Timothy Pickering
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Timothy Pickering (July 17, 1745 – January 29, 1829) was the third United States Secretary of State, serving in that office from 1795 to 1800 under Presidents George Washington and John Adams.
Pickering was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University in 1763. He opposed the patriot cause early in the American Revolutionary War, but in 1777 he accepted General George Washington's offer to be adjutant general of the American army, and was widely praised for his work in supplying the troops during the remainder of the conflict.
After the first of two failed attempts to make money speculating in Pennsylvania frontier land, now-President Washington appointed Pickering commissioner to the Iroquois Indians, and Pickering represented the United States in the negotiation of the Treaty of Canandaigua with the Iroquois in 1794.
Washington also brought Pickering into his cabinet, as Postmaster General in 1791. He remained in the cabinet for nine years, serving as postmaster general until 1795, Secretary of War for a brief time in 1795, then Secretary of State from 1795 to 1800.
After a quarrel with President John Adams over Adams's plan to make peace with France, Pickering was dismissed from office in May 1800. In 1802 Pickering and a band of Federalists, agitated at the lack of support for Federalists, attempted to gain support for the secession of New England from the Jeffersonian United States. The irony of a Federalist moving against the national government was not lost among his dissenters. He was named to the United States Senate as a senator from Massachusetts in 1803 as a member of the Federalist Party. He lost his senate seat in 1811, and was elected to the United States House of Representatives in U.S. House election, 1812, where he remained until 1817. His congressional career is best remembered for his leadership of the New England secession movement (see Essex Junto and the Hartford Convention).
After Pickering was denied re-election in 1816, he retired to Salem, where he lived as a farmer until his death in 1829.
Trivia
- Pickering's ancestral home, the circa 1651 Pickering House, is the oldest house in the United States to be owned by the same family continually.
- In 1942, a United States Liberty ship named the SS Timothy Pickering was launched. She was lost off Sicily in 1943.
References
- Clarfield, Gerard. Timothy Pickering and the American Republic. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.
- Garraty, John A. and Mark C. Carnes. American National Biography, vol. 17, "Pickering, Timothy". New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Wilentz, Sean "The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln" W.W. Norton. New York. 2005.
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