Chapter IV: Part III (2)

Between the ages of 18 and 20, Chase read law with an Annapolis firm and joined the bar in 1761. The next year, he married; his wife bore at least two sons and two daughters. Two years after his marriage, he entered the colonial/State legislature and retained membership for two decades. From the beginning, he opposed the royal government. Annapolis officials denounced him for his participation in the violent protests of the Sons of Liberty in 1765 against the Stamp Act. In 1774–75 he took part in the Maryland committee of correspondence, council of safety, and the provincial convention.

In the former year, Chase had joined the Continental Congress. He advocated an embargo on trade with Britain, showed special interest in diplomatic matters, early urged a confederation of the Colonies, defended George Washington from his congressional detractors, and in 1776 journeyed to Montreal with a commission that tried but failed to achieve a union with Canada. When he returned to Philadelphia around the middle of June, Congress had just postponed the vote on the Lee independence resolution. Realizing that Maryland was straddling the fence on the issue, Chase rushed home. Along with Charles Carroll of Carrollton and William Paca, he labored for 2 weeks to overcome opposition and won a committal to independence from the convention. The Maryland Delegates registered it in time for the first congressional vote, on July 1. In 1778 Chase lost his office because of adverse publicity generated by the advantage he had taken of knowledge gained in Congress to engage in a profiteering scheme.

In 1783–84 Chase traveled to London as a State emissary on an unfruitful mission to recover Maryland stock in the Bank of England from two fugitive Loyalists. Upon his return apparently, his first wife having died, he remarried; resumed his law practice; and engaged in various unsuccessful business enterprises that led to bankruptcy in 1789. Meantime, he had reentered politics. In 1785 he had represented Maryland at the Mount Vernon (Va.) Conference, forerunner of the Annapolis Convention. The next year, he moved his family from Annapolis to Baltimore, where he soon became chief judge of the Baltimore County criminal court (1788–95). As a delegate to the Maryland ratifying convention in 1788, he strongly opposed the Constitution, though he later became a staunch Federalist. From 1791 until 1794, while still a county judge, he also held the position of chief justice of the Maryland Superior Court.

Chase achieved his greatest fame as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1796–1811). He was one of the ablest jurists in the body prior to Chief Justice John Marshall (1801–35), and delivered many influential opinions. His inability to control his political partisanship while on the bench—a trait he shared with some other judges of his time—led to various judicial improprieties and impeachment proceedings against him in 1805. But Congress acquitted him.

Still a Justice, Chase died in Baltimore 2 months after he celebrated his 70th birthday. His grave is in St. Paul’s Cemetery.

Abraham Clark

NEW JERSEY

Abraham Clark—farmer, surveyor, self-taught lawyer, and
politician—typifies those signers who dedicated most of
their lives to public service but never gained national
renown.

An only child, Clark was born in 1726 at his father’s farm in what is now Roselle, N.J. In his boyhood, he was too frail for farmwork. He received only a minimum of formal education, but in his independent study demonstrated a bent for mathematics. When he reached manhood, besides farming his father’s land, he took up surveying and informally read law to aid in mediating land disputes. Although probably never admitted to the bar, he gained a reputation as the “poor man’s counselor” for his willingness to dispense free legal advice or accept produce or merchandise in lieu of a fee. He married in 1749, and fathered 10 children.

Clark followed his father’s example by taking an active part in civic affairs. For many years, he served the Crown as high sheriff of Essex County and as clerk in the colonial legislature. The exact date of his entry into the patriot ranks is not known, but in the period 1774–76 he became a member and secretary of the New Jersey council of safety, attended several Revolutionary conventions, and won election to the provincial assembly. In June of the latter year, he and four other men replaced the existing congressional Delegates, who were opposing independence.

Despite poor health and deep concern for the welfare of his family and the safety of his home, located not far from an area of British occupation, Clark stayed in Congress throughout the War for Independence and sometimes sat concurrently in the State legislature. He suffered additional anxiety when the British captured his two soldier sons and incarcerated them for a time on the prison ship _Jersey_, where hundreds of captives perished.

At the end of the war in 1783, Clark resumed his life back in New Jersey. The next year he began a 3-year tour in the State legislature, which he represented at the Annapolis Convention (1786). The following year, ill health prevented his attendance at the Constitutional Convention. He subsequently opposed the Constitution until it incorporated the Bill of Rights. In 1787–89 he returned to the Continental Congress, but in 1789–90 remained in New Jersey as commissioner to settle his State’s accounts with the Federal Government. In 1791–94 he climaxed a long career of alternating State-National service as a Representative in the Second and Third Congresses.

Clark was stricken with a sunstroke in 1794 at his birthplace in Roselle, where he had lived all his life except when political duty called him away. He died a few hours later, at the age of 68, in the nearby town of Rahway and was buried there in the Presbyterian Cemetery.

George Clymer

PENNSYLVANIA

George Clymer, a leading Philadelphia merchant, rendered
long years of service to his city, State, and Nation. He
signed the Constitution as well as the Declaration, and
applied his commercial acumen to the financial problems of
the Colonies and the Confederation.

Clymer was orphaned in 1740, only a year after his birth in Philadelphia. A wealthy uncle reared and informally educated him and advanced him from clerk to a full-fledged partner in his mercantile firm, which on his death he bequeathed to his ward. Later, Clymer merged operations with the Merediths, prominent businessmen, and cemented the relationship by marrying his senior partner’s daughter.

