Richard Hildreth is most often remembered as an historian who wrote the six-volume History of the United States (1849; 1851, 1852). But Hildreth also was a lawyer, a successful newspaper editor, an active pamphleteer, an ardent abolitionist, and the author of the first novel-length work of abolitionist fiction. His contribution to antislavery literature has begun to attract the interest of literary scholars.

Richard Hildreth was born on 28 June 1807 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the son of Hosea and Sarah (McLeod) Hildreth. On his father's side Richard was descended from among the earliest English settlers in North America: his namesake, Richard Hildreth, arrived on the shores of Massachusetts sometime in 1635. In 1811 Hosea Hildreth obtained a teaching position as a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, where Richard spent his early childhood and in 1816 became the youngest student at Phillips Exeter. In 1822 Richard entered Harvard, where he...