Robert Treat Paine

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For others with the same name, see Robert Treat Paine (disambiguation).

Robert Treat Paine (March 11, 1731–May 11, 1814) was a signer of the Declaration of Independence as a representative of Massachusetts.

He was born in Boston and attended the Boston Latin School. He graduated from Harvard College in 1749, then taught school and studied theology. He became a merchant and traveled to the southern colonies, Spain, the Azores and England. He returned home and was admitted to the bar of Massachusetts in 1757 or 1759, practicing in Portland (then part of Massachusetts but now in Maine), and later in Taunton, Massachusetts.

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 British soldiers following the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770.

He served in the Massachusetts General Court from 1773 to 1774, in the Provincial Congress from 1774 to 1775 represented Massachusetts at the Continental Congress of 1776. (He served in the Continental Congress from 1774 through 1778 and helped frame the rules of debate and acquire gunpowder for the coming war). He signed the final appeal to the king (the Olive Branch Petition) in 1775.

He 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, Massachusetts Attorney General from 1777 to 1790 and a justice of the state supreme court from 1790 to 1804 when he retired. When he died at the age of 83 in 1814 he was buried in the Granary Burying Ground in Boston. A statue to commemorate him was erected in the Church Green area of Taunton.

Paine is an ancestor of and namesake of contemporary American actor Treat Williams through his mother's line.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] External links

• Appleton's Biography edited by Stanley L. Klos
• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Biography by Rev. Charles A. Goodrich, 1856