The Most Valuable Signature in America
And Why 56 Mostly Forgotten Men Matter More Than Ever
On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate 250 years of independence.
A quarter millennium.
Two and a half centuries since 56 men gathered in Philadelphia and signed their names to a document that would change human history.
You may know some of them: John Hancock with his oversized flourish.
Benjamin Franklin, the elder statesman.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the words.
John Adams, who made them happen.
But what about the other 52?
What about the man whose signature is worth more than George Washington’s—not because he was more important, but because he died in a duel before the ink was dry?
What about the signer whose wife was captured by the British and held prisoner as revenge?
What about the youngest signer, just 26 years old, who watched his property burned and still never wavered?
What about the preacher who told his congregation that revolution was God’s will and then proved it by signing himself?
Over the next six months, I’m going to tell you the stories of The 56.
Some we have a lot of information on, and some very little.
My goal is for this to wrap up on July 4, 2026.
Exactly 250 years after these men pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
These aren’t the sanitized textbook versions.
These are stories of ambition and cowardice, of wealth lost and principles tested, of men who made impossible choices and lived (or died) with the consequences.
Some of them became presidents.
Some died in debtors’ prison.
Some owned slaves while writing about liberty.
Some freed their slaves after signing.
Some were brilliant.
Some were lucky.
All of them were human.
In an era where we often look for perfect heroes, their messy, complicated humanity matters more than ever.
Let us begin with the most improbable story of all: the man whose signature sells for more than any other founder’s.
Button Gwinnett: The Most Valuable Signature in America
In May 2010, a single piece of paper sold at auction for $722,500.
It wasn’t the Declaration of Independence.
It wasn’t even a letter from a president.
It was a document signed by a man most Americans have never heard of: Button Gwinnett of Georgia.
That same year, you could buy a George Washington signature for around $10,000. A John Adams for $15,000. Even a Thomas Jefferson rarely topped $50,000.
But a Button Gwinnett?
Collectors have paid over half a million dollars, multiple times, for nothing more than his name scratched on a receipt.
Why is the signature of an obscure Georgian signer worth more than the Father of Our Country?
The answer involves a duel, a festering wound, and the strange mathematics of immortality.
The Immigrant Who Bet on Georgia
Button Gwinnett was born in 1735 in Gloucestershire, England.
Yes, “Button” was his real name—a family tradition.
His father was a vicar, which in 18th-century England meant respectability without wealth.
Young Button tried his hand as a merchant in Bristol and London before doing what ambitious young men of limited means have done throughout history: he looked across the ocean.
In 1765, at age 30, Gwinnett arrived in Charleston, South Carolina. He was unremarkable. A merchant. A middleman. The kind of man history forgets.
But Gwinnett had something many colonial merchants lacked: the ability to read a map. Georgia, the youngest and most vulnerable of the thirteen colonies, was desperate for settlers. Land was cheap. Opportunity was everywhere. The only thing missing was ambition.
In 1765, Gwinnett bought St. Catherines Island, a 25,000-acre sea island off the Georgia coast. He became a planter. He bought enslaved people to work the land, as nearly all Southern planters did. He raised cattle and tried to grow indigo.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t particularly good at it.
By 1773, he was deeply in debt.
But debt, in colonial Georgia, wasn’t necessarily an obstacle to advancement.
The colony was so thinly populated that anyone with education and ambition could rise.
Gwinnett had both.
The Accidental Radical
Gwinnett entered politics almost by chance.
In 1769, he was elected to the Georgia Commons House of Assembly, not because of his political views, but because St. Catherines Island needed representation and he was there.
But once in politics, Gwinnett discovered something about himself: he loved it.
More importantly, he was good at it. He could write. He could speak. He could maneuver. And by 1775, as tensions between Britain and the colonies reached their breaking point, Gwinnett found himself swept up in the revolutionary tide.
Georgia was the most loyalist colony in America.
It had the smallest population, the weakest economy, and the most to lose from breaking with Britain.
The royal governor, James Wright, was competent and well-liked. Most Georgians wanted nothing to do with rebellion.
But a small faction of radicals, centered in Savannah, saw opportunity in chaos. Gwinnett joined them. Savannah has always been a city of eccentrics and disruptors—from the revolutionaries of 1776 to the rule-breaking 'Banana Ball' played by the Savannah Bananas today.
But back in 1776, the game was much deadlier.
By 1776, Button was a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He was 41 years old, unremarkable among the brilliant minds gathered there, and almost certainly unknown to most of his fellow delegates.
When the Declaration was passed on July 4 and signed over the following weeks, Button Gwinnett added his name to history.
Then he went home to Georgia.
And that’s where his story takes its fatal turn.
The Feud
Gwinnett’s great rival was a man named Lachlan McIntosh, who represented everything Gwinnett was not.
McIntosh was a soldier. Gwinnett was a politician.
McIntosh led troops. Gwinnett wrote legislation.
McIntosh was respected by Washington himself.
Gwinnett was respected mainly by himself.
The two men despised each other.
Their feud centered on power in Georgia. After the Declaration was signed, Gwinnett returned to find the colony in chaos. The royal governor had fled. Someone needed to take charge.
