Robert Treat Paine

Robert Treat Paine 1731-1814, political figure in the American Revolution , signer of the Declaration of Independence , b. Boston, Mass. He served briefly as a chaplain in the French and Indian War but gave up the ministry for law. In 1770 he conducted the prosecution of the British troops indicted for murder in the Boston Massacre . Paine was a member of the Continental Congress (1774-78) and in 1775 was sent (with John Langdon and Robert R. Livingston) on an unsuccessful mission to win Canada to the Revolutionary cause. Paine later served as attorney general of Massachusetts and then (1790-1804) as state supreme court justice.

Paine, Robert Treat (1773–1811), was reared in the best society of Boston, but after his graduation from Harvard (1792) drifted from business into bohemianism, and through his writing and actions estranged himself from his conventional background. He edited the Federal Orrery (1794–96), a strongly Federalist journal that specialized in satire of Jacobin politics. His marriage to an actress, constant indebtedness, and vehement manner placed him beyond the pale of Boston society, but his satirical ability, facile versification, and general eccentricity caused him to be considered a genius. His poetry, including The Invention of Letters (1795) and The Ruling Passion (1796), was widely read. Adams and Liberty⧫ (1798), his most famous work, was sung throughout the nation. Until 1801 he used his christened name, Thomas Paine, but that year he adopted the name of a dead brother, presumably because of his opposition to the ideas of the pamphleteer. His Works (1812) includes early neoclassical verse, later political satire, and patriotic prose.