I was born in 1723 in Albany, New York. In 1741, I graduated from Yale College and moved to New York City to take up a law apprenticeship. In 1747, I wrote and published the most famous poem by a colonial American, Philosophic Solitude. In 1752, I co-authored New York's first periodical (and the only one in the colonies at the time), The Independent Reflector. I am also a co-founder of The New York Society Library. Throughout the 1750s and 1760s, I wrote many pamphlets and newspaper essays on the importance of the separation of church and state.

In 1772, I retired from the law and politics and moved to Elizabethtown, New Jersey. However, I quickly came to lead the colony's revolutionary movement. In 1776, I was elected Governor of New Jersey and named Brigadier General of the state militia, a post which I held until the end of the war. I also served as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and served on a drafting committee with Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson.

In 1787, I served as a New Jersey delegate to the Constitutional Convention. I continued to be re-elected Governor of New Jersey every year until my death in 1790.