Hoa-How: Hoar through Howland

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


HOAR, Ebenezer Rockwood (February 21, 1816-January 31, 1895), jurist, congressman, attorney-general, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 86-87.

HOAR, EBENEZER ROCKWOOD (February 21, 1816-January 31, 1895), jurist, congressman, attorney-general, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of Samuel Hoar and brother of George Frisbie Hoar [qq.v.]. His mother was Sarah, daughter of Roger Sherman [q.v.]. He graduated from Harvard College in 1835, taught a year, began to read law in his father's office, and continued in the Harvard Law School, where he received the degree of LL.B. in 1839. He rapidly rose to eminence in practice, being associated in various cases with Choate and with Webster. He entered politics in 1840 as a delegate to the Whig young men's convention for Middlesex County. Five years later he was one of the organizers of an anti-annexation meeting at which was adopted a pledge written by himself and Henry Wilson to "use all practicable means for the extinction of slavery on the American Continent." A few months later as an anti-slavery Whig he was elected to the Massachusetts Senate, where his declaration that he would rather be a "Conscience Whig" than a "Cotton Whig" gave the slogan to the anti-slavery movement, of which he became a leader. His call to the people of Massachusetts in protest against the nomination of Taylor for president led to the Free Soil convention at Worcester on June 28, l848.

In 1849 he was appointed a judge of the court of common pleas. One of the notable features of his service on the bench was his charge to the grand jury in the trial of the men who attempted to free the fugitive slave, Anthony Burns [q.v.]. In 1855 he resigned to resume practice but in 1859 he became an associate justice of the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts, a position which he held for a decade. Then called by President Grant to the post of attorney-general, he proved one of the most effective department heads. He exerted his influence against the recognition of the Cuban insurgents as belligerents. When nine new circuit judgeships were created, Hoar's sturdy insistence that these positions be filled by men of high character and fitness was keenly resented by many senators who wished to treat them as patronage. Accordingly, a few months later when the President nominated him for a seat upon the supreme bench, the Senate rejected the nomination, ostensibly because he did not live in the district to which he was to be assigned. "What could you expect from a man who had snubbed seventy Senators!" said Simon Cameron (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, post, p. 304). The charge that Grant and Hoar connived to pack the Supreme Court so as to obtain a reversal of its stand upon the legal-tender issue has been conclusively refuted (G. F. Hoar, The Charge against President Grant and Attorney General Hoar of Packing the Supreme Court, 1896; Storey and Emerson, post, pp. 199-202). In 1870, with dignified loyalty to his chief, he retired from the cabinet when Grant sought to secure the support of some Southern senators who were demanding that the Attorney-General be displaced by a man from the South; but the next year he yielded to Grant's request to serve as a member of the joint high commission which framed the Treaty of Washington to settle the Alabama claims. He served a single term in Congress (1873-75), where his brother, George F. Hoar, was one of his colleagues. Here he opposed the Sherman Resumption Bill and the Force Bill. He was a valuable member of the committee to which was referred the revision of the United States statutes and he served as a regent of the Smithsonian Institution. At the end of his term he returned to Concord. In 1876 he was induced to enter the campaign as a candidate for Congress against Benjamin F. Butler [q.v.], to whose influence in national and in state politics he had for ·many years been the most vigorous opponent, but he was heavily defeated by that astute politician. As a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1876, he supported Bristow till the last ballot, when he voted for Hayes. In 1884 he supported Blaine. In his later years he declined to reenter public service though urged to be a member of the commission to investigate governmental conditions in Louisiana and to act as counsel for the United States before the fishery commission.

He was a devoted son of Harvard College, serving for nearly thirty years either as overseer or as member of the corporation. In the American Unitarian Association he was a dominant force. At the bar he was noted for the closeness of his reasoning and the keenness of his wit. He was a brilliant conversationalist and for nearly forty years was a member of the Saturday Club, which numbered many of the brightest intellects in New England. On November 20, 1840, he married Caroline Downes Brooks. Of their seven children, the youngest, Sherman Hoar, was elected as representative to Congress in 1890, third of the family in direct descent to hold that position.

Moorfield Storey and E. W. Emerson, E. R. Hoar (1911); G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (2 vols., 1903); Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 2 series, IX (1895); H. S. Nourse, The Hoar Family (1899); Boston Transcript, February 1, 1895.]

G. H. H.


HOAR, George Frisbie (August 29, 1826- September 30, 1904), lawyer, representative, senator, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 87-88.

HOAR, GEORGE FRISBIE (August 29, 1826- September 30, 1904), lawyer, representative, senator, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of Sarah (Sherman) and Samuel Hoar [q.v.] and the brother of E. Rockwood Hoar [q.v.]. He was educated in the academy at Concord, Harvard College (B.A. 1846), and the Harvard Law School (LL.B. 1849). In 1849 he began the practice of law in Worcester, where he continued to make his home for the rest of his life. His beginning in politics was in folding and directing the call, prepared by his father and brother, for the convention which launched the Free Soil party in Massachusetts.

He was intimately associated with the planning and the early organization of the Republican party in the state and, for half a century, he gave to it service in many responsible positions without, apparently, appreciating those social and economic developments which had changed the party of Abraham Lincoln to that of Mark Hanna and William McKinley. He presided over the Republican state convention in 1871, 1877, 1882, and 1885. He was a delegate to its national convention from 1876 to 1888, and chairman of the one which nominated Garfield. In 1852 he was elected to the state House of Representatives and five years later he served a term in the Senate. In 1869, during his absence in England, he was elected as a Republican to Congress, and served in the House till 1877, when he was elected by the legislature to the Senate. Reelected four times, he continued to represent Massachusetts in the Senate until his death.

During his seven years in the House his most congenial work was on the committee on the judiciary. He was one of the managers of the House in the impeachment of William Belknap [q.v.] and presented a vigorous argument for his conviction despite the plea that the Senate had no jurisdiction because the defendant was no longer in office as secretary of war. He was a member of the electoral commission which determined the outcome of the Hayes-Tilden controversy in 1877. In 1873 he was chairman of the special committee which investigated governmental conditions in Louisiana.

In the Senate his most effective work was done upon measures of a professional or an administrative character, rather than upon more popular political measures. In his own opinion his most important service to the country was on the committee on claims, where he exercised great influence in determining the doctrines which guided the Senate's action on civil war claims of individuals, corporate bodies, and states. For more than twenty-five years he served continuously on the committee on privileges and elections, and his opinions are cited as authoritative. For twenty years he was a member of the committee on the judiciary and during much of the time its chairman. At the request of this committee he waited upon President McKinley [q.v.] to protest against his practice of appointing senators upon commissions whose work was later to come before the Senate for approval. In character, in speech, and in bearing he upheld the highest traditions of the Senate and was the author of two of its rules demanding decorum in debate. His speeches in opposition to the election of senators by popular vote were among the weightiest arguments on that side of the question. He was the author of the law of 1887 which repealed the portion of the tenure-of-office act then in force, and of the presidential succession act of 1886, and he had a large part in framing bankruptcy and anti-trust legislation.

Moral issues won his prompt and tireless support. In the House he opposed the "salary grab" of 1873 and he turned over every pen ny of back pay which that brought to him to found a scholarship in the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In the Senate he was the chief sponsor for laws to curb lotteries. His contempt for the bigotry of the "A. P. A." nativist movement led him, against the advice of his friends, to write a scathing letter which helped bury that movement "in the 'cellar' in which it was born" (Dresser, post, p. 7). Reckless of the possible political effect upon his future, he fought most strenuously against the Republican administration's Philippine policy. Although his stand upon this question was disapproved in Massachusetts, yet so great was the admiration for his sincerity that he was reelected in 1901 by a very large majority. Devotion to the country's service in the House and Senate involved not only the renunciation of a rapidly increasing legal practice but also the declining of other high honors. Twice he was offered an appointment to the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts. Hayes and McKinley each offered to send him to represent the United States in England, where his friendships among judges and scholars and statesmen would have made his position exceptionally congenial, but his modest means did not permit him to accept.

His counsel was sought in behalf of many educational and literary institution s. For twelve years he was an overseer of Harvard College. He helped establish in his home city the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Clark University and was an influential trustee of both these institutions from their organization until his death. He served as a regent of the Smithsonian Institution and as president of the American Antiquarian Society and of the American Historical Association. He was ever a student, accumulated for himself a choice library in hi story and in English and classical literature, and took an active interest in the development of the Library of Congress. He was instrumental in obtaining the return to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of the manuscript of Governor Bradford's History of Plymouth plantation. He was a formidable debater, quick in repartee and in sustaining his arguments by legal and historical precedents. He was often invited to address literary and historical associations. Though he had neither a pleasing voice nor a graceful presence, he was an effective speaker possessed of a noble and dignified style. The stern · puritanism to which he had been accustomed in childhood was mollified in his later years. He was a liberal Unitarian, scrupulous in the support of his church and tolerant of the views of others. He delighted in the associations of the Saturday Club and in loyalty to his friends.

He was twice married: to Mary Louisa Spurr in 1853, and to Ruth Ann Miller in 1862. He was survived by the two children of his first wife.

[G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (2 vols., 1903); Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 2 series, XVIII-XIX (1905-06); a critical estimate by T. W. Higginson in Proceedings Academy of Arts and Science, vol. XL (1905); F. F. Dresser, G. F. Hoar: Reprint from Reminiscences and Biographical Notices of Past Members of the Worcester Fire Society 1917 (1917); eulogy in Proceedings American Antiquarian Society, vols. XVI-XVII (1905-07); G. F. Hoar, Memorial Addresses Delivered in the Sen. and H. of R. (1905); Talcot Williams, in Review of Review (New York), November 1904; M. A. De W. Howe, Later Years of the Saturday Club (1927); Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation ... With a Report of the Proceedings Incident to the Return of the MS. to Massachusetts (1899); H. S. Nourse, The Hoar Family (1899); Records of the Trustees of Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Boston Transcript, September 30, 1904; Springfield Daily Republican, September 30, 1904.]

G. H. H.


HOAR, Samuel (May 18, 1778-Nov. 2, 1856), lawyer, congressman, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 89-90

HOAR, SAMUEL (May 18, 1778-November 2, 1856), lawyer, congressman, was born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the son of Susanna (Pierce) and Samuel Hoar, a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War, later a magistrate and member of the Massachusetts House and Senate. He was a descendant of John, one of the brothers of Leonard Hoar [q. v.]. He was prepared for college by the Reverend Charles Stearns of Lincoln and was graduated from Harvard College (B.A.) in 1802. The next two years he spent as tutor in a private family in Virginia, where he developed a life-long abhorrence of domestic slavery. He studied law in the office of Artemas Ward [q.v.] and in 1805 began practice in Concord. He rose rapidly in his profession and for forty years was one of the eminent lawyers in the state, ranking in court practice with Webster and Choate. He was a conservative in the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1820, served several terms in the state Senate, and at seventy-two was elected to the House of Representatives, where he was successful in defeating an attempt to abolish the corporation of Harvard College and to substitute a board to be chosen by the legislature. Harvard's president declared: "Other men have served the College; Samuel Hoar saved it" (G. F. Hoar, Autobiography, I, 29).

In politics he was first a Federalist, then a Whig. He was a representative in Congress, 1835-37, and vigorously upheld the power of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and opposed the recognition of the independence of Texas. He was a delegate to the convention which nominated Harrison for president. In 1848, believing that the nomination of Taylor marked the Whig party's abandonment of its opposition to the spread of slavery, he at once exerted himself to bring about united political action by men of all parties opposed to the nominations of Cass or Taylor. He was the first to sign the call written by his son, E. Rockwood Hoar [q.v.], for the convention, over which he presided, at Worcester on June 28, 1848, and in the ensuing campaign his name headed the electoral ticket of the Free Soil party in Massachusetts. In 1854 he led in the movement which, at the Worcester convention in September, first placed "Republican" candidates in · nomination for state  offices. The following year he was chairman of the committee which called the convention that formally organized the Republican party in Massachusetts.

In 1844 the governor, as authorized by the legislature, employed him to test the constitutionality of certain South Carolina laws under which many Massachusetts colored citizens, seamen on vessels touching at South Carolina ports, were seized on arrival, put in jail, and kept imprisoned till their vessel s ailed or, if their jail fees were not then paid, sold as slaves. On the day of Hoar's arrival in Charleston the legislature, only one member dissenting, by resolution requested the Governor to expel "the Northern emissary" from the state. Warned by the mayor and the sheriff that his life was in danger and urged to depart, he replied that he was too old to run and that he could not return to Massachusetts without an effort to perform the duty assigned him. Under threat of violence from the mob that surrounded his hotel, at the earnest request of a committee of seventy leading citizens, he consented to walk instead of being dragged-to the carriage waiting to convey him to the boat. The indignity to which this venerable citizen of Massachusetts had been subjected produced hot indignation throughout the North.

After he had retired from active practice of the law, for nearly twenty years he devoted his energies to the service of the church, of temperance, and of various organizations for the promotion of peace, colonization, and education. He was an overseer of Harvard College but not less interested and conscientious in his duties a s a member of the Concord school committee. He was a Unitarian, strict in observance of the Sabbath, and for many years teacher and superintendent in the local Sunday school, He was of imposing appearance, of great courtesy especially to women and little children, and tender to all who were the victims of injustice. He married (October 13, 1812) Sarah, daughter of Roger Sherman [q. v.] of Connecticut. Six children were born to them. Four of his descendants followed him in service in the national House of Representatives: his sons, E. Rockwood and George F. Hoar [q.v.]; and two grandsons, Sherman and Rockwood Hoar.

[G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (1903), vol. I; G. F. Hoar, in Memorial Biographies New England Hist. Genealogical Society, vol. III (1883); Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 1 series, vol. V (1862); Barzillai Frost, A Sermon Preached in Concord (1856); Joseph Palmer, Necrology of Alumni of Harvard College (1864); H. S. Nourse, The Hoar Family (1899); R. W. Emerson, in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, December 1856; Boston Transcript, November 3, 1856.)

G. H. H.


HOFFMANN, Francis Arnold (June 5, 1822-January 23, 1903), clergyman, lieutenant-governor of Illinois, agricultural writer under the name Hans Buschbauer, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 118-119.

HOFFMANN, FRANCIS ARNOLD (June 5, 1822-January 23, 1903), clergyman, lieutenant-governor of Illinois, agricultural writer under the name Hans Buschbauer, was born at Herford, Westphalia, the son of Frederick William and Wilhelmina (Groppe) Hoffmann. After attending the schools of 'Herford, he fled to America to escape conscription. Reaching Chicago in 1840, he served for a time as a hotel bootblack; then became the teacher of the pastorless Lutheran church at Dunkley's Grove (now Addison), III. The following year he studied for the ministry in Michigan. Returning after ordination, he was given charge of the Lutherans of northeastern Illinois. On February 22, 1844, he married Cynthia Gilbert, an American of English ancestry. While zealously ministering to his scattered flock and insisting on the exclusive use of German in his home, he soon mastered the English language and became active in public affairs as town clerk, postmaster, member of the school board, and contributor to the Chicago Democrat and the Prairie Farmer. In 1847 he was elected representative from Du Page County to the River and Harbor Convention held in Chicago. The same year he became pastor of the church at Schaumberg, Illinois. In 1851 he quit the ministry, moved to Chicago, studied law, and was admitted to the bar. He also engaged successfully in the real-estate and insurance business and was the first editor of the Illinois Staats Zeitung. In 1852 he was elected to the city council. By organized efforts he attracted German immigrants to Chicago and Illinois, and, being entrusted with their money, as well as with capital from abroad for investment, he started a bank in 1854 with immediate success. He was appointed consul for several German states and in recognition of the services rendered his countrymen he was decorated by the Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha.

When Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Bill made the extension of slavery the dominant issue in politics, Hoffmann and his countrymen, theretofore Democrats, immediately protested. This was followed by an immense demonstration, February 8, 1854, at which he took the leading part, his sensational speech predicting the defection of the Germans should the measure pass. When the bill became a law, he proved a strong factor in winning an Anti-Nebraska majority in the legislature which elected Lyman Trumbull to the United States Senate in 1855. A friend of Lincoln, he was one of the organizers of the Republican party in Illinois and in 1856 was unanimously nominated for lieutenant-governor, but he proved ineligible because not yet of constitutional age. He spoke and wrote effectively, both in English and German, in 1856, 1858, and in 1860, when he was again nominated for lieutenant-governor and duly elected, serving with credit for four years. After the outbreak of the Civil War his bank failed owing to the repudiation of the bonds of the Southern states. Later, when he became commissioner of the Foreign Land Department of the Illinois Central Railroad, settling thousands of persons on their grants in the state, he used his large earnings mainly to liquidate obligations incident to the bank failure. In 1866 he established the International Bank, which soon took a leading place in business affairs. After the great fire of 1871, Hoffmann was chairman of the committee of bankers through whose efforts the banks were promptly reopened, thereby averting a panic. He was likewise prominently active in restoring Chicago's necessary business establishments.

His health failing, Hoffmann retired in 1875 to his estate on Rock River near Jefferson, Wisconsin. He had been an assiduous student of agriculture and horticulture since boyhood, and he devoted the rest of his life to the instruction of his countrymen in farm economy. He became editor of Der Haus und Bauernfreund, an agricultural supplement to Die Germania of Milwaukee; Die Deutsche Warte of Chicago; and the Deutsches Volksblatt of Buffalo. He assumed the pen name of Hans Buschbauer for these papers and for the books he wrote on agricultural subjects. Attaining great popularity and influence in his new field, he was urged to reenter politics but declined, continuing his literary activities and idyllic life at his home, "Tusculum," until his death.

[J. H. A. Lacher, "Francis Arnold Hoffmann of III. and Hans Buschbauer of Wisconsin," Wisconsin Magazine of History, June 1930; Wisconsin Farmer, December 29, 1893; F. I. Herriot, "The Germans of Chicago and Stephen A. Douglas in 1854," Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsbliitter. Jahrbuch der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Historischen Gesellschaft von Ill. Jahrgang I9I2, vol. XII (1913); D. I. Nelke, ed., The Columbian Biographical Directory ... of the Representative Men of the U.S., Wisconsin Vol. (1895), pp. 540-48; The Bench and Bar of Chicago (n.d.), pp. 465- 69; Who's Who in America, 1901-02; Milwaukee Journal, January 23, 1903; Milwaukee Sentinel, January 24, 1903.]

J. H.A.L.


HOLLEY, Myron, 1779-1841, Rochester, New York, abolitionist leader, political leader, reformer. Founder of the Liberty Party. Published the anti-slavery newspaper, Rochester Freeman. (Blue, 2005, pp. 20, 23, 25, 26; Chadwick, 1899; Dumond, 1961, pp. 295-296, 404n16; Goodell, 1852, pp. 470, 474, 556; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 16-17, 21; Sernett, 2002, pp. 107-109, 112, 180, 305-306n17; Sorin, 1971; Wright, 1882; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 236; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 150; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 62)

HOLLEY, MYRON (April 29, 1779-March 4, 1841), Abolitionist, born at Salisbury, Connecticut, was the son of Luther and Sarah (Dakin) Holley and by family tradition a direct descendant of Edmund Halley, the English astronomer. Horace Holley [q.v.] was his younger brother. In 1799 he graduated from Williams College and began the study of law in the office of Judge Kent at Cooperstown, New York. In 1802 he practised law at Salisbury, and in the following year he moved to Canandaigua in New York. There he abandoned the law, and having purchased the stock of Bemis, a local merchant, he became the bookseller for the village and the surrounding country. In 1804 he married Sallie House who bore him six daughters. Elected in 1816 to represent Canandaigua in the General Assembly, he became deeply interested in the projected Erie Canal and was appointed one of the canal commissioners. He acted as treasurer of the commission and expended more than $2,500,000 for the state. Because of the method of the disbursements and his carelessness in safeguarding his own interests he was unable to produce vouchers for $30,000 of the total, and in order to make up the deficiency, he surrendered his small estate. An investigating committee exonerated him of all charges of misappropriation, but, although the state later returned his property, he was never adequately compensated for his great services. He had retired and was devoting himself to horticulture when he was again brought into public affairs by the abduction and murder of William Morgan followed by the anti-Masonic movement which swept New York state and culminated in a convention at Albany. He drafted the address of that convention to the people of the state and was one of the New York delegates to the National Anti-Masonic Convention which assembled in Philadelphia in 1830. The Address ... to the People of the United States (1830), eloquently demonstrating that Masonic societies were inimical to the principles of a free, republican government, was the work of Holley as the committee chairman. In 1831 he became editor of the Lyons Countryman and for the next three years waged a vigorous campaign against Freemasonry. In 1834 he went to Hartford to edit the Free Elector for the Anti-Masons of Connecticut, but after a year he returned to New York and settled near Rochester.

Holley first began to take a practical interest in the slavery question in the winter of 1837 and was soon convinced of the necessity of organized political action. At the anti-slavery convention held in Cleveland in 1839 he moved that a nomination of candidates for president and vice-president be made, but the motion was badly defeated. He returned to New York and secured the passage of a resolution by the Monroe County antislavery convention in favor of a distinct nomination, and a few days later he was again successful at a larger convention held at Warsaw, which convention nominated James G. Birney as its candidate. The formation of the Liberty party in April 1840 at Albany was thus in a large measure his achievement, for he had succeeded in transforming the moral and religious indignation of the Abolitionists into effective political action. On June 12, 1839, H9lley issued the first number of the Rochester Freeman which he edited until it failed shortly before his death.

[Elizur Wright, Myron Holley; and What He Did for Liberty and True Religion, (1882); A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters of Sallie Holley (1899), ed. by J. W. Chadwick; Wm. L. Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, vol. II (1885); The Rochester Historical Society Pub. Fund Ser., vols. I-III (1922-24); W. F. Peck, Semi-Centennial History of the City of Rochester (1884); History Collections Relating to the Town of Salisbury, Connecticut, vol. II (1916); the Nation, March 9, 1882; files of the Rochester Freeman in the library of the Buffalo Historical Society; and manuscript letters in the Holley collection, New York Historical Society]

F. M-n.


HOLLEY, Sallie, abolitionist, women’s rights leader, orator, lecturer, graduate of Oberlin College. (Chadwick, 1899; Dumond, 1961, pp. 281, 402n40, 402n41; Van Broekhoven, 2002, pp. 53, 219-220)


HOOPER, Samuel, 1808-1875, merchant.  Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts.  Elected in 1860, served until his death in 1875.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. 

(Appletons’, 1888, Vol. III, p. 252; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 203; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 144; Congressional Globe)


HOPKINS, John, 1795-1873, abolitionist, entrepreneur, philanthropist.  His family were Quakers and freed their slaves in 1807.  Worked with prominent abolitionists Myrtilla Miner and Henry Ward Beecher.  Strong supporter of Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War.  Supported African American institutions.  After the war, founder of John Hopkins Institutes in Baltimore, Maryland. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 213-217.


HOPKINS, Reverend Dr. Samuel, 1721-1803, Newport, Rhode Island, theologian, opponent of slavery. Pastor of the First Congregational Church of New port, Rhode Island.  Wrote A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of Africans, 1776. 

(Basker, 2005, p. 136; Bruns, 1977, pp. 290, 293, 340, 397, 457, 492; Drake, 1950, pp. 85, 88, 97-99, 123; Dumond, 1961, pp. 22-23; Goodell, 1852, pp. 28, 41, 76, 92, 109, 114, 120-122, 127; Locke, 1901, pp. 40, 55, 58, 60, 64, 65, 86, 90, 103n, 187, 192; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 20, 22-23, 331; Zilversmit, 1967, pp. 107, 118-119, 121, 153, 154, 156-157; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 217; Dark, “Memoir of Samuel Hopkins,” in Hopkins’ Works, Vol. I, pp. 116, 140, 160; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 186)

HOPKINS, SAMUEL (September 17, 1721-December 20, 1803), theologian, was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the son of Timothy and Mary (Judd) Hopkins. He was a descendant of John Hopkins who emigrated from England and settled at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1634, removing to Hartford, Connecticut, two years later. Timothy Hopkins was an influential person in his community and was many times sent to the General Court. Reared on a farm, Samuel fitted for college with the Reverend John Graham of the adjoining town of Woodbury, and graduated from Yale in 1741. After receiving licensure as a Congregational minister from the Fairfield East Association on April 29, 1742, he returned to the family of Jonathan Edwards at Northampton, Massachusetts, where he had spent the previous winter, and remained in its stimulating mental and spiritual atmosphere until December. About a year later, December 28, 1743, he was settled over a church of five members in a parish of about thirty families, now known as Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Here on January 13, 1748, he married a member of his parish, Joanna Ingersol, and here his five sons and three daughters were born. The severity of the preacher's logic and his dullness as a sermonizer finally alienated his people and he was dismissed from his charge on January 18, 1769. The most important fact of this pastorate from the point of view of Hopkins' subsequent career was the seven years of intimate association with Jonathan Edwards, who in 1751 was appointed over the church in the adjoining town of Stockbridge. This close connection between two such strong and kindred minds greatly influenced the thinking of both. Obliged to seek a new settlement, Hopkins was installed as minister of the First Congregational Church of Newport, Rhode Island, on April 11, 1770, in which office he was continued until his death thirty-three years later. In 1776 Newport was occupied by the British who held it for more than three years, and Hopkins was compelled to seek refuge in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Canterbury, Connecticut, and Stamford, Connecticut. In 1780 he returned to find his parsonage burned, the church edifice nearly ruined, and his people impoverished. Refusing an attractive call to Middleboro, Massachusetts, he decided to remain in Newport, living on such weekly contributions as his people chose to give a sum which seldom exceeded $200 a year. His congregations were small, for few had a "high relish for truth" so profound and subtle, uttered in a manner without animation and heavy. In the pews, however, sat a superior youth, William Ellery Channing, whose spiritual nature was sensibly moulded by what he heard. While declaring "he was the very ideal of bad delivery" and that "such tones never came from any human voice within my hearing," Channing adds, "he lived in a world of thought above all earthly passions ... the sight of such (men) h.is done me more good, has spoken more to my head and heart, than many sermons and volumes" (The Works of W. E. Channing, vol. IV, 1841, pp. 348-53). He was an indefatigable student, spending some fourteen hours a day in his study, taking no exercise, living abstemiously; yet the interests of this recluse were broader than those of most of his contemporaries. His is the distinction of being one of the first Congregational ministers to denounce slavery; an act requiring unusual heroism, for Newport at the time was one of the centers of the slave-holding interests, and many of his congregation were slave-owners and financially identified with the trade. He also raised money to free a number of slaves in the neighborhood, and in 1773 joined with a ministerial friend, Ezra Stiles [q.v.], in an appeal for funds to train colored missionaries for Africa; he even perfected a plan, which he was prevented from carrying out, of establishing colonies of negroes in that continent.

Hopkins is chiefly remembered, however, for his profound influence on New England theology. The pupil and intimate friend of Jonathan Edwards, he carried the principles of the New Divinity to their logical conclusions. This he did in a fashion so complete and acceptable to large numbers of thinking men of his day that his school of thought was called "Hopkinsianism," and its philosophy, which quickened the spiritual life of New England, largely prevailed until different modes of thinking discredited its premises and antiquated its methods. He was the first of the New England theologians to form his teachings into a closely articulated scheme, and his System of Doctrines Contained in Divine Revelation, Explained and Defended (2 vols., 1793) is the presentation of the matured thought which he had preached and written in pamphlets during his long life. He taught that a sovereign God does all things for his own glory and the greatest happiness of the whole; sin and evil are the occasion of great god as through his dealings with them the Deity displays his divine justice and mercy. Every one should gladly take his place in the divine plan, live for the good of the whole, and love God supremely without making any personal conditions whatever, even being willing to be among the reprobate, if such a fate would make for the glory of God. This "willing-to-be-damned" doctrine was not original with Hopkins, and Edwards had repudiated it, but critics seized upon it a s making too strenuous a demand upon frail human nature. Extreme and irrational though this feature was, the "system', as a whole, with its teaching of disinterested benevolence as the supreme motive of the individual, was of great ethical value, and its conception of a universe steadily set towards the greatest happiness of all had real spiritual grandeur. In power of comprehensive and thoroughgoing reasoning, in sustained elevation of tone, and in ability to bring ideas to bear persuasively upon the will it was a solid contribution to advancing ethical thought. The System of Doctrines had an unusual sale of twelve hundred copies and brought to the author the needed and substantial sum of nine hundred dollars. Hopkins was a voluminous and controversial writer, and among his other published works are: Sin, thro' Divine Interposition, an Advantage to the Universe (1759); An Enquiry Concerning the Promises of th e Gospel. Whether Any of Them Are Made to the Exercises and Doings of Persons in an Unregenerate State (1765); The True State and Character of the Unregenerate, Stripped of All Misrepresentation and Disguise (1769); Remarks on President Edwards' s Dissertation Concerning the Nature of True Virtue (1771); An Inquiry into the Nature of True Holiness (1773); A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans; Shewing It To Be the Duty and Interest of the A1nerican States to Emancipate all Their African Slav es (1776); A Discourse upon the Slave Trade and the Slavery of Africans (1793); A Treatise on the Millennium (1793), and The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Jonathan Edwards (1765). His first wife died in 1793, and in 1794, when he was seventy-three years of age, he married Elizabeth West, a member of his congregation, long a boarding school principal in Newport, and learned in theology.

[Memoir by E. A. Park, published as an introduction to The Works of Samuel Hopkins (3 vols., 1852); Stephen West, Sketches ·of the Life of the Late Samuel Hopkins (1805), containing Hopkins' autobiography; John Ferguson, Memoir of the Life and Character of Reverend Samuel Hopkins, D.D. (1830); F. B. Deter, Biographical Sketches Grads. Yale College 1701-45 (1885); Wm. A. Patten, Reminiscences of Samuel Hopkins Illustrative of his Character and Doctrines (1843); Williston Walker, Ten New England Leaders (1901); W. B. Sprague, Annals American Pulpit, vol. I (1857); F. H. Foster, A Genetic History of the New England Theology (1907); Early Religious Leaders of Newport (1918); Newport Mercury, December 24, 1803.]

C.A.D.


HOPKINS, Stephen, 1707-1785, Rhode Island, founding father, political leader, signer of the Declaration of Independence.  Hopkins was a slaveholder.  He manumitted several of his slaves, but not all, during his lifetime.  In 1774, as a Rhode Island Assemblyman, he introduced a bill prohibiting importing slaves into the colony, which was passed.  This was one of the earliest anti-slavery laws enacted in the United States.  Hopkins was a practicing Quaker.  (Arnold, 1894; Austin, 1887)


HOPPER, Anna, daughter of Lucretia Mott, abolitionist, Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Yellin, 1994, pp. 71, 75)


HOPPER, Isaac Tatem, 1771-1852, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Society of Friends, Quaker, prison reformer, philanthropist, radical abolitionist leader, member Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Treasurer of the Anti-Slavery Society, operator of the Underground Railroad, helped 3,000 Black fugitive slaves to Canada.  (Drake, 1950, pp. 118, 148, 160, 162, 187; Mabee, 1970, pp. 27, 29, 30, 100, 105, 111, 225, 273, 276, 277, 374; Nash, 1991, p. 131; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 261; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 224; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 445-446; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 202)

HOPPER, ISAAC TATEM (December 3, 1771- May 7, 1852), humanitarian, abolitionist, was born in Deptford, Gloucester County, New Jersey, the son of Levi and Rachel (Tatem) Hopper. His father came of a Quaker family, his mother was a member of the Presbyterian Church. Isaac settled in Philadelphia in 1787 at the age of sixteen, served a period of apprenticeship as a tailor, and then opened a tailor-shop on his own account. He was profoundly influenced in his religious life by William Savery [q.v.], a prominent Philadelphia Quaker preacher of that period, and he joined the Society of Friends by his own request, at the age of twenty-two. On September 18, 1795, he married Sarah Tatum, a distant relative. He had imbibed in his early youth a strong sympathy for negro slaves and as a young man became a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Before 1800 he had begun the work of assisting runaway slaves to escape. He became thoroughly familiar with the "underground" methods of procedure in Philadelphia and from 1800 until 1829, when he moved to New York, he was one of the foremost promoters of the secret transmission of slaves through the city on their way northward. He became an expert in all the intricacies of the laws affecting slaves and he handled many slave cases in the Philadelphia courts as voluntary advocate. He was tactful, quick in the discovery of expedients, devoid of fear, and he soon acquired unusual prestige as the defender of the friendless and oppressed.

In 1822 his wife, the mother of ten children, died. Two years later, in 1824, he married Hannah Attmore. When in 1827 the "Separation" occurred in the Society of Friends in Philadelphia, Hopper affiliated himself with the so-called "Hicksite" section and became one of the leaders of that branch. Moving to New York City in 1829, he became manager of a bookshop and transferred his anti-slavery activities to the New York center of operations. He often sent escaping slaves by water from New York to Providence and Boston. Both he and his son John were set upon by mobs, the father in New York, the son in Charleston, South Carolina, but they both escaped without serious injury. His daughter, Abigail Hopper Gibbons [q.v.] and his son-in-law, James Sloan Gibbons [q.v.] were also active in anti-slavery activities. In 1841, Hopper became associated with Lydia Maria Child [q.v.] in the editorship and management of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. His public work in connection with this extreme anti-slavery journal and his reputation in connection with the "Underground Railroad" aroused an opposition to him. A section in the Quaker Meeting (the "Hicksite Branch") led by a conservative minister of the Society disapproved of public reform work carried on by Friends. Furthermore, the press of the city and its churches generally, reflected the feeling of its merchants, who had a large and profitable Southern trade and did not wish that trade disturbed. The Society of Friends, which had, eighty years previous, disowned the last few of its members who would not manumit their slaves, was at this time, and for the next decade much influenced by the pervading pro-slavery sentiment. Hopper, his son-in-law Gibbons, and Charles Marriott were "disowned from membership" in 1841 by the New York Monthly Meeting. An appeal was made by these three Friends to the Quarterly Meeting and the Yearly Meeting, both of which narrowly sustained the action of the Monthly Meeting. Hopper continued throughout his life to wear the Quaker garb and to use the Quaker form of speech and he was always popularly known as "Friend Hopper.'' Work for prison reform paralleled his anti-slavery work and equally absorbed his attention. During his period of life in Philadelphia he had been an inspector of prisons and in the New York period he gave much time to the work of the prison association of the state. As he grew older and his anti-slavery work slackened, he became agent of the Prison Association of New York and gradually acquired the reputation of being one of the foremost experts in penology in the United States. His work fell into three parts: first, protecting and defending persons who were arrested and held without suitable legal counsel; second, advising and instructing convicts while in prison; and third, aiding discharged prisoners in their return to normal social and business relations. His work in this field was of a high order and entitles him to a place among the notable reformers of prison systems and prison methods. He had become everywhere recognized as the prisoner's friend and helper as he had been throughout his life the friend and helper of persons of color when he died in New York City.

[L. M. Child, Isaac T. Hopper: A True Life (1853); Sarah Hopper Emerson, Life of Abby Hopper Gibbon s (2 vols., 1897); William Still, The Underground Railroad (1872); W. H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad (1898); R. P. Tatum, Tatum Narrative 1626-1925 (1925); Narrative of the Proceedings of the Monthly Meeting of New York, and Their Subsequent Confirmation by the Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, in the Case of Isaac T. Hopper (1843); files of the National Anti-Slavery Standard; obituaries in that journal, May 13, 1852, and in the New York Tribune, May 8, 1852.]

R.M.J.


HOPPER, Sarah, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Society of Friends, Quaker, abolitionist, member of the Association of Friends for Advocating the Cause of the Slave  (Drake, 1950; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III)


HORTON, George Firman, 1806-1886, physician, temperance activist, abolitionist.  Active member of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 266)


HORTON, George Moses, North Carolina slave, published book of poetry, The Hope of Liberty, 1824 (Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 20-21, 278; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 232)


HOUGHTON, George Hendric (February 1, 1820-November 17, 1897), Protestant Episcopal clergyman, founder and rector of the Church of the Transfiguration in New York City, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 255.

HOUGHTON, GEORGE HENDRIC (February 1, 1820-November 17, 1897), Protestant Episcopal clergyman, founder and rector of the Church of the Transfiguration in New York City, was born at Deerfield, Massachusetts, the son of Edward Clark and Fanny (Smith) Houghton and a descendant of Ralph Houghton who emigrated from England in the middle of the seventeenth century to Massachusetts. At the age of fourteen George Houghton left his Puritan home for New York. After varied experiences, including that of teaching, he entered the University of the City of New York and was graduated in 1842. He studied theology under the direction of William A. Muhlenberg [q.v.] at the same time teaching Greek in St. Paul's College, Flushing, Long Island, of which Muhlenberg was headmaster. The Oxford (High-Church) Movement, which began in England in 1833, made a lasting impression on him. He was ordained deacon in 1845 and priest in 1846, and was Muhlenberg's curate at the Church of the Holy Communion in New York until 1847. Then, after a period of non-parochial activity, when he ministered to the sick and dying in Bellevue Hospital and devoted his time to the underprivileged, he established regular religious services at 48 East Twenty-Fourth Street, the furnishings for the improvised church consisting of borrowed school benches, a wheezy parlor organ, and a reading desk of pine wood. The parish was organized February 12, 1849, as the Church of the Transfiguration in the City of New York. Later a site on Twenty-ninth Street, just east of Fifth A venue, was purchased, and a new building was erected which was first occupied on March 10, 1850. The present building was completed in 1864. Houghton's salary was augmented, beginning in 1850, by five hundred dollars a year, received as professor of Hebrew in the General Theological Seminary.

Houghton responded in every way to the needs of those who called upon him for help. During the Civil War, it is said, he harbored negroes on their way to the Canadian border; he established a war hospital, and during the Draft Riots of 1863 he sheltered hundreds of helpless negro children driven by a mob from the Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street. Events following the death of the famous comedian, George Holland [q.v.], in 1870, gave Houghton's church its popular name and made it famous throughout America. Joseph Jefferson and Holland's son called on the Reverend William T. Sabine, rector of the Church of the Atonement on Fifth A venue, to make arrangements for Holland's funeral. On learning that Holland had been an actor, Sabine refused to take the service. What followed, Joseph Jefferson recorded in these words: "I paused at the door and said: 'Well, sir, in this dilemma is there no other church to which you can direct me, from which my friend can be buried?' He replied that 'there was a little church around the corner' where I might get it done; to which I answered: 'Then, if this be so, God bless "the little church around the corner," ' and so I left the house" (The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, 1890, p. 340). News stories, editorials, and songs on the variety stage gave emphasis to the incident, which endeared the rector to the people of the stage and has ever since made the Little Church around the Corner a shrine to the acting profession, who were known to Houghton thenceforth as "the kindly folk." Houghton's wife was Caroline Graves Anthon, the daughter of John Anthon of New York.

[Geo. Mac Adam, The Little Church Around the Corner (1925); J. W. Houghton, The Houghton Genealogy (1912); New York Times, December 29, 1870, November 18, 1897.]

G.E.S.


HOWARD, Jacob Merritt, 1805-1871, lawyer.  Republican U.S. Senator from Michigan.  U.S. Congressman 1841-1843.  Founding member of Republican Party in 1854.  Elected in 1862.  Served until March 1871.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery

(Appletons’, 1888, Vol. III, p. 277; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 278; Dumond, 1961, p. 313; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 304; Congressional Globe)

HOWARD, JACOB MERRITT (July 10, 1805-April 2, 1871), congressman and senator from Michigan, was born in Shaftsbury, Vermont, the son of Otis and Polly (Millington) Howard. His education was obtained in the district school at Shaftsbury, the academies 'in Bennington and Brattleboro, and Williams College, from which he graduated in 1830. He began the study of law in Ware, Massachusetts, and was admitted to the bar in 1833 in Detroit, Mich., to which place he had moved in the preceding year. Although he soon became one of the leaders of the bar of Michigan, his chief interest lay in politics. He supported the Whig party until 1854, when he became a Republican. From 1838 to 1871 he held public office almost continuously while his party was in power. In 1838 he was elected to the state legislature as a representative from Wayne County and was active in the enactment of the Revised Laws of that year, in railroad legislation, and in the legislative examination of the state's wildcat banks. He served as a member of Congress from 1841 to 1843.

In 1854 he was one of the leaders of the movement that led to the organization of the Republican party at Jackson on July 6, and was the author of the resolutions that were adopted at that time. In the same year the party nominated and elected him attorney general of Michigan, a position which he held until 1861. From 1862 to 1871 he was a member of the United States Senate. Here he distinguished himself as a radical and outspoken leader. During his first term, he held influential positions on the important committees on the judiciary and on military affairs; as a member of the former committee he drafted the first clause of the Thirteenth Amendment. During the stormy period following the Civil War, he was an outspoken opponent of executive reconstruction and favored extreme punishment for the South. He served during the session of 1865-66 on the joint committee on reconstruction and was assigned to investigate conditions in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. He drew up the report of the committee on military affairs on the removal of Stanton. He also served as chairman of the committee on the Pacific Railroad from the creation of the committee, January 6, 1864, until the end of his term. President Grant offered him the presidency of the Southern claims commission, but this he refused. He died in Detroit as a result of an apoplectic stroke within a month after the expiration of his last term as senator.

Howard was an eloquent speaker, although his style was somewhat ponderous. He appealed to reason rather than to the emotions. He had a wide reading knowledge not only of law and history, but also of literature. He is said to have been an excellent classical scholar, and he knew both English and French literature. In 1848 he published a translation, in two volumes, of M. A. Le-Normand's Historical and Secret Memoirs of the Empress Josephine. He was married, October 8, 1835, to Catharine A. Shaw, whom he had met in Ware, Massachusetts. She died in 1866. He was survived by two daughters and three sons.

[Published sources include: H. G. Howard, In Memoriam: Jacob M. Howard of Mich. (1906) and Civil War Echoes (1907); Calvin Durfee, Williams Biog. Annals (1871); Detroit Free Press, April 3, 5, 1871; editorials in the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, April 3, 1871, and in the Detroit Daily Post of the same date; R. B. Ross, The Early Bench and Bar of Detroit (1907); American Biographical History . . . Mich. Vol. (1878), pt. I, p. 79; H. M. Dilla, The Politics of Mich., 1865-78 (1912); W. C. Harris, Public Life of Zachariah Chandler (1917); Life of Zachariah Chandler (1880), by the members of the Post and Tribune staff, Detroit. The Burton History Collection in the Detroit Public Library has thirty bound volumes of manuscript letters, etc., by Jacob M. Howard.]

J. O. K.


HOWARD, Oliver Otis, abolitionist, Union Major General, commander of the 11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the Tennessee, the Right Wing of General Sherman’s March to the Sea, and the Carolinas Campaign, November 1864-April 1865.  Recipient of the Medal of Honor.  Founder and director of the  Freeman’s Bureau, 1865.  Founder of Howard University, Washington, DC. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 278; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 279; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11; Cullum, 1891; U.S. War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 vols. Washington, DC: GPO, 1881-1901. Series 1; Warner, 1964.)

HOWARD, OLIVER OTIS (November 8, 1830-October 26, 1909), soldier, was born at Leeds, Maine. His father, Rowland Bailey Howard, a well-to do farmer, was descended from John Howard, one of the founders of Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He died in 1839. His widow, Eliza M. (Otis) Howard, remarried two years later. The boy lived with his uncle, John Otis, at Hallowell, Maine. He attended Monmouth Academy, a school at North Yarmouth, and Bowdoin College, where, supporting himself by teaching during vacations, he graduated in 1850. Entering West Point that summer, he graduated fourth in his class in 1854. After brief service at the Watervliet and Kennebec arsenals, he was made chief of ordnance of the department of Florida, and a year later, promoted to first lieutenant, he returned to West Point an instructor in mathematics, remaining there until June 1861, when he resigned to become colonel of the 3rd Maine Regiment. He was promoted to brigadier-general of volunteers in September 1861 and major-general in 1862, and in 1864 became a brigadier-general in the regular army with brevet rank of major-general.

In Virginia Howard participated in the first battle of Bull Run and the Peninsular campaign, losing his right arm at Fair Oaks. Quickly back in the field, he commanded the rear guard at Second Bull Run, was present at South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg-where he commanded a division-Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Although his personal bravery at Chancellorsville has never been disputed, the better military critics assign to him much responsibility for the Union reverse in the first day's fighting. He was in command of the XI Corps, composed largely of Germans who, because he had displaced General Sigel, did not like him, and were, in addition, not impressed with his reputation as a great Biblical soldier, "the Havelock of the Army." Holding the right, he was in spite of warning surprised by Jackson and routed. Livermore accuses him of "persistent negligence and blind credulity" (post, p. 151, passim). Bigelow (post, p. 297) admits his neglect and disregard of orders; and Hooker charged him with disobeying an order, which Howard always denied receiving but which Carl Schurz testified that he personally read to Howard (Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, III, 1888, pp. 196, 219-20). At Gettysburg he showed a lack of decision and Livermore blames him largely for the loss of the first day's battle. By Halstead he is accused of insubordination (Ibid., 285), but he personally rallied the I Corps in the cemetery on the fir st day and, though there is considerable doubt as to whether he deserves the credit, he received the Thanks of Congress for the selection of that important position.

In September 1863 he was ordered to Tennessee, where he participated in the battles around Chattanooga, and in 1864 he was placed in command of the IV Corps. He took an active part in the Atlanta campaign and in July was given command of the Army and Department of the Tennessee. Thenceforward he commanded the right wing of Sherman's army. His kindly soul was harrowed by the horrors of the march to the sea and northward, and while he justified the harsh treatment of the inhabitants, he opposed and rigorously punished looting and violence.

On May 12, 1865, President Johnson appointed him commissioner of the newly established Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, for which position he had been selected by Lincoln. So far as good intentions, humanitarian passion, and religious enthusiasm were concerned a better choice could not have been made, and the Bureau rendered valuable service in relieving destitution and suffering in its early days; as an executive, however, Howard left much to be desired. The rank and file of lower Bureau officials were unfit or unworthy, and presently the whole service was so honeycombed with fraud, corruption, and inefficiency, so busy with politics looking to negro enfranchisement; and so bent on bringing about the political separation of the negroes and the native whites that its usefulness was hopelessly impaired (House Executive Document 120, 39 Congress, 1 Session). Howard, always inclined to believe the best of any one associated with him, persistently refused to give credence to any charges of misconduct against Bureau officials, declaring all of them based upon race prejudice or political partisanship, and accepted all the reports of his subordinates at their face value, regardless of their patent falsity (Howard, Autobiography, ch. LX; Daily North Carolina Standard, Raleigh; May 23, 1866). In his enthusiasm for the negro he lost his poise. A climax to numerous absurdities into which sentimentality betrayed him was his favorable comment on the notorious South Carolina legislature of 1868 (Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington, D. C., October 1, 1868).

From time to time charges were made against Howard, and in 1870 some of these were investigated by a committee of Congress which exonerated him by a strict party vote (House Report 121, 41 Congress, 2 Session). Later Secretary Belknap preferred charges and Howard at last asked for a court of inquiry. Objecting to that appointed by Belknap, whom he thought hostile to negroes, he was able to persuade Congress to create, by special act, a court which Grant appointed. The charges were failure to establish and enforce a proper system of payments to colored soldiers, responsibility for some minor defalcations of officers, misapplication of public funds, and the transfer of confused and incomplete records. From all of these he was completely exonerated (Proceedings, Findings, and Opinions of the Court of Inquiry ... in the Case of Brigadier-General Oliver O. Howard, 1874).

Dishonest Howard undoubtedly was not, but he had too many irons in the fire. He was buy organizing a Congregational church in Washington and raising funds for it. Seeking to bring in colored members, he precipitated a quarrel which disrupted the congregation. Instrumental in founding Howard University, he became its president in 1869 and gave much of his time to it until 1874 when he resigned. He was a director of the Freedmen's Bank and his name was influential in securing the patronage of the negroes for the venture, which resulted in financial disaster to many of them.

In 1872 Grant sent him as a peace commissioner to the Apache Indians under Cochise, with whom he concluded a treaty. In 1874 he was placed in command of the Department of the Columbia. In 1877 he commanded an expedition against the Nez Perce Indians and in 1878 one against the Bannocks and Piutes. In 1880 he became superintendent at West Point and two years later took command of the Department of the Platte. In 1884 he spent some months in Europe, attending the meetings of the International Y. M. C. A. in Berlin and representing the United States at the French army maneuvers, upon which occasion he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Promoted major-general in 1886, he was placed in command of the Division of the East, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1894.

After his retirement Howard lived at Burlington, Vermont, until his death, continuing his writings and engaging in religious and educational activities. He was prominent in raising funds for the establishment of Lincoln Memorial University. He actively participated as a Republican speaker in the presidential campaigns of 1896, 1900, and 1904, and commanded the veterans in the inaugural parades which followed. He was the author of Nez Perce Joseph (1881), General Taylor (1892), Isabella of Castile (1894), Fighting for Humanity (1898), Donald's School Days (1899), Henry in the War (1899), Autobiography (1907), My Life and Experiences among Our Hostile Indians (1907), Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known (1908). In 1881 he translated T. Borel's Count Agenor de Gasparin. He wrote constantly for magazines and newspapers and was much in demand as a lecturer and preacher. In 1893 he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery at Fair Oaks. He was married, February 14, 1855, to Elizabeth Ann Waite of Portland, Maine, who survived him.

[Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard (2 volumes, 1907); War of the Rebellion: Official Records (Army); Abner Doubleday, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1882); John Bigelow, Jr., The Campaign of Chancellorsville (1910); Papers of the Military History Society of Massachusetts, volume VIII (110); W. R. Livermore, The Story of the Civil War (1913); Laura C. Holloway, Howard : the Christian Hero (1885); J. M. Hudnut, Commanders of the Army of the Tennessee (1884) ;Southern Magazine (Baltimore), November 1873; P. S. Peirce, The Freedmen's Bureau (1904) ; Forty-first Annual Reunion Association Graduates U. S. Military Academy (1910); Military Order of the Loyal Legion of th e U. S., Commandery of the State of Vermont, Circular No. 9, Series of  1909; Who's Who in America, 1908-09; H. Howard, Howard Genealogical (1903); Army and Navy Journal, October 30, 1909; Burlington Daily Free Press, October 27, 1909].

