Revisiting Benson John Lossing’s account of the lives of these 56 extraordinary men.
Revisiting Benson John Lossing’s account of the lives of these 56 extraordinary men.
W hen 56 men pledged “our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” 250 years ago, none forfeited the first or last. But many lost great fortunes — and sacrificed more besides.
“The signers of the Declaration everywhere were marked for vengeance,” Benson John Lossing noted in 1848’s Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The sad experience of Francis Lewis, a delegate from New York to the Continental Congress, was not terribly atypical. Lossing recounts that the British “not only destroyed his property, but had the brutality to confine his wife in a close prison for several months, without a bed or change of raiment, whereby her constitution was ruined, and she died two years afterward.”
Lossing notes the destruction of the homes of New York’s Lewis Morris, New Jersey’s John Hart, Pennsylvania’s George Clymer, one of six to sign the Declaration and the Constitution, and several others. And he details George Walton’s heroism in 1778’s Battle of Savannah: “In that engagement he received a severe shot wound in his thigh, and he fell from his horse. In this condition he was taken prisoner, but was soon afterward exchanged.”
New Jerseyan Richard Stockton “remained a prisoner for some time, and, on account of his position as one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, he was treated with great severity. The hardships he endured shattered his constitution, and when he found himself almost a beggar, through the vandalism of the British in destroying his estate, and by the depreciation of the continental paper currency, he was seized with a despondency from which he never recovered.” Cancer took him before the revolution’s end.
The sacrifices of the signers from South Carolina appear particularly drastic. Thomas Heyward Jr. suffered a gunshot wound while defending coastal Beaufort from the British. Along with Edward Rutledge and Arthur Middleton — captured after defending Charleston — Heyward spent considerable time as a prisoner of war in St. Augustine.
While at times relating stories that may have served to flatter the prejudices of Americans, Lossing generally distinguishes himself from American historians of the mid-19th century. For instance, later scholars mostly sided with him and against such authorities as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that the signing, for almost all of the 56, took place at a date subsequent to July 4. The illustrator, engraver, newspaper editor, contributor to Harper’s Magazine, author of more than three dozen books, and accumulator of more than 5,000 over his lifetime (which he housed in a fireproof library) spent several years and logged several thousand miles of travel to uproot primary sources for his books on the early republic. As with the Founding Fathers he wrote about, we judge him fairly as a historian when we compare him not to those who inherited wisdom uncommon in his era but to contemporaries. Those contemporaries operated in an anarchic environment that lacked professionalized standards and overflowed with stories aimed to please book buyers rather than satisfy the truth. Lossing, though occasionally indulging in the tics of his time, helped nudge historians from storytellers toward reliable presenters of what actually happened.
“The signing of that instrument was a solemn act, and required great firmness and patriotism in those who committed it,” Lossing judges. “It was treason against the home government, yet perfect allegiance to the law of right. It subjected those who signed it to the danger of an ignominious death, yet it entitled them to the profound reverence of a disenthralled people.”
Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence rates a read every year around this time as a reminder, to borrow a phrase associated with Christmas, of the reason for the season.