A few of the signers, such as George Ross, were latecomers to the Revolutionary cause. Like many others, he exerted more influence in State than national affairs.
The oldest son of an Anglican clergyman who had immigrated from Scotland, Ross was born in 1730 at New Castle, Del. After a preliminary classical education, he read law with his stepbrother John at Philadelphia and in 1750 entered the bar. Settling the next year at Lancaster, Pa., where he married and fathered two sons and a daughter, he built up a successful law practice and served as crown prosecutor for Cumberland County (1751–63). A member of the colonial legislature from 1768 until 1775, he sometimes joined in its disputes with the Proprietary Governor and demonstrated an interest in Indian affairs.
Meantime, in 1774, despite his Loyalist leanings, a provincial convention to which Ross had been elected sent him to the Continental Congress. The next year, by which time he had for some reason decided to affiliate with the Revolutionaries, he also served on the Pennsylvania council of safety and held a militia colonelcy. In 1776 he assisted in negotiating a peace treaty with the Indians in northwestern Pennsylvania, and acted as vice president of the State constitutional convention, for which he helped draft a declaration of rights. Not a Member of Congress during the voting for independence on July 1–2, 1776, he received his appointment soon enough to sign the Declaration on August 2. He won a reputation among his colleagues for his eloquence, wit, and conviviality, but made no noteworthy contributions to congressional proceedings. Illness brought about his resignation in January 1777.
In 1778, while Ross was acting as admiralty judge in Pennsylvania, a congressional court of appeals overruled his decision in a case involving a dispute between a citizen of Connecticut and the State of Pennsylvania. Ross, refusing to acknowledge the authority of the higher court to counter State decisions, initiated a dispute between Pennsylvania and the Central Government that represented an early manifestation of the States rights controversy and did not subside until 1809. But Ross did not live to see the outcome, for he died in Philadelphia in 1779 at the age of 49. He was buried in Christ Church Burial Ground.
Benjamin Rush
PENNSYLVANIA
Doctor, medical educator, chemist, humanitarian, politician, author, reformer-moralist, soldier, temperance advocate, abolitionist—Benjamin Rush was all of these. One of the younger signers, only 30 years of age at the time, he was already a physician of note.
Rush, the fourth of seven children, was born in 1745 at Byberry (“The Homestead”), near Philadelphia. At the age of 5, his farmer-gunsmith father died. The youth obtained a sound education at West Nottingham Academy, in Rising Sun, Md., operated by an uncle, and graduated from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). Returning to Philadelphia in 1760, he apparently first considered studying law but chose medicine. In 1766, at the end of a 5-year apprenticeship to a local physician, he sailed to Scotland, where 2 years later the University of Edinburgh awarded him a medical degree.