Elbridge Thomas Gerry (; July 17 [O.S. July 6] 1744 – November 23, 1814) was an American Founding Father, merchant, politician, and diplomat, who as a member of the Second Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation. From 1813 until his death in 1814, he served as the fifth vice president of the United States under President James Madison. The political practice of gerrymandering is named after him.
Born into a wealthy merchant family, Gerry vocally opposed British colonial policy in the 1760s and was active in the early stages of organizing the resistance in the American Revolutionary War. In addition to signing the Declaration and the Articles, he was one of three men who attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but refused to sign the Constitution because originally it did not include a Bill of Rights. After its ratification, he was elected to the inaugural United States Congress, where he was actively involved in the drafting and passage of the Bill of Rights as an advocate of individual and state liberties.
Gerry was at first opposed to the idea of political parties and cultivated enduring friendships on both sides of the political divide between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. He was a member of a diplomatic delegation to France that was treated poorly in the XYZ Affair, in which Federalists held him responsible for a breakdown in negotiations. Gerry thereafter became a Democratic-Republican, running unsuccessfully for Governor of Massachusetts several times before winning the office in 1810. During his second term, the legislature approved new state senate districts that led to the coining of the word "gerrymander"; he lost the next election, although the state senate remained Democratic-Republican.
Gerry was nominated by the Democratic-Republican party and elected as vice president in the 1812 election. Advanced in age and in poor health, Gerry served 21 months of his term before dying in office. Gerry is the only signatory of the Declaration of Independence to be buried in Washington, DC.
Elbridge Thomas Gerry was born on July 17, 1744, in the North Shore town of Marblehead, Massachusetts. His father, Thomas Gerry (1702–1774), was a merchant who operated ships out of Marblehead, and his mother, Elizabeth (Greenleaf) Gerry (1716–1771), was the daughter of a successful Boston merchant. Gerry's first name came from John Elbridge, one of his mother's ancestors. Gerry's parents had 11 children in all, although only five survived to adulthood. Of these, Elbridge was the third. He was first educated by private tutors and entered Harvard College shortly before turning 14. After receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1762 and a master of arts in 1765, he entered his father's merchant business. By the 1770s, the Gerrys numbered among the wealthiest Massachusetts merchants, with trading connections in Spain, the West Indies, and along the North American coast. Gerry's father, who had emigrated from England in 1730, was active in local politics and had a leading role in the local militia.
Colonial business and politics
Gerry was from an early time a vocal opponent of Parliamentary efforts to tax the colonies after the French and Indian War ended in 1763. In 1770, he sat on a Marblehead committee that sought to enforce importation bans on taxed British goods. He frequently communicated with other Massachusetts opponents of British policy, including Samuel Adams, John Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and others.
In May 1772, he won election to the Great and General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which served as the state's legislative assembly. He worked closely with Samuel Adams to advance colonial opposition to Parliamentary colonial policies. He was responsible for establishing Marblehead's committee of correspondence, one of the first to be set up after that of Boston. However, an incident of mob action prompted him to resign from the committee the next year. Gerry and other prominent Marbleheaders had established a hospital for performing smallpox inoculations on Cat Island; because the means of transmission of the disease were not known at the time, fears among the local population led to protests, which escalated into violence that wrecked the hospital and threatened the proprietors' other properties.
Gerry re-entered politics after the Boston Port Act closed that city's port in 1774, and Marblehead became an alternative port to which relief supplies from other colonies could be delivered. As one of the town's leading merchants and Patriots, Gerry played a major role in ensuring the storage and delivery of supplies from Marblehead to Boston, interrupting those activities only to care for his dying father. He was elected as a representative to the First Continental Congress in September 1774, but declined, still grieving the loss of his father.
Gerry was elected to the provincial assembly, which reconstituted itself as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress after Governor Thomas Gage dissolved the body in October 1774. He was assigned to its committee of safety, responsible for ensuring that the province's limited supplies of weapons and gunpowder did not fall into British hands. His actions were partly responsible for the storage of weapons and ammunition in Concord; these stores were the target of the British expedition that sparked the start of the American Revolutionary War with the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. (Gerry was staying at an inn at Menotomy, now Arlington, when the British Army marched through on the night of April 18.) During the Siege of Boston that followed, Gerry continued to take a leading role in supplying the nascent Continental Army, something he continued to do as the war progressed. He leveraged business contacts in France and Spain to acquire not just munitions, but also supplies of all types, and was involved in the transfer of financial subsidies from Spain to Congress. He sent ships to ports all along the American coast and dabbled in financing privateering operations against British merchant shipping.
Unlike some other merchants, no evidence indicates that Gerry profiteered directly from the hostilities. He spoke out against price gouging and in favor of price controls, although his war-related merchant activities notably increased the family's wealth. His gains were tempered to some extent by the precipitous decline in the value of paper currencies, which he held in large quantities and speculated.
Gerry served in the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia from February 1776 to 1780, when matters of the ongoing war occupied the body's attention. He was influential in convincing several delegates to support passage of the Declaration of Independence in the debates held during the summer of 1776; John Adams wrote of him, "If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell." He was implicated as a member of the so-called "Conway Cabal", a group of congressmen and military officers who were dissatisfied with the performance of General George Washington during the 1777 military campaign. However, Gerry took Pennsylvania leader Thomas Mifflin, one of Washington's critics, to task early in the episode and specifically denied knowledge of any sort of conspiracy against Washington in February 1778.
Gerry's political philosophy was one of limited central government, and he regularly advocated for the maintenance of civilian control of the military. He held these positions fairly consistently throughout his political career (wavering principally on the need for stronger central government in the wake of the 1786–87 Shays' Rebellion) and was well known for his personal integrity. In later years, he opposed the idea of political parties, remaining somewhat distant from both the developing Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties until later in his career. Until 1800, he had not formally associated with the Democratic-Republicans in opposition to what he saw as attempts by the Federalists to centralize too much power in the national government.