George Read

Biography

George Read was born on his family’s farm in Maryland in 1733, the son of John and Mary Howell Read. His father was born in Dublin, the son of a wealthy Englishman, but he had emigrated to America when his wife died. He purchased a large estate in Cecil County, Maryland, and he and several associates founded the city of Charlestown on Chesapeake Bay. When his son George was an infant, John moved his family to Delaware. As the son of a wealthy man, George Read received a good education, studying first at an academy in New London, Pennsylvania, and then reading law with a well-known attorney. He was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1753 at the age of twenty.

Read returned to Delaware to set up his law practice. Ten years later, in 1763, he married Gertrude Ross Till, a widow who was the sister of another man who would eventually sign the Declaration of Independence, Pennsylvanian George Ross. In the same year that he married, Read took his first step into the public sphere, becoming the Crown Attorney General for three Delaware Counties. As a Crown Attorney, he took it upon himself to warn the British government that it was dangerous to attempt to tax the colonists without giving them direct representation in Parliament. His contacts in Britain ignored his warning that taxation would lead to rebellion.

In 1765, Read was chosen to serve in the colonial assembly. His reputation now well established, in 1775, he was elected a delegate to the First Continental Congress. Read came to the Congress as a member of Delaware’s “court party,”

a political faction made up primarily of wealthy Anglicans who preferred reconciliation to revolution. This put him at odds with Delaware’s two other delegates to the Congress, Caesar Rodney and Thomas McKean, members of the opposing “country party,” whose pro-independence leaders were drawn from the Scots-Irish residents of Delaware. It is not surprising, therefore, that George Read voted against Richard Henry Lee’s resolution, arguing that it was too “hasty.” Yet once the majority approved the resolution, Read signed the Declaration of Independence.

Read then became a firm advocate of the revolution, going so far as to introduce the following resolution to the Congress: “that anyone who shall willfully break this agreement [i.e. the Declaration] shall have his name published in the Public Newspaper as a betrayer of the civil rights of America and forever be deemed infamous and a traitor.”

Meanwhile, Delaware’s General Assembly had anticipated the break with Britain, and on June 15, 1776, it had declared a separation from the British government. Once the Continental Congress approved independence, the assembly called a convention to draft a state constitution. Read was elected to this convention and was made its president. Despite any competition that had existed between the court and country parties, Read now helped pass Thomas McKean’s draft of the Delaware constitution.

In 1777, the British captured Delaware’s governor and Read took over the executive office. He led his state until March of 1778, when his former rival, Caesar Rodney, was elected to replace him. Read then served in the legislative council until 1779, when illness forced him to resign from all official duties. When he recovered his health, he returned to the Assembly until 1782 and to the Legislative Council that same year. At the end of 1782, he was elected judge of the Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture. Ultimately, he became the Chief Justice of the State, a position he held until his death in 1798.

Read was called back to political service in 1786 to be a delegate to the Annapolis Convention, a precursor of the Constitutional Convention called the next year in Philadelphia. Read was chosen to attend that Convention, as well. One fellow delegate to the Constitutional Convention observed that Read was an able interpreter of the law but “his powers of oratory are fatiguing and tiresome…his voice is feeble and his articulation so bad that few can have patience to attend him.”

At the Convention, Read argued against any effort to amend the existing government, the Articles of Confederation, and urged instead the creation of a strong central government. At one point he suggested abolishing the state governments altogether. When this radical suggestion went nowhere, he worked to protect the small states against any infringement by their larger neighbors. He feared that large states like Pennsylvania and Virginia would swallow up smaller ones – and tiny Delaware would become nothing but a cipher in the new union. To prevent this, he became a vocal advocate of equal representation of the states in the Senate. He also favored giving Congress the power to veto state laws, making the federal legislature immune to popular whims by giving senators long terms in office, and granting the U.S. President broad appointive powers. At one point, he threatened to lead the Delaware delegation out of the Convention if the rights of the small states were not specifically ensured in the new Constitution.

Once he was certain that protections had been granted to the small states, George Read became an ardent defender of the Constitution. He led the ratification movement in Delaware and was responsible, in large part, for his state becoming the first to ratify – and to do so unanimously.

Read was elected to serve in the first U.S. Senate in 1789. He was reelected in 1791, but he resigned before that term was up. As a Federalist, he supported Hamilton’s plans for the assumption of state debts, the establishment of a national bank, and the imposition of excise taxes to help pay off the national debt. He resigned from the federal government when he was appointed chief justice of the Delaware Supreme Court.

George Read died from heart problems on September 21, 1798. His colleagues remembered him as a dignified man, courteous, and a person of sound judgment.