Six men signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Franklin you know. Robert Morris and James Wilson you may know from earlier posts in this series, mostly for how they ended: one in debtors' prison, one dying on the run from creditors. Roger Sherman gets remembered as the only man who signed everything.
Then there's George Clymer of Philadelphia, and here is the shortest honest summary of his career: whenever the Revolution had a job that was dangerous, tedious, unpaid, or guaranteed to make enemies, Clymer raised his hand. And unlike most of the founding generation's money men, he ended his life solvent, respected, and holding office. He is arguably the best-adjusted man in this entire series, which may be exactly why nobody remembers him.
Orphaned at seven, in business at fourteen
Clymer was born in Philadelphia in 1739. His mother died before he turned two; his father, a sometime privateer captain, died when George was seven, leaving him almost nothing. His aunt Hannah and her husband William Coleman took him in, and that turned out to be the luckiest break in Pennsylvania.
Coleman was Benjamin Franklin's close friend, and not casually: he was one of the backers who financed Franklin's start as an independent printer, and he worked beside him founding the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the college that became the University of Pennsylvania. He rose from clerk to a lifetime seat as an associate justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The boy in his house got no formal schooling, read Jonathan Swift voraciously, appeared in the firm's business records at fourteen, and was handling documents on his own by seventeen. A bequest from his grandfather at eleven and, later, the bulk of Coleman's estate gave Clymer capital of his own; he opened his own trading firm in 1759.
An honest telling includes what the family money contained. His grandfather's estate listed four enslaved people, and his father's meager legacy included an enslaved man who died within the year. Coleman's will, notably, ordered his own house sold in part to fund freeing his three slaves and apprenticeships for their children. Clymer inherited the world that produced both facts.
In 1765 he married Elizabeth Meredith, whose father Reese was, per the DSDI biography, second in wealth among Philadelphia merchants only to Robert Morris. The marriage lasted forty-seven years, until his death. And the Meredith house came with a remarkable standing guest: years earlier Reese had struck up a conversation with a young Virginia planter sitting alone in a public house and invited him home, and from then on, whenever George Washington visited Philadelphia, he stayed with the Merediths.
The radical the moderates couldn't shake
Clymer was early to the cause and loud about it. He signed the Stamp Act non-importation agreement in 1765 with four hundred other merchants, helped organize the boycott of the Townshend duties, and wrote pseudonymous broadsides. In December 1773, days after the Boston Tea Party, Philadelphia's own tea ship arrived downriver, and the DSDI biography credits Clymer with convincing the captain to sail back to England with the cargo still aboard. When Paul Revere rode into Philadelphia with news of the Boston port closure, the city's moderates counseled patience; Clymer demanded an immediate embargo and publicly called out fellow merchants for putting their ledgers ahead of the common good.
After Lexington and Concord, he was made a captain of the silk-stocking city troop and promptly resigned the commission for a less glamorous assignment that mattered more: procuring munitions. Congress then made him joint treasurer of the united colonies, keeping the books of a government that barely existed. He sat with Franklin and Robert Morris on the Committee of Safety, arming and fortifying Pennsylvania over Quaker objections.
Here's the odd footnote of his signature: Clymer wasn't actually in the room for independence. As a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly he'd helped rewrite the delegation's instructions to remove the prohibition on voting for it, but he wasn't a delegate on July 2, 1776. Elected to a new delegation on July 20, he signed the engrossed Declaration on August 2, which had been left open for exactly that purpose. He also refused, on principle, to sign Pennsylvania's own radical state constitution that same summer, one of twenty-three dissenters out of ninety-six, and spent years absorbing abuse as a supposed traitor for it. Signing the most dangerous document in America and refusing to sign a popular local one, in the same season, tells you what his signature meant to him.
The volunteer
Read enough founder biographies and you notice how many great men discovered pressing business elsewhere when hard assignments came up. Clymer's file reads like the opposite. In December 1776, with the British advancing and Congress fleeing to Baltimore in a panic, three men stayed behind in Philadelphia as an executive committee to keep the army supplied and the government functioning: Robert Morris, George Walton, and George Clymer.
Congress sent him north to inspect the defenses at Ticonderoga, and his reporting refocused attention on supply and on the deplorable state of wounded soldiers, which pulled him into the grinding, unglamorous work of hospital administration. When reports of treason at Fort Pitt surfaced and, per DSDI, several other members declined the trip, Clymer volunteered and spent four winter months on the frontier repairing relations with the Delaware and Shawnee. The British, for their part, rated his work highly: marching on Philadelphia in 1777, they made a special detour to vandalize and loot his family's house in Chester County.
His masterpiece came in 1780, the war's financial rock bottom. Paper money was worthless, procurement had collapsed, and Washington doubted the army would hold together until harvest; even flour was nearly gone. Clymer led the Philadelphia merchants in chartering the Pennsylvania Bank, a private, explicitly non-profit vehicle that raised funds and sent buyers scouring the countryside. Thousands of barrels of flour, bushels of corn, casks of rum, and hundreds of tents reached the army, and the Continental Army's commissioner general wrote that the bank had, against all expectations, kept the army from dissolution. Alexander Hamilton looked at the structure and saw the seed of his national bank. And when accusations of profiteering circulated anyway, the record answered them: none of the participants made a profit, and many subscribers lost money, knowingly. Clymer had built the rarest thing in this series: a bounded, honest, capped-downside way to throw private money at a public emergency.
