Captains of Industry; or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money
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Title: Captains of Industry; or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money
Author: James Parton
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Language: English
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[Illustration:
Very Truly Yours
Ichabod Washburn]
CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY
OR
MEN OF BUSINESS WHO DID SOMETHING
BESIDES MAKING MONEY
_A BOOK FOR YOUNG AMERICANS_
BY
JAMES PARTON
FIFTH THOUSAND
[Illustration]
BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1890
Copyright, 1884,
By JAMES PARTON.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
PREFACE.
In this volume are presented examples of men who shed lustre upon
ordinary pursuits, either by the superior manner in which they exercised
them or by the noble use they made of the leisure which success in them
usually gives. Such men are the nobility of republics. The American
people were fortunate in having at an early period an ideal man of this
kind in Benjamin Franklin, who, at the age of forty-two, just mid-way in
his life, deliberately relinquished the most profitable business of its
kind in the colonies for the sole purpose of developing electrical
science. In this, as in other respects, his example has had great
influence with his countrymen.
A distinguished author, who lived some years at Newport, has expressed
the opinion that the men who occupy the villas of that emerald isle
exert very little power compared with that of an orator or a writer. To
be, he adds, at the head of a normal school, or to be a professor in a
college, is to have a sway over the destinies of America which reduces
to nothingness the power of successful men of business.
Being myself a member of the fraternity of writers, I suppose I ought to
yield a joyful assent to such remarks. It is flattering to the self-love
of those who drive along Bellevue Avenue in a shabby hired vehicle to be
told that they are personages of much more consequence than the heavy
capitalist who swings by in a resplendent curricle, drawn by two matched
and matchless steeds, in a six-hundred dollar harness. Perhaps they are.
But I advise young men who aspire to serve their generation effectively
not to undervalue the importance of the gentleman in the curricle.
One of the individuals who has figured lately in the society of Newport
is the proprietor of an important newspaper. He is not a writer, nor a
teacher in a normal school, but he wields a considerable power in this
country. Fifty men write for the journal which he conducts, some of whom
write to admiration, for they are animated by a humane and patriotic
spirit. The late lamented Ivory Chamberlain was a writer whose leading
editorials were of national value. But, mark: a telegram of ten words
from that young man at Newport, written with perspiring hand in a pause
of the game of polo, determines without appeal the course of the paper
in any crisis of business or politics.
I do not complain of this arrangement of things. I think it is just; I
know it is unalterable.
It is then of the greatest possible importance that the men who control
during their lifetime, and create endowments when they are dead, should
share the best civilization of their age and country. It is also of the
greatest importance that young men whom nature has fitted to be leaders
should, at the beginning of life, take to the steep and thorny path
which leads at length to mastership.
Most of these chapters were published originally in "The Ledger" of New
York, and a few of them in "The Youths' Companion" of Boston, the
largest two circulations in the country. I have occasionally had reason
to think that they were of some service to young readers, and I may add
that they represent more labor and research than would be naturally
supposed from their brevity. Perhaps in this new form they may reach and
influence the minds of future leaders in the great and growing realm of
business. I should pity any young man who could read the briefest
account of what has been done in manufacturing towns by such men as John
Smedley and Robert Owen without forming a secret resolve to do something
similar if ever he should win the opportunity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
David Maydole, Hammer-Maker 9
Ichabod Washburn, Wire-Maker 18
Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith 27
Michael Reynolds, Engine-Driver 36
Major Robert Pike, Farmer 43
George Graham, Clock-Maker, buried in Westminster Abbey 51
John Harrison, Exquisite Watch-Maker 58
Peter Faneuil, and the Great Hall he built 65
Chauncey Jerome, Yankee Clock-Maker 79
Captain Pierre Laclede Liguest, Pioneer 89
Israel Putnam, Farmer 96
George Flower, Pioneer 104
Edward Coles, Noblest of the Pioneers, and his Great Speech 117
Peter H. Burnett, Banker 126
Gerrit Smith 133
Peter Force, Printer 140
John Bromfield, Merchant 148
Frederick Tudor, Ice Exporter 156
Myron Holley, Market-Gardener 163
The Founders of Lowell 170
Robert Owen, Cotton-Manufacturer 180
John Smedley, Stocking-Manufacturer 188
Richard Cobden, Calico Printer 195
Henry Bessemer 206
John Bright, Manufacturer 212
Thomas Edward, Cobbler and Naturalist 224
Robert Dick, Baker and Naturalist 232
John Duncan, Weaver and Botanist 240
James Lackington, Second-Hand Bookseller 247
Horace Greeley's Start 254
James Gordon Bennett, and how he founded his "Herald" 264
Three John Walters, and their Newspaper 275
George Hope 288
Sir Henry Cole 294
Charles Summers 300
William B. Astor, House-Owner 307
Peter Cooper 313
Paris-Duverney, French Financier 332
Sir Rowland Hill 342
Marie-Antoine Carème, French Cook 349
Wonderful Walker, Parson of all Work 355
Sir Christopher Wren 363
Sir John Rennie, Engineer 372
Sir Moses Montefiore 379
Marquis of Worcester, Inventor of the Steam-Engine 385
An Old Dry-Goods Merchant's Recollections 392
PORTRAITS.
PAGE
ICHABOD WASHBURN _Frontispiece._
CHAUNCEY JEROME 79
GERRIT SMITH 133
MYRON HOLLEY 163
JOHN BRIGHT 212
JOHN DUNCAN 240
PETER COOPER 313
SIR ROWLAND HILL 342
CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY.
DAVID MAYDOLE,
HAMMER-MAKER.
When a young man begins to think of making his fortune, his first notion
usually is to go away from home to some very distant place. At present,
the favorite spot is Colorado; awhile ago it was California; and old men
remember when Buffalo was about as far west as the most enterprising
person thought of venturing.
It is not always a foolish thing to go out into the world far beyond the
parent nest, as the young birds do in midsummer. But I can tell you,
boys, from actual inquiry, that a great number of the most important and
famous business men of the United States struck down roots where they
were first planted, and where no one supposed there was room or chance
for any large thing to grow.
I will tell you a story of one of these men, as I heard it from his own
lips some time ago, in a beautiful village where I lectured.
He was an old man then; and a curious thing about him was that, although
he was too deaf to hear one word of a public address, even of the
loudest speaker, he not only attended church every Sunday, but was
rarely absent when a lecture was delivered.
While I was performing on that occasion, I saw him sitting just in front
of the platform, sleeping the sleep of the just till the last word was
uttered.
Upon being introduced to this old gentleman in his office, and learning
that his business was to make hammers, I was at a loss for a subject of
conversation, as it never occurred to me that there was anything to be
said about hammers.
I have generally possessed a hammer, and frequently inflicted damage on
my fingers therewith, but I had supposed that a hammer was simply a
hammer, and that hammers were very much alike. At last I said,--
"And here you make hammers for mankind, Mr. Maydole?"
You may have noticed the name of David Maydole upon hammers. He is the
man.
"Yes," said he, "I have made hammers here for twenty-eight years."
"Well, then," said I, shouting in his best ear, "by this time you ought
to be able to make a pretty good hammer."
"No, I can't," was his reply. "I can't make a pretty good hammer. I make
the best hammer that's made."
That was strong language. I thought, at first, he meant it as a joke;
but I soon found it was no joke at all.
He had made hammers the study of his lifetime, and, after many years of
thoughtful and laborious experiment, he had actually produced an
article, to which, with all his knowledge and experience, he could
suggest no improvement.
I was astonished to discover how many points there are about an
instrument which I had always supposed a very simple thing. I was
surprised to learn in how many ways a hammer can be bad.
But, first, let me tell you how he came to think of hammers.
There he was, forty years ago, in a small village of the State of New
York; no railroad yet, and even the Erie Canal many miles distant. He
was the village blacksmith, his establishment consisting of himself and
a boy to blow the bellows.
He was a good deal troubled with his hammers. Sometimes the heads would
fly off. If the metal was too soft, the hammer would spread out and wear
away; if it was too hard, it would split.
At that time blacksmiths made their own hammers, and he knew very little
about mixing ores so as to produce the toughest iron. But he was
particularly troubled with the hammer getting off the handle, a mishap
which could be dangerous as well as inconvenient.
At this point of his narrative the old gentleman showed a number of old
hammers, such as were in use before he began to improve the instrument;
and it was plain that men had tried very hard before him to overcome
this difficulty.
One hammer had an iron rod running down through the handle with a nut
screwed on at the end. Another was wholly composed of iron, the head and
handle being all of one piece. There were various other devices, some of
which were exceedingly clumsy and awkward.
At last, he hit upon an improvement which led to his being able to put a
hammer upon a handle in such a way that it would stay there. He made
what is called an adze-handled hammer, the head being attached to the
handle after the manner of an adze.
The improvement consists in merely making _a longer hole_ for the handle
to go into, by which device it has a much firmer hold of the head, and
can easily be made extremely tight.
With this improvement, if the handle is well seasoned and well wedged,
there is no danger of the head flying off. He made some other changes,
all of them merely for his own convenience, without a thought of going
into the manufacture of hammers.
The neighborhood in which he lived would have scarcely required half a
dozen new hammers per annum. But one day there came to the village six
carpenters to work upon a new church, and one of these men, having left
his hammer at home, came to David Maydole's blacksmith's shop to get
one made.
"Make me as good a hammer," said the carpenter, "as you know how."
That was touching David upon a tender place.
"As good a one as I know how?" said he. "But perhaps you don't want to
pay for as good a one as I know how to make."
"Yes, I do," replied the man; "I want a good hammer."
The blacksmith made him one of his best. It was probably the best hammer
that had ever been made in the world, since it contained two or three
important improvements never before combined in the instrument.
The carpenter was delighted with it, and showed it, with a good deal of
exultation, to his five companions; every man of whom came the next day
to the shop and wanted one just like it. They did not understand all the
blacksmith's notions about tempering and mixing the metals, but they saw
at a glance that the head and the handle were so united that there never
was likely to be any divorce between them.
To a carpenter building a wooden house, the mere removal of that one
defect was a boon beyond price; he could hammer away with confidence,
and without fear of seeing the head of his hammer leap into the next
field, unless stopped by a comrade's head.
When all the six carpenters had been supplied with these improved
hammers, the contractor came and ordered two more. He seemed to think,
and, in fact, said as much, that the blacksmith ought to make _his_
hammers a little better than those he had made for the men.
"I can't make any better ones," said honest David. "When I make a thing,
I make it as well as I can, no matter who it's for."
Soon after, the store-keeper of the village, seeing what excellent
hammers these were, gave the blacksmith a magnificent order for two
dozen, which, in due time, were placed upon his counter for sale.
At this time something happened to David Maydole which may fairly be
called good luck; and you will generally notice events of the kind in
the lives of meritorious men. "Fortune favors the brave," is an old
saying, and good luck in business is very apt to befall the man who
could do very well without it.
It so happened that a New York dealer in tools, named Wood, whose store
is still kept in Chatham Street, New York, happened to be in the village
getting orders for tools. As soon as his eye fell upon those hammers, he
saw their merits, and bought them all. He did more. He left a standing
order for as many hammers of that kind as David Maydole could make.
That was the beginning. The young blacksmith hired a man or two, then
more men, and made more hammers, and kept on making hammers during the
whole of his active life, employing at last a hundred and fifteen men.
During the first twenty years, he was frequently experimenting with a
view to improve the hammer. He discovered just the best combination of
ores to make his hammers hard enough, without being too hard.
He gradually found out precisely the best form of every part. There is
not a turn or curve about either the handle or the head which has not
been patiently considered, and reconsidered, and considered again, until
no further improvement seemed possible. Every handle is seasoned three
years, or until there is no shrink left in it.
Perhaps the most important discovery which he made was that a perfect
tool cannot be made by machinery.
Naturally, his first thought, when he found his business increasing, was
to apply machinery to the manufacture, and for some years several parts
of the process were thus performed. Gradually, his machines were
discarded, and for many years before his retirement, every portion of
the work was done by hand.
Each hammer is hammered out from a piece of iron, and is tempered over a
slow charcoal fire, under the inspection of an experienced man. He looks
as though he were cooking his hammers on a charcoal furnace, and he
watches them until the process is complete, as a cook watches mutton
chops.
I heard some curious things about the management of this business. The
founder never did anything to "push" it. He never advertised. He never
reduced the price of his hammers because other manufacturers were doing
so.
His only care, he said, had been to make a perfect hammer, to make just
as many of them as people wanted, and _no more_, and to sell them at a
fair price. If people did not want his hammers, he did not want to make
them. If they did not want to pay what they were worth, they were
welcome to buy cheaper ones of some one else.
For his own part, his wants were few, and he was ready at any time to go
back to his blacksmith's shop.
The old gentleman concluded his interesting narration by making me a
present of one of his hammers, which I now cherish among my treasures.
If it had been a picture, I should have had it framed and hung up over
my desk, a perpetual admonition to me to do my work well; not too fast;
not too much of it; not with any showy false polish; not letting
anything go till I had done all I could to make it what it should be.
In telling this little story, I have told thousands of stories. Take the
word _hammer_ out of it, and put _glue_ in its place, and you have the
history of Peter Cooper. By putting in other words, you can make the
true history of every great business in the world which has lasted
thirty years.
The true "protective system," of which we hear so much, is _to make the
best article_; and he who does this need not buy a ticket for Colorado.
ICHABOD WASHBURN,
WIRE-MAKER.
Of all our manufactures few have had a more rapid development than
wire-making. During the last thirty years the world has been girdled by
telegraphic wires and cables, requiring an immense and continuous supply
of the article. In New York alone two hundred pianos a week have been
made, each containing miles of wire. There have been years during which
a garment composed chiefly of wire was worn by nearly every woman in the
land, even by the remotest and poorest.
Who has supplied all these millions of miles of wire? A large part of
the answer to this question is given when we pronounce the name at the
head of this article, Ichabod Washburn. In the last years of his life he
had seven hundred men at Worcester making wire, the product of whose
labor was increased a hundred fold by machinery which he had invented or
adapted.
It is curious to note how he seemed to stumble into the business just in
the nick of time. I say, _seemed_; but, in truth, he had been prepared
for success in it by a long course of experience and training. He was a
poor widow's son, born on the coast of Massachusetts, a few miles from
Plymouth Rock; his father having died in early manhood, when this boy
and a twin brother were two months old. His mother, suddenly left with
three little children, and having no property except the house in which
she lived, supported her family by weaving, in which her children from a
very early age could give her some help. She kept them at school,
however, during part of the winter, and instilled into their minds good
principles. When this boy was nine years of age she was obliged, as the
saying was, "to put him out to live" to a master five miles from her
house.
On his way to his new home he was made to feel the difference between a
hard master and a kind mother. Having a quick intelligent mind, he
questioned the man concerning the objects they passed. At length the boy
saw a windmill, and he asked what that was.
"Don't ask me so many questions, boy," answered the man, in a harsh,
rough voice.
The little fellow was silenced, and he vividly remembered the event, the
tone, and the scene, to old age. His employer was a maker of harness,
carriages, and trunks, and it was the boy's business to take care of a
horse and two cows, light fires, chop wood, run errands, and work in the
shop. He never forgot the cold winter mornings, and the loud voice of
his master rousing him from sleep to make the fire, and go out to the
barn and get the milking done before daylight. His sleeping-place was a
loft above the shop reached by a ladder. Being always a timid boy, he
suffered extremely from fear in the dark and lonely garret of a building
where no one else slept, and to which he had to grope his way alone.
What would the dainty boys of the present time think of going to mill on
a frosty morning astride of a bag of corn on the horse's back, without
stockings or shoes and with trousers half way up to the knees? On one
occasion the little Ichabod was so thoroughly chilled that he had to
stop at a house to get warm, and the good woman took pity on him, made
him put on a pair of long black stockings, and a pair of her own shoes.
Thus equipped, with his long black legs extending far out of his short
trousers, and the woman's shoes lashed to his feet, he presented a
highly ludicrous appearance, and one which, he thought, might have
conveyed a valuable hint to his master. In the daytime he was usually
employed in the shop making harnesses, a business in which he became
expert. He served this man five years, or until he was fourteen years of
age, when he made a complete harness for one of his cousins, which
rendered excellent service for many years, and a part of it lasted
almost as long as the maker.
Thus, at fourteen, he had completed his first apprenticeship, and had
learned his first trade. The War of 1812 having given a sudden start to
manufactures in this country, he went to work in a cotton factory for a
while, where, for the first time in his life, he saw complicated
machinery. Like a true Yankee as he was, he was strongly attracted by
it, and proposed to learn the machinist's trade. His guardian opposed
the scheme strongly, on the ground that, in all probability, by the time
he had learned the trade the country would be so full of factories that
there would be no more machinery required.
Thus discouraged, he did the next best thing: he went apprentice to the
blacksmith's trade, near Worcester, where he was destined to spend the
rest of his life. He was sixteen years of age when he began this second
apprenticeship; but he was still one of the most timid and bashful of
lads. In a fragment of autobiography found among his papers after his
death he says:--
"I arrived at Worcester about one o'clock, at Syke's tavern where we
were to dine; but the sight of the long table in the dining-room so
overpowered my bashful spirit that I left the room and went into the
yard without dinner to wait till the stage was ready."
On reaching his new home, eighty miles from his mother's house, he was
so overcome by homesickness that, the first night, he sobbed himself to
sleep. Soon he became interested in his shop and in his work, made
rapid progress, and approved himself a skillful hand. Having been
brought up to go to church every Sunday, he now hired a seat in the
gallery of one of the churches at fifty cents a year, which he earned in
over-time by forging pot-hooks. Every cent of his spending money was
earned in similar ways. Once he made six toasting-irons, and carried
them to Worcester, where he sold them for a dollar and a quarter each,
taking a book in part payment. When his sister was married he made her a
wedding present of a toasting-iron. Nor was it an easy matter for an
apprentice then to do work in over-time, for he was expected to labor in
his master's service from sunrise to sunset in the summer, and from
sunrise to nine o'clock in the winter.
On a bright day in August, 1818, his twentieth birthday, he was out of
his time, and, according to the custom of the period, he celebrated the
joyful event by a game of ball! In a few months, having saved a little
money, he went into business as a manufacturer of ploughs, in which he
had some little success. But still yearning to know more of machinery he
entered upon what we may call his third apprenticeship, in an armory
near Worcester, where he soon acquired skill enough to do the finer
parts of the work. Then he engaged in the manufacture of lead pipe, in
which he attained a moderate success.
At length, in 1831, being then thirty-three years old, he began the
business of making wire, in which he continued during the remainder of
his active life. The making of wire, especially the finer and better
kinds, is a nice operation. Until Ichabod Washburn entered into the
business, wire of good quality was not made in the United States; and
there was only one house in Great Britain that had the secret of making
the steel wire for pianos, and they had had a monopoly of the
manufacture for about eighty years.
Wire is made by drawing a rod of soft, hot iron through a hole which is
too small for it. If a still smaller sized wire is desired, it is drawn
through a smaller hole, and this process is repeated until the required
size is attained. Considerable power is needed to draw the wire through,
and the hole through which it is drawn is soon worn larger. The first
wire machine that Washburn ever saw was arranged with a pair of
self-acting pincers which drew a foot of wire and then had to let go and
take a fresh hold. By this machine a man could make fifty pounds of
coarse wire in a day. He soon improved this machine so that the pincers
drew fifteen feet without letting go; and by this improvement alone the
product of one man's labor was increased about eleven times. A good
workman could make five or six hundred pounds a day by it. By another
improvement which Washburn adopted the product was increased to
twenty-five hundred pounds a day.
