On March 20, 1776, Joseph Hewes wrote from Philadelphia to Samuel Johnston in North Carolina: “I see no prospect of a reconciliation. Nothing is left now but to fight it out.”

For most men in Congress, that was a political judgment. For Hewes, it was also a break with the faith that had shaped him. He had spent months as a moderate, pushing for peace because he still believed the empire could be reformed from within.

His mother, Providence Hewes, had survived a musket ball to the neck during a frontier attack and still chose pacifism. She became a Quaker minister. She raised her oldest son to believe that violence solved nothing. How does a man formed in that house end up helping launch a war fleet?

Joseph Hewes did not become a revolutionary because he loved war. He became one because he decided war had already been chosen for him, and once he made that decision he gave it his ships and then his health.

By March, the evidence was piling up faster than any moderate case for peace could survive. King George III had declared the colonies in open rebellion. Parliament had passed the Prohibitory Act, authorizing the seizure of American ships and cargo. The British were hiring Hessian mercenaries to crush the resistance.

When the vote for independence came, John Adams, writing in an 1813 letter to Governor William Plumer, remembered Hewes rising from his seat, lifting both hands toward heaven “as if he had been in a trance,” and crying, “It is done and I will abide by it.” Adams said he would give more for a perfect painting of “the terror and horror upon the face of the old majority at that critical moment” than for the best piece of Raphael.

It is a magnificent scene. It is also a late memory, written decades after the fact, and Adams overstated the idea that Hewes had spent all spring resisting independence. Hewes’s own March letter shows the turn had already happened. The famous outcry, if Adams remembered it right, was not the start of the transformation. It was the moment he made it public.

What is not in dispute: Joseph Hewes signed his name to the Declaration. Then he went to work building the one thing the new nation needed most desperately, a navy capable of challenging the greatest maritime power on Earth.

A Quaker Family, Forged in Violence

Joseph Hewes was born on July 9, 1730, at Maybury Hill near Princeton in West Jersey. His parents, Aaron and Providence Hewes, were devout Quakers. Aaron was a successful farmer who, according to some accounts, had also spent time as a sea captain. They came to New Jersey after Puritan intolerance and frontier violence drove them from their previous home.

During their journey south, according to family accounts, the family was attacked by a Native American raiding party. A musket ball struck Providence Hewes in the neck. She survived.

That his mother carried a scar from frontier violence and still raised her son in absolute pacifism tells you something about the depth of the Hewes family’s Quaker convictions. That her son would later chair the committee that built a war fleet and sponsor the Revolution’s most celebrated naval fighter is one of the deepest contradictions in his life.

The family settled at Maybury Hill. When Joseph was five, the original house burned and was rebuilt. Joseph attended the Kingston Friends’ Grammar School, where the education was practical and the values were Quaker: simplicity, honesty, public duty.

When Joseph was nineteen, he faced a choice: stay in New Jersey and work the family land, or seek his fortune elsewhere. He chose elsewhere.

The Making of a Merchant

In 1749, Hewes traveled to Philadelphia and apprenticed himself to Joseph Ogden, a prosperous merchant in the import-export trade who happened to be married to Hewes’s first cousin, Jimima Hewes. For five years, he learned the business from the inside. But the apprenticeship was not spent behind a desk. Hewes traveled as a supercargo on cargo ships, the person responsible for buying and selling goods at every port. He visited Boston, New York, Charleston, Edenton, and even Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. A bill of lading from one voyage listed cloth, bonnets, powder, snuff boxes, and cheese heading south. The return cargo included snakeroot, beeswax, myrtle wax, and rice. That was Atlantic trade at its most granular, and Hewes learned it from the deck of a rolling ship.

It was during one of these voyages that Edenton, North Carolina, lodged itself in his mind. Later accounts described it as a “prospering well protected port town on a small bay on the north side of Albemarle Sound.” What Hewes would have smelled coming into that harbor was the entire economy of the place: boiling pitch, coal tar, rosin, the sharp tang of raw turpentine, and the dust of sawn lumber and barrel staves. Edenton’s export trade was built on naval stores, the raw materials that kept ships afloat. The town advertised itself through its nose before it revealed itself to the eye. It was a backwater by Philadelphia standards, but Hewes saw what a merchant sees: growing trade and less competition.

When his apprenticeship ended in 1754, Ogden offered him a partnership. Hewes declined. He secured modest start-up funds from his father’s estate and headed south. By early 1755, he had set up shop in Edenton.

His first business partnership was with Charles Blount, in a firm called Blount, Hewes and Co. Within a few years, Hewes had become Edenton’s leading merchant. He named his first ship Providence, after his mother.

The Business of Prosperity

By the early 1770s, Hewes’s reorganized firm, Hewes and Smith, had become a maritime empire in miniature. The partnership owned warehouses, a wharf, and a fleet of five ships, three sloops, and two brigs. Hewes also owned a ship repair and shipbuilding yard at Pembroke Creek. During the war he established a rope walk there covering 131 acres, one of the first in North Carolina, where workers braided the ropes, cables, and hawsers that kept American ships rigged.

He didn’t just buy and sell cargo. He understood how ships were built, rigged, and crewed because he had spent years close to the work itself. That made him irreplaceable when Congress needed someone who actually understood ships.

By 1774, the firm was valued at 20,000 pounds, and Hewes had turned that wealth into civic power as a justice of the peace, port inspector, and colonial assemblyman.

And like most wealthy colonists in the South, Hewes was a slaveholder. Chowan County tax records list sixteen enslaved people in his firm’s holdings by 1774. By 1779, the combined personal and business records show roughly thirty, including individuals recorded as “Frank, A Cripple,” “Cuff, A Cripple,” “Gun, abt 45 years old,” and “Peter, 6 months old.” The tax records stand as they are.

He was successful and comfortable, and by the early 1770s the empire he had built was about to collide with the empire that had made it possible.

The Lost Love

In 1760, Joseph Hewes fell in love with Isabella Johnston, the younger sister of Samuel Johnston, one of North Carolina’s most prominent political figures. The Johnston family seat was Hayes Plantation, near Edenton. Hewes was by then the town’s leading merchant, moving in the same circles, attending the same social events. The match made sense on every level.

They became engaged. And then, within days of the planned wedding, Isabella contracted a sudden illness, likely one of the coastal fevers that moved through tidewater towns with the summer heat, and died.

The best account comes from James Iredell, a future Supreme Court Justice who knew Hewes personally and described him elsewhere as “one of the best and most agreeable men in the world.” In a letter written around 1772, Iredell described what the loss did to him:

“About six or seven years ago he was within a very few days of being married to one of Mr. Johnston’s sisters, who died rather suddenly, and this unhappy circumstance for a long time embittered every satisfaction in life to him. He has continued ever since unmarried. His connection with Mr. Johnston’s family is just such as if he had been really a brother-in-law.”

“Embittered every satisfaction in life.” Iredell was writing years after the event, and the bitterness was still the defining fact. The Johnston family maintained ties with Hewes despite the tragedy. Samuel Johnston became an important political ally and treated Hewes as family for the rest of his life. But Hewes never married and never had children.

In 1776, the artist Charles Willson Peale painted a miniature portrait of Hewes on ivory, set in a gold frame with garnets and designed as a lady’s brooch. Hewes gave this portrait not to a relative or political ally, but to Helen Blair, Isabella Johnston’s niece.

That detail, which almost no popular account mentions, tells you everything the surviving letters do not. The miniature is now in the collection of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis.

The Man Who Belonged to No Church

Hewes’s religious identity defies easy labels.

The standard account says he broke with the Quakers when they formally denounced the Revolution in 1775. The reality is more complicated. Quaker historian Charles Francis Jenkins made the careful argument that Hewes “never resigned or was disowned” from his birthright meeting, that he was a member of Chesterfield, New Jersey, Monthly Meeting his entire life, and that “when he died his death was recorded in his old home meeting showing that they, at least, regarded him as one among them.”

If this is true, Hewes died formally a Quaker while serving on the committee that built the Continental Navy.

But he was also a vestryman at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Edenton, an active leadership position, not a nominal one. Iredell’s private diary adds another layer. Iredell noted that Hewes had “imbibed some Prejudices which cannot stand the Test of a fair Inquiry,” a phrase understood by historians as a coded reference to deism, the eighteenth-century philosophy that acknowledged a creator but rejected church authority and supernatural revelation.

The National Park Service biography adds one more detail: Hewes’s drift from Quaker practice had been underway for years before the Revolution, driven at least partly by his “love of dancing and other social pleasures.” The Quakers condemned dancing as vanity. Hewes liked to dance. The break was physical before it was political. By the time the Revolution demanded he choose between pacifism and independence, he had already been living a life that did not fit Quaker discipline for a long time.

He was also a Freemason, affiliated with Unanimity Lodge in Edenton. He would be buried with Masonic honors.

He was born a Quaker and served an Anglican church, and later writers also placed him among deists and Freemasons. No single label fits.

The Coming Storm

By 1773, Hewes had joined North Carolina’s Committee of Correspondence, the network of colonial leaders coordinating resistance to British policy. In August 1774, he was selected as one of three delegates to the Continental Congress.

He arrived in Philadelphia on September 14, 1774, aligned with the “moderate Whigs,” colonists who wanted their rights respected but hoped to achieve reform within the empire. As late as July 1775, Hewes wrote to a British contact with startling candor: “We do not want to be independent, we want no revolution... we are loyal subjects to our present most gracious Sovereign, in support of whose crown and dignity we would sacrifice our lives.”

The first Continental Congress was largely a success for the moderates. The delegates agreed on a unified boycott of British goods and petitioned the king for redress. Then they went home hoping London would see reason.

London did not see reason. Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill made that plain enough, and Hewes still supported the Olive Branch Petition, the last plea for reconciliation sent to King George III. The king rejected it and proclaimed the colonies in open rebellion.

Meanwhile, back in Edenton, the women of his own community were acting. In October 1774, fifty-one women had signed a public resolution boycotting British tea and cloth, one of the earliest organized political actions by women in American history. Hewes supported them. The people around him were already choosing sides.

By March 1776, he had crossed the line from reluctant patriot to committed revolutionary.

On April 12, 1776, the North Carolina Provincial Congress, meeting in Halifax, adopted the Halifax Resolves, the first official colonial action authorizing delegates to vote for independence. They sent copies to their Philadelphia delegation, and Hewes acknowledged receiving them on May 16.

Then something odd happened. Hewes sat on the documents for eleven days. The Journal of Congress records that the North Carolina instructions were not presented until May 27, the same day Virginia presented its own similar instructions.

Why the delay? No explanation survives. Was it caution from a man still uncomfortable with where events were heading? Was he coordinating the presentation with Virginia to maximize political impact? The question is unanswered. What is clear is that when the final vote came, Hewes was ready.

Building a Navy From Nothing

In late 1775, months before the Declaration, Congress established a Naval Committee to create an American navy. The members included John Adams of Massachusetts, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and Joseph Hewes of North Carolina.

Their task was close to absurd. Britain had a vast war fleet. America had merchant vessels and the hope that privateers would help close the gap.

Every evening at six o’clock, the committee walked from the Pennsylvania State House to a rented room in the Tun Tavern on the Philadelphia waterfront. It was a working-class dockside bar. The Continental Marines had been recruited there weeks earlier. The committee worked by candlelight, sometimes past midnight, with no precedent and no money. Adams would later call these evenings “the pleasantest part of my labours for the four years I spent in Congress.” In those late hours, Hewes became the committee’s working engine. He served as secretary from November 1775 to February 1776, effectively the first administrator of what would become the American Navy, personally keeping the accounts and handling much of the committee’s enormous correspondence. The work was granular: coal tar, tallow, rosin, and all the other dull essentials that kept wooden ships afloat.

The burden fell disproportionately on Hewes. His two North Carolina colleagues were away from Philadelphia for months, leaving him as the sole representative of his state. Even on days when Congress did not meet, the calendar kept its grip. In a note to James Iredell on May 17, 1776, Hewes explained that Congress had not sat because it was “a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer (or in vulgar language Congress Sunday).” It is the only surviving flash of humor from a man the record otherwise shows only under pressure. In a July 8, 1776, letter, he described the toll:

“I had the weight of North Carolina on my shoulders within a day or two of three months. The service was too severe. I have sat some days from Six in the morning till five, and sometimes Six in the afternoon without eating or drinking.” Source

When it came time to actually equip the first fleet, Hewes put his entire merchant fleet at the disposal of the Continental forces. The ships he had spent decades acquiring, the shipyard at Pembroke Creek, the rope walk that braided the cables and hawsers, all of it went to the war effort.

Years later, Adams would say that he and Hewes “laid the foundation, the cornerstone of the American Navy.” The Naval Institute’s more measured assessment acknowledged the collective effort: “No one man founded our navy.” But Hewes was the one who understood ships from the waterline to the mast, and that made him the committee’s working engine.

The Discovery of John Paul Jones

Hewes’s most lasting contribution to the navy was not a ship, a regulation, or a supply chain. It was a man.

In late 1773 or early 1774, a Scottish sailor named John Paul arrived in Virginia from Tobago under circumstances he deliberately kept vague. He had killed a mutinous crewman with a sword and, unwilling to face trial in what he considered a hostile jurisdiction, fled to Virginia. According to long-held tradition, he found shelter with Willie and Allen Jones, revolutionary sympathizers, and added their surname to his own. (Historians have questioned whether Jones actually met the Jones brothers, but the name stuck.) John Paul became John Paul Jones.

John Paul Jones was talented. He had been a ship’s boy on a merchantman and a captain by twenty-one. He had instincts for aggressive naval tactics that most career officers lacked. But in 1775, he was nobody, a foreign-born sailor with a changed name and no connections.

On April 25, 1775, before the Naval Committee even existed, Jones wrote to three members of Congress seeking a naval appointment. Hewes was the first name on the list, ahead of Robert Morris and Thomas Jefferson.

When the Naval Committee was selecting the first officers for the Continental Navy, Hewes advocated for Jones as one of the four initial ship captains. The basis for his confidence is not recorded in surviving documents, but Jones’s seamanship was real and Hewes, a man who understood ships, would have recognized it.

Adams disagreed. His reasoning, as he later framed it, was sectional: a Southerner had already been given the Army in Washington. Adams believed the Navy should go to New England. He prevailed. The command of the first fleet went to Esek Hopkins of Rhode Island.

Jones received only a lieutenant’s commission, a step below what Hewes had wanted, assigned to the flagship Alfred. That winter, Jones would hoist the Grand Union flag over the Alfred, the first man to raise an American flag over a naval vessel. But that moment was still ahead. In the summer of 1775, he had needed someone to believe in him first, and Hewes had. Jones never forgot it.

On August 17, 1777, Jones wrote to Hewes with a directness that the famously difficult captain rarely showed anyone:

“You have laid me under the most singular Obligations, & you are indeed the Angel of my Happiness; since to your Friendship I owe my present enjoyments, as well as my future prospects.”

“Angel of my Happiness.” The phrase appears in no other Jones letter to anyone. From a man not given to emotional language, it captures a depth of personal gratitude that the official naval histories rarely convey.

The vindication of Hewes’s judgment was complete. Esek Hopkins, Adams’s choice, was suspended from command by early 1777 for insubordination and poor leadership. Jones went on to fight the most famous single-ship engagement of the Revolution, the battle between the Bonhomme Richard and HMS Serapis in September 1779, during which he reportedly declared “I have not yet begun to fight.”

The man Hewes had backed, at real political cost, became the Navy’s most celebrated hero.

(A note on sources: in 1900, a writer named Augustus C. Buell published a popular biography of Jones that included forged letters between Jones and Hewes, romanticizing their relationship with invented dialogue. These fabrications were accepted as fact for decades before modern historians debunked them. The quotes used in this essay are from verified primary sources, not the Buell forgeries.)

The Toll of Service

After independence was declared, Hewes returned to North Carolina periodically, but Congress kept pulling him back. There was too much work. The war effort needed supplies, ships, money, coordination.

Then, in April 1777, the political knives came out.

When the North Carolina General Assembly met to appoint delegates to the Continental Congress, John Penn, a fellow signer of the Declaration, led a faction that accused Hewes of two offenses: holding multiple offices in violation of the new state constitution (since he served on the Marine Committee while seeking a delegate position), and profiting personally from his position overseeing naval procurement.

The profiteering accusation had a specific barb. Prize ships captured by the Continental Navy had been sent to Hewes’s partner Robert Smith in Edenton, with cargo consigned to “Messrs Hewes & Smith the Owners.” Seven words that turned a man who had donated his own fleet into a man who appeared to be profiting from the same war. The accusation had political traction. North Carolina’s Constitutional Convention had split bitterly between Conservatives and Radicals, and Hewes was caught in the factional crossfire.

Penn prevailed. Hewes was left out of the delegation. He withdrew from congressional politics for two years, refusing to stand for any office in 1777 or 1778, feeling that his reputation had been unjustly smeared.

The Last Summer

In 1779, at the urging of popular sentiment, Hewes allowed himself to be returned to the Continental Congress. He arrived in Philadelphia on July 22, already unwell.

Within weeks, Congress assigned him to the Treasury and Marine committees. Within a month, he received two more assignments. The institution could not function without him and did not care what the work was doing to his body.

By mid-August, he wrote to Governor Richard Caswell describing the illness in his own words: “I have been much distressed with a continual head ach attended with a kind of stupor which renders me unfit for business of any kind and altho I do attend Congress yet I cannot pay that attention to business which the urgency of our affairs seem to require.”

By late September, with high fevers and fading vision, he could no longer walk to Carpenter’s Hall, where Congress met.

On October 29, 1779, Hewes submitted his formal resignation. He could not travel home. He remained in his Philadelphia rooming house, hoping rest would restore him.

It did not. He was confined to his room at Mary House’s boarding house, an upscale establishment on Market Street where delegates like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison also stayed. In a candlelit room, listening to carriages rattle past on the cobblestones, the forty-nine-year-old Hewes waited for a recovery that would not come. On the night of November 9, carrying into the early hours of November 10, he died.

The Pennsylvania Packet captured his end in a sentence that works as both eulogy and indictment: “His mind was constantly employed in the business of his exalted station until his health, much impaired by intense application, sunk beneath it.”

By contemporary accounts, he was the only member of the Continental Congress to die in Philadelphia while Congress was in session.

The Funeral Nobody Remembers

The Continental Congress’s response was an extraordinary public honor that has been almost entirely forgotten.

When news reached Congress on November 10, delegates voted to attend the funeral as a body and proclaimed a one-month period of mourning, the same mourning period typically reserved for military commanders. The funeral notice, published in the Pennsylvania Packet, directed that Congress would attend “as mourners, with a crape round the left arm.” The committee superintending the funeral invited the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, the President and Supreme Executive Council of the state, the Minister Plenipotentiary of France, and “other persons of distinction in town.”

On November 11, 1779, at three in the afternoon, the procession formed at the boarding house. Pallbearers carried the coffin through the streets of Philadelphia to Christ Church. Hewes was buried in the Christ Church Burial Ground, the same ground that holds Benjamin Franklin and four other signers, with Masonic funeral honors.

The entire apparatus of the revolutionary government of the United States turned out to bury this man. His estate, the accumulated wealth of decades building one of North Carolina’s largest merchant operations, was divided among his brothers, their children, and Quaker institutions. No wife’s hand to receive it. No children’s names in the will. And then, having no descendants to carry his memory, he was largely forgotten.

Benjamin Rush, who knew Hewes in Congress, described him as “a plain, worthy merchant... very useful upon committees.” Adams, who had clashed with him over naval appointments and still respected him, called him a man with “a sharp Eye and keen, penetrating Sense... a Man of Honour and Integrity.” A contemporary eulogy went further: his public life was “honorable and useful,” and he died “unregretting, tho’ deeply regretted,” having paid his “last debt to nature... in the service of his country.”

The Ships That Carried His Name

Two vessels have been named USS Joseph Hewes. The Navy remembered what the country mostly did not: one of its first makers had been a merchant who knew ships from the smell of tar and the weight of ledgers.

The first was AP-50, a troop transport converted from the luxury liner SS Excalibur. Commissioned in May 1942, she carried approximately 1,074 troops of the 3rd Infantry Division toward French Morocco as part of Operation Torch. She completed her landings and was at anchor off Casablanca when the German submarine U-173 struck her in the second hold on November 11. The ship went down.

The second, USS Joseph Hewes (DE/FF/FFT-1078), served from 1971 to 1993.

When Hewes wrote in March 1776 that nothing was left but to fight it out, he was naming the cost before he paid it. The war took the merchant life he had built and the body that kept Congress afloat. What lasted was the navy he helped launch. His mother’s ship, the Providence, sailed on.

Next: Philip Livingston

If Joseph Hewes was the reluctant revolutionary who gave everything once he committed, Philip Livingston was the reluctant revolutionary who never quite made peace with his choice.

Livingston was one of the richest men in New York, a merchant prince whose family owned an enormous manor in the Hudson Valley. He had helped found King’s College (now Columbia University) and established New York’s first professorship of law.

He was also, by temperament and interest, a moderate who believed the empire could be reformed. When independence came, he voted for it, but never with full conviction. He spent the remaining years of his life torn between the world he had helped destroy and the nation he was helping to build.

He died at his desk in Congress, still working, still conflicted.

That’s our next story.

This is Essay #26 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

Sources:

• Joseph Hewes | NCpedia

• Signers of the Declaration Factsheet | U.S. National Archives

• The Signers’ Gallery | U.S. National Archives

• Joseph Hewes | Constitution Center

• Joseph Hewes | U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command

• The Halifax Resolves | NCpedia

• Joseph Hewes | Edenton Historical Commission

• John Paul Jones Papers | Charleston Library Society Digital Collections

• James Iredell, letter c. 1772 (on Isabella Johnston)

• John Paul Jones to Joseph Hewes, August 17, 1777

• Joseph Hewes to unknown, July 8, 1776

• Joseph Hewes to Richard Caswell, August 1779

• John Adams, letter to William Tudor, 1813

• Pennsylvania Packet, November 1779 (obituary and funeral notice)

• Charles Francis Jenkins, Quaker historical research (Chesterfield Monthly Meeting records)

Across the street from where the Declaration of Independence was written, there was a horse stable.

It sat directly opposite the three-story brick house of Jacob Graff Jr., a bricklayer who had finished building the place only the year before. The house stood on the southwest corner of Market and Seventh Streets, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, surrounded by open fields. The stable meant the smell of manure on warm days, and the summer humidity held it in the air. Thomas Jefferson had rented the second floor because he wanted quiet. He got the quiet. He also got the flies.

Horseflies drifted through the open windows all summer long, drawn by the stable and the June humidity. Jefferson complained about them. He was thirty-three years old, over six feet two, red-haired and freckled, with a soft voice that barely carried across a room. He had arrived in Philadelphia as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and he needed a place to write.

His room had a furnished parlor and bedroom, with paneled walls and four windows on each side for airflow. In the parlor, Jefferson set up a small mahogany box on his lap and went to work.

The box was a portable writing desk of his own design, built by a Philadelphia cabinetmaker named Benjamin Randolph. It measured roughly ten inches by fourteen inches, about the size of a modern laptop. It had a hinged writing surface lined with green cloth, a lockable drawer for paper and quills, and a small glass inkwell. Jefferson called it his “writing-box.” He would use it for the rest of his life.

On that desk, above the horse stable, swatting at flies, Thomas Jefferson wrote the most famous sentence in the English language.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Writing those words took seventeen days. He spent the rest of his life watching other people decide what they meant.

The Writing

Congress chose a committee of five to draft the declaration: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, and Jefferson.

Adams wanted Jefferson to write it. Jefferson said Adams should do it instead. Adams refused. Writing to a friend forty-six years later, he remembered giving Jefferson three reasons.

“Reason first: You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.”

Jefferson paused. “Well,” he said, “if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”

He consulted no books. He drew entirely on ideas he had absorbed over a decade of reading, especially John Locke on natural rights and George Mason‘s Virginia Declaration of Rights, written just weeks earlier. The drafting took roughly seventeen days. Congress met six days a week, from about ten in the morning until four in the afternoon. Jefferson’s writing hours were in the edges of the day, early mornings and late afternoons and the hours after dinner at the City Tavern. His diary from those weeks shows the everyday life underneath the historic work: pencil and map purchases, riding expenses logged on “June 31” (a date that does not exist), the kind of mistake a mind makes when it is living in committees rather than calendars.

On July 1, 1776, he walked to the shop of a merchant named John Sparhawk and purchased a new thermometer. Jefferson kept weather journals his entire adult life, recording temperatures three times a day, every day, for decades. While the Continental Congress prepared to debate the question of independence, he was also checking the temperature.

On July 4, the morning he knew Congress would take a final vote on his Declaration, he recorded 68 degrees at six in the morning. By one in the afternoon it had reached 76. The modern average high for July 4 in Philadelphia is 87 degrees. The birth of the nation happened on a mild day. He also bought seven pairs of women’s gloves and made some charitable donations.

The Cutting

They cut roughly a quarter of it.

Over three days, July 2 through 4, Congress convened as a full committee and debated Jefferson’s text line by line. By one scholarly count, they made eighty-six changes across both stages: forty-seven by the Committee of Five before submission, thirty-nine by Congress on the floor. Jefferson sat in the Pennsylvania State House and watched. He said nothing that anyone recorded.

The heat was bad. The windows were open. Flies from a nearby stable swarmed through the chamber, biting the delegates through their silk stockings. The delegates swatted at them with handkerchiefs and kept cutting.

The most famous change was small and enormous at the same time. Jefferson had written: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” On the rough draft, those words are struck through. Above them, in what most scholars identify as Franklin’s handwriting, two words appear: “self-evident.”

Most scholars believe Franklin suggested the change. Jefferson had called these truths sacred. Franklin made them self-evident. One word invoked God. The other invoked logic. Franklin also changed “deluge us in blood” to “destroy us.” Where Jefferson wrote in a high moral register, his editors enforced precision.

Congress cut passages criticizing the British people (not just the King), removed a lengthy condemnation of the slave trade that offended delegates on both sides of the issue, tightened the preamble, and modified various charges. Jefferson had written that men “from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable.” Congress trimmed it to “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Shorter and sharper, with less of Jefferson in it.

Franklin, who was seventy years old and gouty, watched the younger man suffer. He noticed Jefferson “writhing” under the criticism. He leaned close, his joints swollen, and told the younger man a story.

He told Jefferson about a hatter named John Thompson who was opening his own shop. Thompson wanted a handsome signboard and composed the inscription: “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,” with a painted picture of a hat underneath. Proud of his work, he showed it to his friends for their thoughts.

The first friend said “Hatter” was unnecessary, since “makes hats” already showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next friend said “makes” didn’t matter, because customers wouldn’t care who made the hats. It was struck out. A third said “for ready money” was pointless, since nobody in town sold on credit. Gone. A fourth asked why “sells” was needed, since nobody would expect free hats. Gone. “Hats” followed it, since there was already a picture of one painted on the board.

The signboard now read: “John Thompson,” with a picture of a hat.

