Henry Adams Thompson (March 23, 1837 – July 8, 1920) was an American prohibitionist and professor who was the vice-presidential nominee of the Prohibition Party in 1880. Thompson was a native of Pennsylvania, but he spent much of his career in Ohio. He became a member of the United Brethren church and taught mathematics at several United Brethren colleges in the Midwest. Thompson served as president of Otterbein University from 1872 to 1886. Much of his time as college president was devoted to improving the financial standing of the school during the economic depression that followed the Panic of 1873. Initially a Republican, he became an early member of the Prohibition Party. His attempt at election to the vice presidency in 1880, running on a ticket with Neal Dow of Maine, was the party's best showing to date, but they still placed a distant fourth to the eventual winners, James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur. He ran for office under the Prohibition banner several other times before and after 1880, all without success. Early life and educational career Henry Thompson was born in Stormstown, Pennsylvania on March 23, 1837, the son of John Thompson and Lydia Blake Thompson. John Thompson was the manager of an ironworks in Centre County, and later owned a general mercantile business in Stormstown. Lydia Blake was a Quaker from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, who was disinherited when she married Thompson, a Presbyterian. John Thompson was politically active and served two terms as county sheriff. He was active in anti-slavery and temperance causes, in both of which his son Henry followed him. Thompson graduated from Jefferson College (now Washington & Jefferson College) in 1858 with a bachelor's degree, and studied for two years at the Western Theological seminary (now Pittsburgh Theological Seminary). In 1861, he was appointed professor of mathematics at Western College (now Leander Clark College), a United Brethren-affiliated college in Shueyville, Iowa, and taught there for one year. The United Brethren, a pietist church that arose first among Pennsylvania Germans during the Great Awakening, was one of the earliest churches in the United States to embrace abolitionism. By Thompson's time, they had also joined the fight for the prohibition of alcohol, though most did so from within the Republican Party and did not join the small single-issue Prohibition Party. The next year, 1862, Thompson began teaching mathematics and natural science at another United Brethren