led four regiments to upper New York State and helped encircle

and besiege the British army at Saratoga. He was present on October

17 at the surrender of Gen. John Burgoyne; signed the Convention of

Saratoga, ending the New York campaign; and helped escort the British

troops to a winter encampment near Boston to await embarkation for

England. In 1778 he led another contingent of New Hampshire militia

into Rhode Island on a campaign that sought but failed to recapture

Newport from the British.

During his last years, Whipple held the offices of State legislator

(1780–84), associate justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court

(1782–85), receiver of finances for Congress in New Hampshire

(1782–84), and in 1782 president of a commission that arbitrated the

Wyoming Valley land dispute between Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Ill

the remaining few years of his life, he passed away in 1785 at the age

of 55 at Portsmouth, where he was buried in Union Cemetery. His wife

survived him.

William Williams

CONNECTICUT

[Illustration]

Merchant William Williams was prominent in Connecticut

politics, but never won national fame except for signing

the Declaration.

A Congregational pastor’s son, Williams was born in 1731 at Lebanon,

Conn., his lifelong home. After graduating from Harvard in 1751, he

began studying for the ministry under his father. Four years later,

during the French and Indian War (1754–63), he accompanied a British

expedition to Lake George, in northeastern New York, that won a

victory. Back home, he became a merchant. In 1771 he married a daughter

of Jonathan Trumbull, Royal Governor of Connecticut; they had three

children.

During his long political career, Williams held a myriad of local,

provincial, and State offices: town clerk (1752–96) and selectman

(1760–85); member, clerk, and speaker of the lower house of the

colonial legislature (1755–76); State legislator (1781–84); member of

the Governor’s council (1784–1803); judge of the Windham County court

(1776–1805); and probate judge for the Windham district (1775–1809).

He also represented Connecticut at various New England meetings, and

attended the 1788 convention that ratified the Federal Constitution, of

which he approved.

Upon the outbreak of the Revolution, Williams threw his weight behind

the cause. Besides writing tracts for the press expressing the colonial

viewpoint, he prepared Revolutionary state papers for Governor

Trumbull. Williams also raised money for and personally contributed

to the war effort. Between 1773 and 1776 he held a colonelcy in the

Connecticut militia and served on the provincial council of safety. In

Congress (1776–78 and 1783–84), he sat on the Board of War and helped

frame the Articles of Confederation, though he did not sign them.

During the winter of 1780–81, while a French regiment was stationed in

Lebanon, he moved out of his home and turned it over to the officers.

Williams died at the age of 80 in 1811. His grave is in the Trumbull

Cemetery, about a mile northeast of town.

James Wilson

PENNSYLVANIA

[Illustration]

Brilliant yet enigmatic James Wilson possessed one of the

most complex and contradictory personalities of all the

signers. Never able to reconcile his strong personal drive

for wealth and power with his political goals nor to find

a middle road between conservatism and republicanism, he

alternately experienced either popularity or public scorn,

fame or obscurity, wealth or poverty. Yet his mastery of

the law and political theory enabled him to play a leading

role in framing the U.S. Constitution and to rise from

frontier lawyer to Justice of the Supreme Court.

Wilson was born in 1741 or 1742 at Carskerdo, near St. Andrews,

Scotland, and educated at the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow,

and Edinburgh. He then emigrated to America, arriving in the midst

of the Stamp Act agitations in 1765. Early the next year, he accepted

a position as Latin tutor at the College of Philadelphia, but almost

immediately abandoned it to study law under John Dickinson.

[Illustration: From 1778 until 1790 James Wilson resided in this

Philadelphia residence, which became known as “Fort Wilson” in 1779,

when a mob of citizens and militiamen attacked it.]

In 1768, the year after his admission to the bar, Wilson set up

practice at Reading, Pa. Two years later, he moved westward to the

Scotch-Irish settlement of Carlisle, and the following year took a

bride. He specialized in land law and built up a broad clientele. On

borrowed capital, he also began to speculate in land. In some way he

managed, too, to lecture for many years on English literature at the

College of Philadelphia.

Wilson also became involved in Revolutionary politics. In 1774 he

took over chairmanship of the Carlisle committee of correspondence,

attended the first provincial assembly, and completed preparation of

_Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority

of the British Parliament_. This tract circulated widely in England

and America and established Wilson as a Whig leader. It denied

Parliament’s authority over the Colonies, though it did not question

their allegiance to the Crown, and recommended a reorganization of the

imperial structure similar to the later British Commonwealth of Nations.

