HILL, DANIEL HARVEY (1821–1889), American Confederate soldier, was born in York district, South Carolina, on the 12th of July 1821, and graduated at the United States Military Academy in 1842, being appointed to the 1st United States artillery. He distinguished himself in the Mexican War, being breveted captain and major for bravery at Contreras and Churubusco and at Chapultepec respectively. In February 1849 he resigned his commission and became a professor of mathematics at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University), Lexington, Virginia. In 1854 he joined the faculty of Davidson College, North Carolina, and was in 1859 made superintendent of the North Carolina Military Institute of Charlotte. At the outbreak of the Civil War, D. H. Hill was made colonel of a Confederate infantry regiment, at the head of which he won the action of Big Bethel, near Fortress Monroe, Va., on the 10th of June 1861. Shortly after this he was made a brigadier-general. He took part in the Yorktown and Williamsburg operations in the spring of 1862, and as a major-general led a division with great distinction in the battle of Fair Oaks and the Seven Days. He took part in the Second Bull Run campaign in August-September 1862, and in the Antietam campaign the stubborn resistance of D. H. Hill’s division in the passes of South Mountain enabled Lee to concentrate for battle. The division bore a conspicuous part in the battles of the Antietam and Fredericksburg. On the reorganization of the army of Northern Virginia after Jackson’s death, D. H. Hill was not appointed to a corps command, but somewhat later in 1863 he was sent to the west as a lieutenant-general and commanded one of Bragg’s corps in the brilliant victory of Chickamauga. D. H. Hill surrendered with Gen. J. E. Johnston on the 26th of April 1865. In 1866–1869 he edited a magazine, The Land we Love, at Charlotte, N.C., which dealt with social and historical subjects and had a great influence in the South. In 1877 he became president of the university of Arkansas, a post which he held until 1884, and in 1885 president of the Military and Agricultural College of Milledgeville, Georgia. General Hill died at Charlotte, N.C., on the 24th of September 1889.
HILL, DAVID BENNETT (1843–1910), American politician,
was born at Havana, New York, on the 29th of August 1843. In
1862 he removed to Elmira, New York, where in 1864 he was
admitted to the bar. He at once became active in the affairs of
the Democratic party, attracting the attention of Samuel J.
Tilden, one of whose shrewdest and ablest lieutenants he became.
In 1871 and 1872 he was a member of the New York State
Assembly, and in 1877 and again in 1881, presided over the
Democratic State Convention. In 1882 he was elected mayor of
Elmira, and in the same year was chosen lieutenant-governor of
the state, having been defeated for nomination as governor by
Grover Cleveland. In January 1885, however, Cleveland having
resigned to become president, Hill became governor, and in
November was elected for a three-year term, and subsequently
re-elected. In 1891–1897 he was a member of the United States
Senate. During these years, and in 1892, when he tried to get the
presidential nomination, he was prominent in working against
Cleveland. In 1896 he opposed the free silver plank in the
platform adopted by the Democratic National Convention
which nominated W. J. Bryan; in the National Convention of
1900, however, the free-silver issue having been subordinated to
anti-imperialism, he seconded Bryan’s nomination. After 1897
he devoted himself to his law practice, and in 1905 retired from
politics. He died in Albany on the 30th of October 1910.
HILL, GEORGE BIRKBECK NORMAN (1835–1903), English
author, son of Arthur Hill, head master of Bruce Castle school,
was born at Tottenham, Middlesex, on the 7th of June 1835.
Arthur Hill, with his brothers Rowland Hill, the postal reformer,
and Matthew Davenport Hill, afterwards recorder of Birmingham,
had worked out a system of education which was to exclude compulsion
of any kind. The school at Bruce Castle, of which Arthur
Hill was head master, was founded to carry into execution their
theories, known as the Hazelwood system. George Birkbeck
Hill was educated in his father’s school and at Pembroke College,
Oxford. In 1858 he began to teach at Bruce Castle school, and
from 1868 to 1877 was head master. In 1869 he became a
regular contributor to the Saturday Review, with which he remained
in connexion until 1884. On his retirement from teaching
he devoted himself to the study of English 18th-century literature,
and established his reputation as the most learned commentator
on the works of Samuel Johnson. He settled at Oxford in 1887,
but from 1891 onwards his winters were usually spent abroad.
