PICKERING, TIMOTHY (1745-1829), American politi cian, was born at Salem, Mass., on July 17, 1745. He graduated from Harvard college in and was admitted to the bar in '768. In the pre-Revolutionary controversies he identified himself with the American Whigs; and in 1776 he was a representative from Salem in the general court of Massachusetts. Early in 1775 he published An Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia. In the same year he became judge of the court of common pleas for Essex county, and in the winter of 1776-77 he led an Essex regiment of volunteers to New York. He subsequently served as adjutant general, later as quartermaster general and was also a member of the board of war. In April, 1783, he drew up a plan for the settle ment of the North-West territory, which provided for the exclu sion of slavery. In 1785 he became a commission merchant in Philadelphia; but in Oct., 1786, soon after the legislature of Penn sylvania had passed a bill for erecting Wyoming district into the county of Luzerne, he was commissioned to organize the county. He offered to purchase for himself the Connecticut title to a farm, and in 1787 he was appointed a member of a commission to settle claims according to the terms of an act, of which he was the author, confirming the Connecticut titles (see WYOMING VALLEY and WILKES-BARRE). In 1790 he negotiated a peace with the Seneca Indians, and he concluded treaties with the Six Nations in 1791-94. Under Washington he was postmaster general (1791 secretary of war (1795), and after December, 1795, secre tary of state, to which position he was reappointed (1797) by Adams. In 1783, while he was quartermaster general, he had pre sented a plan for a military academy at West Point, and, as secre tary of war, he supervised the West Point military post with a view to its conversion into a military academy. As head of the state
department he soon came into conflict with Adams. His hatred of France made it impossible for him to sympathize with the presi dent's efforts to settle the differences with that country peaceably. He was dismissed, after refusing to resign, in 1800. Returning to Massachusetts, he was elected a United States senator in 1803– I I and a member of the House of Representatives in 1813-17. As an ultra Federalist—he was a prominent member of the group known as the Essex junto—he strongly opposed the purchase of Louisiana and opposed the War of 1812. He died at Salem, Mass., on Jan. 29, 1829.
The standard biography is that by his son, Octavius Pickering (1791-1868), and C. W. Upham, The Life of Timothy Pickering (Boston, 1867-1873). In the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society at Boston, there are 62 manuscript volumes of the Pickering papers, an index to which was published in the Collections of the society, 6th series, vol. viii. (Boston, 1896).
His son, JOHN PICKERING (1777-1846) , graduated at Harvard in 1796. He wrote on the languages of the North American Indians. He was a founder of the American Oriental Society and published a Comprehensive Dictionary of the Greek Language (1826).
Timothy Pickering's grandson, CHARLES PICKERING (1805 1878), was naturalist to the Wilkes exploring expedition of 1838 42, and in 1843-45 travelled in East Africa and India.