January 16, 1776

Julia Rush, née Stockton, has the distinction of being the daughter of one signer of the Declaration of Independence and the wife of another. Her parents were Richard Stockton, who became a delegate to the Continental Congress from New Jersey later in 1776, and the poet Annis Boudinot Stockton. Her husband was Benjamin Rush, who joined the Pennsylvania delegation after the contentious debate over independence. When the couple married in January 1776 at the Stockton family’s home in Princeton, she was sixteen years old and he was a thirty-year-old physician.

On June 28, 1776—the week before the Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain—local artist Charles Willson Peale began a portrait of Julia Rush. According to his journal, Rush sat for him on June 28 and 29, and again on July 3 and 5. This painting, now in the collections of the Winterthur Museum, was intended to depict the young bride, but it also shows a teenaged girl at the exact moment of the Declaration of Independence. 

Charles Willson Peale, Mrs. Benjamin Rush, 1776, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library

The Pennsylvania Evening Post
Printed by Benjamin Towne

MARRIED. At Princeton, Dr. BENJAMIN RUSH, of this city, to Miss JULIA STOCKTON, daughter of the Honorable Richard Stockton, Esq.