1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Everett, Alexander Hill

EVERETT, ALEXANDER HILL (1790–1847), American author and diplomatist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 19th of March 1790. He was the son of Rev. Oliver Everett (1753–1802), a Congregational minister in Boston, and the brother of Edward Everett. He graduated at Harvard in 1806, taking the highest honours of his year, though the youngest member of his class. He spent one year as a teacher in Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and then began the study of law in the office of John Quincy Adams. In 1809 Adams was appointed minister to Russia, and Everett accompanied him as his private secretary, remaining attached to the American legation in Russia until 1811. He was secretary of the American legation at The Hague in 1815–1816, and chargé d’affaires there from 1818 to 1824. From 1825 to 1829, during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, he was the United States minister to Spain. At that time Spain recognized none of the governments established by her revolted colonies, and Everett became the medium of all communications between the Spanish government and the several nations of Spanish origin which had been established, by successful revolutions, on the other side of the ocean. Everett was a member of the Massachusetts legislature in 1830–1835, was president of Jefferson College in Louisiana in 1842–1844, and was appointed commissioner of the United States to China in 1845, but did not go to that country until the following year, and died on the 29th of May 1847 at Canton, China. Everett, however, is known rather as a man of letters than as a diplomat. In addition to numerous articles, published chiefly in the North American Review, of which he was the editor from 1829 to 1835, he wrote: Europe, or a General Survey of the Political Situation of the Principal Powers, with Conjectures on their Future Prospects (1822), which attracted considerable attention in Europe and was translated into German, French and Spanish; New Ideas on Population (1822); America, or a General Survey of the Political Situation of the Several Powers of the Western Continent, with Conjectures on their Future Prospects (1827), which was translated into several European languages; a volume of Poems (1845); and Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (first series, 1845; second series, 1847).