They Signed It! Facts About the Signers of the Declaration of Independence!

By Arthur W. Ritchie

This is a fact book on the 56 signers of our Declaration of Independence plus a precis of the era in terms of education, travel, the calendar problem, the various forms of governance etc., plus the Parliamentary acts that caused the revolution in the first place. This is where you'll find that 25% of the signers never voted for independence. Then there is a table of miscellaneous facts: Which signer refused to vote for independence? Which was murdered? Who was lost at sea? Died from a duel?

It is fun to read, browse, or use as a source for your own historical works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arthur W. Ritchie
• Release date: Sep 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463199572

Book preview

As usual, it started with a war.

In 1750, there were roughly 20 Englishmen in North America for every Frenchman. Yet, both nations claimed huge hunks of the continent based on little more than when and where they thought someone or other of their nation had set their boot as represented on a faulty map. And as much of that land was thinly populated it was ripe for speculators and the wars they breed.

Virginia’s royal Governor Dinwiddie was one of many Ohio Company investors upset to learn that the French had moved troops into what he considered British territory, and they were murdering Englishmen that refused to leave. Dinwiddie sent George Washington to chat with the French—they said screw you—and by the way, have you seen our new fort? You can’t miss it! It’s where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio River. PS: we call it Fort Duquesne! [we call it Pittsburg]

Angered by big George’s report, Dinwiddie sent him back with a few troops in May of 1754. The 22-year-old Washington built Fort Necessity near the enemy lines, sallied out and ambushed a French patrol, outnumbered, he headed back to his fort which he was quickly forced to surrender. Before the French would release him and his men, they forced him to sign a surrender document, it was written in French, a language he did not understand; and it falsely accused Washington of deliberately murdering a political envoy, and that kicked off what we call the nine-year-long French & Indian War.

Fort Necessity turned out to be the only thing Washington ever surrendered—on July 4, 1754. From then to the end of his life he hated July 4th. Anyway, we declared our independence on July 2nd 1776, so why do we celebrate it on the 4th, the day we accepted the Declaration of Independence?

But as most of Europe didn’t jump in for another two years, they take the deduction and call it the Seven Years War, and what a war it was! Before it was over, England, Prussia and Hanover were pitted against France, Austria, Saxony, Sweden, Russia and Spain! And it was fought all over the world from India and the Philippines to Boston and Georgia, and England won! So why is any of this important to the new-world’s colonies independence? Because whatever reason you give for the American Revolution that reason is spelled:

M-O-N-E-Y.

• With peace, England had thousands of politically connected military personnel that didn’t want to give up their cushy peacetime paychecks and return to England to find a job. But who wants to pay soldiers in peacetime just because they’re politically connected?

• Needing a good excuse to keep troops and their officers here, Parliament noted that England’s spoils of war included the former Spanish colony of Florida, and the only way to keep it in British hands was to move people and troops there to defend it.

• And to make the Florida thing sound even better they pointed out that to the west there was this Indian named Pontiac who was raising hell because he felt his people had been unjustly treated in the peace agreement. Now we don’t want to have to pay troops to protect you way out there do we? So to keep you safe and the military budget down, we forbid you colonists from moving across the Allegheny mountains to the west. But if you felt you just had to move, why not move south to our lovely new colonies called Georgia and Florida?

A Comment on Britain’s Financial Advisors at the time.

According to Adam Smith’s, The Wealth of Nations, the French & Indian War cost Great Britain about £40 million, and the British wanted their American Colonists to cough up some of that money. And if we wouldn’t tolerate a little taxing, then they had to fight the American Revolution to prove their sovereignty. The American Revolution cost them:*

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_costs_of_the_American_Revolutionary_War

• £250 million in cash

• 24,000 casualties plus the 7,554 dead Hessian that had to be paid for

• 338,936 square miles of North American real estate

• The gigantic Colony of Florida reverted to Spanish rule

• and ca. 2,500,000 former subjects were now lost to British control

And all that to collect a measly 40 million pounds. I’d avoid their investment advisors.

