Background
Elbridge Gerry was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, United States on the 17th of July 1744; son of Thomas Gerry, a native of Newton, England, who emigrated to America in 1730 and became a prosperous Marblehead merchant.
Founding Father and Republican Statesman
Elbridge Gerry was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, United States on the 17th of July 1744; son of Thomas Gerry, a native of Newton, England, who emigrated to America in 1730 and became a prosperous Marblehead merchant.
He graduated from Harvard College in 1762, and entered the shipping business with his father.
In February 1780 he withdrew from Congress because of its refusal to respond to his call for the yeas and nays.
Subsequently he laid his protest before the Massachusetts General Court which voted its approval of his action.
In 1786 he served in the state House of Representatives.
Not favouring the creation of a strong national government he declined to attend the Annapolis Convention in 1786, but in the following year, when the assembling of the Constitutional Convention was an assured fact, although he opposed the purpose for which it was called, he accepted an appointment as one of the Massachusetts delegates, with the idea that he might personally help to check too strong a tendency toward centralization.
Subsequently he served as an Anti-Federalist in the national House of Representatives in 1789- 1793, taking, as always, a prominent part in debates and other legislative concerns.
In 1797 he was sent by President John Adams, together with John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, on a mission to France to obtain from the government of the Directory a treaty embodying a settlement of several long-standing disputes.
Gerry, although despairing of any good results, remained in Paris for some time in the vain hope that Talleyrand might offer to a known friend of France terms that had been refused to envoys whose anti-French views were more than suspected.
This action of Gerry's brought down upon him from Federalist partisans a storm of abuse and censure, from which he never wholly cleared himself.
(Issue of civil versus military supremacy.)
1976In its deliberations he consistently advocated for a strong delineation between state and federal government powers, with state legislatures shaping the membership of federal government positions.
Gerry was at first opposed to the idea of political parties, and cultivated enduring friendships on both sides of the political divide between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.
In 1772 and 1773 he was a member of the Massachusetts General Court, in which he identified himself with Samuel Adams and the patriot party, and in 1773 he served on the Committee of Correspondence, which became one of the great instruments of intercolonial resistance.
From 1776 to 1781 Gerry was a member of the Continental Congress, where he early advocated independence, and was one of those who signed the Declaration after its formal signing on the 2nd of August 1776, at which time he was absent.
In 1786 he married Ann Thompson, the daughter of a wealthy New York merchant who was twenty years his junior. Gerry had ten children, of which seven survived into adulthood: Gerry's son, James Thompson Gerry, commanded the USS Albany, a United States Navy war sloop that went down with all hands in 1854.
