Featured Book Review by historian Bill Potter
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Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed The Declaration of Independence, by Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese
In the summer of 1776, fifty six men signed their names to a
document that could well have confirmed their reservations with the royal
hangman. Realizing they had everything to lose—family, property, and life
itself, they nonetheless pledged themselves to secession from the mightiest
nation on earth and to the creation of independent states. They were not
fomenting revolution: they had no intention of dethroning the monarch or
replacing their revealed religion with the worship of goddess Reason, as their
French contemporaries would attempt a few years later. But their actions
signified that the ancient laws of their heritage and the new ones that
governed their states would be preserved and passed on to future generations
within The United States of America.
The lives of those signers have long been the subject of study and of myth-making. Historian Benjamin Lossing published a popular book of biographical sketches in 1848 which remains in print today and provides a nice introduction to the signers. As the years passed, however, the stories of those founders of the United States have attracted embellishment, hyperbole, and mythologizing, as the 4th of July speech-makers got carried away with rhetorical flourish.
Unfortunately, even the heroically altered remembrances of the men who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, have all but vanished from the schools and the great celebratory orations have disappeared into the slurry of national apathy and cynicism.
In the year just passed, several good, but very different, books on the signers of America’s birth certificate have found their way to publication. Reading these works could rectify the absence of interest in their past and to inspire Americans to remember the sacrifices and the commitments of the Founders.
In Signing Their Lives Away, Kiernan and D’Agnese, set a course to tell each signer’s story, stripped of myth but in a witty, and occasionally, hilarious style. The authors use judicious and revealing quotes from the signers themselves, observations that highlight their quirks and petty jealousies and that breathe new life into the biographies of men long miscast as boring intellectuals or self-centered poltroons.
For instance, the South Carolina signers were all young, arrogant and hot-headed though a couple matured some after being captured by the British in the siege of Charleston. A representative from Delaware, who happened to be physically deformed, saved the day at the convention by riding hell-bent for leather through rain and mud to Philadelphia. A New Jersey delegate was a world-renowned Scottish preacher and college president whose oldest son was killed in battle serving under George Washington. A Georgia signer, and soon to be governor of the state, was a man with a bad temper who got himself killed in an ill-advised duel with the General in command of Georgia’s Patriot army. Governor Button Gwinett, also a notorious debtor, could never have foreseen that his ever so rare signature, on any document, fetches six figures at auction in the Twenty first century.
Plain speaking John Adams of Massachusetts described fellow-delegate, Virginian Benjamin Harrison, as “an indolent, luxurious, heavy gentleman, of no use in Congress or committee, but a great embarrassment to both.” Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, with a different take on the affable Harrison said that “He had strong state prejudices and was very hostile to the leading characters of the New England States.” [Adams perhaps?], “in private life he preferred pleasure and convivial company to business of all kinds . . .He was upon the whole a useful member of Congress, sincerely devoted to the welfare of his country.”
Adams, never a fan of swaggering and pretense noted also, that Arthur Middleton of South Carolina had “little information and less argument; in rudeness and sarcasm his forte lay; and he played off his artillery without reserve.” Little did John Adams realize that Middleton’s grandsons would play off bigger guns at Fort Sumter eighty five years later, and aimed at Adam’s kinfolk.
In a day when some high school textbooks only give a paragraph to George Washington and not one word concerning the signers of the Declaration of Independence, except (occasionally) Thomas Jefferson, it is good to acquaint ourselves with the other men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to declare their states free and independent. They were men with wives and children (Carter Braxton had eighteen children) and fortunes to lose (Charles Carrol of Carrolton had seventy thousand acres of land and hundreds of slaves). The men of the Continental Congress all have a story to tell, and Signing Their Lives Away enlightens us in short but powerful vignettes.
To the representatives in Philadelphia, their most precious possession was “sacred honor.” They were willing to stake their good name, their reputation, their moral character before that generation, and all who came after, on the rightness of defending liberty. History has vindicated their decision as the right one. Their legacy however doesn’t pass automatically to the next generation. Perhaps Patrick Henry said it best: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction, we didn’t pass it along to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on to them to do the same.”
Bill Potter
Alpharetta, Georgia
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