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Gerry, Elbridge

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fun fact: grandson namesake on NY? commission approved electric chair

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Elbridge Thomas Gerry (/ˈɛlbrɪdʒ ˈɡɛri/; July 17, 1744 (O.S. July 6, 1744) – November 23, 1814) was an American statesman and diplomat. As a Democratic-Republican he was selected as the fifth Vice President of the United States (1813–1814), serving under James Madison. He is known best for being the namesake of gerrymandering, a process by which electoral districts are drawn with the aim of aiding the party in power, although its initial "g" has softened to /dʒ/ from the hard /ɡ/ of his name.[2]

Born into a wealthy merchant family, Gerry vocally opposed British colonial policy in the 1760s, and was active in the early stages of organizing the resistance in the American Revolutionary War.

Elected to the Second Continental Congress, Gerry signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. He was one of three men who attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787 but refused to sign the United States Constitution because it did not then include a Bill of Rights. After its ratification he was elected to the inaugural United States Congress, where he was actively involved in drafting and passage of the Bill of Rights as an advocate of individual and state liberties.

Gerry was at first opposed to the idea of political parties, and cultivated enduring friendships on both sides of the political divide between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. He was a member of a diplomatic delegation to France that was treated poorly in the XYZ Affair, in which Federalists held him responsible for the breakdown in negotiations.

Gerry thereafter became a Democratic-Republican, running unsuccessfully for Governor of Massachusetts several times before winning the office in 1810. During his second term, the legislature approved new state senate districts that led to the coining of the word "gerrymander"; he lost the next election, although the state senate remained Republican. Chosen by Madison as his vice presidential candidate in 1812, Gerry was elected, but died a year and a half into his term. He is the only signer of the Declaration of Independence who is buried in Washington, D.C.

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Early life

Elbridge Gerry was born on July 17, 1744, in Marblehead, Massachusetts. His father, Thomas Gerry, was a merchant operating ships out of Marblehead, and his mother, Elizabeth (Greenleaf) Gerry, was the daughter of a successful Boston merchant.[3] Gerry's first name came from John Elbridge, one of his mother's ancestors.[4] Gerry's parents had eleven children in all, although only five survived to adulthood.

Of these, Elbridge was the third.[5] He was first educated by private tutors, and entered Harvard College shortly before turning fourteen. After receiving a B.A. in 1762 and an M.A. in 1765, he entered his father's merchant business. By the 1770s the Gerrys numbered among the wealthiest Massachusetts merchants, with trading connections in Spain, the West Indies, and along the North American coast.[3][6] Gerry's father, who had migrated from England in 1730, was active in local politics and had a leading role in the local militia.[7]

Early political career

Gerry was from an early time a vocal opponent of Parliamentary efforts to tax the colonies after the French and Indian War ended in 1763. In 1770 he sat on a Marblehead committee that sought to enforce importation bans on taxed British goods. He frequently communicated with other Massachusetts opponents of British policy, including Samuel Adams, John Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and others.[3]

In May 1772 he won election to the General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (its legislative assembly). There he worked closely with Samuel Adams to advance colonial opposition to Parliamentary colonial policies. He was responsible for establishing Marblehead's committee of correspondence, one of the first to be set up after that of Boston.[8]

However, an incident of mob action prompted him to resign from the committee the next year. Gerry and other prominent Marbleheaders had established a hospital for performing smallpox inoculations on Cat Island; because the means of transmission of the disease were not known at the time, fears amongst the local population led to protests which escalated into violence that wrecked the facilities and threatened the proprietors' other properties.[9]

Gerry reentered politics after the Boston Port Act closed that city's port in 1774, and Marblehead became a port to which relief supplies from other colonies could be delivered. As one of the town's leading merchants and Patriots, Gerry played a major role in ensuring the storage and delivery of supplies from Marblehead to Boston, interrupting those activities only to care for his dying father. He was elected as a representative to the First Continental Congress in September 1774, but refused, still grieving the loss of his father.[10]

Congress and Revolution ....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_Gerry

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Gerry, Elbridge T. (Elbridge Thomas), 1837-1927.

Lawyer, philanthropist. Gerry was an 1857 graduate of Columbia College. He founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and was chairman of the legislative committee that abolished hanging in favor of the electric chair as capital punishment in New York State. He also worked with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and was chairman for the New York City commission for the insane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_T._Gerry,_Sr.

Elbridge T. Gerry, Sr., a.k.a. Ebby Gerry, (1908–1999) was an American banker and polo player.[1][2]

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Biography

Early life

His great-great-grandfather was Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.[1] His uncles were New York Gov. W. Averell Harriman and E. Roland Harriman.