Wil: Wilcox through Wilson

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


WILCOX, Stephen (February 12, 1830-November 27, 1893), inventor, engineer.  His father was a banker and business man, a strong opponent of slavery.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 204-205:

WILCOX, STEPHEN (February 12, 1830-November 27, 1893), inventor, engineer, was born in Westerly, Rhode Island, a descendant of Edward Wilcox, who was in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, as early as 1638, and the son of Stephen and Sophia (Vose) Wilcox. His father was a banker and business man, a strong opponent of slavery. Stephen was educated in the common schools of Westerly, and seems to have followed his natural aptitude for mechanics without serving a regular apprenticeship. He was a prolific inventor even as a young man, but when he attempted to patent his devices usually found that he had been anticipated. One of his early inventions was a practical caloric or hot-air engine, which he submitted to the United States Lighthouse Board for opera ting fog signals. Believing, however, that the field for the hot-air engine was limited, he turned his attention to steam boilers, and, in 1856, invented a safety water-tube boiler with inclined tubes-the germ of the Babcock & Wilcox boiler later well known throughout the world. In partnership with D. M. Stillman of Westerly he was granted Patent No. 14,523 for this boiler, March 25, 1856.

Some ten years later, with his boyhood friend George Herman Babcock [q.v.], he designed a steam generator based on the principal of the earlier boiler, and was granted a patent for it on May 28, 1867. In that year the firm of Babcock, Wilcox & Company was formed to manufacture the boiler; the concern was incorporated in 1881, and Wilcox was vice-president from then until his death. The Babcock & Wilcox boiler and the Babcock & Wilcox stationary steam-engine were used in the first central station s (power plants) in the country and were of considerable significance in the development of electric lighting. Babcock & Wilcox products were used all over the world, and the company opened offices in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Wilcox was primarily the inventor and mechanic of the combination while Babcock was the executive; the boil er is the Wilcox boiler but is often call ed the Babcock, because Babcock's name came first in the title of the firm. Wilcox continued his experimentation with engines and boilers till the end of his life, in later years being assisted by his wife's nephew, William D. Hoxie [q.v.]. Much of his work was carried out on his yacht, the Reverie, and this circumstance may have been responsible for Roxie's perfection of the marine form of the Babcock & Wilcox boiler. Wilcox secured, alone or with others, forty-seven patents in forty years. He was married in 1865 to Harriet Hoxie, who survived him. He was hand so me and popular, simple and unaffected by his rise to affluence. During the last part of his life he made his home in Brooklyn, New York, where he died. Public-spirited and generous, he presented to Westerly, his birthplace, a public library building, which, after his death was enlarged and endowed by his widow, who also carried out their joint plans for many other gifts to the town, including a park and a high-school building.

[Representative Men and Old Families of Rhode Island; (1908), volume I; Transactions American Society Mech. Engineers, volume XV (1894); Fifty Years of Steam: A Brief History of the Babcock & Wilcox- Company (1931); J. N. Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island .... Washington County (1894); Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 28, 1893.]

W. M. M.


WILKESON, Samuel, 1781-1848, manufacturer, businessman, political leader, president, American Colonization Society.  In federal affairs, his chief interest seems to have been the abolition of slavery, which he hoped to bring about gradually with compensation to slaveholders. He was a member of the American Colonization Society, for some time president of its board of directors, and was instrumental in shipping many freed negroes to Liberia.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, pp. 509-510; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 218-219). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 218-219:

WILKESON, SAMUEL (June 1, 1781-July 7, 1848), pioneer, was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the son of John and Mary (Robinson) Wilkeson. His father emigrated from the north of Ireland in 1760, settling first in Delaware, then at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and in 1784, having served as lieutenant in the Revolution, took up a soldier's grant in Washington County, near Pittsburgh, with his wife and three young children. Samuel worked on his father's farm and had only a few weeks of schooling. In 1802 he removed to Ohio, near the site of Youngstown. In 1809 he removed to Lake Erie, near the present Westfield, New York There he built keel boats and engaged in the lake and river trade. When, on a trading expedition to Detroit, he found General Harrison's army delayed in the Grand River by lack of transports, he successfully undertook the building of the necessary vessels. With Pennsylvania militia he took part in the unsuccessful defense of Buffalo against the British. Convinced of the commercial possibilities of the ruined village, on his return home in 1814 he loaded a lake boat with the frames and covering for a store and dwelling, embarked his family, and sailed to his new home. As trader, shipowner, contractor, iron founder, and manufacturer he engaged with success in practically all the business enterprises of the frontier community. His uncompromising dealing, as justice of the peace, with unruly disbanded soldiers won him the respect and gratitude of his neighbors; but the accomplishment that marked him as a leader in the community was the construction in 1820, in the face of great odds, of a harbor at the mouth of Buffalo Creek suitable for the western terminus of the Erie Canal. With two others he pledged property to the value of $24,000 to secure a loan of $12,000 from the state of New York. When the superintendent of the work proved incompetent, Wilkeson was asked to take charge. He lacked engineering training and had never seen an artificial harbor of any kind; but the following morning at daylight he was on the job. Neither the plan of the work nor its precise location had been determined. All kinds of makeshift devices were employed. A pile-driver was improvised from a two-thousand-pound mortar. After eight months of unremitting effort a pier eighty rods long was extended, reaching water twelve feet deep. In 1821 he was appointed first judge of common pleas in Erie County, in 1824 was elected state senator, and in 1836 became mayor of Buffalo.

In federal affairs, his chief interest seems to have been the abolition of slavery, which he hoped to bring about gradually with compensation to slaveholders. He was a member of the American Colonization Society, for some time president of its board of directors, and was instrumental in shipping many freed negroes to Liberia. While traveling in Tennessee, he was suddenly taken ill at Kingston and died there. He was married three times, before 1802 to Jane Oram, who bore him six children, and after her death to Sarah St. John, of Buffalo. His third wife was Mary Peters of New Haven, a teacher. A tall man, his appearance was stern and commanding. His fearlessness won him many devoted friends, but his unwillingness to conciliate his opponents, and to explain or justify his actions, involved him in many controversies and provoked bitter enmities. He was an eloquent and convincing speaker. In 1842 and 1843 he published in the American Pioneer of Cincinnati a series of articles on his own experiences (reprinted in Buffalo Historical Society Publications, volume V, 1902). These recollections show not only accurate and discriminating observation but also unusual literary powers. Considering his entire lack of formal education, the variety and solidity of his achievements were amazing.

["Recollections," ante; Samuel Wilkeson, Jr., "Biographical Sketch," Buffalo Historical Society Publications, volume V (1902); Ibid., volume IV (1896); J. C. Lord, "The Valiant Man," A Discourse on the Death of the Hon. Samuel Wilkeson (1848); African Repository, August 1848, also May 1838, January 15, 1840.]

P. W. B.  


WILLARD, Joseph (March 14, 1798-May 12, 1865), lawyer and historian. He was a Free-Soiler in 1847 and an abolitionist in 1850; finally, he almost welcomed the Civil War as means to end of slavery.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 235-236:

WILLARD, JOSEPH (March 14, 1798-May 12, 1865), lawyer and historian, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the youngest child of Joseph Willard [q.v.], president of Harvard College, and Mary (Sheafe) Willard. Sidney Willard [q.v.] was his brother. Joseph studied at Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and at a private school in Boston conducted by William Jennison. Entering Harvard, he was graduated with the class of 1816. He then became a student in the law office of Charles H. Atherton of Amherst, New Hampshire, tutoring the Atherton children in return for his own instruction. Later he removed to the office of Judge Samuel P. P. Fay of Cambridge, and finally entered the Harvard Law School, where he received the degree of LL.B. in 1820. He began practice in Waltham, but soon removed to Lancaster, Massachusetts, where he practised for ten years. Here he fill ed various town offices and was a member of the legislature in 1828 and 1829. His Sketches of the Town of Lancaster (1826) led to his election to the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society at an unusually early age. He served the latter society as librarian (1833-35), as recording secretary (1835-57), and as corresponding secretary (1857-64).

On February 24, 1830, he married Susanna Hickling Lewis, and shortly thereafter he removed to Boston. He was appointed master in chancery in 1839 and carried on his duties so well that there was hardly an objection to, or an appeal from, his probate decisions. In 1841 he was appointed to one of the clerkships of the Suffolk County courts, and chose to act in the court of common pleas. Here again his decisions were seldom appealed, and those appeals seldom sustained. His extensive knowledge of law and procedure made him of great service to the lawyers practising in the court. When the office was made elective in 1856 he was returned as a matter of course in recognition of the fact that he was a rare type of public servant. He continued in office until his death.

