(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
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a signer of the Declaration of Independence
Button Gwinnett was born at Down Hatherley, Gloucestershire, England, the son of Samuel and Anne (Ernes) 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 Button Gwinnett was engaged in exporting goods to the American colonies, and by September 1765 he had settled in Savannah, Georgia, 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 1767-68, 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 réélection 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 Governor 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 reelection to the governorship by a representative of his own faction in politics.
As governor, his affiliation with his “radical” New- England-derived neighbors brought him the enmity of the conservatives. Button Gwinnett was opposed particularly by General Lachlan McIntosh, whose brother he had arrested upon a suspicion of treachery, and whose authority as a soldier was always perilously near clashing with his own authority as governor.
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.
As a representative of Georgia to the Continental Congress, Button Gwinnett was one of the signatories (first signature on the left) on the United States Declaration of Independence. He was also, briefly, the provisional president of Georgia in 1777, and Gwinnett County (now a major suburb of metropolitan Atlanta) was named for him. He took a respectable part in the sittings of the Congress. He also took an important part in the drafting of the first constitution of Georgia and was commissioned “President of the State of Georgia” and commander-in-chief of the army.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Button Gwinnett was married on April 19, 1757, to Ann Bourne of Wolverhampton.