Motivated at least partly by the impact of British economic restrictions on his business, Clymer early adopted the Revolutionary cause and was one of the first to recommend independence. He attended patriotic meetings, served on the Pennsylvania council of safety, and in 1773 headed a committee that forced the resignation of Philadelphia tea consignees appointed by Britain under the Tea Act. Inevitably, in light of his economic background, he channeled his energies into financial matters. In 1775–76 he acted as one of the first two Continental treasurers, even personally underwriting the war by exchanging all his own specie for Continental currency.

In the Continental Congress (1776–77 and 1780–82) the quiet and unassuming Clymer rarely spoke in debate but made his mark in committee efforts, especially those pertaining to commerce, finance, and military affairs. During and between his two congressional tours, he also served on a series of commissions that conducted important field investigations. In December 1776, when Congress fled from Philadelphia to Baltimore, he and fellow signers George Walton and Robert Morris remained behind to carry on congressional business. Within a year, after their victory at the Battle of Brandywine, Pa. (Sept. 11, 1777), British troops advancing on Philadelphia detoured for the purpose of vandalizing Clymer’s home in Chester County, about 25 miles outside the city, while his wife and children hid nearby in the woods.

After a brief retirement following his last tour in the Continental Congress, Clymer was reelected in the years 1784–88 to the Pennsylvania legislature, where he had also served part time in 1780–82 while still in Congress. As a State legislator, he advocated reform of the penal code, opposed capital punishment, and represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention (1787). The next phase of his career consisted of service as a U.S. Representative in the First Congress (1789–91), followed by appointment as collector of excise taxes on alcoholic beverages in Pennsylvania (1791–94). In 1795–96 he sat on a Presidential commission that negotiated a treaty with the Indians in Georgia.

During his retirement, Clymer advanced various community projects, including the Philadelphia Agricultural Society, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Bank. At the age of 73, in 1813, he died at Summerseat, an estate a few miles outside Philadelphia at Morrisville that he had purchased and moved to in 1806. His grave is in the Friends Meeting House Cemetery at Trenton, N.J.

William Ellery

RHODE ISLAND

One of a small group of lesser known signers whose
achievements were comparatively modest, William Ellery
gained little fame beyond his hometown—in sharp contrast
to fellow Rhode Island signer Stephen Hopkins. The office
of Delegate to the Continental Congress was the only
significant position, State or National, to which Ellery
ever won election, but he occupied it for a far longer
period than most other Members.

The second son in a family of four, Ellery was born in 1727 at Newport, his lifelong residence. He followed in the footsteps of his father, a rich merchant and political leader, by attending Harvard. On his graduation in 1747, he returned home. During the following two decades or so, he tried his hand at several occupations, eventually taking up the study of law, which he began practicing in 1770. Meantime, he had married twice and was to rear two sons and three daughters. Among his grandchildren were William Ellery Channing, influential theologian and apostle of Unitarianism, and Richard Henry Dana, Sr., noted poet and essayist.

By May 1776, when the colonial legislature sent Ellery to the Continental Congress, he had already earned a reputation for his work on local patriotic committees. Tradition records that, at the formal signing of the Declaration on August 2, he placed himself beside the Secretary and observed “undaunted resolution” on every face as the Delegates subscribed to their “death warrant.” The next year, Rhode Island initiated popular election of congressional Delegates, and Ellery’s Newport constituency maintained him in office until 1786 except for the years 1780 and 1782. In 1780 he remained in Philadelphia as an ex officio member of the board of admiralty, on which he had been sitting. His other committee assignments included those dealing with commercial and naval affairs. On occasion, to entertain himself and others, he wrote witty epigrams about various speakers. In 1785 he turned down the chief justiceship of the Rhode Island Superior Court to remain in Congress, where he had attained commanding seniority.

The very next year, Ellery terminated his congressional career to accept an appointment as commissioner of the Continental Loan Office for Rhode Island (1786–90). Probably the need to straighten out his finances compelled him to accept. British troops in 1778, during their 3-year occupation of Newport, had destroyed his home and property, and he had been too busy to rebuild his fortune. In 1790 President Washington appointed Ellery as customs collector for the district of Newport, a position he held for three decades. Although he was a Federalist, he managed to retain office during the Democratic-Republican administrations, probably because of his Revolutionary record and competence.

In his later years, Ellery prospered. He kept active in public affairs and spent many hours in scholarly pursuits and correspondence. Living to 92, a more advanced age than all the signers except Charles Carroll, he died in 1820 at Newport. His remains rest there in the Common Ground Cemetery.

William Floyd

NEW YORK

William Floyd, a wealthy landowner-farmer, belongs to the
category of signers who played only a peripheral part in
the Revolution. Nevertheless, he suffered anguish when
British troops and Loyalists ravaged his estate during
the war and drove his family into a 7-year exile in
Connecticut. He also climbed to the rank of major general
in the State militia, and served in the U.S. First Congress.

Floyd was born in 1734 at present Mastic, Long Island, N.Y., in Brookhaven Township. He was the second child and eldest of two sons in a family of nine. His father, a prosperous farmer of Welsh ancestry, kept the youth busy with chores. As a result, his education consisted only of informal instruction at home. When Floyd reached his 20th year, his father and mother died within 2 months of each other, and he inherited a large estate along with the responsibility of caring for his brothers and sisters. Six years later, he married. His bride helped care for the family and assisted in managing the farm, for which slaves supplied most of the labor. A community stalwart, Floyd also devoted considerable time to the affairs of the Brookhaven church, occupied the position of town trustee (1769–71), and moved up in the ranks of the Suffolk County militia to a colonelcy in 1775.

