Biography
Hale was born on April 3, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Hale (1784–1863), proprietor and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and the brother of Lucretia Peabody Hale, Susan Hale, and Charles Hale. Edward Hale was the nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, while his father was the nephew of Nathan Hale, the war hero who was executed by the British for espionage during the Revolutionary War. He was also a descendant of Richard Everett and related to Helen Keller.
At the age of thirteen Edward Hale enrolled in Harvard, as the youngest in the class of 1839. While there he settled in with the literary set, won two Bowdoin prizes, and was considered the Class Poet. He graduated second in his class.
Hale was licensed to preach by the Boston Association of Ministers and in 1846 was settled in the Church of the Unity in Worcester. He was pastor of the Church of the Unity, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1846-1856, and of the South Congregational (Unitarian) Church, Boston, in 1856-1899. In 1903 he became Chaplain of the United States Senate. He maintained a home in South Kingstown, Rhode Island where he and his family often spent summer months.
Hale married Emily Baldwin Perkins in 1852; she was the niece of Connecticut Governor and U.S. Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin and Emily Pitkin Perkins Baldwin on her father's side and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher on her mother's side. They had nine children: one daughter and eight sons. Hale died in Roxbury, by then part of Boston, in 1909.
Read more about this topic: Edward Everett Hale
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