On the night of April 14, 1865, Sawyer was at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., and witnessed the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Sawyer was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under William Adams Richardson from 1873 to 1874 and was employed in the United States Coast Survey from 1874 to 1880.

He conducted a preparatory school in Ithaca, New York, and gave private instruction to students in Cornell University.

Myra Sawyer Hamlin wrote a series of books for girls, and her husband was editor of a weekly magazine for school teachers and a music critic for the New-York Tribune.

[3] Sawyer's younger daughter, Clara, married Isaiah Kidder Stetson, grand-nephew of Hannibal Hamlin and nephew of U.S.