Signing Their Rights Away (18 page)

When Morris returned to the United States, he moved into Morrisania, his family’s vast estate. He was a senator for the state of New York in 1800, serving until 1803. A staunch Federalist, he campaigned in favor of John Adams and against Thomas Jefferson in the testy election of 1800. He feared mob rule and thought government posts should be reserved for those with money and family clout.

As he aged, Morris suffered from gout and other ailments, but the peg-legged playboy still had a few tricks up his sleeves. On Christmas Day 1809, he shocked his family and friends by announcing that he was getting married—and then called in a preacher and his fiancée and got hitched on the spot! His bride was Anne “Nancy” Cary Randolph, a woman with a checkered past from a prominent Virginia family. At age eighteen, she had given birth to the baby of her brother-in-law Richard, who was later charged with murdering the child. The great patriot Patrick Henry defended the pair, and they were acquitted. But the scandal ruined Anne’s reputation as well as her chances of landing a husband, and so she fled north, where she eventually ended up working as a housekeeper in Morris’s house. Their marriage was apparently a happy one. They had a son, who was burdened with his father’s name—Gouverneur II—but was bolstered by his father’s wealth. Morris had become a dad at sixty-one.

In the last years of his life, Morris worked on the Erie Canal and became president of the New-York Historical Society. (His wooden leg is on display there, in the same case as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s polio brace.) Just three years after the birth of his son, Morris died at Morrisania in the same room in which he was born. His grave can be visited today, an underground vault under an oasis of green in the urban sprawl of the Bronx.

VII. Delaware

The Signer Who Signed Twice

BORN
: September 18, 1733

DIED
: September 21, 1798

AGE AT SIGNING
: 53

PROFESSION
: Lawyer

BURIED
: Immanuel Episcopal Churchyard, New Castle, Delaware

George Read is one of only six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and, on both occasions, he was something of an exception. When he put his pen to the Declaration, he was the only signer who had voted
against
independence on July 2, 1776. And when he signed the Constitution, he did so twice—the first time for himself, and the second for a friend.

Born in Maryland, Read and his family moved to Delaware when he was a child. He later journeyed to nearby Philadelphia to study law in the office of John Moland, the same office in which his friend and fellow signer John Dickinson learned his trade. Eventually Read knew enough to set out on his own, and he opened his own practice
in New Castle, Delaware. There he married Gertrude Ross Till, the widowed sister of soon-to-be fellow Declaration signer George Ross, and the couple got to work making their family of five children. Read was a stand-up guy, by all accounts, and in 1763 was working for the Crown as attorney general of the Three Lower Counties, as Delaware was then known. But in 1765, his role in public life changed. That was the year of the Stamp Tax, the notorious British levy on all paper documents and products, which Read protested. He resigned his post as attorney general and became a member of the Delaware legislature.

When Read attended the first and second Continental Congresses, he wasn’t your typical tar-and-feather patriot. Yes, he was against the taxes the British kept lobbing across the pond. And yes, he was all for punitively reducing British goods. He even raised money to help Boston citizens when they were reeling from the closing of their port (punishment for the famous Tea Party). But like his friend and fellow signer John Dickinson, Read desired neither war nor independence—at least not yet. On the contrary, Read hoped that the colonies and Mother England would find some way to kiss and make up.

Alas, that was not to be. But Read, a principled kind of guy, voted his conscience on July 2, 1776. And his conscience said
no
—the colonies should not break with Britain. It was a unique position: there were plenty of waffling congressmen who abstained from the vote or who abstained and later signed it. Read was alone in that he voted “no” and then proceeded to sign the treasonous Declaration of Independence anyway. (Years later, Read’s grandson wrote a book attempting to explain his grandpa’s motivation. Simply put, Read thought that taking on the Crown was too risky; Britain was a world superpower, and the colonies barely had enough money to buy ammunition for their small, inexperienced military. Hard to argue with that.)

But the majority had spoken, and Read respected their wishes—he signed the Declaration along with the rest of them. Pennsylvania
delegate Joseph Galloway said Read did so “with a rope about his neck.” Read quipped, “I know the risk, and am prepared for all consequences.”

He supported the war effort wholeheartedly. Back in Delaware, he chaired the committee to draft the Delaware Constitution and was also vice president (assistant governor) of the state. Along the way, he experienced an up-close-and-personal scare at the hands of the enemy. When Governor John McKinly was captured by the British, assistant governor Read was called to take over. While heading south from Philadelphia with his family, Read attempted to cross the Delaware River, but their small boat ran aground in sight of a British ship. When the Redcoats descended, quick-thinking Read told them he was just a local guy taking his wife and kids home. The soldiers believed the ruse and even helped the treasonous colonial governor to shore.

Read served until 1778, and shortly after his health began to decline. He resigned from his public activities for a spell but returned in 1782 as a judge of the court of appeals in admiralty cases. When the Annapolis Convention came around, Read was there. He didn’t want the Articles of Confederation to be altered; he wanted them scrapped, period. Anything less, Madison quoted him as saying, “would be like putting new cloth on an old garment.”

Read brought this same passion to the Constitutional Convention, where he was a major force for the rights of small states. Since Rhode Island played hooky at the gathering, Read and the other Delaware delegates were representing the smallest state. Although he was a straightforward man who believed in speaking his mind, he was not exactly celebrated for his off-the-cuff speaking skills. Still, anyone who underestimated Read didn’t do so for long. He was a respected delegate, one of the few who had also signed the Declaration of Independence, and his distrust of large states had been brewing for a long time. He’d had a hand in shaping Delaware’s instructions for the convention delegates, which included a mandate not to give up the “one state, one vote” right that had been in the Articles of Confederation. So when Madison proposed, and
Gouverneur Morris seconded, the idea of representation based on population, Read told them to table the conversation or Delaware would “retire from the Convention.” It was only May 30, just two weeks into the proceedings, and already a small state was threatening to hit the road. Read’s wishes were respected, and the representation discussion was postponed.

Read said he favored the United States “doing away with the states altogether, and uniting them all into one society.” So, like New Jersey’s David Brearley, he was ready to erase boundaries and redraw the national map. Read had equally strong feelings about paper money and was vehemently opposed to giving Congress the power to “emit bills,” or print paper money. Read said those words had to go, and, if they did not, it “would be as alarming as the mark of the Beast in Revelations.” His point: paper money was intrinsically worthless. Why should one man’s paper money be valued the same as another man’s gold? The line was removed.

When all was said and done, Delaware supported the Great Compromise, which gave small states equal representation in the Senate. And so Read went on to sign—the first to do so for what would become the so-called First State—and then some. When his old pal John Dickinson, a Quaker lawyer and gentleman farmer, was forced by illness to leave before the signing ceremony, he instructed Read to sign in his place. That made Read the only delegate to sign the Constitution twice. Delaware went on to become the first state to ratify.