Button Gwinnett didn’t want to be in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress in the summer of 1776, and not just because a heat wave gripped the city and delegates dressed in wool and powdered wigs.
Gwinnett, one of three Georgians in attendance, would rather have been prepping the Georgia battalion of the Continental Army to invade British-controlled Florida. But that commission had gone to a rival, Lachlan McIntosh.
Electing Gwinnett and sending him north diffused tension in the still-nascent rebel colony. Georgians had removed the royal governor just a few months earlier — nearly nine months after the Revolution’s first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord — and Gwinnett’s ambitious personality was deemed to better serve Georgia far from home…