powerful Federalist Party leader, especially in New England.

After studying at Harvard, Cabot went to sea. He became a shipowner and successful merchant, retiring from business in 1794. Cabot was a member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention (1779–80), of the state Senate (1783), and of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Federal Constitution (1788). He served in the U.S. Senate (1791–96), where he was a leading supporter of the financial policies of treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, and in 1793 he was named a director of the Bank of the United States. He was president of the Hartford Convention, a secret meeting called on Dec. 15, 1814, to express the opposition of the New England Federalists to the War of 1812. Its report of Jan. 5, 1815, attacking President James Madison's administration and the war, aroused charges of lack of patriotism from which the party, already unpopular, never recovered.