William Cushing was the last judge in the United States to wear a full wig.
16 Facts About William Cushing
2.
The William Cushing family had a long history in the area, settling Hingham in 1638.
3.
William Cushing's father John William Cushing was a provincial magistrate who in 1747 became an associate justice of the Superior Court of Judicature, the province's high court.
4.
William Cushing's grandfather John Cushing was a superior court judge and member of the governor's council.
5.
William Cushing's mother, Mary Cotton William Cushing, was a daughter of Josiah Cotton.
6.
William Cushing graduated from Harvard College in 1751 and became a member of the bar of Boston in 1755.
7.
William Cushing practiced law until 1772, when he was appointed by Governor Thomas Hutchinson to replace his father on the Superior Court bench.
8.
William Cushing did not express any opinion on the matter, but declined the crown payment in preference to a provincial appropriation.
9.
The provincial congress appointed William Cushing to be the court's first sitting Chief Justice in 1777.
10.
William Cushing was a charter member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
11.
William Cushing would sit as Massachusetts Chief Justice until 1789, during which period the court ruled in 1783 that slavery was irreconcilable with the new state constitution, and it was ended in the state.
12.
In 1783, William Cushing presided over a series of cases involving Quock Walker, a slave who filed a freedom suit based on the language of the new state constitution.
13.
In Commonwealth v Jennison, Cushing stated the following principles, in his charge to the jury:.
14.
William Cushing generally held a nationalist view typically in line with the views of the Federalist Party, and often disagreed with Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans.
15.
In 1810, William Cushing died in his hometown of Scituate, Massachusetts.
16.
William Cushing is buried in a small cemetery there which is a state park.