Today, Elbridge Gerry is best known for being the force and namesake behind “Gerrymandering.” That has obscured the significance of a founder who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and later ascended to the Vice Presidency.
Gerry, along with George Mason and Edmund Randolph, is one of three dissenters who refused to sign the Constitution in September 1787 as depicted in the National Constitution Center’s “Signers’ Hall.” Scholars have treated Gerry as a paradoxical figure, a maverick, and an obstinate member of the Convention opposed to everything—or as Max Farrand, the pre-eminent scholar of the Convention, put it, “a ‘Grumbletonian,’ a man who objected to everything he did not propose.” Georgia delegate William Pierce described Gerry as a “gentleman in principles and manners” known both for his “integrity and perseverance and for being a “hesitating and laborious speaker” who talked at length “without respect for elegance or flower of diction.”
Gerry’s education at Harvard in the 1760s made him familiar with the English radical Whig “country-opposition” tradition, which was greatly influential to the ideology of the American Revolution. This tradition was based on a deep hatred of centralized power and a fear of political and financial structures that supported such power as standing armies, high taxes and debts, and excessive executive authority. Gerry thus had a deep fear of monarchical power, misuse of power, and the concentration of power. After he graduated from Harvard, Gerry ran his father’s business until the outbreak of the Revolution before he helped found the Marblehead, Massachusetts “Committee of Correspondence” in 1772, one of many revolutionary organizations formed to oppose British rule through grievances, petitions, and boycotts.
As a member of the Committee of Safety, Gerry was responsible for the storage of weapons and ammunition at Concord before the April 19, 1775 battle that sparked the Revolutionary War. As a signer and supporter of the Declaration of Independence, Gerry helped persuade many delegates to support independence, leading John Adams to say, “If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.” Gerry considered signing the Declaration the greatest single act of his life. He then served in the Continental Congress from 1776 to 1780 and then again in 1783 to 1785.
As an “Old Whig,” Gerry arrived in Philadelphia suspicious that a strong national government would annihilate state governments. At the Convention, Gerry was one of the most active speakers—during the final tumultuous six weeks of the Convention, he made 78 speeches. While he was opposed to standing armies and weary of national power to tax revenue, he was also was a moderate voice pushing consistently for the “Great Compromise” over the representation issue central to the early debates.
At the Constitutional Convention, Gerry made clear his suspicion about democracy and putting too great of trust in the people themselves. Gerry said on May 31, 1787, early in the Convention, that the problem with state governments was their closeness to the people. Thus, at the Convention, he was one of the stalwart forces against proportional representation—and thought the popular election of the House was unwise and unnecessary.
The deadlock over the issue of representation on July 2, 1787 led Gerry to push for a Committee to broker a compromise, which was formed over the objections of James Madison and James Wilson who supported proportional representation. Most of the Committee members— including Gerry, George Mason, and Benjamin Franklin—were known to be in favor of conciliation. Gerry was selected to be the chairman of the Committee of Compromise on Representation in Congress; he worried that without compromise, the Convention could splinter—warning, “If we do nothing, it appears to me we must have war and confusion.” The compromised proposal—keeping the Senate as equal representation while having all tax and appropriations bills originate in the House based on proportional representation—barely passed on July 16 after being rejected by Madison and his allies.
Gerry, although not as vocally opposed to slavery as fellow New Englander Gouverneur Morris, was forthright in the debates about the problem of the Three-Fifths compromise. As scholars like Richard Beeman have noted, Gerry’s opposition to the compromise must be seen through the lens of his general opposition to proportional representation and his desire to avoid placing slaves upon equal footing to a freeman.
In another significant contribution, on July 23, Gerry moved to create a Committee of Detail to “prepare and report a Constitution conformable thereto.” As Beeman observed, it is likely that Gerry’s proposal was made with full knowledge and consent of other delegates who after two months of debate broadly desired compromise and settlement. The five-man committee was unanimously adopted, consisting of John Rutledge, Edmund Randolph, Nataniel Gorham, Oliver Ellsworth, and James Wilson.
Gerry also had real influence on the structure of the presidency. He favored a single, independent president, but worried about how the president would be selected. Like Gouverneur Morris, he thought giving the legislature the choice would only lead to corruption and would be “radically and incurably wrong”; but the people themselves could not be trusted with direct election either, given their ignorance and weakness towards the manipulation by self-interested elites. On the other hand, he did not favor the Electoral College or Congressional election, but instead proposed that state executives choose the president. Gerry also impacted the Constitutional structure of the presidency by pushing for impeachment provisions and helping to both reject an executive “council of revision” and an absolute presidential veto power.
Two days before the convention ended on September 17, Gerry, like Mason, pushed to include a Bill of Rights. In his notes, James Madison described the scene on the 17th when Gerry declined to sign: “Mr. Gerry described the painful feelings of his situation and the embarrassment under which he rose to offer any further observations on the subject which had finally been decided. . . .” Among his given reasons for his decision, as noted by Farrand, Gerry cited the treatment of slaves as freemen for purposes of representation, the power of the Senate, the attendant separation of powers issues, the threat of a standing army, and the lack of a Bill of Rights.
Despite his notable role throughout the Convention and being one of three dissenters, Gerry would not lead the Massachusetts Anti-Federalists at the state ratifying convention. Anti-Federalists had a potential majority of the convention and the Federalists decided to grant Gerry a seat in the convention to “answer any questions of fact” on the Constitution—but when Gerry spoke, Federalists complained he was engaging in debate and Gerry left the convention. Thereafter, Gerry was elected to the House, where he served until 1793.
Shortly after John Adams was elected President in the heavily contested 1796 election, he had to deal with the rising crisis of French harassment of American ships alongside the French government’s refusal to receive Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as Adams’ American minister to France. Adams instead sent three commissioners, John Marshall, Pinckney, and his personal friend and pro-French Jeffersonian Republican, Gerry. The mission’s failure after French officials demanded a $240,000 bribe from the three commissioners to see the French foreign minister became known as the “XYZ Affair” and led to the Quasi-War with France until 1800.
In 1810, Gerry was elected Governor of Massachusetts and he found himself pushing back against the Federalist criticism and opposition to the Madison administration. In his inaugural address, he took a stand against parties in 1810, previewing Abraham Lincoln’s phrasing by saying “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” But he would soon be better known for the redistricting bill passed by the state’s Democrat-Republicans to maintain control of the legislature and other official offices. Gerry did not create the “gerrymander” strategy that would bear his name, but he did approve the plan to redraw county boundaries. The word “gerrymander” likely came from a Federalist Boston dinner party in February 1812 in which one opponent of redistricting described the unnatural and monster-like shape of the remapped districts, leading to Elkanah Tisdale’s famous cartoon in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812.
When DeWitt Clinton died in April 1812, Madison needed a Vice President and choose Gerry, thinking he would help him win votes in New England in the 1812 election. Unlike most New England Federalists, Gerry made clear his support of the War of 1812, but he was also in declining health. After complaining of chest pains on November 22, 1812, he attempted to return to the Senate the next morning before returning to his home, where he was later found dead. He was the only signer of the Declaration to be buried in the capital city.
Nicholas Mosvick is a Senior Fellow for Constitutional Content at the National Constitution Center.
Further Reading:
Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (2009)
Georgie Bilias, Elbridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman (1976)
Mark O. Hatfield, Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789-1993 (1997) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDOC-104sdoc26/pdf/CDOC-104sdoc26.pdf
Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Convention (1996)
