W-Z: Wade through Wright

See below for annotated biographies of Free Soil Party leaders, members and supporters. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.

WADE, Benjamin Franklin, 1800-1878, lawyer, jurist, U.S. Senator, strong and active opponent of slavery.  In 1839, opposed enactment of stronger fugitive slave law, later calling for its repeal.  U.S. Senator, March 1851-1869.  Opposed Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854.  Reported bill to abolish slavery in U.S. Territories in 1862.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, pp. 310-311; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, p. 303; Congressional Globe and the "Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War," Senate Report No. 108, 37 Congress, 3 Session, (3 volumes, 1863); Senate Report No. 142, 38 Congress, 2 Session, (3 volumes, 1865); Blue, 2005, pp. 11-13, 213-237; Filler, 1960, pp. 103, 151, 229; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 23, 25, 48-49, 54, 71, 116, 132, 143-144, 172, 189, 216, 217, 227, 228, 230; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 499; Sewell, 1976, pp. 210, 229, 239, 242, 255, 256n, 274, 289, 308, 310, 321, 324-325, 365;  American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 22, p. 431)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, p. 303;

WADE, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (October 27, 1800-March 2, 1878), senator from Ohio, the tenth of eleven children of James and Mary (Upham) Wade, was a native of Feeding Hills, a hamlet near Spring field, Massachusetts. His father traced his descent from Jonathan Wade of County Norfolk, England, who emigrated in 1632 and became an honored citizen of Medford, Massachusetts Bay Colony. His mother was the daughter of a Baptist clergyman of West Spring field. Decius S. Wade [q. v.] was his nephew. Reared amidst the poverty and hard ships of a New England farm, Wade received little education in childhood, save that acquired from his mother and at a local school in the winter months. With his parents he moved in 1821 to the frontier community of Andover, Ohio, where two of his brothers had gone a year earlier. For the next few years he was by turns a farmer, drover, laborer, medical student, and school teacher in Ohio and New York state, but about 1825 he settled down to th e study of law in Canfield, Ohio, and in 1827 or 1828 was admitted to the bar. Diffidence in public speaking threatened his ambitions at the outset, but perseverance gradually made him a vigorous advocate, and partners hips with Joshua R. Giddings [q. v. ] in 1831 and Rufus P. Ranney [q.v.] in 1838 brought him a wide and successful practice in northeastern Ohio. On May 19, 1841, he was married to Caroline M. Rosekrans of Ashtabula and they took up their residence in Jefferson, Ohio, his place of practice. She bore him two sons, James F. and Henry P. Wade, and with them survived him.

Once established in the law, Wade turned his attention to politics and public office. After a term (1835-37) as prosecuting attorney of Ashtabula County he was elected to the state Senate in 1837. There he identified himself with the anti-slavery element; his outspoken opposition to a more stringent fugitive-slave law in Ohio is said to have been responsible for his failure to be reelected in 1839. But he was returned to the Senate for a second term in 1841 and was chosen by the legislature in 1847 to sit as president-judge of the third judicial circuit. His forceful and business-like methods on the bench, together with his rising popularity, commended him to the Whigs in the legislature and in 1851, apparently without effort on his part, he was elected to the United States Senate. Twice reelected as a Republican, he served until March 3, 1869.

Wade's entrance into the Senate in the early fifties was eventful in the history of slavery and the Union. Rough in manner, coarse and vituperative in speech, yet intensely patriotic, he speedily became a leader of the anti-slavery group in Congress. At heart an abolitionist, he supported a move in 1852 to repeal the Fugitive- slave Law (Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, I Session, p. 2371) and denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (Ibid., 33 Congress, 1 Session, pp. 337-40). He also opposed the several efforts to win Kansas for slavery and almost every other measure or device for the promotion or protection of the system. When the controversy in the Senate became intensely personal and Wade was much involved, he entered into a secret compact (1858) with Simon Cameron and Zachariah Chandler [qq.v.] whereby they pledged themselves to make their own the cause of any Republican senator receiving gross personal abuse, and to "carry the quarrel into a coffin" (Riddle, post, pp. 215-16). He was an ardent supporter of the proposed homestead legislation of the period, saying in 1859 that it was "a question of land to the landless," while the bill to buy Cuba was "a question of niggers to the nigger less" (Congressional Globe, 35 Congress, 2 Session, p. 1354). During the secession crisis of 1860-61 he took his stand on the Republican platform of 1860, and as a member of the Senate Committee of Thirteen voted against the Crittenden proposals (Senate Report No. 288, 36 Congress, 2 Session), holding that the time for compromise had passed.

With the outbreak of war, Wade became one of the most belligerent men in Congress, demanding swift and decisive military action. Personally a fearless man, he played a dramatic part in momentarily stemming a portion of the Union retreat from Bull Run (July 21, 1861). When the army was reorganized he pressed vigorously for another forward movement, and when McClellan delayed, Wade became one of his sharpest critics. With Senators Chandler and J. W. Grimes he was instrumental in setting up the Committee on the Conduct of the War. From the moment of its creation the Committee, under Wade's chairmanship, became a violently partisan machine, suspicious of the loyalty of those who ventured to dissent from its wishes and bent upon an unrelenting prosecution of the war. Its members worked in close cooperation with Secretary of War Stanton, a kindred spirit whom Wade had urged for that office, but they were generally critical of the President. Like other Radical Republicans in Congress, Wade seemed temperamentally incapable of understanding Lincoln and deplored his cautious and conservative policies. He himself favored drastic punitive measures against the South, including legislation for the confiscation of the property of the Confederate leaders and the emancipation of their slaves (Congressional Globe, 37 Congress, 2 Session, p. 3375; Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States ... during the Great Rebellion (1864, pp. 196 ff.). He was not overburdened with constitutional scruples where measures that he favored were concerned. At the same time he decried the President's "dictatorship" and found Lincoln's clement reconstruction policy, announced on December 8, 1863, particularly obnoxious. When he and Henry Winter Davis [q.v.] attempted to counteract it by a severe congressional plan, embodied in the Wade-Davis bill, and Lincoln checked this by a "pocket veto," announcing his reasons in a proclamation (July 8, 1864), their indignation was unbounded. The result .. his Wade-Davis Manifesto (August 5), a fierce blast, condemned the President's "executive usurpation" as a "studied outrage on the legislative authority" and insisted that in matters of reconstruction Congress was "paramount and must be respected" (Appletons' American Annual Cyclopaedia ... 1864, 1865, pp. 307-10). Previously Wade had joined with others in indorsing the Pomeroy circular, designed to replace Lincoln with Salmon P. Chase (G. F. Milton, The Age of Hate, 1930, p. 28), but when that project collapsed and the Manifesto aroused a storm of disapproval in Ohio, he gave his support to Lincoln in the closing weeks of the election contest in 1864. But he continued to resist the President's reconstruction policy, characterizing it as "absurd, monarchical, and anti-American" (Congressional Globe, 38 Congress, 2 Session, p. 1128).

The accession of Johnson to the presidency in April 1865 was hailed by Wade and his faction as a godsend, and they hastened to make overtures to him in behalf of their own measures. When to their surprise he took over Lincoln's policy, Wade dubbed him either "a knave or a fool," and contended that to admit the Southern states on the presidential plan was "nothing less than political suicide" (H.K. Beale, The Critical Year, 1930, pp. 49, 314). From December 1865 onward, along with Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and other vindictive leaders, he waged a persistent campaign against Johnson, pressing for the enactment of the congressional program, including the Civil Rights, Military Reconstruction, and Tenure of Office bills. At the opening of the session in December 1865 Wade promptly introduced a bill for the enfranchisement of negroes in the District of Columbia (Congressional Globe, 39 Congress, 1 Session, p. 1), and supported negro suffrage in the campaign of 1866, although he was willing to readmit the Southern states if they ratified the fourteenth amendment within a reasonable time (Ibid., 39 Congress, 2 Session, p. 124). His methods during the period leave the impression that he, like Stevens, was ready to resort to almost any extremity in order to carry through the congressional policies or gain a point.

The Radicals succeeded in having Wade elected president pro tempore of the Senate when that office became vacant (March 2, 1867). According to the statute then in force, he would have succeeded to the presidency in the event of Johnson's removal. But it appears that the prospect of Wade's succession really became an embarrassment to them, for many of the conservatives felt that he would be no improvement and might prove less satisfactory than Johnson (Diary of Gideon Welles, 1911, volume III, 293; Oberholtzer, post, II, 13411.). Wade himself voted for Johnson's conviction despite the fact that he was an interested party. So expectant was he of success that he began the selection of his cabinet before the impeachment trial was concluded (Adam Badeau, Grant in Peace, 1887, pp. 136-37; C. G. Bowers, The Tragic Era, 1929, pp. 188-89). Thwarted in his presidential ambitions by Johnson's acquittal, and having failed of reelection to the Senate, Wade sought the second place on the ticket with Grant in 1868. However, after leading on the first four ballots in the Republican convention, he lost the nomination to Schuyler Colfax.

Upon his retirement from the Senate in 1869 Wade resumed the practice of law in Ohio. He became general counsel for the Northern Pacific Railroad and served for a time as one of the government directors of the Union Pacific. In 1871 Grant appointed him a member of the commission of investigation which visited Santo Domingo and recommended its annexation (Report of the Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo, 1871). Seven years later he died in Jefferson, Ohio.

[The chief documentary sources for Wade's public career are the Congressional Globe and the "Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War," Senate Report No. 108, 37 Congress, 3 Session, (3 volumes, 1863); Senate Report No. 142, 38 Congress, 2 Session, (3 volumes, 1865). A. G. Riddle, The Life of Benjamin F. Wade (1886), is too brief and uncritical to be of much historical value. Short sketches of Wade's life are to be found in L. P. Brockett, Men of Our Day (1872), pp. 240-62 a contemporary eulogistic account; The Biographical Cyclopaedia and Portrait Gallery ... of ... Ohio, volume I (1883), 293-94; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); New York Herald and New York Times, March 3, 1878. J. F. Rhodes, History of the U. S. (9 volumes, 1893-1922); and E. P. Oberholtzer, A History of the U. S. since the Civil War (4 volumes, 1917-31) contain numerous references to Wade, as do the biographies of his political contemporaries. D. M. DeWitt, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1903) is useful for the post-war period. This work, like the more recent studies of the war and reconstruction eras, is hostile to Wade and his faction.]

A.H.M.


WADE, Edward, 1802-1866, West Springfield, Massachusetts, Ohio, lawyer, prominent abolitionist.  Free Soil party U.S. Congressman from Ohio in the 33rd Congress.  Republican representative in the 34th and 35th Congresses.  Opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. 

(Blue, 2005, pp. 11-13, 213, 226, 236, 268; Dumond, 1961, pp. 302, 363; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 23, 25, 26, 48, 65, 71, 72; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 56; Sewell, 1976, pp. 76, 208, 209, 249, 256n; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).


WADSWORTH, JAMES SAMUEL (October 30, 1807-May 8, 1864), Union soldier. Originally “a Democrat, his strong anti-slavery sentiments made him join in organizing the Free-Soil party, which later merged with the Republican party in 1856. He was a delegate to the unofficial "peace conference" in Washington in February 1861”.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, pp. 312-313; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2,  pp. 308-309. [C. C. Baldwin, Wadsworth (Copyright 1882); H. G. Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo (1913); L. F. Allen, Memorial of the Late General James S. Wadsworth (1865); Proc. Century Association in Honor of Brigadier General James S. Wadsworth (1865); War of the Rebellion: Official Records (Army); Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 vols., 1887-88);

WADSWORTH, James Samuel, soldier, born in Geneseo, New York, 30 October, 1807; died near Chancellorsville, Virginia, 8 May, 1864, was educated at Harvard and Yale and studied law in Albany, completing his course with Daniel Webster. Although he was admitted to the bar in 1833, he never practised his profession, but devoted himself to the management of the family estate in western New York, which amounted to 15,000 acres. In 1852 he was elected president of the State Agricultural Society, in which he was interested during his life. He promoted education and the interests of the community in which he lived. He founded a public library in Geneseo. was a subscriber to the endowment of Geneseo College, aided in establishing the school-district library system, and was active in philanthropical labors. Although a Federalist by education and a Democrat by conviction,  he supported the Free-Soil Party in 1848, and continued to act in defence of the anti-slavery movement. He was a presidential elector on the Republican ticket in 1856 and 1860. In 1861 he was a delegate to the Peace Convention in Washington, and at the beginning of the Civil War he was among the first to offer his services to the government. In April, 1861, he was commissioned a major-general by Governor Edwin D. Morgan, but the appointment was subsequently revoked. When communication with the capital was cut off, he chartered two ships upon his own responsibility, loaded them with provisions, and went with them to Annapolis, where he superintended the delivery of the supplies. He was volunteer aide to General Irvin McDowell at the first battle of Bull Run, where he was commended for bravery and humanity. Afterward he was made brigadier-general of volunteers, 9 August, 1861, assigned to a command in the advance under General George B. McClellan, and guarded the city of Washington. On 15 March, 1862, he became military governor of the District of Columbia. In the autumn of 1862 he was the Republican candidate for governor of New York, but was defeated by Horatio Seymour. In the following December he was assigned to the command of a division in the Army of the Potomac under General Ambrose B. Burnside, and participated in the battle of Fredericksburg, 13 December, 1862. He displayed great military skill in the command of the 1st Division of the 1st Army Corps under General John F. Reynolds. At Gettysburg his division was the first to engage the enemy on 1 July, 1863, and on that day lost 2,400 out of 4,000 men. During the second and third days' fighting he rendered good service in maintaining the heights on the right of the line. At the council of war held after the victory he was one of the three that favored pursuit of the enemy. Early in 1864 he was sent on special service to the Mississippi Valley, and made an extensive tour of inspection through the southern and western states. On the reorganization of the Army of the Potomac in 1864, he was assigned to the command of the 4th Division of the 5th Corps, composed in part of his old command. While endeavoring to rally his troops during the battle of the Wilderness, 6 May, 1864, he was struck in the head by a bullet, and before he could be removed the enemy had gained possession of the ground where he lay. Although unconscious, he lingered for two days. It is said that his troops were inspired by his heroic bearing continually to renew the contest, when but for him they would have yielded. He was brevetted major-general of volunteers on 6 May, 1864. Horace Greeley, in his " American Conflict" (Hartford, 1864-'6), says: "The country's salvation claimed no nobler sacrifice than that of James S. Wadsworth, of New York. . . . No one surrendered more for his country's sake, or gave his life more joyfully for her deliverance." In 1888 a movement was in progress for the erection in Washington of a monument to his memory. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, pp. 312-313.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, pp. 308-309.

