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HIN

གསའ་མན།

...

HENRY WILSON.

BAKER

CHAPTER XXVIII.

HENRY WILSON.

His Humble Birth-Apprenticed to a Farmer-Learns the Shoemaker's Trade After Becoming Twenty-one-Pursues an Academical Course After That-Becomes a Stump Orator-Great success-Enters Public Life-In the Legislature-An Ardent Free Soiler-An Editor for Two Years-Chosen United States Senator in 1850-His Career in the Senate-Challenged by Bully Brooks-Service on the Military Committee-Joins the ArmyHis Labors for the Colored Race-Why he Would Not Join the Workingmen's Party-An Answer Worth Reading-A Busy Career.

Our sketch of Henry Wilson, Republican candidate for Vice-President, is mainly a hasty compilation from recent newspaper sketches, of which the New York Times and the Philadelphia Telegraph have published the best which have come to hand. The origin of Wilson, like that of Lincoln, Grant, Johnson and others whom the whole nation has seen fit to elevate to the highest places within its gift, was extremely humble; more so, indeed, than any of the others. His manner of struggling upward against adversity was very like that of Horace Greeley; but as the temperaments and minds of the two men are essentially different, the parallel does not extend to their respective careers after attaining manhood.

Henry Wilson was born at Farmington, N. H.,

February 16th, 1812, and is now, therefore, in his sixty-first year. On account of the extreme poverty of his parents, he was at ten years of age apprenticed to a farmer in the vicinity for eleven years. His master was a kind and generous man, who sent the young hard-working boy to school in the intervals of agricultural labor, and here he soon developed a great taste for reading. He hungered after knowledge, and his evident desire to learn induced a lawyer of Farmington to offer him the free use of his library, which was fortunately a very extensive one. Here the statesman in embryo reveled, and, in after life he has declared to friends that he believes he read during those eleven years a hundred volumes a year. When he became twenty-one he had exhausted the library. We continue the narrative in the words of another :

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LEARNS A TRADE.

His indentures were now completed, and if he had chosen to become a farmer, opportunities of advancement were not wanting, for everybody liked the shy awkward youth, with his broad, high forehead, his honest eyes and his immense but somewhat desultory stores of information. But he had resolved upon quitting Farmington and seeing the world. Putting his few clothes and his books, his only treasures, into a bundle, he slung it across his shoulder and walked gayly off to Natick, in Massachusetts, where he hired himself to a shoe-maker, with the resolution of working at this trade until he had accumulated a fund sufficient to maintain him in some good academy. It took three years to do this, when he returned to New Hampshire and studied for a time in the academies at Stafford, Wolfsborough and Concord. Most unfortunately, the man to whom he had confided his little heap of savings became insolvent, so Henry Wilson was obliged to return to the shoemaker's bench at Natick.

"Mr. Wilson himself gives, in one of his speeches, the following account of his rugged experience as a boy and young man :

"I left my home at ten years of age and served an apprenticeship of eleven years, receiving a month's schooling each year, and at the end of eleven years

of hard work, a yoke of oxen and six sheep, which brought me eighty-four dollars. Eighty-four dollars for eleven years of hard toil! I never spent the amonnt of one dollar in money, counting every penny, from the time I was born until I was twenty-one years of age. I know what it is to travel weary miles and ask my fellow-men to give me leave to toil. I remember that, in October, 1833, I walked into your village from my native town, went through your mills, seeking employment. If anybody had offered me nine dollars a month, I should have accepted it gladly. I went to Salmon Falls, I went to Dover, I went to New Market, and tried to get work, without success, and I returned home footsore and weary, but not discouraged. I put my pack on my back and walked to where I now live, in Massachusetts, and learned a mechanic's trade.'

BECOMES A STUMP ORATOR.

He was now twenty-six, and noted everywhere in the neighborhood as a modest, well-educated young man, with a great turn for debating. He delighted in discussion, and was so redoubtable an opponent that no one in the academies or among his comrades at Natick cared to enter into an argument with one who was so logical, so keenly alive to the weak points of others, and who had, moreover, so powerful a flow of language. Everybody predicted that at the next election the people would hear of Henry Wilson. They did. In 1840 General Harrison was the Whig candidate, and young Wilson's feelings were warmly enlisted on his side. He spoke with great effect at Natick in his favor, and afterward in other towns of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He was at once recognized as a genuine orator, and his services were engaged by the Whig party, for whom he delivered no less than sixty speeches during that campaign.

AND AN EDITOR.

In the next five years he was himself elected three times a member of the Legislature of Massachusetts, and was twice State Senator. Here he quickly distinguished himself as a bitter hater of slavery, and, when a State Senator from Middlesex county, was selected to carry the great protest of Massachusetts against the evils of slavery and against the annexation of Texas to Washington. The poet Whittier was connected with him in this characteristic embassy. He was a delegate to the Whig National Convention of 1848, being now thirty-six, and he took the opportunity of proposing and presenting to the Convention a series of anti-slavery resolutions which were declared by many authorities to be the most comprehensive and the most unsparing that the brain of man could devise. The Convention, however, was too timid to accept them, and Henry Wilson, on their rejection, at once withdrew and devoted himself to assisting in the formation of the Free Soil Party. Believing that the public mind wanted educating on the subject, he purchased the Boston Republican and for two years agitated the question without fear or flinching.

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