Hab-Hal: Habersham through Halstead

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


HABERSHAM, Robert, Savannah, Georgia, District Attorney.  Member of the Savannah auxiliary of the American Colonization society. 

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 71)


HAHN, Georg Michael Decker (November 24, 1830-March 15, 1886), the first Republican governor of Louisiana, congressman, editor. Throughout the controversial fifties he was a bitter opponent of slavery, and in 1860-61 he was a member of a committee which canvassed the state against secession.  In December 1862 the two Louisiana congressional districts within the Union lines elected congressmen, and Hahn was chosen to represent the 2nd district, but, with the representative from the 1st district.  In the election of February 22, 1864, he was chosen governor by the Free-State party, one of three groups participating in the election, and proceeded to carry out President Lincoln's mild reconstruction policy.

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

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2 pp. 87-88:

HAHN, GEORG MICHAEL DECKER (November 24, 1830-March 15, 1886), the first Republican governor of Louisiana, congressman, editor, was born at Klingenmunster in Bavaria, Germany, and when a small child was brought to the United States by his widowed mother, Margaretha Decker Hahn, along with four other children. After a short stay in New York, they settled in New Orleans about 1840. The next year the mother died of yellow fever. Young Michael attended the public schools of his adopted city, and after graduating from high school, entered the law office of Christian Roselius, a leading New Orleans lawyer, and at the same time attended lectures in the law department of the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University), from which he received the degree of LLB. in 1851. While a student he made a living by conducting a real-estate agency and by writing for newspapers. After completing his studies he immediately began the practice of his profession, combining with it the duties of a notary public. When barely twenty-two he was elected to the New Orleans school board, and soon became its president. In the days before the Civil War he was a Democrat, but independent in his political thinking. He was opposed to the Slidell wing of the party in Louisiana, opposed the nomination of Buchanan in 1856, and in 1860 supported Douglas for the presidency. Throughout the controversial fifties he was a bitter opponent of slavery, and in 1860-61 he was a member of a committee which canvassed the state against secession. He omitted the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy in renewing his oath as notary, and when Farragut's fleet arrived at New Orleans he hastened to pledge his allegiance to the United States government.

In December 1862 the two Louisiana congressional districts within the Union lines elected congressmen, and Hahn was chosen to represent the 2nd district, but, with the representative from the 1st district, he was not permitted to take his seat until February 1863. During his short stay in Washington he supported the war measures of President Lincoln and at the expiration of his term he was appointed prize commissioner at New Orleans. In 1864)le purchased the New Orleans Daily True Delta, which he edited for some time as a Republican newspaper-the first of two ventures in Republican journalism in New Orleans, for in 1867 he started the New Orleans Republican, which he conducted until 1871. In the election of February 22, 1864, he was chosen governor by the Free-State party, one of three groups participating in the election, and proceeded to carry out President Lincoln's mild reconstruction policy. He resigned the governor's office, March 4, 1865, having been elected to the United States Senate, but it seems he never pressed his claim to a senatorial seat because of his opposition to President Johnson's reconstruction policy. During a New Orleans riot, in 1866, he received a gunshot wound which made him a cripple for the rest of his life. In 1871 he gave up his New Orleans newspaper and retired to his sugar plantation in St. Charles Parish, where the following year he laid out the town of Hahnville. On February 15, 1872, he issued the first number of the St. Charles Herald, which he published until his death. He was chosen a representative to the state legislature, where he served for a time as speaker, and served also as district judge. In 1884 he was Republican nominee for Congress in the 2nd district of Louisiana, and, in a district usually Democratic, he was elected by 3,000 majority. Not long after he had entered upon his new duties he was found dead at his lodging place in Washington. Hahn was a scholarly man of much ability and was recognized for his integrity and devotion to principle. Because of this he was able to retain the respect of the people although affiliated with a party which was unpopular in the state. Said Congressman Blanchard of Louisiana: "Of all the leading Republicans of Louisiana he was one of the least objectionable."

[Addresses on the Life and Character of Michael Hahn ... Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, 49 Congress, I Session (1886); Maynier's Louisiana Biographies, pt. I (1882), pp. 42-46; Mrs. Eugene Soniat, Biographical Sketches of Louisiana's Governors from D'Iberville to McEnery, by a Louisianaise (1885); J. R. Ficklen, History of Reconstruction in Louisiana (through 1868) (1910); Ella Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana After 1868 (1918); Alcee Fortier, A History of Louisiana (1904), Volume IV; Evening Star (Washington, D. C.), March 15, 1886; Times-Democrat (New Orleans), March 16, 1886.]

M.J.W.


HAINES, Caspar, abolitionist, officer of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, reorganized April 23, 1787.

(Nash, Gary B., & Soderlund, Jean R. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 124)


HALE, David, 1791-1849, Boston, Massachusetts, journalist, philanthropist.  Member of the American Colonization Society Committee in Boston.   Nephew of soldier and patriot Nathan Hale. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 31; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 98; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 86).


HALE, Edward Everett, 1822-1909, Boston, Massachusetts, clergyman, Unitarian minister, writer, abolitionist leader.  Before the Civil War he threw himself  into the work of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, writing a book on Kansas (spelled Kanzas) and Nebraska, and thus virtually beginning his long career of the service of causes. Co-founder of the Freedman’s Aid Society in 1862, which aided African Americans. 

(Adams, 1977; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 325-326; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 32-33, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 99; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 9, p. 816)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, pp. 99-100:

HALE, EDWARD EVERETT (April 3, 1822- June 10, 1909), author, Unitarian minister, brother of Lucretia Peabody and Charles Hale [qq.v.], was born in Boston, the fourth of his parents' eight children, and died, at eighty-seven, in the house, in the Roxbury district of Boston, in which he had lived for forty years. His father, Nathan Hale [q.v.], was a nephew of the young American soldier of the same name whose story is a classic episode in the War of Independence. His mother, Sarah Preston Everett, was a sister of Edward Everett [q.v.]. He was fond of saying that he was "cradled in the sheets of a newspaper," and his father's long identification with the Boston Daily Advertiser, of which he acquired the ownership in 1814 and was editor for nearly fifty years thereafter, gave abundant color to the remark. When he was about eleven years old, his father suggested his translating, for publication in the Daily, an article from a French newspaper. It made no difference that he had never studied French. With the help of a sister and a dictionary he translated the article, which was duly printed (Life and Letters, 1917, I, 196). An easy-going journalistic attitude towards writing in general characterized much of his own work throughout life. At a dame school and the Boston Latin School he was made ready to enter Harvard College, as he did, at the age of thirteen. Looking upon school as a "necessary nuisance," he acquired much of his early education from the large, happy, and busy family of which he was a member. The young people made miniature railroad engines and printed books and periodicals of their own composition. Church-going and Sunday school, dancing lessons, frequent contacts with the most stimulating minds of the stirring, homogeneous community-all combined with the more definite processes of schooling to qualify the thirteen-year-old freshman for getting the best out of college. At Harvard he appears to have taken a healthy, all-round interest in the duties and pastimes of his course, gaining some mastery of the classics and English composition, and graduating in 1839, second in his class, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and class poet. At seventeen his formal education thus stood completed.

It had always been taken for granted that he would enter the Unitarian ministry. Without feeling any positive impulse in that direction, and with a marked disinclination to a formal course in theology, he devoted his first two years out of college to teaching in the Boston Latin School, wrote for the press, and pursued his studies for the ministry under private guidance. Before the end of 1842 he began to preach, and in April 1846 was ordained minister of the Church of the Unity in Worcester, Massachusetts. Ten years later he became minister of the South Congregational Church in Boston-his only other parish for the forty-three ensuing years through which he was to continue his active ministry.

A sketch of "Boston in the Forties"-in his New England Boyhood and Other Bits of Autobiography (1900)-helps one to account for the Hale of the fifties and thereafter. Here he depicted the ferments of the little city, of whose inhabitants Emerson was saying that "every man carries a revolution in his waist-coat pocket." What Hale himself said of the leaders in Boston at this time was that they "really believed that they could make the city of Boston the city of God, and they meant to do so," and that they were "men who knew that all things are possible to one who believes" (Ibid., p. 243).