That's the difference worth underlining. Robert Morris backed the war with personal notes and his whole balance sheet, and the same instincts later carried him into 6 million acres of debt-financed land and Prune Street prison. Clymer put in effort without limit and money within structure. Same patriotism, different risk architecture, very different endings.
Constitution, whiskey, and the Creeks
Clymer served again in Congress on the finance committee under Robert Morris, made a fruitless fundraising circuit of the southern states, and by the mid-1780s had concluded the Confederation was hopeless without federal taxing power. Elected to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he pushed for a strong national government, signed the document, and then pulled the most consequential procedural move of his career: in the final moments before Pennsylvania's Assembly adjourned, he rammed through the enabling legislation for a state ratifying convention. Pennsylvania ratified second, fast, and the momentum mattered enormously to the states still deciding.
In the first federal Congress he voted the full Hamilton program: import duties, assumption of war debts, the Bank of the United States, and the liquor excise. Then, characteristically, he took personal delivery of the consequences: Washington appointed him supervisor of revenue for Pennsylvania, meaning the man collecting the wildly hated whiskey tax from the frontier settlers he'd wintered with at Fort Pitt. He did the job for three years, per DSDI often at real personal risk, and resigned in 1794 just before the Whiskey Rebellion boiled over.
Washington called him back once more in 1796 as one of three commissioners to negotiate with the Creek and Seminole nations in Georgia, and Clymer did something federal commissioners rarely did: he sided with the Creeks against what he judged illegal and rapacious attempts by Georgia to annex their land. The resulting treaty helped pull the southern tribes away from Spanish trade dependence.
The ending the others didn't get
Then the last act, and notice how unlike his friends' it is. At sixty-four Clymer became the first president of the newly chartered Philadelphia Bank, and in 1805 the first president of the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and he held both posts until he died. He put twenty-two years into the trusteeship of the college that became Penn, an institution his uncle had helped Franklin found, though Clymer himself never attended it or any school. He died on January 23, 1813 at his son Henry's home after a brief illness, and was buried in a Quaker burial ground near Trenton.
No bankruptcy. No auction. No flight from creditors. Of the money men in this series, the Revolution's treasurer is the one who died holding a bank presidency, and he's the one without a fresco, a statue on Wacker Drive, or a Yale journal article calling him lost. Memory, it turns out, runs on drama, and Clymer's genius was the prevention of drama: supplies that arrived, banks that didn't fail, taxes collected without a war, a treaty instead of a land grab. I compared how all four of the Revolution's money men ended, and what actually separated the solvent from the ruined, in a companion piece on the W-2 Trap blog, because the pattern is a personal-finance lesson wearing a tricorn hat.
Related reading
- Robert Morris: The Founding Father in the Capitol Dome Nobody Can Name: Clymer's Committee of Safety colleague, Executive Committee partner, and cautionary mirror image.
- James Wilson Drafted the Constitution and Died Hiding From His Creditors: the second of the six dual signers this series covers.
- Haym Salomon: The Immigrant Broker Who Kept the Revolution Solvent: the man converting the loans while Clymer moved the flour.
- William Bingham Was the Richest Man in Early America. You've Never Heard of Him.: the other founder who kept his fortune.
Fact-check notes and sources
- Biography (birth 1739, orphaned at seven, William Coleman guardianship and his Franklin partnership, Woodford, no formal education, business records at fourteen, own firm 1759, grandfather's and father's estates including enslaved people, Coleman's will freeing his three slaves, 1765 marriage to Elizabeth Meredith, Reese Meredith "second in wealth only to Robert Morris" and Washington lodging with the Merediths, Stamp Act non-importation, tea-ship episode of December 1773, joint treasurer of the united colonies, Committee of Safety with Franklin and Morris, rewriting the delegation instructions, election July 20 and signing August 2, refusal to sign the state constitution, the three-man Executive Committee with Robert Morris and George Walton, Ticonderoga and hospital work, four months at Fort Pitt, the 1777 British detour to loot his Chester County home, the Pennsylvania Bank of 1780 and the commissioner general's "kept the army from dissolution" verdict, Hamilton's interest, no participant profit, the 1787 Convention and the ratification maneuver, first-Congress votes, supervisor of revenue and 1794 resignation before the Whiskey Rebellion, the 1796 Creek and Seminole treaty and siding with the Creeks, Philadelphia Bank presidency at sixty-four, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts presidency from 1805, twenty-two years as a Penn trustee, death January 23, 1813): DSDI, George Clymer.
- Corroboration (1739-1813, orphaned childhood and small paternal legacy including an enslaved man, trading firm by 1759, 1765 marriage, August 2 signing as part of the new delegation, "one of only six men who signed the Declaration and the Constitution," the vandalized Chester County home, congressional service 1776-77 and 1780-82, the private supply bank, single House term, death after a brief illness at 73): National Constitution Center, George Clymer.
- The tea-ship credit is attributed to DSDI's Clymer biography; DSDI's Robert Morris page credits Morris with a similar persuasion as port warden, and this series reports each as its source states it.
This post is informational, not financial advice. Historical institutions are mentioned as nominative fair use; no affiliation is implied.
