Leeman, William Henry

Life Span
to
    Full name
    William Henry Leeman
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Family
     
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
     

    William H. Leeman (Villard, 1910)

    Scholarship
    William H. Leeman, born March 20, 1839, and killed on October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, had early left home, being of a rather wild disposition. Owen Brown found him hard to control at Springdale. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams writes of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.” Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell, Maine, he worked in a shoe-factory in Haverhill, Massachusetts, at the age of fourteen. In 1856 he entered Kansas with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and became a member of John Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars” September 9, 1856. He fought well at Osawatomie, when but seventeen years old. George B. Gill says of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.”
    Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 685.
    How to Cite This Page: "Leeman, William Henry," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/12028.