Jefferson laughed. Franklin was telling him: this is what committees do. But the laughter did not last.

The Wound

In the days after July 4, Jefferson made at least four handwritten copies of his original draft. In each copy, he underlined every word and passage that Congress had changed or removed. Then he sent the copies to his friends.

He was asking them to judge.

Richard Henry Lee, who had proposed the original resolution for independence, wrote back: “I wish sincerely, as well for the honor of Congress, as for that of the States, that the Manuscript had not been mangled as it is.”

Jefferson adopted the word. For the next fifty years, he described what Congress had done to his draft as “mangling.” He distributed annotated copies well into old age, making sure that anyone who cared about the Declaration could see what he had written versus what Congress had approved. In 1823, a political rival named Timothy Pickering accused him of copying. The similarities with Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights were obvious. Jefferson replied to James Madison with honesty: “I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”

Madison’s reply was sharper: “Nothing can be more absurd than the cavil that the Declaration contains known and not new truths. The object was to assert not to discover truths.”

Jefferson had written the most important document in American history on a box the size of a laptop, in a room above a horse stable, while swatting flies. The rest of Congress had then cut a quarter of it away while he sat in silence. He never forgave them.

The Man Who Couldn’t Speak

The man who wrote the Declaration could barely speak in public. His rival Patrick Henry could move a room. Jefferson couldn’t hold one. What Jefferson could do was write you into a corner on paper, and Henry had no answer for that.

Jefferson’s voice, when he spoke in public, sank into his throat. People who met him described it as “guttural and inarticulate.” John Adams, who admired almost everything else about Jefferson, recorded that “during the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”

As president for eight years, Jefferson delivered exactly two public speeches: his inaugural addresses. He read both in such a low mumble that few people in the room could hear him. Rather than deliver the annual message to Congress in person, he sent a written document, a practice that held until Woodrow Wilson revived the spoken address in 1913. On occasion, he reportedly faked illness to avoid events that required him to speak at all.

The people who met him in private were astonished.

George Ticknor, a young scholar from Boston who visited Monticello in 1815, expected a small man. Instead: “I was doubly astonished to find Mr. Jefferson, whom I had always supposed to be a small man, more than six feet high, with dignity in his appearance, and ease and graciousness in his manners.” Standing, he was erect and commanding. Seated, as one contemporary noted, his “shoulders slouched and uneven,” his body folding into itself like “part jackknife, part accordion.” Even his posture contained a contradiction.

His grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph described him as “well proportioned, and straight as a gun-barrel. He was like a fine horse: he had no surplus flesh.” Isaac Jefferson, an enslaved man at Monticello who later dictated his memoirs, remembered: “Mr. Jefferson was a tall straight-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered. Nary man in this town walked so straight as my Old Master.”

Isaac Jefferson also remembered something else. “Mr. Jefferson was always singing when riding or walking. Hardly see him anywhere out of doors but what he was a-singing. Had a fine clear voice. Sung minuets and such. Fiddled in the parlor.” The man who could not raise his voice in a legislative chamber sang constantly when he thought no one was listening.

Jefferson played the violin from his teens, practicing at least three hours a day. He owned a small “kit” violin in a case fitted to his saddle and rode with it wherever he traveled. The habit ended in 1786 when he broke his right wrist in Paris. He had met the Italian-born artist Maria Cosway weeks earlier, and the break reportedly happened while trying to jump a fence, possibly in her company. Unable to write with his right hand, he composed a twelve-page, 4,600-word letter to her with his left, structured as a dialogue between Head and Heart. The Heart’s argument: “I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings.” He never played seriously again.

He succeeded in American politics almost entirely on the power of the pen. Congress had taken its cut. What he built next was made of stone.

The Architect

Jefferson spent the rest of his life revising two things: the Declaration on paper and Monticello in brick.

Construction began in 1769. The first version was a six-room classical manor, largely complete by 1782.

Then Jefferson went to France.

He spent five years in Paris as American minister, from 1784 to 1789, and came home, in his grandson’s words, “violently smitten with Parisian architecture.” He began tearing down his own house. The rebuilt Monticello, started in 1796 and completed in 1809, was a thirty-five room mansion with the first dome ever built in Virginia. Total construction time: roughly forty years. “Architecture is my delight,” he told a visitor, “and putting up and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements.”

The house was a marvel of invention and control. The entrance hall was part natural history museum, part trophy room: mastodon bones, Lewis and Clark artifacts, two painted Native American hides, all arranged beneath the Great Clock.

The Great Clock was Jefferson’s design, built by clockmaker Peter Spruck in 1792. A series of eighteen-pound cannonball weights descended through the week, marking the day on the wall as they passed: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But Jefferson had originally designed the clock for a different building. When the installer discovered the seven-day weight cycle needed more vertical space than the entrance hall provided, the solution was pure Jefferson: cut holes in the floor so the weights could keep descending into the cellar. Saturday, accordingly, happened underground. On at least one occasion, a cable snapped and the weights crashed through the floor.

His bedroom opened into his study through a wide archway, and between them, built into the opening, was his bed, custom-made at six feet three and a half inches. Beside him, always: two pistols and a sword. The Dome Room, his most celebrated architectural feature, had eight circular windows and a skylight. Scholars at Monticello note that its function “is not completely understood.” A beautiful room that served no clear purpose.

Visitors in his final years found the house grand but ragged. Years of deferred maintenance had taken their toll. Jefferson had spent forty years revising this house, just as he had spent fifty years circulating his original draft of the Declaration. He could not stop editing.

The Reckoning

Thomas Jefferson died $107,000 in debt. The number is not a later estimate. It appeared in the Richmond Enquirer on July 22, 1828, published by his executor, grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph. In today’s money, roughly $2 to $3 million.

The bleeding started early. When Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772, her father died the following year, leaving 11,000 acres but also enormous debts to British creditors. The heirs divided the estate, which made them personally responsible for paying the debt. Jefferson planned to sell land to cover it. Then the Revolution happened. Buyers paid in wartime paper currency, which Jefferson was legally required to accept. That currency was, in his words, “not worth oak leaves.” After the war, the Treaty of Paris required all pre-war British debts be repaid in full, in real money. The money he had accepted was gone.

Then there was the wine. Jefferson led a three-thousand-mile tasting tour through France and Italy, tasting his way through Burgundy and Bordeaux, sending crates home to Virginia. He ordered 250 bottles of Meursault in a single letter. During his two presidential terms, he spent over $16,500 on wine alone, on a salary of $25,000 a year. In some years the wine bill alone approached $10,000. His own advice, from a letter to a young namesake in 1825: “Never spend your money before you have it.” He had violated this rule for sixty years.

He sold his library to Congress in 1815 after the British burned Washington. It was the largest private library in North America: 6,487 volumes. Congress paid $23,950 (the vote was close, 71 to 61). Ten wagons hauled the books from Virginia to Washington. He wrote to Adams: “I cannot live without books.” He immediately began collecting again.

The final blow came from a friend. In 1818, Wilson Cary Nicholas, a former senator and governor, asked Jefferson to co-sign two loans worth $20,000 total. Nicholas assured Jefferson he was worth $350,000. Jefferson signed. In August 1819, a letter arrived. Nicholas confessed that risky investments in western land, combined with the Panic of 1819, had left him $200,000 in debt. The bank was calling the notes. Jefferson’s granddaughter was in the room when he read the letter. “He said very little,” she recorded, “but his countenance expressed...” The sentence trails off. She could not find the words for what she saw on his face.

In January 1826, eighty-two years old and unable to sleep, Jefferson conceived a desperate plan. He would hold a public lottery, offering his properties as prizes, to clear his debts. The Virginia legislature approved it. But the lottery never succeeded before his death. When a friend suggested he sell Monticello to relieve the pressure, Jefferson “turned white” at the thought.

The estate sales after his death raised $35,000 toward the debt, leaving $72,000 still owed. Monticello sat on the market for five years. It finally sold in 1831 to a Charlottesville druggist named James Turner Barclay. The price was $7,000. The assessed value had been $71,000. Barclay tore up the lawns and planted mulberry trees for a silkworm farm.

The Reconciliation

In the bitter election of 1800, Jefferson defeated John Adams for the presidency. Supporters on both sides had been vicious. Jefferson had secretly funded a journalist who called Adams “a repulsive pedant” with “a hideous hermaphroditical character.” Adams’s supporters warned that under Jefferson, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced.”

Adams left Washington before dawn on Inauguration Day, refusing to attend. They did not speak for twelve years.

The architect of their reunion was Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and fellow signer of the Declaration. In October 1809, Rush wrote to Adams describing a dream he had had. In the dream, Rush read from a future history book about “the renewal of the friendship and intercourse between Mr. John Adams and Mr. Jefferson, the two ex-Presidents.” The dream was a barely disguised nudge. But the ground had been prepared earlier. In 1804, after Jefferson’s daughter Polly died, Abigail Adams had written him a condolence letter, the first contact between the families in years. The exchange collapsed again into political argument, but the door had been cracked.

Adams wrote first, on January 1, 1812. He sent a short note mentioning “two pieces of homespun” he was sending. (The “homespun” was actually his son John Quincy’s Harvard lectures.) Jefferson misunderstood the reference and replied with a long letter about cloth-making. But the warmth was real. “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” Jefferson wrote. “It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause.”

Over the next fourteen years, they exchanged 158 letters.

Adams, characteristically blunt:

“I believe in God and in his Wisdom and Benevolence, and I cannot conceive that such a Being could make such a Species as the human merely to live and die on this Earth.”

Even in theology, Adams could not resist a fight.

Jefferson, characteristically cutting: he described taking a razor to the Bible, removing the miracles, and extracting only the moral teachings of Jesus. What remained was, he told Adams, “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”

Jefferson’s final letter to Adams, written March 25, 1826, introduced his grandson and reflected on their shared lives in the language of myth: “It was the lot of our early years to witness nothing but the dull monotony of Colonial subservience, and of our riper ones to breast the labors and perils of working out of it. Theirs are the Halcyon calms succeeding the storm which our Argosy had so stoutly weathered.”

Adams replied on April 17: “Your letter is one of the most beautiful and delightful I have ever received.” It was the last exchange between them. Ten weeks later, both men would be dead.

The Fourth

In the spring of 1826, Jefferson was failing. He had been ill for months. As June turned to July, he drifted in and out of consciousness in the alcove bed he had designed, in the house he had spent forty years building, in the estate he was about to lose.

He kept asking one question: Was it the Fourth?

Three people were at his bedside, and each remembered the moment differently.

His doctor, Robley Dunglison, said Jefferson asked, “Is it the Fourth?” Dunglison replied, “It soon will be.”

His granddaughter’s husband, Nicholas Trist, said Jefferson asked, “It is the Fourth?” Trist did not know what to say. When Jefferson pressed a second time, Trist lied and told him yes. He later described the lie as “repugnant” to him.

His grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, said Jefferson spoke with certainty: “It is the Fourth of July.”

Thomas Jefferson died at ten minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon on July 4, 1826. The fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Five hours later, in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Adams was dying. He had been awakened that morning by town bells and cannon fire celebrating the Jubilee. When asked if he wanted to offer a toast, he said: “Independence forever.” Then he added: “Not a syllable more.”

As his heart failed in the late afternoon, Adams spoke his last words: “Thomas Jefferson still lives.”

He was wrong by five hours.

Neither family knew about the other’s death for days. When the news reached the public, the nation was stunned. The two men who had made the Declaration, who had become enemies, who had written their way back to friendship, had died on the birthday of the document that bound them. Edward Everett, the Massachusetts congressman who delivered the first eulogy connecting the two deaths, declared: “When, toward the hour of noon, he felt his noble heart growing cold within him, the last emotion which warmed it was, that ‘Jefferson still survives.’ But he survives not. He is gone. Ye are gone together!”

His tombstone inscription was found on the back of an envelope after his death: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.” He left out the presidency, the vice presidency, the cabinet, the governorship, and the years as minister to France. He explained the choice in a note: “These were the testimonials that I have lived, and by which I wish most to be remembered.” The most powerful man in the world for eight years chose to be remembered as a writer and a builder.

What Jefferson Teaches Us

In 1825, giving away the writing desk on which he had drafted the Declaration, Jefferson attached a small prediction. The desk would become a relic, he wrote, valued for “its great association with the birth of the Great Charter of our Independence.” His granddaughter’s husband, receiving the box, called it “no longer inanimate, and mute, but as something to be interrogated and caressed.”

The desk sits in the Smithsonian today. The words sit everywhere. Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln both reached for “all men are created equal” when the country needed to be held to what it had promised. The sentence has been doing work for 250 years. It has outlived every argument about the man who wrote it.

Jefferson learned this on July 4, 1776, when the rest of Congress rewrote his draft. He spent fifty years resenting it. The words kept working anyway.

The mahogany box survived. The green cloth lining is still there. The four windows of the Graff house parlor are long gone, and the stable across the street, and the flies. But the sentence Jefferson wrote in that room, on that box, above that stable, is still being read by someone, right now, who has never heard of Jacob Graff or John Sparhawk or the hatter named John Thompson.

Next: Joseph Hewes

From the philosopher who wrote the nation’s founding document, we turn to a quieter signer with a different kind of influence.

In the spring of 1776, Joseph Hewes sat in the Pennsylvania State House and wept. The North Carolina merchant had opposed independence for months. When the vote came, something broke. He reversed his position, reportedly crying out: “It is done! And I will abide by it.”

It was Hewes who recommended John Paul Jones for naval command. Without Hewes, the man who became America’s greatest naval hero might never have gotten his chance.

Hewes died before the war ended, exhausted by the work of revolution. He gave everything he had, including his health, to the cause.

Next Sunday, we’ll tell the story of the merchant who helped launch America’s navy.

This is Essay #25 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Sources:

• Thomas Jefferson | Monticello

• Jefferson and Slavery | Thomas Jefferson Foundation

• The Papers of Thomas Jefferson | Founders Online

• Declaration of Independence | National Archives

• Declaration of Independence Writing Desk | Smithsonian

• Adams-Jefferson Letters | Massachusetts Historical Society

• Notes on the State of Virginia | Electronic Text Center, UVA

• Isaac Jefferson Memoirs | University of Virginia Library

• George Ticknor Account | Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (1876)

A young Englishwoman named Esther DeBerdt met Richard Stockton in London in 1767 and wrote about him in a letter afterward. “I like Mr. Stockton exceedingly,” she wrote. “He is certainly the cleverest man I have yet seen from America.” Stockton was thirty-seven years old, in England on a mission for the College of New Jersey, moving through the best rooms in London with the ease of a man who had been moving through the best rooms his whole life.

He had already met the King. He had already spoken to Parliament about the coming war. Edinburgh had given him the freedom of the city, an honor they handed to almost no one. He had fought off an armed robber in Scotland and missed a ship that sank with everyone aboard. He was heading home with a personal coat of arms, a Latin motto, and a conviction that the British Empire and the American colonies could still work things out.

Fourteen years after Esther DeBerdt wrote that letter, Richard Stockton was dead at fifty. His own neighbors had dragged him from his bed in the middle of the night, beaten him, chained him in a frozen prison, destroyed his library, burned his papers, looted his estate, and left him with a cancer that no surgeon could stop. And if the evidence is right, they may have also gotten him to sign away everything he stood for, in exchange for the chance to go home and die slowly among the ruins of it.

The Man Who Had Everything

Richard Stockton’s grandfather bought the family’s land from William Penn himself in 1701. By the time Richard was born on October 1, 1730, the Stocktons were one of the most powerful families in New Jersey. Their estate, called Morven, sat on 150 acres in Princeton: a 146-foot brick mansion with one of the finest private libraries in the colonies, gardens designed by his wife Annis after the estate of the English poet Alexander Pope, and a dining table where Congress members, college professors, and George Washington himself came to eat and argue about the future.

Stockton graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in its very first class, in 1748. The college sat across the street from his front door. He studied law and by 1763 held the title of serjeant-at-law, the highest legal rank in the colonies. His son-in-law Benjamin Rush later called him “timid where bold measures were required” but “sincerely devoted to the liberties of his country.” That tension between caution and conviction would define the rest of his life.

The Mission to Scotland

Both close calls happened during a fifteen-month trip through England, Scotland, and Ireland. Late one night in Edinburgh, a robber came at Stockton on a dark cobblestone street. Stockton drew the small sword he carried as part of his formal dress and fought the man off, wounding him before walking away clean. Weeks later, he booked passage on a ship to Ireland but arrived at the dock too late. The ship sailed without him, hit a storm in the Irish Sea, and went down with everyone aboard.

The college trustees had sent Stockton to recruit a new president, a Scottish minister named John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was one of the most respected religious thinkers in Scotland, and the college desperately needed his credibility. But Witherspoon had already turned them down once. His wife was terrified of the Atlantic crossing and had no interest in leaving Scotland for what she saw as the American wilderness.

Stockton enlisted a young American medical student named Benjamin Rush, who would later marry Stockton’s daughter Julia. Together, they spent weeks working on Mrs. Witherspoon. Stockton used his lawyer’s charm. Rush used his youthful enthusiasm. Eventually, she agreed. Witherspoon came to Princeton in 1768 and turned the college into one of the most important schools in America, educating a generation that included future president James Madison. Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence alongside Stockton. The Edinburgh recruitment may have been the most consequential academic hire in American history.

While in England, Stockton was formally presented to King George III at court and attended the Queen’s birthday ball. In meetings with senior members of Parliament, he warned them directly: taxing the colonies without giving them a voice would lead to war.

On his way home, he knocked a piece of Roman brick off Dover Castle and mailed it to Annis (he addressed her by the romantic nickname “Emilia” throughout their marriage), a souvenir for the collection of ancient artifacts she was building at Morven. A man collecting beauty from castle walls for his wife.

This was Richard Stockton in 1767: charming kings, fighting off muggers, dodging shipwrecks, sending his wife souvenirs from ancient castles. He came home with a personal coat of arms and a Latin motto, Omnia Deo Pendent, “All Depends on God.”

Within a decade, he would find out if he believed it.

When he got home, Stockton wrote to Lord Dartmouth, the British official in charge of the colonies, with a detailed plan for American self-government under the Crown. The proposal was remarkably forward-thinking. Stockton suggested a system where the American colonies would govern themselves through their own legislatures but remain loyal to the King, a model that looked a lot like the British Commonwealth that would not exist for another 150 years. He warned Dartmouth in plain language that if Britain refused to compromise, “the result would be an obstinate, awful, and tremendous war.” In modern terms: this will be long, it will be bloody, and nobody will forget it.

The British ignored the proposal completely.

By 1776, Stockton had given up on peace. He resigned his positions in the colonial government and threw his support behind independence. New Jersey sent him to the Continental Congress in June 1776. He voted yes on independence on July 2 and signed the Declaration in August, the first person from New Jersey to put his name on it.

He was right about the war.

Barefoot Soldiers and a Collapsing Front

Congress put Stockton to work immediately. In September 1776, they sent him north to inspect the army at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, a key position guarding the route from Canada. What he found there changed him.

The soldiers were in terrible shape. Whole regiments of men from New Jersey were marching without shoes, their bare feet cracked and bleeding on frozen ground. They were starving. Many were sick. The supplies Congress had promised had never arrived. Stockton, who had spent his life in paneled rooms and on horse chestnut walks, was looking at the actual cost of the document he had just signed.

He wrote a desperate letter to his fellow signer Abraham Clark:

“My heart melts with compassion for my brave countrymen who are thus venturing their lives in the public service and yet so distressed. There is not a single shoe or stocking to be had in this part of the world, or I would ride a hundred miles through the woods to purchase them with my own money.”

He came back to New Jersey in November 1776 to find the situation at home even worse. The British had invaded the state. General William Howe, commander of the entire British army in America, was pushing Washington’s battered forces toward Pennsylvania in a retreat that looked like it might end the Revolution entirely. New Jersey was in chaos. The British army and Loyalist militias moved through the countryside looting farms, settling grudges, and hunting anyone connected to the rebel cause.

Stockton rushed to evacuate his family. He sent Annis and the children to the home of a friend, John Covenhoven, in Monmouth County, near what is now Freehold. He thought the distance from the front lines would keep them safe.

Monmouth County was full of Loyalists. And they knew exactly where to find a man who had just signed a document declaring war on the King.

The Night Everything Changed

On November 30, 1776, in the middle of the night, a Loyalist militia guided by a local man named Cyrenus Van Mater raided the Covenhoven house. They dragged Stockton from bed in his nightshirt and breeches. They beat him. They stripped him in freezing weather and marched him to Perth Amboy, where they handed him to British military authorities.

The people who did this were not soldiers from across the ocean. They were from Stockton’s own colony, possibly from his own county. They may have known him, or known people who knew him. This is what the Revolution looked like in New Jersey in the winter of 1776. Historians who study the period call it a civil war within a revolution. Families were divided. Friendships became intelligence networks. Loyalists and Patriots lived side by side, and when the British army arrived, it gave people who had been nursing quiet resentments the power to act on them. Local Loyalist commanders like Lieutenant Colonel Elisha Lawrence organized raids specifically to capture prominent rebels. Van Mater, who guided the raiders to Covenhoven’s house, was a neighbor. He knew the roads.

Other signers were targeted by the British during the war. Several had their homes destroyed or their families threatened. But Stockton was the only one who was actually captured and held as a prisoner.

They shipped him to the Provost Prison in New York City. The Provost was a converted jail near what is now City Hall Park. It was overseen by Captain William Cunningham, a Loyalist with a personal grudge against American Patriots. Before the war, a Patriot mob had publicly humiliated Cunningham in the streets of New York. He never forgot it.

Cunningham ran the Provost like a revenge operation. He called the room where he kept high-ranking American prisoners “Congress Hall,” a mockery of the government they had tried to build. He threw drunken parties where he paraded captured officials in front of his guests, jeering at them as “rebel judges.” He withheld food for twenty-four hours at a stretch, sometimes longer. Prisoners later alleged that guards mixed poison into the already meager rations to speed up the death rate.

The cold was the constant. Guards stripped prisoners of their coats and left them in their shirts. The New York winter of 1776-1777 was bitter. Rain and snow blew through shattered, unglazed windows. The floors were bare oak planks. Prisoners slept packed so tight on the floor that they had to roll over on command when a guard shouted “Turn over! Right! Left!” The smell was what you would expect from hundreds of unwashed, starving, sick men crammed into a building with no sanitation: human waste, rotting straw, the sour sweat of men who had not been clean in weeks. Typhus spread easily in those conditions. So did dysentery.

Stockton was kept in heavy irons. The tall, polished lawyer who had charmed the court of King George III was now shivering in his shirt on a wooden floor, starving, listening to men cough and die in the dark around him. Somewhere across the water, his library was burning. His wife was pulling their letters from soldiers’ straw. And someone, at some point during those weeks, slid a piece of paper in front of Richard Stockton that would come to haunt him.

Congress itself took note of Stockton’s condition. On January 3, 1777, they passed a formal resolution protesting that Stockton, a sitting member of Congress, had been “ignominiously thrown into a common gaol” and directed Washington to investigate and complain directly to General Howe. Washington did complain, writing to Howe about the “inhuman treatment” at the Provost and warning that he would “retaliate instantly” against British prisoners if it continued.

Over the course of the war, more than 11,500 Americans died on British prison ships anchored in Wallabout Bay alone, in what is now Brooklyn. Thousands more died in jails like the Provost. The total exceeded all the Americans killed in battle during the entire Revolution. The prison ships were the worst. But the Provost was where the British kept the people they wanted to break.

When Rush, Stockton’s son-in-law, heard what was happening, he wrote a furious letter to fellow delegate Richard Henry Lee: “My much honored father in law who is now a prisoner with General Howe suffers many indignities and hardships... every particle of my blood is electrified with revenge, and if justice cannot be done him in any other way I swear by the ghost of General Warren that I will revenge his indignities.”

The Paper

On the same day Stockton was captured, November 30, 1776, the British commanders issued a proclamation offering a deal to any American who wanted out of the war. The terms were simple: sign a printed form promising “peaceable obedience to his Majesty” and pledge not to fight against Britain. In return, you get a full pardon and a guarantee that your property will not be seized. The form was standardized, starting with the words “I, [your name], do promise and declare...” It was mass-produced. The British were running a bureaucratic machine for switching sides.

The timing was devastating. Washington’s army was in retreat. The Revolution looked like it was failing. About 4,800 Americans signed the deal. 2,700 of them came from New Jersey alone. Among the signers were judges, legislators, and local officials. John Covenhoven, the friend at whose house Stockton was captured, also signed.

Did Richard Stockton sign?

The surviving evidence all points in one direction.

A British military order from December 29, 1776, written by Lieutenant Colonel James Webster of the 33rd Regiment, states that “[General] Howe having granted a full pardon to Richard Stockton, Esq.” and orders the return of his horse and property. That language is significant. Under normal rules of war, a captured gentleman could give his word not to fight and walk free. That was called a parole, and it required no oath of loyalty to anyone. What Stockton received was different. A “full pardon” with property rights attached meant he had been forgiven for a crime, which meant he had admitted to committing one. Those terms match the loyalty proclamation exactly.

Congress soon found out about it. By late December, Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry was writing to colleagues that Stockton had “sued for pardon.” By February, Abraham Clark, another New Jersey signer, told the state assembly that Stockton “by his late proceedure, cannot act” in Congress. John Hancock, the president of Congress, confirmed it the next day: “Stockton it is said, and truly, has received General Howe’s protection.” Three independent sources, all saying the same thing.

But the most important source is a letter from John Witherspoon, Stockton’s Princeton neighbor and the man Stockton had personally recruited from Scotland a decade earlier. In March 1777, Witherspoon wrote a private letter to his son David, passing along what he had been hearing around Princeton. He was not making a formal accusation. He was telling his son what everyone already seemed to know: that Stockton had signed the British loyalty deal and given his word not to participate in American affairs for the rest of the war.

Then, in the same letter, Witherspoon reported a worse rumor: that Stockton had actually been on his way to surrender voluntarily when he was captured. Stockton denied this. And Witherspoon, even while reporting the loyalty deal as fact, shot down the uglier version. The man spreading it, a Loyalist named Richard Cochran, had a well-known personal grudge against Stockton, and that “makes it very doubtful to candid Persons.”

The most important witness delivers the accusation and the defense in the same letter. That contradiction is the center of the mystery. It is made worse by the fact that Stockton had a Loyalist cousin, also named Richard Stockton, known locally as “Double Dick,” who was captured around the same time, and whose name may have been confused with the signer’s in the gossip spreading through Philadelphia.

No signed loyalty oath with Stockton’s name has ever been found. 250 years later, the question remains open.

What Was Left

On February 15, 1777, the New Jersey legislature quietly accepted Stockton’s resignation from Congress. No trial. No public condemnation. The Continental Congress, which would later denounce Benedict Arnold with fury heard across the continent, simply let Stockton disappear. If the British could prove that one of the signers had taken back his sacred honor, it could have broken the entire revolutionary coalition apart.

