New Light on the Declaration and Its Signers

The Declaration of Independence remains one of the most hallowed documents in our national history and the men who produced it are singularly honored by the unique designation “the Signers.” Yet most of us know little about these daring revolutionaries. What were their occupations? What were their religious or philosophical commitments? Were they all highly educated men? Men of wealth? Were they American born or immigrants? In this issue of History Now, our scholars introduce you to these men as three-dimensional individuals, with different personal histories and circumstances. Although they shared a gender and a race, it turns out they were not cut from the same mold; the synergy that produced the declaration arose from their diversity. They cooperated because they shared a single purpose: to announce an end to colonial dependency and the beginnings of a new nation.

Professor James Basker and Harvard undergraduate Sofia Melnychuck start us off in “A Nation of Immigrants from the Outset: The Signers Born Abroad” by noting the remarkable diversity of the men sent to the Continental Congress who drafted the Declaration. The governments that sent these delegates did not regard “birthplace, ethnicity, religion, or educational attainments as prerequisites” for participation. Basker and Melnychuck focus here on the demographic diversity of the Signers, noting that twelve of the thirteen delegations included men who were born abroad or were the children of immigrants. They offer profiles of eight of the immigrant delegates, introducing us to three from Ireland, two from Scotland, and one from Wales. Basker and Melnychuck remind us that the talents and aspirations of these eighteenth-century immigrants are shared by the thousands of immigrants who followed in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Today, as in decades past, the people who come to these shores play a critical role in the achievements of our nation.

Professor Denver Brunsman explores the diversity of occupations to be found in the Continental Congress in 1776 in his essay “Pledging Their Fortunes: The Professions of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.” Although most of these men were members of the colonial elite, they had arrived at this status through pursuit of many occupations. Lawyering led the pack, with 23 of the 56 signers earning their living primarily by practicing law. An even dozen of the signers were plantation owners, and the same number earned their wealth as merchants. Yet, the lines between these three professions are not so sharp as they may at first seem, for as Brunsman shows, many of these men operated in a hyphenated fashion as lawyer-merchant or merchant-plantation owner. The signers included eight men who did not fit the common mold of lawyer, planter, or merchant; four were physicians, three were farmers, and one was a full-time minister. The inimitable Ben Franklin defied all categories, having his hand in many professions over the course of his remarkable lifetime. Brunsman’s central point, however, is not the diversity of professions, but the fact that these men, successful though they may have been, maintained close contact with the communities they represented. The Declaration thus reflected a broad constituency, far beyond the small group who risked their fortunes when they put their signatures upon it.

The Signers were even more diverse in their religious preferences than in their occupations. As Professor Richard Carwardine ably shows us in “The Religious Diversity of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence,” the Declaration made no mention of Christianity. Worded with care, it justified the cause of independence by referring to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Like Jefferson, many elite colonial men saw the Creator through the prism of the rationalist idea of Deism. Yet, in producing the Declaration, Jefferson found it necessary to concede to changes in his draft that accommodated men of more traditional and orthodox faiths like John Adams, a Calvinist turned Unitarian, and John Witherspoon, a staunch Presbyterian. While Deists held that the Creator had withdrawn from interference in human behavior once having established the laws of nature, evangelicals like Witherspoon saw their God as active in human affairs. The religious pluralism at the Congress mirrored the diversity in the White colonial population. The New England colonies were home to Baptists, Quakers, and Anglicans as well as Congregationalists and Presbyterians, while in the middle colonies and in the South, there were Roman Catholics, German Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, French Huguenots, Dutch Reformers, and Sephardic Jews. This pluralism insured that the Declaration contained no overt mention of religion in its list of grievances against George III.

In “The Education of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence,” Professor Caroline Winterer uses the signatures of the 56 signers as a starting point to discuss their educational backgrounds. Benjamin Rush, for example, had only to add the prefix “Dr.” to his signature to convey his superior educational credentials, while Ben Franklin, whose formal education ended when he was a boy, gave visual weight to his achievements by adding a “huge curlicue” that wound “like a garden hose under his name.” Winterer reminds us that, In the eighteenth-century world of elite men, education was a primary marker of a gentleman. And that education fit them, they believed, to lead and to govern. The curriculum of their century bore little similarity to our modern-day schooling. Greek and Latin, above all else, marked you as a gentleman and instilled the morality required of a leader. Thomas Jefferson paid architectural tribute to this classicism in designing Monticello, and Cæsar Rodney of Delaware joined the “a” and “e” of his first name in tribute to the custom within Latin texts. In closing, Winterer notes that the large empty space at the bottom of the Declaration ought to remind us of the colonists who did not meet the gentlemanly criteria: enslaved people and White women. The former were forbidden to learn to read and write at all, and even the wealthiest of the latter were denied anything more than the smattering of Latin they could pick up from their brothers’ lessons.

In our final essay, “James Wilson: Scottish Immigrant, Pennsylvania Statesman, Signer of the Declaration, and Framer of the Constitution,” Professor Jonathan Gienapp draws a portrait of one of the most influential members of the founding generation. Less well known than Franklin or Jefferson, Wilson “gave voice to the central idea announced in the Declaration: that Americans were ‘one people’ who had formed a single indivisible nation.” Born and educated in Scotland, Wilson immigrated to the colonies in 1765. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers instilled in him a deep belief in the benevolent nature of human beings and their capacity to intuit the truths upon which the Declaration would be based. This belief, Gienapp tells us, made Wilson an ardent champion of popular sovereignty. Although he did not immediately support independence, he became one of the most vocal spokesmen for the Declaration and its call to the American people to rise up as “one people,” not thirteen separate peoples. Wilson carried this intense nationalism into the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and helped shape the provisions of the Constitution that insured a single, indivisible union. Like other immigrants, including Alexander Hamilton, his identity was as an American, loyal to a united country rather than to an individual state.

Supplementing the five original essays in this issue of History Now are related materials from the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s archives, including further readings, videos, and key primary sources. The issue’s special feature is a remarkable chart by Gilder Lehrman intern Sofia Melnychuck, which lists how many signers of the Declaration were immigrants, how many were the children of immigrants, how many were Anglicans, Catholics, or Quakers, and more. We hope that this meticulous analysis of the backgrounds, religious affiliations, professions, and educational levels of the Signers will be useful to you and your students in examining the origins of the Declaration of Independence.

Nicole and I hope that you are having a good, productive semester, and that you will be able to utilize this important issue of History Now in your classroom teaching.

Carol Berkin, Editor
Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, Baruch College & The Graduate Center, CUNY

Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, History Now, and Senior Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History