RUSH, RICHARD (1780–1859), American statesman and diplomatist, son of Dr Benjamin Rush, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 29th of August 1780 He graduated at Princeton in 1797, and was admitted to the bar in 1800. He was attorney-general of Pennsylvania in 1811, comptroller of the treasury of the United States in 1811-14, attorney general in the cabinet of President James Madison in 1814–17, acting secretary of state from March to September 1817, minister. to Great Britain in 1817–25, secretary of the treasury in the cabinet of President J. Q. Adams in 1825–29, and candidate for vice-president on the Adams ticket in 1828. In 1818, while minister to Great Britain, he, in association with Albert Gallatin, concluded with British plenipotentiaries the important treaty which determined the boundary line between the United States and Canada from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains and provided for the joint occupation of Oregon for ten years. He also conducted the negotiations with Canning in 1823 relating to the S. American policy of the Holy Alliance. He followed the Adams-Clay faction of the Democratic-Republican party in the split of 1825–28, but returned to the Democratic party about 1834 on the bank issue. In 1835 he and Benjamin C. Howard, of Baltimore, Maryland, were sent by President Jackson to prevent an outbreak of hostilities in the Ohio-Michigan boundary dispute. In 1836–38 Rush was commissioner to receive the Smithson legacy (see Smithsonian Institution), and in 1847–49 he was minister to France. He died at Philadelphia on the goth of July 1859.
He published A Narrative of a Residence at the Court of London from 1817 to 1825 (2 vols., 1833–45; all editions after the first edition of the 1st volume are entitled Memoranda of a Residence, &c.); Washington in Domestic Life (1857), compiled from letters written by Washington to his private secretary in 1790–98; and Occasional Productions, Political, Diplomatic and Miscellaneous (1860); and while attorney-general he suggested the plan for the compilation, Laws of the Nation (5 vols., 1815), edited by, John B. Colvin.