Hill

from Hill's timber lands. In 1780 he supplied
most of the different kinds of cannon balls used
at the siege of Charleston. Although carefully
guarded, the iron-works were burned by the
British in June 1780, and Hill lost his home,
grain mill, sawmills, negro houses, and ninety
negroes. Leaving his family in a log hut, he
joined Gen. Thomas Sumter \_q.v."\ as lieutenant-
colonel of militia and soon after fought at Wil-
liamson's Plantation. He distinguished himself
at Rocky Mount, and although wounded in the
arm at Hanging Rock, was present at King's
Mountain and fought at Fishdam Ford and
Blackstock's.

After the Revolution he served many terms in
the South Carolina legislature. In 1783 he was
a justice for Camden District, and from 1785
to 1799 he was a member of the county court
of York. He rebuilt JEra. Furnace in 1787 and
built JEtna Furnace the next year, utilizing a
simple method of blowing his fires by a fall of
water, which gave a more regular blast than bel-
lows, without freezing. Besides slaves, he em-
ployed miners, founders, woodcutters, and col-
liers, whom he paid in iron. Since the nearest
river landing from which he could ship his prod-
uct was at Camden, seventy miles away, Hill be-
came active in transportation schemes. In 1782
he was a member of the House committee on im-
provement of inland navigation; he was a char-
ter member of the Santee canal company and of
the Catawba company, and commissioner for
making navigable the Broad.

In 1795 Hill and the executors of Hayne ad-
vertised the iron-works for sale, with brick
house, gristmill, sawmills, and 15,000 acres of
land; but in 1798 he was still operating and sold
to the state fifty horsemen's swords and fifteen
field-pieces with cannon balls. In 1815, "hav-
ing waited near thirty years," as he said, for cer-
tain errors in Revolutionary history to be cor-
rected, he undertook the task himself and dic-
tated his memoirs, largely to justify General
Sumter. Hill was a vigorous personality; in the
legislature he spoke often and in his community
he wielded great influence. He was survived by
four sons, two daughters, and his widow who
was Jane McCall; and he is buried in an un-
marked grave at Bethel Presbyterian Church,
near York.

[County records, York, S. C.; state archives, Co-
lumbia, S. C.; The Statutes at Large of S. C.t vols.
VI, VII (1840), IX (1841) ; Gazette of the State of S, C.
(Charleston), Nov. 24, 1779; City Gazette and Daily
Advertiser (Charleston), May 12, 1795; address by
D. H. Hill, in Yorkville Enquirer (York, S, C.), Oct.
28, 1919; Col. William Hill's Memoirs of the Revolu-
tion (1921) ; M. A. Moore, Reminiscences of York
(n.d., 1870?) ; J. M. Swank, Hist, of the Manufacture

Hillard

of Iron in All Ages (1884); J. L. Bishop, A Hist, of
Am. Manufactures, vol. I (1866). ] A. K. G.

HILLARD, GEORGE STILLMAN (Sept.
22, i8o8-Jan. 21, 1879), lawyer, man of letters,
was born in Machias, Me., the son of John and
Sarah (Stillman) Hillard. In 1828 he gradu-
ated with first honors from Harvard College.
After teaching for two years tinder George Ban-
croft in the Round Hill School in Northampton,
he entered the Dane Law School in Cambridge;
received his A.M. from Harvard in 1831 and his
LL.B. in 1832; was admitted to practice in 1833;
aided George Ripley for a year in conducting
the Christian Register, a Unitarian weekly; and
in 1834 opened a law office with Charles Sum-
ner and became editor of the Jurist. In 1835 he
married Susan Tracy Howe, daughter of Judge
Samuel Howe \_q.v.~\ of Northampton. Their
one child, a son, died in infancy. In 1835, also,
he was elected to the state House of Representa-
tives. Hillard was ambitious of success at the
bar, in politics, and in literature, and his career
began auspiciously. He had a retentive memory,
cultivated taste, unfailing amiability and cheer-
fulness, high moral character, and a strong sense
of public duty; but since he lacked sufficient
health, vigor, and money, his divided aims over-
taxed him and he never achieved the eminence
to which he seemed destined Although he had
many of the higher qualities of an advocate, he
was respectable rather than distinguished as a
lawyer. For the rough and tumble of politics he
was decidedly unfit; he seldom got reflected to
anything. He was president of the Common
Council of Boston, 1846-47; a state senator in
1850, and a delegate to the constitutional con-
vention of 1853, contributing the 'Tetters of
Silas Standfast to his Friend Jotham" to the
Discussions on the Constitution Proposed to the
People of Massachusetts by the Convention of
1853 (1854); city solicitor from 1854 until 1855,
when the irruption of the Know Nothings turned
him out; and United States attorney for the dis-
trict of Massachusetts, 1866-71. In spite of his
warm friendship with Charles Sumner, he clung
with fatuous loyalty to the Whig party, accept-
ed the Fugitive-Slave Law of 1850 without a
murmur, and went with his party into limbo.
His greatest talents were literary and forensic.
He was master of rhetoric and an excellent
though seldom a profoundly moving orator. His
occasional addresses, such as that on the Rela-
tion of the Poet to His Age (1843), delivered
Aug. 24, 1843, before the Harvard chapter of
Phi Beta Kappa, were famous in their day. To
Sparks's Library of American Biography (i
ser. II, 1834), he contributed a Life of Captain

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