Not Your Father's Founders

by Arthur G. Sharp

  Political bickering in New Hampshire came to a head in 1775. Patriots expelled Governor Wentworth, but he did not leave without a fight. One of his final acts was to revoke Bartlett’s commissions as justice of the peace, colonel, and assemblyman. It was a desperate act by a disappointed man. The Provincial Assembly responded by appointing Bartlett to represent the colony at the Second Continental Congress in 1775 and 1776.

  A Busy Bartlett

  1775 was a difficult year for Bartlett. He was the only delegate from New Hampshire at the Second Continental Congress for a while. Because Congress preferred that each of its committees include at least one representative from each colony, Bartlett was kept very busy serving on the committees considered most important: safety, secrecy, munitions, marine. If there was a committee of significance, Bartlett was on it.

  Finally, Bartlett wrote home in desperation to ask for help. The Provincial Assembly dispatched John Langdon and William Whipple to complement Bartlett. Whipple was back the next year to sign the Declaration of Independence, along with Bartlett and Matthew Thornton.

  Once Bartlett’s workload decreased, he threw himself into the congressional committee activities in Philadelphia to the point that both his mental and physical health weakened, although he recovered quickly.

  REVOLUTIONARY REVELATIONS

  Josiah Bartlett was the first delegate asked whether independence from Britain was a good idea. The Second Continental Congress accorded him that honor when it decided to begin the polling with the northernmost colony and proceed geographically to the southern delegations. He answered yes. In that same vein, when the delegates to the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776, Bartlett was the second signer, after John Hancock.

  After the Congress concluded its mission, Bartlett returned to New Hampshire, but his work was far from done.

  Age Before Duty

  As a reward for his hard work, the New Hampshire Assembly reelected Bartlett to another term with the Continental Congress. This time he abstained. His wife, who had managed the family farm and raised the children in his absence, was as tired as he was. He served one more term in the Continental Congress in 1778 and then returned to New Hampshire to retire—sort of.

  REVOLUTIONARY REVELATIONS

  Dr. Josiah Bartlett applied his medical skills at the August 16, 1777, Battle of Bennington. Even though it was named for a town in Vermont, the battle actually took place at Walloomsac, New York, ten miles west. Other than that one battle, Bartlett did not participate in the war.

  Bartlett could not sit around. He held almost every political office in New Hampshire while continuing his medical practice. He served as the chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court—even though he was not a lawyer—and governor. The state legislature selected him to serve as a U.S. senator, but he turned down the position because it required him to leave New Hampshire.

  But Josiah Bartlett could not go on forever. His dual medical and political careers took their toll on his health. He resigned from the governor’s chair in 1794 and died a year later.

  Bartlett, like so many of his cosigners, is remembered via the names of towns and streets in New Hampshire. But there is no more vivid memory of him than his signature on the Declaration of Independence. That was a big honor for the man from the small colony of New Hampshire.

  WILLIAM CAMPBELL

  Augusta, Virginia

  1745−August 22, 1781

  A Campbell Created by a Committee

  Brigadier General and political leader William Campbell’s role in the Revolutionary War was like a cameo in a movie. Few people recognize his name or his role. He and his troops defeated a Tory army at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, on October 7, 1780, in a relatively obscure battle that had a large impact on the outcome of the war and the country’s future. He was a symbol of the virtually unrecognized men and women who stepped up during the war and made contributions that did not seem important at the time, but that altered the course of history.

  Tories Be Terrorized

  Campbell was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses (the colony’s legislature, which was the first assembly of elected representatives of English colonists in North America), like his brother-in-law Patrick Henry, a patriot who despised British rule.

  On January 20, 1775, Campbell, along with twelve other representatives of Fincastle County, Virginia, signed a resolution to be forwarded to the colony’s delegation at the First Continental Congress. It stated that they would resist the Intolerable Acts (punitive laws of the British—see Appendix A for more information). They swore they would fight to their deaths to preserve their political liberties. The document became known as the Fincastle Resolutions.

  Campbell was willing to do more than sign resolutions. He was ready and willing to fight the British, wherever and whenever. He was especially eager to punish Tories for their misguided allegiance if the chance arose. It did.

  REVOLUTIONARY REVELATIONS

  Campbell was not fond of Tories. He earned the nickname of the “bloody tyrant of Washington County” for his harsh treatment of people who remained loyal to Britain during the war.

  King of Kings Mountain

  State militias in the southern part of the United States were busy between 1778 and 1781. The British invaded the region because they believed the numerous Tories in the area would flock to their side. They did not reckon on the strength and cunning of the patriots, who fought an unconventional battle at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, just west of Charlotte.

  The Battle of Kings Mountain, which is omitted or glossed over in many history books, is considered by some historians as the turning point in the Revolutionary War. The patriot militia’s victory destroyed the left wing of General Charles Cornwallis’s British army and forced it to abandon its operations in North Carolina. Cornwallis moved his army to South Carolina to await reinforcements. While he waited, American General Nathanael Greene increased his own forces, which were ultimately successful in driving Cornwallis out of South Carolina as well.

