name was Catharine Potts. His father was Thomas Handerson, son of Ira
Handerson. The family immigrated to Ohio from Columbia county, New
York, in 1834. Thos. Handerson died as the result of an accident in
1839, leaving the widow with five children, the eldest thirteen years
of age, to support. Henry and a sister were adopted by an uncle, Lewis
Handerson, a druggist, of Cleveland. In spite of a sickly childhood
the boy went to school a part of the time and at the age of fourteen
was sent to a boarding school, Sanger Hall, at New-Hartford, Oneida
county, New York. Henry's poor health compelled him to withdraw from
school. No one at that time would have predicted that the delicate
youth would live to be the sage of four score years and one. With his
foster father and family he moved to Beersheba Springs, Grundy county,
Tennessee.

In 1854, in good health, the boy returned to Cleveland, prepared
for college, and entered Hobart College, Geneva, New York, where he
graduated as A.B. in 1858. Returning to Tennessee, he occupied himself
for about a year with surveying land and in other work and then
became private tutor in the family of Mr. Washington Compton on a
cotton plantation near Alexandria, Louisiana. There he remained a
year or more, then in the autumn of 1860 matriculated in the Medical
Department of the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University),
where he studied through the winter, and also heard much of the
political oratory of that exciting period.

The bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, followed by the call
of President Lincoln for 75,000 troops to suppress the rebellion,
found young Handerson again employed as tutor, this time in the family
of General G. Mason Graham, a veteran of the Mexican war.