Stockton came home to Morven and found a ruin. Lieutenant Colonel William Harcourt and the 16th Light Dragoons had used it as their headquarters during the occupation of Princeton. They had systematically destroyed the place. The east wing library, one of the finest private collections in the colonies, was ashes. Every law book, every volume of philosophy, every document from a legal career that stretched back decades, all burned. The family portraits had been slashed with bayonets. The silver was gone. The livestock was gone. The grain stores were gone. Rush, his son-in-law, estimated the total loss at 5,000 pounds, roughly $700,000 in today’s money, enough to wipe out the family’s savings entirely.

When Annis came back, she walked through what was left. Soldiers had slept on straw bedding scattered across the floors. Stuffed into the straw, she found personal letters, the kind of private correspondence between a husband and wife that was never meant for anyone else. She pulled them out and saved what she could. It was one of the few things she was able to recover.

On December 22, 1777, the New Jersey Council of Safety summoned Stockton and made him take a formal oath renouncing whatever deal he had made with the British. This oath was called the Oath of Abjuration and Allegiance. It existed specifically for people who had signed the loyalty proclamation. If you refused to take it, the state could seize and publicly auction everything you still owned. Stockton stood before the Council, swore the oath, and walked out. Whatever he had promised the British in that prison cell, he had now publicly taken it back in front of the men who controlled his property, his legal standing, and what was left of his reputation.

He tried to rebuild. He went back to practicing law, but it was not the same. The rumor of what he had done followed him. In 1779, he wrote that angry mobs threatened him when he showed up in court. “A tyranny in the Country,” he complained, “instead of liberty and law.” The man who had once argued cases before the King’s own judges in London could no longer safely walk into a courtroom in New Jersey.

His health was destroyed. Rush said it took him over two years to even partially recover from the physical effects of the prison. The starvation, the cold, the sustained psychological abuse had broken something in him that never healed. People around him described what they called “nervous disorders,” a term used in that era for conditions that today might be recognized as severe trauma.

Then, in 1779, a cancer appeared on his lip. It spread to his throat and neck. Rush, who was one of the most respected doctors in America, performed two surgeries to try to remove it. Both failed.

Annis sat by his bed through the final nights, writing poetry by candlelight. “By that glimmering taper’s light,” she wrote, “hearing his groans and making each sigh my own.”

On February 28, 1781, Richard Stockton died at Morven. He was fifty years old. The war would not end for another two years, when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. He never saw the country he helped create.

After Stockton

His family buried the story. Rush wrote in his autobiography that Stockton had been “permitted to return to his family upon parole,” with no mention of a loyalty oath. Annis’s poetry cast her husband as a patriot martyr and nothing else. It worked. For 150 years, nobody questioned the hero version. In 1888, New Jersey placed a marble statue of Stockton in the Capitol building in Washington.

Then, in 1975, military historian Frederick Bernays Wiener published “The Signer Who Recanted” in American Heritage magazine. Wiener dug up the Clark and Witherspoon letters and laid out the evidence that Stockton had signed the loyalty proclamation. The article noted that Stockton “appears never to have denied” the accusation. The hero story cracked open. In recent years, researcher Todd Braisted found the Webster military order in the New Jersey State Archives, the first British document directly confirming the “full pardon.”

His son, Richard “The Duke” Stockton, became a US Senator and rebuilt the family fortune. His grandson, Robert “The Commodore” Stockton, conquered California during the Mexican-American War and declared himself military governor on the spot. The man who may have broken in a frozen prison cell in 1776 left behind a dynasty that bent American history for the next hundred years.

The Question

Esther DeBerdt called him the cleverest man she had ever seen from America. He fought off a robber with a sword in an Edinburgh alley and walked away clean. He missed a ship that killed everyone aboard because he stayed too long at a party. He stood in front of King George III, looked the man in the eye, went home, and signed a piece of paper that made them enemies forever. He watched barefoot soldiers bleed in the snow and offered his own money to buy them shoes.

Then his neighbors dragged him out of bed in his nightshirt and handed him to a man who called his cell block Congress Hall.

No signed oath has ever been found. Stockton never confirmed what happened in that prison. He never denied it. He walked out, went home to a ruined estate and a shattered reputation, watched his health collapse, and died at fifty with his wife writing poetry at his bedside by candlelight. Annis kept writing about him for twenty years after he was gone, always as a hero, never once mentioning the accusation.

The other signers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Most of them kept all three. Stockton lost every one. Whether he lost them to the British or to his own decision in a frozen cell, nobody alive can say for certain. The cleverest man Esther DeBerdt had ever seen from America took that answer with him when he died.

Next: Thomas Jefferson

From the accused traitor, we turn to the author.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. He put into words the principles that Stockton signed and may or may not have betrayed.

Jefferson is the most famous signer after Washington and Franklin. He is also one of the most complicated. He wrote “all men are created equal” while living in a world that was anything but equal. How a man holds those two ideas in his head at the same time, and what it means that the country he helped build inherited the same contradiction, is the question his essay will try to answer.

Next Sunday, we tell the story of the pen of the Revolution, and the man who held it.

This is Essay #24 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

Sources:

• Richard Stockton | Britannica

• Richard Stockton | National Park Service

• Was Richard Stockton a Hero? | Journal of the American Revolution

• Winning Hearts and Minds: Pardons and Oaths of Allegiance | Journal of the American Revolution

• The Signer Who Recanted | American Heritage, 1975

• Morven Estate | State of New Jersey

• Journals of the Continental Congress | Library of Congress

• Lt. Col. James Webster dispatch, Dec 29, 1776 | NJ State Archives

• John Witherspoon to David Witherspoon, March 17, 1777 | via A House Called Morven

• Abraham Clark to John Hart, February 8, 1777 | NJ Executive Correspondence

• Richard Stockton statue | Architect of the Capitol

• Prison Ship Martyrs Monument | National Park Service

• Annis Boudinot Stockton | Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia

• Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence | Wikipedia

A former Facebook executive once said he felt “tremendous guilt” about what the platform does to people. He said the company had “created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

On March 25, a Los Angeles jury told us why.

After five weeks of trial and 44 hours of deliberation stretched across nine days, a jury in Los Angeles County Superior Court found Meta and YouTube negligent in the design and operation of their platforms. The damages were $6 million. Meta pays 70%. YouTube pays 30%.

Six million dollars is a rounding error for companies worth over a trillion. But the number was never the story. How they got there was.

The Untouchables

For 29 years, social media companies operated behind a legal shield that made them nearly impossible to sue. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, was written for a different internet. The law was a direct response to Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy (1995). Yes, that Stratton Oakmont, Jordan Belfort's firm from The Wolf of Wall Street.

They sued an early online service because someone posted accusations of fraud on a message board. The firm was actually committing fraud, but they won anyway because Prodigy moderated its boards, which made the court treat it as a publisher liable for everything users posted. That case left platforms facing a perverse choice: moderate content and risk being treated as a publisher (liable for everything), or don't moderate and stay protected. Congress wrote Section 230 to let platforms moderate without becoming publishers. It was a reasonable fix for message boards and dial-up services.

It was never designed to protect companies that build algorithms to identify vulnerable teenagers and feed them content engineered to make them feel worse.

But that is what much of social media has become. For nearly three decades, every lawsuit aimed at social media companies ran into the same wall. You can’t sue the platform for what users post. The platform isn’t the publisher. Case dismissed.

The mob had a version of this. For decades, everyone knew what organized crime families were doing. The violence, the extortion. But the legal system couldn’t touch them through conventional prosecution. The evidence was there, the will was there, but the law wasn’t built for it.

How did the feds get around this? They got Al Capone on tax evasion. The feds couldn’t prove the murders or the bootlegging in court. But they could prove he didn’t pay his taxes. The charge didn’t match the public harm, but it fit the conduct, and it put him away.

The lawyers who brought this case against Meta did something similar.

The Side Door

They stopped trying to sue Meta as a publisher. Instead, they sued Meta as a manufacturer of a defective product.

They went after how the product was built: the infinite scroll, the notification loops designed like slot machines, the algorithm that learns within days what makes a 13-year-old girl feel ugly and then serves her more of it. Also the beauty filters that Meta’s own researchers said harm teenage girls, which Mark Zuckerberg chose to reinstate anyway.

Product liability law has been on the books for decades. It’s how courts held tobacco companies accountable for engineering cigarettes to be more addictive while marketing them to teenagers. Opioid litigation worked the same way: not “your drug is dangerous” but “you designed the distribution system to maximize addiction.”

In November 2025, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl drew a line that made this possible. She ruled that Section 230 did not protect Meta from claims about product design. The argument wasn’t about what users posted. It was about how the product was built. That distinction, content versus conduct, cracked the shield open.

Which left one question: what had the product actually done to someone?

What the Jury Saw

The plaintiff, identified in court as K.G.M., is now 20 years old. She started watching YouTube at age 6. She was on Instagram by 9. By her teens, she had given up her hobbies, withdrawn from friends, and developed depression and suicidal thoughts.

Her lawyers didn’t argue that bad posts hurt her. They argued that the machine was built to keep her there, and it worked exactly as designed.

Zuckerberg took the stand on February 18, 2026. Plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier, who previously won a $4.69 billion verdict against Johnson & Johnson in the talc cancer litigation using the same product-liability playbook, held up an internal Meta document from 2018: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”

Zuckerberg, who had testified that Meta does not target children, was asked to read it aloud.

A separate internal communication from Instagram employees was entered into evidence: “We’re basically pushers... We’re causing reward deficit disorder, because people are binging on Instagram so much they can’t feel the reward.”

Meta’s own people wrote the prosecution’s best argument.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Six million dollars barely registers on Meta’s balance sheet.

The real exposure isn’t one sweeping government settlement where lawyers consolidate everything into a single case, the company pays a lump sum, and prosecutors take jobs in-house counsel later. That model, the one that made people furious about bank settlements after 2008, breaks down when you’re facing 2,000 individual cases.

More than 2,400 lawsuits are pending against social media companies in state and federal courts. This was the first to reach a verdict and provides a playbook for future cases. TikTok and Snapchat settled before trial. Only Meta and YouTube went the distance.

The day before the LA verdict, a separate jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for 75,000 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, each carrying a $5,000 penalty, for exploiting children on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Attorney General Raul Torrez’s team had run an undercover operation, creating fake child accounts to document how predators used the platform and how Meta responded.

Meta cannot hire enough lawyers to fight every one of these individually, and consolidating them into a single class action is not an option. Every state attorney general watching this, particularly in an election year, is looking at a cause that polls at 80%+ bipartisan support and thinking about what a product liability case would do for their career.

There’s another detail that should worry Meta’s shareholders. A Delaware court ruled that Meta’s insurers have no duty to defend these cases. The reasoning: the lawsuits allege intentional design choices, not accidents. Insurance covers negligence. It doesn’t cover a product you built to work this way on purpose. Meta is paying its own legal bills across every one of those 2,400+ cases, which changes the financial calculation entirely.

Meta’s best argument is that proving damages here is harder than tobacco or opioids. Tobacco plaintiffs had lung cancer. Opioid plaintiffs had overdose deaths and medical records. The harms in these cases are depression and suicidal thoughts. Real, but harder to put a dollar figure on. There’s no tumor to show a jury. In previous mass torts, individual opioid victims received as little as $400 after fees. The $6 million this jury awarded is actually high by comparison. Whether that number holds as a benchmark across 2,400 cases, or whether the psychological nature of the harm drives settlements lower, remains genuinely open. But Meta can’t bet on that ambiguity while it’s paying out of pocket for every fight.

The pressure accumulates from hundreds of individual cases that collectively make it more expensive to fight than to change. The tobacco industry learned this. It took decades of individual verdicts and state AG lawsuits, a slow accumulation of internal documents proving that the companies knew what they were doing. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement cost the industry $246 billion. It didn’t happen because of one verdict. It happened because the losses kept coming, and at some point it was cheaper to settle than to keep showing up in court.

And the people inside the companies knew it was coming.

What They Already Knew

Meta’s practices don’t stop at American teenagers. In Southeast Asia, the company has faced accusations of enabling scam operations and failing to moderate content that destabilizes communities with no resources to fight back. This verdict gives local authorities in those countries something they didn’t have before: a finding from Meta’s home country that its product design is harmful.

You don’t need to follow international law to see why this matters to your family, though.

Internal researchers at Meta wrote in documents that are now trial evidence. Meta knew that 30% of 10-to-12-year-olds in the U.S. were on Instagram despite a stated policy requiring users to be 13. They set internal targets to push daily engagement for tweens (ages 10-12) to 40 minutes.

The practices these companies encourage for your children are not the same practices their own executives follow with their children. Everyone knew that. Now a jury has seen the internal documents that prove it.

Meta will appeal. YouTube will appeal. The legal process will take years. But the legal theory that kept social media companies untouchable for three decades just failed in front of a jury.

That former Facebook executive said he felt tremendous guilt. He said it in 2017. It took eight more years and a nine-day jury deliberation for the legal system to catch up to what his own colleagues had written down.

If you’re a parent, you don’t have to wait that long.

Curious Jay is weekly essays on why things don’t work the way they should. Subscribe free for investigations into power, money, and broken systems.

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On July 9, 1776, a crowd in New York City pulled down a four-thousand-pound equestrian statue of King George III from its pedestal at Bowling Green. They hacked off the head and dragged the body through the streets. British Captain John Montresor later recovered the severed head and shipped it to England, where it disappeared into a private collection. The rest of the king lay in chunks on the cobblestones.

Oliver Wolcott, a Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress, saw four thousand pounds of lead that the Continental Army desperately needed.

He arranged for the remains to be loaded onto barges, shipped up Long Island Sound to Norwalk, and hauled by oxcart a hundred miles inland to his home in Litchfield, Connecticut. Then he went back to Philadelphia, because Congress still had a war to argue about.

The melting happened in a shed behind the Wolcott house. Oliver’s wife Laura ran the operation with their daughters and neighbors. For weeks that summer, they heated lead over open fires, poured the liquid metal into iron molds, and packed the cooled musket balls into crates for the front lines. Oliver’s papers include a tally of what they produced: forty-two thousand and eighty-eight bullets, cast from the body of the king.

Ebenezer Hazard wrote to General Horatio Gates that British troops would soon have “melted Majesty fired at them.”

The rest of Oliver Wolcott’s life would take him places far stranger than a shed full of melted royalty.

The Sheriff’s Son

Oliver Wolcott was born in 1726 in Windsor, Connecticut. His father, Roger Wolcott, had been governor of Connecticut until 1754, when a dispute over a captured Spanish merchant ship brought accusations of corruption and cost him the next election. Roger became the first Connecticut governor ever voted out of office. He was later cleared of the charges, but the damage was done. The Wolcott name carried weight in the colony, and now it carried a stain.

Oliver graduated first in his class at Yale in 1747 and studied medicine with his older brother, but never opened a practice. He moved to Litchfield, took the job of county sheriff, and held it for twenty years.

A county sheriff in eighteenth-century Connecticut collected taxes, ran the jail, and settled everything from property disputes to public fights across a large rural county. Court records from Litchfield show lawsuits tied to Wolcott’s time in office, including a prisoner escape and accusations of mistreating a servant. It was messy, thankless, constant work.

By the time the Revolution arrived, Wolcott knew how to organize people, move supplies, and make hard decisions under pressure. Nobody in Connecticut could match that experience.

The Spy

In the summer of 1779, Major General William Tryon burned New Haven and Fairfield. Danbury had already been hit two years earlier. The British were raiding the Connecticut coast at will, torching entire towns, and vanishing before anyone could respond.

Wolcott was the top militia commander in Connecticut. His forces were too slow. By the time word reached inland and the militia assembled, the British ships were already gone.

So he built a spy network.

Volume III of the Oliver Wolcott Sr. Papers at the Connecticut Historical Society contains a ledger, dated August 4 through August 13, 1779, recording payments for intelligence services. The entries show coordination with Colonel Andrew Ward, a veteran who managed informants along the coast and Long Island Sound. Wolcott paid people to watch British ship movements and track suspected loyalists operating inside Connecticut. The intelligence let him position his militia where the British were likely to land, instead of scrambling after the fact.

The ledger is a small, quiet document. It records amounts paid, dates, contacts. Nothing dramatic about it on the page. But it means that the man remembered for melting a statue into bullets was also funding a covert intelligence operation along the Connecticut coastline, out of his own pocket, while the towns around him burned.

The General

Two years before the spy ledger, in the autumn of 1777, Wolcott marched north with several hundred Connecticut volunteers to join the fight at Saratoga.

British General John Burgoyne was pushing south from Canada, trying to split the colonies in half by capturing the Hudson River Valley. Wolcott’s militia joined General Horatio Gates and helped surround Burgoyne’s army at Freeman’s Farm and Bemis Heights. The American victory at Saratoga brought France into the war.

Wolcott was not a famous general. No one painted his portrait at the battle. But according to tradition, some of the musket balls his Connecticut soldiers carried to Saratoga were the same ones Laura had cast in their backyard from the body of King George III. Nobody can confirm that for certain. But the timing fits, and the image is hard to let go of: the king’s own lead, fired back at the army he sent to keep the colonies.

After the war, Wolcott served seventeen years as lieutenant governor, then governor of Connecticut.

In 1788, he spoke at the state’s convention to approve the Constitution, warning that the agreement holding the states together was too weak and that the country could fall apart. When the sitting governor died in 1796, Wolcott stepped into the same office his father had lost forty years earlier.

The Wolcott name, damaged in Oliver’s twenties, was restored by the time he was seventy. His son, Oliver Wolcott Jr., would go even further, replacing Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury and eventually becoming governor himself.

Oliver Wolcott Sr. had spent fifty years in public service. He had melted a king into bullets, fought at the battle that turned the war, and run a spy network to protect his coastline. By any measure of his time, he had done enough.

He did not think so.

The Prayer

Oliver Wolcott died in office on December 1, 1797. He was seventy years old.

His pastor, Azel Backus, preached the funeral sermon. What Backus recorded about the governor’s final days caught people off guard.

Wolcott did not die giving orders or settling accounts. He spent his last days in what Backus described as quiet torment. The governor expressed “a deep sense of his personal unworthiness and guilt.” For several days before his death, Backus wrote, “every breath seemed to bring with it a prayer.”

Wolcott was raised in a strict Calvinist household, the kind of faith that teaches no amount of human achievement can earn a place in heaven. You cannot work your way there. You cannot build enough or sacrifice enough. Everything you accomplish is, in the final accounting, a debt you can never repay.

The man who melted a king into forty-two thousand bullets spent his last breaths feeling that none of it had been enough.

The Statue’s Afterlife

Not all of the statue made it to Litchfield. Loyalists in Wilton, Connecticut stole fragments during transport and buried them on their property. The pieces were recovered decades later, and several are now held at the New-York Historical Society.

The head, as noted earlier, was recovered by Captain Montresor and sent to England. It ended up in the hands of Lord Townshend. No museum has confirmed having it since. It has never been found.

In 1935, the people of Litchfield reenacted the melting to celebrate Connecticut’s 300th anniversary, creating souvenir bullets for visitors. In 1991, a twenty-pound piece identified as part of the horse was pulled from a swamp in Wilton. It is now on display at the New-York Historical Society.

The statue stood on its pedestal at Bowling Green for six years. It has been remembered for 250.

What Wolcott Teaches Us

Oliver Wolcott spent his entire adult life climbing. Sheriff, militia commander, congressman, spy master, general, governor. Each accomplishment led to the next. Each mountain revealed another one behind it.

That is how most of us are taught to live. One more goal. One more achievement. The next thing will be the thing that makes it feel complete.

Wolcott reached the top. He held the same office his father had lost. He rebuilt a family name that had been ruined before he turned thirty. He fought in the battle that won the war. He melted a king.

And on his deathbed, none of it was enough. His faith told him that a lifetime of service was still a debt unpaid. Every breath was a prayer for something he could not earn.

Maybe the lesson is not about doing more. Maybe it is about learning to sit with what you have already done and accepting that it was enough, even if it never feels that way. Because no one gets to the end and thinks they checked every box. The question is whether you spent the time doing work that mattered, not whether you finished.

Wolcott did. He just never believed it.

Next: Richard Stockton

From the man who melted a king, we turn to the most controversial signer of all.

Richard Stockton of New Jersey signed the Declaration of Independence. Then he was captured by the British. And then, according to some accounts, he signed something else: a loyalty oath to the Crown.

Did Richard Stockton betray the Revolution? The evidence has been argued for 250 years.

Next Friday, we tell the story of the signer accused of treason.

This is Essay #23 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

Sources:

• Oliver Wolcott | Britannica

• Oliver Wolcott | National Park Service

• The Fate of the King George III Statue | Smithsonian Magazine

• Battle of Saratoga | American Battlefield Trust

• Oliver Wolcott Sr. Papers | Connecticut Historical Society

• Statue Fragments | New-York Historical Society

• Bullet Mold | New-York Historical Society

In June 1751, a twenty-seven-year-old minister named Lyman Hall stood up in a Connecticut church and confessed to “immoral conduct.” The church stripped him of his pulpit. Whatever he did was bad enough to end his career, but the specific offense was never recorded. All we have is the label and the result.

Twenty-four years later, that same man walked into the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He was carrying papers from a single Georgia parish. Not from the colony of Georgia, which had refused to send anyone. From one parish, acting on its own. Congress gave him a seat in the room but would not give him a vote.

What happened between those two rooms is one of the strangest reinventions in the founding generation.

The Fall

Hall graduated from Yale in 1747 and studied theology under his uncle Samuel Hall. By 1749 he was preaching at a parish in Stratfield, Connecticut, in what would later become Bridgeport. A few months later, a regional church council called the Fairfield West Consociation ordained him as a full minister.

The ordination was messy from the start. Sixteen members of the congregation formally protested it. They were loyal to the previous pastor, Reverend Samuel Cooke, who had served the parish for thirty-two years. Connecticut churches in the 1740s were tearing themselves apart over the Great Awakening, a wave of emotional, revival-style preaching that split congregations into rival camps. One side, called “New Lights,” wanted more passion in worship. The other side, the “Old Lights,” thought the revivalists were dangerous. Hall sided with the Old Lights, which put him on the wrong side of Cooke’s supporters from the day he took the pulpit.

Two years later, those parishioners had ammunition. On June 18, 1751, the Consociation convened a formal hearing and charged Hall with “immoral conduct.”

In a Congregational church, discipline was a public event. The meetinghouse was not just where people worshipped. It doubled as the town’s courthouse, its meeting hall, its center of civic life. Outside, the town green had stocks and a whipping post. Moral failure in colonial Connecticut was not a private matter. It was something your neighbors watched.

Hall stood up in that room and confessed. The charges, the records say, were “supported by proof and also by his own confession.” The Consociation dismissed him but then did something unexpected: they voted to restore him, saying they believed his repentance was sincere. Hall went back to preaching, filling vacant pulpits while quietly studying medicine on the side. But it did not hold. By 1753, he had abandoned the ministry entirely.

The specific offense was never made public. Church records from this period typically used vague phrases like “immoral conduct” without spelling out what happened. Sexual wrongdoing was the most common reason for that label, but drunkenness or other violations could trigger it too. And given the factional warfare tearing through Connecticut churches at the time, even a real charge could have been pushed harder than it deserved.

What we do know is the result. The experience in the room could be devastating, but the written record would preserve only a cold sentence: “dismissed on charges of immoral conduct.” By age twenty-nine, Lyman Hall’s first career was over.

The Reinvention

Hall needed a new way to earn a living, and medicine was the obvious choice. In colonial New England, there were no medical schools. The first one in America would not open until 1765. Doctors learned by apprenticing with other doctors, and plenty of ministers had already made the same switch. Nobody asking a doctor to set a bone or treat a fever cared whether he had been thrown out of a church.

Hall apprenticed with a practicing physician, returned to his hometown of Wallingford, and started over.

In May 1752, Hall married Abigail Burr, the daughter of one of Fairfield’s most prominent families. Fourteen months later, she was dead. Hall buried his wife, kept practicing medicine, and at some point made a decision that tells you everything about where his head was.

He remarried in 1757, to a woman named Mary Osborne, and left Connecticut entirely. He did not move one town over. He moved eight hundred miles south. He had befriended a group of Congregationalist families who were migrating from Dorchester, South Carolina to the Georgia coast, and he went with them. By 1760, he had a rice plantation called Hall’s Knoll on the Savannah-Darien road, a summer residence in the port town of Sunbury, and a medical practice. He was a doctor in a colony where nobody knew his name, let alone his story.

The Puritan Island

St. John’s Parish was unlike anywhere else in Georgia. The families who settled there had originally come from New England. They migrated first to Dorchester, South Carolina, and then, in the early 1750s, moved again to the Georgia coast. They founded the town of Midway, formed the Midway Society in 1754, and built a permanent meetinghouse by 1756. The first service was held in 1758. They were Congregationalists, the same tradition Hall had grown up in, and they brought with them the same culture of self-governance and distrust of royal authority that had defined New England since the Puritans.

The land they carved out was not easy, but it was productive. The naturalist William Bartram visited plantations near Midway and described rice fields engineered with canals and water gates, shaded groves along slow creeks, and tables loaded with “plain but plentiful” food. These families had built a rice and indigo economy out of the coastal swamp. They ran their own church, chose their own leaders, and answered to nobody in Savannah. Later writers claimed the parish held an outsized share of Georgia’s wealth, and whether or not that was literally true, it tells you how the community saw itself.

Georgia’s royal governor, James Wright, saw the problem clearly. He called the parish’s rebellious energy the work of “descendants of New England people of the Puritan Independent sect” who retained a “strong tincture of Republican or Oliverian principles.” He was calling them revolutionaries before they even used the word.

Georgia was the only colony in America that sent zero delegates to the First Continental Congress in 1774. St. John’s Parish was furious. When Georgia still could not agree on delegates for the Second Congress in early 1775, the parish stopped waiting. It declared itself “a body detached” from the rest of the colony, negotiated its own trade agreements through South Carolina’s resistance network, and chose a delegate to send to Philadelphia on its own authority.

They chose the doctor. The one who had once been thrown out of a church just like theirs.

The Non-Voting Delegate

Hall arrived in Philadelphia in May 1775 with 160 barrels of rice and a set of credentials that nobody in Congress had ever seen before. The rice was a gift from St. John’s Parish to the people of Boston, whose port the British had shut down. The credentials said Hall represented that one parish, not the colony of Georgia. Georgia had officially sent nobody.

Congress had to figure out what to do with him. They seated him “as a delegate from the Parish of St. John” and let him join debates, but they would not let him vote on anything decided by colony. He sat in every session. He argued in the hallways. When it came time to raise hands, his stayed down.

Hall accepted the terms. He told colleagues he believed the parish’s example would be “speedily followed” and that Georgia would eventually send a full delegation. It was a bold prediction from a man representing a few thousand people in a coastal parish. But Hall understood something about how momentum works. A single parish showing up with rice and credentials was a harder thing for the rest of Georgia to ignore than a colony that simply never appeared.