He was now in his element. He always had a partner to manage the
counting-room part of the business, which he disliked.
"I never," said he, "had taste or inclination for it, always preferring
to be among the machinery, doing the work and handling the tools I was
used to, though oftentimes at the expense of a smutty face and greasy
hands."
His masterpiece in the way of invention was his machinery for making
steel wire for pianos,--a branch of the business which was urged upon
him by the late Jonas Chickering, piano manufacturer, of Boston. The
most careless glance at the strings of a piano shows us that the wire
must be exquisitely tempered and most thoroughly wrought, in order to
remain in tune, subjected as they are to a steady pull of many tons.
Washburn experimented for years in perfecting his process, and he was
never satisfied until he was able to produce a wire which he could
honestly claim to be the best in the world. He had amazing success in
his business. At one time he was making two hundred and fifty thousand
yards of crinoline wire every day. His whole daily product was seven
tons of iron wire, and five tons of steel wire.
This excellent man, in the midst of a success which would have dazzled
and corrupted some men, retained all the simplicity, the modesty, and
the generosity of his character. He felt, as he said, nowhere so much at
home as among his own machinery, surrounded by thoughtful mechanics,
dressed like them for work, and possibly with a black smudge upon his
face. In his person, however, he was scrupulously clean and nice, a
hater of tobacco and all other polluting things and lowering influences.
Rev. H. T. Cheever, the editor of his "Memorials," mentions also that he
remained to the end of his life in the warmest sympathy with the natural
desires of the workingman. He was a collector of facts concerning the
condition of workingmen everywhere, and for many years cherished a
project of making his own business a coöperative one.
"He believed," remarks Mr. Cheever, "that the skilled and faithful
manual worker, as well as the employer, was entitled to a participation
in the net proceeds of business, over and above his actual wages. He
held that in this country the entire people are one great working class,
working with brains, or hands, or both, who should therefore act in
harmony--the brain-workers and the hand-workers--for the equal rights of
all, without distinction of color, condition, or religion. Holding that
capital is accumulated labor, and wealth the creation of capital and
labor combined, he thought it to be the wise policy of the large
capitalists and corporations to help in the process of elevating and
advancing labor by a proffered interest."
These were the opinions of a man who had had long experience in all the
grades, from half-frozen apprentice to millionaire manufacturer.
He died in 1868, aged seventy-one years, leaving an immense estate;
which, however, chiefly consisted in his wire-manufactory. He had made
it a principle not to accumulate money for the sake of money, and he
gave away in his lifetime a large portion of his revenue every year. He
bequeathed to charitable associations the sum of four hundred and
twenty-four thousand dollars, which was distributed among twenty-one
objects. His great bequests were to institutions of practical and homely
benevolence: to the Home for Aged Women and Widows, one hundred thousand
dollars; to found a hospital and free dispensary, the same amount;
smaller sums to industrial schools and mission schools.
It was one of his fixed convictions that boys cannot be properly fitted
for life without being both taught and required to use their hands, as
well as their heads, and it was long his intention to found some kind of
industrial college. Finding that something of the kind was already in
existence at Worcester, he made a bequest to it of one hundred and ten
thousand dollars. The institution is called the Worcester County Free
Institute of Industrial Science.
ELIHU BURRITT,
THE LEARNED BLACKSMITH.
Elihu Burritt, with whom we have all been familiar for many years as the
Learned Blacksmith, was born in 1810 at the beautiful town of New
Britain, in Connecticut, about ten miles from Hartford. He was the
youngest son in an old-fashioned family of ten children. His father
owned and cultivated a small farm; but spent the winters at the
shoemaker's bench, according to the rational custom of Connecticut in
that day. When Elihu was sixteen years of age, his father died and the
lad soon after apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in his native
village.
He was an ardent reader of books from childhood up; and he was enabled
to gratify this taste by means of a small village library, which
contained several books of history, of which he was naturally fond. This
boy, however, was a shy, devoted student, brave to maintain what he
thought right, but so bashful that he was known to hide in the cellar
when his parents were going to have company.
As his father's long sickness had kept him out of school for some time,
he was the more earnest to learn during his apprenticeship; particularly
mathematics, since he desired to become, among other things, a good
surveyor. He was obliged to work from ten to twelve hours a day at the
forge; but while he was blowing the bellows he employed his mind in
doing sums in his head. His biographer gives a specimen of these
calculations which he wrought out without making a single figure:--
"How many yards of cloth, three feet in width, cut into strips an inch
wide, and allowing half an inch at each end for the lap, would it
require to reach from the centre of the earth to the surface, and how
much would it all cost at a shilling a yard?"
He would go home at night with several of these sums done in his head,
and report the results to an elder brother who had worked his way
through Williams College. His brother would perform the calculations
upon a slate, and usually found his answers correct.
When he was about half through his apprenticeship he suddenly took it
into his head to learn Latin, and began at once through the assistance
of the same elder brother. In the evenings of one winter he read the
Æneid of Virgil; and, after going on for a while with Cicero and a few
other Latin authors, he began Greek. During the winter months he was
obliged to spend every hour of daylight at the forge, and even in the
summer his leisure minutes were few and far between. But he carried his
Greek grammar in his hat, and often found a chance, while he was waiting
for a large piece of iron to get hot, to open his book with his black
fingers, and go through a pronoun, an adjective or part of a verb,
without being noticed by his fellow-apprentices.
So he worked his way until he was out of his time, when he treated
himself to a whole quarter's schooling at his brother's school, where he
studied mathematics, Latin and other languages. Then he went back to the
forge, studying hard in the evenings at the same branches, until he had
saved a little money; when he resolved to go to New Haven, and spend a
winter in study. It was far from his thoughts, as it was from his means,
to enter Yale College; but he seems to have had an idea that the very
atmosphere of the college would assist him. He was still so timid that
he determined to work his way without asking the least assistance from a
professor or tutor.
He took lodgings at a cheap tavern in New Haven, and began the very next
morning a course of heroic study. As soon as the fire was made in the
sitting-room of the inn, which was at half-past four in the morning, he
took possession, and studied German until breakfast-time, which was
half-past seven. When the other boarders had gone to business, he sat
down to Homer's Iliad, of which he knew nothing, and with only a
dictionary to help him.
"The proudest moment of my life," he once wrote, "was when I had first
gained the full meaning of the first fifteen lines of that noble work. I
took a short triumphal walk in favor of that exploit."
Just before the boarders came back for their dinner, he put away all his
Greek and Latin books, and took up a work in Italian, because it was
less likely to attract the notice of the noisy crowd. After dinner he
fell again upon his Greek, and in the evening read Spanish until
bed-time. In this way he lived and labored for three months, a solitary
student in the midst of a community of students; his mind imbued with
the grandeurs and dignity of the past, while eating flapjacks and
molasses at a poor tavern.
Returning to his home in New Britain, he obtained the mastership of an
academy in a town near by: but he could not bear a life wholly
sedentary; and, at the end of a year, abandoned his school and became
what is called a "runner" for one of the manufacturers of New Britain.
This business he pursued until he was about twenty-five years of age,
when, tired of wandering, he came home again, and set up a grocery and
provision store, in which he invested all the money he had saved. Soon
came the commercial crash of 1837, and he was involved in the widespread
ruin. He lost the whole of his capital, and had to begin the world anew.
He resolved to return to his studies in the languages of the East.
Unable to buy or find the necessary books, he tied up his effects in a
small handkerchief, and walked to Boston, one hundred miles distant,
hoping there to find a ship in which he could work his passage across
the ocean, and collect oriental works from port to port. He could not
find a berth. He turned back, and walked as far as Worcester, where he
found work, and found something else which he liked better. There is an
Antiquarian Society at Worcester, with a large and peculiar library,
containing a great number of books in languages not usually studied,
such as the Icelandic, the Russian, the Celtic dialects, and others. The
directors of the Society placed all their treasures at his command, and
he now divided his time between hard study of languages and hard labor
at the forge. To show how he passed his days, I will copy an entry or
two from a private diary he then kept:--
"Monday, June 18. Headache; 40 pages Cuvier's Theory of the Earth; 64
pages French; 11 hours forging.
"Tuesday, June 19. 60 lines Hebrew; 30 pages French; 10 pages of Cuvier;
8 lines Syriac; 10 lines Danish; 10 lines Bohemian; 9 lines Polish; 15
names of stars; 10 hours forging.
"Wednesday, June 20. 25 lines Hebrew; 8 lines Syriac; 11 hours forging."
He spent five years at Worcester in such labors as these. When work at
his trade became slack, or when he had earned a little more money than
usual, he would spend more time in the library; but, on the other hand,
when work in the shop was pressing, he could give less time to study.
After a while, he began to think that he might perhaps earn his
subsistence in part by his knowledge of languages, and thus save much
waste of time and vitality at the forge. He wrote a letter to William
Lincoln, of Worcester, who had aided and encouraged him; and in this
letter he gave a short history of his life, and asked whether he could
not find employment in translating some foreign work into English. Mr.
Lincoln was so much struck with his letter that he sent it to Edward
Everett, and he having occasion soon after to address a convention of
teachers, read it to his audience as a wonderful instance of the pursuit
of knowledge under difficulties. Mr. Everett prefaced it by saying that
such a resolute purpose of improvement against such obstacles excited
his admiration, and even his veneration.
"It is enough," he added, "to make one who has good opportunities for
education hang his head in shame."
All this, including the whole of the letter, was published in the
newspapers, with eulogistic comments, in which the student was spoken of
as the Learned Blacksmith. The bashful scholar was overwhelmed with
shame at finding himself suddenly famous. However, it led to his
entering upon public life. Lecturing was then coming into vogue, and he
was frequently invited to the platform. Accordingly, he wrote a lecture,
entitled "Application and Genius," in which he endeavored to show that
there is no such thing as genius, but that all extraordinary attainments
are the results of application. After delivering this lecture sixty
times in one season, he went back to his forge at Worcester, mingling
study with labor in the old way.
On sitting down to write a new lecture for the following season, on the
"Anatomy of the Earth," a certain impression was made upon his mind,
which changed the current of his life. Studying the globe, he was
impressed with the _need_ that one nation has of other nations, and one
zone of another zone; the tropics producing what assuages life in the
northern latitudes, and northern lands furnishing the means of
mitigating tropical discomforts. He felt that the earth was made for
friendliness and coöperation, not for fierce competition and bloody
wars.
Under the influence of these feelings, his lecture became an eloquent
plea for peace, and to this object his after life was chiefly devoted.
The dispute with England upon the Oregon boundary induced him to go to
England, with the design of traveling on foot from village to village,
preaching peace, and exposing the horrors and folly of war. His
addresses attracting attention, he was invited to speak to larger
bodies, and, in short, he spent twenty years of his life as a lecturer
upon peace, organizing Peace Congresses, advocating low uniform rates of
ocean postage, and spreading abroad among the people of Europe the
feeling which issued, at length, in the arbitration of the dispute
between the United States and Great Britain; an event which posterity
will, perhaps, consider the most important of this century. He heard
Victor Hugo say at the Paris Congress of 1850:--
"A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in public museums, just
as an instrument of torture is now, and people will be amazed that such
a thing could ever have been."
If he had sympathetic hearers, he produced upon them extraordinary
effects. Nathaniel P. Rogers, one of the heroes of the Anti-slavery
agitation, chanced to hear him in Boston in 1845 on his favorite subject
of Peace. He wrote soon after:--
"I had been introduced to Elihu Burritt the day before, and was much
interested in his original appearance, and desirous of knowing him
further. I had not formed the highest opinion of his liberality. But on
entering the hall my friends and I soon forgot everything but the
speaker. The dim-lit hall, the handful audience, the contrast of both
with the illuminated chapel and ocean multitude assembled overhead,
bespeak painfully the estimation in which the great cause of peace is
held in Christendom. I wish all Christendom could have heard Elihu
Burritt's speech. One unbroken, unabated stream it was of profound and
lofty and original eloquence. I felt riveted to my seat till he finished
it. There was no oratory about it, in the ordinary sense of that word;
no graces of elocution. It was mighty thoughts radiating off from his
heated mind like the sparkles from the glowing steel on his own anvil,
getting on as they come out what clothing of language they might, and
thus having on the most appropriate and expressive imaginable. Not a
waste word, nor a wanting one. And he stood and delivered himself in a
simplicity and earnestness of attitude and gesture belonging to his
manly and now honored and distinguished trade. I admired the touch of
rusticity in his accent, amid his truly splendid diction, which
betokened, as well as the vein of solid sense that ran entirely through
his speech, that he had not been educated at the college. I thought of
ploughman Burns as I listened to blacksmith Burritt. Oh! what a dignity
and beauty labor imparts to learning."
Elihu Burritt spent the last years of his life upon a little farm which
he had contrived to buy in his native town. He was never married, but
lived with his sister and her daughters. He was not so very much richer
in worldly goods than when he had started for Boston with his property
wrapped in a small handkerchief. He died in March, 1879, aged sixty-nine
years.
MICHAEL REYNOLDS,
ENGINE-DRIVER.
Literature in these days throws light into many an out-of-the-way
corner. It is rapidly making us all acquainted with one another. A
locomotive engineer in England has recently written a book upon his art,
in order, as he says, "to communicate that species of knowledge which it
is necessary for an engine-driver to possess who aspires to take high
rank on the footplate!" He magnifies his office, and evidently regards
the position of an engineer as highly enviable.
"It is very _natural_," he remarks, "for those who are unacquainted with
locomotive driving to admire the life of an engine-man, and to imagine
how very pleasant it must be to travel on the engine. But they do not
think of the gradations by which alone the higher positions are reached;
they see only on the express engine the picturesque side of the result
of many years of patient observation and toil."
This passage was to me a revelation; for I had looked upon an engineer
and his assistant with some compassion as well as admiration, and have
often thought how extremely disagreeable it must be to travel on the
engine as they do. Not so Michael Reynolds, the author of this book, who
has risen from the rank of fireman to that of locomotive inspector on
the London and Brighton railroad. He tells us that a model engineer "is
possessed by a master passion--a passion for the monarch of speed." Such
an engineer is distinguished, also, for his minute knowledge of the
engine, and nothing makes him happier than to get some new light upon
one of its numberless parts. So familiar is he with it that his ear
detects the slightest variation in the beats of the machinery, and can
tell the shocks and shakes which are caused by a defective road from
those which are due to a defective engine. Even his nose acquires a
peculiar sensitiveness. In the midst of so much heat, he can detect that
which arises from friction before any mischief has been done. At every
rate of speed he knows just how his engine ought to sound, shake, and
smell.
Let us see how life passes on a locomotive, and what is the secret of
success in the business of an engineer. The art of arts in
engine-driving is the management of the fire. Every reader is aware that
taking care of a fire is something in which few persons become expert.
Most of us think that we ourselves possess the knack of it, but not
another individual of our household agrees with us. Now, a man born
with a genius for managing a locomotive is one who has a high degree of
the fire-making instinct. Mr. Reynolds distinctly says that a man may be
a good mechanic, may have even built locomotives, and yet, if he is not
a good "shovel-man," if he does not know how to manage his fire, he will
never rise to distinction in his profession. The great secret is to
build the fire so that the whole mass of fuel will ignite and burn
freely without the use of the blower, and so bring the engine to the
train with a fire that will last. When we see an engine blowing off
steam furiously at the beginning of the trip, we must not be surprised
if the train reaches the first station behind time, since it indicates a
fierce, thin fire, that has been rapidly ignited by the blower. An
accomplished engineer backs his engine to the train without any sign of
steam or smoke, but with a fire so strong and sound that he can make a
run of fifty miles in an hour without touching it.
The engineer, it appears, if he has an important run to make, comes to
his engine an hour before starting. His first business, on an English
railroad, is to read the notices, posted up in the engine house, of any
change in the condition of the road requiring special care. His next
duty is to inspect his engine in every part: first, to see if there is
water enough in the boiler, and that the fire is proceeding properly;
then, that he has the necessary quantity of water and coal in the
tender. He next gets into the pit under his engine, with the proper
tools, and inspects every portion of it, trying every nut and pin within
his reach from below. Then he walks around the engine, and particularly
notices if the oiling apparatus is exactly adjusted. Some parts require,
for example, four drops of oil every minute, and he must see that the
apparatus is set so as to yield just that quantity. He is also to look
into his tool-box, and see if every article is in its place. Mr.
Reynolds enumerates twenty-two objects which a good engineer will always
have within his reach, such as fire implements of various kinds,
machinist tools, lamps of several sorts, oiling vessels, a quantity of
flax and yarn, copper wire, a copy of the rules and his time-table; all
of which, are to be in the exact place designed for them, so that they
can be snatched in a moment.
One of the chief virtues of the engineer and his companion, the fireman,
is one which we are not accustomed to associate with their profession;
and that is cleanliness. On this point our author grows eloquent, and he
declares that a clean engineer is almost certain to be an excellent one
in every particular. The men upon a locomotive cannot, it is true, avoid
getting black smudge upon their faces. The point is that both the men
and their engines should be clean in all the essential particulars, so
that all the faculties of the men and all the devices of the engine
shall work with ease and certainty.
"There is something," he remarks, "so very degrading about dirt, that
even a poor beast highly appreciates clean straw. Cleanliness hath a
charm that hideth a multitude of faults, and it is not difficult to
trace a connection between habitual cleanliness and a respect for
general order, for punctuality, for truthfulness, for all placed in
authority."
Do you mark that sentence, reader? The spirit of the Saxon race speaks
in those lines. You observe that this author ranks among the virtues "a
respect for all placed in authority." That, of course, may be carried
too far; nevertheless, the strong races, and the worthy men of all
races, do cherish a respect for lawful authority. A good soldier is
_proud_ to salute his officer.
On some English railroads both engineers and engines are put to tests
much severer than upon roads elsewhere. Between Holyhead and Chester, a
distance of ninety-seven miles, the express trains run without stopping,
and they do this with so little strain that an engine performed the duty
every day for several years. A day's work of some crack engineers is to
run from London to Crewe and back again in ten hours, a distance of
three hundred and thirty miles, stopping only at Rugby for three minutes
on each trip. There are men who perform this service every working day
the whole year through, without a single delay. This is a very great
achievement, and can only be done by engineers of the greatest skill and
steadiness. It was long, indeed, before any man could do it, and even
now there are engineers who dare not take the risk. On the Hudson River
road some of the trains run from New York to Poughkeepsie, eighty miles,
without stopping, but not every engineer could do it at first, and very
often a train stopped at Peekskill to take in water. The water is the
difficulty, and the good engineer is one who wastes no water and no
coal.
Mr. Reynolds enumerates all the causes of accidents from the engine,
many of which cannot be understood by the uninitiated. As we read them
over, and see in how many ways an engine can go wrong, we wonder that a
train ever arrives at its journey's end in safety. At the conclusion of
this formidable list, the author confesses that it is incomplete, and
notifies young engineers that _nobody_ can teach them the innermost
secrets of the engine. Some of these, he remarks, require "years of
study," and even then they remain in some degree mysterious.
Nevertheless, he holds out to ambition the possibility of final success,
and calls upon young men to concentrate all their energies upon the
work.
"Self-reliance," he says, "is a grand element of character: it has won
Olympic crowns and Isthmian laurels; it confers kinship with men who
have vindicated their divine right to be held in the world's memory. Let
the master passion of the soul evoke undaunted energy in pursuit of the
attainment of one end, aiming for the highest in the spirit of the
lowest, prompted by the burning thought of reward, which sooner or later
will come."