The French cost of the war was about 1.3 billion livres. It ultimately ended their monarchy.

Anyway, these are the ways they tried to tax us to pay for that war:

As all those signing the Declaration of Independence had exactly the same background experiences with regard to the British acts attempting to tax the colonies, let’s discuss those acts that the individual delegate articles deal only with how that signer responded personally.

CHAPTER 1: THE ACTS:

1733-63: The Molasses Act:

Why start with something that happened decades before the French & Indian War? Because, as most British laws of that era, the Molasses Act had an expiration date, and that date fell at just the right moment to be useful to Parliament’s plans to pay for the French & Indian war.

Around 1731, the British Caribbean Islands producing sugar cane and molasses didn’t like competition from the French, Dutch and Spanish Caribbean Islands doing the same thing and asked Parliament to tax molasses going to a British colony from any non-British colony. Wanting to keep their possessions happy while making a few bucks at the same time, Parliament said sure! And taxed molasses produced on non-British soil at the rate of six pence per gallon. Unfortunately, smugglers don’t pay taxes by definition, and the act was a flop. It also expired in 30-years at which time Parliament had a choice: Just let it go? Or try again with a law that worked.

http://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/eighteenth-century/1733-6-george-2-c-13-the-molasses-act/

1764: The Sugar Act:

The Molasses act expired right on cue and Parliament thought they’d take another stab at taxing the colonies, only this time—even though the new act cut the tax on foreign bought molasses in half from six pence to three pence per gallon—they were going to collect it. But the act was a bit more complex than that, and among its more onerous provisions were that American lumber could only be sold in England, and that ship manifests carrying these products had to meet certain new high standards which had to be verified before the ship could be unloaded etc. But because the Sugar Act tax was paid by merchants and shippers rather than individual citizens, few noticed that sugar was being taxed, or that the act contained a hidden zinger: No longer could those accused of violating the act be sure their cases would be heard by local, and therefore probably lenient, civil courts. If a prosecutor felt that public bias would prejudice their case, they could transfer the case to an admiralty court—which only met in Nova Scotia, Canada. Furthermore, those charged with the crime not only had to pay their own way to the Nova Scotia court, their nonappearance was automatically entered as a guilty plea.

https://ahp.gatech.edu/sugar_act_bp_1764.html

1764 The Currency Act

Lacking gold and silver mines, the colonies were always short of hard currency, and to get around this, they took to printing paper money. Unfortunately, with nothing backing up paper notes, there was no realistic conversion rates between the various colonial currencies or those currencies and the British pound sterling and Parliament became uncomfortable with this.

September 1st: Parliament passed the Currency Act which abolished colonial paper money by prohibiting the printing of new bills or the reissuing of existing ones. From now on, the British Empire would be run on a hard currency based on the pound Stirling. Or so they thought. As the colonies were already running a trade deficit with England, this caused instant chaos for how does one pay for needed goods with a hard currency they don’t have? Especially when they don’t have sufficient merchandize to sell to get that hard cash?

The Currency Act also loaded the law on Parliament’s side by creating an ersatz superior vice-admiralty court, callable at the whim of prosecutors wishing to be sure that those they suspected of violating the customs laws would be tried in a manner favorable to the crown. That means they loaded the dice.

https://books.google.com/books?id=0L4uAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA103&vq=%22legal+tender%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1_1#v=onepage&q=%22legal%20tender%22&f=false

1765: The Quartering Act:

May 15th: Few things enraged the colonists more than The Quartering Act which required those living where troops were stationed to pay for those troops’ quartering and in some cases, even providing them with places to stay. The Americans rebelled against it so strongly that it was not only retracted in 1767, its abolition became the third amendment to our Constitution on December 15, 1791.

http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/related/quartering.htm

1765-66: The Stamp Act:

Parliament’s first tax paid by individuals rather than merchants or shippers really got the public’s attention, especially since it taxed nearly everything in sight: 54 separate items including anything printed smaller than a book, plus playing cards, dice, land grants, lawyers’ licenses and on and on and on. Then there was this bit about iron products made in the colonies could only be exported to England and the taxes paid still had to be in hard currency not colonial paper money. This poorly thought through blunder severely impacted and annoyed the two most influential groups in any colony: Its lawyers and newspaper editors with their ever-popular editorials, and it set up an arbitrage market in currencies that only helped those rich enough in hard currencies to deal in currency speculation.

https://ahp.gatech.edu/stamp_act_bp_1765.html

The Townshend Acts:

Tired of the cavalier way the colonies were ignoring Parliament’s laws, Prime Minister Charles Townshend decided to get nasty.

1767: New York Restraining Act:

June 5th: This prevented New York from passing any laws until they agreed to comply with the Quartering Act of 1765 requiring them to provide and pay for the room and board of any British troops in the colony. New York pleaded taxation without representation, plus they didn’t believe British soldiers were needed in the colony, since the French & Indian War was over. But they reluctantly agreed to pay for some of the soldiers’ needs because the alternative was to involuntarily turn their homes into bed and breakfasts for those troops.

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/new-york-restraining-act-text.html

1767: The Revenue Act:

June 26th: This taxed things that almost had to be imported because no one in the colonies was making or mining the product: Lead, tea, painters’ pigments, blown glass items, etc. It also gave customs officials a broad authority to enforce the law via the newly minted writs of assistance —essentially search warrants giving them an unlimited right to invade private property in search of smuggled goods. On the plus side, it also reduced the tax on molasses.

The Molasses Act started out taxing molasses at six pence a gallon, the Sugar Act took the tax down to three pence, and the Revenue Act reduced it to a single penny a gallon. Guess what? It still didn’t work.

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/revenue-act-of-1767-text.html

1767: Indemnity Act:

June 29th: The gigantic British East India Company was on the verge of collapse as they sat on 17,000,000 pounds of unsold tea—and all because British law required that their tea be sold at auction in London with a two shillings six pence tax per pound. Even the Brits were drinking the much cheaper smuggled Dutch tea. So, to save the company—and as many in Parliament owned shares in the company—they wrote this act which refunded the duty paid on tea exported to the colonies. But the tea still had to go through the auction system, and when the act expired they’d be right back where they started—nearing bankruptcy—they’d learn, but it would take time.

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/indemnity-act-of-1767-text.html

1767: Commissioners of Customs Act:

June 29th: This created a Boston headquartered Customs Board to enforce shipping regulations to increase tax revenue. It replaced England’s Customs Board which distance had made ineffective. But this new board increased law enforcement in areas where smuggling was rampant leading to numerous confrontations, the occupation of Boston by British troops and the Boston Massacre.

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/commissioners-of-customs-act-text.html

1768: Vice Admiralty Court Act:

July 6th: Written by His Majesty’s Treasury Commissioners instead of Parliament, it added admiralty courts in Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston to the one in Halifax Nova Scotia to make prosecutions more efficient.

As usual, the courts’ judges were appointed by the Crown. What was new was their ability to award ‘the court’—read themselves—5% of any fine levied. The decisions were made by judges which violated what was considered to be a fundamental right of British subjects: a jury of your peers. And, as usual, the accused had to travel to the court at their own expense, and nonappearance was entered as a default guilty plea.

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/vice-admiralty-court-act-of-1768-text.html

1773 The Tea Act:

The Indemnity Act of 1767 expired in 1772 meaning that the British East India Company was right back where they started before the ill though through Indemnity Act and were going broke again just as before as a massive surplus of tea again began collecting in its London warehouses. Realizing that the Indemnity Act was a mistake, Parliament passed The Tea Act which allowed the East India’s Company’s ships to go directly from the tea’s source in the orient to American ports eliminating both the enormous amount of wasted shipping time and the London tea auction with its two shillings and six pence per pound tax. It also gave the company an exclusive right to sell tea in the colonies. But to prove Parliament had the right to tax the colonies, they kept the three pence per pound Townshend tea tax. The first tea ship entering Boston Harbor under this new law brought so much joy to the populous that they held a party to celebrate the event.

