The Declaration of Independence is the most powerful document defining individual freedom known to the world. For the Founding Fathers who signed it, they knew they were risking the lives of their families and their own. The last sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads:

The price they paid for our freedom should not go untold.

This story was reprinted from One Hundred Famous Fathers, by Meldrim Thomson, Jr.

Thomas Nelson, Jr. was born on December 26, 1738 and died on January 4, 1789. He was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence who best demonstrated by his conduct what the delegates meant when they pledged to support the Declaration "with our lives, our fortunes and our scared honor."

He was the oldest of five sons. After graduating from Hackney School and Cambridge University in England, he returned to Virginia to help his father manage his huge plantation and mercantile business.

In 1762 Nelson married Lucy Grymes. They had eleven children. Because of his great wealth the family was able to live in elegance and enjoy luxury.

Nelson was appointed a Justice of the Peace for York County in 1764. He also became a member of the House of Burgesses the same year and served in that body until May of 1774 when the Royal Governor, Lord Dummore, dissolved the house because of protest over the Boston Port Act.

Nelson then served in three of the Virginia Provincial Assemblies where he introduced a resolution for organizing a military force in the province of Virginia.

In July of 1775 Nelson was appointed a delegate from Virginia to the Continental Congress which drafted the Declaration of Independence. At the time of his appointment to the Continental Congress he resigned his Colonelcy in the Virginia Militia.

Nelson was an early advocate of independence as evidenced by the fact that he introduced a resolution recommending national independence at a convention held in Williamsburg in May of 1776. Nelson carried the resolution, drafted by Edmund Pendleton, to Philadelphia where it was redrafted, condensed and introduced June 7th in the Continental Congress.

In 1777 Nelson resigned from the Congress because of poor health which was to plague him for the remainder of his life. He returned to Virginia and was there given the rank of Brigadeer General and elected to the lower House of the Legislature. Later, in 1778 when the Congress appealed to men of financial substance in the Colonies to form troops of light Cavalry, Nelson, at his own expense, raised and trained a unit.

In 1779 and 1780, he was instrumental in obtaining the munitions and supplies for the Virginia militia, commanding troops, attending the Legislature, and raising money to subsidize the war. He was especially gifted at raising money from plantation owners for the war effort. He promised personally to repay the loans if the state should fail to do so.

When the British invaded Virginia in 1780-81 Nelson found that his effectiveness as a Militia Commander was seriously hampered by some opponents. In 1781 the Virginia Legislature elected Nelson Governor and gave him almost dictatorial powers to run the military.

In the September-October fighting of that year, he effectively commanded the Virginia Militia and participated in the fighting that led to George Washington’s victory over Cornwallis on October 19, 1781.

During the fighting around Yorktown in 1781, which was Nelson’s home town, he noted that his artillery men were directing their fire all over the town but were being careful to avoid the area where his beautiful two story brick colonial home was located. He asked some of his artillerymen why they were not firing in the direction of the town where his home was located. The answer was, "Out of respect to you, Sir."

Nelson stepped forward to the nearest cannon, aimed it at his own beautiful two-story house and fired at it.

At the moment of firing it was reported that Nelson’s house was occupied by British Officers who were enjoying a feast and making merry with wine. Nelson’s shot and others that followed were responsible for killing two British officers.

Struggling to defend the state with inadequate forces, Nelson felt compelled to call hundreds of young men from their farms. This disturbed him so much that he assigned many of his slaves from his own plantation to help harvest the fields in the smaller farms where he had called for young men. At this time he distributed large sums of money to more than one hundred families in the area.

It is small wonder that George Washington cited Thomas Nelson, Jr. in his General Orders of the 20th of October 1781 as follows:

By the end of the war most of the great wealth Thomas Nelson had fallen heir to from his father had been invested in the Revolutionary efforts. He, like many of our Founding Fathers, lost his fortune in the course of the War but never once did he lose his sacred honor.

To such great men do we owe the precious freedom that is ours today. To others who drafted our Constitution six years after the surrender of Cornwallis, we owe our everlasting gratitude for the unique republican form of government that protects that freedom today.

In 1781, Robert Morris issued over a million dollars of personal credit to finance the war effort, and raised 200,000L from friends to defeat the British at Yorktown. In 1798, his personal finances collapsed. Never reimbursed by his country, he spent three years in a debtor’s prison.

This term in its particular application means "that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual."

In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.

In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.

He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his persons, his faculties, or his possessions. Where there is excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause.

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that term particularly expresses. This being the end of the government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.

According to this standard of merit, the praise of affording a just security to property, should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the estimation of some, a more valuable property.

More sparingly should this praise be allowed to the government, where a man’s religious rights are violated by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy. Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man’s house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man’s conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizers of one class of citizens for the service of the rest. A magistrate issuing his warrants to a press gang, would be in his proper functions in Turkey or Indostan, under appellations proverbial of the most complete despotism.

That is not just a government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called. What must be the spirit of legislation where a manufacturer of linen cloth is forbidden to bury his own child in a linen shroud, in order to favor his neighbor who manufactures woolen cloth; where the manufacturer and wearer of woolen cloth are again forbidden the economical use of buttons of that material, in favor of the manufacturer of buttons of other materials!

A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species: where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied, by an unfeeling policy, as another spur; in violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him, in the small repose that could be spared form the supply of his necessities.

If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their actual faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.

If the United States mean to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights: they will rival the government that most sacredly guards the former; and by repelling its example in violating the latter, will make themselves a pattern to that and all other governments.