PICKERING, TIMOTHY, LL.D., 1745-1829; b. Mass.; graduated at Harvard in 1763, and was admitted to the bar in 1768. In 1774 he drew up and presented to gen. Gage the memorial of the citizens of Salem in regard to the Boston port bill.' He belonged to the committee of correspondence, and his arrest was ordered for summoning a town meeting to consider the state of public affairs, but the warrant for his arrest was with- ' drawn. In 1775 he became a justice of the common pleas for Essex co., and the slime year appeared his Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia, which became the authorized manual of the colonial militia. He led an Essex co. regiment of 700 men in 1776, was made adj.gen., was at Brandywine and Germantown, served on the continental board of war in 1757, and was appointed quartermaster gen. 1780. At the close of the war he went into the commission business in Philadelphia., but removed to Wilkesbat•e in 1786. lie settled the territorial disputes between Pennsylvania and the inhabitants of the Wyoming valley, and organized Luzerne co., which he represented in the Pennsyl vania convention of 1787 that ratified the federal constitution. Between 1790 and 1793
be negotiated treaties with the Six Nations, and the Indians in the n.w. In 1791 he was appointed postmaster-general; in Jan., 1795, secretary of war; and in December of the same. year he was transferred to the state department, from which president Adams removed him in 1800. He again settled on his Uncultivated lands; but, a number of his Massachusetts friends having bought a large part of them to secure his return to his native state, he removed to co., of whose court of common pleas he was made chief justice in 1802. In 1803 he filled the unexpired term of Dwight Foster in the U. S. senate, to which he was re-elected in 1805. In 1812 he served on the Massachusetts board of war, and he was a member of congresg, 1813-17. In politics he was an extreme federalist, but the warmth of his temper involved him iu controversies with some of his political colleagues. He wrote a Review of the Correspondence between John Adams and William Cunningham, addresses, etc.