Big of body and spirit, destined to grow, with his aspect of a shaggy prophet and his great, reverberating voice, into the very figure of a seer, Hale was precisely the man to put into action the prevailing beliefs of the Boston in which he came to maturity. Strongly Unitarian in his theological views, honored as a leader in his denomination, he was nevertheless concerned chiefly with the aspects of Christianity on which all could agree. The "New Civilization" for which he labored implied a general betterment of human relationships, social, political, personal. Before the Civil War he threw himself heartily into the work of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, writing a book on Kansas (spelled Kanzas) and Nebraska, and thus virtually beginning his long career of the service of causes through the printed word. As the war approached he drilled with a rifle corps in Boston-but felt, when the contest began, that he could be of most use at home. There he worked tellingly enough in the Sanitary Commission to win for his figure a conspicuous place on one of the bas-reliefs adorning the Soldiers' Monument on Boston Common. What was more important, he wrote at this time, "The Man Without a Country" (Atlantic Monthly, December 1863), one of the best short stories written by an American, and representing Hale at his best as a writer of fiction with a purpose.

The intended immediate purpose of "The Man Without a Country" was to influence an impending election. Its larger, long-continued service as a rarely effectual incentive to patriotism was unforeseen. In its blending of fact, none too thoroughly verified, with extravagant fiction, all narrated with a plausibility of detail clearly suggesting the influence of Defoe, it displays to the best advantage its author's method and manner. Four years earlier, in 1859, he h ad published in the Atlantic Monthly the s tory "My Double; and How He Undid Me," revealing him, equally at his best, in a distinctive vein of humor. These stories, with others, were included in his first volume of fiction, If, Yes, and Perhaps. Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations, with Some Bits of Fact (1868). His many subsequent books were, almost without exception, the work of a religious, humanitarian journalist, keenly perceptive of significances, historic and other, prodigal in illustrations from fact, but much le ss concerned with minor points of accuracy than with major considerations of meaning. "If a parable teaches its lesson," one can imagine his saying, "what matter if it does not tally at every point with the books of reference?" Especially in two of his books, Ten Times One is Ten (1871) and In His Name (1873), which he, though probably few others, counted his best, he gave the direction to far-reaching movements-the Lend a Hand movement, with its familiar motto of Hale's invention, "look up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, lend a hand," and the I. H. N. and other clubs of organized good-will. Both of these stories appeared in Old and New, a monthly magazine which Hale edited from 1870 to 1875. This was a periodical of which one of his friends said that "it would have succeeded had there been anybody connected with it who wanted to make money." Through the press, daily, weekly, and monthly, Hale constantly poured himself forth, turning at times from prose to verse. In the vast bulk of his production three volumes-containing much of autobiography must be noted: A New England Boyhood (1893; reprinted in A New England Boyhood and Other Bits of Autobiography, 1900), lames Russell Lowell and His Friends (1899), and Memories of a Hundred Years (2 volumes, 1902).

Two honors, one local, one national, were appropriate to the end of his career. When the twentieth century came in, it was Hale who was chosen to read the Ninetieth Psalm from the balcony of the Massachusetts State House to the great silent crowd that assembled on Boston Common during the final hour of December 31, 1900. The national honor was his election, at the end of 1903, as chaplain of the United States Senate. In these final years also he seized every occasion to urge, through speech and print, the cause of international peace. This was but the logical climax of a life-long work 'or the general wellbeing of mankind.

His domestic life was happy and spirited. On October 13, 1852, he married Emily Baldwin Perkins, of Hartford, Connecticut, a grand-daughter of Lyman Beecher [q.v.]. Travel, more often in America than in Europe, gave variety to the family routine of Boston in the winter and Matunuck, Rhode Island, in the summer. Up to April in the last year of his life he performed the duties of his chaplaincy at Washington. Then he came back to Boston, where he died, June 10, 1909. His wife, with their one daughter and three of their seven sons, survived him.

[The three autobiographical volumes mentioned above provide many facts in the life of Hale. These are supplemented by the prefaces he wrote for the "Library Edition" of his works (Boston, 1898-1901). The Life and Letters of Edward Everett Hale, by Edward E. Hale, Jr. (2 volumes, 1917), is the authoritative biography. The Philip Nolan of "The Man Without a Country" is not to be confused with the Philip Nolan [q.v.] of history, as Hale explained in "The Real Philip Nolan," Mississippi Historical Society Pubs., IV (1901), 281-329.]

M.A. De W. H.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 32-33:

HALE, Edward Everett, clergyman, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 3 April, 1822, after studying at the Boston Latin-school, was graduated at Harvard in 1839. He then spent two years as an usher in the Latin-school, and read theology and church history with the Reverend Samuel K. Lothrop and the Reverend John G. Palfrey. In 1842 he was licensed to preach by the Boston association of Congregational ministers, after which he spent several years in ministering to various congregations, passing the winter of 1844-'5 in Washington. His first regular settlement was in 1846 as pastor of the Church of the Unity in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he remained until 1856. In that year he was called to the South Congregational (Unitarian) church in Boston, where he still (1887) remains. Mr. Hale's influence has been extensively felt in all philanthropic movements. His book “Ten Times One is Ten” (Boston, 1870) led to the establishment of clubs devoted to charity, which are now scattered throughout the United States, with chapters in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the islands of the Pacific. These associations have a membership that is supposed to exceed 50,000 in number, and are called “Harry Wadsworth clubs.” They have for their motto: “Look up and not down; look forward and not back; look out and not in; lend a hand.” The “Look-up Legion,” a similar organization among the Sunday-schools, is due to his inspiration, and includes upward of 5,000 members. He also has taken great interest in the Chautauqua literary and scientific circle, of which he is one of the counsellors, and is a frequent contributor to the “Chautauquan.” Mr. Hale has served his college as a member of the board of overseers for successive terms, and has been very active in advancing the interests of Harvard. He has also held the office of president of the ɸ B K society, and in 1879 received the degree of S. T. D. from Harvard. As a boy he learned to set type in his father's printing-office, and he has served on the “Daily Advertiser” in every capacity from reporter up to editor-in-chief. Before he attained his majority he wrote his full share in the monthly issues of the “Monthly Chronicle” and the “Boston Miscellany.” In later years he edited the “Christian Examiner,” and also the “Sunday-School Gazette.” In 1869 he founded, with the American Unitarian association, “Old and New,” for the purpose of giving wider currency to liberal Christian ideas through the medium of a literary magazine. Six years afterward this journal was merged into “Scribner's Monthly.” In 1886 he again returned to journalism and began the publication of “Lend a Hand; a Record of Progress and Journal of Organized Charity.” As a writer of short stories Mr. Hale has achieved signal distinction. His “My Double, and How he undid Me,” published in the “Atlantic Monthly” in 1859, at once caught the popular fancy. “The Man Without a Country,” published anonymously in the “Atlantic” during 1863, produced a deep impression on the public mind, and has a permanent place among the classic short stories of American writers. His “Skeleton in the Closet” also well known, was contributed to the “Galaxy” in 1866. He has been associated in several literary combinations, among which is “Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other” (Boston, 1872), a social romance jointly constructed by Harriet B. Stowe, Adeline D. T. Whitney, Lucretia P. Hale, Frederick W. Loring, Frederic B. Perkins, and Mr. Hale himself, its projector. His historical studies began when he was connected with the “Advertiser,” and for six years he was its South American editor, having been led to the study of Spanish and Spanish-American history at a time when he expected to be the reader and amanuensis of William H. Prescott, the historian. Beginning in this way, his studies have increased until he is regarded as an authority on Spanish-American affairs. He has contributed important articles to Justin Winsor's “History of Boston” to his “History of America” to Bryant and Gay's “Popular History of the United States,” and frequent papers to the proceedings of the American antiquarian society. Of the latter, perhaps the most important is his discovery of how California came to be so named. He has edited “Original Documents from the State Paper Office, London, and the British Museum, illustrating the History of Sir W. Raleigh's First American Colony and the Colony at Jamestown, with a Memoir of Sir Ralph Lane” (Boston, 1860), and John Lingard's “History of England” (13 vols., Boston, 1853). Besides the foregoing he has published “The Rosary” (Boston, 1848); “Margaret Percival in America” (1850); “Sketches of Christian History” (1850); “Letters on Irish Emigration” (1852); “Kansas and Nebraska” (1854); “Ninety Days’ Worth of Europe” (1861); with the Reverend John Williams. “The President's Words” (1865); “If, Yes, and Perhaps” (1868); “Puritan Politics in England and New England” (1869); “The Ingham Papers” (1869); “How To Do It” (1870); “His Level Best, and Other Stories” (1870); “Daily Bread, and Other Stories” (1870); “Ups and Downs, an Every-Day Novel” (1871); “Sybaris, and Other Homes” (1871); “Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day” (1874); “In His Name” (1874); “A Summer's Vacation, Four Sermons” (1874); “Workingmen's Homes, Essays and Stories” (1874); “The Good Time Coming, or Our New Crusade” (1875); “One Hundred Years” (1875); “Philip Nolan's Friends” (New York, 1876); “Back to Back” (1877); “Gone to Texas, or the Wonderful Adventures of a Pullman” (Boston, 1877); “What Career?” (1878); “Mrs. Merriam's Scholars” (1878); “The Life in Common” (1879); “The Bible and its Revision” (1879); “The Kingdom of God” (1880); “Crusoe in New York” (1880); “Stories of War” (1880); “June to May” (1881); “Stories of the Sea” (1881); “Stories of Adventure” (1881); “Stories of Discovery” (1883); “Seven Spanish Cities” (1883); “Fortunes of Rachel” (New York, 1884); “Christmas in a Palace” (1884); “Christmas in Narragansett” (1884); “Stories of Invention” (Boston, 1885); “Easter” (1886); “Franklin in France” (1887); “The Life of Washington” (New York, 1887); and “The History of the United States.”—Another brother, Charles, journalist, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 7 June, 1831; died there, 1 March, 1882, was graduated at Harvard in 1850, and entered his father's employ as a reporter. In 1852 he began the publication of “To-day, a Boston Literary Journal,” a weekly of which only two volumes were published, and later became junior editor of the “Daily Advertiser.” Meanwhile he also contributed to the “North American Review” and to the “Nautical Almanac.” In 1855 he was chosen to the legislature from one of the Boston districts, and continued be re-elected until 1860, being speaker during his last term, and the youngest man ever chosen that office. From 1864 till 1870 he was U. S. consul-general to Egypt, and it was largely his efforts that John H. Surratt was arrested and sent back to the United States. In 1871 he returned to Boston, and was elected in that to the state senate. He was appointed chairman of the committee on railroads, in which capacity he drew up the general railroad act now in force, and was active in securing its enactment. In 1872-'3 he was assistant secretary of state under Hamilton Fish. He then returned to Boston, began the study of law, and in 1874 was admitted to the bar. In the same year he was again elected to the legislature, and continued to serve in that body for four years. During the latter part of his life he lived in retirement, occupied in literary work, and was much of the time an invalid. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 32-33.


