Four confirmed primary documents from the man who stood on the prosecution side of every defining legal case in Massachusetts for forty years. The Massacre trial. The Declaration. The first Attorney General. The abolition case. The Shays's Rebellion trials.
Robert Treat Paine was born in Boston on March 11, 1731. He graduated from Harvard in 1749 at seventeen. His father had lost his fortune, and Paine spent years finding his way, teacher, chaplain, merchant sailor, whaler, visiting Spain, the Azores, and England. He studied law on his own initiative and was admitted to the bar in 1757. He established his practice in Taunton, Massachusetts.
He was the grandson of Governor Robert Treat of Connecticut, which gave him his name. His legal career built slowly. By 1770 he had become one of the more prominent lawyers in Massachusetts, which is why Boston came to him when it needed a prosecutor.
In the fall of 1770, the town of Boston asked Paine to serve as prosecuting attorney in the trial of British soldiers charged with murder following the shooting of March 5. The defense attorney was John Adams. The Channel covered Adams's defense in Context Series Episode 09, the prosecution side of that same trial is Robert Treat Paine.
Paine argued the case through December 1770. Adams won the acquittal of six soldiers; two were convicted of manslaughter. Paine was noted for the professionalism of his case. The Massachusetts Historical Society holds Paine's trial minutes, legal papers, and correspondence from this period. His full papers, correspondence, account books from 1751 to 1814, and minutes of trials including the Boston Massacre, are at the MHS.
Paine was elected to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and returned for the Second. He served in Philadelphia as chairman of the ordnance committee, managing the supply of weapons and ammunition to the Continental forces. He signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776. His signature is at the National Archives.
He wrote to his friend Joseph Palmer after the signing: "The issue is joined; and it is our comfortable reflection, that if by struggling we can avoid the servile subjection which Britain designs for us, we shall be happy." The letter is at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
the issue is joined; and it is our comfortable reflection, that if by struggling we can avoid the servile subjection which Britain designs for us, we shall be happy.
Paine left Congress at the end of 1776. In 1777 he was elected the first Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a position he held for thirteen years. The role put him at the center of two more defining cases of the founding era.
First: In 1783 he prosecuted Commonwealth v. Jennison, the case that effectively abolished slavery in Massachusetts, the first state to do so. The court ruled that slavery was inconsistent with the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Second: In 1786–1787 he prosecuted the treason trials following Shays' Rebellion, the armed uprising of indebted farmers in western Massachusetts. He was appointed Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1790, serving until 1804. He died in Boston on May 11, 1814, at eighty-three, buried at the Granary Burying Ground.
In 1770 Robert Treat Paine stood as counsel for the prosecution in the Boston Massacre trials. Almost two decades later, he prosecuted the Shays's Rebellion treason trials (1786–1787). While Paine is best remembered for his involvement in these two well-known cases, he was a prominent public figure in Massachusetts for over 30 years.