Annie Heloise Abel-Henderson

Background

Annie Heloise Abel was born on February 18, 1873 in Fernhurst, Sussex, England, the first daughter and the third of seven children of George Abel and Amelia Anne (Hogben) Abel.

Her parents made a brief trip to Kansas in the 1870's but quickly tired of frontier life and went back to England.

Part of the family, including the father, who was a gardener, returned to Salina, Kansas, in 1884; Annie and two younger sisters followed in 1885.

Education

Abel completed high school, taught for two years, then went to the University of Kansas, where she graduated in 1898.

After another year of teaching at Colby, Kansas, high school, she returned to the university, earning a master's degree in history, philosophy, and English in 1900. Her major professor, Frank Heywood Hodder, called her the most brilliant history student he had ever known and sent her to Cornell for the doctorate, but for lack of funds she returned to Kansas after a year to teach history in a high school in Lawrence.

Her free time was spent in graduate study with Hodder at the University of Kansas, doing research on United States Indian policy. In 1903 the university published her study of Kansas Indian reservations, which attracted wide scholarly attention.

Both Yale and Columbia offered her scholarships. She accepted Yale's Bulkley fellowship, and, after two years of study under Edward Gaylord Bourne and George Burton Adams, she received the Ph. D. in 1905.

Career

Abel's first year out of Yale was spent as instructor of history in Wells College, Aurora, New York. In 1906 she became history instructor in the Women's College of Baltimore, now Goucher College. Despite her retiring nature, scholarly recognition came early.

Her revised doctoral dissertation, "The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi River, " was published in 1906 Annual Report of the American Historical Association. A tendency toward long and rambling footnotes was curbed in this study, still her most readable work. In her book reviews she checked every source consulted, plus many the author failed to find.

Acting on a suggestion of Professor Bourne, Abel began to study American treatment of the California Indians. At the Indian Bureau in Washington, she poked into dusty bundles of official records, making copious longhand notes and careful typescript copies. The Smithsonian Institution originally planned to publish her California Indian documents, but she withdrew the manuscript when the Smithsonian insisted on deleting all reference to politics. The California material was never published, though other important studies were, including a massive three-volume history of the Five Civilized Tribes during the Civil War, The Slaveholding Indians (1915-1925).

In 1913 she received a brief presidential appointment as official historian of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In order to show the sort of valuable material buried in government files and thus generate public support for a national archives, she edited (and the government published) The Official Correspondence of James S. Calhoun (1915). At Goucher, Abel rose to full professor and head of the history department, at the same time teaching English history at Johns Hopkins University Teachers College. She also served as president of the Maryland branch of the College Equal Suffrage League.

In 1915 she moved to Smith College as associate professor of history, becoming full professor the next year. By 1921 her interest in the American West had begun to fade.

With a sabbatical from Smith for 1921-1922, she went to Great Britain, then to New Zealand and Australia to study the British native policy.

In 1924, she returned to the United States and taught for a year at Sweet Briar College.

In 1925 the American Association of University Women awarded her the Alice Freeman Palmer traveling fellowship, which enabled her to go to England to continue her research. One result of this work was the publication in 1927 of the Lewis Tappan Papers, which she edited with Frank J. Klingberg.

An Australian friend suggested she hyphenate her surname, and, after 1927, she did so, calling herself Annie Heloise Abel-Henderson, though she often dropped the Henderson in scholarly publications. In the fall of 1928 Abel-Henderson was appointed professor of history at the University of Kansas, and the following year, after receiving a grant from the Social Science Research Council, she went to Ottawa, Canada, for further research into British native policy. This led to her finishing her work on Chardon's Journal at Fort Clark, 1834-1839 (1932) and on Tabeau's Narrative of Loisel's Expedition to the Upper Missouri (1939).

After 1930, though insisting she had retired, Abel-Henderson continued to lecture, do research, and write for another fifteen years.

During World War II, in spite of ill health, she worked for British-American War Relief in Seattle and helped to organize a chapter of the Daughters of the British Empire.

She died of cancer at Aberdeen, Washington, on March 14, 1947. In her final years, Abel-Henderson planned to write a comparative study of British and American policy toward native peoples, but the research was never completed. She considered The Slaveholding Indians her most valuable work, but probably her greatest service to scholars was the publication of great masses of original documents.

Achievements

• Abel received much acclaim for her studies of Native Americans in relation to their participation and experiences during the American Civil War period. The American Historical Association awarded her the Justin Winsor Prize in 1906 for her manuscript The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi River. She is also notable for her works "The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist", "The American Indian at the End of the Confederacy, 1863-1865" and "The American Indian in the Civil War, 1862-1865". In 1946 the British government decorated Abel for her help in organization of a chapter of the Daughters of the British Empire.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Black and Native American Soldiers in the Civil War

    (This volume, reformatted to meet current ebook standards ...)

  • Chardon's Journal at Fort Clark, 1834-1839

    ( Thirty years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark p...)

  • The Slaveholding Indians Vol. I: The American Indian As Slaveholder And Secessionist An Omitted Chapter In The Diplomatic History Of The Southern Confederacy (Volume 1)

    (Published in 1915, this is the history of the American In...)

  • The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

  • Tabeau's Narrative of Loisel's Expedition to the Upper Missouri

    (Written by an educated French -Canadian voyageur, coverin...)

  • The American Indian and the End of the Confederacy, 1863-1866 (Civil War)

    ( Late in April 1861, President Lincoln ordered Federal t...)

  • The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War

    (Annie Heloise Abel was a history professor. After her mar...)

Personality

She was tall and plain, a careful scholar, but painfully shy. Her lectures tended toward dull formality, yet she was warm and witty with small groups.

Quotes from others about the person

• "She was the first academically trained historian in the United States to consider the development of Indian-white relations and, although her focus was narrowly political and her methodology almost entirely archival-based, in this she was a pioneer. "

Connections

Abel married George Cockburn Henderson, an Australian historian, on October 27, 1922. She was then almost fifty years old, her husband fifty-two; neither was able to adjust after so many years of independence. The marriage was later dissolved.

Father:

George Abel

Mother:

Amelia Anne (Hogben) Abel

Spouse:

George Cockburn Henderson