Josiah Smith

Josiah Smith ( born February 26, 1738 in Pembroke, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, † April 4, 1803 ) was an American politician. Between 1801 and 1803 he represented the state of Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Career

Josiah Smith attended Harvard College to 1774. After a subsequent study of law and qualifying as a lawyer, he began to work in this profession. At the same time he embarked on a political career. In the years 1789 and 1790, he was a member of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts; 1792-1794, and in 1797 he was a member of the State Senate. In 1797 he was Finance Minister of his state. Politically, he was a member of the end of the 1790s by Thomas Jefferson founded the Democratic-Republican Party.

In the congressional elections of 1800, Smith was the sixth electoral district of Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington DC chosen, where he became the successor of John Reed on March 4, 1801. Since he resigned in 1802 to further candidacy, he could thus do only one term in Congress until March 3, 1803. Josiah Smith died on April 4, 1803 in Pembroke, only one month after the end of its term, of smallpox, with whom he had been infected on the way back from the federal capital, Washington.