“Colonel John Butler; his spectacular and even bloodier-minded son, Walter; Sir John Johnson, and the great [Mohawk Leader Joseph] Brant kept western New York in a frenzy of terror. In July, 1778, Sir John Butler struck at the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, which was largely settled by people from Connecticut. Hundreds perished in a dreadful massacre and the subsequent flight. Shrieking in anguish, men were burned at the stake and others roasted over live coals and kept pinned down by pitchforks while their horrified families looked helplessly on. Still others were arranged in a circle while a ghastly half-breed squaw, Queen Esther, chanting a wild hymn of triumph, chopped off their heads.”
Another massacre of men, women, and children accompanied a strike by Brant and Walter Butler in New York’s Cherry Valley on November 10. In response to such outrages, the settlers vowed total destruction of their Indian nemesis, with General John Sullivan appointed to command an expedition of nearly five thousand men in 1779 to do just that—destroy the Indian. He never did reach Fort Niagara, described by historian Wallace as “the spring-board for these raids,” but one column, under Sullivan himself, cleared out the Susquehanna River corridor upstream from Wyoming, while a second column, led by General James Clinton and moving up the Mohawk Valley, burned out fourteen Indian villages before linking up with Sullivan at Tioga Point. That was on August 22—a week later, the Sullivan forces decisively defeated some 1,500 Indians and Loyalists, including Brant, the two Butlers, and Johnson, at a site near today’s Elmira, New York.
Overall during the punitive Sullivan campaign, “forty towns were destroyed, some of them consisting of more than one hundred houses.” His men also destroyed Indian crops, granaries, and even fruit trees. As a result, “In the succeeding winter, one so severe that New York harbor froze over, hundreds of Indian families starved to death.”
In the meantime, another expeditionary force—six hundred men led by Colonel Daniel Brodhead—had “devastated” Seneca Indian towns and crops in the Allegheny River Valley upstream from Pittsburgh. “This attack from the west diverted the attention of many Indians who would otherwise have joined against Sullivan.”
Not that the Indian wars were all over—there still remained a good many more fights along the frontier, north and south, before the Revolutionary War was over, to say nothing of the continued friction as young America then pushed ever westward over the next century, into more and more Indian lands.
They Signed
WHEN THEY MUTUALLY PLEDGED TO EACH OTHER THEIR LIVES, THEIR FORTUNES and their “sacred honor,” they knew this was serious business. This was treason, and they had signed the document that would convict them before all of mankind. No doubt about it, lives, fortunes, and honor surely were at stake.
With the Revolution quashed and British law reinstituted, the supreme penalty for such traitors very well could be hanging. Long attributed to Benjamin Franklin is the possibly apocryphal statement, “Indeed, we must all hang together, otherwise we shall most assuredly hang separately.”
Whether he actually made the remark is doubted today, since it didn’t appear in print until fifty or so years after his death. But the Signers, well aware of the risks they ran, undoubtedly engaged in some sort of wry gallows humor to relieve tensions. They knew there was good reason for fear. Rhode Island’s sixty-nine-year-old Stephen Hopkins supposedly signed the great document with the comment, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”
As events turned out, none of the fifty-six actually would be hanged, but virtually all would be hunted by the British, fortunes indeed would be lost, family members would be hounded, incredible sacrifices would be made, various sudden deaths would thin the ranks before war’s end…but not one of the fifty-six ever went back on his signature, on his pledge of sacred honor.
The first to sign the Declaration of Independence, as is well known, was wealthy John Hancock of Massachusetts, president of the Continental Congress when it adopted the Declaration on July 4, 1776. He affixed his large and bold signature then and there—and may or may not have said he did it in large enough letters for “John Bull” to read without recourse to spectacles.
The largest group of signers then added their signatures to the officially engrossed copy of the Declaration on August 2, 1776. Thus, not all who actually voted for independence on July 4 became signers, and not all who signed on August 2 (or even later) had been present for the vote of July 4. For one reason or another, changes in personnel had taken place.
The very last to sign apparently was Thomas McKean of the future state of Delaware. He did take part in the vote for independence, but just when he signed the document itself remains open to question. Living to the age of eighty-three, and at one point serving as governor of Pennsylvania, he later insisted he signed in 1776, but his signature was missing from the printed copy that Congress authenticated on January 17, 1777. That means he must have signed at a later date.
Like McKean, many of the signers were lawyers, but many of those doubled, in the South anyway, as planters. The group also included four physicians, a number of merchants, several farmers, a manufacturer or two…and a college president who was the group’s only clergyman—John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (the future Princeton University). The youngest signers were George Walton of Georgia and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, both only twenty-six, and the oldest was Ben Franklin at seventy.
While some were men of simple rural lives and small means, the Signers risking lives and fortunes also could count some of America’s wealthiest men in their ranks. In addition to Hancock, these would include Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, Philip Livingston of New York, Charles Carroll of Maryland, and Arthur Middleton of South Carolina.
Among the other Signers were Pennsylvania’s Dr. Benjamin Rush, famous in his day as an outstanding physician and lecturer in medicine, and New Jersey’s Francis Hopkinson, the multitalented man often credited with designing the future American flag (rather than Betsy Ross).
The respective state delegations making up the Continental Congress voted under the unit rule—one vote to a delegation, no matter how many members. Thus, some states could claim many more Signers than others. Pennsylvania, both for its large population and as the site where the Congress met, could boast the largest number of Signers with nine, while more rural, less populated states such as North Carolina, New Hampshire, or Georgia, could claim only three each.
On a more individual basis, if no Signer ever disavowed the Declaration, ever recanted his pledge to “sacred honor,” what about lives and fortunes? Here, the news was not always so good.
The first of them to die was Pennsylvania’s John Morton, only about fifty-three, a farmer from today’s Chester County in Delaware. A member of the rebel Provincial Congress of Pennsylvania, then a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, he was a swing vote within the Pennsylvania delegation for independence. At home, though, most of his neighbors and friends were avowed Tories who let him know of their disenchantment with his stand. On his deathbed in April of 1777, less than a year after signing the Declaration, he supposedly said: “Tell them that they will live to see the hour when they shall acknowledge it to have been the most glorious service that I ever rendered my country.”
Also in 1777, Georgia’s Button Gwinnett died of wounds suffered in a duel with a political enemy back home.
Pure chance would add to the woes of the Patriot Lynch family from South Carolina. Only twenty-seven, rice planter Thomas Lynch Jr. had replaced his father, Thomas Senior, as a delegate to the Congress that summer of 1776, because the older Lynch had been incapacitated by a stroke. Thus, by accident, the younger Lynch became a Signer. But he himself was in frail health, the result of a bilious fever contracted in 1775. He and his father left Philadelphia shortly after the August signing of the Declaration, and the elder Lynch died on the way home. Three years later, Thomas Junior’s own health had worsened, due in part to his activity as a militia officer. Advised to take time out to
save his own life, he and his wife, the former Elizabeth Shubrick, set sail for the West Indies as the first leg of a projected trip to southern France. Their ship disappeared at sea, never to be heard from again.
Many others who signed the document survived both the war and the vicissitudes of eighteenth-century life, but suffered a variety of woes. The wealthy merchant Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, often called “The Financier of the Revolution” for all his contributions to the cause, wound up in debtors prison before his death in obscurity three decades after he signed. George Wythe of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s great friend and tutor in the law, was destined to become a murder victim—poisoned by an impatient heir, his own grandnephew.
But those were outcomes unrelated to the revolutionary cause. The real story here is the fierce, unrelenting punishment the British imposed during the war upon a startling number of the Signers. In South Carolina, the state’s three remaining Signers, Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton, and Thomas Heyward, were actually captured by the British with the fall of Charleston in 1780 and imprisoned for months in St. Augustine, Florida.
