Joseph Hewes

Biography

Joseph Hewes was born in New Jersey, the son of Quaker parents, Aaron and Providence Hewes. Aaron was a successful farmer, and this ensured that Joseph would receive a good early education at the Kingston Friends Grammar School. Joseph did not want to follow his father’s career as a farmer; he wanted to become a merchant. To this end, he moved to Philadelphia and apprenticed himself to the owner of a thriving import business and then began his own mercantile company.

In 1754, Hewes moved to Edenton, North Carolina, a prospering port town he had visited when he was an apprentice. Here he formed a partnership first with Charles Blount and later with Robert Smith. With Smith, his business grew; the two men owned a store on Main Street, offices and three warehouses, a wharf and five ships. On his own, Hewes also opened a ship repair and ship building yard as well as a factory for braiding rope. By 1760, his prosperity was recognized by his election to the North Carolina assembly.

When colonial leaders created a continental congress in 1774 to discuss the deteriorating relationship between Britain and America, Hewes was chosen to represent North Carolina in its deliberations. He and his two fellow delegates were given very specific instructions by the provincial congress: they were to argue for colonial rights and they should support a boycott of British goods, but they had no authority to endorse or even debate independence.

Hewes was also elected to the Second Continental Congress that convened in August 1775. Hewes worked on preparing a reconciliation proposal addressed to the King that came to be called the Olive Branch Petition. George III not only rejected it, he officially declared the colonies in rebellion. Aware that war might come, Hewes accepted the chairmanship of the committee responsible for fitting out the first American warships. In a letter to Samuel Johnston he wrote "I see no prospect of a reconciliation. Nothing is left but to fight it out."

In April of 1776, North Carolina at last authorized its delegates to “concur …in declaring independency.” Writing to James Iredell on June 20th, Hewes faced the prospect of war and independence squarely, saying "...On Monday the great question of independency and total separation from all political intercourse with Great Britain will come on. It will be carried, I expect, by a great majority, and then, I suppose we shall take upon us a new name.” Yet Hewes hesitated when Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the colonies were and ought to be independent came to a vote. John Adams claimed to have seen the moment when Hewes finally threw off his doubts and voted for independence. “He started upright,” Adams said, “and lifting both his hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, ‘It is done! and I will abide by it!’” Whether Hewes’s decision to vote for independence was as dramatic as Adams portrayed it, it is true that Joseph Hewes signed the Declaration of Independence.

It is also true that Hewes and John Adams locked horns when it came time to select the first naval captains. Adams insisted that all these leadership positions go to New Englanders since a Southerner had been chosen to lead the continental army. Hewes, however, strongly supported a captaincy for his friend John Paul Jones who had risen from ship boy to master of a Brigantine. Hewes had confidence that John Paul deserved a commission – and he proved right. John Paul Jones became the most honored naval hero of the Revolution.

The events of July 2 and 4 exhausted Hewes physically and emotionally. On July 8, he wrote “I had the weight of North Carolina on my shoulders within a day or two of three months. The service was too severe. I have sat some days from Six in the morning till five, and sometimes Six in the afternoon without eating or drinking. My health is bad, such close attention made it worse. ...Duty, inclination and self preservation call on me now to make a little excursion in the County to see my mother. This is a duty which I have not allowed myself to perform during almost nine months that I have been here."

In 1777 Hewes took a seat in the North Carolina General Assembly. The state’s new constitution prohibited him from accepting reelection to the Continental Congress since it did not allow multiple office holding. However, after a two year absence, he was once again on his way to Philadelphia for a term in Congress. He took his seat on July 22, but by August 17, he wrote to a friend of “a continual head ach [sic] attended with a kind of stupor which renders me unfit for business of any kind.” On October 25th, he tendered his resignation from Congress to the North Carolina assembly. Hewes was bedridden from October until his death on November 10 of that year.

Joseph Hewes had no immediate family to mourn him. He had been engaged in his thirties, but his bride-to-be died before the wedding, and he remained a bachelor all his life. But his funeral was attended by many friends and colleagues whose respect he had earned over his career including members of Congress and of the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the Minister Plenipotentiary of France. Ordinary citizens also came to pay their respects. In his honor, members of Congress wore black crape around their left arms for a month. In its obituary, The Pennsylvania Packet attributed his death to his devotion to the country. “His mind,” they wrote “was constantly employed in the business of his exalted station until his health, much impaired by intense application, sunk beneath it.”