BOSTON THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE BY M. A. DE WOLFE HOWE ILLUSTRATED BY LOUIS A. HOLMAN BOSTON COLLE^^l XIBRARY CHESTNUT I: ^8g, THE MACMILLAN COMPANY New York igT2 LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO. LIMITED "7 6-2, Copyright, 1903, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up, electrotyped, and published October, 1903. Reprinted September, 1907. 53844 ■^^'^ Xortoootr ^rcgg S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. ^ TO F. H. Q. H. MY BEST HERITAGE FROM THE CITY OF HER FATHERS PREFATORY NOTE The volumes of biography bearing directly upon Boston history are many. To these and to shorter memoirs of men and women whose lives have been identified with the place, the author is chiefly indebted for whatever flavor of reality his own pages have attained. How many persons and events he has been forced to ignore, or touch but lightly, the reader with the slenderest knowledge of the local records will detect. Others will recognize, as familiar friends, the most bountiful sources of information. The list of them would be long ; and the writer must content himself with a special word of acknowledg- ment to the text and references of the exhaustive Memorial History of Boston, edited by Justin Winsor, and to the shorter narrative, Boston, by the Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge. Finally to Mr. J. P. Quincy and Mr. Edwin M. Bacon, for their valuable com- ments upon manuscript and proof, a peculiar debt is due. Boston, August, 1903. CONTENTS I. Foundation and Early Years II. Colonial Boston III. Provincial Boston IV. Revolutionary Boston V. From Town to City VI. The Hub and the Wheel VII. " The Boston Religion " . VIII. The " Literary Centre " IX. The Slave and the Union X. Men and Monuments XI. Water and Fire XII. The Modern Inheritance PAGE I 26 54 87 123 156 190 222 250 297 350 372 THE FANEUIL HALL VANK ILLUSTRATIONS John Winthrop : autograph, seal, and portrait by Van Dyck, in Massachusetts State House .... Frontispiece Mural Tablet, Liberty Tree Block, Washington Street . Title-page Faneuil Hall Vane ....... Province House Vane ...... Seal of City of Boston, adopted 1827 Initial, Original Charter, Massachusetts Bay Company -. Winthrop Cup, First Church Communion Plate Facsimile of Resolution naming Boston, from Town Records Old Corner Bookstore ...... Sir Henry Vane ....... Autograph of Robert Keayne ..... Royal Arms, from Council Chamber, Old State House . A Bit of Fort Independence (Castle Island) Tremont Street and the Common, about 1800 Roger Williams John Eliot preaching to the Indians King Philip's Mark King Philip's Bowl Pine Tree Shillings XI XV I 5 8 II 15 21 25 26 29 34 39 45 50 51 52 Xll ILLUSTRATIONS Cross captured at Louisburg From the Great Seal of New England Cotton Mather .... Samuel Sewall's Book-plate (reduced) Old Brick Church .... Cockerel Church Vane Mather Byles's Clock Old South Church, 1903 George Whitefield . . . . Original Faneuil Hall Faneuil Hall of To-day . Entrance to Governor Shirley's Mansion Stamp Act Stamps . . Samuel Adams .... Royal Proclamation, for suppressing Rebellion and Sedition Proposal of ** Loyal Citizens" of Boston to support General Howe ...... Hutchinson House ..... ** Boycott" Handbill .... Francis Rotch . . . . - . Christ Church ..... Paul Revere ...... Revolutionary Handbill .... General Gage's Headquarters Tower on Dorchester Heights (South Boston) Washington Medal .... John Hancock's Tea-kettle and Money Trunk Hancock House ..... Federal Street Theatre .... ILLUSTRATIONS Xlll Tontine Crescent . Boston Athenseum , Removing Beacon Hill . ♦ House of John Phillips Seal of Boston Marine Society . Earliest Chart of Boston Harbor «* Hull's Victory" The Constitution Autograph of Captain Robert Gray Drawing by George Davidson of Columbia Expedition Drawing by George Davidson of Columbia Expedition Frederic Tudor . . . . Advertisement of Ice for Sale in Martinique, 1806 Autograph Motto of Frederic Tudor . Sailing o^ Britannia, February 3, 1844 Emblem from Porch of Trinity Church Jonathan Mayhew . « . . King's Chapel .... Lyman Beecher . , WilHam Ellery Channing Monument . Park Street Church Lyman Beecher' s Church, Bowdoin Street Theodore Parker First Boston Imprint Boston Primer Ticknor House, 1903 House of Charles Sumner House of W. H. Prescott Diagram of Saturday Club Dinner 138 142 151 154 156 157 159 161 164 165 169 173 174 175 185 190 191 197 204 207 211 214 217 222 224 232 233 235 245 XIV ILLUSTRATIONS Massachusetts Historical Society Building Lock and Key of Leverett Street Jail, 1835 . William Lloyd Garrison ..... Final Heading of The Liberator Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Georg Thompson ...... Lydia Maria Child ...... Maria Weston Chapman ..... Wendell Phillips ' Autograph Sentence and Signature of Charles Sumner Old Court House ...... Old State House ...... Tablet at Corner of Essex Street and Harrison Avenue Extension Charles Sumner ...... John Albion Andrew ..... Shaw Memorial ...... Ball's Washington • Josiah Quincy ...... Edward Everett . ..... House of Daniel Webster .... Water Celebration ...... John Lowell, Jr. , . . , , , Horace Mann ...... Thomas Handasyd Perkins .... Early Ether Operation ..... Boston Public Library : Bates Hall William Barton Rogers ..... House of Edwin Booth ..... Museum of Fine Arts : Greek Sculptures ILLUSTRATIONS XV Phillips Brooks Trinity Church Tower Trinity Church, Summer Street Back Bay in 1 8 1 4 . Back Bay in 1836 . Site of Mechanics' Fair Building, 1 8 7 Water-color Drawing View from State House, 1858 . Ruins of Great Fire Entrance to South Terminal Station Franklin Park : Playstead North End Beach . Bonner Map, 1722, and Modern Boston Proper Pitcher in Possession of Bostonian Society I. From Contemporary PAGE 344 347 350 354 355 359 361 367 372 379 383 386 388 .--> THE PROVINCE HOUSE VANE BOSTON The Place and the People FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS THE lover of the pic- turesque makes just complaint against modern life for its levelling and all-assimilating tendencies. Through a thousand agen- cies, individuals are under- going the experience of fractions about to be added, — reduction to a common denominator. Perform the addition, and your sum total represents the vast, homogeneous modern state. When the persons of such a state build a city, it can- not be expected to differ in any marked degree from the city founded just before or after it. Not so the cities and men of the older time. It was inevitable that the town should begin and continue with highly characteristic qualities of its own. 2 BOSTON The wit who said, " gqston is not a city, but a state of mind," may not have realized how much of historic significance was in his remark. If there ever was a community which did not merely happen, but repre- sented a definite idea, embodied and strengthened through all the life of its formative years, that com- munity was . the city — the " state of mind " — of Boston. " JThis town of Boston," said Emerson, " has a history. It is not an accident, not a windmill, or a railroad station, or cross-roads tavern, or an army-bar- racks grown up by time and luck to a place of wealth ; but a seat of humanity, of men of principle, obeying a sentiment and marching loyally whither that should lead them ; so that its annals are great historical lines, inextricably national ; part of the history of political liberty. I do not speak with any fondness, but the language of coldest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America." The town to which such leadership can be ascribed must have had early leaders at whom it is well worth while to look ; and they in turn must have had their leadings in influences of no common moment and cogency. Like the heredity and childhood of every man and woman, the parentage and infancy of each American colony had a quality peculiar to itself and of the highest importance in