We perceive that Michael Reynolds possesses one of the prime requisites
of success: he believes in the worth and dignity of his vocation; and in
writing this little book he has done something to elevate it in the
regard of others. To judge from some of his directions, I should suppose
that engineers in England are not, as a class, as well educated or as
intelligent as ours. Locomotive engineers in the United States rank very
high in intelligence and respectability of character.
MAJOR ROBERT PIKE,
FARMER.
I advise people who desire, above all things, to have a comfortable time
in the world to be good conservatives. Do as other people do, think as
other people think, swim with the current--that is the way to glide
pleasantly down the stream of life. But mark, O you lovers of inglorious
ease, the men who are remembered with honor after they are dead do not
do so! They sometimes _breast_ the current, and often have a hard time
of it, with the water splashing back in their faces, and the easy-going
crowd jeering at them as they pant against the tide.
This valiant, stalwart Puritan, Major Robert Pike, of Salisbury,
Massachusetts, who was born in 1616, the year in which Shakespeare died,
is a case in point. Salisbury, in the early day, was one of the frontier
towns of Massachusetts, lying north of the Merrimac River, and close to
the Atlantic Ocean. For fifty years it was a kind of outpost of that
part of the State. It lay right in the path by which the Indians of
Maine and Canada were accustomed to slink down along the coast, often
traveling on the sands of the beaches, and burst upon the settlements.
During a long lifetime Major Pike was a magistrate and personage in that
town, one of the leading spirits, upon whom the defense of the frontier
chiefly devolved.
Others were as brave as he in fighting Indians. Many a man could acquit
himself valiantly in battle who would not have the courage to differ
from the public opinion of his community. But on several occasions, when
Massachusetts was wrong, Major Pike was right; and he had the courage
sometimes to resist the current of opinion when it was swollen into a
raging torrent. He opposed, for example, the persecution of the Quakers,
which is such a blot upon the records both of New England and old
England. We can imagine what it must have cost to go against this policy
by a single incident, which occurred in the year 1659 in Robert Pike's
own town of Salisbury.
On a certain day in August, Thomas Macy was caught in a violent storm of
rain, and hurried home drenched to the skin. He found in his house four
wayfarers, who had also come in for shelter. His wife being sick in bed,
no one had seen or spoken to them. They asked him how far it was to
Casco Bay. From their dress and demeanor he thought they might be
Quakers, and, as it was unlawful to harbor persons of that sect, he
asked them to go on their way, since he feared to give offense in
entertaining them. As soon as the worst of the storm was over, they
left, and he never saw them again. They were in his house about three
quarters of an hour, during which he said very little to them, having
himself come home wet, and found his wife sick.
He was summoned to Boston, forty miles distant, to answer for this
offense. Being unable to walk, and not rich enough to buy a horse, he
wrote to the General Court, relating the circumstances, and explaining
his non-appearance. He was fined thirty shillings, and ordered to be
admonished by the governor. He paid his fine, received his reprimand,
and removed to the island of Nantucket, of which he was the first
settler, and for some time the only white inhabitant.
During this period of Quaker persecution, Major Pike led the opposition
to it in Salisbury, until, at length, William Penn prevailed upon
Charles II. to put an end to it in all his dominions. If the history of
that period had not been so carefully recorded in official documents, we
could scarcely believe to what a point the principle of authority was
then carried. One of the laws which Robert Pike dared openly to oppose
made it a misdemeanor for any one to exhort on Sunday who had not been
regularly ordained. He declared that the men who voted for that law had
broken their oaths, for they had sworn on taking their seats to enact
nothing against the just liberty of Englishmen. For saying this he was
pronounced guilty of "defaming" the legislature, and he was sentenced to
be disfranchised, disabled from holding any public office, bound to good
behavior, and fined twenty marks, equal to about two hundred dollars in
our present currency.
Petitions were presented to the legislature asking the remission of the
severe sentence. But even this was regarded as a criminal offense, and
proceedings were instituted against every signer. A few acknowledged
that the signing was an offense, and asked the forgiveness of the court,
but all the rest were required to give bonds for their appearance to
answer.
Another curious incident shows the rigor of the government of that day.
According to the Puritan law, Sunday began at sunset on Saturday
evening, and ended at sunset on Sunday evening. During the March thaw of
1680, Major Pike had occasion to go to Boston, then a journey of two
days. Fearing that the roads were about to break up, he determined to
start on Sunday evening, get across the Merrimac, which was then a
matter of difficulty during the melting of the ice, and make an early
start from the other side of the river on Monday morning. The gallant
major being, of course, a member of the church, and very religious, went
to church twice that Sunday. Now, as to what followed, I will quote the
testimony of an eye-witness, his traveling companion:--
"I do further testify that, though it was pretty late ere Mr. Burrows
(the clergyman) ended his afternoon's exercise, yet did the major stay
in his daughter's house till repetition of both forenoon and afternoon
sermons was over, and the duties of the day concluded with prayer; and,
after a little stay, to be sure the sun was down, then we mounted, and
not till then. The sun did indeed set in a cloud, and after we were
mounted, I do remember the major spake of lightening up where the sun
set; but I saw no sun."
A personal enemy of the major's brought a charge against him of
violating the holy day by starting on his journey _before_ the setting
of the sun. The case was brought for trial, and several witnesses were
examined. The accuser testified that "he did see Major Robert Pike ride
by his house toward the ferry upon the Lord's day when the sun was about
half an hour high." Another witness confirmed this. Another testified:--
"The sun did indeed set in a cloud, and, a little after the major was
mounted, there appeared a light where the sun went down, which soon
vanished again, possibly half a quarter of an hour."
Nevertheless, there were two witnesses who declared that the sun was not
down when the major mounted, and so this worthy gentleman, then
sixty-four years of age, a man of honorable renown in the commonwealth,
was convicted of "profaning the Sabbath," fined ten shillings, and
condemned to pay costs and fees, which were eight shillings more. He
paid his fine, and was probably more careful during the rest of his life
to mount on Sunday evenings by the almanac.
The special glory of this man's life was his steadfast and brave
opposition to the witchcraft mania of 1692. This deplorable madness was
in New England a mere transitory panic, from which the people quickly
recovered; but while it lasted it almost silenced opposition, and it
required genuine heroism to lift a voice against it. No country of
Europe was free from the delusion during that century, and some of its
wisest men were carried away by it. The eminent judge, Sir William
Blackstone, in his "Commentaries," published in 1765, used this
language:--
"To deny the existence of witchcraft is to flatly contradict the
revealed word of God, and the thing itself is a truth to which every
nation has in its turn borne testimony."
This was the conviction of that age, and hundreds of persons were
executed for practicing witchcraft. In Massachusetts, while the mania
lasted, fear blanched every face and haunted every house.
It was the more perilous to oppose the trials because there was a
mingling of personal malevolence in the fell business, and an individual
who objected was in danger of being himself accused. No station, no age,
no merit, was a sufficient protection. Mary Bradbury, seventy-five years
of age, the wife of one of the leading men of Salisbury, a woman of
singular excellence and dignity of character, was among the convicted.
She was a neighbor of Major Pike's, and a life-long friend.
In the height of the panic he addressed to one of the judges an argument
against the trials for witchcraft which is one of the most ingenious
pieces of writing to be found among the documents of that age. The
peculiarity of it is that the author argues on purely Biblical grounds;
for he accepted the whole Bible as authoritative, and all its parts as
equally authoritative, from Genesis to Revelation. His main point was
that witchcraft, whatever it may be, cannot be certainly proved against
any one. The eye, he said, may be deceived; the ear may be; and all the
senses. The devil himself may take the shape and likeness of a person or
thing, when it is not that person or thing. The truth on the subject, he
held, lay out of the range of mortal ken.
"And therefore," he adds, "I humbly conceive that, in such a difficulty,
it may be more safe, for the present, to let a guilty person live till
further discovery than to put an innocent person to death."
Happily this mania speedily passed, and troubled New England no more.
Robert Pike lived many years longer, and died in 1706, when he was
nearly ninety-one years of age. He was a farmer, and gained a
considerable estate, the whole of which he gave away to his heirs before
his death. The house in which he lived is still standing in the town of
Salisbury, and belongs to his descendants; for on that healthy coast
men, families, and houses decay very slowly. James S. Pike, one of his
descendants, the well-remembered "J. S. P." of the "Tribune's" earlier
day, and now an honored citizen of Maine, has recently written a little
book about this ancient hero who assisted to set his fellow-citizens
right when they were going wrong.
GEORGE GRAHAM,
CLOCK-MAKER, BURIED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
It is supposed that the oldest clock in existence is one in the ancient
castle of Dover, on the southern coast of England, bearing the date,
1348. It has been running, therefore, five hundred and thirty-six years.
Other clocks of the same century exist in various parts of Europe, the
works of which have but one hand, which points the hour, and require
winding every twenty-four hours. From the fact of so many large clocks
of that period having been preserved in whole or in part, it is highly
probable that the clock was then an old invention.
But how did people measure time during the countless ages that rolled
away before the invention of the clock? The first time-measurer was
probably a post stuck in the ground, the shadow of which, varying in
length and direction, indicated the time of day, whenever the sun was
not obscured by clouds. The sun-dial, which was an improvement upon
this, was known to the ancient Jews and Greeks. The ancient Chinese and
Egyptians possessed an instrument called the Clepsydra (water-stealer),
which was merely a vessel full of water with a small hole in the bottom
by which the water slowly escaped. There were marks in the inside of the
vessel which showed the hour. An improvement upon this was made about
two hundred and thirty-five years before Christ by an Egyptian, who
caused the escaping water to turn a system of wheels; and the motion was
communicated to a rod which pointed to the hours upon a circle
resembling a clock-face. Similar clocks were made in which sand was used
instead of water. The hour-glass was a time-measurer for many centuries
in Europe, and all the ancient literatures abound in allusions to the
rapid, unobserved, running away of its sands.
The next advance was the invention of the wheel-and-weight-clock, such
as has been in use ever since. The first instrument of this kind may
have been made by the ancients; but no clear allusion to its existence
has been discovered earlier than 996, when Pope Sylvester II. is known
to have had one constructed. It was Christian Huygens, the famous Dutch
philosopher, who applied, in 1658, the pendulum to the clock, and thus
led directly to those more refined and subtle improvements, which render
our present clocks and watches among the least imperfect of all human
contrivances.
George Graham, the great London clock-maker of Queen Anne's and George
the First's time, and one of the most noted improvers of the clock, was
born in 1675. After spending the first thirteen years of his life in a
village in the North of England, he made his way to London, an
intelligent and well-bred Quaker boy; and there he was so fortunate as
to be taken as an apprentice by Tompion, then the most celebrated
clock-maker in England, whose name is still to be seen upon ancient
watches and clocks. Tompion was a most exquisite mechanic, proud of his
work and jealous of his name. He is the Tompion who figured in
Farquhar's play of "The Inconstant;" and Prior mentions him in his
"Essay on Learning," where he says that Tompion on a watch or clock was
proof positive of its excellence. A person once brought him a watch to
repair, upon which his name had been fraudulently engraved. He took up a
hammer and smashed it, and then selecting one of his own watches, gave
it to the astonished customer, saying: "Sir, here is a watch of my
making."
Graham was worthy to be the apprentice of such a master, for he not only
showed intelligence, skill, and fidelity, but a happy turn for
invention. Tompion became warmly attached to him, treated him as a son,
gave him the full benefit of his skill and knowledge, took him into
partnership, and finally left him sole possessor of the business. For
nearly half a century George Graham, Clock-maker, was one of the best
known signs in Fleet Street, and the instruments made in his shop were
valued in all the principal countries of Europe. The great clock at
Greenwich Observatory, made by him one hundred and fifty years ago, is
still in use and could hardly now be surpassed in substantial
excellence. The mural arch in the same establishment, used for the
testing of quadrants and other marine instruments, was also his work.
When the French government sent Maupertuis within the polar circle, to
ascertain the exact figure of the earth, it was George Graham,
Clock-maker of Fleet Street, who supplied the requisite instruments.
But it was not his excellence as a mechanic that causes his name to be
remembered at the present time. He made two capital inventions in
clock-machinery which are still universally used, and will probably
never be superseded. It was a common complaint among clock-makers, when
he was a young man, that the pendulum varied in length according to the
temperature, and consequently caused the clock to go too slowly in hot
weather, and too fast in cold. Thus, if a clock went correctly at a
temperature of sixty degrees, it would lose three seconds a day if the
temperature rose to seventy, and three more seconds a day for every
additional ten degrees of heat. Graham first endeavored to rectify this
inconvenience by making the pendulum of several different kinds of
metal, which was a partial remedy. But the invention by which he
overcame the difficulty completely, consisted in employing a column of
mercury as the "bob" of the pendulum. The hot weather, which lengthened
the steel rods, raised the column of mercury, and so brought the centre
of oscillation higher. If the column of mercury was of the right length,
the lengthening or the shortening of the pendulum was exactly
counterbalanced, and the variation of the clock, through changes of the
temperature, almost annihilated.
This was a truly exquisite invention. The clock he himself made on this
plan for Greenwich, after being in use a century and a half, requires
attention not oftener than once in fifteen months. Some important
discoveries in astronomy are due to the exactness with which Graham's
clock measures time. He also invented what is called the "dead
escapement," still used, I believe, in all clocks and watches, from the
commonest five-dollar watch to the most elaborate and costly regulator.
Another pretty invention of his was a machine for showing the position
and motions of the heavenly bodies, which was exceedingly admired by our
grandfathers. Lord Orrery having amused himself by copying this machine,
a French traveler who saw it complimented the maker by naming it an
Orrery, which has led many to suppose it to have been an invention of
that lord. It now appears, however, that the true inventor was the Fleet
Street clock-maker.
The merits of this admirable mechanic procured for him, while he was
still little more than a young man, the honor of being elected a member
of the Royal Society, the most illustrious scientific body in the
world. And a very worthy member he proved. If the reader will turn to
the Transactions of that learned society, he may find in them twenty-one
papers contributed by George Graham. He was, however, far from regarding
himself as a philosopher, but to the end of his days always styled
himself a clock-maker.
They still relate an anecdote showing the confidence he had in his work.
A gentleman who bought a watch of him just before departing for India,
asked him how far he could depend on its keeping the correct time.
"Sir," replied Graham, "it is a watch which I have made and regulated
myself; take it with you wherever you please. If after seven years you
come back to see me, and can tell me there has been a difference of five
minutes, I will return you your money."
Seven years passed, and the gentleman returned.
"Sir," said he, "I bring you back your watch."
"I remember," said Graham, "our conditions. Let me see the watch. Well,
what do you complain of?"
"Why," was the reply, "I have had it seven years, and there is a
difference of more than five minutes."
"Indeed!" said Graham. "In that case I return you your money."
"I would not part with my watch," said the gentleman, "for ten times the
sum I paid for it."
"And I," rejoined Graham, "would not break my word for any
consideration."
He insisted on taking back the watch, which ever after he used as a
regulator.
This is a very good story, and is doubtless substantially true; but no
watch was ever yet made which has varied as little as five minutes in
seven years. Readers may remember that the British government once
offered a reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling for the best
chronometer, and the prize was awarded to Harrison for a chronometer
which varied two minutes in a sailing voyage from England to Jamaica and
back.
George Graham died in 1751, aged seventy-six years, universally esteemed
as an ornament of his age and country. In Westminster Abbey, among the
tombs of poets, philosophers, and statesmen, may be seen the graves of
the two clock-makers, master and apprentice, Tompion and Graham.
JOHN HARRISON,
EXQUISITE WATCH-MAKER.
He was first a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter, born and reared in
English Yorkshire, in a village too insignificant to appear on any but a
county map. Faulby is about twenty miles from York, and there John
Harrison was born in 1693, when William and Mary reigned in England. He
was thirty-five years of age before he was known beyond his own
neighborhood. He was noted there, however, for being a most skillful
workman. There is, perhaps, no trade in which the degrees of skill are
so far apart as that of carpenter. The difference is great indeed
between the clumsy-fisted fellow who knocks together a farmer's pig-pen,
and the almost artist who makes a dining-room floor equal to a piece of
mosaic. Dr. Franklin speaks with peculiar relish of one of his young
comrades in Philadelphia, as "the most exquisite joiner" he had ever
known.
It was not only in carpentry that John Harrison reached extraordinary
skill and delicacy of stroke. He became an excellent machinist, and was
particularly devoted from an early age to clock-work. He was a student
also in the science of the day. A contemporary of Newton, he made
himself capable of understanding the discoveries of that great man, and
of following the Transactions of the Royal Society in mathematics,
astronomy, and natural philosophy.
Clock-work, however, was his ruling taste as a workman, for many years,
and he appears to have set before him as a task the making of a clock
that should surpass all others. He says in one of his pamphlets that, in
the year 1726, when he was thirty-three years of age, he finished two
large pendulum clocks which, being placed in different houses some
distance apart, differed from each other only one second in a month. He
also says that one of his clocks, which he kept for his own use, the
going of which he compared with a fixed star, varied from the true time
only one minute in ten years.
Modern clock-makers are disposed to deride these extraordinary claims,
particularly those of Paris and Switzerland. We know, however, that John
Harrison was one of the most perfect workmen that ever lived, and I find
it difficult to believe that a man whose works were so true could be
false in his words.
In perfecting these amateur clocks he made a beautiful invention, the
principle of which is still employed in other machines besides
clock-work. Like George Graham, he observed that the chief cause of
irregularity in a well-made clock was the varying length of the
pendulum, which in warm weather expanded and became a little longer, and
in cold weather became shorter. He remedied this by the invention of
what is often called the gridiron pendulum, made of several bars of
steel and brass, and so arranged as to neutralize and correct the
tendency of the pendulum to vary in length. Brass is very sensitive to
changes of temperature, steel much less so; and hence it is not
difficult to arrange the pendulum so that the long exterior bars of
steel shall very nearly curb the expansion and contraction of the
shorter brass ones.
While he was thus perfecting himself in obscurity, the great world was
in movement also, and it was even stimulating his labors, as well as
giving them their direction.
The navigation of the ocean was increasing every year in importance,
chiefly through the growth of the American colonies and the taste for
the rich products of India. The art of navigation was still imperfect.
In order that the captain of a ship at sea may know precisely where he
is, he must know two things: how far he is from the equator, and how far
he is from a certain known place, say Greenwich, Paris, Washington.
Being sure of those two things, he can take his chart and mark upon it
the precise spot where his ship is at a given moment. Then he knows how
to steer, and all else that he needs to know in order to pursue his
course with confidence.
When John Harrison was a young man, the art of navigation had so far
advanced that the distance from the equator, or the latitude, could be
ascertained with certainty by observation of the heavenly bodies. One
great difficulty remained to be overcome--the finding of the longitude.
This was done imperfectly by means of a watch which kept Greenwich time
as near as possible. Every fine day the captain could ascertain by an
observation of the sun just when it was twelve o'clock. If, on looking
at this chronometer, he found that by Greenwich time it was quarter past
two, he could at once ascertain his distance from Greenwich, or in other
words, his longitude.
But the terrible question was, how near right is the chronometer? A
variation of a very few minutes would make a difference of more than a
hundred miles.
To this day, no perfect time-keeper has ever been made. From an early
period, the governments of commercial nations were solicitous to find a
way of determining the longitude that would be sufficiently correct.
