His political interests were inspired by his father,
Charles Clinton, who was an
Irish immigrant to
Little Britain, New York and a member of the New York colonial assembly. George Clinton was the brother of
General James Clinton and the uncle of New York's future governor,
DeWitt Clinton.
At 18, he enlisted in the
British Army to fight in the
French and Indian War. He subsequently studied law, became clerk of the court of common pleas and served in the colonial assembly. He was elected to the
Continental Congress and voted for the
Declaration of Independence, but was called to serve
George Washington as a brigadier general of militia and had to leave before the signing. He did not support the adoption of the
Constitution until the
Bill of Rights was added.
He was known for his hatred of
Tories and used seizure and sale of Tory estates to help keep taxes down. A supporter and friend of George Washington, he supplied food to the troops at
Valley Forge, rode with Washington to the first Inauguration and gave an impressive dinner to celebrate it.
In 1759 he was appointed County Clerk for
Ulster County, New York, a position he held for the next fifty-two years. He served as the first
Governor of New York from 1777 to 1795, as a member of the
New York Assembly in 1800 and 1801, and as Governor again from 1801 to 1804. In 1783, at
Dobbs Ferry, Clinton and
George Washington met General
Sir Guy Carleton, later known as
Lord Dorchester, to negotiate for the evacuation by the British troops of the posts they still held in the United States. With 21 years of service, he was the longest-serving governor of a U.S. state.
Herbert Storing attributes to George Clinton the authorship of the
Anti-Federalist essays, which appeared in New York newspapers under the
pseudonym Cato during the Constitutional ratification debates of 1787. However, the authorship of the essays is disputed.
He went on to serve as the fourth
Vice President of the United States, first from 1805 to 1809 under
Thomas Jefferson, and then from 1809 until his death under
James Madison, becoming the first Vice President to die in office. He died of a heart attack.
Clinton is one of only two
United States vice presidents to serve the position under two
presidents (
John C. Calhoun being the other). He is of no known relation to the 42nd
President of the United States, Bill Clinton, whose name at birth was William Jefferson Blythe III.
He had been an unwilling candidate for
President of the United States in the
1808 election, garnering six electoral votes from a wing of the
Democratic-Republican Party that disapproved of James Madison. He came in third after Madison and
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of the
Federalist Party.
His original burial was in Washington. He was reinterred in
Kingston, New York in 1908.
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