Abraham Clark

Abraham Clark was born in 1726 in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, worked as a surveyor and as a lawyer who often took the causes of ordinary neighbors, and earned the nickname of the poor man's counselor. He sat in the provincial congress, was sent to the Continental Congress, and signed the Declaration of Independence. He remained a long-serving member of Congress during the war and was known for distrust of privilege and of a standing army. Two of his sons who served in the Continental Army were captured and held in British prisons; the family felt the cost of the war in a direct way. After independence Clark sat in the federal Congress and opposed measures he thought favored the wealthy. He died in 1794. His public life was less famous than that of some other signers, but it was consistent: a local man who took on a dangerous office and stayed with it.

See also: Signers of the Declaration · Richard Stockton · John Witherspoon · Francis Hopkinson · John Hart