Thus, the King of Spain, in 1598, offered a reward of a thousand crowns
to any one who should discover an approximately correct method. Soon
after, the government of Holland offered ten thousand florins. In 1714
the English government took hold of the matter, and offered a series of
dazzling prizes: Five thousand pounds for a chronometer that would
enable a ship six months from home to get her longitude within sixty
miles; seven thousand five hundred pounds, if within forty miles; ten
thousand pounds if within thirty miles. Another clause of the bill
offered a premium of twenty thousand pounds for the invention of any
method whatever, by means of which the longitude could be determined
within thirty miles. The bill appears to have been drawn somewhat
carelessly; but the substance of it was sufficiently plain, namely, that
the British Government was ready to make the fortune of any man who
should enable navigators to make their way across the ocean in a
straight line to their desired port.
Two years after, the Regent of France offered a prize of a hundred
thousand francs for the same object.
All the world went to watch-making. John Harrison, stimulated by these
offers to increased exertion, in the year 1736 presented himself at
Greenwich with one of his wonderful clocks, provided with the gridiron
pendulum, which he exhibited and explained to the commissioners.
Perceiving the merit and beauty of his invention, they placed the clock
on board a ship bound for Lisbon. This was subjecting a pendulum clock
to a very unfair trial; but it corrected the ship's reckoning several
miles. The commissioners now urged him to compete for the chronometer
prize, and in order to enable him to do so they supplied him with
money, from time to time, for twenty-four years. At length he produced
his chronometer, about four inches in diameter, and so mounted as not to
share the motion of the vessel.
In 1761, when he was sixty-eight years of age, he wrote to the
commissioners that he had completed a chronometer for trial, and
requested them to test it on a voyage to the West Indies, under the care
of his son William. His requests were granted. The success of the
chronometer was wonderful. On arriving at Jamaica, the chronometer
varied but four seconds from Greenwich time, and on returning to England
the entire variation was a little short of two minutes; which was
equivalent to a longitudinal variation of eighteen miles. The ship had
been absent from Portsmouth one hundred and forty-seven days.
This signal triumph was won after forty years of labor and experiment.
The commissioners demanding another trial, the watch was taken to
Barbadoes, and, after an absence of a hundred and fifty-six days, showed
a variation of only fifteen seconds. After other and very exacting
tests, it was decided that John Harrison had fulfilled all the
prescribed conditions, and he received accordingly the whole sum of
twenty thousand pounds sterling.
It is now asserted by experts that he owed the success of his watch, not
so much to originality of invention, as to the exquisite skill and
precision of his workmanship. He had one of the most perfect mechanical
hands that ever existed. It was the touch of a Raphael applied to
mechanism.
John Harrison lived to the good old age of eighty-three years. He died
in London in 1776, about the time when General Washington was getting
ready to drive the English troops and their Tory friends out of Boston.
It is not uncommon nowadays for a ship to be out four or five months,
and to hit her port so exactly as to sail straight into it without
altering her course more than a point or two.
PETER FANEUIL,
AND THE GREAT HALL HE BUILT.
A story is told of the late Ralph Waldo Emerson's first lecture, in
Cincinnati, forty years ago. A worthy pork-packer, who was observed to
listen with close attention to the enigmatic utterances of the sage, was
asked by one of his friends what he thought of the performance.
"I liked it very well," said he, "and I'm glad I went, because I learned
from it how the Boston people pronounce Faneuil Hall."
He was perhaps mistaken, for it is hardly probable that Mr. Emerson gave
the name in the old-fashioned Boston style, which was a good deal like
the word _funnel_. The story, however, may serve to show what a
widespread and intense reputation the building has. Of all the objects
in Boston it is probably the one best known to the people of the United
States, and the one surest to be visited by the stranger. The Hall is a
curious, quaint little interior, with its high galleries, and its
collection of busts and pictures of Revolutionary heroes. Peter Faneuil
little thought what he was doing when he built it, though he appears to
have been a man of liberal and enlightened mind.
The Faneuils were prosperous merchants in the French city of Rochelle in
1685, when Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes. The great-grandfather
of John Jay was also in large business there at that time, and so were
the ancestors of our Delanceys, Badeaus, Pells, Secors, Allaires, and
other families familiar to the ears of New Yorkers, many of them having
distinguished living representatives among us. They were of the religion
"called Reformed," as the king of France contemptuously styled it.
Reformed or not, they were among the most intelligent, enterprising, and
wealthy of the merchants of Rochelle.
How little we can conceive the effect upon their minds of the order
which came from Paris in October, 1685, which was intended to put an end
forever to the Protestant religion in France. The king meant to make
thorough work of it. He ordered all the Huguenot churches in the kingdom
to be instantly demolished. He forbade the dissenters to assemble either
in a building or out of doors, on pain of death and confiscation of all
their goods. Their clergymen were required to leave the kingdom within
fifteen days. Their schools were interdicted, and all children hereafter
born of Protestant parents were to be baptized by the Catholic
clergymen, and reared as Catholics.
These orders were enforced with reckless ferocity, particularly in the
remoter provinces and cities of the kingdom. The Faneuils, the Jays, and
the Delanceys of that renowned city saw their house of worship leveled
with the ground. Dragoons were quartered in their houses, whom they were
obliged to maintain, and to whose insolence they were obliged to submit,
for the troops were given to understand that they were the king's
enemies and had no rights which royal soldiers were bound to respect. At
the same time, the edict forbade them to depart from the kingdom, and
particular precautions were taken to prevent men of capital from doing
so.
John Jay records that the ancestor of his family made his escape by
artifice, and succeeded in taking with him a portion of his property.
Such was also the good fortune of the brothers Faneuil, who were part of
the numerous company from old Rochelle who emigrated to New York about
1690, and formed a settlement upon Long Island Sound, twelve miles from
New York, which they named, and which is still called, New Rochelle. The
old names can still be read in that region, both in the churchyards and
upon the door plates, and the village of Pelham recalls the name of the
Pell family who fled from Rochelle about the same time, and obtained a
grant of six thousand acres of land near by. The newcomers were warmly
welcomed, as their friends and relations were in England.
The Faneuil brothers did not remain long in New Rochelle, but removed to
Boston in 1691. Benjamin and Andrew were their names. There are many
traces of them in the early records, indicating that they were merchants
of large capital and extensive business for that day. There are
evidences also that they were men of intelligence and public spirit.
They appear to have been members of the Church of England in Boston,
which of itself placed them somewhat apart from the majority of their
fellow-citizens.
Peter Faneuil, the builder of the famous Hall, who was born in Boston
about 1701, the oldest of eleven children, succeeded to the business
founded by his uncle Andrew, and while still a young man had greatly
increased it, and was reckoned one of the leading citizens.
A curious controversy had agitated the people of Boston for many years.
The town had existed for nearly a century without having a public market
of any kind, the country people bringing in their produce and selling it
from door to door. In February, 1717, occurred the Great Snow, which
destroyed great numbers of domestic and wild animals, and caused
provisions for some weeks to be scarce and dear. The inhabitants laid
the blame of the dearness to the rapacity of the hucksters, and the
subject being brought up in town meeting, a committee reported that the
true remedy was to build a market, to appoint market days, and establish
rules. The farmers opposed the scheme, as did also many of the citizens.
The project being defeated, it was revived year after year, but the
country people always contrived to defeat it. An old chronicler has a
quaint passage on the subject.
"The country people," he says, "always opposed the market, so that the
question could not be settled. The reason they give for it is, that if
market days were appointed, all the country people coming in at the same
time would glut it, and the towns-people would buy their provisions for
what they pleased; so rather choose to send them as they think fit. And
sometimes a tall fellow brings in a turkey or goose to sell, and will
travel through the whole town to see who will give most for it, and it
is at last sold for three and six pence or four shillings; and if he had
stayed at home, he could have earned a crown by his labor, which is the
customary price for a day's work. So any one may judge of the stupidity
of the country people."
In Boston libraries, pamphlets are still preserved on this burning
question of a market, which required seventeen years of discussion
before a town meeting was brought to vote for the erection of market
houses. In 1734, seven hundred pounds were appropriated for the purpose.
The market hours were fixed from sunrise to 1 P. M., and a bell was
ordered to be rung to announce the time of opening. The country people,
however, had their way, notwithstanding. They so resolutely refrained
from attending the markets that in less than four years the houses fell
into complete disuse. One of the buildings was taken down, and the
timber used in constructing a workhouse; one was turned into stores, and
the third was torn to pieces by a mob, who carried off the material for
their own use.
Nevertheless, the market question could not be allayed, for the
respectable inhabitants of the town were still convinced of the need of
a market as a defense against exorbitant charges. For some years the
subject was brought up in town meetings; but as often as it came to the
point of appropriating money the motion was lost. At length Mr. Peter
Faneuil came forward to end the dissension in a truly magnificent
manner. He offered to build a market house at his own expense, and make
a present of it to the town.
Even this liberal offer did not silence opposition. A petition was
presented to the town meeting, signed by three hundred and forty
inhabitants, asking the acceptance of Peter Faneuil's proposal. The
opposition to it, however, was strong. At length it was agreed that, if
a market house were built, the country people should be at liberty to
sell their produce from door to door if they pleased. Even with this
concession, only 367 citizens voted for the market and 360 voted against
it. Thus, by a majority of seven, the people of Boston voted to accept
the most munificent gift the town had received since it was founded.
Peter Faneuil went beyond his promise. Besides building an ample market
place, he added a second story for a town hall, and other offices for
public use. The building originally measured one hundred feet by forty,
and was finished in so elegant a style as to be reckoned the chief
ornament of the town. It was completed in 1742, after two years had been
spent in building it. It had scarcely been opened for public use when
Peter Faneuil died, aged a little less than forty-three years. The
grateful citizens gave him a public funeral, and the Selectmen appointed
Mr. John Lovell, schoolmaster, to deliver his funeral oration in the
Hall bearing his name. The oration was entered at length upon the
records of the town, and has been frequently published.
In 1761 the Hall was destroyed by fire. It was immediately rebuilt, and
this second structure was the Faneuil Hall in which were held the
meetings preceding and during the war for Independence, which have given
it such universal celebrity. Here Samuel Adams spoke. Here the feeling
was created which made Massachusetts the centre and source of the
revolutionary movement.
Let me not omit to state that those obstinate country people, who knew
what they wanted, were proof against the attractions of Faneuil Hall
market. They availed themselves of their privilege of selling their
produce from door to door, as they had done from the beginning of the
colony. Fewer and fewer hucksters kept stalls in the market, and in a
few years the lower room was closed altogether. The building served,
however, as Town Hall until it was superseded by structures more in
harmony with modern needs and tastes.
What thrilling scenes the Hall has witnessed! That is a pleasing touch
in one of the letters of John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, where he
alludes to what was probably his last visit to the scene of his youthful
glory, Faneuil Hall. Mr. Adams was eighty-three years old at the time,
and it was the artist Trumbull, also an old man, who prevailed upon him
to go to the Hall.
"Trumbull," he wrote, "with a band of associates, drew me by the cords
of old friendship to see his picture, on Saturday, where I got a great
cold. The air of Faneuil is changed. _I have not been used to catch cold
there._"
No, indeed. If the process of storing electricity had been applied to
the interior of this electric edifice, enough of the fluid could have
been saved to illuminate Boston every Fourth of July. It is hard to
conceive of a tranquil or commonplace meeting there, so associated is it
in our minds with outbursts of passionate feeling.
Speaking of John Adams calls to mind an anecdote related recently by a
venerable clergyman of New York, Rev. William Hague. Mr. Hague
officiated as chaplain at the celebration of the Fourth of July in
Boston, in 1843, when Charles Francis Adams delivered the oration in
Faneuil Hall, which was his first appearance on a public platform.
While the procession was forming to march to the Hall, ex-President John
Quincy Adams entered into conversation with the chaplain, during which
he spoke as follows:--
"This is one of the happiest days of my whole life. Fifty years expire
to-day since I performed in Boston my first public service, which was
the delivery of an oration to celebrate our national independence. After
half a century of active life, I am spared by a benign Providence to
witness my son's performance of his first public service, to deliver an
oration in honor of the same great event."
The chaplain replied to Mr. Adams:--
"President, I am well aware of the notable connection of events to which
you refer; and having committed and declaimed a part of your own great
oration when a schoolboy in New York, I could without effort repeat it
to you now."
The aged statesman was surprised and gratified at this statement. The
procession was formed and the oration successfully delivered. Since that
time, I believe, an Adams of the fourth generation has spoken in the
same place, and probably some readers will live to hear one of the fifth
and sixth.
The venerable John Adams might well say that he had not been used to
catch cold in the air of Faneuil Hall, for as far as I know there has
never been held there a meeting which has not something of extraordinary
warmth in its character. I have mentioned above that the first public
meeting ever held in it after its completion in 1742 was to commemorate
the premature death of the donor of the edifice; on which occasion Mr.
John Lovell delivered a glowing eulogium.
"Let this stately edifice which bears his name," cried the orator,
"witness for him what sums he expended in public munificence. This
building, erected by him, at his own immense charge, for the convenience
and ornament of the town, is incomparably the greatest benefaction ever
yet known to our western shore."
Towards the close of his speech, the eloquent schoolmaster gave
utterance to a sentiment which has often since been repeated within
those walls.
"May this hall be ever sacred to the interests of truth, of justice, of
loyalty, of honor, of liberty. May no private views nor party broils
ever enter these walls."
Whether this wish has been fulfilled or not is a matter of opinion.
General Gage doubtless thought that it had not been.
Scenes of peculiar interest took place in the Hall about the beginning
of the year 1761, when the news was received in Boston that King George
II. had fallen dead in his palace at Kensington, and that George III.,
his grandson, had been proclaimed king. It required just two months for
this intelligence to cross the ocean. The first thing in order, it
seems, was to celebrate the accession of the young king. He was
proclaimed from the balcony of the town house; guns were fired from all
the forts in the harbor; and in the afternoon a grand dinner was given
in Faneuil Hall. These events occurred on the last day but one of the
year 1760.
The first day of the new year, 1761, was ushered in by the solemn
tolling of the church bells in the town, and the firing of minute guns
on Castle Island. These mournful sounds were heard all day, even to the
setting of the sun. However doleful the day may have seemed, there was
more appropriateness in these signs of mourning than any man of that
generation could have known; for with George II. died the indolent but
salutary let-them-alone policy under which the colonies enjoyed
prosperity and peace. With the accession of the new king the troubles
began which ended in the disruption of the empire. George III. was the
last king whose accession received official recognition in the thirteen
colonies.
I have hunted in vain through my books to find some record of the dinner
given in Faneuil Hall to celebrate the beginning of the new reign. It
would be interesting to know how the sedate people of Boston comported
themselves on a festive occasion of that character. John Adams was a
young barrister then. If the after-dinner speeches were as outspoken as
the political comments he entered in his Diary, the proceedings could
not have been very acceptable to the royal governor. Mr. Adams was far
from thinking that England had issued victorious from the late
campaigns, and he thought that France was then by far the most brilliant
and powerful nation in Europe.
A few days after these loyal ceremonies, Boston experienced what is now
known there as a "cold snap," and it was so severe as almost to close
the harbor with ice. One evening, in the midst of it, a fire broke out
opposite Faneuil Hall. Such was the extremity of cold that the water
forced from the engines fell upon the ground in particles of ice. The
fire swept across the street and caught Faneuil Hall, the interior of
which was entirely consumed, nothing remaining but the solid brick
walls. It was rebuilt in just two years, and reopened in the midst of
another remarkably cold time, which was signalized by another bad fire.
There was so much distress among the poor that winter that a meeting was
held in Faneuil Hall for their relief, Rev. Samuel Mather preaching a
sermon on the occasion, and this was the first discourse delivered in it
after it was rebuilt.
Seven years later the Hall was put to a very different use. A powerful
fleet of twelve men-of-war, filled with troops, was coming across the
ocean to apply military pressure to the friends of liberty. A convention
was held in Faneuil Hall, attended by delegates from the surrounding
towns, as well as by the citizens of Boston. The people were in
consternation, for they feared that any attempt to land the troops
would lead to violent resistance. The convention indeed requested the
inhabitants to "provide themselves with firearms, that they may be
prepared in case of sudden danger."
The atmosphere was extremely electric in Boston just then. The governor
sent word to the convention assembled in Faneuil Hall that their meeting
was "a very high offense" which only their ignorance of the law could
excuse; but the plea of ignorance could no longer avail them, and he
commanded them to disperse. The convention sent a reply to the governor,
which he refused to receive, and they continued in session until the
fleet entered the harbor.
October 2, 1768, the twelve British men-of-war were anchored in a
semicircle opposite the town, with cannon loaded, and cleared for
action, as though Boston were a hostile stronghold, instead of a
defenseless country town of loyal and innocent fellow-citizens. Two
regiments landed; one of which encamped on the Common, and the other
marched to Faneuil Hall, where they were quartered for four or five
weeks. With one accord the merchants and property-owners refused to let
any building for the use of the troops.
Boston people to this day chuckle over the mishap of the sheriff who
tried to get possession of a large warehouse through a secret aperture
in the cellar wall. He did succeed in effecting an entrance, with
several of his deputies. But as soon as they were inside the building,
the patriots outside closed the hole; and thus, instead of getting
possession of the building, the loyal officers found themselves
prisoners in a dark cellar.
They were there for several hours before they could get word to the
commanding officer, who released them.
The joke was consolatory to the inhabitants. It was on this occasion
that Rev. Mather Byles heightened the general merriment by his
celebrated jest on the British soldiers:
"The people," said he, "sent over to England to obtain a redress of
grievances. The grievances have returned _red-dressed_."
The Hall is still used for public meetings, and the region roundabout is
still an important public market.
[Illustration: Chauncey Jerome]
CHAUNCEY JEROME,
YANKEE CLOCK-MAKER.
Poor boys had a hard time of it in New England eighty years ago.
Observe, now, how it fared with Chauncey Jerome,--he who founded a
celebrated clock business in Connecticut, that turned out six hundred
clocks a day, and sent them to foreign countries by the ship-load.
But do not run away with the idea that it was the hardship and
loneliness of his boyhood that "made a man of him." On the contrary,
they injured, narrowed, and saddened him. He would have been twice the
man he was, and happier all his days, if he had passed an easier and a
more cheerful childhood. It is not good for boys to live as he lived,
and work as he worked, during the period of growth, and I am glad that
fewer boys are now compelled to bear such a lot as his.
His father was a blacksmith and nailmaker, of Plymouth, Connecticut,
with a houseful of hungry boys and girls; and, consequently, as soon as
Chauncey could handle a hoe or tie up a bundle of grain he was kept at
work on the farm; for, in those days, almost all mechanics in New
England cultivated land in the summer time. The boy went to school
during the three winter months, until he was ten years old; then his
school-days and play-days were over forever, and his father took him
into the shop to help make nails.
Even as a child he showed that power of keeping on, to which he owed his
after-success. There was a great lazy boy at the district school he
attended who had a load of wood to chop, which he hated to do, and this
small Chauncey, eight or nine years of age, chopped the whole of it for
him for _one cent_! Often he would chop wood for the neighbors in
moonlight evenings for a few cents a load. It is evident that the
quality which made him a successful man of business was not developed by
hardship, for he performed these labors voluntarily. He was naturally
industrious and persevering.
When he was eleven years of age his father suddenly died, and he found
himself obliged to leave his happy home and find farm work as a poor
hireling boy. There were few farmers then in Connecticut--nay, there
were few people anywhere in the world--who knew how to treat an orphan
obliged to work for his subsistence among strangers. On a Monday
morning, with his little bundle of clothes in his hand, and an almost
bursting heart, he bade his mother and his brothers and sisters good-by,
and walked to the place which he had found for himself, on a farm a few
miles from home.