determining its future course. This is no place for a comparative study of these qual- ities ; yet it should be noted that the Boston settlement FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 3 held a unique distinction in the fact that with its founders came the actual charter of its existence and government. It was at first and for many years virtu- ally independent of control from the mother country. The first step toward this independence was taken when twelve members of the Massachusetts Bay Com- pany met in Cambridge in Old England, on August 265 1629, and signed their names to an agreement binding them and their families to emigrate to the Company's plantations, there to " inhabit and con- tinue," provided the whole government and the royal patent should be transferred and should remain with them. Two days later the Company as a whole voted to support this determination, and the distinctive be- ginnings of Boston were assured. Inconspicuous amongst the names of these twelve venturous spirits stood the signature of John Winthrop. Though he had biit recently become a member of the Company, it was upon him about two months later that the office of governorship was conferred. He had received " extraordinary great commendations," the Records of the election say, " both for his integ- rity and sufficiency, as being one every [way] fitted and accomplished for the place of Governor." In his forty-first year, thrice married, a lawyer, justice of the peace, and Lord of the Manor of Groton, of excellent birth and breeding, acquired in part through two years of study at Trinity College, Cambridge ; equipped, moreover, with abundant native gifts of gentleness, strength, and wisdom, he was indeed as capable a rep- 4 BOSTON resentative of the great Puritan gentry of England as could well be found to lead and mould the undertaking to which he was called. His English life belonged to that time of which George Herbert wrote: — ■<' Religion stands on tiptoe in our land. Ready to pass to the American strand." While Winthrop himself was preparing in London for his momentous departure, and intending to leave his wife behind for a year, he could write to her thus : " If now the Lord be thy God, thou must show it by trusting in him, and resigning thyself quietly to his good pleasure. If now Christ be thy Husband, thou must show what sure and sweet intercourse is between him and thy soul, when it shall be no hard thing for thee to part with an earthly, mortal, infirm husband for his sake." If the domestic aspect of his enterprise was so regarded, it is no wonder that he should have written of its more general bearing : " seeing the Church hath no place left to fly into but the wilderness, what better work can there be, than to go and provide tab- ernacles and food for her against she comes thither." And in both these respects, the personal and the gen- eral, Winthrop was merely the mouthpiece for the controlling spirit of his followers. Of all the early comers to New England, one of their immediate successors said in 1688, "God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain into the wilderness." Winthrop and his closest associates could surely be FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS called " choice grain." The company which during ten months of preparation joined itself to them was of course not wholly made up, like the leaders, of men of education and influence ; but neither was it composed of mere adventurers and troublesome younger sons. It was drawn chiefly from the sturdy yeoman stock of the East Anglian counties, where Puritanism had its stronghold. In this quiet region it is not fanciful to place the average strength and stability of unmixed English character. Here was the England of pleasant farmsteads and well-ordered do- mestic life which Ten- nyson two centuries later knew as a boy, and has taught all readers of English poetry to regard as typical of his land. It was essentially a good place to come from, a hard place to leave ; and the rank and file of the emigration resembled its leaders in their readiness to give up an existing good for a problematical better, in which the freedom to worship God in their own way played an important part. Their idea of freedom may have involved much which seems slavish to mod- ern minds, yet it is no small thing for men to yield themselves as they did to the control of an idea. It was in October of 1629 that Winthrop was Initial Word of Original Charter of THE Massachusetts Bay Company, preserved in the State-house. 6 BOSTON elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Four of the twelve ships in which his expedition was to cross the Atlantic were ready to sail on the 22d of the following March. There were a few delays, but on the 8th of April the voyage actually began. With Winthrop on the Arhella^ named for the Lady Arbella, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, and wife of Isaac Johnson, were this lady herself, her husband, Sir Richard Saltonstall, William Coddington, the first governor of Rhode Island, Simon Bradstreet, the young- est assistant, destined to carry the earliest traditions of the colony farthest into its future, and others whose names are of frequent recurrence in the annals of New England. The three other ships were the Ambrose J the Jewels and the Talbot. On one of these sailed John Wilson, the first minister of the " First Church of Boston." Before the actual departure took place the emigrants on board the Arbella ad- dressed a Farewell Letter " to the rest of their brethren in and of the Church of England." They wrote " as those who esteem it our honor to call the Church of England, from whence we rise, our dear mother;" and declared, "we leave it not, therefore, as loathing that milk wherewith we were nourished there." The Pilgrim Fathers who had founded Plymouth nine years before were Separatists before they left England. Winthrop and his fellows cut loose from the mother church only when they found themselves, with a charter leaving their religious affairs in their own hands, in a new country with its ecclesiastical conditions all to be determined. FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 7 The church government of Charles I, who three years later gave the Primacy to Archbishop Laud, was not the government they would naturally seek to establish. At about the time Laud came to the Primacy, the Rev. John Cotton emigrated from the old to the new Bos- ton. Two hundred and fifty years later his very-great- grandson Phillips Brooks said, " I thank him, as a Church-of-England man, as a man loving the Epis- copal Church with all my heart, I thank him for being a Puritan." So indeed may the later genera- tions turn with gratitude to the earlier. Through the first pages of the journal kept by Winthrop for nineteen years and now reprinted as the History of New England^ one may gain many glimpses of the voyage across. When the emigrants think themselves pursued by hostile ships, they pray and, in a moment, are ready to fight with equal zeal. In a great storm, says Winthrop, " few of our people were sick, (except the women, who kept under hatches,) and there appeared no fear or dismayedness among them." The evil practices of a servant who tried to sell biscuits for his own unwarranted profit were punished after a gentle fashion of the day : his hands wer» tied to a bar above his head, a bag of stones was hung about his neck, and thus he stood for two hours. Besides the entries in his diary Winthrop wrote, during the voyage, a paper setting forth the course of conduct the colonists should pur- sue in order to make their enterprise truly a success. No sentence in the paper is more significant than this, 8 BOSTON " We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our super- fluities, for the supply of others' necessities/' To voy- agers whose leadership could thus express itself we are glad to read at last that