William Cushing (ca. 1732-1810) was born in Scituate, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1755. He practiced law in the district of Maine for 13 years before returning to the Boston area to sit on the colony’s Superior Court. As royal authority crumbled in Massachusetts, he gained appointments to the state’s high courts, becoming chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 1780. His efforts as vice president of Massachusetts’s convention for ratification of the federal constitution led to his appointment by George Washington to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1789. He served as senior associate justice until his death (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, New York and Oxford, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ).

Hannah Phillips Cushing (ca. 1754-1834) was raised in Middletown, Connecticut. She and William Cushing were married in 1774. While the couple maintained a home in Scituate, after 1789 they often resided at the capital. Cushing often accompanied her husband when he rode circuit, traveling in a phaeton especially designed to carry books, goods, and food. By the late 1790s, she had developed a friendship with Abigail Adams, with whom she remained a close correspondent. Hannah Cushing returned to Scituate after her husband died (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, New York, 1928-36, 20 vols. description ends , s.v. “Cushing, William”; Henry Flanders, The Lives and Times of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, 2 vols. [Philadelphia, 1855-58], 2:18, 38; Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Republican Court [New York, 1855], 331; Abigail Adams to Hannah Phillips Cushing, 9 Mch. 1798, in MHi: Adams Papers; Woody Holton, Abigail Adams: A Life [New York, 2009], 367, 371).

Monday next: 4 Feb. (see Appendix II).