The next year, Wilson was elected to both the provincial assembly and

the Continental Congress, where he sat mainly on military and Indian

affairs committees. In 1776, reflecting the wishes of his constituents,

he joined the moderates in voting for a 3-week delay in considering

Richard Henry Lee’s resolution of June 7. On July 1, however, Wilson

dissented from the majority of the Pennsylvania delegation and

balloted with John Morton and Benjamin Franklin for independence. On

July 2 the three men, representing a majority of the Commonwealth’s

Delegates present, voted the same. Wilson’s strenuous opposition to

the republican Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, besides indicating

a switch to conservatism on his part, led to his removal from

Congress the following year. To avoid the clamor among his frontier

constituents, he repaired to Annapolis during the winter of 1777–78,

and then took up residence in Philadelphia.

Wilson affirmed his newly assumed political stance by closely

identifying with the aristocratic and conservative republican groups,

multiplying his business interests, and accelerating his land

speculation. He also took a position as Advocate-General for France in

America (1779–83), dealing with commercial and maritime matters, and

legally defended Loyalists and their sympathizers.

In the fall of 1779, during a period of inflation and food shortages, a

mob, including many militiamen and led by radical-constitutionalists,

set out to attack the republican leadership. Wilson was a prime target.

He and some 35 of his colleagues barricaded themselves in his home at

Third and Walnut Streets, henceforth known as “Fort Wilson.” During a

brief skirmish, several people on both sides were killed or wounded.

The shock cooled sentiments and pardons were issued all around, though

major political battles over the Commonwealth constitution still lay

ahead.

During 1781 Congress appointed Wilson as one of the directors of the

Bank of North America, newly founded by Robert Morris with the legal

advice of Wilson. In 1782–83, by which time the conservatives had

regained some of their power, he was reelected to Congress, as well as

in the period 1785–87.

Wilson reached the apex of his career in the U.S. Constitutional

Convention (1787), in which he was one of the leaders, both in

the floor debates and the drafting committee. That same year,

overcoming powerful opposition, he led the drive for ratification

in Pennsylvania, the second State to ratify. The new Commonwealth

constitution, drafted in 1789–90 along the lines of the U.S.

Constitution, was also primarily Wilson’s work and represented the

climax of his 14-year fight against the constitution of 1776.

For his services in the formation of the Federal Government, though

Wilson expected to be appointed Chief Justice, in 1789 President

Washington named him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. He

was chosen that same year as the first law professor at the College of

Philadelphia. Two years hence, he began an official digest of the laws

of Pennsylvania, a project he never completed, though he carried on for

awhile after funds ran out.

Wilson, who wrote only a few opinions, did not achieve the success

on the Supreme Court that his capabilities and experience promised.

Indeed, during those years he was the object of much criticism and

barely escaped impeachment. For one thing, he tried to influence the

enactment of legislation in Pennsylvania favorable to land speculators.

Between 1792 and 1795 he also made huge but unwise land investments in

western New York and Pennsylvania, as well as in Georgia. This did not

stop him from conceiving a grandiose but ill-fated scheme, involving

vast sums of European capital, for the recruitment of European

colonists and their settlement on western lands. Meantime, in 1793,

a widower with six children, he had remarried; the one son from this

union died in infancy.

Four years later, to avoid arrest for debt, the distraught Wilson

moved from Philadelphia to Burlington, N.J. The next year, apparently

while on Federal circuit court business, he arrived at Edenton, N.C.,

in a state of acute mental stress and was taken into the home of

James Iredell, a fellow Supreme Court Justice. He died there within a

few months. Although first buried at Hayes Plantation near Edenton,

his remains were later reinterred in the yard of Christ Church at

Philadelphia.

John Witherspoon

NEW JERSEY

[Illustration]

Rev. John Witherspoon, the only active clergyman among

the signers, achieved a greater reputation as a religious

leader and educator than as a politician. Emigrating

from Scotland to America in the midst of the controversy

between the Colonies and the Crown, he took part in the

Revolution, lost a son during the war, and signed the

Articles of Confederation as well as the Declaration. He is

better known, however, for his role in the growth of the

Presbyterian Church and for his distinguished presidency of

the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University).