http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/related/teaact.html

The Intolerable Acts:

1774 The Boston Port Act

March 31st: In response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament closed Boston’s harbor until the people of Boston paid for the destroyed tea, and the king was satisfied that order had been restored to the city. Bostonians objected to this punishment of the whole city without being given a chance to testify in their own defense which was basically that, as only a handful of people destroyed the tea, why should the whole city be punished? Parliament took the posture that, as you all cheered, you all pay.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Boston_Port_Act

1774 Massachusetts Government Act:

May 20th: Rescinding Massachusetts Bay’s charter, this act placed the colony directly under Parliamentary control. All colonial offices would be filled by London appointees, and town meetings were limited to one a year, unless authorized by the Governor. It sent shockwaves across the continent as colonists feared that their own charters could be just as easily changed by Parliamentary fiat.

https://worldhistoryproject.org/1774/5/20/massachusetts-government-act

1774 Administration of Justice Act:

May 20th: This empowered the governor of Massachusetts to move any trial to anywhere in the Empire if he believed the government was unlikely to get an impartial verdict locally. And while the act reimbursed witnesses for travel expenses, it didn’t cover lost wages during the duration of the travel and trial meaning that few colonials were rich enough to be able to testify. George Washington dubbed it the Murder Act believing it allowed British officials to harass Americans and then escape justice.

http://www.stamp-act-history.com/intorelable-coercive-acts/administration-of-justice-act-1774/

1775

April 19th: The mini Battles of Lexington and Concord were fought and now, few cared what Parliament thought or did.

May 10th: Three weeks to the day after Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress gaveled in.

June 17th: The Battle of Bunker Hill was fought. Now, only Loyalists gave a damn what Parliament thought or did.

CHAPTER 2

Our First Attempts at Self Governance:

Before George Washington was sworn in as our first President under the Constitution on April 30, 1789, there were three Continental Congresses:

The First Continental Congress

1774

September 5th-October 26th

Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia:

The First Continental Congress lasted 51 days and did little more than send George III a kissy kissy note* telling him that they loved him—but.... Even before it arrived, he opened Parliament on November 30, 1774 with a blistering diatribe against the colony’s arrogance in defying lawful acts. PS: When it arrived, he refused to touch it.

* Called the First Petition to the King and dated October 25, 1774, it was ignored by the crown triggering the Second Continental Congress. It can be found in Appendix 3.

The Second Continental Congress and

The Rules They Ran Under:

1775-81

It was the Second Congress that set the rules that would, for the most part, run the country until superseded 15 years later by our Constitution in 1789. These rules were basically:

• Sick of kings and incompetent prime ministers, America would have no national executive to enforce anything, only impotent Presidents of Congress whose power was be limited to keeping order and ordering lunch.

• Without an executive, committees would be all powerful: They, and they alone, wrote the laws and rules, etc. Then tried to enforce the same with no mechanism to do so.

• Each colony decided on the number of delegates they’d send to the Congress, but regardless of that number, each colony would have one vote.

• Colonies decided whether their delegates voted their conscience, or were strictly bound by instructions from the colony’s governing body such as the ever-abstaining New York delegation which was consistently without instructions.

• Voting would be in order from north to south with New Hampshire voting first and Georgia—which wasn’t represented in the first congress—voting last.

Between 1775 and 1781 they created a few standing committees to handle war related activities, such as the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the Treasury Board, the Board of War and Ordnance, and the Navy Board. But most of their work was done in ad hoc committees nominated from the floor with 3 to 5 members and the delegate with the most votes became the committee chairman. 77% of the committees had three members. Over the 14.5-year life of the congress, they created 3,294 committees—that’s nearly 19 a month or roughly one every day they sat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Congress

One last thing: When they met as a Congress, they had a President and minutes were kept of what transpired. But most of the time they gaveled in as a Committee of the Whole which had a chairman who was not the regular President, and minute were not kept.

