Question

Thomas Cushing does not appear to be a Founding Father of the United States which is defined as:

Signing the United States Declaration of Independence

Establishing the United States Constitution

Signers of the Articles of Confederation.

Further, 'Signers of the Continental Association' do not appear to be Founding Fathers of the United States just by virtue of signing that document.  For example, we could include everyone that signed the Leedstown Resolutions and Fairfax Resolves, and similar early protest documents from all of the colonies, as "Founding Fathers" but that is not generally accepted as the definition.

Can we remove 'Signers of the Continental Association' from the Founding Fathers category?

Comments

Also, similarly these sub-categories seem to have been erroneously added to the Founding Fathers category:

United States Founding Ministers (0, 10, 1)

Special Improvement Projects (0, 101, 1)

---

I have added some tags to your post to give it wider coverage.

---

Who defines this? Is there a generally agreed authority (other than Wikipedia)?

---

Special Improvement Projects is a category listing persons already in the Founding Fathers Categories who needed improvement to their profiles. It would be equivalent to the current categories "Needs Biographies" or ":Needs Research". 1776 and Profile improvement Project (me at the time)  created the category to bring attention to this important group of persons. "Needs" categories did not yet exist. I did look at some of the profiles listed randomly and it looks like they could be removed from the category.

---

Got it.  Leaving Special Improvement Projects

 and removing

'Signers of the Continental Association'

'United States Founding Ministers'

They'll still be available, just not as part of 

Founding Father of the United States

---

Another note:  "Thomas Cushing III" appears to have opposed independence from Britain throughout his career.  So, it's sort of a joke that he would be on a list of "Founding Fathers".

"Cushing represented Massachusetts in the First (during which he signed the Continental Association) and Second Continental Congresses but was voted out when he opposed independence. Despite this, he remained politically active after independence, continuing to serve in the state government. During the Revolutionary War, he was a commissary responsible for provisioning the military, a position he used to enrich the family merchant business."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cushing

Answer 1

As a neutral party  with an interest in history I did a search on the founding fathers, there seems to be no coherent and consistent definition.

 The best definition seems to me to be those who made a significant contribution to the founding of the United States, and includes a broader group than the list of signers of the documents listed above, and would include military leaders and heroes.

 The categories cited above would exclude Paul Revere, yet he was a pivotal figure in the events that lead to the first shots of the war of independence, founder of a vital intelligence network, and before that an advocate for independence.

 Is he to be excluded because he didn't sign a key document?

Comments

Yep. Not to downplay Revere's heroics, but the same could be said for many who served and died in the actual American Revolution.

The point is for the category is not to celebrate every hero of the time, but to pinpoint the most important players.  In this case, it's the documents that define the US. Government and the people that made our split from Great Britain possible..

Answer 2

Personally, I like Wikipedia's definition and it's entry has withstood the onslaught of people that differ with it through a lot of back and forth.:  Wikpedia is A LOT like Wikitree.

"a group of late-18th-century American revolutionary leaders who united the Thirteen Colonies, oversaw the War of Independence from Great Britain, established the United States, and crafted a framework of government for the new nation."

"America's Founders include the signers of the United States Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the United States Constitution, along with many others. In 1973 historian Richard B. Morris identified seven figures as key Founders, based on what he called the "triple tests" of leadership, longevity, and statesmanship: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.[2]"

It SHOULD be a limited  list of an agreed upon list of the greats, through consensus (Wikipedia), NOT any 1 person or a small group of people.

See the TALK section of the Wikpedia article:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States

Comments

John, I read with interest some of the thread at the TALK link you provided. I am heartened to see that the subject has survived at Wikipedia despite what appear to be political (I'll stick to that one term rather than invite digression) motivations to remove it. However, I remain leery of a concrete definition which may exclude significant founding fathers for not happening to tick a particular box.

Answer 3

As others have noted, there does not seem to be a general consensus on the meaning.  Personally, I have trouble with the thought that the 'United States' that was created by the Articles of Confederation is the same 'United States' created by the U.S. Constitution.  These two confederacies existed concurrently for a time, from the ratification of the Constitution by New Hampshire until the ratification by North Carolina (I would have said Rhode Island but can one still have a confederation if there is only one member country?).

The one point typically missing in most history books is that 75% of Americans were against this new 'United States' but the 25% who wanted it had most of the money and controlled the post office and the press.  The Spirit of 76 that so animated the Revolution would have died with the new confederacy were it not for the insistence of including most of the articles in the 'Bill of Rights'.

Maybe there should be two sets of founding fathers!

Answer 4

Professor Allen Guelzo gave a truly great course of lectures on 36 people he identified as founding fathers.

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/americas-founding-fathers

I highly recommend this course.

Also, I don't think the list should require that someone be on the tip of the average American's tongue. We as a whole don't know our own history nearly well enough to be the judges.

Answer 5

I think that every category should have black-and-white, objective criteria for membership. So I would not have a Founding Fathers category at all, because that's subject to a lot of interpretation. (In fact, we can see that political interpretation is already breaking out in this brief discussion.) However, I would retain categories with objective criteria like: 

Signers of the United States Declaration of Independence

Members of United States Constitutional Convention

Signers of the Articles of Confederation.