Hall, Lyman

HALL, LYMAN. (1724–1790). Signer. Connecticut. He graduated from Yale in 1747 and was ordained a minister in 1749 in Fairfield, Connecticut. He took up medicine and, abandoning the ministry, set up practice in Wallingford. About 1757 he moved to South Carolina, settling in Charleston as a physician. Hall was granted land in Georgia in 1760 and established a rice plantation near Midway and built a home in Sunbury, St. John's Parish. He returned to South Carolina in 1762 and moved back to Georgia in 1774, soon becoming a radical leader in the area. Leading the other parishes in rebellion, St. John's elected Hall in March 1775 as its delegate to the Continental Congress; the Provincial Congress and then the state legislature chose him as a delegate from 1776 to 1780, although he did not attend after February 1777. Hall and Button Gwinnett led the radical faction in Georgia, which eventually dominated state politics with the adoption of the state constitution in 1777. Calling themselves the Liberty Society, the radicals labeled anyone not in support of their party a Loyalist or Tory. After General Lachlan McIntosh, viewed by radicals with hostility, killed Gwinnett in a duel in May 1777, Hall used every means at his disposal, including coercion, to obtain signatures on a circular letter supporting McIntosh's removal from Georgia. When the British reoccupied Georgia in December 1778, he moved his family first to Charleston and later, it is thought, to Connecticut. He returned at the end of the war to practice medicine in Savannah. Elected governor in 1783, he displayed a broad grasp of the many issues facing the state. He then served in the assembly and as judge of the Inferior Court of Chatham County. In 1790 Hall moved to Burke County, Georgia, where he soon died.

SEE ALSO Signers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hoffman, Ronald. "The 'Disaffected' in the Revolutionary South." In The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism. Edited by Alfred F. Young. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976.

Jackson, Harvey H. Lachlan McIntosh and the Politics of Revolutionary Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979.