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Jonathan Baxter Harrison

Jonathan Baxter Harrison
Jb harrison.jpg
Jonathan Baxter Harrison, around 1880
Born (1835-04-05)April 5, 1835
Greene County, Ohio
Died June 17, 1907(1907-06-17)
Franklin, New Hampshire
Occupation journalist, Unitarian minister
Known for advocacy of forest preservation; studies of New England working class, Indian reservations, and postbellum South

Jonathan Baxter Harrison (April 5, 1835 – June 17, 1907), was a Unitarian minister and journalist who was involved in many of the social causes of his day: abolitionism, Indian rights, forest preservation, and the cultural improvement of the working class. Best known for his realistic depictions of everyday American life, he is acknowledged as an important influence in the development of literary realism.

Born in a log cabin in Greene County, Ohio, he early showed an eagerness for reading, often studying beside the fire at night after a long day spent working in the fields. As a young man, he became a backwoods Methodist minister, and then worked for a Quaker-run abolitionist paper. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, he joined, with the rank of First Sergeant, the 8th Indiana Infantry Regiment, a regiment of volunteers formed for a three-month period of service; the regiment fought at the Battle of Rich Mountain under the command of William Rosecrans. He spent the remaining war years as editor of the Winchester Journal in Randolph County, Indiana, where he began corresponding with Charles Eliot Norton, the secretary of the Loyal Publication Society, beginning a lifelong friendship. In Norton’s papers we see Harrison described as a figure much like Abraham Lincoln: an unaffected frontiersman, at once virtuous and wise.


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