In 1845 he was one of the incorporators of the New-England Historic Genealogical Society, and he was one of the trustees of the old Boston Library. He was a frequent and welcome visitor in the homes of the intellectual leaders who then lived in Concord. In politics he was an ardent Whig. He was a Free-Soiler in 1847 and an abolitionist in 1850; finally, he almost welcomed the Civil War as a surgeon's knife to remove the cancer of slavery. His declining health was shattered by the news of the death of his son, Major Sidney Willard, at Fredericksburg, in December 1862. He was a Unitarian by religion and a practising Christian whose contemporaries had only praise for him. In 1858 he published Willard Memoir, or Life and Times of Major Simon Willard; a biography of General Henry Knox he left unfinished at his death, and the manuscript is now in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

[Willard Genealogy (1915), ed. by C.H. Pope; Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, series IX (1867), et passim; New England Historical and Genealogical Register, October 1865; Boston Transcript, May 13, 1865.]

C. K. S.


WILLEY, Austin, b. 1806, reformer, abolitionist, clergyman. Congregational minister.  Editor of Advocate of Freedom.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, p. 518; Dumond, 1961, pp. 301, 405n12)


WILLEY, Waitman Thomas, 1811-1900, lawyer.  U.S. Senator from Virginia (1861), later West Virginia (1863).  Served in Senate until March 1871.  He presented the constitution of West Virginia and was instrumental in securing its acceptance by Congress and the ratification by the people of the "Willey amendment" providing for the gradual abolition of slavery in the proposed state. Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, p. 519; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 246-247; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 246-247:

WILLEY, WAITMAN THOMAS (October 18, 1811-May 2, 1900), senator from West Virginia, was born in a log cabin in Monongalia County, Virginia, near what is now Farmington, Marion County, West Virginia. William, his father, of English descent, had moved west from Delaware about 1782; Waitman's mother, Sarah (Barnes), was born in Maryland of English and Irish stock. As a child, Waitman attended school less than twelve months, most of his youth being spent on his father's farm, first on Buffalo Creek and later on the banks of the Monongahela. He was graduated in 1831 from Madison College, Uniontown, Pennsylvania, studied law with Philip Doddridge [q.v.] and John C. Campbell, and in Morgantown (then in Virginia) began a practice in which he gained a livelihood and a local reputation. He married Elizabeth E. Ray on October 9, 1834.

A Whig in political faith, Willey served in various minor positions, from 1840 to 1850, and was a delegate to the Virginia constitutional convention of 1850, where he championed western measures, especially white manhood suffrage. He also joined the Methodist Episcopal Church and became active in the Sons of Temperance. He was defeated as a candidate for lieutenant governor in 1859. The next year, supporting Bell and Everett, he struggled against the tide of disunion, and in the state convention of 1861 voted against the secession of Virginia.

His chief work began with the movement for a new state in western Virginia. Reluctantly he admitted the necessity for dividing the Old Dominion. In the Mass Convention at Wheeling, May 12, 1861, he was one of the conservative leaders who checked the radical movement to create a state government immediately. A new convention, contingent upon the ratification of secession at the polls, met on June 11, and reorganized the government of Virginia in the northwestern counties, under Francis H. Pierpont [q.v.] as governor. In addition to consenting to the division of the state, this government later became the reconstruction government of Virginia. By it Willey was elected almost immediately to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the withdrawal of James M. Mason [q.v.]. He presented the constitution of West Virginia and was instrumental in securing its acceptance by Congress and the ratification by the people of the "Willey amendment" providing for the gradual abolition of slavery in the proposed state. He was continued in the Senate by the legislature of West Virginia and was reelected in 1865. That the West Virginia revolution took the form of law and that the statehood movement was successful were in large measure due to the leadership of Willey and his associates.

In the meantime, he had become a Republican and had campaigned for Lincoln in 1864. He later became a Radical Republican and voted for the impeachment of President Johnson. Usually, but not invariably, he supported party measures. Democratic victory in West Virginia in 1870 resulted in his retirement from office, which he accepted gracefully, closing his work in the state constitutional convention of 1872 by introducing resolutions calling for a cessation of political disabilities. He campaigned for the Republicans in 1868, 1872, and 1876, being a member of the national convention in the last-named year. Local office holding, law, and domestic duties engaged his activities during the remainder of his life. He died in Morgantown, West Virginia, in his eighty-ninth year.

[Willey's diary (2 volumes, covering 1844-1900 and containing newspaper clippings) and 1 s boxes of letters to Willey in West Virginia University Library; biographical essay written before Willey's death by his son-in-law, J. M. Hagans, in S. T. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, West Virginia (1883), and in abridged form in Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of Monongalia, Marion and Taylor Counties, West Virginia (1895); W. P. Willey, An Inside View of the Formation of the State of West Virginia (1901); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Wheeling Register, May 3, 1900.]

J-n D.B.


WILLIAMS, George Henry (March 26, 1820-April 4, 1910), attorney-general, senator from Oregon. After Iowa was granted statehood, he was elected a district judge in 1847 and served until 1852. The next year President Pierce appointed him chief justice of the Territory of Oregon. Soon after his arrival at Salem in June 1853 he rendered a decision in favor of a freed negro, Robin Holmes, suing his former owner for the custody of his three minor children After the call of a convention to meet in August 1857 to form a state constitution, he wrote a letter to the Oregon, Statesman, July 28, urging the inexpediency of slavery in Oregon

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 262-263:

WILLIAMS, GEORGE HENRY (March 26, 1820-April 4, 1910), attorney-general, senator from Oregon, was born at New Lebanon, Columbia County, New York, the son of Taber and Lydia (Goodrich) Williams. The father was of Welsh, the mother of English descent and both grandfathers were Revolutionary soldiers. During George's childhood his father moved to Onondaga County, New York, where the son attended district school and Pompey Hill Academy until he was seventeen. He then read law, was admitted to the Syracuse bar in 1844, and began practice at Fort Madison, Iowa Territory.

After Iowa was admitted to statehood, he was elected a district judge in 1847 and served until 1852. The next year President Pierce appointed him chief justice of the Territory of Oregon. Soon after his arrival at Salem in June 1853 he rendered a decision in favor of a freed negro, Robin Holmes, suing his former owner for the custody of his three minor children (Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, June 1922). After the call of a convention to meet in August 1857 to form a state constitution, he wrote a letter to the Oregon, Statesman, July 28, urging the inexpediency of slavery in Oregon (Ibid., September 1908; C. H. Carey, The Oregon Constitution ... of 1857, 1926, pp. 32-33). He was a leading member of the constitutional convention and chairman of the committee on the judicial department. He opposed unsuccessfully the proposal that the property of a married woman should not be subject to the debts of a husband and should be registered separately (Art. XV sect. 5) on the ground that "in this age of woman's rights and insane theories" legislation should "unite the family circle" and make husband and wife one (Carey, p. 368).

 Williams retired from the bench in 1857 to take up the practice of law in Portland. He supported Douglas in the campaign of 1860, and as a northern Democrat opposed to slavery in the call for a Union state convention in 1862. He was a delegate to this body, which met at Eugene in April, and was chairman of the executive committee that carried on the campaign for the Union state ticket, which was entirely successful at the June election. In September 1864 he was elected as a Republican to the United States Senate for the term beginning in March 1865. When Congress met in December of that year he was appointed a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction and supported Thaddeus Stevens and the Radicals against President Johnson. He introduced the Tenure of Office bill in the Senate in December 1866, and held at the time that this measure did not take away the power of the President to remove cabinet officers (J. G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, volume II, 1886, p. 270). He claimed authorship for the Military Reconstruction bill, which he introduced in the Senate February 4, 1867, and which was passed by Congress (see his article, "Six Years in the United States Senate," Sunday Oregonian, Portland, December 3, 10, 1905). With his Oregon colleague, H. W. Corbett, he voted "guilty" in the impeachment trial of President Johnson. He failed of reelection to the Senate in 1871, but in February of that year was appointed a member of the Joint High Commission that negotiated the Treaty of Washington with Great Britain, and in May was appointed attorney-general, a position which he held until May 5, 1875. In 1873 Grant nominated him as chief justice to succeed Salmon P. Chase [q.v.], but the appointment aroused such criticism and opposition that Williams requested the President to withdraw his name. The Senate judiciary committee refused to recommend him after an inquiry that revealed that "Williams had removed from office A. C. Gibbs, United States District Attorney at Portland, Oregon, to prevent him from prosecuting election frauds, an action taken at the insistence of Senator John H. Mitchell [q.v.], who was said to have been implicated in the use of "bribes and repeaters" (Diary of M. P. Deady, January 7, 1874, and letters of J. W. Nesmith written to Deady from Washington, December 2, 7, 8, 1873, January 10, 1874, in Oregon Historical Society). In 1876 Williams and General Lew Wallace were sent to Florida by the Republican National Committee "to save the state for Hayes" and managed, so Williams wrote afterwards, "to put the returns in such shape that the authorities would" know how the people voted."

