A Nation of Immigrants from the Outset: The Signers Born Abroad

We are often focused today on the fact that the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not include women, African Americans, or Indigenous people, and how far this deviated from the spirit of “all men are created equal.” And rightly so: these kinds of exclusions and contradictions would haunt the United States for decades to come. But we might also wish to remind ourselves of the seeds of inclusiveness that were evident in the collection of men who formed the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration. By the standards of the day, they were a surprisingly diverse group.

As the individual delegates arrived in Philadelphia in the spring of 1776, no one asked to see their birth certificate or tried to verify that they were born in the colony or state they represented, or even if they were born anywhere in the American colonies. No one checked their religious affiliation, or educational level, or marital status, or record of military service. The only eligibility requirement was that they had been appointed by their government back home to represent them in Congress. And from the mix of people who assembled, it is evident that no one in those governments seemed to regard birthplace, ethnicity, religion, or educational attainments as prerequisites either. The one unifying characteristic of the delegates was a shared set of ideas about freedom and self-determination, and a desire to form a collective that would act on those beliefs.

By contrast, back in England many of these congressional delegates would have been categorically excluded from any government body or elite institution, and discriminated against generally in civic and social life. People with Scottish or Irish and other foreign accents were routinely mocked on the stage and attacked in the streets. In England, at least since the Scottish Jacobite Rebellion in 1745, all Scots were suspect. The Irish, because they were predominantly Catholic and therefore potential allies or agents of archenemy France, were even more distrusted. All Catholics, Quakers, and other dissenting denominations were excluded or severely restricted in their access to elected office, government jobs, or opportunities such as university education. Indentured servants and apprentices did not rise to become members of Parliament or bishops in the church. In a country with a hereditary monarchy, landed aristocracy, established church, and strict social hierarchy defined partly by one’s mastery of “the King’s English,” an assemblage of people such as those in the Continental Congress setting out to form or influence a national government was almost inconceivable.

And yet, there it was: if not a melting pot, at least a mixed bag of individuals with very different backgrounds. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration, for example, fewer than half (24) were Anglican or Episcopalian. Nine of the signers were Congregationalists, eight were Presbyterians, and five were Quakers—all sects that, significantly, favored local control at the congregational level rather than centralized authority.[1] The two Deists (Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia) were even further from the established Anglican church, and the one Catholic (Charles Carroll III of Maryland) would have been a total outcast in England. Educational backgrounds were wildly mixed: about half (29) were college educated, but eleven of them (20%) had no formal education at all and the rest were somewhere in between. Socioeconomic profiles were similarly varied. Many of the signers were wealthy merchants, businessmen, and plantation owners, and at least 26 were qualified lawyers. But eight of them had started life as apprentices. One was a former indentured servant (George Taylor of Pennsylvania), and at least two (James Wilson and Robert Morris, both of Pennsylvania) landed in debtor’s prison late in life. Almost all the signers were married at some point (54, of whom 12 were widowed and remarried), but two of them—Cæsar Rodney of Delaware and Joseph Hewes of North Carolina—remained single all their lives. By the time they signed the Declaration, 23 of the 56 had served in the military (usually the local militia), and nine more would go on to military service after signing. But 24 of the 56 signers would never do any military service at all, an intriguing fact for us today, when so many political candidates flourish their military service as a sterling credential for public office.

Perhaps the most remarkable demographic about the signers is that eight of them were immigrants, having been born abroad. Another 10 of them were the sons of immigrants, with one or both parents born overseas. They were spread across the states. Eleven of the thirteen state delegations included an immigrant or a son of immigrants, including the largest—Pennsylvania—for which six of its nine delegates were immigrants or children of immigrants. Moreover, when it came to representation, not counting the eight who were born abroad and immigrated to America, 12 of the delegates represented a state that was different from the one they were born in. In total, 20 of the signers came to the Congress representing a place different from where they were born, and such “non-natives” were present in 12 of the 13 state delegations (Rhode Island was the exception). Clearly “nativism” in the etymological sense of the word, and as we think of it today, was not an important concern among the men who became the signers of the Declaration.