WADSWORTH, JAMES SAMUEL (October 30, 1807-May 8, 1864), Union soldier, was the son of James Wadsworth [q.v.] and his wife, Naomi, daughter of Samuel Wolcott of East Windsor, Connecticut, Born at Geneseo, New York, at a time when the hardships of the first settlement there were over, Wadsworth grew up among pioneer surroundings, but as the prospective heir to a great landed estate. He spent two years at Harvard, without graduating, studied law, and was admitted to the bar, but did not practise, his legal education having been intended only to prepare him for the management of his properties. On May 11, 1834, he married Mary Craig Wharton, daughter of John Wharton, a Quaker merchant of Philadelphia. His position in the community and his own sense of public duty made him active in politics throughout his life, although he had no ambition for office. At first a Democrat, his strong anti-slavery sentiments made him join in organizing the Free-Soil party, which merged with the Republican party in 1856. He was a delegate to the unofficial "peace conference" in Washington in February 1861. From the outbreak of the Civil War his life and fortune were unreservedly at the service of the country. "It always seemed to me," wrote his friend John Lothrop Motley, "that he was the truest and the most thoroughly loyal American I ever knew" (Pearson, post, p. 34). But he was no candidate for high military rank. The governor of New York, on the understanding that he could name two major generals of volunteers, offered an appointment to Wadsworth, who advised the selection of a regular army officer instead, and accepted only when this was found impossible. "I am better than a worse man," was his sagacious comment, and he was frankly gratified when the grant of power to the governor was refused. He went to the front, however, and offered his services as an aide to General Irvin McDowell, a gift accepted with hesitation, for a middle-aged gentleman of national reputation would not seem to be either physically or mentally suitable for an orderly officer. But he proved at the battle of Bull Run that both in hard riding and in intelligent obedience he could match the youngest of the staff. On August 9, 1861, he was commissioned brigadier-general of volunteers. The appointment, which was partly political, was intended to conciliate Republicans of Democratic antecedents. Wadsworth accepted it after considering in his usual detached fashion what the effect on the public service might be. He was, indeed, much better qualified than most of the non-professional general officers. Though destitute of military training like the rest, he had the habit of command, rarer among Union than among Confederate volunteers, and his civil occupations had fitted him peculiarly well for the care of his men in the field. A military education would not have shown him how to organize a system of supply by ox team, as he did when his brigade was camped in the Virginia mud near Arlington during the first winter of the war and mule-drawn wagons could not get through. He was fortunate in not being required to command a large force in action until he had been nearly two years in service and the men under him were seasoned veterans. When the Army of the Potomac moved to the peninsula in the spring of 1862, he was left in command of the defenses of Washington  Doubtful of getting service in the field, he accepted the Republican nomination for governor of New York but was defeated at the election. In December 1862, after the battle of Fredericksburg, he took command of the 1st Division, I Corps. It had a small part in the battle of Chancellorsville and a very great one at Gettysburg. On the first day of the battle, in spite of terrific loss, it held the Confederates in check while the rest of the army was hastening to the battlefield. On the second and third days it held Culp's Hill, on the right of the Union line. In the reorganization of the army for the 1864 campaign, Wadsworth received the 4th Division of the V Corps, made up largely of regiments from his old command. After nearly succeeding in breaking through the Confederate center on the second day (May 6) of the battle of the Wilderness, it was outflanked and driven back. Wadsworth had already had two horses shot under him; his third was unmanageable, and the Confederate line was close upon him before he could turn. He was shot in the head, and the enemy's advance passed over his body. He died two days later in a Confederate field hospital. He was survived by his wife and their six children.

[C. C. Baldwin, Wadsworth (Copyright 1882); H. G. Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo (1913), an adequate biography, with ample citations of authorities; L. F. Allen, Memorial of the Late General James S. Wadsworth (1865); Proc. Century Association in Honor of Brigadier General James S. Wadsworth (1865); War of the Rebellion: Official Records (Army); Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 vols ., 1887-88); New York Monuments Commission, In Memoriam, James Samuel Wadsworth (1916); Morris Schaff, The Battle of the Wilderness (1910); obituary in New York Times, May 11, 1864. ]

T. M. S.


WALDEN, John Morgan M. E. bishop, born in Lebanon, Warren County, Ohio, 11 February, 1831. For a year and a half of which he was editor and publisher of a free-state paper in Kansas. He was also a member of the Topeka legislature, and of the Leavenworth Constitutional Convention at the time of its adoption of a constitution in 1858.

D. H. Moore, John Morgan Walden (1915); Biographical Cyclopedia and Portrait Gallery ... of the State of Ohio, volume V (n. d.); The Biographical Encyclopedia of Ohio of the Nineteenth Century (1876); Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, p. 320; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 1, pp. 330-331;

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

WALDEN, John Morgan, M. E. bishop, born in Lebanon, Warren County, Ohio, 11 February, 1831. He was graduated at Farmers' (now Belmont) College, near Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1852, and engaged in educational work for two years and in editorial work for four years, during the last year and a half of which he was editor and publisher of a free-state paper in Kansas. He was also a member of the Topeka legislature, and of the Leavenworth Constitutional Convention at the time of its adoption of a constitution in 1858, under which he was elected superintendent of public instruction. In September of that year he left Kansas and entered, as a minister, the Cincinnati conference of the Methodist Episcopal church, where he occupied several important posts. After a few years he was elected corresponding secretary of the Freedmen's Aid Commission, an undenominational society. He remained in this office until August, 1866, when, on the organization of the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, he was chosen its first corresponding secretary, and he has been officially connected with it ever since, being its president at the present time. In 1868 he was elected one of the publishing agents of the Western Methodist book concern, and he held that post sixteen years. He was a member of every general conference from 1868 till 1884, when he was elected bishop. He is a man of great industry and capacity for business   and giving attention to energy thing that is committed to his care. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, p. 320.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 1, pp. 330-331;

WALDEN, JOHN MORGAN (February 11, I831- January 21, 1914), bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, was born near Lebanon, Ohio; the son of Jesse and Matilda (Morgan) Walden, who moved to Hamilton County in 1832. He was of Virginian ancestry, his great-grandfather Walden having moved from Culpeper County to Kentucky in 1770, and his grandfather, Benjamin, to Ohio in 1802. After the death of his mother in 1833 John went to live with relatives near Cincinnati. He attended a local school until 1844, when he went to work. Becoming a wanderer, he found employment as a carpenter, in a country store and post office, and in connection with theatrical performances. A carpenter for whom he worked interested him in Thomas Paine's writings, and he became a skeptic. He read extensively in Scott and Goldsmith and wrote romantic stories over the name of Ned Law for the Hamilton, Ohio, Telegraph (1849-53). After attending Farmers' College, College Hill, Ohio, in 1849, he taught for a year in Miami County, where he was converted by a Methodist circuit rider. Returning to Farmers' College he was graduated in 1852 and for two years was a teacher there.

In 1854 he went to Fairfield, Illinois, where he published the Independent Press, opposing in his editorials the liquor traffic and "squatter sovereignty." The Illinoisans starved him out by refusing to support his paper, and in 1855 he returned to Ohio, where he reported for the Cincinnati Commercial. So deeply interested in the Kansas troubles did he become while reporting the National Democratic Convention of 1856 that he went to Kansas, where he established the Quindaro Chindowan, a free-soil organ. He was a delegate to five free-state conventions, including the Leavenworth constitutional convention (1858). That same year he campaigned over half the Territory, opposing the Lecompton constitution.

On September 8, 1858, he was admitted on trial to the Cincinnati Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The first two years of his ministry were spent on circuits, and on July 3, 1859, he married Martha Young of Cheviot, Ohio. In 1860 he was admitted to the Conference in full connection and sent to the York Street Church, Cincinnati. While he was here the Civil War began, and he became very active and raised two regiments to defend the city against threatening attack. After service in connection with the Ladies' Home

Mission in Cincinnati (1862-64) and as corresponding secretary of the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission and of the Methodist Freedmen's Aid Society, he became in 1867 presiding elder of the East Cincinnati District. The following year he was chosen an assistant agent of the Wes tern Methodist Book Concern. His penchant for statistics and organization, his business ability, and his sympathetic cooperation with preachers made the Concern a financial success.

At the General Conference of 1884 he was elected bishop. In his official capacity he presided at some time over every Conference in the United States and inspected Methodist missionary work in Mexico, South America, Europe, China, and Japan, doing much to shape the missionary policy of his Church. He was a delegate to the Ecumenical Conferences in London, 1881., Washington, 1891, and Toronto, 1911. With respect to church organization he insisted upon strict adherence to the written law, but otherwise he was liberal in his views. He was noted for his wit and for his optimistic spirit. He was happiest when, attired in a white slouch hat and linen duster, he started out for a day's recreation with fish bait in his pocket. His wife and three of his five children survived him. In recognition of his work for the colored race the name of Central Tennessee College, in Nashville, was changed in 1900 to Walden University.

[D. H. Moore, John Morgan Walden (1915); Biographical Cyclopedia and Portrait Gallery ... of the State of Ohio, volume V (n. d.); The Biographical Encyclopedia of Ohio of the Nineteenth Century (1876); H. C. Jennings, "Bishop John Morgan Walden," Journal of the Twenty-seventh Dele gated General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1916); C. T. Greve, Centennial History of Cincinnati and Representative Citizen s (1904), volume II; Who's Who in America, 1912-13; Cincinnati Enquirer, January 22, and Cincinnati Times-Star, January 28, 1914; Walden Papers, in possession of Mrs. S. O. Royal.]

W. E. S-h.


WALKER, Amasa, 1799-1875, Boston, Massachusetts, political economist, abolitionist.  Anti-slavery Republican U.S. Congressman from Massachusetts.  Active and vigorous opponent of slavery.  Walker was an early supporter of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, 1834.  He submitted a resolution outlining the objectives of the Society to be the principles of religion, philanthropy and patriotism.  American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) Manager, 1837-1840, 1840-1841, 1843-1844, Counsellor, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1840-1841.  Co-founder of Free Soil Party in 1848.  Served in Congress December 1862 through March 1863. 

(Filler, 1960, pp. 60, 254; Mabee, 1970, pp. 258, 340, 403n25; Sewell, 1976, pp. 9, 26, 48, 166, 219; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, pp. 324-325; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 1, p. 338; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 22, p. 485; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe); Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 1.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 223-230; Annual Report of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, 1834)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography :

WALKER, Amasa, political economist, born  in Woodstock, Conn., 4 May, 1799;died  in Brookfield, Massachusetts, 29 Oct., 1875. He received a district-school education in North Brookfield, where among his fellow-students was William C. Bryant. In 1814 he entered commercial life, and in 1820 formed a partnership with Allen Newell in North Brookfield, but three years later withdrew to become the agent of the Methuen manufacturing company. In 1825 he formed with Charles G. Carleton the firm of Carleton and Walker, of Boston, Massachusetts, but in 1827 he went into business independently. In 1840 he withdrew permanently from commercial affairs, and in 1842 he went to Oberlin, Ohio, on account of his great interest in the college there, and gave lectures on political economy at that institution until 1848. After serving in the legislature, he became the Free-soil and Democratic candidate for speaker, and in 1849 was chosen to the Massachusetts senate, where he introduced a plan for a sealed-ballot law, which was enacted in 1851, and carried a bill providing that Webster's Dictionary should be introduced into the common schools of Massachusetts. He was elected secretary of state in 1851, re-elected in 1852, and in 1853 was chosen a member of the convention for revising the state constitution, becoming the chairman of the committee on suffrage. He was appointed in 1853 one of the examiners in political economy in Harvard, and held that office until 1860, and in 1859 he began an annual course of lectures on that subject in Amherst, which he continued until 1869. Meanwhile, in 1859, he was again elected to the Massachusetts legislature, and in 1860 he was chosen a member of the electoral college of that state, casting his ballot for Abraham Lincoln. He was also elected as a Republican to congress, and served from 1 Dec., 1862, till 3 March, 1863. Mr. Walker is best known for his work in advocating new and reformatory measures. In 1839 he urged a continuous all-rail route of communication between Boston and Mississippi river, and during the same year he became president of the Boston temperance society, the first total abstinence association in that city. He was active in the anti-slavery movement, though not to the extent of recommending unconstitutional methods for its abolition, and in 1848 he was one of the founders of the Free-soil party. Mr. Walker was a member of the first International peace congress in London in 1843, and was one of its vice-presidents, and in 1849 he held the same office in the congress in Paris. The degree of LL. D. was conferred on him by Amherst in 1867. In 1857 he began the publication of a series of articles on political economy in “Hunt's Merchant's Magazine,” and he was accepted as an authority on questions of finance. Besides other contributions to magazines, he published “Nature and Uses of Money and Mixed Currency” (Boston, 1857), and “Science of Wealth, a Manual of Political Economy” (1866), of which eight editions have been sold, and it has been translated into Italian. With William B. Calhoun and Charles L. Flint he issued “Transactions of the Agricultural Societies of Massachusetts” (7 vols., 1848-'54).

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, pp. 324-325; Holmes Ammidown, Historical Collections (1874), volume II; F. Walker, Memoir of Hon. Amasa Walker, LL.D. (1888), Biographical Directory American Congress (1928).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 1, p. 338;

WALKER, AMASA (May 4, 1799-0ct. 29, 1875), business man, economist, congressman, was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, the son of Walter and Priscilla (Carpenter) Walker, and a descendant of Samuel Walker of Lynn, Massachusetts, who came to New England about 1630. His childhood was spent in Brookfield; Massachusetts, to which place his parents moved not long after his birth. Here he attended the district school and Worked on the farm-or for the card manufacturers of Leicester at seventy-five cents a week-until he was fifteen years old, when he became a clerk in a country store. During the next six years he varied this employment by farm work, by teaching, and by an attempt to prepare for Amherst College which failed because of his frail health. At twenty-one, with a partner, he purchased a store in West Brookfield, but three years later sold his share in the small business and became an agent for the Methuen Manufacturing Company. His next move carried him to Boston, where in 1825 he established a boot-and-shoe store with Charles G. Carleton, whose sister Emeline he married on July 6, 1826. Her death occurred two years later, and on June 23, 1834, he married Hannah Ambrose of Concord, New Hampshire. To this marriage three children were born.

