Signing Their Rights Away Read online

  In 1774, after the British closed the port of Boston in retaliation for the Tea Party, Livingston wrote letters for the rebel cause and then served in the first and second Continental Congresses. Though active, he hoped for resolution without bloodshed. After leaving Congress, he took a post as a commander of New Jersey militia, but the poet was ill suited for military life. He once wrote, “My ancient corporeal fabric is almost tottering under the fatigue I have lately undergone: constantly rising at 2 o’clock in the morning to examine our lines.”

  In August 1776, Livingston was elected New Jersey’s first governor, a post he would hold for fourteen years, until his death. He replaced the ousted royal governor and loyalist, William Franklin (Ben Franklin’s illegitimate son). While Franklin sat in jail, Livingston was exhorting New Jerseyans to set their “faces like a flint against that dissoluteness of manners and political corruption which will ever be the reproach to any people.” From that moment on, he was nicknamed “Doctor Flint.”

  The war was hard on everyone, rich and poor alike, and Livingston was no exception. His home was ransacked, and a bounty was placed on his head. He lost his son John Lawrence, a midshipman, to the conflict. Currency depreciation and the bankruptcy of numerous debtors depleted his savings. But he did own his home, and he used it to shelter soldiers.

  As governor, Doctor Flint saw New Jersey through the war and the wobbly, uncertain years that followed. He joined the New York Anti-Slavery Society and, in 1786, successfully worked to forbid the importation of slaves into New Jersey, even though he owned two of his own. He said slavery was “utterly inconsistent with the principles of Christianity and humanity, and in Americans, who have almost idolized liberty, peculiarly odious and disgraceful.”

  Livingston’s feelings about slavery were tested the next year when he attended the Constitutional Convention and served on the committee that reached the Three-Fifths Compromise. A “small-state nationalist,” he supported the New Jersey Plan, which was rejected by the convention, and ended up accepting the Great Compromise, which provided for equal representation in the Senate but population-based representation in the House of Representatives.

  Livingston signed the Constitution at age sixty-three—the third oldest man to do so—and went back to New Jersey to work on securing a speedy ratification before serious opposition could be organized. (New Jersey was one of only three states to ratify before the end of 1787.) Still governor, Livingston received an honorary law degree from Yale not long before his death. He lost his wife, Susanna, in 1789, and shortly thereafter became sick as well. He died in 1790.

  Then his next journey began, for one of the worst things you could do for the fate of your earthly remains was to sign the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. Livingston was buried first in a New Jersey Presbyterian churchyard, but a year later his body was moved to a family vault at Trinity Churchyard in Manhattan. In 1844, his body was moved yet again to—gasp!—the outer boroughs. Today you can visit his grave at Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. Liberty Hall was never moved and is now a lovely museum on the grounds of Kean University. It is open to the public and is a popular site for weddings, which surely would have made the poet in Livingston smile.

  The Signer Who Proposed Erasing State Boundaries and Starting Over

  BORN: June 11, 1745

  DIED: August 16, 1790

  AGE AT SIGNING: 42

  PROFESSION: Lawyer

  BURIED: St. Michael’s Episcopal Church Graveyard, Trenton, New Jersey

  Pennsylvania half its size? Little Rhode Island three times bigger?

  Was this the key to equitable representation among the first thirteen states? We’ll never know—but it’s certainly one of the strangest ideas floated at the Constitutional Convention, and it comes courtesy of David Brearley.

  Brearley was born in Spring Grove, New Jersey. He was one of five children in a family that owned land but wasn’t particularly wealthy. Nevertheless, he received a good education and attended the College of New Jersey, a little school that was later known as Princeton, although he left before graduation to pursue law. Things moved along rather nicely for young Brearley. By the age of twenty-two, he had been admitted to the New Jersey bar, moved to Allentown to start his own practice, and married Elizabeth Mullen, with whom he would have four children.

  Then came the Revolutionary War and all the skirmishes proceeding from that first shot heard ’round the world. Brearley was always a stalwart patriot in a state that had its fair share of loyalists, and his outspoken manner didn’t win him any popularity contests with then-royal governor William Franklin (the illegitimate son of Electric Ben). His dedication to the patriot cause resulted in his arrest for treason, but his capture was short-lived. Before he could be hanged, a group of like-minded revolutionaries sprung him loose from the clutches of the British.

  Brearley continued to fight and took up arms in the New Jersey militia, where he rose from the rank of captain and eventually become a colonel. It was a time of hardship and hard work. He lost his wife, Elizabeth, in 1777; he fought in various battles throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania; and he helped draft the New Jersey Constitution, which would govern the state after the royal governor, Franklin, was ousted.

