5th Vice President of the United States
From Wikipedia:
Elbridge Thomas Gerry (July 17, 1744 – November 23, 1814) was an
American statesman and
diplomat. As a
Democratic-Republican he was selected as the
fifth Vice President of the United States (1813–1814), serving under
James Madison, until his death a year and a half into his term.
Gerry was one of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence and the
Articles of Confederation. He was one of three men who refused to sign the
United States Constitution because it did not then include a
Bill of Rights. Gerry later became the
ninth Governor of Massachusetts. He is known best for being the namesake of
gerrymandering,
a process by which electoral districts are drawn with the aim of aiding
the party in power, although its initial "g" has softened to
/dʒ/ from the hard
/ɡ/ of his name.
Early life
Elbridge Gerry was born on July 17, 1744, in
Marblehead, Massachusetts,
the third of twelve children. His father, Thomas Gerry, was a merchant
operating ships out of Marblehead, and his mother, Elizabeth (Greenleaf)
Gerry, was the daughter of a successful Boston merchant. Gerry's first name came from John Elbridge, one of his mother's ancestors. Gerry was educated by private tutors, and entered
Harvard College
shortly before turning fourteen. After receiving a B.A. in 1762 and an
M.A. in 1765, he entered his father's merchant business. By the 1770s
the Gerrys numbered among the wealthiest Massachusetts merchants.
Early political career
Gerry was from an early time a vocal opponent of
Parliamentary efforts to tax the colonies after the
French and Indian War
ended in 1763. In 1770 he sat on a Marblehead committee that sought to
enforce importation bans on taxed British goods. He frequently
communicated with other Massachusetts opponents of British policy,
including
Samuel Adams,
John Adams,
Mercy Otis Warren, and others.
In May 1772 he won election to the General Court of the
Province of Massachusetts Bay
(its legislative assembly). There he worked closely with Samuel Adams
to advance colonial opposition to Parliamentary colonial policies. He
was responsible for establishing Marblehead's
committee of correspondence, one of the first to be set up after that of
Boston.
However, an incident of mob action prompted him to resign from the
committee the next year. Gerry and other prominent Marbleheaders had
established a hospital for performing
smallpox inoculations on
Cat Island;
because the means of transmission of the disease were not known at the
time, fears amongst the local population led to protests which escalated
into violence that wrecked the facilities and threatened the
proprietors' other properties
.
Samuel Adams convinced Gerry to reenter politics after the
Boston Port Act
closed that city's port in 1774, and Marblehead became a port to which
relief supplies could be delivered. Gerry was elected to serve on the
Massachusetts Provincial Congress when the
American Revolutionary War broke out, where he used his merchant connections to see that the
Continental Army besieging Boston was supplied.
Congress and Convention
Gerry was a Massachusetts delegate to the
Continental Congress
from February 1776 to 1780, when matters of the ongoing war occupied
the body's attention. He was influential in convincing a number of
delegates to support passage of the
United States Declaration of Independence in the debates held during the summer of 1776;
John Adams wrote of him, "If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell." He served again in the
Confederation Congress from 1783 to September 1785, when it met in
New York City. The following year he married Ann Thompson, the daughter of a wealthy New York merchant; his best man was his good friend
James Monroe. The couple had ten children between 1787 and 1801, straining Ann's health. In 1787 he purchased the
Cambridge, Massachusetts estate of the last royal lieutenant governor of Massachusetts,
Thomas Oliver, which had been confiscated by the state. This 100 acre property, whose remnant is now known as
Elmwood, became the family home for the rest of Gerry's life.
Gerry attended the
United States Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia during the summer of 1787. In its deliberations he strongly supported the idea that the
Senate
composition should not be determined by population; the view that it
should instead be composed of equal numbers of members for each state
prevailed in the
Connecticut Compromise,
which was adopted on a narrow vote in which the Massachusetts
delegation was divided. Gerry supported the compromise, but was also
vocal in opposing the
Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted
slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of apportionment in the
House of Representatives and gave southern states a decided advantage.
Gerry was also unhappy about the lack of expression of any sort of
individual liberties in the proposed constitution, and consequently was
one of only three delegates who voted against it in the convention (the
others were
George Mason and
Edmund Randolph).
