Signing Their Rights Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

national politics; it gave the South an unfair advantage over the North, both in the production of goods and in population. This stance made him unpopular with some southern delegates, but he didn’t care. The nation was divided not so much into big and small states, he insisted, as it was into North and South. Prescient words.
    After signing the Constitution, King promoted the document as the nation’s last best hope for a strong union. This message was a hard sell in fiercely independent Massachusetts, but the state finally became the sixth to ratify. King hoped to become one of the first Massachusetts senators under the new Constitution, but his personal life was undermining his political aspirations. Since marrying a New York socialite in 1786, he was spending more and more time away, and his political cronies viewed him as an outsider. In 1788, at the urging of Alexander Hamilton, King extinguished the last relic of his Massachusetts life—his law practice—and moved to New York for good. He immersed himself in politics there and was elected to the Senate a year later (beating out Declaration of Independence signer Lewis Morris, among others).
    King was reelected to a second term in 1795 but resigned to accept an invitation by President Washington to be U.S. minister, or ambassador, to Great Britain. He served in this post under the country’s first three presidents, returning in 1803 to launch a series of runs at the executive office. He twice ran for vice president underhis old convention colleague, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The duo lost in 1804 to Thomas Jefferson and George Clinton and, in 1808, to James Madison and George Clinton. In 1816 King launched a third campaign, running for president against James Monroe, but lost that bid as well. (“Lost” is something of an understatement. King and his running mate, John Eager Howard of Maryland, were obliterated, 34 electoral votes to 183.)
    But his political career was far from over. King enjoyed two more terms as a senator and offered some stirring remarks on slavery when Missouri was being considered for statehood. The nation was already divided between “slave states” and “free states,” and King waged a valiant battle to make Missouri one of the latter. In a famous 1820 speech (attended by whites and free blacks), he spoke of how he could not comprehend slavery. “I have yet to learn that one man can make a slave of another,” he said. “If one man cannot do so, no number of individuals can have any better right to do it.” These were stirring words, but he lost the fight. Much of the northern land that was part of the Louisiana Purchase, then dubbed the Missouri Territory, would be slave-free, but Missouri ended up a slave state, all courtesy of the political agreement known as the Missouri Compromise.
    King bid farewell to the Senate forever when President John Quincy Adams asked him to serve yet again as ambassador to Great Britain. Now seventy years old and slowing down, King happily sailed for London, where he had a merry old time, until he fell ill and asked to be relieved of his duties. Two years later, he died at his estate—King Manor in Queens, New York—at the age of seventy-two. Today that estate is open to visitors.

III. Connecticut

The Signer Who Lived the Longest
    BORN : October 7, 1727
    DIED : November 14, 1819
    AGE AT SIGNING : 55
    PROFESSION : Lawyer
    BURIED : Christ Episcopal Church Cemetery, Stratford, Connecticut

    When William Samuel Johnson arrived in Philadelphia in June 1787, people expected big things. At age fifty-nine, this eminent lawyer with dark, smoldering eyes was one of the elder statesmen of the convention; he had earned two diplomas from Yale as well as honorary degrees from Harvard and Oxford. His reputation as an intellectual heavyweight preceded him, and everyone addressed him deferentially as “Dr. Johnson.” And yet, he remained surprisingly quiet while the framers hammered out the Constitution,