The Revolutionary movement in New York was much less fervent and started later than that in the other Colonies. The spirited Massachusetts opposition to the Tea Act in the later half of 1773 and in 1774 created the first major ferment in New York. One of the scattered focal points was eastern Long Island, where Floyd lived. He and many of his neighbors attended meetings that extended sympathy and aid to Massachusetts and protested the closing of the port of Boston by the British. Despite such local outbursts, by the end of 1774 New York was one of only two Colonies, Georgia being the other, in which the patriots did not control the government. For this reason, the Revolutionaries operated mainly on a county basis.

In 1774 Suffolk County sent Floyd to the Continental Congress. He remained there until 1777, returned in the period 1779–83, and in the interim served in the State senate and on the council of safety. Yielding the floor of Congress to the other New York Delegates, he labored without special distinction on a few committees. But worry about the welfare of his family presented a major distraction. In 1776, when British forces occupied Long Island, his wife, son, and two daughters fled northward across the sound and took refuge in Middletown, Conn. His wife died there in 1781. To make matters worse, the redcoats used his home at Mastic for a barracks, and Loyalists plundered his lands and belongings. When he brought his children back in 1783, he found the fields and timber stripped, the fences destroyed, and the house damaged.

After the war, Floyd sat for several terms in the State senate, attended the constitutional convention of 1801, supported the Federal Constitution, won election in the years 1789–91 as a Representative in the First Congress, served as presidential elector on four occasions, and became a major general in the New York militia. His second wife, whom he had married in 1784, bore him two daughters.

About this time, Floyd acquired an interest in western lands. The year of his marriage, he purchased a tract in central New York at the headwaters of the Mohawk River in the environs of present Rome; he supplemented this 3 years later by obtaining a State grant of more than 10,000 acres in the area. He spent most of his summers visiting and developing the acreage.

In 1803, in his late sixties, at a time when most men possess lesser ambitions, Floyd deeded his Long Island home and farm to his son Nicoll, and set out with the rest of his family to make a new life on the frontier. During the first year, he built a home at present Westernville, N.Y. There he succumbed, at the age of 86 in 1821, and was buried in the Presbyterian Cemetery.

Benjamin Franklin

PENNSYLVANIA

Benjamin Franklin, elder statesman of the Revolution
and oldest signer of both the Declaration and the
Constitution, sat on the committee that drafted the
Declaration, attended the Constitutional Convention, and
distinguished himself as a diplomat. But he was a self-made
and self-educated intellectual colossus whose interests
far transcended politics. He won international renown
as a printer-publisher, author, philosopher, scientist,
inventor, and philanthropist. On both sides of the Atlantic
he mingled with the social elite, whom he impressed with
his sagacity, wit, and zest for life.

Franklin was born in 1706 at Boston. He was the tenth son of a soap- and candle-maker. He received some formal education but was principally self-taught. After serving an apprenticeship to his father between the ages of 10 and 12, he went to work for his half-brother James, a printer. In 1721 the latter founded the _New England Courant_, the fourth newspaper in the Colonies. Benjamin secretly contributed to it 14 essays, his first published writings.

In 1723, because of dissension with his half-brother, Franklin moved to Philadelphia. He spent only a year there, and then sailed to London for two more years. Back in Philadelphia, he rose rapidly in the printing industry. He published _The Pennsylvania Gazette_ (1730–48), which had been founded by another man in 1728, but his most successful venture was annual _Poor Richard’s Almanac_ (1733–58). It won a popularity in the Colonies second only to the Bible, and its fame eventually spread to Europe.

Meantime, in 1730 Franklin had taken a common-law wife, who was to bear him a son and a daughter, as was another woman out of wedlock. By 1748 he had achieved financial independence and gained recognition for his philanthropy and the stimulus he provided to such worthwhile civic causes as libraries, educational institutions, and hospitals. Energetic and tireless, he also found time to pursue his deep interest in science, as well as enter politics.

Franklin served as clerk (1736–51) and member (1751–64) of the colonial legislature, and as deputy postmaster of Philadelphia (1737–53) and deputy postmaster general of the Colonies (1753–74). In addition, he represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress (1754), called to unite the Colonies during the French and Indian War. The congress adopted his “Plan of Union,” but the colonial assemblies rejected it because it encroached on their powers.

During the years 1757–62 and 1764–75, Franklin resided in England, originally in the capacity of agent for Pennsylvania and later for Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. During the latter period, which coincided with the growth of colonial unrest, he underwent a political metamorphosis. Until then a contented Englishman in outlook, primarily concerned with Pennsylvania provincial politics, he distrusted popular movements and saw little purpose to be served in carrying principle to extremes. Until the issue of parliamentary taxation undermined the old alliances, he led the conservative Quaker party in its attack on the Anglican proprietary party and its Presbyterian frontier cohorts. His purpose throughout the years at London in fact had been displacement of the Penn family administration by royal authority—the conversion of the province from a proprietary to a royal colony.

It was during the Stamp Act crisis that Franklin evolved from leader of a shattered provincial party’s faction to celebrated spokesman at London for American rights. Although as agent for Pennsylvania he opposed by every conceivable persuasive means enactment of the bill in 1765, he did not at first realize the depth of colonial hostility. He regarded passage as unavoidable and preferred to submit to it while actually working for its repeal. His nomination of a friend and political ally as stamp distributor in Pennsylvania, coupled with his apparent acceptance of the legislation, armed his proprietary opponents with explosive issues. Their energetic exploitation of them endangered his reputation at home until reliable information was published demonstrating his unabated opposition. For a time, mob resentment threatened his family and new home in Philadelphia until his tradesmen supporters rallied. Subsequently, Franklin’s defense of the American position in the House of Commons during the debates over the Stamp Act’s repeal restored his prestige at home.