While he was extending his business southward and westward from Boston, Walker's attention was drawn to the railroad as the coming means of transportation. In a series of articles published in the Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot in 1835, under the signature "South Market Street," he urged the building of a railroad to connect Boston and Albany; he was also one of a committee to visit Albany in order to induce the citizens of that city to build their end of such a road. Four years later, on a trip to the West, he presented to audiences in St. Louis and Alton, Illinois, the desirability of a railroad connecting Boston with the Mississippi River, but his suggestion that the time would come when a man might travel from Boston to St. Louis eating and sleeping on the train provoked only mirth.

In 1840, being now provided with a modest livelihood despite heavy losses in the panic of 1837, he retired from business, partly because of ill health but also because he wished to devote his time to study and to public service. The first months after his retirement were spent in Florida in search of health, but for the most part the years which followed were crowded with activities. In 1842 he visited Oberlin College, which he had helped to found, and for seven years thereafter, at irregular intervals and without remuneration, he. lectured at Oberlin on political economy. From 1853 to 1860 he was an examiner in political economy at Harvard, and from 1860 to 1869 he lectured at Amherst College.

Walker's special interest in the field of economics was the monetary system, to which he had turned his attention after the panic of 1837. In 1857 he published in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review a series of articles on the subject, which also appeared in pamphlet form as The Nature and Uses of Money and Mixed Currency (1857); The panic of 1857 gave him an opportunity to put his opinions to practical test. When the business men of Boston agreed to maintain specie payment in that city Walker argued that it could not be done for more than two weeks and that the tightening of credit necessitated by the effort would result in the ruin of many business houses. His proposal that the suspension should take place at once met with shocked opposition; but twelve days later, after a number of failures, suspension was forced upon the Boston banks. The publicity which this episode gained brought him much into demand as a speaker on currency problems. His most considerable publication, The Science of Wealth: A Manual of Political Economy (1866), was widely read and in 1876 was quoted by Walker's son, Francis Amasa Walker [q.v.], in his better-known work, The Wages Question (pp. 141, 231). Amansa Walker's qualifications for the authorship of his treatise he described as "a practical knowledge of business and banking affairs generally, and a most earnest and persistent search for the truth in all matters appertaining to my favorite science" (Science of Wealth), p. ix).

In politics, Walker was successively a Clay protectionist, a member of the Anti-Masonic party, a Democrat, a Free-Soiler, and a Republican. In 1848 he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and was the candidate of Free-Soilers and Democrats for speaker. The next autumn he entered the state Senate. In 1851 and 1852 he was secretary of state of Massachusetts, and the following year he served as chairman of the committee on suffrage of the constitutional. convention of the state. In 1859 he was chosen for a second term in the state House of Representatives, where he assisted in revising the Massachusetts banking laws. Elected as a Republican to fill a vacancy in Congress (December 1, 1862-March 3, 1863), he joined in the monetary debates of that body and throughout the remainder of his life, both in his private correspondence and in articles in periodicals, he frequently expressed his views on monetary questions, especially his belief in the need for contraction of the currency.

During the. years after his retirement from business Walker lived in the Brookfield residence which had belonged to his father. He was president of the Boston Temperance Society in 1839; ten years. earlier he had been a founder and the first secretary of the Boston Lyceum. Though warmly attached to the anti-slavery cause, he insisted that more form must be accomplished by constitutional means. His heart was also enlisted in the cause of world peace and as vice-president he attended the International Peace Congress held in England in 1844 and the Paris Congress of 1849.

[Holmes Ammidown, Historical Collections (1874), volume II; F. Walker, Memoir of Hon. Amasa Walker, LL.D. (1888), reproduced from New-England Historical and Genealogical Register, April 1888; New-England Historical and Genealogy Register, January 1898; J.P. Munroe, A Life of Francis Amasa-Walker (1923); D. I. Hurd, History of Worcester County, Massachusetts (1889); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Boston Transcript, October 29, 1875; Hugh McCulloch Papers, volume III, Library of Congress]  

E. D.


WALLACE, LEWIS (April 10, 1827-February 15, 1905), lawyer, soldier, diplomat, author, commonly known as "Lew" Wallace, He campaigned against Zackary Taylor for president in 1848, and edited a Free-Soil paper. Author of popular novel Ben-Hur. Lew Wallace, An Autobiography, (1906).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 1, pp. 375-376.

WALLACE, LEWIS  (April 10, 1827-February 15, 1905), lawyer, soldier, diplomat, author, commonly known as "Lew" Wallace, was born at Brookville, Indiana, the son of David [q.v.] and Esther French (Test) Wallace. His mother, to whom he was deeply attached, died during his boyhood. He early displayed a love of adventure; his father tried to keep him in school, but the boy was irked by ordinary tasks and preferred to draw caricatures or to play truant. As he grew older, however, he carried his books to the woods as often as his gun and rod. When his father was elected governor of Indiana in 1837 and the family moved to Indianapolis, Lew's zest for reading was stimulated by the advantages of th e state library. Before he was sixteen he began to support himself by copying records in the county clerk's office. About the same time, Prescott's Conquest of Mexico made such a deep impression upon him that he determined to write upon the theme. Thus, The Fair God of later years had its inception. In 1844-45 he reported the proceedings of the Indiana House of Representatives for the Indianapolis Daily Journal, and soon afterwards began the study of law in his father's office. When the Mexican War began, he raised a company of which he became second lieutenant and which was assigned to the 1st Indiana Infantry. His services in Mexico gave him experience without involving him in the dangers of any serious engagement. He campaigned against Taylor in 1848 and edited a Free-Soil paper, chiefly because of resentment against Taylor's treatment of the Indiana regiments. Following the campaign he became a Democrat. Admitted to the bar in 1849 he began practice in Indianapolis. Soon he moved to Covington, and in 1850 and 1852 was elected prosecuting attorney. In 1853 he changed his residence to Crawfordsville, and in 1856 was elected to the state Senate. There he advocated a reform in divorce laws and in 1859 proposed the popular election of United States senators. In the summer of 1856 he had organized a military company at Crawfordsville which he drilled so efficiently that most of its members became officers in the Civil War. After Fort Sumter was fired upon, Governor O. P. Morton [q.v.] made him adjutant-general of the state. Within a week he had 130 companies in camp, seventy more than the state quota, and was made colonel of the 11th Regiment. Soon at the front, he helped to capture Romney, on the South Branch of the Potomac, and to evict the enemy from Harpers Ferry. An excellent disciplinarian and popular with his men, he was promoted rapidly. On September 3, 1861, he was made a brigadier-general and on March 21, 1862, after his service at the capture of Fort Donelson, Tennessee, a major-general. Unfortunately, he incurred the ill will of General Halleck, who twice removed him from command; the first time he was restored by President Lincoln, the second time, by General Grant. In November 1862, he was president of the military commission that investigated the operations of the army under Major-General Don Carlos Buell [q.v.]. The following year he saved Cincinnati from capture by General E. Kirby-Smith [q.v.], after which event the President gave him command of the Middle Division and VIII Army Corps, with headquarters at Baltimore. With 5,800 men, part of them inexperienced, he held a force of 28,000 under General Jubal A. Early [q.v.] at the Monocacy, July 9, 1864. Though defeated, he probably saved Washington from capture, and was highly commended by Grant in his Memoirs (post, II, 306). He served on the court martial which tried the assassins of Lincoln, and was president of the court that tried and convicted Henry Wirz [q.v.], commandant of Andersonville Prison. At the close of the war he undertook to procure munitions and to raise a corps of veterans for the Mexican liberals, and spent some time in Mexico. Returning to Crawfordsville, he practised law, and in 1870 was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket. In 1878 he was appointed governor of New Mexico, serving until 1881, when President Garfield appointed him minister to Turkey. There he lived for four years, 1881-85, winning the confidence of the Sultan to an unusual degree. In 1890 he declined an offer of the mission to Brazil tendered by President Harrison. Wallace is best known, however, as a man of letters. In 1873 he published The Fair God, a story of the conquest of Mexico, which won him wide recognition. The fame thus attained was greatly enhanced by Ben Hur; A Tale of the Christ (1880), of which 300,000 copies were sold within ten years. It was translated into a number of foreign languages, including Arabic and Chinese, and was successfully dramatized. The extraordinary success of this work was largely due to the fact that the greatest figure in history was with the deepest reverence brought into a strong story dramatically told. Among his other publications were The Life of Benjamin Harrison (1888), written for campaign purposes; The Boyhood of Christ (1888); The Prince of India (1893), inspired by his stay in Constantinople; and The Wooing of  Malkatoon (1898), a poem, with which was included Commodu1, a tragedy, written many years earlier. In 1906 appeared Lew Wallace, An Autobiography, which Wallace had brought down only to 1864, but which was sketchily completed by his wife and Mary H. Krout. On May 6, 1852, he married Susan Arnold (December 25, 1830-October 1, 1907), born in Crawfordsville, the daughter of Colonel Isaac C. and Maria Aken Elston. Fifty years later he called her "a composite of genius, common-sense, and all best womanly qualities" (Autobiography, I, 209). She was a frequent contributor to newspapers and periodicals, and one of her poems, "The Patter of Little Feet," had wide popularity. Other publications by her include The Storied Sea (1883); Ginevra: or The Old Oak Chest (1887); The Land of the Pueblos (1888); and The Repose in Egypt (1888). Wallace's poise and urbanity marked him as a man of the world, yet he was simple in taste and democratic in ideals. For politics he had no aptitude; the law he did not like; the military life challenged his adventurous spirit but could not hold him after his country had no special use for his services; art, music, and literature were his most vital and permanent interests. Many a young person had reason to remember the gracious hospitality of his study, built as "a pleasure-house for my soul." Never a church member, he believed in the divinity of Christ. His last years were serene. He lectured frequently and received unstinted praise. He died at Crawfordsville, and five years after his death his statue was unveiled in the Capitol at Washington as representative of the state of Indiana.

[In addition to the Autobiography, see Commemorative Biographical Record of Prominent and Representative Men of Indianapolis and Vicinity (1908); J. P. Dunn, Greater Indianapolis (1910), volume II; M. H. Krout, "Personal Record of Lew Wallace," Harper's Weekly, March 18, 1905; Meredith Nicholson, in Review of Reviews, April 1905; New York Tribune, Indianapolis Star, Indianapolis News and Daily Sentinel (Indianapolis), February 16, 1905; Senate Doc. 503, 61 Congress, 2 Session; War of the Rebellion: Official Records (Army); Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (2 volumes, 1885-86).] A.L.L. port 1335, 62 Congress, 3

J.H.J.P.


WARD, Samuel Ringgold, 1817-1866, New York, American Missionary Association (AMA), African American, abolitionist leader, newspaper editor, author, orator, clergyman.  Member of the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party.  Wrote Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada and England, 1855.  Lecturer for American Anti-Slavery Society.  Member and contributor to the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada.

(Dumond, 1961, p. 330; Mabee, 1970, pp. 128, 135, 136, 294, 307, 400n19; Sernett, 2002, pp. 54-55, 62-64, 94, 117, 121, 126, 142, 149, 157-159, 169, 171-172; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 34, 46, 48, 53, 166, 446-447, 454; Sewell, 1976, pp. 101, 160; Sorin, 1971, pp. 85-89, 96, 104, 132; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 1, p. 440; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 22, p. 649; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 11, p. 380; See Ward's Autobiography; W. J. Wilson, "A Leaf from my Scrap Book ...," Autographs for Freedom, volume II (1854), ed. by Julia Griffiths; Journal of Negro History, October 1925)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 1, p. 440;

WARD, SAMUEL RINGGOLD (October 17, 1817-1866 ?), negro abolitionist, was born of slave parents on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His parents ran away to Greenwich, New Jersey, in 1820. Six years later they removed to New York where the boy received an elementary education and became a teacher in colored schools. He was married in 1838 to a Miss Reynolds. His ability as a public speaker attracted the attention of Lewis Tappan [q.v.] and others and led to his appointment in 1839 as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society from which he was soon transferred to the service of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. Licensed to preach by the New York Congregational (General) Association in 1839, he subsequently held two pastorates, at South Butler, Wayne County, New York, from 1841 to 1843, where his congregation was entirely white, and at Cortland, New York, from 1846 to 1851. He resigned the earlier pastorate because of throat trouble and subsequently studied medicine for a few months. He resumed his antislavery labors in 1844 with the Liberty Party and spoke in almost every state oi the North. In 1851 he removed to Syracuse where, in October of that year, he took an active part in the rescue of the negro fugitive Jerry. Fearing arrest, he fled to Canada where he became an agent of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. He organized branches of the society, lectured, and le nt assistance to the numerous fugitives in Canada. In April 1853 he was sent to England to secure financial aid for the Canadian effort and with the help of a committee raised the sum of 1,200 [pounds] in ten months.

He spoke at both the 1853 and 1854 meetings of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and delivered numerous other addresses during his stay in Great Britain. He attracted the interest of some of the nobility and met many of the leading philanthropists. His Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (London, 1855), records that John Candler, of Chelmsford, a Quaker, presented him with fifty acres of land in the parish of St. George, Jamaica, and he apparently accepted the gift, for about 1855 he went to Jamaica and in Kingston became the pastor of a small body of Baptists. He continued in this post until early in 1860 when he left Kingston and settled in St. George Parish. The new venture did not prosper and he died in great poverty in or after 1866. During his pastorate in Kingston he is said to have exercised a powerful influence over the colored population and was the head of a political party which controlled local elections. In 1866 he published in Jamaica his Reflections Upon the Gordon Rebellion. Ward's extraordinary oratorical ability is mentioned by a number of his contemporaries. He was frequently advertised during his lecture tours as "the black Daniel Webster."