The Second Continental Congress:

Where they Met

1775-81

May 10, 1775: Three weeks to the day after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress gaveled in, in the Philadelphia State House now known as Independence Hall. Yet, leaderless and with mixed signals regarding who could do what, this was the congress that declared our freedom on July 2, 1776, and codified its actions in a document they named the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.

The British Army kept Congress on the move a lot meaning that to avoid being captured they met at a variety of locations during its existence.

May 10, 1775 to December 12, 1776: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

December 20, 1776 to March 4, 1777: Baltimore, Maryland

March 5, 1777 to September 18, 1777: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

September 27, 1777: Lancaster, Pennsylvania one day only

September 30, 1777 to June 27, 1778: York, Pennsylvania

July 2, 1778 until February 281781: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Thus, the Congress that gaveled out in February 1781, next gaveled in as

The Articles Congress:

1781-89: For all practical purposes, the Articles of Confederation Congress was just the Second Continental Congress with its almost nonexistent rules codified. The delegates were the same; it first met in the same room; it had no executive, voted from north to south with each colony getting one vote; and was just as toothless with regard to raising money or enforcing their laws as its predecessor. Yet it ran from March 1, 1781 until we recognized how worthless a government it was without an executive and reorganized under an entirely new government structured by the Constitution of the United States in 1789.

Where the Articles Congress met:

March 1, 1781–June 21, 1783, Philadelphia

June 30, 1783–November 4, 1783, Princeton

November 26, 1783– June 3, 1784, Annapolis Maryland

November 1, 1784– December 24, 1784, Trenton, New Jersey

January 11, 1785–March 2, 1789, New York, New York

The last session of the Articles Congress met at Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan, New York City on March 2, 1789. Only one Congressman, Philip Pell of New York, showed up. And after a few drinks, he adjourned the Congress sine die.

PS: Re the Perpetual Union part? It lasted a rip roaring eight years and 61 days.

CHAPTER 3

DEFINING TERMS RE THE ERA:

This is about History. There are lots of

DATES:

Get used to it

Calendars

In 1752, the British Empire switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian by removing 11 days from that year, and the days chosen for removal were September 3rd through the 13th. That means that in 1752, September went 1st, 2nd, 14th, 15th and so on. As all the signers of the Declaration were born before this transitional year and changed their birthdays by adding 11 days to it, this work only uses the new style of dating. If you wish to find the old-style date, just subtract 11 days from the new style date given.

Example: For the first 20 years of his life, George Washington celebrated his birthday on February 11th. Then, over the next 47 years of his life, he got around to celebrating it on December 22nd.

Education

In 1760, the 14-year-old Benjamin Rush graduated from the College of New Jersey with a BA. and a Sheldon Cooper, this jerk was not. He became the quack doctor who either directly or through his myriad students killed more people by incompetence than the revolution ever did.

During the 18th century, colleges were less than today’s high schools in terms of their practical usefulness. Harvard, Yale, William & Mary etc., were boarding houses for adolescent boys who entered at about puberty, were fed bread and a pint of beer in a leather cup for breakfast, studied under one or at most three or four teachers, and graduated in a class rarely exceeding 10 or 20 students with a bachelors’ degree that was somewhere between our junior high school graduation and a high school diploma. Master’s degrees were often awarded for nothing more than a request. And much of what they learned—in essence the very core of their curriculum—was pure crap.

The utterly worthless Latin and Greek languages were taught that you might read the ancients in the purity of their original tongues. For instance, how else would you know that most sublime of Greek thinkers, Aristotle, taught that:

• women have fewer teeth then men? They don’t. [He never asked his wife to open wide I guess]

• Swallows—a bird—spend the winter in the bottom of streams? Only a few dead ones.

• That heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Not true.

• And everything not of this earth is of heaven and therefore perfect. Wrong again. And when Galileo pointed out that the sun has spots, the moon has craters and there are things circling Mars that sure look like moons, he came skittishly close to being burned at the stake for questioning the ancients which the medieval church had essentially elevated to scriptural purity. Oh, and I almost forgot:

• Did you know that that ancient mental titan also taught that the purpose of the brain is to cool the blood? Well, this may be true of some in academia.