  The Battle of Kings Mountain did not involve regular British troops. It was fought between patriot and Tory militia units. The Tories were led by Major Patrick Ferguson, a Scottish officer in the British army—and the only regular army officer on either side at the battle.

  The American forces that convened at Kings Mountain included about 900 troops led by Campbell, John Sevier, Isaac Shelby, Benjamin Cleveland, Charles McDowell, and James Williams. They combined their forces when they arrived for the battle, but they did not have a chief commander. They put the matter to a vote. Campbell became the overall commander of the patriot forces—in other words, a leader created by a committee.

  Major Ferguson’s little army included about 1,125 Tories defending a mountain about one-quarter mile long at an elevation slightly above 1,003 feet. He was confident in his ability to ward off any patriot attack. Ferguson was wrong. The patriots were determined to drive the enemy off the mountain—if any of the Tories were still alive after the battle.

  Quotations to Live (and Die) By!

  “HE WAS ON KINGS MOUNTAIN, THAT HE WAS KING OF THAT MOUNTAIN AND THAT GOD ALMIGHTY AND ALL THE REBELS OF HELL COULD NOT DRIVE HIM FROM IT.”

  —COLONEL ISAAC SHELBY, DESCRIBING MAJOR PATRICK FERGUSON

  Some of the patriot leaders were veterans of Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774 against the Shawnee and Mingo Indians and they had developed unconventional battle strategies as a result. At about 3 P.M. on the day of the battle, the patriots attacked in a four-column formation. Campbell led one of the interior columns. Their years of hunting in the mountains and fighting Indians paid off. They fired from behind trees and rocks, a style of warfare that flustered Ferguson and his troops. The patriots decimated their enemies and killed Ferguson.

  The Tories tried to surrender to the patriots’ leader, but they could not find him. Campbell had removed his coat and was fighting in an open-collared shirt. No one could single him out as
the elected commander. Finally, the slaughter abated of its own accord.

  The Battle of Kings Mountain lasted about one hour. Casualty figures show how one sided it was. There were 225 Tories killed, 163 wounded, and 716 captured. Not one of them escaped! Only twenty-eight patriots were killed and sixty-eight wounded.

  The unheralded—but historically significant—battle all but ended the war in the South.

  FEDERAL FACTS

  Allegedly, the patriots stripped Major Ferguson’s clothes from his body and urinated on his remains before burying him near where he fell.

  The Final Promotion

  After General Cornwallis heard about the outcome of the Battle of Kings Mountain, he withdrew his troops from North Carolina and assembled them near Winnsboro, South Carolina. But it was too late for him.

  Within a few months the Continental Army and their militia counterparts chased Cornwallis out of South Carolina, the South in general, and the United States. Campbell had earned himself a place in history, but he did not live long enough to realize what he had accomplished.

  The Virginia Assembly commissioned William Campbell as a brigadier general in 1781. It was his last promotion. In June of that year, Campbell joined the French military leader Marquis de Lafayette in eastern Virginia to continue the campaign against the British. On August 22, 1781, he suffered an apparent heart attack and died.

  The assembly granted 5,000 acres of land to his young son, Charles Henry Campbell, to express its appreciation for his father’s distinguished service.

  The “Campbell created by a committee” had driven a lethal nail into the British army’s campaign to defeat the American enemy. More importantly, he had shown that some of the biggest heroes in the war for independence were not Founding Fathers: They were often everyday Americans, whose numbers formed the biggest committee of patriots in the country.

  SAMUEL CHASE

  Princess Anne, Maryland

  April 17, 1741−June 19, 1811

  Committees and Chicanery

  There was nothing in Samuel Chase’s early life to suggest that he was destined to play a leading role in the American Revolution or its aftermath. He was homeschooled by his father, an Episcopalian clergyman, earned a law degree, and practiced law for several years. Chase engaged in activities as a member of the Sons of Liberty that might earn him a label of “terrorist” today. Nevertheless, he was elected to the Continental Congress, where he served on twenty-one committees in 1777 and thirty in 1778, convinced his fellow Marylanders to vote for independence, signed the Declaration of Independence, fell afoul of Alexander Hamilton when he tried to make a few dollars, became a Supreme Court justice, and was impeached. He was a sometimes controversial, but always well-meaning, patriot whose penchant for acting rashly at times separated him from most of his contemporaries.

  An Innocuous Beginning

  Chase got an early start in politics as a member of the Maryland General Assembly, where he served from 1764−1784.

  Chase, an ardent proponent of independence as a young man, was not shy about letting people know where he stood on the issue. He did more than talk about his patriotism; he acted on it.

  REVOLUTIONARY REVELATIONS

  One of the proposed laws Chase supported in the Maryland General Assembly would have regulated the salaries of the colony’s clergy. He believed the law would serve the people’s best interests—even though it would have cut his Episcopal clergyman father’s salary in half.

  Chase was an active member of the Sons of Liberty, a group of American patriots who banded together in 1766 to protect the colonists from a growing number of onerous British laws. After the passage of the Stamp Act, he led a group of Sons in a raid on the Annapolis, Maryland, public offices, where they destroyed the tax stamps and burned the king’s tax agent in effigy. He was twenty-four years old at the time.

