By Kay Daly

Gunning Bedford, one of the signers of the Constitution, was a graduate of Princeton University, where he and James Madison had shared a room. While at Princeton, Bedford studied law under John Witherspoon, then the nation's preeminent legal scholar and theologian.

Bedford was a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1783 to 1785 and served as Delaware's attorney general from 1784 to 1789. In 1787, Bedford was a known champion of the rights of small states, even suggesting at one point that small states might seek foreign alliances if they did not receive adequate protection in the new Constitution.

The state of Delaware at the time required that all state officials "make and subscribe the following declaration, to wit: 'I, <insert name>, do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.'" As attorney general and state delegate, Bedford would have complied with the law.

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