He was most willing to work; but his affectionate heart was starved at
his new place; and scarcely a day passed during his first year when he
did not burst into tears as he worked alone in the fields, thinking of
the father he had lost, and of the happy family broken up never to live
together again. It was a lonely farm, and the people with whom he lived
took no interest in him as a human being, but regarded him with little
more consideration than one of their other working animals. They took
care, however, to keep him steadily at work, early and late, hot and
cold, rain and shine. Often he worked all day in the woods chopping down
trees with his shoes full of snow; he never had a pair of boots till he
was nearly twenty-one years of age.
Once in two weeks he had a great joy; for his master let him go to
church every other Sunday. After working two weeks without seeing more
than half a dozen people, it gave him a peculiar and intense delight
just to sit in the church gallery and look down upon so many human
beings. It was the only alleviation of his dismal lot.
Poor little lonely wretch! One day, when he was thirteen years of age,
there occurred a total eclipse of the sun, a phenomenon of which he had
scarcely heard, and he had not the least idea what it could be. He was
hoeing corn that day in a solitary place. When the darkness and the
chill of the eclipse fell upon the earth, feeling sure the day of
judgment had come, he was terrified beyond description. He watched the
sun disappearing with the deepest apprehension, and felt no relief until
it shone out bright and warm as before.
It seems strange that people in a Christian country could have had a
good steady boy like this in their house and yet do nothing to cheer or
comfort his life. Old men tell me it was a very common case in New
England seventy years ago.
This hard experience on the farm lasted until he was old enough to be
apprenticed. At fourteen he was bound to a carpenter for seven years,
during which he was to receive for his services his board and his
clothes. Already he had done almost the work of a man on the farm, being
a stout, handy fellow, and in the course of two or three years he did
the work of a full-grown carpenter; nevertheless, he received no wages
except the necessaries of life. Fortunately the carpenter's family were
human beings, and he had a pleasant, friendly home during his
apprenticeship.
Even under the gentlest masters apprentices, in old times, were kept
most strictly to their duty. They were lucky if they got the whole of
Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July for holidays.
Now, this apprentice, when he was sixteen, was so homesick on a certain
occasion that he felt he _must_ go and see his mother, who lived near
her old home, twenty miles from where he was working on a job. He walked
the distance in the night, in order not to rob his master of any of the
time due to him.
It was a terrible night's work. He was sorry he had undertaken it; but
having started he could not bear to give it up. Half the way was through
the woods, and every noise he heard he thought was a wild beast coming
to kill him, and even the piercing notes of the whippoorwill made his
hair stand on end. When he passed a house the dogs were after him in
full cry, and he spent the whole night in terror. Let us hope the
caresses of his mother compensated him for this suffering.
The next year when his master had a job thirty miles distant, he
frequently walked the distance on a hot summer's day, with his
carpenter's tools upon his back. At that time light vehicles, or any
kind of one-horse carriage, were very rarely kept in country places, and
mechanics generally had to trudge to their place of work, carrying their
tools with them. So passed the first years of his apprenticeship.
All this time he was thinking of quite another business,--that of
clock-making,--which had been developed during his childhood near his
father's house, by Eli Terry, the founder of the Yankee wooden-clock
manufacture.
This ingenious Mr. Terry, with a small saw and a jack-knife, would cut
out the wheels and works for twenty-five clocks during the winter, and,
when the spring opened, he would sling three or four of them across the
back of a horse, and keep going till he sold them, for about twenty-five
dollars apiece. This was for the works only. When a farmer had bought
the machinery of a clock for twenty-five dollars, he employed the
village carpenter to make a case for it, which might cost ten or fifteen
dollars more.
It was in this simple way that the country was supplied with those tall,
old-fashioned clocks, of which almost every ancient farm-house still
contains a specimen. The clock-case was sometimes built into the house
like a pillar, and helped to support the upper story. Some of them were
made by very clumsy workmen, out of the commonest timber, just planed in
the roughest way, and contained wood enough for a pretty good-sized
organ.
The clock business had fascinated Chauncey Jerome from his childhood,
and he longed to work at it. His guardian dissuaded him. So many clocks
were then making, he said, that in two or three years the whole country
would be supplied, and then there would be no more business for a maker.
This was the general opinion. At a training, one day, the boy overheard
a group talking of Eli Terry's _folly_ in undertaking to make two
hundred clocks all at once.
"He'll never live long enough to finish them," said one.
"If he should," said another, "he could not possibly sell so many. The
very idea is ridiculous."
The boy was not convinced by these wise men of the East, and he lived to
make and to sell two hundred thousand clocks in one year!
When his apprenticeship was a little more than half over, he told his
master that if he would give him four months in the winter of each year,
when business was dull, he would buy his own clothes. His master
consenting, he went to Waterbury, Connecticut, and began to work making
clock dials, and very soon got an insight into the art and mystery of
clock-making.
The clock-makers of that day, who carried round their clock-movements
upon a horse's back, often found it difficult to sell them in remote
country places, because there was no carpenter near by competent to make
a case. Two smart Yankees hired our apprentice to go with them to the
distant State of New Jersey, for the express purpose of making cases for
the clocks they sold. On this journey he first saw the city of New York.
He was perfectly astonished at the bustle and confusion. He stood on the
corner of Chatham and Pearl Streets for more than an hour, wondering why
so many people were hurrying about so in every direction.
"What is going on?" said he, to a passer-by. "What's the excitement
about?"
The man hurried on without noticing him; which led him to conclude that
city people were not over polite.
The workmen were just finishing the interior of the City Hall, and he
was greatly puzzled to understand how those winding stone stairs could
be fixed without any visible means of support. In New Jersey he found
another wonder. The people there kept Christmas more strictly than
Sunday; a thing very strange to a child of the Puritans, who hardly knew
what Christmas was.
Every winter added something to his knowledge of clock-making, and, soon
after he was out of his apprenticeship, he bought some portions of
clocks, a little mahogany, and began to put clocks together on his own
account, with encouraging success from the beginning.
It was a great day with him when he received his first magnificent order
from a Southern merchant for twelve wooden clocks at twelve dollars
apiece! When they were done, he delivered them himself to his customer,
and found it impossible to believe that he should actually receive so
vast a sum as a hundred and forty-four dollars. He took the money with a
trembling hand, and buttoned it up in his pocket. Then he felt an awful
apprehension that some robbers might have heard of his expecting to
receive this enormous amount, and would waylay him on the road home.
He worked but too steadily. He used to say that he loved to work as well
as he did to eat, and that sometimes he would not go outside of his gate
from one Sunday to the next. He soon began to make inventions and
improvements. His business rapidly increased, though occasionally he had
heavy losses and misfortunes.
His most important contribution to the business of clock-making was his
substitution of brass for wood in the cheap clocks. He found that his
wooden clocks, when they were transported by sea, were often spoiled by
the swelling of the wooden wheels. One night, in a moment of extreme
depression during the panic of 1837, the thought darted into his mind,--
"A cheap clock can be made of brass as well as wood!"
It kept him awake nearly all night. He began at once to carry out the
idea. It gave an immense development to the business, because brass
clocks could be exported to all parts of the world, and the cost of
making them was greatly lessened by new machinery. It was Chauncey
Jerome who learned how to make a pretty good brass clock for forty
cents, and a good one for two dollars; and it was he who began their
exportation to foreign lands. Clocks of his making ticked during his
lifetime at Jerusalem, Saint Helena, Calcutta, Honolulu, and most of the
other ends of the earth.
After making millions of clocks, and acquiring a large fortune, he
retired from active business, leaving his splendid manufactory at New
Haven to the management of others. They thought they knew more than the
old man; they mismanaged the business terribly, and involved him in
their own ruin. He was obliged to leave his beautiful home at seventy
years of age, and seek employment at weekly wages--he who had given
employment to three hundred men at once.
He scorned to be dependent. I saw and talked long with this good old man
when he was working upon a salary, at the age of seventy-three, as
superintendent of a large clock factory in Chicago. He did not pretend
to be indifferent to the change in his position. He felt it acutely. He
was proud of the splendid business he had created, and he lamented its
destruction. He said it was one of his consolations to know that, in the
course of his long life, he had never brought upon others the pains he
was then enduring. He bore his misfortunes as a man should, and enjoyed
the confidence and esteem of his new associates.
CAPTAIN PIERRE LACLEDE LIGUEST,
PIONEER.
The bridge which springs so lightly and so gracefully over the
Mississippi at St. Louis is a truly wonderful structure. It often
happens in this world that the work which is done best conceals the
merit of the worker. All is finished so thoroughly and smoothly, and
fulfills its purpose with so little jar and friction, that the
difficulties overcome by the engineer become almost incredible. No one
would suppose, while looking down upon the three steel arches of this
exquisite bridge, that its foundations are one hundred and twenty feet
below the surface of the water, and that its construction cost nine
millions of dollars and six years of time. Its great height above the
river is also completely concealed by the breadth of its span. The
largest steamboat on the river passes under it at the highest stage of
water, and yet the curve of the arches appears to have been selected
merely for its pictorial effect.
It is indeed a noble and admirable work, an honor to the city and
country, and, above all, to Captain James B. Eads, who designed and
constructed it. The spectator who sees for the first time St. Louis, now
covering as far as the eye can reach the great bend of the river on
which it is built, the shore fringed with steamboats puffing black
smoke, and the city glittering in the morning sun, beholds one of the
most striking and animating spectacles which this continent affords.
Go back one hundred and twenty years. That bend was then covered with
the primeval forest, and the only object upon it which betrayed the hand
of man was a huge green mound, a hundred feet high, that had been thrown
up ages before by some tribe which inhabited the spot before our Indians
had appeared. All that region swarmed with fur-bearing animals, deer,
bear, buffalo, and beaver. It is difficult to see how this continent
ever could have been settled but for the fur trade. It was beaver skin
which enabled the Pilgrim Fathers of New England to hold their own
during the first fifty years of their settlement. It was in quest of
furs that the pioneers pushed westward, and it was by the sale of furs
that the frontier settlers were at first supplied with arms, ammunition,
tools, and salt.
The fur trade also led to the founding of St. Louis. In the year 1763 a
great fleet of heavy batteaux, loaded with the rude merchandise needed
by trappers and Indians, approached the spot on which St. Louis stands.
This fleet had made its way up the Mississippi with enormous difficulty
and toil from New Orleans, and only reached the mouth of the Missouri
at the end of the fourth month. It was commanded by Pierre Laclede
Liguest, the chief partner in a company chartered to trade with the
Indians of the Missouri River. He was a Frenchman, a man of great energy
and executive force, and his company of hunters, trappers, mechanics,
and farmers, were also French.
On his way up the river Captain Liguest had noticed this superb bend of
land, high enough above the water to avoid the floods, and its surface
only undulating enough for the purposes of a settlement. Having reached
the mouth of the Muddy River (as they called the Missouri) in the month
of December, and finding no place there well suited to his purpose, he
dropped down the stream seventeen miles, and drove the prows of his
boats into what is now the Levee of St. Louis. It was too late in the
season to begin a settlement. But he "blazed" the trees to mark the
spot, and he said to a young man of his company, Auguste Chouteau:--
"You will come here as soon as the river is free from ice, and will
cause this place to be cleared, and form a settlement according to the
plan I shall give you."
The fleet fell down the river to the nearest French settlement, Fort de
Chartres. Captain Liguest said to the commander of this fort on
arriving:--
"I have found a situation where I intend to establish a settlement which
in the future will become one of the most beautiful cities in America."
These are not imaginary words. Auguste Chouteau, who was selected to
form the settlement, kept a diary, part of which is now preserved in the
Mercantile Library at St. Louis, and in it this saying of Captain
Liguest is recorded. So, the next spring he dispatched young Chouteau
with a select body of thirty mechanics and hunters to the site of the
proposed settlement.
"You will go," said he, "and disembark at the place where we marked the
trees. You will begin to clear the place and build a large shed to
contain the provisions and tools and some little cabins to lodge the
men."
On the fifteenth of February, 1764, the party arrived, and the next
morning began to build their shed. Liguest named the settlement St.
Louis, in honor of the patron saint of the royal house of France--Louis
XV. being then upon the throne. All went well with the settlement, and
it soon became the seat of the fur trade for an immense region of
country, extending gradually from the Mississippi to the Rocky
Mountains.
The French lived more peacefully with the Indians than any other people
who assisted to settle this continent, and the reason appears to have
been that they became almost Indian themselves. They built their huts in
the wigwam fashion, with poles stuck in the ground. They imitated the
ways and customs of the Indians, both in living and in hunting. They
went on hunting expeditions with Indians, wore the same garments, and
learned to live on meat only, as Indian hunting parties generally did.
But the circumstance which most endeared the French to the Indians was
their marrying the daughters of the chiefs, which made the Indians
regard them as belonging to their tribe. Besides this, they accommodated
themselves to the Indian character, and learned how to please them. A
St. Louis fur trader, who was living a few years ago in the ninetieth
year of his age, used to speak of the ease with which an influential
chief could be conciliated.
"I could always," said he, "make the principal chief of a tribe my
friend by a piece of vermilion, a pocket looking-glass, some
flashy-looking beads, and a knife. These things made him a puppet in my
hands."
Even if a valuable horse had been stolen, a chief, whose friendship had
been won in this manner, would continue to scold the tribe until the
horse was brought back. The Indians, too, were delighted with the
Frenchman's fiddle, his dancing, his gayety of manner, and even with the
bright pageantry of his religion. It was when the settlement was six
years old that the inhabitants of St. Louis, a very few hundreds in
number, gathered to take part in the consecration of a little church,
made very much like the great council wigwam of the Indians, the logs
being placed upright, and the interstices filled with mortar. This
church stood near the river, almost on the very site of the present
cathedral. Mass was said, and the Te Deum was chanted. At the first
laying out of the village, Captain Liguest set apart the whole block as
a site for the church, and it remains church property to this day.
It is evident from Chouteau's diary that Pierre Laclede Liguest, though
he had able and energetic assistants, was the soul of the enterprise,
and the real founder of St. Louis. He was one of that stock of Frenchmen
who put the imprint of their nation, never to be effaced, upon the map
of North America--a kind of Frenchman unspeakably different from those
who figured in the comic opera and the masquerade ball of the late
corrupt and effeminating empire. He was a genial and generous man, who
rewarded his followers bountifully, and took the lead in every service
of difficulty and danger. While on a visit to New Orleans he died of one
of the diseases of the country, and was buried on the shore near the
mouth of the Arkansas River.
His executor and chief assistant, Auguste Chouteau, born at New Orleans
in 1739, lived one hundred years, not dying till 1839. There are many
people in St. Louis who remember him. A very remarkable coincidence was,
that his brother, Pierre Chouteau, born in New Orleans in 1749, died in
St. Louis in 1849, having also lived just one hundred years. Both of
these brothers were identified with St. Louis from the beginning, where
they lived in affluence and honor for seventy years, and where their
descendants still reside.
The growth of St. Louis was long retarded by the narrowness and tyranny
of the Spanish government, to which the French ceded the country about
the time when St. Louis was settled. But in 1804 it was transferred to
the United States, and from that time its progress has been rapid and
almost uninterrupted. When President Jefferson's agent took possession,
there was no post-office, no ferry over the river, no newspaper, no
hotel, no Protestant church, and no school. Nor could any one hold land
who was not a Catholic. Instantly, and as a matter of course, all
restricting laws were swept away; and before two years had passed there
was a ferry, a post-office, a newspaper, a Protestant church, a hotel,
and two schools, one French and one English.
ISRAEL PUTNAM.
It is strange that so straightforward and transparent a character as
"Old Put" should have become the subject of controversy. Too much is
claimed for him by some disputants, and much too little is conceded to
him by others. He was certainly as far from being a rustic booby as he
was from being a great general.
Conceive him, first, as a thriving, vigorous, enterprising Connecticut
farmer, thirty years of age, cultivating with great success his own farm
of five hundred and fourteen acres, all paid for. Himself one of a
family of twelve children, and belonging to a prolific race which has
scattered Putnams all over the United States, besides leaving an
extraordinary number in New England, he had married young at his native
Salem, and established himself soon after in the northeastern corner of
Connecticut. At that period, 1740, Connecticut was to Massachusetts what
Colorado is to New York at present; and thither, accordingly, this
vigorous young man and his young wife early removed, and hewed out a
farm from the primeval woods.
He was just the man for a pioneer. His strength of body was
extraordinary, and he had a power of sustained exertion more valuable
even than great strength. Nothing is more certain than that he was an
enterprising and successful farmer, who introduced new fruits, better
breeds of cattle, and improved implements.
There is still to be seen on his farm a long avenue of ancient apple
trees, which, the old men of the neighborhood affirm, were set out by
Israel Putnam one hundred and forty years ago. The well which he dug is
still used. Coming to the place with considerable property inherited
from his father (for the Putnams were a thriving race from the
beginning), it is not surprising that he should have become one of the
leading farmers in a county of farmers.
At the same time he was not a studious man, and had no taste for
intellectual enjoyments. He was not then a member of the church. He
never served upon the school committee. There was a Library Association
at the next village, but he did not belong to it. For bold riding,
skillful hunting, wood-chopping, hay-tossing, ploughing, it was hard to
find his equal; but, in the matter of learning, he could write legibly,
read well enough, spell in an independent manner, and not much more.
With regard to the wolf story, which rests upon tradition only, it is
not improbable, and there is no good reason to doubt it. Similar deeds
have been done by brave backwoodsmen from the beginning, and are still
done within the boundaries of the United States every year. The story
goes, that when he had been about two years on his new farm, the report
was brought in one morning that a noted she-wolf of the neighborhood had
killed seventy of his sheep and goats, besides wounding many lambs and
kids. This wolf, the last of her race in that region, had long eluded
the skill of every hunter. Upon seeing the slaughter of his flock, the
young farmer, it appears, entered into a compact with five of his
neighbors to hunt the pernicious creature by turns until they had killed
her. The animal was at length tracked to her den, a cave extending deep
into a rocky hill. The tradition is, that Putnam, with a rope around his
body, a torch in one hand, and rifle in the other, went twice into the
cave, and the second time shot the wolf dead, and was drawn out by the
people, wolf and all. An exploit of this nature gave great celebrity in
an outlying county in the year 1742. Meanwhile he continued to thrive,
and one of the old-fashioned New England families of ten children
gathered about him. As they grew towards maturity, he bought a share in
the Library Association, built a pew for his family in the church, and
comported himself in all ways as became a prosperous farmer and father
of a numerous family.
So passed his life until he reached the age of thirty-seven, when he
already had a boy fifteen years of age, and was rich in all the wealth
which Connecticut then possessed. The French war broke out--the war
which decided the question whether the French or the English race should
possess North America. His reputation was such that the legislature of
Connecticut appointed him at once a captain, and he had no difficulty in
enlisting a company of the young men of his county, young farmers or the
sons of farmers. He gained great note as a scouter and ranger, rendering
such important service in this way to the army that the legislature made
him a special grant of "fifty Spanish milled dollars" as an honorable
gift. He was famous also for Yankee ingenuity. A colonial newspaper
relates an anecdote illustrative of this. The British general was sorely
perplexed by the presence of a French man-of-war commanding a piece of
water which it was necessary for him to cross.
"General," said Putnam, "that ship must be taken."
"Aye," replied the general, "I would give the world if she was taken."
"I will take her," said Putnam.
"How?" asked the general.
"Give me some wedges, a beetle, and a few men of my own choice."
