Thomas Haynes Drew (d. ca. 1 September 1793), member of the Convention of 1788, was born in the mid-1750s, possibly in Virginia. The names of his parents are not known. Drew was living in Buckingham County in September 1775 when he was appointed an ensign in a company of minutemen. His rank suggests that he was then a young man from a family with at least some social distinction; otherwise he probably would have enlisted in the ranks.
On 6 February 1777 Drew was commissioned a second lieutenant in Grayson's Additional Regiment, a Virginia unit fighting in the Continental army. Promoted to first lieutenant and then to captain, he served in other regiments and was assigned for part of the time to General George Washington's bodyguard before resigning in July 1779. Drew then returned to Virginia and became a paymaster, deputy quartermaster, and clothier with the rank of captain in the State Garrison. In 1780 he accompanied Virginia soldiers south, where the British routed American troops at Camden, South Carolina, on 15 August. Drew continued to act as a deputy quartermaster and gathered war matériel of all kinds for the forces in Virginia before the siege of Yorktown in the autumn of 1781. He served until sometime in 1782.
After the Revolutionary War, Drew settled in Cumberland County, where he married Ann Harrison about 1783. They had three sons. On 24 March 1788 voters elected him one of the county's two delegates to the convention called to consider ratification of the proposed constitution of the United States, which he was known to oppose. A resident of the county challenged his qualifications, not realizing that Drew had recently acquired part-interest, as holder of a mortgage, in a ninety-acre tract of land there. When the convention met in June, its Committee on Privileges and Elections investigated, and the convention voted to seat him. Drew did not speak during the debates. He voted with the other opponents of ratification when they attempted to require amendment of the Constitution before ratification and, after that measure failed, voted against ratification. Drew attended only about half of the sessions between the opening of the convention on 2 June and its adjournment on 27 June, but the reason for his absences is not recorded. He was not present on the final day of the convention for the vote on an amendment to reduce the new government's power of taxation.
A local man asserted that at the time of his election to the convention Drew was notable for little other than his vices. Drew certainly had financial problems by then, both in the collection of debts owed to him and in paying his own debts. In June 1787 he lost a debt suit in the Cumberland County Court in the amount of £1,645 16s 7d. Consequently he deeded to his father-in-law a 1,500-acre tract of land that he owned in Campbell County, the seven enslaved workers and all of the tobacco and other crops growing there, and his carriage, wagon, six horses, and the crops growing on land he evidently rented in Cumberland County. Drew also made several fruitless attempts to obtain an increase in his postwar military allowance. The wills of his father-in-law, dated in October 1793, and of his brother-in-law, probably composed in December 1800, imply that he was dead by the first date and that by the second date his widow and children were in financial need.
The date and place of Thomas Haynes Drew's death and the place of his burial are not known. A United States War Department file recording his half-pay-for-life pension contains a notation that he was paid through 1 September 1793, which may be the approximate date he died. The final reference to him in Cumberland County records was dated 28 April 1794, when one of the suits he had filed against a man who owed him money "abates by the death of the plaintiff."
Sources Consulted:
Family relationships in Cumberland Co. Will Book, 3:20–21, 157; William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), 4:85; several Drew wartime letters in Richard Young Papers, Accession 22687, and in Executive Department, Letters Received, Record Group 3, both Library of Virginia (LVA), some printed in William P. Palmer et al., eds., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 1652–1869 (1875–1893), vols. 2 and 4; petition of Thomas H. Drew, 16 Oct. 1792, Legislative Petitions, Miscellaneous, Records Group 78, LVA; Land Office Military Certificates (1782–1876), Virginia Land Office, Record Group 4, LVA; Revolutionary War Rejected Claims (with approximate marriage date), Record Group 3, LVA; Virginia General Assembly, House of Delegates, Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1776– ), 1784–1785 sess., 102, 1785–1786 sess., 51, 1792 sess., 55; Henry R. McIlwaine et al., eds., Journals of the Council of the State of Virginia, 1776–1791 (1931–1982), 1:415, 5:81, 82; John P. Kaminski et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution: Ratification of the Constitution by the States, vols. 8–10: Virginia (1988–1993), 9:579–580, 917, 943, 10:1538, 1541, 1565; Campbell Co. Deed Book, 2:274–275 (with middle name); Cumberland Co. Order Book (1786–1788), 347–348, and (1792–1797), 187 (quotation); approximate death date in Thomas H. Drew File, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.