L. G. de R. H.

“HOWARD, Oliver Otis, soldier, born in Leeds, Maine, 8 November, 1830. He was graduated at Bowdoin in 1850, and at the U. S. military academy in 1854, became 1st lieutenant and instructor in mathematics in 1854, and resigned in 1861 to take command of the 3d Maine regiment. He commanded a brigade at the first battle of Bull Run, and for gallantry in that engagement was made brigadier-general of volunteers, 3 September, 1861. He was twice wounded at the battle of Fair Oaks, losing his right arm on 1 June, 1862, was on sick-leave for six months, and engaged in recruiting service till September of this year, when he participated in the battle of Antietam, and afterward took General John Sedgwick's division in the 2d corps. In November, 1862, he became major-general of volunteers. He commanded the 11th corps during General Joseph Hooker's operations in the vicinity of Fredericksburg, 2 May, 1863, served at Gettysburg, Lookout Valley, and Missionary Ridge, and was on the expedition for the relief of Knoxville in December, 1863. He was in occupation of Chattanooga from this time till July, 1864, when he was assigned to the Army of the Tennessee in the invasion of Georgia, was engaged at Dalton, Resaca, Adairsville, and Pickett's Mill, where he was again wounded, was at the surrender of Atlanta, and joined in pursuit of the Confederates in Alabama, under General John B. Hood, from 4 October till 13 December, 1864. In the march to the sea and the invasion of the Carolinas he commanded the right wing of General William T. Sherman's army. He became brigadier-general in the U. S. army, 21 December, 1864. He was in command of the Army of the Tennessee, and engaged in all the important battles from 4 .January till 26 April, 1865, occupying Goldsborough, North Carolina, 24 March, 1865, and participating in numerous skirmishes, terminating with the surrender of General Joseph E. Johnston at Durham, North Carolina, 26 April, 1865. In March of this year he was brevetted major-general for gallantry at the battle of Ezra Church and the campaigns against Atlanta, Ga. He was commissioner of the Freedmen's bureau at Washington from March, 1865, till July, 1874, and in that year was assigned to the command of the Department of the Columbia. In 1877 he led the expedition against the Nez Perces Indians, and in 1878 led the campaign against the Bannocks and Piutes. In 1881-'2 he was superintendent of the U. S. military academy. In 1886 General Howard was commissioned major-general, and given command of the division of the Pacific. Bowdoin college gave him the degree of A. M. in 1853, Water field college that of LL. D. in 1865. Shurtleff college the same in 1865, and Gettysburg theological seminary in 1866. He was also made a chevalier of the Legion of honor by the French government in 1884. General Howard was retired in 1894, and in 1898 was active in the movement for National volunteer reserves. He has contributed various articles to magazines, and has published" Donald's School Days" (1879); "Chief Joseph, or the Nez Perces in Peace and War" (1881); and "General Taylor" (in the" Great Commanders" series, New York, 1893).”  Source: Wilson, James Grant, & Fiske, John (Eds.). Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. 1. New York: Appleton, 1888, 1915.


HOWARD, Roland, abolitionist.  Brother of General Oliver Otis Howard.  (Marching in Proud Company, Civil War Recollections of Oliver Otis Howard [pamphlet, reprint], Anthoensen Press, Portland, ME, 1983)


HOWE, Dr. Samuel Gridley, 1801-1876, abolitionist leader, philanthropist, physician, reformer.  Actively participated in the anti-slavery movement.  Free Soil candidate for Congress from Boston in 1846.  From 1851-1853 he edited the anti-slavery newspaper, the Commonwealth.  Active with the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War.  Member of the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, 1863. Supported radical abolitionist John Brown. Husband of Julia Ward Howe. 

(Filler, 1960, pp. 43, 56, 117, 181, 204, 214, 238, 241, 268; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 32, 117, 119-120, 213; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 165, 207, 327, 388, 341; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 283; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 296; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 453-456; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 342)

HOWE, SAMUEL GRIDLEY (November 10, 1801-January 9, 1876), champion of peoples and persons laboring under disability, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to sturdy, middle-class parents. He was a descendant of Abraham How or Howe who settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts, about 1637. His mother, handsome Patty Gridley, came from a martial family. Through her he probably inherited his love of adventure and his soldierly bearing, as well as his beauty of person. His father, Joseph Neals Howe, was notably businesslike and frugal. Deciding to send but one son to college, he chose Sam, because he read aloud the best from the big family Bible; and Brown University, because it was less under Federalist influence than Harvard. The boy graduated in 1821, being more noted for pranks and penalties than for scholarship. He had, however, according to a college contemporary, a mind that was quick, versatile, and inventive, and he saw intuitively and at a glance what should be done (Julia Ward Howe, Memoir, post, p. 83). In 1824 he received the degree of M.D. from Harvard. Being allured by the romantic appeal of Greece, then battling against the Turk, like a crusader he set sail for that land, where, as fighter in its guerrilla warfare, surgeon in its fleet, and helper in reconstructing its devastated country and in ministering to its suffering people, he spent six adventurous years, during one of which he rushed home to plead for help and went back with a shipload of food and clothing. These supplies he distributed wisely, giving them outright to the feeble, but requiring the able-bodied to earn them through labor on public works. This procedure was the index of his future career; his chivalric zeal had become practical. His idea of real charity then and always was far in advance of his time and, together with much else that was momentous and permanently useful in his later life, seemed to spring full-fledged from his active and original brain.

Meanwhile, in 1829, Massachusetts had incorporated a school for the blind and in 1831 Howe was engaged to open it and carry it on. He went again to Europe and inspected such schools there. Incidentally, for bringing American aid and comfort to Polish refugees in Prussia, he was held six weeks in prison, secretly, and under harrowing conditions which profoundly affected him and explain some things in his after career. Returning home, he started the school (August 1832) in his father's house, with six pupils. He is said to have gone about at first blindfolded, the better to comprehend their situation. Having trained them by instrumentalities created by himself and according to his maxim, "Obstacles are things to be overcome," he exhibited their accomplishments, thereby obtaining funds and the gift of the Perkins mansion, whence the name Perkins Institution was derived. Never thereafter did he fail to win friends to his cause or money for his work and for the embossing of his books, which were in the "Boston line" (Roman letter) or "Howe" type. He showed the world that the young blind both could and should be brought up to be economically and socially competent. His annual reports-philosophic common-sense put into clear, pure, and forcible language were widely read. Succeeding educators must needs recur to them for re-inspiration. Horace Mann, one of his board of trustees, allowed himself to say in 1841: "I would rather have built up the Blind Asylum than have written Hamlet" (Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, post, II, 107). In the forty-four years of Dr. Howe's directorship of his school he visited seventeen states in behalf of the education of the blind, and in the 1870's he generously released several of his best teachers to further the American principles of training, then being introduced under Francis Joseph Campbell [q.v.] in London. He awakened the deafblind child, Laura Bridgman, to communication with others, educating her to usefulness and happiness at that time an astounding achievement which, done in the face of general disbelief, became of vast importance to human psychology, education, and hopefulness.

His knight-errantry was extended into many fields. He supported Horace Mann in his fight for better public schools and for normal schools; promoted the use of articulation and of the oral, as against the sign method, for instructing the deaf; so pioneered in behalf of the care and training of children then called idiots that Dr. Walter E. Fernald, one of his successors at the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble Minded Youth, declared these labors to be the chief jewel in his crown. He agitated for prison reform and the aiding of discharged convicts; helped Dorothea Dix by private and public support in her campaign for the humanitarian care ~f the insane; and from 1865 to 1874 he was chairman of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, the fir st in America, and wrote its annual reports, therein stating his principles which have since become the orthodoxy of charity (F. G. Peabody, Hibbert Journal, post). Though tardy in joining the anti-slavery movement he · finally plunged headlong into it, opening his · town office as a rallying point. He served for the needed years as
chairman and whip of a Boston vigilance committee, self-constituted, to prevent the forcible return South of fugitive slaves. With Julia (Ward) Howe [q.v.], whom he married April 27, 1843, he was co-editor for a while of the anti-slavery paper, The Commonwealth. He even ran for Congress in 1846 as the candidate of the "Conscience" Whigs; but here he suffered defeat, as he did also for reelection to the Boston school committee. Politics, indeed, was no forte of his, while action as a freelance was. Therefore, though much of the time ill from overwork, he threw himself with better success into helping save Kansas to the Free-Soilers. In this enterprise, as in his aiding and abetting the purposes of John Brown, he obeyed conscience rather than law. There are those who cannot excuse him for this "obfuscation," especially for his public letter disclaiming advance knowledge of Brown's raid, and his own subsequent disappearing into Canada. Later, when public excitement had quieted, he  went to Washington and testified before a Senate committee of inquiry regarding his knowledge of the affair. During the Civil War he was an active and useful member of the Sanitary Commission. Secretary Stanton appointed him one of the President's Inquiry Commission. He supported his friend, Senator Sumner, in behalf of negro suffrage as a politic al measure, and the education of freedmen as essential to their citizenship.

In 1866-67 he was protagonist in raising funds and clothing for the suffering Cretans, then waging a losing fight for freedom, and, accompanied by wife and children, again went to Greece to manage the distribution of supplies. He even stole into Crete itself, a hazardous undertaking, and while at Athens opened an industrial school for the Cretan refugees. In 1871, President Grant appointed Howe, Senator Wade of Ohio, and President White of Cornell, commissioners to report on the advisability of the United States' annexing the island of Santo Domingo. After spending about two months there they recommended such action, advice which mo st people considered quixotic. "He was never the hero of his own tale," says Dr. F. H. Hedge (Julia Ward Howe, Memoir, p. 95). He disliked being in the limelight, and his greater services were temporarily overshadowed by his gifted wife who long outlived him. His aggressive personality inspired both love and fear: he could be harsh and exacting or tender and generous. He had a host of friends; his enemies were few.

[F. B. Sanborn, Dr. S. G. Howe, the Philanthropist (1891); Julia Ward Howe, Memoir of Dr. Samuel  Gridley Howe (1876); " The Hero," poem by John Greenleaf Whittier; J. L. Jones, "Samuel Gridley Howe," in Charities Review, December 1897; P roc. at the Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, November 11, 1901 (1902); F. P. Stearns, "Chevalier Howe," in Cambridge Sketches (1905); Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe (2 vols., 1906-09), ed. by his daughter Laura E. Richards; F. G. Peabody, "A Paladin of Philanthropy," in Hibbert Journal, October 1909; D. W. Howe, Howe Genealogies,  Abraham of Roxbury (1929); J. J. Chapman, Learning and Other Essays (1910); L. E. Richards, Laura Bridgman, The Story of an Opened Door (1928); Boston Transcript, Boston Herald, Springfield Republican, January 10, 1876; see also Dickens' American Notes (1 842) for a short appreciation of Dr. Howe.]

E. E. A.


HOWE, Julia Ward, 1819-1910, abolitionist, women’s suffrage advocate, social activist, poet, essayist. Author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Wife of abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe, whom she aided in the publishing and editing of the Boston Anti-slavery newspaper, the Commonwealth before the Civil War.

