George Ross

Biography

George Ross was born in New Castle, Delaware. His father was a minister, educated at the University of Edinburgh, and George and his many siblings all received a sound classical education under the guidance of their father. At the age of 18, George chose the law as his profession, and he moved to Philadelphia to apprentice under his older brother John. Two years later, he was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar and soon established his own successful practice in the town of Lancaster.

In the years before the crisis between Crown and colonies came to a head, George Ross served for a dozen years as the colony’s Crown Prosecutor [Attorney General] and was a loyal supporter of the King and Parliament. But in 1768, he was elected to Pennsylvania’s provincial legislature, and, there, he came to better understand the growing colonial dissatisfaction with British rule. He was not yet ready to advocate breaking the bonds of loyalty to the Mother Country, but this changed in 1774 when Pennsylvania named him one of its delegates to the First Continental Congress. He soon embraced the notion of independence, and, in 1776, when he was again elected as one of his colony’s delegates to Congress, he did not hesitate to sign the Declaration of Independence. Knowing that war was inevitable, Ross also accepted a commission as a Colonel in the Continental Army.

Ross was sent to the Congress once more in 1777 but had to resign his seat due to poor health. In March of 1779, he was appointed to a judgeship in his state’s Court of Admiralty, but was only in office for three months before he died, probably from a severe case of gout, in July of that year. Thus, he did not live to witness the American victory in the Revolutionary War and the birth of the new nation.

George Ross was a patriot for the cause of independence, but ironically, he is far less well known than his brother John’s wife, Betsy Griscom Ross, who has gone down in history as the seamstress who sewed the first American flag.