David Lee Child
*David Lee Child was born on July 8, 1794. He was a white-American soldier, lawyer, abolitionist, and journalist.
David Lee Child was born in West Boylston, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1817. Child was the submaster of the Boston Latin School, followed as secretary of the legation in Lisbon about 1820, and enlisted and fought for Spain, "defending what he considered the cause of freedom against her French invaders." Returning to the United States in 1824, he began studying law with his uncle, Tyler Bigelow, in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1825 and was admitted to the bar in the same year.
In 1830, Child edited the Massachusetts Journal, and while a legislator denounced the annexation of Texas, he later published a pamphlet entitled Naboth's Vineyard. He wrote a lot about American slavery and the slave trade and authored work on beet culture. He was an early member of the anti-slavery Society and, in 1832, addressed a series of letters on slavery and the slave trade to Edward S. Abdy, an English philanthropist. He also published ten articles on the same subject (Philadelphia, 1836). He went to Belgium in 1836 to study the beet sugar industry and received a silver medal for being the first sugar manufacturer in the United States.
During a visit to Paris in 1837, he addressed an elaborate memoir to the Société pour l'abolition d'esclavage and sent a paper on the same subject to the editor of the Eclectic Review in London. John Quincy Adams was much indebted to Child's facts and arguments in the speeches that he delivered in Congress on the Texan question. In 1841, he moved to New York and worked closely with his wife, Lydia Maria Child, who became the joint editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. He spent his later years in Wayland, Massachusetts. David Lee Child, best known for the independence of his character and the boldness with which he denounced social wrongs and abuses, died on September 18, 1874.
