George Cabot (1752-1823), like Timothy Pickering, was born in Salem, in Essex County Massachusetts. He too, attended Harvard. He was a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775. He was a delegate to his state’s constitutional convention in 1777 when John Hancock coined the term “Essex Junto.” He also served as a member of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Constitution.[1]
During the Revolutionary War, while Pickering was participating in military operations, George Cabot took advantage of the situation to profit from privateering, commercial ventures and war contracts.[2] He was of proper but not prosperous origins, and elevated his position politically and socially with his mercantile abilities. [3] He believed commerce and America’s merchant marine were essential for national unity. He argued that America’s commercial success reaped benefits for the entire nation.[4]
He was a reluctant public servant, serving in the Senate from 1791 to 1796. John Adams asked him to become the first Secretary of the Navy, but Cabot declined the offer.[5] Despondent in retirement, he found he needed to participate in public life. He remained active in the Federalist Party and the Essex Junto.[6]
While Pickering was serving as a member of the House of Representatives in Washington, Cabot became a delegate to the Hartford Convention in 1814. He was elected the presiding officer.[7]
Although at one point he advanced the notion of stricter parameters for suffrage, allowing only those men who owned $2,000 in land free and clear, Cabot was a moderate Federalist . He did not want a civil war.[8]
Cabot said to Pickering “Why can’t you and I let the world ruin itself its own way?” [9]
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[1] http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=c00009, accessed 7/18/2013.
[2] James M. Banner, Jr. To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1970) 9.
[3] Banner, Hartford Convention, 124.
[4] Banner, Hartford Convention, 49.
[5] Bioguide, “George Cabot.”
[6] Banner, Hartford Convention, 136-7, 137n.
[7] Bioguide, “George Cabot.”
[8] Banner, Hartford Convention, 120, 132, 272.
[9] Henry Adams, History of the United States of American During the Administrations of James Madison (New York: The Library of America, 1986) 1111.
