Hinsdale

Shortly after reaching his majority he was ad-
mitted to the New Haven County bar and settled
in Waterbury to practise law. On Oct. 9, 1825,
he married Alathea Maria Scovill of Water-
bury. In 1830 he was appointed a judge of pro-
bate for the Waterbury district and held this of-
fice for ten years. Having taken an active in-
terest in party politics, he was elected to repre-
sent the 5th district in the state Senate in 1836
and was reflected for the succeeding term. He
then served as a member of the House of Repre-
sentatives for the town of Waterbury, In 1842,
while a member of the House, he was elected a
judge of the superior and supreme courts, there-
by winning the distinction of being the youngest
man up to that time elevated to that position.

There was little in Hinman's record to war-
rant his receiving this honor. During his ca-
reer as a legislator he spoke seldom and never
at length, and in the active practice of his pro-
fession he was slow of utterance, indolent, and
unmethodical. The limited practice of a country
lawyer provided no incentive for wide legal re-
search and it had only been upon rare occasions
that he had displayed any considerable knowl-
edge of the law. He was recognized as a leader,
however, and his elevation to the bench gave
him some inducement to exert himself and an
opportunity to display his native qualities of
mind. After some nineteen years on the bench
he became the chief justice, a post which he held
until his death. His opinions, contained in twen-
ty volumes of the Connecticut Reports, are sim-
ple and direct, and are remarkable for their prac-
tical common sense rather than for their erudi-
tion. Hinman was an unusually heavy person
and was slow and ponderous in his movements.
For forty years he maintained the same style in
dress and was always to be seen in frock coat
and full broad-ruffled shirt.

[R. R. Hiuman, A Family Record of the Descendants
of Sergeant Edward Hinman (1856) ; 35 Conn., 599-
603; Albany Law Jour.f Mar. 5, 1870; Hartford Daily
Courantj Feb. 22, 1870.] L. H. S.

HINSDALE, BURKE AARON (Mar. 31,
i837-Nov. 29, 1900), educator, editor, author,
was born on a farm near Wadsworth, Ohio, the
son of Albert Hinsdale, who moved from Tor-
rington, Conn., to Ohio, in the fall of 1816, and
Clarinda Elvira Eyles, the daughter of other
emigrants from Connecticut who had cast their
lot in the Western Reserve. He was descended
from Robert Hinsdale who came to America in
1637, settling first at Dedham, Mass., and later
in Deerfield. He worked on his father's farm
and attended the short sessions of the district
school until his sixteenth year. He then entered
Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram

Hinsdale

College). His student days, scattered over the
years from 1853 to 1860, were interspersed with
short winter terms of school teaching. At Hiram
he found James A. Garfield, first a student and
later a member of the faculty and principal of
the Institute. Between them developed a life-
long friendship. In 1860 Hinsdale became a
tutor in the Eclectic Institute and through the
Civil-War period he was one of a small group
of instructors that remained at the school. Later,
from 1864 to 1869, he held church pastorates in
Solon and Cleveland and was for one year a pro-
fessor in a college which had a brief existence at
Alliance, Ohio. During this interval he was as-
sistant editor of the Christian Standard, a church
weekly published under the auspices of the Dis-
ciples of Christ. On May 24, 1862, he had mar-
ried Mary Eliza Turner of Cleveland who had
been a classmate at Hiram.

In 1869 Hinsdale became professor of philoso-
phy, English literature, and political science in
Hiram College. In the next year he was made
president, and under his administration the in-
stitution became a college in fact as well as in
name. He continued at its head until 1882, serv-
ing as lecturer, preacher, and administrator.
During these years also he wrote three books on
theological subjects and in 1880, at the request
of the Republican National Committee, he wrote
a campaign life of Garfield. Upon the death of
the President, he published as a Hiram memorial
President Garfield and Education (1881), a trib-
ute revealing the author's growing interest in
the problems of education. Later he edited The
Works of James Abram Garfield (2 vols., 1882-
83). Having won wide recognition as an edu-
cator, in 1882 he became superintendent of the
Cleveland schools, an office which he held four
years. At the time the Cleveland school system
was under a cloud of textbook and patronage
scandals and it is doubtful whether Hinsdale and
the board of education had much in common or
ever understood one another. He was not re-
elected in 1886, but he remained two years in
Cleveland largely engaged in compiling his his-
torical study, The Old Northwest (1888). He
had meanwhile published a collection of articles
and addresses under the title: Schools and Stud-
ies (1884). In 1888 he accepted the professor-
ship of the science and art of teaching at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, and in addition to his teach-
ing he continued to write on the subjects which
had long interested him. In his studies in the
field of education, he showed himself in his later
works to be rather less critical of existing meth-
ods of instruction than he had formerly been,
supplanting his criticism with constructive meth-

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