And utterly primitive as these ‘colleges’ were, only New Jersey, had two of them: Queen’s College, (1766) now named Rutgers University, and The College of New Jersey, (1746) today’s Princeton University. And in writing, their use of capital letters, punctuation, and spelling can at best be called, experimental and the rules for the same were never settled by these professors but had to wait for professional thinkers to work out the kinks.

So remember, the next time you see the movie or play 1776! In the scene where John Adams challenges Thomas Jefferson’s use of the word ‘unalienable’ vs. ‘inalienable’ in the Declaration of Independence, they banter on their academic credentials and Adams says he went to Harvard and Jefferson says the College of William & Mary—what they were really arguing about was, who had the better junior high school English teacher.

Where did this lead? Just years later, these students, who were so well versed in Greek and Latin, would be trying to get help from the French—knowing no French. Begging for loans from the Dutch—without speaking Dutch. Dealing with Frederick the Great about a trade deal—without knowing a word of German. (But should this count? Fred preferred to speak French) Now ask yourself: If Latin and Greek were so important, why didn’t our diplomats communicate with their European counterparts in those languages? Because only English-speaking lands were dumb enough to waste all that time learning dead languages. My guess is that, if they’d translated those ‘great’ works from antiquity into English, it would have put a lot of snobby language teachers out of business and that’s the reason for all that wasted time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_colleges#The_nine_colonial_colleges

Travel

In 1766, it took the mail coach three days to travel the 94 miles between Philadelphia and New York City. And that was on the best road in the country where a coach averaged about 30 miles a day. How fast do you think a Georgia delegate moved per day as they made the 800-mile trip to Philadelphia when hundreds of those miles were nothing but dirt trails? Whether by horseback, stagecoach or ship, it usually took a Georgia delegate over a month to get to Philadelphia, and any of these methods involved hardships and dangers.

In the summer’s sun, dirt roads were dusty ruts; in the stormy weather of spring and fall, they were quagmires; and life and limb were always at risk as travelers were subject to Indian attacks and highwaymen. Taverns were few and far between, food was awful, and you slept on the floor, 10 or more to a room, with the ever-present possibility that you’d wake up with your boots, purse, pants or baggage missing.

The British fleet organized to invade the south sailed from New York City on December 26, 1779 and arrived in Charleston harbor, South Carolina on February 1, 1780. It had taken 37 days to sail 755 miles or roughly 20.4 miles a day.

Yet, on the night of July first / second 1776, Caesar Rodney made the 80 odd mile trek from Dover Delaware to Philadelphia in 18 hours on horseback averaging 4.4 miles per hour.

Sea Battles

Hollywood has avoided one obvious fact about the era’s sea battles: They came in two very different types. Fleet actions were a fight to the finish no matter what because those involved knew that, regardless of the outcome, there’d be someone around to pick up survivors. But one on one battles were completely different in that both parties know that if both ships went down everybody dies. So one on one battles tended to be more like adolescent games of chicken where you either give up if it looks like you’re both going down, or you press your opponent to give up because they don’t want to die either. This is why questions like, Do you surrender? are answered with the braggadocios I have not yet begun to fight! which translates: ‘You ready to die? I am!’

Prisoners of War

No war has ever been more disparate with regard to the treatment of prisoners than the American Revolution, and for one very simple reason: While Americans saw the revolution as just another run of the mill war where captured combatants were to be treated as prisoners of war, George III saw it as a treasonous rebellion and ordered that captured combatants be treated as traitors. And anything short of death was considered kind treatment for a traitor. And before you get your knickers in a knot over this, ask yourself: Had we captured the traitor Benedict Arnold, how kindly do you think we would have treated him?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_war_in_the_American_Revolutionary_War

Chapter 4:

The Man Who Hid the Truth

"I shall not undeceive future generations."

