Authors: Denise Kiernan

Signing Their Rights Away (11 page)

The Signer Who Stole $18,000 from Congress

BORN
: October 16, 1760

DIED
: October 9, 1824

AGE AT SIGNING
: 26

PROFESSION
: Lawyer, politician

BURIED
: St. John’s Episcopal Church, Elizabeth, New Jersey

At the time of the nation’s founding, human life could be brutally short. The medications that today allow us to manage conditions like heart disease and diabetes simply didn’t exist. The common cold could be a killer. Gout was rampant. And the smallest scrape or cut might lead to an amputation. Knowing that life was precious, people in revolutionary America matured quickly and stepped into adult roles while still very young. All of which helps explain how a New Jersey delegate named Jonathan Dayton came to sign the U.S. Constitution at the tender age of twenty-six.

The youngest signer was born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, the son of a storekeeper and local politician. At the time of the Revolutionary
War he was studying at the future Princeton University but entered the Continental Army with his father before he could finish his studies. He fought throughout the northeast, from Canada to Pennsylvania, and in 1780 was captured, along with his uncle, during a skirmish in his home state. The pair was released in a prisoner exchange the next year. Young Captain Dayton went on to fight in a famed bayonet attack on Redoubt 10 in Yorktown under the command of his old schoolmate Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette. After the war, Dayton became a lawyer and entered local politics. He married Susannah Williamson, with whom he had two children.

In 1787, the New Jersey legislature chose his father, Elias Dayton, to attend the Constitutional Convention. The elder Dayton didn’t want to go, so instead he sent his son. Rumor has it that dad sent junior to Philadelphia to keep him away from the bad influences of misbehaving friends. And with his young son out from under, goes the theory, Papa Elias would be able to focus on running the family business.

Thus, says one historian, Dayton’s presence at the convention was regarded as something of an insult to the profound legal thinkers present. One of the more charitable delegates noted that Dayton was “little known; having no other merit than to be the son of a good patriot.” Others were more direct, including Georgia delegate William Pierce, who claimed, “There is an impetuosity in his temper that is injurious to him.”

In Dayton’s defense, plenty of evidence suggests that he was an active member of the convention. According to James Madison’s copious notes, Dayton angrily defended the right of small states to an equal say in their future government: “He considered the system on the table [the Virginia Plan] as a novelty, an amphibious monster; and was persuaded that it would never be received by the people.” To no one’s surprise, Dayton supported William Paterson’s New Jersey Plan, but he ultimately came around to the Great Compromise. He joined fellow delegates in signing the Constitution, went home to help push through ratification, and embarked on a promising career that would see him
become one of New Jersey’s first U.S. representatives and senators. He had been elected Speaker of the House by the age of thirty-four.

Like many a rising star, Dayton had a weakness: investing in real estate and other astounding speculative ventures. He was “notorious from Boston to Georgia,” wrote one historian who studied Dayton’s wheeling and dealing. “The deeds of other men in Congress were scarcely known beyond the circle of their respective states, but the speculations of this man have rung throughout the western world.” A month after the convention, Dayton teamed up with a syndicate of other men to buy up tremendous amounts of land—one million acres—on the Miami River in Ohio. The plan was to lure New Jersey farmers out west and sell them the land at a profit. (Dayton, Ohio, was named by its first settlers in his honor.) But when the syndicate ran into trouble paying back the borrowed money, Dayton sweet-talked creditors into more favorable terms. Unlike fellow signers Robert Morris and James Wilson, he managed to avoid debtor’s prison.

Still, his decline continued. He next invested $18,000 worth of congressional cash into yet another land speculation deal. Although Congress tracked down the money and Dayton returned it, his reputation was forever tarnished. Few people trusted him—except the man who would lead to his downfall.

Aaron Burr befriended Dayton when the two were students at Princeton. The friendship blossomed when Burr became vice president under Thomas Jefferson, but then events took an outrageous turn. Burr allegedly lured Dayton into a strange scheme to invade Spanish-held lands in the western part of the continent. The motives for the plot are sketchy even today; many speculate that Burr wanted to carve out his own mini-empire in the west. Whatever the reason, Dayton did lend his friend some money, creating a financial paper trail that proved to be his undoing. (It’s not clear if he intended to participate in Burr’s plan.)

When Thomas Jefferson got wind of the scheme, he ordered the
capture of all alleged conspirators. Dayton was arrested for treason in 1807 and posted bail but was never brought to trial. Burr stood trial. Despite Jefferson’s angry exhortations to Chief Justice John Marshall to convict, Burr was found not guilty.

Yet, guilt by association was enough to ruin Dayton’s already tarnished political career. He continued to serve in the New Jersey legislature but never again stepped foot onto the national stage. He became something of a pathetic figure later in life. Active in various veteran organizations, he was known for wearing tricorn hats and colonial dress long after they’d gone out of style. “The last of the cocked hats,” people called him.

When the dear old Marquis de Lafayette returned to the United States at the invitation of President James Monroe for a tour of the nation he’d helped liberate, Dayton was high on the list of men who feted him. Incessant carousing exhausted Dayton and wrecked his health. He died in 1824, just before his sixty-fourth birthday. He is buried in the churchyard of St. John’s Church in Elizabeth, but you’ll never find his plot there. When the church was rebuilt in 1860, elders saw fit to erect the new structure right over his grave.