  In 1779, Brearley became chief justice of New Jersey and soon found himself involved in the groundbreaking trial of Holmes v. Walton, a case involving a smuggler, John Holmes, who was tried and convicted of dealing contraband. During the war it was tempting to sell goods to the British—they paid with real hard cash, not depreciating paper money and promissory notes that were the oh-so-weak currency of the colonies. But there was a problem with Holmes’s trial: he had been convicted by a jury of six men, rather than the usual twelve, as dictated by British Common Law. The appeal to the state’s supreme court landed in Brearley’s lap, and he dismissed all charges—a hugely unpopular decision but a necessary one, in Brearley’s opinion, because the conviction violated the state’s constitutional right guaranteeing trial by jury. Because Holmes hadn’t been granted a full jury, the trial was null and void. This decision would be cited in years to come and referenced as one of the first to establish the power of a supreme court to determine whether a law is constitutional, known as the principle of judicial review.

  The year after this famed decision, Brearley was given an honorary master’s degree from Princeton, despite never having officially finished his studies. He was plenty popular around New Jersey but not quite popular enough to become governor, a post he sought three times (and lost, each time, to William Livingston).

  With a new wife, Elizabeth Higbee, whom he married in 1783, three more children, and an admirable legal career, Brearley was a natural delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He was, in fact, the very first delegate elected from any of the colonies. He didn’t speak much during the proceedings in Philadelphia that summer—but if there was any topic that got his knickers in a wad, it was bigger states attempting to control Congress at the expense of smaller states. According to James Madison, Brearley felt that “the substitution of a ratio … carried fairness on the face of it; but on a deeper examination was unfair and unjust.” He noted that proportional representation in both the House and the Senate would give a more populous state such as Virginia sixteen votes, while sparsely populated Georgia would cast a measly one.

  “What remedy then?” Brearley asked. “One only: that a map of the United States be spread out, and that all the existing boundaries be erased, and that a new partition of the whole be made into thirteen equal parts.” Some reports say that Brearley was serious, but others claim he was merely taking his beliefs to an extreme to make a point. In the end, he put his support behind William Paterson’s New Jersey Plan, which gave each state one vote, no matter its size.

  Later Brearley embraced the principles of the Great Compromise, though he insisted on capping the size of the House at sixty-five members. He got his wish, but not for long; as time passed and the nation’s population increased, mor
e states and more people necessitated more representatives. By 1929, the House had grown to 435 members—and has remained at that number ever since, despite not even coming close to the minimum representational standards set out by the framers in 1787. (Today, movements in the United States seek to return to the ratio of 1 representative per 30,000 citizens first outlined in 1787. Among other obstacles, the Capitol would require a serious overhaul to accommodate all those people. New York City alone would require 267 representatives!)

  Brearley happily signed the Constitution and was president of the state ratification convention in New Jersey. In addition to continuing his legal practice, he acted as grand master of the New Jersey Masons, found time to help work on the Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church, and served as the state vice president of the Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans organization founded after the Revolutionary War. It is named for the Roman Cincinnatus, a farmer who fought bravely but famously returned home after battles to tend his fields, passing up greater power and spoils of war. George Washington was regarded as the Cincinnatus of the West and served as the group’s first president-general. The organization still exists today.

  Washington appointed Brearley the U.S. district judge of New Jersey in 1789, a post he held for less than a year before dying, at age forty-five. If you visit Trenton, you can stop by to see the memorial dedicated to Brearley at the Grand Lodge of Masons before heading to St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, where the famed framer is buried.

  The Son of a Door-to-Door Salesman

  BORN: December 24, 1745

  DIED: September 9, 1806

  AGE AT SIGNING: 42

  PROFESSION: Lawyer, judge

  BURIED: Albany Rural Cemetery, Menands, New York

  The framers of the U.S. Constitution represented the nation’s elite—wealthy, privileged men who had much to gain from the creation of a strong, stable government. Only a handful came from modest backgrounds, and William Paterson was among them. The son of a peddler who sold pots and pans going door to door, he would one day rise to become a governor, a senator, and a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Paterson’s parents emigrated from northern Ireland to America a few years after he was born, eventually settling in Princeton (literally across the street from the famous college, which was then in its infancy). His parents saved enough to send their first-born son to the school, and he did them proud by staying long enough to acquire a master’s degree. He went on to study law with Richard Stockton, a local man of culture who would one day sign the Declaration of Independence. Young Paterson probably longed to move to Philadelphia, New York, or even Trenton, but unlike his wealthy friends at school, he didn’t have the connections to establish himself in a large city. And so he kept to Princeton’s farm country; he ended up serving on his colony’s supreme court while also running a law practice and working for his father. (Lawyers had yet to pioneer billing software and the $250 hourly rate and so had to supplement their incomes in all sorts of ways.)

  Paterson grew into a diminutive, painfully bookish man with a bulbous nose and an aversion for romantic attachments, developing a reputation for being an uptight, friendless workaholic. He disowned family members who borrowed money and didn’t repay, censured male friends who married women pregnant with their children, and came down hard in his court judgments on fornicators and debtors. From the bench he railed against publick houses, billiards, and booze. He seemed to fear that society would descend into anarchy unless certain people—namely, himself—imposed order.

  And like many people who feel the same, Paterson found his way into politics.

