Hep-Hit: Hepburn through Hitchcock

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


HEPBURN, John, Society of Friends, Quaker, early anti-slavery activist, promoted colonization project as early as 1715.  Wrote that slavery was “anti-Christian and vile.”  Wrote, The American Defense of the Golden Rule, or An Essay to Prove the Unlawfulness of Making Slaves of Men, 1715. 

(Bruns, Roger, ed. Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688-1788. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977, pp. 16-31; Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, pp. 34-36, 38, 121; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 12, 94; Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, p. 66)


HERBERT, John Carlyle, Beltsville, Maryland, planter, American Colonization Society, Vice-President, 1833-1841. 

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 27, 30, 70)


HERNDON, William Henry (December 25, 1818-March 18, 1891), law partner of Abraham Lincoln. His influence on Lincoln's opinions on slavery can probably be overestimated; but Herndon, who was in close correspondence with Theodore Parker and in touch with anti-slavery literature, undoubtedly called to his partner's attention on this, as on other subjects, many papers and books which would have otherwise escaped him.

(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 579;  J. C. Power, History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois (1876); Jesse W. Weik, The  Real Lincoln (1922); Joseph Fort Newton, Lincoln and Herndon (1910); A. J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln (2 volumes, 1928)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 579:

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

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

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

T. C. P.  


HERRICK, Anson, 1812-1868, journalist.  Democratic Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Served in Congress December 1863-March 1865.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 187; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume III, p. 187;

HERRICK, Anson, journalist, born in Lewiston, Maine, 21 January, 1812; died in New York city, 5 February, 1868. His father was a representative in congress from Maine. The son received a common-school education, and at the age of fifteen was apprenticed to a printer. In 1833 he established “The Citizen” at Wiscassett, Maine, and in 1836 removed to New York city and worked as a journeyman printer till 1838, when he began the publication of the New York “Atlas,” a weekly journal. In 1857 he was appointed naval store-keeper of the port of New York, and in 1862 was elected to congress as a Democrat, serving from 3 December, 1863, to 3 March, 1865. He was a delegate in 1866 to the National Union convention at Philadelphia. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 187.


HERSEY, John, Reverend, clergyman.  Assistant agent for the Maryland State Colonization Society in Africa.  Assistant to Dr. James Hall. 

(Campbell, Penelope. Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831-1857. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1971, pp. 58, 69-71, 74, 78-79)


HEWS, William H., abolitionist, Haverhill, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1840-41.


HEYWOOD, Ezra Hervey, 1829-1893, abolitionist, temperance activist, women’s rights advocate.  Member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.  Follower of William Lloyd Garrison. 

(American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 10, p. 727; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 428-429; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 609)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 609:

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

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

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

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

Z.C., Jr.


HIBBON, Thomas, Clinton County, Ohio, Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-38.


HICKMAN, William, born 1747 in Virginia, clergyman.  Pastor in Baptist Church at Forks of the Elkhorn, Lexington, Kentucky, censured for anti-slavery views. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 90)


HICKS, Elias, 1748-1830, clergyman, abolitionist leader.  Long Island farmer.  Society of Friends, Quaker minister. Founder of Hicksite sect of Quakerism, which believed in a radical form of abolitionism. 

(Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, pp. 116-118, 120, 155, 160; Hicks, 1861; Pease, William H., & Pease, Jane H. The Antislavery Argument. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965, pp. 143-148; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 195-196; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, p. 6; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 430-431; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 10, p. 744)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, pp. 6-7:

