Background
Thomas was born in Portland, Cumberland County, Maine, in 1839. He was the son of William Widgery and Elizabeth White (Goddard) Thomas.
(Excerpt from Sweden and the Swedes I came as consul to ...)
Excerpt from Sweden and the Swedes I came as consul to Gothenburg - one of the thirty war consuls sent out by Abraham Lincoln. It was here I first learned to know what a noble, gener ous, hospitable race the Swedes really are - the worthy descendants of the soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus and the boys in blue of Charles XII. On my return to America it grieved me to find how little my countrymen knew of the Swedes, and it became one of the chief aims of my life to make their name and fame better understood in my native land. This result I endeavored to accomplish by means of lectures, magazine and newspaper articles, and translations; but I was deterred from publishing a completed work on Sweden and the Swedes for fear I could not do them justice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Thomas was born in Portland, Cumberland County, Maine, in 1839. He was the son of William Widgery and Elizabeth White (Goddard) Thomas.
After his graduation from Bowdoin College in 1860, he studied law until he was appointed a carrier of diplomatic dispatches in 1862.
He served successively as vice-consul-general at Constantinople, acting consul-general at Galatz, Moldavia, and consul at Gothenburg, Sweden. In 1865 he resigned and in the following year completed his legal studies at Harvard, whereupon he established his residence at Portland and became active in politics. He served as commissioner of public lands for Maine (1869), as a member of the commission of immigration (1870 - 73), as a member of the Maine House of Representatives (1873 - 75), and as a member of the upper house of the state legislature (1879).
During his residence at Gothenburg, Thomas had acquired a deep attachment for Sweden and a great admiration for its people (he learned to speak fluent Swedish and translated into English Viktor Rydberg's masterpiece The Last Athenian, 1869), and in 1870 he played an important part in the establishment of the Swedish settlement in Aroostook County, Me. As a member of the commission of immigration appointed to find means of attracting settlers to increase the declining population of Maine, he went to Gothenburg in May 1870, embarked on an extensive advertising campaign in the newspapers, commissioned agents armed with circulars to visit the northern provinces, and himself visited many parishes. On July 23, 1870, with Thomas as their leader, a party of some fifty immigrants arrived at a spot in the woods destined to be known as New Sweden. The advertising campaign in Sweden continued, and from time to time new immigrants came, until at the end of a decade Maine's Swedish colony boasted a population of almost eight hundred. In 1883, as a reward for his services to the Republican party, he received the appointment of minister to Sweden and Norway, and served under four presidents (1883-85, 1889-94, 1897 - 1905).
In 1892 he published a bulky volume, Sweden and the Swedes (which was also published in Sweden), a description of the country and the customs of the people, with some account of his experiences as a diplomat. After his retirement as a diplomat he lived in Portland. His ability to deliver speeches in Swedish made him a valuable stump speaker in states like Minnesota and Illinois, and he continued to hold a position of prominence in Maine. The genial founder of the Swedish colony was always a welcome visitor there, and was present on a number of ceremonial occasions.
(Excerpt from Sweden and the Swedes I came as consul to ...)
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He was married on October 11, 1887, to Dagmar Törnebladh (d. 1912), a Swedish noblewoman. He was married a second time, on June 2, 1915, to Mrs. Aina Törnebladh. He had two children by his first marriage, and one adopted son.
