Elbridge Gerry

Biography

Elbridge Gerry was born in 1744 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, into a prosperous merchant family. He entered Harvard College at thirteen, took his BA in 1762 and his MA in 1765, and then joined his father's shipping business. An early opponent of Parliament's taxes on the colonies, he was elected to the Massachusetts assembly in 1772 and set up Marblehead's committee of correspondence. On the Provincial Congress's committee of safety he helped gather the military stores at Concord that the British marched to seize in April 1775, and through the war he used his trading contacts to supply the Continental Army.

In the Continental Congress from 1776 to 1780 he pressed delegates to support independence and signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787 he was one of three delegates who refused to sign the Constitution, chiefly because it lacked a bill of rights. Elected to the first House of Representatives, he served from 1789 to 1793 and helped shape the Bill of Rights, notably the protections of assembly and against unreasonable searches.

In 1797 President John Adams sent him with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and John Marshall to negotiate with France. When French agents demanded bribes, the talks collapsed in the XYZ Affair; Gerry stayed on in Paris under threat of war and was attacked by the Federalists for it. He joined the Democratic-Republicans in 1800 and lost four races for governor before winning in 1810.

In his second term as governor he signed a redistricting law whose oddly shaped state senate district gave rise to the word gerrymander, and he lost re-election in 1812. That year he was elected vice president on James Madison's ticket. He served from March 1813 until his death in Washington in November 1814.