(1812–75). Perhaps because he himself came from a poor family and had to work extremely hard from an early age, Henry Wilson made the antislavery movement the key issue of his political career. After many years as an influential United States senator, Wilson served as vice-president (1873–75) in the Republican administration of Ulysses S. Grant.
He was born Jeremiah Jones Colbath on Feb. 16, 1812, in Farmington, N.H. Indentured as a farm laborer at age 10, he worked for food and clothing. He received a month of schooling each winter, and neighbors loaned him books and helped him with his reading skills. He legally changed his name to Henry Wilson when he completed his indenture at age 21. He learned to make shoes and became a small-scale manufacturer in Natick, Mass.—leading to his later nickname, the Natick Cobbler. He married Harriet Malvina Howe in 1840.
After attending slavery debates and observing slave auctions in Washington, D.C., Wilson decided to devote his life to the abolition of slavery. He attracted attention as a stump speaker and was elected as a Whig to the Massachusetts legislature in 1840, serving almost continuously for the next 12 years. Disappointed at the Whigs’ ambivalence on slavery, he helped form the Free-Soil party in 1848 and edited its publication Boston Republican. In 1854 he joined the Know-Nothing party, hoping to convert it to abolitionism. Disgusted with their policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants, Wilson switched to the Republican party a few years later.
Wilson lost his Congressional bid in 1852 and failed to win the Massachusetts governorship the following year. After filling a vacancy in the United States Senate in 1855, he held the seat with victories in 1859, 1865, and 1871. He served as chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs during the American Civil War (1861–65). Having been a member of the Massachusetts state militia and achieving the grade of brigadier general, his military knowledge proved valuable to the Senate. He also shaped bills in such a way that many slaves in border states received freedom years before the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified. Wilson’s only son, Henry Hamilton Wilson, served with distinction in the war and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel of an African American regiment.
A Radical Republican, Wilson opposed President Andrew Johnson’s postwar policy of accommodation toward the defeated South. Wilson often wrote on the war and Reconstruction, with his best-known work being the 3-volume History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77).
Defeated for the vice-presidential nomination in 1868, Wilson was nominated four years later and resigned his Senate seat in 1873 to serve during Grant’s second term. Like many 19th-century vice-presidents, Wilson was frustrated by his lack of influence on administration policy. He suffered a stroke while in office and died on Nov. 22, 1875, in Washington, D.C., in the vice-president’s room in the United States Capitol.