[See Ward's Autobiography; W. J. Wilson, "A Leaf from my Scrap Book ...," Autographs for Freedom, volume II (1854), ed. by Julia Griffiths; Journal of Negro History, October 1925; information from Mr. Frank Cundall, of the Institute of Jamaica, and from Lord Olivier.]

F.L.


WATTLES, Augustus, 1807-1883, established school for free Blacks.  Agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  Worked with Emigrant Aid Society in Lawrence, Kansas.  Edited Herald of Freedom. 

(Dumond, 1961, pp. 164-165; Mabee, 1970, pp. 104, 155, 394n31, 403n29)


WHITE, W. A., U.S. Congressman, member of the Free Soil Party.

(Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 345; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).


WHITMAN, Walt, 1819-1892, poet, essayist, journalist. Wrote antislavery poetry.  Supported the Wilmot Proviso and was opposed to the inclusion of slavery in the new territories.  His poetry presented his views on the equality of the races.  Supported the abolition of slavery, but did not necessarily support the tactics of the abolitionist movement.  Member of the Free Soil Committee for Brooklyn and writer for the Brooklyn Freeman, a Free Soil newspaper.  In 1856, he wrote to the people of the South, in an unpublished work, “You are either to abolish slavery, or it will abolish you.”

(Hughes, Meltzer, & Lincoln, 1968; Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, pp. 485-486;

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, p. 143)

WHITMAN, WALT (May 31, 1819-March 26, 1892), poet, was born at West Hills, in the town of Huntington, Long Island, of parents in whom Dutch and English blood predominated. His first known ancestor, Joseph Whitman, seems to have come from England to Stratford, Connecticut, and thence to Huntington about 1660. The family settled as farmer s in the hamlet of West Hills, where Nehemiah Whitman, the poet's great-grandfather, owned several hundred acres, worked by slaves. Nehemiah's widow is said by the poet to have been a great swarthy woman who smoked tobacco and swore at her slaves from the back of a vicious horse which she rode like a man. Their son Jesse married Hannah Brush, a schoolmistress, in 1775, and one of his children was Walter Whitman (1789-1855), the father of the poet. Walter, who added the occupation of carpenter to that of farmer, was a large, silent man; he inherited a leaning toward the Quakers and toward Elias Hicks [q.v.], the famous preacher 'whom the poet himself was always to remember and revere. The son, given his father's name; signed it to his writings until 1855, when he changed it to Walt, as he had been known at home. His father was married in 1816 to Louisa Van Velsor (1795-1873), of Cold Spring, Huntington. Her father, Major Cornelius Van Velsor, a horse-breeder whose joviality and stout red face his grandson liked to celebrate, was pure Dutch, but he had married a woman (Amy Williams) of Welsh descent and Quaker leanings. The poet has had more to say about his mother than about his father; she was not educated, but in sympathy and understanding she was "perfect," and his relations to her were always very close. He was the second of nine children, the eldest and youngest of whom were mentally defective.

In 1823 or shortly thereafter the family moved to Brooklyn, then a town of less than 10,000 inhabitants. Here the poet spent a few years in the public schools, later being remembered by one of his teachers as "a big, good-natured lad, clumsy and slovenly in appearance, but not otherwise .remarkable" (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, xxvi). In the summers he was taken on visits back to Huntington and to other places on Long Island, and he was subsequently to believe that the early knowledge thus gained of life on farm and seashore, among haymakers, eel-fishers, baymen, and pilots, was one of the few important influences upon his work. The shore, both then and during his young manhood, drew him to it whenever he was free; "I loved, after bathing, to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour" (Autobiographia, pp. 23-24). But he was to be a poet of cities as well as of the sea, and his reminiscences in later life were also of the Brooklyn he had known as a boy, with its old houses and its winding streets, and with its ferries that went across the East River to New York.

His schooling ended in his thirteenth year, or possibly in his eleventh (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, xxvii). At eleven he was an office boy first for a lawyer and then for a doctor, the lawyer's son subscribing for him to a circulating library which introduced him to the Arabian Nights and to Sir Walter Scott. In the summer of his thirteenth year he became a printer's devil in the office of the Long Island Patriot, whence he went in the same capacity to the Long Island Star. This w.as the beginning of his long acquaintance with newspapers, and of a career which during three decades was to identify him with a bewildering number of editorial offices. Between 1833, when his family moved back to Long Island, and 1836, when he joined them there for a brief while, he may have been a journeyman compositor in Brooklyn and New York, making occasional contributions to the papers he worked for and getting his first taste of the theatre and the opera, those mainstays of his education a little later on.

Between 1836 and 1841 he confined his wanderings to Long Island, teaching seven schools in as many towns and editing the Long Islander at Huntington in 1838-39. His contributions to this and other local papers were conventional in their youthful sentiment, the verses dealing generally with the themes of loneliness, unrequited affection, and the grave. In 1839-40, when he alternated between teaching and typesetting at Jamaica, he impressed the wife of his employer, the publisher of the Long Island Democrat, as "a dreamy, impracticable youth," "untidy," "inordinately indolent," "morose," "not at all in tune with his surroundings," and insultingly indifferent to children. "He was a genius who lived, apparently, in a world of his own" (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, xxxiii-xxxiv). This world included books among other things, for he was beginning by his own later testimony to read the Bible, Shakespeare, Ossian, the Greek tragic poets, the ancient Hindu poets, the Nibelungenlied, the poems of Scott, and Dante. He was also interested in politics; he electioneered as a Democrat in Queens County in 1840, and in 1841 he was one of several speakers at a Tammany mass meeting in City Hall Park, New York. Yet even this early it would appear that his thoughts turned frequently in upon himself.

From 1841 to 1848 Whitman was associated with at least ten newspapers or magazines in New York and Brooklyn: the Aurora, the Sun, the Tattler, Brother Jonathan, the Statesman, the Democrat, the American Review, the Columbian, the Democratic Review, and the Brooklyn Eagle. The two last were the most important. The Democratic Review was the best literary journal of the day, which meant that Whitman's contributions to it between 1841 and 1845 admitted him to the company of Hawthorne, Poe, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Thoreau, and Whittier. His contributions were not poems but stories- now in the manner of Hawthorne, now in the manner of Poe; sentimental, melancholy, and melodramatic. The few poems he printed elsewhere, while they were competent exercises in conventional verse forms, had nothing either of the method or of the quality which eventually were to distinguish his poetry from that of all others. Their subject matter also was routine, as was that of a temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, a Tale of the Times, which Whitman wrote for an extra issue of the New World in 1842, and which in its bombast and bathos failed to raise itself above the level of rhetoric on which a great deal of reform literature was being written at the moment. All the while Whitman was familiarizing himself with the varied life of the metropolis; he sauntered about the streets, haunted the omnibuses and ferries, became intimate with drivers and pilots, strolled off to the beaches and the bathing crowds, went regularly to the Bowery Theatre to see Fanny Kemble, the younger Kean, the elder Booth, Macready, Edwin Forrest, and Charlotte Cushman, listened to public speeches, and intoxicated himself at the opera with the "vocalism of sun-bright Italy." When in January 1846 he became editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a Democratic newspaper, his was equipped both by his personal and by his professional experience to conduct, as he did for two years, a brisk editorial page which was on the whole enlightened and well written, though naturally it never gave expression to a soul which even in these busy years was possessed with a sense of separateness and bewilderment. Whitman supported most of the contemporary reforms, local and national; he reviewed as many as 200 new books; he celebrated the joys of living in Brooklyn; and on the question of slavery he moved rapidly in the Free-Soil direction-losing his position, indeed, when in January 1848 he protested too vehemently against the failure of the Democratic party to face the issue of slavery in the new states. He was once more without a job.

Within a month, however, he was on his way south, having contracted in a theatre lobby to write for the New Orleans Crescent. With his brother Jeff he spent two weeks in February crossing Pennsylvania and Virginia and steaming down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers toward a different sort of city from any that he had known. New Orleans undoubtedly charmed him. His work was not arduous, so that he had ample leisure for exploring the markets, the levees, the barrooms, the sidewalks, and the cemeteries. Certain of his sketches for the Crescent indicate a susceptibility to the women of New Orleans. But it is not necessary to believe the legend that he fell in love with one of these and that the attachment colored all of his later life and work. His statement to John Addington Symonds in 1890 that he was the father of six illegitimate children was not accepted by some of his best friends as true, nor is it more generally credited; and even if it was true there is no evidence that the mother of any of the children had been met in New Orleans. Vague assertions by Whitman in his old age concerning later trips to the South have transferred the scene of his "romance" elsewhere; but it remains doubtful whether he took any such trips. The poem, "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City," has been offered as evidence; but a manuscript version of this poem (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, II, 102-03) reveals that it originally referred to an attachment with a man, not a woman. Nor is it possible to say with certainty that Whitman began now, and only now, to write his characteristic poetry; one of his notebooks (Ibid., II, 63 ff.) ·makes it reasonably clear that he was experimenting introspectively with sexual themes before 1848. The importance of the residence in New Orleans can easily be exaggerated, though it may be significant in that it introduced Whitman to a portion of the country he would never have seen otherwise. As for a romance, it is just as conceivable that he failed to find one there, and that this failure-in a scene so suitable for it-precipitated the lonely Leaves of Grass. At any rate, Whitman left New Orleans with his brother after three months, coming home by way of St. Louis, Chicago, the Great Lakes, Niagara Falls, Albany, and the Hudson.

In Brooklyn he returned ostensibly to journalism, writing for the Freeman, a Barnburner paper, in 1848-49, for the Daily Advertiser in 1850, and for various unknown papers between 1850 and 1854. For two years, 1857-59, he edited the Brooklyn Times, and in 1861-62 he published a long series of articles on the early history of Brooklyn in the Standard. But he had returned, as only he knew for the. time being, to something of much greater importance to himself than journalism. For it was now that he entered definitely upon the seven-year period which came to its end and climax with the publication l in 1855 of Leaves of Grass.

It has been customary to suppose that Whitman passed through some mystical experience shortly before he wrote the twelve poems which composed the first edition of Leaves of Grass, and that this experience consisted in his having a sudden, full apprehension of himself. It is likely that his state of mind throughout the early 185o's was extraordinary, since the book which resulted was extraordinary; but his knowledge of himself was a much older thing. The illumination, if illumination there was, would appear to have been a discovery not of his own nature, which he already knew too well, but of a way in which that nature might be presented to the world and so justified. His existence up to this point must have seemed unsatisfactory to him, not only because in the outward matter of a profession he had managed to be little more than a knockabout journalist, but also, and this is more important, because in inward matters pertaining to his own soul he had been forced to realize how unlike the rest of the world he was. He was to celebrate himself as an "average man," and was always to insist that Leaves of Grass had no other value than that; yet he was anything but an average men, and, ignorant though he may have remained concerning his fundamental nature, he must have admitted his uniqueness long before 1850. Early and late his writings bear testimony to the sense of isolation which pursued him. His passion for rubbing through crowds on ferries and buses was not the passion of one whose need for society is normally satisfied. The theme of separation is constant in his work, both prose and verse. He was reserved to the end, so that among his final worshippers there was not one who knew whether he had ever enjoyed his complete confidence.

He was tall and heavy, but he was not the robust individual he claimed to be. Both his body and his mind moved slowly, dreamily. His eyes, as may best be seen in the portraits of 1855, 1863, and 1869, were heavy-lidded and uncommunicative; Emerson spoke of them as "terrible"; John Burroughs called them "dumb, yearning, relentless, immodest, unhuman" (Barrus, post, p. 15). Burroughs also is authority for the statement that Whitman's body was "that of a child," and that there was always "something fine, delicate, womanly in him" (Ibid., p. 265). He was more than moderate in his habits, he was fastidious; he never smoked. He was fond of cooking, bathing, and nursing, and he always paid the strictest attention to the dress both of himself and of his acquaintances. As a very young man he was a dandy; after he came back from New Orleans he cultivated the rough garments which in the early photographs made him famous; later on, in Washington, he carefully prescribed the fashion in which his shirts should be made, and invariably wore a gray suit; in his old age his open, lace-edged collar revealed a smooth, delicate neck, he wore in his shirt-bosom a pearl stud approximately an inch in diameter, and he regularly bathed his face and hands with eau de cologne.

Earlier than 1850 he must have recognized that his impulses were extraordinary. He was inordinately excitable by things and persons that touched him, and his notebooks of 1847 (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, II, 63) show how painfully conscious of the fact he was. He has been called autoerotic, erethistic, and homosexual; nor is it possible to doubt that some such extremes of nomenclature are necessary to explain certain passages in the "Song of Myself." For in those passages he does not seem to be inventing aptitudes and habits for himself; they could not have been invented, and furthermore, whatever deliberate construction he may have seen fit then or later to place upon them, their treatment retains many a trace of the uneasiness and the terror which a contemplation of them had inspired in him. That he loved men more than women was a fact which he was subsequently to erect into a reason for claiming special insight into the principle upon which democracies would hold together. The fact remains, however, that love for his own sex is the only kind of love about which he is ever personal or convincing, and that in his correspondence he reserves the word "darling" for his mother and for young men alone.