During the ratification debates that took place in the states following
the convention Gerry continued his opposition, publishing a
widely-circulated pamphlet documenting his objections to the lack of a
Bill of Rights. Following ratification, he was elected to the inaugural House of Representatives, serving there from 1789 to 1793.
Gerry surprised his friends by becoming a strong supporter of the new government. He so vigorously supported
Alexander Hamilton's reports on public credit, including the assumption of state debts, and supported Hamilton's new
Bank of the United States, that he was considered a leading champion by the
Federalists. He did not stand for re-election in 1792, and was a presidential elector for
John Adams in the
1796 election.
XYZ Affair
President Adams appointed Gerry to be a member of a special diplomatic commission sent to
France in 1797. Tensions had risen between the two nations after the 1796 ratification of the
Jay Treaty,
made between the US and Great Britain was seen by French leaders as
signs of an Anglo-American alliance, and France had stepped up seizures
of American ships. Gerry, along with cocommissioners
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and
John Marshall, traveled to France and met with Foreign Minister
Talleyrand.
Some days after that meeting, the delegation was approached by three
French agents (at first identified as "X", "Y", and "Z" in published
papers, leading the controversy to be called the "
XYZ Affair")
who demanded substantial bribes from the commissioners before
negotiations could continue.
The commissioners refused, and Pinckney and
Marshall were soon afterward deported. Gerry stayed behind, believing
that Talleyrand was not behind the extortion attempt. When the affair
became public, Federalists accused him of supporting the French while
Republicans such as
Thomas Jefferson supported him. He returned in October 1798 and switched his affiliation to the
Democratic-Republican Party in early 1800.
Governor of Massachusetts
For the next four years he unsuccessfully sought the governorship of Massachusetts. His opponent in these races,
Caleb Strong,
was a popular moderate Federalist, whose party dominated the state's
politics despite a national shift toward the Republicans. Republican
James Sullivan
won the governor's seat from Strong in 1807, but his successor was
unable to hold the seat in the 1809 election, which went to Federalist
Christopher Gore.
Gerry stood for election again in 1810 against Gore, and won a narrow
victory. A temporary lessening in the threat of war with Britain aided
Gerry in the win, as did Republican criticisms of Gore's ostentatious
lifestyle (which contrasted significantly with Gerry's more somber
ways). The two battled again in 1811, with Gerry once again victorious.
Gerry's first year as governor was less controversial than his
second. He preached moderation in the political discourse, noting that
it was important that the nation present a unified front in its dealings
with foreign powers.
In his second term he became notably more partisan, purging much of the
state government of Federalist appointees. He and the
Republican-controlled legislature also enacted "reforms" of the court
system that resulted in an increase in the number of judicial
appointments. Infighting within the party and a shortage of qualified
candidates, however, played against Gerry, and the Federalists scored
points by complaining vocally about the partisan nature of the reforms.
The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was used for the first time in the
Boston Gazette
newspaper on March 26, 1812. Appearing with the term, and helping
spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting a
strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-type head satirizing the
map of the odd shaped district.
In 1812 the state adopted new constitutionally mandated electoral
district boundaries. The Republican-controlled legislature had created
district boundaries designed to enhance their party's control over state
and national offices, leading to some oddly shaped legislative
districts. Although Gerry does not seem to have been directly involved
in the drafting of the district, the shape of one of the districts (not
far from his home in
Essex County) resembled a
salamander,
leading a local Federalist newspaper to print a political cartoon
calling it a "Gerry-mander". Ever since, the creation of such districts
has been called
gerrymandering. The redistricting controversy contributed to Gerry's defeat in 1812 (once again at the hands of
Caleb Strong, whom the Federalists had brought out of retirement).
Vice President
Gerry was chosen by by the Democratic-Republican party congress to be
James Madison's vice presidential running mate in the
1812 election.
Madison easily won reelection, and Gerry took office in March 1813. At
that time the office of vice president was largely a sinecure; however,
Gerry's duties included advancing the administration's agenda in
Congress, and the securing of loans for the government to assist in
funding the nation's prosecution of the
War of 1812. He died in office of
heart failure in
Washington, D.C. and is buried there in the
Congressional Cemetery.
Quotes
- "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are dupes of pretended patriots"
- "What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the
establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Whenever
governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they
always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon
their ruins."
- "A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent
assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign
adventure."
