The home once standing here belonged to United States Senator John Brooks Henderson and his wife Mary Foote Henderson, whose lives were tied to major struggles over slavery, voting rights, and reform. Born in Virginia in 1824 and raised in Louisiana, Missouri, John Henderson had been a slave owner before entering the Senate in 1862 to fill the seat of a Missouri senator expelled for supporting the Confederacy, and he served until March, 1869. Historians credit John B. Henderson as co-author of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and his Senate record also included the first draft of the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing voting rights for all male U.S. citizens, as well as a proposal in 1866 to grant women the vote. In 1868 he was one of seven Republican senators to vote to acquit President Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial, and a month later he married Mary Foote of New York. After his Senate career, the couple lived for a time in Louisiana, Missouri, then built a house at 3010 Pine Street in St. Louis in 1871. During the next fifteen years, Mary attended Washington University, founded the St. Louis Woman's Exchange, and in 1876 served as president of the Missouri State Suffrage Association, while John practiced law, ran unsuccessfully as the Republican nominee for governor of Missouri in 1872, represented Virginia Minor in the St. Louis suffrage case decided against female voting rights by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1874, and served as special prosecutor in the Whiskey Ring cases until he was fired in December, 1875 on orders of a sitting president. The Hendersons moved to Washington, D.C. in 1888 and spent the rest of their lives there. Through Mary Foote Henderson's family, the property was also connected to the women's rights movement at Seneca Falls: in 1848 her mother, Eunice Newton Foote, a friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, helped organize the Women's Rights Convention of July 19-20, served on the committee to publish its proceedings, and was one of sixty-eight women to sign its Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. Eunice Foote was also recognized as the originator of the theory of the greenhouse effect of CO2 gas in an 1856 scientific paper, though the discovery was long credited to a British man. Mary, who was six years old in Seneca Falls in 1848 and did not participate in the convention, may have been the last surviving woman to have witnessed that event when she died in 1931. The history connected with this place also reaches into the Civil War through General John Charles Fremont's martial law order in Missouri on August 30, 1861, which declared free any enslaved person serving a slaveowner in arms against the United States. Although the Lincoln administration rescinded the order, Fremont freed several men in September 1861, beginning with Hiram Reed, whose order of manumission was issued from army headquarters in St. Louis on September 12, 1861. Reed became the first slave freed on the authority of the American military during the Civil War, later moved to Nantucket Island, joined a Massachusetts cavalry regiment formed in 1864, fought through the rest of the war, and lived the remainder of his life as an honored citizen there until his death in 1911.
