Richard Hildreth

Richard Hildreth (June 28, 1807 - July 11, 1865), American journalist, historian, novelist, and anti-slavery activist.

Hildreth was born at Deerfield, Massachusetts, the son of Hosea Hildreth (1782-1835), a teacher of mathematics and later a Congregational minister.

Richard graduated Harvard College in 1826, and, after studying law at Newburyport, Massachusetts, was admitted to the bar at Boston in 1830. He had already taken to journalism, and in 1832 he became joint founder and editor of a daily newspaper, the Boston Atlas.

Having in 1834 gone to the South for the benefit of his health, he was led by what he witnessed of the evils of slavery (chiefly in Florida) to write the anti-slavery novel The Slave: or Memoir of Archy Moore (1836; enlarged edition, 1852, The White Slave). In 1837 he wrote for the Atlas a series of articles vigorously opposing the annexation of Texas. In the same year he published Banks, Banking, and Paper Currencies, a work which helped to promote the growth of the free banking system in America.

In 1838 he resumed his editorial duties on the Atlas, but in 1840 removed, on account of his health, to British Guiana, where he lived for three years and was editor of two weekly newspapers in succession at Georgetown, Guyana. He published in this year (1840) a volume in opposition to slavery, Despotism in America (2nd ed., 1854).

In 1849 he published the first three volumes of his History of the United States, adding two more volumes in 1851 and the sixth and last in 1852. The first three volumes of this history, his most important work, deal with the period 1492-1789, and the second three with the period 1789-1821. The history is notable for its painstaking accuracy and candor, as they are based on very careful analysis of the primary sources. The later volumes favor the Federalist Party. In dealing with the Jeffersonians, Hildreth calls them both "Republicans" and "Democrats" on the same page, but never "Democratic Republicans."

Hildreth's Japan as It Was and Is (1855) was at the time a valuable digest of the information contained in other works on that country (new ed., 1906). He also wrote a campaign biography of William Henry Harrison (1839); Theory of Morals (1844); and Theory of Politics (1853), as well as Lives of Atrocious Judges (1856), compiled from Lord Campbell's two works. Between 1857 and 1860 Hildreth worked for the New York Tribune and during the same period he wrote several anti-slavery tracts for the fledgling Republican party under various pseudonyms. Poor health forced him to retire from his writing career in 1860. Massachusetts Governor Nathaniel Prentiss Banks and Senator Charles Sumner successfully lobbied for Hildreth's appointment as the United States consul at Trieste in 1861. In 1865 he resigned from that position and moved to Florence, Italy, where he died and is buried in the English Cemetery.

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Bibliography

Main Works

• Hildreth, Richard. Despotism in America: An Inquiry into the Nature, Results, and Legal Basis of the Slave-Holding System in the United States. 3rd, revised and enlarged edition. Boston: John P. Jewett, / New York: Sheldon, Lamport and Blakeman, 1854. (The first edition was published anonymously with a slightly different title by Whipple and Damrell in Boston in 1840.)
• Hildreth, Richard. The History of the United States of America. 6 vols. Revised edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856-1860. (First published as The History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent to the Organization of Government under the Federal Constitution, 1497-1788, 3 vols. [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849], and The History of the United States of America, from the Adoption of the Federal Constitution to the End of the Sixteenth Congress, 1788-1821, 3 vols., [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851-52].) Online availability at books.google.com:
  • Volume 1 [1]
  • Volume 2 [2]
  • Volume 3 [3]
  • Volume 4 (covering the years 1788 to 1796) [4]
  • Volume 5 (covering the years 1797 to 1800) [5]

• Hildreth, Richard. The History of Banks: To which is Added, a Demonstration of the Advantages and Necessity of Free [6]

Secondary literature

• Emerson, Donald E. Richard Hildreth Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946. Fulltext in QUESTIA
• Emerson, Donald E. "Hildreth, Draper, and 'Scientific History'." In Historiography and Urbanization: Essays in American History in Honor of W. Stull Holt, 139-70. Ed. by Eric F. Goldman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941.
• Friedland, Louis S. "Richard Hildreth's Minor Works." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 40 (First quarter 1946):127-50. (With a "Bibliography of Richard Hildreth's Minor Works," 139-50.)
• Kelly, Alfred H. "Richard Hildreth." In The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography, 25-42. Ed. by William T. Hutchinson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937.
• Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. "The Problem of Richard Hildreth." New England Quarterly 13, no. 2 (June 1940):223-45.
• Wish, Harvey. The American Historian: A Social-Intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. (Chapter 4 on Bancroft.) Fulltext in QUESTIA

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