LEMUEL SHAW, LL. D., Boston, for thirty years chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, was the son of Rev. Oaks and Susannah (Hayward) Shaw, and was born in Barnstable, Mass., Jan. 9, 1781.  His grandfather, Rev. John Shaw, the minister of Bridgewater, educated four sons at Harvard College, all of whom became Congregational ministers.  His father, Rev. Oaks Shaw, was born in Bridgewater, Mass., June 10, 1736, was ordained over the First Church (West Parish) in Barnstable on Oct. 1, 1760, and continued in that pastorate until his death, Feb. 11, 1807; his wife, Susannah, was a sister of Dr. Lemuel Hayward, a leading physician of Boston, from whom the son was named.  She was born in Braintree, Mass., and was a woman of vigorous mental and physical powers, and died in 1836, aged ninety-four.
     Lemuel Shaw was fitted for college by his father and by Rev. William Salisbury, of Braintree, and in 1796 entered the freshman class at Harvard, where he was graduated in 1800.  In order to pay his expenses through college he taught school winters, and after graduating he was for one year an usher in the old Franklin (Brimmer) Grammar School in Boston under Dr. Asa Bullard, principal.  He also contributed to the Boston Gazette, then a leading Federal organ, acting for a time as its assistant editor.  Late in the year 1800 he began the study of law in the office of David Everett, lawyer, author and scholar, who soon removed from Boston to Amherst, N. H., where Mr. Shaw, having followed him, completed his legal studies, being admitted to the New Hampshire bar at Hopkinton in September, 1801.  In October of the same year he was admitted to the bar of Massachusetts, and at once settled in Boston, having an office in the Old State House with Thomas O. Selfridge.
     His progress was slow, but sure.  The first case in which his name appears in the Reports is Young vs. Adams, 6 Mass., 162 (1810), which involved $5.  He continued in active practice for twenty-six years, studying not only the law, but also English classics and general literature, and mastering the English tongue.  He was also prominent in local affairs, serving as fire warden, school committeeman, Fourth of July orator, and selectman.  He represented the town of Boston in the General Court from 1811 to 1815 inclusive, was a member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1820, served as State senator in 1821-22 and 1828-29, and wrote the act incorporating the city of Boston with the exception of the sections relating to public theatres and exhibitions and the Police Court, which were drafted by William Sullivan.  This charter and plan of city government, devised by him as chair man of the joint committee while a member of the Senate, was well done and eminently successful in practical operation.  While in the House he and Prof. Asahel Stearns, of Cambridge, were appointed a commission to publish a new and revised edition of the General Laws of the Commonwealth, which was in exclusive use from 1820 to the general revision of the statutes in 1836.  He was an ardent Federalist, and a strong supporter of his party from the first of the century until its dissolution.  After practicing law alone for sixteen years he admitted his law student, Sidney Bartlett, to partnership, under the style of Shaw & Bartlett.
     On the 23d of August, 1830, Governor Lincoln appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to succeed Chief Justice Isaac Parker, deceased, and he continued in that exalter office for thirty years, resigning Aug/ 31, 1860, on account of old age and feeble health.  He died in Boston on Mar. 30, 1861.
     Judge Shaw held the chief justiceship longer than any other man in the history of his Commonwealth, and to say that he filled it with the highest honor and distinction is only just to his memory.  He was a good nisi prius? judge, careful, thorough and systematic.  His charges to the jury were invariably simple and clear.  He brought to the hearing in bane the same patience, the same desire to be instructed.  He was a man of great firmness, and had the highest sense of natural justice and equity.  Two of his famous opinions are contained in Farwell vs. Boston and Worcester Railroad Co., 4 Metcalf 49 ( 1841 ), and in Jones vs. Robbins, 8 Gray, 329 (1857).  An example of his wonderful vitality and vigor to the end may be found in his decision in the case of the Commonwealth vs. Temple, 14 Gray, 69, which was written in his eightieth year.   His decisions, beginning with 9 Pickering and including 16 Gray, make about one-third of the fifty seven volumes of the Massachusetts Reports issued while he was chief justice.  The following extract from the writing of the late Judge Benjamin F. Thomas shows how Lemuel Shaw was induced to become chief justice:
     "Daniel Webster used to give a pleasant account of this conference.  He found the future chief justice smoking his evening cigar.  Mr. Webster could not join him.  It was a weakness of this otherwise notable man, that he could not smoke.  So Mr. Webster talked while Mr. Shaw smoked.  Mr. Webster made a regular onslaught upon him.  Conceding the personal and pecuniary sacrifice, he pressed upon him, with the greater earnestness, the public want and demand, the dignity and importance of the office, and the opportunity it presented of winning an honored name, by valuable and enduring service to the State.  Mr. Shaw was silent, showing, as Mr. Webster put it, the impression made upon him only by the intensity with which he smoked.  Mr. Webster could get no more at the first interview than the promise not to say No before he saw him again.  At a second interview, with the aid of his own reflections and the urgency of leading members of the bar and his own appeal, Mr. Webster got a reluctant assent.  Mr. Webster used to add that, however the balance might be as to his efforts (so he thought) had secured for the State, for thirty years, so able, upright, and excellent a chief justice.  It is not difficult to believe that the earnest counsel and pressure of Mr. Webster, fresh from the field of the great debate - in which he had shown himself the first of living orators, and for which the heart of New England so clave to him - should have had large, even decisive upon the judgment and will of his friend.  Be this as it may, it speaks none the less for the chief justice, that the greatest of New England statesmen should have felt it added to his laurels, and to his claims upon the consideration of the people of Massachusetts, that he had aided in obtaining for her the services of such a magistrate."
     One of Judge Shaw's contemporaries records the following tribute to his memory:
     "With a firm trust in God, with a constant sense of His presence, looking to Him for guidance and support, nothing could move him from the path of duty.  He stood in his place, and the billows broke at his feet.  As man and as judge, he stood the severest test, the closet scrutiny.  The nearer you got to him the more thoroughly you knew him - the greater wiser, better man and magistrate he appeared to you.  Great on the bench and in the books, it was in the consultation room that you first understood of his resources."
     Judge Shaw was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard College for twelve years and of the Corporation of Harvard for twenty-seven years, and a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, of the Boston Library Society, of the Humane Society, of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians of North America.  He received the degree of LL. D. from Harvard in 1831 and from Brown University in 1850, and was a strong anti-slavery advocate and an occasional contributor to the press.
     He was married, first, Jan. 6, 1818, to Elizabeth, daughter of Josiah Knapp, of Boston, by whom he had a son and a daughter.  In August, 1827, he married, second, Hope Savage, daughter of Dr. Samuel Savage, of Barnstable, Mass.; they had two sons, Lemuel and Samuel S., both of whom became members of the Boston bar, being admitted in 1852 and 1856 respectively.