Richard Stockton was chosen as first chief justice of the new state but declined, preferring for the moment the more active career of a member of Congress. Toward the end of August the new state government of New Jersey began to function. New delegates to Congress, among them Richard Stockton, were chosen on June 21 and were empowered to join with representatives of the other colonies “in declaring the United Colonies independent of Great Britain, entering into a Confederacy for Union and common Defence.” Accordingly they participated in the final affirmative vote for independence on July 2, 1776, and the vote for the Declaration itself on July 4. By June, however, the Provincial Congress of New Jersey had deposed William Franklin from the governor’s chair and had directed his arrest. A congressional committee was immediately dispatched to New Jersey to implement this resolution, with the result that the project for a separate New Jersey petition was quietly dropped.ĭuring the early days of 1776, as American public opinion generally grew ever stronger in favor of independence, the middle colonies still hesitated. But when news of the New Jersey proposal reached the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, that body resolved that it would be “very dangerous to the liberties and welfare of America” if any colony were to petition the king separately. Just three days after the last council meeting that Stockton attended, a committee appointed by the New Jersey Assembly drafted a petition to the king, “humbly beseeching him to use his interposition to prevent the effusion of blood and to express the great desire this House hath to a restoration of peace and harmony with the Parent State, on constitutional principles”-all this after the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. It is essential to bear in mind that New Jersey sentiment on independence was sharply divided for a long time. In February, 1774, Stockton was commissioned an associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, meanwhile retaining his seat on the council, whose meetings he attended as late as November 24, 1775-more than a half year after the shooting started. But this circumstance did not prevent his appointment in 1768 to the Council of the Royal Governor, William Franklin, a barrister-at-law of the Middle Temple in England and the illegitimate son of Dr. When the Stamp Act controversy arose in 1765, Stockton aligned himself on the side of the protesting colonists. Before long he was widely considered one of the outstanding lawyers of the province of New Jersey. He rose steadily in his profession, not only by routine advancement-attorney in 1754, counsellor in 1758, serjeant-at-law in 1764-but, preeminently, in reputation. Born in 1730, the son of a county judge, he was a member of the class of 1748 at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and after graduation studied law. Richard Stockton was the fourth generation of a wealthy and prominent New Jersey family. One signer, following capture by the British and under pressure of a harsh confinement during what was without question the darkest hour of the Revolution for the American cause, did then defect, by taking an oath of obedience to the king and pledging that he would take no further part in the pending struggle. A commonly held belief, as one scholar expressed it in AMERICAN HERITAGE (December, 1962), is that “not one man of the fifty-six lost his ‘sacred honor.’ Throughout the long ordeal of an often-floundering war, in a cause that at times seemed hopelessly lost, there was not among the fifty-six men a single defection-despite the reservations that some had had about independence at the beginning and despite the repeated sagging of popular support for the war.” Various legends linger around the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the circumstances of the signing.
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