Button Gwinnett, Man of Mystery

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Button Gwinnett, member of the Continental Con gress from Georgia, and Signer of the Declaration of In dependence, like the Man in the Iron Mask, was a man of mystery. No patriot of the American Revolution, no citizen of the Republic, is as little known, nor is there such meagre material in manuscript or printed book, con cerning any individual in American history. He has been likened to a meteor, flashing across the universe, and in his brief career of scarce half a dozen years small record is left to us of his movements and activities during this brief period of time. Coming out of the vast unknown, he flashes the light of his being upon the world, and fades away into' an obscurity and a darkness more intense than that from which he emerged. A remarkable figure in the early history of a great Southern state, we know less of him now, than was known in the year of 1776, when in Philadelphia, he signed the immortal document, that makes his name endure for all time. We are informed by a writer in the Encyclopedia Brit tanica1 that Gwinnett was born in England in 1732 and was a merchant in Bristol. Harper's Cyclopedia of United States History2 says he was born about 1732.