19 of 56 · New Jersey
STOCKTON
A Martyr's Guide
28 lessons. 4 chapters. In his own words.
Captured, starved, broken, paroled. He recanted under duress and spent the rest of a short life trying to stand up again.
Richard Stockton · 1730–1781 · Jurist · prisoner
01
Taken in the Night
1 of 4
The night is when they come for the name.
“If something of the kind was not done, the result would be an obstinate, awful, and tremendous war.”
Richard Stockton to Lord Dartmouth · 1774
He had tried a plan: colonial self-rule, loyalty to the Crown, no war. Dartmouth did not take it. Two years later Stockton signed. November 30, 1776, Loyalists dragged him from a friend's bed in Monmouth, nightshirt and weather. He had predicted the war. The war came to the bedroom.
Do not assume a gentleman's arrest.
“The public is generally unthankful, and I never will become a Servant of it, till I am convinced that by neglecting my own affairs I am doing more acceptable service to God and Man.”
Richard Stockton, on taking office · n.d.
He had not wanted the public. He took it. The public did not get him a parole of honor at the door. Irons. Treated as a criminal, not a captive officer. The night does not read your scruples. It reads the list.
Leave the house before the list is served.
“My heart melts with compassion for my brave countrymen who are thus venturing their lives in the public service and yet so distressed.”
Letter to Abraham Clark · 1776
He had been north with the army, begging shoes for barefoot Jersey men at Ticonderoga. Then home to move the family. Then taken. Service does not immunize you. It locates you. Move earlier than dignity prefers.
A signer is a wanted man by definition.
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
First New Jersey name on the parchment. First of the fifty-six taken specifically as a signatory. The pledge is not poetry. It is a warrant the other side can serve. Write it knowing the knock has a calendar.
They take jurists in the night because jurists signed.
“He was dragged from his bed by a party of loyalists and delivered to the British.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
From his bed. The law did not protect the lawyer. That is the news. Do not be shocked. Be gone before dawn, or be ready not to be.
A captured signer is a trophy. Do not help them mount it.
“He was carried to New York and imprisoned.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
New York, occupied. A trophy in a garrison town. Starve before you entertain them. Silence is a kind of uniform.
Leave a back door in the plan. Pride is not a sentry.
“He had retired to his seat at Morven, thinking himself safe.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Thinking himself safe. That sentence is how captures happen. Safety is a moving condition. Keep moving.
02
The Prison Ship
2 of 4
The cell does not care what you signed in ink.
“There is not a single shoe or stocking to be had in this part of the world, or I would ride a hundred miles through the woods, and purchase them with my own money.”
Letter to Abraham Clark · 1776
Weeks earlier he would have spent his own purse on stockings for the army. Then Perth Amboy. Then the Provost in New York, and the hulks in the harbor. Irons, cold, starvation. Compassion does not pad a cell. It does tell you who he was before they broke the body.
Congress can remonstrate. You still sit the jail.
“Ignominiously thrown into a common gaol and there detained.”
Resolution of the Continental Congress, on Stockton · 1777
January 3: Congress asked Washington to inquire. Stockton was already near release, health ruined. Remonstrance is what colleagues do. It does not warm the first month. Do not confuse a resolution with a rescue.
Five weeks can unmake a constitution.
“Judge Stockton is not very well in health & much spoken against for his conduct.”
John Witherspoon to his son · 1777
Witherspoon was his friend, his recruiter to Princeton, his colleague in Congress. He told the truth: sick, and the room had turned. Prison is designed to make the next bargain look like air. It often works. That is the point of the hulks.
Remember the men you tried to shoe.
“Shall the brave troops from New Jersey stand in lines half leg deep in snow without shoes or stocking — God forbid.”
Letter to Abraham Clark · 1776
He emptied his own portmanteau of stockings except one pair. Then he learned the other half of Jersey's winter: the prison. The army's bare feet and the signer's irons are the same war. Hold both pictures. Pity that cannot survive its own captivity was never pity.
The prison ship is the other half of the signature.
“He suffered extremely from cold and want of food.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Cold and want. The parchment did not mention the hull. It is implied. Endure without a speech. Speeches rot in a hold.
Starvation is a policy. Treat it as one.
“The treatment of the American prisoners at New York was barbarous.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Barbarous is a moral word for a method. They meant to buy recantations cheap. Price yours infinitely.
A body that leaves the ship is not the body that boarded.
“His health was irreparably broken.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Irreparably. Some receipts cannot be reversed. That does not unsay the name. It only shortens the remainder. Spend the remainder standing if you can.
03
The Ugly Bargain
3 of 4
Some bargains are made with a ruined body.
