ROBERT TREAT

See also:

• ROBERT TREAT PAINE (1731–1814)
• PAINE, THOMAS (1737–1809)

PAINE (1731–1814)  , American politician, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 11th of March 1731 . He graduated at Harvard in 1749, and was admitted to the bar in 1759 . In 1768 he was a delegate to the provincial convention which was called to meet in Boston, and conducted the prosecution of Captain Thomas Preston and his men for their share in the famous " Boston Massacre" of the 5th of March 1770., He served in the Massachusetts General Court in 1773-1774, in the Provincial Congress in 1774–1775, and in the Continental Congress in 1774-1778, and was speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1777, a member of the executive council in 1779, a member of the committee which drafted the constitution of 1780, attorney-general of the state from 1777 to 1790, and a judge of the state supreme court from 1790 to 1804 . He died in Boston on the 11th of May 1814 . See John Sanderson, Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (Philadelphia, 1823), vol. ii . His son, ROBERT TREAT PAINE (1773-1811), who was christened Thomas but in 1801 took the name of his father and of an elder brother who died without issue in 1794,was a poet of some repute, but his verses have long been forgotten . His best known productions are Adams and Liberty, a once popular song written in 1798, The Invention of Letters (1795), and The Ruling Passion, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1797 . His Works in Verse and Prose (Boston, 1812) contains a biographical sketch .