William Paca

William Paca was born in 1740 in Harford County, Maryland, to one of the colony's wealthiest planter families. He studied law at the Middle Temple in London, returning to Maryland to build a legal and political career that matched his inherited social prominence. In Annapolis he constructed a grand Georgian mansion set in elaborate terraced gardens — a statement of taste and wealth that placed him among the most visible members of Maryland's ruling class. His entry into revolutionary politics came naturally from this position; as a member of the Maryland colonial assembly and a lawyer defending colonists against British taxation, Paca moved steadily from loyal subject to committed revolutionary.

Paca served in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1779 and signed the Declaration of Independence in August 1776. His signature committed a man of substantial property and comfortable circumstances to a cause whose failure would have meant ruin or worse. During the war he served as chief judge of Maryland's General Court and contributed to the legal infrastructure of the new state government that had to be built while the fighting continued. When the Continental Congress relocated to Annapolis in 1783 following the British evacuation of Philadelphia, it was Paca who served as governor and helped facilitate the city's brief role as the national capital — the location where Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris in January 1784, formally ending the Revolutionary War.

Paca was appointed federal judge for Maryland by President Washington in 1789, a position he held until his death in 1799. His Annapolis mansion, after passing through various uses over the intervening centuries, was eventually restored and opened as a museum — one of the finest surviving examples of colonial Maryland architecture and a direct physical connection to the world the founding generation inhabited. Paca's career exemplified the path of Maryland's revolutionary leadership: men of colonial wealth and legal training who transformed their inherited authority into the institutions of the new republic.