Hyatt, Thaddeus

Born: 1816-07-21 New Jersey

Died: 1901-07-25 England, United Kingdom

Flourished: New York, New York

Thaddeus Hyatt, abolitionist and inventor, was born in Rahway, New Jersey and spent his early life in New York. He invented and manufactured glass lenses for use in sidewalks to illuminate subterranean spaces. Politically, Hyatt was a Republican and he opposed the expansion of slavery, working especially to prevent the spread of slavery to the Kansas Territory. He became president of the National Kansas Committee on its creation in 1856, and helped to organize and fund the settlement by free state supporters of the short-lived town of Hyatt, in Anderson County, Kansas. Hyatt was a friend and supporter of abolitionist John Brown, and in 1860, when called upon to testify in the U.S. Senate regarding Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Hyatt refused on the grounds that the Senate did not have the authority to compel testimony. He was jailed in Washington, DC for his refusal, and made political capital out of his imprisonment, writing to newspapers from prison, inviting supporters to visit him in his cell, and continuing to finance the abolition movement. Hyatt was released after three months when the Senate investigation finished. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln nominated Hyatt for the position of U.S. consul at La Rochelle, France. Hyatt was confirmed as consul in July 1862 and was ultimately recalled from the position by March 1865. Hyatt married twice, his first marriage apparently ending in divorce, and he was survived by several children. He died in England, at Sandown on the Isle of Wight.

U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ward 5, New York City, New York County, NY, 98; Ralph Volney Harlow, “The Rise and Fall of the Kansas Aid Movement,” The American Historical Review 41 (October 1935), 13-18; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Ward 9, New York City, New York County, NY, 61; W. A. Johnson, The History of Anderson County, Kansas, from its first Settlement to the Fourth of July, 1876 (Garnett, KS: Kauffman & Iler, 1877), 275-78; Edgar Langsdorf, “Thaddeus Hyatt in Washington Jail,” The Kansas Historical Quarterly 9 (August, 1940), 227-39; Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of America (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 12:27, 434; 14:274; Freedom’s Champion (Atchison, KS), 19 September 1867, 3:6; The Weekly Free Press (Atchison, KS), 30 November 1867, 3:6; The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (NY), 26 July 1901, 16:3-4; 27 July 1901, 16:1.