Background
Joshua Cushman was born on April 11, 1761, the son of Abner and Mary (Tillson) Cushman of Halifax, Massachusetts, and a descendant in the sixth generation of Robert Cushman, agent of the Pilgrims in England.
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Joshua Cushman was born on April 11, 1761, the son of Abner and Mary (Tillson) Cushman of Halifax, Massachusetts, and a descendant in the sixth generation of Robert Cushman, agent of the Pilgrims in England.
Cushman entered Harvard in 1783, but, owing to his inability to meet the bills of his final quarter, he did not receive the degree of Bachelor of Arts until 1791.
Meanwhile he had studied theology under Reverend Ephraim Briggs, and was approved as a candidate for the ministry by the Worcester Association in January 1789.
Cushman was ordained religious teacher of Winslow in the District of Maine in 1795. In 1814, by reason of reduced numbers and financial difficulties brought on by the war, his agreement with the town was terminated. It seems entirely probable that his liberal ideas had also caused some discontent.
He represented Kennebec County in the Massachusetts Senate in 1810, and the Town of Winslow in the House in 1811 and 1812. He was elected to the national House of Representatives in the fall of 1818.
After the organization of the state of Maine, he served in the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Congresses as one of its representatives. He was a state senator in 1828, and representative in 1833. As the senior member of the House he presided over its organization early in January 1834.
Cushman's sermons show him to have been devout and very liberal in his religious views.
Though an earnest advocate of the separation of Maine from Massachusetts, Cushman, with three other representatives from Maine, hostile to slavery, voted against Clay’s compromise, which admitted Missouri and Maine to the Union at the same time. Later, with them, he defended his action in a pamphlet.
In politics he was a supporter of Jefferson, and later of Jackson. His sympathies with struggling debtors, numerous in his own state, led him to speak in Congress in March 1822 in favor of the Bankrupt Bill. He was a strong advocate of Revolutionary pensions, the benefits of which he himself shared in the last years of his life.
A clear thinker and an accomplished speaker, Cushman was much in demand as an orator on public occasions; his printed and manuscript orations are good examples of the grandiloquent oratory of the times.
On September 13, 1802 Cushman married Lucy, the daughter of Peter and Aurah (Tufts) Jones.