North Carolina's Revolutionary Founders

Jeff Broadwater, Troy L. Kickler, Jeff Broadwater, Troy L. Kickler

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781469651200, 9781469651194
• eBook ISBN: 9781469651217
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

This collection of essays profiles a diverse array of North Carolinians, all of whom had a hand in the founding of the state and the United States of America. It includes stories of how men who stood together to fight the British soon chose opposing sides in political debates over the ratification of the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. It also includes accounts of women, freedmen, and Native Americans, whose narratives shed light on the important roles of marginalized peoples in the Revolutionary South. Together, the essays reveal the philosophical views and ideology of North Carolina’s revolutionaries.

Contributors: Jeff Broadwater, Jennifer Davis-Doyle, Lloyd Johnson, Benjamin R. Justesen, Troy L. Kickler, Scott King-Owen, James MacDonald, Maggie Hartley Mitchell, Karl Rodabaugh, Kyle Scott, Jason Stroud, Michael Toomey, and Willis P. Whichard.

III. The Federalists

5. Hugh Williamson

North Carolina Federalist

Jennifer Davis-Doyle

When one examines the lives of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, receiving less attention is one of North Carolina’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Hugh Williamson. This oversight persists even though Williamson’s varied accomplishments in science, philosophy, education, and politics rivaled those of Benjamin Franklin’s, while his nationalist perspective on a future United States matched that of other prominent Federalists of his time. Georgia delegate William Pierce applauded him as “a gentleman of education and talents,” and contemporary historians have called him “North Carolina’s Benjamin Franklin.”¹ Williamson not only was among the most influential of North Carolina’s delegates at the Constitutional Convention’s proceedings but also was among the most vocal of them, giving over seventy speeches and serving on five different committees.² Williamson was invaluable to his fellow colleagues as they sought to set a new course for the national government.

During heated debates at the 1787 convention in Philadelphia, Williamson was one of the first to suggest and unequivocally support the formation of a strong federal government to act as the supreme law of the land. This suggestion was a bold one given the political divisions among founders who had so recently fought a war against what they deemed oppressive centralized government. Yet when one studies Hugh Williamson’s life, his support for a strong central government is unsurprising. Both admirers and critics accused Williamson of being an “aggressive nationalist” because of his insistence on the supreme sovereignty of the national government.³ Other contemporaries noted the importance of his contributions at a critical period in early America. Thomas Jefferson observed that “he was a useful member, of an acute mind, attentive to business, and of an high degree of erudition” during his time as a member of the Continental Congress.⁴ Benjamin Franklin once called Williamson a “detestable skunk” during a political disagreement, but he shared a close friendship with him.⁵ Evidence illustrates that Williamson enjoyed the respect of his fellow founders and was an important part of the early American republic’s founding. Historian Winthrop Jordan wrote that Williamson “brought to his work the assumptions of a Protestant Christian, a Pennsylvanian who lived in the South, a Jeffersonian intellectual, a gentlemanly go getter, and an American nationalist. It would be difficult to find a more representative man.”⁶

It is fitting to reexamine the life of Hugh Williamson and his role as a founder of the United States. At a memorial to Williamson a few months after his death, a friend, David Hosack, suggested that among Williamson’s endeavors in education, philosophy, medicine, and politics, his contributions to the nation’s formation would be most remembered and appreciated. He predicted that Williamson’s “name will be associated with those to whom we are most indebted for our country’s independence, and the successful administration of that happy constitution of government which we now enjoy.”⁷

Hugh Williamson was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, on 5 December 1735. He was part of the first graduating class of the University of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania). There, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, taught secondary courses in English and Latin, and studied astronomy and theology. Williamson continued to pursue varied interests in math, science, philosophy, medicine, and the ministry before ultimately earning a medical degree from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Williamson later relied on his medical background as surgeon general of North Carolina in 1779.⁸

In addition to continued interests in medicine, Williamson, an eighteenth- century Renaissance man, was a member of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, where he wrote essays and delivered speeches on such varied topics as “the transit of Venus over the Sun” and “some observations upon the change of climate that had been remarked to take place more particularly in the middle colonies of North America.”⁹ He also founded the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York and was active in the New York Historical Society.

