Hildreth

City, he was survived by two sons and two
daughters.

Columbian Exposition (1895); Chicago Daily Tribune,
Apr. 19, 1919; Harriet Monroe, Harlow Niks Higin-
botham: A Memoir with Brief Autobiog., etc. (pri-
vately printed, 1920) ; S. H. Ditchett, Marshall Field
and Co.: The Life Story of a Great Concern (1922) ;
Report of the President to the Board of Directors of
the World's Columbian Exposition (1898) ; Who's Who
in America, 1918-19.] W—mB. S.

HILDRETH, RICHARD (June 28, iSo7-July
11, 1865), writer, editor, lawyer, was born in
Deerfield, Mass., a descendant of Richard Hil-
dreth who became a freeman of the colony of
Massachusetts Bay in 1643 an(* the son of the
Rev. Hosea and Sarah McLeod Hildreth. His
father, a graduate of Harvard, became professor
of mathematics at the Phillips Exeter Academy
in 1811. Richard entered the Academy in 1816
and probably graduated in 1822. He graduated
at Harvard in 1826. Turning to the law, he en-
tered an office in Newburyport and was admitted
to the bar in Suffolk County in 1830. He prac-
tised in Boston and Newburyport until July 1832,
when he interested himself in the founding of the
Boston Daily Atlas, receiving a small annual
salary for writing its chief editorials. He had
already been contributing to the Ladies' Maga-
zine and the American Monthly Magazine, and
his work appeared in the first and later issues of
the New-England Magazine. In 1834 he be-
came a part owner of the Atlas, but in the sum-
mer Caleb Gushing acquired the paper in order
to enlist its support for Webster (My Connec-
tion with The Atlas Newspaper, 1839; C. M.
Fuess, The Life of Caleb Gushing, 1923,1, 146-
48). Hildreth went to Florida for his health,
returning to Boston in April 1836. He now
agreed to do two articles each week for the Atlas,
and early in 1837 began to supply editorials as
before and also to report thfe proceedings of the
law courts. In September he contracted to fur-
nish most of the editorial matter for the paper.
His articles are said to have "powerfully con-
tributed to excite the strenuous opposition which
was afterwards manifested ... to the annex-
ation of Texas" (Duyckinck, post, II, 299). He
was in Washington from September 1837 till the
next April. In November 1838 he gave up his
editorial work for the Atlas because its stand on
the license law disagreed with his. He urged
supporters of temperance to vote only for men
who were "inflexible friends" to prohibition (A
Letter to Emory Washburn> Wm. M. Rogers,
and Seventy-eight Others, 1840).

He supported Harrison by printing a cam-
paign biography, The People's Presidential Can-

Hildreth
didate (1839), and The Contrast: or William
Henry Harrison versus Martin Van Buren
(1840). In the latter year he also brought out
Banks, Banking, and Paper Currencies, found-
ed on his earlier work, The History of Banks
(1837). The book was "written principally with
the design of advocating the system of open com-
petition in banking." The year 1840 also saw
the publication of his translation of a work by
fitienne Dumont on Bentham's theory of legis-
lation, and of Despotism in America, a discus-
sion of the results of slavery. The latter book
was reprinted in 1854 w^h a new chapter on the
legal basis of slavery drawn from two articles
written by Hildreth for Theodore Parker's
Massachusetts Quarterly Review. He also en-
tered theological controversy by attacking some
of the views of Andrews Norton \_q.v'.] in A
Letter to Andrews Norton on Miracles as the
Foundation of Religious Faith (1840). More
noted was his novel, The Slave: or Memoirs of
Archy Moore (1836), reissued in a second and
a third edition in 1840. As The White Slave, an
enlarged version came out in London and Boston
in 1852, and in London again the next year. As
Archy Moore it was published at Auburn, N. Y.,
in 1855, an(l fa New York in 1857. There were
also five French editions and probably other
English issues of this book, the popularity of
which seems to have been far greater than its
literary quality justified. He was in British
Guiana, probably from 1840 to 1843, and Sabin
ascribes to him a Local Guide of British Guiana
(1843). He is also said to have edited succes-
sively two Guiana papers supporting the abo-
lition of slavery, and to have edited a compilation
of the colonial laws.
After his return to the United States and his
marriage on June 7,1844, to Caroline Neagus of
Deerfield, he devoted himself chiefly to his His-
tory of the United States, which he began to plan
while he was in college. The first volume ap-
peared in 1849; the sixth and last, coming to
1821, in 1852. A revised version appeared in
1854 and 1855, and there have been several later
editions. His fame rests upon his History; The
earlier volumes are strongly Federalist in point
of view, and the work as a whole is dry. It is
valuable chiefly for its accuracy in the matter of
names and dates. His Theory of Morals (1844)
and Theory of Politics (1853) are two of six
projected works in which he hoped to treat also
"wealth," "taste," "knowledge," and "education,"
in a purely inductive, scientific vein. To quote
the Athenaeum (Nov. 12,1853), his thought was
"like his style; solid, level, monotonous. It nei-
ther warms by its vividness nor startles by its