Henry Brewster Stanton

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Henry Brewster Stanton (June 27, 1805 – January 14, 1887) was an American abolitionist, reformer, lawyer, journalist, and politician. He wrote for the New York Tribune, the New York Sun, and abolitionist papers The Liberator and Anti-Slavery Standard. He served in the New York State Senate in 1850 and 1851.

Born in Preston, Connecticut, to Joseph Stanton and Susan Brewster, a childhood memory of hearing a slave sing helped spark his commitment to racial justice. He studied law after marrying Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1840, and they had eight children, including Theodore and Harriot. He worked as a patent attorney in Boston before moving to Seneca Falls in 1847 due to ill health.

Stanton was active in reform movements. He helped start the Free Soil Party in 1848 and the Republican Party in 1856. He served as Deputy Clerk of Monroe County, was secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1835–1840), and was Deputy Collector of the Port of New York (1861–1863). He wrote Sketches of Reforms and Reformers in Great Britain and Ireland (1849) and was finishing Random Recollections when he died of pneumonia in New York City in 1887. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was in London at the time, advocating for women’s suffrage. Frederick Douglass remembered him as one of the best abolition orators.