HALE, James T., Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

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


HALE, John Parker, 1806-1873, New Hampshire, lawyer, statesman, diplomat, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Senator.  Member of the anti-slavery Liberty Party.  President of the Free Soil Party, 1852.  Elected to Congress in 1842, he opposed the 21st Rule suppressing anti-slavery petitions to Congress.  Refused to support the annexation of Texas in 1845.  Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1846, he was the first distinctively anti-slavery Senator.  Adamantly opposed slavery for his 16 years in office.  In 1851, served as Counsel in the trial of rescued slave Shadrach.  In 1852, he was nominated for President of the United States, representing the Free Soil Party.  As U.S. Senator, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. 

(Blue, Frederick J. No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005, pp. 8, 35, 51-54, 74, 100-102, 121, 126, 152, 164, 170, 205, 220; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960, pp. 187, 189, 213, 247; Goodell, 1852, p. 478; Mitchell, Thomas G. Antislavery Politics in Antebellum and Civil War America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007, pp. 20, 28, 29, 33-37, 43-46, 51, 60, 63-65, 68, 72, 254n; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 50, 54, 298; Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971, pp. 130, 132; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 33-34; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 105-107; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 9, p. 862; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 105-107:

HALE, JOHN PARKER (March 31, 1806--November 19, 1873), lawyer, politician, diplomat, was born at Rochester, New Hampshire. He was descended from Robert Hale who settled in Charlestown, in Massachusetts, in 1632. His parents were John Parker and Lydia C. (O'Brien) Hale, the latter the daughter of an Irish refugee who had died in the American service during the Revolution. His father was a successful lawyer but his death in 1819 left the family in straitened circumstances and it was due to the courage and self-sacrifice of his mother that John was enabled to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and Bowdoin College, graduating from the latter in 1827. He then studied law  at Rochester and Dover, was admitted to the bar in 1830, and began practice at the latter town, maintaining residence there henceforth. When he left college he had gained a reputation for combined brilliance and laziness. In his profession he came to be known not as a learned, but as a "ready lawyer," possessed of tact and oratorical ability, and remarkably skilled in extricating himself from untenable positions (Bell, post, p. 417). He rose rapidly and made a reputation as a successful jury lawyer. It was doubtless due to this fact, as well as to his democratic principles, that he was an advocate of increasing the powers of the jury and making them judges of the Jaw as well as the fact.

Hale's political career began in 1832 with his election to the state legislature. In 1834 he was appointed United States district attorney and held office until removed by President Tyler in 1841. A year later he was elected to Congress. New Hampshire was a Democratic stronghold and Hale followed conventional doctrines. His early speeches have a somewhat demagogic tone, but he showed independence, and shortly before the end of his term, he proposed a limitation of the area open to slavery should Texas be added to the Union. His attitude on the Texas question finally led to a breach with the party when in January 1845 he addressed a letter to his constituent s denouncing annexation as promoting the interests of slavery and "eminently calculated to provoke the scorn of earth and the judgment of heaven" (Exeter News-Letter, January 20, 1845). In a special convention, the Democrats on February 12 revoked his renomination and solemnly read him out of the party. With the backing of some loyal friends, he proceeded to organize an independent movement. As a result, the New Hampshire legislature in 1846 passed under control of a combination of Whigs and independent Democrats, which on June 9 elected the insurgent Hale to the United States Senate for a six-year term commencing March 4, 1847. It was the most notable anti-slavery success hitherto achieved.

For some time, until joined by Chase and Sumner, Hale occupied a most conspicuous place, and if excluded from all party councils and responsibilities, he was at least free to assail slavery without the restraint which party membership imposed. His most notable speech was probably the one delivered in reply to Webster's address of March 7, 1850, on the territorial question (Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, App. pp. 1054-65). His long speeches, however, are in general inferior to his brief extemporaneous utterances in the course of debate. A voiding the excesses of some anti-slavery advocates, good humored, witty, and eloquent, he was personally popular, although his sallies occasionally provoked outbursts of wrath among the Southern members. It was during his first term in the Senate that he secured the abolition of flogging in the navy, a reform which he had urged from the time of his appearance in the lower house. His further argument that discipline should be more intelligent and humane, that the navy should offer advantages to the ordinary seaman which would make service attractive to the best grade of young men, rewarding good conduct with promotion and better opportunities (Ibid., 32 Congress, 1 Session, p. 449), was decidedly in advance of his time. He constantly urged the abolition of the grog ration as well and this was finally brought about in 1862. He himself considered these reforms the outstanding accomplishments of his Senate career, and in deference to his opinion they are recorded on his monument in the State House yard at Concord. In addition to his anti-slavery activity in the Senate, Hale conducted various platform campaigns on the subject and was a well-known lecturer throughout the North. He also appeared as counsel in cases arising under the Fugitive-Slave law, including the famous Anthony Burns case involving Theodore Parker and other eminent Bostonians. His prominence in the anti-slavery cause led to his nomination for the presidency by the Liberty party in 1847, but he withdrew in favor of Van Buren when the Free-Soil party absorbed the Liberty party in 1848. In 1852 he accepted the nomination of the Free-Soilers and polled 150,000 votes.