When night came, Putnam rowed under the vessel's stern, and drove the
wedges between the rudder and the ship. In the morning she was seen with
her sails flapping helplessly in the middle of the lake, and she was
soon after blown ashore and captured.
Among other adventures, Putnam was taken prisoner by the Indians, and
carried to his grave great scars of the wounds inflicted by the savages.
He served to the very end of the war, pursuing the enemy even into the
tropics, and assisting at the capture of Havana. He returned home, after
nine years of almost continuous service, with the rank of colonel, and
such a reputation as made him the hero of Connecticut, as Washington was
the hero of Virginia at the close of the same war. At any time of public
danger requiring a resort to arms, he would be naturally looked to by
the people of Connecticut to take the command.
Eleven peaceful years he now spent at home. His wife died, leaving an
infant a year old. He joined the church; he married again; he cultivated
his farm; he told his war stories. The Stamp Act excitement occurred in
1765, when Putnam joined the Sons of Liberty, and called upon the
governor of the colony as a deputy from them.
"What shall I do," asked the governor, "if the stamped paper should be
sent to me by the king's authority?"
"Lock it up," said Putnam, "until we visit you again."
"And what will you do with it?"
"We shall expect you to give us the key of the room where it is
deposited; and if you think fit, in order to screen yourself from
blame, you may forewarn us upon our peril not to enter the room."
"And what will you do afterwards?"
"Send it safely back again."
"But if I should refuse you admission?"
"Your house will be level with the dust in five minutes."
Fortunately, the stamped paper never reached Connecticut, and the act
was repealed soon after.
The eventful year, 1774, arrived. Putnam was fifty-six years of age, a
somewhat portly personage, weighing two hundred pounds, with a round,
full countenance, adorned by curly locks, now turning gray--the very
picture of a hale, hearty, good-humored, upright and downright country
gentleman. News came that the port of Boston was closed, its business
suspended, its people likely to be in want of food. The farmers of the
neighborhood contributed a hundred and twenty-five sheep, which Putnam
himself drove to Boston, sixty miles off, where he had a cordial
reception by the people, and was visited by great numbers of them at the
house of Dr. Warren, where he lived. The polite people of Boston were
delighted with the scarred old hero, and were pleased to tell anecdotes
of his homely ways and fervent, honest zeal. He mingled freely, too,
with the British officers, who _chaffed_ him, as the modern saying is,
about his coming down to Boston to fight. They told him that twenty
great ships and twenty regiments would come unless the people
submitted.
"If they come," said Putnam, "I am ready to treat them as enemies."
One day in the following spring, April twentieth, while he was ploughing
in one of his fields with a yoke of oxen driven by his son, Daniel, a
boy of fifteen, an express reached him giving him the news of the battle
of Lexington, which had occurred the day before. Daniel Putnam has left
a record of what his father did on this occasion.
"He loitered not," wrote Daniel, "but left me, the driver of his team,
to unyoke it in the furrow, and not many days after to follow him to
camp."
Colonel Putnam mounted a horse, and set off instantly to alarm the
officers of militia in the neighboring towns. Returning home a few hours
after, he found hundreds of minute-men assembled, armed and equipped,
who had chosen him for their commander. He accepted the command, and,
giving them orders to follow, he pushed on without dismounting, rode the
same horse all night, and reached Cambridge next morning at sunrise,
still wearing the checked shirt which he had had on when ploughing in
his field. As Mr. Bancroft remarks, he brought to his country's service
an undaunted courage and a devoted heart. His services during the
Revolution are known to almost every reader. Every one seems to have
liked him, for he had a very happy turn for humor, sang a good song, and
was a very cheerful old gentleman.
In 1789, after four years of vigorous and useful service, too arduous
for his age, he suffered a paralytic stroke, which obliged him to leave
the army. He lived, however, to see his country free and prosperous,
surviving to the year 1790, when he died, aged seventy-three. I saw his
commission as major-general hanging in the house of one of his
grandsons, Colonel A. P. Putnam, at Nashville, some years ago. He has
descendants in every State.
GEORGE FLOWER.
PIONEER.
Travelers from old Europe are surprised to find in Chicago such an
institution as an Historical Society. What can a city of yesterday, they
ask, find to place in its archives, beyond the names of the first
settlers, and the erection of the first elevator? They forget that the
newest settlement of civilized men inherits and possesses the whole past
of our race, and that no community has so much need to be instructed by
History as one which has little of its own. Nor is it amiss for a new
commonwealth to record its history as it makes it, and store away the
records of its vigorous infancy for the entertainment of its mature age.
The first volume issued by the Chicago Historical Society contains an
account of what is still called the "English Settlement," in Edwards
County, Illinois, founded in 1817 by two wealthy English farmers, Morris
Birkbeck and George Flower. These gentlemen sold out all their
possessions in England, and set out in search of the prairies of the
Great West, of which they had heard in the old country. They were not
quite sure there were any prairies, for all the settled parts of the
United States, they knew, had been covered with the dense primeval
forest. The existence of the prairies rested upon the tales of
travelers. So George Flower, in the spring of 1816, set out in advance
to verify the story, bearing valuable letters of introduction, one from
General La Fayette to ex-President Jefferson.
With plenty of money in his pocket and enjoying every other advantage,
he was nearly two years in merely _finding_ the prairies. First, he was
fifty days in crossing the ocean, and he spent six weeks in
Philadelphia, enjoying the hospitality of friends. The fourth month of
his journey had nearly elapsed before he had fairly mounted his horse
and started on his westward way.
It is a pity there is not another new continent to be explored and
settled, because the experience gained in America would so much
facilitate the work. Upon looking over such records as that of George
Flower's History we frequently meet with devices and expedients of great
value in their time and place, but which are destined soon to be
numbered among the Lost Arts. For example, take the mode of saddling and
loading a horse for a ride of fifteen hundred miles, say, from the
Atlantic to the Far West, or back again. It was a matter of infinite
importance to the rider, for every part of the load was subjected to
desperate pulls and wrenches, and the breaking of a strap, at a
critical moment in crossing a river or climbing a steep, might
precipitate both horse and rider to destruction.
On the back of the horse was laid, first of all, a soft and thin
blanket, which protected the animal in some degree against the venomous
insects that abounded on the prairies, the attacks of which could
sometimes madden the gentlest horse. Upon this was placed the saddle,
which was large, and provided in front with a high pommel, and behind
with a pad to receive part of the lading. The saddle was a matter of
great importance, as well as its girths and crupper strap, all of which
an experienced traveler subjected to most careful examination. Every
stitch was looked at, and the strength of all the parts repeatedly
tested.
Over the saddle--folded twice, if not three times--was a large, thick,
and fine blanket, as good a one as the rider could afford, which was
kept in its place by a broad surcingle. On the pad behind the saddle
were securely fastened a cloak and umbrella, rolled together as tight as
possible and bound with two straps. Next we have to consider the saddle
bags, stuffed as full as they could hold, each bag being exactly of the
same weight and size as the other. As the horseman put into them the few
articles of necessity which they would hold he would balance them
frequently, to see that one did not outweigh the other even by half a
pound. If this were neglected, the bags would slip from one side to the
other, graze the horse's leg, and start him off in a "furious kicking
gallop." The saddle-bags were slung across the saddle under the blanket,
and kept in their place by two loops through which the stirrup leathers
passed.
So much for the horse. The next thing was for the rider to put on his
leggings, which were pieces of cloth about a yard square, folded round
the leg from the knee to the ankle, and fastened with pins and bands of
tape. These leggings received the mud and water splashed up by the
horse, and kept the trousers dry. Thus prepared, the rider proceeded to
mount, which was by no means an easy matter, considering what was
already upon the horse's back. The horse was placed as near as possible
to a stump, from which, with a "pretty wide stride and fling of the
leg," the rider would spring into his seat. It was so difficult to mount
and dismount, that experienced travelers would seldom get off until the
party halted for noon, and not again until it was time to camp.
Women often made the journey on horseback, and bore the fatigue of it
about as well as men. Instead of a riding-habit, they wore over their
ordinary dress a long skirt of dark-colored material, and tied their
bonnets on with a large handkerchief over the top, which served to
protect the face and ears from the weather.
The packing of the saddle made the seat more comfortable, and even
safer, for both men and women. The rider, in fact, was seldom thrown
unless the whole load came off at once. Thus mounted, a party of
experienced horsemen and horsewomen would average their thirty miles a
day for a month at a time, providing no accident befel them. They were,
nevertheless, liable to many accidents and vexatious delays. A horse
falling lame would delay the party. Occasionally there would be a
stampede of all the horses, and days lost in finding them.
The greatest difficulty of all was the overflowing waters. No reader can
have forgotten the floods in the western country in the spring of 1884,
when every brook was a torrent and every river a deluge. Imagine a party
of travelers making their westward way on horseback at such a time,
before there was even a raft ferry on any river west of the Alleghanies,
and when all the valleys would be covered with water. It was by no means
unusual for a party to be detained a month waiting for the waters of a
large river to subside, and it was a thing at some seasons of daily
occurrence for all of them to be soused up to their necks in water.
Many of the important fords, too, could only be crossed by people who
knew their secret. I received once myself directions for crossing a ford
in South Carolina something like this: I was told to go straight in four
lengths of the horse; then "turn square to the right" and go two
lengths; and finally "strike for the shore, slanting a little down the
stream." Luckily, I had some one with me more expert in fords than I
was, and through his friendly guidance managed to flounder through.
Between New York and Baltimore, in 1775, there were more than twenty
streams to be forded, and six wide rivers or inlets to be ferried over.
We little think, as we glide over these streams now, that the smallest
of them, in some seasons, presented difficulties to our grandfathers
going southward on horseback.
The art of camping out was wonderfully well understood by the early
pioneers. Women were a great help in making the camp comfortable. As the
Pilgrim Fathers may be said to have discovered the true method of
settling the sea-shore, so the Western pioneer found the best way of
traversing and subduing the interior wilderness. The secret in both
cases was to get _the aid of women and children_! They supplied men with
motive, did a full half of the labor, and made it next to impossible to
turn back. Mr. Flower makes a remark in connection with this subject,
the truth of which will be attested by many.
"It is astonishing," he says, "how soon we are restored from fatigue
caused by exercise in the open air. Debility is of much longer duration
from labor in factories, stores, and in rooms warmed by stoves. Hail,
snow, thunder storms, and drenching rains are all _restoratives_ to
health and spirits."
Often, when the company would be all but tired out by a long day's ride
in hot weather, and the line stretched out three or four miles, a good
soaking rain would restore their spirits at once. Nor did a plunge into
the stream, which would wet every fibre of their clothing, do them any
harm. They would ride on in the sun, and let their clothes dry in the
natural way.
It must be owned, however, that some of the winter experiences of
travelers in the prairie country were most severe. In the forest a fire
can be made and some shelter can be found. But imagine a party on the
prairie in the midst of a driving snowstorm, overtaken by night, the
temperature at zero. Even in these circumstances knowledge was safety.
Each man would place his saddle on the ground and sit upon it, covering
his shoulders and head with his blanket, and holding his horse by the
bridle. In this way the human travelers usually derived warmth and
shelter enough from the horses to keep them from freezing to death.
Another method was to tie their horses, spread a blanket on the ground,
and sit upon it as close together as they could.
Sometimes, indeed, a whole party would freeze together in a mass; but
commonly all escaped without serious injury, and in some instances
invalids were restored to health by exposure which we should imagine
would kill a healthy man.
When George Flower rode westward in 1816, Lancaster, Pa., was the
largest inland town of the United States, and Dr. Priestley's beautiful
abode at Sunbury on the Susquehanna was still on the outside of the "Far
West." He had more trouble in getting to Pittsburg than he would now
have in going round the world. In the Alleghany Mountains he lost his
way, and was rescued by the chance of finding a stray horse which he
caught and mounted, and was carried by it to the only cabin in the
region. The owner of this cabin was "a poor Irishman with a coat so
darned, patched, and tattered as to be quite a curiosity."
"How I cherished him!" says the traveler. "No angel's visit could have
pleased me so well. He pointed out to me the course and showed me into a
path."
Pittsburg was already a smoky town. Leaving it soon, he rode on westward
to Cincinnati, then a place of five or six thousand inhabitants, but
growing rapidly. Even so far west as Cincinnati he could still learn
nothing of the prairies.
"Not a person that I saw," he declares, "knew anything about them. I
shrank from the idea of settling in the midst of a wood of heavy timber,
to hack and to hew my way to a little farm, ever bounded by a wall of
gloomy forest."
Then he rode across Kentucky, where he was struck, as every one was and
is, by the luxuriant beauty of the blue-grass farms. He dwells upon the
difficulty and horror of fording the rivers at that season of the year.
Some of his narrow escapes made such a deep impression upon his mind
that he used to dream of them fifty years after. He paid a visit to old
Governor Shelby of warlike renown, one of the heroes of the frontier,
and there at last he got some news of the prairies! He says:
"It was at Governor Shelby's house (in Lincoln County, Ky.) that I met
the first person who confirmed me in the existence of the prairies."
This informant was the Governor's brother, who had just come from the
Mississippi River across the glorious prairies of Illinois to the Ohio.
The information was a great relief. He was sure now that he had left his
native land on no fool's errand, the victim of a traveler's lying tale.
Being thus satisfied that there _were_ prairies which could be found
whenever they were wanted, he suspended the pursuit.
He had been then seven months from home, and November being at hand, too
late to explore an unknown country, he changed his course, and went off
to visit Mr. Jefferson at his estate of Poplar Forest in Virginia, upon
which the Natural Bridge is situated. Passing through Nashville on his
way, he saw General Andrew Jackson at a horse race. He describes the
hero of New Orleans as an elderly man, "lean and lank, bronzed in
complexion, deep marked countenance, grisly-gray hair, and a restless,
fiery eye." He adds:--
"Jackson had a horse on the course which was beaten that day. The
recklessness of his bets, his violent gesticulations and imprecations,
outdid all competition. If I had been told that he was to be a future
President of the United States, I should have thought it a very strange
thing."
There are still a few old men, I believe, at Nashville who remember
General Jackson's demeanor on the race ground, and they confirm the
record of Mr. Flower. After a ride of a thousand miles or so, he
presented his letter of introduction to Mr. Jefferson at Poplar Forest,
and had a cordial reception. The traveler describes the house as
resembling a French château, with octagon rooms, doors of polished oak,
lofty ceilings, and large mirrors. The ex-President's form, he says, was
of somewhat majestic proportions, more than six feet in height; his
manners simple, kind, and polite; his dress a dark pepper-and-salt coat,
cut in the old Quaker fashion, with one row of large metal buttons,
knee-breeches, gray worsted stockings, and shoes fastened by large metal
buckles, all quite in the old style. His two grand-daughters, Misses
Randolph, were living with him then. Mr. Jefferson soon after returned
to his usual abode, Monticello, and there Mr. Flower spent the greater
part of the winter, enjoying most keenly the evening conversations of
the ex-President, who delighted to talk of the historic scenes in which
he was for fifty years a conspicuous actor.
George Flower and his party would have settled near Monticello,
perhaps, but for the system of slavery, which perpetuated a wasteful
mode of farming, and disfigured the beautiful land with dilapidation.
He had, meanwhile, sent home word that prairies existed in America, and
in the spring of 1817 his partner in the enterprise, Morris Birkbeck,
and his family of nine, came out from England, and they all started
westward in search of the prairies. They went by stage to Pittsburg,
where they bought horses, mounted them and continued their journey, men,
ladies, and boys, a dozen people in all. The journey was not unpleasant,
most of them being persons of education and refinement, with three
agreeable young ladies among them, two of them being daughters of Mr.
Birkbeck, and Miss Andrews, their friend and companion.
All went well and happily during the journey until Mr. Birkbeck, a
widower of fifty-four with grown daughters, made an offer of marriage to
Miss Andrews, aged twenty-five. It was an embarrassing situation. She
was constrained to decline the offer, and as they were traveling in such
close relations, the freedom and enjoyment of the journey were seriously
impaired. Then Mr. Flower, who was a widower also, but in the prime of
life, proposed to the young lady. She accepted him, and they were soon
after married at Vincennes, the rejected Birkbeck officiating as father
of the bride.
But this was not finding the prairies. At length, toward the close of
the second summer, they began to meet with people who had seen prairies,
and finally their own eyes were greeted with the sight. One day, after a
ride of seven hours in extreme heat, bruised and torn by the brushwood,
exhausted and almost in despair, suddenly a beautiful prairie was
disclosed to their view. It was an immense expanse stretching away in
profound repose beneath the light of an afternoon summer sun, surrounded
by forest and adorned with clumps of mighty oaks, "the whole presenting
a magnificence of park scenery complete from the hand of nature." The
writer adds: "For once, the reality came up to the picture of the
imagination."
If the reader supposes that their task was now substantially
accomplished, he is very much mistaken. After a good deal of laborious
search, they chose a site for their settlement in Edwards County,
Illinois, and bought a considerable tract; after which Mr. Flower went
to England to close up the affairs of the two families, and raise the
money to pay for their land and build their houses. They named their
town Albion. It has enjoyed a safe and steady prosperity ever since, and
has been in some respects a model town to that part of Illinois.
The art of founding a town must of course soon cease to be practiced. It
is curious to note how all the institutions of civilized life were
established in their order. First was built a large log-cabin that would
answer as a tavern and blacksmith's shop, the first requisites being to
get the horses shod, and the riders supplied with whiskey. Then came
other log-cabins, as they were needed, which pioneers would undertake to
build for arriving emigrants for twenty-five dollars apiece. Very soon
one of the people would try, for the first time in his life, to preach a
sermon on Sundays, and as soon as there were children enough in the
neighborhood, one of the settlers, unable to cope with the labors of
agriculture, would undertake to teach them, and a log-cabin would be
built or appropriated for the purpose.
Mr. Flower reports that, as soon as the school was established,
civilization was safe. Some boys and some parents would hold out against
it for a while, but all of them at last either join the movement or
remove further into the wilderness.
"Occasionally," he says, "will be seen a boy, ten or twelve years old,
leaning against a door-post intently gazing in upon the scholars at
their lessons; after a time he slowly and moodily goes away. He feels
his exclusion. He can no longer say: 'I am as good as you.' He must go
to school or dive deeper into the forest."
All this is passing. Already it begins to read like ancient history.
George Flower survived until March, 1862, when he died at a good old
age. Certainly the Historical Society of Chicago has done well to
publish the record he left behind him.
EDWARD COLES,
NOBLEST OF THE PIONEERS, AND HIS GREAT SPEECH.
When James Madison came to the presidency in 1809, he followed the
example of his predecessor, Mr. Jefferson, in the selection of his
private secretary. Mr. Jefferson chose Captain Meriwether Lewis, the son
of one of his Virginia neighbors, whom he had known from his childhood.
Mr. Madison gave the appointment to Edward Coles, the son of a family
friend of Albermarle County, Va., who had recently died, leaving a large
estate in land and slaves to his children.
Edward Coles, a graduate of William and Mary college, was twenty-three
years of age when he entered the White House as a member of the
President's family. He was a young man after James Madison's own heart,
of gentle manners, handsome person, and singular firmness of character.
In the correspondence both of Jefferson and Madison several letters can
be found addressed to him which show the very high estimation in which
he was held by those eminent men.
Among the many young men who have held the place of private secretary in
the presidential mansion, Edward Coles was one of the most interesting.
I know not which ought to rank highest in our esteem, the wise and
gallant Lewis, who explored for us the Western wilderness, or Edward
Coles, one of the rare men who know how to surrender, for conscience'
sake, home, fortune, ease, and good repute.