Many others up and down the eastern seaboard were hunted with vengeance. In Virginia, outgoing governor Thomas Jefferson barely eluded a British raiding party led by “Bloody Ban” Banastre Tarleton in 1781. Even when the Signers escaped capture, however, their families often suffered, and their homes and other properties were deliberately devastated. According to a detailed compilation by Rush H. Limbaugh Jr. (made famous by his son, the radio personality Rush Limbaugh), that was the fate of the extensive lands owned by South Caronlina’s three captive Signers.
But there was worse. New Jersey’s Judge Richard Stockton, hiding out at a friend’s home with his family “was pulled from bed in the night and brutally beaten by the arresting soldiers.”
Wrote the elder Limbaugh: “Thrown into a common jail, he was deliberately starved. Congress finally arranged for Stockton’s parole, but his health was ruined. The judge was released as an invalid, when he could no longer harm the British cause. He returned home to find his estate looted and did not live to see the triumph of the Revolution. His family was forced to live off charity.”
No better was the fate of his fellow Signer from New Jersey, John Hart. Trying to visit his dying wife, he had to flee pursuing Hessian troops. “While his wife lay on her deathbed, the soldiers ruined his farm and wrecked his homestead. Hart, sixty-five, slept in caves and woods as he was hunted across the countryside. When at long last, emaciated by hardship, he was able to sneak home, he found his wife had already been buried, and his thirteen children taken away. He never saw them again. He died a broken man in 1779, without ever finding his family.”
Another tragic case the elder Limbaugh researched was that of still another New Jersey Signer, Abraham Clark. Again in Limbaugh’s words: “He gave two sons to the officer corps in the Revolutionary Army. They were captured and sent to that infamous British prison hulk afloat in New York harbor known as the hell ship Jersey. The younger Clarks were treated with a special brutality because of their father. One was put in solitary and given no food. With the end almost in sight, with the war almost won, no one could have blamed Abraham Clark for acceding to the British request when they offered him his sons’ lives if he would recant and come out for the King and parliament.”
But Abraham Clark answered their request with a heartbreaking no.
Another signer who had to make a sacrificial choice was Virginia’s Thomas Nelson Jr. of Yorktown, who succeeded Thomas Jefferson as governor of Virginia in 1781 and doubled as commander of the state’s militia. Present for the Siege of Yorktown, it is said, he told his compatriots to go ahead and fire upon his own handsome home of brick, which unfortunately had been taken over by Lord Cornwallis as his own quarters. The Americans did fire upon the Nelson house—cannonballs can still be seen today in one of its brick walls. The once healthy and wealthy shipper-planter Nelson died in near-poverty seven years later of asthma.
In some cases, spouses were subjected to the vengeance of the British. New York’s Francis Lewis escaped harm himself, but his Long Island home was burned down by the British and his wife, Elizabeth, was made a prisoner. Her early death was blamed in large part on the deprivations she suffered as a captive of the British. Her husband, his personal wealth undermined by the Revolution, lived to nearly ninety and is buried in an unmarked grave at Trinity Church at the top of Wall Street in Manhattan. (Incidentally, the last of all the Signers to die was Maryland’s Charles Carroll, one of the richest men in America…and the only Catholic Signer. He passed away in 1832 at the age of ninety-five.)
Overall, four Signers apparently died of Revolutionary War–related causes; another five were captured; nine endured British-inspired damage or destruction of their homes; and several lost their fortunes or family members…sometimes both.
Their future nation, their states, their own localities, though, would respond to their leadership in very tangible ways—two Signers were elected president of the new nation (Jefferson and John Adams); three (Eldridge Gerry, Jefferson, and John Adams) would serve as vice president; at least seven became governors, and several were destined to serve as U.S. senators or congressmen under the Constitution that a handful of the Signers themselves helped to frame at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
More important, for all the pain and hardship visited upon them, the fifty-six Signers gave the future nation an example of undeviating loyalty to the ideal at the very root of the entire revolutionary movement—freedom.