Within months, he was right. Georgia sent a complete delegation, and in the summer of 1776, Hall signed the Declaration of Independence alongside Button Gwinnett and George Walton.

A man who had once confessed before a Connecticut congregation now put his name on a document the British Crown called treason.

The War and After

The cost came quickly.

On November 24, 1778, a British force of 750 soldiers, Loyalists, and Indian warriors marched north from Florida toward the Midway settlement. They outnumbered the local defenders nearly eight to one. General James Screven was shot multiple times and killed in the fighting. American officers left a forged letter inside the Midway Meeting House claiming reinforcements were on the way from Savannah. The trick worked. The British commander occupied Midway but then pulled back, and on his way out, he ordered the meetinghouse burned to the ground. His troops also burned most of the surrounding town and seized two thousand livestock from the area.

Five weeks later, Savannah fell. The British issued a bill of attainder against Hall, branding him a traitor and ordering the confiscation of his property. Both Hall’s Knoll and his Sunbury residence were burned. The British burned every house on the King’s Highway whose owner refused to swear allegiance to the Crown.

The community that had sent Hall to Congress no longer existed. Hall’s wife Mary and their son John fled north. Hall himself had been elected to Congress through 1780, but he had stopped attending sessions after February 1777. By the time the British were finished with St. John’s Parish, there was nothing left to go back to.

When the war ended in 1782, Hall returned to Savannah and quietly resumed practicing medicine. Georgia elected him governor in January 1783. The state was broke and broken. Property seized from Loyalists sat in limbo, not yet redistributed. Government funds were nearly empty.

His most lasting act came in 1785, when he helped charter the University of Georgia, the first state-chartered university in America. A man who had been expelled from his own religious community helped build an institution that would educate Georgia’s leaders for the next two and a half centuries.

Hall sold what was left of Hall’s Knoll that same year. In 1790 he moved to Burke County and bought Shell Bluff Plantation. He died there on October 19, 1790, at sixty-six.

What Hall Teaches Us

Most people who get publicly humiliated at twenty-seven do not end up signing the founding document of a nation at fifty-two.

Hall lost his pulpit and his first wife within the span of a few years. He could have stayed in Connecticut and lived small. Instead he learned a new trade and moved eight hundred miles to a community radical enough to send him where nobody else would go.

The parish chose him precisely because he was the kind of person who had already survived being judged. A man who had stood before a congregation and confessed was not afraid to walk into Congress and take an empty seat.

In 1751, a church told Lyman Hall he did not belong. In 1776, he put his name on the document that told a king the same thing.

Next: Oliver Wolcott

From Georgia’s disgraced minister, we turn to Connecticut’s statue destroyer.

Oliver Wolcott was a military man, a veteran of the French and Indian War who later became a Revolutionary general.

But he’s best remembered for what he did to a statue.

In July 1776, after independence was declared, a crowd in New York pulled down a large statue of King George III. The statue was made of lead, and Wolcott had an idea.

He sent pieces to Connecticut, where they were melted into musket balls. The figure often cited is about 42,000 rounds.

King George III, transformed into ammunition to be fired at his own soldiers. It’s the kind of poetic justice that the Revolution specialized in.

Next Sunday, we’ll tell the story of the governor who tore down a king.

This is Essay #22 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

Sources:

• Lyman Hall | New Georgia Encyclopedia

• Revolutionary War in Georgia | New Georgia Encyclopedia

• Signers of the Declaration Factsheet | U.S. National Archives

• University of Georgia | New Georgia Encyclopedia

• Lyman Hall | National Constitution Center

• Dictionary of American Biography | Hall entry

• Midway Congregational Church History | James Stacy (1894)

• Cambridge Platform (1648) | Congregational Polity

Somewhere in Seoul right now, a teenager is dropping into a PUBG match on her phone. She’s parachuting onto a virtual island, looting a shotgun from a bombed-out house, sprinting toward gunfire. She is not alone. PUBG Mobile alone has been downloaded over a billion times.

Now Krafton, the company behind PUBG, wants to expand from entertainment into defense contracting.

On March 13, Hanwha Aerospace and Krafton announced plans to jointly develop “Physical AI.”

The goal?

Use PUBG’s engine along with a $1 billion joint fund to train the AI inside real weapons.

The idea isn’t new. In 1996, a Marine lieutenant modified DOOM II to train fire teams for close-quarters combat. Demons became enemy combatants. The BFG became an M16. The graphics were terrible. The AI enemies ran at you like they wanted to die. It worked anyway.

That was a zero-budget hack on a $50 game engine. South Korea is betting a billion dollars that the same principle scales to autonomous weapons.

Why Game Engines

Training AI for the physical world requires a staggering volume of scenarios. A self-driving car needs millions of simulated miles before it touches asphalt. A military drone needs millions of simulated engagements before it enters airspace.

The problem is that real-world military testing is slow and expensive. You can’t crash 10,000 drones into mountains to teach the 10,001st how to avoid them. You can’t fire live munitions at scale to train a targeting algorithm. If you’ve seen Tron: Ares, the opening sequence is closer to what’s actually happening than most people realize.

A program trained and tested inside the Grid before being released into the real world. The US military has known this since 1983, when DARPA launched SIMNET, a program born from an idea Jack Thorpe first outlined in a 1978 paper. It was the first networked military simulation. Soldiers in M1 Abrams simulators fought computer-generated Soviet tanks over Ethernet cables. When a crew got “killed,” their screen went blank. Then they replayed it, Groundhog Day-style, until the tactics clicked.

SIMNET was primitive. But it proved the concept: you can train human judgment through virtual combat.

Game engines took that concept and scaled it by orders of magnitude. A modern engine like Unreal Engine 5 simulates real-world physics: gravity, ballistics, wind, terrain deformation. It generates a different city layout every run. It models enemy AI that learns and adapts instead of following scripts. PUBG’s engine already handles all of this for 100 simultaneous players across a 64 square kilometer map. The computational infrastructure Krafton built to entertain gamers turns out to be almost exactly what you need to train autonomous weapons.

The “almost” is important. Entertainment physics are close enough to fool your eyes. Military physics need to be close enough to land a munition. That’s the gap the billion dollars is meant to close.

Korea’s Defense Machine

South Korea’s defense exports hit a record $17.3 billion in 2022, up from around $3 billion in 2015.

What changed?

Europe rearmed after Russia invaded Ukraine and discovered its own defense contractors couldn’t deliver fast enough. Germany’s tank production lines were cold. France’s order books were full for years. Seoul could ship now, at lower prices, and was willing to share the technical knowledge to build locally, something companies like Lockheed and Rheinmetall historically refused to do.

When Poland needed to replace its Soviet-era tanks, it called Seoul. Within months, the first K2 Black Panther tanks were rolling off ships. The deal eventually expanded to over 1,000 tanks and hundreds of K9 howitzers, one of the largest arms deals in modern European history.

Hanwha Aerospace, the K9’s manufacturer, sits at the center of this boom. The company absorbed Samsung’s defense subsidiary, added precision-guided munitions and space launch vehicles, and now wants to be the Korean Lockheed Martin.

But hardware alone is a commodity game. Every defense company in the world can build a drone chassis. The margin lives in the software that tells the drone what to do when it loses contact with its operator and the target moves.

That’s where Krafton comes in.

What “Physical AI” Actually Means

The term “Physical AI” is everywhere in 2026, and it means different things depending on who’s selling it. NVIDIA uses it to describe robot simulation. Tesla uses it to describe humanoid robots. Hanwha and Krafton mean something more specific: AI trained in simulation environments with accurate-enough physics to operate reliably in the real world.

Training Physical AI requires simulation environments that model real physics with enough fidelity that lessons transfer to reality. This is called the “sim-to-real gap,” and it’s the central unsolved problem of AI that has to operate in the physical world. A drone that flies perfectly in simulation and crashes into a tree in real life is useless.

PUBG’s engine isn’t accurate enough for this out of the box. But the infrastructure underneath it is. The networking, the procedural world generation, the ability to run thousands of simultaneous AI agents in a shared environment. That’s what Hanwha is buying. Krafton’s engineers know how to build virtual worlds at scale. Hanwha’s engineers know what physical accuracy those worlds need to achieve.

The Convergence A General Predicted

Last August, retired four-star general Joseph Votel wrote an essay arguing that the US military should be paying attention to competitive gaming. Not as a recruiting tool, though that was the Pentagon’s usual pitch, but as a training methodology. Games like StarCraft II and Rainbow Six Siege, he argued, develop the same cognitive skills as military command: rapid decision-making under uncertainty and real-time adaptation to adversarial tactics.

Seven months later, South Korea is proposing that the games themselves become the training ground for the weapons. The cognitive loop that Votel described for human players is now being applied to AI agents. Instead of a human learning to make faster decisions in StarCraft, an AI is learning to navigate physical terrain in a simulation built on PUBG’s architecture.

This is a fundamentally different bet than what the US defense-tech ecosystem is making. Anduril, the most prominent American defense startup, builds autonomous systems powered by its Lattice software platform. It acquired a game studio, Carbon Games, back in 2019 for its engine tech. But the American approach still treats defense AI as a software integration problem. The Korean approach treats it as a simulation problem, and the scale of the bet reflects that.

Anduril has simulated testing environments, but its primary development loop runs through real-world sensor data. If Hanwha and Krafton can build simulation environments accurate enough to train weapons AI, they can run thousands of tests per day at a fraction of the cost. The speed advantage compounds.

This isn’t new in principle. The internet was a DARPA project. GPS was built for missile guidance. The semiconductor industry exists because the military needed smaller circuits. Civilian and military technology have always been entangled.

But the relationship used to flow in one direction: military R&D produced technology that eventually became consumer products. The Hanwha-Krafton deal reverses the flow. Consumer entertainment technology, built to keep gamers engaged, is being repurposed for weapons training. The skills Krafton developed to make PUBG’s ballistics feel satisfying are being applied to make real ballistics accurate.

Follow the Money

The old defense model is simple: build hardware, bill the government, collect your guaranteed profit margin. That model assumed the hardware was the hard part.

Defense investors have spent the last five years chasing hardware companies. Drone makers and missile builders. But if simulation becomes the bottleneck, the companies with the best virtual worlds win the contracts, not the ones with the best assembly lines.

The US spent $886 billion on defense last year. Its biggest defense-tech startup bought a small game studio six years ago and folded it into an engineering team. South Korea spent a fraction of that budget and launched a billion-dollar joint venture between its top weapons maker and the studio behind the most-downloaded mobile shooter in history.

The next generation of weapons AI won’t be trained on battlefields. It will be trained in virtual worlds built by game developers. Whoever builds the best simulation environment controls the pace of weapons development for the next decade. Right now, the country best positioned to do that is the one that built PUBG.

The Pentagon might want to start returning General Votel’s calls.

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Sources:

• Korea Economic Daily

• Seoul Economic Daily

• Korea Herald

• Krafton Press Release

• Defense Mirror

“Undaunted resolution.”

That is how William Ellery described the faces of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence.

On August 2, 1776, while other delegates waited for their turn at the signing table, Ellery did something no one else thought to do. He positioned himself right next to Secretary Charles Thomson, close enough to study every face as each man stepped forward to sign. Most signers left almost no record of what it felt like in that room. Ellery was different. He watched closely, and he wrote it down.

He was a small man, about five foot five, thin and light. The kind of person who could slip to the front of a room without anyone noticing. He later wrote that “undaunted resolution was displayed in every countenance.” No trembling hands. No long pauses. Just name after name on a sheet of parchment that could have sent every one of them to the gallows.

The large-bodied Benjamin Harrison of Virginia looked at Ellery and saw an opportunity for a joke. “I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Ellery, when we are all hung for what we are now doing,” Harrison said. “From the size and weight of my body, I shall die quickly, but from your lightness of body, you will dance for some time before you are dead.”

Gallows humor. Literal gallows humor, from men signing what they believed could be their own death warrant. Ellery did not record whether he laughed. He recorded that he watched.

The Late Bloomer

Ellery was born December 22, 1727, in Newport, Rhode Island, a city that most Americans today could not place on a map but that in 1727 was one of the wealthiest ports in British North America. Newport was the fifth-largest city in the colonies, with a population of roughly 9,200. Its deep-water harbor ranked as the third-busiest port on the continent. Ships carried rum, whale oil, and candles across the Atlantic. The streets near the waterfront were lined with merchant houses, distilleries, and the workshops of some of the finest furniture makers in the colonies. A Jewish community had settled there as early as 1658, and by the 1760s they had built the Touro Synagogue, still standing today as the oldest synagogue in North America.

This was the Newport that shaped young William Ellery. His father, William Ellery Sr., was a prominent merchant and member of the colonial legislature. Young William graduated from Harvard in 1747, where he was reportedly better known for his humor than his studies, and seemed headed for an ordinary life in trade or law.

For the next two decades, nothing stuck. He tried his hand as a merchant, served as a clerk for the Rhode Island legislature, and held minor local offices. His first wife, Ann Remington, died in 1764. He married Abigail Cary and, nearing fifty, finally settled into a law practice. He was admitted to the bar in 1770, at the age of forty-three.

A family story, passed down through his grandson William Ellery Channing (who would later become one of America’s most famous ministers), captures his temperament. Ellery’s wife kept a family almanac. One day she recorded as its “most precious event” that her husband had spent the evening at home with her and the children. Ellery read the entry. He said nothing. He went out that evening as usual. Then, when he returned, he announced he had come for a “parting cup” and declared he would seek his evenings at home from then on. No argument. No speech. Just a private decision, made quietly and kept.

By his own assessment, he was a “quack lawyer.” Despite the self-deprecation, or perhaps because of it, he had found his calling. The law gave structure to the restlessness. And that restlessness found its purpose when the Revolution arrived.

In 1765, when the Stamp Act protests erupted, Ellery did not just join the local resistance. He helped lead a march through Newport’s streets, and in a letter to a friend, he wrote with an intensity that revealed how far the quiet observer could go: “You must exert yourself. To be ruled by Tories, when we may be ruled by Sons of Liberty, how debasing. There is liberty and fire enough, it only requires the application of the bellows. Blow then, a blast that will shake this country.”

In May 1776, Rhode Island became the first colony to formally renounce allegiance to the British Crown. Weeks later, delegate Samuel Ward died of smallpox in Philadelphia. The colony sent Ellery to take his seat in the Continental Congress.

He arrived just in time to vote for independence and sign the Declaration. He was forty-eight years old, and his signature was the second-largest on the document, right after John Hancock‘s. The quiet watcher wrote his name bigger than almost everyone else in the room.

But signing a document and surviving its consequences were two different things.

The War at Home

The Revolution cost William Ellery everything he had built.

Before the British came, Newport was a thriving port city of nearly 9,500 people, a place where merchants, craftsmen, and sailors crowded the streets around the Brick Market at the head of Long Wharf. The Colony House, where the Declaration of Independence had been read aloud in July 1776, stood at the center of civic life.

In December 1776, a British fleet of more than seventy ships sailed into Narragansett Bay. Seven thousand British and Hessian soldiers occupied the city, and Newport began to die. The soldiers turned churches into barracks and stables. They cut down every tree on Aquidneck Island for firewood during three brutal winters. They tore down roughly 300 houses, ripping them apart board by board for fuel. Fences, orchards, and woodlots disappeared. The population collapsed from over 9,200 to barely 5,300 as residents fled.

The Jewish community scattered. Aaron Lopez, the merchant who had helped build Newport’s candle and whale oil industries, left for Leicester, Massachusetts, and most of the community followed. Isaac Touro, the synagogue’s prayer leader, protected the building during the occupation but was forced to flee under British escort in 1779. He never returned. He died in poverty four years later.

British soldiers targeted patriot property specifically. Ellery’s house on Thames Street, directly across from the Liberty Tree, was one of many buildings burned in retribution for his “treason.” His furniture, personal effects, and a large portion of his personal library were destroyed.

Ellery was not there to see it. He was serving in Congress in Philadelphia. When he learned what had happened, he kept working. He sat on the Marine Committee and the Board of Admiralty, helping oversee the small American navy. To save money, he traveled between Rhode Island and Philadelphia on horseback, a small man on a long road. He later joked that few people along the route would have taken him for a “Lord of the Admiralty.”

He served in Congress until 1785, building a new government while the city he grew up in shrank around him. When he finally returned to Rhode Island, the “quack lawyer” was elected Chief Justice of the state’s Supreme Court, a position he held while the state wrestled with debt crises and paper money fights.

When the British left Newport in October 1779, they left behind a stripped, scarred town. The orchards were gone. Half the houses were gone. The merchants had scattered to Providence and Boston and never came back. Newport would not recover its pre-war population for decades. The city William Ellery grew up in no longer existed.

The Enforcer

In 1790, George Washington appointed Ellery customs collector for the District of Newport. He was sixty-two years old. He would hold the job for thirty years, under five presidents, until the day he died.

The work was not glamorous. Ellery walked to the customs house every morning to review shipping records, cargo lists, crew manifests, and bills of sale. His annual salary in 1817 was $1,275.67, a figure that reads like accounting because that is exactly what the job was. The same eyes that had studied every face at the signing table now tracked tonnage and invoices at a wounded harbor.

But the customs job was not ceremonial, and Ellery was not a passive observer.

In the late 1790s, he went to war with the DeWolf family of Bristol, one of the wealthiest and most powerful clans in Rhode Island. The DeWolfs ran an illegal trading network through the port, and Ellery, as the federal customs collector, was the one person standing between them and unchecked commerce.

In 1799, Ellery seized a schooner called the Lucy, owned by the DeWolfs and captained by a man named Charles Collins. When a court ordered the ship sold at auction, Ellery sent his deputy to bid on it for the government. The DeWolfs tried to convince the deputy to back off. He refused. So they kidnapped him. In broad daylight, the deputy was grabbed and carried onto a boat. He later wrote: “I was forcibly seized and carried on Board of a small sail Boat... I struggled... but in vain.” Several bystanders watched and did nothing.

With the government’s bidder gone, a straw buyer purchased the Lucy back for the DeWolfs at a fraction of its value.

Ellery did not stop. He kept filing reports, kept enforcing federal law. The DeWolfs responded with politics. James DeWolf, who had powerful connections to President Jefferson’s party, lobbied for the creation of a separate customs district in Bristol, one that would be outside Ellery’s jurisdiction entirely. In 1801, Jefferson approved it. And in 1804, Charles Collins, the very captain whose ship Ellery had seized, was appointed as the new Bristol customs collector.

Then, in 1809, came a gut-punch from above. Ellery seized ships carrying illegal cargo from Cuba. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin sent a letter ordering him to “release the vessel and cargo.” The man on the wharf enforced the law. The man at the capital overruled him.

Ellery held his post anyway. He kept walking to the customs house. He kept filing reports. He kept watching.

A letter to Ezra Stiles from July 1776 captures the finality of his commitment: “The door is shut. We have been driven into a Declaration of Independency and must forget our former love of our British brethren. The Sword must determine our quarrel.” Once Ellery made a decision, he did not unmake it. Not at the signing table, and not at the customs house.

The Long Life

William Ellery lived to be ninety-two years old.

Past eighty, he bragged about helping pioneer more intensive vegetable gardening in Newport, boasting that “ten times” as many vegetables were raised on the same ground as before. He was especially proud of his peas. He maintained that a diet from his own garden, combined with goat’s milk and cheese from his own livestock, was the secret to his “healthful and agreeable” condition. He was still competing, still measuring, still improving.

He fathered seventeen children across two marriages, seven with Ann and ten with Abigail. He outlived both wives. His grandson, William Ellery Channing, became the most important Unitarian minister in American history. In his later years, Ellery wrote letters to Channing that mixed advice, classical references, and the same ironical humor that had followed him since Harvard.

During congressional sessions decades earlier, Ellery had spent his time writing short, biting poems about his fellow delegates, capturing their vanities in verse. The observer never stopped observing. But late in life, he asked his friends to preserve none of his personal correspondence. A man who watched others sign their names to history tried to erase his own written record. He wanted the public act remembered. Not the private man.

By the time Ellery died on February 15, 1820, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Carroll, and William Floyd were still alive among the signers. He was the fifth-to-last survivor.

On the morning of his death, he rose as usual. He sat in an armless, flag-bottomed chair that he had used for half a century, a chair that had been rescued from the flames when his house was burned during the occupation. He opened Cicero’s De Officiis and began to read in the original Latin, without glasses, despite the small print.

His physician stopped by and found him thin and pale. Ellery told him: “I am going off the stage of life, and it is a great blessing that I go free from sickness, pain and sorrow.”

His daughter helped him to his bed. He sat upright and asked for the book again. A few moments later, he died without a struggle, still holding De Officiis, still on the page.

De Officiis means “On Duties.” A fitting last text for a man who had spent ninety-two years attending to his.

What Ellery Teaches Us

Most of the signers are remembered for what they did. Ellery is remembered for what he saw.

He was the one who positioned himself next to the secretary so he could watch every face. He was the one who wrote down “undaunted resolution” while everyone else was thinking about their own name on the page. He was the customs collector who spent thirty years watching ships and cargo lists, catching what others missed or chose to ignore.

Ellery was not a general. He was not a famous writer. He never led a charge or published a pamphlet that changed the course of the war. But he paid attention. And in a room full of men who were focused on their own moment, Ellery focused on theirs. That is why we know what it looked like when the country began.

The lesson is simple: someone has to watch. Someone has to notice. Someone has to write it down. Most of the time, that person does not get credit. Ellery did not expect credit. He asked for his letters to be burned.

But “undaunted resolution” survives because one man in a room full of signers chose to look at their faces instead of the document.

Next: Lyman Hall

From Rhode Island’s curious observer, we turn to Georgia’s healing physician.

Lyman Hall was one of the few physicians among the signers. He came to Georgia as a missionary and later became a leader in a fragile patriot movement.

Georgia was the most reluctant colony to join the Revolution. It was small and dependent on British protection against frontier attacks. When the Continental Congress first met, Georgia sent no delegates.

Lyman Hall changed that. He represented St. John’s Parish, a small district along the Georgia coast, at Congress before Georgia itself was officially participating. He helped bring his colony into the Revolution, one community at a time.

Next up: the physician who helped heal a colony.

This is Essay #21 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

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Sources:

• William Ellery | Britannica

• William Ellery | USHistory.org Signers

• Signers of the Declaration Factsheet | U.S. National Archives

• OCCUPIED! Newport and the Fight for Independence | Newport Historical Society

• Newport Historical Society Walking Tour & Manuscripts Collection

• Ezra Stiles Literary Diary | Yale University Library / Massachusetts Historical Society

• The Rhode Island Signers of the Declaration of Independence (1913) | Digitized Collection

• U.S. State Department Register of Officers and Agents (1818)

• Leonardo Marques, “Federal Enforcement and the Slave Trade” (scholarly article)

• The Huntington Library, “Albert Gallatin Letter to Newport Customs Collector, 1809”

In September 1797, a Supreme Court justice sat in a jail cell in Burlington, New Jersey, writing a letter to his son.

He needed $600. He also needed shirts and stockings. “I want them exceedingly,” James Wilson wrote.

A man named Thomas Shippen heard what had happened and wrote it down with disbelief: “What shall we come to? One [member] of the highest Court in the United States in a Jersey Gaol!”

This was James Wilson, signer of the Declaration of Independence, one of the chief architects of the Constitution. George Washington had named him to the first Supreme Court. At the Constitutional Convention, Wilson spoke more than almost any other delegate. He pushed for a single president with broad powers. And he kept insisting that authority belonged to the people, not the government.

Now he was locked up for debts he could not pay. And this was only the beginning of the end.

The Immigrant

James Wilson was born on September 14, 1742, in Carskerdo, a farming community near St. Andrews, Scotland. His parents were Presbyterian farmers who wanted him to enter ministry, and they scraped together enough to send him to the University of St. Andrews, where he studied Latin, philosophy, and the bold new ideas about reason and human nature that Scottish thinkers were developing at the time.

His father’s death in 1762 ended those plans. Wilson worked as a tutor and accountant, but he found Scotland’s rigid class system stifling, and in 1765 he crossed the Atlantic with letters of introduction and a twenty-three-year-old’s ambition.

His first job in Philadelphia was teaching Latin at the College of Philadelphia. Within a year, he shifted to law, studying under John Dickinson, one of Pennsylvania’s leading attorneys. Wilson borrowed money to pay for the privilege of reading law in Dickinson’s office. It was a pattern that would repeat for the rest of his life.

He was admitted to the bar by 1767 and moved his practice to Carlisle, on the Pennsylvania frontier, where he handled land disputes for Scots-Irish settlers. The Carlisle court records show Wilson appearing in nearly half of all cases in the county. By the early 1770s, he was one of the most respected lawyers in Pennsylvania, known for sharp arguments and a deep grasp of constitutional theory.

He was building something else, too: a political philosophy that would shape the founding.

The Theorist

In 1774, Wilson published “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament.”

Wilson argued that Parliament had no authority over the American colonies. In his view, the colonies owed allegiance to the king, but not to Parliament.

This was radical. Many patriots still accepted some parliamentary role in imperial affairs. Wilson rejected that view outright.

The pamphlet spread fast and shaped the debates leading to independence. When the Continental Congress later declared that the colonies owed no allegiance to Parliament, they were adopting Wilson’s position almost word for word.

Wilson had provided the intellectual framework for revolution. Now he would help build the government itself.

The Convention

If the Declaration was Wilson’s preliminary work, the Constitution was his masterpiece.

But before that summer of 1787, Wilson had to survive a mob.

By 1779, Philadelphia was a city of shortages and rage. Inflation had made Continental currency nearly worthless, food was scarce, and militia families blamed merchants and lawyers for profiting from the war while ordinary people suffered. Wilson had made himself a target. He defended men accused of helping the British during their occupation of Philadelphia. He had recently won an acquittal, and the city’s most militant patriots were furious.

On October 4, roughly 200 militiamen gathered at Burns Tavern, led by Captain Ephraim Faulkner. The artist Charles Willson Peale tried to redirect the march, but when the crowd shouted “Get Wilson!” there was no stopping them. They headed for Wilson’s home at Third and Walnut Streets. Wilson and thirty-five associates, including Robert Morris, barricaded themselves inside.

What followed was a firefight. The militia tried to force the doors with crowbars, set the first floor on fire, and dragged a small cannon into view. Robert Campbell, defending the house from an upstairs window, was killed. Pennsylvania’s top official, Joseph Reed, arrived with cavalry and dispersed the crowd. When the shooting stopped, six lay dead and seventeen were wounded. Wilson fled to Morris’s country estate and hid there until the anger passed.

He could have left Philadelphia. Instead, he stayed. Eight years later, he walked into Independence Hall for the Constitutional Convention.

At the Convention in 1787, Wilson spoke 168 times, more than any other delegate except Gouverneur Morris. He sat on the Committee of Detail and helped produce the first full draft of the Constitution, pushing hard for direct election of the president and proportional representation in Congress.

Not all of his ideas prevailed. The Senate ended up with equal votes for each state regardless of size. But Wilson’s fingerprints are all over the final document.

