MMS "Extra Feature"

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MMS "Extra Feature" -
200th Birthday of Natick's own
U.S. Vice President Henry Wilson
by A. Richard Miller

994 visits since 990618; last updated 120216.
Hi, Friends of MMS:

Today, February 16th, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of U.S. Vice President Henry Wilson. I don't expect this bicentennial day to receive much celebration - even in his adopted home town (and ours) of Natick, Massachusetts.

Henry Wilson devoted much of his life to freeing the American slaves. He had a particular understanding of their problem, and of the nation's shame, because he also grew up in a yoke. Wilson was born Jeremiah Colbath, a bright New Hampshire boy who poverty drove into indentured servitude on a farm, from age ten to twenty-one. Freed at last, he changed his name, walked one hundred miles to Natick, and learned to hand-assemble shoes and to create his own future and the future America.

Wilson would become a factory-owner, a politician, a national leader, a mentor of The Great Emancipator, Lincoln, and a man who finally saw his dream come true. Wilson was a real-life role model for the wildly successful Horation Alger novels. (Horation Alger, Jr., twenty years Wilson's junior, also became a Natick citizen; the famous author's far larger memorial stone graces another cemetery in our town.)

Wilson hopped through four political parties; when each reversed its policy on abolition, he refused to waver. Through it all, Wilson remained a plain man, and a great friend of the people. When President Grant's first Cabinet disgraced him, only Wilson as an election partner enabled his election to a second term in 1872. And when abolition of slavery finally was achieved, Wilson turned to Women's Suffrage, the winning of voting rights for women.

This popular hero of his time has one of the smallest headstones in Natick's Old Dell Park Cemetery, and a miniscule place in his country's awareness. The Henry Wilson History Trail, begun years ago to celebrate this day and this year, remains incomplete. Perhaps by the close of Henry Wilson's bicentennial year, he will have a better tribute.

(The MMS "Extra Feature" is updated twice monthly; you can find it on-line, near the top of our MMS home page.)

Best wishes from
--Dick and Jill Miller, Partners, MMS <TheMillers@millermicro.com> backhome

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