by Christopher B. Gordon
Look at the bottom right corner of the Declaration of Independence, away from John Hancock’s great flourish in the center, away from the head of the columns where the famous names sit, and you will find a signature crowded into the last open space on the parchment, as though the man had arrived to find the table full and signed wherever there was room. There was a reason for that. There was no room. The other men had signed months before he ever reached Philadelphia.
The name is Matthew Thornton, and he was the last man to put his hand to the Declaration of Independence.
His name was Matthew Thornton, and most Americans have never heard of him.
The boy off the boat
Thornton was not born in America. His birth came in the north of Ireland, most likely in 1714, into the Scots-Irish world of Ulster Presbyterians who had been planted in that country a few generations before and were already looking across the ocean for a place with more land and fewer landlords. The exact date and the exact town do not survive in any record a careful person can lean on. The Dictionary of Irish Biography places his birth around the third of March, 1714, in the north of Ireland, probably near Derry. Family tradition has long said Lisburn, in County Antrim. Both should be held loosely. No baptismal page proves either one.
What is firm is that he came as a small child, about three or four years old, in the great Scots-Irish migration of 1718 that carried thousands of Ulster families to New England. The Thorntons landed on the Maine coast and tried to make a start there, on a frontier that did not want them and could not protect them. The old accounts say the family once had to flee a burning cabin to save their lives during one of the Indian raids that swept those settlements, and while that particular scene comes down through later retellings rather than a document of the day, it fits the known attacks on the Maine frontier in those years, and the family did what frightened families did. They moved inland, to Worcester, Massachusetts, where the boy was raised and got his schooling.
The doctor without a diploma
There is a pattern among the New Hampshire signers worth noticing. Josiah Bartlett was a country doctor with no medical degree. Matthew Thornton was the same.
Thornton studied medicine the way nearly every colonial physician studied it, not at Edinburgh or Leiden with a diploma at the end, but locally, by apprenticeship and reading and practice. In 1740 he settled in Londonderry, New Hampshire, a town founded by Scots-Irish families like his own, and there he hung out his shingle and doctored the surrounding country for the better part of forty years. The practice prospered, and he acquired land, grew into one of the leading men of the town, and took up the small offices a respected man takes up, justice of the peace and colonel of the local militia under the royal commission.
In 1745, when New England raised an army to go take the great French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Thornton went along as surgeon to the New Hampshire troops. The expedition succeeded against long odds, and the country doctor came home from it with the standing of a man who had served.
The plan of government
When the break with Britain came, Londonderry sent its doctor to speak for it.
Thornton sat in the New Hampshire provincial assembly off and on from the late 1750s. When the royal government dissolved and the province governed itself through a series of revolutionary congresses, he served in the second, third, fourth, and fifth of them, and rose to be president of the last. In 1775, as a member of the Committee of Safety, he was asked to draft a plan of government for New Hampshire to replace the Crown’s authority that had simply walked away. The plan he helped write was adopted in January of 1776, which made New Hampshire the first of the colonies to set up a formal government independent of the king, months before the Declaration in Philadelphia gave the rest of them their reason. Under that new frame, Thornton became the first Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and a justice of the state’s Superior Court, though he had no more training in law than he had in medicine.
The last to sign
Here is the part that makes Matthew Thornton worth a column of his own.
The Declaration was debated and adopted in Philadelphia on the fourth of July, 1776, and the great parchment copy was signed by most of the delegates on the second of August. Thornton was not there for either day. New Hampshire did not elect him to the Continental Congress until the autumn, after the deciding was done, and he did not reach Philadelphia and take his seat until November. The argument was over. The famous votes were cast. The risk, however, was not over at all, because the men who had signed that parchment had committed treason against the Crown in writing, and the war to make the treason stick was going badly.
Thornton arrived too late for the glory and right on time for the danger, and he asked to sign anyway. Congress allowed it. So it is that his name went onto the document in early November of 1776, months after the others, and because the New Hampshire space at the head of the right-hand column was already filled by Bartlett and Whipple, the clerk or the man himself fit his signature into the open space at the lower right, off on its own, the last name added to the founding paper of the country.
There is a line that follows Thornton through the popular histories, that when he insisted on adding his name he claimed the privilege of being hanged for patriotism. It is a good line, and it may even be the kind of thing a dry Scots-Irishman would say, but it does not appear in any record of the time, and an honest account will not put words in his mouth that the documents cannot back. What the documents do show is enough. A man who had no part in the debate, who could have let the thing alone and kept his neck out of the noose, instead asked for the right to sign his name to treason after the fact, when signing carried all of the risk and none of the credit. That was the act. It needs no invented quotation to make it land.
The Honest Man
Thornton spent his last decades the way a great many old revolutionaries did, in service that drew no crowds and on land that asked for his back.
Moving down to Merrimack, New Hampshire, he bought a large farm and operated the ferry across the Merrimack River that had been called Lutwyche’s and came to be called Thornton’s. There were a few more turns in the state senate and on the council, a seat on the bench, and political essays written for the newspapers in his retirement, an old man still arguing for the country he had helped make. His wife, Hannah Jack, whom he had married around 1760 and with whom he raised five children, died in 1786 and left him a widower for his last years.
On the twenty-fourth of June, 1803, while visiting his daughter in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Matthew Thornton died, at about eighty-nine years of age. They carried him home and buried him in Merrimack, in the ground that still bears his name.
The stone they raised over him does not list his offices. It does not call him a signer of the Declaration, or a judge, or the father of the New Hampshire constitution. By the accounts of those who have read it, the epitaph is three words. The Honest Man.
There is a humbling truth folded into that grave, and it is worth saying plainly. One of the earliest biographers of the signers wrote that Thornton, apart from his service presiding over the Provincial Congress, possessed no remarkable abilities. Thornton was not a great orator. There was no famous phrase, no towering office, no fortune, no monument but a farm, a ferry, and a one-line stone. Here was a plain Irish immigrant country doctor who came to a hard new land as a frightened child, doctored his neighbors for forty years, quietly wrote his colony its first government, and arrived too late for the glory but in time to share the gallows if it came to that. The country was not built only by its geniuses. It was built, in great part, by honest men of ordinary gifts who did the next needed thing and asked for no statue. Thornton is the proof of it, and the three words on his stone are the truest summary any of these profiles could hope to reach.
His name was Matthew Thornton.
Now we know him.
— Christopher B. Gordon
TurningPoint Press · Where History Comes to Life
A note on the record. Thornton’s birth is usually given as 1714 in the north of Ireland, with the town reported by family tradition as Lisburn and by the Dictionary of Irish Biography as probably near Derry. No baptismal record confirms the exact date or place, and they are best held as probable. The story that his family fled a burning cabin during an Indian raid on the Maine frontier comes from later narratives and fits the documented attacks of the period, but is not tied to a contemporary document. His arrival in Congress in November 1776 and his signing of the already-engrossed Declaration months after the others are well documented, and his signature stands apart at the lower right of the parchment. The often-quoted line about the privilege of being hanged for patriotism appears only in later popular retellings and is treated here as unverified tradition, not as a genuine quotation. Descriptions of him as tall and dark are repeated in modern accounts but lack a contemporary source. His epitaph is recorded by several independent observers as The Honest Man, with some giving the wording as An Honest Man. His death on the twenty-fourth of June, 1803, at Newburyport, and his burial at Merrimack, are well attested.