Sampson Salter Blowers

[2] A very successful trial lawyer, he worked with Josiah Quincy and John Adams in defending the soldiers[3] involved in the Boston Massacre, a March 1770 confrontation in which British soldiers fired into a crowd of a few hundred Bostonians who had been verbally harassing and throwing projectiles at them.

In Halifax he built a busy law practice, and in 1784 was named attorney general of Nova Scotia.

[1] Because Blowers put the onus on slave owners to prove that they had a legal right to purchase slaves, slavery died out in Nova Scotia early in the 1800s, unlike in New Brunswick, where Chief Justice George Duncan Ludlow had ruled that slavery was legal.

Most of his estate went to his adopted daughter, Sarah Ann Anderson, who had married William Blowers Bliss.

[7] Although he lost a substantial amount of property in the American War of Independence,[1] he regained his wealth in Nova Scotia, leaving a large estate to his adopted daughter.