Background
He was born in Boston on August 24, 1729 to Jonathan and Mary (Payne) Sewall. He married Esther Quincy, a daughter of merchant Edmund Quincy.
He was born in Boston on August 24, 1729 to Jonathan and Mary (Payne) Sewall. He married Esther Quincy, a daughter of merchant Edmund Quincy.
However through scholarships, funds raised by his pastor William Cooper and with the help of his uncle, Chief Justice Stephen Sewall, Sewall was able to attend Harvard. Sewall graduated from Harvard College in 1748, and was a teacher in Salem until 1756.
Sewall"s father was an unsuccessful merchant who died at a young age. After studying law, he began a successful practice in Charlestown and served as attorney general of Massachusetts from 1767 to 1775. In 1768 he was also appointed Judge of Admiralty for Nova Scotia.
At the urging of Governor Francis Bernard, Sewall offered Adams the position of Advocate General in the Admiralty Court.
Adams declined. A devout Loyalist, Sewall took his family to England in 1775 after a mob stormed his family home in Cambridge (he was subsequently named in the Massachusetts Banishment Acting of 1778). Adams, in his diary, grieved that his best friend in the world had become his implacable enemy.
While Adams was assigned to London as a United States. minister to the Court of Saint James"s in 1785, he looked up his old friend and they had a two-hour meeting. Both men were entrenched in their own ideas and no reconciliation was possible.
Adams considered Sewall a casualty of the war.
Sewall later served as a judge in the Vice Admiralty Court of Nova Scotia. He died in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1796. Sewall was portrayed by James Noble in the Public Broadcasting Service miniseries, The Adams Chronicles, and by Guy Henry in the Home Box Office miniseries, John Adams.