Quincyan’s Ancestor Signed Declaration of Independence

This
space last week detailed the way in which the death of an ancestor of the late
Quincy physician, Alcee Jumonville III, caused the French and Indian War. That
event, the murder by Major George Washington’s British troops of French Ensign
Joseph de Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville in the Upper Ohio Valley ignited an
even more important occurrence in American history, the American Revolution.
Quincy is directly connected to that history, as well.

About halfway down the far right
column of signatures on the Declaration of Independence is the shaky penmanship
of Stephen Hopkins, the former ten-term governor of Rhode Island. At 69 years
of age, Hopkins was the second oldest of the 56 men—Benjamin Franklin at 81 was
oldest—who were signing their death warrants in declaring independence from
Great Britain. Hopkins was a direct ancestor of the late David Sanders of
Quincy, who for 33 years taught biology, microbiology, and zoology in Quincy
schools.

Hopkins’s signature is easily
recognizable. He suffered from palsy. In affixing his signature, he tried to
control his quivering right hand with his left. Historians write that as he shakily
signed the document, he said, “My hand trembles, but my heart is steady.” Here’s
the Hopkins and Sanders story:

After the murder of 35-year-old
French Ensign Jumonville near today’s Pittsburgh on May 27, 1754, the French
and British fought seven years for control of the American continent. Great
Britain won the war, secured its American colony’s borders, and acquired
significant French territory in Canada and the Floridas. But the war left
Britain heavily in debt, and British and
Dutch bankers who financed the war were demanding repayment.

It was the way Britain proposed to
pay down the debt that brought one of the first and one of the strongest
protests in 1764 by Stephen Hopkins, governor of the British Rhode Island
colony. The late David Sanders’s grandmother was born a Hopkins. It meant that Sanders,
who died on November 29, 2017, also was related to Benedict Arnold, the
Revolutionary War officer who rose to the rank of major general before
defecting to the British in 1780. Arnold was Stephen Hopkins’s cousin.

Britain’s King George II believed
that since the war saved American colonists from the French, the colonists
should be responsible for the debt. The British Parliament in 1765 passed a
Stamp Tax, the first direct tax on the colonists, which was assessed on every
document printed or used in America. In addition, Britain began to post regular
army units in America and required the colonists to pay for quartering them.
Parliament next imposed duties on china, glass, lead, paint, sugar, and molasses imported from Britain. Most
antagonizing was the Tea Act of 1773, which was designed not to raise revenue
but to bail out the failing British East India Company. The act gave the company
monopoly status for importing and selling tea in the colonies.

Hopkins was among the first
firebrands for independence in the colonies. With his brother Esek, he had
built and outfitted ships for American trade at Atlantic ports. The British
required that goods be shipped only on British ships, which infuriated Hopkins.
In 1744 he was elected to the Rhode Island General Assembly, served as an
associate justice of the state supreme court from 1747 to 1749, and became
chief justice in 1751.

In 1754 Hopkins attended a
conference at Albany in 1754 at which Benjamin Franklin proposed an alliance of
the colonies, which Hopkins supported. Franklin’s proposal failed, but the
conference cemented a lifelong friendship of the two men called radicals in
their day.

In 1764, Hopkins wrote a 25-page
pamphlet, “The Rights of the Colonies Examined,” widely circulated in American
and Great Britain, which condemned British taxation without representation. His
colleagues knew him as a man fearless against the British where liberty was
threatened. In an incendiary speech in 1774 to the First Continental Congress that
colonial patriot Paul Revere recorded,
Hopkins said, “Powder and ball will decide this question. The gun
and bayonet alone will finish the contest in which we are engaged, and any of
you who cannot bring your minds to this mode of adjusting the question had
better retire in time.”

Dave Sanders was in the line of
ancestry whose generations from the time of Stephen Hopkins had been involved
in American wars from the Revolution to World War II. Sanders and his brothers
William and James, a bronze star winner, were World War II veterans. Their
Uncle George Day served in World War I, and their father David fought in Cuba,
one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, during the Spanish-American War.
Grandfather William V. Sanders was a Union Army lieutenant in the Civil War,
and six great uncles were imprisoned at Andersonville during that test of
national endurance. Great Uncle David Hopkins fought at the Battle of Horseshoe
Bend under General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. David Hopkins’s father
Ephraim, cousin of Stephen Hopkins, had been a minuteman in Boston in the war
Stephen Hopkins helped to launch.

Sanders left high school before he
finished his final semester in 1944 to join the Marine Corps. His high school
awarded him the half-credit in American history he needed to graduate. He
trained at San Diego and Ft. Pendleton and deployed as an electronic
communications expert operating equipment that scrambled and decoded messages
in his assignments in the Pacific. He was with the Sixth Marine Division when
it reclaimed Okinawa.

When the Japanese sought peace in
the Pacific after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sanders was
aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri where he witnessed Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu
and Supreme Allied Commander General Douglas MacArthur sign the treaty that
ended the war in the Pacific and World War II. Sanders was discharged from the
Marines in May 1946. Full military honors were conducted at his gravesite at
Sunset Cemetery at the Illinois Veterans Home.

Sources

“David
Sanders, 1926-2017,”

Herald-Whig

,

David
Sanders, interview by Reg Ankrom, June 2, 2015.

Foster,
William E.

Stephen Hopkins: A Rhode Island Statesman.

(Providence:
Sidney S. Rider, 1884), 207.

Goodrich,
Charles Augustus.

Lives of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence.

(Murrieta, California: R.W. Classic Books,
2018), 166.

Hopkins,
Stephen. “The Rights of Colonies Examined.” Booklet. Providence, Rhode Island, 1764.

Millar,
John F.

Stephen Hopkins, Architect of American Independence, 1707-1785

.
(Newport, Rhode Island: Journal of the Newport
Historical Society, Winer 1980), 31.

Sanderson,
John.

Sanderson’s Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of
Independence.

Robert T. Conrad, ed.
(Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co., 1874) 200.

“Stephen
Hopkins,” Society for the Descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence,

Stephen-Hopkins

Stewart,
Thomas C. “A shaky hand but steady heart.”

Washington Times,

July 3,
2017.