Richard Hildreth was an American polymath. Although trained as a lawyer, he spent the larger part of his working life as a journalist. A vigorous and powerful polemicist, he wielded a trenchant pen in the major controversies--political, economic, and theological--from the 1830s through the 1850s. A pioneer in the antislavery movement, he authored the first novel published in the United States that had as its central theme the evils of the South's peculiar institution. He was this country's leading exponent of Benthamite utilitarianism. His 1840 translation of Jeremy Bentham's Theory of Legislation from the French (in which the work had been first published) has, according to a leading Bentham scholar, "become almost an integral part of the Benthamic canon.... By Hildreth's work alone Bentham is known both to the majority of lawyers and to the wider public...." And his own attempt at formulating what he called RUDIMENTS OF...