the smell off the shore came like that of a garden. On June 12, 1630 (O.S.), the ships, having sailed for seventy days more than the allotted six of modern travel, dropped their an- chors in the harbor of Salem. Here John Endicott, acting as governor under the Massachusetts Bay Company, had already been for two years at the head of a set- tlement now numbering three hun- dred souls. Across the bay, at Plymouth, the Pilgrims' colony had in nine years grown to about the same number. Smaller groups, from little settlements down to in- dividual families, were established at other points in the neighbor- hood. The coming of Winthrop and his followers was therefore an unprecedented event. AVith him and immediately afterwards, forming a part of his expedition, came seven or eight hundred persons. On the heels of these followed two or three hundred more, and after these in turn came quickly so many colonists that the total number with which his settlement virtu- The Gift of Governor jno Winthrop to ye jT Church," still AMONG ITS Commun- ion Plate. FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 9 ally began amounted to about two thousand. This was indeed the foundation for important state-building. Where so considerable a company should plant itself to the best advantage was of course the first great question to be settled. At Charlestown, across the river from the three-hilled promontory of Shawmut, which has been translated " hving fountains," they found the beginnings of a town already made, and pitched upon the site for their abode. The midsum- mer heats of the place, however, were rendered the harder to endure by a lack of good fresh water. Many of the colonists, already weakened by the hardships of their voyage, fell sick and died. The early town records describe the people as " generally very loving and pitiful " toward each other during this baleful sum- mer, yet the place was not to be endured ; and when the Rev. William Blackstone, — *' old Shawmut' s pioneer. The parson on his brindled bull/' — came to Winthrop and bade him welcome to his peninsula, where good water abounded, the greater part of the community crossed the Charles and began vigorously to prepare themselves for the coming of winter. This final, short migration was made in September of 1630. As the settlers had looked across the river, the most conspicuous object in the landscape had been the three-pronged eminence of what is now Beacon Hill. The name of Trimountaine (now Tremont) had accord- lo BOSTON ingly been given to the place. In the very month of the departure from Charlestown it appears that the Court of Assistants, the first legislative body of the colony, had met and voted " that Trimountaine shall be called Boston." It was from Boston in old Eng- land that the Lady Arbella and her husband, Isaac Johnson, — neither of whom survived the early autumn, — had come; and Boston was the county seat of the Lincolnshire upon which many of the colonists looked back as their home. Yet the new town did not receive its name after the fashion of New Amsterdam, New York, or New Orleans. The new Boston was simply to be another Boston, new perhaps in a better sense than that implied by a capital letter. Certainly the colonists did not propose to leave their white and Indian neighbors in any uncertainty regarding their attitude toward life and conduct. One of their first actions - — even before leaving Charlestown — was to summon from Mount Wollaston, now in the city of Quincy, one Thomas Morton, who ruled over the settlement of Merrymount, and with his roistering followers presented anything but an edifying example of seriousness. His religious sympathies were with the unreformed Church of England. Apparently the reddest-lettered feast in his calendar was Mayday ; and if one wishes to know what revels took place round his Maypole, one may find pages of imaginative writing by Hawthorne and Motley which tell the story with enough of historical accuracy. Morton indeed represented the phases of English life most FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS ii objectionable to the Puritans who had left home in search of straighter, narrower paths, and it is not to be supposed that, with the power to suppress, they would tolerate him. Winthrop and his associates passed swift judgment that he was to be set in the From the Court Record of the Naming of Boston. bilboes and returned to England in a ship soon to sail ; his goods were to be seized to pay his passage, his debts, and the just dues of some Indians whose canoe he had stolen ; furthermore, for the general satisfaction of the Indians whom he had misused, his emptied house was to be burned to the ground in their presence. Except that he was held over for a ship sailing a little later than the one first determined upon, this sentence was carried out, with two additions not on the programme : Morton offered such personal resistance to his embarkation that he was hoisted on board the ship by means of a tackle, and the firing of his house was so carefully timed that the sight of it in flames was one of the last things upon which his eyes rested as he sailed out of Boston harbor. It is fair to add that when the faithful offended, the rigor of the law was in nowise omitted. It was an early order of the court that no one of the "Assistants" 12 BOSTON — of whom the charter provided for eighteen as the persons next in authority to the Governor and Deputy Governor — should administer corporal pun- ishment unless a second Assistant were present. Sir Richard Saltonstall, ignoring this rule, whipped two persons ; whereupon a penalty of five pounds was promptly imposed upon him by his fellows. Even a more poetic justice was meted out to the carpenter who made the first stocks for the town, and rendered an exorbitant bill for his work. His immediate pun- ishment was to be cast into the pit he had digged — to sit in his own stocks, as an unexpected warning to the evildoers for whose ankles his handiwork was designed. This was the true Old Testament method of deal- ing with sinners, and it may well be doubted whether elsewhere outside of ancient Jewry, life and law have ever been ordered according to standards more strictly Biblical. Even the children were named on the as- sumption that not only — ** Young Obadias, David, and Josias, All were pious," but that whenever a Christian name could be made Hebrew its bearer was the better for it. Judge Sewall expressed a direct inheritance of thought when near the end of the seventeenth century he recorded the wish for his infant daughter that she might be helped "to speak the Jews Language and to forget that of Ashdod." FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 13 In the affairs of state one need not look far for the expression of a similar spirit. In 1636, three years after the coming of the Rev. John Cotton to Boston, he was asked to join with other ministers and some of the Magistrates — as the Assistants came to be called — in compiling a body of fundamental laws. For these he went to the book of Leviticus, and codifying its contents in a manner which he thought suited to the needs of Massachusetts, presented the result to the General Court. This code of " Moses, His Judi- cial " was not adopted, but the laws that were decided upon, the " Body of Liberties " drawn by Nathaniel Ward, the " Simple Cobbler of Aggawam," were of a character eminently Hebraic, and were based in many instances directly upon Old Testament texts. There is nothing to excite surprise in this Biblical foundation for civil affairs. The civil authorities showed their very dependence upon the ecclesiastical by look- ing to the clergy as to a court of higher appeal for counsel on doubtful matters. The Rev. John Cotton frequently used his Thursday lectures for giving almost authoritative advice on points at issue in the secular court. Within less than a year from the founding of the town the