On the expiration of his first term in the Senate Hale resumed legal practice and for a short time lived in New York. By 1855, however, the anti-slavery coalition again controlled the New Hampshire legislature and after a prolonged contest he was elected to serve out the unexpired term of Charles G. Atherton, deceased. Three years later he was reelected for a full term. He had become one of the most prominent Republicans in the country, although the influence of his earlier Democratic affiliations was still perceptible, and it was reported that the power of the national party leaders was exerted in his behalf, inasmuch as the legislature was reluctant to break the local precedents which favored rotation. This term, however, added little to his fame, although he was active on the floor and prominent in the adoption of the various measures which at last gave slavery its quietus. During the war he held the chairmanship of the committee on naval affairs. The standard of public morals had relaxed, and in naval matters, to quote Secretary Welles, there had developed a "debauched system of personal and party favoritism" (post, I, 482), especially pernicious in the services of construction and supply. There was a navy-yard in New Hampshire, and Hale was admittedly careless, easy going, accommodating, and not over careful as to the character of his professional and political associations. His friends, who have always insisted on his personal honesty, believed that he was imposed upon by unscrupulous and designing parties, and Secretary Welles, that he was trying to use his chairmanship for personal gain and political advantage. Senators Grimes and Foot both expressed disapproval of his conduct and in 1864 when he was a candidate for reelection the impression was abroad that the leaders in Washington would be glad to see his retirement. Late in 1863 an investigation disclosed that he had accepted a fee from one J. M. Hunt, convicted of fraud against the government, and had appeared on his behalf before the secretary of war. Although exonerated by the Senate judiciary committee of any violation of law, the fact that its report included a bill making such practice illegal in future (Congressional Globe, 38 Congress, I Session, pp. 420, 460, 555) told heavily against him and undoubtedly contributed to a decisive defeat by the Republican caucus at Concord, June 9, 1864. His speech on the propose d bill (Ibid., pp. 559 ff.) does not indicate a keen sense of moral values and lends color to the comment of the Boston Daily Courier, January 1, 1864, that though he did not mean to be dishonest or dishonorable, "his perceptions were befogged by the atmosphere of fraud, corruption and crime surrounding him in the party to which he is attached."

In March 1865 Hale was appointed minister to Spain although he would have preferred the Paris legation. According to Sumner, "President Lincoln selected Hale out of general kindness and good-will to the ' lame ducks,' " and "wished to break his fall" (E. L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Volume IV, 1893, p. 25 5). His training and temperament were not suited for such a post, and he was handicapped by ignorance of the language. As far as can be judged by the somewhat meager records in the Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs his services were not especially significant. In 1869 he became embroiled in a singularly bitter quarrel with H. J. Perry, secretary of the legation, and in addition to the personal questions involved, the minister was charged with serious moral delinquencies involving the Queen of Spain and with having abused his importation franchise. Hale admitted signing certain con1promising documents but pleaded that the secretary had laid them before him without explaining their contents which were in Spanish. He was recalled April 5, 1869, and took leave July 29. His strength had already begun to fail, having been seriously impaired by the famous National Hotel epidemic of 1857, and he spent some further time abroad in a vain que st for health. Returning to New Hampshire in June 1870, he suffered a paralytic stroke soon afterward and his la st years were spent in semi-invalidism. His wife was Lucy Lambert of South Berwick, Maine; his daughter, Lucy Lambert Hale, the wife of William Eaton Chandler [q.v.]. As a crusader in a humanitarian cause Hale ranked among the great men of the day, but his qualities were not those best calculated to produce constructive legislation or successful administration.

[The New Hampshire Historical Society has a considerable collection of letters and miscellaneous manuscripts relating to John P. Hale. Other sources include The Hale Statue (1892), published by the New Hampshire General Court; E. S. Stearns, Genealogy and Family History of the State of New Hampshire (1908), III, 1044-49; I. W. Stuart, Life of Captain Nathan Hale (2nd ed., 1856); C. H. Bell, The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire (1894), pp. 415-18; Diary of Gideon Welles (3 volumes, 1911); G. W. Julian, "A Presidential Candidate of 1852," Century, October 1896; J. H. Ela, " Hon. John P. Hale," Granite Monthly, July 1880; Boston Transcript, New York Tribune, November 20, 1873; Independent Statesman (Concord, New Hampshire), November 27, 1873.]

W.A.R.  

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 33-34:

HALE, John Parker, senator, born in Rochester, New Hampshire, 31 March, 1806; died in Dover, New Hampshire, 19 November, 1873. He studied at Phillips Exeter academy, and was graduated at Bowdoin in 1827. He began his law studies in Rochester with Jeremiah H. Woodman, and continued them with Daniel M. Christie in Dover, where he was admitted to the bar, 20 August, 1830. In March, 1832, he was elected to state house of representatives as a Democrat. On 22 March, 1834, he was appointed U. S. district attorney by President Jackson, was reappointed by President Van Buren, 5 April, 1838, and was removed, 17 June, 1841, by President Tyler on party grounds. On 8 March, 1842, he was elected to congress, and took his seat, 4 December, 1843. He opposed the 21st rule suppressing anti-slavery petitions, but supported Polk and Dallas in the presidential canvass of 1844, and was nominated for re-election on a general ticket with three associates. The New Hampshire legislature, 28 December, 1844, passed resolutions instructing their representatives to vote for the annexation of Texas, and President Polk, in his message of that year, advocated annexation. On 7 January, 1845, Mr. Hale wrote his noted Texas letter, refusing to support annexation. The State convention of his party was re assembled at Concord, 12 February, 1845, and under the lead of Franklin Pierce struck Mr. Hale's name from the ticket, and substituted that of John Woodbury. Mr. Hale was supported as an independent candidate. On 11 March, 1845, three Democratic members were elected, but there was no choice of a fourth. Subsequent trials, with the same result, took place 23 September and 29 November, 1845, and 10 March, 1846. During the repeated contests, Mr. Hale thoroughly canvassed the state. At his North Church meeting in Concord, 5 June, 1845, Mr. Pierce was called out to reply, and the debate is memorable in the political history of New Hampshire. At the election of 10 March, 1846, the Whigs and Independent Democrats also defeated a choice for governor, and elected a majority of the state legislature. On 3 June, 1846, Mr. Hale was elected speaker; on 5 June, the Whig candidate, Anthony Colby, was elected governor; and on 9 June, Mr. Hale was elected U. S. senator for the term to begin 4 March, 1847. In a letter from John G. Whittier, dated Andover, Massachusetts, 3d mo., 18th, 1846, he says of Mr. Hale: “He has succeeded, and his success has broken the spell which has hitherto held reluctant Democracy in the embraces of slavery. The tide of anti-slavery feeling, long held back by the dams and dykes of party, has at last broken over all barriers, and is washing down from your northern mountains upon the slave-cursed south, as if Niagara stretched its foam and thunder along the whole length of Mason and Dixon's line. Let the first wave of that northern flood, as it dashes against the walls of the capitol, bear thither for the first time an anti- slavery senator.” On 20 October, 1847, he was nominated for president by a National liberty convention at Buffalo, with Leicester King, of Ohio, for vice-president, but declined, and supported Mr. Van Buren, who was nominated at the Buffalo convention of 9 August, 1848. On 6 December, 1847, he took his seat in the senate with thirty-two Democrats and twenty-one Whigs, and remained the only distinctively anti-slavery senator until joined by Salmon P. Chase, 3 December, 1849, and by Charles Sumner, 1 December, 1851. Mr. Hale began the agitation of the slavery question almost immediately upon his entrance into the senate, and continued it in frequent speeches during his sixteen years of service in that body. He was an orator of handsome person, clear voice, and winning manners, and his speeches were replete with humor and pathos. His success was due to his powers of natural oratory, which, being exerted against American chattel - slavery, seldom failed to arouse sympathetic sentiments in his audiences. Mr. Hale opposed flogging and the spirit-ration in the navy, and secured the abolition of the former by law of 28 September, 1850, and of the latter by law of 14 July, 1862. He served as counsel in 1851 in the important trials that arose out of the forcible rescue of the fugitive slave Shadrach from the custody of the U. S. marshal in Boston. In 1852 he was nominated at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, by the Free-soil party for president, with George W. Julian as vice-president, and they received 157,685 votes. His first senatorial term ended, and he was succeeded by Charles G. Atherton, a Democrat, on 4 March, 1853, on which day Franklin Pierce was inaugurated president. The following winter Mr. Hale began practising law in New York city. But the repeal of the Missouri compromise measures again overthrew the Democrats of New Hampshire; they failed duly to elect U. S. senators in the legislature of June, 1854, and in March, 1855, they completely lost the state. On 13 June, 1855, James Bell, a Whig, was elected U. S. senator for six years from 3 March, 1855, and Mr. Hale was chosen for the four years of the unexpired term of Mr. Atherton, deceased. On 9 June, 1858, he was re-elected for a full term of six years, which ended on 4 March, 1865. On 10 March, 1865, he was commissioned minister to Spain, and went immediately to Madrid. Mr. Hale was recalled in due course, 5 April, 1869, took leave, 29 July, 1869, and returned home in the summer of 1870. Mr. Hale without sufficient cause, attributed his recall to a quarrel between himself and Horatio J. Perry, his secretary of legation, in the course of which a charge had been made that Mr. Hale's privilege, as minister, of importing free of duty merchandize for his official or personal use, had been exceeded and some goods put upon the market and sold. Mr. Hale's answer was, that he had been misled by a commission-merchant, instigated by Mr. Perry. The latter was removed 28 June, 1869. Mr. Hale had been one of the victims of the “National hotel disease,” and his physical and mental faculties were much impaired for several years before his death. Immediately upon his arrival home he was prostrated by paralysis, and shortly afterward received a fracture of one of the small bones of the leg when thrown down by a runaway horse. In the summer of 1873 his condition was further aggravated by a fall that dislocated his hip. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 33-34.

