Signing Their Rights Away (10 page)

Later Brearley embraced the principles of the Great Compromise, though he insisted on capping the size of the House at sixty-five members. He got his wish, but not for long; as time passed and
the nation’s population increased, more states and more people necessitated more representatives. By 1929, the House had grown to 435 members—and has remained at that number ever since, despite not even coming close to the minimum representational standards set out by the framers in 1787. (Today, movements in the United States seek to return to the ratio of 1 representative per 30,000 citizens first outlined in 1787. Among other obstacles, the Capitol would require a serious overhaul to accommodate all those people. New York City alone would require 267 representatives!)

Brearley happily signed the Constitution and was president of the state ratification convention in New Jersey. In addition to continuing his legal practice, he acted as grand master of the New Jersey Masons, found time to help work on the Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church, and served as the state vice president of the Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans organization founded after the Revolutionary War. It is named for the Roman Cincinnatus, a farmer who fought bravely but famously returned home after battles to tend his fields, passing up greater power and spoils of war. George Washington was regarded as the Cincinnatus of the West and served as the group’s first president-general. The organization still exists today.

Washington appointed Brearley the U.S. district judge of New Jersey in 1789, a post he held for less than a year before dying, at age forty-five. If you visit Trenton, you can stop by to see the memorial dedicated to Brearley at the Grand Lodge of Masons before heading to St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, where the famed framer is buried.

The Son of a Door-to-Door Salesman

BORN
: December 24, 1745

DIED
: September 9, 1806

AGE AT SIGNING
: 42

PROFESSION
: Lawyer, judge

BURIED
: Albany Rural Cemetery, Menands, New York

The framers of the U.S. Constitution represented the nation’s elite—wealthy, privileged men who had much to gain from the creation of a strong, stable government. Only a handful came from modest backgrounds, and William Paterson was among them. The son of a peddler who sold pots and pans going door to door, he would one day rise to become a governor, a senator, and a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Paterson’s parents emigrated from northern Ireland to America a few years after he was born, eventually settling in Princeton (literally across the street from the famous college, which was then in its
infancy). His parents saved enough to send their first-born son to the school, and he did them proud by staying long enough to acquire a master’s degree. He went on to study law with Richard Stockton, a local man of culture who would one day sign the Declaration of Independence. Young Paterson probably longed to move to Philadelphia, New York, or even Trenton, but unlike his wealthy friends at school, he didn’t have the connections to establish himself in a large city. And so he kept to Princeton’s farm country; he ended up serving on his colony’s supreme court while also running a law practice and working for his father. (Lawyers had yet to pioneer billing software and the $250 hourly rate and so had to supplement their incomes in all sorts of ways.)

Paterson grew into a diminutive, painfully bookish man with a bulbous nose and an aversion for romantic attachments, developing a reputation for being an uptight, friendless workaholic. He disowned family members who borrowed money and didn’t repay, censured male friends who married women pregnant with their children, and came down hard in his court judgments on fornicators and debtors. From the bench he railed against publick houses, billiards, and booze. He seemed to fear that society would descend into anarchy unless certain people—namely, himself—imposed order.

And like many people who feel the same, Paterson found his way into politics.

He became immersed in rebel activity in the 1770s, just as the colonies were heating up, and served on the committee that arrested New Jersey’s royal governor, William Franklin. Now an attorney general in the new patriot government, Paterson refused to serve in the Continental Congress, claiming he was too busy. Less-charitable historians say that he didn’t want to leave New Jersey because—finally—he was making decent money.

In his thirties, Paterson found love not once, but twice. His first romance inspired him to spend long hours writing love letters to his dear Cornelia Bell. In 1779, he installed his new bride in a posh
four-hundred-acre estate in New Jersey that had been swiped from a loyalist family and snapped up by Paterson in a bargain sale. But their love would be short-lived, for Cornelia died just four years after their wedding day. But soon he married Euphemia White, one of his wife’s girlfriends.

In 1786, Paterson attended the Annapolis Convention and shared concerns that the Articles of Confederation must be revised. This time around, nothing would keep the older, more confident, well-heeled lawyer from going to Philadelphia. Influential men around the nation were already familiar with his writings, political work, and court decisions, and the forty-one-year-old quickly became the voice of the New Jersey delegation and de facto spokesman for so-called small states fearful of being robbed of both their rights and their tax money by their larger neighbors. Early on, Paterson insisted that accepting Virginia’s plan for representation based on population was tantamount to tyranny and despotism. He would not be a party to it. He would fight it on the convention floor and do all he could to demolish the measure at home. Instead, Paterson and his small-state confreres presented the New Jersey Plan, which preserved the one state–one vote setup of the Articles of Confederation and merely tacked on a chief executive, to be chosen by that Congress, and a court to settle disputes.

It was a tight, law-and-order plan from a tight, law-and-order man. The small states loved it, because it appeared to preserve the equal voting rights they already enjoyed under the Confederation. The big states hated it, because it required states to be taxed according to their populations:
Oh, so we’ll kick in more money, but you’ll have equal say over how it’s spent? We think not!
The delegates fought over the warring plans for weeks, until Roger Sherman introduced the Great Compromise.

Delighted that the power of the big states would be checked, Paterson left the convention at the end of July 1787 to attend to various business matters. He returned to sign the finished Constitution and
supported its ratification. (Though he signed the document “Paterson,” his name is sometimes spelled with two
T
s.)

Despite serving as one of New Jersey’s first senators, Paterson claimed to hate public life. When his convention colleague William Livingston died in office, he was sworn in as the second governor and, over the next eight years, revised many of the state’s laws. He approved the creation of a town named Paterson, which Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s new secretary of the Treasury, hoped to build into the country’s most powerful manufacturing center by harnessing the power of the city’s waterfalls. (The results were mixed, and recent years have not been kind to Paterson the place; today, a large percentage of the city’s population lives below the poverty line.)

In 1793, Paterson left the governorship to serve as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. While performing his circuit-court duties, he famously instructed a jury to render a guilty verdict and then ordered the execution of the ringleaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, an early-1790s uprising against a despised whiskey tax. Washington pardoned the men, thinking Paterson’s judgment too harsh; indeed, modern historians call the decision “indefensible.” The hard-as-nails judge later declined Washington’s invitation to serve as Secretary of State.

In 1803, Paterson was gravely injured when a team of horses went wild and sent his carriage toppling over. He tried to continue his job on the bench, but, with his health shattered, he finally had to step down. He died at the age of sixty while visiting his daughter in upstate New York.