Henry Wheaton Washburn was probably born in the late 1820s in New York to Noah Washburn. He married Harriet Grey on April 6, 1851, and they had four children: Mary, born on February 14, 1855; Charles, born on September 29, 1858; Henry, born on August 10, 1863; and Edith, born on September 9, 1867. They lived in New London, Connecticut, and Washburn worked as a cooper. By 1860, he owned $150 of personal property.
He joined the Union navy, and he became acting master of the USS Morning Light on March 12, 1862. The ship was part of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron. He received a gunshot wound in his forearm in November 1862. Confederate forces captured the ship on January 21, 1863, and Washburn remained a prisoner of war for the next two years. According to one acquaintance, he was “closely confined [in Texas] during the summer + autumn of 1863 in a filthy prison camp with no sanitary or police regulations.” Nearly “every prisoner was suffering from billious diarrhea or dysentery,” and Washburn soon fell ill, as well. The following year, he was “again exposed to intense heat,” and his prison camp was “covered with every form of filth and the air filled with an intollerable stench. He was finally released in February 1865 and assigned to the USS Sabine that April. According to one officer, however, Washburn was “much reduced by his privations and disease.” He was detached from the Sabine in May 1865, and he was discharged in April 1866.
He settled in Washburn, Connecticut, after the war and earned a living as a farmer. His health, however, never fully recovered, and he died on October 12, 1870.