The eight immigrants came from a variety of countries: three from Ireland, two each from Scotland and England, and one from Wales. Two of them had immigrated to the colonies as young children, both from Ireland: Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire, who arrived as a two-year-old in 1716, and James Smith of Pennsylvania, who immigrated with his parents at age 10 in 1729. Ironically, in the summer of 1776 both of them arrived in Philadelphia after July 4, but still were able to sign the Declaration, though they had minimal involvement in the Congress’s deliberations. But both made major contributions to public life in the country into which they had assimilated. Smith was a practicing lawyer who served as captain of a Pennsylvania militia company and as a delegate to the Pennsylvania state constitutional convention, which overlapped with the Continental Congress in late summer 1776. Thornton was a physician whose long career in public life included two stints in the New Hampshire militia, multiple terms as a justice of the peace and as a representative in the Provincial Assembly, a role in drafting the New Hampshire constitution, six years on the New Hampshire Superior Court, and in the 1780s, terms in the state House of Representatives and Senate.

One signer, Francis Lewis of New York, had a double immigration experience. Born in Llandaff, Wales, in 1713 to Welsh parents, he was sent to the elite Westminster School in London for his education and he stayed on in London pursuing a career in business until age 21. Thoroughly Anglified by then, his ambitions moved him to immigrate to New York, where he achieved considerable success in business and civic life. In 1775 he served on the Committee of Sixty and then was elected to the New York Provincial Congress, before going on to serve four years as a New York delegate to the Continental Congress, 1775–1779. During the Revolutionary War the British destroyed his estate in Queens and took captive his wife Elizabeth, who died in 1778 of the harsh treatment she received while held prisoner. Lewis’s family history illustrates how complex the rupture with Britain could be. One of his daughters married a captain in the British navy, and in turn her daughter (Lewis’s granddaughter) would marry a Cambridge-educated English clergyman who would go on, after her death, to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

The most recent arrival of these immigrant signers, John Witherspoon of New Jersey, was also the oldest when he decided to come to America. Witherspoon was a prominent Presbyterian minister with university degrees from Edinburgh and St Andrews and a national reputation, as well as a wife and family (eventually 10 children), when in 1768, aged 45, he accepted the invitation to come to New Jersey to become the president of a little college now known as Princeton University. He would serve in that role until his death in 1794. Within six years of his arrival, he was immersed in anti-British politics, first as a member of the New Jersey Committee of Correspondence, and then from 1776 to 1784 as a member of the Continental Congress. Appointed official Chaplain to the Congress, his intellect and energy made him one of the most influential members, and he is reported to have served on hundreds of committees during those years. Given his government service and his transformative 25-year presidency of Princeton, Witherspoon contributed more to the founding era than anyone could have expected of a recently arrived immigrant.

Another immigrant who arrived in the late 1760s, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, became one of the most valuable and influential of all the American founders. Born and educated in Scotland, Wilson was a legal scholar who came to Pennsylvania in 1766 at age 24, to join the faculty of the College of Philadelphia (today the University of Pennsylvania) and open a legal practice. He joined the Pennsylvania Militia (rising to be brigadier general), wrote pamphlets against the British, was an outspoken delegate in the Continental Congress, later a main architect of the Constitution at the Convention in 1787, then a Justice on the Supreme Court from 1789 to 1798. The sadness is that he was also a land speculator and developer who after many years of great success, crashed spectacularly in the downturn of 1797. Bankrupt, he endured debtor’s prison before seeking refuge from his creditors in North Carolina, where he died of sudden illness in 1798, still only 55.

