Signing Their Rights Away (5 page)

But Gorham wasn’t completely confident that the country could
reach a better way to govern via the people—so, as a backup plan, he wrote to Prince Henry of Prussia to ask if he would be interested in serving as king of the United States. This proposal was not nearly as strange as it might seem; in formulating a government for a new nation, it was only natural to look to Europe as a model. But the prince declined, and his close friend Friederich von Steuben quipped, “As far as I know the prince, he would never think of crossing the ocean to be your master. I wrote to him a good while ago what kind of fellows you are; he would not have the patience to stay three days among you.”

The next year, when Gorham arrived in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, his accomplishments and popularity had preceded him. He was elected chairman of the Committee of the Whole, essentially making him the number two man, behind George Washington, who was president of the convention. It’s believed that Gorham had a perfect attendance record throughout the convention and offered his opinion on a variety of subjects. He suggested a six-year term limit for senators and opposed Gouverneur Morris’s insistence that only property owners should have voting rights. “The people have been long accustomed to this right in various parts of America,” Gorham said, “and will never allow it to be abridged. We must consult their rooted prejudices if we expect their concurrence in our propositions.”

Though he hailed from the fourth most populous colony, Gorham expressed concern that the smaller states might get lost in the representation shuffle. He was in favor of redrawing state lines so that populations would be spread evenly among the colonies, a zany idea that didn’t gain much traction among his fellow signers.

Perhaps Gorham’s most significant contribution came on the last day of the convention, when he proposed increasing the number of representatives in the House to 1 for every 30,000 citizens (instead of 1 for every 40,000, the figure then under consideration). Before the motion could be debated, the usually reticent George Washington voiced his support—and when George talked, people listened. This change became the very last alteration made to the
Constitution before the delegates added their signatures. (If only Gorham could see America now: the average population in a congressional district has ballooned from 30,000 to 700,000.)

After the Constitution was signed, Gorham urged his colleagues back in his home state to ratify the new document. The idea of an enlarged and empowered central government was a hard sell in Massachusetts, that hotbed of revolution. The vote passed by an extremely narrow margin, and Gorham’s hopes of becoming a representative in the new government were dashed. Instead, the state chose Declaration of Independence signer Elbridge Gerry, a delegate who attended the Constitutional Convention but ultimately refused to sign the document.

It was the beginning of Gorham’s spectacular decline. Like many of his cosigners, Gorham saw great promise (and the possibility of great wealth) in land speculation. He and his business partner, Oliver Phelps, invested in six million acres in an area of western New York that had been ceded to Massachusetts. They bought the parcel for the bargain-basement price of roughly £300,000 (about $1 million), payable in three installments. But their estimated costs were based on the 1787 value of Massachusetts “scrip,” a certificate that was exchangeable for cash at a later date.

Unfortunately for Gorham, the new government guidelines established by the Constitution were about to transform the economy. As Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton worked to establish a central financial system (and pay off the country’s old debts), the value of old securities rose dramatically. Gorham and his partner now owed roughly four times as much on their land contract as they’d originally estimated. The two men went bust, as did countless others in similar situations.

Just a few short years later, in 1796, Gorham died from “apoplexy,” or most likely a stroke. You can visit his grave in Charlestown, the Boston neighborhood that is also home to the end of the Freedom Trail, Bunker Hill, and the USS
Constitution
.

The Signer Who Always Ran (and Never Won)

BORN
: March 24, 1755

DIED
: April 29, 1827

AGE AT SIGNING
: 32

PROFESSION
: Lawyer

BURIED
: Grace Episcopal Churchyard, Jamaica, Queens, New York

Rufus King was the Ralph Nader of early American politics—every few years he would run for vice president or president, and every time he would lose. But these ambitions didn’t surface until late in his life, long after he’d helped shape the United States Constitution.

When King was born in 1755, his coastal hometown of Scarborough was part of Massachusetts (it’s now a part of Maine). He was the son of a wealthy merchant, a staunch Tory who had defended the Stamp Act. In 1766 local patriots ransacked the family’s home, and in 1774 they intimidated the elder King at his house. One historian claims that this event led to the old man’s death a year later, in 1775, and instilled in Rufus a love of order and reason.

