Six primary documents from the man who gave more than almost anyone and received less recognition than almost anyone. The orphaned inheritance. The Continental treasurership. The targeted home. The double signature. The long service.
George Clymer was born in Philadelphia on March 16, 1739. His parents died before he was two. He was raised by his aunt and her husband William Coleman, a wealthy Quaker merchant, who apprenticed him in an accounting house. When Coleman died in 1769, he left Clymer the bulk of his estate. By 1774 Clymer had the second highest residential tax assessment in Philadelphia and ranked third in gross income from property. He spent most of what he had on the Revolution.
An early and outspoken advocate of independence, Clymer co-authored a letter to Berks County on April 18, 1775, the day of Lexington and Concord, urging assembly of a militia. In 1775 he was appointed one of two joint Continental Treasurers. He converted his entire personal holdings of gold and silver into Continental currency to demonstrate his confidence in the new government. The currency eventually became nearly worthless.
Clymer signed the engrossed parchment Declaration on August 2, 1776, as one of the new Pennsylvania delegates. His signature on the Declaration is at the National Archives. Eleven years later his signature appears on the Constitution. Both documents are at archives.gov/founding-docs.
When British forces marched into Philadelphia in September 1777, they made a deliberate detour to Clymer's Chester County home. The house was vandalized and ransacked. His family had fled. The British were aware of Clymer's active role, his outspoken advocacy, his committee work, his personal financial contributions to the Revolution, and targeted his property specifically.
While other members of Congress fled Philadelphia for Baltimore when the British approached, Clymer had repeatedly volunteered to remain and visit the front lines, personally assessing conditions for supply committees when others refused to make the trip.
Clymer was not a member of Pennsylvania's delegation to the Continental Congress when independence was voted on July 2nd. He was, however, part of the Pennsylvania constitutional convention that met soon afterward, and on August 2, he and the other members of that convention immediately signed the engrossed copy of the Declaration.
Clymer returned to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1780. He attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and supported a strong federal government. He served one term in the first United States Congress (1789–1791). President Washington then appointed him to negotiate a treaty with the Creek and Cherokee nations in Georgia in 1796, a mission he completed before retiring from public life. He died January 23, 1813, at seventy-three.
His papers are at the American Philosophical Society and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Selected correspondence is at Founders Online. A letter of Clymer to an unidentified recipient, April 2, 1779, discussing the "Constitutionalists" is at the LOC House Archives.