Autograph letter signed to Horace C. Hovey

1912. Near Fine. 2 sheets of paper, each written on one side. Henry S. Dewey (1856-1932) was writing from Boston State Hospital on June 10, 1912, in response to a letter from Dr. Horace C. Hovey, who had apparently written to him while doing research on The Hovey Book: Describing the English Ancestry and American Descendants of Daniel Hovey, published in 1913. Dewey was a member of the Boston Common Council from 1885 to 1887 and served in the lower house of the state legislature from 1889 to 1891. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1891; appointed a special justice of the municipal court of Boston in 1896 and an associate justice in 1899; and was the chairman of the state board of bar examiners from 1898 until his resignation in March 1903. In 1900 he was appointed judge advocate general on the staff of the commander in chief by Governor Crane. In 1901 he retired from the bench (where he had a reputation as a colorful judge) to focus on private practice. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Boston in 1905 (Louis D. Brandeis wrote several letters arguing strongly for Dewey's "unfitness." In 1909 his behavior began to be seen as unusual when he represented himself in his suit against the Good Government Association for $76 million for its attacks on him in the 1905 campaign. Several months after losing that suit, he spent 12 hours speaking on Boston Common. In Jan. 1912 he was sent to Boston State Hospital, having been deemed insane "by one of the overseers of Harvard University," according to this letter. Although he considered it "false imprisonment," he spent the rest of his life at the hospital for the insane at Pierce Farm. In Near Fine Condition: light creases; clean and intact.