CHOATE, RUFUS (1799-1859), American lawyer and ora tor, was born at Ipswich (Mass.), on Oct. I, 1799. He graduated as valedictorian of his class at Dartmouth college in 1819, was a tutor there in 1819-20, spent a year in the law school of Harvard university, and studied for a like period at Washington, in the office of William Wirt, then attorney general of the United States. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1823 and practised for five years, during which time he served in the Massachusetts house of representatives (1825-26) and in the State senate (1827). In 183o he was elected to Congress as a Whig from the Salem district, and in 1832 was re-elected. His career in Congress was marked by a notable speech in defence of a protective tariff.
In 1834, before the completion of his second term, he resigned and established himself in the practice of law in Boston. For several years he devoted himself unremittingly to his profession, but in 1841 succeeded Daniel Webster in the U.S. Senate. Shortly afterwards he delivered one of his most eloquent addresses at the memorial services for President Harrison in Faneuil Hall, Boston. In the Senate he made a series of brilliant speeches on the tariff, the Oregon boundary, in favour of the Fiscal Bank Act, and in opposition to the annexation of Texas. On Webster's re election to the Senate, Choate resumed (1845) his law practice, which no amount of urging could ever persuade him to abandon for public office, save for a short term as attorney general of Massachusetts in 1853-54. In 1853 he was a member of the State Constitutional Convention. In July 1859 failing health led him to seek rest in a trip to Europe, but he died on the i3th of that month at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he had been put ashore when it was seen that he probably could not outlive the voyage across the Atlantic. Choate, besides being one of the ablest of American lawyers, was one of the most scholarly of American public men, and his numerous orations and addresses were remark able for their pure style, their grace and elegance of form, and their wealth of classical allusion.
His Works (edited with a memoir by S. G. Brown) were published in 2 vols. in 1862. The Memoir was afterwards published separately (1870) . See also E. G. Parker's Reminiscences of Rufus Choate (186o) ; E. P. Whipple's Some Recollections of Rufus Choate (1879) ; and the Albany Law Review