Chapter: “Vermont and Massachusetts. --John P. Hale. -- Cassius M. Clay,” by Henry Wilson, in History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 1872.

While the struggle for the annexation of Texas by Joint Resolution was in progress, the friends of that measure left no means untried which political chicanery or menace could suggest. The President elect made no concealment of his purpose; and it was distinctly understood that those Democrats who opposed the measure had little to expect from his administration. Even those in New York who had signed the secret circular which alone made Mr. Polk's election possible were soon made to feel the force of that displeasure which the Slave Power usually inflicted on those who resisted its authority. 

But its immediate and most marked demonstration was in New Hampshire, and John P. Hale was its first victim. Though at first successful, its ultimate results were disastrous to the cause and party which prompted it. For it placed Mr. Hale in a far more commanding position than he had ever occupied before, and gave his ready tongue a voice and an audience it could never otherwise have obtained, besides affording an example of successful resistance to partisan tyranny and slaveholding dictation greatly damaging to their pretentious and hitherto unquestioned supremacy.

Mr. Hale, then a member of the House of Representatives, had been nominated by the Democratic Party for re-election. But he had not, like the great body of that party, forgotten its strong anti-Texas testimonies; nor would he, at the bidding of the convention which overslaughed Mr. Van Buren and nominated Mr. Polk; or in the hope of the prospective patronage of the incoming administration, disown that record, and applaud what a few short weeks before had been so vociferously condemned.

Compelled to define his position, he did not hesitate to reaffirm his opposition to the scheme, and to vote against it, though he regarded that declaration and vote as his political death-warrant; a martyrdom from which he evidently expected no resurrection. Indeed, he at once made his arrangements to retire from public life, and to resume his profession in the city of New York; a purpose from which he was with some difficulty dissuaded.
What he apprehended soon transpired. Such honesty of purpose, such fealty to right, such contumacy to party discipline could not be tolerated in the ranks of the exacting Democracy of that State. Early in January Mr. Hale addressed to his constituents a letter on the annexation of Texas. It was an earnest and unequivocal condemnation of the scheme. The reasons given by its advocates in support of the measure he declared to be "eminently calculated to provoke the scorn of earth and the judgment of Heaven "; and he avowed that he could never consent, by any agency of his, to place the country in the attitude of annexing a foreign nation for the avowed purpose of sustaining and perpetuating slavery.

At once the leading Democratic presses of New Hampshire and of the country opened upon him a war of denunciation, calling upon his constituents to rebuke and silence him. The Democratic State Committee immediately issued a call for a convention at Concord on the 12th of February. Franklin Pierce, who had been distinguished in Congress for his fidelity to the Slave Power, addressed the meeting, sharply and bitterly criticising this independent action of Mr. Hale, and defending the policy of annexation. He admitted that he would rather have Texas annexed as free territory, but he exclaimed, "Give it to us with slavery, rather than not have it, and have it now." And such an avowal was consistently applauded by the same convention which had just voted down, by "an emphatic No," the proposition that the meeting should be opened with prayer.

Stephen S. Foster, being present, inquired if he might be permitted “to set the speaker right in a few of his misstatements." A violent clamor at once arose against permission. The chairman decided that none but delegates could speak; and Mr. Foster took his seat, with the declaration: " I consider myself, in common with every man in the house, insulted by the remarks of the gentleman who has just taken his seat." And that convention of the same party which had a few months before pronounced against the annexation scheme, and whose chief organ had declared it to be “black as ink and bitter as hell," at once changed front on this very issue, and by a unanimous vote struck Mr. Hale's name from the ticket on which it had so recently inscribed it, and placed in its stead that of an obscure politician.
But many of Mr. Hale's constituents were more hopeful than their leader; at least, they were less resigned and less disposed to submit to defeat and death. Under the lead of Amos Tuck, who had already taken an active part in giving expression and direction to the popular disfavor against such high-handed tyranny, they at once prepared for action. In consequence of 'their earnest and vigorous proceedings, even without much aid from Mr. Hale, who deemed all resistance to the decrees of the party hopeless, the Democratic candidate lacked a thousand votes of a majority. While this result surprised and exasperated the Democratic leaders, it greatly encouraged Mr. Hale and his friends. Stimulated by their success, and continuing the struggle with increased determination and vigor, they established at the State capital the “Independent Democrat," under the editorial control of George G. Fogg. It was conducted with signal ability and tact, rendered essential service, and contributed largely to the triumph of this first successful revolt against the iron despotism of the Slave Power.

In the next election Mr. Hale participated. He canvassed the State, delivering speeches, in which he brought into full play the capacities and characteristics of his peculiar, versatile, and popular eloquence. Great excitement pervaded the State, and crowds thronged to hear him. But the Democratic leaders were indignant at his continued contumacy, and deeply chagrined at his manifest success with the people. These feelings found voice at a meeting held at the capital the first week of June. During that week the legislature commenced its session, and the religious and benevolent associations of the State held their anniversaries. Mr. Hale was expected to address a meeting at the Old North Church. Unwilling that his speech should be heard, as it probably would be, by the political and religious representatives of the State then assembled, the Democratic leaders determined that it should be replied to on the spot. Franklin Pierce was selected for that purpose. Aware that he was addressing many men of large intelligence and influence, and that his words would be sharply criticised by him under whose lead his name had been stricken from the ticket, Mr. Hale spoke with calmness, dignity, and effect. Those who listened to him could not but feel, whether they agreed with him or not, that he had been actuated by conscientious convictions and a high sense of public duty.