His biggest mark was the presidency. Many delegates wanted multiple executives, or a weak office controlled by Congress. “Mr. Wilson moved that the Executive consist of a single person,” the convention records show, and he argued that a single leader would create “energy, dispatch, and responsibility.” He insisted this was not a step toward monarchy but “the best safeguard against tyranny.” That argument won, and the presidency as we know it exists in large part because Wilson made the case.

He also insisted that the government’s power came from the people, not the states. Most delegates thought of the country as a collection of independent states that had agreed to cooperate. Wilson saw it differently. The Constitution, in his view, was an act of “We the People,” not a deal between governments. That idea would take decades to become the dominant view, but Wilson planted it at the founding.

Madison is often called the “Father of the Constitution.” Wilson deserves the title “Uncle.”

The Justice

George Washington appointed James Wilson to the Supreme Court in 1789, as one of the original six justices.

The early Court had little to do. Cases were scarce, and the justices spent most of their time traveling the country to hear lower-court cases on circuit. Wilson wanted to shape American law from the bench, but the bench barely existed yet.

His most important opinion came in Chisholm v. Georgia in 1793. Wilson argued that citizens of other states could sue a state directly. In the opinion, he mocked the idea that a state could dodge a creditor’s lawsuit by claiming sovereignty. Could Georgia, when summoned to answer a debt, simply shape-shift into a sovereign and refuse to show up? “Surely not,” Wilson wrote. The backlash was fierce enough to produce the Eleventh Amendment, which reversed that result entirely.

Four years later, Wilson would be the one fleeing creditors. The justice who ridiculed sovereign-debtor evasion became a debtor fugitive himself.

He kept writing and teaching, too. In 1790, he became the first professor of law at the College of Philadelphia. His opening lecture was a major event, attended by President Washington, the First Lady, the Vice President, and members of Congress. Wilson’s ambition was enormous: he wanted to build a distinctly American legal theory from the ground up, a rival to the great English legal texts that every lawyer in America had grown up reading. The foundation of his theory was natural rights and the power of the people, the same ideas he had championed at the Convention.

But Wilson had a problem. The same confidence that made him a bold legal thinker made him reckless with money. He started speculating in land.

The Fall

Land speculation destroyed James Wilson.

Like Robert Morris, Wilson believed that American expansion would send frontier land prices soaring. He was an early subscriber and likely drafter of key documents for the Bank of North America. He was also one of its largest debtors, borrowing heavily to finance his land purchases. He had helped build those financial institutions to steady the new republic. Now they were the instruments that destroyed him.

He borrowed against that reputation to buy vast tracts across Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and Georgia. The Illinois-Wabash Company alone claimed roughly thirty million acres; Wilson’s personal share ran to roughly one million acres. In Georgia, he was the largest single shareholder in the Georgia Land Company, one of the Yazoo companies, investing $25,000 for rights to 750,000 acres. His reputation secured the credit. The credit bought more land.

Then came the collapse. The Illinois-Wabash Company’s claims were based on direct purchases from Native American tribes, but the federal government ruled that only the national government could acquire Indian lands. The constitutional supremacy Wilson had championed in 1787 destroyed his largest investment in the 1790s. The Yazoo grants were rescinded. European buyers never materialized. Land prices fell. Wilson borrowed more to cover what he already owed, sometimes at interest rates as high as thirty percent. Under the laws of the time, even a Supreme Court justice could be jailed for debt.

Wilson started running. A sitting Supreme Court justice, moving from town to town to dodge arrest. The Burlington jail was first. His son Bird secured bail, but freedom was temporary. Senator Pierce Butler of South Carolina, one of Wilson’s creditors, demanded payment of $197,000. Wilson could not pay and was jailed again. Butler eventually agreed to his release, but Wilson was trapped.

By early 1798, he had reached Edenton, North Carolina, where fellow Justice James Iredell lived. Wilson lodged at Horniblow Tavern near the courthouse, a modest inn where room and board were expensive and his clothes grew threadbare. His second wife, Hannah Gray, eventually joined him after months of separation. She had married Wilson in 1793, when she was nineteen and he was fifty-one. Now she nursed him through illness without changing her own clothes “for three days and nights,” and described his mind as “harassed and perplexed.”

Back in Philadelphia, Wilson’s stepdaughters were selling their needlework to survive. In Congress, members openly discussed impeaching him. The spectacle of a Supreme Court justice dodging legal process for private debts was an embarrassment the young government could not afford.

Wilson was ill and getting worse. He died on August 21, 1798, still formally on the Court’s roster, still a fugitive from creditors.

The Irony

James Wilson’s story is Robert Morris’s story, but worse.

Morris, at least, had been a businessman his whole life. Speculation was an extension of what he already did. Wilson was a legal theorist and a sitting Supreme Court justice. His land gambling cut against everything he had built his reputation on.

He had spent his life building legal structures. Those structures chased him to his grave. In 1779, he was besieged by a militia crowd enraged at his legal defense of unpopular clients. In 1797, he was besieged by creditors using the legal system to seize his body. The instrument was the same. Law as coercion. Only the plaintiffs changed.

He championed federal supremacy over the states. That supremacy invalidated his land claims. He mocked debtors who hid behind sovereignty. Then he hid from his own debts. He argued for an energetic executive that could act with “dispatch and responsibility.” That same government could now seize him like any other debtor.

The same confidence that let him challenge Parliament also fed his belief that his land bets would pay off. He was used to being right. Land didn’t care.

In his 1787 speech defending the Constitution, Wilson wrote: “It is the nature of man to pursue his own interest, in preference to the public good.” He meant it as political science. It reads now like an accidental self-portrait.

Disgrace is temporary. Ideas endure.

A century passed. In 1906, the U.S.S. Dubuque carried Wilson’s remains from North Carolina to Philadelphia. His body lay in state at Independence Hall. Then, finally, he was reinterred at Christ Church alongside his first wife, Rachel, a formal return that the scandal of his life had denied him.

The man who had written to his son from a jail cell, asking for shirts and stockings, was finally home.

What James Wilson Teaches Us

Wilson’s story is not about greed. Plenty of founders speculated in land. What makes Wilson different is the gap between what he understood and what he did.

He understood constitutional law better than almost anyone alive. He could see how power flowed and how institutions bent under pressure. He built systems designed to protect people from exactly the kind of ruin that eventually consumed him.

But understanding a system and being immune to it are not the same thing. Wilson could name every force that drives men to overreach. He just couldn’t stop himself from overreaching.

That’s the lesson. Seeing clearly is not enough. You also have to act on what you see. The smartest person in the room can still make the worst bet.

Next: William Ellery

From the fugitive justice, we turn to the curious customs collector.

William Ellery of Rhode Island is remembered for one thing: he watched.

When the Declaration of Independence was being signed, Ellery positioned himself near the table so he could study each signer’s face as they wrote their names. He wanted to see how men looked when they committed treason.

What did he see? “Undaunted resolution,” Ellery wrote later. Every man signed “with a firm and steady hand.”

It’s a small detail, but a telling one. Ellery understood that he was witnessing history. He wanted to remember it.

Next, we’ll tell the story of the signer who watched.

This is Essay #20 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

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Sources:

• James Wilson | Federal Judicial Center

• James Wilson | Britannica

• James Wilson, 1789-1798 | Supreme Court Historical Society

• Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) | Cornell LII

• Eleventh Amendment Historical Background | Constitution Annotated

• James Wilson Biography | Encyclopedia.com

In 1993, Danville, Virginia had seven textile mills and 6,500 people working in them. Dan River Mills paid enough that you didn’t need a college degree to own a house. Over the next decade, nearly all of those jobs vanished.

The mills closed. The machinery shipped overseas. Drive through Danville today and you can still count the damage. Boarded windows, empty storefronts, a population that never recovered.

That was NAFTA. It took a decade to gut one industry in one region. The government spent billions on retraining programs. They failed so badly that even workers who completed them and found new jobs mostly earned less than they had before.

Now the same thing is about to happen to 3.3 million office workers across the country. Medical coders, claims adjusters, customer service reps. Not in one town over ten years. Everywhere, in about three.

I call these people “mushy potatoes”. Every company has them. The people who followed the recipe. Showed up, learned the system, got good at the process. They were the foundation. The ones who filled in the gaps as growth happened, who kept the lights on while someone else got the credit. They did everything right and came out average. Now we’re facing a world that doesn’t need average anymore, and there’s no retraining playbook, because the last one already failed.

The NAFTA Template

Danville wasn’t unique. It was just one town in a pattern that hit the entire country.

The North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect on January 1, 1994. The promise was that free trade would create prosperity for everyone. Some jobs would be lost, but they’d be replaced by better jobs. The workers would be retrained. Everyone would benefit.

Between 1993 and 2002, NAFTA displaced 879,280 jobs. By 2016, more than 900,000 workers had been certified as NAFTA-displaced. But those are just the direct job losses. They don’t count the ripple effects. The suppliers who closed when their biggest customers vanished. The housing markets that collapsed when entire industries left town.

The government created Trade Adjustment Assistance programs. Retraining and job placement services. They spent billions trying to help displaced workers transition.

The programs failed catastrophically.

Only about half of eligible workers even entered the training programs. Why? Because they couldn’t afford to. Training takes time. You can’t pay rent with promises of future employment. Most displaced workers took the first job they could find, even if it paid half what they were making before.

Of those who completed training and found new jobs, most still earned less than they had before. The government’s own data showed only 56 percent of reemployed workers were earning 80 percent or more of their prior wages. The placement rate was dismal. Less than four out of ten workers got placed in jobs that used their new skills.

Two in five displaced manufacturing workers who found new jobs took pay cuts, and roughly one in four took cuts exceeding 20%. The new jobs paid a fraction of manufacturing wages. You went from middle class to working poor overnight.

Case and Deaton called what followed “deaths of despair.” Drug overdoses, suicides, communities hollowed out. The effects lasted 25 years. The damage passed to kids who grew up watching their parents spiral and never recovered.

The Government Accountability Office found the Trade Adjustment Assistance programs fell far short of need, concluding that improvements were necessary but the programs alone could not solve communities’ long-term problems. Meanwhile, nearly a million people needed help.

That was the retraining playbook. It had one advantage AI displacement doesn’t: time. NAFTA’s damage unfolded over decades. AI is compressing the same disruption into years.

And this time, the jobs at risk aren’t concentrated in mill towns. They’re spread across every office park in America. Three professions in particular look safe on paper. They’re not.

Three Jobs That Look Safe

You’d think medical coding would be safe. 195,000 specialists translating doctor’s notes into billing codes. It’s detailed work that requires knowledge of anatomy and insurance requirements. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 7% growth through 2034. Healthcare is booming, right? More patients means more coding.

Except the routine work is already being automated. Optum launched an autonomous medical coding platform in May 2025. Healthcare organizations are now racing to pilot it and similar platforms. The coders who remain aren’t coding anymore. They’re auditing. Checking the AI’s work. Quality control for algorithms.

That’s the first step. You go from 100 coders doing coding to 100 coders checking AI output. Productivity improves. Margins improve. Then you realize that one person can check the output of ten AI coders. Now you need 10 people, not 100. The math is brutal and obvious.

Insurance claims adjusters tell a different story. 356,100 of them assess damage and negotiate settlements. They drive to accident sites and inspect damage firsthand. Seems hard to automate. You need judgment and the ability to spot fraud.

In optimized deployments, AI-powered systems can handle 70-90% of simple claims from start to finish with no human involved, compared to an industry-wide straight-through processing rate of roughly 7%. Tractable’s AI can assess vehicle damage from photos as accurately as a trained adjuster. Upload pictures from your phone, the AI estimates repair costs, claim approved. No adjuster visit needed. The BLS projects a 5% decline in claims adjuster jobs from 2024-2034. That’s their official, conservative estimate.

Talk to anyone in the insurance industry and they’ll tell you the real number is going to be much higher. Soon asking insurance companies “Are you using AI?” in 2027 will sound as dated as asking “Do you have a website?” in 2007. The shift isn’t coming. It’s here. It just hasn’t scaled yet.

Then there’s the big one. 2.8 million customer service representatives. 2.8 million people answering phones and processing returns. Gartner predicts that by 2029, AI will resolve 80% of common customer service issues without any human involvement. Today, that number is in the single digits.

We’re going from single digits to 80% in four years. The automation creeps, then sprints. 2027 and 2028 are going to be the inflection years. That’s when companies finish their pilots and start scaling. That’s when “AI customer service” stops being a beta feature and becomes the default.

2.8 million people. And that’s just one job category. Companies have already tried replacing them wholesale. The results should be reassuring. They’re not.

The Klarna Lesson

The media misread Klarna. They see early failures and assume permanent failure.

In February 2024, the Swedish fintech company announced its AI assistant was doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski went on a victory lap. The AI handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month. Resolution time dropped from 11 minutes to under 2 minutes. He projected $40 million in profit improvement. That isn’t what happened.

Quality collapsed. Simple problems escalated into nightmares because the AI couldn’t handle context or nuance. Engineers who were supposed to be building products got pulled off their work to answer phones. The people who remained were drowning.

By late 2024, Siemiatkowski was doing interviews admitting they went too far, too fast. He said cost had been “a too predominant evaluation factor.” Klarna started rehiring humans.

The media jumped on this.

See? AI can’t replace humans.

You need the human touch. The empathy. We’re safe.

But that’s not what the Klarna story actually means.

What it means is that we’re in the awkward middle. The capability exists, but companies are still struggling to use the tools. Klarna deployed badly. Not because AI can’t do customer service, but because they rushed the rollout without figuring out when to hand a customer to a real person.

Every company that tries too early and fails is learning the lesson. They’re going to try again in 18 months with better tools and better implementation. The second wave won’t make Klarna’s mistakes. They’ll have learned from them.

The mushy potatoes see the Klarna story and think they’re safe. They’re not. Their turn just hasn’t come.

The Quiet Part

The AGI debate is a distraction. People argue about whether artificial general intelligence is here today or arriving next year. We can laugh about AI recommending you walk to the carwash instead of driving, and point to logic failures as proof it isn’t ready

But that’s not the question that matters for employment.

In San Francisco, a startup called Artisan AI put the quiet part on a billboard: “Stop Hiring Humans.” Their product is an AI sales agent named Ava that handles the prospecting and outreach that used to require a team of junior reps. The founder, 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, raised $25 million on that pitch.

He’s not the only one thinking this way. Platforms like Synthflow let a plumber deploy an AI phone agent in an afternoon. No code required. It answers every call and books every appointment. One case study: 600,000 monthly calls handled, 40 AI agents deployed in 60 days, zero new hires. The person on the other end often doesn’t realize they’re talking to software. The system can be configured to introduce itself as an employee or use the owner’s name, blurring the line between human and automated service.

A September 2025 New York Fed survey found that 12% of service firms already using AI had hired fewer workers because of it. Nearly a quarter of firms planning to adopt AI expected to do the same.

But who benefits when those jobs disappear?

Not the people who succeeded by following the process. Process-following is how you climb in traditional organizations. You learn the rules, you work the rules. But following rules is useless for anticipating what replaces them. The skills that made someone reliable for twenty years are exactly what strand them when the job evaporates. A structural trap, not a character flaw.

The people who thrive with these tools are the ones with more ideas than hours in the day. The ones who were always told they were “too much” or “not a culture fit.” AI removes the bottleneck that held them back: other people. Give that person tools that replace the team they never had, and the gap between what they can do and what a traditional company can do disappears.

Pieter Levels runs Photo AI, an AI headshot service pulling in $132,000 a month. Zero employees. He handles everything from code to customer support. A traditional SaaS at that revenue would typically employ a team. Levels does it alone and told Lex Fridman: “Every employee makes your company slower.” His operating philosophy: automate everything and go surfing.

The technology today is the worst it will ever be, and so are the skills of the people using it. Both are improving at the same time. Once an operator realizes they can outcompete a company with a hundred employees using nothing but AI, they don’t go back.

This is also one of the most actively resisted technologies in memory. Corporate politics run on headcount. Managers don’t voluntarily shrink their teams. That’s why the adoption curve looks artificially slow and the aggregate numbers haven’t moved enough to alarm policymakers. The resistance is rational. It’s also temporary.

So what happens to the 3.3 million people whose jobs become optional?

The Davos Disconnect

The people running the world know this is coming. They’re just wildly disconnected from what it actually means for normal people.

Jamie Dimon runs JPMorgan. He’s worth roughly $2 billion. In January 2026, he said he would welcome government bans on mass AI layoffs. His proposal: phase it in, retrain, you can’t lay off 2 million truckers tomorrow.

Sounds reasonable, right? Except it assumes everyone can be retrained. The 55-year-old trucker with a high school education who’s been driving for 30 years isn’t becoming an AI specialist. He’s not going back to school for a four-year degree in data science. The gap is too wide and the money isn’t there.

Dimon’s solution works for people like Dimon. People who are already educated and positioned to benefit from technological change. It doesn’t work for the mushy potatoes.

Larry Fink runs BlackRock. He manages $14 trillion in assets. He asked the right question at Davos. “What happens to everyone else if AI does to white-collar workers what globalization did to blue-collar workers?” His answer: invest pensions in AI infrastructure so displaced workers “participate in the upside.”

In practice: you lose your job, but don’t worry. You’ll own shares in the robots that replaced you.

There are two problems with this. Most people don’t have meaningful retirement savings. The median 401(k) balance for Americans aged 55-64 is around $71,000. That’s not enough to live on for a year, let alone a lifetime. And the infrastructure investments he’s talking about aren’t guaranteed winners. They’re going to throw billions at AI data centers and energy projects. Some will succeed. Many will fail. The mushy potatoes get to gamble their retirement on which ones Larry’s team picks correctly.

Alex Karp runs Palantir. He has a PhD in social theory from a top European university. He graduated from Haverford, one of the most elite liberal arts schools in America. At Davos, he said “AI will destroy humanities jobs” and recommended vocational training instead.

The guy with a philosophy degree telling everyone else to learn a trade. He got his and pulled up the ladder. Now he’s giving advice from the top rung.

But even the vocational training argument breaks down when you think it through. What happens when robots can do plumbing? When autonomous systems handle HVAC repair? The timeline on that is longer than knowledge work, but it’s not infinite. We’re building general-purpose robots. They’re not going to stop at customer service.

Then there’s Elon Musk and Sam Altman with their universal basic income proposals. Give everyone enough money to live on. Problem solved.

Except it ignores basic human psychology. Money solves the rent. It doesn’t solve the 14 hours between waking up and going to sleep. For most of human history, work provided that. Strip work away and replace it with a monthly check, and aimlessness is what you get.

The deeper absurdity: the people pushing UBI are the same ones who hire armies of accountants to minimize their tax burden. Musk famously paid zero federal income tax in 2018. Now we’re supposed to believe they’ll fund universal income for millions of displaced workers? That’s a fantasy dressed up as a plan.

Every one of these proposals comes from people far removed from normal life. Their understanding of how average people navigate economic disruption is nonexistent. The minority who know how to leverage AI will pulling ahead. The rest are stuck. Not benefiting. Not improving. Just watching the gap widen.

The mushy potatoes aren’t even in the conversation. They’re not the power users. They’re not the early adopters. They’re the people who got a company-wide email about the new AI tools, clicked through a 20-minute training video, and went back to doing their jobs the same way they always have.

When their job gets automated, the advice will be “learn to use AI.” But they already couldn’t figure it out when they had time and job security. How are they supposed to learn it when they’re unemployed and desperate?

The Comfortable Cage

The optimists say AI frees humans from drudgery. People pursue meaning. Art and community. Renaissance 2.0. It’s a beautiful vision. It’s also completely disconnected from how most people work.

Finding your own meaning requires curiosity and internal drive without anyone telling you what to do. Strip away the structure and most people don’t become creative geniuses pursuing passion projects. They become depressed and aimless. We already saw this in NAFTA communities. Opioid epidemics. Disability claims skyrocketing not because people were more injured, but because it was the only socially acceptable way to stop working.

The pessimists say Wall-E. Monthly check, streaming services, bodies gone soft. Dystopia that feels comfortable.

California started putting VR headsets in prisons. Inmates get to take virtual vacations. Rickshaw rides through Thailand and walks through Paris. Creative Acts, the company running the program, reported a 96% reduction in disciplinary infractions across California prisons. At Corcoran, a one-week session cut infractions from 735 to 1. Violent offenders became docile and manageable. Creative Acts calls them “hope machines.”

Now scale that concept. If you can pacify a violent offender with a VR nature scene, could you pacify a displaced worker with a virtual life that’s better than their real one?

Managed containment through technology. Not prison in the literal sense, but a comfortable cage where people are too pacified to rebel. The sedative of our era, except instead of a pill, it’s a headset.

This is the most likely outcome. Not because anyone plans it, but because it solves the problem everyone is actually worried about: social instability. 3.3 million unemployed people with nothing to lose is a revolution. But 3.3 million people plugged into virtual worlds where they feel fulfilled? That’s stability.

No Recipe

Every previous wave of displacement had a landing zone. When manufacturing left, service jobs caught the fall. Worse jobs, worse pay, but jobs. When AI displaces service and knowledge workers simultaneously, there’s nowhere to land.

The winners are building for a world with far fewer employees. No payroll, machine speed, compounding their lead every quarter. But they were never mushy potatoes to begin with. They had ideas before they had tools. The tools just removed the bottleneck.

The mushy potatoes have all the raw material for something. But a recipe requires someone who knows what to cook, and everyone holding the cookbook is too busy profiting from the ingredients to write one.

Drive through Danville today. That’s what twenty-five years of “we’ll figure it out” looks like. Now multiply it by every office park in America and compress the timeline from decades to years.

We can do what we did last time. Retrain. Vouchers. Panel discussions. Watch the same movie play out faster and pretend the ending will be different. Or we can admit that nobody has a plan, and that building one is the most important thing this country could do right now. We put a man on the moon because a president said the words and a country decided it mattered. This is that kind of problem

We don’t need a jobs program or UBI checks. We need a real answer to the question nobody in charge wants to ask out loud: what does it mean to be useful when the machines don’t need you?

The mushy potatoes deserve an answer. And they’re not going to get one from the people holding the cookbooks.

Somewhere below the waterline of HMS Jersey, Thomas Clark was starving.

The ship sat anchored in Wallabout Bay, off the coast of Brooklyn. The British had decommissioned it as a warship and repurposed it as a floating prison. The British packed over a thousand men into a hull built for four hundred. Guards had sealed the portholes. Iron bars covered breathing holes drilled every ten feet along the sides. The air below deck was so thick that a candle couldn’t stay lit.

According to later accounts, Thomas wasn’t in the general population. His captors had locked him in the ship’s dungeon, a separate cell below even the main prisoner hold. They had stopped bringing him food.

He survived because the other prisoners fed him. Men who were themselves living on moldy biscuits and rancid meat pushed what scraps they could spare through the keyhole of his cell door. Stale bread. Dried peas.

Every morning, guards opened the hatches above and called down: “Rebels! Turn out your dead!” Six to eleven bodies were carried up each day and buried in shallow pits along the sandbars.

Thomas Clark captained an artillery unit in the Continental Army. He was around twenty-five years old.

His father, Abraham Clark, was sitting in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The British had sent word: if Abraham Clark would take back his signature on the Declaration of Independence and swear loyalty to the Crown, his sons would be released.

Abraham Clark said no.

The Poor Man’s Counselor

To understand why Clark refused the deal, you have to understand what kind of man he was.

Abraham Clark was born on February 15, 1726, in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. His father was a farmer. His mother was Hannah Winans, whose family had been among the original settlers of the town.

Clark was a sickly child, too frail for farm work. His father hired a math tutor instead, and young Abraham discovered he had a mind for numbers and logic. He taught himself surveying. Then he taught himself law by reading borrowed books.

He never earned a law license or attended a university. But he learned enough to help people, and that’s what he did. Farmers in Essex County came to him with land disputes and legal problems they couldn’t afford to take to a real lawyer. Clark helped them for free.

This is how he earned his nickname: The Poor Man’s Counselor.

He didn’t look like a revolutionary. He wore no wig. He owned no ruffled shirts. Historian Dennis Brindell Fradin later described him as perhaps “the signer who was closest to being a typical citizen.” He married Sarah Hatfield in 1748, and together they raised ten children on a modest farm.

Clark’s politics grew from his law practice. He saw how the legal system worked against ordinary people: expensive courts and fees that made justice available only to those who could pay. He didn’t trust anyone who had too much power. Historian Ruth Bogin would later call him “an enemy to every form of privilege.”

By the 1770s, Clark had served as clerk of the New Jersey colonial legislature and High Sheriff of Essex County. He was also a member of the Provincial Congress, a local leader known and trusted. Not famous or rich. Just useful.

The Replacement

On June 21, 1776, New Jersey did something unusual. The Provincial Convention replaced its entire delegation to the Continental Congress.

The old delegates had refused to vote for independence. New Jersey replaced all of them in a single stroke, sending five new men to Philadelphia with clear instructions: vote yes.

Abraham Clark was one of the five. The others were Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, and John Hart. They arrived in Philadelphia on June 28, four days before the July 2 vote on independence.

Clark had barely unpacked when he sat down to write a letter to his friend Colonel Elias Dayton, who led a group of New Jersey soldiers stationed hundreds of miles away. The letter is dated July 4, 1776, the day Congress approved the Declaration.

“We are now Sir embarked on a most Tempestious Sea,” Clark wrote. “Life very uncertain, Seeming dangers Scattered thick Around us... Let us prepare for the worst, we can Die here but once.”

He wasn’t being dramatic. Every man who signed the Declaration was committing treason against the British Crown. The punishment for treason was death. Clark knew this when he picked up the pen.

Ten days later, he wrote to Dayton again: “A few weeks will probably determine our fate. Perfect freedom, or Absolute Slavery. To some of us freedom or a halter.” A halter was a rope around the neck.

The Prison Ship

Clark’s two oldest sons, Aaron and Thomas, both served in the Continental Army.

Thomas enlisted early and rose through the artillery under Henry Knox’s command. He succeeded to Captain after his commanding officer was killed at the Battle of Princeton in January 1777, and fought through some of the war’s hardest campaigns. He crossed the Delaware for the surprise attack at Trenton and fought at Princeton.

Both brothers were captured during coastal operations and sent to British prison ships. Thomas, according to later accounts, ended up on HMS Jersey.

The Jersey was the deadliest prison in the American Revolution. An estimated 11,000 or more men died on British prison ships anchored in New York harbor during the war. The Jersey alone held roughly 8,000 prisoners. A prisoner writing in 1781 recorded burying “6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 prisoners a day.”

The British used the prison ships as a weapon. They offered prisoners a choice: join the Royal Navy, or rot. Most refused. The ones who survived did so through stubbornness and luck.

But the Clark brothers received special attention. The British knew who their father was. They knew his name was on the Declaration. And they had a use for that.

The Deal

The terms were simple. Abraham Clark would publicly take back his signature on the Declaration of Independence. He would swear an oath of loyalty to King George III. In exchange, his sons would be released.

