History Notes Special: What Happened to the Men Who Signed the Declaration

A look at the real toll the Revolution took on the 56 men who put their names to American independence.

Every Fourth of July, a familiar story recirculates online: fifty-six men signed a piece of parchment in Philadelphia, and in doing so, doomed themselves to ruin. Homes burned. Farms seized. Wives imprisoned. Sons killed. It’s a stirring narrative, and pieces of it are true. But historians who have traced the fates of the signers say the popular version — often forwarded as an unsigned essay called “The Price They Paid” — inflates and distorts what actually happened. The real record, drawn from letters, court documents, and contemporary newspapers, is less tidy than the legend, but no less remarkable.

The lawyer who lost his library

Richard Stockton of New Jersey may have suffered more concretely than any other signer. In November 1776, as British forces swept into New Jersey, Stockton moved his family to a friend’s house for safety — only to be dragged from his bed by Loyalist raiders in the middle of the night and handed over to British troops. He was thrown into New York’s Provost Prison, where he was kept in irons and, by most accounts, nearly starved through the winter.

While Stockton languished in confinement, British General Charles Cornwallis made Stockton’s estate, Morven, his headquarters. Soldiers stripped the house of furniture and food stores, drove off the livestock, and burned Stockton’s library — reportedly one of the finest private collections in the colonies. A fellow Founder, Dr. Benjamin Rush, estimated Stockton’s losses at roughly five thousand pounds, a fortune at the time. Stockton was released after five weeks, his health broken; he spent nearly two years recovering, developed cancer, and died in 1781 without seeing the war’s end.

A widower in the Sourland caves

John Hart, a prosperous Hopewell farmer and Speaker of New Jersey’s Assembly, faced a similar reckoning. As British and Hessian troops overran his part of New Jersey in late 1776, Hart’s farm, gristmill, and livestock were ransacked. Hart himself, marked as a target for his role in the new government, spent the winter hiding in the woods and rock outcroppings of the Sourland Mountains rather than surrender. His wife Deborah died amid the upheaval, and his large family scattered to relatives’ homes. Hart eventually returned to public life, but his health never recovered from the exposure, and he died in 1779 — his estate later sold off to satisfy debts.

A wife left in a New York cell

Francis Lewis of New York paid his price through his family. While Lewis attended Congress in Philadelphia, British troops overran his estate on Long Island, burned the house, and took his wife, Elizabeth, prisoner. She was held for weeks in a New York jail without a bed or a change of clothes before being freed in a prisoner exchange. According to family accounts, she never recovered her health and died a few years later. Lewis, who had already poured much of his mercantile fortune into supplying the Continental Army, ended the war with comparatively little money left, living out his final decades with his sons.

Imprisoned in Florida

Three signers from South Carolina — Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward Jr., and Arthur Middleton — were captured together when Charleston fell to the British in May 1780. All three were shipped roughly 500 miles south and held for nearly a year in St. Augustine, then part of British East Florida, along with dozens of other captured Patriots. Middleton’s family plantation, Middleton Place, was ransacked in the same campaign, though the main buildings survived. All three men were freed in a 1781 prisoner exchange; Rutledge and Heyward went on to long postwar careers — Rutledge eventually became governor of South Carolina — while Middleton died in 1787, not long after rebuilding his estate.

Where the legend runs ahead of the record

The viral “Price They Paid” account claims that five signers were captured and tortured as traitors, that nine died from wounds or hardships of the war, and that a dozen or more had their homes burned. Historians who have checked these claims against military and family records say the reality is more modest, though still costly:

Only Richard Stockton was targeted and arrested specifically because he was a signer; the handful of others captured during the war — including the South Carolina trio — were taken as prisoners of war during military campaigns, not hunted down for their signatures, and none is documented as having been tortured. Of the nine signers who died before the war ended, historians have found none died directly from combat wounds or enemy mistreatment; one signer, Button Gwinnett of Georgia, did die of a wound in 1777 — but it came from a pistol duel with a political rival, not a British soldier. A number of signers, roughly a dozen by most tallies, did have homes or property looted or destroyed by British or Hessian forces — Stockton, Hart, Lewis, and the Carolinians among them — which is likely the origin of that figure, even as the popular essay overstates the details in individual cases.

Other claims in wide circulation don’t hold up well either. Virginia’s Carter Braxton, often described as dying “in rags,” did lose ships and money to the war but died a man of substantial property. Thomas Nelson Jr. of Virginia is said to have urged gunners to fire on his own occupied house during the siege of Yorktown; the story is popular but only loosely documented, and Nelson’s later financial troubles stemmed as much from advancing his own money to supply Virginia’s militia as from wartime destruction.

Sacrifice, without the exaggeration

None of this diminishes what did happen. Signing the Declaration was an act of treason under British law, punishable by death, and the men who did it were overwhelmingly people of property and standing — lawyers, merchants, planters — who had far more to lose than to gain from a war whose outcome was, in 1776, deeply uncertain. Several lost homes, libraries, and fortunes; at least two lost wives to the hardships of imprisonment or displacement; one died broken by confinement in a Florida dungeon’s shadow. Most, however, survived the war, and many prospered afterward — two of them, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, went on to the presidency.

The historical truth needs no embellishment: fifty-six men pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to a cause that could easily have gotten them all hanged. That some of them paid dearly for it is well documented. That is usually enough.

Sources consulted include the U.S. Constitution Center’s signer biographies, the American Battlefield Trust, the Descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, Wikipedia biographical entries, and published fact-checks of the “Price They Paid” essay, including analysis from the Sons of the American Revolution and independent historical bloggers.

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Wayne Creed

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