1814 Massachusetts Passport Signed by Caleb Strong
The 1814 Massachusetts Passport Signed by a Founding Father Who Almost Signed the Constitution
Turn over a passport issued in 1814 and you’d expect to find the seal of the United States Department of State. This one doesn’t have it. Instead, it carries the seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the signature at the bottom belongs to Caleb Strong, the sitting governor.
That’s not an error or a forgery. For the first several decades of American independence, a state government issuing its own passport was entirely legal. This particular document happens to be signed by a man who helped shape the US Constitution itself, even though he never signed the final draft.
A passport with no federal seal
Before 1856, a US passport didn’t have to come from Washington at all. Governors, mayors, and even notaries public could issue them alongside the Department of State, which had itself only been issuing passports since 1789. There was no single accepted format and no requirement to carry one in the first place. A document from a Massachusetts governor and one from a New York notary might look nothing alike, yet both functioned as passports for citizens heading abroad.
That patchwork system caused real friction overseas. Some European governments grew wary of passports that hadn’t come through a US consular office and started refusing to honor them without a formal endorsement. Congress finally shut the door on the practice with the Act of August 18, 1856, which handed the Secretary of State sole authority to issue US passports and made it illegal for any other official, state or municipal, to do so. Everything issued before that date, including this Massachusetts passport, comes from the brief window when American passports were as decentralized as the young republic that printed them.
Who was Caleb Strong
Caleb Strong spent most of his career one step removed from the biggest moments in early American history, present for nearly all of them and credited with none of the signatures. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, on January 9, 1745, he graduated from Harvard with highest honors in 1764 and was admitted to the bar in 1772, building a prosperous country law practice before the Revolution even began.
He served on Northampton’s committee of safety through the Revolutionary War and spent 24 years as Hampshire County’s attorney after his 1776 election to the Massachusetts General Court. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Strong sat on the drafting committee and pushed successfully to have money bills originate in the House of Representatives. He also voted for the compromise that gave states equal representation in the Senate and proportional representation in the House, a structure that still defines Congress today.
Then illness in his family called him home before the Constitution was finished, and Strong missed the signing entirely. Of the 55 delegates who took part in the convention, only 38 put their names on the final document. He wasn’t one of them, though he more than made up for it during Massachusetts’s ratifying convention, where he became one of the state’s leading Federalist voices arguing for adoption.
Massachusetts sent him to the US Senate in 1789, where he helped frame the Judiciary Act and backed the Washington administration’s foreign policy, including the contentious Jay’s Treaty. In 1800, Strong defeated Elbridge Gerry to become governor, holding the office through annual re-election until 1807. He returned to the governorship in 1812, again beating Gerry, and served until retiring in 1816.
Why Massachusetts calls itself a commonwealth
Massachusetts calls itself a commonwealth because its 1780 state constitution says so in plain language, describing “a free, sovereign, and independent body politic, or state by the name of The Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” That single clause in the “Frame of Government” section is the entire legal basis for the title.
The term wasn’t unique to Massachusetts. Virginia adopted it in its constitution on June 29, 1776, and Pennsylvania followed on September 25, 1776. Kentucky later wrote “commonwealth” into its full official name as well, and today four US states use the designation. Legally, it changes nothing. A commonwealth carries no distinct political status or special relationship with the federal government; it’s simply a name some states chose over “state.”
In the years leading up to 1780, “commonwealth” was a favored term among political writers for the whole body of citizens making up a nation or state, and it may have carried a faint anti-monarchical charge for a generation that had just rejected a king. John Adams, who drafted the Massachusetts Constitution, used the word deliberately. He later wrote that republic, commonwealth, and popular state all pointed to the same idea in the writing of English and French thinkers: a representative democracy, “a government in one center, and that center the nation,” with sovereignty vested in a single elected assembly (Adams, John, and Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850-56, vol. 5, p. 454).
The War of 1812 and a governor who said no
This passport was issued in 1814, in the middle of the War of 1812, a conflict Strong opposed from the governor’s office. When the Secretary of War pressed him to place part of the Massachusetts militia under federal command, Strong refused. He went further, endorsing the report of the Hartford Convention, the gathering of New England Federalists who had grown openly resentful of Jeffersonian and Madisonian policy.
That’s the political backdrop worth keeping in mind when you look at a state-issued passport from this exact year. It’s a small paper reminder of just how much authority individual states still exercised, even over something as fundamentally national as the right to travel abroad, at a moment when New England’s relationship with Washington was under real strain.
Strong died on November 7, 1819, two years after his wife Sarah, and was buried in the Bridge Street Cemetery in Northampton. Four of his nine children outlived him.
What makes this passport worth a second look
Early 19th-century American passports rarely surface in collectible condition, which is what makes this one worth pausing on. It’s one of the earliest US passports in my own collection, and after two centuries it’s held up remarkably well. A document tied this directly to a Constitutional Convention delegate, a two-term governor, and a US senator, issued at the state level during a war his own state government was actively resisting, is the kind of piece that would be at home in a museum case rather than a collector’s folder.
A related version of this piece also ran in the magazine of the Ephemera Society of America, for anyone who wants to see how the story was told there.
Further reading: Origins of the United States Passport – Part I
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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