Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Image via Wikipedia.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
SEPT. 20, 2024 | If you live in Gwinnett County, you may know why the county is named for Button Gwinnett. He is famous for two reasons. First, the county was named for him as one of the three signers of the Declaration of Independence from Georgia. Second, nearby counties got their names from the other two signers, George Walton and Lyman Hall.
Button also served in Georgia’s colonial legislature, and as president of Georgia’s Revolutionary Council of Safety, being essentially the second provisional governor of Georgia.
Old Button is also famous for his signature being rare. The last known signature sold at auction fetched nearly $700,000 over a decade ago at Sotheby’s. Some say it could be worth over $1 million today. There are only 33 known verified signatures of his.
Now may we ask: who from Georgia signed the U.S. Constitution when it was adopted in 1787?
Their names are not ones quite as familiar as Button’s.
Georgia sent six delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Only four went. And only two—Abraham Baldwin and William Few—signed the final document. The other two attending were William Houston and William Leigh Pierce, both of whom have counties named for them.
The states were asked to send delegates to sign the document they had created to replace the Articles of Confederation, which were awkward in guiding the early efforts of our county. Of the 55 people who attended the Convention, only 39 signed on the document.
Some left as the convention progressed, whereas others refused to sign in protest. Since Rhode Island refused to send a delegate, no representative from Rhode Island signed the document. In addition, the convention’s secretary, William Jackson, also signed the document, not as a delegate, but in attestation of the document’s signing.
The Constitution adopted by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was later ratified by special conventions in each of the then-existing 13 American states. Today, the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the United States of America.
And here is something you may not also know: it’s deliberately hard to easily understand the Constitution, since those writing it purposefully made the language ambiguous.
The Constitution was conceived by Gouveneur Morris of Pennsylvania, and another from Pennsylvania, the well-known Benjamin Franklin, presented it to the convention. Franklin was the oldest, at age 81, to sign the document.
Why intentionally ambiguous? It was politics, hopes of winning the votes of dissenting delegates. Advocates for the new frame of government, realizing the impending difficulty of obtaining the consent of the states needed for it to become operational, were anxious to obtain the unanimous support of the delegations from each state. It was feared that many of the delegates would refuse to give their individual assent to the Constitution. Therefore, in order that the action of the Convention would appear to be unanimous, the formula, with the phrase, “Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the states present”… was devised.
The document outlines how the government is to be run, notes its three branches and how they are to function. While it lays all this out in black-and-white, today people interpret its original intent in many different ways. We see this in many U.S. Supreme Court interpretations.
And how about Abraham Baldwin? His big claim to fame is that he founded the University of Georgia.
And William Few? A lawyer, he served four years as a U.S. senator, then state judge, and moved to New York to join Manhattan Bank, and later was president of City Bank.
Bet you didn’t know that City Bank connection!
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