The son of a Calvinist minister, Witherspoon was born in 1723 at the

village of Gifford, near Edinburgh. He attended grammar school at

the neighboring town of Haddington and won master of arts (1739) and

divinity (1743) degrees from the University of Edinburgh. In 1743

the Haddington Presbytery licensed him to preach. He was ordained 2

years later at Beith, where he occupied a pulpit until 1757. He then

transferred to Paisley, not far from Glasgow. Meantime, in 1748, he had

married; only five of his ten children survived childhood.

Over the years, Witherspoon attained leadership of a group of

conservative clergymen who were engaged in a prolonged struggle with a

group of their colleagues to maintain the “purity” of orthodox Church

doctrine. Witherspoon penned a stream of sermons and tracts attacking

the opposition and denouncing moral decay in Scotland. He also defended

the traditional prerogative of the people to choose their own

ministers, a right ecclesiastical authorities had taken from them.

In 1768 Witherspoon channeled his energies in a new direction. He gave

up his post at Paisley and accepted the presidency of the College of

New Jersey, after two representatives of the college had visited him

and finally at the end of 2 years of effort overcome the objections of

his wife. He sailed to America with his family. The college bloomed

under his direction. He increased the endowment, instituted new

methods of instruction, and broadened and revitalized the curriculum.

Continuing also as a minister and church leader, he patched up a major

schism in the Presbyterian Church; stimulated its expansion, especially

in the Middle Colonies; and worked closely with the Congregationalists.

[Illustration: The College of New Jersey (later Princeton University)

in 1764. Rev. John Witherspoon served as its president from 1768 until

1794. The main building, Nassau Hall, is on the left; the President’s

House, on the right.]

The Revolution fanned Witherspoon’s hatred of the English, which had

originated in Scotland. By 1770 his students were openly demonstrating

in favor of the patriot cause. In a commencement oration he advocated

resistance to the Crown, which became his favorite theme in sermons

and essays. In 1774–76 he represented his county in the New Jersey

provincial assemblies, and sat on local committees of correspondence.

In the latter year he figured prominently in the agitations that led to

the removal from office and imprisonment of the Royal Governor, and

then received an appointment to the Continental Congress.

On July 2, 1776, in a congressional speech urging independence,

Witherspoon declared that the Colonies were “not only ripe for the

measure but in danger of rotting for the want of it.” In November,

when the British invaded New Jersey, he closed the College of New

Jersey. The redcoats occupied its major building, Nassau Hall, burned

the library, and committed other acts of destruction. The next year,

Witherspoon’s son James lost his life at the Battle of Germantown, Pa.

Witherspoon stayed in Congress until 1782. His main committee

assignments dealt with military and foreign affairs. He also

participated in the debates on the Articles of Confederation, aided

in setting up the executive departments, and argued for financial

stability. Meantime, in 1779, he had moved from the President’s House

at Princeton to Tusculum, a country home he had earlier built nearby.

He left the Rev. Samuel S. Smith, his son-in-law and the college vice

president, in charge of the nearly defunct institution.

Witherspoon devoted most of his effort during the postwar years

to rebuilding the college, which never fully recovered its prewar

prosperity during his lifetime. In addition, during the years 1783–89

he sat for two terms in the State legislature, attended the New Jersey

(1787) convention that ratified the Federal Constitution, participated

in the reorganization of the Presbyterian Church, and moderated its

first general assembly (1789). In 1791, at the age of 68, Witherspoon

took a second wife, a 24-year-old widow, who bore him two daughters.

Blind his last 2 years, he died in 1794, aged 71, at Tusculum. His

remains rest in the Presidents’ Lot at Princeton Cemetery.

Oliver Wolcott

CONNECTICUT

[Illustration]

Oliver Wolcott, as much a soldier as a politician, helped

convert the concept of independence into reality on the

battlefield. He also occupied many local, provincial, and

State offices, including the governorship. One of his five

children, Oliver, also held that position and became U.S.

Secretary of the Treasury.

Wolcott was the youngest son in a family of 15. Sired by Roger Wolcott,

a leading Connecticut politician, he was born in 1726 at Windsor

(present South Windsor), Conn. In 1747, just graduated from Yale

College at the top of his class, he began his military career. As a

militia captain during King George’s War (1740–48), he accompanied an

unsuccessful British expedition against the French in New France. Back

home, he studied medicine for a time with his brother before deciding

to turn to law.

