Signing Their Rights Away Read online

  Considering how he’d been maltreated by family inheritance, you’d think Butler would’ve been kind to his own progeny. But no. Instead, he became an odd and controlling old gent. He cut some of his children out of his will and promised to reward a son-in-law who named his own son Pierce Butler. That grandson married a British actress who was so horrified by the slavery practices she witnessed that she filed for divorce and published a tell-all book about her horrific experience in Georgia. Her husband squandered his fortune and was forced to sell his slaves in what was the largest human auction in U.S. history.

  Upon his death in 1822, at age seventy-seven, Butler was buried just outside the walls of Christ Church in Philadelphia. And thus the soldier who liked America so much settled in for the long haul.

  XII. Georgia

  The Signer Who Lived the American Dream

  BORN: June 8, 1748

  DIED: July 16, 1828

  AGE AT SIGNING: 39

  PROFESSION: Farmer, lawyer

  BURIED: St Paul’s Episcopal Church, Augusta, Georgia

  An undereducated frontier farm boy who went on to become a lawyer and a signer of the Constitution, William Few—perhaps more than any of the other signers—best exemplified the American Dream, and that at a time when America was just getting started.

  Born on a family farm in Baltimore County, Maryland, Few came from humble beginnings. His father was a Quaker farmer, his mother a Catholic; later, Few would align himself with the Methodist faith. He received little proper schooling and certainly no money to send him off to be educated, as other prosperous planters often did for their children. He once described an early experience at a country school as being fraught with “terror and anxiety,” primarily because of a teacher he abhorred.

  When Few was about ten years old, the family moved to North Carolina in hopes of finding better weather and, with it, more productive crops. The life of a frontier farmer was a difficult one, and Few, like many young men, soon found himself learning to work the land. His second year of schooling was his last and, by his own account, very enjoyable. He was just twelve years old, but the schoolmaster-for-hire with whom he studied was to his liking. This relationship gave Few a love of reading and learning that would shape the rest of his life.

  At age sixteen, Few and his family moved again, this time to the small town of Hillsborough. By then, Few was teaching himself, reading every book he could get his hands on and visiting the courthouse to listen to arguments. When he was nineteen years old, his father gave him his own plot of land to work. Even then, he took a book with him when it was time to plow, occasionally taking a break to read during the long days in the fields.

  The North Carolina frontier became a hotbed of revolution that preceded the war against the British. The Regulator movement was taking hold, pitting farmers against landed gentry or other gentlemen of the seaboard who were viewed as privileged folk in control of all the state’s money and power. Their appointees were corrupt officials and sheriffs who took advantage of the working man at every turn. Few’s family was caught up in the class struggle. The height of the rebellion was the battle of Alamance, where Governor William Tryon, leading the colonial militia, crushed the uprising. Few’s brother was captured and hanged for his part in the fighting. The family farm was destroyed and Few’s father, besieged by creditors, eventually fled to Georgia; Few stayed behind to clean up his family’s affairs, providing the young man with even more experience—some of it less than pleasant—with courts and lawyers.

  As the Revolutionary War approached, farmers and gentry alike were beginning to unify against the British. Few jumped on the militia bandwagon in Hillsborough and helped form a volunteer company. He attended meetings to understand the nature of the conflict. “I felt the spirit of an American,” he wrote, “and without much investigation of the justice of her cause, I resolved to defend it.”

  He joined his family near Augusta, Georgia, and quickly became known in both business and the patriotic movement. He continued fighting with the militia forces there, eventually earning the rank of lieutenant colonel. His political life began in 1777, when he was elected to the convention in Savannah that created the Georgia constitution. He was appointed to the state’s first legislature, served on the governor’s advisory council, and eventually worked as surveyor general of the state, commissioner of confiscated estates, and senior justice for Richmond County.

  Few also saw fighting in the American Revolution. In 1778, he and his militia brothers fended off British forces on the state’s southeast border as well as in Florida, a trip that proved disastrous for the troops, many of whom fell sick in the swamps. On December 28, 1778, the British took Savannah, then the colony’s capital. In 1780, he was elected to attend Congress (at that time still based in Philadelphia); when he returned to Georgia, he served in the state legislature and focused on his law practice. All his reading and careful attention to court cases paid off; the self-taught lawyer built a successful practice in Augusta. He later wrote that he had “never spent one hour in the office of an attorney to prepare for the business, nor did I know anything of the practice.”

