Life and Career
Claflin was born in 1818 in Milford, Massachusetts. After some education at Brown University, Claflin returned to his father Lee Claflin's shoe manufacturing company. He opened his own boot and shoe manufacturing firm in St. Louis, but became a partner in the family's Massachusetts business five years later.
Claflin had a significant political career in Massachusetts. He was a founder of the Free Soil Party, served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1849–1853, and was elected to the Senate in 1859. By this time he had switched to the United States Republican Party and later served on its national committee. He became Senate President in 1861. After serving as Lieutenant Governor for Alexander Hamilton Bullock, Claflin was elected to the Governor's office in 1868.
While Governor, Claflin promoted women's suffrage and extended women greater rights under the law. During his administration, he advocated prison reform and established the state's first board of public health. Claflin also created the Massachusetts Indian Commission with social activists Wendell Phillips and Helen Hunt Jackson. In 1869, Claflin chartered Boston University, a Methodist institution, which his father co-founded. He served for three terms, each one year in length, but declined to run for a fourth.
Claflin returned to business and supported philanthropic activities. Along with his father, Claflin donated funds to purchase land for Claflin University, the historically black, Methodist university in South Carolina. The University was founded in 1869. Elected as a Republican, he later served two terms as a member of the Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Congresses (from March 4, 1877 to March 3, 1881). He died in 1905 in Newton, Massachusetts.
Read more about this topic: William Claflin
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“To you, God the Singer, our voices we raise,
to you Song Incarnate, we give all our praise,
to you, Holy Spirit, our life and our breath,
be glory for ever, through life and through death.”
—Peter Davison (20th century)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)