Jeremiah Mason (1768 - 1848)
Born at Lebanon (CT); died at Boston (MA).
Lawyer, state and national legislator.
Copy by unknown artist, c. 1875 after the original by artist Chester Harding, 1835.
The plaque on the Dartmouth College original dates the year of the portrait as 1825; but it was not painted until 1835. See "Dartmouth Luminaries: The College Counsel Portraits, " in American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (to be published 2007-2008).
Gift to the State, 1875.

Mason was the son of a Revolutionary War militia officer, and a descendent of the notorious Captain John Mason, whose notorious 1637 attack against the Pequot Indians has been reevaluated in recent years. The military tradition ran deep in Mason's family.

Mason did not attend Lebanon (CT) public schools until he was fourteen years old But with the help of a Harvard College graduate, a Mr. Tisdale, Mason prepared himself for admission to Yale College within two years. Mason graduated from Yale with the Class of 1788, at twenty years of age.

After graduation Mason began to read law with Simeon Baldwin, of New Haven (CT). Within six months Mason moved north to Westminster (VT), a Connecticut River town near the frontier. There Mason read law with Stephen R. Bradley (1789-1791). He bought the farm of Colonel Alpheus Moore at Westmoreland (NH) and was admitted to the bar in 1791.

Mason practiced law in Westmoreland (NH) for three years (1791-1794), then moved to Walpole (NH). In 1797 Mason moved to Portsmouth (NH), where a leading lawyer, Edward Livermore, had been recently elevated to the bench. Mason found a place for himself in the Portsmouth legal community.

Mason was appointed New Hampshire Attorney General in 1802, but he resigned shortly thereafter (1805-1806). The issue may have been one of low pay, but Charles Bell, author of The Bench and Bar in New Hampshire (1894) says that Mason's talents were as a defense lawyer, not as a prosecutor.

Daniel Webster and Jeremiah Mason became friends because of an 1807 case in which Webster was arguing for the prosecution and Mason for the defense. Some years later, in 1817-1818, Webster and Mason teamed up again as two of the four legal counsel employed by Dartmouth College in the famous Trustees of Dartmouth College v. William H. Woodward case.

Mason was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1813 but resigned in 1817 to play his part in representing Dartmouth College before New Hampshire Superior Court (Webster helped with the 1818 appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court; Mason was one of the two counsel who lost the New Hampshire Superior Court case - and he had been approached earlier that year by Governor Plummer about becoming Chief Justice of that court.

In 1822 Mason moved to Boston (MA). There he was employed to defend Rev. Ephraim K. Avery in a sensational murder trial. Avery's acquittal brought Mason national attention. Hon. Rufus Choate said of Mason that "as a jurist he would have filled the seat of [first U.S. Supreme Court Justice John] Marshall as Marshall filled it." Daniel Webster declared, "If you were to ask me who was the greatest lawyer in the country, I should answer John Marshall; but if you.demanded my real opinion, I should be compelled to say it was Jere. Mason."

Reference: Charles H. Bell, The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire (1894).