Joseph Story - Early Life

Early Life

Story was born at Marblehead, Massachusetts. His father was Dr. Elisha Story, a member of the Sons of Liberty who took part in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Doctor Story moved from Boston to Marblehead during the American Revolutionary War. His first wife, Ruth (née Ruddock) soon died, and Story remarried in November 1778 to Mehitable Pedrick, nineteen, the daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant who lost of his fortune during the war. Joseph was the first-born of the 11 children of this second marriage; Elisha had seven from his first marriage.

As a boy, Story studied at the Marblehead Academy until the fall of 1794, where he was taught by schoolmaster William Harris, later president of Columbia University. At Marblehead, he chastized a fellow schoolmate, and Harris responded by beating him in front of the school; his father withdrew him immediately afterwards. Story was accepted at Harvard University in January 1795, after both passing the entrance examination and studying the entire fall semester's workload in six weeks. At Harvard, he was admitted to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and he was part of Adelphi, a student-run critical literary review organization. Story graduated from Harvard in 1798 second in his class behind William Ellery Channing; he noted that his graduation was with "many bitter tears". He read law in Marblehead under Samuel Sewall, then a congressman and later chief justice of Massachusetts. He later read law under Samuel Putnam in Salem.

He was admitted to the bar at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1801. As the only lawyer in Essex County aligned with the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, he was hired as counsel to the powerful Republican shipping firm of George Crowninshield & Sons. He was a poet as well and published "The Power of Solitude" in 1804, one of the first long poems by an American. In 1805 he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he served until 1808, when he succeeded a Crowninshield to become one of Essex County's representatives in Congress, serving from December 1808 to March 1809, during which he led the successful effort to put an end to Jefferson's Embargo against maritime commerce. He re-entered the private practice of law in Salem and was again elected to the state House of Representatives, which he served as Speaker in 1811.

Story's young wife, Mary F.L. Oliver, died in June 1805, shortly after their marriage and two months after the death of his beloved father. In August, 1808, he married Sarah Waldo Wetmore, the daughter of Judge William Wetmore of Boston. They would have seven children, though only two, Mary and William Wetmore Story, survived to adulthood. Their son became a noted poet and sculptor (his bust of his father is in the entrance to the Harvard Law School Library) who would publish The Life and Letters of Joseph Story (2 vols., Boston and London, 1851). Volume I and Volume II