Mr. Pierce had noted, with the quick instincts of an adroit politician, the marked effects produced by Mr. Hale's manly and temperate vindication of his principles and position. Evidently in a towering passion, he spoke under the deepest excitement. He was domineering and insulting in manner, and bitter and sarcastic in the tone and tenor of his remarks. Mr. Hale replied briefly, but pertinently and effectively. He closed his triumphant vindication of his motives, opinions, and purposes against the aspersions of his bitter enemy with these words: “I expected to be called ambitious, to have my name cast out as evil, to be traduced and misrepresented. I have not been disappointed. But if things have come to this condition, that conscience and a sacred regard for truth and duty are to be publicly held up to ridicule, and scouted at 'Without rebuke, as has just been done here, it matters little whether we are annexed to Texas or Texas is annexed to us. I may be permitted to say that the measure of my ambition will be full if my earthly career shall be finished and my bones are laid beneath the soil of New Hampshire, and, when my wife and children shall repair to my grave to drop the tear of affection to my memory, they may read on my tombstone: 'He who lies beneath surrendered office and place and power, rather than bow down and worship slavery.' "

At the second election the Democratic candidate lacked some fifteen hundred votes necessary to an election. Several other attempts were made, in which the “Independent Democrats," though they failed of electing their own, succeeded in defeating the Democratic candidate, and in holding the balance of power. In the election of 1846, Mr. Hale was chosen a member of the legislature, was made Speaker, and subsequently elected to the Senate of the United States. The State was then subdivided into congressional districts, and Mr. Tuck was nominated to fill the seat Mr. Hale had occupied in the national House of Representatives. As a majority of votes was necessary for an election, no choice was effected during the whole of the XXIXth Congress. But in July, 1847, by a coalition between the Whigs and " Independent Democrats “in the first and third districts, Mr. Tuck was chosen in the former and General James Wilson in the latter. Mr. Tuck served six years in Congress, and made an honorable record. His chief distinction, and perhaps his chief service, however, grew out of his bold and wise leadership in that first and successful assault upon the party which had for years controlled the State with iron sway; beating down the very Gibraltar of the Northern Democracy, and making it one of the leading and most reliable States in opposition to the Slave Power.

And if merit is due to any actors in the great struggle now under review, surely no inconsiderable share belongs to those who, in that dark night, dared to beard the lion in his Northern lair, and strike for freedom with the odds so fearfully against them. Nor is the nation's debt of gratitude to Mr. Hale small for his long, brave fight in the Senate, against the scorn and contumely of the slaveholding majority. For if he did not then proclaim the full and perfect evangel of liberty, his was certainly the voice of one crying in the wilderness, preparing the way of complete deliverance. As his successful resistance to party and slaveholding tyranny broke the spell of its assumed invincibility, and encouraged others to go and I do likewise, so his ready eloquence and wit, his brilliant repartee and unfailing good-humor, did much to familiarize the country with the subject, and to call attention to its facts and principles, which perhaps a sterner advocate would have failed to effect.
Source:  Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 1.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 624-628.


HALE, Josiah W., abolitionist, Brandon, Vermont, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1839-40.


HALE, Matthew, abolitionist, Committee of Twenty-Four/Committee of Employ, the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery (PAS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

(Nash, Gary B., & Soderlund, Jean R. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 129)


HALE, Nathan (August 16, 1784-February 8, 1863), journalist. His newspaper Advertiser was first Federalist, then Whig, and finally Republican, that it opposed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and that Hale supported those parties in their successive incarnations and opposed all measures seeking to extend slavery or to establish it more firmly.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2 pp. 109-110:

HALE, NATHAN (August 16, 1784-February 8, 1863), journalist, born in Westhampton, Massachusetts, was of English ancestry, a descendant of Robert Hale who settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1632, and the son of Reverend Enoch and Octavia (Throop) Hale. Nathan Hale [q.v.], who was hanged as a spy by the British, was his uncle. After receiving his early education from his father, he entered Williams College, from which he received the degree of A.B. in 1804. For a short time he studied law in Troy, New York, and then went to Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, where he taught mathematics until 1810, in which year he received the degree of A.M. from Dartmouth. Returning to his native state, he completed his law studies in Boston and was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1810. In 1814 he abandoned the legal profession and began his long career in journalism. After a brief editorship of the Boston Weekly Messenger, in the spring of 1814 he purchased the Boston Daily Advertiser, the first daily newspaper to be established in that city, which he edited until 1854, when he retired from its active control. To him a newspaper was the means for swaying public opinion as well as for recording events. He applied this belief, however, only to the world of government, business, and political affairs, for he long excluded from his paper news and opinions of books, art, plays, and music. For many years he was a participant in politics and public affairs, taking sides upon all the great questions of the day, in city, state, and nation. He was one of the first American editors to introduce editorial articles as a regular feature, and a file of the Advertiser reflects his own political opinions and his attitude towards all the great problems that contributed to the making of history during nearly fifty years. When it is said that the Advertiser was first Federalist, then Whig, and finally Republican, that it opposed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, it will be seen that Hale supported those parties in their successive incarnations and opposed all measures seeking to extend slavery or to establish it more firmly. His interest in all the leading local movements of his time was no less than his interest in national affairs. He was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1820 to 1822 inclusive, of the Senate from 1829 to 1830, and of two constitutional conventions. As acting chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Internal Improvements, he was an early advocate of the establishment and extension of railroads in New England, and he became the first president of the Boston & Worcester Railroad when it was organized in July 1831, holding that position until June 1849. His services as a railroad organizer give him high place in the hi story of American transportation. He was a leading spirit in other public enterprises, and among his contributions to the betterment of Boston was his work as chairman of the commission that established the Boston water system. His interests seem to have been widespread and in the forwarding of them all his newspaper was a powerful factor.

From time to time, moreover, he engaged in other journalistic undertakings. In 1815, as a member of the Anthology Club, he helped to found the North American Review; he was also one of the founders of the Christian Examiner, which first appeared in January 1824, and from 1840 to 1846 he published and edited the Monthly Chronicle. His series of stereotype maps of New England became a standard geographical authority, and were reprinted from time to time with the necessary additions and revisions. He also published the Journal of Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of Delegates Chosen to Revise the Constitution of Massachusetts (1821), and many pamphlets on railroads, canals, and other practical schemes for public improvements. In 1816 he married Sarah Preston Everett, daughter of Judge Oliver Everett, and sister of Edward Everett [q.v.]. Their children were Lucretia Peabody, Charles, Edward Everett [qq.v.], Nathan, a journalist, and Susan, an artist. He was a member of the Brattle Square Church and a deacon there for many years.

[Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the U. S. from 1690 to 1872 (1873); Justin Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston (4 volumes, 1881-83); S. A. Allibone, Critical Dir. of English Literature (1859); S. K. Lothrop, "Memoir of Hon. Nathan Hale, LL.D.," Proc. Massachusetts Historical Society, XVIII (1881), 270-79; Calvin Durfee, Williams Biog. Annals (1871), obituary in Boston Daily Advertiser, February 9, 1863.]

E. F. E.


HALE, Salma, 1787-1866, historian, U.S. congressman, abolitionist.  He was a contributor to newspapers and periodicals, and promoted temperance, education, the abolition of slavery, and the Unitarian movement. While in congress he opposed the Missouri compromise.

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

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III:

HALE, Salma, historian, born in Alstead, Cheshire county, New Hampshire, 7 March, 1787; died in Somerville, Massachusetts, 19 November, 1866. His father, David Hale, joined the American army after the battle of Lexington, and served throughout the Revolutionary war. Salma, the third of fourteen children, was apprenticed to a printer in Walpole, New Hampshire. At seventeen he wrote an English grammar (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1804), which was afterward rewritten under the title “A New Grammar of the English Language” (New York, 1831). At the age of eighteen he became editor of “The Political Observatory,” at Walpole, New Hampshire. He then studied law, became clerk of the court of common pleas for Cheshire county, and removed to Keene, New Hampshire, in 1813. In 1817-'34 he was clerk of the supreme judicial court, and in the latter year was admitted to the bar. ln 1816 he was elected to congress as a Republican, but declined a re-election. He subsequently devoted himself to the preparation of a “History of the United States,” which gained a prize of $400 and a gold medal that had been offered by the American academy of belles-lettres of New York “for the best-written history of the United States, which shall contain a suitable exposition of the situation, character, and interests, absolute and relative, of the American republic, calculated for a class-book in academies and schools.” This was first published under the title of “The History of the United States of America, from their First Settlement as Colonies to the Close of the War with Great Britain in 1815” (1821). It was afterward continued to 1845, and went through many editions. Mr. Hale was a trustee of Dartmouth in 1816, and of the University of Vermont in 1823, and received honorary degrees from each. He was secretary to the commissioners for determining the northeastern boundary-line of the United States, was president of the New Hampshire historical society in 1830, a member of the New Hampshire house of representatives in 1828 and 1844, and of the senate in 1824 and 1845. He was a contributor to newspapers and periodicals, was instrumental in organizing the first agricultural society in New Hampshire, and in promoting temperance, education, the abolition of slavery, and the Unitarian movement. While in congress he opposed the Missouri compromise. His works include “The Administration of John Q. Adams and the Opposition by Algernon Sidney” (Concord, New Hampshire, 1826); “Conspiracy of the Spaniards against Venice, translated from Abbé Rea, and of John Lewis Fiesco against Genoa, translated from Cardinal De Retz” (Boston, 1828); “Annals of the Town of Keene, from its First Settlement in 1734 to 1790” (Concord, New Hampshire, 1826, and a continuation to 1815, Keene, 1851); “An Oration on the Character of Washington” (Keene, New Hampshire, 1832); “Address on the Connection of Chemistry and Agriculture,” delivered before the Cheshire county agricultural society (Keene, 1848); and an “Address before the New Hampshire Historical Society in 1828” (Concord, 1832; Manchester, 1870). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III.


HALL, Hiland (July 20, 1795-December 18, 1885), historian, jurist, and governor of Vermont.  Up to the 1850’s he had been a member of the Whig party, but his anti-slavery principles led him in the middle fifties to identify himself with the rising Republican party. He was a member of the Vermont delegation to the Republican National Convention in 1856, and was nominated as the Republican candidate for governor in 1858. He was elected by a substantial majority, and reelected for a second term in 1859.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2 pp. 131-132:

HALL, HILAND (July 20, 1795-December 18, 1885), historian, jurist, and governor of Vermont, descended from John Hall, born in Kent, England, in 1584, who came to New England in 1633 and some five or six years later settled in Hartford, Connecticut, was born at Bennington, Vt. He was the oldest of the seven children of Nathaniel and Abigail (Hubbard) Hall. His youth was spent on his father's farm in Bennington. He was educated in the common schools of the locality supplemented by one term in the academy at Granville, New York, and by private study. He studied law, was admitted to the bar of Bennington County in December 1819, and settled down to the practice of his profession in his native town. He was a representative of his town in the legislature in 1827, clerk of the county court in 1828, and state attorney for the county from 1829 to 1831. In January 1833 he was elected to fill a vacancy in Congress and served till March 3, 1843.

In 1842 he declined to stand for reelection. During the next decade and a half he filled the offices of state bank commissioner, 1843-46, judge of the supreme court of Vermont, 1846-50, second comptroller of the treasury, 1850-51, and federal land commissioner for California, 1851-54. Up to this time he had been a member of the Whig party, but his anti-slavery principles led him in the middle fifties to identify himself with the rising Republican party. He was a member of the Vermont delegation to the Republican National Convention in 1856, and was nominated as the Republican candidate for governor in 1858. He was elected by a substantial majority, and reelected for a second term in 1859. At the expiration of his second term as governor he retired from public life, except for a brief service as a member of the famous Peace Convention held on the eve of the Civil War. Notwithstanding the numerous offices he held, Hall is best known as a historian of his native state. From his early youth hi story and biography were his favorite studies, and he made the early history of Vermont his special field. In 1859 he became president of the Vermont Historical Society and held the office for six years. Later as chairman of the committee on printing and publication he brought about the publication of the first two volumes of the society's Proceedings. In 1868 he published his most important historical work, The History of Vermont, From Its Discovery to Its Admission into the Union in 1791. This is an excellent piece of historical research, based upon a careful study of the original documents and showing sound historical scholarship, although the Vermont sympathies of the author are evident in his treatment of New York's claim to juris diction over the Vermont settlements. Besides this work, Hall presented a number of carefully prepared papers before various historical societies, and contributed to historical periodicals.

He was married on October 27, 1818, to Dolly Tuttle Davis. They had eight children and lived to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary. Hall died at the home of his son Charles, in Springfield, Massachusetts, in his ninety-first year.

[Two memoirs by Hall's son, Henry D. Hall, in New-England History and Genealogical Register, January 1887, and in A. M. Hemenway, Vermont Historical Gazetteer, Volume V (1891), pt. III (section relating to Bennington), pp. 83-96; W. H. Crockett, Vermont, V (1923), 112-13; M. D. Gilman, The Bibliog. of Vermont (1897); D. B. Hall, The Halls of New England (1883); Springfield Daily Republican, December 19, 1885; Burlington Free Press and Times, December 21, 1885.]

A.M. K.


HALL, James, Dr., physician.  Colonial doctor for the American Colonization Society in Africa.  Served as General Agent of the Maryland State Colonization society. 

(Campbell, Penelope. Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831-1857. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1971, pp. 55, 56, 58, 69, 70-90, 119-120, 126-127, 149, 166-170, 182-183, 193, 200, 205, 207-209)


HALL, Primus, 1756-1842, African American abolitionist.  Formerly enslaved individual.


HALL, Prince, 1753-1807, African American, abolitionist, former slave.

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 5, p. 312)



HALL, Robert Bernard, 1812-1868, Episcopal clergyman, member of the Massachusetts State Senate, U.S. Congressman, 1855-1859, one of twelve founders of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in Boston in 1832 and the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1832 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 43; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 315). 

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 43:

HALL, Robert Bernard, clergyman, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 28 January, 1812; died in Plymouth, Massachusetts, 15 April, 1868. He entered the Boston public Latin-school in 1822, and studied theology at New Haven in 1833-'4. He was ordained to the ministry of the orthodox Congregational church, but afterward became an Episcopalian. In 1855 he was a member of the Massachusetts senate and was elected to congress in 1855 on the Know-Nothing ticket, and again in 1857 on the Republican ticket. He was a delegate to the Union convention in Philadelphia in 1866. Mr. Hall was one of the twelve founders of the New England anti-slavery society in Boston in January, 1832, and was one of the founders of the American antislavery society in Philadelphia in December, 1833. The degree of LL. D. was conferred on him by Iowa central college in 1858.  Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 43.


HALL, Willard, 1780-1875, Delaware, lawyer, jurist.  Vice-President, American Colonization Society, 1840-41. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 45; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 146; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961)


HALLOWELL, Edward Neddles, 1837-1871, soldier, brother of abolitionist Richard Price Hallowell.  Superseded Colonel Robert Gould Shaw as the commander of the 54th Massachusetts (U.S. Colored Troops).  He was Brevetted Brigadier General at the end of the Civil War.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 160-161).


HALLOWELL, Mary Post, 1823-1913, suffragist, reformer, abolitionist. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 52)


HALLOWELL, Norwood Penrose, 1839-1914, Philadelphia, PA, abolitionist, soldier.  Deputy Commander of the all-Black 54th Massachusetts, Colonel Commander of the 55th Massachusetts.  Participated in the siege of Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor.


HALLOWELL, Richard Price, 1835-1904, merchant, reformer, ardent abolitionist.  Follower of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison.  Dedicated himself in early life to the anti-slavery cause. He broke his first business connection in Philadelphia because his firm dealt in slave-made products from the South. He joined the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and became an active leader in the anti-slavery agitation in Philadelphia and later in Boston.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 52; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 160)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2, p. 160:

HALLOWELL, RICHARD PRICE (December 16, 1835-January 5, 1904), merchant, abolitionist, descended from John Hallowell who came from Nottinghamshire, England, to Pennsylvania in 1682 or 1683, was born in Philadelphia, the son of Morris Longstreth and Hannah Smith (Penrose) Hallowell. He was a member of the Society of Friends and attended Haverford School (later Haverford College) from 1849 to 1853. Hallowell was a wool commission-merchant during most of his active business life, first in Philadelphia, but after 1857 in Boston. On October 26, 1859, he married Anna Coffin Davis, the marriage taking place in the home near Philadelphia of the bride's grandparents, James and Lucretia Mott [qq.v.], of anti-slavery fame. His home after his marriage was at West Medford, Massachusetts. He was for a time a director of the National Bank of Commerce, Boston, a trustee of the Medford Savings Bank, a selectman of the town of Medford, vice-president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, and treasurer of the Free Religious Association.

