tator? Just a dabbler in pseudoscience; a successful printer with an unsavory youth; a shrewd old publicist with an eye to the main chance.
Thomas Jefferson, statesman, philosopher, architect, musician? Stuff! He was a rich young aristocrat with a dilettante's relish for the excitements of public life.
John Adams, fearless champion of unpopular causes? Pah! An ambitious Massachusetts lawyer who had recently defended the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre case and who had now switched to the other side.
Their Motives Maligned
And so on and on and on. Beginning around 1920, and continuing even to the present, it has been open season on the signers. What were their motives? What personal advantages did they seek? What selfish interests did they serve? Hardly anyone of them was spared derogatory questions, innuendoes, accusations.
It was even pointed out that some of the signers had come into the Congress after action had been taken on the Declaration; and it was implied that there was something strange, and possibly reprehensible, about their desire to affix their signatures ex post facto!
Some writers with the iconoclastic urge made much of the fact that among the fifty-six signers there were twenty-two lawyers, ten merchants, and fourteen wealthy land owners; and one such writer was almost tearfully indignant because the great Document bore no signature of either a laboring man or a dirt farmer. The implica-
