David Henshaw was an American businessman and politician. He also served as Collector of the Port of Boston from the late 1820s until 1838.
Background
David Henshaw was born on April 2, 1791, in Leicester, Massachusetts, United States, to a descendant family of Joshua Henshaw of Lancashire, England, who settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, about 1653. He was the fifth son of David and Mary (Sargent) Henshaw.
Education
David attended the free schools and the academy of Leicester, Massachusetts. At the age of sixteen he became a druggist’s apprentice.
Career
David Henshaw went into the wholesale drug business at age 21. Before he was thirty- three he had acquired means to become a banker and to establish an insurance company, and by 1828 he had entered actively into the project for a railroad through the Berkshires to Albany, New York. Later he became an incorporator of the Western Railroad which, with the Boston & Worcester of which also he was a director, completed the interstate line.
In 1821, Henshaw and his associates established the Boston Statesman, under the editorship of Nathaniel Greene, and about it gathered a faction opposed to the Federalists who were then in power in Massachusetts. The Statesman’s editorials preferred Crawford of Georgia to John Quincy Adams in the campaign of 1824; but Henshaw later made terms with the party of President Adams and, on its ticket, gained election to the state Senate in 1826. This political alliance was short-lived however; for Henshaw, interested in the real estate of South Boston, advocated free bridges. Bostonians who had property rights in the toll bridge to Charlestown were thoroughly aroused; old Federalists and Republicans sank their enmities and rallied around Governor Lincoln, Senator Webster, and President Adams to form a new conservative party which overwhelmed Henshaw and his free-bridge party at the polls in April 1827.
Henshaw lost no time in finding another political alliance. Standing for “Republican friends of Jackson, he sought election to Congress in July, appealing to the ship-owners and importers who opposed the protective tariffs which Adams and Webster were beginning to favor in behalf of New England’s rising textile industry. He was again defeated, but he was given the collectorship of the port of Boston and the patronage of that office, which made him the Democratic boss of Massachusetts. When he attempted, however, to hand over the collectorship to an intimate friend and to seek the place of postmaster-general, he learned that Marcus Morton, his perennial candidate for the governorship, had been given the disposal of the office. Close upon this disappointment came the panic of 1837, which forced Henshaw’s Commonwealth Bank into bankruptcy and himself into political repudiation. He withdrew to his home in Leicester to bide his time, meanwhile making a tour of the West and representing the town of Leicester in the state legislature of 1839.
The return of Calhoun to influence, after the break between Tyler and Clay, gave Henshaw his opportunity. In the spring of 1843 he gathered his old associates to form a Tyler-Calhoun faction and challenged the authority of the Van Buren organization by seeking the nomination for Congress from Worcester County. Although unable to regain control of the Democratic party at this time, he was so nearly reestablished that he obtained the President’s nomination to be secretary of the navy. He administered the Department satisfactorily from July 23, 1843, to February 19, 1844, when, the Senate having rejected his appointment in deference to Webster and other Whigs, he was succeeded by Thomas W. Gilmer. In spite of this occurrence, Henshaw was now so prominent in his party, owing to the support of Southern Democrats, that he continued to dominate Democratic affairs in Massachusetts until the slavery issue began to disrupt parties. He died in 1852.
Politics
David Henshaw was a member of the Democratic party.
Personality
Henshaw read much and possessed a keen knowledge of men. Although he never married, he dispensed a generous hospitality at his country home in Leicester.