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."