(Clifford, 1979; Grant, 1994; Richards, 1916; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 341-342; Williams, 1999; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 291; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 451-453; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 331)

HOWE, JULIA WARD (May 27, 1819-Oct. 17, 1910), author, reformer, was born in New York City, the daughter of Samuel Ward [q.v.], a wealthy banker, and Julia Rush (Cutler) Ward, writer of occasional poems. She was a descendant of John Ward of Gloucester, England, one of Cromwell's officers who came to America after the Restoration and settled in Rhode Island. Two of her ancestors, Richard Ward [q.v.] and Samuel Ward [q.v.], were colonial governors of Rhode Island. Her grandfather, Samuel Ward [q.v.], was a distinguished Revolutionary officer. Having abundant means, her parents gave her an excellent education under governesses and in private schools, and her inborn esthetic taste had ample means of cultivation. The Ward house on the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, then very far uptown, contained a picture gallery, and its carefully chosen art strongly influenced the young girl. An urge for self-expression found vent, even in childhood, in poems and romances. The ethical spirit controlled the esthetic, however. Though she chafed because her father's religious scruples delayed her entrance into New York society, when she chose her husband he was not one of the youths with whom she had sung and danced, but a man of unusual moral earnestness, Samuel Gridley Howe [q.v.], almost twenty years her senior. After their marriage in 1843, they spent a year in England, Germany, France, and Italy. Even in her youth, the European prestige of her father's banking firm, together with her own eager interest, had accustomed her to think internationally, and her trip abroad strengthened this habit and began friendships with literary people and leaders of thought in several countries. Her marriage also placed her in the Boston environment of philosophers, poets, and Unitarians; practically all of the prominent Massachusetts intellectuals and reformers of that period became her acquaintances. She herself began to exercise her literary gifts assiduously, and in spite of domestic duties, proficiency in performing which she acquired with some difficulty, and though five children were born to her within twelve years of her marriage, she published anonymously in 1854 her first volume of lyrics, Passion Flowers. This was followed by Words for the Hour (1857), also a volume of poems; A Trip to Cuba (1860) and From the Oak to the Olive (1868), ho.th prose travel sketches; and by a play, The World's Own (1857). None of these productions, notwithstanding the facile music and buoyant spirit of the lyrics, obtained, or indeed merited, general recognition, although The World's Own was produced for a few performances at Wallack's.

It was inevitable that the Abolitionist movement should enlist both the Howes as enthusiastic crusaders. Mrs. Howe helped her husband edit The Commonwealth, an anti-slavery paper, and "Green Peace," their Boston residence, was a center of anti-slavery activity where Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, and many others gathered. From her war experience came at length a poem which won extraordinary popularity, though it brought her in cash-from the Atlantic -only four dollars. One night, while visiting a camp near Washington, D. C., with the party of Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, too stirred by emotion to sleep, she composed to the rhythm of "John Brown's Body," "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," scribbling down in the dense darkness of her tent the lines she could not see. It is probable that much of the popularity of the poem was due to the long rolling cadence of the old folk song, and even more to the hysteria of the moment; but the honors, public and private, showered upon the author, have seldom been equaled in the career of any other American woman.
From 1870, when marriages of daughters and son began the breaking up of the family life completed by Dr. Howe's death in 1876, the major part of her time was given to public service, which extended through the United States and across the sea. No movement or "Cause" in which women were interested, from suffrage, to pure milk for babies, could be launched without her. Her courage, her incisiveness and quickness of repartee, her constructive power, the completeness of her conviction accompanied by a balance of mind, and a sense of humor that disarmed irritation made her the greatest of woman organizers. In her earliest great campaign, where she "had the honor of pleading for the slave when he was a slave" (Reminiscences, p. 444), she was an enthusiastic follower of others; now she became a leader. In February 1868 the New England Woman's Club was formed, one of the earliest of such institutions, and Mrs. Howe was one of its first vice-presidents, and from 1871 to 1910, with the exception of two short intervals, she was its president. In 1868 she allied herself with the woman's suffrage movement, and when the New England Woman Suffrage Association was formed, she became its president. In 1869 this organization issued the call for the meeting in Cleveland at which the American Woman's Suffrage Association was formed, of which she became one of the most active representatives. The movement for peace enlisted her fervid support, and in September 1870 she issued an "Appeal to Womanhood throughout the World," calling for a general congress of women to promote the alliance of different nationalities, "the amicable settlement of international questions," and the general promotion of peace. It was translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish. On December 23, 1870, a meeting was held in New York to arrange for a "World's Congress of Women in behalf of International Peace," at which she made the opening address; the following year the American Branch of the Woman's International Peace Association was formed with Mrs. Howe as president. In the spring of 1872 she went to England, hoping to insure the holding of a woman's peace conference in London, but in this enterprise was unsuccessful. While in England she sat as a delegate at a prison reform congress. As a Unitarian she consistently worked in the interests of liberal religion and occasionally preached sermons from Unitarian pulpits and from those of other denominations. She made addresses before the Massachusetts legislature in the interests of reform, the Boston Radical Club, the Concord School of Philosophy, and in Faneuil Hall, where she plead the cause of the oppressed Greeks.

If lyric poetry was the literary medium of Mrs. Howe's early life, the essay and its vocal counterpart, the lecture, were the more frequently chosen vehicles of expression in her later years. An ineradicable sense of humor alone saved her from being too didactic. She had an unusual command of Italian, Greek, and French. The philosophy of Comte she read in the original, and she had sufficient familiarity with German to grasp the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Spinoza. Her love of communicating knowledge led her to embody what she had acquired in addresses and essays. Among her publications are: Memoir of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (1876); Modern Society (1881), essays on various topics; Margaret Fuller (1883), possibly the be st of her works from the standpoint of literature; Is Polit e Society Polite! (1895), essays; From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New (1898); Reminiscences (1899); At Sunset (1910). She also aided in editing numerous publications. Potent though her message to her contemporaries undoubtedly was, her influence, so far as it continues, is due largely to the memory of her personality and to the operation of the organizations which she was instrumental in founding and impregnated with her spirit.

Death came to her from pneumonia in her ninety-second year, shortly after she had received an honorary degree from Smith College. Four of her six children survived her-Florence Marion Howe Hall [q.v.], Henry Marion Howe [q.v.], Maud, the wife of John Elliott [q.v.], and Laura Elizabeth, the wife of Henry Richards. The youngest, Samuel, born in 1859, had died in early childhood; the eldest, Julia, wife of Michael Anagnos [q.v.], in 1886.

[L. E. Richards and M. H. Elliott, Julia Ward Howe (2 vols., 1915); L. E. Richards, Two Noble Lives (copyright 1911); M. H. Elliott, The Eleventh Hour in the Life of Julia Ward Howe (1911); Heroines of Modern Progress (1913); Women Who Have Ennobled Life (1915); Memorial Exercises in Honor of Julia Ward Howe, Held in Symphony Hall, Boston, on Sunday Evening, January 8, 1911 (1911); Bliss Perry, commemorative tribute in Proceedings American Acad. of Arts and Letters, and of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, vol. I (1913).]

M.S.G.


HOWE, Timothy Otis, 1816-1883, lawyer, jurist.  Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin.  Elected 1861, served until 1879.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery

(Appletons’, 1888, Vol. III, p. 284; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 297; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 11, p. 343; Congressional Globe)

HOWE, TIMOTHY OTIS (February 24, 1816- March 25, 1883), senator and postmaster general, was born in Livermore, Maine, the son of Betsy (Howard) and Dr. Timothy Howe and the descendant of John Howe, who emigrated from England before 1639 and settled in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He was educated in the common schools and in the Maine Wesleyan Seminary. In 1839 he was admitted to the bar and opened his office at Readfield, Vermont, where he practised until he moved to Green bay, Wisconsin, in 1845. In 1848 he was defeated in the election for Congress, but two years later he was elected judge of the 4th circuit and, by virtue of that office, justice of the state supreme bench, on which he served until 1853, when he resigned to resume his law practice. Being a Whig his sympathies naturally turned to the new Republican party, in which he became candidate for United States senator to succeed Henry Dodge, whose term expired in 1857. He lost the nomination, however, because he had become very unpopular with the large group in Wisconsin that adopted the state sovereignty doctrine, embodied in the Kentucky resolution of 1798, in order to defeat the operation of the Fugitive-Slave Act of 1850. When a fugitive slave, arrested by his master in Milwaukee, was rescued by a mob, composed partly of prominent citizens, the supreme court of Wisconsin, after the prosecution in the United States court (case of Ableman vs. Booth, 21 Howard, 506-66), refused to obey the mandate of the United States Supreme Court. The Wisconsin courts (II Wisconsin Reports, 498-554) and the legislature (General Laws Passed by the Legislature of Wisconsin, 1859, 1859, pp. 247-48) practically nullified the law. Almost alone Howe opposed this defiance of federal authority. In 1861, when public opinion had reversed itself to favor his position in support of the rights of the United States government, he was elected to the Senate, to which he was reelected in 1866 and again in 1872, each time without the formality of a caucus. Upon the death of Chief Justice Chase, President Grant offered him the empty post, but Howe declined because he believed it to be a breach of trust to give the Democratic governor of Wisconsin the opportunity to appoint a Democrat to the vacancy. For the same reason, he refused the appointment as minister to Great Britain. He was one of the earliest advocates of universal emancipation, strongly favored the suffrage bill of the District of Columbia, urged the federal government's right to establish territorial government over the seceded states, spoke vigorously against Andrew Johnson's policy and voted in favor of his conviction, supported the silver bill in 1878, advocated the repeal of the law restricting the number of national banks, and was one of the first to urge the redemption of the green-back currency. Perhaps the best expression of his political opinions is in the pamphlet, Political History ... "The Session" by Henry Brooks Adams, Reviewed by Hon. T.O. Howe (1870), reprinted from the Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) for October 7, 1870. His wife, Linda Ann Haynes, whom he had married December 21, 1841, died in 1881, leaving two children. In that same year President Garfield appointed him as commissioner to the Paris monetary conference, and at the end of the year President Arthur made him postmaster general, in which capacity he served until his death in Kenosha some months later. During the time he was postmaster general, a reduction of postage was accomplished, postal notes were issued, and reform measures vigorously urged.