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in May 1775, and immediately became a Member of the Continental Congress. Thirteen months later, he served on the committee that drafted the Declaration. According to a traditional anecdote, when he finished signing he declared, “Gentlemen, we must now all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately,” He subsequently contributed to the Government in other important ways, and took over the duties of president of the Pennsylvania constitutional convention.

But, within less than a year and a half after his return, the aged statesman set sail once again for Europe, beginning a career as diplomat that would occupy him for most of the rest of his life. In 1776–79, one of three commissioners, he directed the negotiations that led to treaties of commerce and alliance with France, where the people adulated him, but he and the other commissioners squabbled constantly. While he was sole commissioner to France (1779–85), he and John Jay and John Adams negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the War for Independence.

Back in the United States, in 1785–87 Franklin became president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. At the Constitutional Convention (May 1787), though he did not approve of many aspects of the finished document, he lent his prestige, soothed passions, and compromised disputes. In his twilight years, working on his _Autobiography_, he could look back on a fruitful life as the toast of two continents. Active nearly to the last, in 1787 he was elected as first president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery—a cause to which he had committed himself as early as the 1730’s. His final public act was signing a memorial to Congress recommending dissolution of the slavery system. Shortly thereafter, in 1790 at the age of 84, Franklin passed away in Philadelphia and was buried in Christ Church Burial Ground.

Elbridge Gerry

MASSACHUSETTS

During an extended and controversial career, Elbridge Gerry
experienced many triumphs and disappointments. A prosperous
merchant who worked alongside the two Adamses and John
Hancock in the cause of independence, he integrated
personal interests with public service and translated them
into wartime profits. In the course of his long tenure in
the Continental Congress, he signed both the Declaration
and Articles of Confederation. But throughout his years
in office, which crested in the U.S. Vice-Presidency, his
inconsistencies, ambivalence, and truculence stirred up
animosity among his colleagues—though he usually managed to
muster enough party and popular support to win reelection.

Gerry was born in 1744 at Marblehead, Mass., the third of 12 children. His mother was the daughter of a Boston merchant; his father, a wealthy and politically active merchant-shipper who had once been a sea captain. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1762, Gerry joined his father and two brothers in the family business, which consisted of exporting dried codfish to Barbados and Spain. In 1772–74 he entered the colonial legislature, where he came under the influence of Samuel Adams, and took part in the Marblehead and Massachusetts committees of correspondence. In June of the latter year, when Parliament closed Boston Harbor and Marblehead became a major port of entry for supplies donated by patriots throughout the Colonies to relieve the Bostonians, he aided in the transshipment.

Between 1774 and 1776, Gerry attended the first and second provincial congresses; served with Samuel Adams and John Hancock on the council of safety, which prepared the colony for war; and, as chairman of the committee of supply, a job for which his merchant background ideally suited him, raised troops and dealt with military logistics. During the night of April 18, 1775, he barely eluded capture by the British troops marching on Lexington and Concord. Following the adjournment of a meeting of the council of safety at an inn in Menotomy (Arlington), on the road from Cambridge to Lexington, he had retired for the night but responded to the alarm and fled.

Gerry entered the Continental Congress in 1776 and voted for independence in July, but his absence at the formal ceremonies on August 2 necessitated his signing the Declaration later in the year. His congressional specialties were military and financial matters, in both of which he demonstrated a duality of attitude that was to become his political trademark. He earned the nickname “soldiers’ friend” for his advocacy of better pay and equipment, yet he vacillated on the issue of pensions. Despite his disapproval of standing armies, he recommended long-term enlistments. Although mistrustful of military officials, he befriended both George Washington and Thomas Conway, two generals who were implacable enemies.

Until 1779 Gerry sat on and sometimes presided over the congressional treasury board, which regulated Continental finances. An Army procurement agent as well as a merchant-supplier, he utilized information he obtained in Congress to benefit his lucrative business. On the other hand, he denounced profiteering and personally adhered to a fair-price schedule. In 1780, as wartime financial problems mounted, however, the Delegates resolved to revise the schedule. Gerry’s vehement objections led to a quarrel, and he stormed out of Congress. Although nominally a Member, he did not reappear for 3 years. During the interim, he engaged in trade and privateering and saw duty in the lower house of the State legislature.

Back in Congress in 1783–85, Gerry numbered among those Representatives who had possessed talent as Revolutionary agitators and wartime leaders but who could not effectually cope with the painstaking task of stabilizing the National Government. He was experienced and conscientious, but created many enemies with his lack of humor, suspicion of the motives of others, and obsessive fear of political and military tyranny. In 1786, the year after leaving Congress, his fortune well established, he retired from business, married, and took a seat in the State legislature. The next year, he moved from Marblehead to Cambridge and purchased a confiscated Loyalist estate, where he was to reside for the rest of his life.

Gerry was one of the most vocal of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He antagonized practically everyone by his inconsistency and, according to a colleague, “objected to everything he did not propose.” At first he advocated a strong Central Government, but ultimately rejected and refused to sign the Constitution, especially because it lacked a bill of rights and because he deemed it a threat to republicanism. He led the drive against ratification in Massachusetts. In 1789, when he changed his mind and announced his intention to support the Constitution, he was elected to the First Congress, where to the chagrin of the Antifederalists he championed Federalist policies.

Gerry left Congress for the last time in 1793 and retired for 4 years. During this time, he came to mistrust the aims of the Federalists, particularly their attempts to nurture an alliance with Britain, and sided with the pro-French Democratic-Republicans. In 1797 President John Adams appointed him as the only non-Federalist member of a three-man commission charged with negotiating a reconciliation with France, on the brink of war with the United States. During the ensuing XYZ affair (1797–98), Gerry tarnished his reputation. The French foreign minister duped him into believing that his presence in France would prevent war, and he lingered on long after the departure of the other disgusted commissioners. Finally, the embarrassed Adams recalled him, amid Federalist vituperation.

