Joseph H. Choate (1832-1917), a diplomat and lawyer, was considered the quintessential New Englander, though much of his life was spent in New York City at the apogee of America's Gilded Age. As a partner in a successful law practice there, Choate was involved in some of the country's most publicized legal cases during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. President William McKinley named him U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in 1899, where he proved himself a skilled diplomat.

Old New England Name

Choate was the scion of one of Massachusetts's Puritan-era families. An ancestor, John Choate, sailed there from England in 1643, and a number of his descendants had distinguished themselves by the time of Joseph Hodges Choate's birth in 1832. There were farmers of Hog Island, sometimes called Choate Island, in Ipswich Bay of Massachusetts; another served in the state legislator in the 1700s; and a cousin...