Richard
Stockton
Richard
Stockton
With many friends and interests, Stockton lead a full life
Until the British imprisoned him,
causing poor health, strain, and strife.
Richard graduated from the College of New Jersey, and he next studied law and chose it as a profession. With great talent and hard work, he became highly distinguished. Even the British showed him favors and special appointments. "Having been honored by the personal regard of the King, and possessing an ample fortune, it would have seemed natural for him to have remained loyal; but, like Lewis Morris, his principles could not be governed by self-interest, and he espoused the cause of the patriots." From Lives of the Signers, B .J. Lossing, 1848.
He favored establishment of American rights rather than tolerate oppressive acts of the British ministry. In 1776, he was elected a delegate to the general congress in Philadelphia where he listened carefully to the arguments proposed by John Adams in favor of the Declaration of Independence. After signing the Declaration, he was captured at night by the furious British, dragged from his bed half-clad, and carried to New York's common prison. He was not even given basic necessities for living.
He was released in 1777 in very poor physical condition, a condition from which he was to never fully re-cooperate. Hi
s home was destroyed--lands devastated, irreplaceable papers burned, and his blood stock seized and driven away. His friends helped him as he languished for several years until his death at Princeton at the age of 51. "The hardships he endured shattered his constitution; and when he found himself almost a beggar, through the vandalism of the British in destroying his estate, and by the depreciation of the continental paper currency, he was seized with a despondency from which he never recovered." From Lives of the Signers, B.J.Lossing He is buried at the Stony Brook Quaker Meeting House Cemetery.
"As a Christian, you know that, many years a member of this church, he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. Nor could the ridicule of licentious wits, nor the example of vice in power, tempt him to disguise the profession of it, or to decline from the practice of its virtues. He was, however, liberal in his religious principles. Sensible, as became a philosopher, of the rights of private judgment, and of the difference in opinion that must necessarily arise from the variety of human intellects; he was candid, as became a Christian, to those who differed from him, where he observed their practice marked with virtue and piety. But if we follow him to the last scene of his life, and consider him under that severe and tedious disorder which put a period to it, there the sincerity of his piety, and the force of religion to support the mind in the most terrible conflicts, was chiefly visible. For nearly two years he bore with the utmost constancy and patience, a disorder that makes us tremble only to think of it. With most exquisite pain it preyed upon him, until it reached the passages by which life is sustained: yet, in the midst of as much as human nature could endure, he always discovered a submission to the will of heaven, and a resignation to his fate, that could only flow from the expectation of a better life.
"Such was the man, whose remains now lie before us, to teach us the most interesting lessons that mortals have to learn, the vanity of human things; the importance of eternity; the holiness of the divine law; the value of religion; and the certainty and rapid approach of death."
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"I think it proper here not only to subscribe to the entire belief of the great and leading doctrines of the Christian religion, such as the Being of God, the universal defection and depravity of human nature, the divinity of the person and the completeness of the redemption purchased by the blessed Savior, the necessity of the operations of the Divine Spirit, of Divine Faith, accompanied with an habitual virtuous life, and the universality of the divine Providence, but also . . . that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; that the way of life held up in the Christian system is calculated for the most complete happiness that can be enjoyed in this mortal state; that all occasions of vice and immorality is injurious either immediately or consequentially, even in this life; that as Almighty God hath not been pleased in the Holy Scriptures to prescribe any precise mode in which He is to be publicly worshipped, all contention about it generally arises from want of knowledge or want of virtue." Will of Richard Stockton
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James 1:27Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.