Author: Story, Joseph
Biography:
STORY, Joseph (1779-1845: ANBO)
Joseph Story, a cousin of Isaac Story, Jr. (q.v.), was also born in Marblehead MA; his parents were the physician Elisha Story and his wife Mehitable Pedrick. After graduating from Harvard in 1798, he studied law, was called to the bar, and set up practice in Salem MA. (His 1800 Eulogy on General George Washington, printed at Salem, contains eight pages of verse.)He was elected to the state House of Representatives 1805-8 and again in 1811 and served out a term in Congress in 1808-9. His first wife, Mary Lynde Oliver, died in June 1805 not long after their wedding. With his second wife Sarah Waldo Wetmore, whom he married later in 1805, he had seven children but only two survived to grow up and his wife eventually became an invalid. In 1811 he was appointed to the US Supreme Court, the youngest person ever nominated. He remained on the Court for the rest of his life but also undertook legal cases, presided over the Merchant's Bank of Salem (1815-35), and from 1829 held a professorship at Harvard, where he is credited with building up the size and reputation of the law school. Story's first purely literary publication,The Power of Solitude, was not well received but in the 1830s and 40s he wrote several influential treatises on law under the general title of "Commentaries": Commentaries on the Constitution (1833), Commentaries on Conflicts of Laws (1834), Commentaries on Equity Pleadings (1838), etc. He died in Cambridge MA after a protracted illness. (ANBO 24 Oct. 2020; ancestry.com 24 Oct. 2020)