After returning to Portland he renewed his practice of law and was twice elected mayor of that city, serving 1902-05. In his later years he lent his name in support of the "Oregon System" of popular government and of the woman's suffrage movement.

In 1850 Williams married Kate Van Antwerp of Keokuk, Iowa, who died in 1863; in 1867 he married Kate (Hughes) George. This was the "pushing and ambitious wife" whose "new landau," furnished at public expense and displayed at Washington while the husband was a member of Grant's official family, is said to have helped block the way to her husband's promotion as chief justice (James Schouler, History of the United States, volume VII, copyright 1913, p. 230). He had one daughter by his first marriage and two adopted children. In addition to "Six Years in the Senate," cited above, Williams published Occasional Addresses (1895), and "Political History of Oregon from 1853 to 1865" (Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, March 1901).

[Joseph Gaston, Portland, Oregon (19II), volume II; Charles Warren, The Supreme Court  in U. S. History (1928), volume II; Proceedings Oregon State Bar Association, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Sessions (n.d.); Who's Who in America, 1910-11; Oregon Native Son, May 1899; Oregon Historical Society Quarterly, June 1910; Morning Oregonian (Portland), April 5, 1910.)

R. C. C.


WILLIAMS, Thomas, 1779-1876, Providence, Rhode Island, clergyman, abolitionist. Manager, 1833-1834, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.

(Dumond, 1961, p. 180; Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, p. 533)


WILLIAMS, Thomas, 1806-1872, lawyer.  Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.  Served as Congressman from December 1863 through 1869.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, p. 533; Congressional Globe)


WILMOT, David, 1814-1868, lawyer, jurist, anti-slavery activist, U.S. Congressman, Pennsylvania.  He was an early founder of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania.  Introduced Wilmot Proviso into Congress to exclude slavery in territories acquired from Mexico in 1846-1849.  The Proviso stated:  “Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.”  Congressman Wilmot’s writings suggest that one of his motives was to protect White laborers in the new territory.  In a New York speech, Wilmot talked of the end of slavery when he stated, “Keep it within its given limits… and in time it will wear itself out.  Its existence can only be perpetrated by constant expansion…  Slavery has within itself the seeds of its own destruction.”  In 1856, Wilmot attended the Republican national convention and supported John C. Frémont as its presidential candidate.  He was appointed by the Pennsylvania state legislature to serve in the U.S. Senate from 1861-1863.

(Blue, 2005, pp. 10, 13, 52, 105, 184-212, 265; Dumond, 1961, pp. 359-360; Going, 1966; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 32-33, 47-48, 60, 92, 98, 146, 147, 255n; Morrison, 1967; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 49, 133, 252, 261, 397, 476, 513, 517-518; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, p. 544; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, p. 317; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 23, p. 553; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe). 

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

WILMOT, David, jurist, U.S. Congressman, born in Bethany, Pennsylvania, 20 January, 1814; died in Towanda, Pennsylvania, 16 March, 1868. He received an academical education at Bethany and at Aurora, New York, was admitted to the bar at Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, in 1834, and soon began practice at Towanda, where he afterward resided. His support of Martin Van Buren in the presidential canvass of 1836 brought him into public notice, and he was subsequently sent to Congress as a Democrat, serving from 1 December, 1845, to 3 March, 1851. During the session of 1846, while a bill was pending to appropriate $2,000,000 for the purchase of a part of Mexico, he moved an amendment “that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” This, which became known as the “Wilmot Proviso,” passed the house, but was rejected by the Senate, and gave rise to the Free-Soil movement. Mr. Wilmot was president-judge of the 13th district of Pennsylvania in 1853-'61, a delegate to the National Republican conventions of 1856, and 1860, acting as temporary chairman of the latter, was defeated as the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania in 1857, and elected to the U. S. Senate as a Republican, in place of Simon Cameron, who resigned to become Secretary of War in President Lincoln's cabinet, serving from 18 March, 1861, to 3 March, 1863. In that body he was a member of the committees on pensions, claims, and foreign affairs. He was appointed by President Lincoln judge of the U. S. Court of Claims in 1863, and died in office. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI. pp. 544.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, p. 317:

WILMOT, DAVID (January 20, 1814-March 16, 1868), representative from Pennsylvania, was born at Bethany, Pennsylvania, the descendant of Benjamin Wilmot who with his son, William, aged six, emigrated from England to New Haven, Connecticut, before 1641, and the son of Randall and Mary (Grant) Wilmot. In 1820 his mother died and a step-mother soon took her place. His father, a local merchant, prospered and built a large pillared house in the fashion of the period, where the family lived during David's boyhood. He went to school at the local academy and later at Aurora, New York. In 1832 he entered the law office of George W. Woodward at Wilkes Barre, and in 1834 he was admitted to the bar. He settled down in Towanda, Pennsylvania, to practise law, and on November 28, 1836, he married Anne Morgan of Bethlehem. For ten years he continued law and politics, with more and more politics and less and less law in the mixture. He was an ardent Jacksonian and an inveterate attendant of political gatherings. He was stout and of average height, rather slovenly in dress, enormous in appetite both in eating and drinking, forceful in speech, and lazy. It was much easier to make extempore political speeches than engage in the drudgery of the law. In 1844 he was active in promoting the indorsement of Van Buren by the Democratic state convention and later in the year was elected to Congress from one of the strongest Democratic districts. He served from 1845 to 1851. The Twenty-ninth Congress contained many Northern Democrats who resented Polk's disregard of Northern interests. Wilmot at first was loyal to the administration, even voting for the tariff of 1846, the only Pennsylvania congressman to do so. He could vote thus with some degree of safety, for his constituents were mostly farmers. However, he, like many others, came to the conclusion that the Southern power was getting too well fortified and that the question was how to stop its further growth (but for a discussion of his motives as more immediately personal and political see R. R. Stenberg, "The Motivation of the Wilmot Proviso," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, March 1932). Wilmot and his associates feared the Mexican War meant the annexation of southwestern territory, so when the president on August 8, 1846, asked for $2,000,000 with which to make peace, Wilmot determined to offer a proviso using the phraseology of the Northwest Ordinance to the effect that slavery should be prohibited in any territory that might be acquired with this money. Jacob Brinkerhoff [q.v.] of Ohio had a similar plan. There was a conference of Northern Democrats, and, after Wilmot had rephrased his proviso, he introduced it the same day, perhaps because he was less identified with the Free-Soil movement. The proviso was adopted in the House but defeated in the Senate.

Wilmot's further service in his two remaining congressional terms was not notable, but his proviso had made him famous and, with his bolt with Van Buren in 1848, placed him among the leaders of Free-Soil men. In 1850 he was so unpopular with the predominant Buchanan wing of the Pennsylvania Democracy that he was beset by a bolting ticket, and in the interests of harmony he withdrew from the campaign for congressman in favor of Galusha A. Grow [q.v.], whom he designated. In 1851 he was elected president judge of the 13th judicial district, over which he presided until 1861. He was one of the founders of the Republican party and was its first candidate for governor. In 1860 he supported Lincoln as against Cameron. After the election Lincoln offered him a cabinet position, which Wilmot declined, preferring the Senate. The pretensions of western Pennsylvania politicians prevented his selection for the long term (C. P. Markle to John Covode, January 8, 1861, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania), but, when Lincoln finally appointed Cameron to his cabinet, Wilmot was chosen to succeed him for the short term, 1861-63. In the Senate, he was a faithful supporter of Lincoln and had the satisfaction of seeing his proviso finally enacted into a law forbidding slavery in the territories, the act approved June 19, 1862. When a Democratic legislature forced him to retire, Lincoln appointed him judge of the reorganized court of claims. His health, however, was failing, and his service, neither continuous nor effective, was terminated by death. He was survived -by his wife and one of their three children.

[C. B. Going, David Wilmot, Free-Soiler (1924); C. E. Persinger, "The 'Bargain of 1844' as the Origin of the Wilmot Proviso," Annual Report of the American Historical Association 1911, volume I (1913); Press (Philadelphia), March 19, 1868. Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe].

R.F.N.


WILSON, Henry, 1812-1875, abolitionist leader, statesman, U.S. Senator and Vice President of the U.S.  Massachusetts state senator.  Member, Free Soil Party.  Founder of the Republican Party.  Strong opponent of slavery.  Became abolitionist in 1830s.  Opposed annexation of Texas as a slave state.  Bought and edited Boston Republican newspaper, which represented the anti-slavery Free Soil Party.  Called for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1815.  Introduced bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and the granting of freedom to slaves who joined the Union Army.  Supported full political and civil rights to emancipated slaves.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, pp. 548-550; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 322-325; Congressional Globe; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Wilson, History of the Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-Eighth United States Congresses (1864); Wilson, Military Measures of the United States Congress, 1861-1865 (1866); Wilson, History of the Reconstruction Measures of the Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Congresses (1868); and Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (3 volumes, 1872-77), Elias Nason and Thomas Russell, The Life and Public Services of Henry Wilson (1876).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

WILSON, Henry, statesman, born in Farmington, New Hampshire, 16 February, 1812; died in Washington, D. C., 22 November, 1875. He was the son of a farm-laborer, whose ancestors were from the north of Ireland, and at the age of ten was apprenticed to a farmer till the age of twenty-one. During those eleven years of service he received not more than twelve months' schooling altogether, but read more than a thousand volumes. When his apprenticeship terminated in December, 1833, he set out from Farmington on foot in search of work, which he found at Natick, Massachusetts, in the house of a shoemaker. On attaining his majority he had his name, which was originally Jeremiah Jones Colbaith, changed by legislative enactment to the simpler one of Henry Wilson. He learned the trade of his employer and followed it for two years, earning enough money to return to New Hampshire and study in the academies at Stafford, Wolfborough, and Concord. At the same time he made his appearance in public life as an ardent Abolitionist during the attempts that were made in 1835 to stop the discussion of the slavery question by violent means. The person to whom he had intrusted his savings became insolvent, and in 1838, after a visit to Washington, where his repugnance to slavery was intensified by the observation of its conditions, he was compelled to relinquish his studios and resume shoemaking at Natick. In 1840 he appeared in the political canvass as a supporter of William Henry Harrison, addressing more than sixty Whig meetings, in which he was introduced as the “Natick cobbler.” In that year and the next he was elected to the Massachusetts house of representatives, and then after a year's intermission served three annual terms in the state senate.

He was active in organizing in 1845 a convention in Massachusetts to oppose the admission of Texas into the Union as a slave state, and was made, with John Greenleaf Whittier, the bearer of a petition to congress against the proposed annexation, which was signed by many thousands of Massachusetts people. In the following year he presented in the legislature a resolution condemnatory of slavery, supporting it with a comprehensive and vigorous speech. In 1848 he went as a delegate to the Whig national convention in Philadelphia, and on the rejection of anti-slavery resolutions spoke in protest and withdrew. On his return he defended his action before his constituents, and soon afterward bought the Boston “Republican” newspaper, which he edited for two years, making it the leading organ of the Free-soil party. He was chairman of the Free-soil state committee in 1849-'52. In 1850 he returned to the state senate, and in the two following years he was elected president of that body. He presided over the Free-soil national convention at Pittsburg in 1852, and in the ensuing canvass acted as chairman of the national committee of the party. As chairman of the state committee he had arranged a coalition with the Democrats by which George S. Boutwell was elected governor in 1851 and Charles Sumner and Robert Rantoul were sent to the U. S. senate. He was a candidate for congress in 1852, and failed of election by only ninety-three votes, although in his district the majority against the Free-soilers was more than 7,500. In 1853 he was a member of the State constitutional convention and proposed a provision to admit colored men into the militia organization. In the same year he was defeated as the Free-soil candidate for governor. He acted with the American party in 1855, with the aid of which he was chosen to succeed Edward Everett in the U. S. senate. He was a delegate to the American national convention in Philadelphia in that year, but, when it adopted a platform that countenanced slavery, he and other Abolitionists withdrew. He had delivered a speech in advocacy of the repeal of the fugitive-slave law and the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia shortly after taking his seat in the senate in February, 1855. On the disruption of the American organization through the secession of himself and his friends, he took an active part in the formation of the Republican party, with the programme of opposition to the extension of slavery. On 23 May, 1856, the morning after his colleague in the senate, Charles Sumner, was assaulted by Preston S. Brooks, Mr. Wilson denounced the act as “brutal, murderous, and cowardly.” For this language he was challenged to a duel by Brooks; but he declined on the ground that the practice of duelling was barbarous and unlawful, at the same time announcing that he believed in the right of self-defence.

During the next four years he took part in all the important debates in the senate, delivering elaborate speeches on the admission of Kansas, the treasury-note bill, the expenditures of the government, the Pacific railroad project, and many other topics. His speeches bore the impress of practical, clear-sighted statesman ship, and if the grace of oratory and polished diction was wanting, they always commanded attention and respect. The congressional records during his long term of service in the senate show that he was one of the most industrious and efficient members of that body, and that his name stands connected with nearly all the important acts and resolves. Strong in his convictions, he was fearless in their expression, but he was scrupulously careful in his statements, and the facts he adduced were never successfully disputed. In March, 1859, he made a notable reply to James H. Hammond, of South Carolina, in defence of free labor, which was printed and widely circulated through the northern states. He had been continued in the senate for a full term by an almost unanimous vote of the Massachusetts legislature in the preceding January. In March, 1861, he was made chairman of the committee on military affairs, of which he had been a member during the preceding four years. He induced congress to authorize the enlistment of 500,000 volunteers at the beginning of hostilities between the states, and during the entire period of the war he remained at the head of the committee, and devised and carried measures of the first importance in regard to the organization of the army and the raising and equipment of troops, as well as attending to the many details that came before the committee. He had been connected with the state militia as major, colonel, and brigadier-general from 1840 till 1851, and in 1861 he raised the 22d regiment of Massachusetts volunteers, and marched to the field as its colonel, serving there as an aide to General George B. McClellan till the reassembling of congress.

During the session of 1861-'2 he introduced the laws that abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, put an end to the “black code,” allowed the enrolment of blacks in the militia, and granted freedom to slaves who entered the service of the United States and to their families. During the civil war he made many patriotic speeches before popular assemblages. He took a prominent part in the legislation for the reduction of the army after the war and for the reconstruction of the southern state governments, advocating the policy of granting full political and civil rights to the emancipated slaves, joined with measures of conciliation toward the people who had lately borne arms against the United States government. He was continued as senator for the term that ended in March, 1871, and near its close was re-elected for six years more. He was nominated for the office of vice-president of the United States in June, 1872, on the ticket with Ulysses S. Grant, and was elected in the following November, receiving 286 out of 354 electoral votes. On 3 March, 1873, he resigned his place on the floor of the senate, of which he had been a member for eighteen years, in order to enter on his functions as president of that body. The same year he was stricken with paralysis, and continued infirm till his death, which was caused by apoplexy.

It is but just to say of Henry Wilson that with exceptional opportunities which a less honest statesman might have found for enriching himself at the government's expense, or of taking advantage of his knowledge of public affairs and the tendency of legislation upon matters of finance and business, he died at his post of duty, as he had lived, rich only in his integrity and self-respect. Among his many published speeches may be mentioned “Personalities and Aggressions of Mr. Butler” (1856); “Defence of the Republican Party” (1856); “Are Workingmen Slaves?” (1858); “The Pacific Railroad” (1859); and “The Death of Slavery is the Life of the Nation” (1864). He was the author of a volume entitled “History of the Anti-Slavery Measures of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth United States Congresses,” in which he relates the progress of the bills relating to slavery and cites the speeches of their friends and opponents (Boston, 1865); of a history of legislation on the army during the civil war, with the title of “Military Measures of the United States Congress” (1866); of a small volume called “Testimonies of American Statesmen and Jurists to the Truths of Christianity,” being an address that he gave before the Young men's Christian association at Natick (1867); of a “History of the Reconstruction Measures of the Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Congresses, 1865-'8” (1868); of a series of articles on Edwin M. Stanton that were reprinted from a magazine, with those of Jeremiah S. Black, with the title of “A Contribution to History” (Easton, Pa., 1868); of a published oration on “The Republican and Democratic Parties” (Boston, 1868); and of a great work bearing the title of “History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America,” on which he labored indefatigably during his last illness, yet was not quite able to complete (3 volumes, Boston , 1872-'5). See his “Life and Public Services,” which was written by his friend, Thomas Russell, and Reverend Elias Nason, who was his pastor for many years (1872). Congress directed to be printed a volume of “Obituary Addresses,” that were delivered in both houses, on 21 January, 1876 (Washington, 1876). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI. pp. 548-550. 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 322-325:

WILSON, HENRY (February 16, 1812-November 22, 1875), United States senator, vice-president, born at Farmington, New Hampshire, and named Jeremiah Jones Colbath, was one of the many children of Winthrop and Abigail (Witbam) Colbath. The father was a day-laborer in a sawmill. So dire was the family's poverty that soon after the boy's tenth birthday he was bound by indenture to work for a neighboring farmer; he was to have food and clothing, and one month's schooling each winter. For more than ten years he worked at increasingly heavy farm labor. Two neighbors sent him books and directed his reading. By the end of his service he had "inwardly digested" nearly a thousand volumes, including the best in English and American history and biography. At twenty-one he received in quittance "six sheep and a yoke of oxen," which he immediately sold for $85-the first money returns for his years of work. At this period, with the approval of his parents, he had his name changed by act of the legislature to Henry Wilson.

After some weeks of unsuccessful job-hunting in neighboring towns, he walked more than a hundred miles to Natick, Massachusetts, and hired himself to a man who agreed, in return for five months' labor, to teach him to make "brogans." In a few weeks he "bought his time" and began to work for himself. For several years he drove himself hard at the shoemaker's bench, intent upon getting together enough money to begin the study of law. Meanwhile, he was reading incessantly and developing effectiveness in public speaking by taking an active part in the weekly meetings of the Natick Debating Society. To regain his health, broken by overwork, he made a trip to Virginia. In Washington he listened to passionate debates over slavery, and in the nearby slave pen watched negro families separated and fathers, mothers, and children sold at auction as slaves. Many years later he declared: "I left the capital of my country with the unalterable resolution to give all that I had, and all that I hoped to have, of power, to the cause of emancipation in America" (Nason and Russell, post, p. 31). With health restored, he turned to study; three brief terms in New Hampshire academies (at Strafford, Wolfborough, and Concord) ended his meager schooling. His savings exhausted, he returned to Na tick, paid off his debt by teaching district school in the winter term, and than with a capital of a very few dollars started fo manufacture shoes, continuing in this industry for nearly ten years and at times employing over a hundred workers. He dealt with them as man to man, and won their entire confidence and devotion. He was moderately successful in business, but the making of a fortune was not a career that attracted him. On October 28, 1840, he married Harriet Malvina Howe. Their only son, Henry Hamilton Wilson (d. 1866) served with distinction in the Civil War, attaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel of a colored regiment.

In 1840 Wilson supported the Whig candidate, Harrison, for president, believing that the Democrats' financial policy had injured the industrial interests of the North and brought misery to its wage-earners. In that year he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and for the next dozen years only twice did he fail to win a seat in one branch or the other of the legislature. In 1845 he was active in the Concord convention in protest against the extension of slavery, and with Whittier was chosen to present to Congress the petition of 65,000 Massachusetts citizens against the annexation of Texas. At the Whig national convention in Philadelphia (June 1848) when General Taylor was nominated for the presidency and no stand taken by the party as to the Wilmot Proviso, Wilson and Charles Allen, another Massachusetts delegate, headed the small group that denounced the Whigs' action, withdrew from the convention hall, and called the convention at Buffalo which launched the Free Soil party. From 1848 to 1851 Wilson edited the Boston Republican, the organ of that party. He was mainly instrumental in bringing about in 1851 the coalition-abhorred by all straight party men of that day-which resulted in the election of Charles Sumner to the United States Senate. In 1851 and 1852 Wilson was president of the state Senate. In the latter year he served as chairman of the Free Soil national convention. Believing that the rising American (Know Nothing) party might be liberalized so as to become an important force for the cause of freedom, in 1854, with many other anti-slavery men, he joined that organization. No act of his life drew upon him so much criticism, and he soon came to deplore the step he had taken. He loathed the intolerant nativist spirit of the Know Nothings, and before many months had passed he declared that if the American party should prove "recreant to freedom" he would do his utmost to "shiver it to atoms" (Nason and Russell, p. 121). Over his vehement protest the American National Council at Philadelphia in 1855 adopted a platform as evasive on the slavery issue as had been that of the Whig convention in 1848, and forthwith Wilson again led anti-slavery delegates from the hall in a revolt which dismembered the American party in its first attempt to control national politics.

In January 1855-by a legislature almost entirely "American" in membership-Wilson had already been elected to fill the vacancy in the Senate caused by the resignation of Edward Everett [q.v.]. In his very first speech he aligned himself with those who favored the abolition of slavery "wherever we are morally or legally responsible for its existence" (i.e. in the District of Columbia and the Territories), and the repeal of the fugitive slave law, declaring his firm belief that, if the federal government were thus relieved from all connection with and responsibility for the existence of slavery, "the men of the South who are opposed to the existence of that institution, would get rid of it in their own States at no distant day" (Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 2 Session, p. 238). He was outspoken in the debate upon the struggle in Kansas. Following Brooks's assault upon Sumner, Wilson upon the floor of the Senate characterized that act as " brutal, murderous, and cowardly" (Ibid., 34 Congress, 1 Session, p. 13o6). This brought a challenge from Brooks, to which Wilson instantly wrote a reply declining to "make any qualification whatever ... in regard to those words," and adding: " The law of my country and the matured convictions of my whole life alike forbid me to meet you for the purpose indicated in your letter" (History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, II, 487). In many states Wilson took a most active part in the campaign for the election of Lincoln. While peace hung in the balance, he made a powerful speech against the Crittenden compromise (Congressional Globe, 36 Congress, 2 Session, pp. 1088-94).

With the outbreak of the war heavy responsibilities at once devolved upon him. For nine years he had been a member of the Massachusetts state militia, rising to the grade of brigadier-general. In the Senate he had served for several years on the committee on military affairs. To its chairmanship he now brought a combination of long military and legislative experience unequaled by that of any other member of the Senate. With tremendous energy he threw himself into the task of framing, explaining, and defending legislative measures necessary for enlisting, organizing, and provisioning a vast army. General Winfield Scott declared that in that short session of Congress Wilson had done more work "than all the chairmen of the military committees had done for the last twenty years" (Nason and Russell, p. 307). At the end of the session, he returned to Massachusetts and within forty days recruited nearly 2300 men. Simon Cameron, secretary of war, wrote to Wilson, January 27, 1862: "No man, in my opinion, in the whole country, has done more to aid the war department in preparing the mighty army now under arms than yourself" (Ibid., p. 316). He constantly urged Lincoln to proclaim emancipation as a war measure, and he shaped the bills which brought freedom to scores of thousands of slaves in the border states, years before the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. In March 1865 he reported from the Senate conference committee the bill for the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau.

He was a bitter opponent of Johnson's reconstruction policy and attitude toward Congress. In that dark era Wilson was so concerned for the welfare of the freedmen in whose cause he had Jong been fighting that he could not appreciate the realities of the chaos in which the South had been left by the war, nor the sincerity and self-sacrifice with which many of the Southern leaders were grappling with the problems of reconstruction. He therefore joined with extremists in Congress in imposing tests and restrictions which in the retrospect of seventy years seem unnecessarily harsh and unrelenting. As a result of long tours through the South and West, however, his attitude soon became more conciliatory; he conferred frankly with pre-war Southern leaders, and counseled the freedmen who thronged to hear him to learn something, to get and till a bit of land, and to obey the law. He favored federal legislation in aid of education and homesteading in the impoverished Southern states. In 1872 the nomination of Wilson for vice-president strengthened the Republican ticket. He proved a highly efficient and acceptable presiding officer, though ill health soon made his attendance irregular. In November 1875 he suffered a paralytic stroke in the Capitol and was taken to the Vice-President's Room, where twelve days later he died. He was buried in Old Dell Park Cemetery, Natick.

Through nearly thirty years of public service Wilson did not allow personal ambition to swerve him from the unpopular causes to which he had devoted himself from the beginning-the freeing of the slave, and the gaining for the workingman, white or black, a position of opportunity and of dignity such as befitted the citizen of a republic. To gain these ends he did not hesitate to compromise on what he deemed non-essentials, to cut loose from old party ties, and to manipulate new coalitions to the dismay of party leaders who denounced him as a shifty politician. His sympathies were always with the workers from whose ranks he had sprung, and in his career they found incentive and inspiration. In his own state he was the champion of the free public school, of the free public library, of exemption of workers' tools and household furniture from taxation, and of the removal of property tests from office-holding. In the opinion of Senator G. F. Hoar (post, pp. 213, 216-17), Wilson was "a skilful, adroit, practiced and constant political manager"-"the most skilful political organizer in the country" of his day. No other leader of that period could sense as clearly as he what the farmer, the mechanic, and the workingman were thinking about, and he "addressed himself always to their best and highest thought." Wilson brought together much valuable material in the following books: History of the Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-Eighth United States Congresses (1864); Military Measures of the United States Congress, 1861-1865 (1866); History of the Reconstruction Measures of the Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Congresses (1868); and History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (3 volumes, 1872-77), the last written with the zeal and the bias of a crusader, but without overemphasis upon his own part in the movement.

[The most detailed account of Wilson is Elias Nason and Thomas Russell, The Life and Public Services of Henry Wilson (1876), a laudatory, crudely expanded revision of Nason's campaign biography of 1872. See, also, Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of Henry Wilson ... Delivered in the Senate and House of Representatives January 11, 1876 (1876); New England Historical and Genealogical Register, July 1878; G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (1903); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Evening Star (Washington) and Boston Transcript, November 22, 1875.]

G. H. H.


WILSON, Hiram V., abolitionist, cleric, agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Ohio.  Helped set up schools and aid Blacks who escaped to Canada.  Founded British-American Manual Labor Institute of the Colored Settlements of Upper Canada. 

(Blue, 2005, pp. 80, 82-85; Dumond, 1961, p. 164; Henson, 1858, pp. 167-171; Siebert, 1898, p. 199; Woodson, 1915, p. 25; The Emancipator, February 22, 1837)


WILSON, James (September 14, 1742-August 21, 1798), congressman, jurist, speculator, founding father, signer of the Declaration of Independence, opponent of slavery, member of the Pennsylvania Constitutional Ratifying Convention

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume XI, p. 550; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 326-330; Dumond, 1961, pp. 37, 40, 43; Locke, 1901, p. 93; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 23, p. 586). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 326-330:

WILSON, JAMES (September 14, 1742-August 21, 1798), congressman, jurist, speculator, son of William and Aleson (Landale) Wilson, was born at Carskerdo, near St. Andrews, Scotland. He entered the University of St. Andrews in November 1757, and probably remained there until 1759. He is said to have attended the University of Glasgow some time between 1759 and 1763, going from there to the University of Edinburgh in 1763. In June 1765 he left the University of Edinburgh, probably without a degree. That month he began the study of accounting, but for some reason he abandoned it at once and left for America, arriving in New York in the midst of the Stamp Act disturbances. Equipped with a much better education than most immigrants of the period and having also letters of introduction to prominent persons in Pennsylvania-among them Richard Peters, provincial secretary and trustee of the College of Philadelphia-he secured in February 1766 a position as Latin tutor in this institution. On May 19 his petition for an honorary M.A. degree was granted.

Although he retained his scholarly interests throughout life Wilson saw that advancement in America lay not in some struggling academy, but in the law. He thereupon entered the office of John Dickinson [q.v.] and began poring over Coke and the recent lectures of Blackstone. He remained in Dickinson's office about two years, being admitted to the bar in November 1767, but not entering upon practice at that time. With William White [q.v.], one of his earliest friends, he published during his student days a series of Addisonian essays in the Pennsylvania Chronicle called "The Visitant." In the summer of 1766 he began practice in Reading, in agreeable proximity to Rachel Bird of "Birdsboro," for whom he had formed an attachment in Philadelphia. His practice among the conservative German farmers was "very far from being contemptible" (Wilson to White, c. 1770, Historical Society of Pennsylvania), but increased prospects to the westward, in addition to some obstacles in his suit with Miss Bird, induced him to settle in the Scots-Irish region at Carlisle. Here his practice increased with phenomenal rapidity: by 1774 he was charged with nearly half of the cases tried in the county court and was practising in seven other counties. He purchased a home, livestock, a slave, and, on November 5, 1771, married Rachel Bird. Most of his practice involved land disputes. By 1773 he was borrowing capital to make land purchases and was infected with a virus of speculation that he never shook off. Prospering in law, which occasionally took him into New Jersey and New York, he yet found energy during six years of this early period to lecture on English literature at the College of Philadelphia.
On July 12, 1774, he was made head of a committee of correspondence at Carlisle and elected to the first provincial conference at Philadelphia. There his influence was such that he was nominated, but not elected to the legislature, as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. Immediately he began revising a manuscript entitled Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament. This he published in time for distribution to members of the Congress. Beginning this study with the "exception of being able to trace some constitutional line between those cases in which we ought, and those in which we ought not, to acknowledge the power of parliament over us" (Selected Political Essays, p. 45), Wilson finally reached the conclusion that Parliament had no authority over the colonies in any instance. Only a few had taken this advanced position as early as 1774 yet a careful examination of Wilson's original manuscript (never adequately edited) shows that he had arrived at this conclusion, and defended it with exceptionally able arguments, four years before he revised and published the es say. Ascribed at first to Franklin by Rivington's New York Gazetteer and noticed by Tucker and Mansfield as an able statement of the extreme American position, the pamphlet was widely read in America and England. For America its significance became historic with the Declaration of Independence; but with its prophetic phrase stating for the first time that "all the different members of the British empire are DISTINCT STATES, INDEPENDANT OF EACH OTHER, BUT CONNECTED TOGETHER UNDER THE SAME SOVEREIGN" (Selected Political Essays, p. 81), it still has meaning as one of the ablest arguments for what the Britannic Commonwealth of Nations has become. It should be noted that in 1774 Wilson was on the extreme Whig left: thenceforward his movement to the right was steady and uninterrupted.

Wilson's notable speech before the provincial conference of January 1775 (Ibid., pp. 85-101) reiterated his position and asserted that there could be such a thing as an unconstitutional act of Parliament. Presaging the distinctive American doctrine of judicial review, he introduced a resolution declaring the Boston Port Act unconstitutional, but it failed of adoption. On May 3, 1775, he was elected colonel of the 4th battalion of Cumberland County associators, though he was never in active service, and three days later he was elected to the Second Continental Congress. He was assigned to various committees, one of which was to secure the friendship of the western Indians. In August and September he attended an unsuccessful meeting with them at Pittsburgh. Early in 1776 he prepared an address to the inhabitants of the colonies (W. C. Ford, Journals of the Continental Congress, volume IV, 1906, pp. 134-46), designed, as he declared to Madison, "to lead the public mind into the idea of Independence" (Ibid., p. 146 n.); but soon popular sentiment had moved beyond Wilson's position and the plan to publish the address was abandoned. On the question of independence he was cautiously attentive to the wishes of his constituents, joining with Dickinson, Rutledge, and Livingston on June 8 in securing a three weeks' delay. This caused a storm of abuse to break about him, and twenty-two of his colleagues in Congress felt it necessary to issue an explanation and defense of his position (manuscript copy in Library of Congress). On July 2 he was one of three out of seven Pennsylvania delegates to vote for independence. During 1776-77 most of his time was occupied with tasks of the board of war and with his quasi-judicial duties as chairman of the standing committee on appeals. His committee assignments, which he discharged industriously, were particularly burdensome. He was  one of the first to urge relinquishment of the western claims of the states, to advocate revenue and taxation powers for Congress, to try to strengthen the national government, and to seek representation according to free population, with its corollary of voting by individuals in Congress (E. C. Burnett, Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, II, 1923, p. 515 n; Walter Clark, The State Records of North Carolina, XI, II, 237).

Despite his espousal of the democratic principle and the sovereignty of the individual, Wilson so bitterly fought the constitution of Pennsylvania of 1776, a product of the democratic force s of the frontier and immigration. (J. P. Selsam, The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, 1936, passim), that even his close friend Arthur St. Clair [q.v.] thought him "perhaps too warm" (W. B. Reed, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, 1847, II, 153). This opposition to George Bryan [q.v.] and his party made Wilson's place in Congress increasingly precarious. Early in 1777, sensing his approaching removal, he drew up plans for a congressional legal office similar to that of the British solicitor general or the French avocat general (Burnett, II, 215- 17). This plan he forwarded to Robert Morris [q.v.], hoping that Morris would secure its adoption and urging., himself as a candidate for the office. Morris gave his approval, but the plan was not adopted. On February 4, 1777, Wilson's expected removal took place, but the difficulty of finding a successor caused him to be reinstated on February 22. He continued his opposition to the constitution of Pennsylvania, "the most detestable that ever was formed" (letter to Wayne, c. 1778, Wayne MSS., Historical Society of Pennsylvania), and his removal from Congress on September 14, 1777, was inevitable. Because of the heat of political feeling in Pennsylvania, Wilson spent the winter of 1777-78 in Annapolis, a move which was subsequently embarrassing to him as an office holder in Pennsylvania (Max Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention, 1911, II, 237).