In 1800–03 Gerry, never very popular among the Massachusetts electorate because of his aristocratic haughtiness, met defeat in four bids for the Massachusetts governorship, but finally triumphed in 1810–12. Near the end of his two terms, scarred by partisan controversy, the Democratic-Republicans passed a devious redistricting measure to insure their domination of the State senate. In response, the Federalists heaped ridicule on Gerry and punningly coined the term “gerrymander” to describe the salamander-like shape of one of the redistricted areas.

Despite his advanced age, frail health, and the threat of poverty brought on by neglect of personal affairs, in 1813 Gerry accepted the Vice-Presidency in James Madison’s Democratic-Republican administration. In the fall of 1814, the 70-year-old politician was stricken fatally while on the way to the Senate. He left his wife, who was to live until 1849, the last surviving widow of a signer, as well as three sons and four daughters. Gerry is buried in Congressional Cemetery at Washington, D.C.

Button Gwinnett

GEORGIA

Tempestuousness and ill-fortune marked the destiny of
uniquely named Button Gwinnett, whose forename is that
of a branch of his mother’s family. The second signer
to die, he met a tragic end in a duel while only in his
forties. The only highlight of his brief tour in the
Continental Congress was signing the Declaration. Even
in Georgia, where he rose to the acting governorship,
controversy and failure usually dogged him. Financial
misfortunes were continual distractions, and he found that
his paltry rewards as a merchant and planter matched his
disappointments in politics.

Gwinnett was likely born in 1735, at the village of Down Hatherly, Gloucestershire, England. The second male in a family numbering at least seven, he was the son of an Anglican vicar of Welsh ancestry and a mother with English ties. He probably learned trade and finance from an uncle, a Bristol merchant, and in 1757 moved to Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. He married a grocer’s daughter, who was to bear three girls, and for a time he joined her father in a partnership. In 1759, however, Gwinnett entered the export shipping business and built up an extensive trade with the American Colonies, possibly sometimes visiting them himself.

The date of Gwinnett’s emigration to Savannah, Ga., is not known but in 1765 he purchased a store there. Later that same year, for some reason, he sold it and abruptly switched vocation. Apparently dazzled by visions of a planter’s life on a great estate but undeterred by his lack of capital, experience, and training, he borrowed £3,000 and purchased large St. Catherine’s Island. It was located off the Georgia coast not far from the busy mainland port of Sunbury, a rival of Savannah. At this time, he probably erected a home on the island. Before long, though already deep in debt, he also purchased some coastal lands on credit and received grants of others from the colony; and bought large numbers of slaves to work his holdings. Poachers aggravated his problems by raiding the island’s livestock.

Gwinnett’s land, slaves, and other possessions were soon gobbled up by creditors. Finally, in 1773, they took over the island, but allowed Gwinnett to maintain his home there. He did so for the rest of his life. During the war, however, the approach of British vessels, who replenished their food supplies from the livestock on the exposed island, sometimes forced him and his family to scurry over in their boat to Sunbury for temporary refuge.

Meantime, Gwinnett had long since entered politics. In 1768–69 he had been designated as one of His Majesty’s justices of the peace and as a local pilotage commissioner. In the years 1769–71 the voters of St. John’s Parish elected him to the colonial assembly at Savannah, but he attended only spasmodically because of his financial woes. When they worsened, he left public office for 5 years.

Gwinnett returned on the national level. Unlike the other two Georgia signers, Lyman Hall and George Walton, he belatedly joined the patriot side—apparently held back for some time by his English birth and close family connections in England. His friend Hall, a Sunbury resident and fellow member of the Midway Congregational Church, swung him over, probably beginning in the summer of 1775. The next February, the provincial congress named Gwinnett to the Continental Congress, though he did not arrive in Philadelphia until May. He attended for only about 10 weeks. Right after he signed the Declaration on August 2, he trekked back to Georgia, where he hoped but failed to win at least an Army colonelcy in one of the units the State was forming.

In October Gwinnett was reelected to the Continental Congress, but chose not to attend. Instead, during the next 5 months, he played a key role in drafting the State’s first constitution, in the course of which he helped thwart a proposed union of South Carolina and Georgia. Upon the death of the Governor, or president of the Executive Council, in March 1777 the council commissioned Gwinnett as Acting Governor for 2 months, but he failed to achieve reelection. Before leaving office, he had clashed with controversial Gen. Lachlan McIntosh, an old rival. The result was a pistol duel in May just outside Savannah. Both men suffered wounds, but Gwinnett died a few days later of a gangrenous infection in his leg. Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah contains a grave reputed to be his.

Lyman Hall

GEORGIA

Lyman Hall was one of the four signers originally trained
as ministers. He eventually found his pulpit in politics,
though he had to preach vigorously to inspire the
“congregation” of Georgia. He enthusiastically sparked the
slow-developing independence movement there with George
Walton and recruited Button Gwinnett, the third Georgia
signer. Somehow Hall also managed to pursue careers as
doctor, planter, and Governor.

A native of Wallingford, Conn., Hall was born in 1724. He graduated from Yale College in 1747 at the age of 23, returned home, and heeded a family call to the Congregational ministry. An uncle, Rev. Samuel Hall, trained him in theology. In 1749 he began preaching in Bridgeport and adjacent towns. Young and immature, he probably entrapped himself in the middle of a liberal-conservative schism and in some way alienated his congregation, but repentance brought quick reinstatement from dismissal in 1751, and for a couple of years he temporarily filled vacant pulpits.