Williamson advocated for the importance of education throughout his life. During his time in North Carolina (1777–93), he was instrumental in either founding or advising Dobbs Academy in Kinston, Pitt Academy in Greenville, New Bern Academy, and Smith Academy in Edenton. Williamson’s interest in forming schools in North Carolina is ironic, given that in 1793 he wrote a letter to George Washington complaining, “The State of the Climate [in North Carolina] proves unfavourable to the means of Learning.”¹⁰ Later that same year, Williamson chose to move to New York. He eventually served as a faculty member at what became Princeton University, the University of Delaware, and the University of Pennsylvania. He also served on the board of trustees for the University of North Carolina as both member and secretary from 1795 to 1798. Williamson considered education important for the betterment of individuals as well as necessary to liberty. Authoring a history textbook in 1812, Williamson explained, “Civil liberty has always been supported by learning . . . there never has been a nation who preserved the semblance of freedom without being enlightened by the rays of science.”¹¹

Perhaps the connection Williamson made between liberty and education explains how his diverse interests led him to a life in politics even though he initially lacked such aspirations. As a medical student and a fund-raiser for the University of Delaware, Williamson’s travels took him throughout the American colonies as well as Europe. Perhaps his traveling also influenced him. Military historians Robert Wright Jr. and Morris MacGregor Jr. argue that these journeys not only served to make Williamson more well rounded but also encouraged his nationalist political views.¹² However much his travels affected his views, records show that Williamson moved extensively between the colonies and England just as conflict between them erupted into revolution and war.

Almost immediately after the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, Williamson returned to the colonies from England and made his home in Edenton, North Carolina, after finding it difficult to travel any farther north due to the British naval blockade. While living in Edenton, Williamson, in 1789, married Maria Apthorp, with whom he had two sons. Maria died soon after the birth of their second son. From North Carolina, Williamson served as surgeon general of the state and as a member of the North Carolina House of Commons. He also represented the state at the Continental Congress, the Annapolis convention (although he arrived late due to sickness after proceedings there had ended), the Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Congress, all before retiring to New York in 1793. He remained in New York, still active in politics, philosophy, and education, until his death during a carriage ride at the age of eighty-three. He is buried in Trinity Churchyard, New York City, near political ally and fellow Federalist Alexander Hamilton. At Williamson’s memorial, his friend David Hosack concluded, “Whatever may be the merits of Dr. Williamson, as a scholar, a physician, a statesman, or philosopher . . . he may be distinguished for his integrity, his benevolence, and those virtues which enter into the moral character of man.”¹³ To better understand Williamson’s contributions to U.S. history as a statesman, one must look more closely at his activities during the Revolutionary era, particularly at the Constitutional Convention.

Williamson could be considered a political moderate in the years leading up to the American Revolution. He valued his connections with England; in fact, he was able to persuade the king of England to make a financial donation to the University of Delaware at a time when relations between the Crown and the colonies had all but collapsed. Even after the fighting at Lexington and Concord in 1775, Williamson, like some of his colleagues, was hesitant to advocate declaring independence. He believed that if England peacefully returned to its pre–French and Indian War policies, both the colonies and England would prosper. On the other hand, Williamson did not believe that colonists should endure oppressive leadership from the English, and he supported attempts by the colonists to drive this point home to the mother country using any means necessary, from petitions and boycotts to outright defiance.

An inveterate traveler, Williamson observed and supported colonial defiance firsthand in Boston, Massachusetts. During one visit, Williamson attended meetings of the Boston Sons of Liberty and witnessed the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Samuel Adams, a leader of the Sons of Liberty, noted that Williamson was present at their meetings and was involved in planning the rebellion.¹⁴ Afterward, Williamson journeyed to England on his fund-raising campaign and there delivered the news of the Boston Tea Party to the king’s officials. Williamson used this opportunity to plead for British leniency toward colonists he viewed as merely reacting to unfair treatment and to warn officials of potential civil war in the colonies. Parliament’s leaders instead closed Boston’s port until the city paid for the destroyed tea and then passed additional punitive legislation, which colonists referred to as the “Intolerable Acts.”¹⁵ In a 1775 essay addressed to Lord Mansfield, the king’s chief justice, titled Plea of the Colonies on the Charges Brought against Them by Lord Mansfield, and Others: In a Letter to His Lordship, Williamson accused British officials of “erroneously” condemning colonists in Boston after the Tea Party.¹⁶ He suggested that if English officials had investigated rebellious colonists’ motivations rather than treated them as an “enemy,” they might have seen that colonists were taking part in civil disobedience in response to legitimate grievances.¹⁷ Williamson explained to Lord Mansfield in the essay that until the 1770s, colonists had “enjoyed as much liberty as was consistent with civil government” and were conscious of its “blessings.”¹⁸ It was only in light of these liberties being threatened that colonists rebelled, Williamson implied.

The messages in Williamson’s Plea of the Colonies were widely disseminated, having been published in both London and Philadelphia. He wrote this essay in the years between the Boston Tea Party and his appointment as North Carolina’s surgeon general during the Revolutionary War. During this time, Williamson transitioned from advocating for peace between the colonies and Britain to endorsing full American independence. Writing the preface to a reprinting of the essay in 1776, Williamson noted, in retrospect, that part of his objective in composing the piece had been “t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• North Carolina’s Revolutionary Founders
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figure
• Introduction
• I: The Revolutionaries
• II: The West
• III: The Federalists
• IV: The Anti-Federalists
• V: The Legatees of the Revolution
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index