[J. R. Berryman, History of the Bench and Bar of Wisconsin (1898), vol. I; P. M. Reed, The Bench and Bar of Wisconsin (1882); The Columbian Biographical Directory, Wisconsin vol. (1895); Maurice McKenna, Fond du, lac County, Wisconsin (1912), vol. I; J. B. Winslow, The Story of a Great Court (1912); Report of the Annual Meeting of the Wisconsin State Bar Association Held . . . 1900 (1901); D. W. Howe, Howe Genealogies. ... John Howe of Sudbury and Marlborough, Massachusetts (1929); Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), March 26, 1883; Milwaukee Sentinel, March 26, 1883.]

R.B.W.


HOWELL, David, 1747-1826, educator, professor of law, acting president of Brown University, abolitionist leader, Providence Society.  Petitioned Congress for implementation of House Resolution of March, 1790, against slavery.

(Bruns, 1977, p. 515; Dumond, 1961, p. 57; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. III, p. 284; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 301)

HOWELL, DAVID (January 1, 1747-July 30, 1824), Rhode Island jurist, member of the Continental Congress, was born in Morristown, New Jersey, the son of Aaron and Sarah Howell. He received his early education at Hopewell Academy, Hopewell, New Jersey, under the supervision of the Reverend Isaac Eaton, a Baptist clergyman who was the first of that denomination to establish in America a school for the higher education of young men. From Hopewell Howell went to the College of New Jersey, from which he was graduated in 1766. At the Academy he had been a fellow student of the brilliant James Manning [q.v.], and the latter, who had recently assumed the presidency of a new Baptist college in Rhode Island, now invited Howell to share the task of teaching with him. Howell accepted and thus began with Brown University, which was then known as Rhode Island College, a connection which, under varying relationships, was to last throughout his life. In 1769, after three years as tutor, he was given the degree of A.M. and appointed professor of natural philosophy and mathematics. In addition to these subjects, which he was engaged to teach at a salary of £72, he also taught French, German, and Hebrew. He had need to be a scholar of varied abilities, since for some years Manning and he were the only members of the college faculty. He continued as professor until 1779, when, owing to the Revolutionary War, all college exercises were temporarily suspended.

In 1768 he had been admitted to the bar, and in the field of law, which he now entered, he was destined to become exceptionally successful. Rhode Island College gave him the degree of LL.D. in 1793, and from 1790 to 1824 he bore the title of professor of  jurisprudence, but in point of fact he did no more teaching nor lecturing. He continued to be intimately interested in the welfare of the institution, however; from 1773 to 1824 he was a member of the board of fellows, and he was secretary of the corporation from 1780 to 1806. After Manning's death, Howell acted for a brief time (1791-92) as president ad interim, and on several occasions he presided at college commencements. He was a tall, handsome man of imposing bearing, an accomplished scholar, an excellent public speaker, and possessed of a brilliant wit, all of which attributes contributed to his preeminence as a lawyer. He was associate justice of the supreme court of the state from 1786 to 1787, attorney-general in 1789, and United States judge of Rhode Island from 1812 to 1824. From 1782 to 1785 he was a member of Congress under the Confederation, and he was appointed by President Washington a boundary commissioner in connection with the Jay Treaty of 1794. His particular concern in this matter was to assist in determining the true course of the St. Croix River. On September 30, 1770, he was married to Mary Brown, a daughter of Jeremiah Brown, one of the early pastors •of the First Baptist Church of Providence. They had five children, one of whom, Jeremiah, became a United States senator.

[The Biographical Cyclopedia of Representative Men of Rhode Island (1881); R. A. Guild, Life, Times, and Correspondence of James Manning, and the Early History of Brown University (1864) and History of Brown University with illustrative Documents (1867); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); G. S. Kimball, Providence in Colonial Times (1912); W. C. Bronson, The History of Brown University, 1764-1914 (1914).]

E. R. B.


HOWELL, James Bruen (July 4, 1816- June 17, 1880), pioneer editor, political journalist, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 302-303.

HOWELL, JAMES BRUEN (July 4, 1816- June 17, 1880), pioneer editor, political journalist, was born near Morristown, New Jersey, but in 1819 he was taken by his parents, Elias and Eliza Howell, to Licking County, Ohio. His father served in the state Senate and in Congress. James was educated in the Newark, Ohio, schools and at Miami University, where he graduated in 1837. As a student he had a reputation for aggressive leadership. He studied law at Lancaster, Ohio, and was admitted to the bar in 1839. The following year he was an enthusiastic Harrison supporter and served the cause as an unsuccessful candidate for prosecuting attorney. Owing to failing health, in 1841 he took a western horseback journey in the course of which he came to Keosauqua, in Iowa Territory, a town which seemed a promising location for a young lawyer, and in time he settled there. He soon came to rank as one of the leading lawyers of the territory, but abandoned the law to purchase, in 1845, with James H. Cowles, the Des Moines Valley Whig. Three years later the paper was removed to Keokuk, which seemed to offer an opportunity for a larger constituency. In 1854 he and Cowles established a daily called the Whig, rechristened the next year the Gate City. Howell remained the active editor until 1870.

Howell has been termed, not inaptly, the Horace Greeley of Iowa. He had the same intense zeal for a cause, the agitator's conviction that permitted no qualification or concession. He was a hard fighter who gave no quarter and expected none. His editorial style had no adornments but was simple, direct, specific, immediately understandable to all readers, and, in harmony with the standards of the time, not lacking in personalities. "From 1845 to 1865 J. B. Howell was the most potent maker of newspaper opinion in the Des Moines Valley and in Io.va" (S. M. Clark, post, p. 350). A loyal Whig, he early took leadership in that party in Iowa; but with the joining of the issue over the extension of slavery, he was among the first to urge the merging of all free-soil elements in a new organization and signed the call for the convention to organize the Republican party in the state. He was a delegate to the first national convention of the Republicans in 1856 and in the campaign sought in every way to promote party harmony and solidarity. At the Chicago convention, where he was one of the party counselors, he hailed the ticket with enthusiasm and lent every effort for its success. He was an ardent admirer of Lincoln and opposed the administration only when it seemed to falter in its policy regarding slavery. Inevitably he was a pronounced radical in bitter opposition to Johnson's Reconstruction policy. He was a consistent supporter of Grant.

Although Howell sought public offices from time to time, he held but few. In the first state election he was an unsuccessful candidate for district judge. On several occasions his name was before the legislature for the United States senatorship, but he served only to fill out an unexpired term (January 1870-March 1871). His tenure was too brief to provide opportunity for constructive service, but he was active throughout and attracted attention by his vigorous opposition to additional railroad grants. At the end of his te rm he was appointed by Grant a member of the court of Southern claims upon which he served to the completion of its work in 1880. During the last twenty years of his life he labored under serious physical disability as a result of an accident which contributed ultimately to his death. He was married, on November 1, 1842, to Isabella Richards, of Granville, Ohio. Following her death he married, on October 23, 1850, Mary Ann Bowen of Iowa City.

[S. M. Clark, "Senator James B. Howell, " Annals of Iowa, April 1894; D. C. Mott, "Early Iowa Newspapers," Ibid., January 1928; D. E. Clark, Hist. of Senatorial Elections in Iowa (191 2); General Catalog of Graduates and Former Students of Miami University ...1809-1909; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); files of the Des Moines Valley Whig and the Gate City, especially the latter for June 18, 19, 20, 1880. ]

E.D.R.


HOWLAND, Emily (November 20, 1827-June 29, 1929), educator, reformer, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 312.

HOWLAND, EMILY (November 20, 1827-June 29, 1929), educator, reformer, was born at Sherwood, New York, the only daughter of Slocum and Hannah (Tallcot) Howland. Her grandparents had been prominent among the Quaker pioneers who settled the eastern shore of Lake Cayuga: some thirty years earlier. Her father was a man of many interests, owning several farms and engaging in the wool and grain trade on the lake. The community observed strict Quaker discipline and discussed in meeting the evils of war, intemperance, and slavery. Women took free part in the discussions and some would buy no goods produced by slave labor. Emily Howland was sent to good local schools and then to Miss Grew's school for girls in Philadelphia. At sixteen she was at home again, still studying and reading whatever came her way. Her father took the National Anti-Slavery Standard and she agonized over slavery. Finally, in 1857, she went to Washington to teach in Miss Miner's normal school for colored girls. During the Civil War she helped organize the Freedman's Village at Camp Todd for refugee slaves, nursing through a smallpox epidemic and teaching school day and night. After the war, her father bought, for her a tract of land in Northumberland County, Virginia. Thither she transported destitute families and there she boldly opened a colored school, visiting later neighboring districts and starting other schools. Her own school she supported for fifty years until the state of Virginia took it over.

Her interest spread rapidly to colored schools throughout the South and to other educational institutions. Many of these she visited and to all she became a generous and understanding friend. In 1871 she helped found the Sherwood Select School (later the Emily Howland School) in her native village and in 1882 she assumed financial responsibility for it, erecting a new building and taking its teachers into her own household, an arrangement which she maintained until 1927, when she relinquished the school to the state. In that year, the University of the State of New York conferred on her the degree of Litt.D. for service to education. She had then been patron, teacher, or director in thirty schools. She had ardor to spare for other causes and a gift for terse and forcible speech. For years she was president of the county Woman's Suffrage Association and coworker with Susan B. Anthony and Anna H. Shaw in the general suffrage movement. She took part in temperance agitation and other enterprises for social betterment and in her last years she was a tireless champion of international peace. From 1891 until her death she was a director of the Aurora National Bank. Genial and humorous, she loved travel, flowers, and gaieties, and deplored the asceticism of her Quaker youth, choosing to attend a Unitarian church whenever it was possible. Yet the causes to which she gave her life were those of which she had first heard as a child at home and in the Friends' meeting-house near Sherwood.

[Emily Howland's letters and diaries are preserved by her niece, Miss Isabel Howland of Sherwood, New York, to whom the writer is indebted for most of the material in this article. For printed sources see Who's Who in America., 1928-29; Genevieve Parkhurst, article in the Pictorial Review, September 1928, inaccurate in some details; Emily Howland, "Early History of Friends in Cayuga County, New York," in Cayuga County Historical Society Collections, II (1882), 49-90; Franklyn Howland, A Brief Genealogy. and Biographical History of Arthur, Henry, and John Howland, and Their Descendants (1885); F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, A Woman of the Century (1893); New York Times, June 30, 1929; and Auburn Advertiser-Journal, July 1, 3, 1929.]

L. R. L.



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