James Smith

Biography

James Smith was born in Ireland but emigrated with his family when he was ten or twelve years old. His father became a successful farmer, and this made it possible for James to receive a classical education from a local minister. He went on to attend the Philadelphia Academy (later to become the University of Pennsylvania) and to study law with his older brother George. He was admitted to the bar in 1745 and set up his own practice near Shippensburg.

Because this was a frontier area, Smith spent much of his time as a surveyor rather than practicing law. By 1750, he had moved east to York. There, he still had trouble building his practice, although he was the only lawyer in town until 1769. In an attempt to diversify his source of income, he began an iron factory, but the two partners he chose in this venture proved dishonest. One, he noted, “was a knave” and the other “a fool.” As a result, Smith lost a great deal of money.

By the 1770s, Smith had grown increasingly concerned about the colonial relationship with Britain. In 1774, he was elected to the provincial assembly, and, there, he first revealed his concern about what he considered Britain’s dangerous overreach of authority in the colonies. He expressed this view in a paper entitled “Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great Britain over the Colonies in America.” In this paper, he recommended a boycott of British goods and the creation of a General Congress of the Colonies in order to defend colonial rights. Both these steps were ultimately adopted.

In January 1775, Smith attended Pennsylvania’s state convention, where he supported the convention’s open opposition to Britain. “If the British administration should determine by force to effect a submission to the late arbitrary acts of the British parliament,” the convention declared, “we hold it our indispensable duty to resist such force, and at every hazard to defend the rights and liberties of America.”

Smith was elected to serve in the Second Continental Congress. Although he did not arrive in Philadelphia in time to participate in the debates over Richard Henry Lee’s resolution or the draft of the Declaration of Independence, Smith did sign the Declaration. And on the evening of July 6, 1776, he and two fellow supporters of independence rode to York with a printed broadside copy of the Declaration and read it to the public in York’s town square.

Smith retired from Congress after two years. He left with a reputation among his congressional colleagues as a wit, a good conversationalist, and an eccentric. He was elected to serve once again in 1785 but declined, declaring himself too old. Instead, until his retirement in 1801, he practiced law. On July 11, 1806, James Smith died York. He was 86 years old.