Rufus King grew up in Scarborough, Massachusetts, in present day Maine, the son of Richard King, a wealthy merchant, sea captain and lumberman loyal to the Crown. In 1765 a mob ransacked the family home and destroyed his father’s papers, and a year later returned to burn the barn; John Adams wrote to Abigail that the family’s suffering would melt a heart of stone. Rufus and his brothers sided with the Patriots anyway. He studied at Harvard, served as an aide to General John Sullivan at the Battle of Rhode Island, and rose through the Massachusetts General Court and the Confederation Congress to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where he never missed a session and served on the Committee of Style and Arrangement.

King arrived in Philadelphia defending the Articles of Confederation and left a leading nationalist. At Alexander Hamilton’s urging he moved to New York, entered the U.S. Senate in 1789, and served as minister to Great Britain under Washington, staying on under Jefferson. He was the Federalist vice presidential nominee in 1804 and 1808 and lost the 1816 presidential race to James Monroe. Though his party collapsed, he won reelection to the Senate in 1819, and in 1820 gave his most important speech, opposing Missouri’s admission as a slave state.

• He co-wrote newspaper essays with Hamilton under the pen name Camillus defending the Jay Treaty.
• As minister in London he opposed letting refugees from the 1798 Irish Rebellion settle in America, fearing radical ideas.
• Once a slaveholder himself, he wrote antislavery expansion provisions into the 1787 Northwest Ordinance.
• In 1821 he fought a New York constitutional clause restricting voting rights by race.
• His library of more than 2,200 books survives at the New-York Historical Society.