Joseph Roswell Hawley

Born:  Stewartville, North Carolina; October 31, 1826
Died:  Washington, D.C.; March 18, 1905

Joseph Roswell Hawley was a long-time owner of the Hartford Courant, a fearless Union officer in the Civil War, and a major figure in the Connecticut Republican party for almost fifty years.

Hawley, a descendant of one Joseph Hawley who came from England to Boston in 1629 and subsequently settled in Connecticut in Stratford, received his early schooling in Hartford, was graduated with honors from Hamilton College in 1847, and was admitted to the bar in Connecticut in 1850.

A crusader against the expansion of slavery into the territories, Hawley, along with Gideon Welles (1802-1878), organized the Republican party in Connecticut in 1856 and was active in the presidential campaign of that year of John C. Fremont of California. In 1857 Hawley put aside the practice of law to serve as editor of the Hartford Evening Press, a Republican organ.

Hawley was one of the first Connecticuters to organize a company of volunteers for Union service in the Civil War. Within twenty-four hours of the news of Fort Sumter, Hawley formed Rifle Company A, First Connecticut Volunteers. Later in the war he helped form the Seventh Regiment, Connecticut Volunteers, subsequently known as "Hawley's Regiment." Hawley saw action in over a dozen Civil War engagements, being cited for "meritorious conduct" at the first battle of Bull Run in July 1861 and at an action in Olustee, Florida, in February 1864. Hawley's service ended in January 1866 with his having been brevetted major general of volunteers "for gallant and meritorious services during the war."

From the end of the Civil War until his death Hawley was one of the owners of the Hartford Courant. He also served briefly as the paper's editor in the late 1860s.

But Hawley's principal interest in the last decades of his life was politics. He served as governor of Connecticut from 1866 to 1867, and between 1868 and 1881 he served three terms in the United States House of Representatives. From 1881 until two weeks before he died, Hawley represented Connecticut in the United States Senate. The crusading Hawley who had been passionately anti-slavery before the Civil War and who after the war had supported Radical Reconstruction of the South, became a conservative Republican, supporting a high tariff and sound money. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Hawley at the time of the Spanish-American War was a key figure in legislation strengthening the nation's coastal defenses, providing for a volunteer army, and reorganizing the regular army.

For Further Reading

McNulty, John Bard. Older Than the Nation: The Story of the Hartford Courant. Stonington, Connecticut, 1964.

Entry by David M. Roth.

* Entry under revision.