Clark knew this deal existed. Members of Congress knew it too.

He refused.

Among his fellow New Jersey signers, Clark had already seen what British pressure could do. Richard Stockton had been captured in November 1776 and imprisoned. According to members of the Provincial Congress, Stockton accepted a British pardon under duress. His reputation suffered, and he died of cancer on February 28, 1781.

Clark’s situation was worse in some ways. Stockton had been the one suffering. Clark had to watch his children suffer and know he could stop it.

He didn’t.

When Clark refused, Thomas’s conditions got worse. He was locked in a cell by himself. His food was cut off entirely. The keyhole became his lifeline.

The Intervention

Clark never went to Congress himself to ask for help. By all accounts, he thought it was his family’s problem and refused to ask Congress for special treatment.

But other members of Congress found out what was happening. According to accounts preserved by Clark’s descendants, they arranged for General Washington to threaten similar treatment against a British prisoner of equal rank. Later retellings credit this intervention with improving Thomas’s conditions, though no contemporary British or congressional record confirms the exchange.

Both sons survived the Jersey. Aaron recovered. Thomas did not.

The British released Thomas in a prisoner exchange, reportedly in 1781. He came home with his health permanently destroyed. The years of starvation and being locked up had taken something from him that couldn’t be given back.

He died on May 13, 1789. He was thirty-six years old. He is buried in the Presbyterian Cemetery in Rahway, New Jersey.

Thomas Clark lived long enough to see freedom. Not long enough to enjoy it.

His father couldn’t give that back. But he could change what his son had fought for.

The Reformer

Clark turned back to what he’d always done: making the law work for the people his son died protecting.

After the war, he turned his instincts into legislation. In 1784, he pushed through the New Jersey legislature what became known as “Clark’s Law,” a reform that shortened how long court cases dragged on and cut what people had to pay. His stated goal was to make justice available to ordinary citizens. “It will tear off the ruffles from the lawyers’ wrists,” he said.

In February 1786, he published a forty-page pamphlet. He signed it “A Fellow Citizen.” In it, he attacked what he called a small group of powerful lawyers and merchants who were strangling farmers with debt. That same year, thousands of farmers across New Jersey signed petitions backing him. He pushed a bill through the legislature that let people pay their debts in paper money instead of gold or silver coins. Creditors hated it. Clark didn’t care.

He attended the Annapolis Convention in 1786, one of only twelve men who showed up. The meeting didn’t accomplish much on its own, but it led directly to the Constitutional Convention the following year.

Clark was elected as a delegate but was too ill to attend. When the Constitution was drafted without a Bill of Rights, Clark opposed it until one was promised. He didn’t trust any government, not even the one he’d helped create, to protect personal freedom without being forced to.

In 1791, Clark was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served in the Second and Third Congresses, still fighting the same fights.

When the Federalists pushed a bill to let the federal government call out state militias to crush internal rebellions, Clark mocked it on the floor of the House. Under those provisions, he said, if “an old woman was to strike an excise officer with a broomstick, forsooth the military is to be called out to suppress an insurgency.” The bill was defanged.

Around the same time, when Federalists proposed stamping the president’s face on American coins (the way monarchies put kings on theirs), Clark was among those who opposed it. The Coinage Act of 1792 required instead an image representing liberty. By law, each coin had to include the word “LIBERTY.” That requirement is still in force. If you pick up a coin today, you can read what Clark put there.

In 1794, he introduced a bill to suspend commercial intercourse with Britain until they kept the promises they’d made in the Treaty of Paris. The House passed it. The Senate killed it on Vice President John Adams’s tie-breaking vote.

That was his last major act.

On September 15, 1794, Clark was watching workers build a bridge near his farm in Rahway. The afternoon was hot. He suffered a sunstroke and collapsed.

He was dead within two hours. He was sixty-eight years old.

No deathbed speech. No dramatic final words. He died watching something practical get built.

What Clark Teaches Us

Most of the signers risked their fortunes. Abraham Clark risked his children.

That is a different kind of sacrifice. You can choose to put yourself at risk. But watching your children starve for a decision you made, knowing you could stop it and choosing not to? Most of us hope we will never be tested on that.

Clark wasn’t a wealthy man who gave up luxury. He was a plain man from a modest farm who believed ordinary people deserved a fair system. He gave free legal advice to his neighbors and fought for cheaper courts.

And when the British told him the price of his signature was his sons’ lives, he decided the signature was worth more.

Thomas Clark paid for that decision. He came home from the Jersey a broken man and died at thirty-six. His father outlived him by five years.

There’s no way to make that story comfortable. It doesn’t resolve neatly or have a happy ending. Abraham Clark believed in something strongly enough to let his sons suffer for it, and one of them never recovered.

We call the men who signed the Declaration “founders.” We imagine them as marble statues, but Abraham Clark was different. He was a farmer’s son who taught himself law from borrowed books. He signed his name because he believed ordinary people deserved freedom. He kept his name on the document because he believed that freedom was worth more than his family’s safety, more than his own son’s life.

Next: James Wilson

From the plainest man in Congress, we turn to one of the most brilliant.

James Wilson was a Scottish immigrant who became one of America’s leading legal minds. He signed the Declaration and helped write the Constitution. He was appointed to the first Supreme Court.

Then he died on the run, hiding from creditors who wanted him imprisoned for debt.

Wilson’s story is Robert Morris’s story all over again: a brilliant man destroyed by risky bets on buying land. But Wilson’s fall was even more dramatic. He fled from state to state, dodging arrest warrants, dying in the home of a fellow justice who took him in.

Next Friday, we’ll tell the story of the genius who couldn’t stop gambling.

This is Essay #19 of 56 in “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

Sources:

• Abraham Clark | Britannica

• Abraham Clark | DSDI 1776

• Abraham Clark | U.S. House of Representatives History

• Thomas Clark military service | Westfield NJ History

• Abraham Clark letter to Colonel Elias Dayton, July 4, 1776 | WorldCat

• HMS Jersey prison ship | Smithsonian Magazine

• Walking Skeletons: Starvation on the Jersey | Journal of the American Revolution

• Ruth Bogin, “New Jersey’s True Policy: The Radical Republican Vision of Abraham Clark” | William and Mary Quarterly, January 1978

In 1780, Francis Hopkinson sent a bill to Congress.

He wanted payment for services rendered. Specifically, he claimed design work on the Great Seal and the American flag.

The amount he requested was a quarter cask of wine.

Congress refused. They said Hopkinson already held paid public posts and hadn’t worked alone on the designs. He pushed back. They held firm.

The dispute faded for decades. Then the late nineteenth century revived interest in who designed the flag, and suddenly Hopkinson’s claim mattered again.

The best answer was partial credit.

But the flag was the least interesting thing about Francis Hopkinson.

The Apple-Sized Head

To understand why Hopkinson kept asking for credit, you have to understand what kind of man was doing the asking.

John Adams met him at the Continental Congress in 1776 and left one of the most vivid physical descriptions of any founder. Adams called him “one of your pretty, little, curious, ingenious men.” Then he added the detail that stuck: “His head is not bigger than a large apple.”

He praised Hopkinson’s breeding and manners, calling him “genteel” and “well-bred” and “very social.” But he filed him away almost as a curiosity, an amusing specimen compared with the grim work of war.

Hopkinson was born on October 2, 1737, in Philadelphia. His father, Thomas, was a lawyer and one of Benjamin Franklin’s closest friends. When Thomas died in 1751, Francis was fourteen.

His mother held the family together and enrolled him as the first student at the Academy of Philadelphia. Today it is known as the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in its first class.

He studied law and built a practice, but law was never the point. Hopkinson wrote songs and sketched designs for public symbols. He composed what music historians now consider among the first art songs written by a native-born American.

Jefferson called him “a man of genius, gentility & great merit” and then immediately noted he was poor, with a large family, holding “a little office more respectable than profitable.”

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Franklin was closer. In his will, Franklin called Hopkinson “my ingenious friend” and left him all his scientific instruments.

Not books. Not money. The tools of investigation. He trusted Hopkinson to use them.

A man like that was never going to sit out a revolution.

The Comedian

When the war came, Hopkinson turned to the only weapon he’d ever had.

He had a gift for mockery. Starting in 1774, he published satirical pieces attacking the British and their American loyalist allies. “A Pretty Story” was a fable where Parliament became a wicked nobleman and the colonies became his long-suffering farm. It traveled fast through parlors and coffeehouses.

But his best-known work came in 1778. “The Battle of the Kegs” was a comic ballad mocking the British response to floating explosive devices in the Delaware River. The poem spread so fast it was printed as a broadside. A broadside was a single sheet posted on walls and passed hand to hand.

The British noticed.

Hopkinson staged “The Temple of Minerva,” an early attempt at American opera celebrating the French alliance. Loyalists in New York fired back with a parody called “The Temple of Cloacina.” Cloacina was the Roman goddess of sewers. They turned his temple into an outhouse.

That tells you he was effective. You don’t spend ink mocking someone who isn’t hurting you.

Hopkinson’s satire had consequences beyond the printed page. In December 1776, Hessian soldiers raided his house in Bordentown, New Jersey.

Captain Johann Ewald walked into Hopkinson’s library and found it full of books and scientific equipment. He wrote in one of the volumes: “one of the greatest Rebels... nevertheless a very learned Man also.” The house was looted but not burned.

Hopkinson didn’t just mock the enemy. He tried to give the new country a face.

The Flag

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress passed the Flag Resolution:

“the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.”

The resolution named no designer.

That silence created a vacuum. In 1780, Hopkinson tried to fill it. He filed a claim for design work on the flag and several government seals, including an early version of the Great Seal. His proposed design included a striped shield in national colors and an olive branch. Both elements survived into the final version.

Congress acknowledged the work but wouldn’t pay. They said the design process involved committees. No single author could own a national symbol.

The flag claim sat quiet for nearly a century. Then in 1870, Betsy Ross’s grandson told a story: George Washington had visited his grandmother’s shop in 1776 and asked her to sew the first flag. No proof from the time supports this. No letter, no receipt, no diary entry.

Hopkinson’s claim is closer to the event and better documented. His letters and Congress’s replies survive. Ross appears in family memory and in the documented trade of flag-making.

Hopkinson contributed to the design. Ross may have sewn flags. Neither made the flag alone.

But ask most Americans who designed the Stars and Stripes, and they’ll say Betsy Ross. They won’t mention Hopkinson.

But he found different ways to be useful to building of a new nation.

The Judge

After the war, Hopkinson became a judge. First in Pennsylvania’s Admiralty Court. Then, in 1789, George Washington appointed him to the new federal bench, one of the first federal judges in American history.

Getting to the federal bench required surviving an impeachment. In 1780, Constitutionalist Party rivals in the Pennsylvania legislature formally accused him of accepting improper payments. A trial cleared his name and he kept his seat.

Meanwhile, he kept composing. In 1788, he published “Seven Songs for the Harpsichord or Forte Piano” and dedicated them to Washington. In the dedication, he made a bold claim: he expected “Credit” as “the first Native of the United States who has produced a Musical Composition.” Washington wrote back with dry humor, thanking him for the “delightful harmony” and joking the music might “melt the Ice of the Delaware.”

Hopkinson also won the Magellanic Premium, the American Philosophical Society’s top science prize. He was its first recipient, honored for inventing a spring-block device to help with sailing. He designed a keyboard upgrade for Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica, a musical instrument made from spinning glass bowls. He wrote essays that mixed scientific description with comedy. Judge, composer, scientist, satirist, Hopkinson aimed to live his life to fullest.

On May 9, 1791, Hopkinson suffered a sudden seizure and died. He was fifty-three. He was buried at Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia, not far from Franklin.

The bill he sent to Congress was never paid.

His son Joseph would later write “Hail, Columbia,” which served as the country’s unofficial national anthem until “The Star-Spangled Banner” replaced it in 1931.

What Hopkinson Teaches Us

Two generations of Hopkinsons gave the country its sounds and its symbols.

Both were forgotten.

Hopkinson spent his life doing the work that revolutions need but rarely remember. He designed the symbols and wrote the songs that gave a new country its look and its voice. He made the enemy look foolish in print.

Then he asked for credit. A quarter cask of wine. Congress said no.

Two hundred and fifty years later, most Americans know Betsy Ross but have never heard of Francis Hopkinson. The man who submitted documentation for the flag’s design is a footnote. The woman whose grandson told a story in 1870 is a legend.

The people who create a nation’s symbols rarely get to own them.

Next: Abraham Clark

From the man who may have designed America’s flag, we turn to the man who was asked to choose between his country and his sons.

Abraham Clark of New Jersey was called “The Poor Man’s Counselor.” He was a self-taught lawyer who gave free legal advice to farmers. He wore no wig and owned no ruffled shirts. He was the most ordinary man in Congress.

Then the British captured his two sons and locked them on HMS Jersey, the deadliest prison ship in the Revolution. They told Clark the terms: take back your signature on the Declaration, and your sons go free.

He refused. One son never recovered.

Next time, we tell the story of the father who would not unsign his name.

This is Essay #18 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe now

Sources:

• Francis Hopkinson | Britannica

• Francis Hopkinson | Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia

• Today in History: June 14 (Flag Resolution text) | Library of Congress

• Francis Hopkinson’s Claim | Smithsonian National Postal Museum

• The Legend of Betsy Ross | Smithsonian National Postal Museum

• John Adams diary, 1776 (Adams Papers Digital Edition, Massachusetts Historical Society)

• Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1784 (Founders Online, National Archives)

• Benjamin Franklin, Last Will and Testament, 1790

• George Washington to Francis Hopkinson, February 5, 1789 (Founders Online, National Archives)

• Captain Johann Ewald, diary entries, December 1776

• American Philosophical Society: Magellanic Premium history

In 2006, Hollywood released a movie about a man whose job was to make cigarettes sound safe.

Nick Naylor, the fictional tobacco lobbyist at the center of “Thank You for Smoking,” had a talent for one specific argument. The cigarettes don’t kill people. People choose to smoke. Personal responsibility. The product is fine. It’s the choices that are the problem.

Twenty years later, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Los Angeles courtroom in February 2026 and made the same argument. Instagram doesn’t harm teenagers. Teenagers harm themselves by how they use it. The platform is fine. It’s the behavior that’s the problem.

He had eight hours on the stand. Eight hours defending a product that a jury in that same courtroom is deciding might be defective, the same way a car with bad brakes is defective. Not the posts. The platform itself.

The platform’s core defect?

The notification loop.

The algorithm that figures out, within days, what makes a 13-year-old girl feel ugly, and then feeds her more of it.

The lawsuit targets the product itself. Whether Instagram was built to be addictive, and whether the company knew.

It’s the first time a CEO of a major tech company has testified under oath about how his product was designed. The product is finally on trial.

The defense Zuckerberg is using has been tried before. By an industry that used it for fifty years before the courts caught up.

The Playbook

Big Tobacco knew cigarettes caused cancer by the 1950s. Internal research proved it. The companies buried the findings and hired scientists to cast doubt. For decades, their public position was simple: no link between smoking and disease had been established. Meanwhile, their chemists were busy engineering cigarettes to deliver nicotine faster and more efficiently.

They went after teenagers. First with Joe Camel as a cartoon, then with Candy-flavored cigarettes. The pitch was always dressed up as freedom and cool, never addiction. When the lawsuits came, their lawyers made a clean argument: nobody forced anyone to light up.

Their defense almost worked.

Meta is hoping that same defense can work this time around.

In 2019, Meta’s own researchers concluded the company made body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. That stayed internal.

A 2020 internal document found that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to return to Meta’s apps repeatedly compared to older users. The company flagged this as an opportunity, not a warning.

An internal strategy document put it plainly: “If we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” Internal targets were set to push daily engagement for 10-year-olds to 40 minutes by 2023.

They knew. They planned around it. And at least one employee saw the parallel coming. An internal message, later entered as evidence, asked: “If the results are bad and we don’t publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?”

Yes. That’s exactly what it looks like.

Frances Haugen left Meta in 2021 and took tens of thousands of internal documents with her. Those documents showed the gap between what the company said publicly and what it knew privately.

In September 2025, four whistleblowers testified against Meta, including Dr. Jason Sattizahn and Cayce Savage. They told the court that Meta’s legal department altered teen safety research. Then the company hid the altered findings behind attorney-client privilege, a legal shield designed to keep lawyer communications out of court.

They didn’t just ignore the research. They worked to make it disappear.

The tobacco industry’s own cancer research became the smoking gun in court. It showed the gap between what they knew and what they said. Meta’s teen mental health studies are sitting in the same position now.

The Shield

So how did this take so long?

In 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Twenty-six words that became the most important sentence in internet law: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Plain English: don’t sue the bookstore for what’s in the books. Don’t blame the phone company for what callers say. The platform isn’t the author.

It was a sensible rule for 1996. The internet was message boards and AOL. Platforms hosted speech but didn’t control it. They passed things along. They didn’t choose what you saw.

That’s not what Instagram is.

Instagram’s algorithm watches you.

It learns from you.

Every pause, every click, it adjusts.

If you spend two seconds longer on weight-loss content, it remembers. It serves you more. Then more. Internal Facebook research showed the algorithm had identified vulnerable teenagers and was serving them eating disorder content at three times the rate of other users. Among those vulnerable teens, content related to eating disorders made up 10.5% of what they saw. For everyone else, 3.3%.

The platform didn’t write that content. But it decided who got it. It built the machine that sorted teens by vulnerability and filled their screens accordingly.

Section 230 says platforms aren’t publishers. Technically, that’s still true. But calling Instagram a neutral platform in 2026 is like calling a casino a building where people happen to gamble. The design itself is the product.

That gap, between what Congress wrote Section 230 to protect and what it actually shields today, is where these lawsuits pushed through. In September 2023, Judge Carolyn Kuhl in Los Angeles cracked the shield. She found that Section 230 did not protect the companies from claims that the product itself was badly designed. The people suing Meta weren’t attacking the content users posted. They were attacking the design of the product itself. The system that decides what you see next. The algorithm that picks and pushes. That’s a different argument, and it found a different answer.

The Broken Product

Section 230 protects publishers. So the plaintiffs stopped trying to prove Meta is one.

They flipped the argument. They aim to prove the product itself is broken. Not what users post. Not what teenagers do with it. The machine that decides what they see next is a problem for teenagers and society.

The plaintiff goes by “Kaley” in court filings. She’s twenty years old. She started using YouTube compulsively at age 6. Moved to Instagram at 9. Her case argues that the platforms made her depression worse and pushed her toward thoughts of suicide, not through the content users posted, but through deliberate design choices baked into the apps themselves.

Infinite scroll. Algorithmic feeds that surfaced more body comparison content the longer she stayed.

Big Tobacco lost on the same logic. For years, cigarette companies hid behind “personal choice.” Adults chose to smoke. Not our fault. That defense collapsed when courts focused on the product. The cigarette was engineered to be addictive, and the marketing was pointed at children. The choice was manufactured.

The algorithm wasn’t serving content. It was engineered to maximize time-on-platform. The notification system was designed to keep pulling you back, the way a slot machine does. Beauty filters were found in previous research to cause harm towards teenage girls. Zuckerberg chose to reinstate them anyway, calling a ban overreaching.

On February 26, while testimony continued, Instagram announced a new feature: alerts sent to parents when their teenager’s account gets flagged. (source needed: Feb 26 Instagram announcement) After years of internal research showing the harm, after whistleblowers and a CEO on the stand, the company’s public response was a notification. A parental ping. The equivalent of a cigarette company printing “please smoke responsibly” on the carton.

On February 26, while testimony continued, Instagram announced a new feature: parents will receive alerts when their teenager repeatedly searches for suicide or self-harm content. After years of internal research showing the harm, after whistleblowers and a CEO on the stand, the company’s public response was a notification. A parental ping. The equivalent of a cigarette company printing “please smoke responsibly” on the carton.

What makes the announcement worse is the feature only works if a parent is enrolled in Meta’s supervision tools. Fewer than one in ten teen accounts have that turned on. And that assumes the account the parent monitors is the only one. Most teenagers keep a second account, a private one their parents never see. Meta knows this. The company built a platform where a thirteen-year-old can create an anonymous account in two minutes. The parental alert doesn’t fix that. It gives Meta something to point to in court.

If the defective product theory holds up in this trial, the legal risk doesn’t stop at Meta. Every app optimized for attention has the same potential liability. Infinite scroll started at Twitter. Auto-play is YouTube’s thing. If this new legal argument wins, then its ramifications applies to all of them.

Careless People

The legal theory targets the product. But someone built it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote one passage that has followed certain people through history. Tom and Daisy Buchanan, he said, were careless people. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

In January 2024, Zuckerberg sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said the existing body of scientific research had not proved that social media causes mental health harms. His own researchers had been writing the opposite for years inside the company. On beauty filters, his position was that banning them would be overreaching, even with studies already in the public record showing those filters harm teenage girls.

Two years later, he was back on the stand. This time in a Los Angeles courtroom, in front of a jury.

His legal team had coached him to appear “authentic, direct, human, insightful and real.” Zuckerberg acknowledged he’s not great at that. “I think I’m actually well known to be very bad at this,” he told the court.

Then his own people proved the point. Members of his entourage wore Meta AI glasses into a courtroom where recording is prohibited. Judge Kuhl stopped the proceedings and questioned them to see if they were recording the proceedings. “If you have done that, you must delete that, or you will be held in contempt of the court.”

The careless people don’t see the mess. They see engagement metrics and time-on-platform numbers going up.

Plaintiff’s lawyer Mark Lanier unspooled a banner across the room. Somewhere between 35 and 50 feet long. Every Instagram post Kaley Cooper had ever made. Her whole account. Her whole record of being a teenager online.

Zuckerberg sat there and looked at it.

A 50-foot banner of a girl’s posts doesn’t leave much room for retreat.

Now the question is what a jury does with it.

The Verdict That Isn’t About Meta

As of this writing, the first test case is still in session. No verdict yet. But the trial doesn’t end with Meta.

Two more test cases are scheduled: March 9 and May 11. A federal trial brought by school districts is set for June. Over 1,600 plaintiffs are waiting to see what this jury does.

TikTok and Snap settled before anyone got to a verdict.

If this jury finds Meta liable, it opens every one of those pending cases. Bloomberg reported potential settlements “that could total billions, a scenario similar to the deals that tarnished the tobacco and opioid industries.”

Insurance Journal called it social media’s “Big Tobacco moment.”

If product-design claims survive this trial and the inevitable appeals, every app that optimizes for attention is exposed. Every company tracking “daily active users” and “time on platform” as its core success metrics is now tracking liability.

The tobacco industry argued for decades that nobody forced anyone to light up.

Courts eventually stopped buying it.

A jury in Los Angeles is deciding whether social media companies suffer the same fate.

The most famous story about Thomas Nelson Jr. goes like this: during the siege of Yorktown in October 1781, American guns faced the British lines. The gunners avoided civilian homes. One mansion in particular was off limits. A large brick house that dominated the skyline.

Then Nelson, the governor of Virginia, rode up and demanded to know why they weren’t firing at it.

The officers explained it belonged to a prominent citizen.

“That house is mine,” Nelson said. “The British are using it as their headquarters. Open fire. Five guineas to the first gunner who strikes it.”

They fired. The cannonballs tore through the walls. The house still stands in Yorktown today, with damage visible in the brickwork. Tourists photograph it. Park rangers point to it.

There’s one problem.

The “five guineas” detail first appears in print in 1881, a hundred years after the siege. No diary or military record from 1781 records Nelson giving that order. The earliest visitor account comes from historian Benson Lossing in 1848. He noted “marks of the iron hail” on the house but said nothing about Nelson personally ordering the fire. A 1939 National Park Service memo admitted its own files on the subject were “incomplete” and “not adequate for preparing a general statement.” Even the park didn’t know for sure.

The legend is clean. One dramatic moment, one perfectly timed sacrifice.

The real story is messier. And worse.

The Fortune

To understand what Nelson lost, you have to see what he started with.

Thomas Nelson Jr. was born on December 26, 1738, in Yorktown, Virginia, into a fortune built on tobacco and Atlantic trade.

His grandfather, Thomas “Scotch Tom” Nelson, came over from Cumberland, England around 1705 and built a trading empire on the York River. The Nelsons shipped cured Virginia tobacco to England and agricultural products to Barbados.

Nelson’s father, William, served as president of the Virginia Council, the highest office in colonial Virginia. He made the family even richer. When it came time to educate young Thomas, the family did what ultra-wealthy Virginia families did: sent him across the Atlantic. He went to school in Hackney, then Eton, then Cambridge. He spent eight years in England learning the manners and philosophy of the British ruling class.

He returned to Virginia in 1761. While he was still aboard the ship home, the House of Burgesses elected him to represent York County. He hadn’t even stepped off the ship.

The following year he married Lucy Grymes, a young widow. Through her, he married into Virginia’s most powerful families. Jefferson was a cousin by marriage. His father’s wedding gift: 20,000 acres of land and £30,000 in capital.

When William died in 1772, Thomas inherited the rest. He was thirty-four years old and controlled an estate worth over £40,000. In today’s money, roughly eight to ten million dollars.

One historian called him a “jovial fat man whose affability and fund of off-color stories hid an inner core of steel.” He had an open face and a way with people. He could move between the richest planter families and the rough militia soldiers he would later command. Big, generous, the kind of man who laughed easily and never hesitated.

He had every reason to stay loyal to the Crown. The British system had made his family one of the richest in the colony. Unlike the lawyers in Philadelphia or the merchants in Boston, Nelson had nothing obvious to gain from independence.

And yet, he was among the first to act.

The Yorktown Tea Party

Virginia’s break with Britain came fast. In May 1774, the Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, dissolved the legislature for protesting the Boston Port Act. Eighty-nine delegates refused to quit. They met at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and banned all commerce with Britain.

Six months later, on November 7, the merchant ship Virginia docked at the Yorktown waterfront carrying tea. That broke the ban.

Nelson boarded it.

He personally led members of the York County Committee of Safety onto the vessel and threw two half-chests of tea into the York River. Virginia’s own tea party. Less famous than Boston’s, but the same message.

While other planters talked about supporting the cause, Nelson spent his own money buying and shipping supplies to the blockaded citizens of Boston.

In mid-1775, Nelson took George Washington’s seat in the Second Continental Congress. Washington had left Philadelphia to command the army.

By May 1776, Nelson was done waiting. At the Virginia convention, he pushed through resolutions telling the colony’s delegates in Philadelphia to propose independence. He carried those resolutions to Congress himself. Richard Henry Lee read them on the floor on June 7.

Weeks later, Nelson signed the Declaration, putting his name and his fortune on the line. The cost of that signature would take a decade to add up.

The Cavalry Debacle

Nelson’s ruin didn’t start at Yorktown. It started in 1778, with horses.

Congress put out an appeal for new troops of light cavalry. Nelson personally financed and outfitted a full cavalry troop from his own pocket. In July, he marched them north to Philadelphia.

Congress took one look at the cavalry and sent them home. Nelson and his men made the long ride back to Virginia with nothing to show for it.