Charles Thomson

The non-delegate signer who was

The man who knew too much

1729-1824

Charles Thomson, married a Miss Harrison on Thursday September 1, 1774, and returned to Philadelphia with her on Monday, September 5th to visit relatives. But as he alighted from his carriage, he was tapped on the shoulder by a servant who informed him he’d just been elected secretary to the Continental Congress and would he mind following him so that he might begin taking minutes?

The Irish-born Patriot leader in Philadelphia during the Revolution, would be the Congress’ only secretary never missing a single meeting during their almost 15 year existence. And during those years, 343 delegates came and went, and he knew and wrote of each and every one of them.

And while Thomson was paid as a Congressional secretary, according to biographer Boyd Schlenther, Thomson took a direct role in the conduct of foreign affairs. Fred S. Rolater goes even further suggesting that Thomson was essentially the Prime Minister of the United States.

William Barton, and Charles Thomson designed the Great Seal of the United States which played a disputatious role in the January 14, 1784, ratification of the Treaty of Paris. Britain's representatives argued over the placement of our Great Seal and Articles Congress President Thomas Mifflin’s signature on the document. It took Ben Franklin to unsnarl the mess.

T

he Barton / Thomson Seal which was the basis of our current Great Seal

But Thomson’s service was not without its critics. One cane fight on the congressional floor began when delegate James Searle, said he’d been misquoted in Thomson’s Minutes. Both he and Thomson wound up with slashed faces. Such floor brawls were not uncommon, and many were over Thomson’s way of writing minutes.

As Thomson was Congress’ secretary, he did not take notes when they met as a Committee of the Whole, and that was most of the time. Then, he made it a rule to expunge anything that had not passed in a vote from the day’s record. And many orators didn’t like the thought of their brilliance being lost to posterity rather than memorialized for eternity just because they spoke on the losing side of a subject.

Acceptance of the Constitution put the Congress’ out of business and Thomson was charged with taking the news to George Washington of his election as president. Thomson stayed at Mount Vernon before riding with Washington to New York City. In total they were together about two weeks, and all that time he was hinting that he’d like an appointment of some sort in the new government. Unfortunately, he attached strings to his request and it never came. He resigned as Congress’ secretary in July 1789 and was ordered by Washington to hand the Great Seal and all the congressional papers etc., to Mr. Roger Alden, the man who’d been Thomson’s Deputy Secretary of Congress, and who now had an appointment.

During his years as congress’ secretary, he’d been working on a manuscript that eventually ran to over 1000 pages covering the political history of the Revolution. But as he polished it for publication, he changed his mind and destroyed it. Why? Because he decided he wanted to preserve the myths that had cropped up. Or as he put it, he had no desire to

"contradict all the histories of the great events of the Revolution. Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them, and thus good may be done. I shall not undeceive future generations."

https://books.google.com/books?id=mHssAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA92&ots=tp3FhXehSD&dq=charles+thomson+resigns+from+continental+congress&pg=PP1&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false

To paraphrase him, ‘Those in the First Congress were men of the first quality, from then on it was all downhill. At the end, we had trouble finding a quorum. Sort of like today.

John Adams

1735-1826

Representing Pennsylvania

Born: October 30. 1735 John Adams was the eldest of three sons born to John Sr. and Susanna Bylston Adams on the family farm in Braintree—now Quincy—Massachusetts.

Died: July 4, 1826 at age 90

Education: Dame School, Braintree Latin School, Harvard College

Religion: Congregationalist turned Unitarian

Profession: Lawyer

Marriage: On October 25, 1764 John married his third cousin, Abigail Smith and they had three sons and three daughters:

Abigail Nabby 1765-1813 John Quincy 1767-1848

Grace Susanna 1768-1770 Charles 1770-1800

Thomas Boylston 1772-1832 Elizabeth 1777

Wealth: That of a successful lawyer, but in his last years his bank failed and he lost about $13,000, about $600,000 in today’s money leaving him practically penniless.

Personal Facts: Brilliant and extremely hardworking, he was also a narcissistic egomaniacal, immature twit.

Offices Held:

1774: John Adams was elected a delegate to the First Continental Congress

1775-77: Second Continental Congress

1778: Adams was appointed a commissioner to France.

