William Ellery

William Ellery (1727–1820) was an American merchant, lawyer, and statesman who signed the Declaration of Independence as a delegate from Rhode Island. He was born in Newport, the son of a deputy governor of the colony, and graduated from Harvard College in 1747 at the age of twenty.

Ellery returned to Newport and worked variously as a merchant, customs collector, and clerk of the Rhode Island General Assembly before being admitted to the bar in 1770 at age forty-three. He became active in the Sons of Liberty in the 1760s, opposing the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties, and was elected to the Continental Congress in May 1776 to fill a seat vacated by the death of Samuel Ward.

He arrived in Philadelphia in time to vote for independence and to sign the engrossed Declaration on August 2, 1776. He later wrote that he had positioned himself near the table to watch each delegate's expression as they signed. British forces occupied Newport from December 1776 until October 1779 and burned his Newport house and many of his papers in retaliation for his signature.

Ellery served in the Continental Congress on and off through 1786, sitting on the Marine Committee and the Board of Admiralty, and signed the Articles of Confederation in 1778. He was an early and outspoken opponent of slavery in Rhode Island. President George Washington appointed him collector of the port of Newport in 1790, a post he held for thirty years until his death at age ninety-two in 1820, the last surviving signer from Rhode Island.

Etymology: William comes from the Old Germanic Wilhelm, combining wil "will" and helm "helmet, protection," giving the sense "resolute protector." It came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and has remained one of the most enduring boy names in the English-speaking world, holding steady as a top-five boy name across colonial New England. He carried it through three decades of revolution and republic.