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Richard Hildreth BACKGROUND
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Richard HildrethBACKGROUNDRichard Hildreth was a journalist, philosopher, historian, and antislavery activist. He was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where his father, Hosea Hildreth, was the principal of Deerfield Academy. Hildreth’s father had trained as a Congregational minister and intended to teach only until he could be settled in a church. However, he was so successful as a teacher that he remained in that profession for twenty years. During most of Richard's boyhood, his father taught at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, where Hildreth studied before attending Harvard at age 15. After graduating from Harvard, Hildreth taught school for a year. Unlike his father, however, he did not have a natural talent for it. Because of this he decided to pursue a career in law and literature. He took up study with several attorneys in Boston and surrounding cities, and was admitted to the bar in 1830. He also wrote prolifically including fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays for magazines, articles about the Unitarian controversy for Gloucester and Salem newspapers, and a school textbook, An Abridged History of the United States, 1831. In 1832, Hildreth received an offer which diverted him from the career he might have envisioned. John Eastburn, a leading politician of the anti-Jacksonian party (then just adopting the name “Whig”), invited him to help start a new Whig newspaper. “The Atlas” was vigorous in its attacks on the “imbecility, venality, and corruption” of the Jackson administration. A fellow journalist said of Hildreth's political writing, “His pen was like the sword of the Arab chieftain: ‘ornament it carried none, but the notches on the blade’.” After two years, Hildreth sold his share in the Atlas and left Boston for Florida, the first of several trips he would make in search of a more healthful climate. Hildreth suffered from tuberculosis, and recurring periods of depression. These problems would haunt him for large periods of his life. ACTIVISM AND CAREERIn 1836 Hildreth returned to Massachusetts and to the Atlas. Despite fragile health, he was unsparing in his labors for political reform. To his friend and fellow abolitionist, Maria Weston Chapman, he wrote, “I am impelled by an irresistible impulse to act—or rather to write—for the sharpened point of a goose quill is the most potent instrument in my power to employ.” He added, saying, “To perish in the breach in the assault against tyranny and error is not the worst death a man might die.” Besides slavery, the issues he dealt most closely with were the dispossession of the southeastern Indians, the movement to annex Texas, the economic crisis of 1837, and the Massachusetts liquor license law of 1838. During the next four years, while serving as a court reporter and Washington correspondent for the Atlas, Hildreth turned out numerous articles and pamphlets on political issues, wrote two books on the banking crisis, and founded a short-lived temperance newspaper. In 1839, he ran for the Massachusetts House of Representatives as a Temperance Whig. He went on to lose by just eight votes. However, Hildreth remained active in politics despite this setback. He supported the presidential campaign of William Henry Harrison with speeches, pamphlets and a campaign biography, “The People's Presidential Candidate,” 1839. By Election Day, exhausted and ill, he had left Boston for British Guiana. Hildreth's three years in South America were among the happiest in his life. His health improved so much that, he wrote in a letter home, he knew for the first time in his life what it was to be well. Editing two newspapers and a local guidebook freed him from financial worries and left time for an ambitious project he called the Science of Man. He intended “to apply to the philosophy of man's nature the same inductive method which has proved so successful in advancing what is called natural philosophy.” In 1844, Hildreth married Caroline Gould Negus, a member of a distinguished family of artists, well known in Boston for her work as a portrait painter. A reformer with an interest in utopian communities, she was at one time a director of the Boston branch of the American Union of Associationists. For eight years, Caroline supported the family so Richard could spend his time in research and writing. After the revolutions of 1848, he revised Theory of Politics, adding new material on the relationship between capitalism and democracy and incorporating ideas from utopian socialism introduced by his wife. “This socialist question of the distribution of wealth, once raised,” he warned, “is not to be blinked out of sight.” VIEWS ON SLAVERYIn Florida, Hildreth stayed on a plantation where he developed an intense hatred for slavery. During eighteen months there he wrote two books: a novel, “The Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive,” 1836; and “Despotism in America,” 1840, an analysis of the harmful effects of slavery on the economic and political development of the southern states. Though "The Slave" was not the first American novel to express disapproval of slavery, it was the first written specifically to present an antislavery argument. “The story illustrates the many ways slavery exerted a corrupting influence over the morals of masters and slaves alike. Hildreth was one of the very few white people of his (or any) era free enough from racism to truly imagine what it would be like to be a slave. The slaves he portrays are neither brutes nor saints, but complex human beings doing their limited best to survive in an impossible situation. The Slave is remarkably free from the racist assumptions that marred many other anti-slavery works by white people, even committed abolitionists.” In one of the most powerful moments in the book, the hero, Archy, who had felt superior to his fellow slaves because of his “white blood,” realizes the extent to which he has been complicit in the racism of his culture when he comes to admire the dark-skinned slave who leads a band of runaways. The abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips remarked that "The Slave," “owed its want of success to no lack of genius, but only to the fact that it was born out of due time.” Hildreth's philosophical views on slavery were best expressed through literature. He felt that freedom was paramount, and taking the freedom of another was unethical. This, however, moved people most when they could read those values in a story about slaves. Therefore, by using fiction to express his views, Hildreth reached more people than he could have otherwise hoped to. This is similar to other writers like Frantz Fannon and Fredrick Douglass, the later of which used a narrative form of storytelling to try to express the feeling and story of someone who has to undergo slavery and oppression. 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