Thomas McKean – President of Congress (1781)

Thomas McKean entered those working days with the blunt tools of a self-made lawyer and the stubbornness of a border man. Born in 1734 in the Pennsylvania backcountry to parents of Ulster-Scots stock, he learned early that order was something you built, not something given. He read law in New Castle, Delaware, gathered clients one case at a time, and moved quickly into the tangle of local power: clerkships, assembly seats, the dry, relentless business of committees. He was precise by habit and pugnacious by temperament. When the Stamp Act jolted the colonies in 1765, McKean pushed Delaware’s delegation at the Stamp Act Congress toward a stiff spine; he cared less for oratory than for getting language onto paper that could force London to see limits.

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