In 1751, when Litchfield County was organized, Wolcott moved about 30

miles westward to the town of Litchfield and immediately took over the

first of a long string of county and State offices: county sheriff

(1751–71); member of the lower house (1764, 1767–68, and 1770) and

upper house (1771–86) of the colonial and State legislatures; and

probate (1772–81) and county (1774–78) judge. By 1774 he had risen to

the rank of colonel in the militia.

The next spring, the legislature named him as a commissary for

Connecticut troops and in the summer the Continental Congress

designated him as a commissioner of Indian affairs for the northern

department. In that capacity he attended a conference that year with

the Iroquois (Six Nations) at Albany, N.Y., that temporarily gained

their neutrality in the war. Before the year was out, he also aided in

arbitrating land disputes between Pennsylvania and Connecticut and New

York and Vermont.

Wolcott sat in Congress from 1775 until 1783 except for the year 1779.

In June 1776 illness caused him to return to Connecticut. Absent at

the time of the voting for independence the next month and at the

formal signing of the Declaration in August, he added his signature

sometime after his return to Congress in October. Throughout his tour,

Wolcott devoted portions of each year to militia duty, highlighted

by participation as a brigadier general in the New York campaigns of

1776–77 that culminated in the surrender of Gen. John Burgoyne in

October of the latter year at Saratoga (Schuylerville). During 1779, as

a major general, Wolcott defended the Connecticut seacoast against the

raids of William Tryon, Royal Governor of New York.

Wolcott’s postwar career was varied. On the national level, he helped

negotiate two Indian treaties: the Second Treaty of Fort Stanwix,

N.Y. (1784), in which the Iroquois ceded to the United States some of

their lands in New York and Pennsylvania; and another (1789) with the

Wyandottes, who gave up their tract in the Western Reserve, in present

Ohio. On the State level, Wolcott continued his long period of service

in the upper house of the legislature (ended 1786); enjoyed a lengthy

stint as Lieutenant Governor (1787–96); attended the convention (1788)

that ratified the U.S. Constitution; and, like his father before him

and his son after him, held the office of Governor (1796–97).

While occupying the latter position, Wolcott died, aged 71, at East

Windsor. His remains rest in the East Cemetery at Litchfield.

George Wythe

VIRGINIA

[Illustration]

Virginia’s George Wythe spent only about a year in the

Continental Congress, never aspired to any other national

office, and played a minor part in the Constitutional

Convention. But he made a deep impress on legal education

in the Nation and strongly influenced the government and

jurisprudence of his State. A brilliant classical scholar

and the first professor of law in an American college, he

instructed scores of young lawyers. Included among them

were Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, John Marshall, and

Henry Clay.

Wythe was born in 1726, the second of three children, on his father’s

plantation on the Back River in Elizabeth City County, Va., within the

confines of present Hampton. He lost his parents at an early age and

grew up under the guardianship of his older brother, Thomas. George

acquired a knowledge of the classics from his well-educated mother

before her death, and he probably attended for a time a grammar school

operated by the College of William and Mary.

Wythe’s brother later sent him to Prince George County to read law

under an uncle. In 1746, at the age of 20, he joined the bar, moved

to Spotsylvania County, and became associated with a lawyer there.

In December 1747, he married his partner’s sister, but she succumbed

the next year. In 1754 Lt. Gov. Robert Dinwiddie appointed him as

acting colonial attorney general, a position he held for a few months

and which likely required that he spend some time in Williamsburg.

The next year, Wythe’s brother died and he inherited his birthplace.

He chose, however, to live in Williamsburg in the house that his new

father-in-law, an architect, designed and built for him and his

betrothed, whom he married about 1755. Their only child died in infancy.

At Williamsburg, Wythe immersed himself in further study of the

classics and the law and achieved accreditation by the colonial Supreme

Court. Like his father, he served in the House of Burgesses (mid-1750’s

until 1775), first as delegate and after 1769 as clerk. During this

period, in 1768 he held the mayorship of Williamsburg, and the next

year sat on the board of visitors of the College of William and Mary.

He also had found time during the years 1762–67 to train youthful

Thomas Jefferson in the law. The two men, at first as mentor and pupil

and later as political allies, maintained a lifetime friendship.