All this has nothing to do with his being a great poet, but it has much to do with the state of mind out of which Leaves of Grass grew with such slow and conscious effort. That effort was put forth both by the artist and by the man-was put forth by the man, indeed, in order that he might become an artist and so free himself from the slavery of self-contemplation. Leaves of Grass purports to be a poem about "Myself." But in one very important sense it is not personal at all. Or if it is personal, it exploits two selves in Whitman, one natural and one created. The created self is the one which the world has enjoyed, and it is one of the most magnificent fabrications of modern times. Whitman discovered the way to it through a number of channels, the broadest and deepest of these being undoubtedly his reading. Mention has been made of his early acquaintance with Scott and Homer and Shakespeare, the last of whom he knew in the theatre as well as from the printed page and continued throughout his life to discuss with significant eloquence. It is likely, however, that his immediate illumination came through intellectual contact with contemporaries. His review for the Eagle in 1846 of Goethe's autobiography shows how excited he was before the spectacle of a man who had explored the universe in terms of himself. Early and late Carlyle stood huge upon his horizon, helping him to find a prose style and convincing him that mystical significances could be discovered in the social behavior of men. Yet it was from Emerson that he caught the final, determining fire. Later on he denied this, attempting, unsuccessfully, to establish that he had never read Emerson before 1855 (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, 132). It is impossible to read either the early notebooks or the first edition of Leaves of Grass without feeling the presence of Emerson everywhere-in the epigrammatic style of the preface and the twelve poems, in the nature of the things said, and in the quality of the egoism. From Emerson he learned his fundamental lesson, that a man could accept and celebrate himself in cosmic language. He could transfer his vision from the eccentric, the unique self to the general, the impersonal one. He could move at once from doubt of Walt Whitman to faith in Man, of whom he might take what he called "Myself" as representative. Bound as he was to brood upon his own nature, he found in Emerson a way to do so which would legitimatize his emotions, liberate himself, and fascinate the world. He seems to have been assisted and supported in this acceptance of himself by the circumstance that in 1849 he had his "bumps" read at the phrenological cabinet of Fowler and Wells in New York and was told that he possessed an unusually high degree of every human quality. From the importance he attached to his own "chart of bumps" and to the claims of phrenology generally it would appear that the experience had convinced him of his signal sanity and his remarkable representativeness; it was thence, perhaps, that he gained the confidence to assert of himself in an anonymous review he wrote of Leaves of Grass in 1855 that he was "of pure American breed, large and lusty ... a naive, masculine, affectionate, contemplative, sensual, imperious person" (In Re Walt Whitman, p. 23).

At the same time that he experimented in his notebooks with a new form and mood of poetry he reflected also upon a possible career which he might have as an orator. He never surrendered, indeed, his vision of himself as one who might go forth among the American people and astonish them with fresh and forceful utterances. His notebooks show that he practised even the gestures of the platform, and there is abundant evidence that he devoted a great deal of his time to the planning and writing of lectures. The style of his poetry can best be explained in terms of his apprenticeship in declamation. His temper, however, was not the positive temper of the happy orator, and he seems to have recognized this, as he recognized that the printed broadsides which he also conceived as a medium of expression might not be the most satisfactory medium. At any rate it was to poetry that he applied himself with the greatest zeal in the years after his return from New Orleans, and it was through his poetry, much of which must have been written while he helped his father build houses in Brooklyn (1851-54), that he was to become famous around the world.

Whatever hopes of fame he had, however, were confounded by the reception of his first performance. Leaves of Grass, printed in 1855, was a failure with the public. It was a tall, thin volume containing a long preface in prose and twelve poems without titles. The preface rendered an Emersonian account of the relation between the miraculous universe and the no less miraculous soul of man; predicted the future greatness of the American people, who "of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature"; and prescribed the duties of the American poet, as well as suggested the broad rules of his art. The poems included those later to be known as "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "There was a Child Went Forth." The book was incomprehensible to some readers and shocking to others, and it still is one of the most difficult of all books to understand. The man who wrote it never fully understood himself-never, perhaps, understood how excellent he was merely as a poet, occupied as he was both then and later with the thought that he must be first of all a prophet. The complexity of his temperament explains the baffling way he took of gliding back and forth in these poems between his actual and his assumed self; the subtlety and the power of his faculties are evidenced everywhere by images and cadences beyond which no modern poet has gone in the direction either of explicitness or of ellipsis.

The book struck home here and there. A copy sent to Concord elicited the famous letter in which Emerson said: "I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy .... I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start" (Emory Holloway, Whitman. An Interpretation in Narrative, 1926, p. 118). Emerson was never to publish a word in praise of Whitman, and he is said to have recanted some of this praise in conversation; but he already had done enough. Whitman says he visited him soon in Brooklyn; certainly Thoreau and Bronson Alcott came down to see him, as Bryant came over from Manhattan. There were a few favorable reviews among many that were indignant or bewildered; in Putnam's Monthly Magazine for September 1855 Charles Eliot Norton in an unsigned article mingled disapprobation with astonished praise, confining to the secrecy of his desk a poem which he wrote at the same time in imitation of a book that had overwhelmed him against his will; and Edward Everett Hale was complimentary in the North American Review for January 1856 (unsigned, in "Critical Notices"). But for the most part the book fell dead from the printer's hands, and even the three rhapsodic reviews of it which Whitman himself wrote for the Brooklyn Times, the American Phrenological Journal, and the United States and Democratic Review failed of any noticeable effect. He could not have known at the moment that a few copies of Leaves of Grass had crossed the Atlantic to England, where in time they were to arouse a tempest of admiration.

After a brief retreat to eastern Long Island Whitman returned to the city "with the confirmed resolution, from which I never afterward wavered, to go on with my poetic enterprise in my own way and finish it as well as I could" (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, Iiii). By the next year, 1856, he had a second edition ready. This was printed by Fowler and Wells, and it included among twenty-one new poems "Salut au Monde," "Song of the Broad-Axe," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and "Song of the Open Road." Stamped on the back in gold letters was the unauthorized legend: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, R. W. Emerson." An appendix inside reprinted certain press notices and a long-letter from the author to Emerson, "dear Friend and Master." This edition was even more unfavorably received, an additional reason for dislike ·now being the presence of such exploitations, of the sexual theme · as "Spontaneous Me" and "A Woman Waits for Maine" Fowler and Wells, after selling, it is said, a thousand copies, refused to handle the volume any longer, and so it too fell into an apparent oblivion, though certain infatuated readers of it were to be heard from later.

The four years which elapsed before the third edition of 1860 were spent in necessary newspaper work and in writing more than a hundred new poems. It was during this time also, that Whitman began to frequent the "Bohemian" society of authors, actors, and artists at Pfaff's restaurant in New York, where he made valuable literary acquaintances. In 1859 he read to some friends a new poem which he called "A Word Out of the Sea" and which was immediately taken for publication by the Saturday Press, where the young John Burroughs saw it. Now known as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," this poem, upon which Whitman never improved more than perhaps once, gave full and perfect lyric expression to the emotions about death which he had only tentatively touched upon in the first two editions of his book. Henceforth love and death-love as longing and death as the satisfaction of longing-were to be his great themes, though the fact was not so easily apparent to most readers of the edition of 1860-61, which, brought out in Boston by the firm of Thayer and Eldridge, contained two new sections, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus." "Children of Adam" celebrated "amativeness," or the love of men and women; "Calamus" celebrated "adhesiveness," or the love of men for men. The first of these is treated from the greater distance, remaining "athletic" and abstract in Whitman's hands, and in a sense unreal; it is rather in the poems of comradeship or "manly love" that he is intimate and convincing. Only here does he employ the secondary but indispensable themes of bashfulness and jealousy; only here is he tenderly personal, so that one may believe him when he insists over and again that this is his true self speaking. And it is in association with the thought of an unattainable friendship that he utters most touchingly his philosophy of death.

The edition of 1860-61 sold better than either of the others, and Whitman's visit to Boston in connection with its printing brought about his meeting with William Douglas O'Connor [q.v.], who was to be his fiercest champion in future years. It also gave him an opportunity, he says, to talk at length with Emerson, who advised him in vain to expurgate his poems. But this edition too was ill fated. The Civil War reduced Thayer and Eldridge to bankruptcy and the book fell into the hands of pirates; Whitman once more was without a publisher. But the war itself was to engage both his body and his mind during the four years ahead.

The importance of the Civil War in Whitman's life was incalculable. Not only did it determine, Washington as his place of residence for eleven years; it influenced and modified every thought he had, and was the occasion of his last great burst of poetry. But he was not drawn into close contact with it until the end of 1862. During 1861 and 1862 he was contributing a series of twenty-five articles called "Brooklyniana" to the Brooklyn Standard, and in 1862 he wrote seven articles for the New York Leader, four of these dealing with the Broadway Hospital, where he spent some time in attendance upon the sick and wounded, both soldier and civilian. He lived at home with his mother, one of whose sons, George, the poet's junior by ten years, had enlisted in the 51st New York Volunteers, a Brooklyn regiment. He also was writing poems about the war, some of which were to be included in Drum Taps three years later. In December 1862 word came that George was wounded in Virginia. Whitman left immediately for Washington, where he happened upon his friend O'Connor and received assistance of a sort which enabled him to find his brother at Falmouth, Virginia, opposite Fredericksburg. George was recovered by this time, but Whitman saw enough wounded men and heard enough about battles at close range to realize that his life must somehow be involved with the war until it ended. Back in Washington after several days, he. accepted Mr. and Mrs. O'Connor's offer of a room in their house; and Major Hapgood, an army paymaster, gave him a desk in his office where he could earn a little money copying documents. Soon he was devoting himself to wounded soldiers, Northern and Southern, in the various huge hospitals about the city. He has left two records of this experience, his letters to his mother, published in 1902, and Memoranda During the War (1875). He may not have tended "from eighty thousand to a hundred thousand" soldiers, as he claimed, but there is ample testimony to the faithfulness of his services. He seems not to have been connected, unless for the briefest period, with the Christian Commission; he went entirely on his own, basket on arm, entering the wards in order to talk with the soldiers or read to them, to bring them gifts of oranges, jelly, and horehound candy, to furnish them with paper and envelopes and on occasion to write the letters which they dictated to their families, and even now and then to assist at dressings and operations. His subsequent paralysis he attributed to an infection which he received during these months of exposure to gangrene and fever. Whenever possible he made small gifts of money to the soldiers, out of a fund which he raised in Boston, Salem, Providence, Brooklyn, and New York. He made money for himself by contributions to the New York newspapers, and he attempted to secure a clerkship in some government office, but for the present without success.

He saw much of the O' Connors, since he lived with them, and of their friends, among whom was Edmund Clarence Stedman [q.v.], a frequent visitor and already an admirer of Whitman. In 1863 he was sought out by John Burroughs [q.v.], then living in Washington with his wife, and made to understand how much he had influenced the mind of the younger man; the attachment between the two was strong until the end of Whitman's life. There seem to have been no :meetings between Whitman and Lincoln, and if the story (H. B. Rankin, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1916, pp. 124-27) that Lincoln had read Leaves of Grass before he came to Washington is to be disbelieved (W. E. Barton, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, 1928, pp. 90-94) there is a probability that Lincoln never knew of the poet's existence. But Whitman saw the President a number of times as he rode in the city, and he liked to think that Lincoln was nodding to him from his horse. The death of Lincoln, occurring only a few weeks after Whitman had. secured his first clerkship, in the office of the Department of the Interior, was at any rate the occasion for Whitman's masterpiece, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," which was printed as a supplement to Walt Whitman's Drum Taps, already in the press (1865). Whitman's letters at the time reveal that he thought Drum Taps his best work (Perry, post, pp. 150-51), partly because it lacked the "perturbations" of Leaves of Grass. The remark is significant of a change which was coming over all his work. Henceforth it is mellower, less egocentric, less nervous, less raw. Henceforth it makes much of religion and the spiritual problems facing society. Henceforth, too, the poems reprinted in successive editions of Leaves of Grass, are tempered and shorn of certain excesses. The war, as well as advancing age, had completed the process in Whitman whereby his private nature was lost sight of in the great, gray, kindly figure of the legend.

On June 30, 1865, Whitman was dismissed from his position in the Department of the Interior. He was soon given another in the attorney- general's office, but since the reason for his dismissal had been Secretary Harlan's unwillingness to employ the author of a scandalous book there was occasion now to enlist a wider sympathy for Whitman than the book itself had aroused. O'Connor's pamphlet The Good Gray Poet, written in a blue heat of indignation and published in 1866, was the first published volume about Whitman. The second was Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), by John Burroughs. At least half of this was written by Whitman himself, who desired that the secret be kept until Burroughs' death, as it was. The Nates are passionate in their praise and often inaccurate in their information, but they have an interest as showing Whitman's prose style of the period, and as revealing how completely he had made Burroughs his disciple. Burroughs never included the Nates in his collected writings, but he wrote more than fifty other books and articles about Whitman before he died. The next year, 1868, O'Connor laid another stone in the foundation of the Whitman legend by contributing his story "The Carpenter," presenting the poet in a disguised and idealized form, to Putnam's Magazine for January. Meanwhile Whitman was finding friends and-admirers, as well as a number of enemies, abroad; and the next few years saw the beginning of his European vogue. Articles about him appeared in Germany in 1868 and in France, Denmark, and Hungary in 1872. Edward Dowden in Ireland was creating a group of enthusiastic readers, and in England the publication of an expurgated edition of Leaves of Grass by W. M. Rossetti (1868) put men like Swinburne, Edward Carpenter, and John Addington Symonds under the spell-Swinburne, however, only temporarily. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, the widow of Blake's biographer, read Rossetti's edition and wrote an article for the Boston Radical (May 1870) which particularly pleased Whitman as being the first tribute to him from a woman. The correspondence between the two which began in 1871 and continued until Mrs. Gilchrist's death in 1885, being interrupted only by her residence in Philadelphia for two years in order that she might be near the poet, is evidence that Mrs. Gilchrist's love was personal as well as literary, though Whitman could only give her friendship and esteem in return. His fame grew steadily, bringing him the first of his English visitors and stimulating a greater and greater amount of discussion in current periodicals.

Whitman's Washington period came to its close when in January 1873 he suffered a stroke of paralysis and was forced to leave for Camden, New Jersey, where his brother George took him into his house and where he shortly (May 23, 1873) was to witness the death of his mother. His illness and his bereavement were two blows from which he never recovered, and henceforth his life ran gradually downhill. Between 1865 and 1873, however, he had published two new editions of Leaves of Grass (1867 and 1871), Passage to India (1871), and the prose work Democratic Vistas (1871). Both of these latter works reveal again how he had tempered his message with time. "Passage to India," his last great poem, is among other things a recognition of the claims of the past upon our souls, and an admission that America needs all the support she can find in old ideas and religions. Democratic Vistas, written more or less in answer to Carlyle's Shooting Niagara, is remarkable for the frankness with which it discusses the shortcomings of American democracy so far; the reference of Whitman's idealism is now to the future, in which he still has faith-as, ultimately, he still has faith in the democratic masses of "These States."

Of the nineteen years which remained to him Whitman spent the first eleven in his brother's house in Stevens Street, Camden, and the last eight in a smaller house he had bought for himself at 328 Mickle Street. After eighteen months' absence from his position in the attorney-general's office at Washington he lost it, being henceforth dependent for his living upon his brother, upon friends, and upon the sale of his book s, which he conducted partly from his own quarters, receiving orders and filling them with his own hand. His literary income was from time to time augmented through articles for the press, through the sale of new poems, and through the lecture he gave perhaps a dozen times on "The Death of Abraham Lincoln." His illness, from which he never recovered, was less acute during the ten years following 1876, when he formed the habit of going down to Timber Creek, a stream which flows into the Delaware about ten miles below Camden, and enjoying the out-of-doors as a guest of the Stafford family at Laurel Springs. Here he was repaired and refreshed, and here he composed for Specimen Days some of the best prose he ever wrote, besides revising his earlier work and preparing new editions for the press.

Before the end came he had issued five new editions of Leaves of Grass (1876, 1881-82, 1882, 1888-89, 1891-92); had published three collections containing new poems (Two Rivulets, 1876; November Boughs, 1888; and Good-Bye, My Fancy, 1891); and had published most of the prose which now belongs to his canon. Memoranda During the War (1875) was included in Specimen Days and Collect (1882-83), which with Democratic Vistas came after his death to represent him in prose until the process began a quarter-century later of unearthing his earliest work.

During no portion of this period was he lonely or neglected. His old friends Burroughs and O'Connor were usually within reach, though he was estranged from O'Connor for ten years after 1872. He continued to correspond with Peter Doyle, a young horse-car conductor whom he had met in Washington in 1866 and with whom he always comported himself half as father and half as lover. More and more visitors arrived for interviews, many of them from England Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, Lord Houghton, Sir Edwin Arnold, Henry Irving, Bram Stoker, Ernest Rhys, Edmund Gosse. As time went on he found himself surrounded by disciples. Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian physician, attached himself to the poet in 1877 and produced the first official biography in 1883, following this pious performance with a number of articles emphasizing the prophetic importance of Whitman, whom he considered one of the first men, along with Bucke himself, to have come under the influence of "cosmic consciousness." Bucke was one of Whitman's three literary executors, and as such was in a position to publish his literary remains. The other two executors were Thomas B. Harned and Horace Traubel [q.v.]-the latter a young man who fell completely under the old poet's influence and took down with a busy pencil almost every remark he let fall.

Two episodes during these years aroused wide discussion and gave new impetus to Whitman's fame. In the West Jersey Press of January 26, 1876, appeared an article, apparently by Whitman himself, describing him as "old, poor, and paralyzed," and neglected by his countrymen. A copy of this was sent by Whitman to W. M. Rossetti in England, who had a portion of it reprinted in the Athenaeum, where it attracted the fiery eye of Robert Buchanan, the Scotch poet (Blodgett, post, pp. 36 ff.). His blast about it in the Daily News was the signal for a controversy which ceased neither in England nor in America until relief began pouring in on Whitman in the form of orders for his books. Six years later the action of Osgood & Company, the Boston publishers who had just brought out a new edition of Leaves of Grass, in withdrawing the book because of official protests against its indecency, inspired another controversy, O'Connor this time returning to the front rank of the Whitman forces. The result among other things was the sale of 3,000 copies of the Philadelphia edition (1882) in a single day. Meanwhile the fame of Whitman grew steadily in a more normal fashion. Certain "enemies," as he called those who did not think him a great poet, continued to express their doubts-notably Thomas Wentworth Higginson and William Winter [qq.v.] in America and the editors of the Saturday Review in England. Swinburne recanted his praise of 1868 and 1872 in a savage article of 1887, and Robert Louis Stevenson tempered the admiration he had originally felt. But there was at the same time a growing chorus of appreciation. Before the poet died he. had been translated into Danish, Dutch, French (by Jules Laforgue and Francis Viele-Griffin), German, and Italian, and had been the subject of numerous critical studies which ranged all the way from analysis to panegyric.

Whitman's tendency to bask in so much adoration and to surround himself with champions who did his name on the whole more harm than good is pardonable, considering his career, and at the same time pitiable. Of necessity he lived quietly in Camden, though he left it for trips to Colorado in 1879, to Canada in 1880 to visit Dr. Bucke, to Boston (where he saw Emerson for the last time) in 1881, and to his birthplace on Long Island in the same year. In his own mind he mellowed perceptibly, embracing Hegelianism and asserting once more, in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" which prefaced November Boughs (1888), the importance to America of religion and of the older literatures. His former impatience with any poetry which was not American had quite disappeared in his old age, as had his tendency to dismiss other American poets than himself as of no account. His mature appraisals of Longfellow, Poe, Whittier, Bryant, and of course Emerson are no less valuable as contributions to criticism than are his meditations on the death of Carlyle.

His death in Camden on March 26, 1892, was the occasion for many attempts to sum up his excellence and his importance. For the most part these were failures, since the shadow of the disciples and the executors still obscured him. During forty years this shadow has gradually been dissipated under the influence of biographical research, a saner criticism, and the passage of time. The claims originally made for him as man and moralist are made less often, and promise to disappear. To the extent that his "teachings" can be proved to have been built upon the unsteady basis of his own unique psychology, proof has been forthcoming-in America, in England, in Germany, and in France. It is now difficult if not impossible to believe that he came into the world to save it, or that he will save it. The world in general pays little attention to his name; he has never been a popular poet, accepted of democracies as he hoped, nor has he been often imitated by other poets, as he also hoped. But as his isolation grows more apparent it grows more impressive, so that his rank among the poets of his country and his century, and indeed of the world, is higher than it has ever been before. His work manages to survive the attacks made either upon, its author as a man or upon what George Santayana called before 1900 the "barbarism" of his mind. It survives as certainly the most original work yet done by any American poet, and perhaps as the most passionate and best. It is easier now to comprehend Whitman as the artist that he was, though it is not easy and it never will be. As a maker of phrases, as a master of rhythms, as a weaver of images, as an architect of poems he is often beyond the last reach of analysis. His diaries of the war, his prefaces to Leaves of Grass, his Democratic Vistas, and his notes on the landscape at Timber Creek are a permanent part of American prose. He himself, looked back at purely as a writer, will always loom a gigantic and beautiful figure in nineteenth-century letters.

[The Harned Collection of Whitman manuscripts in the Library of Congress includes twenty-four notebooks of various dates as well as annotated newspaper clippings, letters, and miscellaneous items. The Complete Works of Walt Whitman were published by the literary executors, R. M. Bucke, T. B. Harned, and Horace Traubel, in 10 volumes in 1902. This material has been supplemented by Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada (1904), ed. by W. S. Kennedy; An American Primer (1904), ed. by Horace Traubel; Criticism, An Essay, by Walt Whitman (1913); The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman (1918), ed. by T. B. Harned; The Gathering of the Forces, contributions to the 'Brooklyn Eagle (2 volumes, 1920), ed. by Cleveland Rodgers and John Black; The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (2 vols., 1921), ed. by Emory Holloway; Walt Whitman's Workshop, A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (1928), ed. by C. J. Furness; I Sit and Look Out; Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times by Walt Whitman (1932), ed. by Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz; Walt Whitman and the Civil War (1933), manuscripts and contributions to the New York Leader, ed. by C. I. Glicksberg. For bibliographies see the Complete Works, volume VII; The Cambridge History of American Literature, volume II (1918), pp. 551-81; A Concise Bibliography of the Works of Walt Whitman (1922) by Carolyn Wells and A. F. Goldsmith; and the various annual bibliographies of American literature.

The chief biographies are: R. M. Bucke, Walt Whitman (1883); H. B. Binns, A Life of Walt Whitman (1905); Bliss Perry, Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (1906); Leon Bazalgette, Walt Whitman; L'Homme et son Oeuvre (1908), published in translation by Ellen FitzGerald (1920); G. R. Carpenter, Walt Whitman (1909); Emory Holloway, biographical introduction to The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (2 volumes, 1921); Emory Holloway, Whitman. An Interpretation in Narrative (1926); John Bailey, Walt Whitman (1926); Jean Catel, Walt Whitman; La Naissance du Poille (1929). Reminiscences and miscellaneous biographical material may be found in: John Burroughs, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867, 1871); H. H. Gilchrist, ed., Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings (1887); In Re Walt Whitman (1893), ed. by his literary executors; T. B. Donaldson, Walt Whitman: The Man (1896); W. S. Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (1896); I. H. Platt, Walt Whitman (1904); Edward Carpenter, Days with Walt Whitman (1906); Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, March 28, 1888-January 20, 1J. Johnston and J. W. Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890--1891 (1917); Elizabeth L. Keller, Walt Whitman in Mickle Street (1921). The growth of Whitman's reputation has been studied in W. S. Kennedy, The Fight of a Book for the World (1926); in Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs Comrades (1931); and in Harold Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England (1934). For psychological analyses of Whitman see: Eduard Bertz, Der Yankee-Heiland (Dresden, 1906), and Whitman-Mysterien. Eine Abrechnung mit Johannes Schlaf (Berlin, 1907); W. C. Rivers, Walt Whitman's Anomaly (1913). For critical studies see: J. A. Symonds, Walt Whitman: A Study (1893); Basil de Selincourt, Walt Whitman: A Critical Study (1914); Cebria Montoliu, Walt Whitman: L'home i sa tasca (Barcelona, 1913); Leon Bazalgette, Le 'Poeme-Evangile' de Walt Whitman (Paris, 1921). An obituary and a long article were published in New York Times, March 27, 1892.]

M.V-D.


WHITTIER, John Greenleaf, 1807-1892, Haverhill, Massachusetts, poet, journalist, newspaper publisher and editor, Society of Friends, Quaker, radical abolitionist.  Wrote antislavery poetry.  Publisher and editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman.  Founding member, Manager, and Secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  Member of the Executive Committee, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.  Leader and active with the Liberty Party.  Member, Free Soil Party.  Called for immediate abolition of slavery in the United States. 

(Blue, 2005, pp. 5, 37-64; Drake, 1950, pp. 113, 127, 137, 140-142, 158-159, 176, 181, 195; Dumond, 1961, pp. 167, 245, 286, 301; Filler, 1960, pp. 56, 66, 90, 105, 134, 148, 151, 194; Mabee, 1970, pp. 2, 4, 9, 11-13, 18, 21-22, 25-26, 29-30, 35-36, 48, 51, 65, 194, 211, 309, 326, 329, 359, 368, 373, 378; Pease, 1965, pp. 65, 102-104, 123-128; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 161, 433, 641, 723; Sewell, 1976, pp.  5, 9, 14, 28-29, 33, 39-40, 65, 70, 73, 130, 134, Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, pp. 493-494; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, p. 173; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 23, p. 350; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. I. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 407).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

WHITTIER, John Greenleaf, poet, born  in Haverhill, Massachusetts, 17 Dec., 1807. His parents were members of the Society of Friends, and to the principles and practices of this sect he always remained faithful, […]

The literary impulse in him must have been strong, for while yet in his nineteenth year he contributed anonymous verse to the poet's corner of the “Free Press,” a journal edited by W. L. Garrison in Newburyport, and enjoyed the furtive bliss of print. Garrison saw signs of promise in these immature experiments, sought out the author, and gave him the precious encouragement of praise and sympathy. This led to a lasting friendship, and, with the traditions of his sect, may have had some influence in preparing Whittier to enlist in the anti-slavery crusade which began with the establishment of the “Liberator” in 1831, and afterward caught so much of its inspiration from his fervid lyrics. The ambition to become a poet was awakened in him appropriately enough by a copy of Robert Burns's poems, which fell into his hands in his fourteenth year.

His father dying, he carried on the farm for the next five years, and in 1835 was sent to the general court from Haverhill. During all these years he had been an industrious writer, seeking an outlet in all directions and contributing poems to John Neal's “Yankee” and to the “New England Magazine,” where the “Autocrat” began his admirable discourses. In 1829 he undertook the editorship of the “American Manufacturer” in Boston, and in 1830 succeeded George D. Prentice as editor of the “Haverhill Gazette” during the first six months of the year, and then of the “New England Weekly Review” in Hartford, Conn. This office he resigned in 1832 on account of failing health and returned home. In 1836 he became secretary of the American anti-slavery society, and afterward removed to Philadelphia, where for a year (1838-'9) he edited the “Pennsylvania Freeman.” This he did with such sincerity that its printing-office was sacked and burned by a mob. At that time it required the courage of passionate conviction to maintain principles the noisier profession of which was to become profitable a few years later. Delicate as his organization was, Whittier faced many a brutal mob with unflinching composure. He was never a mere fanatic, but always quick to recognize and celebrate high qualities even in an adversary, as many of his poems show. He refused to follow Garrison in the renunciation of political action as one means of reform. In 1840 he took up his abode in Amesbury, a quiet village near his birthplace, and there (with the exception of six months spent at Lowell as editor of the “Middlesex Standard”), in the simple dignity of a frugal independence, the fruit of his own literary labors, he has lived ever since, and happily still lives, known and loved wherever our tongue is spoken. From 1847 to 1859 he contributed editorially to the “National Era,” an anti-slavery newspaper published at Washington, in which '”Uncle Tom's Cabin” was first printed.

In his seclusion Whittier was never idle, nor did he neglect his duties as a citizen while confirming his quality as a poet. Whenever occasion offered, some burning lyric of his flew across the country, like the fiery cross, to warn and rally. Never mingling in active politics (unless filling the office of presidential elector may be called so), he probably did more than anybody in preparing the material out of which the Republican party was made. When the civil war was impending he would have evaded it if possible by any concession short of surrender, as his “Word for the Hour” (January, 1861) shows. While the war continued he wrote little with direct reference to it, and never anything that showed any bitterness toward the authors of it. After it was over he would have made the terms of settlement liberal and conciliatory. He was too wise and too humane to stir the still living embers of passion and resentment for any political end however dear to him.

