Choate, Rufus

Born: 1799-10-01 Massachusetts

Died: 1859-07-13 Halifax, Nova Scotia

Flourished: 1834 to 1859 Boston, Massachusetts

Rufus Choate, attorney and public official, was born in Essex County, Massachusetts, and received his early education locally before attending a New Hampshire academy for a year, then enrolling at Dartmouth College, where he graduated in 1819. He studied law briefly at Harvard University then continued his legal education in the law office of U.S. Attorney General William Wirt in Washington, DC. Choate returned to Massachusetts and subsequently read law first in Ipswich, then in Salem, and was admitted to the bar in the Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas in 1822, and to the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 1825. That same year Choate opened a legal practice in Danvers, Massachusetts, and embarked on a long legal career with a varied caseload that included business and railroad litigation as well as criminal and civil cases. He moved to Salem in 1828 and settled permanently in Boston in 1834, where he was a leading figure in the city’s legal profession. Choate’s political career included election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1825, to the Massachusetts Senate, 1827, and service in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1831-1834. He assisted in establishing the Whig Party in Massachusetts in 1834, then represented the party in the U.S. Senate from 1841 to 1845, having been chosen to fill Daniel Webster’s vacant seat when the latter resigned to become U.S. secretary of state. Choate was attorney general of Massachusetts for a year beginning in 1853. Following the disintegration of the Whig Party, he denounced the new Republican Party as promoting sectionalism by prioritizing abolition over union, and endorsed Democrat James Buchanan for president in the election of 1856. Choate married Helen Olcott in 1825 and the pair had seven children.

Jean V. Matthews, “Choate, Rufus,” American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4:834-36; Claude M. Fuess, “Choate, Rufus,” Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 4:86-90; Biographical Directory of the American Congress 1774-1996 (Alexandria, VA: CQ Staff Directories, 1997), 811; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ward 9, Boston, Suffolk County, MA, 294; Boston Evening Transcript (MA), 15 July 1859, 1:5-6; The Liberator (Boston, MA), 29 July 1859, 3:1; Gravestone, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA.