Hea-Hit: Heath through Hitchcock

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


HEATH, William, 1737-1814, Massachusetts, soldier, statesman.  Member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Ratifying Convention.  (Dumond, 1961, p. 43; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 154; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2, p. 490; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 473)

HEATH, WILLIAM (March 2, 1737-January 24, 1814), Revolutionary soldier, was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the son of Samuel and Elizabeth (Payson) Heath. He was primarily a farmer by occupation. On April 19, 1759, he was married to Sarah Lockwood of Cambridge. Although he did not serve in the Seven Years' War, he was enrolled in a militia company, and in 1765 he joined the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston, subsequently becoming a captain, and supplementing his training by a careful study of works on military science and tactics. In the growing dispute with Great Britain, he exerted an influence in arousing a spirit of resistance. Over the pseudonym of "A Militia Man" he published in the Boston Gazette in 1770 two articles advocating military preparedness. In 1761 he had represented Roxbury in the General Court. In 1771 he was again elected to that body and remained a member until its dissolution by Governor Gage in 1774. When the crisis became imminent he was a member of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts and served on the committees of safety and supplies. In February 1775 the Provincial Congress commissioned him a brigadier-general, and at the battle of Bunker Hill he won promotion to the rank of major-general. When the Continental Congress took charge of the army before Boston, Heath became a brigadier-general under Washington. A year later he was commissioned major-general in the Continental service. In January 1777, while attempting to carry out Washington's orders in connection with an attack on Fort Independence, Heath handled the affair so badly that he brought upon himself a reprimand from the commander-in-chief. Thenceforth he was used for staff work rather than for active fighting.

During 1777 and 1778, after the Fort Independence episode, Heath was placed in command of the Eastern district, with headquarters in Boston. It fell to him in this position to act as guardian of Burgoyne's surrendered army, until it was removed to Virginia. Then, in the summer of 1778, when General John Sullivan and the Boston populace were threatening the French admiral, D'Estaing, with vengeance, because of disappointment over the proposed attack upon the British in Rhode Island, Washington wrote to Heath to try to prevent the Bostonians from casting unwarranted aspersions upon the French. In June 1779 he was transferred once more to the lower Hudson and remained in command there until the encl of the war, with the exception of a period in 1780 when he was sent to Rhode Island to prepare for the arrival of Rochambeau's French army. On July 1, 1783, Heath returned to his farm in Roxbury, where he spent the remaining thirty years of his life. He served as a member of the state convention which in 1788 ratified the Federal Constitution, in 1791 and 1792 was a member of the state Senate, and in 1792 was judge of probate. In 1806 he was elected to the lieutenant-governorship, but he declined to serve. He seems to have been a man of solid rather than brilliant part s, and probably a better farmer than a strategist or tactician.

[For Heath's letters and papers see the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 5 series, vol. IV (1878), 6 series, vols. IV (1904) and V (1905). For his own record of his military career see the Memoirs of Major-General Heath (1798), reprinted by Wm. Abbott in 1901 and by R. R. Wilson in 1904. Other sources include J. M. Bugbee, Memorials of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati (1890), and th e Boston Daily Advertiser, January 28, 1814.]

R. V. H.


HECKER, FRIEDRICH KARL FRANZ (September 28, 1811-March 24, 1881), German revolutionist, Union soldier, farmer, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2

HECKER, FRIEDRICH KARL FRANZ (September 28, 1811-March 24, 1881), German revolutionist, Union soldier, farmer, was born in Eichtersheim, Baden. His father was well-to-do, a court counsellor under Furst-Primas von Dalberg; his mother, nee Von Lueders, was of noble family. After an early training in the Lyceum at Mannheim, he studied law and history at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich, receiving at the latter his doctor's degree in law. After a visit to Paris in 1835, he settled down in Mannheim and rapidly gained distinction as an advocate. Drawn into politics by his election in 1842 to the Second Chamber of Baden, he led, with Itzstein and Sander, the liberal movement for parliamentary government. His speech in the Chamber of Baden opposing the incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein with Denmark won him fame throughout Germany, and his popularity increased when on a visit to Berlin in 1845 he was expelled from Prussia. Not willing to compromise on, halfway measures, as were his colleagues Bassermann and Welker, he resigned in 1847 and made a trip to Southern France and Algiers, but he was soon recalled by his constituents. Regarded as the champion of popular rights, he drew up, with Gustav Struve, the program of the Claims of the People of Baden at the Offenburg popular convention, September 12, 1847. Idealist that he was, he thought the German people were ready to throw over their monarchistic and particularistic traditions at once and declare themselves for a united republic. Such a resolution he brought forward in the Preliminary Parliament (Vorparlament) at Frankfurt, March 31, 1848. The moderates won, however, and when the government of Baden resorted to energetic measures, Hecker proclaimed the German Republic from Constance, and summoned the people of the Lake District (Seekreis) and the peasants of the Black Forest to armed resistance. He hoped for a spontaneous uprising in vast numbers of such as had been carried away by his fiery eloquence and magnetic personality, but the poorly armed force of a few thousand that gathered about him was no match for the combined troops of Baden and Hessen under General von Gagern. In the engagement near Kandern, April 20, 1848, Hecker's little army was badly routed and the leader fled across the Swiss border. Hecker was honored with reelection to the Chamber, but the Baden government would not respect his immunity, and the new Frankfurt Parliament refused to admit him to a seat as a member. He decided to emigrate, with the hope of collecting funds for the support of the revolution. The defeated Hecker was received like a conquering hero in New York City, and the ovations were repeated in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. With the aid of friends he selected a farm near Belleville, Illinois., and planned to join the colony of "Latin farmers," but when in May 1849 the Baden government was overthrown, the revolutionary Provisional Government called him home. He got as far as Strasbourg, where he learned that the Prussian armies had already vanquished the revolutionary forces in the Palatinate and Baden, and that the cause upon which he had staked all was lost. Emigration was now compulsory. With his wife (nee Josephine Eisenhardt of Mannheim) and two children he set sail from France and returned to his Belleville farm, situated near what later became the village of Summerfield, St. Clair County, Illinois.

Hecker became a successful farmer, cattle raiser, and viticulturist. A born leader, he could not keep out of politics when great questions agitated his adopted country. Though never accepting political office, he was one of the early Republicans, was on the Fremont electoral ticket, stumped the East and West against slavery, especially where Germans had settled, and was a n ardent supporter of Lincoln. At the age of fifty when the Civil War began he served as a private soldier under General Sigel, until he was made colonel of the 24th Illinois. Difficulties with superior officers caused him to resign hot-headedly, but soon another regiment was recruited for him in Chicago, the 82nd Illinoi s, which he led for the greater part of the war. He was wounded severely at Chancellorsville, but recovered quickly and did his part in the battles of Chattanooga, Missionary Ridge, and elsewhere. He returned to his farm after the war, but remained a chosen leader of the German element on public occasions and in public affairs. His speech at St. Louis in 1871 (Festrede zur St. Louiser Friedensfeier) was noteworthy, showing his adherence to republican principles. Another address, delivered July 4 of the same year a t Trenton, Illinois, is included in D. J. Brewer's World's Best Orations (1899, vol. VII). He was active in the Liberal Republican movement of 1872 and, although he opposed Greeley's nomination and spoke against him in the campaign, gave hearty support to the state Liberal Republican ticket. In 1873 he visited Germany. He died of pneumonia at his Summerfield fa rm on March 24, 1881, after a very brief illness. His wife and five children survived him. Reeker's winning personality and inspiring oratory, his integrity, wholeheartedness, and readiness to sacrifice all for the cause in which he believed, made him almost a legendary hero, in spite of his impetuosity, tactlessness, and vanity.

[Allegemeine Deutsche Biographie, Bd. 50 (1905); F. K. F. H ecker, Die Erhebung des Volkes in Baden fur die Deutsche Republik im Friihjahr 1848 (1848); Friedrich von Weech, Badische Biographiee11, Bd. 4 (1891); Karl Mathy, Aus dem Nachlass: Briefe al1s den lahren 1846- 1848 (1898), ed. by Ludwig Mathy; Friedrich Hecker und sein Anteil an der Geschiclzte Deutsch/ands 1md Amerikas (1881); Erinner1111 g an Friedrich Hecker (1882); Redenmd Vorlesungen von Friedrich Hecker (1872); Memoirs of Gustave Koerner 1809- 1896 (1909), ed. by T. J. McCormack; Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (1907); 1848 : Der Vorkan,pf deutscher Einhet und Freiheit (1914); F. I. Herriott, "The Conference in the Deutsches Haus, Chicago, May 14-15, 1860," Trans. Illinois State Historical Soc. ... 1928 (1928); St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 25, 188 1.]

A.B.F.


HEINZEN, Karl Peter (February 22, 1809-Nov. 12, 1880), German revolutionist, journalist, and author, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2

HEINZEN, KARL PETER (February 22, 1809-Nov. 12, 1880), German revolutionist, journalist, and author, was born in Grevenbroich, in the Dusseldorf district of Rhenish Prussia, son of Joseph and Marie Elisabeth (Schmitz) Heinzen. His father during the French Revolution was one of the most ardent of Rhenish republicans, but turned conservative when he accepted the post of Prussian forest inspector in 1815. The early death of his mother deprived the boy of her sympathy and love, and the restraint put upon him at home and at school served to foster a ruling passion for opposing all arbitrary authority. After completing his studies in the Gymnasium of Cleve, he began the study of medicine at Bonn in 1827, but on account of a revolutionary speech was dismissed from the university. Wishing to see the world, he entered the Dutch military service, which brought him the rank of a subaltern officer and a trip to the East Indies in 1829. Some years after he published a graphic picture of his eighteen months' sojourn there, in a work entitled Reise nach Batavia (1841). After he had returned home in 1833, though he had suffered mental tortures under the monotony of a soldier's life, he performed the required year of Prussian military service. His deep attachment for the accomplished and beautiful Luise Schiller during this period was a turning point in his early life. She was the daughter of the lawyer Moras in Cleve, and widow of the cavalry captain, Richard Schiller. She inspired the most beautiful of Heinzen's poems, those lamenting her early death. The care and education of her four children Heinzen, then twenty-six years of age, took upon himself, sacrificing eight years of his life in most distasteful and ill paid clerical service under a bureaucratic government, a life especially galling to a man of his independent spirit. In 1840 the oldest daughter, Henriette Schiller, became his wife, to whom and their son, Karl Frederick, born in 1844, Heinzen dedicated his autobiography, Erlebtes, in remembrance of their having borne bravely and c:heerfully the persecutions and miseries of which the book gives account. His positions in the Prussian civil service were first, that of a tax-collector, later clerk in the Rhenish railway system at Kiln. He then accepted a better paid position with the Aachen Fire Insurance Company, the duties of which also left him some leisure for writing. A volume of poems, Gedichte (1841), was favorably reviewed by the leading critics Menzel and Kurz, who saw in his work virility, genuine emotion, and unconventionality. It was in satire, however, that Heinzen early found his proper sphere. Die Ehre (1842), and Die gehehne Konduitenliste (1842) sharply criticized Prussian civil government, and he became even bolder in his contributions to the radical journals Leipzige Allgemeine Zeitmig and Rheinische Zeitung, which were both forbidden in Prussia. This interdict angered Heinzen into writing his severe arraignment of Prussian bureaucracy, Die preussische Bureai1 kratie (1844), which was widely circulated in spite of the order of confiscation. Criminal proceedings were instituted against the author, who, however, escaped to Belgium and in 1846 went to Switzerland, whence he se nt his broadsides of revolutionary propaganda into German territory, aided secretly and skilfully by liberal friends. Noteworthy among his bitter satires were Bin Steckbrief (1845), Mehr als zwanzig Bogen (1845), Politische und impolitische Fahrten itnd Abentelter (1846), Macht euch bereit (1846). The pens of Heine and of Borne in the preceding decade were not more caustic and effective. The radical of radicals was banished successively from Zurich, Basel-Land, Bern, and Geneva, and in January 1848 he came to the United States. In New York, in conjunction with Ivan Tyssowski, the Krakaur evolutionist, he edited Die deutsche Schnellp ost, founded by Eichthal. When the Paris revolution broke out in February 1848, Heinzen hastened back and took active pa rt in the second Baden revolution, but antagonized most of the other leaders. After the collapse he was not tolerated in France or Switzerland, but was transported with his family to London. When all hope of a third revolution had to be abandoned, he set sail for America, a riving in New York in 1850. There he founded the radical paper Der Volkerbund, only one number of which appeared. After its financial failure he again edited Die deutsche Schnellpost, subsequently the New Yorker Deutsche Zeitung, and finally the Janus, all of which failed in quick succession. Finding a new great cause in the abolition of slavery, which he wished to agitate in a slave state, he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1853 to become editor of the Herold des Westens. His establishment was burned, but German friends gave him a new s tart with a paper called the Pioneer, founded in 1854, removed to Cincinnati, then to New York, and fin ally in 1859 to Boston. Into this weekly journal he poured his intellectual powers and his soul for more than twenty years. Extremely radical, always advocating unpopular causes, it yielded at best a hand-to-mouth existence, but th e editor never considered his material welfare, and his able wife for long periods reduced publication expenses to a minimum by serving as type-setter and business manager. The Pionier appeared until December 1879, a year before Heinzen's death.

A born satirist, he spared neither friend nor foe; opposition he could not tolerate; the value of tact and cooperation he never learned. A courageous seeker after truth, he could not compromise with truth as others saw it. The most intellectual of all the German revolutionists, he n ever mastered the English language and his works with very few exceptions became known to only a limited few. His masterful German style with its clear flow, caustic wit, and brilliant sallies could not easily be transferred into another language. He thought a truly democratic republic must not be based alone on equal political but also on equal social rights. He did not believe in communism, for th at could be maintained only through an unendurable despotism. The sacredness of property based on individual work he considered a necessity for personal independence. Heinzen's philosophy was materialistic, his religion ethical, non-Christian, anti constitutional. He was opposed to all strongly centralized government, but had nothing constructive to offer in its place.

An edition of his collected works was to comprise twelve volumes, but only five appeared. There is a four-volume collection of his essays and addresses under the title: Teutscher Radikalismus in Amerika: Ausgewahlte Vortrage (1867-79). Among his essays, editions of which appeared in English are: Mankind the Criminal (1864); Six Letters to a Pious Man (1869); The True Character of Humboldt (1869), an oration; What is Real Democracy'! (1871); Lessons of a Century (1876), a Fourth of July oration; What is Humanity? (1877); Separation of State and Church (1882); The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relation (1891).

[Erlebtes, Autobiography, esters Theil (1864), zweiter Theil (18 74); Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Ed. 50 (1905); Heinrich Kurz, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, Ed. 4 (5th ed. 1894); Deutsch-amerikanisches Conversations-Lexicon, Ed. 5 (1877), ed. by A. J. Schem; H. A. Rattermann, Der Deutsche Pionier, April-September 1881; P. 0. Schinnerer, in Jahrbuch der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Historischen Gesellschaft von Illinois . . . 1915 (1916); Boston Transcript, November 13, 1880; manuscript sources in the possession of Henriette M. Heinzen, Cambridge, Massachusetts]

A. B. F.


HELPER, Hinton Rowan, 1829-1909, North Carolina, abolitionist leader, diplomat, writer.  Wrote anti-slavery book, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, 1857.  It argued that slavery was bad for the South and its economy.  The book was banned from distribution in the South. 

(Dumond, 1961, p. 353; Mabee, 1970, pp. 196, 197, 219, 240, 327; Pease, 1965, pp. 163-172; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 60, 63, 114, 225-226, 333-334, 426, 682-684; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, pp. 161-162; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2, p. 517; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 420-422; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 542)

HELPER, HINTON ROWAN (December 27, 1829-March 8, 1909), author, was born in Rowan (now Davie) County, North Carolina. He was the youngest child of Daniel and Sarah (Brown) Helper. His father, whose parents (spelling their name Helfer) emigrated to North Carolina from the vicinity of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1752, had acquired a small farm and several slaves but died the year after Helper was born so the boy grew up in straitened circumstances. He managed to graduate from Mocksville Academy in 1848 and for a time worked in a store in the neighboring town of Salisbury. In 1850 he went to New York and from there, by way of Cape Horn, to California. He returned three years later with his mind greatly stimulated and wrote The Land of Gold (1855). He afterward claimed his publisher forced him to eliminate from this certain criticisms of slavery based upon his observation of free labor in California and thus intensified his dislike of the institution, but the book itself (pp. 221-22, 275-79), hardly supports that explanation of his opinions during the following year when he wrote The Impending Crisis. He moved to New York as a safer place to live after the appearance of this work, which was a brief in behalf of the non-slaveholding whites of the South. Contrasting the economic condition of the free and slave states, he attributed the backwardness of the South to the impoverishment of free labor by slavery. There was no trace of interest in the negro and his real or fancied wrongs. He attacked the slave-holders violently and threatened a slave uprising if necessary to overthrow the system. The book had a significance not then realized as an expression of the growing feeling against slavery among non-slave-holders and small slave-holders in North Carolina. Published in 1857, it caused a sensation, one far greater than Uncle Tom's Cabin produced. It was furiously attacked in the South bitt few dared to read it and it thus remained without an adequate answer. Instead of pointing out the real weakness of the book, those who read it cast doubts on Helper's integrity. Samuel M. Wolfe in Helper's Impending Crisis Dissected (1860, p. 75) accused him of stealing money from his employer. This charge continued to be repeated and believed in spite of Helper's denial (Bassett, post, p. 16) and his attempts to prove its falsity by a certificate from the employer (New Englander, November 1857, p. 647). In the North the book was read and in 1859 a fund was raised to print one hundred thousand copies of it for Republican campaign use in 1860. John Sherman's indorsement of it caused his defeat for speaker of the House in 1859 and the heat which it aroused was a powerful contributing cause of the Civil War.

In 1861 Lincoln appointed Helper consul at Buenos Aires, where he tried to establish close relations with South America, in 1863 married Maria Luisa Rodriguez, and served satisfactorily though uneventfully until he resigned in 1866. He returned to the United States and wrote in quick succession three books on the negro question. Nojoque (1867), often described as an inconsistency, was to Helper logically the next step. It is a furious denunciation of the negro as a menace to the South and to white labor, and the purpose avowed in its preface was "to write the negro out of America ... and out of existence. " Helper was naturally opposed to congressional reconstruction, foreseeing its results and detesting its theory of negro equality. Negroes in Negroland (1868) was an even more elaborate continuation of the theme, while Noonday Exigencies (1871) was a plea for a new political party. His detestation of the negro continued to the end of his life and, as long as his circumstances allowed him any choice, he would not stay where negroes were employed.

After resigning from the consulship Helper acted as attorney to citizens of the United States in the collection of their claims against South American governments and interested himself in the various phases of political and commercial relations with South America, such as the establishment of regular steamship communication, the building of a canal at one of the three feasible sites, the subsidy of a commercial marine, and the character and efficiency of the navy, which he felt failed in its duty to represent a friendly United States in South American waters. His Oddments of Andean Diplomacy (1879) is a collection of papers and letters pertaining to these activities. More and more, however, his time and thought were absorbed in plans to promote a railroad from Hudson Bay to the Strait of Magellan. He offered prizes to the amount of $5,000 for the best essays and poem on the subject and published five of the papers as The Three Americas Railway (1881). He wrote thousands of letters, memorialized Congress, interviewed hundreds of influential men, and paid several visits to South America in the interests of the plan. Becoming a monomaniac on the subject, he called himself "the new Christopher Columbus." He was a man of keen intellect, with a touch of genius akin to madness.

Helper's last years were spent in poverty. Having sacrificed comfort, fortune, and family to his dream, when hope waned he grew despondent and bitter, finally committed suicide in Washington, and was buried by strangers.

[J. S. Bassett, "Anti-Slavery Leaders of North Carolina," Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science, 16 series, no. 6 (1898); S. A. Ashe, Biographical History of North Carolina, vol. VIII (1917); Charlotte Observer, April 18, 1909; W. S. Pelletreau, "Hinton Rowan Helper and His Book," Americana, August 1911; The South in the Building of the Nation, vol. XI (1909); Nation, March II, 18, 1909; Washington Post, March 10, 1909.]

J.G. de R.H.J.


HEMENWAY, Mary Porter Tileston (December 20, 1820-March 6, 1894), philanthropist, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2

HEMENWAY, MARY PORTER TILESTON (December 20, 1820-March 6, 1894), philanthropist, was born in New York of old New England ancestry, the daughter of a shipping merchant, Thomas Tileston, and of Mary (Porter) Tileston. She went to a private school in New York, and at home "was reared," as she said, "principally on household duties, the Bible, and Shakespeare" (Memorial Services, p. 21). On June 25, 1840, she married Augustus Hemenway, a successful merchant, and thereafter she was identified with Boston, Massachusetts. Her husband died in 1876, but she survived him eighteen years, devoting her wealth and her energies to the development of numerous educational and philanthropic projects. She read carefully, loved pictures, and knew well leading writers and citizens. She was a member of James Freeman Clarke's Church of the Disciples. A queenly woman without affectation or condescension, she combined in her philanthropic work enthusiasm with effectiveness. She sought able helpers and her benefactions were generally the result of careful thought.

After the Civil War she helped the establishment of schools on the southern seaboard for both whites and blacks. Later, she made gifts to Armstrong at Hampton and Booker Washington at Tuskegee for the further education of the freedmen. In the course of her welfare work for soldiers' families during the war she had discovered that many of the soldiers' wives did not know how to sew; accordingly, in 1865 she provided a teacher and materials for systematic instruction in sewing in a Boston public school. The experiment brought good results, and the instruction was taken over by the city. In 1883, she started an industrial-vocation school in Boston and two years later, in 1885, she opened a kitchen in a public school, the first venture of its kind in the United States. After three years the city assumed the cost of the kitchen, and cooking as well as sewing became part of the program of public education. Meantime, in 1887, Mrs. Hemenway had started the Boston Normal School of Cooking, which after her death became the Mary Hemenway Department of Household Arts in the State Normal School at Framingham. Next, for a year, she furnished a hundred Boston teachers free instruction in gymnastics, using the Swedish system as best adapted to schoolrooms. In order to interest the public, she promoted in 1889 a conference on physical training, held in Boston, which led to the introduction of gymnastics into the city's public schools, by action of the School Commits tee, and was influential in stimulating nationwide interest in the cause of physical education (F. E. Leonard, A Guide to the History of Physical Education, 1923). In 1889, also, she established the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, which twenty years later became the Department of Hygiene and Physical Education of Wellesley College. She promoted, at much personal effort, the Boston Teachers' Mutual Benefit Association.

In 1876, in order to save from destruction the Old South Meeting-house, famous for meetings of Revolutionary days, she gave $100,000-a quarter of the total sum required-her hope being to make the old church a center for the cultivation of patriotic idealism through education in history. Prizes were offered for essays by high-school pupils, historical lectures were given, the Old South Leaflets, a series of reprints of historical "sources" edited by Edwin D. Mead, were issued, and the young persons who had competed  for prizes were organized into a historical society. At a time when the history of the United States had no place in the school curriculum, the "Old South work" was almost unique. Such scholars as John Fiske and James K. Hosmer [qq.v.] furthered Mrs. Hemenway's plans and were helped by her to publish lectures and biographies. Her interest in American history was further evidenced by her promotion of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition begun in 1886 under Frank H. Cushing [q.v.] of the United States Bureau of Ethnology and continued after 1900 under J. W. Fewkes [q.v.] of the Bureau. The collections made by the expedition are kept in the Hemenway Room at the Peabody Museum at Harvard; the results of its investigations are set forth in five volumes, A Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology (1891-1908), edited by Fewkes and published at Mrs. Hemenway's expense. Her will provided for the support of her various enterprises for fifteen years, during which time her trustees were able to put them on a permanent basis.

[A Memorial of the Life and Benefactions of Mary Hemenway, 1820-1894 (privately printed, 1927), preface signed by Mary Wilder Tileston; Memorial Services in Honor of Mrs. Mary Hemenway by the Boston Public School Teachers (1 894), ed. by Larkin Dunton; Katherine H. Stone, " Mrs. Mary Hemenway and Household Arts in the Boston Public Schools," in Jour. of Home Economics, January 1929; E. D. Mead, The Old South Work (1899); L. V. Briggs, History and Genealogy of the Cabot Family (1927), vol. II; M. D. R. Young, An Ideal Patriot of Peace (1894); E. E. Hale in Lend a Hand, April 1894; C. G. Ames, Ibid., July 1894; Agnes Crane in Leisure Hour, September 1894; Boston Evening Transcript, March 6, 15, 1894; Boston Post, March 7, 1894.]

J.R.B.


HEMPHILL, Joseph, 1770-1842, jurist, Congressman from Pennsylvania.  Opposed extension of slavery into the new territories.  Speaking on the concept of citizenship in relation to slavery, he state in the debate of 1820: “If being a native, and free born, and of parents belonging to no other nation or tribe, does not constitute a citizen in this country, I am at a loss to know in what manner citizenship is acquired by birth… when a foreigner is naturalized, he is only put in the place of a native freeman.  This is the genuine idea of naturalization… But citizenship is rather in the nature of a compact, expressly or tacitly made; it is a political tie, and the mutual obligations are contribution and protection.” 

(Dumond, 1961, pp. 107-108, 383n34; 16 Congress, 2 Sess., 1820-21, p. 599; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 162; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2, p. 521; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 556)

HEMPHILL, JOSEPH (January 7, 1770-May 29, 1842), lawyer, congressman, judge, son of Joseph and Ann (Wills) Hemphill, was born in Thornbury Township, Chester (later Delaware) County, Pennsylvania. His father, a native of Londonderry, Ireland, was a well-to-do farmer. Joseph attended grammar school at West Chester and received the bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1791. He then studied law and in 1793 was admitted to the bar. From 1797 to 1800 he was a member of the state Assembly, where he was active in securing the final adjustment of the Wyoming controversy. In 1800 he was elected to Congress as a Federalist. His first speech, in opposition to the repeal of the judiciary act (February 16, 1802), earned for him the title, "Single-Speech Hemphill." Charging that the Republicans aimed at destroying the Constitution, he predicted that if the act were repealed, "it will become as much a matter of course to remove the judges as the heads of departments, and in bad times the judges would be no better than a sword in the hands of a party, to put out of the way great and obnoxious characters for pretended treasons" (Annals of Congress, 7 Congress 1 Session, col. 544). In 1804 he moved to Philadelphia to continue his growing law practice. Although he was a Federalist, many of his best friends and clients were Republicans. In the Constitutionalist victory (1805) he was sent to the state legislature, where he assisted in revising the judiciary. In 1811 Governor Snyder, arch-Jacobin, appointed him first president-judge of the district court for Philadelphia City and County, an unusual tribute for those partisan times. He was recommissioned in 1817 but resigned in 1819 owing to his delicate health and weak eyes.

From 1819 to 1831, except for two years, 1827-29, Hemphill was again in Congress. As chairman of the committee on the slave trade he attacked as unconstitutional (December 11, 1820) Missouri's discrimination against free negroes and mulattoes, contending that the provision in the federal Constitution regarding privileges and immunities was a condition precedent and, until complied with, no state was or could be created. A report on the enormities of the slave trade (House Report 59, 16 Congress, 2 Session), which he and Charles Fenton Mercer prepared, evoked favorable comment in England. An administration man throughout this period, a member of the committee on the judiciary and of that on the Cumberland Road (1822), he advocated internal improvements, the encouragement of domestic manufactures, and relief for war veterans. His political career ended with a term in the state Assembly, 1831-32. Having become interested in porcelain manufacturing, after visiting European factories in 1827 he engaged in that business in Philadelphia. The enterprise failed and was soon abandoned. Hemphill married Margaret, daughter of Robert Coleman of Lancaster, on September 11, 1806.

[Sources include: Gilbert Cope and H. G. Ashmead, Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogy and Personal Memoirs of Chester and Delaware Counties, Pennsylvania (1904), I, 112-13; J. S. Futhey and G. Cope, History of Chester County, Pennsylvania (1881); and North American and Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), May 30, 1842. For reception of slave trade report in Great Britain see the Edinburgh Review, October 1821, p. 50, and T. C. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 2 ser., vol. VII (1823), cols. 1400-02.]

J.H.P-g.


HENDERSON, John Brooks, 1826-1913, lawyer. U. S. Senator from Missouri.  Appointed Senator in 1863.  Member of the Republican Party.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery

(Appletons’, 1888, Vol. III, pp. 163-164; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2, p. 527; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 569; Congressional Globe)

HENDERSON, JOHN BROOKS (November 16, 1826-April 12, 1913), United States senator, was born in Danville, Virginia, the son of James and Jane (Dawson) Henderson. In 1832 the family moved to Lincoln County, Missouri, where a few years later his father was accidentally killed. His mother died soon afterward and he went to live for some years on the farm of a minister where he worked to the advantage of both brain and brawn, acquiring rugged health and obtaining a firm grounding in his studies. From then until the end of his life he was an omnivorous reader and a prodigious worker. At fifteen he began teaching in Pike County and also read law. Admitted to the bar in 1844, he began practice at Louisiana, the county-seat, rapidly built up a large practice, and, fortunate always in investments, accumulated a considerable property which developed ultimately into a large fortune. In politics he was an ardent Democrat and was elected to the legislature in 1848 and again in 1856. In both sessions he was prominent in railroad and banking legislation. During this period he was president of one of the branches of the state bank. He was defeated for Congress in 1850, 1858, and 1860, but he was judge of the court of common pleas for a short time and was offered a seat in the supreme court. In 1856 and in 1860 he was a presidential elector. Independent then as always, he opposed President Buchanan's Kansas policy; and in 1860, supporting Douglas, he was a delegate to the Charleston and Baltimore conventions. He was a state-rights Democrat, or at least so considered himself, but when the issue was drawn in 1861, he strongly opposed the secession of Missouri and was a Union delegate to the convention and one of the most influential forces in preserving the state to the Union. But he was opposed to the coercion of the seceded states. "Has it ever been supposed, by any member of this convention, that any man could be elected President of the United States who could so far disregard his duties under the Constitution and forget the obligation of his oath as to undertake the subjugation of the Southern States by military force? ... If so ... this Government is at an end" (Journal and Proceedings of the Missouri State Convention, post, pt. 2, pp. 91-92). Declaring secession "a damnable heresy," he was bitter against the North and the Abolitionist element of the Republican party which he thought had provoked the trouble and declared that revolution would be the better course for Missouri if Abolitionist doctrines were to prevail. He served on the federal relations committee and its report expressed his views. In the report of the commission appointed to receive the commissioner from Georgia he made a powerful argument for the Union, and his speech, made by request of the convention on March 5, was fiery and eloquent. The fall of Sumter and the call for troops changed his opinion as to coercion, and he raised a brigade of militia of which he became brigadier-general. He saw no active service and on January 17, 1862, was appointed United States senator to replace Trusten Polk. The following year, he was elected for a full term.

In the Senate, where he was next to the youngest member, Henderson quickly became prominent. He served on a number of important committees, including finance, foreign relations, and Indian affairs, and was responsible for much of the financial legislation of the war. He was greatly interested in the purchase of Alaska and aided Seward in arranging the terms. As chairman of the committee on Indian affairs he urged better treatment of the Indians, and in 1867, as chairman of the Indian peace commission, he concluded advantageous treaties, bringing peace with several tribes. He was friendly to Lincoln 's plan for compensated emancipation and voted for the resolution indorsing it. At Lincoln's request he went to Missouri to urge the policy, later introducing a bill to carry it into effect there. Lincoln informed him in the summer of 1862 of the proposed emancipation proclamation, but while approving, he, like Seward, urged its delay. In 1864, believing that an amendment abolishing slavery would pass only if proposed by a border-state member, he introduced the Thirteenth Amendment despite his belief that it meant his political death. He voted for the Wade-Davis bill, but he supported Lincoln's plan of reconstruction. In the session of 1865-66, however, he acted with the radicals, voting for the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills, and in February 1866, while opposing the Fourteenth Amendment as inadequate, he advocated negro suffrage and offered an amendment to the resolution which was almost identical to the wording used later in the Fifteenth Amendment. In the end he voted for the Fourteenth Amendment, but in 1869, when the Fifteenth Amendment was under discussion, he did not s pea k in its behalf and was absent when it was passed. He doubted the wisdom of the provision for military government in the Reconstruction acts but yielded the point. He was a severe critic of Johnson and voted for the Tenure of Office Act, but, alone of the regular Republican senators, voted against the bill forbidding the president to issue military orders except through the gen. era! in command of the army. From a sense of decency he would not vote for the resolution declaring Stanton's removal illegal and during the progress of the trial of Johnson he was liberal with respect to the admission of evidence. He found it hard to reach a decision, harder still to vote against his party, and visibly wavered, even offering to resign that his successor might vote guilty. When an insolent telegram of instructions came from Missouri his poise was restored, and he replied: "Say to my friends that I am sworn to do impartial justice according to law and conscience, and I will try to do it like an honest man" (Henderson, post, p. 208). he voted "not guilty," defied the attempt of the managers to fasten corruption upon him, assuring the Senate that he had no appropriate epithets for B. F. Butler's report, and, if he had, could not, in justice to himself or to the Senate, use them, and filed an unanswerable defense on legal grounds for his votes. He was denounced, threatened, and burned in effigy by Missouri radicals, but more than any other of the recalcitrant Republicans he was forgiven by his party. He was, of course, not a candidate for reelection. Returning to the law, he began to practise in St. Louis. In 1870 he supported the Liberals, but in 1872 he was back in the fold and the party candidate for governor and in 1873, candidate for senator. In 1875 he was appointed special federal district attorney to investigate and prosecute the whiskey ring, but he was soon removed for a speech attacking General Babcock, which Grant thought reflected upon him as well. Henderson knew Grant well and had sought in 1867 and 1868 to guide him away from some of his undesirable political associates. He did not approve of Grant's administration and supported him reluctantly in 1872. In 1876 and 1880 he was a determined opponent of the third-term movement. In 1884 he was president of the Republican national convention and was eager for the nomination of his friend and neighbor, General William T. Sherman.

In 1889 Henderson retired from practice and moved to Washington, D. C., where he spent the rest of his life. He was an interested delegate to the Pan-American Congress of 1889 and for many years, 1892-1911, a regent of the Smithsonian Institution. He wrote constantly for magazines and the press, preserved a lively interest in public affairs, entered into the social life of the capital with zest, entertaining a great deal, and grew gracefully to old age. He died after a brief illness and was buried at Arlington Cemetery. Although Henderson was a man of warm and affectionate nature, he had a gusty temper not infrequently aroused. In politics he was courageous and never hesitated to differ with his party. A touch of intellectual uncertainty in him is indicated by his frequently voting for measures he opposed in speech. He married, in 1868, Mary Newton Foote, the daughter of Elisha Foote of New York, who survived him.

[J. B. Henderson, "Emancipation and Impeachment," Century Magazine, December 1912; Journal and Proceedings of the Missouri State Convention Held ... March 1861 (1861); D. P. Dyer, Autobiography and Reminiscences (1922); Wm. Hyde and H. L. Conard, Encyclopedia of the History of St. Louis (1899), vol. II; Evening Star (Washington, D. C.), and St. Louis Republic, April 13, 1913. ]

J. G. de R. H.


HENDRICKS, William (November 12, 1782- May 16, 1850), congressman, governor of Indiana, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2

HENDRICKS, WILLIAM (November 12, 1782- May 16, 1850), congressman, governor of Indiana, was born at Ligonier, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, the son of Abraham and Ann (Jamison) Hendricks. He received an elementary education in the common schools at Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Jefferson (later Washington and Jefferson) College in 1810. In early manhood he mov ed to Cincinnati where he taught school and studied law, and in 1813 he removed to Madison, Indiana, while that state was still a territory. Madison remained his home until his death. In the year of his arrival he joined with a partner in publishing the Western Eagle and in the same year he was elected to the territorial legislature. Reelected in 1814, he was chosen speaker of the Assembly. He was also made territorial printer. In 1816, when the territorial convention met at Corydon to draw a constitution for the new state, Hendricks became secretary of the convention al, though he was not a delegate. In the first elec., tion under the constitution in August 1816 he was elected to Congress and was reelected in 1818 and 1820. In the latter year he favored placing an anti-slavery restriction on Missouri in the controversy ·over the admission of that state. He denounced slavery as "morally wrong," and "an epidemic in the body politic." Contending that Congress had power to impose conditions on a territory, he held that the people of a territory "are not possessed of sovereign State powers when making a constitution, nor when it is made, until Congress shall admit them to the Union" (Annals of Congress, 16 Congress, 1 Session, p. 1345).

In 1822 Hendricks was elected governor of Indiana without opposition, receiving nearly all the votes that were cast. He resigned from Congress to accept the governorship, but in 1825 he was elected to the United States Senate and resigned the governorship to take his seat there. In December 1830, he was elected to a second term in the Senate. During his twelve years of senatorial service he was a member of the committee on roads and canals, acting as chairman from 1830 to 1837. Although he was a Jackson Democrat he was a firm believer in internal improvements and favored the building of roads and canals in all parts of the country. He sought to have the public lands ceded to the states in which they lay, since otherwise he saw no escape from federal appropriations. There was, he contended, no equality between the old states and the new so long as the old states owned their lands while the new states did not. He particularly insisted that the Western states should have title to the public lands within their borders. In financial matters he stood for a central national bank, with its seat in Washington, empowered to establish branches in the states, but only by the consent of the states themselves.

In 1837 Hendricks retired from public life as the result of Whig triumphs in his state. During his nearly twenty years of service in Congress he had followed the habit of sending an annual letter, or report, to his constituents giving an account of his stewardship and setting forth the leading topics and features of the session just closed. He gave faithful and competent service, and his long public life was above reproach. He helped to lay the foundations of his state and made the first revision of the laws of Indiana which he had printed on his own press. He was married, on May 19, 1816, to Ann P. Paul. Vice-President Thomas A. Hendricks [q.v.] was his nephew.

[Logan Esarey, ed., Governors Messages and Letters, vol. III, which is vol. XII (1924) of the Indiana History Collections; A Biographical History of Eminent and Self-made Men of the State of Indiana (2 vols., 1880); Biographical and Historical Catalog of Washington and Jefferson College, 1802-89 (1889); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928). ]

J.A.W.


HENRY, Patrick, 1736-1799, Virginia, statesman, founding father, opponent of slavery.  Henry wrote in 1773: “I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them [slaves].  I will not, I can not justify it.  However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue, as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and to lament my own want of conformity to them.”  (Bruns, 1977, pp. 221, 310, 348-350, 382-383, 389, 508; Drake, 1950, pp. 71, 83, 85; Mason, 2006, pp. 21, 250n140, 250n147, 293-294n157; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 95, 152; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, pp. 173-175; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2, p. 544; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 615)


HENSON, Josiah, 1789-1883, born a slave in Maryland, led one hundred slaves to freedom, founded Community of Former Slaves in Ontario, Canada; said to be the basis for Uncle Tom in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Founded British American Manual Labor Institute in Canada.  (Dumond, 1961, p. 337; Lobb, 1971; Mabee, 1970, p. 173; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 26, 38, 335-336, 486; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 178; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2, p. 544; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 621)

HENSON, JOSIAH (June 15, 1789-May 5, 1883), an escaped slave, active in the service of his race, and the reputed original of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Toni's Cabin, was born in Charles County, Maryland, on a farm belonging to Francis Newman, about a mile from Port Tobacco. In his early years, under the system of slavery, he saw his mother brutally assaulted and his father mutilated. The master, Riley, into whose hands he fell while still a young boy, was harsh and incompetent. Josiah, however, became a strong and vigorous youth. Before he was grown his ability made him superintendent of the farm, and the crop doubled under his management. At the age of eighteen, never before having heard a sermon, he was deeply moved by the discourse of ci, godly baker, John McKenny, who was opposed to slavery. One evening, in rescuing his master at a convivial gathering, he offended the overseer of a neighboring plantation, who later attacked him with the assistance of three slaves, broke one of his. arms; and otherwise abused him. At the age of twenty-two he married a slave girl, who became the mother of twelve children. In 1825, Riley, about to be ruined by his improvidence, exacted from Josiah a promise that he would conduct the slaves of the plantation, about twenty in number, to a brother living in Kentucky. In passing through Ohio they were urged to assert their freedom, but Josiah remained true to his word. In Kentucky he worked under more favorable conditions and in 1828 was admitted as a preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church. After trying in vain to purchase his freedom, he was sent to New Orleans to be sold.

Deciding to make a bid for freedom he set forth one night with his wife and four young children. It took him two weeks to reach Cincinnati. Later a Scotchman named Burnham, captain of a boat, assisted him in getting to Buffalo, and, October 28, 1830, he crossed over to Canada. He worked hard, learned his letters from his oldest boy, who now went to school, became a preacher in Dresden, Bothwell County, Ont., and rapidly advanced in influence and esteem. He was interested not only in helping other slaves to escape from bondage but also in cultivating in the negroes the spirit of thrift and in encouraging them to acquire land. He tried to develop a community and to found an industrial school at Dawn, in the territory between Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River, to which place he took his family in 1842. Committees in both England and America were interested, but through the incompetence of an age nt the project dragged on for years, little being clone. Henson's own integrity was called in question both in England and by the negroes in the settlement; but he cleared himself to the satisfaction of all concerned. In 1851, on the second of three trips to England, he was awarded a bronze medal for some black walnut boards that he exhibited at the World's Fair, was honored before a distinguished company at the home of Lord John Rus sell, prime minister, and invited by Lord Grey to go to India to supervise cotton raising. Late in life, his first wife having died, he married a widow in Boston, who accompanied him on his third visit to England in 1876. A farewell meeting in Spurgeon's Tabernacle was attended by thousands, and Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle presented him with a photograph of herself framed in gold.

A quarter of a century before, on passing through Andover, Massachusetts, Henson had told his story to Harriet Beecher Stowe. In A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) she had referred to his career; henceforth he was famous as Uncle Tom, though his claim was not without dispute. In 1849 he published The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself. It appeared enlarged and with an introduction by Harriet B. Stowe in 1858, under the title Truth. Stranger than Fiction: Father Henson's Story of His Own Life, and further enlarged was published in 1879 under the title, "Truth Is Stranger than Fiction": An Autobiography of the Reverend Josiah Henson, with a preface by Harriet B. Stowe and introductory notes by Wendell Phillips. He died in Dresden, Ont.

[In addition to works already mentioned, see New York Tribune, May 6, 1883.]

B. B.


HEPBURN, John, Society of Friends, Quaker, early anti-slavery activist, promoted colonization project as early as 1715.  Wrote that slavery was “anti-Christian and vile.”  Wrote, The American Defense of the Golden Rule, or An Essay to Prove the Unlawfulness of Making Slaves of Men, 1715.  (Bruns, 1977, pp. 16-31; Drake, 1950, pp. 34-36, 38, 121; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 12, 94; Zilversmit, 1967, p. 66)


HERNDON, William Henry (December 25, 1818-March 18, 1891), law partner of Abraham Lincoln, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2,

HERNDON, WILLIAM HENRY (December 25, 1818-March 18, 1891), law partner of Abraham Lincoln, was born in Greensburg, Kentucky. His mother, Rebecca (Day) Johnson, in 1816 had taken as her second husband Archer G. Herndon, who moved to Illinois in 1820, settling in Sangamon County in 1821 and in Springfield in 1825. Here he engaged in politics and business. William Herndon entered the preparatory department of Illinois College, only to imbibe its anti-slavery atmosphere. An emphatic public utterance on the death of Lovejoy caused his father to recall him, and a breach developed between father and son. Herndon was a great admirer of Lincoln and probably in 1844 he joyfully accepted an invitation to become his junior law partner. Thereafter he worked loyally to further Lincoln's political ambitions. His influence on Lincoln's opinions on slavery can probably be overestimated; but Herndon, who was in close correspondence with Theodore Parker and in touch with anti-slavery literature, undoubtedly called to his partner's attention on this, as on other subjects, many papers and book s which would have otherwise escaped him. Herndon's own political ambitions were easily satisfied. He was mayor of Springfield for a term, state bank examiner, and candida te for presidential elector in 1856. But he sedulously nursed Lincoln's fortunes through the setback in 1848, and through the trials and vicissitudes of the years from 1854 to 1860. Lincoln's last request of him on leaving their office was to keep the old sign, Lincoln & Herndon, till his return. After his partner's death, Herndon had successively as partners Charles Zane and Alfred Orendorff. Business reverses, due as he frankly admitted to his long habits of intemperance, overtook him about 1871. For the latter part of his life he turned his attention not very successfully to a small fruit farm. On March 26, 1840, he had married Mary J. Maxey by whom he had six children; after her death he married, July 31, 1861, Anna Miles, who bore him two children.

Herndon's chief claim to fame is as the biographer of his great friend. Immediately after Lincoln's death he traveled in Kentucky and Indiana collecting reminiscences of Lincoln's childhood and boyhood, from men still living who could speak of them at fir st hand. He laboriously exhausted the recollections of John Hanks and Dennis Hanks. Although he himself planned to write a n elaborate biography based on his researches, he generously gave of his stores to biographers like Holl and, Barrett, and Arnold, who made scanty acknowledgment of their debt. A bout 1870 his financial straits induce d him to sell copies of his notes to the persons engaged on the Lamon Life of Abraham Lincoln (187 2); that he had any further share in th at work he strenuously denied. As an old man he published in association with Jesse W. Weik Herndon' s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (3 vols., 1889). The original publishers, Belford, Clarke & Company, went bankrupt, and in 1892 D. Appleton & Company republished it in two volumes with important alterations. A t the time of its publica tion the work met savage criticism for its statements as to the birth of Lincoln's mother, Lincoln's religious beliefs, and other details. The best recent opinion acquits Herndon of any very serious blunders on these heads and endorses his attempt to keep Lincoln a human personality and to save him from too uncritical an apotheosis; it finds more vulnerable his attempts to dramatize his material s and to find the motifs of Lincoln's career in an unhappy marriage and the blighted romance with Ann Rutledge. For introducing the Rutledge interpret a tion of Lincoln's career, so popular with th e rom antic, Herndon's lecture of November 16, 1866, has justly to do penance (Abraham Lincoln, Miss Ann Rutledge, New Salem, Pioneering and the Poem, 1910). But the debt of all serious Lincoln students to his researches is very great.

[Sources include: J. C. Power, History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois (1876); Jesse W. Weik, The  Real Lincoln (1922); Joseph Fort Newton, Lincoln and Herndon (1910); A. J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln (2 vols., 1928); Paul M. Angle, Where Lincoln Practiced Law-Lincoln Centennial Association Papers (1927); Ceremonies at the Unveiling of Monument to Wm. H. Herndon (n.d.); Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1891. Date of birth is taken from the inscription on Herndon's tombstone.]

T. C. P.  


HERRICK, Anson, 1812-1868, journalist.  Democratic Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Served in Congress December 1863-March 1865.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. III, p. 187; Congressional Globe)


HEYWOOD, Ezra Hervey, 1829-1893, abolitionist, temperance activist, women’s rights advocate.  Member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.  Follower of William Lloyd Garrison.  (American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 727; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 428-429; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 2, p. 609)

HEYWOOD, EZRA HERVEY (September 29, 1829-May 22, 1893), radical pamphleteer, was the son of Ezra Hoar, an enterprising farmer related to Senator George F. Hoar [q.v.], and Dorcas (Roper) Hoar, a collateral descendant of John Locke. After the father's death in 1845 the children took the name Heywood in 1848 by legislative sanction. Heywood was born in Princeton, Massachusetts, a country village, where he spent the greater part of his life. From Westminster Academy he went to Brown University, graduating in 1856, but remaining for two years' further study, with the Congregationalist ministry in view. He was already an advocate of women's rights, and his commencement address was on "Milton-The Advocate of Intellectual Freedom." An encounter with William Lloyd Garrison at an abolitionist meeting in Framingham influenced Heywood to become an active agent of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society. Thus he became a frequent and popular platform speaker. After the Civil War, which he opposed as a pacifist, he carried over the abolitionist spirit and methods into social and economic radicalism.

He married, June 6, 1865, a woman who shared his every interest, Angela Fiducia Tilton of Worcester. Heywood removed to that city where he lived until 1871, when he returned to Princeton. The Heywoods (under the name of The Co-operative Publishing Company), set up a press from which, aided only by their children, they poured out an astonishing volume of propaganda. Abbreviated titles of his chief pamphlets are: Cupid's Yokes, on marriage reform, which ran to fifty thousand copies and for mailing which Heywood and De Robigne M. Bennett [q.v.] were prosecuted; Uncivil Liberty, advocating women's rights, which ran to eighty thousand copies; Social Ethics ... Free Rum ... Assures Temperance; The Labor Movement; Hard Cash; Free Trade; The Great Strike ... of 1877. In May 1872, appeared the first number of The Word, a monthly journal of reform, which continued until April 1893, interrupted only by Heywood's imprisonment. Mrs. Heywood supplied some of the most daring contributions, which her husband never revised, even when he disapproved of them, so strong was his belief in women's rights. Heywood's writings were courageous, plainspoken, earnest, but without humor and very lengthy. Their importance lies less in their substance than in the fact that they were so much in advance of contemporary thought and so widely read. These two fiery spirits soon attracted others. The Heywoods established in Princeton The Mountain Home, a kind of summer hotel for agitators and spiritualist s. They organized a radical society, the Union Reform League, which held conventions in Princeton. They joined in forming the New England Free Love League in 1873, which Heywood thenceforth regarded as the beginning of a new chronology, dating his letters and journal Y. L. (Year of Love), instead of the outworn A. D. The federal statute of 1873 against mailing obscene matter, obtained by Anthony Comstock [q.v.], was bitterly opposed by Heywood. whose publications wen; equally objectionable to Comstock. In November 1877, Comstock arrested Heywood in Boston at a meeting of the Free Love Society. Heywood was convicted, June 1878, in the United States court, for mailing obscene publications to Comstock, who had applied for them under an assumed name. He was sentenced to $mo fine and two years' imprisonment at hard labor in Dedham jail. An indignation meeting in Faneuil Hall, attended by six thousand persons, resulted in a pardon from President Hayes after Heywood had served six months' imprisonment. A second arrest in 1882 by Comstock, at Princeton, for similarly induced mailing was followed by acquittal, Heywood appearing in his own defense. Upon a third arrest, under the Massachusetts obscenity law, in 1883, Heywood's neighbors, despite their strong disagreement with his views, formed a defense committee and petitioned against the prosecution. which was not pressed. In 1890 he was convicted in the United States court for obscene passages in The Word, written by Mrs. Heywood, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment, which he served.

Those who knew him well attest his kindliness of spirit, sincerity of motive, and the integrity of his private life. He and his wife, despite their advocacy of free love, were a faithful, devoted, and happy couple, who gave excellent training to their four children, Hermes, Angelo, Vesta, and Psyche Ceres. The family were somewhat ostracized in a small village, but were nevertheless respected. The neighbors used occasionally to buy The Word to see what shocking statements it contained; yet a Princeton farmer once concealed a whole issue in his barn to avoid its seizure by the authorities. A few months after his last release Heywood died in Boston, while on a visit for medical treatment. His funeral was typical of his life, without minister, prayers, or Scripture, but the friends who were present spoke as they were impelled to do. He was buried in the family lot at Princeton, in a plain unpainted pine box.

[See Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall ... (1878); Free Speech: Report of Ezra H. Heywood's Defense (1883}; Boston Herald, May 23, 25, 1893; Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord (1927); Providence Journal, June 28, 1893. The petition of the neighbors on his third arrest is in the Harvard University library. Much use has been made of numerous letters about Heywood in the Brown University library, which also possesses a death mask. a photograph, and a file of The Word.]

Z.C., Jr.


HICKS, Elias, 1748-1830, clergyman, abolitionist leader.  Long Island farmer.  Society of Friends, Quaker minister. Founder of Hicksite sect of Quakerism, which believed in a radical form of abolitionism.  (Drake, 1950, pp. 116-118, 120, 155, 160; Hicks, 1861; Pease, 1965, pp. 143-148; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, pp. 195-196; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 6; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 430-431; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 744)

HICKS, ELIAS (March 19, 1748-February 27, 1830), Quaker preacher, leader of the separation in the Society of Friends, was born in Hempstead Township, Long Island, New York, fifth in descent from John Hicks, who came to America about 1638. He was the son of John and Martha (Smith) Hicks, who shortly before Elias's birth had become members of the Society of Friends. He received a meager education, and spent much time as a boy in fishing and hunting; but he possessed a natively keen, strong mind and acquired the habit of diligent reading. At the age of thirteen, his mother having died two years before, he went to live with a married brother, and at seventeen he apprenticed himself to a carpenter. 1n 1771 he married Jemima Seaman, daughter of Jonathan Seaman of Jericho, Long Island, by whom he had four sons and seven daughters. After his marriage he lived on the Seaman farm, which he managed until his death.

He began to make short "religious visits" to nearby pl aces, but as time went on these visits became more extensive. Walt Whitman, who frequently heard him and admired him, describes the eloquent manner of public address which he developed. By the time he had reached middle life he was recognized as one of the two or three most effective Quaker preachers of his period. Immense audiences, both of Quakers and non Quakers, flocked to hear him, especially in the new settlements of the Middle West. His popularity was perhaps greater in Philadelphia than in any other Quaker center. He was a tall, straight, impressive figure with clean-shaven face, expansive forehead, and prominent eyebrows, and was always dressed in utmost drab simplicity. He was unusually sensitive to the movings of conscience and rigidly honest. Possessing a tender, humane spirit, quickly touched by either human or animal suffering, he was all his life a powerful advocate of kindness to animals and a pleader for enlarged rights and opportunities for unprivileged classes of people. He was an opponent of slavery and a devoted friend of the slave.

From 1815 onwards, when he was already sixty-seven years old, he became recognized as the exponent and champion of liberal views, which his conservative opponents preferred to call radical and dangerous. The ideas which formed the content of his sermons and discourses are somewhat difficult to formulate. They do not come under well-known and easily recognized patterns or rubrics. He had a strong bent toward an extreme Quietism. Outward authorities, external performances, and historical revelations held in his mind a relatively unimportant status. He gave the inward aspect and sphere of religion an unusual emphasis. The inward Light became for him the all-important central feature of life and religion. He was often called a "unitarian," but his interpretation of Christ does not correspond to the usual unitarian types of thought. He sharply discriminated between the Jesus of history and the eternal spiritual Christ. Jesus, according to his conception, was essentially "human," a perfect man, the completion and fulfilment of human life, a "prophet" of the highest order. In him, Hicks taught, dwelt in supreme measure the eternal Christ who was, for him, the spiritual revelation of God and who likewise dwells in all men in all ages as the inward Light and spiritual Guide. This inward Christ, he held, is the true, only, and all-sufficient Saviour. Hicks strenuously opposed the so-called evangelical doctrines of salvation which seemed to him man-made "innovations." He himself pushed over to the other extreme and held that the entire work and process of salvation is within man and not something historically and outwardly accomplished. This emphasis of Hicks on the inward aspect of religion and his slender interest in the historical aspect, came to formulation at a time when there was a strong wave of evangelical thought prevailing in many sections of the Society of Friends, and the collision of views was inevitable. Other situations existed which were factors in the separation which in 1827-28 took place, but the theological collision was beyond question the major factor. Hicks was not present in person when the first Quaker separation occurred in Philadelphia in April 1827, but his name was from the first popularly and unofficially attached to the liberal Quaker branch th at emerged from the controversy. He was present when the separation occurred a year later (May 1828) in New York. Separations followed, during the year 1828, in Ohio and in Baltimore, and a small division occurred in Indiana. The terms "Hicksite" and "Orthodox" which came into wide use to discriminate the two branches of the Society of Friends in the sections where separations occurred have never been officially recognized. Hicks continued to preach and to expound his religious po si tion far on into a virile old are, dying from the effect of a paralytic stroke.

[Journal of the Life and Religious Labours of Elias Hicks (1832); The Quaker 4 vols., 1827-28), containing a series of sermons by Hicks taken in shorthand by M. T. H C. Gould; Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (1892); J. J. Foster, Report of the Testimony in ... the Court of Chancery (2 vols., 1831); Journal of Thomas Shillitoe (2 vols., 1839); A Letter from Anna Braithwaite to Elias Hicks (1825); S. M. Janney, History of the Religious Society of Friends (1 vols., 1859-67); R. M. Jones, The Later Periods of Quakerism (2 vols., 1921); H. W. Wilbur, Life and Labors of Elias Hicks (1910); Edward Grubb, Separations (1914); Elbert Russell, The Separation After a Century (1928); Journal of the Life and Religious Labors of John Comly (1853); Miscellaneous Repository (4 vols., 1827-32).]

R. M. J.


HIGGINSON, Thomas Wentworth Storrow, 1823-1911, author, editor, Unitarian clergyman, radical abolitionist, women’s rights advocate, secretly supported radical abolitionist John Brown, and his raid on the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, (West) Virginia, on October 16, 1859.  Served as a Colonel in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first African American regiment formed under the Federal Government. 

(Edelstein, 1968; Mabee, 1970, pp. 309, 312, 318, 319, 321, 336, 345, 377; Renehan, 1995; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 138, 207, 327, 337-338, 478-479; Rossbach, 1982; Sernett, 2002, pp. 205, 208, 211, 213, 325-326n3; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 199; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 16; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 431-434; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 10, p. 757; Wells, Anna Mary. Dear Preceptor… 1963.  Higginson, Thomas, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 1870)

HIGGINSON, THOMAS WENTWORTH (December 22, 1823-May 9, 1911), reformer, soldier, author, was born and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Stephen Higginson, a prosperous Boston merchant, steward, or bursar, of Harvard College after his impoverishment by the Embargo of 1812, was the son of Stephen Higginson [q.v.], and was descended from Francis Higginson [q.v.], first minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Louisa Storrow, the second wife of Stephen Higginson, Jr., bore him ten children, of whom Thomas was the youngest. The name with which he began life, Thomas Wentworth Storrow Higginson, came direct from his maternal ancestry, for his mother was the daughter of an English army officer, Captain Thomas Storrow, a prisoner-of-war at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the Revolution, and Anne Appleton, a great-grand-daughter of the fir st royal governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth [q.v.]. Higginson dropped the name of Storrow before entering college. At the age of thirteen he enrolled at Harvard in the class of 1841. "A child of the college," as he called himself in later life, he had passed his boyhood in the very shadow of it, and was better prepared than his years would suggest to profit from its influences. Graduated at seventeen, he stood second in his class, and was already a voracious reader, with a happily retentive memory. The out-door pursuits of a lover of nature and of such athletic sports as the times afforded-swimming, skating, loosely knit football-kept his tall, awkward body in good physical condition. While an undergraduate he could write in his journal, "I am getting quite susceptible to female charms" (Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 31), and long afterwards had the frankness to recall such tendencies, in their bud, by writing, "I don't believe there ever was a child in whom the sentimental was earlier developed than in me" (Ibid.). He found little satisfaction in the two years of teaching that followed his graduation from college. In 1843 he returned to Cambridge as a "res ident graduate" student, and for three years indulged his taste for discursive reading, without a fixed professional goal. The divinity school was reported to be made up of "mystics, skeptics, and dyspeptics," and did not attract him immediately upon his return to Cambridge, or hold him continuously after he had entered it; but in 1846-47 he was enrolled in its senior class, with which he graduated.

When only nineteen and still employed in teaching, Higginson became engaged to marry his second cousin, Mary Elizabeth Channing. Slender resources and uncertain prospects led to a long engagement, in the course of which the young student, charged with the idealism that produced many "come-outers" of the time, began his devotion to two favorite cause s, woman suffrage and opposition to slavery. In the second of these he was no mere anti-slavery theorist, but, at twenty-two, a "disunion abolitionist," pledged "not only not to vote for any officer who must take oath to support the U. S. Constitution, but also to use whatever means may lie in my power to promote the Dissolution of the Union" (Ibid., p. 76). So pronounced a radical was fortunate in finding any pulpit of his own, but in September 1847 Higginson became pastor of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts; in the same month he married Mary Channing. In the Unitarian ministry of his time and region there was abundant precedent for freedom of speech and action, and Higginson followed it heartily. Besides taking his place among temperance, suffrage, and anti-slavery reformers, he ran-unsuccessfully-for Congress as a Free-Soil candidate, and dealt so outspokenly with politics in his sermons that, after two years, he was found, in his own words, to have "preached himself out of his pulpit." For over two years more he remained in the neighborhood of Newburyport, when, in the spring of 1852, he accepted a call to the pastorate of a "Free Church" in Worcester-one of the precursors of later "ethical societies," and falling, as an organization, under a definition of "Jerusalem wildcats," which Higginson evidently relished (Cheerful Yesterdays, 1898, p. 130). In this post he remained till the autumn of 1861, occupied with many things besides his preaching-lecturing on anti-slavery and other topics, school-committee work, temperance and suffrage activities.

Through this period anti-slavery took more and more the right of way over other reforms with him. While still at Newburyport he was summoned hurriedly to Boston on one occasion to join a vigilance committee for the rescue of a fugitive slave, and suffered genuine chagrin at the government's thwarting of the rescue plans, Three years later, in May 1854, he was similarly summoned from Worcester to take part in the liberation of another fugitive slave, Anthony Burns [q.v.], about to be returned from Boston to his owner in the South. In this historic case Higginson bore an important part, helping to batter a passage through a door of the court house, and receiving a severe cut on the chin from his encounter with the police. In such enterprises he continued as he began-in sharp contrast with the leading anti-slavery reformers who refused, on principle, to fight. Twice in
1856 he supplemented his work in the East for freedom in Kansas by going West himself in the interest of organized settlers on debatable ground. His first visit took him to Chicago and St. Louis, his second into Kansas, on an adventurous, semi military journey, chronicled in letters to the New York Tribune, which were published al so as an anti-slavery tract, A Ride Through Kanzas (1856). This experience brought him into relations with John Brown, which later became those of close confidence and sympathy.

Holding no theories against the use of force, Higginson found it natural soon after the outbreak of war to stop his preaching and prepare for fighting. He was on the point of starting for the front in November 1862, as captain of a Massachusetts regiment he had helped to raise and drill, when the colonelcy of the first negro regiment in the Union army was offered to him. This he accepted, and held the command of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers from November 1862 until May 1864, when the serious effects of a slight wound obliged him to leave the army. His regiment took part in no important battles, but its experiences in camp at Beaufort, South Carolina, and on skirmishing and raiding expeditions up the St. Mary's and South Edisto Rivers afforded abundant material for his excellent book, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), besides placing him in physical perils which he appears to have met with fine courage.

When Higginson quitted the army in 1864 his wife had moved, because of her delicate health, from Worcester to Newport, Rhode Island, the scene of his one novel, Malbone (1869), and of his collected sketches, Oldport Days (1873). Here also he produced the two volumes of Harvard Memorial Biographies (1866), a work of high merit, for which he wrote thirteen of the ninety-five memoirs of Harvard graduates and students who gave their lives for the Northern cause in the Civil War. In Newport he and his wife continued to live until her long invalidism was ended by her death in September 1877, soon after which he went abroad for some months before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1878, for the remainder of his life. In February 1879 he married his second wife, Mary Potter Thacher, of Newton, Massachusetts, who survived him. From his return to Cambridge until his death his life was that of a man of letters and a reformer, especially in the field of women's rights. As a writer he was primarily a "magazinist." His gifts of graceful and agreeable writing, of broad sympathy, of shrewd observation, both of men and of nature, joined with the equipment of wide reading well remembered, made him a welcome contributor to many periodicals, particularly the Atlantic Monthly in its earlier years. Through not qualifying as a specialist in any one field he felt conscious of a certain resemblance to a celebrated horse, "which had never won a race, but which was prized as having gained a second place in more races than any other horse in America" (Cheerful Yesterdays, p. 183). While still in Newport he wrote and published his popular and profitable textbook, Young Folks' History of the United States (1875), followed ten years later by his Larger History of the United States (1885). A bibliography of all his writings fills twenty-six closely printed pages of the biography by his widow. The chief books, not previously mentioned in this article, are: Atlantic Essays (1871), Life of Francis Higginson, First Minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1891); Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (7 vols., 1900); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1902), in the American Men of Letters series; John Greenleaf Whittier (1902), in the English Men of Letters series; Part of a Man's Life (1905), Life and Times of Stephen Higginson (1907), Carlyle's Laugh and Other Surprises (1909). Magazine articles, many of which were reprinted in these volumes, besides addresses and pamphlets swell the bibliography to its great size.

Though Higginson's tall, slender figure and sensitive features conveyed no marked suggestion of the soldier, the title of colonel clung to him through life. The uneventful career of a writer in Cambridge, a term of service (1880-81) in the Massachusetts legislature, a second and third journey to Europe, where he met many congenial spirits, the discovery and heralding of Emily Dickinson and her poetry, a lively interest in the past and present of his community, by summer residence stretched to include Dublin, New Hampshire, as well as Cambridge-with such concerns, intellectual, social, civic, the years of nearly half a century following the Civil War were happily and gently filled. Two daughters were born of his second marriage. Through the younger of these his old age was brightened by grandchildren. He had passed his eighty-seventh birthday when the labors of his active, well-stored mind and faithful pen came to their end.

[Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of his Life (1914), and Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1921) are the chief biographical sources. There is, moreover, much of autobiographic interest and value in books of his own that have been mentioned above.]

M.A. De W.H.


HILDRETH, Richard (June 28, 1807-July 11, 1865), writer, editor, lawyer, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 19-20.

HILDRETH, RICHARD (June 28, 1807-July 11, 1865), writer, editor, lawyer, was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, a descendant of Richard Hildreth who became a freeman of the colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1643 and the son of the Reverend Hosea and Sarah McLeod Hildreth. ills father, a graduate of Harvard, became professor of mathematics at the Phillips Exeter Academy in 1811. Richard entered the Academy in 1816 and probably graduated in 1822. He graduated at Harvard in 1826. Turning to the law, he entered an office in Newburyport and was admitted to the bar in Suffolk County in 1830. He practised in Boston and Newburyport until July 1832, when he interested himself in the founding of the Boston Daily Atlas, receiving a small annual salary for writing its chief editorials. He had already been contributing to the Ladies' Magazine and the American Monthly Magazine, and his work appeared in the first and later issues of the New-England Magazine. In 1834 he became a part owner of the Atlas, but in the summer Caleb Cushing acquired the paper in order to enlist its support for Webster (My Connection with The Atlas Newspaper, 1839; C. M. Fuess, The Life of Caleb Cushing, 1923, I, 146- 48). Hildreth went to Florida for his health, returning to Boston in April 1836. He now agreed to do two articles each week for the Atlas, and early in 1837 began to supply editorials as before and also to report the proceedings of t4e law courts. In September he contracted to furnish most of the editorial matter for the paper. His articles are said to have "powerfully contributed to excite the strenuous opposition which was afterwards manifested ... to the annexation of Texas" (Duyckinck, post, II, 299). He was in Washington from September 1837 till the next April. In November 1838 he gave up his editorial work for the Atlas because its stand on the license law disagreed with his. He urged supporters of temperance to vote only for men who were "inflexible friends" to prohibition (A Letter to Emory Washburn, Wm. M. Rogers, and Seventy-eight Others, 1840). He supported Harrison by printing a campaign biography, The People's Presidential Candidate (1839), and The Contrast: or William Henry Harrison versus Martin Van Buren (1840). In the latter year he also brought out Banks, Banking, and Paper Currencies, founded on his earlier work, The History of Banks (1837). The book was "written principally with the design of advocating the system of open competition in banking." The year 1840 also saw the publication of his translation of a work by Etienne Dumont on Bentham's theory of legislation, and of Despotism in America, a discussion of the results of slavery. The latter book was reprinted in 1854 with a new chapter on the legal basis of slavery drawn from two articles written by Hildreth for Theodore Parker's Massachusetts Quarterly Review. He also entered theological controversy by attacking some of the views of Andrews Norton [q.v.] in A Letter to Andrews Norton on Miracles as the Foundation of Religious Faith (1840). More noted was his novel, The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), reissued in a second and a third edition in 1840. As The White Slave, an enlarged version came out in London and Boston in 1852, and in London again the next year. As Archy Moore it was published at Auburn, New York, in 1855, and in New York in 1857. There were also five French editions and probably other English issues of this book, the popularity of which seems to have been far greater than its literary quality justified. He was in British Guiana, probably from 1840 to 1843, and Sabin ascribes to him a Local Guide of British Guiana (1843). He is also said to have edited successively two Guiana papers supporting the abolition of slavery, and to have edited a compilation of the colonial laws.

After his return to the United States and his marriage on June 7, 1844, to Caroline Neagus of Deerfield, he devoted himself chiefly to his History of the United States, which he began to plan while he was in college. The first volume appeared in 1849; the sixth and last, coming to 1821, in 1852. A revised version appeared in 1854 and 1855, and there have been several later editions. His fame rests upon his History. The earlier volumes are strongly Federalist in point of view, and the work as a whole is dry. It is valuable chiefly for its accuracy in the matter of names and dates. His Theory of Morals (1844) and Theory of Politics (1853) are two of six projected works in which he hoped to treat also "wealth," "taste," "knowledge," and "education," in a purely inductive, scientific vein. To quote the Athenaeum (November 12, 1853), his thought was "like his style; solid, level, monotonous. It neither W:\rms by its vividness nor startles by its boldness. It is pre-eminently respectable .... Mr. Hildreth is a republican, with a tendency, the full strength of which he unconsciously disguises from himself, toward socialism." In 1855 he published Japan as it Was and Is, which has been several times reissued and was, for its day, a good compilation of data. From 1855 to 1861 Hildreth was a contributor to the New York Tribune. In 1861 he was appointed consul at Trieste, where he served till ill health forced him to resign in 1864. He died at Florence and was buried in the Protestant graveyard, near Theodore Parker.

In addition to the works already mentioned, and a few other books of minor importance, Hildreth wrote numerous controversial pamphlets, dealing chiefly with slavery and abolition, temperance, and banking. An estimate of him, apparently written by a friend, says: "He took a decisive part in several campaigns, and was always esteemed a powerful friend and a bitter and formidable foe. Very decided in the utterance of his opinions, vehement and caustic in controversy ... he was not likely to receive full justice for the finer qualities of his mind and heart. His intimate friends, however, recognized in him a certain sweetness of nature that called forth sympathy, and often love; ... and an inability to harbor personal malice, that perhaps made him unconscious of the force of his denunciations" (New-England Historical and Genealogical Register, January 1866, p. 80). He seems to have had too little originality in ideas or style to win for himself a great place in history, and his reputation is likely to remain simply that of an active editor and writer whose competence in historical craftsmanship saved him from oblivion.

[The best list of Hildreth's writings is in Joseph Sabin, A Directory of Books relating to America, vol. VIII (1 877). Brief sketches are in Nouvelle Biographie Generate (1862-70); S. A. Allibone, A Critical Directory of English Literature, vol. I (1858); E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck, Cyclopedia of American Literature, vol. II (rev. ed., 1875). See also his own Origin and Genealogy of the American Hildreths, reprinted from New-England History and Genealogical Register, January 1857; Vital Records of Deerfield, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850 (1920); General Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Phillips Exeter Academy, 1783-1903 (1903); New England History and Genealogical Register, January 1866; Wm. T. Davis, Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1895), vol. I; F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (1930).]

K.B.M.


HIMES, JOSHUA VAUGHAN (May 19, 1805-July 27, 1895), reformer, a leader in the Second Advent movement, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 60-61

HIMES, JOSHUA VAUGHAN (May 19, 1805-July 27, 1895), reformer, a leader in the Second Advent movement, was born in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, the son of Stukeley Himes, a West India trader, and Elizabeth (Vaughan) Himes. It had been the intention of the father to educate Joshua at Brown University for the ministry of the Episcopal Church, but in 1817 an unfaithful captain absconded with a ship and cargo, ruining the elder Himes financially. The boy was then apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in New Bedford. During his apprenticeship he became an exhorter and in 1827 he entered the ministry of the Christian Church and was assigned to evangelistic work in southern Massachusetts. In 1830 he was called to Boston as pastor of the First Christian Church. Seven years later he organized the Second Christian Church, of which he remained in charge until 1842. Under his labors it grew from a little handful to such numbers that the Chardon Street Chapel with a capacity of about five hundred was built. Through the influence of William Lloyd Garrison, he became active in the abolitionist movement, and he took a prominent part in other reforms of the day. He helped to organize the Non-resistance Society of Boston in the late thirties, and promoted a manual-training school.

In 1839 he met William Miller, who was preaching that the second coming of Christ was likely to occur about 1843. He accepted Miller's teaching and became his chief assistant. An agitator and a reformer by nature, he turned his restless energy to the crusade of preparing the world for Christ's coming. He organized and financed the Adventist publishing work and at thirty-five years of age was one of the outstanding publicity agents of his day. Previous to his meeting with Himes, Miller had been a rather obscure figure working in the rural sections. As if by magic, Himes opened the great cities to his captain, and within three years Miller's name and doctrine were on the lips of every one. He became a veritable Aaron to the Moses of the Advent movement. Early in 1840 he began at Boston the publication of Signs of the Times. This grew into a vigorous weekly. In 1842 The Midnight Cry was established in New York, running for one month as a daily and thereafter as a weekly. A huge tent was purchase d and Miller and Himes journeyed from city to city holding immense meetings, warning the world of the n ear advent of Christ. In the larger places visited, papers were started and within two years flourishing little journals had been established in Philadelphia, Rochester, Cincinnati, and elsewhere. Under his direction tracts, pamphlets, and books streamed from the press for distribution to the ends of the earth. Literature was placed on the ships leaving New York; bundles of papers were mailed to post offices and newspaper offices for free distribution. Owing to his direct connection with the publishing work and to the fact that he handled large sums of money, the press accused him of insincerity and of enriching himself at the expense of his credulous followers; These charges he readily disproved and stood acquitted in the public eye. He was not without faults, however, for at a church trial a few years later some of his earlier action s were shown to be questionable; but his shortcomings appear to have been due to personal weakness in time of stress rather than to insincerity.

Bitterly disappointed that Christ did not appear in 1843 or 1844, he looked for his coming in 1854 but was again disappointed. In the late fifties he sold the Advent Herald (formerly Signs of the Times) at Boston and mov ed West, publishing the Advent Christian Times in Buchanan, Mich., and Chicago, for some years. Because of differences a rising between him and the Advent Christian denomination of which he had become a member, he left it, and in 1878 returned to the Episcopal Church, although his views on the Advent remained unchanged. The following year he took charge of the Vermilion and Elk Point missions, South Dakota, and at the time of his death was rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Elk Point. He was twice married: fir st, in 1826, to Mary Thompson Handy, who died in 1876; and second, in 1879, to Hannah Harley.

[See E. N. Dick, " The Adventist Crisis 1831-1844" (1930), a doctoral dissertation (MS.) at the University of Wisconsin; J. N. Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island, 1836- 1850, vol. V (1894); I. C. Wellcome, History of the Second Advent Message and Mission, Doctrine and People (1874); M. E. Olsen, A History of the Origin and Progress of Seventh Day Adventists (1925); Evening Argus-Leader (Sioux Falls, S. D.), July 29, 1895. A photograph of Himes's signature (Dick, ante) shows that be spelled his middle name "Vaughan."]

E. N. D.


HITCHCOCK, Phineas Warrener (November 30, 1831-July 10, 1881), Nebraska pioneer and politician, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 78.

HITCHCOCK, PHINEAS WARRENER (November 30, 1831-July 10, 1881), Nebraska pioneer and politician, was born in New Lebanon, Columbia County, New York, the son of Gad and Nancy (Prime) Hitchcock. His father, fourth in descent from Luke Hitchcock who came to New Haven about 1644, had fought in the War of 1812. Phineas was only a plain farmer'5 son, but he was accorded for the time excellent educational advantages, and in 1855 he received his bachelor's degree from Williams College. Thereafter for two years he studied law in Rochester, New York, making a living by reporting for one of the local papers. In 1857, when the western boom was at its crest, he moved to Omaha, Nebraska Territory, then a frontier village without even a railroad. Here he took up the practice of his profession, adding somewhat to his income as a lawyer by conducting also a real-estate and insurance business. A Republican of strongly anti-slavery tendencies, he participated in the work of organizing his party in the territory, aided in establishing the first Republican paper in Omaha, and went as delegate to the second Republican National Convention. This loyalty to party was rewarded in 1861 by an appointment as federal marshal for Nebraska Territory, in 1864 by election as territorial delegate to Congress, and in 1867, when Nebraska became a state, by another federal appointment, this time as surveyor-general for the district of Nebraska and Iowa.

In the rough-and-tumble combats of pioneer politics Hitchcock soon proved that he was not without skill. In 1871 he emerged the victor from a four-cornered contest for the United States senatorship, because twelve Democratic members of the legislature had preferred him to the "regular" candidate. As senator, however, he was thoroughly "regular," and hardly distinguished. Probably his most notable success came in 1872, when he carried through the Senate his pet measure, the timber-culture act. He was much interested, also, in the ambitions of new territories to become states; but only in the case of Colorado was he identified with a measure of this kind that passed. In 1877, when he came up for reelection, he found the opposition to him in the legislature both bitter and strong. It was openly charged that bribery had won him his seat six years before, and that he was an obedient tool of the railroads. Of the latter charge probably no prominent Nebraska politician of the time could have been fully cleared, but the bribery charge was not traced directly to any fault of Hitchcock himself, whatever others may have done for him. He was not reelected.

Hitchcock was a forceful writer and speaker, tenacious of his opinions, much beloved by his friends, and cordially hated by his enemies. For several years he was interested in the Omaha Republican, both as part owner and as contributor. He did his share towards the shaping of political thinking in the state. Following his defeat for
reelection to the Senate, he turned his attention to business, but not for long. He was devoted to his family, and family misfortunes the death in 1877 of his wife, Annie (Monell) Hitchcock, whom he had married in 1857, soon after his removal to Nebraska, and in 1880 of his daughter Grace-left him a broken man. He died before he was fifty. Thirty years later his son, Gilbert M. Hitchcock, was elected to the United States Senate from Nebraska as a Democrat.

[Sketch of Hitchcock by his son Gilbert, in Trans. and Reports Nebraska State Historical Society, vol. I (1885); J. S. Morton and Albert Watkins, Illustrated History of Nebraska, I (1905), 495-97; T. W. Tipton, "Forty Years of Nebraska," Proceedings and Collections Nebr. State Historical Society, 2 series, IV (1902); A. C. Edmunds, Pen Sketches of Nebraskans (1871); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); M. L. J. Hitchcock, The Genealogy of the Hitchcock Family (1894); Omaha Daily Herald, July 12, 1881.]

J.D.H.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.