Six primary documents from fifty-six years of public service. The ride he made possible. The fox hunt through Pennsylvania. The Chief Justiceship that lasted twenty-two years. The letter to Adams that tells the whole story in one passage.
Thomas McKean was born on March 19, 1734, in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He read law and was admitted to the bar at eighteen, three years below the normal age. He settled in Delaware. Because Pennsylvania and Delaware shared a common executive until 1776, McKean served simultaneously in both colonial legislatures for years. He was a member of the Delaware Assembly, a justice of the peace, and attorney general of Delaware, all before the Revolution changed anything.
As the independence vote approached in July 1776, Delaware's delegation was split: McKean was for independence, George Read was against it, and Caesar Rodney was away attending to militia matters. If Delaware was to vote for independence, Rodney had to be there. McKean sent an urgent message to Rodney in Delaware to come to Philadelphia immediately. Rodney rode through the night, eighty miles, arriving at the State House the morning of July 2 in time to break the tie. Delaware voted for independence.
Rodney's ride would not have happened without McKean's message. McKean signed the Declaration, on a date that has never been definitively established, likely in 1776 but possibly later, and his name appears on the parchment.
During the British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777 and 1778, McKean served simultaneously as President of Delaware and as Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, two of the most demanding posts available, while moving his family ahead of the advancing British Army. He described his situation in a letter to John Adams on November 8, 1779, from Philadelphia. The letter is at Founders Online.
The consequence was to be hunted like a fox by the enemy and envied by those, who ought to have been my friends. I was obliged to remove my family five times in a few months, and at last fixed them in a little Log house on the banks of the Susquehanna above an hundred miles from this; but safety was not to be found there, for they were soon obliged to remove again, occasioned by the incursions of the Indians.
McKean served as Chief Justice of Pennsylvania from 1777 to 1799, the longest tenure of any chief justice in American history to that point. He also served as President of the Continental Congress in 1781, the year the Articles of Confederation were ratified, making him the first person to hold both executive and judicial positions under the Articles.
He was elected Governor of Pennsylvania in 1799 and served three terms, until 1808. His career in public office ran from 1752 to 1808, fifty-six years. He died on June 24, 1817, at age eighty-three.