The Rest of the Story · by Christopher B. Gordon
On the Declaration of Independence, the first name your eye can actually read is not John Hancock’s.
Hancock’s is the famous one, the great black flourish in the center of the page, swept out so large that the word came to mean the act of signing itself. But it is so ornamented that it is closer to a drawing than to a name. Directly beneath it, at the head of the right-hand column, written in a plain and level hand, is the first name on the page a stranger can read without effort. It belongs to a country doctor from New Hampshire who held no medical degree, who would later sit as a chief justice with no training in law, and who had already watched his own house burn for the cause the page announced.
His name was Josiah Bartlett, and most Americans have never heard of him.
The doctor with no diploma
Bartlett was born in Amesbury, Massachusetts, on the twenty-first of November, 1729, the youngest child of Stephen and Hannah Bartlett. His schooling was the ordinary kind, a few years under a local master and some Latin and Greek read with a relative, and then, at about sixteen, he did what a New England boy with ambition and no fortune did. He apprenticed himself. He went into the office of a practicing physician, Dr. James Ordway of Amesbury, and learned medicine as nearly every colonial doctor learned it, by mixing the drugs, pulling the teeth, setting the bones, and watching the fevers come and go.
There were a handful of men in the colonies who had crossed the ocean to study at Edinburgh or Leiden and come home with a diploma. Bartlett was not one of them, and he never pretended to be. Before he was twenty-one he packed a horse with saddlebags, a case of surgical instruments, and a small stock of medicines, and rode ten miles north to Kingston, New Hampshire, a frontier town that had no doctor of its own. Kingston did not ask to see his credentials. It had none to compare him against. It simply had a young man willing to ride its rough roads in the dark, and that was enough.
The doctor who would not bleed his children
What set Bartlett apart was not a diploma but a habit of mind. He trusted what he saw over what he had been told, and in eighteenth-century medicine that was nearly a radical act.
When smallpox came through, he was among the earlier physicians in his corner of New Hampshire to practice inoculation, the deliberate giving of a mild case to prevent a deadly one. The technique was not his invention. It had been fought over in Boston a generation before him. But in a rural town where many still regarded it as tampering with providence, choosing to inoculate took a certain nerve, and he had it.
The harder test came with the throat distemper, the strangling childhood epidemic that later physicians have generally taken to be diphtheria, though without the tools to be certain. It killed children by the score. Kingston buried more than a hundred people in one of these outbreaks. The standard treatment of the day was to bleed the patient, to purge and blister and starve, to weaken an already failing body in the belief that the illness was being drawn out. Bartlett looked at that and declined. He treated the sick instead with Peruvian bark, the cinchona that carries the substance we now call quinine, and with cool drink to bring the fever down, supporting the body rather than draining it. The clearest measure of his conviction is that he is said to have done it first on his own children, refusing to bleed them when bleeding was what every authority advised.
Here the honest record asks for care. The claim, repeated in old local histories, that Bartlett was the very first physician to use Peruvian bark against the throat distemper is more than the documents can prove, and modern reviewers note we cannot even be sure of the exact disease. What is fair to say is plainer and still striking. Faced with dying children and a standard of care that bled and starved them, a self-taught country doctor trusted his own eyes, chose the gentler and the sounder course, and by the accounts that survive lost fewer of them than his colleagues did.
The man the governor could not buy
The same independence that shaped his medicine shaped his politics.
Kingston made him a selectman by 1757, and in 1765, in the heat of the Stamp Act, the town sent him to the New Hampshire provincial assembly. There he settled into steady opposition to the Crown’s tightening hand, and there he drew the attention of the royal governor, John Wentworth. By the account of his early biographers, Wentworth tried to bring so capable and respected a man over to the government’s side with the ordinary currency of empire, the offer of office and favor. Bartlett did not take it. The exact words of those offers do not survive, and a careful telling should not invent them, but the shape of the thing is clear enough from what he did next. When Wentworth dissolved the lawful assembly in 1774 to silence its protest, Bartlett took his seat in the extralegal Provincial Congress that met in open defiance of the governor he had just refused.
He served on the committee of correspondence and on the Committee of Safety, the bodies that ran New Hampshire’s resistance and then, when royal authority simply collapsed, ran New Hampshire itself.
The house on the Kingston plains
Defiance has a price, and in 1774 Bartlett’s came due. His house in Kingston burned to the ground.
It was arson. Every reputable account agrees on that, and on the obvious reading, that a prominent patriot’s home went up in the same season he openly broke with the Crown. The institutions that keep his memory, the Park Service and the New Hampshire historians among them, attribute the fire to local loyalists striking back at a leading rebel. It is worth being precise that no court record names the men who set it. The loyalist motive is an inference, a strong one, but an inference. What is not in doubt is what Bartlett did about it. He rebuilt on the same ground. The fire also cost him the First Continental Congress. Chosen as a delegate in 1774, he could not leave a burned-out household and a frightened family to make the journey to Philadelphia, and he stayed home to put the roof back on.
He went the next time.
The first aye, and the first name
New Hampshire returned him to the Second Continental Congress, and there Josiah Bartlett took his place in the year that made the country.
