Working Career
After graduating from Harvard, Sumner took charge of the Roxbury school, where he remained for two years while he apprenticed law under Samuel Quincy, the provincial solicitor general. He sought to study under John Adams, but the latter had enough students. Adams wrote that Sumner "was a promising genius, and a studious and virtuous youth." Sumner was admitted to the bar in 1770 and opened a law office in Roxbury that year.
Sumner was chosen a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1776 where he represented the town of Roxbury. In 1777 he participated in a state convention to draft a new constitution, whose result was not adopted. He continued to serve in the provincial congress until the state constitution was adopted in 1780, when he was elected state senator for Suffolk County. This post he held for two years. In June 1782 he was elected to the Confederation Congress by the state legislature, replacing Timothy Danielson, who resigned, but Sumner never actually took the seat. In August 1782 Governor John Hancock nominated him as an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He accepted this position instead, serving from 1782 to 1797. During his time on the court Sumner took detailed notes of many of the cases he heard; these notes, preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society, now form a valuable repository of early Massachusetts judicial history.
The period when he served in the Supreme Judicial Court was a time of great turmoil in Massachusetts. Following the American Revolutionary War the value of the paper currency then in circulation fell significantly leaving many citizens in financial difficulties. The administration of James Bowdoin raised taxes to pay the public debt which had run up during the war and stepped up collection of back taxes. These economic pressures led to outbreaks of civil unrest which culminated in Shays' Rebellion, an uprising in central and western Massachusetts lasting from 1786 to 1787.
Sumner also sat in the court when it heard the appeals in the Quock Walker case, an early decision that confirmed the state constitution had effectively abolished slavery.
In 1785 Sumner was chosen by the legislature to sit on a committee to revise the laws of the Commonwealth. In 1789 he was a member of the state convention that met to discuss adoption of the United States Constitution.
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