Background
Thatcher was born April 12, 1754, in Yarmouth, Province of Massachusetts Bay. He was the tenth of the eleven children of Lieut. Peter and Anner (Lewis) Thacher, and a descendant of Ant[h]ony Thacher who came to New England in 1635.
Thatcher was born April 12, 1754, in Yarmouth, Province of Massachusetts Bay. He was the tenth of the eleven children of Lieut. Peter and Anner (Lewis) Thacher, and a descendant of Ant[h]ony Thacher who came to New England in 1635.
He was prepared for college under the direction of Timothy Hilliard, the minister at Barnstable. He graduated from Harvard in 1776, and, except for one cruise on a privateer during the Revolution, he spent the three years thereafter studying law with that famous Cape Cod instructor, Shearjashub Bourne.
The confused land titles and rapidly growing settlements in Maine offered at that time special inducements to young lawyers, and thither he removed, settling finally in 1782 at Biddeford, where he succeeded to the practice of James Sullivan.
After his election by the Massachusetts legislature in 1787 as delegate to the Continental Congress he was elected by the District of Maine as a Federalist to every Congress from 1789 until his retirement in 1801, when he accepted an appointment as associate judge of the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts. He held this office until his resignation in January 1824.
In temperament he was more judge than politician. Of his judicial duties, in which his talent for weighing questions came to the fore, he wrote, "This Judge business is more agreeable than I had apprehended". When Maine was separated from Massachusetts in 1820, he moved, somewhat unwillingly, to Newburyport in order that he might continue in office, but on his retirement he returned to Biddeford, where he died shortly after.
The political support which he gained in his district because of his intellectual power, his integrity, and his natural gift for friendship was sometimes challenged by current reports of his irreligion. A deist, he advocated cheerfulness in religion; he did not believe in the existence of a soul apart from the body; he was a "mortal enemy to the Devil and all such Notions. " "Religion, " he wrote, "heretofore destroyed the pleasures of Life and made the world a state of misery".
He was a follower of Joseph Priestley, whom he met while in Congress. He was sympathetic to Unitarian beliefs and was one of the founders of the Second Church in Biddeford.
As a member of Congress he was faithful in attendance. Not a partisan by nature – he once wrote, "Parties are not necessary to the existence or support of political liberty" – he was not especially active in Congress, although on occasion he spoke his mind in no uncertain terms.
He did not believe a bill of rights necessary. He favored assumption of state debts, and was reconciled to the Potomac Bill. He opposed attempts to prevent Quaker antislavery petitions being read in Congress, and he again defended the right of petition when he urged the reference of the petitions of certain free blacks. When the Mississippi Territory Bill came up in Congress, March 23, 1798, he moved to strike out the words "excepting that slavery shall not be forbidden. " He defended Matthew Lyon in the Griswold-Lyon fight, but objected to the expulsion of either. Though an ardent champion of the rights of Americans and strongly anti-French, he believed that peace should be preserved. With less than his usual judgment, he advocated making the Sedition Act permanent.
Thatcher was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814.
He married on July 21, 1784, Sarah, the daughter of Samuel Phillips Savage of Weston, Massachussets.