Halbert Stevens Greenleaf was an American industrialist, public official and a U. S. Representative from New York.
Background
Halbert Stevens Greenleaf was born on April 12, 1827 in Guilford, Vermont, the son of Jeremiah and Elvira Eunice (Stevens) Greenleaf, and a descendant of Edmund Greenleaf who emigrated from Suffolk, England, to Massachusetts about 1635, settling at what is now Newburyport. Jeremiah Greenleaf was a school-teacher and the author of several works well-known in their day, including Grammar Simplified (1820), which went through twenty-odd editions, The Self-Taught Latinist (1825), a Family Gazetteer, and a New Universal Atlas (1840).
Education
Halbert received a common-school education, supplemented by some training in a local academy.
Career
From his nineteenth to his twenty-third year he taught school during the winter months, and during one season worked in a country brickyard. At twenty-three, he made a six months’ sea voyage in the whaling ship Lewis Bruce, serving as a common sailor. Shortly after his return from the sea in September 1852 he settled at Shelburne Falls. After a few months as a day-laborer in a cutlery establishment, he went to work in the gimlet and bit manufactory of Sargent & Foster. The senior member of this firm, James Sargent, became his fast friend, and Greenleaf was made business manager and then a member of the firm. In the meantime he was commissioned a justice of the peace (March 1856), and became the captain of a local military company.
In 1859 he went to Philadelphia to join the firm of Linus Yale, Jr. , & Company which was engaged in the manufacture of locks, but in 1861 he returned to Shelburne Falls, and established the Yale & Greenleaf Lock Company of which he became business manager. He enlisted in the Union army in August 1862, as a private soldier, entering the 52nd Massachusetts Regiment.
He was commissioned captain of Company E on September 12, and a month later, October 13, was unanimously elected colonel. He was soon afterwards ordered into service with Gen. Banks in the Department of the Gulf. Here he distinguished himself in several encounters, and bore a conspicuous part in the assault on Port Hudson and in the subsequent siege operations. At the expiration of his term of service, he accepted the command of the government steamer Colonel Benedict on the lower Mississippi, and soon after the close of the war took charge of the extensive salt works on Petite Anse Isle, St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana.
In 1867, at the invitation of James Sargent, who had invented a chronometer type of lock and had set up his business in Rochester, New York, in 1864, he became a member of the firm of Sargent & Greenleaf, in that city. The firm prospered, and made locks of all kinds during the rest of Greenleaf’s life. Greenleaf became active in politics fairly late in life. He stumped for Gen. Hancock in 1880, and organized a local marching club. In 1882 he was elected to Congress as a Democrat by a plurality of over 6, 000 in a strongly Republican district.
In 1884 he failed of réélection, though he ran far ahead of his ticket. Again becoming a candidate in 1890, he was elected in the Democratic reaction of that year, but by a slender majority. He did not take much part in debate in his two terms in Congress, though in the first session of the Fifty-second Congress he made a cogent speech on the reduction of the wool duty. He interested himself in pensions, serving in the 48th Congress on the pension committee.
His orientation on two major problems of a later period is shown by his votes for the creation of a committee on the alcoholic liquor traffic and for the creation of a committee on woman’s suffrage. Mrs. Greenleaf was an ardent suffragist and a close friend of Susan B. Anthony. Greenleaf’s last political campaign was for the mayoralty of Rochester in 1894. His opponent was George W. Aldridge, already rising into prominence as the Republican boss of Monroe County. Greenleaf made a good run, but in the last days of the fight the charge was made that he was a member of the A. P. A. (American Protective Association). He at once categorically denied any such connection, but the denial was of no avail, and this political canard had much to do with his defeat. In 1895 he was stricken with paralysis.
He was able to pay some attention to his business, however, and lived eleven years longer, dying on August 25, 1906, at Charlotte, New York.
Achievements
Membership
He was a member of the A. P. A. (American Protective Association).
Connections
He married on June 24, 1852, Jane Frances Brooks of Bernardston, Massachusetts.