William Few

At 80 years old, William Few physical status not available right now. We will update William Few's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

William Few Jr. (June 8, 1748 – July 16, 1828) was a farmer, a businessman, and a Founding Father of the United States.

Few represented the U.S. state of Georgia at the Constitutional Convention and signed the U.S. Constitution.

Few and James Gunn were the first Senators from Georgia. Born into a poor yeoman farming family, William Few achieved both social prominence and political power later in life.

Exhibiting those characteristics of self-reliance vital for survival on the American frontier, he became an intimate of the nation's political and military elite.

The idea of a rude frontiersman providing the democratic leaven within an association of the rich and powerful has always excited the American imagination, nurtured on stories of Davy Crockett.

In the case of the self-educated Few, that image was largely accurate. Few's inherent gifts for leadership and organization, as well as his sense of public service, were brought out by his experience in the American Revolutionary War.

Important in any theater of military operations, leadership and organizational ability were particularly needed in the campaigns in the south where a dangerous and protracted struggle against a determined British invader intimately touched the lives of many settlers.

Few's dedication to the common good and his natural military acumen quickly brought him to the attention of the leaders of the Patriot cause, who eventually invested him with important political responsibilities as well. The war also profoundly affected Few's attitude toward the political future of the new nation, transforming the rugged frontier individualist into a forceful exponent of a permanent union of the states.

Men of his stripe came to realize during the years of military conflict that the rights of the individual, so jealously prized on the frontier, could be nurtured and protected only by a strong central government accountable to the people.

This belief became the hallmark of his long public service.

Early history

Descendant of Quaker shoe polisher Richard Few from the county of Wiltshire, England, and his son Isaac Few, a cooper who emigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1640s, the Few family lived in northern Maryland, where they eked out a modest living raising tobacco on small holdings. When a series of droughts struck the region in the 1750s, the Fews and their neighbors—actually a sort of extended family consisting of cousins and distant relations—found themselves on the brink of ruin. The whole community decided to abandon its farms and try its luck among the more fertile lands on the southern frontier.

In time the Few family achieved a measure of prosperity, emerging as political leaders in rural Orange County. Like many other western settlers, however, the family became involved with the Regulators, a populist movement that grew up in reaction to the political and economic restrictions imposed on the frontier or back-country farmers by the merchants and planters of the tidewater area and by the local politicians and lawyers. By 1771 protest had become confrontation, and a large group of mostly unarmed westerners gathered to clash with North Carolina militia units at the Battle of Alamance. The uneven fight ended in total victory for the militia, although most of the Regulator's demands for political representation and economic relief eventually would be met by the state legislature. More immediately, Few's brother James was hanged for his part in the uprising, and the Few family farm just east of Hillsborough was ransacked by William Tryon's militia troops. This led to Few's ambivalence towards capital punishment. The rest of the family fled to Wrightsboro, Georgia, leaving Few behind to settle the family's affairs and sell their property.

These antagonisms within North Carolina began to evaporate as American opinion turned against the imperial measures instituted by Great Britain in the 1770s. Both the eastern planters and the new settlers found new taxes and restrictions on western expansion at odds with their idea of self-government, and Patriot leaders were able to unite the state against what they could portray as a threat to the liberties of all parties.

Few participated in this training as one of the first men to enlist in the volunteer militia or "minute men" company formed in Hillsborough. Typically, Few's unit received its tactical instruction from a veteran of the colonial wars, in this case a former corporal in the British Army who was hired by the company as its drill sergeant. Citing the press of family business, Few rejected the offer of a captaincy in one of the first units North Carolina raised for the Continental Army in the summer of 1775. But when he finally settled the family's accounts the next year and joined his relatives in Georgia, where he opened a law office, he quickly placed his newly acquired military knowledge at the service of the Patriot cause in his new state.

Source