Untitled - the Digital Library of Georgia

282 GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS
"Veni, vidi, vici." But lie reached the Continental Congress too late
to participate in the momentous drama of signing the immortal protest
against oppression. The bonfires had been kindled in the streets of Phil
adelphia, and from the belfry of old Independence Hall the sweet siren
of liberty had commenced to sing.
It is sorely to be regretted that the name of this patriotic Georgian
was not appended to the great charter of liberty, for he was no less
wedded to the sacred cause than were the men whose names were in
scribed upon the deathless roll of honor. He was in just desert if not
in actual fact one of the Georgia signers. Mr. Houstoun was the son
of old Sir Patrick Houstoun, a baronet whose conservative inclinations
were so partial to the fence that he was denounced first by the Tory and
then by the Whig government, perhaps unjustly by the latter; but he
gave the patriotic cause two sons, John and William, whose knee-joints
were too stiff with the starch of liberty to crook in obsequious homage
to the king. Mr. Houstoun was twice governor, and died in 1796 well
advanced in years.
As for Doctor Zubly, he was banished from Savannah in 1777 and
took refuge in South Carolina; but when the town fell into the hands
of the British in 1778, he returned to Savannah and resumed pastoral
work among the uncontaminated members of the flock who drank the
king's tea. But he was not the same man. Broken in health, and in
fortune, he failed rapidly and died in 1781 on the eve of the evacuation
of the city by the British. Thus sank into ignominious eclipse one of
the brightest luminaries that lit the gray horizon of the revolutionary
dawn in Georgia.
George Walton, who sprang from an old Virginia family, became
the most distinguished member of the group of signers. He was twice
governor, six times congressman, an officer in the Revolution, chief jus
tice of the state, judge of the Superior Court and United States senator.
Doctor Hall afterwards occupied the gubernatorial chair. He was an
eminent physician from Connecticut, who early became the foremost
champion of liberty in the parish of St. John, and who was sent by
the parish as an independent delegate to the Continental Congress, be
fore the colony at large was sufficiently aroused to demand representa
tion. He lived at Sunbury, where Governor Wright located the head of
the republican disaffection in Georgia, stating that it came from the
Puritan settlers who had imbibed too freely the vicious principles of
Oliver Cromwell.
Button Gwinnett was an Englishman who became identified with
the colony only four years before the Declaration was signed; but the
short period of his residence in the colony only serves to lay emphasis
upon his zeal in the cause. He, too, lived at Sunbury, but the thrifty
little town which in the old colonial days was an enterprising commer
cial center, sufficiently infused with the patriotic ardor to give two
signers to the Declaration of Independence, is today numbered among
the buried towns of Georgia, and as if the very memories of the Revolu
tion had germinated upon the saeret spot, it sleeps enfolded in an
evergreen mantle of bermuda. Soon after the war began, Mr. Gwinnett
became involved in personal difficulties with General Lachlan Melntosh,
growing out of the latter's appointment to the brigadier-generalship in