Signing Their Rights Away (19 page)

Read served as one of his state’s first two senators in the new government he played such a significant part in framing. He was a staunch Federalist and supporter of Alexander Hamilton’s national finance system. He left Congress in 1793 and served as chief justice of Delaware’s supreme court. Read died in New Castle at age sixty-five, his life and efforts having helped little Delaware earn the big rep as the very first state.

The Signer Who Trusted No One

BORN
: 1747

DIED
: Marh 30, 1812

AGE AT SIGNING
: About 40

PROFESSION
: Lawyer, judge

BURIED
: Masonic Home Cemetery, Christiana, Delaware

Gunning Bedford Jr.’s story is filled with mysterious gaps. No one knows his birthday. His early years are a blur. And details of his military record—if indeed he even served in the Revolutionary War—are so spotty that military biographers tend to omit him entirely from their catalog of soldier-signers. Luckily for us, however, he springs most vividly to life in the history of the Constitutional Convention, where his rants crystallized the deepest fears of all the delegates.

This oversized, tempestuous delegate was born in Philadelphia, the son of an architect. Young Gunning didn’t enter college until he was twenty, which made him the old man on campus in Princeton, New Jersey. One of his roomies was James Madison, the future president and father of the U.S. Constitution. By the time he graduated, the affable, sociable Gunning had acquired a wife, Jane Ballaroux
Parker, who brought the couple’s first child to hear Bedford’s valedictorian speech in 1771.

Bedford studied law in Philadelphia but moved to Dover, Delaware, to practice in 1779; eventually the family moved to a townhouse in Wilmington. No one has ever found records of Bedford’s service during the Revolutionary War, but his daughter described him in her will as an aide-de-camp to Washington; she bequeathed to the Smithsonian a pair of pistols, which she said the good general had given her father as protection during a secret mission from Trenton to New York. After the war, Bedford was elected to the Continental Congress and, shortly after, began working as attorney general for Delaware.

By the time he showed up in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, Bedford was all too aware of the current government’s deficiencies. And since Rhode Island had refused to send delegates to the convention, he and his fellow Delawareans were representing the single smallest state. Bedford spoke often and had a penchant for making impolitic statements; historians have described him as impulsive, impetuous, rash, agitated, and quick to temper.

In one early-June session, he erupted, accusing the big states of “crushing” the others or having a “monstrous influence” on matters. On the last day of the month, a sweltering Saturday, when the small states had presented their compromise, the big-state delegates still clung stubbornly to an all-or-nothing position: the Senate must also be based on a proportion of the population. Bedford leapt to his feet and denounced the big states, saving his sternest condemnation for the three southernmost states, the Carolinas and Georgia, which didn’t have huge populations but were nevertheless siding with the big states in anticipation that one day they, too, would be big. His double chins flapping in the heat, Bedford then railed at all the big states in general: “
I do not, gentlemen, trust you!
If you possess the power, the abuse of it could not be checked.… The small states can never agree to the Virginia Plan … Is it come to this, then, that the sword must decide this controversy? Will you crush the small states,
must they be left unmolested? Sooner than be ruined,
there are foreign powers who will take us by the hand!
”

With these words, Bedford had summarized the profound underlying fear of the convention: the attendees were terrified of being dominated and controlled by their fellow states. Working together they had shucked off a monarch. Who in their right mind would now voluntarily sign away their rights to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Virginia? Bedford’s reference to the sword was an all-too-prescient suggestion of all-out civil war. But his veiled threat that the small states would ally themselves with foreign powers was as childishly irrational as it was unlikely. And yet, his words echoed in the delegates’ minds when they adjourned for Sunday. Upon returning for a vote on Monday, Georgia sided with the small states, and for the first time the entire delegation realized that in order to save the union the small states had to get their way on
something
. They were far from finished, but the logjam had been broken.

The other delegates asked Bedford to sit on the committee that hammered out the details of the Great Compromise. Either they respected his opinions or they hoped to buy his silence by allowing him to have input on this critical matter. Once the idea of a bicameral legislature was set in stone, Bedford fought off any attempts to limit its power. “Mr. Bedford was opposed to every check on the Legislative,” James Madison wrote at one point, practically sighing with exhaustion over his quill. Bedford signed the Constitution and went home to promote it at his state’s ratifying convention.

Bedford was passed over for the House and Senate in the new Congress but was picked by George Washington to be the first U.S. district judge for Delaware, a bench he occupied till the end of his days. He and his wife bought a 250-acre farm outside Wilmington, where they derived a nice income from crops and enjoyed some town and country socializing. He was active in education, served as the first president of Wilmington College, and became an abolitionist. Never regarded as a brilliant or profound jurist, the
convention’s corpulent hothead mellowed into an able judge of moderate talents. He died in the spring of 1812, when he was sixty-five years old. He was buried in a Presbyterian churchyard, but his body was later moved to a Masonic cemetery, where he is a prominent resident. The bullet-shaped monument over his grave hints at his size, proclaiming, “His form was goodly.”

The Signer Who Never Signed

BORN
: November 8, 1732

DIED
: February 14, 1808

AGE AT SIGNING
: 54

PROFESSION
: Lawyer

BURIED
: Friends Burial Ground, Wilmington, Delaware

He supported the revolutionary cause but was opposed to the Declaration of Independence. He sought a peaceful resolution to the colonies’ troubles with Britain yet joined the militia. He hailed from teeny-tiny Delaware but supported nationalist policies that favored his larger neighbors. At first blush, John Dickinson appears to be all over the map on issues of independence and government—but the reality is much simpler: throughout his life, Dickinson was true to his ideals and his countrymen, and he was always willing to do what was asked by his country, including compromise.

Born in Maryland to a fairly wealthy landowner, Dickinson was raised in a Quaker family; his father was a judge. Young John grew up on an estate, surrounded by books and educated by tutors. After clerking in a law office, he studied law at Middle Temple in London, a popular choice for well-educated men of the day (and the
alma mater of more than a few signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution).