| | 1 | Name: | Gerard Bancker | | | Year Elected: | 1772 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1740 | | | Death Date: | 1798 | | | | |
| 2 | Name: | Daniel Coxe | | | Year Elected: | 1772 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 3 | Name: | Thomas Hutchins | | | Year Elected: | 1772 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1730 | | | Death Date: | 4/28/1789 | | | | | | |
Thomas Hutchins (c. 1730–28 April 1789) was a woodsman, cartographer, surveyor, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1772. Born on the New Jersey frontier and orphaned in childhood, Thomas Hutchins began surveying and making maps in 1760 as an Indian agent. He recorded his diplomatic missions to various tribes and typically produced maps of the regions he encountered. Having built a reputation as a skilled surveyor and mapmaker in North America, Hutchins received a British army commission to continue doing just that. Throughout the 1760’s and 1770’s, he joined multiple explorations surveying the Mississippi River Valley region, and later the southern colonies. All the while, Hutchins turned another profit with his surveying: acquiring land. In 1776, with the onset of the American Revolution, his promotion to captain enabled him to avoid combat and relocate to London. Two years later, he published a book on the natural history of the American northwestern frontier. Later, British authorities arrested him on treason charges for sympathizing with American patriots, but he was found innocent. The British’s suspicions were not unfounded, however, and shortly after being released, Hutchins went to Paris and took an oath of loyalty to the United States under Benjamin Franklin. In 1781 Congress employed him to serve in the south as a geographer, and he was later designated “Geographer of the United States''. Hutchinson was the first to use, and perhaps invented, the Township-Section-Range system, which is standard today. In 1788 Hutchinson secretly joined the Spanish effort to fortify New Spain, planning to renounce his American citizenship and work as surveyor-general to the Spanish Crown. He died in Pittsburgh before this could happen. (ANB) | |
| 4 | Name: | Henry Laurens | | | Year Elected: | 1772 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 2/24/1724 | | | Death Date: | 12/8/1792 | | | | | | |
Henry Laurens (24 February/6 March 1724–8 December 1792) was a planter-merchant, slave holder and trader, and public officeholder, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1772. He was born in Charleston, South Carolina to a wealthy family. In 1744 he apprenticed under a prominent London merchant for three years before returning to Charleston after his father died. With his inheritance, he opened up an export business dealing in deerskins, rice, rum, and slaves. He held 20,000 acres in plantation land as well as multiple residential properties. He accepted an election to the Assembly in 1757. Laurens believed that the crown did not respect the rights of its colonial citizens, declining an appointment to the Royal Council for this reason in 1764. However, he was also apprehensive of the growing revolutionary zeal; declaring his fealty to British law after the Sons of Liberty raided his basement during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765. As tensions between Britain and the Colonies increased, his sympathies shifted towards independence: in 1774 he joined the first South Carolina congress, became its president in 1775, and in 1776 he fought to defend Charleston. Seeing the inconsistency in his claim of exploitation by the hands of the British and his own slave-holding, Laurens freed the hundreds of enslaved people working on his plantation. He was a delegate to the continental congress from 1777 to 1779, also serving as its president from 1777-1778. In 1780 British naval forces captured him at sea, en route to the Netherlands. The crown charged him with treason and held him in the tower of London. In captivity, his health declined before Benjamin Franklin secured his release in 1781. Still, Laurens joined Franklin at the peace conference in Paris before returning to New York in 1784. His now failing health along with the news of his son’s death at the hands of British forces weighed on him until his death. Rather unusually, he requested that his former slaves build and ignite his funeral pyre. (ANB, DNB) | |
| 5 | Name: | Jesse Lukens | | | Year Elected: | 1772 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 6 | Name: | Arch McClean | | | Year Elected: | 1772 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 7 | Name: | George Milligan | | | Year Elected: | 1772 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 8 | Name: | Samuel Williams | | | Year Elected: | 1772 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1734 | | | Death Date: | 1 / /1817 | | | | |
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