  In 1786, Few returned to Congress, which by that time had relocated to New York City. The next year he was sent to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and so shuttled back and forth between the two cities. Given the circumstances, his attendance was surprisingly steady. He was one of the rare signers who hailed from the farming class—small, subsistence, plow-your-own-fields farming. Of him fellow Georgia delegate William Pierce wrote: “Mr. Few possesses a strong natural Genius, and from application has acquired some knowledge of legal matters; —he practices at the bar of Georgia, and speaks tolerably well in the Legislature. He has been twice a Member of Congress, and served in that capacity with fidelity to his State, and honor to himself.”

  He signed, he ratified, and he served as one of his state’s first senators. His travels to Congress in New York City brought him more than political clout, it brought him personal satisfaction, too: in 1788, he married Catherine Nicholson, a New Yorker. During his term as senator, Few witnessed George Washington being sworn in as president. But over time, he found himself increasingly drawn to the views of Thomas Jefferson and opposed to Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal policies.

  Upon leaving the Senate in 1793, Few moved with his wife to Columbia County, Georgia. He ran for the Senate again in 1796, but lost. He served as a judge for three years before deciding to shake things up and move back to New York City. The relocation may have been because of his wife’s homesickness, but Few did write about the “scorching climate of Georgia” and “accumulating evils of fevers and Negro slavery,” which he regarded as “enemies to humane felicity.” He and Catherine were Big Apple–bound.

  Few’s resume carried weight in that city as well, and the end of his life was peppered with a variety of appointments and official posts. In 1801, he was elected to the New York legislature, where he served three years. He served as inspector of the state prisons for a decade, a state commissioner of loans, director of Manhattan Bank, president of City Bank, and a city alderman to boot.

  When Few finally retired to his country home in Dutchess County at the age of sixty-eight, he estimated his wealth to be worth more than $100,000—not bad for a frontier farm boy born into poverty and deprived of a formal education. He died at the respectable age of eighty at the home of his daughter, in what was then Fishkill-on-Hudson (now Beacon), New York. He was originally buried at the Reformed Dutch Church, but his body was later moved—everybody loves to dig up the signers—to St. Paul’s Church in Augusta, Georgia.

  The Signer Who Pinched Pennies

  BORN: November 22, 1754

  DIED: March 4, 1807

  AGE AT SIGNING: 32

  PROFESSION: Chaplain, lawyer, politician

  BURIED: Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

  Abraham Baldwin, a mousy chaplain-turned-lawyer, was the chief actor in the most dramatic moment of the Constitutio
nal Convention. Though he’d gone to Philadelphia on behalf of Georgia, he was a born-and-bred Connecticut Yankee. But when his big moment arrived, he managed to set aside all of his allegiances and act for the good of the nation.

  To most other delegates, the state of Georgia was something of a mystery. It was sizable enough on a map, but it was populated sparsely with only 25,000 people, most of them settled at the prosperous coast. By rights, Georgia should have been voting en bloc with the small states on the important but divisive issue of congressional representation. But, from day one at the convention, Georgia and the other “small” southern states—North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maryland—debated as though they had a large population the size of, say, Virginia’s. They couldn’t make that claim just yet, but they certainly had plenty of room to grow.

  And new citizens were arriving every day. Then, as now, people moved in droves to the Sun Belt in search of better climates and opportunities. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, none of the Georgia delegates had been born in Georgia. Eleven years later, none of the men representing Georgia at the Constitutional Convention had been born there, either, including Abraham Baldwin.