They Didn’t Sign, But…
THEY DIDN’T SIGN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, BUT THESE DISTINGUISHED Patriots risked lives and fortunes anyway. Some, like the Signers of the Declaration, would suffer greatly for their commitment. Most lived to see their cause triumph, and many became leaders of the new American nation themselves. Just a few of these early rebels or Founding Fathers…
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First and foremost was the revolutionary soldier and post-Revolution political and financial theorist who served as the new nation’s first secretary of the Treasury and gave the country a sound financial system; who eased the ratification pains of the proposed Constitution by writing more of the Federalist Papers than anyone else (fifty of the eighty total); and who helped to create the two-party political system. Born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies of an illegal marriage, left on his own at age eleven after his mother died, Alexander Hamilton came to the future United States at the age of sixteen, his travel expenses donated by family and a friendly Presbyterian minister. Never finishing college, he took command of a New York area artillery battery in 1776 at the age of nineteen—as youngest man in the group. He would soon become an aide to George Washington and later, returning to the field, would lead the Americans in storming the key Redoubt #10 at Yorktown, one of the last actions forcing Lord Cornwallis to surrender. Hamilton’s postwar career included law studies and election to the Confederation Congress. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and later, after his Treasury service, the ranking major general in the U.S. Army. After George Washington’s death in 1799, he became the army’s most senior officer—and thus its commander in chief. He was quite honorably discharged in 1800, and there is no telling what further achievements might have been his, but for the mortal wound he suffered in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804. He died in New York City the next day at the age of forty-seven.
***
New Jersey’s William Livingston, Yale graduate, attorney, columnist, essayist, and Continental Congress member, missed out on signing the Declaration because he had gone home to assume command of his state’s militia. His brother Philip, delegate from New York, did sign it. Soon after, Brigadier General Livingston became the first governor of New Jersey. His home was fated to be destroyed by the British, but he moved around New Jersey often enough to elude British efforts to capture him in person. Little-known fact: In the 1770s, Livingston provided the schooling, including
college classes, needed for a bright but penniless young man newly arrived from the British West Indies: Alexander Hamilton.
***
When British General John Burgoyne marched on the Hudson Valley from Canada, New Hampshire was ready to send its militiamen into the fray along with their fellow New Englanders. But New Hampshire didn’t have the funds available to pay their way to war. Never mind, said wealthy merchant John Langdon, Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, he would finance their deployment in the field. He did, and in fact, he joined them as a Continental Army officer serving in the Battles of Bennington and Saratoga. As early as 1774, he had shown he was a man of action—in December of that year he led hundreds of fellow colonists in a raid against a Royal fort in Portsmouth, seizing one hundred barrels of powder in the process. The future president and governor of New Hampshire, Continental Congress member, U.S. senator, and first president of the U.S. Senate also was a shipbuilder for the neophyte American navy—his Ranger, captained by John Paul Jones, was the first to sail under a boldly displayed American flag.
***
This revolutionary figure didn’t live long enough to see the fruits of his passionate advocacy, and he first was heard in South Carolina as a loud voice supporting the Crown. His uncle was Lieutenant Governor William Bull, acting royal governor. For all that, and a short but blazing rebel career, William Henry Drayton is counted as one of South Carolina’s early Patriot heroes. In less than two years’ time, the Low-Country planter jumped from a seat on the royalist South Carolina Council to presidency of the rebel Provincial Congress. He became a pamphleteer and speaker, asserting that Parliament had no right to “exercise despotism over America.” He directed raids against royal arsenals and, in November 1775, boldly sent the armed schooner Defence into a gunbattle with two British men-of-war in Charleston harbor (with himself on board). An early advocate of total American independence, he served as chief justice of South Carolina (despite lacking a law degree) and in 1778 joined the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Always arguing against reconciliation with Great Britain, the tempestuous Drayton often was at odds with fellow Carolinian Henry Laurens, president of the Congress. They achieved a reconciliation, however, when Drayton, only thirty-six, contracted typhus in 1779 and lay on his deathbed. Members of Congress attended his burial in Philadelphia’s Christ Church Cemetery.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 19