At the encouragement of his loving but firm stepmother, young
Rufus worked hard in school and was rewarded with admission to Harvard College. Afterward, he served briefly in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. One morning, during a break in the fighting in Rhode Island, King was sitting at breakfast with his superiors. Cannon fire broke out, and King left his place to investigate. Another soldier, an officer named Henry Sherburne, wandered in for breakfast and took King’s spot at the table. At that moment, a cannonball smashed through the window, landed underneath the table, and crushed every bone in the officer’s foot. His leg had to be amputated, and poor Sherburne wore a wooden limb for the rest of his days. Lucky King later told friends, “If this had happened to me on the field, in active duty, the loss of a leg might have been [bearable], but to be condemned through all my future life to say I lost my leg under a breakfast-table, is too bad.”

By the time he arrived in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, the thirty-two-year-old King was a brainy Massachusetts legislator and Congressman whose gift for speechmaking, the history books would have you believe, allowed him to trade law for politics forever. (Don’t kid yourself: an inheritance from his father—and his marriage to Mary Alsop, a wealthy sixteen-year-old New York socialite—meant he could have underlings manage his business and mercantile interests for the rest of his life.) A handsome five-foot-ten man with a sweet high-toned voice, he outshone his convention colleague Nathaniel Gorham and became the de facto spokesman for the state of Massachusetts and the larger group of so-called big states, which included Pennsylvania and Virginia.

King was a logical man, and he knew a good argument when he heard one. At first, he was adamantly opposed to tinkering with the Articles of Confederation, but fine speeches by other delegates won him over. He became an ardent supporter of a strong Constitution for the sake of the union. In one of his more famous speeches on the convention floor, he argued that the states under the Articles may have seemed appealingly
sovereign
, until you realized that they were
also
deaf
and
dumb:
they could not effectively communicate with foreign nations upon whom they relied for trade. They were also completely vulnerable to attack, because they had only limited resources to raise troops and defend themselves. “A union of the States is a union of the men composing them, from whence a national character result to the whole,” King was quoted as saying by unofficial note taker James Madison.

King detested slavery and lobbied hard before the convention to prevent the spread of “that peculiar institution” in the largely unsettled lands north of Ohio. He argued that slavery distorted national politics; it gave the South an unfair advantage over the North, both in the production of goods and in population. This stance made him unpopular with some southern delegates, but he didn’t care. The nation was divided not so much into big and small states, he insisted, as it was into North and South. Prescient words.

After signing the Constitution, King promoted the document as the nation’s last best hope for a strong union. This message was a hard sell in fiercely independent Massachusetts, but the state finally became the sixth to ratify. King hoped to become one of the first Massachusetts senators under the new Constitution, but his personal life was undermining his political aspirations. Since marrying a New York socialite in 1786, he was spending more and more time away, and his political cronies viewed him as an outsider. In 1788, at the urging of Alexander Hamilton, King extinguished the last relic of his Massachusetts life—his law practice—and moved to New York for good. He immersed himself in politics there and was elected to the Senate a year later (beating out Declaration of Independence signer Lewis Morris, among others).

King was reelected to a second term in 1795 but resigned to accept an invitation by President Washington to be U.S. minister, or ambassador, to Great Britain. He served in this post under the country’s first three presidents, returning in 1803 to launch a series of runs at the executive office. He twice ran for vice president under
his old convention colleague, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The duo lost in 1804 to Thomas Jefferson and George Clinton and, in 1808, to James Madison and George Clinton. In 1816 King launched a third campaign, running for president against James Monroe, but lost that bid as well. (“Lost” is something of an understatement. King and his running mate, John Eager Howard of Maryland, were obliterated, 34 electoral votes to 183.)

But his political career was far from over. King enjoyed two more terms as a senator and offered some stirring remarks on slavery when Missouri was being considered for statehood. The nation was already divided between “slave states” and “free states,” and King waged a valiant battle to make Missouri one of the latter. In a famous 1820 speech (attended by whites and free blacks), he spoke of how he could not comprehend slavery. “I have yet to learn that one man can make a slave of another,” he said. “If one man cannot do so, no number of individuals can have any better right to do it.” These were stirring words, but he lost the fight. Much of the northern land that was part of the Louisiana Purchase, then dubbed the Missouri Territory, would be slave-free, but Missouri ended up a slave state, all courtesy of the political agreement known as the Missouri Compromise.

King bid farewell to the Senate forever when President John Quincy Adams asked him to serve yet again as ambassador to Great Britain. Now seventy years old and slowing down, King happily sailed for London, where he had a merry old time, until he fell ill and asked to be relieved of his duties. Two years later, he died at his estate—King Manor in Queens, New York—at the age of seventy-two. Today that estate is open to visitors.