Thomas
Stone

Historians have called Stone "The Elusive Maryland Signer." He spoke rarely in Congress. His letters are sparse. He left no memoir, no autobiography, no collected papers to match the men he sat beside. What the record holds is fragments. The fragments are enough.

Thomas Stone was born in 1743 at Poynton Manor in Charles County, Maryland, the second son of David and Elizabeth Jenifer Stone. His thirst for learning was visible early: he rode more than ten miles to school each day and back again, studying Greek and Latin under a Scottish schoolmaster. In the early 1760s he read law at the office of Thomas Johnson in Annapolis, was admitted to the bar in 1764, and opened a practice in Frederick, Maryland. In 1768 he married Margaret Brown.

By 1773 he had moved his practice to Charles County and joined the Charles County Committee of Correspondence, the network through which colonial grievances circulated across colony lines. He was a member of Maryland's Annapolis Convention from 1774 to 1776. His neighbors considered him cautious and deliberate, a fine advocate who was more comfortable with argument than spectacle. In 1775, the Convention sent him to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

His instructions were explicit. The Maryland Convention told its delegates they were not to "without the previous knowledge and approbation of the Convention of the Province, assent to any proposition to declare these Colonies independent of the Crown of Great Britain." Stone went to Congress bound by those instructions. He personally hoped reconciliation was still possible. On July 8, 1775, he signed the Olive Branch Petition, the Congress's last formal appeal to King George III. The King refused to read it and declared the colonies in rebellion.

By early 1776, Stone could see what was coming. He wrote of his position in a letter that has been widely quoted: he wanted peace on terms of security and justice, but war, anything, was preferable to a surrender of rights. In a second letter he observed that the connection with Britain was severed, that the path back was closed. He had not wanted this. He had tried the other path. The petition had been refused. The war had come.

In January 1776, Maryland had tightened its instructions further, explicitly forbidding its delegates from supporting independence without prior approval. Stone was bound. On May 15, 1776, he voted in favor of drafting a declaration of independence, acting ahead of Maryland's formal authorization, the distinction between drafting a document and authorizing independence allowing him that step. Then in June 1776 the Maryland Convention lifted the restriction entirely. Its delegates were free to vote as they judged best.

On July 2, 1776, Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence came to a vote. Thomas Stone voted yes. He was the youngest member of the Maryland delegation. He had spent months legally prohibited from casting that vote. On August 2, 1776, the engrossed parchment was brought out. Stone signed.

Ten days after the vote, Stone wrote to the Maryland Council of Safety. The letter is the most quoted thing he ever wrote, and one of the more striking statements left by any signer. The man who had spent months hoping for reconciliation, who had been legally barred from voting for independence until weeks before the vote, wrote this:

Stone remained in Congress through the end of the 1776 session. He was assigned to the committee that drafted the Articles of Confederation, the first framework of national government for the United States. He was, despite his reputation for reticence, doing the work.

Margaret Stone visited her husband in Philadelphia while Congress was in session. Philadelphia in 1776 was in the midst of a smallpox epidemic. Margaret was inoculated. Her reaction to the inoculation was severe and permanent. Her health declined from that point and continued declining for the rest of her life.

Stone declined reappointment to Congress in 1777 and accepted a seat in the Maryland Senate instead, which met closer to home. He served in the Senate from 1779 to 1787. He continued his law practice in Annapolis in the 1780s, where his colleagues held him in high regard as an advocate. A fellow member of the Maryland Senate later described him as mild and courteous in manner, fond of society and conversation, and universally a favorite from his good humor and intelligence, though by nature of an irritable temper.

In 1783 he was elected again to the Continental Congress. He took his seat on March 26, 1784, and served briefly as its chairman near the end of the session. In 1785 he worked closely with George Washington to advance the Potowmack Company bill through the Maryland Senate, a venture Washington considered important. Stone wrote to Washington on January 30, 1787, enclosing documents from the Maryland Senate's debate over a paper money bill.

In 1787 Maryland appointed Thomas Stone as one of its delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He declined. Margaret was dying. He would not leave her.

The Convention proceeded without him. It opened May 25, 1787. It closed September 17, 1787. The Constitution that emerged from it was signed by thirty-nine delegates. Thomas Stone's name is not among them. He was not there. The man who had voted for independence in 1776, who had helped draft the Articles of Confederation, who had spent a decade in the Maryland Senate advancing the national cause, chose his wife over the room.

Margaret Stone died in June 1787. She was thirty-six years old. Stone never recovered. His own health, which had never been strong, collapsed rapidly. He died on October 5, 1787, in Alexandria, Virginia, four months after his wife. He was forty-four. He is buried with Margaret at Habre de Venture, his estate in Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, now the Thomas Stone National Historic Site.

The book on Thomas Stone is titled "Thomas Stone: Elusive Maryland Signer." The title is accurate. He spoke little in Congress. He left few letters. The papers that do survive are scattered across Maryland State Archives, Library of Congress holdings, and the Founders Online collection of correspondence with Washington and Jefferson. There is no single large collection of Stone papers at a single archive. There is no autobiography. There is no memoir.

What the record shows is a man who went to Congress constrained, found his constraint lifted, voted for a document he had been forbidden to support, wrote one of the more striking post-vote statements among the fifty-six, drafted the Articles of Confederation in committee, spent a decade in the Maryland Senate, and then stepped back entirely when the work he had done was complete and the woman he loved needed him.

He did not attend the Constitutional Convention. He did not sign the Constitution. He died at forty-four. The archive does not hold much of Thomas Stone. What it holds is not thin.