Mark Cole
Button Gwinnett spent the first 38 years of his life in England, arriving in South Carolina only in 1770. In 1772, he went to Georgia to buy a plantation. A native Englishman, he did not immediately embrace the cause of independence. And in that regard, his opinions were consistent with the vast majority of colonists who lived in Georgia.
Over time, however, as Dr. Lyman Hall traversed the colony and made the case for independence, Gwinnett, too, was persuaded. Gwinnett openly espoused the patriot cause for the first time in 1775 and was accordingly elected to the First and Second Continental Congress. In the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia, he signed the Declaration of Independence, making complete his “treason” to his homeland and securing his absolute loyalty to the independence of the colonies.
Like many of the signers, especially those in the southern colonies, Gwinnett lost his home and his plantation during the Revolutionary War.
He pledged his fortune. He kept his word. He lost his fortune.
Nonetheless, his service to Georgia continued when he was elected to a State Constitutional Convention to form the government of Georgia, free from its colonial shackles. By all accounts, Gwinnett performed admirably at the convention, and the architecture of the first government of Georgia was strongly influenced by Gwinnett.
After the government was formed, Gwinnett was elected to the highest office in the state at that time, President of the Council. Such a rapid rise for the recent convert to the patriot cause was astonishing, to say the least.
But Gwinnett wanted more. Somewhere along the way, his earlier patriotism and selflessness were corrupted by intense personal ambition. Was it because he lost everything in the war that he frantically sought to rebuild his life through public achievement? Was it because he had been an Englishman for so long that he continually sought to convince fellow Georgians that he was one of them?
No one knows. No one knows what exactly happened to Button Gwinnett. But in early 1777, though he had plenty of responsibility as a member of the Continental Congress and head of the executive branch of the Georgia government, Gwinnett sought to become a brigadier general in the Georgia Continental Brigade.
He was not selected and that office went to Colonel Lackland M’Intosh.
Tragically and mistakenly, Gwinnett took this as a personal insult and from that day on, his career as a leading figure in the Georgia state government was devoted to the ruin of M’Intosh.
He almost succeeded, and because of Gwinnett’s meddling, an important colonial military expedition to East Florida almost failed. With his foolishness, Gwinnett almost undermined the cause that he believed in so strongly.
Naturally, the animosity between the two men, Gwinnett and M’Intosh, grew into blind hatred. Eventually, Gwinnett challenged M’Intosh to a duel.
M’Intosh loathed Gwinnett as much as Gwinnett despised him. He thus accepted the challenge and the two men dueled with pistols at a distance of only twelve feet. Some two decades later, Hamilton and Burr would face off a full twenty paces from each other, a distance of probably sixty feet – which with primitive flintlock pistols meant that it was entirely possible that both combatants would miss. But at twelve feet (two paces each), it was virtually certain that either Gwinnett or M’Intosh would die.
As it happened, both men were severely wounded.
Gwinnett died a few days later, leaving his wife a widow, and his family destitute. They did not long survive him.
Gwinnett could have remarked, as Hamilton would later say on his deathbed, “I have lived like a man, but I have died like a fool.” Alas, there is no record that Gwinnett had the same deathbed remorse as Hamilton. Thus, on May 27, 1777, at forty-five years of age, one of America’s founding fathers and one of the first great men of Georgia, the formerly heroic Button Gwinnett died.
He was a casualty of false ambition with a false sense of honor which became so warped that it turned into deadly pride.
May his example serve as a warning to us: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).
Check out Mark’s book: Lives, Fortunes, Sacred Honor: The Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence
