Six primary documents from the planter who chaired the independence debates and signed at fifty. The gallows joke is in Rush's letter to Adams. The dynasty that followed is in the historical record.
Benjamin Harrison was born in 1726 at Berkeley Plantation on the James River in Virginia, one of the oldest and wealthiest plantations in the colony. He attended the College of William and Mary. He was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses at twenty-three and served there for more than two decades before the Revolution, alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Lee.
Harrison was fifty when he signed the Declaration. He was not a lawyer or a writer. He was a planter and a legislator, the kind of man who built the institutions of colonial Virginia before anyone thought about independence.
Harrison represented Virginia in the Continental Congress beginning in 1774. In June 1776, he was appointed to chair the Committee of the Whole during the debates on independence, one of the most procedurally important roles in the Congress. He presided over the floor debates in which independence was argued and eventually voted on. His position as chairman placed him at the center of the proceedings without leaving a detailed record of his own words.
On August 2, 1776, Harrison signed the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was present at the signing, recorded the scene in a letter to John Adams in 1811, including the exchange between Harrison and Elbridge Gerry that is the only contemporary account of what was said in the room that morning.
Do you recollect the pensive and awful silence which pervaded the house when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress, to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants? The Silence & the gloom of the morning were interrupted I well recollect only for a moment by Col: Harrison of Virginia who said to Mr Gerry at the table, "I shall have a great advantage over you Mr: Gerry when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead." This Speech procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the Solemnity with which the whole business was conducted.
Harrison was elected Governor of Virginia in 1780, serving during one of the most dangerous periods of the war. In 1781, British forces under Benedict Arnold and then Lord Cornwallis invaded Virginia. The state capital at Richmond was raided. Jefferson, the outgoing governor, narrowly escaped capture at Monticello. Harrison presided over the state through the invasion and the Yorktown campaign that ended it, coordinating Virginia's contribution to the siege.
He left office in 1782 and returned to the House of Delegates, where he served as Speaker. He was elected Governor again for a second term in 1791 but declined a full term due to ill health. He died on April 24, 1791.
Benjamin Harrison's son William Henry Harrison was the ninth President of the United States, inaugurated in 1841. He died thirty-one days later, the shortest presidency in American history. Benjamin Harrison's great-grandson, also named Benjamin Harrison, was the twenty-third President, serving from 1889 to 1893. The Harrison family produced more presidents than any other founding family.
The signer died in 1791. He did not live to see his son enter public life. He had signed the Declaration sixty-five years before his great-grandson took the oath of office. The distance between the signing and the dynasty is the history of the republic's first century.