| 1 | Name: | George Clymer | |
| Year Elected: | 1786 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 3/16/1739 | ||
| Death Date: | 1/23/1813 | ||
George Clymer (16 March 1739–23 January 1813) was a politician and merchant and a member of the Young Junto (elected in 1759) and American Philosophical Society (elected in 1786). Born in Philadelphia, he was orphaned at a young age and adopted by his uncle William Coleman, a wealthy merchant and founding APS member. In adulthood Clymer’s merchant business made him one of the wealthiest men in the city and a force in local politics. An early supporter of American independence, he served on several Philadelphia resistance committees and, jointly with APS member Michael Hillegas, as Treasurer of the United Colonies. Clymer was then elected to the Second Continental Congress, where he sat on the boards of treasury and war and signed the Declaration of Independence. After inspecting military outposts at Albany, Ticonderoga, and Saratoga, he was part of the three-person congressional executive committee that remained in Philadelphia during its evacuation. As a delegate to the Pennsylvania constitutional convention, Clymer refused to sign the state’s radical new constitution and rose to prominence in the Republican party for his efforts to repeal it in the Pennsylvania Assembly. In order to finance the war effort, he helped found the Bank of Pennsylvania. He signed the federal Constitution and advocated for the location of the new nation’s capital in Philadelphia. And he served in the first U.S. Congress, in the unpopular position of supervisor of revenue for Pennsylvania, and on the commission that negotiated the 1796 Treaty of Coleraine with the Creek Indians of Georgia. A member of several voluntary societies and a donor to numerous charities, his retirement found him serving as president of the Philadelphia Bank and the Academy of Fine Arts, vice-president of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, and trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. (PI, ANB, DNB) | |||