page_title: Henry Browne Blackwell
section_title: Business and investments
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Browne Blackwell / Business and investments
caption_attribution_description: English: Henry Browne Blackwell (1825–1909) c. 1909. American abolitionist, husband of women's rights leader Lucy Stone, publisher of Woman's Journal, father of Alice Stone Blackwell.
context_page_description: Henry Browne Blackwell, sometimes written Brown, was an American advocate for social and economic reform. He was one of the founders of the Republican Party and the American Woman Suffrage Association. He published Woman's Journal starting in 1870 in Boston, Massachusetts with Lucy Stone.
context_section_description: In January 1856, Blackwell and his brother Sam sold their interests in the hardware company, and the entire family moved east. In October, Blackwell took a position with C. M. Saxton and Company, publisher of agricultural books. During his first year with the company, as he traveled through the west selling books to farmers’ libraries, he developed a new venture for the company – selling a collection of books suitable as a basic library for district schools. After consulting with the Illinois superintendent of schools, he compiled a list of appropriate books, arranged for special terms from publishers, and obtained a contract from the state of Illinois authorizing the firm to sell to school districts. However, when the Panic of 1857 threatened the firm's survival, Blackwell withdrew until the company could reorganize. During the interlude, he worked as a bookkeeper for the Vanderbilt steamship line. When he returned to the book company at the end of August 1857, Augustus Moore had taken sole ownership and the firm was renamed the A.O. Moore Company. Moore put Blackwell in charge of the "school libraries" enterprise, and in the spring of 1858 Blackwell established an office in Chicago from which he obtained endorsements, arranged publicity, corresponded with school officials in each of the state's one hundred counties, and hired agents to canvass the state. So successful was the venture that Blackwell contacted school officials in other states about introducing the books there and Moore doubled his salary to $3,000. The following year, Stone and their daughter accompanied him to Chicago, where the family lived for nine months while Blackwell managed the school libraries venture. When they returned in the fall of 1859, Moore's failing health forced him to sell the company, and Blackwell left as well.
  During the 1850s land boom, the entire Blackwell family were avid land speculators, purchasing land first in Illinois and later in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. In December 1853, a group of Cincinnati businessmen hired Blackwell to be their agent in purchasing 640-acre sections of land in Wisconsin, which the government was selling on easy terms. As compensation, Blackwell received ten percent of the land he registered. By the time he married in the spring of 1855, Blackwell owned more than forty-eight hundred acres of Wisconsin land in addition to land he had purchased elsewhere.
  When Lucy Stone married into the Blackwell family, she became an eager investor too but kept her purchases and accounts separate from her husband's. In 1857 they took equal ownership in a house in Orange, New Jersey, for which they traded western lands. They later sold the house to make a down payment on a farm in Montclair, New Jersey, and traded more western land to purchase a neighboring tract. After their return from Illinois in September 1859, Blackwell opened a real estate business, through which, in addition to selling and trading for clients, he traded western land for eastern properties. In this way both he and Stone became owners of a string of rental properties. While they were "land rich," they were "cash poor," so to raise funds for tax and interest payments, Blackwell briefly sold kitchen stoves manufactured by fellow abolitionist Cornelius Bramhill and then, from 1862 to 1864, was bookkeeper for the sugar refining business of one of his father's former employees.
  In the summer of 1864, Blackwell sold a large property whose proceeds allowed him to pay off all his debt, including the mortgage on a house he and brother George had purchased for their mother, as well as purchase property on Martha's Vineyard and invest a large sum in government bonds. Additional land  trades over the next few years and the rental income they produced gave Blackwell, as his daughter termed it, a "competence" that enabled him "to devote himself fully to the progressive causes which he always had at heart." Around 1872, Stone told Francis J. Garrison in confidence that she and Blackwell could live on their income and thus "cheerfully give" their time and eff
caption: Blackwell c. 1909
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