1779: August: On the committee produced the first colonial constitution for Massachusetts

Fall of 1779-85: Unanimously appointed a minister Plenipotentiary charged with negotiating a treaty of peace, amity and commerce with Britain.

1785: The Confederation Congress appointed Adams our first ambassador to the Court of St. James

War Damage: His Boston office was vandalized

Military Service: None.

Age at Signing: 40

Unusual Items:

• Although named exactly as his father who sometimes suffixed his name with Sr., our John Adams never used the Jr. after his.

• The home he bought in Holland while our ambassador there was America’s first owned foreign embassy.

• First Vice President of the United States.

• First President to live in the White House although for only four months.

• Last president to read his state of the union address to congress until Wilson.

• First President to fail to be reelected.

• First of five presidents who refused to attend their successors inauguration.

• Only Father / Son presidencies until the Bushes nearly two centuries later.

• July 4, 1826 began with three signers of the Declaration of Independence alive: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Carroll. When the day ended, only Charles Carroll lived. And five years later on this date, President James Monroe died. How strange that three of our first five presidents should die on exactly the same day. Oh, and Steven Foster, the song writer? He said he was born just after Jefferson died but before Adams did. Just thought you’d like to know.

________________

"His Rotundity!"

__________Ralph Izard

a monkey just put into breeches.

_______ Senator William Maclay

"In my many years I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress."

___________ John Adams

"The History of our Revolution will be one continued lie ... The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical Rod smote the Earth and out sprung Gen. Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his Rod—and henceforth these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislatures and War."

From the diary of

___________ John Adams

John Adams was a highly intelligent and extraordinarily hardworking immature pompous twit. Forever seeking fame and glory, he was annoying, complaining, cranky, and regardless of his talents you wonder why he’s not on our currency?

1735

October 30th: John Adams was the eldest of John Adams Sr. and Susanna Bylston Adams three sons was born on the family farm in Braintree, now Quincy, Massachusetts. His father was a deacon in the Congregational Church, a farmer, cordwainer,* lieutenant in the militia, and town councilman who supervised the building of schools and roads.

* A cordwainer made new shoes as compared to a cobbler that repaired old shoes. The guilds of old loved to regulate everything and cordwainers and cobblers were different guilds. And while John the son was technically a junior or even the third, he never used those words.

By the year of John’s birth, the Puritan tenets of predestination etc. were pretty much passé, and most of their fairly strict practices had mellowed, but John emphatically recalled that his parents held every Species of Libertinage in... Contempt and horror, making their son a truly stuffed shirt.

As the eldest son, John received a formal education beginning at six at a typical Dame School; the Braintree Latin School where his dislike of the master found Deacon Adams hiring a teacher his son could get along with, and at 16, Adams entered Harvard College. As an adult, Adams was a scholar who read the works of such ancient writers as Thucydides, Plato, Cicero and Tacitus in their original Greek and Latin while looking down his nose at those who could not.

The French & Indian War [1754—1763] found him struggling with his perceived obligations, for as he later wrote, I longed more ardently to be a Soldier than I ever did to be a Lawyer. As a self-anointed member of the upper class, he believed he’d shirked his civic duty by failing to become a militia officer.

1755

Graduating from Harvard College he taught school for a few years while his diary filled with his longing for fame and glory. He craved Honour or Reputation and defference from (his) fellows. At 21, he decided law would make him a great Man. Or as he wrote to his father, lawyers involve themselves in noble and gallant achievements, while the clergy wallowed in the pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces.

1756

He apprenticed in the law office of John Putnam and in 1759 was admitted to the Massachusetts bar.

1763

Under the nom de plume, Humphrey Ploughjogger; he published seven essays in Boston newspapers, on political theory.

1764

October 25th: Over the bride’s mother’s objection that Adams was but a country lawyer who still reeks of the farm John married his third cousin, Abigail Smith (1744–1818). After the reception, they mounted a single horse and rode back to the farm he had inherited. They eventually had three sons and