Signing Their Lives Away: Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire

Author’s Note:  This series of postings are taken from the book Signing Their Lives Away by Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese.  The publishers at Quirk Books kindly gave me permission to judiciously quote from it on my blog.  While I dispense with quotation marks, the sentences are lifted directly from the book.  The purpose is to introduce you to those who signed the Declaration of Independence and who often remain in the shadows of history.  This book is a must for the home collection of any avid reader, historian, or patriot.

 

 

New Hampshire                               LIVE FREE OR DIE

1.  Josiah Bartlett.  Age at signing: 46, Profession: Physician

As the son of a cobbler, he lacked access to formal education, so he studied medicine with a local doctor (a routine custom at the time) and eventually began his own successful practice in Kingston, New Hampshire.  His career in politics started around 1765 when he became a member of New Hampshire’s provincial assembly and received appointments from the governor as a colonel in the militia and as a justice of the peace.

Bartlett was the first man to cast a vote for independence on July 2, the first to approve the Declaration on July 4, and the first – after the president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock – to sign the engrossed “final draft” of the document on August 2.

(NH was the ninth state to ratify the Constitution.  Bartlett became the first governor of NH and was the founder and first president of the New Hampshire Medical Society.)

 

That it would please Him still to have these United States under His Holy protection and guidance – that He would inspire those who have the management of all our public affairs with all that wisdom, prudence and integrity that is necessary to the faithful discharge of their important trusts, that all their determinations may tend to promote the real happiness and prosperity of this great and rising Republic, and that all people may be disposed to afflict in carrying such determinations into effect.  Josiah Bartlett, 1793, A Proclamation, For a Public Thanksgiving (excerpt)