author
Caleb William Loring
1819–1897
A Boston lawyer and legal writer, he is best remembered for exploring the constitutional meaning of nullification and secession in a work that kept Daniel Webster’s Unionist arguments in public view. He also belonged to a prominent Massachusetts family whose papers help trace a wide circle of legal, civic, and literary life.
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About the author
Caleb William Loring was born in 1819 and died in 1897. Contemporary notices describe him as an eminent Boston lawyer, and archival records from Harvard place him within the well-documented Loring family of Massachusetts.
He is the author of Nullification, Secession, Webster's Argument, and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, a historical and constitutional study that argues for the strength of the Union and revisits one of the great American political debates of the nineteenth century. That book remains the work most closely associated with his name in major public-domain library catalogs.
Family and archival sources also show his connection to a notable New England household: he was the father of Katharine Peabody Loring and William Caleb Loring, and related collections preserve correspondence, notebooks, and family papers that reflect the intellectual world around him. Some genealogical and historical sources identify him as president of the Plymouth Cordage Company; because that detail is not equally clear across the sources reviewed here, it is best taken as probable rather than certain.