We the Bachelors By JOHN G. McCURDY BY July 4, 1776, Elbridge Gerry had tired of independence. A delegate at the Second Continental Congress, Gerry had worked for months to secure his country's freedom. But in the oppressive heat of a Philadelphia summer, Gerry's mind turned to the woman he had left behind in Massachusetts. While America's freedom was important to Gerry, he was simultaneously determined to extinguish a more personal type of independence: his bachelorhood. Mere days from his 32nd birthday, Gerry was already an old bachelor by 18th-century standards. Abigail Adams was particularly cold toward him. Although she tried to forgive Gerry "because he is a stranger to domestic felicity," she confessed to her husband, John, that she could not reconcile herself to "the stoicism which every bachelor discovers." Sadly for Gerry, his progress toward matrimony proved unsuccessful. Although he courted Catherine Hunt throughout the summer, by September he returned to Philadelphia still a bachelor. Elbridge Gerry was not the only man to struggle with the taint of bachelorhood in Revolutionary America. As the delegates created a new nation, they assailed sexual immorality, luxury and sloth -- all of which they associated with the single life. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania advised a young man to wed for his own health "for your disorder is seldom met with in married life," while Benjamin Franklin made a small fortune with such aphorisms as "a man without a wife is but half a man." Nor was it just inside Independence Hall that bachelors were scorned. For 80 years, Pennsylvania had collected a levy on single men who earned wages but did not own property. This tax had been devised as a means of easing the burden on men with large families, but it had become increasingly onerous for the colony's bachelors. Since the 1740s, landless singles had been paying higher taxes than 90 percent of property owners. At the same time, these bachelors were denied the right to vote because they owned no property. As we commemorate Independence Day, we often remember the familial connections of our founders: John and Abigail, George and Martha. It's a way to integrate women into the story, but also reminds us that the delegates were working not for themselves but for future generations. Single men fall out of this narrative, rebuked by the Revolutionaries and historians as selfish men who chose personal pleasure over duty to country. Yet to tell such a story misstates what really happened in Independence Hall in the summer of 1776. Not far from Elbridge Gerry sat 46-year-old Joseph Hewes of North Carolina. In his youth Hewes had courted a governor's daughter, but a few days before the wedding, his fianc¨Ĥe died. Heartbroken, Hewes lived out the rest of his life a bachelor. Also in attendance was Caesar Rodney, the frail delegate from Delaware. Rodney never married, instead keeping house with his sister and helping to raise his brother and nephew. Hewes and Rodney were decidedly less self-conscious about their marital status than Gerry, and they devoted themselves to the cause of independence. Hewes worked himself into an early grave. Rodney earned his place on the back of the Delaware quarter for his midnight ride to cast the deciding vote for independence and was his state's governor. For these men, bachelorhood was a personal difference that separated them from the rest of the delegates, but it hardly impeded their work. Indeed, this may be the most profound lesson we can derive from our bachelor founders. Although they envisioned a nation built on morals and families, the men who declared independence dreamed of a country where the intimate details of one's life did not matter to citizenship. Bachelorhood might be an undesirable lifestyle, but it should not abrogate a man's rights. A week after Congress completed its work, another group of delegates met in Philadelphia to put this theory to the test. Convening to draft Pennsylvania's first constitution, these delegates swept away the laws that required bachelors' taxation without representation. Henceforth all men who paid taxes would have the right to vote. Significantly, the Pennsylvania Constitution did not seek to empower bachelors -- it did not even mention them by name -- it simply asserted that all men were to be treated equally. After his disappointing courtship in 1776, Elbridge Gerry returned to Congress. Finally, in 1786, he married Ann Thompson and began a family. Yet Gerry stood at the dawn of a new era when personal differences -- first marital status, but later sex and race -- no longer mattered in determining one's citizenship. John Gilbert McCurdy, an assistant professor of history at Eastern Michigan University, is the author of "Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States."