It’s the Fourth of July, time to recall that courageous moment in our history when men in Philadelphia pledged their “lives’ fortunes and sacred honor” in a resolution that has become our nation’s birth certificate.

Though Maine as part of Massachusetts at the time did have representation of sorts at the Congress that forged our independence, we don’t often think of any connection our own state has to the event. None of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers was from Maine at the time, though one, New Hampshire’s William Whipple, was a Maine native. Another Granite state signer, Matthew Thornton, spent a winter of his life living in a ship off the Maine coast at the time his family was on its way from Ireland to help settle the colonies.

Whipple was born in Kittery but as a teenager went to sea to make a living and by the time he was 21 had become captain of a ship where, among other pursuits, he engaged in the slave trade, keeping some of the Africans he brought back as his own servants. This hypocrisy in a man who would later be one of liberty’s great crusaders is blunted a bit by cognizance that the small number of Whipple’s slaves paled by comparison with the 400 owned by the Declaration’s prime author, Thomas Jefferson, and actions by which Whipple liberated the slaves before his death.

Whipple gave up the seafaring life at age 30 when he joined his brother in a Portsmouth, N.H., business partnership. After signing the Declaration, Whipple became a soldier in the Revolution, one of only about l6 of the signers to do so. He served as a general in a number of wartime campaigns.

Matthew Thornton was a Londonderry, N.H., physician when he won attention for working so hard over a 10 day period as the state legislative president that he didn’t even take time to change his clothes. It is believed he made greater use of Philadelphia’s laundry facilities when a few months later he was sent there to do business with his more hygiene-oriented Congressional brethren.

It is nevertheless understood that he voluntarily relinquished his medical career after the war and served both as a state legislator and judge in New Hampshire until retirement to a farm in Merrimack where he continued to write political articles for newspapers until he was in his 80s.

An intriguing present-day Maine link to a Declaration of Independence signer is embodied in one our newest state officials, Kingfield’s John Witherspoon, who in April became head of the Finance Authority of Maine.

Witherspoon has a dual connection to one of the more prominent signers. Not only is Witherspoon a direct descendant of a brother to a signer. He is also named for him.

Witherspoon’s name-sake was president of Princeton University at this time in 1776. Leader of the Presbyterian Church, he was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration.

When pointing out the differences between the English spoken in Britain with that spoken in the United States, the 18th-century John Witherspoon in 178l coined the term “Americanism,” the first known use of the expression.

Maine’s present-day John Witherspoon took one of the tiniest banks in the country, Kingfield Savings, now known as United Kingfield, and expanded it over a 20-year period into one of the fastest growing and most influential lending institutions in west central Maine by the time of its merger with Camden National nearly five years ago. He recently finished his sixth year on the local school board.

I’ll remember Witherspoon most for his civic activism in Kingfield at a time in the l980s when this columnist was the town’s moderator. Despite an understandable reluctance of most banking and business leaders to thrust themselves into the vortex of local political controversy, neither Witherspoon nor his wife, Cathy – in more recent years director of the Sugarloaf ski school program – shirked from a battle when hot topics were on the line.

Both of them would bring their convictions to the floor of Kingfield town meeting and engage in the debate, occasionally taking issue with the established view of municipal leadership and at other times siding with it. Their civic minded enthusiasm was a page out of the book by the original John Witherspoon himself.

South Portland attorney Meg Johnson is another Mainer with family ties to a Declaration signer. Johnson is a direct descendant of John Hart, who, like Witherspoon, was a delegate from New Jersey. Johnson, like the modern day Witherspoon, has also engaged in a career that’s had significant public service overtones.

Granddaughter of Maine Maritime Academy founder Ralph Leavitt, Johnson was attorney for the Public Advocate’s office at the state PUC and later, while co-chair of the State Bar Association’s Family Law Section, has become one of the more active court-appointed overseers of child custody matters at this time in Maine.

Only a few months after the Declaration, John Hart had to flee his home to avoid capture by British troops. At some 65-years of age, Hart had to sleep in caves and outdoors in the hills around Sourland Mountain, N.J., to which the British had pursued him in cold December weather. Though he was able to return to his home town of Hopewell after Washington’s victory in the Battle of Princeton in 1777, he was never able to resume a normal life.

In his absence, Redcoats had destroyed his home and other possessions and his heartbroken wife had also succumbed. His own health laid waste by his fugitive existence, Hart died in May 1779. His fate is one of the more dramatic illustrations of the risks our country’s founders took at that time and that we commemorate today on this Fourth of July.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney, well-known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail at pmills@midmaine.com.

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