General Court passed an order limiting to members of the churches within the colony the right of voting conferred by the charter upon freemen. This excluded from citizenship an increasing number of excellent persons. By 1676 five-sixths of the men in the colony had no vote on civil affairs. The mere fact that this condition could 14 BOSTON maintain itself so long — and longer — speaks volumes for the power of ecclesiasticism. By what seems to us now a curious contradiction, the rites of marriage and burial in the earliest days of Boston were not performed by the ministers, but by civil functionaries. The drum, not the bell, was used to summon the Puritan " meeting-going animal " — as John Adams defined the New England man — to the frequent religious exercises. These facts, together with the circumstance that the public reading of the Scriptures without exposition was not permitted, must, however, be laid rather to a zealous avoidance of all things savoring of ritual than to any unreadi- ness of the ministers to bear a part in affairs falHng within or without their special province. The warp and woof of life in early Boston were essentially ec- clesiastical, and the first great disturbance of the peace arose, naturally enough, from a theological controversy. The so-called " Antinomian " episode was one of the significant events of the first decade in Boston, and as such deserves some special scrutiny. " Boston never wanted a good principle of rebellion in it," said Emerson, " from the planting until now." The rebel- lion led by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson was against a blind following of the ruling clergy. It has been well de- scribed as " New England's earliest protest against formulas." Its leader stands head and shoulders above the transcendental women of all periods of Boston history in her success in putting the whole machinery of church and state out of running order. FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 17 In 1634 she had come from Lincolnshire to Boston, in the footsteps of John Cotton, whom she ardently admired in both places. Her husband, William Hutchinson, was defined in his time as " a man of very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife." As these very words imply, she was directly his opposite. It is said that she was a cousin to John Dryden. In her new home it is easier to place her by saying that she lived where the " Old Corner Bookstore " has long stood in Boston. At the very first she distinguished herself from the crowd by her ministrations to the sick amongst her own sex. But, in addition to her practical qualities, she possessed mental and spiritual gifts of which she soon began to give evidence. When, within a year or two of her arrival, she organized a weekly meeting of women, it was thought that she was doing the town a good service. Her plan was to repeat the substance of Mr. Cotton's latest sermon, and by comment and inter- pretation to strengthen its impression. Mrs. Hutch- inson was a woman of shrewd inteUigence and spiritual insight, but for her or any other woman to act as the champion of one minister, without pointing out the shortcomings of the others in the community, would have been almost superhuman. The ministers were used to being considered beyond reproach ; but here was the cleverest woman in town telling the fifty, eighty, or a hundred other women who came to her assembhes, that Mr. Cotton was the only Boston min- ister under the " Covenant of Grace." The others. 1 8 BOSTON being under a " Covenant of Works," were not "sealed," were not " able ministers." Reduced to the terms of modern speech, and stated as favorably as possible, her central teaching was that the spirit of Christianity dwelling in a man*s heart was the important thing for him, over and above any outward manifestations of piety. But the theological speech of the day involved Mrs. Hutchinson and those who disagreed with her in the most abstruse discussions of " sanctification," "justification," and scores of other questions which, for the mind of a modern layman, could have only an academic interest. To the seventeenth century Puri- tan, lay or clerical, the truth of these questions was amazingly vital ; and by causing all the women of the place to think and talk about her new doctrines, Mrs. Hutchinson, whether knowingly or not, took the surest means of making general trouble. In Boston itself it appears that most of the pious folk found themselves on her side of the dispute. In any event the good order of the churches was much disturbed through the restlessness of persons who left their own places of worship in search of congenial preaching. Winthrop himself has borne record that it became as common to distinguish between men by saying that they were under a Covenant of Grace, or of Works, as, in other countries, by calling them Protestants and Papists. In opposing the new teach- ings Winthrop had the support of the Rev. John Wilson, his fellow-emigrant, of the ministers in the outlying towns, and of an active minority of the laity FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 19 in Boston. In support of Anne Hutchinson the most conspicuous lay figure — so to call him — was Sir Harry Vane, "young in years, but in sage counsel old/' of whom Milton further wrote, surely without recalling the part he played in the little Boston tempest, — " on thy firm hand Religion leans In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son." Under his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London are the less flattering words, "He was of a turbulent and visionary temperament," — possibly a truer definition. In less than eight months after his arrival in Boston in the autumn of 1635, he was elected to the governor- ship, when he was but twenty-four years old. Young as the colony was, it had lived long enough to have traditions — and consequently a conservative and an " advanced " element. Winthrop w^as the natural leader of the one, and Vane of the other, in matters relating both to the state and to the church. On the day after Vane's election the Rev. John Wheelwright, Anne Hutchinson's brother-in-law, a minister of great independence, landed in Boston. It was not long be- fore Mrs. Hutchinson did him the doubtful kindness of placing him beside Cotton as an " able " minister, distinguished, like Cotton, from the rest as a preacher of the Covenant of Grace. Here then were the rival factions provided with powerful champions. To us of this later day the 20 BOSTON strangest thing about the conflict into which they cast themselves, is that persons of so great intellectual force could have looked upon the points at issue as worthy of the zeal with which the contest was waged. But precisely therein lies the significance of the con- troversy. The mere facts of its cause and its virulence go far to explain the early New Englander, and to re- move the need of extended comment in this place. It would be superfluous to follow out all the details of charges and countercharges, hearings, Synod, and trials. The victory of the conservative party, the triumph of conformity to the new-world rule of " lord-brethren," is the upshot of the story. First Vane, having be- trayed his youth by using his governorship for a boyish furtherance of party issues, comes up for re- election, and is defeated — but only after the dignified Wilson cHmbs a tree to harangue the voters on behalf of Winthrop. Then a Synod declares that the unsafe heretical opinions which have gained currency mount to the number of eighty-two, exclusive of nine "un- wholesome expressions." It is no wonder that Haw- thorne, in his Grandfather s Chair ^ permits the listening boy to observe, " If they had eighty-two wrong opinions, I don't see how they could have any right ones." The Synod having done its work, the General Court purges itself of " Antinomiam " members, and proceeds to banish Wheelwright. Last of all comes the disgrace- ful trial of Anne Hutchinson herself The Court, in spite of its brow-beating methods, fails to convict her on the original charge of speaking ill of the ministers, /^. ^^-si BF^W^Mt ^ tt%% ^^^ ■P '^J f!