The three other immigrant signers of the Declaration all had lives that more closely resembled the paradigmatic American story of rising from humble origins. The oldest of them, George Taylor of Pennsylvania, was born in Ireland in 1716 and came to America in 1736, age 20, as an indentured laborer in an ironworks in Coventry, Pennsylvania. By the 1750s he had worked his way up to owning his own ironworks, acquiring considerable land, and entering public service as a justice of the peace. He became a major supplier of munitions to the American forces early in the Revolutionary War and joined the Continental Congress as a replacement delegate on July 20, 1776, still in time to sign the Declaration with most of the others on August 2. He spoke and wrote little but one can imagine how he might have felt about issues such as religious toleration, as his wife Ann had earlier in her life been expelled from her Quaker congregation for marrying a man outside the faith. For all his success, when Taylor died in 1781, his properties were entangled in multiple legal disputes that when finally resolved in 1799, left his estate insolvent.

Robert Morris, also of Pennsylvania, was only 13 when he immigrated from England in 1747. Rumored to be illegitimate, he had been raised by his maternal grandmother before being sent to Maryland where his father had a tobacco business. At age 15 he was apprenticed to a merchant in Philadelphia, where he worked his way up to his own business career and great financial success. By 1775 he was arguably the richest man in America. When Philadelphia became the capital in the 1790s, Morris’s was the grandest house in the city and it became the official residence of George Washington during his presidency. During the 1770s and ’80s, Morris was a very active delegate both to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, and he became one of only six men to be signers of both documents. Meanwhile he used his financial acumen to help find ways to underwrite the American war effort. When he declined Washington’s offer to become first Secretary of the Treasury, his modern economic ideas were put into execution by another immigrant he recommended for that position, Alexander Hamilton. His elaborate empire of business ventures and land speculation proved overextended when the panic of 1797 hit, and he was ruined. He spent more than three years in debtors’ prison before a new bankruptcy act freed him in 1801. He died five years later, still destitute and dependent on the charity of friends.

Finally, Button Gwinnett of Georgia was another of the signers who came from very modest origins and rose to prominence. He had arrived in America relatively recently. Born in England in 1735 to a Welsh father and English mother, Gwinnett was apprenticed first to a greengrocer, then to an ironmonger. In 1762, aged 27, married with three children, he brought his family to America to make a fresh start. He settled in Georgia, where he tried many ventures both in trade and farming, none very successfully. He became active in politics, gaining election to the Georgia Provincial Assembly and later the state legislature. He represented Georgia in the Continental Congress in 1776, and, in 1777, drafted the Georgia state constitution while also being elected president (governor) of Georgia. But his career was cut short. Within weeks of these achievements, Gwinnett died in a duel he had provoked with his political archrival Lachlan McIntosh. Ironically, McIntosh was also an immigrant, having come from Scotland with his family at age 11.

The talents, hard work, and sacrifices of the eight immigrant signers of the Declaration should also stand for the thousands of other immigrants and children of immigrants who contributed in essential ways to the American founding. From the beginning, welcoming and enfranchising immigrants seems to have been in the DNA of the United States. No wonder audiences always cheer when, in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Lafayette and Hamilton proclaim “Immigrants, we get the job done!” From the beginning, new citizens in the US have been asked to swear loyalty and allegiance not to a person or a party, a religion or a region, but to a set of ideas embedded in a social contract among “we the people,” the US Constitution. By unselfconsciously including immigrants, religious dissenters, and people of radically different backgrounds, the signers of the Declaration had set a precedent and established principles by which succeeding generations could expand their idea of the body politic over time to include women, African Americans, and Indigenous people, as well as the property-less, the under-21s, and other marginalized groups. It has not been an easy or steady progress, but it is a direction that still remains open for us and, one hopes, for our descendants.

James G. Basker is the Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. His books include Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (Yale University Press, 2002; rev. 2005) and American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (Library of America, 2012). His new book, Black Writers of the Founding Era, 1760–1800, is forthcoming from the Library of America in fall 2023.

Sofia Melnychuck is an undergraduate at Harvard University and an intern in the Education Department at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.