Saltonstall began his political involvement with the Whigs, his father's political party. In 1854 he was appointed to the staff of Governor Emory Washburn.[2]
From 1885 to 1889, Saltonstall served as Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston under president Grover Cleveland.[1] Saltonstall gave John F. Fitzgerald a job as a customs inspector. Fitzgerald later became Mayor of Boston and championed major improvements to the port.[3]
In 1854, Saltonstall was married to Rose Smith Lee (1835–1903), a daughter of John Clarke Lee.[4] Together, they were the parents of four sons and two daughters.[1]
Leverett Saltonstall III (1855–1863),[4] who died young.[1]
Richard Middlecott "Dick" Saltonstall (1859–1922),[4] who married Eleanor Brooks, a great-daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, in 1891.[1][5]
Rose Lee Saltonstall (1861–1891), who married Dr. George Webb West, son of George West, in 1884.[4]
Mary Elizabeth Saltonstall (1862–1947), who married Louis Agassiz Shaw, son of Quincy Adams Shaw and brother to Robert Gould Shaw II, in 1884.[6] After his death in 1891, she married John S. Curtis.[4]
Philip Leverett Saltonstall (1867–1919), a banker who married Frances Anne Fitch Sherwood, daughter of Thomas Dubois Sherwood, in 1890.[4] After his death, she married Dr. Joel Ernest Goldthwait.[7]
Saltonstall died on April 16, 1895, at his home in Chestnut HillinBrookline, Massachusetts.[1] In his will, he left $5,000 (~$159,206 in 2023) to establish a scholarship for "meritorious students" at Harvard.[10]
Through his daughter Mary Elizabeth, he was a grandfather of Louis Agassiz Shaw Jr., a Harvard physiologist who is credited in 1928, along with Philip Drinker, for inventing the Drinker respirator, the first widely used iron lung.[11]
^ abSaltonstall, Leverett. The Autobiography of Leverett Saltonstall: Massachusetts Governor, U.S. Senator, and Yankee Icon. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
^Cummins, TK (1909). "Records of the class". Twenty-fifth anniversary report (report VII) of the secretary of the class of 1884 of Harvard College. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 191–2.
^Kenneth E. Behring Center (2011). "The iron lung and other equipment". Whatever happened to polio?. Washington, DC: National Museum of American History. Archived from the original on June 4, 2011. Retrieved July 2, 2011.