  Not surprisingly, Chase was not a popular young man among town officials in Annapolis. They preferred that he take his tendency for rebellion and insurrection elsewhere. In a classic “be careful what you wish for” case, he did. The leaders of the movement for independence wanted men like Chase on their side. In 1774, Chase and four other Maryland patriots were appointed delegates to the First Continental Congress.

  Quotations to Live (and Die) By!

  “[SAMUEL CHASE IS A] BUSY, RESTLESS INCENDIARY, A RINGLEADER OF MOBS, A FOUL-MOUTHED AND INFLAMING SON OF DISCORD AND FACTION, A COMMON DISTURBER OF THE PUBLIC TRANQUILITY, AND A PROMOTER OF THE LAWLESS EXCESSES OF THE MULTITUDE.”

  —ANNAPOLIS TOWN OFFICIALS

  Cut to the Chase

  Chase performed so well at the First Continental Congress that Maryland offered him the chance to return to the Second Continental Congress in 1775. When it came time to form a committee at that Congress, Chase was usually available. Due to his popularity and indefatigable nature, he remained a member of Congress until 1778.

  When the members of the Second Continental Congress gathered to sign the Declaration of Independence, Chase was among them. It was a proud day for him, but signing the document did not curb his relentless pursuit of liberty or fairness for soldiers and citizens.

  Amidst all his hard work Chase hit a bump in the road. In 1778, he and a group of individuals capitalized on some insider trading information. They cornered the market on flour in anticipation of making a huge sale to the French fleet coming to the aid of the United States. Alexander Hamilton exposed the scheme and wrote about it in New York newspapers under the pseudonym Publius. The affair did not attract a lot of attention, but Maryland left Chase out of its congressional delegation for the next two years, possibly in retribution for his involvement in the grain affair. He was reappointed in 1784, but stayed inactive in congressional proceedings after his return.

  FEDERAL FACTS

  One of Chase’s early 1776 assignments was to work on a committee with Benjamin Franklin and fellow Marylander Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who used the “Carrollton” to distinguish himself from his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis. Their assignment was to win the hearts and minds of Canadians. The trio visited Canada in an effort to convince the residents to side with the colonies in their attempt to separate from Britain. There was an ongoing—but unrelated—attempt by patriot militant forces to oust the British troops from Canada. That ended in June 1776, when British troops drove the Americans back to Fort Ticonderoga. In the end, the American army and the committee failed miserably.

  In 1786, Chase moved to Baltimore, where he became chief judge of the criminal court and later chief judge of the General Court of Maryland. Those assignments paved the way for his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court by President George Washington on January 26, 1796.

  Chase served on the Supreme Court for fifteen years and became the first—and only—Supreme Court justice ever impeached. The impeachment happened when President Thomas Jefferson “suggested” to the House of Representatives in 1803 that it impeach Chase, ostensibly because he did not give John Fries, a defendant in a treason case, a fair trial. The real reason may have been Jefferson’s desire to get rid of Chase because he did not agree with Jefferson’s political views. The impeachment proceedings in 1805 became a politically motivated circus. Congress failed to get the two-thirds majority it needed to convict Chase.

  FEDERAL FACTS

  The Americans named a committee in January 1777 to investigate British atrocities at New York and New Jersey in late 1776, e.g., when they implemented martial law in Queens, New York, and their troops raped, robbed, and cheated the inhabitants. Chase was named as a member. In addition to participating in the investigation, he vigorously advocated for higher pay for the soldiers fighting the war, even if it required wage and price controls throughout the colonies to raise the money.

  REVOLUTIONARY REVELATIONS

  Chase campaigned against the U.S. Constitution for two reasons. He believed that the federal government’s ability to tax citizens and regulate commerce would inhibit the states’ rights to do the same, and
he did not see any protection in the Constitution for individuals’ rights. Chase saw the proposed Constitution as a reversion to British rule—which he had spent a good part of his life fighting to throw off.

  The impeachment and severe attacks of gout had an adverse effect on Chase. He lost some of his fire after 1805, but it had burned brightly up until that point—enough to fuel the flame of liberty for the crucial years during the struggle for American independence. Chase had gone from incendiary to being impugned and impeached in his lifetime, but he exemplified the resiliency of the men and women who established American independence.

  HENRY CLAY

  Hanover County, Virginia

  April 12, 1777−June 29, 1852

  The Bridge

  Henry Clay, an active politician in the first half of the nineteenth century, was one of the people who supported and maintained what the Founding Fathers had built. He moved to Kentucky five years after it became the country’s fifteenth state in 1792, and served as a state representative, U.S. congressman and senator, governor of Kentucky, and United States secretary of state. The experiences he gained in these positions molded Clay into an astute politician capable of dealing with national problems such as the implementation of a new economic system and the slavery issue. Clay was a throwback to the original Founding Fathers. He bridged the gap between the infant and adolescent United States and influenced a new style of political leadership that introduced innovative policies that steered the country into its adult phase. He was a perfect example of the right man in the right place at the right time—for a long time—just as the Founding Fathers had been.