William Henry (delegate)
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William Henry (May 19, 1729 – December 15, 1786) was an American gunsmith from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and a delegate for Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress in 1784, 1785, and 1786.
Prior to his service in the Continental Congress, Henry was a gunsmith and provided rifles to the British during the French and Indian War and later the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Over a thirty-year period, Henry's gun factory in Lancaster not only supplied arms to Pennsylvanian and, later, Revolutionary troops (during the Revolution, his workmen were exempted from military service to ensure the continued production of necessary arms): Henry himself, serving as armorer, accompanied troops on Edward Braddock's disastrous expedition in the summer of 1755 to retake Fort Duquesne and again on John Forbes's successful mission in 1758.
Henry later served in many positions of public responsibility, including Assistant Commissary General to the Continental Army for the district of Lancaster and, in 1779, Commissary of Hides for Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. In these positions, Henry managed vast sums of money and acquired and transferred enormous amounts of material. In 1780 Henry informed Joseph Reed that he had "laid out…between Sixty & Seventy Thousand Pound" just to "purchase Leather and Paying Workmens Wages at the Shoe-Factory[s]" he had established "at Philadelphia, Allentown and Lancaster."[1] His correspondence is filled with letters from Army leaders, including George Washington, begging for arms and other materials. Henry was also the Treasurer of Lancaster Country for many years, a position filled by his wife, Ann Wood Henry, from Henry's death in 1786 until her own in 1799.
Henry was also an intellectual. He helped found Lancaster’s Juliana Library-Company in 1759, which during the Revolution and after was housed in his residence, and he held membership in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, whose first Transactions (1771) printed Henry's account of his invention of a "Description of a Self-Moving or Sentinel Register" to regulate the flue of a furnace. Henry also invented a screw auger, manufactured and sold exclusively at his Lancaster store, and some credit him with inventing the steamboat: the twelve-year-old Robert Fulton, a Lancaster neighbor, visited Henry in 1777, who had been experimenting since 1763 on boats with steam engines on the Conestoga River (Fulton's own experiments began only in 1786 in England). Henry was also the earliest patron of Benjamin West, who lodged in Henry's home in Lancaster in 1756 and painted portraits of William and Ann Henry, probably shortly after their marriage. More significantly, Henry encouraged West to paint "The Death of Socrates" (1756), perhaps the first history painting produced in the colonies[2]; West always credited Henry with having initiated the painter's interest in history painting, the genre for which the painter became so famous.
Henry's sons carried on his gun business, in Lancaster, in Philadelphia, in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and then in Boulton, PA. One of his sons, John Joseph Henry, served as a sixteen year old rifleman on Benedict Arnold's march on Quebec in the fall and winter of 1775 (he was captured and imprisoned for much of 1776), and later served as president judge of the second District in Pennsylvania from 1795-1811.
[edit] Notes
- ^ William Henry to Joseph Reed (April 25, 1780), quoted in Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., “William Henry (1729-1786),” in Patriot-Improvers: Biographical Sketches of Members of the American Philosophical Society, Volume One: 1743-1768 (Philadelphia, 1997), 349-61 (quotation, 356).
- ^ Scott Paul Gordon, “Martial Art: Benjamin West’s Death of Socrates, Colonial Politics, and the Puzzles of Patronage.” William and Mary Quarterly 65, 1 (2008): 65-100.
[edit] References
- Jordan, Francis. The Life of William Henry, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1729-1786, Patriot, Military Officer, Inventor of the Steamboat; A Contribution to Revolutionary History. Lancaster, Pa.: New Era Printing Company, 1910.
- Purcell, L. Edward. Who Was Who in the American Revolution. New York: Facts on File, 1993. ISBN 0-8160-2107-4.
- Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., “William Henry (1729-1786),” in Patriot-Improvers: Biographical Sketches of Members of the American Philosophical Society, Volume One: 1743-1768 (Philadelphia, 1997), 349-61.