It got worse. Virginia’s tobacco economy was already in a credit crunch. The state government was struggling to borrow. Nelson started using his own property to back the state’s paper money. When the Assembly tried to raise a two-million-dollar loan in Continental currency for the war effort and couldn’t find enough willing lenders, Nelson stepped in. He put his own estates on the line, promising that if the state couldn’t pay, he would.

The state would default. Nelson would cover the losses.

His chronic illness made the whole thing harder. By May 1777, he had already been forced to resign his Congressional seat after what people at the time described as a “severe asthma attack.” Doctors couldn’t tell the difference between respiratory disease and what we’d now call a stress-related collapse. The multi-week carriage rides between Yorktown and Philadelphia wore him down. He was organizing a defense and watching his fortune disappear at the same time. It broke something in him. Every time he tried to serve, his body gave out. But Virginia wasn’t done with him.

The Governor

In early June 1781, a British cavalry detachment rode hard for Charlottesville, Virginia, where the state legislature was meeting. Their target was Governor Thomas Jefferson. A young militia captain named Jack Jouett rode through the night to warn him, and Jefferson escaped Monticello just ahead of the British. The legislature scattered into the Blue Ridge Mountains.

When the delegates reassembled, they had two items of business. The first was to elect a new governor. The second was to investigate the old one. Jefferson was brilliant on paper. But he had hesitated to seize civilian supplies or force militia drafts, worried about overstepping his authority. Virginia was paying for that caution. Richmond had been burned. British forces under Benedict Arnold had been rampaging along the James River. Cornwallis was marching north from the Carolinas with a battle-hardened army.

Virginia didn’t need caution anymore. On June 12, 1781, the Assembly elected Thomas Nelson Jr. and gave him extraordinary wartime powers.

He used them immediately. He ordered the forced seizure of food and livestock from civilian farms and authorized the forced removal of suspected loyalists without jury trials. He drafted militiamen without limit. When supply chains collapsed entirely, he paid for the state’s supply orders out of his dwindling personal fortune.

His actions were outside the law. His fellow planters hated him for it. The Assembly later passed an indemnity act to shield him from the lawsuits his own emergency orders had triggered.

He held the office for five months. It was enough.

Yorktown

The siege of Yorktown lasted from September 28 to October 19, 1781. Washington’s army, combined with a French force under Rochambeau, closed in from land while the French fleet sealed the Chesapeake Bay from the sea. Cornwallis had nowhere to go.

Nelson commanded nearly a third of the American ground force on the right flank. About 3,700 Virginia militia. But his real job wasn’t fighting. It was keeping the army fed. Feeding and supplying over 16,000 men fell on his shoulders. He stripped the Virginia countryside of grain and livestock, often making permanent enemies of his neighbors. Without those supplies, the siege lines would have collapsed.

On the night of October 10, French gunners fired “hot shot” at the British fleet in the York River. Hot shot meant solid iron cannonballs, heated in special furnaces until they glowed red. The HMS Charon, a 44-gun frigate, caught fire. It broke loose from its anchor lines, set fire to nearby transport ships, and drifted across the river toward Gloucester Point, burning to the waterline before it sank. The inferno lit up the night over Yorktown.

The bombardment devastated the town and the Nelson properties with it. Two Nelson houses stood in Yorktown: the governor’s mansion and the home of Nelson’s uncle, Secretary Thomas Nelson. Cornwallis set up headquarters in the uncle’s house first. Allied artillery destroyed it. Cornwallis then relocated to the governor’s mansion. It was hit too.

Nobody recorded at the time whether Nelson personally ordered the bombardment of his own home. The house was damaged and the British were inside. Nelson didn’t object. The legend came later, as legends do, and it made for a better story than the truth.

On October 19, Cornwallis surrendered. The British army marched out and laid down their arms. Washington rode to accept the surrender on a light sorrel charger that didn’t flinch at cannon fire.

The horse’s name was Nelson. A gift from the governor himself, sent to Washington in 1778.

The Ruin

Nelson resigned as governor on November 22, 1781, less than six months after taking office. He was exhausted and violently ill, facing threats of lawsuits from the very planters whose supplies he had seized.

Unable to afford repairs on his war-damaged Yorktown mansion, he retreated to Offley Hoo, a modest estate in Hanover County. The Marquis de Chastellux visited in 1782 and found a family trying to hold itself together. They still had an extensive library. Even when fifteen or twenty guests were trapped indoors by weather, they read and talked rather than playing cards or gambling. Chastellux noted this would have been unthinkable in Europe.

The state owed Nelson for supplies and troops he had personally financed. He petitioned for repayment. The state acknowledged the debt. Payment came slowly, then not at all.

His creditors did not wait. Creditors sold or mortgaged the estates that had made the Nelson family wealthy for generations. In 1786, Nelson filed a lawsuit against Carter Braxton, another signer of the Declaration, also drowning in debt, trying to recoup what he could. Two men who had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor were now suing each other over money that didn’t exist.

By 1788, he was selling off everything he could. Land that had been in the family for generations went to creditors. The Nelson name, which had once meant wealth across the Virginia tidewater, now meant debt.

Lucy had given him thirteen children. Eleven survived. He had almost nothing to leave them.

The Exquisite Tortures

The physician who attended Nelson in his final illness was a Dr. Smith. What he wrote tells you exactly how the story ends.

Nelson had been one of the richest men in Virginia. Now he had nothing. He believed he had doomed his wife and a dozen children to the same.

Dr. Smith wrote: “From his unexampled patriotick exertions during the late war he had exhausted a fortune... He cou’d not bear it. I attended him in his last illness and saw that the exquisite tortures of the mind were the disease that destroyed his body.”

Thomas Nelson Jr. died on January 4, 1789, at his son’s home in Hanover County. He was fifty years old. George Washington would be inaugurated as president four months later.

Nelson didn’t live to see it.

Under Virginia debtor law, inherited from English common law, creditors could legally seize a dead person’s body until outstanding debts were settled. The practice was called “arrest of the dead body.” Nelson’s family knew this. They transported his body back to Yorktown in secret and buried him in an unmarked grave in the yard of Grace Episcopal Church. No headstone. No name.

They hid a founding father from the country he had bankrupted himself to create.

He lay there, anonymous, for decades. Historian Benson Lossing visited in 1848 and found “nothing marks the spot but a rough stone.” In 1822, Nelson’s heirs petitioned the Virginia Assembly for repayment. Virginia never paid.

What Nelson Teaches Us

We tell the clean version. A governor on horseback, ordering cannons at his own house. One perfect moment of sacrifice. That story showed up in print a hundred years after it supposedly happened.

The real sacrifice took a decade. Nelson pledged his fortune to back a state that couldn’t pay him. He seized his neighbors’ property to feed an army. He sold off land his grandfather had built an empire on. And when it killed him, his family hid his body in an unmarked grave so creditors couldn’t take it.

That is the distance between the story we tell about the founding and what it actually cost.

Next: Francis Hopkinson

From the Virginia planter buried in an unmarked grave, we turn to the New Jersey wit who claimed credit for everything, including America’s flag.

Francis Hopkinson was a lawyer and judge with a sharp creative streak. He wrote songs mocking the British and helped design public symbols for the new nation. He also submitted a bill to Congress claiming he had designed the American flag.

Congress refused to pay. They said Hopkinson hadn’t worked alone, and besides, he was already being compensated for other work.

Did Francis Hopkinson design the Stars and Stripes? The answer is complicated. The story reaches into the Betsy Ross legend and into records historians still debate.

Next time, we tell the story of the signer who may or may not have given America its flag.

This is Essay #17 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

Subscribe now

Sources:

• Thomas Nelson, Jr. | George Washington’s Mount Vernon

• Yorktown | American Battlefield Trust

• Nelson House | Yorktown Battlefield (NPS)

• Thomas Nelson Jr. (1738-1789) | Encyclopedia Virginia

• Governors of Virginia | Library of Virginia

• Virginia Chronicle, 1881 (earliest “five guineas” print source)

• HABS Nelson House Data File | Library of Congress

• Journal of the House of Delegates, May 29, 1781 | Encyclopedia Virginia

• Election of Governor Nelson, June 12, 1781 | Encyclopedia Virginia

• Brigadier General Thomas Nelson Jr. | NPS

• Thomas Nelson Jr. | Descendants of the Signers

• Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782 (1787)

A preacher told his congregation that rebellion was God’s will.

John Witherspoon stood at his pulpit in Princeton and said what no other minister in the colonies was willing to say. He told them that fighting the British wasn’t just politics. It was God’s work, and staying loyal to the Crown was a sin.

In 1776, ministers were the loudest voices in public life. Churches were where news spread and arguments were settled. When a minister blessed something, it carried weight that no political argument could match.

“There is not a single instance in history,” Witherspoon declared, “in which civil liberty was lost and religious liberty preserved entire.”

The fight for independence, in Witherspoon’s view, wasn’t about taxes or representation.

It was a holy cause.

When Witherspoon signed his name to the Declaration, he brought something that lawyers and merchants couldn’t: the blessing of heaven.

The Scottish Minister

John Witherspoon was born in Scotland on February 5, 1723, in the parish of Yester, near Edinburgh.

He studied at the University of Edinburgh and became a Presbyterian minister at twenty-two. He quickly rose to become one of the most respected clergymen in Scotland, known for his writing and his powerful preaching.

He might have spent his entire life in Scotland. But in 1766, an offer came from across the Atlantic.

The College of New Jersey was looking for a new president. Today we call that college Princeton. The school had been founded by Presbyterians, and they wanted a respected minister to lead it. They invited Witherspoon.

He initially declined. His wife Elizabeth hated the idea of crossing the ocean and starting over in the wilderness. Witherspoon loved his wife, and he was not going to force her.

Then Benjamin Rush intervened.

Rush, a young Philadelphia physician who would later sign the Declaration himself, was visiting Scotland. He met with Elizabeth Witherspoon and somehow convinced her that America was worth the risk. The details of their conversation are lost, but the result was clear: Elizabeth changed her mind, and in 1768, the Witherspoons sailed for America.

The Educator

Witherspoon transformed Princeton.

When he arrived, the college was struggling, underfunded and understaffed, overshadowed by Harvard and Yale. Witherspoon rebuilt it from the ground up, raising money and hiring new faculty while updating classes that had fallen behind. He taught many students himself, mixing ideas from Scotland’s best thinkers with lessons about right and wrong. The goal was leadership, not ministry.

His students included James Madison, who would help write the Constitution, and Aaron Burr, who became vice president. Dozens more served in Congress or on the federal bench.

The Revolutionary

Within a decade of arriving, Witherspoon was a revolutionary.

The shift happened gradually. Like many colonists, Witherspoon initially hoped to make peace with Britain. He respected British institutions and had no desire for violence.

But as tensions escalated, Witherspoon moved toward independence. By 1774, he was writing pamphlets attacking British rule, and two years later he took a seat in the Continental Congress.

His sermons from this period are powerful documents. Witherspoon argued that political freedom and religious freedom were tied together. A people ruled by a tyrant could not freely worship God. Therefore, resistance to tyranny was not just a political duty. It was a religious one.

Many colonists worried that rebellion was sinful, a violation of the biblical command to obey earthly authorities. Witherspoon argued the opposite. He gave Americans permission, even a duty, to fight.

On May 17, 1776, Witherspoon delivered what became his most famous sermon: “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men.” It spread widely across the colonies.

“While we give praise to God, the Supreme Disposer of all events, for His interposition in our behalf,” Witherspoon declared, “let us guard against the dangerous error of trusting in, or boasting of, an arm of flesh.”

Witherspoon was saying something simple: We fight because God wills it. But we fight with humility, knowing that victory comes from Him, not from us.

The Congress

Witherspoon arrived at the Continental Congress in late June 1776, just as the final debates over independence were reaching a breaking point.

He didn’t hesitate. On July 2, when a delegate argued that the colonies weren’t “ripe” for independence, Witherspoon is said to have replied: “In my judgment, sir, we are not only ripe, but rotting.”

The line may not be true. Many famous founding quotes are hard to verify. But it captures Witherspoon’s impatience. He had been making the case for independence from his pulpit for months. He was ready.

On August 2, Witherspoon signed the Declaration. He was fifty-three years old.

His signature meant something. It told the world this was a cause blessed by God.

The Losses

The Revolution cost Witherspoon dearly.

The British occupied Princeton in late 1776, driving Witherspoon and his family into exile. They used Nassau Hall as a barracks. The library was ransacked, and scientific equipment was destroyed. Years of work were undone in weeks.

Witherspoon’s son James was killed at the Battle of Germantown in 1777. He was twenty-two years old and a Princeton graduate. His father’s pride. Witherspoon never fully recovered from the loss.

Another son was taken prisoner and a son-in-law killed. The family estates in New Jersey were stripped bare.

By the war’s end, Witherspoon had lost his son and much of his property. The college he led had also been badly damaged. The minister who had blessed the Revolution had paid for it with blood.

The Later Years

After the war, Witherspoon returned to Princeton and tried to rebuild.

It was slow work. The college was broke and the buildings were damaged. Witherspoon spent the rest of his life fundraising, trying to piece back together what the British had destroyed.

He stayed in politics too, serving in the New Jersey legislature and helping approve the Constitution in 1787. He supported the new government, though he worried about concentrations of power. Like many founders, he wanted liberty and feared what happens when crowds become mobs.

Witherspoon went blind in his final years. He died on November 15, 1794, at seventy-one.

He was buried at Princeton, near the college he had spent his life building.

What Witherspoon Teaches Us

John Witherspoon brought something unique to the Revolution: the authority to say what was right.

The other signers argued about rights and taxes. Witherspoon argued about sin and salvation, and that reframing did something the lawyers couldn’t: it made the cause feel bigger than a dispute with Parliament.

That kind of moral authority can be dangerous. Wars fought in God’s name tend to be brutal, because the enemy stops being an opponent and becomes a demon. Witherspoon kept both in the same sermon: fight, yes, but do not boast.

In 1776, Witherspoon’s blessing mattered. It gave Americans permission to fight, and it turned a political argument into a moral cause that ordinary colonists understood.

He paid for that blessing with his son’s life.

Next: Thomas Nelson Jr.

From the preacher who blessed the Revolution, we turn to the planter who sacrificed everything for it.

Thomas Nelson Jr. was a wealthy Virginia aristocrat. He had everything to lose and little obvious to gain from rebellion. He signed the Declaration and spent heavily on the war effort. He later became governor of Virginia.

And then, at the Battle of Yorktown, he did something extraordinary.

The British had occupied his own mansion, using it as a headquarters while they defended the town. American artillery was directed at the fortifications, carefully avoiding civilian property.

Nelson ordered them to fire on his house.

One quote often linked to him says, “Spare no private property. Destroy it all if necessary.”

They did. Nelson’s mansion was shelled, and his fortune was ruined. The British were later driven out. He died broke, worn down by the stress of war.

Next Sunday, we’ll tell the story of the governor who ordered his own home to be destroyed.

This is Essay #16 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe now

Sources:

• John Witherspoon | Britannica

• History | Princeton University

• The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men (excerpt) | Teaching American History

• Signers of the Declaration: John Witherspoon | U.S. House Clerk

You’re 26. You make $42,000 a year. The median home in your city costs $420,000, which is ten times your salary. Your parents bought theirs at three times theirs.

You have a 401(k) that might matter in 40 years. You have student loans that matter right now. You don’t have a house, you’re not going to have a house, and every financial advice column tells you to skip the latte and invest the difference.

So when Coachella offers to split $649 into four payments of $162.25, you click yes.

Of course you do.

Sixty percent of Coachella‘s general admission buyers this year purchased tickets on payment plans. Not because they’re bad with money. Because the math of their lives pushed them here.

The Logic

This is the part most coverage gets wrong. The headlines frame Buy Now, Pay Later as reckless spending by young people who can’t delay gratification. That framing misses what’s actually happening.

A LendingTree study found that 23% of Americans have used BNPL to pay for concerts or festivals. Among Gen Z, it’s 37%. Among millennials, 35%.

One in three young Americans has financed a concert. And if you look at what else is available to them, it starts to make sense.

Homeownership feels impossible. The typical first-time home buyer is now 56 years old. Retirement planning feels like science fiction when you’re carrying student debt into your thirties. The big financial milestones that used to define adulthood have been priced out of reach for most people under 35.

So what do you spend on?

The thing you can actually have. A weekend in the desert with your friends. A memory that’s yours.

The “treatonomics“ trend puts a name to it: small luxuries as self-care in an economy that won’t give you the big ones. You deserve that concert. You’ve earned that experience. And honestly? The framing has a point. Life is hard. Joy matters.

The Numbers

BNPL makes spending frictionless. That’s the product. And friction, it turns out, was doing a lot of work.

41% of BNPL users were behind on payments in the past year. That’s up from 34% the year before. The trend line is going the wrong direction.

More than half of Americans, and 57% of Gen Z, believe BNPL encourages overspending. They know it. They use it anyway. Because $162.25 doesn’t feel like $649, even when it is.

The number that should worry everyone: one in three concertgoers expects to go into debt over concerts or festivals this year. Not worries about debt. Expects it. Plans for it.

The Invisible Ledger

Traditional credit has guardrails. You apply for a credit card. The bank checks your credit history. It sets a limit. If you miss payments, it hits your credit score. Future lenders see the damage. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s visible.

BNPL bypassed all of it.

Until recently, most BNPL transactions weren’t reported to credit bureaus. You could carry loans from Afterpay and Klarna at the same time, and neither would show on your credit report. Lenders couldn’t see how much you owed. You couldn’t either, unless you manually tracked every four-payment plan across every app.

Regulators have been playing catch-up. Australia’s ASIC review found the same pattern. The UK’s Woolard Review recommended bringing BNPL under financial regulation. The debt was real.

It just didn’t count. Until it did.

The Reckoning

In June 2025, FICO announced it would start incorporating BNPL data into its credit scores. In April 2025, Affirm began sharing consumer loan data with Experian.

For people who’ve been paying on time, this could be a small win. On-time payments will now count for something.

For people who’ve been stacking BNPL loans across platforms, treating them like money that doesn’t show up anywhere, the bill is arriving. Credit scores will finally reflect what they actually owe.

BNPL grew fast because spending felt consequence-free.

Miss a payment? Doesn’t touch your credit.

Stack multiple loans? Nobody’s counting.

That era is ending, and the people who leaned on it hardest are the ones least prepared for what comes next.

The Real Price

Coachella entry-level tickets went from $499 to $649 between 2024 and 2025. The BNPL option added another $41 in enrollment fees. That’s $690 for a weekend, split into payments that feel smaller than they are.

The average concertgoer now spends around $1,000 per year on live events. For a Gen Z worker earning median wages, that’s roughly 3% of their annual after-tax income. On concerts.

If that’s a conscious choice made with cash in hand, fine. Spend your money on what makes you happy. But BNPL removes the moment where you check whether you actually have the money. It replaces a decision with a checkout flow.

Nobody’s sitting down, looking at their bank account, and choosing concerts over savings. They’re tapping a button that says “4 easy payments” and dealing with the math later.

The Damage

A generation locked out of homeownership, watching retirement drift further away every year, decided to spend money on the one thing they could actually experience. Not because they’re financially illiterate. Because the financial system has stopped working for them.

The financial industry saw this as an opportunity and built a product to exploit it. BNPL doesn’t solve the problem of things being too expensive. It makes expensive things feel cheap. It turns a $649 decision into a $162 impulse. And it does it at the exact moment you’re most emotionally invested, standing in a checkout line with your friends already making plans.

The scary part isn’t that people are financing Billie Eilish tickets. The scary part is that it makes perfect sense. When the traditional markers of financial progress are out of reach, of course you optimize for the things within reach.

Of course you click “4 easy payments.”

Of course sixty percent of Coachella goes on a plan.

The question nobody is asking: what kind of economy makes this the logical choice?

And right now, nobody in charge is asking that question.

They’re too busy building the next payment plan.

George Walton had no right to sign the Declaration of Independence.

He was an orphan. His parents died when he was young, so young that the details are lost to history. He was raised by relatives who saw him as a burden, not an opportunity. At some point in his teens, he was sent to work under a carpenter.

This was the 18th-century version of a dead end. Apprentices worked for years learning a trade, bound to their masters until they came of age. They had little schooling and no path to power. A carpenter’s apprentice in colonial Georgia could expect to spend his life building houses for people who mattered.

Walton had other ideas.

The story goes that his master refused to let him study. Books were a distraction from work. Young George was supposed to learn to cut wood, not read.

So Walton taught himself at night, by candlelight, after the day’s work was done. He read whatever he could find. He taught himself law from borrowed books. He was determined to escape the life that circumstances had assigned him.

By his mid-twenties, George Walton was a practicing attorney in Savannah. By his late twenties, he was one of Georgia’s delegates to the Continental Congress. He was likely twenty-seven when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Some records place his birth in 1749, while others point to 1750.

The carpenter’s apprentice had made himself a founder.

The Self-Made Lawyer

Walton arrived in Savannah sometime in the early 1770s.

Georgia was the youngest and poorest of the thirteen colonies. Savannah was a frontier town, more village than city, with a population of around 3,000. The colony had been founded only forty years earlier, as a buffer between the Carolinas and Spanish Florida.

For an ambitious young man with no connections, Georgia was perfect. The colony was so short of educated people that anyone with legal training could find work. Walton opened a law practice and began climbing.

He climbed fast.

By 1774, he was involved in the revolutionary movement. By 1775, he was secretary of Georgia’s Provincial Congress. By 1776, he was a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

The speed of his rise was striking. In older colonies, men often spent decades building the connections needed for high office. Walton did it in five years.

Part of this was talent. Walton was ambitious and willing to work harder than anyone else. But part of it was Georgia. The colony’s elite was so small and so desperate for capable people that they took talent wherever they could find it.

The orphan had found a place where orphans could succeed.

The Signing

Walton arrived at the Continental Congress in the summer of 1776, just in time to participate in the debates over independence.

Georgia’s delegation was small, and it changed over time. Button Gwinnett, whose name now sells for millions at auction, drew the most attention. Lyman Hall, a physician, gave the group weight. Walton gave it youth and drive.

When the Declaration was signed in August 1776, Walton added his name alongside Gwinnett and Hall. They represented a colony that most delegates had never visited, a distant and underpopulated place on the edge of the British Empire.

Walton’s signature is neat and legible. No fancy loops. Just a name, written carefully.

But he must have felt something. The carpenter’s apprentice was signing his name next to men like Adams and Jefferson. He was pledging everything he had. Most of it he had built from nothing.

The Soldier

After signing, Walton went to war.

He served as a colonel in the Georgia militia, commanding troops in the defense of Savannah. When the British invaded Georgia in late 1778, Walton was in the thick of the fighting.

The Battle of Savannah, fought on December 29, 1778, was a disaster. About 3,500 British troops under Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell attacked at dawn. The American force, roughly 700 Continental soldiers plus militia under General Robert Howe, was badly outnumbered. Walton commanded a section of the defensive line near the edge of the city. The British overwhelmed the American defenses in under an hour. Men scrambled for cover as the line collapsed. Walton was wounded in the battle, shot through the thigh, and captured by the British as he tried to retreat with his men. The British took Savannah and effectively ended patriot control of Georgia.

Walton spent nearly a year as a prisoner of war, held first in Savannah and later in Sunbury. The British treated him as a high-value prisoner. Walton still spent months not knowing if he would ever be free.

In late 1779, he was exchanged for a British naval officer. Walton limped back to patriot lines, his leg never fully healing from the wound.

The Governor

After the war, Walton kept climbing. And kept falling.

He served as governor of Georgia twice. First in 1779-1780, during the darkest days of the war, and again in 1789-1790, after the Constitution was approved. Between terms, he served as chief justice of Georgia’s highest court. He later served in the U.S. Senate.

But his career was also marked by controversy. Walton had a talent for making enemies. He feuded with other Georgia politicians and spent years tangled up in disputes that historians still struggle to untangle.

In 1789, Walton won a bitter governor’s race. His opponents said the vote was tainted, and the legislature had to settle the dispute. The fight became a symbol of Georgia’s rough postwar politics. Walton served out the term, but the controversy stayed with him.

Some of this was personal. Walton could be proud and quick to take offense. The same drive that pulled him from being an orphan to being powerful could also make him hard to work with.

Some of it was Georgia. The state’s politics in the 1780s and 1790s were brutal even by founding-era standards. Factions fought over land and power with an intensity that made other states look calm.

Walton survived it all.

He kept coming back and kept winning office. By the time he died in 1804, he had served as governor and as a federal senator. He had also served as chief justice in Georgia and as a delegate to the Continental Congress. Few men around him built a public record that wide.

The Mystery

One thing about George Walton doesn’t add up: nobody knows how old he was when he signed the Declaration.

Most sources give his birth year as 1749 or 1750, which would have made him twenty-six or twenty-seven at the signing. But some historians have argued for earlier dates, which would make him older.

This uncertainty reflects the mystery of his origins. Walton’s early life is almost completely undocumented. We do not know exactly when he was born or where. We do not know who his parents were, or how they died. We know he was sent to work under a carpenter, but the carpenter’s name is lost.

For most signers, we have thick records. Family papers survive. So do letters and legal files. For Walton, we have almost nothing until he appears in Savannah in the early 1770s, already a young lawyer on the rise.

The orphan left no record of his orphanhood. He emerged from nowhere fully formed, like a character who appears in Act II of a play without explanation.

What Walton Teaches Us

George Walton’s story is the American dream, before there was an America to dream of.

He started with almost nothing.

No parents. No money.

He was sent to work under a carpenter and expected to stay there. He refused.

He taught himself to read. He taught himself law. He thrived in a frontier colony where his lack of family name didn’t matter. He worked harder than anyone else and rose faster than anyone expected.

Before he turned thirty, he had signed the Declaration and served as governor. By fifty, he had held more offices than most men hold in a lifetime.

This is the story America tells about itself.

A self-made life, built from almost nothing. Part of that story is true. Part is myth. Walton’s rise also depended on timing and place. Georgia needed talent fast, and he arrived ready.

But the core of it is real. Walton had no advantages and he built his life from nothing.

His reward?

Having is signature preserved for eternity on the Declaration of Independence.

That’s worth something.

Even 250 years later.

Next: John Witherspoon

From the orphan who made himself, we turn to the preacher who blessed the Revolution.

John Witherspoon was a Scottish minister who came to America to run the College of New Jersey. Today we call it Princeton. Within a decade of his arrival, he was signing the Declaration of Independence.

Witherspoon was the only active clergyman to sign. He brought something to the revolutionary cause that lawyers and merchants couldn’t: the authority of God. When Witherspoon declared that independence was morally right, he wasn’t just making a political argument. He was delivering a sermon.

His influence extended far beyond the pulpit. Witherspoon trained a generation of American leaders, including James Madison, who would later be called the Father of the Constitution.

Next time, we’ll tell the story of the preacher who declared independence from the pulpit.

