The family home was an ancestral farm in New Hampshire, close to Bellows Falls of the Connecticut River in Vermont. Here, Henry grew up without a mother, for she died when he was two years old.

Following his education at Harvard College and Divinity School, he served from 1837 until his death as the pastor of the First Unitarian Church of New York, now named the Unitarian Church of All Souls.

Dr. Bellows was a principal founder of the Century Club, the Union League, and the Harvard Club of New York. His committee work was extensive through the Civil War era. Bellows was the founder and president the United States Sanitary Commission during and after the war. This Commission later merged with the International Red Cross.

In addition to being the first president of the New York Civil Service Association, he poured his energy into the formation of the National Conference of Unitarian and Other Christian Churches. His institutional churchmanship reflected his disenchantment with Emersonian tendencies toward “thin, ghostly individualism and meager congregationalism.”