American jurist, born in Boston, MA, on the 14th of May 1761; died in Athens, NY, on the 3rd of May 1816. He was graduated at Harvard, studied law, practiced in Worcester and Middlesex counties, and was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1788, and to both houses of Congress. He resigned from the Senate in 1800, having been appointed Secretary of War by President Adams, and resumed his legal practice at the conclusion of his public services in the Cabinet. He was an earnest advocate of temperance, becoming first president of the first temperance society in his state. He was a man of independent thought and action, and to this independence is due his refusal of many tempting offers of political preferment. He published a poem, Progress of Science (1780), and a pamphlet, Letter on Freemasonry. He wrote the Senate’s reply to President Adams’s Washington Memorial.
