John Morton, Decisive Signer

A house once stood on this ground where John Morton was born in about seventeen twenty-five. He might be the most consequential voter in American history that almost no one remembers. When the Continental Congress moved toward a vote on independence in July of seventeen seventy-six, Pennsylvania was divided.

Two of its delegates opposed independence outright. Morton, a farmer and judge from Delaware County, cast the deciding ballot, joining Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson to give Pennsylvania to the cause of independence by a single vote. Without Pennsylvania, the declaration of a unified colonial break with Britain would have collapsed.

Morton paid a price. Former friends shunned him as a traitor, and he died in April of seventeen seventy-seven, just months after affixing his name to the document. His last words, by some accounts, were a rebuke to those who had abandoned him: tell them that they will live to see the hour when they shall acknowledge it to have been the most glorious service I ever rendered my country.