This is Essay #15 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, ending on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

Sources:

• George Walton (1749-1804) | New Georgia Encyclopedia

• George Walton | National Governors Association

• Savannah | American Battlefield Trust

• John Varnum and George Walton on Loyalists, [July? 1779] | Founders Online

Samuel Adams didn’t start the American Revolution. But he made sure it happened.

For fifteen years before the Declaration of Independence, Adams worked without stopping to turn colonial anger into a push for revolution. He wrote newspaper articles under fake names and organized boycotts. He was closely tied to the Sons of Liberty and helped plan the Boston Tea Party. He created committees of correspondence that spread radical ideas from colony to colony.

He understood something that the people around him didn’t. Revolutions aren’t made in legislative chambers. They’re made in tavern gossip and newspapers working together to influence the minds of ordinary people.

By the time independence was declared in 1776, Samuel Adams had been pushing for it for over a decade. He had done more than almost anyone to make the idea of revolution thinkable. And then inevitable.

When he died, Boston newspapers called him “the Father of the American Revolution.”

It wasn’t an exaggeration.

The Failure

Samuel Adams was born on September 27, 1722, in Boston. His father was a successful brewer and local political figure who expected his son to follow him into business.

Samuel tried. And he failed, spectacularly.

After graduating from Harvard in 1740, Adams worked briefly for a merchant, lost the job, tried to start his own business with a loan from his father, and lost that money too.

He took over his father’s malting business and ran it into the ground. He served as a tax collector and failed to collect taxes, eventually owing the city thousands of pounds he couldn’t pay back.

By his forties, Samuel Adams had no money and no business worth mentioning. He dressed shabbily, lived in a run-down house, and depended on friends and family for support.

His only talent was politics.

The Gift

Samuel Adams discovered his gift in the 1740s, writing for his father’s political faction in Boston newspapers.

Colonial Boston was a mess of competing interests. Merchants, craftsmen, religious groups, political clubs. Newspapers were weapons for one side or the other, and Adams learned early how to use them. He wrote under fake names. Dozens of them over the years. He attacked his enemies and promoted his allies.

Adams had a gift for the memorable phrase and the emotional appeal. He knew how to make people angry and channel that anger toward political action.

When the Stamp Act crisis erupted in 1765, Adams was ready.

The Organizer

The Stamp Act required colonists to pay a tax on printed materials. Newspapers, legal documents, even playing cards. It was the first direct tax Parliament had ever imposed on the colonies, and it provoked furious resistance.

Adams was at the center of that resistance.

He didn’t just write about the Stamp Act. He organized against it. He helped found the Sons of Liberty, a network of radical groups that coordinated protests across the colonies. On August 14, 1765, a mob hung a straw dummy made to look like Andrew Oliver, Boston’s designated stamp distributor, from a large elm tree. That evening, they destroyed Oliver’s office and damaged his home. Oliver resigned the next day. Collecting the tax became impossible.

The violence was calculated. Adams understood that peaceful petitions wouldn’t work. The British government would simply ignore them. What the colonists needed was pressure, and pressure required force.

The strategy worked. The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766.

The lesson stuck.

The Network

After the Stamp Act, Adams built the network that would make revolution possible.

In 1772, he created the Boston Committee of Correspondence. The group communicated with other towns about political developments.

The idea spread.

Soon, committees of correspondence existed throughout Massachusetts, then throughout the colonies. They became a shadow government, coordinating resistance outside official channels.

This was Adams’s genius. He understood that revolution required organization. Publishing pamphlets and hoping for the best wasn’t enough. You needed networks of people who trusted each other and could act together when the moment came.

In November 1772, Adams and the committee drafted the Boston Pamphlet, listing the rights of colonists and the ways Parliament had violated them. It was sent to every town in Massachusetts. Over 100 towns responded with their own statements of grievances. Adams was building a revolutionary movement, one committee at a time.

The Tea Party

On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of Bostonians disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea into the water.

The Boston Tea Party has become a symbol of American resistance. The moment when colonists stopped petitioning and started acting. What’s less remembered is Samuel Adams’s role in making it happen.

Adams had been pushing against the Tea Act for months. He organized the meetings that preceded the Tea Party. He likely helped plan the raid itself. The participants were careful not to leave evidence.

When the tea hit the water, Adams knew there would be consequences. The British government would not let such defiance go unpunished. The Intolerable Acts soon followed which closed Boston Harbor and brought military occupation. The colonies lurched toward open rebellion.

The Congress

Samuel Adams arrived at the First Continental Congress in 1774 as one of the most radical delegates.

He had been pushing for independence for years. Most colonists weren’t willing to consider it yet. In Congress, he pushed constantly for more aggressive action and more steps toward a final break.

His cousin John Adams, who was also a delegate, later wrote that Samuel “had the most thorough Understanding of Liberty, and her Resources, in the Temper and Character of the People” of anyone he knew.

But Samuel also knew when to hold back.

He understood that the Congress included moderates who weren’t ready for revolution. Pushing too hard, too fast, would split the coalition. So he worked behind the scenes, building support for radical measures while letting others take the lead in public.

When the Second Continental Congress declared independence in 1776, Samuel Adams signed the Declaration. It was the payoff for everything he had worked toward for fifteen years.

The Limits

After independence, Samuel Adams’s influence faded.

He was excellent at revolution but average at governing. The skills that made him a great agitator were less useful in building institutions.

Adams served in Congress until 1781, then returned to Massachusetts. He served as lieutenant governor from 1789 to 1793, then as governor from 1794 to 1797. His time as governor left no real mark.

He also opposed the Constitution. Adams worried that it created a government too powerful and too distant from the people. He only agreed to support it after being assured that a Bill of Rights would be added.

This was consistent with his lifelong suspicion of concentrated power. But it also showed his limits. The nation that Adams had helped create needed strong institutions to survive. His instinct was always toward disruption rather than construction.

The Man

What was Samuel Adams like?

He was plain and simple in his habits. He dressed simply and had no interest in wealth. His enemies accused him of hypocrisy. They said he stirred up mobs while keeping his own hands clean. But even they admitted he wasn’t in it for money.

Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, considered Adams the most dangerous man in the colony. The two battled for years. Hutchinson eventually fled to England. Adams stayed and won.

Adams was also relentless. He never stopped. He wrote and organized without pause. When others grew tired or discouraged, Adams kept pushing.

John Adams, who knew him as well as anyone, said: “Samuel Adams was born and tempered a wedge of steel to split the knot of lignum vitae which tied North America to Great Britain.” Lignum vitae is one of the hardest woods in the world. What John meant was that Samuel was built to break what seemed unbreakable.

A wedge of steel. It’s an apt description. Adams’s purpose was to break the bond between colonies and empire. To create rupture where there had been unity.

That’s not a skill everyone needs. But in the 1760s and 1770s, it was exactly what the American cause required.

The Legacy

Samuel Adams died on October 2, 1803, at the age of eighty-one.

His reputation has shifted over the centuries. During his lifetime, he was honored as a founding father. In the 19th century, he was criticized as a dangerous troublemaker who stirred up crowds and violence. In more recent times, historians like Ira Stoll and Pauline Maier took a fresh look. They saw Adams as a skilled political organizer who understood how to move ordinary people better than anyone in his generation.

Today, his name is best known as a beer brand. An ironic fate for a man who failed at brewing and spent his life in politics.

But it fits.

Samuel Adams’s real legacy is a method. Political change requires organization and the mobilization of ordinary people, not just good arguments.

Every political movement since owes something to Samuel Adams. He didn’t invent propaganda or protest. But he showed what they could accomplish.

What Adams Teaches Us

Samuel Adams’s story is about the power of relentless focus.

He failed at everything except politics. He had no money and no business success. What he had was a cause. He pursued that cause for decades, through failure and frustration, until it succeeded.

There is something both inspiring and uncomfortable about this kind of focus. His persistence is what made the Revolution possible. But it also suggests that changing the world requires an obsession that most people cannot keep up.

Adams gave everything to the Revolution except his life. He lived to eighty-one. But the cause was all he had.

His identity was the cause.

Without it, he would have been a failed businessman in a shabby house, forgotten by history.

Instead, he was the Father of the American Revolution. The agitator who understood that revolution is built in taverns and newspapers before it reaches the streets.

Next: George Walton

From Massachusetts, we turn to Georgia, and to a signer whose rise was as unlikely as Samuel Adams’s.

George Walton was born poor. Dirt poor. An orphan, apprenticed to a carpenter, with no way forward. He taught himself to read. He taught himself law. He worked his way up from nothing to become one of Georgia’s leading politicians.

He signed the Declaration at twenty-eight. He was wounded and captured during the war. He served as governor and later as a judge. He lived the American dream before there was an America to dream of.

Next Sunday, we’ll tell the story of the orphan who signed independence.

This is Essay #14 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, culminating on July 4, 2026---the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Subscribe to follow the journey.

Subscribe now

Sources:

• Samuel Adams | Britannica

• Samuel Adams | National Park Service

• Boston Tea Party | Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum

• Committees of Correspondence | American History Central

• Samuel Adams: A Life | Ira Stoll

Michael McCready was still in his kitchen, coffee not yet poured, when the newsletter hit. Anthropic had released a legal plugin for Claude. He read the headline twice. By the time he reached his desk, Slack had twenty-seven unread messages.

By 7 a.m., his screen showed RELX down 8 percent.

Thomson Reuters negative 10.

By 8 a.m., RELX was down 14 percent.

By noon, $285 billion had vanished from the sector.

McCready had spent two decades building McCready Law in Chicago, the kind of solo practice where you either grow or disappear. He’d bought into LexisNexis tools and adopted contract review software.

His phone buzzed with messages from law firm partners, all asking some version of the same question: what happens now? McCready later told reporters what he’d been thinking that morning: “This is not a matter of people fooling around with ChatGPT or asking queries; this is actual agentic AI built specifically for law and built specifically for certain tasks.”

The market had just priced that reality in real time.

When $285 Billion Vanished Before Lunch

The stock tickers told the story. RELX fell 14 percent, its worst single day since 1988. Thomson Reuters dropped 16 to 18 percent. Wolters Kluwer sank 13 percent. The Goldman Sachs software basket fell 6 percent, the steepest decline since April’s tariff shock. The financial services index lost roughly 7 percent.

Total damage: a $285 billion rout across software and financial services.

Any company selling knowledge work automation faced sudden scrutiny. Investors were rethinking how much of the legal market could be automated. If Claude could review contracts at software subscription costs instead of law firm hourly rates, the economics of knowledge work had just shifted.

The irony was immediate.

Artificial Lawyer noted that “Claude’s legal plug-in has nothing to do with legal research, which is the core value proposition and wide-moat foundation of Thomson and RELX’s legal businesses.” Thomson Reuters gets 45 percent of its profit from Westlaw, its legal research database. RELX derives only 10 to 13 percent from legal operations. Wolters Kluwer is the same.

All three fell between 13 and 18 percent anyway.

The market was not pricing current disruption. It was pricing trajectory. If Claude could handle contract review today, what surfaces next? What capability comes in version 4.7? The selloff showed investors believed AI was improving faster than law firms could adapt. The threat was not to lawyers themselves, but to the high prices firms could charge.

And the selling did not stop on February 3. Ten days later, RELX was down 26 percent from its pre-announcement price, nearly double the initial drop.

The Plugin That Changed the Math

The legal plugin handles specific, high-volume tasks that used to consume paralegal time. Contract review and risk flagging. NDA triage against standard templates. Document summarization for depositions and case files. Compliance checking against regulatory standards. Nothing it does requires a law degree, but all of it used to require billable hours.

Forrester Research, partnering with LexisNexis, found that paralegals saved 50 percent of their time on administrative work when using AI tools. Routine document review that took four hours dropped to two. The gains were real and immediate.

Claude Opus 4.6 achieved 90.2 percent accuracy on legal reasoning benchmarks, the kind of performance that gets quoted in earnings calls. The 1-million-token context window means it can ingest an entire contract, all related NDAs, prior correspondence, and case precedents in a single request. What once required uploading documents in chunks and cross-referencing tabs now happens in one pass.

The economic disruption was surgical. Anthropic open-sourced the plugins. Harvey AI, the legal tech startup RELX acquired in 2024, charges $1,200 per seat per year. Claude operates on standard subscription pricing. The legal plugin is included in enterprise access, not sold as a separate premium product. This turned legal work that LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters had sold at premium prices into a low-cost commodity.

But the plugin comes with one line that matters. Anthropic’s documentation states: “The plugin assists with legal workflows and does not provide legal advice. AI-generated analysis must be reviewed by licensed lawyers before being relied upon for legal decisions.”

That disclaimer is not boilerplate. It is an admission of risk the market had not yet priced in.

The 69% Problem

Stanford researchers quantified the risk. Large language models make up false answers 69 to 88 percent of the time when asked legal questions: fabricated cases, misstated statutes, invented precedents that read like real law but are not. The 90.2 percent benchmark measures structured legal reasoning. Real-world queries are messier. A lawyer asks a question no benchmark anticipated, and the model invents a confident, authoritative, completely wrong answer.

Courts have begun responding with sanctions. In February 2026, a Kansas federal judge imposed $1,000 to $5,000 fines per attorney for submitting fake citations generated by AI. In 2025, an attorney in New York faced a $15,000 personal sanction for hallucinated briefs. Another case required $26,100 in court reimbursements and $5,000 in opposing counsel fees.

The sanctions create a floor of human demand. Someone must check the AI’s work. That someone needs a law degree and liability insurance.

And the liability question is still open. Some malpractice insurers have begun explicitly excluding AI-related claims from coverage. If a lawyer relies on AI output that turns out to be wrong, who carries the loss? Not Anthropic, whose disclaimer says it does not provide legal advice. Not the insurer, if the policy excludes AI errors. The lawyer, alone, absorbs the risk of a tool they did not build and cannot fully verify.

Beyond error rates, entire categories of legal work resist automation. AI cannot appear in court. It cannot read the pause, the tone shift, the body language that tells a lawyer whether opposing counsel will budge on a settlement term. It cannot advise a client on risk appetite or warn them that a deal aligns with the contract but not with their strategic position. It cannot assume ethical responsibility for the advice it gives.

Bloomberg Law captured this: trust is “an ineffable amalgam of expertise, experience, and emotional intelligence.” The plugin has none of these.

The adoption data supports this tension. The American Bar Association reported in late 2025 that AI had moved from experiment to infrastructure. Adoption reached 79 percent of law firms, up from 19 percent two years earlier. Over 30 states have AI-specific guidance for attorneys.

Yet MIT Technology Review found in December 2025 that the legal sector had not experienced major layoffs despite this surge. Roles are changing. Work is not disappearing.

Michael Bennett, law professor at UIC, said it clearly: “The most expert legal practitioners and advisors who have deep skill are going to benefit from this in the short term.”

The benefit flows to those who can use AI. Not those who get replaced by it.

Two Markets, One Profession

The market panic on February 3 was overblown about replacement. It was accurate about division.

Routine work that can be standardized is leaving the profession. Harvey charges $1,200 per seat per year for contract review as a standalone product. Claude includes it as one feature inside a general enterprise subscription.

The legal work is the same. The pricing model is not.

When contract analysis stops being a premium product and becomes a bundled feature, the revenue model underneath it collapses. That work still happens. It just stops generating law firm fees. In-house legal teams will handle it with AI assistance, and the $300/hour outside counsel call becomes a last resort instead of a default.

This creates two tiers. Elite lawyers with specialized expertise and client relationships will thrive. Their work amplifies, letting them handle more matters with deeper analysis. Junior associates who spent years on document review face a shrinking career path. The pipeline that fed law firms for fifty years (hire at 25, make partner at 45) is breaking.

That pipeline matters more than it looks. Document review is not just labor. It is how lawyers learn. A second-year associate reading five hundred contracts does not just review them. She starts to notice which indemnification clauses blow up, which vendors walk deals, which patterns signal trouble three months before it arrives. That pattern recognition is what makes a senior lawyer worth $800 an hour. If AI handles the reps, the training ground disappears. The profession keeps its experts but loses the mechanism that produced them. Nobody has an answer for what replaces it.

Every wave of legal technology, from Westlaw in the 1970s to email in the 1990s, expanded the work rather than eliminating it. But those tools automated lookup and communication. Claude’s plugin does actual analytical work: flagging risks, suggesting alternative language, comparing clauses across precedents. That crosses a line previous technologies never reached.

The legal tech market reached $26.7 billion in 2024, projected to hit $46.8 billion by 2030. Law firm tech spending rose 9.7 percent in 2025. Money is flowing into legal AI, not away from it. The profession is not dying. It is splitting into two professions wearing the same name.

McCready, Two Weeks Later

McCready pulled up the legal plugin in mid-February. Less than two weeks after his stocks crashed, the tool that spooked the market sat in his browser. He ran a vendor agreement through it. The AI flagged three risky indemnification clauses and noted an inconsistent liability cap. It suggested alternative language. Four hours of work compressed to twenty minutes.

He read the output. The AI had treated a force majeure clause as standard boilerplate, but McCready knew this particular vendor had used that exact language to walk away from a deal two years ago. The clause was technically fine. Strategically, it was a trap. He picked up the phone.

The negotiation happened the way it always did. Back and forth. Give and take. Reading the pause on the other end of the line. Deciding which risk to accept and which to push back on. The AI had done the mechanical work. The judgment remained his.

What the February 3 selloff got right: the economics of legal operations are broken. Document-review shops will not survive pricing at software margins. What it missed: the lawyer did not disappear. He changed what he does.

McCready was not replaced by the tool that panicked the market. He was reorganized by it. The $285 billion selloff was a misreading of the profession. AI does not replace lawyers. It sorts them.

Sources:

• Legal IT Insider - Claude Legal Plugin Market Meltdown

• Artificial Lawyer - Anthropic Moves Into Legal Tech

• Artificial Lawyer - Claude Crash Impact Is Irrational

• Law.com - Anthropic Releases Legal Plugin

• Bloomberg - Legal Software Stocks Plunge

• CNN - AI That Spooked the Stock Market

• Bloomberg Law - AI Disruption Best Thing for Lawyers

• Justia - AI Limitations in Law

• MIT Technology Review - AI Not Coming for Lawyers

• ABA - AI Has Moved From Experiment to Infrastructure

• Minnesota Lawyer - Kansas Judge Fines Lawyers for AI Citations

• Grand View Research - Legal Tech Market Size

• Eesel AI - Harvey Pricing

• WebProNews - Claude Opus 4.6 Legal Benchmark

• Harvey AI / RELX Pricing

• Law Firm Tech Spending 9.7%

• Morningstar - Stocks Crushed

• ABA - Does Malpractice Insurance Cover AI?

• RELX Share Price Steadies as AI Fears Linger

On February 15, 1798, Robert Morris walked into the Prune Street Debtors’ Prison in Philadelphia.

He would not walk out for three and a half years.

This was the man who had financed the American Revolution.

When Washington’s army was starving at Valley Forge, Morris found money.

When Congress couldn’t pay its soldiers, he pledged his own credit.

And when the whole war effort nearly collapsed, he held it together through sheer financial nerve.

George Washington called him “the Financier of the Revolution.” Congress appointed him Superintendent of Finance, essentially the nation’s first treasury secretary.

At his peak, Morris was probably the richest man in America.

And now he was in prison. Ruined by bad investments. Unable to pay his debts.

The cell was small. The food was bad. The other prisoners included thieves, bankrupts, and men who had simply been unlucky. Morris spent his days writing letters to friends, pleading for help that rarely came, watching his life’s work dissolve.

He was sixty-four years old, a man who had helped create a nation.

He would die with nothing.

The Merchant

Robert Morris was born in Liverpool, England, on January 20, 1734. His father was a tobacco merchant who traded with the American colonies. Young Robert followed him across the Atlantic, arriving in Maryland as a teenager.

He went to work for the Philadelphia merchant firm of Charles Willing. Morris was smart and ambitious, exactly the qualities a colonial merchant needed. By his early twenties, he had become a partner in what would become Willing & Morris, one of the most successful trading houses in America.

The firm traded in everything: tobacco, wheat, and manufactured goods. They ran ships across the Atlantic, made risky bets on land, and loaned money to other merchants. By the 1770s, Morris was extremely wealthy, a man whose fortune touched every corner of the colonial economy.

He was also becoming political.

As tensions with Britain rose, Morris found himself drawn into the patriot cause. He wasn’t an idealist, but he was a businessman. He understood that British policies at the time were bad for business.

The Financier

When war came, the Continental Congress discovered a problem: they had no money.

Congress couldn’t collect taxes. That power belonged to the states, who were often reluctant to pay. Borrowing was just as hopeless. No one trusted a government that might not exist in a year. They tried printing money, but the resulting “Continentals” quickly became worthless. “Not worth a Continental” became a common phrase.

Robert Morris could do things Congress couldn’t.

He had credit. Decades of successful business had established his reputation across the Atlantic world. When Morris said he would pay, people believed him. They trusted his word when they wouldn’t trust Congress’s.

Starting in 1776, Morris began using that credit to fund the war. He advanced money for supplies and guaranteed loans, putting his personal fortune up as a guarantee for public debt. When the government couldn’t pay, Morris paid instead.

Between 1781 and 1784, Morris raised about $11 million through loans, taxes, and creative financing. He created the Bank of North America, the country’s first commercial bank, partly to fund the war effort. He issued “Morris notes,” which people used as money because people trusted Morris even when they didn’t trust the government.

Washington’s army at Yorktown was paid and supplied largely through Morris’s efforts. Morris personally advanced about $1.4 million for the campaign. The siege that won the war was financed by a man who was betting his entire fortune on American independence.

The Risk

Morris did this partly out of patriotism. He believed in the American cause and was willing to sacrifice for it. He also expected to profit from an independent America through contracts and land deals, plus the general prosperity that peace would bring.

But mostly, Morris was a gambler.

He bet everything, and he expected to win everything. “The door to fortune is open,” he wrote during the war. Morris saw opportunities everywhere. Government contracts. Risky land deals. The chaos of a new nation finding its footing. He was willing to risk everything because he believed he could win everything.

For a while, he was right. After the war, Morris was one of the most powerful men in America. He served in the Constitutional Convention, helping to shape the document that would govern the nation he had financed. He was offered the position of Treasury Secretary under Washington but declined, recommending Alexander Hamilton instead.

He was also buying land. At his peak, he held about 6 million acres. Huge stretches of New York and Pennsylvania, stretching into the western territories. Morris believed that American expansion would make land the most valuable asset in the world. He was betting on America’s future. And this time, he was wrong.

The Crash

The land bubble burst in the Panic of 1796-1797.

Morris had borrowed heavily to pay for his purchases, expecting that rising land prices would let him pay off his debts while keeping a fortune. Instead, prices collapsed. Immigration slowed. The western lands that Morris had bought turned out to be worth a fraction of what he had paid.

His creditors came calling. Morris owed about $3 million, spread across banks, individual investors, and European lenders who had trusted his name. He couldn’t pay. He tried to sell his holdings, but the market was flooded with land and there were no buyers.

In 1798, his creditors had him arrested.

Debtor’s prison in the late 18th century was exactly what it sounds like: a prison for people who couldn’t pay their debts. You stayed until you paid, or until your creditors gave up and released you. Some prisoners died inside. Others spent years in limbo, unable to work off their debts because they were locked up.

Morris entered Prune Street in February 1798. He would remain there until August 1801, more than three years.

The Prison Years

He begged friends for help, tried to arrange deals to pay off his debts, and complained about his health and the terrible food. He couldn’t believe this was happening to him. Robert Morris, the Financier of the Revolution, locked up like a common criminal.

George Washington visited him once. The two old friends sat in Morris’s cell and talked about the past. Washington offered sympathy but couldn’t offer money. His own finances were tight. After Washington died in 1799, Morris was more alone than ever.

Some people tried to help. Gouverneur Morris (no relation), a friend from the Constitutional Convention, provided some support. Other old allies sent what they could. But it wasn’t enough. Morris’s debts were measured in millions, and no amount of charity could bridge the gap.

In 1800, Congress passed a federal bankruptcy law, the first in American history. The law allowed debtors to clear their debts and start over. Morris applied immediately.

On August 26, 1801, Robert Morris walked out of Prune Street a free man. He was sixty-seven years old. Penniless and broken.

The End

Morris spent his final years in a small house in Philadelphia, supported by his wife Mary and the occasional charity of friends.

He never recovered his fortune and never returned to public life.

The nation he had financed moved on, and Morris faded with it.

On May 8, 1806, Robert Morris died. He was seventy-three years old.

His grave in the Christ Church burial ground in Philadelphia is near those of Benjamin Franklin and other founders. But while tourists flock to Franklin’s grave, few visit Morris’s.

The man who financed the Revolution has been largely forgotten.

The Lesson

What happened to Robert Morris?

He gambled and lost.

He had always been a risk-taker, and his risks had always paid off. Land speculating ended that. The skills that made him successful during the war were the same skills that destroyed him afterward.

The difference between Morris at war and Morris at peace was simple.

During the war, Morris’s interests and the nation’s interests lined up perfectly. He profited from the Revolution, but the nation profited too. His gambles paid off for everyone.

After the war, that connection broke down. Morris’s land deals benefited only himself. When it failed, he bore the consequences alone. The nation he had financed moved on without him.

Many founders followed the same arc.

Some prospered.

Some failed.

Morris did both.

What Morris Teaches Us

Robert Morris’s story is about how easily fortune can disappear.

You can be the most important person in the room and still end up in a cell. You can finance a nation’s independence and still die with nothing.

There’s no moral safety net in history.

Being good doesn’t protect you from bad luck.

Being essential doesn’t protect you from ruin.

Morris did more for American independence than almost anyone, and it didn’t save him.

But there’s another way to read it.

Morris gambled on America, and America survived. His personal fortune was lost, but the nation he financed endured. The bet paid off, just not for him.

That might be enough. The point of Morris’s sacrifice was never personal reward. Morris gave everything he had to American independence. He succeeded in helping to create a new nation at the cost of his wealth and freedom.

Robert Morris got sentenced to debtors prison.

The rest of us got an amazing country.

Next: Samuel Adams

From the financier of the Revolution, we turn to its propagandist.

Samuel Adams of Massachusetts was John Adams’s older cousin, and in many ways, his opposite. Where John was a lawyer who defended British soldiers, Samuel was an agitator who organized mobs. Where John wrestled with principle, Samuel dealt in what worked.

Samuel Adams was the man who made the Revolution popular. He wrote pamphlets, organized boycotts, founded the Sons of Liberty, and helped plan the Boston Tea Party. Without his decades of organizing, there might not have been a revolution to finance.

He was also, by all accounts, a terrible businessman. He failed at every business he attempted. His only talent was politics, and in politics, he was a genius.

Next Friday, we’ll tell the story of the man who mastered propaganda before Twitter existed.

This is Essay #13 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, culminating on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

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Sources:

• Robert Morris | Britannica

• Robert Morris | National Park Service

• Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution | Charles Rappleye

• Bank of North America | Federal Reserve History

• Debtor’s Prisons in Early America | Journal of Economic History