Tradition in his home state holds that when the question of independence came to the floor on the second of July, 1776, it was Bartlett who gave the first aye, and gave it so heartily that he made the rafters shake. It is a fine image, and it should be told for what it is. The journals of the Congress recorded votes by colony, not by the order in which individual men spoke, and they preserved no transcript of anyone’s exclamation. The line comes from later retellings, not from the minutes. What can be said without strain is that New Hampshire’s delegate was an early and unhesitating voice for separation, and that his neighbors remembered him that way.
The signing is firmer ground, though it too is often overstated. The engrossed Declaration was not signed on the fourth of July. It was ordered written out on parchment on the nineteenth, and most of the delegates put their names to it on the second of August. Hancock, as president, signed first, in the center. The other names were arranged by colony, north to south, and New Hampshire stood at the head of the right-hand column. So it is that Josiah Bartlett’s signature sits directly beneath Hancock’s, the first of the state names, and he is commonly called the second man to sign the Declaration. Whether the physical act followed the exact order of the layout no one can now prove. But on the page itself, for two and a half centuries, his has been the first ordinary name a reader meets.
The harder truth
A profile that ended on that note would be a comfortable one, and it would be a lie of omission, and TurningPoint Press does not trade in those.
Josiah Bartlett held human beings as property.
The evidence is not a rumor. It is in his own family’s papers. A letter written by his wife, Mary Bartlett, in February of 1776, concerns a seventeen-year-old enslaved person who had run away, describing him so that he might be caught and returned. In the same season her husband was helping to write a new nation’s claim that all men are created equal, the household he headed was advertising for the recovery of a young man it owned.
There is more, and it is worse. In 1782, while Bartlett sat as a justice of New Hampshire’s high court, he arranged to have an enslaved man named Peter conscripted into the Continental forces as a substitute, a thing the law of the state then allowed an owner to do, sending another man to war in his household’s place. The letters that record it survive at Dartmouth. The man Bartlett dealt with on the matter balked at the cruelty of it, said he had always condemned such conduct in others, and suggested Bartlett simply sell Peter instead, calling him a thief. Peter himself appears in the record only in fragments, in another man’s contemptuous words, running, being illegally sold, and at last declaring himself a free man. We do not know how many people the Bartletts held over the years, or whether any were freed. The surviving letters guarantee at least Peter and the runaway youth, and they make plain that the family’s part in slavery was not a distant inheritance but a working fact of the house.
This is the part that does not resolve. The same man who would not bleed a dying child, who rode the night roads to the sick, who refused a governor’s favor and lost his house for liberty, also reckoned a human being as a substitute to be spent or a thief to be sold. New Hampshire was moving, slowly and unevenly, toward the end of slavery in these very years, and its leading men moved with it slowly and unevenly or not at all. Bartlett’s record places him squarely in that uncomfortable middle. A reader is permitted to admire the healer and to hold the slaveholder to account in the same breath. An honest history requires both.
What he built
Bartlett outlived the war and spent his last decades building the state he had helped break free.
He moved from medicine into the law, and in 1788 he was made chief justice of New Hampshire’s highest court, a doctor with no diploma now the senior judge of a state with no training in law, raised on reputation and plain judgment alone. He sat in the convention that ratified the federal Constitution. When the new government offered him a seat in the United States Senate, chosen by the legislature, he declined it, pleading his age and his health and his wish to stay in New Hampshire. In 1790 the state made him its chief executive, first under the old title of President and then, when the constitution was rewritten, as the first man to hold the office of Governor of New Hampshire. He helped found the state’s medical society and took an honorary degree of medicine from Dartmouth in 1790, at the commencement where his own son was graduated. Three of his children and seven of his grandchildren became physicians, a quiet dynasty grown from a sixteen-year-old’s apprenticeship in another man’s office.
Failing health drove him from public life in 1794. He died at Kingston on the nineteenth of May, 1795, at sixty-five, in the house he had rebuilt on the ground where the first one burned.
He voted early and he signed near the top, but that is the smallest part of him. He was a man who trusted what he could see, who would not bleed a child because the books said to, who would not be bought, and who is owed, as every figure this paper takes up is owed, the whole truth and not the flattering half of it.
His name was Josiah Bartlett.
Now we know him.
— Christopher B. Gordon
TurningPoint Press · Where History Comes to Life
A note on the record. The New Hampshire tradition that Bartlett cast the first vote for independence and “made the rafters shake” comes from later retellings, not from the journals of the Continental Congress, which recorded votes by colony rather than by individual delegate. His signature appears first beneath Hancock’s at the head of the right-hand column, and he is commonly described as the second to sign, though the exact physical order of the signing on the second of August 1776 is not documented. The identification of the 1774 arsonists as loyalists is a well-founded inference, not a matter of court record. The throat distemper he treated is generally taken to be diphtheria but cannot be diagnosed with certainty across the distance, and the claim that he was the first to use Peruvian bark against it appears in nineteenth-century local histories and is best read as a later ascription. His slaveholding is documented in the Bartlett family papers at the New Hampshire Historical Society, including Mary Bartlett’s 1776 letter concerning a runaway, and in the 1782 correspondence at Dartmouth’s Rauner Library concerning the enslaved man Peter.