Henry Joseph Gardner (14 June 1819-21 July 1892) was the Know Nothing Governor of Massachusetts from 4 January 1855 to 8 January 1858, succeeding Emory Washburn and preceding Nathaniel P. Banks.
Biography[]
Henry Gardner was born in Dorchester (now in Boston), Massachusetts in 1819, and he worked as a dry goods merchant in Boston until 1876. He served on the city council from 1850 to 1853 as a Whig and as Governor from 1855 to 1858 as a Know Nothing, despite holding no nativist views. Gardner supported abolitionism and temperance, and he abolished imprisonment for debt, changed bankruptcy laws to favor working-class people, mandated vaccinations for schoolchildren, extended property rights to women, restricted child labor, desegregated schools, withdrew state funding from parochial schools, disbanded "foreign" militias, banned foreigners from the police and from government jobs, investigated alleged abuses in Roman Catholic boarding houses, and failed to ally with the Democrats against the rising Republican Party in 1858. He died in 1892.