Author: Dawes, Rufus
Biography:
DAWES, Rufus (1803-59: ancestry.com)
pseudonym Samuel Smythe
The son of Thomas Dawes (q.v.) and Margaret (Greenleaf) Dawes. Born in Boston, he enrolled at Harvard in 1820 but was expelled for an alleged breach of discipline, later proven to be unfounded. He then studied law and was called to the bar, but did not practise. On 18 May 1829 he married Elizabeth Eliot Cranch (d 1860) in Washington DC; the marriage appears to have been childless. A frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, he edited a weekly paper, The Emerald, in Baltimore for a time, and was later involved with the Washington Mirror (1834-6) and the Weekly Whig in New York (1839). He also published plays and fiction, mainly in the late 1830s. In his later years he held a government position in Washington DC, where he died on 30 Nov. 1859. (Appleton; ancestry.com 11 July 2018, 23 August. 2025) HJ