born: Feb. 15, 1726
died: Sept. 15, 1794
buried: Presbyterian Church Cemetery - Rahway, NJ
profession: lawyer
Signer of the Declaration of Independence on July 2nd at age 50.
Abraham Clark had a modest upbringing compared to many other signers. But for someone who had a lot less to lose over the course of the Revolutionary War, Clark seemed to receive more than his fair share of suffering.
A New Jersey native, Abraham was an only child in a farming family. He did not receive much formal education, yet, he made the most of his limited access to teachers and books and found work as a local surveyor and resident go to guy for legal advice. His generosity and solidarity with everyday folk made him exceedingly popular and he soon occupied a variety of public offices.
By 1774, he was firmly entrenched int he patriot movement, serving on the New Jersey committee of safety and attending various revolutionary conventions. After helping to draft the New Jersey constitution, he was elected as one of the five upstart men who made up the "new" New Jersey delegation that showed up in Philadelphia in June 1776.
Signer and diarist Benjamin Rush once wrote that Clark was "a sensible but cynical man. He was uncommonly quick sighted in seeing the weakness and defects of public men and measures." But he was a patriot through and through, and he happily voted for independence. He signed his name on the Declaration along with the others, no matter how he felt about them. Clark knew that the signers were getting themselves into, and soon afterward wrote to his friend, Colonel Elias Drayton: "As to my title, I know not yet whether it will be honorable or dishonorable; the issue of the war must settle it. Perhaps our Congress will be exalted on a high gallows . . . I assure you, Sir, I see, I feel, the danger we are in."
He knew the danger his family was in as well. Clark had two sons, Aaron and Thomas, captured during the war. It's believed Thomas was tossed aboard the notoriously rank and barbarous prison ship Jersey. Prison ships made regular prisons look like the Ritz, and the Jersey was one of the worst. A veritable of dysentery, small pox, and any other kind of scurrilous contagion of death imaginable, the vessel was like a floating morgue, with scores of prisoners dying and being dumped overboard to clear the rancid decks. Clark's son Aaron was thrown in a New York dungeon called the Sugar House, and the other prisoners - themselves in dire straights - felt so bad for his condition and lack of nourishment that they reportedly passed him food through a keyhole. (You know things are going badly for you when starving inmates are poking moldy bread through your keyhole.) How his sons ultimately fared is sketchy. Some sources say Congress ordered retaliation that freed Thomas. Less is known about Aaron's fate. Other sources maintain that a third son, Andrew, may have also died aboard the Jersey.
Abraham Clark continued to serve in Congress on and off until the end of the war, at which point he moved to the state legislature. He attended the Annapolis Convention of 1786, at which representatives of five of the thirteen states gathered to address grievances that had arisen over the cumbersome Articles of Confederation. Representatives met again at the Federal Convention in 1787 to hammer out a new, improved system of government: the U.S. Constitution. Poor health kept Clark from attending, but he opposed the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was added.
In 1787 he returned to the Continental Congress, but he stayed in New Jersey in 1789 to focus on the state's accounts with the federal government. He capped off his public service as a representative of New Jersey under the new federal government, from 1791 to 1794. In summer 1794, Clark was watching some men build a bridge on his lands in what is now Roselle, New Jersey when he suddenly felt ill. Intuiting that he had suffered a bout of severe sunstroke, he staggered to his carriage and got himself home. There, he was put to bed and died hours later. He was sixty-eight.
Kiernan, Denise & Joseph D'Agnese. Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence, Quirk Books, Philadelphia, 2009.