  He became immersed in rebel activity in the 1770s, just as the colonies were heating up, and served on the committee that arrested New Jersey’s royal governor, William Franklin. Now an attorney general in the new patriot government, Paterson refused to serve in the Continental Congress, claiming he was too busy. Less-charitable historians say that he didn’t want to leave New Jersey because—finally—he was making decent money.

  In his thirties, Paterson found love not once, but twice. His first romance inspired him to spend long hours writing love letters to his dear Cornelia Bell. In 1779, he installed his new bride in a posh four-hundred-acre estate in New Jersey that had been swiped from a loyalist family and snapped up by Paterson in a bargain sale. But their love would be short-lived, for Cornelia died just four years after their wedding day. But soon he married Euphemia White, one of his wife’s girlfriends.

  In 1786, Paterson attended the Annapolis Convention and shared concerns that the Articles of Confederation must be revised. This time around, nothing would keep the older, more confident, well-heeled lawyer from going to Philadelphia. Influential men around the nation were already familiar with his writings, political work, and court decisions, and the forty-one-year-old quickly became the voice of the New Jersey delegation and de facto spokesman for so-called small states fearful of being robbed of both their rights and their tax money by their larger neighbors. Early on, Paterson insisted that accepting Virginia’s plan for representation based on population was tantamount to tyranny and despotism. He would not be a party to it. He would fight it on the convention floor and do all he could to demolish the measure at home. Instead, Paterson and his small-state confreres presented the New Jersey Plan, which preserved the one state–one vote setup of the Articles of Confederation and merely tacked on a chief executive, to be chosen by that Congress, and a court to settle disputes.

  It was a tight, law-and-order plan from a tight, law-and-order man. The small states loved it, because it appeared to preserve the equal voting rights they already enjoyed under the Confederation. The big states hated it, because it required states to be taxed according to their populations: Oh, so we’ll kick in more money, but you’ll have equal say over how it’s spent? We think not! The delegates fought over the warring plans for weeks, until Roger Sherman introduced the Great Compromise.

  Delighted that the power of the big states would be checked, Paterson left the convention at the end of July 1787 to attend to various business matters. He returned to sign the finished Constitution and supported its ratification. (Though he signed the document “Paterson,” his name is sometimes spelled with two Ts.)

  Despite serving as one of New Jersey’s first senators, Paterson claimed to hate public life. When his convention colleague William Livingston died in office, he was sworn in as the second governor and, over the next eight years, revised many of the state’s laws. He approved the creation of a town named Paterson, which Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s new secretary of the Treasury, hoped to build into the country’s most powerful manufacturing center by harnessing the power of the city’s waterfalls. (The results were mixed, and recent years have not been kind to Paterson the place; today, a large percentage of the city’s population lives below the poverty line.)

  In 1793, Paterson left the governorship to serve as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. While performing his circuit-court duties, he famously instructed a jury to render a guilty verdict and then ordered the execution of the ringleaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, an early-1790s uprising against a despised whiskey tax. Washington pardoned the men, thinking Paterson’s judgment too harsh; indeed, modern historians call the decision “indefensible.” The hard-as-nails judge later declined Washington’s invitation to serve as Secretary of State.

  In 1803, Paterson was gravely injured when a team of horses went wild and sent his carriage toppling over. He tried to continue his job on the bench, but, with his health shattered, he finally had to step down. He died at the age of sixty while visiting his daughter in upstate New York.

  The Signer Who Stole $18,000 from Congress

  BORN: October 16, 1760

  DIED: October 9, 1824

  AGE AT SIGNING: 26

  PROFESSION: Lawyer, politician

  BURIED: St. John’s Episcopal Church, Elizabeth, New Jersey

  At the time of the nation’s founding, human life coul
d be brutally short. The medications that today allow us to manage conditions like heart disease and diabetes simply didn’t exist. The common cold could be a killer. Gout was rampant. And the smallest scrape or cut might lead to an amputation. Knowing that life was precious, people in revolutionary America matured quickly and stepped into adult roles while still very young. All of which helps explain how a New Jersey delegate named Jonathan Dayton came to sign the U.S. Constitution at the tender age of twenty-six.

  The youngest signer was born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, the son of a storekeeper and local politician. At the time of the Revolutionary War he was studying at the future Princeton University but entered the Continental Army with his father before he could finish his studies. He fought throughout the northeast, from Canada to Pennsylvania, and in 1780 was captured, along with his uncle, during a skirmish in his home state. The pair was released in a prisoner exchange the next year. Young Captain Dayton went on to fight in a famed bayonet attack on Redoubt 10 in Yorktown under the command of his old schoolmate Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette. After the war, Dayton became a lawyer and entered local politics. He married Susannah Williamson, with whom he had two children.

  In 1787, the New Jersey legislature chose his father, Elias Dayton, to attend the Constitutional Convention. The elder Dayton didn’t want to go, so instead he sent his son. Rumor has it that dad sent junior to Philadelphia to keep him away from the bad influences of misbehaving friends. And with his young son out from under, goes the theory, Papa Elias would be able to focus on running the family business.