After working in the offices of Charles Jackson, Loring established his own law practice.[1]:167 He was practicing in Boston by 1816, first with an unrelated partner until 1819, and later with his brother Francis Caleb Loring and his son Caleb William Loring.[2]
In 1851, Loring served, along with Robert Rantoul Jr. and Samuel Edmund Sewall, as defense counsel for Thomas Sims,[3] an African American from Georgia who had escaped to Boston. Arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Sims was ordered back to enslavement, despite vigorous efforts by his lawyers. In 1854, Loring became an actuary for the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, giving up most of his law practice.[1]:167
From 1825 to 1855 the published reports show that no other man in Boston had so large a number of cases in court, and of the cases of no other was the proportion of cases so large which by the novelty of the questions they raised ... may be considered as establishing new law or giving more scope to recognized law.
A member of the Republican Party,[4] Loring was elected to the Massachusetts Senate in November 1861,[5] taking his seat as a member of the 1862 Massachusetts legislature.[6][1]:167 He was chair of the Judiciary Committee and a member of the Committee on Mercantile Affairs.[2] In October 1862, he declined renomination for the Senate, although his supporters attempted to persuade him otherwise.[7]
Personal life
Loring married three times and was a widower twice. In 1818,[2] he married Anna Pierce Brace of Litchfield, Connecticut; she died in 1836.[1]:166 In 1840, he married Mary Ann Putnam of Salem, Massachusetts; she died in 1845.[1]:166 In 1850, he married Cornelia Goddard (née Amory; she was a founder of the New England Hospital for Women and Children) of Boston; she died after Loring, in 1875.[1]:166–167
Loring had four children who survived to adulthood, all with his first wife:[2][1]:168–169
son Caleb William Loring (1819–1897) was a lawyer and manufacturing executive[1]:263—his oldest daughter was Katharine Peabody Loring, a notable educator; his oldest son was William Caleb Loring, a notable judge.[1]:264
Loring and his third wife had a child who was born in 1851 and died in 1852.[1]:169
In 1846, Loring had a summer house built in Beverly, Massachusetts, in the area known as Prides Crossing.[1]:167–168 He died there in October 1867—in reporting his passing, the Boston Evening Transcript wrote that "he was among [Boston's] most prominent and esteemed citizens during the whole of his mature and faithful life."[9]
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