His father was a merchant dealing in fishermen's supplies who had moved from Gloucester to Boston and profited so much by his industry, prudence, and popularity that he occupied what was for those days a conspicuously expensive mansion, although his character was notable for thrift and dread of ostentation.

He studied law after leaving college and was admitted to the bar on February 19, 1811, but he never practised to any extent, for he inherited wealth and greatly increased it by conservative speculation.

[3] He turned to literature as a vocation, publishing The Culex of Virgil; with a Translation into English Verse and a collection of Latin riddles in 1807 and Hubert and Ellen, a volume of poems, in 1812.

[5] He wrote Three Temperance Tales (2 vols., 1848), twenty-one stories of a tract-like nature bearing such titles as "My Mother's Gold Ring",[6] "I Am Afraid There Is A God", "Groggy Harbor", and "An Irish Heart", first published in separate issues between 1833 and 1843.

In 1848 he began a series of weekly articles in the Boston Evening Transcript entitled "Dealings with the Dead" (published in book form in 1856), which in spite of their name did not lack light touches.

Under such pseudonyms as Sigma, Amgis, Saveall, and others, he wrote for numerous other publications, and he aroused considerable interest by attacking the coolie trade of the British in India (Evening Transcript, April 16-October 3, 1856) and by assailing Thomas Babington Macaulay for statements derogatory to William Penn (Dealings with the Dead, I, pp. 231–69).

He was preeminently a good hater, but he was a conspicuous man in his day and helped to develop a sentiment in favor of prohibition, besides making rather valuable contributions to local history.