Gwinnett maneuvered himself into position. In early 1777, he was appointed as temporary president (essentially governor) of Georgia.
The catch?
He had ten weeks to prove himself.
He used those ten weeks to pick a fight with the Continental Army.
Gwinnett ordered a military expedition to attack British-held Florida.
It was his idea. His plan. His glory to claim.
There was only one problem: the military commander of Georgia was Lachlan McIntosh, and McIntosh wanted nothing to do with Gwinnett’s foolish expedition.
McIntosh was right. The expedition was a disaster. The troops slogged through swamps, ran out of supplies, and retreated in humiliation without ever reaching Florida.
Gwinnett blamed McIntosh. McIntosh blamed Gwinnett.
The Georgia legislature conducted an inquiry and Gwinnett was narrowly cleared of wrongdoing.
It wasn’t enough for McIntosh. On the floor of the Georgia assembly, in front of every political leader in the state, McIntosh called Gwinnett “a scoundrel and a lying rascal.”
In 1777, there was only one response to such an insult.
The Duel
Decades before Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton famously squared off, Gwinnett and McIntosh proved that American politics has always been a bloodsport.
The two men met on May 16, 1777, just outside Savannah.
The rules were simple. Twelve paces. Turn. Fire.
Both men fired. Both men hit.
McIntosh was struck in the thigh—a painful wound, but not fatal.
Gwinnett was struck just above the knee. The ball shattered his femur, a catastrophic injury in the era before antiseptics.
In modern times, such a wound would mean surgery, antibiotics, and a few months of recovery. In 1777, it meant infection.
Button Gwinnett died three days later, at 42, on May 19, 1777.
He had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence for less than a year.
The Strange Afterlife
Here is what Button Gwinnett left behind:
- No children who survived to adulthood
- A widow who soon remarried
- A plantation that was sold to pay his debts
- A few dozen documents bearing his signature
Those documents turned out to be the most important.
By the mid-1800s, collecting autographs had become a gentleman’s hobby. And serious collectors wanted the complete set: all 56 signatures of the Declaration.
Washington, you could find.
Adams, Jefferson, Franklin also all had documents with their signature freely available.
But Button Gwinnett?
He had held no national office. He had written few letters. He had lived only 42 years, and most of those years were spent as an obscure Georgia planter. His brief political career produced almost no correspondence.
Historians began to search.
They combed through Georgia archives, South Carolina records, British merchant files.
They found almost nothing.
Today, only 51 authentic Button Gwinnett signatures are known to exist.
Of those, only about 10 are in private hands.
The rest are locked in museums and state archives, never to be sold.
This is why a Button Gwinnett signature is worth more than a George Washington. Not because Gwinnett was more important—he obviously wasn’t. But because Washington signed thousands of documents over a long career, while Gwinnett barely signed anything before dying in a pointless duel.
Rarity creates value. And Button Gwinnett is the rarest of them all.
The Cult of Button
Gwinnett’s obscurity has made him a sort of cult figure in pop culture.
Isaac Asimov wrote a sci-fi mystery, Button, Button, about a time traveler trying to forge his signature.
In the video game Fallout 3, a robot guarding the National Archives is programmed to believe he is Button Gwinnett.
And in 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Stephen Colbert even performed a rap tribute to him on The Late Show, dubbing him the Founding Father that history forgot.
The Complete Set
For collectors who want all 56 Declaration signatures, Gwinnett is the final boss. The impossible get. The bottleneck that makes a complete collection worth over $1.4 million.
In 2022, a collection containing all 56 signers’ autographs sold for $1.68 million at Heritage Auctions. The Gwinnett alone accounted for nearly half the value.
Think about that.
A man who served ten weeks as Georgia’s acting president, who launched a failed military expedition, who died in a petty duel over wounded pride, now has a signature worth more than the generals who won the war.
History has a sense of humor.
What Gwinnett Teaches Us
Gwinnett signed the Declaration, yes, but so did 55 other men.
Many risked far more.
Many suffered far more.
He died in a duel over wounded pride, not on a battlefield or in a British prison.
His ten weeks as Georgia’s president were marked by feuding and failure.
Ambitious without being capable. Confident without being competent.
And yet: you cannot know how history will remember you.
Gwinnett signed his name to the Declaration expecting it might get him hanged. Instead, that signature became more valuable than the signatures of men who actually mattered.
He was not a great man.
But he was there, at the right moment, with a pen in his hand.
Gwinnett reminds us that history isn’t made by marble statues, or perfect heroes, but by flawed people who simply showed up.
And that was enough.
Up Next: John Adams
If Button Gwinnett represents the strange lottery of historical fame, John Adams represents something else entirely: the man who should be famous but somehow isn’t.
Adams did more than almost anyone to make independence happen.
He nominated Washington to lead the army.
He appointed Jefferson to write the Declaration.
He argued, cajoled, and bullied the Continental Congress into voting for separation from Britain.
And then he was largely forgotten—overshadowed by Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, the men he himself had elevated.
We’ll explore how the “Atlas of Independence” became America’s most underrated founder.
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*This essay is a part of the The 56 series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence.
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