Wythe first exhibited Revolutionary leanings in 1764 when Parliament

hinted to the Colonies that it might impose a Stamp Tax. By then

an experienced legislator, he drafted for the House of Burgesses a

remonstrance to Parliament so strident that his fellow legislators

modified it before adoption. Wythe was one of the first to express the

concept of separate nationhood for the Colonies within the British

Empire.

Although elected to Congress in 1775–76, Wythe exerted little influence

in that body. He spent considerable time helping draft a State

constitution and design a State seal, and was not present at the time

of the formal signing of the Declaration in August 1776. Furthermore,

within a few months, Wythe, Jefferson, and Edmund Pendleton undertook

a 3-year project to revise Virginia’s legal code. In 1777 Wythe also

presided as speaker of the lower house of the legislature.

An appointment as one of the three judges of the newly created Virginia

high court of chancery followed the next year. Sitting on it for 28

years, during 13 of which he was the only chancellor, Wythe charted the

course of Virginia jurisprudence. In conjunction with these duties, he

was an ex officio member of the State Superior Court.

Wythe’s real love was teaching. In 1779 Jefferson and other officials

of the College of William and Mary created the first chair of law in

a U.S. institution of higher learning and appointed Wythe to fill

it. In that position, he educated America’s earliest college-trained

lawyers, among them John Marshall and James Monroe. To supplement his

lectures, Wythe introduced the use of moot courts and legislatures,

in which students could put their knowledge into actual practice. In

1787 he also demonstrated his love of the classics and literature

by offering free to anyone interested a class in Latin, Greek, and

English literature. That same year, he attended the U.S. Constitutional

Convention, but played an insignificant role and did not sign the

Constitution. The following year, however, he was one of the Federalist

leaders at the Virginia ratifying convention.

In 1791, the year after Wythe resigned his professorship, his chancery

duties caused him to move his home to Richmond, the State capital.

But he was reluctant to give up his teaching and opened a private law

school. One of his last and most promising pupils was a teenager named

Henry Clay.

In 1806, in his eighth decade, Wythe died at Richmond under mysterious

circumstances—probably of poison administered by his heir, a favorite

grandnephew. Reflecting a lifelong aversion to slavery, Wythe

emancipated his slaves in his will. His grave is in the yard of St.

John’s Episcopal Church at Richmond.

Part Three

Signers of the Declaration:

Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings

Over the decades that separate present-day America from the early

periods of its history, a large number of the structures commemorating

those periods have been marred or obliterated. Those relating to the

signers of the Declaration of Independence have not been spared. The

ravages of war, urbanization, fire, aging, weathering, neglect, and

vandalism have destroyed all the residences of 21 of these 56 men and

seriously impaired some of those that have survived.

Beyond those factors detrimental to all historic buildings are

two special ones that have hampered the marking and preserving of

signers’ homes and other sites. For decades following adoption of the

Declaration, these individuals were not accorded the reverence bestowed

on them in modern times. Secondly, many of them have received only

slight historical recognition because they lacked national reputations

other than as signers.

Yet among the residences and buildings that remain are many of major

significance. As a whole, they reveal much about the way of life of

the signers and illuminate the events involved in the creation of the

Declaration. Of outstanding significance is Independence National

Historical Park, Pa. Within its boundaries the document was written,

debated, approved, and signed. The National Park Service administers

the park in cooperation with the city of Philadelphia and various

private agencies. Three residences of signers are also units of the

National Park System: Adams National Historic Site, Mass.; the Floyd

House, in Fire Island National Seashore, N.Y.; and the Nelson House,

part of Colonial National Historical Park, Va.

Almost half the extant homes of the signers are owned by private

individuals, many of whom personally reside in them and a few of whom

are descendants of the signers. The rest of the residences are owned

and maintained by States, cities, and a wide variety of nongovernmental

institutions, such as patriotic-civic organizations, memorial

associations, local historical societies, foundations, universities,

churches, and corporations and business firms.

Reflecting the dedicated efforts of many of the above individuals and

agencies, a considerable number of the buildings and residences provide

fine examples of historic preservation and restoration. Unfortunately,

some structures have badly deteriorated. But the increased recent

interest in the signers has enhanced the identification, renovation,

and preservation of pertinent sites and buildings.