During this period, in 1752, Hall married, but his wife lived only a year; about 2 years later he remarried, a union that was to bring forth a son. Meantime, Hall had become disillusioned by his ministerial experiences. He studied medicine with a local doctor, partially supporting himself by teaching. When his medical training was completed, he moved back to Wallingford and hung out his shingle.

In 1757 the 33-year-old Hall, seeking brighter fields, emigrated to Dorchester, S.C., a settlement of New England Puritans not far from Charleston. Within a few months, he joined some of the residents in a relocation that had been underway since 1752. They were pushing southward to Georgia’s coastal Midway District, in St. John’s Parish (present Liberty County). This area provided more land and a healthier climate.

In 1758 the colonists finished their emigration and founded Sunbury. It evolved into the thriving seaport-hub of the surrounding slave-based, rice-indigo economy. Like many other planters, Hall maintained a home there, where it was healthier than inland, as well as at Hall’s Knoll, the plantation just north of the present town of Midway that he had purchased shortly after arriving in the area. Because its plantations skirted malarial swamps, Hall kept busy providing medical treatment, as well as managing his estate.

St. John’s Parish became the wealthiest in Georgia. This was not its only uniqueness, for the populace was steeped in the New England tradition of independence. When the trouble with Britain erupted in the mid-1760’s the parish, guided by Hall, stood apart in its opposition from virtually all the rest of the colony except for another cluster of Revolutionaries at Savannah led by George Walton and others. Georgia, which was to be the last of the Colonies to join the Continental Association, was the youngest, most remote, and most sparsely settled. Also the poorest, it felt less the impact of British economic restrictions. The Loyalist ruling aristocracy of Georgia, regarding the tiny band of Revolutionaries with contempt, resisted their every move.

Hall was appalled by the poor representation of the parishes as a whole and the indecisiveness of Revolutionary conventions he attended at Savannah in the summer of 1774 and the next January, especially by their failure to send Delegates to the Continental Congress. He dejectedly returned to St. John’s Parish. It was ready to secede from the colony, and proposed an alliance to South Carolina, which refused. Not to be denied, in March 1775 the parish held its own convention and sent Hall as its own “delegate” to the Continental Congress.

Two months later, Congress admitted Hall as a nonvoting member. In July, Georgia, finally coming into the fold, sanctioned Hall’s presence in Congress and appointed four other Delegates. Hall served until 1780. Two years earlier, he had moved his family somewhere to the north just before British troops ravaged and conquered the Georgia coast. In the process, they destroyed Hall’s Knoll and Hall’s Sunbury residence and confiscated his property.

When the British evacuated Savannah in 1782, Hall settled there and resumed his medical practice to mend his fortune. The next January, St. John’s Parish, where he had maintained ties, elected him to the State legislature. That body, in turn, awarded him the governorship (1783–84). His reconstruction-oriented administration, though marred by his purchase of and speculation in lands confiscated from Loyalists, rehabilitated the wartorn State and laid foundations for future growth.

In Hall’s final years he acted for a time as a judge of the inferior court of Chatham County and as a trustee of a proposed State university (to be called first Franklin College and later the University of Georgia). But his duties as executor of Button Gwinnett’s tangled estate required years of legal wrangling. In 1785 he sold his Hall’s Knoll land. Five years later, he moved from Savannah to Burke County and purchased Shell Bluff Plantation, on the Savannah River about 25 miles below Augusta. A few months hence he died and was buried there. His remains are now interred at the Signers’ Monument in Augusta.

John Hancock

MASSACHUSETTS

One of the fathers of U.S. independence, John Hancock
helped spearhead the pivotal revolt in Massachusetts,
presided as President of Congress during the voting for
independence and adoption of the Declaration, and boldly
penned the first signature on the document. Subsequently
he served as the first and longtime Governor of his
Commonwealth. Despite all these achievements and the
persistent loyalty of his constituents, whom he wooed
with lavish expenditures for public projects, his vanity,
ostentation, and regal way of life irked many of his
professional associates.

Hancock, born in 1737 at Braintree (present Quincy), Mass., lost his father, a Congregational pastor, at the age of 7. He spent the next 6 years with his grandparents at Lexington before joining his guardian, Thomas Hancock, a childless uncle who was one of the richest merchant-shippers in Boston. After studying at Boston Latin School and graduating from Harvard College in 1754, John began working as a clerk in his uncle’s business and learned it rapidly. In 1760–61, while visiting London to observe the English side of the business, he attended the funeral of George II and the coronation of George III, who apparently granted him an audience. In 1763 he became a partner of his uncle, who died the next year and willed him the firm, a fortune that was probably the greatest in New England, and a luxurious house on Beacon Street.

Hancock allied with other merchants in protesting the Stamp Act (1765), and the next year inaugurated a long legislative career. But he did not strongly identify with the patriots until 2 years later. At that time, British customs officials, their courage bolstered by the arrival of a warship in Boston Harbor, charged him with smuggling and seized one of his ships. During the ensuing riots, the terrified customs officials fled to an island in the harbor. A few months later, the first major contingent of British troops sailed into port and created a tense situation that resulted in the Boston Massacre (1770). John Adams ably defended Hancock in court until the British dropped the smuggling charge, but the episode made him a hero throughout the Colonies.

Other factors tied Hancock to the patriots. Samuel and John Adams, shrewdly perceiving the advantages of such a rich and well-known affiliate, welcomed him into their ranks, encouraged his idolatry by the populace, and pushed him upward in the Revolutionary hierarchy. When the first provincial congress met at Salem and Concord in 1774, he acted as its president as well as chairman of the vital council of safety. The second provincial congress, convening the next year at Cambridge and Concord, elected him to the Continental Congress.