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

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

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

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

R. M. J.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 195-196:

HICKS, Elias, minister of the Society of Friends, born in Hempstead, New York, 19 March, 1748; died in Jericho, New York, 27 February, 1830. His youth was passed in carelessness and indifference to religious subjects, but not without frequent checks of conscience for his neglect of duty. At the age of about twenty years the subject of religion deeply affected his mind, and wrought a thorough change in his conduct. He became interested in the principles and testimonies of the society of which he was a member, and when about twenty-seven years of age he began his ministry, soon became an acknowledged minister of the society, and for more than fifty years labored with unwearied diligence. He travelled through almost every state in the Union, and also through Canada several times, and, notwithstanding the fact that his circumstances were not affluent, he never received the least compensation for his services. When not engaged in religious service, he was diligently occupied with his own hands upon his farm. He was in early life deeply impressed with the injustice and cruelty of keeping slaves, and was among the first that brought the subject frequently and forcibly before his religious society. Not only in his public discourses, but also by his pen, his views on this subject widely diffused themselves throughout the community, and through his exertions, conjoined with those of other philanthropists, the state of New York was induced to pass the act that on 4 July, 1827, gave freedom to every slave within its limits. As a preacher he was lucid and powerful, and wielded an influence that has been scarcely attained by any other member of his society. The prominent theme of his ministry was “obedience to the light within,” which he considered as the foundation of true Quakerism. In the latter years of his life he gave ground for uneasiness to some of the society by his views concerning the dogmatic opinions of theologians concerning the pre-existence, deity, incarnation, and vicarious atonement of Christ. He considered that the personality of the meek, wise, majestic prophet of Galilee was overlaid with theological verbiage and technicality, which greatly impaired its practical value and authority as an example to mankind. Hicks's ministry was marked by much dignity and power. Notwithstanding his pure, blameless, and upright walk among men, his doctrinal views became the cause of dissatisfaction, which led to a separation in all, or nearly all, the yearly meetings on the continent, his friends and supporters in most of the yearly meetings being largely in the majority. The contest was conducted with much acrimony, which, to the credit of all concerned, is rapidly passing away. Those members of the society that adhere to the teachings of Elias Hicks are commonly known as “Hicksites,” a name that was originally given in derision, but they recognize no other name than that of “Friends.” Mr. Hicks published “Observations on Slavery” (New York, 1811); “Sermons” (1828); “Elias Hicks's Journal of his Life and Labors” (Philadelphia, 1828); and “The Letters of Elias Hicks” (1834). See also Samuel M. Janney's “History of the Religious Society of the Friends” (1859). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 195-196.


HICKS, John F., New York, abolitionist leader.

(Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971)


HIEBERT, Lamont, abolitionist.


HIGBY, William, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe)


HIGGINS, James W., abolitionist, Jersey City, New Jersey, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1839-40.


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

(Edelstein, 1968; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 309, 312, 318, 319, 321, 336, 345, 377; Renehan, 1995; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 138, 207, 327, 337-338, 478-479; Rossbach, 1982; Sernett, Milton C. North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002, pp. 205, 208, 211, 213, 325-326n3; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 199; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, pp. 16-18; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 431-434; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 10, p. 757; Wells, Anna Mary. Dear Preceptor… 1963.  Higginson, Thomas, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 1870)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, pp. 16-18:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M.A. De W.H.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 199:

HIGGINSON, Thomas Wentworth, author, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 22 December, 1823, was graduated at Harvard in 1841 and at the divinity-school in 1847, and in the same year was ordained pastor of the 1st Congregational church in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He left this church on account of anti-slavery preaching in 1850, and in the same year was an unsuccessful Free-soil candidate for congress. He was then pastor of a free church in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1852 till 1858. when he left the ministry, and devoted himself to literature. He had been active in the anti- slavery agitation of this period, and for his part in the attempted rescue of a fugitive slave (see BURNS, ANTHONY) was indicted for murder with Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and others, but was discharged through a flaw in the indictment. He also aided in the organization of parties of free-state emigrants to Kansas in 1856, was personally acquainted with John Brown, and served as brigadier-general on James H. Lane's staff in the free-state forces. He became captain in the 51st Massachusetts regiment, 25 September, 1862, and on 10 November was made colonel of the 1st South Carolina volunteers (afterward called the 33d U.S. colored troops), the first regiment of freed slaves mustered into the national service. He took and held Jacksonville, Florida, but was wounded at Wiltown Bluff, South Carolina, in August, 1863, and in October, 1864, resigned on account of disability. He then engaged in literature at Newport, Rhode Island, till 1878, and afterward at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has since resided. He is an earnest advocate of woman suffrage, and of the higher education for both sexes. He was a member of the Massachusetts legislature in 1880 and 1881, serving as chief of staff to the governor during the same time, and in 1881-'3 was a member of the state board of education. He is the author of “Out-door Papers” (Boston, 1863); “Malbone, an Old port Romance” (1869); “Army Life in a Black Regiment” (1870; French translation by Madame de Gasparin, 1884); “Atlantic Essays” (1871); “The Sympathy of Religions” (1871); “Old port Days” (1873); “Young Folks' History of the United States” (1875; French translation, 1875; German translation, Stuttgart, 1876); “History of Education in Rhode Island” (1876); “Young Folks' Book of American Explorers” (1877); “Short Studies of American Authors” (1879); “Common-Sense about Women” (1881); “Life of Margaret Fuller Ossoli” (“American Men of Letters” series, 1884); “Larger History of the United States” (New York, 1885); “The Monarch of Dreams” (1886); “Hints on Writing and Speech-making” (1887); “Women and Men” (1888); “The Afternoon Landscape” (poems, 1889); “Travellers and Outlaws” (1889); “Life of Francis Higginson” (1891); “The New World and the New Book” (1892); “Concerning all of us” (1892); “Such as they are” (poems, with Mary Thacher Higginson, 1893); “Massachusetts in the Army and Navy” (1895-'6); “Book and Heart” (1897); “The Procession of the Flowers” (1897); “Cheerful Yesterdays” (autobiography, 1898); “Tales of the Enchanted Islands” (1898). He has also translated the “Complete Works of Epictetus” (Boston, 1865), and edited “Harvard Memorial Biographies” (2 vols., 1866). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 199.


HILDRETH, Richard (June 28, 1807-July 11, 1865), writer, editor, lawyer.  His articles are said to have "powerfully contributed to excite the strenuous opposition which was afterwards manifested ... to the annexation of Texas".  The year 1840 also saw the publication of his translation of a work by Etienne Dumont on Bentham's theory of legislation, and of Despotism in America, a discussion of the results of slavery. The latter book was reprinted in 1854 with a new chapter on the legal basis of slavery drawn from two articles written by Hildreth for Theodore Parker's Massachusetts Quarterly Review.

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 273; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 44); Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, pp. 19-20. Joseph Sabin, A Directory of Books relating to America, Volume VIII (1877). Brief sketches are in Nouvelle Biographie Generate (1862-70); S. A. Allibone, A Critical Directory of English Literature, Volume I (1858); E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck, Cyclopedia of American Literature, Volume II (rev. ed., 1875).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, pp. 19-20:

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

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

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

[The best list of Hildreth's writings is in Joseph Sabin, A Directory of Books relating to America, Volume VIII (1877). Brief sketches are in Nouvelle Biographie Generate (1862-70); S. A. Allibone, A Critical Directory of English Literature, Volume I (1858); E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck, Cyclopedia of American Literature, Volume II (rev. ed., 1875). See also his own Origin and Genealogy of the American Hildreths, reprinted from New-England History and Genealogical Register, January 1857; Vital Records of Deerfield, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850 (1920); General Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Phillips Exeter Academy, 1783-1903 (1903); New England History and Genealogical Register, January 1866; Wm. T. Davis, Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1895), Volume I; F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (1930).]

K.B.M.


HILL, Moses, abolitionist, Maine, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1839-40.


HILLHOUSE, James


HILTON, John J., abolitionist, Boston, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Counsellor, 1836-40, 40-46, Vice-President, 1846-60-.


HILTON, John Telemachus, 1801-1864, African American, abolitionist, civil rights activist.

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 5, p. 615)


HILTON, Lavinia, abolitionist.

(Yellin, Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne (Eds). The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 48n, 129, 130n, 134)


HIMES, JOSHUA VAUGHAN (May 19, 1805-July 27, 1895), reformer, a leader in the Second Advent movement.  Influenced by William Lloyd Garrison, he became active in the abolitionist movement, and he took a prominent part in other reform movements of the day. He helped to organize the Non-resistance Society of Boston in the late eighteen thirties, and promoted a manual-training school.  Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS).  Counsellor, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1840-1843. 
 
(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, pp. 60-61; E. N. Dick, " The Adventist Crisis 1831-1844" (1930), a doctoral dissertation (MS.) at the University of Wisconsin; J. N. Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island, 1836- 1850, Volume V (1894);).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, pp. 60-61:

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

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

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

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

E. N. D.


HIMROD, William, 1791-1873, Pennsylvania, abolitionist.  Opposed Fugitive Slave Act.  Aided fugitive slaves in the Underground Railroad.


Hinckley, Orramel S., Reverend, Tennessee, clergyman.  Agent of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in Tennessee.  Brother-in-law of ACS agent Ralph Gurley. 

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 145)


HINDE, Thomas Spottswood, 1785-1846, Illinois, opponent of slavery, newspaper editor, clergyman, author, historian, businessman.  Early and outspoken opponent of slavery.


HINES, Stephen D., Sandy Hill, New York.  Manager, 1833-1836, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.

(Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833)


HITCHCOCK, George Beckworth, clergyman, abolitionist.  Active in the Underground Railroad in Lewis, Iowa.


HITCHCOCK, Phineas Warrener (November 30, 1831-July 10, 1881), Nebraska pioneer and politician, Hitchcock was Republican of strongly anti-slavery leanings. He participated in the work of organizing the party in the territory, aided in establishing the first Republican paper in Omaha. He went as delegate to the second Republican National Convention.  

(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, p. 78; Sketch of Hitchcock by his son Gilbert, in Trans. and Reports Nebraska State Historical Society, Volume I (1885); J. S. Morton and Albert Watkins, Illustrated History of Nebraska, I (1905), 495-97;)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 5, Pt. 1, p. 78:

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

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

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

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

J.D.H.



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

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.