Four primary documents from the Long Island farmer who paid for his signature with seven years of occupation and his wife's life in exile. The seizure. The letter from Congress. The recovery. The long life after.
William Floyd was born December 17, 1734 at Mastic on the south shore of Long Island, the eldest son of a prosperous farming family of Welsh descent. When his parents died in 1755, he inherited the family estate and the responsibility of running it and caring for his younger siblings. He had no formal education to speak of. He was a farmer who became a politician because the times demanded it.
Elected to the First Continental Congress in 1774, Floyd represented New York through 1776. The New York delegation did not receive authorization to vote for independence until July 9, after the vote had already passed. Floyd and the other New York delegates were thus recorded as not voting on July 2. When authorization came, they unanimously affirmed. Floyd signed the engrossed parchment Declaration on August 2, 1776. The ink was barely dry before the consequences arrived.
The Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776 ended with a decisive British victory and the American evacuation of the island. Floyd's wife Hannah buried the family silver in the yard before she and their three children fled by boat across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, where they would remain in exile for the next seven years.
Floyd's estate at Mastic was seized. The manor house was selected as a rendezvous for a party of British cavalry, which occupied it for the remainder of the war. In October 1776 Floyd took a brief leave from Congress to attempt to retrieve some of his belongings from the island. His account of that effort is in the Letters of Delegates to Congress at the Library of Congress.
I am now going to try to get some of my effects from the island if it is possible, and shall be absent from Congress a few days, I beg you would excuse me as it is the first time I have absented myself.
Hannah Floyd died in Connecticut in 1781, never having returned to her home. Floyd did not return to the Mastic estate until after the Treaty of Paris in 1783, seven years after the British had taken it. The estate had been stripped and damaged during the occupation.
The NPS now manages the William Floyd Estate as part of Fire Island National Seashore, preserving the site where the family's story played out. The house at Mastic is open to the public and interpreted as a site of the Revolution's personal cost to the signers.
After recovering his estate, Floyd served in the New York State Senate (1777–1788) and was elected to the First United States Congress (1789–1791). He voted for the Constitution as a presidential elector in 1792, casting his vote for Washington. In 1803 he gave the Mastic estate to his son Nicoll and moved to Oneida County in upstate New York, where he built a new house that was a mirror image of the old estate. He died on August 4, 1821, at eighty-six, one of the longest-lived signers. His papers from the congressional years are at the LOC House Archives.