Of all American poets, with the single exception of Longfellow, Whittier has been the most popular, and in his case more than in that of any other the popularity has been warmed through with affection. This has been due in part to the nobly simple character of the man, transparent through his verse, in part to the fact that his poetry, concerning itself chiefly with the obvious aspects of life and speculation, has kept close to the highest levels of the average thought and sentiment. His themes have been mainly chosen from his own time and country—from his own neighborhood even—he deals with simple motives and with experiences common to all, and accordingly his scenery (whether of the outward or the inward eye) is domestically welcome to all his countrymen. He is never complex in thought or obscure in expression, and if sometimes his diction might gain in quality by a more deliberate choice, yet the pellucid simplicity of his phrase and the instant aptness of his epithet as often secure a more winning felicity through his frankness of confidence in the vernacular. His provincialisms of word or accent have an endearing property to the native ear, though even that will consent to a few of his more licentious rhymes. One feels that it is a neighbor who is speaking. Nor should the genial piety of his habitual thought and the faith that seeks no securer foothold than the Rock of Ages, on which the fathers stood so firmly, be overlooked among the qualities that give him a privilege of familiar entrance to a multitude of hearts and minds which would be barred against many higher, though not more genuine, forms of poetry. His religion has the sincerity of Cowper's without those insane terrors that made its very sincerity a torture. There are many points of spiritual likeness between the English and the American poet, especially in their unmetaphysicized love of outward natures, their austerity tempered with playful humor, and in that humanity of tone which establishes a tie of affectionate companionship between them and their readers. Whittier has done as much for the scenery of New England as Scott for that of Scotland. Many of his poems (such, for example, as “Telling the Bees”), in which description and sentiment mutually inspire each other, are as fine as any in the language.

Whittier, as many of his poems show, and as, indeed, would be inevitable, has had his moments of doubt and distrust, but never of despair. He has encountered everywhere the moral of his inscription on a sun-dial, convinced that “there's light above me by the shade below.” He, like others, has found it hard to reconcile the creed held by inheritance with the subtle logic of more modern modes of thought. As he himself has said:

“He reconciled as best he could
Old faith and fancies new.”

But his days have been “bound each to each with natural piety”; he has clung fast to what has been the wholesome and instructive kernel of all creeds; he has found consolation in the ever-recurring miracles, whether of soul or sense, that daily confront us, and in the expression of his own delight and wonder and gratitude for them has conveyed that solace to the minds and hearts of all his readers. One quality above all others in Whittier—his innate and unstudied Americanism—has rendered him alike acceptable to his countrymen and to his kindred beyond the sea. His first volume was “Legends of New England,” in prose and verse (Hartford, 1831), which has been followed by “Moll Pitcher” (1832); “Mogg Megone” (Boston, 1836); “Ballads” (1838); “Lays of My Home, and other Poems” (1843); “Miscellaneous Poems” (1844); the first English edition of his poetry, entitled “Ballads, and other Poems,” with an introduction by Elizur Wright (London, 1844); “The Stranger in Lowell” (1845); “Supernaturalism in New England” (New York and London, 1847); “Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal” (Boston, 1849); “Voices of Freedom” (Philadelphia, 1849); a larger English collection of his “Poetical Works” (London, 1850); “Old Portraits and Modern Sketches” (Boston, 1850); “Songs of Labor, and other Poems,” and “The Chapel of the Hermits, and other Poems” (1853); “A Sabbath Scene: a Sketch of Slavery in Verse” (1853); “Literary Recreations and Miscellanies” (1854); “The Panorama, and other Poems” (1856); “Complete Poetical Works” (2 vols., 1857); “Home Ballads and Poems” (1860); “Snow-Bound” (1862); a new edition of his “Complete Poetical Works” (1863); “In War Time, and other Poems” (1863); “National Lyrics” (1865); a collection of his “Prose Works” (2 vols., 1866); “The Tent on the Beach” (1867); “Among the Hills” (1868); an illustrated edition of his “Complete Poetical Works” (1868); one corresponding in typography with the “Prose Works” (1869); a volume of his “Ballads of New England” contains sixty illustrations by various artists (1869); “Miriam, and other Poems” (1870); “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim, and other Poems”  (1872); “Hazel Blossoms” (1874); “Mabel Martin” (1875); a new collected edition of his “Poetical Works” comprising poems that he had written till the date of publication (1875); “Centennial Hymn” (1876); “The Vision of Echard, and other Poems” (1878); “The King's Missive, and other Poems” (1881); “Bay of Seven Islands, and other Poems” (1883); “Poems of Nature” (1885); and “St. Gregory's Guest, and Recent Poems” (1886). A final edition of his poetical and prose works has been supervised by himself, and includes his sister's poems (7 vols., 1888-'9). See a “Biography,” by Francis H. Underwood (Boston, 1875; new ed., 1883), and “John G. Whittier: his Life, Genius, and Writings,” by W. Sloane Kennedy (1882). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI. pp. 493-494.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, p. 173;

WHITTIER, JOHN GREENLEAF (December 17, 1807-September 7, 1892), poet, abolitionist, was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the son of Quaker parents. His father, John Whittier, was a stern, prosaic, but generous man, while his mother, Abigail (Hussey) Whittier, was a kindly soul, who to some extent sympathized with her son's literary leanings. Both parents influenced him considerably by their religious doctrines and tales of local history. On his father's side, he was descended from Thomas Whittier who came to Massachusetts from England in 1638. His youngest son, Joseph, married Mary Peasley, a Quakeress, and their youngest son, also named Joseph, marr1ed Sarah Greenleaf, member of a Puritan family believed to be of Huguenot origin. Spending his boyhood and youth on a farm, Whittier came close to nature, and later described the rural scene of his locality more faithfully than had any other writer up to that time. His "Barefoot Boy" has become a classic poem of New England farm life. Overexertion when he was about seventeen resulted in injuries from which he never fully recovered.

His formal education was limited, but what he did not obtain from schools he learned from books. For a brief period he studied under Joshua Coffin, in the unfinished ell of a farmhouse; and at another time, in a school kept by a Newburyport woman. When he was about fourteen he became acquainted with the poems of Burns. He read them studiously and soon began writing poems himself, some of them in Scotch dialect. As time went on his reading came to include books of travel, and history, works on Quaker doctrine and martyrology, Thomas Ellwood's poem Davideis, and the writings of Milton, Chatterton, Coleridge, Byron, and others. He also delved into colonial literature, becoming particularly familiar with Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana.

The sending of one of his poems, "The Exile's Departure," by his older sister Mary to the Newburyport Free Press, edited by William Lloyd Garrison [q.v.], was an important event in young Whittier's life. The poem was published June 8, 1826, and Garrison was sufficiently interested in the unknown author to call upon him. He urged the father to send his son to some school for a further education, but the elder Whittier was averse to such a procedure. Though Garrison continued publishing poems by Whittier, it was Abijah W. Thayer, the editor of the Haverhill Gazette (later called the Esser Gazette), who made Whittier's work widely known, publishing poems by him weekly. Thayer, also, urged the elder Whittier to send his promising son to an academy and this time the father agreed to do so. At the beginning of May 1827, Whittier entered the newly opened Haverhill Academy, where a poem of his was sung at the inauguration ceremonies. He remained here for about six months, taught school during the winter, and then returned to the academy for another term of six months. During this period he poured forth a steady stream of poems, which appeared not only in the Free Press and the Essex Gazette, but for a time in the Boston Statesmen, edited by Nathaniel Greene [q.v.]. Thayer proposed the publication of Whittier's poems in book form by subscription, but the project was not carried out.

Through the help of Garrison, Whittier, in January 1829, became editor of The American Manufacturer (Boston), serving as such for seven months and resigning in large part because he was needed at home. This was the first of the numerous editorial positions he held during his life. In the early part of 1830 he edited the Essex Gazette. After the death of his father in June, he succeeded George D. Prentice [q.v.] as editor of the New England Weekly Review, published in Hartford, Connecticut. To this periodical he contributed many poems, stories, and sketches, most of which have remained uncollected. In February 1831 he published his first book, Legends of New England in Prose and Verse. Relinquishing the editorship of the Review in January 1832 on account of ill health, he issued that same year his Moll Pitcher, and edited The Literary Remains of John G. C. Brainard, With a Sketch of His Life. During these years he suffered a grievous disappointment because of the marriage to another of Mary Emerson Smith, a relative, for whom he had had a deep affection since boyhood. She is doubtless the heroine of many of his early uncollected love poems and of his famous "Memories" and "My Playmate." His pathetic love letter to her, written May 23, 1829, is the only one of those that passed between them which has been published (L. G. Swett, John Riskin's Letters to Francesca and Memoirs of the Alexanders, 1931, 417-21).

A reading of Garrison's Thoughts on Colonization (1832), and a meeting with the author in the spring of 1833 made Whittier an abolitionist. For the next thirty years he devoted himself to the writing of Tyrtaen poems on subjects connected with slavery and its abolition. In December he was a delegate to the anti-slavery convention at Philadelphia, and was one of the signers of its declaration. Prior to the elections of 1834, 1836, and 1838 he secured from Caleb Cushing [q.v.] pledges that he would support the demand of the abolitionists, and Cushing attributed his success in the elections largely to the support of his Quaker friend (Pickard, post, I, 172). He was practically ostracized socially because of his views and activities, but succeeded in being elected a member of the Massachusetts legislature from Haverhill for the year 1835. On September 4, 1835, he and George Thompson, the English lecturer, were mobbed in Concord, New Hampshire. From May to December 1836 he was again in editorial charge of the Essex Gazette. Meanwhile, he sold his farm in Haverhill and moved, in July 1836, to his new home in Amesbury. His activities during the next few years were varied and his labors exacting; he spoke at an antislavery convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; he lobbied in Boston in behalf of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; during the summer of 1837 he was employed in New York under the auspices of the American Anti-Slavery Society. From March 1838 to February 1840 he edited the Pennsylvania Freeman, to which he contributed daring editorials. The office of the paper was in the new Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia, when that building was burned to the ground by a mob in May 17, 1838. In November of that year he published a volume of fifty of his poems. Ill health compelled his resignation from the Freeman, and in 1840 he returned to Amesbury.

He was much depressed by the disruption of the American Anti-Slavery Society in that year, but he sympathized with the political-action party, to which Garrison was opposed, and became an aggressive member of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. In the fall of 1842 he ran for Congress on the Liberty party ticket. The following year he published Lays of My Home and Other Poems, which contained some of his best work and placed him among the leading American poets. From July 1844 to March 1845 he edited the Middlesex Standard, a Liberty-party paper published in Lowell, Massachusetts, and in his editorials opposed the annexation of Texas. In this paper appeared serially "The Stranger in Lowell," which was published separately in 1845. He also practically edited the Essex Transcript, an organ of the Liberty party, published in Amesbury. His anti-slavery poems were collected and published under the title Voices of Freedom, in 1846. In January of the following year he became corresponding editor of the National Era, published in Washington, and he contributed most of his poems and articles to it for the next thirteen years. In this periodical appeared his only lengthy work in fiction, "Stray Leaves from Margaret Smith's Diary, in the Colony of Massachusetts" (published in book form, under a slightly different title, in 1849) and most of the material in Old Portraits and Modern Sketches (1850) and Literary Recreations and Miscellanies (1854). Meanwhile, there was no relaxing of his political activities. He gave John P. Hale [q.v.] of New Hampshire much political advice, and thus indirectly helped elect him to the United States Senate; he attacked the administration bitterly for the Mexican War; and in the well known poem, "Ichabod," which appeared in the National Era, 11, May 2, 1850, he castigated Webster for the "Seventh of March speech." He was instrumental in inducing Charles Sumner to run for the United States Senate in 1851 on a coalition ticket of Free-Soilers and Democrats, and he urged him to remain a candidate when he wished to retire during the long and bitter fight that ensued in the Massachusetts legislature before he was elected. He was one of the first to suggest the formation of the Republican party and always considered himself one of its founders. In the mid-fifties, though he wrote campaign songs, and poems on the happenings in Kansas, ill health compelled him to abandon some of his activities. His reputation as a poet had meanwhile greatly increased. With the appearance of Songs of Labor (1850), The Chapel of the Hermits (1853), and The Panorama and Other Poems (1856), which contained his "Maud Muller" and the "Barefoot Boy," he took rank with Longfellow and Bryant among the greatest American poets.

During his middle years he had several romances, two of which almost led to marriage. While living in New York, in the summer of 1837, he met Lucy Hooper, a young poetess residing in Brooklyn, and a warm friendship sprang up between them. In 1841 Lucy died of consumption. Whittier never realized to what extent she was attracted to him. When he learned from her surviving sisters the depth of her affection he wrote to them contritely and defensively: "God forgive me, if with no other than kind feelings I have done wrong. My feelings toward her were those of a Brother. I admired and loved her; yet felt myself compelled to crush every warmer feeling-poverty, protracted illness, and our separate faiths-the pledge that I had made of all the hopes and dreams of my younger years to the cause of freedom-compelled me to steel myself against everything which tended to attract me-the blessing of a woman's love and a home" (Albert Mordell, in New England Quarterly, June 1934). His most serious affair, however, was with Elizabeth Lloyd, the poetess, with whom he formed a friendship in Philadelphia when he was editing the Freeman. In 1853 she married Robert Howell, who died in 1856, and Whittier resumed his friendship with her in 1858. Both were looking forward to marriage when Mrs. Howell irritated the poet by attacking the Quaker creed, of which she herself was an adherent. On August 3, 1859, he wrote her a letter which was tantamount to withdrawing from the semi-engagement that existed between them. Their friendship drifted on for a year or two, and by the end of 1860 it was over.

From the beginning of the Civil War Whittier's life was uneventful. His fame as a poet increased by reason of his many contributions to the Atlantic Monthly, in the founding of which he had a part, and to the Independent. The summit of his poetic career was reached in the decade of the sixties, during which appeared Home Ballads (1860); In War Time and Other Poems (1864), containing "Barbara Frietchie"; Snow-Bound (1866); The Tent on the Beach (1867); and Among the Hills (1869). In the summer of 1876 he moved to Danvers, where he lived with his cousins, the three daughters of Colonel Edmund Johnson. Here he made his place of abode almost to the time of his death, with occasional visits to Amesbury, which always continued to be his legal residence. He received numerous honors in his later days, was surrounded by friends, and had many visitors. Republican politicians still consulted him. The more important poetical works of his later years were: Miriam and Other Poems (1871), Hazel-Blossoms (1875); The Vision of Echard (1878); Saint Gregory's Guest (1886); and At Sundown (1890). A complete edition of his works, revised and corrected, in seven volumes, appeared in 1888-89. He died at Hampton Falls and was buried at Amesbury.

