Signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence

The purpose of this webpage is to present information about the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Please feel free to contact me with information, suggestions, or corrections about the information on this site. You can contact me by clicking on the following: paul@bessel.org 

Signers of the Declaration of Independence

[The following item, or something similar, is seen often on the internet or in print. Is it true?]

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army, another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War. They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. What kind of men were they?

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.

Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.

Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton.

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.

Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later he died from exhaustion and a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates.

Such were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These were not wild eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more. Standing tall, straight, and unwavering, they pledged: "For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

They gave you and me a free and independent America. The history books never told you a lot of what happened in the Revolutionary War. We didn't just fight the British. We were British subjects at that time and we fought our own government! Some of us take these liberties so much for granted...We shouldn't.

Patriotic Hooey Revisited
By Timothy Noah

On Independence Eve, Chatterbox is sorry to report that the error-ridden paean to the founding fathers recycled last year by Ann Landers, the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby, National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg, and Rush Limbaugh, among others, remains in circulation. The offending Ann Landers column, Rush Limbaugh's version (written, he says, by his father), and Jonah Goldberg's "In Praise of July 4" essay are all still online, without corrections. For some reason, David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine has an uncorrected reprint of Jacoby's version on its Web site, too. National Review Online gets a gold star for this year posting a corrected paean to the founders, written by Matthew Spalding. But it also gets a demerit for mentioning Jacoby's blunder in the Spalding essay while leaving out Goldberg's. (Goldberg is editor of National Review Online.) The history department of Staunton, Va., Military Academy has an error-laden version on its Web site, as does Alexandria, Va.'s Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies and the Web page for Aaron Hall, a Republican candidate for the Minnesota state legislature. And the Philadelphia-based Descendents of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence continue to insist that signer Carter Braxton died in poverty and that signer Thomas Nelson's house was destroyed. Not true. (These and other founder howlers are dissected on James Elbrecht's Signer's Index Web page and the Web page for the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. The earliest known version was first published in 1956 by radio commentator Paul Harvey.) As Chatterbox noted last year, the main purveyors of this historical misinformation are conservatives. That they should continue to purvey it a full year after Jacoby's gaffe received heavy publicity testifies to the right's deep affection for folklore.

The good news is that the founder's paean isn't turning up much in newspapers anymore. A database search by Chatterbox located only one version of the bogus essay, tacked on to the end of a Jan. 8 story in the Accra Mail about the swearing in of Ghana's President John Kufuor. The same database search found that patriotic articles that do not lift erroneous material from an essay that's been in circulation  for nearly half a century are plentiful, as always. These, of course, are always welcome. Happy Fourth.

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