It’s a week that offers up the Fourth of July, time to recall that courageous moment in our history when men — they were all of that gender at that time — at Philadelphia pledged “their life, fortune, and sacred honor” in a resolution that has become our nation’s birth certificate.

Though Maine — as part of Massachusetts at the time — did have representation at the tribunal that emancipated us from England, we don’t often think of any connection our own state has to the event.

None of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers were from the “District” of Maine at the time, though one, New Hampshire’s William Whipple, was a Maine native. Another Granite state signer, Matthew Thornton, spent an early winter of his life living in a ship off the Maine coast at the time his family was on its way from his native Ireland to help settle the colonies.

Whipple was born in Kittery but as a teenager “went to sea” to make a living and by the time he was 21 had become captain of a ship that did business with ports in Europe, the Caribbean, and even Africa where — among other pursuits — he engaged in the slave trade.

This role of a man who would later be one of liberty’s great crusaders is blunted a bit by cognizance that the number of Whipple’s slaves paled by comparison with the 400 owned by the Declaration’s prime author, Thomas Jefferson.

Whipple gave up the seafaring life at age 30 when he joined his brother in a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, business partnership. After joining his two New Hampshire colleagues as signers of the Declaration Whipple became a soldier in the Revolution, one of only about l6 of the signers to do so, Whipple serving as a general in a number of wartime campaigns.

Thornton was a Londonderry, New Hampshire, physician when he won attention for working so hard over a 10 day period as the legislative president that he didn’t even take time to change his clothes!

It’s believed he made greater use of Philadelphia’s laundry facilities when, a few months later, he was sent there to do business with his more hygiene-oriented congressional brethren.

It’s nevertheless understood that he voluntarily relinquished his medical career after the war and served both as a state legislator and judge in New Hampshire until retirement to a farm in Merrimack, where he continued to write political articles for newspapers until he was in his eighties.

An intriguing present day Maine link to a Declaration of Independence signer is embodied in Kingfield’s John Witherspoon, a former head of the Finance Authority of Maine, now president of Skowhegan Savings.

Witherspoon has a dual connection to one of the more prominent signers. He is a direct descendant of a brother to a signer and also bears the same first and last name.

Witherspoon’s familial and name-sake forebear was president of Princeton University at this time in l776. A leader of the Presbyterian Church, he was the only clergyman to sign the declaration. As a member of Congress during our country’s most difficult financial and economic time the original Witherspoon was a staunch advocate of fiscal stability.

When the country was flooded with too much paper money he opposed taking on more debt unless the government made specific pay-back promises to those who were lending it to us. In an observation that the present day bank President Witherspoon might echo, the original Witherspoon wrote, “No business can be done, some say, because money is scarce. It may be said, with more truth, money is scarce, because little business is done.”

When pointing out the differences between the English spoken in Britain with that spoken in the United States, the l8th-century John Witherspoon in 1781 referred to a word as an “Americanism,” the first known use of the expression.

I’ll remember the contemporary Witherspoon most for his leadership in Kingfield during times when this columnist has served as the town’s moderator. Despite an understandable reluctance of most banking and business leaders to thrust themselves into the vortex of local controversy, neither Witherspoon nor his wife Cathy — in more recent years director of the Sugarloaf ski school program and an executive now in a conglomerate that owns a chain of ski areas — shied away from debate when hot topics, usually those pertaining to education and youth recreation programs, were at stake.

Their civic minded enthusiasm was a page out of the book by the original John Witherspoon himself.

Retired South Portland attorney Meg Johnson is another Mainer with family ties to a declaration signer, Johnson being a direct descendant of John Hart, who, like Witherspoon, was a delegate from New Jersey.

Johnson, has also engaged in a career that’s had a significant element of public service, first as an attorney for the Public Advocate’s office at the state PUC and, while co-chair of the State Bar Association’s Family Law Section, one of the more active court-appointed guardians in child custody matters in the state.

The fate of her forebear, John Hart, is one of the more dramatic illustrations of the risk the signers were taking that time more than two and a quarter centuries ago.

Only a few months after the declaration Hart had to flee his home to avoid capture by British troops. At some 65 years of age, Hart had to sleep in caves and elsewhere in the hills around Sourland Mountain to which the British had pursued him in cold December weather.

Though he was able to return to his home town of Hopewell after Washington’s victory in the Battle of Princeton in 1777, he was never able to resume a normal life. In his absence Redcoats had destroyed his home and other properties and his heartbroken wife had also succumbed.

Hart was thus one of the 17 signers who suffered devastating property losses, including in many instances complete destruction of their own homes. His own health laid waste by his fugitive existence, Hart died in May 1779.

Hart was by no means alone in making extraordinary sacrifices for the cause of liberty. Among the six who died as either a direct or indirect result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, was Button Gwinnett, who died after challenging a Brigadier General of the British forces to a duel over a military dispute.

The fate of Hart, Gwinnett and others are among the more dramatic illustrations of the risks our country’s founders took as we commemorate them in this Fourth of July weekend.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached at pmills@myfairpoint.net

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