Biography
Hillard was born at Machias, Maine on September 22, 1808. After graduating at Harvard College in 1828, he taught in the Round Hill School at Northampton, Massachusetts and attended Northampton Law School. He graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1832, and in 1833 he was admitted to the bar in Boston, where he entered into partnership with Charles Sumner, and developed an extensive legal practice. He was a member of the Massachusetts legislature: the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1836, and the Massachusetts Senate in 1850. There he was conspicuous as an orator, and his policies were praised by Daniel Webster. He was a member of the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1853, city solicitor for Boston from 1854 until 1856, and in 1866-70 was United States district attorney for Massachusetts.
Beginning in 1837, Hillard rented rooms to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had recently taken a job at the customhouse in Boston. Around that time, he was a founding member of an informal social group called the Five of Clubs which also included Sumner, author Henry Russell Cleveland (1809–1843), Cornelius Conway Felton, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Hillard devoted a large portion of his time to literature. With George Ripley, he edited the Christian Register, a Unitarian weekly, beginning in 1833; in 1834, in association with Sumner, he became editor of The American Jurist (1829–1843), a legal journal to which Sumner, Simon Greenleaf and Theron Metcalf contributed; and from 1856 to 1861 he was an associate editor of the Boston Courier.
Read more about this topic: George Stillman Hillard
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