William Schouler was born on December 31, 1814, in Kilbarchan, Scotland, to James and Margaret Schouler. His father was a calico printer who owned $3,150 of real estate by 1850. The family immigrated to America around 1815 and settled in Saugus, Massachusetts. He married Frances Eliza Warren in Arlington, Massachusetts, on October 6, 1835, and they had at least five children: Harriet, born around 1838; James, born around 1839; William, born around 1841; John, born around 1847; and Fannie, born around 1852.

 

Schouler purchased the Lowell Courier around 1841 and served as editor for the next several years. He was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in the 1840s, and in 1845, he headed a commission that investigated mill conditions in Lowell. He opposed proposals to shorten the workday to ten hours, and the popular outrage led to his defeat in the next election.

 

Schouler moved to Boston in 1848 and worked as editor of the Atlas. He served as a delegate to Massachusetts’s 1853 constitutional convention. He moved to Ohio around 1853 and spent the next few years as editor of the Cincinnati Gazette and the Ohio State Journal. In 1855, Governor Salmon P. Chase appointed him adjutant general of Ohio. He returned to Boston in 1858 and became Massachusetts’s adjutant general two years later. He held that position until 1867.

 

By 1870, he was working as a lawyer in Lynn, Massachusetts, and he owned $4,000 of real estate and $1,000 of personal property. He published the two volume History of Massachusetts in the Civil War between 1868 and 1871. He died of liver disease in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on October 24, 1872.

 

Image: William Schouler (courtesy Wikicommons)

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