Whittier was a tall man with piercing dark eyes and a swarthy complexion, and was somewhat vain with respect to his appearance. Although a genial person, he would occasionally flash out in anger when people did not agree with him. He resented the reputation he had of being a saint. That he was of heroic spirit is beyond question, for he sacrificed much, endured abuse, and faced physical perils in his devotion to the cause which he espoused. He had a fine sense of humor and was adept at telling amusing tales. Toward other people's beliefs he was in general tolerant, and he sympathized keenly with those who were persecuted on account of their race, color, or creed. His religious spirit as expressed in his poems was such that not a few of them have found a permanent place in the hymnals of various denominations. With respect to industrial questions he was always extremely conservative, but he supported the operatives in the Amesbury-Salisbury strike of 1852 (T. F. Currier, in New England Quarterly, March 1935). As a means of settling the entire economic problem he recommended obedience to the Golden Rule and the saving of money. He tried to justify the existing system by showing that the laborer derived benefits from his poverty. In his poem, "The Problem," published in 1877, the year of the great railroad strikes, he assailed the labor leaders who sought palliative reforms, as "demagogues" proffering their vain and evil counsels. In the late eighties he refused to aid William Dean Howells in endeavoring to obtain clemency for the convicted Chicago anarchists.

Whittier's standing as a poet has somewhat declined since his day. "Snow-Bound" is still usually considered his masterpiece. A few of his ballads, like "Skipper Iresons's Ride" and "Telling the Bees," and religious poems like "The Eternal Goodness" are still much read and quoted. Critical schools differ as to which of his poems are superior-those treating of rural life or those dealing with colonial history. There is an increasing tendency, however; to regard him as a prophet and to emphasize the value of his abolition poems, in spite of the fact that the occasion that gave rise to them has passed, for the spirit that prompted them was the same spirit that inspired Milton and Shelley to battle against oppression and tyranny. "It is as a poet of human freedom that he must live if he is to hold his own with posterity .... He has not a well-defined domain of mastery save perhaps in the verses inspired by the contest over slavery" (W. P. Trent and John Erskine, Great American Writers, pp. 144, 147). While some of the abolition poems are still read and admired, notably "Massachusetts to Virginia," there are others which deserve to be revived.

[The largest collection of manuscript material is to be found in the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts, which also has photostats and typewritten copies of letters to be found in libraries elsewhere. Whittier letters are preserved in the Library of Congress, the John Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, the New York Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the libraries of Harvard and Yale. The largest collection of printed material by and about Whittier, and some manuscript material is in the Haverhill Public Library, the N. H. Historical Society, Concord, and the Boston Public Library For other sources, see S. T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (2 volumes, 1894; I volume, 1907), and Whittier-Land (1904); W. S. Kennedy, John Greenleaf Whittier-His Life, Genius, and Writings (1882) and John G. Whittier, the Poet of Freedom (1892); F. H. Underwood, John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biog. (1884); T. W. Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier (1902); G. R. Carpenter, John Greenleaf Whittier (1903); A. J. Woodman, Reminiscences of John Greenleaf Whittier's Life at Oak Knoll, Danvers (1908); John Albree, Whittier Correspondence from Oak Knoll Collections, (1911); M. V. Denervaud, ed., Whittier's Unknown Romance: Letters to Elizabeth Lloyd (1922); F. M. 'Pray, A Study of Whittier's Apprenticeship as Poet: Dealing with Poems Written between 1825 and I835 not available in the Poet's Collected Works (1930); Albert Mordell, Quaker Militant, John Greenleaf Whittier (1933). More complete bibliographies are in the Cambridge History of American Literature, II (1918), 436-51, and in Quaker Militant, pp. 333-43. An exhaustive bibliography by T. F. Currier has been announced for publication.]

A. M.


WILLARD, Victor, Wisconsin state senator, member of the Free Soil Party


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; 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. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. VI, p. 544; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, p. 317; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 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, Vol. VI. pp. 544.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 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, Vol. VI, pp. 548-550; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, p. 322; 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, N. H., 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 vols., Boston , 1872-'5). See his “Life and Public Services,” which was written by his friend, Thomas Russell, and Rev. 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, Vol. VI. pp. 548-550.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, p. 322;

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.


WOODARD, Willard, educator, publisher, member of the Free Soil Party.


WRIGHT, Silas, 1795-1849, statesman, Congressman, U.S. Senator, soldier, favored restriction and abolition of slavery.  Congressman from December 1827 through March 1829, U.S. Senator from 1833 to December 1844, Governor of New York State, 1844-1847. Opposed expansion of slavery into the new territories acquired from Mexico.

(Filler, 1960, p. 90; Garraty, 1949, pp. 165-166, 406-407; Mitchell, 2007, p. 34; R. H. Gillet, The Life and Times of Silas Wright (2 volumes, 1874). Other important biographies are J. D. Hammond, Life and Times of Silas Wright (1848), reproduced as volume III of his History of Political Parties in the State of New York (3 volumes, 1852), and J. S. Jenkins, The Life of Silas Wright (1847). W. E. Chancellor, A Life of Silas Wright (1913); Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 10, Pt. 2, pp. 565-567;

WRIGHT, SILAS (May 24, 1795-August 27, 1847), United States senator, governor of New York, was a descendant of Deacon Samuel Wright, an early settler of Springfield and Northampton, Massachusetts The fifth child of Silas and Eleanor (Goodale) Wright, he was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, but grew up in Weybridge, Vermont, where he worked on his father's farm and attended district school. At fourteen he entered Addison County Grammar School and at sixteen Middlebury College. After graduation in 1815 he studied law at Sandy Hill, New York, with Roger Skinner, was admitted to the bar in 1819, and began practice in Canton, New York, boarding with his father's friend, Medad Moody, whose daughter Clarissa he married on September 11, 1833. They had no children.

In 1821 Wright became county surrogate, and within the next decade held a number of local offices and attained the rank of brigadier-general in the militia. An ardent Madisonian in college, Wright was throughout his life a stanch nationalist and Democrat. He led northern New York from the fold of the Clintonians to the "Bucktails," to the "Republicans," thence to the Jacksonian Democrats, and to the left wing of th c: t party. In 1823 he was elected to the state Senate, where he served from January 1, 1824, until December 1827. His firm belief that the yeomanry were usually right made him vote for manhood suffrage and direct election of justices of the peace, yet he held that the people needed the leadership of bosses and honest use of the spoils system to attain the party unity in which lay their hope in the battle against special privilege. He voted against a law providing for the direct election of presidential electors because its adoption would be disadvantageous to the party's candidate, William H. Crawford [q.v.], and voted for the removal of DeWitt Clinton [q.v.] as canal commissioner. He consistently opposed the granting of bank charters by the legislature.

In 1827, as chairman of the committee on canals he made a report opposing the extension of the canal system except when the expected revenues promised to reimburse the treasury. By this time he had become a member of the directing group known as the "Albany Regency." In 1827 Wright took his seat in Congress. At this time he favored a tariff designed for the protection of agriculture as well as manufactures. As a member of the House committee on manufactures he helped frame the "tariff of abominations" of 1828 and took a leading part in defending it; but later, in 1842, he characterized his action as a great error, made through lack of understanding of the subject (Gillet, post, II, 1422). He was reelected in 1828, but resigned in the next year to become comptroller of New York (1829-33). During his years in this office he continued to oppose the building of canals except such as would pay for themselves, and he advocated a tax to replenish the General Fund.

Resigning the comptrollership in January 1833, he became United States senator to complete the unexpired term of William L. Marcy [q.v.], who had been chosen governor. Reelected in 1837 and 1843, Wright was appointed successively to the committees on agriculture, commerce, finance, and post offices and post roads. Master of his subject, cool, and deliberative, logical and powerful in reasoning, he came to hold a high rank "for solid judgment and unselfish service" (Turner, post, p. 114). Benton called him the "Cato of the Senate." Taking his seat when his friend Van Buren was vice-president and the personal choice of President Jackson as his successor, Wright was soon recognized as manager of Van Buren's political interests and with his uncannily accurate sense of public opinion became Van Buren's "most effective lieutenant" (Ibid., p. 118)-a lieutenancy that was almost a partnership. Wright voted for the "Force Bill" and the compromise tariff of 1833; Van Buren consulted him before answering Jackson with regard to the removal of the federal deposits from the Bank of the United States, and, at the President's request, entrusted him with the presentation of resolutions favoring removal (January 30, 1834; Van Buren, ''Autobiography,” post, pp. 729-30). Subsequently Wright with Benton procured the expunging of the resolution censuring Jackson.

Following Van Buren's election to the presidency Wright became chairman of the Senate finance committee (December 21, 1836-March 1841). All measures for rechartering the Bank of the United States he firmly opposed. He opposed the distribution of the ever-mounting surplus among the states, advocating instead its use for defense, investment in easily convertible stocks of states or the United States, or use for general government expenses to permit the reduction of the tariff. The panic of 1837 and suspension of specie payment by the state banks made his position one of great importance. In preparation for the special session of Congress called for September, he contributed to the St. Lawrence Republican seven articles, beginning June 20, 1837, urging the complete divorce of federal finance from the banks and stricter regulation of banking by the states. At the special session he introduced the administration's relief bills, which were adopted, and a bill for the establishment of an independent treasury system, the plan for which he elaborated January 31, 1838. He continued to head the fight for the independent treasury until the bill was passed in 1840.

After Tyler's accession in 1841, relegated to the committees on commerce and claims, Wright urged a tax-and-pay policy; he continued to oppose distribution of the proceeds of the sale of public lands and increase in the tariff. Yet seeing no chance of any other revenue bill passing Congress he reluctantly voted for the high-tariff act of 1842, which automatically ended distribution while raising duties. Declining Tyler's offer of appointment to the Supreme Court in 1844, he campaigned for Van Buren's nomination, refusing to be considered himself for the presidential nomination and declining, when nominated, to be a candidate for the vice-presidency. Reluctant to leave the Senate, he nevertheless resigned through party loyalty, entered the contest for the governorship of New York, and carried the state for Polk. He was offered the secretaryship of the treasury as a reward, but declined.

During his governorship his sturdy support of the policy incorporated in the "stop and tax" law of 1842 led him to veto a bill for canal extension, thus alienating the conservatives. His suppression of violence during the anti-rent disturbances when, though he sympathized with the tenants' grievances and advocated their redress by law, he called out the militia and prosecuted the ring-leaders--caused bitter feeling in the anti-rent districts; his advocacy in 1846 of a tax on income from rents, short-term leases, and no distress for rent, alienated the landlords; his banking policies lost him the banking interests. Thus, although in 1846 he was renominated for the governorship, he failed of reelection. His followers ascribed his defeat to the influence of the "Hunkers" or conservatives within the party, coupled with the coolness of the national administration.

Before his retirement to private life, however, Wright had the satisfaction of seeing the fight against privilege in New York reach lasting success when the reforms he had advocated in the rent system and a provision for a popular check on appropriations for public works were put into effect through the new constitution of 1846. In that same year his tariff policy triumphed, when the revenue tariff enacted by Congress followed closely outlines drawn by him in two speeches of 1844 (Senate, April 19 and 23; Watertown, New York, August 20), and the independent treasury became permanent. Successful with these old issues, he returned to friendly Canton where he attended the Presbyterian church, cultivated his thirty acres, died, and was buried. Many found honesty his outstanding characteristic; Benton simplicity; Van Buren, "perfect disinterestedness." His death precipitated the "Barnburner" revolt just when a growing community of interest between the northern radicals and the "free, grain-growing states" of the Northwest pointed to a new party on the issue of slavery in the territories, and Wright, who though not art abolitionist had opposed Calhoun's treaty for the annexation of Texas because it insisted upon the protection of slavery there and had upheld the Wilmot Proviso, was being talked of for the presidency.

[Manuscript sources include personal letters in the possession of St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York, and H. F. Landon, Esq., Watertown, New York; correspondence with Flagg, Hoffman, and Tilden in New York Public Library, Ransom Cooke and Erastus Corning in New York Stat Library; Van Buren, Marcy, and Polk papers, Library of Congress Printed sources include "Calhoun Correspondence," Annual Report American Historical Association ... 1899, volume II (1900) and 1929 (1930); "The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren," Ibid., I9I8, volume II (1920); Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years' View (1854); C. Z. Lincoln, State of New York: Messages from the Governors (1909), volume IV; letters and speeches in R. H. Gillet, The Life and Times of Silas Wright (2 volumes, 1874). Other important biographies are J. D. Hammond, Life and Times of Silas Wright (1848), repr. as volume III of his History of Political Parties in the State of New York (3 volumes, 1852), and J. S. Jenkins, The Life of Silas Wright (1847). W. E. Chancellor, A Life of Silas Wright (1913) was a campaign document for Governor Sulzer. For genealogy see Curtis Wright, Genealogical and Biographical Notices of the Descendants of Sir John Wright (1915). See also David Murray, "The Antirent Episode in the State of New York," Annual Report American Historical Association ... I896, volume I (1897); E. I. McCormac, James K. Polk (1922); WE. Smith, the Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics (2 volumes, 1933); D.R. Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York (1919); H. D. A. Donovan, The Barnburners . . . 1830-1852 (1925), which has a critical bibliog.; Gates Curtis, Our Country and Its People: A Memorial Record of St. Lawrence County, New York (1894); H.F. Landon, The North Country: A History (1932), volume I; D. S. Alexander, A Pol. History of the State of New York, volumes I, II (1906); F. J. Turner, The U. S.: 1830-50 (1935); Albany Evening Atlas; August 28, 1847. Wright figures in a novel, The Light in the Clearing (1917), by Irving Bacheller, a fellow countryman of the "North Border." Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe].



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