^s ^M k M^\ '^fe fpL "S 1^^ % '" ^r^ ^^^'«te*^ "'^ ^^^^ / . f w ^H^^*^^^ K\^y^^- / / '^ • jfflP^^\2 ]^» 3^^ 1: h^ ^^^B ^I'M 1 . *j %l|^^« ^prM Wm''' ;' ■^"^^K '"^'^ |H| '^Jjp >'t ,^^E| ' ^p^ mj^ 7|iKr^*'' .-■•i; ^fflKM^jp'^^Br ^^Far y/ ^^ J;i afflH^v^i^He ^^sjy ■'"' '^ Pl^^ w ?i i3 I ■'^'M p^a SM ■%^m ^1^ i '^^& ^4'jr ^^^ m n ^-•••■•■-^1 ? Sir Henry Vane, Statue by Frederick MacMonnies, in the Boston Public Library. FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 23 and attains its triumph only when she gives way to the exercise of her wholly intolerable gift of prophecy, and foretells ruin for her judges and their posterity. This is sufficient. The state decrees her banishment, and after an ecclesiastical trial her enemy Wilson pro- nounces this sentence of excommunication : " There- fore in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the name of the church, I do not only pronounce you worthy to be cast out, but I do cast you out ; and in the name of Christ I do deliver you up to Satan, that you may learn no more to blaspheme, to seduce and to lie ; and I do account you from this time forth to be a Heathen and a Publican, and so to be held of all the Brethren and Sisters of this congregation and of others : therefore I command you in the name of Christ Jesus and of this church as a Leper to withdraw yourself out of this congregation." The unfortunate Leper, Heathen, and Publican, delivered over to Satan to learn better manners, be- took herself to Rhode Island, and thence to Man- hattan Island, where with nearly all her family she was murdered by Indians. Against all the inhuman items of her story, it is refreshing to place the words which her husband — "mild" as he may have been — spoke to the three delegates of the Boston church who followed them into their exile to look into the state of religious affairs in Rhode Island, " Mr. Hutchinson told us," the delegates reported, " he was more nearly tied to his wife than to the church ; he thought her to be a dear saint and servant of God." 24 BOSTON In the midst of the Antinomian controversy, two remarkable orders were enacted by the legislature. One of them called upon seventy-five persons — fifty-eight of them residents of Boston — to dehver up whatever arms and ammunition they might possess. Evidently the authorities regarded the doctrines and the possible actions of the " Antinomians " as equally dangerous. The second law put into effect the feeling which Nathaniel Ward, in the next decade, put into words when he proclaimed " to the world, in the name of our Colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Ana- baptists, and other enthusiasts, shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better." The law, supported by Winthrop and opposed by Vane, imposed a heavy fine upon any citizen who, without permission of the authorities, should receive into his house a stranger intending to remain in the place, or should rent him land or dwelling-house. Friends of Wheelwright and relatives of the Hutchinsons were known to be on the way when this remarkable "alien law " was adopted. Its prompt enforcement on their arrival made them continue their search for a place of settlement, and established for a time a wholly anomalous standard for citizenship in Massachusetts. In this way could a rehgious dissension make its mark on the secular legislation of the period. From even smaller beginnings, in 1636, arose a dispute which had for its outcome, in 1644, the division of the legislative body into an upper and FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 25 lower house. The question was that of the owner- ship of a stray pig, claimed respectively by a poor Mrs. Sherman and by one Robert Keayne, the first captain of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, which took its title in Boston from the organization of the same name, of which Captain Keayne had "S^P^iMr T^^f^num been a member in London. The church decided first in favor of the captain. Then the widow carried the case to the courts, where it gath- ered importance, assumed the aspect of a political question between the aristocratic and the democratic class, and took a prominent place in the discussions of the General Court for more than a year. The important result of the conflict was that the " Assist- ants " or Magistrates of the Company, and the dele- gates from the towns, who had sat together as a single body, were divided into two houses, of which each could veto the proceedings of the other. " Mrs. Sherman's pig," said a pubKc speaker some two hundred years later, " was the origin of the present Senate," and he hoped "the members of it would not disgrace their progenitor." The infant colony which within a few years passed an "alien law" excluding Antinomians, and mended its machinery of gov- ernment shown to be imperfect through the agency of a poor woman's pig, was certainly a settlement of which individual and unusual things were fairly to be expected. II COLONIAL BOSTON T Royal Arms from the Council Chamber of THE Old S tate-house. Now in Trinity Church, St. John, N.B. O the person of exact mind, demanding frequent periods of division in the history of Bos- ton, the interval between the founding of the town in 1630 and the withdrawal of the charter of King Charles I in 1684 must seem unduly long. But it was this second event which marked the first inevitable turning-point in the course of affairs. How much it meant to the men of the Puritan town, how steadily and sturdily they opposed the change, it is hard for us who take our forms of government almost as matters of course, to realize. To tell the whole story of the contest on this point between colonists and crown would be to write a separate volume. Here it will suffice to touch upon the earlier and the con- cluding stages of the conflict, and roughly following the years that fell between, to note a few of the more significant circumstances not immediately related to the scheme of government. Three years after Thomas Morton's summary de- portation from Boston, he and others, backed by men 26 COLONIAL BOSTON 27 of consequence with rights of their own at stake in New England, tried in vain to bring the Privy Coun- cil to check the progress of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Still more serious was the threatening of disaster when, later in the same year, 1633, Laud be- came Archbishop of Canterbury. In and out of Eng- land the Puritan subjects of Great Britain had little to expect in the way of favors. It came to be thought that to Boston especially malcontents, civil and ecclesi- astical, were betaking themselves in dangerous num- bers. A few months after Laud's accession some ships, ready to sail for New England and waiting in the Thames, were stayed by an Order of Council. Masters and freighters were called to appear before the authorities, and the ships were permitted to go their way only after the masters pledged themselves to the use of the Book of Common Prayer, morning and evening during the voyage, and all the emigrants took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. These meas- ures were less alarming, however, than the Council's demand upon Mr. Matthew Cradock, Winthrop's only predecessor in the chief office of the company, for the original letters-patent which the emigrants of 1630 had borne away with them. If the King did not realize what a large measure of self-government he had granted a few of his subjects through the Massachusetts charter, the possessors of it were fully awake to their advantage. They knew well the number of points counted in law by actual posses- sion, and, apparently with good reason, had no fear 28 BOSTON that the government eould curtail