Elected officials

The politicians who led the thirteen colonies toward independence were a varied group—wealthy planters and self-taught farmers, lawyers and printers, native-born leaders and recent arrivals—but they shared a decisive moment in which they committed themselves, publicly and irrevocably, to a cause whose outcome remained deeply uncertain. Virginia's leading figures—Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Washington—were unambiguously pro-independence, and Governor Dunmore's 1775 evacuation had already dissolved royal government before the Declaration arrived. Georgia's leaders received the Declaration without recorded dissent. Not all paths to independence were straightforward, however. Pennsylvania's John Dickinson famously refused to vote for independence but refused equally to vote against it, allowing his delegation to tip in favor, then immediately put on a uniform and served in the militia. 

The Revolution expanded the political class dramatically beyond its colonial boundaries. Massachusetts's John Adams circulated his Thoughts on Government privately among delegates across the continent, quietly shaping state constitutions with a framework of checks and balances that foreshadowed the federal Constitution. New Hampshire retained a legislature so large and granular that every representative was tied to a specific town, a commitment to local democracy that persists today. In New York, Alexander Hamilton and George Clinton embodied two contrasting visions of American leadership: the immigrant intellectual who used New York as a launchpad for national politics, and the native-born governor who simultaneously commanded armies and ran a state. Back-country figures like Georgia’s Elijah Clark, a militia leader who may not have been able to sign his own name, rose to prominence on a trajectory that would have been largely impossible during the colonial era.

Image source: Colorized rendition of painting by Henry Samuel Sadd depicting prayer in the first Continental Congress (1848), Library of Congress.