Richard Stockton was one of the most respected lawyers in the Middle Colonies. He turned down the chief justiceship of New Jersey to remain in Congress. He signed the Declaration on August 2, 1776. Within four months he was in irons in a British prison. The Continental Congress put his name in a resolution. The record is there.
The engrossed parchment was signed on August 2, 1776 — not July 4. Stockton had been elected to Congress in June 1776 specifically to vote on independence. He was 45 years old.
When the vote came, he voted for it. When the document was presented for signature, he signed it. He had been offered and declined the position of first chief justice of the new state of New Jersey, choosing to remain in Congress. The Declaration he signed is at Yale Avalon and the National Archives.
In the autumn of 1776, British forces swept through New Jersey. Washington's army retreated across the state. Princeton fell. Stockton sent his family from Morven, the family estate, and was inspecting Continental Army positions in the north when the British advance made his return impossible. He took shelter at the home of John Covenhoven, a New Jersey legislator, in Monmouth County.
On the night of November 30, 1776, a party of Loyalists found them. Both men were taken — Covenhoven to New York, Stockton first to the common jail at Perth Amboy, where he was held not as a political prisoner but as a criminal. He was then transported to Provost Prison in New York City — the most notorious British prison in North America, where conditions killed thousands.
The Continental Congress documented Stockton's imprisonment in a resolution passed on January 3, 1777. The resolution directed General Washington to protest to General Howe. The full text is in the Journals of the Continental Congress at the Library of Congress.
Whereas Congress hath received information that the honorable Richard Stockton, Esq. of New Jersey, and a member of this Congress, hath been made a prisoner by the enemy, and that he has been ignominiously thrown into a common gaol, and there detained: Resolved, That General Washington be directed to make immediate enquiry into the truth of this report, and if he finds reason to believe it well founded, that he send a flag to General Howe, remonstrating against this departure from that humane procedure that has marked the conduct of these states to prisoners.
Samuel Adams documented the same events in a letter to John Adams dated January 9, 1777, naming Stockton among those who had yielded to Howe's pardon proclamation. The letter is at Founders Online.
Richard Stockton, signer of the Declaration of Independence, yielded to Howe's proclamation.
Stockton was released from Provost Prison in mid-January 1777 under parole — an agreement not to participate further in the war effort, standard practice on both sides for released prisoners. The historical record is consistent on this point across multiple accounts. The parole document itself has not been located at a confirmed institutional archive.
He returned to Morven to find it ransacked. The NPS biographical sketch documents what was gone: furniture, household goods, livestock, crops — and his library, one of the finest private collections in the colonies, burned. He reopened his law practice. Two years after his release he developed cancer of the lip that spread to his throat. He died on February 28, 1781 — two and a half years before the Revolution ended. He is buried at the Stony Brook Quaker Meeting House in Princeton.