Nathaniel Gorham was born on May 27, 1738, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the son of Captain Nathaniel Gorham and Mary Soley Gorham. His family belonged to the substantial artisan and merchant community of a busy town directly across the Charles River from Boston. Charlestown’s wharves, workshops, meetinghouse, and coastal trade gave the young Gorham a close view of commerce and municipal life. He received a common-school education rather than attending college, an important contrast with many of the lawyers and classically trained statesmen with whom he later served. At about fifteen, Gorham was apprenticed to Nathaniel Coffin, a merchant in New London, Connecticut. Apprenticeship was both education and employment. Living under a master’s authority, he learned bookkeeping, correspondence, purchasing, credit, shipping, and the careful maintenance of reputation on which eighteenth-century trade depended. New London’s maritime economy also exposed him to merchants and sailors moving goods throughout the Atlantic world. The training gave him practical abilities that formal collegiate study might not have supplied. After completing his apprenticeship, Gorham returned to Charlestown and established himself in business. In 1763 he married Rebecca Call, the daughter of Caleb Call and Rebecca Stimson Call. Their large family eventually included nine children who survived infancy. Marriage strengthened his place within local society and made household stability and commercial success closely connected concerns. Gorham entered public life gradually through town service. Like many New England merchants, he learned politics first at the local level, where questions of taxation, property, public works, and representation were immediate rather than abstract. His commercial livelihood also made imperial trade policy and the growing conflict with Britain personally consequential. By the early 1770s he had become sufficiently trusted to serve in the colonial legislature.