their liberties by any reference to the copy of their precious document which must have existed in the public archives. Of their taking the charter to Massachusetts with them, Judge Story has said, " The boldness of the step is not more striking than the silent acquiescence of the King in per- mitting it to take place." Unless one prefers to read in the charter itself a tacit permission of such a course, the boldness and the acquiescence may both be taken as evidence of the laxity of administration under the second Stuart king. But when a letter from Cradock in London came to the Governor and Assistants in Boston, asking them to send home the charter de- manded by the Privy Council, it became apparent that firmness must be practised, at least on one side of the Atlantic. The colonists at once began to show it in a definite Fabian policy of procrastination. To this first demand they sent back word that the General Court would not meet for some months, and that nothing could be done without its sanction. The next alarming piece of news in Boston was that a gen- eral governor would soon come over to manage all the American colonies, and that all their charters must be examined by a formidable Commission in England with Laud at its head. When the clergy conferred with the Governor and Assistants about the best means of meeting this danger they decided between them not to accept the general governor "but defend our law- ful possessions if we were able ; otherwise to avoid or protract." In the meantime they had taken the first A Bit of Fort Independence. (Formerly Castle Island.) COLONIAL BOSTON 31 steps toward fortifying Castle Island in the harbor. When the next General Court met in March of 1635, it ordered a continuance of this martial work, even to the pressing of men for the purpose, and provided for warning the country of any danger by means of a signal on Centry, or, as it was thenceforth to be called, Beacon Hill. Bullets were created fiat money, at the value of a farthing each. Ready as the rulers and the people were to fight, if, occasion should arise, the true keynote of their policy was summed up in the phrase " to avoid or protract." In the years immediately following, opportunities were not wanting for the ingenious practice of this policy. How skilfully Winthrop himself could use it, is per- haps best shown in his letter of September, 1638, mak- ing humble supplication to the Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations " that this poor plantation which hath found more favour from God than many others, may not find less favour from your Lordships." In the progress of events more powerful forces even than the colonists' own worldly wisdom were fighting for them in England itself The crown, with Cromwell and all his engines striking more fiercely at it every day, was occupied with sufficiently puzzling problems at home. When its enemies, who were, of course, the friends of the New England Puritans, won the ascendency, there was nothing to prevent a firmer rooting of all the liberties which had knit themselves into the Massa- chusetts soil with the planting of Boston. And while this process was going forward, the tree was putting 32 BOSTON forth the leaves and branches which fixed its outward form for many years to come. In how much of this John Winthrop bore an im- portant personal part, the most casual scrutiny of the early years in Boston will show. Between 1630 and his death in 1649 ^^ ^^^ twelve times Governor, thrice Deputy Governor, and, for the few years not devoted to these offices, head of the Board of Assist- ants. Through all this time he served Boston herself as the chief of her selectmen and in other capacities. It was a simple standard of living which his own household set for his fellow-townsmen. From the steps of his house on Washington Street, opposite the foot of School Street, his wife thought it no shame to carry her pail for water to the source which gave Spring Lane its name. Fearing an abuse of the custom of drinking toasts, Winthrop banished it from his own table, and found, as he hoped, that his example was followed in other houses. His view of the commu- nity at large was that "the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." In spite of this austere opinion he did not escape accusations of undue lenity and laxity. Once when he was superseded in the governorship he was even called upon for his accounts ; but it was an easy matter to show that his expenditures for the colony had exceeded his receipts from it by ^^1200. With the Deputy Governor, Dudley, his relations were sometimes peril- ously strained. Yet there could have been little dan- ger of a permanent alienation of the two friends when COLONIAL BOSTON ^3 Winthrop could return a peculiarly irritating letter with no comment beyond " I am unwilling to keep such an occasion of provocation by me." To this Dudley answered, — as well he might, — " Your over- coming yourself has overcome me." When all the authorities of Boston were for sending the trouble- some Roger Williams back to England, it was the pri- vate advice of Winthrop which landed him safe on the shores of Narragansett Bay. His charity, indeed, lived to the very end of his own life — for when to his death-bed Dudley brought an order for the banish- ment of a heterodox person, and asked for Governor Winthrop^s signature, the good man withheld his hand, saying he had done too much of that work already. Mercy and justice were so truly blended in his char- acter that Hawthorne could write of him with perfect truth as " a man by whom the innocent and the guilty might alike desire to be judged ; the first confiding in his integrity and wisdom, the latter hoping in his mild- ness." The seventeenth-century Boston had abun- dant reason to be thankful that its first citizen of the chief importance was such an one as Winthrop. The subtler effects of his personal headship need not be traced. But let us note a few of the good undertakings in which, before his death in 1649, his hand was felt. One of the first of these enterprises was the purchase of Boston Common. In 1633 the town had set aside fifty acres of land, near the house of William Black- stone, — which stood in a six-acre lot bounded in part by the present lines of Beacon, Spruce, and Pinckney 34 BOSTON streets and the ancient border of the Charles River, — for this earliest settler "to enjoy forever." But his enjoyment had a shorter date than the "lord-brethren " of Boston — from whom he proceeded to flee as he had fled from " lord-bishops " in England — could Tremont Street and the Common, about 1800. have foreseen. In 1634 he rehnquished all his rights in the peninsula, excepting the six acres about his house, for ;^30. The money for the purchase was raised by a tax on all the householders, who con- tributed sums from six shillings upward. Winthrop was at the head of those who represented the town in the transaction. Six years later, in 1640, it was agreed that " there shall be no land granted either for house- plot or garden to any person " out of the space which with its boundaries practically unchanged has been the scene of many historic dramas, from tragedy to comedy, and is still, perhaps, the most characteristic bit in the landscape of Boston. In a wider range of history than that which comprises the records of this COLONIAL BOSTON 35 single city, a more profitable investment of one hun- dred and fifty dollars would be difficult to find. To represent the continuity of things in Boston there is no other such tangible object as the Com- mon ; yet the beginning of the story of free schools carries us back into the earliest days of Winthrop's leadership of affairs. The antique name of Philemon Pormort (or Pormont) appears even in the records of 1633 as "school-master for the teaching and nourtering of children with us." In 1636 the chief persons of the place set themselves down as sub- scribers, in amounts from 4.S. to ;^io, "towards the maintenance of free schoolmaster." From the school thus provided for, the Boston Latin School traces direct descent. Its unbroken record is bright with the names of boys preparing for manhood of the highest local and national significance. This prompt recognition of the importance of free and universal education was inevitable in such a com- munity as that of early Boston. Between 1630 and 1647, i^ h^s been estimated, nearly one hundred Uni- versity men came from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Forty or fifty were here by 1639, ^"^ of those it is said that one-half established themselves within {ive miles of Boston or Cambridge. Though many of them were of the clergy, a fair share of the number belonged to the laity. Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge has shrewdly pointed out the difficulties they might well have foreseen in trying to nourish their conflicting principles of church, state, and education 26 BOSTON side by side. But fortunately they did not look so far ahead as to reahze that of the three principles, the one which they cherished most tenderly, the principle of theocracy, would be the surest to give place to the free spirit involved in untrammelled learning. In 1636 they founded Harvard College, primarily for the train- ing of Christian ministers for Indians and whites. In 1642 Winthrop doubtless rejoiced to record in his diary, " Nine bachelors commenced at Cambridge." With them "commenced" an influence of incalculable moment in fixing the Boston temper of mind through the succeeding generations. But this Harvard College — " first flower of their wilderness " — belonged to Boston only as other influences which have spread them- selves through Massachusetts and all the states belonged to Boston ; and here this word about it must suffice. Another institution of far more than local impor- tance was the New England Confederacy — or, to use its own name for itself, " The United Colonies of New England." The four colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Hartford, and New Haven had, in com- mon, too much, both of purpose and of need, to continue long in utter independence of one another. Accordingly, in 1643, ^^^7 achieved a somewhat loose union "for preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of the Gospel, and for their own mutual safety and welfare." More than for anything which the league, as such, accomplished, it has its historic inter- est in its foreshadowing of our own federal scheme of government. A detailed study of its Articles would COLONIAL BOSTON 37 show that in more than one particular this early instru- ment of colonial federation might have served as a model with those who framed the union of our states. From 1643 to 1684, only a short time before the coming of Andros as governor of all New England, the Confederacy maintained its existence. Boston from the first was the capital town, in fact if not in name, of the territory thus bound together ; and in its citizens the constant spectacle of this simple work- ing machinery of union may well have brought into being something like a national consciousness. The Confederacy was but six years old when Win- throp, his good work well done, quitted the scene. To understand the contrast between the place as he found it and as he left it, we cannot do better than to turn to a frequently quoted passage in Johnson^s Wonder- Working Providence describing the town in 1650. When the colonists landed, "the hideous thickets in this place were such that Wolfes & Beares nurst up their young from the eyes of all beholders, in those very places where the streets are full of Girles & Boys sporting up & downe, with a continual con- course of people." Of the building which before 1650 had taken place on the shore of the bay, Johnson says, " The chiefe Edifice of this City-like Towne is crowded on the Sea-bankes, and wharfed out with great in- dustry & cost, the buildings beautiful & large, some fairely set forth with Brick, Tile, Stone, & Slate, whose continuall inlargement presages some sumptuous City." Twenty years had wrought a change indeed from the 38 BOSTON appearance of the barren promontory which an earlier traveller had been able to commend in at least these words : " It being a necke and bare of wood : they are not troubled with three great annoyances of Woolves, Rattle-snakes, and Musketoes." Possibly Johnson overpopulated his hideous thickets. But the treeless promontory in 1650 was of course immeasurably nearer its primeval form than anything we can trace in its outlines to-day. The word peninsula describes it less promptly to our ears than the English equivalent — "almost an island," with a strong empha- sis on the qualifying term. Where Washington Street now winds its way north and south of Dover Street, " the Neck," even up to the century just past, stretched across broad tidal waters to connect Boston with Rox- bury. As the wayfarer across this strip of land looked toward Boston, he saw something very different from the comparatively flat expanse now covered by the main city. In addition to the three-peaked hill of Trimountaine, other eminences rose less conspicuous. Where Fort Hill Square is now surrounded by level streets of trade. Fort Hill itself appeared. Where Copp's Hill Burying-ground is now more noticeable for its graves than for any elevation in the landscape, the height which took its earlier name of Windmill Hill from the structure on its summit rose abruptly from the water. Under all these hills and skirting the harbor, a shore-line even more unlike that of the present day fixed the seaward boundary of the town. Reaching far into districts now covered by business COLONIAL BOSTON 39 buildings, tenement-houses, and the residences of the better sort, deep coves extended into the land. From time to time, as the generations have come and gone, the " continuall inlargement " which presaged " some sumptuous City " has been carried forward by the cutting down of the hills and the fill- ing up of the waters with the dry land thus placed at the dis- posal of man. During the seventeenth century, the early saints, of whom Emerson re- ported the saying that " they had to hold on to the huckle- berry bushes to hinder them- selves from being translated," had work enough in planting their houses where the huckle- berries had grown. But while they were so doing they abated in no wise their activities as saints. Non- conformists as they had been in England, they continued to exact the strictest conformity to their own ecclesiastical methods. The banishment of Roger Williams and the severity against Quakers were among the most patent evidences of this rigidity of rule. These instances, however, might be held up to show no less clearly the inextricable tangling of civil Roger Williams. Statue by Franklin Simmons, at Providence, R.I. 40 BOSTON and ecclesiastical affairs. Williams was banished as a disturber rather of the secular than of the religious peace, because he had " broached and divulged new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates, as also writ letters of defamation, both of the magis- trates and churches here/' This sentence of banish- ment, by the way, was rescinded in 1676, although the fact did not become generally known until 1900, when certain enthusiasts for freedom of opinion sought to have the decree removed from the Massachusetts rec- ords. In Rhode Island, whither Roger Williams had gone, as Cotton Mather said, with " a wind-mill in his head," and where, according to the same authority any- body who had lost a conscience might find one to suit him, the Quakers, too, sought refuge. Regarding them solely as offenders against civil order, the Puritans certainly had a just quarrel with the religious fanatics who walked naked through the public streets, appeared in the churches in sackcloth and ashes, with blackened faces, and clashed empty