Signing Their Rights Away by Denise Kiernan Read Free Book Online Page B

jail, Livingston was exhorting New Jerseyans to set their “faces like a flint against that dissoluteness of manners and political corruption which will ever be the reproach to any people.” From that moment on, he was nicknamed “Doctor Flint.”
    The war was hard on everyone, rich and poor alike, and Livingston was no exception. His home was ransacked, and a bounty was placed on his head. He lost his son John Lawrence, a midshipman, to the conflict. Currency depreciation and the bankruptcy of numerous debtors depleted his savings. But he did own his home, and he used it to shelter soldiers.
    As governor, Doctor Flint saw New Jersey through the war and the wobbly, uncertain years that followed. He joined the New York Anti-Slavery Society and, in 1786, successfully worked to forbid the importation of slaves into New Jersey, even though he owned two of his own. He said slavery was “utterly inconsistent with the principles of Christianity and humanity, and in Americans, who have almost idolized liberty, peculiarly odious and disgraceful.”
    Livingston’s feelings about slavery were tested the next year when he attended the Constitutional Convention and served on the committee that reached the Three-Fifths Compromise. A “small-state nationalist,” he supported the New Jersey Plan, which was rejected by the convention, and ended up accepting the Great Compromise, which provided for equal representation in the Senate but population-based representation in the House of Representatives.
    Livingston signed the Constitution at age sixty-three—the third oldest man to do so—and went back to New Jersey to work on securing a speedy ratification before serious opposition could be organized. (New Jersey was one of only three states to ratify before the end of 1787.) Still governor, Livingston received an honorary law degree from Yale not long before his death. He lost his wife, Susanna, in 1789, and shortly thereafter became sick as well. He died in 1790.
    Then his next journey began, for one of the worst things you could do for the fate of your earthly remains was to sign the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. Livingston was buried first in a New Jersey Presbyterian churchyard, but a year later his body was moved to a family vault at Trinity Churchyard in Manhattan. In 1844, his body was moved yet again to —gasp !—the outer boroughs. Today you can visit his grave at Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. Liberty Hall was never moved and is now a lovely museum on the grounds of Kean University. It is open to the public and is a popular site for weddings, which surely would have made the poet in Livingston smile.

The Signer Who Proposed Erasing State Boundaries and Starting Over
    BORN : June 11, 1745
    DIED : August 16, 1790
    AGE AT SIGNING : 42
    PROFESSION : Lawyer
    BURIED : St. Michael’s Episcopal Church Graveyard, Trenton, New Jersey

    Pennsylvania half its size? Little Rhode Island three times bigger?
    Was this the key to equitable representation among the first thirteen states? We’ll never know—but it’s certainly one of the strangest ideas floated at the Constitutional Convention, and it comes courtesy of David Brearley.
    Brearley was born in Spring Grove, New Jersey. He was one of five children in a family that owned land but wasn’t particularly wealthy. Nevertheless, he received a good education and attended the College of New Jersey, a little school that was later known asPrinceton, although he left before graduation to pursue law. Things moved along rather nicely for young Brearley. By the age of twenty-two, he had been admitted to the New Jersey bar, moved to Allentown to start his own practice, and married Elizabeth Mullen, with whom he would have four children.
    Then came the Revolutionary War and all the skirmishes proceeding from that first shot heard ’round the world. Brearley was always a stalwart patriot in a state that had its fair share of loyalists, and his outspoken manner