Henry Wilson

Biography

Henry Wilson was born Jeremiah Jones Colbath in Farmington, New Hampshire, in 1812 to a poor family. Indentured to a farmer from the age of ten, he educated himself by reading, and at 21 legally changed his name. In 1833 he walked to Natick, Massachusetts, learned shoemaking and ran his own shoe business, which later earned him the nickname the Natick Cobbler.

Active first as a Whig, he sat in the Massachusetts House from 1841 to 1843 and the state Senate in the 1840s and early 1850s, serving as its president from 1851 to 1853, and rose to brigadier general in the state militia. Opposed to the spread of slavery, he left the Whigs in 1848 and helped launch the Free Soil Party, chaired its 1852 national convention, and owned and edited the Boston Republican. He worked to unite anti-slavery Free Soilers, Democrats, Whigs and Know Nothings, the coalition from which the Republican Party grew.

Elected to the United States Senate in 1855, he became a leading Radical Republican. As chairman of the Senate's military affairs committee from 1861 he oversaw legislation and thousands of nominations for the Union war effort, and in 1861 he briefly commanded a Massachusetts volunteer regiment he had raised. He wrote the 1862 law that ended slavery in the District of Columbia and backed the enlistment of African Americans in the Union forces, and after the war he supported Radical Reconstruction.

In 1872 he was elected vice president as Ulysses S. Grant's running mate, though his reputation was dented by his admitted involvement in the Crédit Mobilier affair. He took office in March 1873, suffered a stroke two months later, and died of another stroke at the Capitol on 22 November 1875.