One episode involving Hewes illustrates the recurring problem of sectional rivalries among the Delegates. As key members of the marine committee, Hewes and John Adams were instrumental in establishing the Continental Navy. When the time came to appoint the Nation’s first naval captains, the two men clashed. For one of the positions, Hewes nominated his friend John Paul Jones, an experienced seaman who had recently emigrated to Virginia from Scotland. Adams, maintaining that all the captaincies should be filled by New Englanders, stubbornly protested. New England had yielded to the South in the selection of a commander in chief of the Continental Army and Adams had fostered the selection of the able Virginian George Washington, so he was not now about to make a concession on the Navy. Hewes, sensing the futility of argument, reluctantly submitted. Jones, who was to become the most honored naval hero of the Revolution, received only a lieutenant’s commission.
In 1777 Hewes lost his bid for reelection to Congress, one of the few failures in his life, and in 1778–79 he found solace in the State legislature. In the latter year, despite health problems, he accepted reelection to the Continental Congress. A few months after arriving back in Philadelphia and not long before his 50th birthday, overworked and fatigued, he died. His grave is in Christ Church Burial Ground there.
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
SOUTH CAROLINA
An aristocratic planter, lawyer, and jurist, Thomas Heyward, Jr., sat in the State legislature and the Continental Congress and commanded a militia battalion. He was one of three South Carolina signers captured and imprisoned by the British.
The eldest son of one of the wealthiest planters in South Carolina, Heyward was born in 1746 at Old House Plantation, in St. Helena’s Parish (later St. Luke’s Parish and present Jasper County) near the Georgia border about 25 miles northeast of Savannah. In 1771, following 5 years of study in London, he began practicing law. The next year, his parish sent him to the colonial legislature (1772–75), which was feuding with the Royal Governor over parliamentary taxation. During that period, in 1773, he married and settled down at White Hall Plantation, only a couple of miles from the residence of his father.
While a legislator, Heyward apparently joined the Revolutionaries, for in the summer of 1774 he attended a provincial convention that chose Delegates to the Continental Congress. During 1775–76 he was active in the first and second provincial congresses and on the council of safety and the committee that drafted a State constitution. In the Continental Congress (1776–78), he signed the Articles of Confederation as well as the Declaration. At the end of his tour, he journeyed to Charleston and took up residence in the townhouse he had inherited from his father the year before. He became a circuit court judge; represented Charleston in the State legislature, which convened in the city; and held a militia captaincy.
In 1779 Heyward was wounded during Brig. Gen. William Moultrie’s repulse of a British attack on Port Royal Island, along the South Carolina coast near Heyward’s home. The following year, the British plundered White Hall and carried off all the slaves. When they took Charleston, they captured Heyward, who was helping defend the city. He was imprisoned at St. Augustine, Fla., until July 1781. Shortly before his release, he celebrated Independence Day by setting patriotic verses to the British national anthem. “God save the King” became “God save the thirteen States,” a rendition that soon echoed from New Hampshire to Georgia.