While he was still in college he became deeply interested in the
question, whether men could rightfully hold property in men. At that
time the best of the educated class at the South were still
abolitionists in a romantic or sentimental sense, just as Queen Marie
Antoinette was a republican during the American Revolution. Here and
there a young man like George Wythe had set free his slaves and gone
into the profession of the law. With the great majority, however, their
disapproval of slavery was only an affair of the intellect, which led to
no practical results. It was not such with Edward Coles. The moment you
look at the portrait given in the recent sketch of his life by Mr. E. B.
Washburne, you perceive that he was a person who might be slow to make
up his mind, but who, when he had once discovered the right course,
could never again be at peace with himself until he had followed it.
While at college he read everything on the subject of slavery that fell
in his way, and he studied it in the light of the Declaration of
Independence, which assured him that men are born free and equal and
endowed with certain natural rights which are inalienable. He made up
his mind, while he was still a student, that it was wrong to hold
slaves, and he resolved that he would neither hold them nor live in a
State which permitted slaves to be held. He was determined, however, to
do nothing rashly. One reason which induced him to accept the place
offered him by Mr. Madison was his desire of getting a knowledge of the
remoter parts of the Union, in order to choose the place where he could
settle his slaves most advantageously.
While he was yet a member of the presidential household, he held that
celebrated correspondence with Mr. Jefferson, in which he urged the
ex-President to devote the rest of his life to promoting the abolition
of slavery. Mr. Jefferson replied that the task was too arduous for a
man who had passed his seventieth year. It was like bidding old Priam
buckle on the armor of Hector.
"This enterprise," he added, "is for the young, for those who can follow
it up and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my
prayers and these are the only weapons of an old man. But, in the mean
time, are you right in abandoning this property, and your country with
it? I think not."
Mr. Jefferson endeavored to dissuade the young man from his project of
removal. Mr. Coles, however, was not to be convinced. After serving for
six years as private secretary, and fulfilling a special diplomatic
mission to Russia, he withdrew to his ancestral home in Virginia, and
prepared to lead forth his slaves to the State of Illinois, then
recently admitted into the Union, but still a scarcely broken expanse of
virgin prairie. He could not lawfully emancipate his slaves in Virginia,
and it was far from his purpose to turn them loose in the wilderness. He
was going with them, and to stay with them until they were well rooted
in the new soil.
All his friends and relations opposed his scheme; nor had he even the
approval of the slaves themselves, for they knew nothing whatever of his
intention. He had been a good master, and they followed him with blind
faith, supposing that he was merely going to remove, as they had seen
other planters remove, from an exhausted soil to virgin lands. Placing
his slaves in the charge of one of their number, a mulatto man who had
already made the journey to Illinois with his master, he started them in
wagons on their long journey in April, 1819, over the Alleghany
Mountains to a point on the Monongahela River. There he bought two large
flat-bottomed boats, upon which he embarked his whole company, with
their horses, wagons, baggage, and implements. His pilot proving a
drunkard, he was obliged to take the command himself, upon reaching
Pittsburg.
The morning after he left Pittsburg, a lovely April day, he called all
the negroes together on the deck of the boats, which were lashed
together, and explained what he was going to do with them. He told them
they were no longer slaves, but free people, free as he was, free to go
on down the river with him, and free to go ashore, just as they pleased.
He afterwards described the scene. "The effect on them," he wrote, "was
electrical. They stared at me and at each other, as if doubting the
accuracy or reality of what they heard. In breathless silence they stood
before me, unable to utter a word, but with countenances beaming with
expression which no words could convey, and which no language can now
describe. As they began to see the truth of what they had heard, and to
realize their situation, there came on a kind of hysterical, giggling
laugh. After a pause of intense and unutterable emotion, bathed in
tears, and with tremulous voices, they gave vent to their gratitude, and
implored the blessings of God on me. When they had in some degree
recovered the command of themselves, Ralph said he had long known I was
opposed to holding black people as slaves, and thought it probable I
would some time or other give my people their freedom, but that he did
not expect me to do it so soon; and moreover, he thought I ought not to
do it till they had repaid me the expense I had been at in removing them
from Virginia, and had improved my farm and 'gotten me well fixed in
that new country.' To this all simultaneously expressed their
concurrence, and their desire to remain with me, as my servants, until
they had comfortably fixed me at my new home.
"I told them, no. I had made up my mind to give to them immediate and
unconditional freedom; that I had long been anxious to do it, but had
been prevented by the delays, first in selling my property in Virginia,
and then in collecting the money, and by other circumstances. That in
consideration of this delay, and as a reward for their past services, as
well as a stimulant to their future exertions, and with a hope it would
add to their self-esteem and their standing in the estimation of others,
I should give to each head of a family a quarter section, containing one
hundred and sixty acres of land. To this all objected, saying I had done
enough for them in giving them their freedom; and insisted on my keeping
the land to supply my own wants, and added, in the kindest manner, the
expression of their solicitude that I would not have the means of doing
so after I had freed them. I told them I had thought much of my duty and
of their rights, and that it was due alike to both that I should do what
I had said I should do; and accordingly, soon after reaching
Edwardsville, I executed and delivered to them deeds to the lands
promised them.
"I stated to them that the lands I intended to give them were unimproved
lands, and as they would not have the means of making the necessary
improvements, of stocking their farms, and procuring the materials for
at once living on them, they would have to hire themselves out till they
could acquire by their labor the necessary means to commence cultivating
and residing on their own lands. That I was willing to hire and employ
on my farm a certain number of them (designating the individuals); the
others I advised to seek employment in St. Louis, Edwardsville, and
other places, where smart, active young men and women could obtain much
higher wages than they could on farms. At this some of them murmured, as
it indicated a partiality, they said, on my part to those designated to
live with me; and contended they should all be equally dear to me, and
that I ought not to keep a part and turn the others out on the world, to
be badly treated, etc. I reminded them of what they seemed to have lost
sight of, that they were free; that no one had a right to beat or
ill-use them; and if so treated they could at pleasure leave one place
and seek a better; that labor was much in demand in that new country,
and highly paid for; that there would be no difficulty in their
obtaining good places, and being kindly treated; but if not, I should be
at hand, and would see they were well treated, and have justice done
them.
"I availed myself of the deck scene to give the negroes some advice. I
dwelt long and with much earnestness on their future conduct and
success, and my great anxiety that they should behave themselves and do
well, not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of the black race
held in bondage; many of whom were thus held because their masters
believed they were incompetent to take care of themselves and that
liberty would be to them a curse rather than a blessing. My anxious wish
was that they should so conduct themselves as to show by their example
that the descendants of Africa were competent to take care of and govern
themselves, and enjoy all the blessings of liberty and all the other
birthrights of man, and thus promote the universal emancipation of that
unfortunate and outraged race of the human family."[1]
After floating six hundred miles down the Ohio, they had another land
journey into Illinois, where the master performed his promises, and
created a home for himself. A few years after, he was elected governor
of the State. It was during his term of three years that a most
determined effort was made to change the constitution of the State so as
to legalize slavery in it. It was chiefly through the firmness and
masterly management of Governor Coles that this attempt was frustrated.
When his purpose in moving to Illinois had been completely accomplished,
he removed to Philadelphia, where he lived to the age of eighty-two.
Though not again in public life, he was always a public-spirited
citizen. He corresponded with the venerable Madison to the close of that
good man's life. Mr. Madison wrote two long letters to him on public
topics in his eighty-fourth year. Governor Coles died at Philadelphia in
1868, having lived to see slavery abolished in every State of the Union.
I have been informed that few, if any, of his own slaves succeeded
finally in farming prairie land, but that most of them gradually drifted
to the towns, where they became waiters, barbers, porters, and domestic
servants. My impression is that he over-estimated their capacity. But
this does not diminish the moral sublimity of the experiment.
[1] Sketch of Edward Coles. By E. B. Washburne. Chicago. 1882.
PETER H. BURNETT.
When an aged bank president, who began life as a waiter in a backwoods
tavern, tells the story of his life, we all like to gather close about
him and listen to his tale. Peter H. Burnett, the first Governor of
California, and now the President of the Pacific Bank in San Francisco,
has recently related his history, or the "Recollections of an Old
Pioneer;" and if I were asked by the "intelligent foreigner" we often
read about to explain the United States of to-day, I would hand him that
book, and say:--
"There! That is the stuff of which America is made."
He was born at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1807; his father a carpenter and
farmer, an honest, strong-minded man, who built some of the first
log-houses and frame-houses of what was then the frontier village of
Nashville, now a beautiful and pleasant city. While he was still a child
the family removed to Missouri, then on the outer edge of civilization,
and they spent the first winter in a hovel with a dirt floor, boarded up
at the sides, and with a hole in the middle of the roof for the escape
of the smoke. All the family lived together in the same room. In a year
or two, of course, they had a better house, and a farm under some
cultivation.
Those pioneer settlements were good schools for the development of the
pioneer virtues, courage, fortitude, handiness, directness of speech and
conduct. Fancy a boy ten years old going on horseback to mill through
the woods, and having to wait at the mill one or two days and nights for
his turn, living chiefly on a little parched corn which he carried with
him, and bringing back the flour all right.
"It often happened," says Governor Burnett, "that both bag and boy
tumbled off, and then there was trouble; not so much because the boy was
a little hurt (for he would soon recover), but because it was difficult
to get the bag on again."
There was nothing for it but to wait until a man came along strong
enough to shoulder three bushels of corn. Missouri was then, as it now
is, a land of plenty; for besides the produce of the farms, the country
was full of game, and a good deal of money was gained by the traffic in
skins, honey, and beeswax. The simplicity of dress was such that a
merchant attending church one day dressed in a suit of broadcloth, the
aged preacher alluded to his "fine apparel," and condemned it as being
contrary to the spirit of the Gospel. Fighting with fists was one of
the chief amusements. At a training, some young bully would mount a
stump, and after imitating the napping and crowing of a cock, cry out:--
"I can whip any man in this crowd except my friends."
The challenge being accepted, the two combatants would fight until one
of them cried, Enough; whereupon they would wash their faces and take a
friendly drink. Men would sometimes lose a part of an ear, the end of a
nose, or the whole of an eye in these combats, for it was considered
within the rules to bite and gouge.
In this wild country Peter Burnett grew to manhood, attending school
occasionally in summer, and getting a pretty good rudimentary education.
Coming of intelligent, honest, able ancestors, he used his opportunities
well, and learned a great deal from books, but more from a close
observation of the natural wonders by which he was surrounded. His acute
and kindly remarks upon the wild animals and wild nature of this
continent could be profitably studied by almost any naturalist. It is
surprising that one who has almost all his life lived on the advanced
wave of civilization in this country should have acquired, among his
other possessions, an extensive knowledge of literature, as well as of
life and nature. Nor is his case by any means uncommon.
When he was nineteen his father gave him a horse three years old, a
saddle and bridle, a new camlet cloak, and twenty-six dollars, and his
mother furnished him with a good suit of jeans. Soon after, he mounted
his young horse and rode back to his native State, and took charge of
the tavern aforesaid in the town of Bolivar, Hardiman County, of which
tavern he was waiter, clerk, and book-keeper. Here he had a pretty hard
time. Being very young, gawky, and ill-dressed, he was subject to a good
deal of jesting and ridicule. But he was fond of reading. Finding, by
chance, at the house of an uncle, Pope's translation of the Iliad, he
was perfectly entranced with it.
"Had it been gold or precious stones," he tells us, "the pleasure would
not have equaled that which I enjoyed."
Nevertheless, he fancied that his ignorance, his country dress and
uncouth manners caused him to be slighted even by his own relations.
"I was badly quizzed," he says, "and greatly mortified; but I worked on
resolutely, said nothing, and was always at the post of duty."
Promotion is sure to come to a lad of that spirit, and accordingly we
soon find him a clerk in a country store earning two hundred dollars a
year and his board, besides being head over ears in love with a
beautiful girl. At first he did not know that he was in love; but, one
day, when he had been taking dinner with her family, and had talked with
the young lady herself after dinner a good while, he came out of the
house, and was amazed to discover that the sun was gone from the sky.
"In a confused manner," he relates, "I inquired of her father what had
become of the sun. He politely replied, 'It has gone down!' I knew then
that I was in love. It was a plain case."
In those good old times marriage did not present the difficulties which
it now does. He was soon married, obtained more lucrative employment,
got into business for himself, failed, studied law, and found himself,
at the age of thirty-six, the father of a family of six children,
twenty-eight thousand dollars in debt, and, though in good practice at
the bar, not able to reduce his indebtedness more than a thousand
dollars a year. So he set his face toward Oregon, then containing only
three or four hundred settlers. He mounted the stump and organized a
wagon-train, the roll of which at the rendezvous contained two hundred
and ninety-three names. With this party, whose effects were drawn by
oxen and mules, he started in May, 1843, for a journey of seventeen
hundred miles across a wilderness most of which had never been trodden
by civilized men.
For six months they pursued their course westward. Six persons died on
the way, five turned back, fifteen went to California, and those who
held their course towards Oregon endured hardships and privations which
tasked their fortitude to the uttermost. Mr. Burnett surveyed the scenes
of the wilderness with the eye of an intelligent and sympathetic
observer. Many of his remarks upon the phenomena of those untrodden
plains are of unusual interest, whether he is discoursing upon animate
or inanimate nature.
Arrived in Oregon, an eight months' journey from Washington, the
settlers were obliged to make a provisional government for themselves,
to which the Tennessee lawyer lent an able hand. He relates an incident
of the first collision between law and license. They selected for
sheriff the famous Joseph L. Meek, a man of the best possible temper,
but as brave as a lion. The first man who defied the new laws was one
Dawson, a carpenter, scarcely less courageous than Meek himself. Dawson,
who had been in a fight, disputed the right of the sheriff to arrest
him. The sheriff simply replied:--
"Dawson, I came for you."
The carpenter raised his plane to defend himself. Meek wrested it from
him. Dawson picked up his broad axe, but on rising found himself within
a few inches of Meek's cocked revolver.
"Dawson," said the sheriff, laughing, "I came for you. Surrender or
die."
Dawson surrendered, and from that hour to the present, Oregon has been
ruled by law. In the course of five years the pioneer had brought under
cultivation a good farm in Oregon, which supported his family in great
abundance, but did not contribute much to the reduction of those
Tennessee debts, which he was determined to pay if it took him all his
life to do it.
The news of the gold discovery in California reached Oregon. He
organized another wagon-train, and in a few months he and another lawyer
were in the mining country, drawing deeds for town lots, from sunrise to
sunset, at ten dollars a deed. They did their "level best," he says, and
each made a hundred dollars a day at the business. Again he assisted in
the formation of a government, and he was afterwards elected the first
governor of the State of California. At present, at the age of
seventy-five, his debts long ago paid, a good estate acquired, and his
children all well settled in life, he amuses himself with discounting
notes in the Pacific Bank of San Francisco. Every person concerned in
the management of a bank would do well to consider his wise remarks on
the business of banking. When a man brings him a note for discount, he
says, he asks five questions:--
1. Is the supposed borrower an honest man? 2. Has he capital enough for
his business? 3. Is his business reasonably safe? 4. Does he manage it
well? 5. Does he live economically?
The first and last of these questions are the vital ones, he thinks,
though the others are not to be slighted.
[Illustration: Gerrit Smith]
GERRIT SMITH.
For many years we were in the habit of hearing, now and then, of a
certain Gerrit Smith, a strange gentleman who lived near Lake Ontario,
where he possessed whole townships of land, gave away vast quantities of
money, and was pretty sure to be found on the unpopular side of all
questions, beloved alike by those who agreed with him and those who
differed from him. Every one that knew him spoke of the majestic beauty
of his form and face, of his joyous demeanor, of the profuse hospitality
of his village abode, where he lived like a jovial old German baron, but
without a baron's battle-axe and hunting spear.
He was indeed an interesting character. Without his enormous wealth he
would have been, perhaps, a benevolent, enterprising farmer, who would
have lived beloved and died lamented by all who knew him. But his wealth
made him remarkable; for the possession of wealth usually renders a man
steady-going and conservative. It is like ballast to a ship. The slow
and difficult process by which honest wealth is usually acquired is
pretty sure to "take the nonsense out of a man," and give to all his
enterprises a practicable character. But here was a man whose wealth was
more like the gas to a balloon than ballast to a ship; and he flung it
around with an ignorance of human nature most astonishing in a person so
able and intelligent. There was room in the world for one Gerrit Smith,
but not for two. If we had many such, benevolence itself would be
brought into odium, and we should reserve all our admiration for the
close-fisted.
His ancestors were Dutchmen, long settled in Rockland County, New York.
Gerrit's father owned the farm upon which Major André was executed, and
might even have witnessed the tragedy, since he was twelve years old at
the time. Peter Smith was his name, and he had a touch of genius in his
composition, just enough to disturb and injure his life. At sixteen this
Peter Smith was a merchant's clerk in New York, with such a love of the
stage that he performed minor parts at the old Park theatre, and it is
said could have made a good actor. He was a sensitive youth, easily
moved to tears, and exceedingly susceptible to religious impressions.
While he was still a young man he went into the fur business with John
Jacob Astor, and tramped all over western and northern New York, buying
furs from the Indians, and becoming intimately acquainted with that
magnificent domain. The country bordering upon Lake Ontario abounded in
fur-bearing animals at that period, and both the partners foretold
Rochester, Oswego, and the other lake ports, before any white man had
built a log hut on their site.
Astor invested his profits in city lots, but Peter Smith bought great
tracts of land in northern and western New York. He sometimes bought
townships at a single purchase, and when he died he owned in the State
not far from a million acres. His prosperity, however, was of little
advantage to him, for as he advanced in life a kind of religious gloom
gained possession of him. He went about distributing tracts, and became
at length so much impaired in his disposition that his wife could not
live with him; finally, he withdrew from business and active life, made
over the bulk of his property to his son, Gerrit, and, settling in
Schenectady, passed a lonely and melancholy old age.
Gerrit Smith, the son of this strong and perturbed spirit, was educated
at Hamilton College, near Utica, where he figured in the character, very
uncommon at colleges in those days, of rich man's son; a strikingly
handsome, winning youth, with flowing hair and broad Byron collar, fond
of all innocent pleasures, member of a card club, and by no means
inattentive to his dress. It seems, too, that at college he was an
enthusiastic reader of passing literature, although in after days he
scarcely shared in the intellectual life of his time. At the age of
twenty-two he was a married man. He fell in love at college with the
president's daughter, who died after a married life of only seven
months. Married happily a second time a year or two after, he settled at
his well-known house in Peterboro, a village near Oswego, where he lived
ever after. The profession of the law, for which he had prepared
himself, he never practiced, since the care of his immense estate
absorbed his time and ability; as much so as the most exacting
profession. In all those operations which led to the development of
Oswego from an outlying military post into a large and thriving city,
Gerrit Smith was of necessity a leader or participant,--for the best of
his property lay in that region.
And here was his first misfortune. Rich as he was, his estate was all
undeveloped, and nothing but the personal labor of the owner could make
it of value. For twenty years or more he was the slave of his estate. He
could not travel abroad; he could not recreate his mind by pleasure.
Albany, the nearest large town, was more than a hundred miles distant, a
troublesome journey then; and consequently he had few opportunities of
mingling with men of the world. He was a man of the frontier, an
admirable leader of men engaged in the mighty work of subduing the
wilderness and laying the foundations of empires. He, too, bought land,
like his father before him, although his main interest lay in improving
his estate and making it accessible.
