Charles Wentworth Upham was born in Saint John in the New Brunswick Colony of British Canada on May 4, 1802 to Col. Joshua Upham, Supreme Court Justice of New Brunswick, and his second wife Mary Chandler.

Joshua Upham was born in Brookfield, MA in 1741 and died in England in 1808.

Charles W. Upham married Ann Susan Holmes on March 29, 1826.

[1] A classmate and former friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Upham was an opponent of the burgeoning Transcendentalism movement and later engineered for Nathaniel Hawthorne to be dismissed from his job at the Salem custom house.

[3] Senator Charles Sumner once referred to Upham as "that smooth, smiling, oily man of God".