Presidential Candidates: / Containing Sketches, Biographical, Personal and Political, of Prominent Candidates for the Presidency in 1860

by D. W. Bartlett

HENRY WILSON.

Henry Wilson was born on the 16th of February, 1812, at Farmington, New Hampshire. His parents being poor, with a large family of children to support by their labor, he, with their consent, at the age of ten years, apprenticed himself to Mr. William Knight, a farmer of his native town, a man remarkable for his industry and habits of rigid economy. He remained with Mr. Knight till the age of twenty-one, and for these eleven years of incessant toil, he received one yoke of oxen, and six sheep. During this period, he was annually allowed to attend the public school four weeks. Throughout these years of unremitting, severe, and scantily-rewarded toil, he devoted his Sabbaths, and as much of his evenings as he could command, to reading. Too poor to purchase lights, he was forced to read by the dim light of wood fires; and after other members of the family had retired to rest, though weary with the toils of the day, he spent the hours in reading, which they employed in sleep. During his apprenticeship, he read more than seven hundred volumes of history and biography, most of which were selected and loaned to him by the wife of the Hon. Nehemiah Eastman, a gentleman who was a member of Congress during the first years of John Quincy Adams' administration. Mrs. Eastman was the sister of Hon. Levi Woodbury, and a lady of rare intelligence. To the judicious kindness of this accomplished lady, who thus early discovered and appreciated his talents, he was indebted for the means of acquiring a fund of solid and useful knowledge, and of forming habits of study and reflection, which have largely contributed to his subsequent success. To Judge Whitehouse, of his native town, he was also largely indebted for the use of many valuable books. Poverty and toil were the companions of his boyhood. His means of mental culture were very limited, and his education, on attaining his majority, was very deficient; yet very few young men at the age of twenty-one were better read in history, especially in the history of the United States, England, and modern France.

After attaining his majority, Mr. Wilson, for eight months, worked on a farm, receiving nine dollars a month.

Hoping to better his condition, in December, 1833, he left Farmington, and, with a pack on his back, made his way, on foot, to the town of Natick, Massachusetts, his present residence. Here he hired himself to a shoemaker, who agreed, for five months' service, to teach him the art of bottoming shoes. At the end of six weeks, Mr. Wilson bought his time, and went to work on his own account, at which employment he continued for more than two years, working so hard and incessantly that his health became seriously injured, and he was at length compelled to quit for a time the shoemaker's bench; and in May, 1836, he made a visit to Washington, where he remained for several weeks in regular attendance upon the debates in Congress. During his stay at the metropolis, Pinckney's Gag Resolutions were passed by the House of Representatives, and Calhoun's Incendiary Publication bill passed the Senate by the casting vote of the Vice-President, Martin Van Buren. The exciting debates to which he listened during this memorable period, and the scenes which he witnessed at Williams' slave-pen, to which he paid a visit, made Henry Wilson an anti-slavery man, and he returned to New England with the fixed resolution to do all in his power to advance the anti-slavery cause, and overthrow the influence of slavery in the nation. How steadily he has adhered to that resolution, his subsequent career bears ample witness.

From Washington, Mr. Wilson returned to New Hampshire, and entered Stafford Academy as a student, on the first of July, 1836. In the autumn of that year, he attended the academy at Wolfsborough; and during the winter of 1837, taught school in that town. In the spring of 1837, he entered Concord Academy, where he remained six months. While there, he was chosen a delegate to the Young Men's Anti-slavery State Convention, before which body he made his first public speech in behalf of freedom. In the autumn, he returned to Wolfsborough Academy, and at the close of the academic term, went again to Natick, Mass., where he taught school during the winter of 1837-8. He had intended to continue for some time longer at school, and to commence a course of classical studies, but the failure of a friend, to whom he had intrusted the few hundred dollars his own hands had earned, left him penniless, and he was compelled to change his plans of life.

In the spring of 1838, he engaged in the shoe manufacturing business, in which he continued till the autumn of 1848. During these ten years he annually manufactured from 40,000 to 130,000 pairs of shoes, a large portion of which he sold to southern merchants. One of his southern customers, who owed him more than a thousand dollars, having failed, wrote to him that he could pay him fifty per cent. of his debt, and asked to be discharged. On examining his statement, Mr. Wilson found that several slaves were included in his assets. Here was a question to test his anti-slavery professions. Mr. Wilson promptly signed the papers discharging him from all obligations, and wrote to him, never to send him a dollar of the dividend if it included the money received for slaves.

In November, 1839, Mr. Wilson was a candidate for representative to the legislature from the town of Natick, but being a zealous temperance man, and an advocate of the fifteen-gallon law, he was defeated by the opponents of that measure. In the spring of 1840, he took the stump for General Harrison, and during that memorable campaign, made upward of sixty speeches. In 1840, he was married to Miss Harriet M. Howe, of Natick. In 1840, and again in 1841, the people of Natick elected him their representative to the legislature. In 1842, he was a candidate for the State Senate, for Middlesex County, but in that year the Whig ticket was defeated. The next year, however, and in that following, 1844, he was chosen senator.

During the session of 1845, the State was deeply agitated by the discussion of the annexation of Texas. In February of that year, a State convention was called to be held in Faneuil Hall, to protest against the annexation. Mr. Wilson drew up the paper calling the convention, for the signatures of the members of the legislature, and applied to every Whig member for his name. The president of the Senate, Hon. Levi Lincoln, and other Whig members, refused to sign the call. Mr. Abbot Lawrence, Mr. Nathan Appleton, Mr. John Davis, Mr. Winthrop, and other eminent Whigs also declined to unite in, or to approve the movement. This was the beginning of that division among the Whigs of Massachusetts on the slavery question, which resulted in an open rupture in 1848, and finally in the utter overthrow of that great and powerful party in Massachusetts.

In September, 1845, Mr. Wilson got up a call for a mass convention, in Middlesex County, to oppose the admission of Texas as a slave State. The call was responded to by the people, and at an adjourned meeting in Cambridge, over which Mr. Wilson presided, a state committee was appointed, composed of men of all parties, to procure signatures to petitions against the admission of Texas. Sixty-five thousand names were procured in a few weeks, and Henry Wilson and John G. Whittier were appointed to carry the petitions to Washington.

In the autumn of 1845, Mr. Wilson declined being a candidate for the Senate, and was chosen Representative from the town of Natick. In the legislature he introduced a resolution announcing the unalterable hostility of Massachusetts to the further extension and longer existence of slavery in America, and her fixed determination to use all constitutional and legal means for its extinction. In spite of the coldness and opposition of several leading Whigs, this resolution was adopted by ninety-three majority in the House, but was lost in the Senate by four votes. Mr. Wilson made an elaborate speech in its behalf, and Mr. Garrison, in the "Liberator," pronounced it the fullest and most comprehensive speech upon the slavery question, ever made in any legislative body in this country. In 1846, Mr. Wilson declined to be again a candidate for the legislature.