William Gibbons

William Gibbons (born April 8, 1726 in Bear Bluff , South Carolina , † September 27, 1800 in Savannah , Georgia ) was an American lawyer and politician who attended the Continental Congress as a delegate from Georgia .

Born in what is now Jasper County , South Carolina, William Gibbons trained as a lawyer in Charleston . After joining the bar, he began practicing in Savannah, Georgia. From 1760 to 1762 he was a member of the colonial parliament of Georgia. As a supporter of the independence movement , he joined the Sons of Liberty in 1774 . On May 11, 1775, he and some fellow soldiers broke into a warehouse in Savannah, from which they stole 600 pounds of royal gunpowder.

In July of the same year Gibbons took part as a delegate to the Georgia Provincial Congress; on December 11, 1775, he was appointed to the local Committee of Safety . Between 1777 and 1781 he was a member of the Georgia Executive Council. After serving as associate judge on the Chatham County Court of Justice from 1781 to 1782 , he moved to the Georgia House of Representatives for the first time in 1783 . In 1784 he was a delegate to the Continental Congress, which met in Annapolis and Trenton that year . Further terms of office in the parliament of his state followed from 1785 to 1789 and from 1791 to 1793. Speaker of the House of Representatives, he was in 1783 (as the successor to Nathan Brownson ), 1786 (as the successor to Noble Wimberly Jones ) and 1787 (as the successor to Joseph Habersham ).

In 1789, Gibbons served as President of the Georgia Constitutional Convention. As a result, he acted again legally and was a judge of the Inferior Court in Chatham County from 1790 to 1792 .

Web links

• William Gibbons in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• William Gibbons in the database of Find a Grave (English)