“He signed Howe's declaration & also gave his word of honor that he would not meddle in the least in American affairs during the war.”
John Witherspoon to his son · 1777
Howe's pardon was on the table the day Stockton was taken. After irons and a common jail he took it. Parole: live, go home, do not meddle. Ugly. Human. The parchment does not have a footnote for duress. History does, if it is honest.
Do not pretend the room will be kind about it.
“Judge Stockton of the Jerseys who was also a member of Congress has sued for pardon. I wish every timid Whig or pretended Whig in America would pursue the same plan.”
Elbridge Gerry to James Warren · 1776
Gerry was savage from a safe seat. Clark wrote that Stockton 'by his late procedure cannot act.' Hancock: he has taken Howe's protection. The ugly bargain saves the life and spends the name in the room. Know that before you break.
Resign when you can no longer act.
“The public is generally unthankful, and I never will become a Servant of it, till I am convinced that by neglecting my own affairs I am doing more acceptable service to God and Man.”
Richard Stockton, on taking office · n.d.
February 15, 1777: he resigned the seat. The parole forbade the work. He had said he would serve only when it was real service. When it could not be, he stopped. That is cleaner than sitting a chair you have sworn not to use.
Duress is an explanation, not a statue.
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
He pledged honor and then signed a second paper to stay alive. Hold both facts. A country that needs only marble signers will lie about this one. A country that can stand a broken jurist has grown up. Do not tidy him. Do not discard him.
The ugly bargain is still a bargain. Read it twice.
“He was released on parole, having given his word not to meddle in the war.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Not to meddle. That is a recantation with manners. If you must take it to live, take it as a wound, not as a theory.
A parole extracted from a starving man is not a philosophy.
“His friends lamented that he had been compelled to subscribe a declaration of allegiance.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Compelled. The word matters. So does the signature that preceded it. The first one is the one this library keeps. The second is a scar.
Do not confuse survival with a second vote.
“He never recovered his standing in the cause, nor his health.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Standing. The country is hard on the broken. Be gentler than the country if you sit in judgment on a starving jurist. Be harder on yourself if you are still fed.
04
The Name After
4 of 4
Write the last words as if the children will read them.
“As my children will have frequent occasion of perusing this instrument, and may probably be particularly impressed with the last words of their father, I think it proper here not only to subscribe to the entire belief of the great and leading doctrines of the Christian Religion … but also, in the bowels of a father's affection, to exhort and charge them, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”
Last will of Richard Stockton · 1780
May 20, 1780. Cancer coming. The parole behind him. He used the will as a creed. The name after the prison is not a speech in Congress. It is what you tell the children about God, vice, and why public life is a snare unless Providence forces it.
Do not covet the station that marked you.
“Distinguished abilities, stations and authority are only desirable as occasions of doing greater private and public good, but … unless public life is evidently pointed out by divine providence it should rather be avoided than coveted.”
Last will of Richard Stockton · 1780
He had coveted little and been taken anyway. He left the warning in the will: office attracts envy and wrecks private peace. Serve when you must. Do not love the chair. The chair did not love him back.
Let a friend bury you honestly.
“In council he was wise and firm, but always prudent and moderate. … A declining health and constitution worn out with application and with service obliged him, shortly after, to retire from the line of public duty, and hath at length dismissed him from the world.”
Samuel Stanhope Smith, funeral oration for Stockton · 1781
Nassau Hall. Witherspoon's son-in-law in the pulpit. No erasure of the parole, no cartoon of a martyr. Worn out. Dismissed. The name after can be a eulogy that does not lie. Demand that much for yourself.
Die before the peace. Leave the argument unfinished.
“Judge Stockton is not very well in health & much spoken against for his conduct.”
John Witherspoon to his son · 1777
February 28, 1781. Yorktown still months away. He did not get the scene of vindication. Morven plundered, body broken, name argued over, will in the children's hands. The name after is not a rehabilitation tour. It is a grave at Stony Brook and a parchment that still has his hand.
The name after the prison is a harder name. Keep it.
“He died at Princeton in 1781, in his fifty-first year.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Fifty-one, two years after the parole. The remainder was short and quiet. Quiet after a hold is not cowardice. It is a body finishing its term.
Let the first signature argue with the second. Do not erase either.
“His name remains among the signers.”
Sanderson, Biography of the Signers · 1823
Remains. Congress did not scrape him off the parchment. Neither should you. Complexity is not a disqualification. It is the cost.
A martyr with a parole is still a martyr. Stop requiring clean stories.
“We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
He pledged. He was broken. He pledged again in how he died, poor and early. Clean stories are for children. This library is not.