On July 4th, I wrote about what it’s like to be patriotic and a humanist, and a little bit about what America as a nation means to me. However, I still have a bit more to say about the 4th of July — specifically, I’d like to write a bit about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Why? Well, recently, I got an email forward that highlighted the trials and tribulations of the men who signed the United States Declaration of Independence. It highlighted the extreme risks those men took in signing the Declaration, outlined the demographics of the signers, and then talked about their lives. Unfortunately, while this email did contain a core of historical truth, as Snopes says, another good portion of the email was embellished.

However, I am not here to, as Snopes does, to go through the email piece by piece and point out its historical flaws. However, another quote on the Snopes site caught my eye:

So great is our need for simplified, dramatic events and heroes that even the real-life biographies of the fifty-six men who risked their lives to publicly declare American independence are no longer compelling enough. Through multiple versions of pieces like the one quoted above, their lives have been repeatedly embellished with layers of fanciful fiction to make for a better story. As we often do, we’ll try here to strip away those accumulated layers of fiction and get down to whatever kernel of truth may lie underneath.

I was immediately interested. Even if this email wasn’t entirely accurate on every detail, what were the lives of these signers like? What dangers did they face — both actually and potentially? Should they be respected and revered? What did they look like when the embellishment was pealed away and only the bare history remained?

Of course it’s extensively difficult to present a history without a lens of interpretation. I don’t think I will be able to accomplish this either, since I am in no way a trained historian and only have the power of The Googles to gather my historical insight. I don’t quite have the time to look up the primary sources, and if I did, I would be writing a book on the topic, not an internet essay. Still, I will do my best.

The Beginnings of a Revolution

Before going into detail about the life and times of the signers, it seems worthwhile to get a sense of the historical mood of the time period. What exactly was going on? What did the Declaration of Independence mean? Why was it signed?

We first start with the events leading up to the American Revolutionary War. Among many causes of the Revolution, the four most important appear to be the end of the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years War or the War of Conquest) in 1763; the ongoing policy of enforcing mercantilism, preventing colonists from trading with anyone except Britain; the British parliament’s continued action to enforce authority over the colonies; and the increasing influence of the Enlightenment throughout the early 1700s, most notably that of John Locke, who’s Natural Rights Theory included the right of the people to overthrow the government in some circumstances.

Mercantilism

Britian was committed to mercantilism since the late 1600s. This policy is a requirement that trade only occur within the Empire to the exclusive benefit of the Empire, and not to the benefit of any other nation. The colonists, being a part of this Empire, were thus forbidden from trading with the nearby French and Spanish, and instead had to trade within the colonies or with Britain.

This policy entered the forefront with the 1712 Navigation Acts, which was largely accepted and followed. It wasn’t until the 1733 Molasses Act imposed a tax on molasses imported from non-British colonies that resentment began to build, and because the act wasn’t well enforced, it ended up being regularly violated by smugglers.

French and Indian War

The end of the French and Indian War ended up with some rather unfortunate consequences for the British, most notably weakening their army, doubling their debt, and giving them vast amounts of land to figure out how to control and maintain. This lead the British government to do two wildly unpopular things — attempt to make peace with the Indians by restricting colonial settlement and attempting to pay for the war through additional taxes.

The first goal was set in place by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, declaring that all land west of the Appalachian Mountains was to be reserved for the Native Americans, and not to be settled upon.

The second goal was set in place by 1764 Sugar Act which argued that the colonists had the duty to pay a small part of the French and Indian War. This Act reduced the tax on imported goods established by the Molasses Act, but spread the tax to more items and increased enforcement to prevent evasion due to smuggling. These taxes grew with the 1765 Stamp Act, a tax on paper.

Actions to Assert Authority

At the time, the colonist complaint was not that these taxes were too high, but that they were being placed on the colonists without proper authority — that they were being taxed without representation in Parliament. Hence the oft-quoted phrase “No Taxation Without Representation”.

It’s worth noting that the colonists weren’t being specifically singled out and excluded by Parliament. At the time in Britain, only white men owning expensive property could vote, limiting voting rights to about 1.5% of the population.

Additionally, Parliament had a tradition of “virtual representation” in which members of parliament did not represent a single area like understood in modern representative systems. Instead, each and every member represented each and every citizen, regardless of their voting status.

Still, it did seem like the British went out of their way to assert authority over the colonies. The 1763 “Parson’s Cause” dispute occurred when the King intervened to veto a Virginian law, causing uproar about improper use of authority and meddling in local affairs.

A year later, the 1764 Currency Act also sought to establish further authority by regulating the United States currency in an attempt to prevent colonial debts from being repaid at a lower rate due to ongoing inflation.

