Henry Bergh Founds the ASPCA

On April 10, 1866, the New York state legislature granted a charter to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the country's first group with actual legal power to act on animals' behalf. The man behind it was Henry Bergh, who'd left Columbia College without finishing his degree, spent five years touring Europe, and served as secretary of the U.S. legation in Russia under an appointment from Abraham Lincoln before St. Petersburg's winters sent him home in 1864. Along the way he'd watched cruelties to animals up close and had a conversation with Lord Harrowby, head of Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, that convinced him New York needed the same thing. In February 1866, Bergh addressed a meeting at Clinton Hall about cockfighting and slaughterhouse conditions and began collecting signatures for what he called his 'Declaration of the Rights of Animals.' Two months later he had his charter and the ASPCA's presidency, a job he took without pay, and nine days after that New York passed its first anti-cruelty law and put Bergh's new society in charge of enforcing it.