His religious and family connections made it natural for him to dedicate himself in early life to the anti-slavery cause. He broke his first business connection in Philadelphia because his firm dealt in slave-made products from the South. He joined the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and became an active leader in the anti-slavery agitation in Philadelphia and later in Boston. With others he went to Harper's Ferry in 1859 to receive the body of John Brown after the execution and escort it to North Elba, New York, for interment. Departing from the strict peace tenets of the Society of Friends, he became actively engaged early in the Civil War in recruiting for the famous colored regiments, the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteers. He was treasurer of the recruiting fund and later was engaged actively and successfully in securing proper remuneration for the members of these regiments. When feeling was running high on the slavery question he served occasionally as a member of an informal bodyguard for William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips at public meetings. After the Civil War he spent time and money for the uplift of the colored race and was especially interested in the establishment of schools for colored people in the South. He was a trustee of the Calhoun Colored School, Alabama, from its foundation until the time of his death, and was a manager of the Home for Aged Colored Women in Boston.

Apart from his business and philanthropic interests, Hallowell found time to indulge a taste for historical study. He had a good literary style, and became deeply interested in the early history of Quakerism in New England. In 1870 he published The Quakers in New England. His chief work, The Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts, which r a n through four editions between 1883 and 1887, is a virile defense of the Quakers, a story of their persecutions at the h ands of New England Puritans, and a criticism of their critics. A shorter work, The Pioneer Quakers (1886), is in the same tone but brings the story down to 1724, about fifty years beyond the limits of the earlier volume. His last publication was a pamphlet entitled Why the Negro Was Enfranchised (1903), containing two letters first printed in the Boston Herald, March 11 and 26, 1903.

[Medford Historical Register, October 1904; Medford Mercury, January 8, 1904; Boston Transcript, January 5, 1904; Who's Who in America, 1903-05; Biog. Catalog of Matriculates of Haverford College, I833-I922 (1922); J.C. Rand, One of a Thousand (1890); W. P. Hallowell, Record of a Branch of the Hallowell Family (1893).]

R. W.K.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 52:

HALLOWELL, Richard Price, merchant, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 16 December, 1835. He studied for two years at Haverford college, in 1859 removed to West Medford, Massachusetts, and during the same year began business in Boston as a wool-merchant. He was identified with the abolition movement led by Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, and during the civil war was made a special agent by Governor John A. Andrew, of Massachusetts, to recruit for the negro regiments. Mr. Hallowell is treasurer of the Free religious association, and vice-president of the New England woman suffrage association. He has contributed many articles to the “Index,” and has published “The Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts” (Boston, 1883) and “The Pioneer Quakers” (1887). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 160-161.


HALPINE, Charles Graham (November 20, 1829-August 3, 1868), journalist, poet.  As a Union officer he prepared for Hunter's signature the first order for the enlistment of a negro regiment and overcame many of the objections of the Northern soldiers with his famous poem, "Sambo's Right to be Kilt."

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 4, Pt. 2 pp. 160-161:

HALPINE, CHARLES GRAHAM (November 20, 1829-August 3, 1868), journalist, poet, born at Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland, was the son of Nicholas John and Anne (Grehan) Halpine. His father, after a brilliant career at Trinity College, took orders in the Irish Church but devoted himself to literature. For many years, as editor of the Dublin Evening Mail, he was influential in Irish Protestant circles. The son matriculated at Trinity College at an early age and for a time studied medicine, then law, devoting his leisure to writing for the press. He finally went into journalism in Dublin but soon removed to London. The death of his father in impoverished circumstances and his own early marriage determined him, in 1851, to emigrate to America. Here he wrote advertisements in verse and became private secretary to P. T. Barnum. In 1852 he joined B. P. Shillaber in Boston as co-editor of the Carpet-Bag, a humorous weekly. After a few months he went to New York and became French translator for the New York Herald. He published anonymously Lyrics by the Letter H (1854), poems that had previously appeared in various newspapers, where, as Fitz-James O'Brien said in reviewing the volume, they ought to have remained. As Nicaraguan correspondent of the New York Times, he reported the filibustering expedition of William Walker and, after a short period as Washington correspondent, he became an associate editor of the Times. In 1857 he acquired an interest in the Leader and became its principal editor; through his political articles and sketches it rose rapidly in circulation and influence. Halpine actively interested himself in politics: in Dublin as a member of the "Young Ireland" group and in America, first as private secretary to Stephan A. Douglas and later as a member of the general committee of Tammany Hall. He successfully led the reform movement against Fernando Wood. He was versatile, impetuous, and of a tremendous and restless energy. His contributions to magazines and newspapers were clever and voluminous and brought him a large income. He was a member of a Bohemian group that included Fitz-Hugh Ludlow and Fitz-James O'Brien. He was a brilliant conversationalist; his stammer sometimes served his wit as when he announced that "Harriet Beseecher Be Stowe" had gone abroad to collect funds for the antislavery cause.

At the outbreak of the Civil War he joined the 69th Regiment as a lieutenant and was quickly promoted to the staff of General Hunter, with whom he remained the greater part of the war. He was brevetted lieutenant-colonel of volunteers June 5, 1864, for gallantry and distinguished services at the battle of Piedmont, and at the end of the war received the brevets of colonel and brigadier-general. Under assumed names he wrote effective letters of criticism to many vacillating and lukewarm editors of Northern newspapers. He prepared for Hunter's signature the first order for the enlistment of a negro regiment and overcame many of the objections of the Northern soldiers with his famous poem, "Sambo's Right to be Kilt." In his communications to the press written in the character of an ignorant Irish private, "Miles O'Reilly,"' he achieved a wide popularity in the North. Failing eyesight forced his retirement from the army, July 31, 1864. Having gained prominence as a reformer of municipal corruption, upon his return from the army he was invited by the Citizens Association to assume the editorship of the Citizen, the organ of reform. He built up the Democratic Union, an organization opposed to political corruption. Halpine had frequently held political offices, but in 1866 he ran against Tammany Hall and was elected register of the County and City of. New York. Miles O'Reilly His Book (1864) was immediately successful and was followed by Baked Meats of the Funeral (i866), which included his recollections of the war and miscellaneous essays. He died suddenly in 1868 from an overdose of chloroform taken to relieve insomnia.

[Poetical Works of Charles G. Halpine (1869), with biog. sketch and notes by Robt. B. Roosevelt; the Independent, February 12, 1903; New York Herald and Tribune August 4, 1868; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, August 22, 1868; Horatio Bateman, Biographies of Two Hundred and Fifty Distinguished National Men (1871), I, 219; C. A. Read, The Cabinet of Irish Lit. (new ed., 1905), Volume III; Frederick Phisterer, New York in the War of the Rebellion (3rd ed., 1912).]

F. M.


HALSEY, Job Foster, 1800-1881, Allegheny Town, Pennsylvania, theologian.  Founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.  Manager, 1833-35, 1835-37.

(Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 54)

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 54:

HALSEY, Job Foster, clergyman, born in Schenectady, New York, 12 July, 1800; died in Norristown, Pennsylvania, 7 March, 1881, was graduated at Union in 1819, studied theology with his brother, and spent the years from 1823 till 1826 at Princeton seminary. From 1826 till 1828 he held charge of the Old Tennent church in Freehold, New Jersey. He was agent for the American Bible society in New Jersey in 1828-'9, for the American tract society in Albany, New York, in 1829-'30, and for the Sunday-school union in Pittsburg in 1830-'1. From 1831 till 1836 he was pastor of the First church in Alleghany City, Pennsylvania, and in 1835-'6 a professor in Marion manual-labor college, Missouri. He was principal of Raritan seminary for young ladies in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, from 1836 till 1848, pastor at West Bloomfield (now Montclair), New Jersey, from 1852 till 1856, and pastor of the 1st Presbyterian church in Norristown, Pennsylvania, from 1856 till he resigned in 1881. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, pp. 54.


HALSEY, Luther, 1794-1880, Princeton, New Jersey, clergyman, professor, educator.  Officer of the New Jersey auxiliary of the American Colonization Society. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume III, p. 54; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 85)


HALSTEAD, C. S., abolitionist, Brooklyn, New York, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society,  Recording Secretary, 1848-50.


HALSTEAD, William, Trenton, New Jersey, American Colonization Society, Director, 1839-1841.  (Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961)



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

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