This authority dispute reached it’s height over the next two years with the 1765 Quartering Act, which required colonies to shelter and provide supply for the British Army (but did not, contrary to the myth, ever require the housing of troops in any individual homes); and the 1766 Declaratory Act which repealed the Stamp Act but asserted the superiority of Parliament, the ability for the Parliament to legislate for the colonies without their consent, and that the colonists had no justification for defying British authority.

Republicanism

Resentment surrounding what was viewed as unfair authority were highlighted by the ideology of the time period, which saw a rise in republicanism, eventually emphasized in Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, published during the Revolutionary War.

The idea of republicanism, born out of the Enlightenment, stressed individual, inalienable rights and saw government not as a top-down system authorized by a monarch, but as a bottom-up system with the power vested in the consent of the individual citizens to come together and mutually agree on how they best ought to be governed. This idea saw the greatest threat to liberty as being corruption of a monolithic government, and sought further limitations to power.

A Prelude to War and Independence

Further events finally resulted in the last straw, and the stage was set for a Revolution. The 1767 Townshend Acts were designed to demonstrate that the Parliament did have the authority to tax the colonies and to punish some colonies for violating the Quartering Acts. The acts placed a tax on a large amount of goods, including paper, glass, and tea. It was met with a large amount of boycotts and required a large amount of work to enforce it, eventually resulting in the 1770 Boston Massacre (also called the Boston Riots).

Eventually, the British established taxes further with the 1773 Tea Act, which was responded to with the famous Boston Tea Party incident. This greatly upset British Parliament, who came to see the colonies as growing more intense in their radicalism.

In response came the 1774 Intolerable Acts (Coercive Acts), which closed the port of Boston until the British were repaid for the damages due to the Tea Party; put the Massachusetts Government under the direct control of the British; allowed for trials to be moved out of Massachusetts, even to England if necessary; reaffirmed the power of the Quartering Act; and moved the border of Britian’s Canada Territory to include modern Ohio, stopping colonists from settling there.

Hostilities and reactions to these acts grew, and eventually revolutionary plans were put together. It all came to blows in the April 1975 Battles of Lexington and Concord, the famous shot heard ’round the world.

A Declaration of Independence

Throughout the war, the American Colonies sought to eliminate all vestiges of royal rule, by writing State Constitutions and forming new charters. Eventually this culminated in the Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776 by a 9-3 vote of colonial delegations, with New York abstaining. This document aimed to explain why the Second Continental Congress had voted independence from Britian two days later on July 2. Interestingly, while the wording of the document was approved on July 4, the consensus of historians is now that the declaration was signed mostly in August 1776, with remaining signatures not being added until January 1777.

This document is notable because the Revolution was not initially defiant. Many had hoped that there would be reconciliation and compromise from Britian, and while colonists agreed that Parliament had no authority over them, many still were loyal to the King. However, King George had rejected Congress’s July 1775 Olive Branch Petition and issued the August 1775 Proclamation of Rebellion, declaring America in rebellion against the Empire.

But who were these guys?

The Declaration had 56 different signatories, all of whom were most principally delegates of the Second Congressional Congress. By delegation and name, they were:

• John Hancock (Massachusetts), President of Congress
• Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, and Oliver Wolcott
• Delaware: George Read, Caesar Rodney, and Thomas McKean
• Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, and George Walton
• Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, and Charles Carroll
• Massachusetts: Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Paine, and Elbridge Gerry
• New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, and Matthew Thornton
• New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, and Abraham Clark
• New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, and Lewis Morris
• North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, and John Penn
• Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, and George Ross
• Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins and William Ellery
• South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton, Thomas Heyward Jr., and Thomas Lynch Jr.
• Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Francis Lee, Carter Braxton, and Thomas Nelson Jr.

The Demographics

As an overview: there were eighteen lawyers, seven career politicians, six merchants, six planters, four soldiers (two of which were major generals), four philosophers, four authors, three teachers, three jurists, three judges, three physicians, two clergymen, two surveyors, one ironmaster, one farmer, one land developer, and one scientist (with some degree of overlap). The group included one Postmaster General (Franklin), one ex-governor (Hopkins of Rhode Island), and three Founding Fathers (Samuel Adams, John Adams, Jefferson).

Eventually, after the war, some of these people would go on to be Governor of Massachusetts (Hancock, Gerry, and Samuel Adams), Governor of New Hampshire (Bartlett), Governor of Connecticut (Wolcott), Governor of Delaware (Read), Governor of Maryland (Paca), Governor of Virginia (Jefferson and Nelson), Governor of South Carolina (Rutledge), Governor of Georgia (Hall), Supreme Justice of the United States (Wilson), Secretary of State (Jefferson), Vice President of the United States (Gerry, Jefferson, and John Adams), and even President of the United States (Jefferson and John Adams).

It’s clear that most of these men lead wonderful careers.

Next Up

In the next post, we’ll look at these men in more detail, sketching a very short biography of each signer. Then we’ll wrap up with a conclusion of what these men went through and how heroic they were.

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