On April 18, only 3 days after the provincial congress adjourned, British troops marched from Boston to seize rebel stores at Concord. Warned of their approach during the night by Paul Revere, Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were visiting at nearby Lexington, escaped. But the British-American clashes at Lexington and Concord marked the outbreak of war. The two men avoided Boston and hid at various places for 2 weeks before proceeding to Philadelphia. Later that summer, Hancock married, siring a daughter who died in infancy and a son, John George Washington Hancock, who lived but 9 years.

From 1775 until 1777 Hancock presided over the Continental Congress. The very first year, his egotism, which regularly aroused the antipathy of many Members, created personal embitterment as well. Blind to his own limitations, particularly his lack of military experience, he unrealistically entertained the hope that he, instead of Washington, would be appointed as commander in chief of the Continental Army. Hancock also provoked ill will among his fellow New Englanders, especially Samuel Adams, by courting moderates such as John Dickinson and Benjamin Harrison. Hancock believed that Samuel Adams was responsible in 1777 for blocking a congressional vote of thanks for his services and never forgave him.

Only Hancock and Charles Thomson, the President and Secretary of Congress, signed the broadside copy of the Declaration, printed the night of its adoption, July 4, 1776, and disseminated to the public the following day. At the formal signing of the parchment copy on August 2, tradition holds that Hancock wrote his name in large letters so that the King would not need spectacles to recognize him as a “traitor.” After resigning as presiding officer in 1777, he remained a Member of Congress until 1780, though he spent much of his time in Boston and for the rest of his life solidified his political position in Massachusetts. In 1778, as a major general in the militia, he commanded an expedition that failed to recapture Newport, R.I., from the British. He made a more tangible contribution to the war by accepting Continental currency from his debtors, even though his fortune had already been dented by wartime-induced reverses.

In 1780, the same year Hancock gave up his seat in Congress and attended his Commonwealth’s constitutional convention, he was overwhelmingly elected as first Governor (1780–85). He won reelection in 1787–93. In the interim (1785–86), he once again sat in Congress. In 1788 he chaired the Massachusetts convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution, which he favored.

While still Governor, in 1793 at the age of 56, Hancock died at Boston. His funeral, one of the most impressive ever held in New England, culminated in burial at Old Granary Burying Ground.

Benjamin Harrison

VIRGINIA

Benjamin Harrison, the most conservative of the Virginia
signers except for Carter Braxton, was a member of one of
the most prominent planter families in the South and was
the fifth in a line of active politicians bearing the same
name. Because of his rotundity, joviality, love of good
foods and wines, and fondness for luxury, he acquired the
nickname “Falstaff of Congress.” His son, William Henry,
and his great-grandson, Benjamin, served as the ninth and
23d Presidents of the United States.

Harrison was born in 1726 at his father’s estate, Berkeley, in Charles City County, Va. He matriculated at the College of William and Mary, but left before graduating in 1745 upon the death of his father in order to assume management of the family plantation. Shortly thereafter he married; seven of his children were to survive infancy. In time, his landholdings grew to include eight plantations and other properties, and he also expanded into shipping and shipbuilding. Following the precedent set by his forebears, about 1749 he gained admission to the House of Burgesses. He sat there, frequently as speaker, until 1774, when the Royal Governor disbanded the body.

Harrison’s conservatism manifested itself early in the Revolutionary movement. In 1764 the burgesses, learning about the Stamp Act, impending in Parliament, named a committee to draw up a protest. As one of the committeemen, Harrison helped pen the document. The very next year, however, when the act went into effect, he refused to endorse Patrick Henry’s resolutions urging civil disobedience as a countermeasure. Forced to take a stand as the rift with the Crown widened, Harrison cast his lot with the patriots. Between 1773 and 1776, he shared in the tasks of the Revolutionary conventions, the committee of correspondence, and the provincial congresses.

Meantime, in 1774, Harrison had been appointed to the First Continental Congress. Although usually silent on the floor, he made valuable contributions on the foreign affairs, marine, military, and financial committees. As chairman of the committee of the whole (1776–77), he chaired the deliberations leading up to the adoption of the Declaration and the early debates on the proposed Articles of Confederation.

In 1777, the same year Harrison withdrew from Congress, he entered the lower house of the Virginia legislature, where he presided as speaker in the years 1778–81. His three terms as Governor (1781–84) reflected the ascendancy in Virginia of the conservatives, who included in addition to Harrison and Braxton such former extremists as Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee. Succeeded by Henry, Harrison rejoined the legislature (1784–91), holding the speakership part of the time. In 1788 at the Virginia ratifying convention he objected to the Federal Constitution because it lacked a bill of rights. Once ratification had occurred, however, he supported the new Government. Three years later, Harrison died in his mid-sixties at Berkeley and was buried there in the family cemetery.

John Hart

NEW JERSEY

Signing the Declaration represented John Hart’s one
significant act during an ephemeral tour in the Continental
Congress, his only role in national politics. Yet, like
most of the signers, he was dominant in community and
State affairs. And he and his family directly experienced
the tragedy of the war. Unfortunately, he died before the
attainment of victory.

The year after Hart’s birth in 1711 at Stonington, Conn., his parents emigrated to New Jersey and settled on a farm in the Hopewell vicinity. Hart was to live there and till the soil all his life. In 1740 he married and began raising a family of 13. In time, while gaining the sobriquet “Honest John,” he acquired considerable property, including grist, saw, and fulling mills, and emerged as a civic leader. From the 1750’s until the outbreak of the War for Independence in 1775, despite a paucity of education, he worked his way up the political ladder in Hunterdon County and the State. He held the offices of justice of the peace, county judge, colonial legislator (1761–71), and judge of the New Jersey court of common pleas.

