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For You They Signed: Character Studies from the Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, by Marilyn Boyer, 2009.
A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we have come from, or what we have been about. -- Woodrow Wilson
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.
Did George Washington chop down a cherry tree and then not lie about it? Generations of American children were told the story. Parson Weems’s biography of Washington, the book in which the story first appeared, went through eighty two known editions its first fifty years. Although there is no hard evidence that the incident occurred, we do know that George’s father, Augustine Washington taught George himself for his first eleven years and that he stressed honesty and obedience.
American biographers of the 19th Century not only told the stories of the founders, usually true ones, but they also drew out the moral lessons of history and heroes for the edification of the readers. Writing from a self-consciously Christian culture, the historians saw the hand of God in their own country’s past and present, and they wanted the future generations to understand the same vision. Thus, the lessons of the past were cast in the best known ethical forms-- honesty, courage, respect, and other virtues of moral character. John Adams suggested the Constitution itself was “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.” The keepers of the American heritage intended to help retain that morality and religion.
In the best traditions of earlier American biographers, Marilyn Boyer has written composite biographies of the signers of The Declaration of Independence, at once retelling their stories from childhood to death but also drawing from their lives illustrations of exemplary moral character that should speak to the modern world. She traces each man’s family heritage, education, public service and personal beliefs, and weaves those details together in an easily readable narrative. Boyer expands our understanding of those founders through highlighted vignettes alongside the main text.
Unique features at the end of each chapter are the “Questions for Discussion,” some of which are extensive if the signer was particularly well known or had a long career in public service. Benjamin Rush, for instance, elicits forty questions and John Adam, thirty four. The book is in a large format with handsome black and white illustrations by Linda Linder and, according to the author, is designed to be used in any of five ways: “a year’s worth of family devotional character studies, a complete resource for a single mom, a practical, life-changing self-study, a group study designed to make a difference or inspirational general reading.”
We see the life of John Hancock where “charity was the common business of his life. Hundreds of families, from his private benevolence, received their daily bread; and there is, perhaps, no individual mentioned in history, who has expended a more ample fortune in promoting the liberties of his country.” The lesser known signer from New York, Welsh-born Francis Lewis, as all the signers did, pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor. After watching the family property be destroyed and stolen by the British, Lewis’s aged wife was taken prisoner and confined in an unheated prison for months and died soon after release. After serving in Congress, Lewis returned to a burned down home and loss of wife and fortune. He survived to see independence but the cost was heavy. The Virginian George Wythe was described by Thomas Jefferson:
No man ever left behind him a character more venerated than George Wythe. His virtue was of the purest kind; his integrity inflexible, and his justice exact; of warm patriotism, and devoted as he was to liberty, and the natural and equal rights of men, he might truly be called the Cato of his country; without the avarice of the Roman; for a more disinterested person never lived.
Jefferson went on to site Wythe’s temperance, unaffected modesty, chaste language, etc. Such marvelous quotes and much more are found in this remarkable account. For us they signed, with the burden of treason attached to their signatures. They were men of their times but they saw far into the future and were willing to risk all for their children and their children’s children. The fifty six signers collectively had more than three hundred fifty children; their numerous descendents today enjoy the liberty won with so much difficulty and sacrifice. This ambitious book returns the signers of the Declaration of Independence to a place of prominence in the flow of American history, encouraging the reader to see the hand of God’s Providence in the founding of the United States.
Bill Potter
Alpharetta, Georgia
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