His taking up residence in Philadelphia in 1778 was indicative of changing viewpoints: once a frontier lawyer dealing in land suits, he now became a corporation counsel; once an extreme Whig, he now became a leader of the Republican Society, an anti-Bryan organization of conservatives; once a Presbyterian, he now became an Episcopalian, the friend of Morris, Duer, Bingham and others of the aristocracy. By acting as counsel for Loyalists and by his interest in privateering, land-jobbing schemes, and various commercial enterprises, he widened the breach between himself and the populace. In 1779, during a period of food shortage and high prices, there was considerable rioting in Philadelphia against profiteers, Loyalists, and their sympathizers. On October 4 a handbill appeared calling upon the militia to "drive off from the city all disaffected persons and those who supported them" (Stan V. Henkels, Catalogue No. 694: Washington-Madison Papers, 1892, p. 239). After securing some persons, they sought Wilson "who had always plead for such" (Ibid.). Finding civil aid dilatory, Wilson gathered some of his friends, barricaded his home, and defended himself against the attack of the militia. A few persons were killed and wounded, but Wilson was rescued by the timely arrival of the First City Troop and President Reed. He went into hiding for a few days, appearing on October 19 to post a bond of £10,000. The legislature on March 13, 1780, passed an act of oblivion for all concerned in this affair of "Fort Wilson.''

With the return of the conservatives to power in Pennsylvania in 1782, Wilson was again elected to Congress, serving also in 1785-87. His principal contributions in Congress at this time were his opposition to a separate peace treaty with England, his proposal to erect states in the western lands (April 9, 1783), and his successful advocacy of the general revenue plan of April 19, 1783 (The Writings of James Madison, ed. by Gaillard Hunt, volume I, 1900, pp. 328-30). On the second of these measures he was charged with being interested in the large land companies (Merrill Jensen, "The Cession of the Old Northwest," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, June 1936); and on the third, with being interested in the payment of interest on the loans of the Bank of North America. But he chiefly concerned himself in the decade between 1777 and 1787 with his multiplied business interests, to which he willingly sacrificed his professional practice. In June 1779 he was appointed avocat general by the French government for maritime and commercial causes, a post he held until 1783. In 1780 he acted as legal adviser to Robert Morris in the formation of the Bank of Pennsylvania, drawing up plans for this private agency for purchasing army supplies (Pennsylvania Gazette, July 5, 1780), and in 1785 he published his Considerations on the Power to Incorporate the Bank of North America, an able economic and constitutional argument in which he foreshadowed Marshall's doctrine of inherent sovereignty (Selected Political Essays, pp. 17- 19). In November and December 1782 Wilson defended Pennsylvania's claims against the charter pretensions of Connecticut before the congressional commissioners at Trenton. His argument, wrote Joseph Reed, was "both laborious and judicious, he has taken much pains, having the success of Pennsylvania much at heart, both on public and private account" (Reed, II, 390). Wilson had invested heavily in lands within the Connecticut claim. The same year he and Mark Bird purchased the Somerset Mills on the Delaware, including a rolling-and slitting-mill, gristmill, furnace, and sawmill, for which, in 1785, he sought to borrow 500,000 fl. from Dutch capitalists in order to expand the business (January 16, 1785, Wilson MSS., Historical Society of Pennsylvania). Two months later, through Van Berkel, the Dutch minister, he sought to become agent for a gigantic land speculation to the extent of about 2,000,000 fl., offering to subordinate his law practice to this task; this proposal did not materialize. Wilson was also interested at this time in various western land companies, being president of the Illinois and Wabash Company. In the light of these wide-flung interests, Wain's statement that "as an instructor he was almost useless to those who were under his direction" (Sanderson, post, VI, 171-72), is plausible.

Wilson's greatest achievement in public life was his part in the establishment of the federal Constitution. With the possible exception of James Madison, with whom he was in agreement on most of the major issues, no member of the convention of 1787 was better versed in the study of political economy, none grasped more firmly the central problem of dual sovereignty, and none was more far-sighted in his vision of the future greatness of the United States. James Bryce thought him "one of the deepest thinkers and most exact reasoners" in the convention, whose works "display an amplitude and profundity of view in matters of constitutional theory which place him in the front rank of the political thinkers of his age" (The American Commonwealth, 1888, I, 250 n., 665 n.; see Sanderson, post, VI, 154, for a contemporary opinion on this point). Wilson kept constantly in view the idea that sovereignty resided in the people, favoring popular election of the president, and of members of both houses. On the fundamental problem of sovereignty he clearly stated that the national government was not "an assemblage of States, but of individuals for certain political purposes" (Farrand, I, 406). He strongly opposed the idea of equal representation in the Senate, and perhaps because of his reserve and inelastic opinions, was not facile at compromise. He was a member of the important committee of detail, charged with preparing the draft of the Constitution (Wilson's draft is in Historical Society of Pennsylvania). Despite his statement that there were some parts of it, which if my wish had prevailed, would certainly have been altered" (Selected ' Political Essays, p. 159), Wilson signed the Constitution and fought for its adoption.

Wilson was a dominating factor in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention. His speech before that body was widely read in other states, but it brought about renewed attacks upon its author. "James de Caledonia" was burned in effigy at Carlisle (Independent Gazetteer, January 9, 1788). The drafting of the constitution of 1790 for Pennsylvania was a part of the reactionary movement following the Revolution, and Wilson was in every sense the author of that document. Modeled precisely on the federal Constitution (Selsam, p. 259), it represents the climax of his fourteen-year fight against the democratic constitution of 1776. Wilson had sacrificed his private enterprises during the three years that he gave to constitution making, and he seems to have expected some high office in the new federal government. He was prominently mentioned as a candidate for the chief justices hip (Pennsylvania Gazette, March 11, 1789), and even went so far as to recommend him self to Washington for that post (Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History, 1922, I, 33-34). Washington appointed him associate justice on September 29, 1789.

On August 17, 1789, the trustees of the College of Philadelphia, of whom Wilson was one, acted upon the petition of Charles Smith for permission to give a course in law by appointing Wilson to that early chair. The lectures were opened on December 15 before a distinguished, audience including the President and other officers of the federal and state governments. Wilson was keenly aware of his opportunity to lay the foundations of an American system of jurisprudence. In his lectures, therefore, he departed from the Blackstonian definition of law as the rule of a sovereign superior and, discovering the residence of sovereignty in the individual, substituted therefor "the consent of those whose obedience the law requires" (Selected Political Essays, p. 251). Upon this foundation he raised his able apologia for the American Revolution; in which he challenged Blackstone's denial of the legal right of revolution. In his lecture, "Of Man as a Member of the Great Commonwealth of Nations," he set forth clearly the implications of the Supreme Court of the United States for judicial settlement of international disputes and for the administration of international law. Wilson's hope of becoming the American Blackstone, however, was doomed to disappointment: except for the first, his lectures were not published until after his death, and have never been cited in courts and law schools with the respect accorded the dicta of the Vinerian lecturer. Lacking the judicial detachment of Kent and Story, he left to them, by his consuming interest in practical concerns, the establishment of the bases of an American jurisprudence.

He made, however, one final effort to establish principles for judicial and legislative interpretation of the federal Constitution. Having been commissioned to make a digest of the laws of Pennsylvania, a task he entered upon with characteristic energy, he recommended himself to Washington in order that "Principles congenial to those of the Constitution ... be established and ascertained, in complete and correct theory, before they are called into practical operation" (Washington Papers, volume CXVI, Library of Congress). This visionary project to solve for all time the great problems of federal and state relations Washington referred to the attorney general, who pointedly urged the impropriety of ''a single person," particularly a judge, determining principles for future guidance (Ibid.). When state aid for the Pennsylvania digest was withdrawn, Wilson continued it as a private venture, but did not live to complete it.

Turning from these public interests, he plunged once more into vast land speculations. In 1792 and 1793 he involved the Holland Land Company in unwise purchases of several hundred thousand acres in Pennsylvania and New York. Early in 1795 he bought a large interest in one of the ill-famed Yazoo companies (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, January 1908). Aside from these connections, perhaps the nearest approach to a stain on his judicial gown was his effort to influence enactment of land legislation in Pennsylvania favorable to speculators (Wilson MSS., 1793) and his disregard of the terms of a Pennsylvania statute (P. D. Evans, The Holland Land Company, 1924, pp. 109-10). Almost at the moment the bubble burst, Wilson conceived one of the most comprehensive schemes for immigration and colonization ever projected in America, involving vast sums of European capital, agencies for gathering settlers on the Continent, chartered vessels of transport, stations for debarkation, and methods of transporting settlers to western lands (MS. draft, Rush Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia). But he was already engulfed in his far-flung projects. Wilson's judicial determinations were few. He was one of the first to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional and the only justice to decline to serve as a pension commissioner (Max Far rand, "The First Hayburn Case," American Historical Review, January 1908). His most noted decision was that in Chisholm vs. Georgia (2 Dallas, 419), in which he answered with positive affirmation the important question whether the people of the United States formed a nation (Warren, I, 95 ff.). It was in his bank opinion of 1784, his law lectures, and his part in the constitutional convention of 1787, that he voiced the theories of national powers to which Marshall gave effective application.