In the midst of his business life, when he was carrying a vast spread
of sail (making canals, laying out towns, deep in all sorts of
enterprises), the panic of 1837 struck him, laid him on his beam ends,
and almost put him under water. He owed an immense sum of money--small,
indeed, compared with his estate, but crushing at a time when no money
could be raised upon the security of land. When he owned a million
acres, as well as a great quantity of canal stock, plank-road stock, and
wharf stock, and when fifteen hundred men owed him money, some in large
amounts, he found it difficult to raise money enough to go to
Philadelphia. In this extremity he had recourse to his father's friend
and partner, John Jacob Astor, then the richest man in North America.
Gerrit Smith described his situation in a letter, and asked for a large
loan on land security.
Mr. Astor replied by inviting him to dinner. During the repast the old
man was full of anecdote and reminiscence of the years when himself and
Peter Smith camped out on the Oswego River, and went about with packs on
their backs buying furs. When the cloth was removed the terrible topic
was introduced, and the guest explained his situation once more.
"How much do you need?" inquired Astor.
"In all, I must have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars."
"Do you want the whole of it at once?" asked the millionaire.
"I do," was the reply.
Astor looked serious for a moment, and then said:--
"You shall have it."
The guest engaged to forward a mortgage on some lands along the Oswego
River, and a few days after, before the mortgage was ready, the old man
sent his check for the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Through
the neglect of a clerk the mortgage papers were not sent for some weeks
after, so that Mr. Astor had parted with this great sum upon no other
security than a young man's word. But John Jacob Astor was a good judge
of men, as well as of land.
Thus relieved, Gerrit Smith pursued his career without embarrassment,
and in about twenty years paid off all his debts, and had then a revenue
ranging from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year. He gave away
money continuously, from thirty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars a
year, in large sums and in small sums, to the deserving and the
undeserving. Of course, he was inundated with begging letters. Every
mail brought requests for help to redeem farms, to send children to
school, to buy a piano, to buy an alpaca dress with the trimmings, to
relieve sufferers by fire, and to pay election expenses.
"The small checks," Mr. Frothingham tells us, "flew about in all
directions, carrying, in the aggregate, thousands of dollars, hundreds
of which fell on sandy or gravelly soil, and produced nothing."
He gave, in fact, to every project which promised to relieve human
distress, or promote human happiness. He used to have checks ready drawn
to various amounts, only requiring to be signed and supplied with the
name of the applicant. On one occasion he gave fifty dollars each to all
the old maids and widows he could get knowledge of in the State of New
York--six hundred of them in all. He gave away nearly three thousand
small farms, from fifteen to seventy-five acres each, most of them to
landless colored men.
"For years," said he, "I have indulged the thought that when I had sold
enough land to pay my debts, I would give away the remainder to the
poor. I am an Agrarian. I would that every man who desires a farm might
have one, and no man covet the possession of more farms than one."
I need not say that these farms were of little benefit to those who
received them, for our colored friends are by no means the men to go
upon a patch of northern soil and wring an independent livelihood out of
it. Gerrit Smith was a sort of blind, benevolent Samson, amazingly
ignorant of human nature, of human life, and of the conditions upon
which alone the welfare of our race is promoted. He died in 1874, aged
seventy-seven, having lived one of the strangest lives ever recorded,
and having exhibited a cast of character which excites equal admiration
and regret.
PETER FORCE.
One of the interesting sights of the city of Washington used to be the
library of "Old Peter Force," as he was familiarly called,--Colonel
Peter Force, as he was more properly styled. He was one of the few
colonels of that day who had actually held a colonel's command, having
been regularly commissioned by the President of the United States as a
colonel of artillery in the District of Columbia. He might, indeed, have
been called major-general, for in his old age he held that rank in the
militia of the district. And a very fine-looking soldier he must have
been in his prime, judging from the portrait which used to hang in the
library, representing a full-formed man, tall and erect, his handsome
and benevolent countenance set off by an abundance of curly hair.
His library had about the roughest furniture ever seen in an apartment
containing so much that was valuable. As I remember it, it was a long,
low room, with streets and cross-streets of pine book-shelves,
unpainted, all filled with books to their utmost capacity--a wilderness
of books, in print and in manuscript, mostly old and dingy, and almost
all of them relating in some way to American history. The place had a
very musty smell; and as most of its treasures were in the original
bindings, or without bindings, few persons would have suspected the
priceless value of the collection. I am acquainted with a certain
library in New York of several thousand volumes, most of which are bound
resplendently in calf and gold, and the room in which they are kept is
"as splendid as a steamboat," but old Peter Force could show you single
alcoves of his library which, at a fair valuation, would buy out all
that mass of sumptuosity.
It was not always easy to find the old gentleman in his dusty, dingy
wilderness; but when you had discovered him in some remote recess he
would take pleasure in exhibiting his treasures. He would take down his
excellent copy of Eliot's Indian Bible, a book so faithfully made in
every respect that I question if, as a mere piece of book-making, it
could now be matched in the United States. He lived to see this rarity
command in New York the price of fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. He
would show you forty-one works, in the original editions, of Increase
and Cotton Mather, the most recent of which was published in 1735. He
possessed a large number of books printed and bound by Benjamin
Franklin. He had two hundred volumes of the records of Colonial
legislatures. He could show you a newspaper of almost every month--nay,
almost every week, since newspapers were first published in America. He
had in all nine hundred and fifty bound volumes of newspapers, of which
two hundred and forty-five volumes were published before the year 1800.
He would show you a collection of more than thirty-nine thousand
pamphlets, of which eight thousand were printed before the year 1800.
His collection of maps relating to America was truly wonderful. Besides
all the early atlases of any note, he had over a thousand detached maps
illustrative both of the geography and history of America; for many of
them were maps and plans drawn for military purposes. He would show you,
perhaps, a pen-drawing of date 1779, by a British officer, upon which
was written: "Plan of the rebel works at West Point." He had also
several plans by British officers of "the rebel works" around Boston
during the revolution.
Besides such things (and he had over three hundred plans and maps of
which there was no other copy in existence), he possessed a surprising
number of books printed in the infancy of the printer's art; among them
specimens representing every year from 1467 onward. He had more than two
hundred and fifty books printed before the year 1600, so arranged that a
student could trace the progress of the art of printing from the days of
Caxton. He had also a vast collection of manuscripts, numbering four
hundred and twenty-nine volumes, many of which were of particular
interest. The whole number of volumes in the library was 22,529, and the
number of pamphlets nearly 40,000.
The reader, perhaps, imagines that the collector of such a library must
have been a very rich man, and that he traveled far and wide in search
of these precious objects. Not at all. He never was a rich man, and I
believe he rarely traveled beyond the sight of the dome of the Capitol.
Indeed, the most wonderful thing about his collection was that he, who
began life a journeyman printer, and was never in the receipt of a large
income, should have been able to get together so vast an amount of
valuable material. Part of the secret was that when he began to make his
collection these things were not valued, and he obtained many of his
most precious relics by merely taking the trouble to carry them away
from the garrets in which they were mouldering into dust, unprized and
unknown.
A wise old New York merchant, long ago himself mouldered into dust, used
to say:--
"Men generally get in this world exactly what they _want_."
"How can that be?" asked a youngster one day. "Almost everybody in New
York wants to be rich, but very few of them ever will be. I _want_ a
million or so myself."
"Ah, boy," the old man replied, "you want a million; but you don't want
it enough. What you _want_ at present is pleasure, and you want it so
much that you are willing to spend all your surplus force, time, and
revenue to get it. If you wanted your million as much as you _want
pleasure_, by and by, when you have a bald head like mine, you would
have your million."
Peter Force was a very good illustration of the old merchant's doctrine.
He got all these precious things because he wanted them with a sustained
passion of desire for half a century. There never was a time when he
would not have gladly got up in the middle of the night and walked ten
miles, in the face of a northeasterly storm, to get a rare pamphlet of
four pages. He was a miser of such things. But, no; that word does not
describe him; for one of the greatest pleasures of his life was to
communicate his treasures to others; and he communicated to the whole
American people the best of his collections in massive volumes of
American Archives. He was a miser only in the strength of his desire.
"More than once," he said to Mr. George W. Greene, "did I hesitate
between a barrel of flour and a rare book; but the book always got the
upper hand."
To the same friend he made a remark which shows that his desire to
communicate was quite as strong as his desire to obtain.
"Whenever," said he, "I found a little more money in my purse than I
absolutely needed, I published a volume of historical tracts."
It was interesting to hear the old man relate how this taste for the
treasures of history was formed in his mind. His father, who served,
during the revolution, in a New Jersey regiment, retired after the war
to the city of New York, and at his house the Jersey veterans liked to
meet and talk over the incidents of the campaigns they had made
together. Peter, as a boy, loved to hear them tell their stories, and,
as he listened, the thought occurred to him one evening, Why should all
this be forgotten? Boy as he was, he began to write them down, under the
title of "The Unwritten History of the War in New Jersey." He made
considerable progress in it, but unfortunately the manuscript was lost.
The taste then formed grew with his growth and strengthened with his
strength. At ten he left school forever, and went into a printing
office, which has proved an excellent school to more than one valuable
American mind. He became an accomplished printer, and at twenty-two was
elected president of the New York Typographical Society, an organization
which still exists.
Then the war of 1812 began. Like his father before him, he served in the
army, first as private, then as sergeant, then as sergeant-major, then
as ensign, finally as lieutenant. The war ended. He went to Washington
as foreman of a printing office, and at Washington, as printer, editor,
publisher and collector, he lived the rest of his long and honorable
life; never rich, as I have before remarked, though never without a
share of reasonable prosperity. The most important work of his life was
the publication of the American Archives, in which he was aided by
Congress; he furnishing the documents and the labor, and Congress paying
the cost of publication. Through the nine volumes of this work a great
number of the most curious and interesting records and memorials of
American history are not only preserved, but made accessible to all
students who can get near a library. He had all the state-houses of the
country ransacked for documents, and a room was assigned him in the
Department of State in which his clerks could conveniently copy them.
All went well with the work until William Marcy became Secretary of
State, whose duty it was to examine and approve each volume before it
went to the printer. When Peter Force presented the manuscript of the
tenth volume to Secretary Marcy he received a rebuff which threw a cloud
over several years of his life.
"I don't believe in your work, sir," said the secretary. "It is of no
use to anybody. I never read a page of it, and never expect to."
"But," said Mr. Force, "the work is published in virtue of a contract
with the government. Here is the manuscript of the tenth volume. If
there is anything there which you think ought not to be there, have the
goodness to point it out to me."
"You may leave the papers, sir," said the secretary.
He left the papers; but neither Marcy nor his successors ever found time
to examine that tenth volume, though on the first day of every official
year the compiler called their attention to it. For seven years he was a
suitor on behalf of his beloved tenth volume, and then the war occurred
and all such matters were necessarily put aside. He was now seventy-one
years of age, and his great desire was to dispose of his library in such
a way that its treasures would not be scattered abroad, and perhaps lost
forever to the country. At length, Congress having sanctioned the
enlargement of their own library, their librarian, Mr. Spofford, induced
them to purchase the whole mass, just as it stood, for one hundred
thousand dollars, and the collection now forms part of the Congressional
library.
Colonel Force lived to the year 1868, when he died at Washington,
universally beloved and lamented, in the seventy-eighth year of his age,
enjoying almost to the last two of the things he loved best--his books
and his flowers.
JOHN BROMFIELD,
MERCHANT.
John Bromfield's monument is more lasting than brass. It was he who left
to the city of Newburyport, in Massachusetts, ten thousand dollars for
planting and preserving trees in the streets, and keeping the sidewalks
in order. The income of this bequest would not go far in any other sort
of monument, but it has embowered his native city in beautiful trees.
Every spring other trees are planted, and, as long as that bequest is
faithfully administered, he cannot be forgotten.
Nothing brings a larger or surer return than money judiciously spent in
making towns and cities pleasant. It not only yields a great revenue of
pleasure and satisfaction to the inhabitants; it not only benefits every
individual of them every hour, but it invites residents from abroad; it
is a standing invitation to persons of taste and good sense. The wisest
thing the city of New York ever did, next to the introduction of the
Croton water, was the creation of the Central Park; the one feature
which redeems the city from the disgrace of its dirty streets and its
agonizing tenement region.
This John Bromfield, merchant, was just such a thoughtful and benevolent
man as we should naturally expect to find him from his bequest. He
belonged to a class of merchants which is rapidly becoming extinct. The
cable telegraph and the steam freight ship are superseding the merchants
of moderate capital, and are concentrating the great business of
interchanging commodities in the hands of a few houses who reckon their
capital by millions. Born at Newburyport, in 1779, he was brought up by
excellent parents near Boston, who practiced the old-fashioned system of
making him hardy and self-helpful. His mother used to say that when he
was old enough to wear leather shoes she bored holes in the soles in
order to accustom him to wet feet, so that he might be made less liable
to catch cold from that cause. This appears to have been a custom of
that generation, for it is recorded of the mother of Josiah Quincy that
she would never let him take off his wet shoes, regarding it as an
effeminate practice.
On approaching the time of entering college his father met with
misfortunes and could not bear the expense. Two aunts of his, who could
well afford it, offered to pay his expenses in college. He firmly
declined the offer. The foundation of his character and career was a
love of independence. He asked to be apprenticed, as the custom then
was, to a mercantile house, and remained in it as long as it held
together. After its failure he tried for months to obtain a clerkship,
but, not succeeding, he arranged with a carpenter to learn his trade.
Just before putting on the carpenter's apron an opening occurred in his
own business, and he became a merchant. About the year 1801 he went out
to China as supercargo, and continued to visit that part of the world in
similar capacities for many years, occasionally making small ventures of
his own, and slowly accumulating a little capital. He had a series of
the most discouraging misfortunes. In the year 1813 he wrote to his
sister from Cadiz:--
"It is a melancholy truth that in the whole course of my life I never
arrived at a good market."
On that occasion everything promised well. He had a ship full of
valuable goods, and the market to which he was carrying them was in an
excellent condition for his purpose, but within twenty-four hours of his
port he was captured, and detained ten weeks a prisoner. After the peace
of 1815, merchants could send their ships across the ocean without fear
of their being taken by English or French cruisers. From that time he
had better luck, and gradually gained a moderate fortune, upon which he
retired. He never kept a store, or had any sort of warehouse, but made
his fortune by sending or taking merchandise from a port which had too
much of it to one that was in want of it.
On one of his winter passages to Europe he found the sailors suffering
extremely from handling frozen ropes, as they were not provided with
mittens. Being a Yankee, and having been brought up to _do_ things as
well as read about them, he took one of his thick overcoats and made
with his own hands a pair of mittens for every sailor.
On another occasion, in the ship Atahualpa, in 1809, bound to China, the
vessel was attacked off Macao by pirates, in twenty-two junks, some of
them being twice the tonnage of the vessel. Captain Sturgis, who
commanded the vessel, defended her with signal ability and courage, and
kept the pirates off for forty minutes, until the vessel gained the
protection of the fort. John Bromfield, a passenger on board, took
command of a gun, and seconded the endeavors of the captain with such
coolness and promptitude as to contribute essentially to the protection
of the vessel.
In retirement he lived a quiet life in Boston, unmarried, fond of books,
and practicing unusual frugality for a person in liberal circumstances.
He had a singular abhorrence of luxury, waste, and ostentation. He often
said that the cause of more than half the bankruptcies was spending too
much money. Nothing could induce him to accept personal service. He was
one of those men who wait upon themselves, light their own fire, reduce
their wants to the necessaries of civilized life, and all with a view to
a more perfect independence. He would take trouble to oblige others,
but could not bear to put any one else to trouble. This love of
independence was carried to excess by him, and was a cause of sorrow to
his relations and friends.
He was a man of maxims, and one of them was:--
"The good must merit God's peculiar care,
And none but God can tell us who they are."
Another of his favorite couplets was Pope's:--
"Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,
Lie in three words: health, peace, and competence."
He used to quote Burns's stanza about the desirableness of wealth:--
"Not to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant;
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent."
He was utterly opposed to the way in which business was then
conducted--hazardous enterprises undertaken upon borrowed capital. The
excessive credit formerly given was the frequent theme of his
reprobation.
How changed the country, even in the short space of sixty years! In 1825
he made a journey from Boston to New Orleans, and his letters show
curious glimpses of life and travel as they then were. Leaving Boston at
four o'clock on a Friday morning, he reached New York at ten o'clock on
Saturday morning, and he speaks of this performance with astonishment.
Boston to New York in thirty hours! He was in New York November 4, 1825,
when the opening of the Erie Canal was celebrated. He did not care much
for the procession.
"There was, however," he adds, "an interesting exhibition of steamboats,
probably greater than could be found at any other place in the world;
say, _from twenty-five to thirty_, and most of them of a large class."
He was in the valley of the Ohio that year, and he spoke of it "as the
land of cheapness:" flour, two dollars and a quarter a barrel; oats,
twelve and a half cents a bushel; corn and rye, twenty cents; coal,
three cents. He found all the region from Louisville to Louisiana "one
vast wilderness," with scarcely any settlements, and now and then a log
hut on the banks, occupied by the people who cut wood for the
steamboats. On the prairies of Missouri he rode miles and miles without
seeing a house. Indiana was an almost unbroken wilderness: corn ten
cents a bushel, a wild turkey twelve and half cents, and other things in
proportion.
Nevertheless, travelers at that day had some pleasures which could be
advantageously compared with the ease and comfort of the Pullman car.
The Alleghanies were then crossed by open wagons drawn by splendid
Pennsylvania horses, six in a team, gayly decorated with ribbons, bells,
and trappings. He used to repeat, in a peculiarly buoyant and
delightful manner, a popular song of the day, called "The Wagoner,"
suggested by the apparently happy lot of the boys who rode and drove
these horses. Some readers may remember the old song, beginning:--
"I've often thought if I were asked
Whose lot I envied most,
What one I thought most lightly tasked
Of man's unnumbered host,
I'd say I'd be a mountain boy
And drive a noble team--wo hoy!
Wo hoy! I'd cry,
And lightly fly
Into my saddle seat;
My rein I'd slack,
My whip I'd crack--
What music is so sweet?
Six blacks I'd drive, of ample chest,
All carrying high their head.
All harnessed tight, and gaily dressed
In winkers tipped with red.
Oh, yes! I'd be a mountain boy,
And such a team I'd drive--wo hoy!
Wo hoy! I'd cry;
The lint should fly.
Wo hoy! Dobbin, Ball.
Their feet should ring,
And I would sing,
I'd sing my fal-de-roll."
We have almost forgotten that such a gay mode of crossing the
Alleghanies was ever practiced; and yet a person need not be very old to
have enjoyed the experience. I myself, for example, can just remember
riding from Buffalo to New York by a line of stages that came round by
the Alleghany Mountains, and crossed the State of New Jersey, passing
through Morristown. We were just six days in performing the journey.
This excellent man, after a tranquil and happy life, died in 1849, aged
seventy, and left considerable sums to benevolent societies. His estate
proved to be of about two hundred thousand dollars value, which was then
considered very large, and he bestowed something more than half of it
upon institutions for mitigating human woe. Ten thousand of it he gave
for the promotion of pleasure, and the evidences of his forethought and
benevolence are waving and rustling above my head as these lines are
written. His memory is green in Newburyport. All the birds and all the
lovers, all who walk and all who ride, the gay equestrian and the dusty
wayfarer, the old and the invalid who can only look out of the window
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