In addition to the preservation of sites and buildings, the subject

of this book, the signers have been honored in many other ways.

Commemoration varies widely, however, from State to State and from

signer to signer. Some have been recognized in a major way; others

hardly at all.

In the forefront of the groups that have marked extant homes and

buildings, as well as the sites of former structures and graves, or

otherwise memorialized the signers are: Daughters of the American

Revolution; Daughters of the Revolution; Colonial Dames of America;

National Society of Colonial Dames of America; Sons of the American

Revolution; Sons of the Revolution; and the Descendants of the Signers

of the Declaration of Independence, Inc., chartered by Congress in 1907.

A major share of the sites of residences with no physical remains

has been marked. The 20 signers for whom no existing homes have been

located are: Samuel Adams, Abraham Clark, William Ellery, Benjamin

Franklin, Lyman Hall, John Hart, Francis Lewis, Philip Livingston,

Thomas McKean, Lewis Morris, Robert Morris, John Morton, Robert Treat

Paine, John Penn, George Read, Caesar Rodney, George Ross, Benjamin

Rush, Roger Sherman, and James Smith. Another signer, Samuel Chase, is

represented in this volume only by a structure (Chase-Lloyd House) that

he began building but never resided in.

Monuments and memorials range from simple plaques to the Thomas

Jefferson Memorial, D.C., in the National Park System. Statues of

several signers are located in the U.S. Capitol. Special monuments

have been erected to those from two States. The Founders’ Monument,

in Augusta, Ga., is dedicated to the three signers from that State

(Gwinnett, Hall, and Walton) and contains the burial places of the

latter two. A monument to the three North Carolina signers (Hewes,

Hooper, and Penn) at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, in

Greensboro, N.C., includes the tombs of Hooper and Penn.

Described in the following pages are the principal buildings associated

with the signers of the Declaration. They are comprised of three

categories: National Park Service Areas, National Historic Landmarks,

and Other Sites Considered.

The principal aim of the National Survey of Historic Sites and

Buildings is to identify nationally important sites that are not

_National Park Service Areas_, but no survey of historic places would

be complete without including them. This is particularly true because

many of them were designated as National Historic Landmarks before they

became part of the National Park System. Further information about

a particular area may be obtained by writing directly to the park

superintendent at the address listed immediately following the location.

_National Historic Landmarks_ are those sites judged by the Advisory

Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments to

meet the criteria of national significance in commemorating the history

of the United States (pp. 270–271). They have been declared by the

Secretary of the Interior to be eligible for designation as National

Historic Landmarks. Final designation occurs when the owners apply for

such status. They receive certificates and bronze plaques attesting to

the distinction.

_Other Sites Considered_ consist of those sites deemed by the Advisory

Board to possess noteworthy historical value but not national

significance. The list of sites included in this category does not

purport to be exhaustive; it is merely a representative sampling, all

that is possible because of space limitations.

Many sites in the Other Sites Considered category in all phases of

history are listed on the National Register of Historic Places,

maintained by the National Park Service’s Office of Archeology and

Historic Preservation. The register consists not only of sites in the

National Park System and National Historic Landmarks but also those of

State and local significance, nominated through appropriate channels

by the various States. It is published biennally and distributed by

the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office,

Washington, D.C., 20402. The latest volume is _The National Register of

Historic Places, 1972_, price $7.80.

[Illustration: SIGNERS OF THE DECLARATION

HISTORIC SITES OF NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE (map)]

For the convenience of users of this volume, sites and buildings are

listed alphabetically by State. The following code indicates site

categories:

_Site Categories_

☑ NATIONAL PARK SERVICE AREAS

∆ NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS

‎⊗ OTHER SITES CONSIDERED

NOTE: _The following descriptions indicate sites that are open to the

public. Before visiting any of them, inquiry should be made to the

owners or custodians concerning dates and hours of access and admission

costs, usually nominal. Special permission should be obtained to visit

privately owned sites._

Huntington Birthplace, Connecticut  ∆

_Location: Windham County, on the north side of Conn. 14, about 2

blocks west of its junction with Conn. 97, Scotland._

This plain but charming farmhouse on the bank of Merrick’s Brook was

the birthplace and home of Samuel Huntington through his boyhood and

early manhood. He lived in it from 1731 probably until 1760, the year

he moved to Norwich.