| 1 | Name: | George Bryan | |
| Year Elected: | |||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1731 | ||
| Death Date: | 1/28/1791 | ||
George Bryan (11 August 1731–27 January 1791) was a politician, jurist, and polemicist and a member of the Young Junto (elected c. 1750) and American Philosophical Society (elected in 1768). Born in Dublin, Ireland, he immigrated to Philadelphia in 1752, where he ran a mercantile business and became active in Presbyterian church governance and provincial politics. In 1764 he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly, where he worked to address frontier defense and proprietary privilege, and appointed to the Court of Common Pleas. And in 1780 he became a justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Bryan was also a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress held in New York in 1765, signed the Non-Importation Agreement, and served as port officer for Philadelphia in 1776. He was the primary author of the “Centinel” essays published in 1768 to oppose an Anglican episcopate in America. (His son Samuel Bryan would publish a series of Anti-Federalist essays, to which the elder Bryan contributed, under the same title from 1787 to 1788.) A lifelong proponent of simple, decentralized governance serving the poor and disempowered, Bryan was an outspoken supporter of Pennsylvania’s controversial new constitution, which he helped to draft, publishing essays defending its unicameral legislature and executive council; he was elected to that council in 1777, serving as vice-president and de facto president. Thereafter, he returned to the Pennsylvania Assembly, where he succeeded in ratifying the first act for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the United States. A staunch Anti-Federalist, he opposed the U.S. Constitution and the Bank of North America. But he was on the losing end of both the ratification debates and the local conflicts that saw bicameralism and gubernatorial rule reinstated in Pennsylvania in 1790. (PI, ANB, DNB, DAB) | |||