Henry Shelton Sanford

Henry Shelton Sanford (June 15, 1823 – May 21, 1891) was an American diplomat and businessman who founded the city of Sanford, Florida.

Sanford was born in Woodbury, Connecticut into an old New England family. He was the son of Nehemiah Curtis Sanford, who made his fortune selling brass tacks and was a senator of the Connecticut Senate. [Sanford Historical Society, "General Henry S. Sanford." http://sanfordhistory.tripod.com/id18.html ] Nehemiah C. Sanford's brother was John Sanford, the founder of the Amsterdam, New York branch of the Sanford family.

Henry Shelton Sanford enrolled in Trinity College in 1839, but did not graduate. He obtained the title of ‘General,’ which he is often noted by, after donating a cannon battery to the Union in the Civil War. [Hochschild, Adam. “King Leopold’s Ghost,” page 58. Mariner Books, 1999.]

Sanford first entered diplomacy in 1847, when he was named the Secretary of the American legation to St. Petersburg. In 1848, he was named acting Secretary to the American legation in Frankfurt. President Zachary Taylor then appointed him to the same post in Paris, where he would remain from 1849 to 1854, the last year of which after a promotion to Chargé d'affaires. President Abraham Lincoln appointed him as Minister to Belgium in 1861. in Belgium, apart from preventing Confederate recognition, he signed a number of significant agreements, including the Scheldt Treaties, concerning import duties and the capitalization of the Scheldt dues (1863), a naturalization treaty, and a consular convention including a trademark article supplemental to the commercial treaty of 1858.

In addition, Sanford coordinated northern secret service operations during the Civil War, arranged for the purchase of war materials for the Union, and delivered a message from Secretary of State William H. Steward to Giuseppe Garibaldi, offering the Italian patriot a Union command. In 1870, Sanford paid $18,400 to former Confederate General Joseph Finegan to acquire his extensive land holdings along Lake Monroe and founded the city of Sanford, Florida. [Clark, James C. "200 Quick Looks at Florida History," page 159. Pineapple Press, 2000.] He founded an orange plantation at Lake Monroe that offered some promise to revive his flagging fortunes, but it never proved profitable in the long term. In fact he poured quite a bit of precious capital into land speculation and town building in Florida in the hopes of turning around a family economy that spent far more than it took in, but with no success. The commitment of his time and resources to cashing in on the postbellum Florida land boom was a miserable failure in the end. His wife was so disgruntled with his booster schemes that she lamented in a letter to her husband that Florida was "a vampire that... sucked the repose & the beauty & the dignity & cheerfulness out of our lives." [Fry, Joseph A. Henry S, Sanford: Diplomacy and Business in Nineteenth-Century America, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1982) 170 - 175.] Sanford had numerous other business interests, some in the Congo after his work for Belgium, but none were profitable.

The Belgian King Leopold II used Sanford to convince Henry Morton Stanley to explore the Congo basin for Belgium in 1878. He then hired Sanford in 1883 as his envoy to the United States to try to gain American recognition for his colony in Congo. [Hochschild, Adam. “King Leopold’s Ghost,” page 77. Mariner Books, 1999.] Sanford remained loyal to the Belgian king until 1889, when serving as the American representative at Leopold’s Anti-Slavery Conference, Leopold betrayed his earlier free trade plans for the Congo and asked for the imposition of customs duties so as to aid the destruction of slavery in the Congo. [Hochschild, Adam. “King Leopold’s Ghost,” page 93. Mariner Books, 1999.]

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External links

* [http://books.google.com/books?id=bdIMAAAAYAAJ& "The Different Systems of Penal Codes in Europe: Also, a Report on the Administrative Changes in France since the Revolution of 1848"] by Henry Shelton Sanford.