He died at Hampstead, London, on the 27th of February 1903.
His works include: Dr Johnson, his Friends and his Critics
(1878); an edition of Boswell’s Correspondence (1879); a
laborious edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, including Boswell’s
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and Johnson’s Diary of a
Journey into North Wales (Clarendon Press, 6 vols., 1887); Wit and
Wisdom of Samuel Johnson (1888); Select Essays of Dr Johnson
(1889); Footsteps of Dr Johnson in Scotland (1890); Letters of
Johnson (1892); Johnsonian Miscellanies (2 vols., 1897); an
edition (1900) of Edward Gibbon’s Autobiography; Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets (3 vols., 1905), and other works on the 18th-century
topics. Dr Birkbeck Hill’s elaborate edition of Boswell’s
Life is a monumental work, invaluable to the student.
See a memoir by his nephew, Harold Spencer Scott, in the edition of the Lives of the English Poets (1905), and the Letters edited by his daughter, Lucy Crump, in 1903.
HILL, JAMES J. (1838– ), American railway capitalist,
was born near Guelph, Ontario, Canada, on the 16th of September
1838, and was educated at Rockwood (Ont.) Academy, a Quaker
institution. In 1856 he settled in St Paul, Minnesota. Abandoning,
because of his father’s death, his plans to study medicine,
he became a clerk in the office of a firm of river steamboat
agents and shippers, and later the agent for a line of river
packets; he established about 1870 transportation lines on
the Mississippi and on the Red River (of the North). He effected
a traffic arrangement between the St Paul Pacific Railroad
and his steamboat lines; and when the railway failed in 1873
for $27,000,000, Hill interested Sir Donald A. Smith (Lord
Strathcona), George Stephen (Lord Mount Stephen), and
other Canadian capitalists, in the road and in the wheat country
of the Red River Valley; he got control of the bonds (1878),
foreclosed the mortgage, reorganized the road as the St Paul,
Minneapolis & Manitoba, and began to extend the line,
then only 380 m. long, toward the Pacific; and in 1883 he
became its president. He was president of the Great Northern
Railway (comprehending all his secondary lines) from 1893
to April 1907, when he became chairman of its board of directors.
In the extension (1883–1893) of this railway westward to Puget
Sound (whence it has direct steamship connexions with China
and Japan), the line was built by the company itself, none of
the work being handled by contractors. Subsequently his
financial interests in American railways caused constant sensations
in the stock-markets. The Hill interests obtained control
not only of the Great-Northern system, but of the Northern
Pacific and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and proposed
the construction of another northern line to the Pacific coast.
Hill was the president of the Northern Securities Company, which
in 1904 was declared by the United States Supreme Court to be
in conflict with the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. (See Vol. 27, p.
733.) Among Hill’s gifts to public institutions was one of $500,000
to the St. Paul Theological Seminary (Roman Catholic).
HILL, JOHN (c. 1716–1775), called from his Swedish honours,
“Sir” John Hill, English author, son of the Rev. Theophilus
Hill, is said to have been born in Peterborough in 1716.
He was apprenticed to an apothecary and on the completion
of his apprenticeship he set up in a small shop in St Martin’s
Lane, Westminster. He also travelled over the country in
search of rare herbs, with a view to publishing a hortus siccus,
but the plan failed. His first publication was a translation
of Theophrastus’s History of Stones (1746). From this time
forward he was an indefatigable writer. He edited the British
Magazine (1746–1750), and for two years (1751–1753) he wrote
a daily letter, “The Inspector,” for the London Advertiser and
Literary Gazette. He also produced novels, plays and scientific
works, and was a large contributor to the supplement of Ephraim