  Baldwin was the son of an ambitious Connecticut blacksmith and widower who was willing to sink heavily into debt to ensure that his twelve children received a good education. At age thirteen, Abraham, the second son, went to Yale to study theology and, after graduating in 1772, stayed on there to tutor other students. When the Revolutionary War broke out, he endured a miserable winter preaching the gospel to Washington’s troops, who were encamped at Morristown, New Jersey. In his spare time, he read law books. When his serviced ended, Baldwin’s life was at a crossroads. Yale offered him a high-paying job as a professor of theology, but he turned it down, choosing law instead. He practiced a year in Connecticut but felt dissatisfied, stifled. The little state was bursting with lawyers, many better trained than he.

  So Baldwin headed south to Georgia, settling in the rural backwoods near Augusta, where he bonded with the locals. As his father had been, Baldwin’s new neighbors were self-reliant tradesmen and farmers who didn’t have much money. Some of them may have owned a few slaves, but they shared little in common with the flashy owners of the vast plantations near Savannah. Baldwin was elected to the state legislature only three months after arriving in Augusta and, soon after, was chosen for Congress. By the time he was sent to the Constitutional Convention, he’d been a full-fledged Georgia resident for a mere three years.

  Baldwin had no farm or business investments. He did not dabble in land speculation. There was no inheritance waiting for him. (In fact, when his father died, there were only more debts to be paid.) His law practice did fine, but his most regular income seems to have come from jobs in Congress and the state. Since he had so little money, we can only assume that Baldwin lived rather frugally. It probably helped that he had no family of his own to support. He became known for mentoring young men, paying for their schooling and helping them get a start in business. At age thirty-two, he was one of the convention’s three bachelors, along with Nicholas Gilman of New Hampshire and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer of Maryland.

  As a delegate, Baldwin spoke only a few times, but he was chosen for all the important committees. His big moment came after it had been agreed that the number of congressmen in the House would be determined by the population of each state. With that decided, the small states demanded equal representation in the Senate. Every time the topic was discussed, the big states appeared to have more votes. On June 30, Delaware’s Gunning Bedford angrily denounced his colleagues from the more-populous states. The conventioneers adjourned for a Sunday cool-down. When they returned on Monday, July 2, the entire body took a vote: Should the Senate have equal suffrage?

  Down the list of delegates they went, voting north to south. In the end, the decision fell to Baldwin, the last man to cast a vote. In the past, he’d been pushed around by his three fellow Georgia delegates, who always sided with the big states. But two of those men, convention scribe William Pierce and Methodist William Few, were absent, having left to deal with congressional business in New York.

  Georgia delegate and aristocrat William Houstoun voted no, in support of the big states. Then all eyes turned to Baldwin, a man who pinched pennies and managed to pay off his dead father’s debts and send his siblings to school on an income of only $9 a day; a man who had little in common with the fat-cat planters; a man who saw his constituents as the equals of his Yankee forbears; a man who knew that underpopulated, vulnerable Georgia desperately needed the protection of a strong government.

  Baldwin voted yes.

  Georgia was tied, and thus voided. For the first time, the votes of the big and the small states were even, and thus the two sides were equal in the eyes of the convention.

  It was as if the scales had fallen from everyone’s eyes. The delegates now realized that, for the sake of the union, they had to compromise. The small states must have their way on something, or there would be no true United States of America. The deadlock was finally broken.

  After the convention, Baldwin served as his state’s representative to Congress. His levelheadedness was prized, and in 1788 he was asked to help James Madison draw up the Bill of Rights in committee. His voters sent him to the U.S. Senate twice, in 1798 and 1804, but he didn’t live to finish his second term. Struck down by an unknown illness, he lay dying in a bed at his sister’s house in Washington, D.C., while friends and family fussed over him. Though sick, he enjoyed telling them how, until then, he’d never missed a day in Congress. On the eighth day, he died; he was only fifty-three years old. Baldwin was buried first on the grounds of his sister’s estate, but his body was later moved to a cemetery in downtown Washington, D.C.

  A strong proponent of education, he is fondly remembered by Georgians for creating what would later become the University of Georgia, the first such school chartered by a state.

  Appendix I.

  Text of the U.S. Constitution

  We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

  Article 1.

  Section 1

  All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

  Section 2

  The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

  No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

  Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to choose three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five and Georgia three.

  When vacancies happ
en in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

  The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

  Section 3

  The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

  Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.

  No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

  The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.