merchant patriot founding father
Gwinnett was born c. 1735 in Down Hatherley, England, the son of Samuel and Anne (Emes) Gwinnett, and was baptized on April 10, 1735. His father, whose ancestors had long lived in Wales, was a clergyman, and his mother was related to people of consequence in Herefordshire.
For several years before and after 1760 Gwinnett was engaged in exporting goods to the American colonies, and by September 1765 he had settled in Savannah, Ga. , as a merchant. In October of that year he purchased St. Catherine Island, a tract of some thirty-six square miles lying off the coast of Georgia, near the then flourishing port of Sunbury. There he set up as a planter. Sunbury was the "capital" of a group of settlers originally from New England, and it was through them, and especially through his intimate friendship with Lyman Hall, that Gwinnett was brought to an interest in politics. He was a justice of the peace in 1767-1768, and in 1769 was a member - though a somewhat laggard one - of the Georgia Colonial Assembly, but afterward for nearly five years, perhaps because of the ceaseless financial worries of his plantation, he seems to have eschewed all public activity. In January 1776 he attended a meeting of the Georgia Council of Safety, and was elected as one of five delegates to the Continental Congress. He arrived in Philadelphia in May, took a respectable part in the sittings of the Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence and left in time to be back in Savannah by late August. It was his ambition to be a general of Georgia troops, but all his machinations were unavailing, and he found it necessary to satisfy himself with his election in October as speaker of the Georgia Assembly and his re-election as delegate to the Continental Congress. During the following months he took an important part in the drafting of the first constitution of Georgia and in thwarting the schemes by which Georgia was to be absorbed by South Carolina. In March 1777, upon the sudden death of Gov. Archibald Bulloch, he was commissioned "President of the State of Georgia" and commander-in-chief of the army, positions which he occupied for about two months, when, somewhat inexplicably, he was defeated in his candidacy for re-election to the governorship by a representative of his own faction in politics. As governor, his affiliation with his "radical" NewEngland-derived neighbors brought him the enmity of the conservatives. The bungling of an expedition of Georgia soldiery upon British strongholds in Florida in the spring of 1777 precipitated an inquiry in the Assembly as to whether the civil authority had hampered the military, or otherwise; in short, as to whether Gwinnett or McIntosh was the more culpable. The inquiry sustained Gwinnett, but McIntosh, in pique, proclaimed his opponent before the Assembly as a "scoundrel and a lying rascal". In the duel which followed next morning on the outskirts of Savannah both men were wounded, and Gwinnett died three days later. He died insolvent, and it is not known where he was buried; his descendants are apparently extinct; there is no trustworthy portrait of him; but of his thirty-six autographs, one, in 1924, was sold at public auction for $14, 000.
Member of the Georgia Colonial Assembly (1769)
Gwinnett was married on April 19, 1757, to Ann Bourne of Wolverhampton.
