American lawyer and orator.
A precocious child, at six he is said to have been able to repeat large parts of the Bible and of Pilgrim’s Progress from memory. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated as valedictorian of his class at Dartmouth College in 1819, was a tutor there in 1819–1820, spent a year in the law school of Harvard University, and studied for a like period in Washington, D.C., in the office of William Wirt, then Attorney General of the United States.
He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1823 and practiced at what was later South Danvers (now Peabody) for five years, during which time he served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1825–1826) and in the Massachusetts Senate (1827).
In 1828, he moved to Salem, where his successful conduct of several important lawsuits brought him prominently into public notice. In 1830 he was elected to Congress as a Whig from Salem, and in 1832 he was re-elected. His career in Congress was marked by a 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. Already his reputation as a speaker had spread beyond New England, and he was much sought after as an orator for public occasions.
In the Senate, he spoke on the tariff, the Oregon boundary, in favor of the Fiscal Bank Act, and in opposition to the annexation of Texas. He served a short term as attorney-general of Massachusetts in 1853–1854.
In 1846, Choate convinced a jury that the accused, Albert Tirrell, did not cut the throat of his lover, or, if he did so, he did it while sleepwalking, under the ‘insanity of sleep’. His successful use of sleepwalking as a defense against murder charges was the first time in American legal history this defense was successful in a murder prosecution.
In 1856, he refused to follow most of his former Whig associates into the Republican Party and gave his support to Democrat James Buchanan, whom he considered the representative of a national instead of a sectional party. In July 1859 failing health led him to seek rest in a trip to Europe, but he died on July 13, 1859 at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he had been put ashore when it was seen that he probably could not last the voyage across the Atlantic.
Link to Wikipedia biography