HILDRETH, Richard (1807-1865), an American journalist and author, was born at Deerfield, Massachusetts, June 28, 1807. He was educated at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1826; and after studying law at Newburyport, he was called to the Boston bar in 1830. He had, however, already conceived a predilection for literature, and in 1832 he became joint founder and editor of a daily newspaper, The Boston Atlas. Having in 1834 gone to the south for the benefit of his health, he was led by what he witnessed of the evils of slavery to write the anti-slavery novel Archy Moore, which, chiefly on account of its subject, met with considerable success in America and England. An enlarged edition of it appeared in 1852 under the title of the White Slave. In 1837 he wrote Banks, Banking, and Paper Currency, a work which had some influence in fostering the growth of the free banking system in America. In 1838 he resumed his editorial duties on the Atlas, but in 1840 he found it necessary on account of his health to remove to British Guiana, where lie was editor of two weekly newspapers in succession at Georgetown. He published in the same year Despotism in America, and he also made the columns of his newspapers the medium for the dissemination of antislavery opinions. In 1849 he published the first three volumes of a History of the United States, a work which, if its narrative is rather bald and tame, is characterized by perfect fairness and candour, and displays great industry and care in the representation of facts. Other three volumes, completing the work, appeared in 1855. His Japan as it was and is is a valuable digest of the information contained in other works on that country. He also wrote Theory of Morals (1844), and Theory of Politics (1853), as well as Lives of ...