George Read

George Read was born in 1733 in Cecil County, Maryland, studied law, and became a leading attorney in Delaware. He served as the colony's attorney general and sat in the Continental Congress. On 2 July 1776 he voted against independence, thinking the step premature; Caesar Rodney's ride that day carried Delaware's vote the other way. Read nevertheless signed the engrossed Declaration, accepting the decision of the Congress once it had been made. He later signed the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and he was a United States senator and chief justice of Delaware. His record is valuable for students precisely because it is not simple: a cautious lawyer who said no in July, then bound himself to the new nation and helped write its later frame of government. He died in 1798.

See also: Signers of the Declaration · Caesar Rodney · Thomas McKean