In the legislature’s dispute with the Royal Governor, Hart opposed parliamentary taxation and the stationing of British troops in the colony. During the years 1774–76, he attended the New Jersey provincial congresses, where he achieved the vice-presidency, and won appointment to the council of safety and the committee of correspondence. In June 1776 he and four other Delegates were chosen to replace the incumbent conservatives in the Continental Congress. The new delegation arrived at Philadelphia just a few days before the votes for independence on July 1 and 2 and cast affirmative ballots.

In August 1776, just after Hart signed the Declaration, he departed to accept the speakership in the lower house of the New Jersey legislature. That winter, during the British invasion of the province, the redcoats wreaked havoc on his farm and mills and drove him into hiding among the hills surrounding the Sourland Mountains. When he ended his exile in the wake of the American victories at Princeton and Trenton, he discovered that his wife, ill at the time of the attack, had died and his family scattered. In 1777–78 he sat again on the council of safety, but failing health forced his retirement. He died the next year, at the age of 69, on his Hopewell farm. He is buried in the yard of the First Baptist Church at Hopewell.

Joseph Hewes

NORTH CAROLINA

Even in an age and land of such unlimited opportunities
as 18th-century America, few men attained such success
as merchant Joseph Hewes. He was rarely thwarted in his
ambitions and enjoyed wealth and social prestige, reflected
in political conservatism.

Born in 1730 at Maybury Hill, an estate on the outskirts of Princeton, N.J., Hewes was the son of a pious and well-to-do Quaker farmer. He received a strict religious upbringing, and studied at a local school. After learning trade from a Philadelphia merchant, he entered business for himself. About 1760, anxious to expand his modest fortune, he moved to the thriving seaport town of Edenton, N.C. There, where he was to reside for the rest of his life, he founded a profitable mercantile and shipping firm and gained prominence. Only one fateful event marred his life. A few days before his intended wedding date, his fiancée suddenly died. Hewes remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.

As a member of the North Carolina assembly (1766–75), the committee of correspondence (1773), and the provincial assemblies (1774–75), Hewes helped the Whigs overthrow the royal government. Elected to the Continental Congress in 1774, he vigorously supported nonimportation measures even though it meant personal financial loss. By the time of the outbreak of the War for Independence, the next year, anathema to the pacifistic Quakers, he had rejected the faith altogether—culminating a trend that had been evolving because of his love of dancing and other social pleasures, as well as his Revolutionary activities.

Hewes was one of those who originally opposed separation from Great Britain. Thus it was a disagreeable task for him, in May 1776, to present the Halifax Resolves to the Continental Congress. Enacted the month before by the provincial assembly, they instructed the North Carolina Delegates to vote for independence should it be proposed. Hewes, who considered the resolves premature, ignored his State’s commitment and at first opposed Richard Henry Lee’s June 7 independence resolution. According to John Adams, however, at one point during debate a transformation came over Hewes. “He started suddenly upright,” reported Adams, “and lifting up both his hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, ‘It is done! and I will abide by it.’”

One episode involving Hewes illustrates the recurring problem of sectional rivalries among the Delegates. As key members of the marine committee, Hewes and John Adams were instrumental in establishing the Continental Navy. When the time came to appoint the Nation’s first naval captains, the two men clashed. For one of the positions, Hewes nominated his friend John Paul Jones, an experienced seaman who had recently emigrated to Virginia from Scotland. Adams, maintaining that all the captaincies should be filled by New Englanders, stubbornly protested. New England had yielded to the South in the selection of a commander in chief of the Continental Army and Adams had fostered the selection of the able Virginian George Washington, so he was not now about to make a concession on the Navy. Hewes, sensing the futility of argument, reluctantly submitted. Jones, who was to become the most honored naval hero of the Revolution, received only a lieutenant’s commission.

In 1777 Hewes lost his bid for reelection to Congress, one of the few failures in his life, and in 1778–79 he found solace in the State legislature. In the latter year, despite health problems, he accepted reelection to the Continental Congress. A few months after arriving back in Philadelphia and not long before his 50th birthday, overworked and fatigued, he died. His grave is in Christ Church Burial Ground there.

Thomas Heyward, Jr.

SOUTH CAROLINA

An aristocratic planter, lawyer, and jurist, Thomas
Heyward, Jr., sat in the State legislature and the
Continental Congress and commanded a militia battalion.
He was one of three South Carolina signers captured and
imprisoned by the British.

The eldest son of one of the wealthiest planters in South Carolina, Heyward was born in 1746 at Old House Plantation, in St. Helena’s Parish (later St. Luke’s Parish and present Jasper County) near the Georgia border about 25 miles northeast of Savannah. In 1771, following 5 years of study in London, he began practicing law. The next year, his parish sent him to the colonial legislature (1772–75), which was feuding with the Royal Governor over parliamentary taxation. During that period, in 1773, he married and settled down at White Hall Plantation, only a couple of miles from the residence of his father.

While a legislator, Heyward apparently joined the Revolutionaries, for in the summer of 1774 he attended a provincial convention that chose Delegates to the Continental Congress. During 1775–76 he was active in the first and second provincial congresses and on the council of safety and the committee that drafted a State constitution. In the Continental Congress (1776–78), he signed the Articles of Confederation as well as the Declaration. At the end of his tour, he journeyed to Charleston and took up residence in the townhouse he had inherited from his father the year before. He became a circuit court judge; represented Charleston in the State legislature, which convened in the city; and held a militia captaincy.