A widower with six children-one of them Bird Wilson [q.v.]-after the death of his wife in 1786, Wilson married on September 19, 1793, the nineteen-year-old Hannah Gray of Boston. Their happiness was short-lived. A son by the second marriage died in infancy, and in the summer of 1797 he moved to Burlington, New Jersey, to avoid arrest for debt. He retained his place on the bench amid criticism and talk of impeachment (G. J. McRee, Life and Correspondence of James Iredell, 1857, II, 532). Early in 1798, in acute mental distress, he arrived at Edenton, North Carolina, where for a time he resided at the home of Judge Iredell. "I have been hunted ... like a wild beast," he wrote; his powerful faculties bent under the strain, and he had lucid moments only at intervals. He died at Edenton of a "violent nervous fever"; the report of Samuel Wallis that he died by his own hand (J. F. Meginness, Otzinachson, 1889, p. 358) is refuted by more valid testimony. In 1906 his remains were reinterred in Christ Church, Philadelphia.

Two outstanding personal characteristics of James Wilson opened the whole corpus of his learned writings to the charge of being special pleading: his ambition for place and power and his avid desire for wealth. His democracy was that of the study, not of the market-place or the hustings. He never captured popular imagination as did Jefferson; he never became a symbol as did Hamilton. Yet he was a prophet of both democracy and nationalism.

[Wilson MSS. (10 volumes), Historical Society of Pennsylvania; R. G. Adams, Selected Political Essays of James Wilson (1930), containing bibliography of Wilson's writings and of articles on him; Bird Wilson, The Works of th e Honorable James Wilson (3 volumes, 1804); J. D. Andrews, The Works of James Wilson (2 volumes, 1896); R. G. Adams' Political Ideas of the American Revolution (I922), the best treatment of his political theories; J. B. McMaster and F. D. Stone, eds., Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788 (1888); John Sanderson, Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence, volume VI (1825), by Robert Wain, Jr. The most comprehensive study is Burton Alva Konkle's biography, together with S volumes of letters and writings, as yet unpublished. Through Mr. Konkle's kindness the author was permitted to use this extensive manuscript but in fairness to him it must be stated that he disagrees with this interpretation of Wilson's character and significance.]

J. P. B.


WILSON, James Falconer, b. 1828-1895, lawyer.  Ohio State Senator.  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.  Elected to the federal House of Representatives to fill a vacancy in December 1861, he was reelected as a Republican and served until March 3, 1869. In the days of war and reconstruction he had a conspicuous and determining part in the congressional policies. He used fully his strategic position as chairman of the judiciary committee to forward abolition and the Union program. War measures that he fathered included the article prohibiting the use of troops in the return of fugitive slaves, enfranchisement of negroes in the District of Columbia, and the tax on state bank circulation; he introduced the original resolution for an abolition Amendment.  

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, p. 552; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 331-333). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 331-333:

WILSON, JAMES FALCONER (October 19, 1828-April 22, 1895), lawyer, representative in Congress, United States senator, popularly known as "Jefferson Jim" to distinguish him from his fellow Iowan, "Tama Jim" (James T. Wilson [q.v.], secretary of agriculture under McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Taft), was born at Newark, Ohio. His father, David S. Wilson, a contractor and builder, was of Scotch ancestry and a native of Morgantown, Virginia (now West Virginia); his mother was Kitty Ann (Bramble) of Chillicothe, Ohio. Left fatherless at ten, James aided in the support of the mother and two younger children by serving as apprentice to a harness maker. With brief intervals of school attendance and the personal instruction of sympathetic teachers and ministers he secured what he later termed a "thorough education." While working at his trade he began reading law, and, completing his study under the direction of William Burnham Woods [q.v.], later a justice of the United States Supreme Court, was admitted to the bar in 1851. On May 25, 1852, he married Mary Jewett, and the couple went to Fairfield, Iowa, where they established their home; two sons and a daughter were born to them.

The young lawyer soon took a foremost place on the local circuit but was drawn more and more into politics. Editorials for the local organ gave him standing and offices came in continuous succession. He was one of the most influential delegates in the constitutional convention of 1857, and the same year was appointed to the Des Moines River improvement commission and elected to the state House of Representatives, where he served as chairman of the ways and means committee. Promoted to the state Senate in 1859, he aided in the revision of the state code, published in 1860, and in the special war session of 1861 was named president pro tempore.

Elected to the federal House of Representatives to fill a vacancy in December 1861, he was reelected as a Republican and served until March 3, 1869. In the days of war and reconstruction he had a conspicuous and determining part in the congressional policies. He used fully his strategic position as chairman of the judiciary committee to forward abolition and the Union program. War measures that he fathered included the article prohibiting the use of troops in the return of fugitive slaves, enfranchisement of negroes in the District of Columbia, and the tax on state bank circulation; he introduced the original resolution for an abolition Amendment. During the turmoil of Reconstruction he was one of the ablest leaders among the legalistic Radicals. On every possible occasion he upheld the constitutional prerogatives of Congress. He introduced important amendments to the resolution for repudiation of the Confederate debt, introduced the amendment repealing appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court under the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867, gave the final form to the Civil Rights Act, and served on the conference committee on tenure of office. He voted with the minority of his committee against the origin.al impeachment charges in 1867, giving an elaborate argument that was sustained by the House; but in view of a definite case of wilful violation of statutes, as it appeared to his legalistic mind, he became committed to the President's removal. His selection as a member of the committee to formulate the articles and as a trial manager was a recognition of the more moderate element of the Radical wing. His service at the trial consisted in constitutional arguments, most notably on the responsibility of the executive to abide bv acts of Congress regardless of his opinion as to their validity.

In 1869 Grant persuaded Wilson to accept the state portfolio. Misunderstandings over the activities of Elihu B. Washburne [q.v.], to whom the office had been granted temporarily to pay another personal debt, caused Wilson to withdraw his acceptance. On two subsequent occasions the invitation to enter the Grant official family was unavailingly renewed. While by no means indifferent to the political scene, he now devoted himself mainly to his profession. A prominent interest of these years and the one that was to bring the main attack upon his record was promotion of the Pacific railroad. In Congress he had been a zealous supporter of this enterprise and in 1868 had shown his confidence in it by profitable though moderate speculation in the stock of the construction company. For six years under Grant and one under Hayes he was a government director of the road. These connections brought him rather prominently into the House investigations of 1873. In the first of these he frankly admitted having secured stock as an investment and regretted that he was unable to secure more. Before the second, he emphatically denied the charge by an ex-official that he had received a check for $19,000 out of a fund for "special legal expenses," and no substantiating proof that he had was offered. The resulting attacks on him by hos tile journals apparently did not weaken him in Iowa. Probably the bulk of his constituents agreed with his view that his contribution to this great national enterprise had been praiseworthy and public-spirited.

While mentioned for the Senate from 1866 on his real opportunity did not come until 1882, when all of the other aspirants withdrew; he was reelected in 1888 without organized opposition. In brilliance and specific achievement his senatorial service fell far below that which he had rendered in the House. He was laborious on committees and helped to frame the original Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and other measures, but he was clearly in the rank of the "elder statesmen." His health was steadily failing; he was definitely committed to retirement at the close of his second term, and, as it happened, died, at Fairfield, Iowa, within a few weeks of the close of the session. There was lacking, too, a cause to which he could devote himself as he had to anti-slavery. Prohibition was the only substitute. A zealous personal teetotaler, he belonged to the group that sought to commit the Republican party to temperance reform. In 1890 he secured the passage of the Original Package Act, which at the time was regarded as a great triumph for state control of the liquor traffic.

[Debates, Constitutional Convention of Iowa (1857); Trial of Andrew Johnson (1868); House Report No. 77 and No. 78, 42 Congress, 3 Session; Johnson Brigham, Iowa: Its History (1915), volume I; Portrait and Biographical Album of Jefferson and Van Buren Counties, Iowa (1890); E. H. Stiles, Recollections and Sketches of Notable Lawyers and Public Men of Early Iowa (1916); J. G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress (2 volumes, 1884-86); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Midland Monthly, July 1895; Fairfield Ledger, April 24, May 1, 8, 1895; Iowa State Register (Des Moines), April 23, 24, 1895. ]

E.D.R.



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