The story
Boston1812
Elbridge Gerry signed the Declaration of Independence and refused to sign the Constitution, because it had no bill of rights. By 1812 he was governor of Massachusetts, and his party, the Republicans, controlled the legislature and expected to lose it. So in February they redrew the state senate districts to pack their opponents, the Federalists, into as few seats as possible. One district in Essex County curled up the coast and around the county like a lizard. Gerry thought the bill disagreeable. He signed it on 11 February.
The name came at a dinner. The story, told many ways, has the painter Gilbert Stuart looking at the map at the house of a Federalist editor, adding a head, wings and claws in pencil, and saying it would do for a salamander. Better say a Gerry-mander, said the host. On 26 March the Boston Gazette printed the creature under the headline “The Gerry-mander. A new species of Monster”, drawn, probably, by Elkanah Tisdale.
That April Gerry lost the governorship. His party kept the senate, twenty-nine seats to eleven, having won fewer votes than the other side. It was the first demonstration that the map matters more than the vote, and the word for it has never needed replacing. James Madison made Gerry his Vice President in 1813. He died in office the next year, in his carriage, on the way to the Senate.
The gap
He did not draw the map, did not like it, and would not have recognised the word. He pronounced his name with a hard g, like Gary. Within a generation the word had gone soft, jerry, and it has stayed there; his descendants in Marblehead still object, and the Supreme Court has been told about it.
So the man who held out for a bill of rights is remembered for the trick that undoes elections, under a name he would not have answered to.