A Fictional Interview with George Read in New Castle, Delaware
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | New Castle, Delaware — August 1776
Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. George Read (1733–1798) practiced law in New Castle, Delaware, and was the colony’s delegate to the Continental Congress. On July 2, 1776, he was the only man who would go on to sign the Declaration of Independence to vote against Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for it, preferring to continue seeking reconciliation with Britain. His fellow Delaware delegate Thomas McKean had to send an overnight rider for the ailing Caesar Rodney to break the tie in Delaware’s favor. Once the resolution passed, Read accepted the outcome and signed the engrossed Declaration on August 2, 1776. A Loyalist named Joseph Galloway is recorded taunting Read for signing “with a rope about his neck,” to which Read is recorded to have replied, “I know the risks, and am prepared for all the consequences.” That exchange is documented as having happened elsewhere, not in New Castle, but Delaware itself had strong Loyalist sentiment at the time, so the scene below imagines a similar confrontation happening among Read’s own neighbors upon his return home, using his real recorded reply. Everything else in this conversation is imagined.
SETTING: The front steps of Read’s New Castle home, late afternoon. A small knot of neighbors has gathered, some curious, a few openly hostile. Read has just returned from Philadelphia.
Dan: Mr. Read, word travels fast in a small town. Everyone here already knows you voted against independence and then signed the Declaration anyway. How do you explain that to your own neighbors?
Read: I don’t explain it so much as I simply state it plainly and let a man make of it what he will. I voted against Mr. Lee’s resolution because I believed it hasty, and I believed reconciliation with the Crown was still possible. I was not alone in that belief when I arrived in Philadelphia, only alone in it by the time the vote was counted.
Neighbor: You call that principle, Mr. Read? Or do you simply not have the stomach to stand against your fellow delegates once you’d lost?
Read: I understand why it looks that way to you, and I will not pretend the accusation is an unreasonable one to make. But there is a difference between losing an argument and abandoning a conviction. I argued my position as hard as I knew how, in the room where it mattered, before the vote was taken. Once it was taken, the argument was over, and a man has to decide whether he serves his own pride or the body he agreed to sit in.
Dan: Some are saying worse than that about you in Philadelphia. I heard Joseph Galloway told you that you’d signed with a rope about your own neck.
Read: He did say that, and he meant it as a threat, not a figure of speech. I know the risks, and am prepared for all the consequences. That is the whole of what I said back to him, and I find I do not have much more to add to it today. A man who signs a declaration of treason against the Crown, in his own hand, in ink that will still be legible long after he is dead, has generally understood exactly what he is risking.
Dan: Then why sign at all, if reconciliation was truly what you believed in?
Read: Because reconciliation was what I believed in only so long as it remained possible, and by the time that vote passed, I no longer believed it was. I am not so vain as to think my private hope for peace with the Crown outweighs the judgment of a majority of my fellow delegates, arrived at honestly and after real debate. I would ask any man here tonight… what is the use of a congress at all, if every delegate who loses a vote simply walks out the door instead of signing his name to what the body decided?
Dan: That’s a harder kind of loyalty than simply agreeing from the start.
Read: I have come to think it is the only kind worth having. Agreement is easy when you already believed the thing before you were asked to vote on it. What I am describing to you is different… arguing your true conviction as hard as you can, losing, and then giving the outcome your full name and your full commitment anyway, not a grudging half-measure of it. I did not merely sign that paper, if you’re curious. I have already put my name to a resolution branding any man who breaks faith with it a traitor to this cause. I would not have written that sentence if my own commitment were still divided.
Neighbor: And if it goes badly? If the Crown wins this war, you signed us into?
Read: Then I will have been wrong, and I will answer for it same as every other man whose name is on that page. But I did not sign it as a man hedging his bets, waiting to see which way the wind blew before committing himself. I signed it the only way a signature like that means anything at all — completely, and without a rope loosened around my own neck by half-measures.
Dan: Thank you for your candor tonight, Mr. Read.
Read: Candor is cheap tonight. It’s the next several years that will cost something.
George Read went on to help draft Delaware’s first state constitution just weeks after this scene, later served as the state’s president during the war, and would eventually help write the U.S. Constitution itself in 1787… the same document that would make Delaware the first state to ratify it, an episode of the Travel in Time with Dan show already told. The leadership lesson from these New Castle steps runs against the grain of the “don’t hesitate” story usually told about Delaware’s founding generation: George Read hesitated more than any other man who signed that document, and it did not make him less of a founder. It made his eventual commitment mean something specific, because it was chosen rather than assumed. Principled dissent followed by full, unreserved commitment once a decision is made isn’t a lesser form of loyalty than instant agreement… for a leader whose voice was actually heard and actually overruled, it may be the only form of loyalty that was ever really tested. And once it was decided, George Read and Delaware didn’t hesitate to break away from England, later ratify the U.S. Constitution, and gain First-State status.
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