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Three primary documents from the Pennsylvania farmer who cast the decisive independence vote, died nine months later, and had his papers destroyed by the British before historians could gather them.
John Morton was born in 1725 in Ridley Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, the son of a farmer of Finnish-Swedish descent. His mother remarried John Sketchley, who educated the young Morton and encouraged his interest in surveying and public affairs. Morton had little formal schooling but taught himself law and served in every major public office in colonial Pennsylvania: justice of the peace, assemblyman, sheriff, speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly, and delegate to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765.
By 1776, Morton had been a political moderate, seeking reconciliation with Britain while opposing the most egregious Parliamentary impositions. He arrived at the Continental Congress not certain he would vote for independence. Pennsylvania's delegation was divided: three in favor, two opposed, one absent, one abstaining.
The Pennsylvania delegation faced a deadlock on July 2, 1776. Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson were in favor. John Dickinson and Robert Morris had absented themselves rather than vote against independence. That left Benjamin Rush, James Smith, George Clymer, George Ross, all new or replacement delegates, and Morton and George Taylor of the existing delegation.
Morton voted for independence. His vote ensured Pennsylvania's support for the resolution. Without Pennsylvania, the vote for independence would not have been unanimous. The record of Pennsylvania's vote on July 2, 1776 is in the Journals of the Continental Congress at the Library of Congress. Morton signed the Declaration on August 2, 1776. He was one of nine Pennsylvania signers.
Tell them that they will live to see the hour when they shall acknowledge it to have been the most glorious service that I ever rendered to my country.
Morton chaired the Committee of the Whole that drafted the Articles of Confederation in late 1776. He did not live to see them ratified. His health had deteriorated through the winter of 1776–1777. He died on April 1, 1777, of tuberculosis, at approximately fifty-one years old, the first of the fifty-six signers to die.
He was buried at Old St. Paul's Church Burial Ground (also known as the Old Swedish Burial Ground) in Chester, Pennsylvania. His grave remained unmarked for nearly seven decades. In October 1845 his descendants erected an eleven-foot marble obelisk over his grave. In the fall of 1777, after the Battle of Brandywine, British forces advanced through Chester County and plundered his Ridley Township estate. Most of his papers and correspondence were destroyed in that raid or during his widow's flight across the Delaware River.