bottles together, calling down the wrath of heaven upon the people. Such conduct as this deserved some punishment, but the rancorous infliction of stripes, fines, banishment, and threats of death was something to shift one's sympathy quickly from the persecutors to the persecuted. The threat of execution in store for these violent precursors of the gentle folk we know as Friends was reserved for those who insisted upon returning from banishment. The magistrates may have " desired their hves absent rather than their deaths present " ; but three men and COLONIAL BOSTON 41 a woman courted death at the hands of the Boston magistrates, and won it. Their executions took place between 1659 and 1661. To witness the hanging of Marmaduke Stevenson and WilUam Robinson, who in 1659 were marched to the gallows behind drums which drowned their voices whenever they tried to speak, so many persons had thronged to the Common from the North End that, as they returned home, the drawbridge across the marsh which made the North End practically an island broke down beneath their weight. On the Common these sight-seers had heard the Rev. John Wilson railing against the culprits to the last, and had witnessed the dramatic release of a Quakeress, Mary Dyer, condemned to die with the men. The hang- man's rope was already passed round her neck when the urgent appeal of her son won her the alternative sentence of banishment from the colony ; but in less than a year she returned, and paid the postponed penalty of death. In March of 1661, the fourth vic- tim, one Leddra, suffered the same punishment. In the ground of the Common, where these misbelievers died, their bodies were buried. At a later and safer day, long after Shattuck the Salem Quaker in 1661 had brought to Governor Endicott King Charles's order to have all Quakers awaiting punishment sent to England for trial, the Boston Quakers asked per- mission to put a pahng round the four graves on the Common. This was held to be " very inconvenient," and nothing beyond the enclosure of a few feet of 42 BOSTON ground with boards was permitted. By this time, 1685, the Quakers were firmly enough established to have had a regular place of worship for seven years ; and before the end of the century they built for their own use in Brattle Street the first brick meeting-house in Boston. Yet it may be added that a Quaker trav- eller, visiting Boston as late as 1693, reported "the barbarous and unchristian-Hke welcome " he received. " ' O ! what a pity it was,' said one, ' that all of your society were not hanged with the other four.' " Appar- ently there were lessons both of tolerance and of good manners to be learned in Boston. The Quaker disturbance, acute though it was, had at least the virtue of being short-lived. Its four victims who came to the gallows died within the space of three years. Between the first and the last execu- tion for witchcraft in Boston forty years elapsed. The first of all came during Winthrop's governorship, in 1648. Within the next eight years two more lives were sacrificed to the strangest delusion which ever brought the powers of darkness and the fate of mortals together. For more than thirty years from that time, no other victim came to the Boston scaffold. Soon after Goody Glover was executed in 1688, the hideous history of the witchcraft mania in New England passed, happily for Boston, into the history of Salem. With it, unhappily for Boston, passed such Boston names as those of Cotton Mather and of Samuel Sewall who for one had the grace, when the harm was done, to stand up in meeting of his own free will and " take the COLONIAL BOSTON 43 blame and shame of it." To the credit of Boston itself it should be said that "spectral evidence" was not accepted, as in the Salem trials, against persons accused of witchcraft ; and that the method of treating the two notable cases of Mercy Short and Margaret Rule by the sole spiritual weapon of prayer was that which came to distinguish the Boston from the Salem mode of procedure. But even if the story of New England witchcraft were to be retold in the pages of this book, its chief events belong to a later time than that with which the present chapter deals. Here we may leave the matter in the light of a few figures. It has been estimated that during the years of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries in which the minds of men were inflamed against witches and witchcraft, the executions in Germany numbered one hundred thousand, in France seventy-five thousand, and in Great Britain thirty thousand. The other countries of Europe contributed their proportionate shares. Against these may be set the thirty-two victims of New England, four of whom were provided by the town of Boston. The wonder is not that we hear so much of the early American witch-killers, but that so little is said about their European forerunners and contemporaries. Upon the whole matter of early New England harshness, so to call it, we are prone to look through " near " rather than " far " glasses. We recoil with horror from the thought of a scarlet letter A, or the D hung for a year round the neck of a drunkard. 44 BOSTON The punishment of one Captain Kemble who had to sit for two hours in the stocks for kissing his wife publicly on the Sabbath Day, when he first saw her after an absence of three years, has its droll no less than its painful aspect. The idea of bringing con- demned criminals to divine service on Sunday and to the Thursday Lecture for exposure to a visual appli- cation of text and sermon in a crowded meeting-house provokes both sympathy and repugnance. We shud- der at the list of twelve offences punishable under the Massachusetts " Body of Liberties " by death ; but we forget that in England at the same time a sinner might lose his life by committing any one of a hundred and fifty sins. In point of austerity in ad- ministering justice, the seventeenth-century Bostonian was, indeed, very much a man of his time — with contemporary faults and virtues, blended in special proportions but drawn from the general supply of good and ill. In Hawthorne's characterization of Endico'tt, " who would stand with his drawn sword at the gate of heaven, and resist to the death all pilgrims thither, except they travelled his own path," we find a memorable suggestion of the chief and distinguishing fault, if such it be, of the race of New England Puritans. Men of their time in most respects, the Boston Puritans, as colonists, stood in advance of it. If their provision for free education showed the guidance of an enlightened few, the record of their printing, buying, and reading of books tells something of the intelligent John Eliot preaching to the Indians. Mural Painting by Henry O. Walker, in the State-house. %, COLONIAL BOSTON 47 many. For a long time, to be sure, the work of printing, begun in Cambridge in 1639, ^^^ afterwards confined by law to that place, was not taken up in Boston itself It was not until 1674 that John Foster displayed his "Sign of a Dove" and became the first Boston printer. Before the loss of the charter Boston and Cambridge together printed some three hundred publications, of which, of course, the greater number were theological. But as early as 1652 Hezekiah Usher was a bookseller in the town. By 1673 there was a public library to which John Oxenbridge could bequeath his books — as John Harvard and John Winthrop had earlier left theirs to the library of the college. When Dunton, a London bookseller, brought over an assortment of books for sale in 1685, he found five dealers already established in the place. All these would be dry facts were they not significant of an intellectual activity not usually found in seventeenth-century colonies. Since the men of Boston began so promptly to provide themselves with books, what wonder that their Beacon Hill has in later years appeared as «'a tall mountain, citied to the top. Crowded with culture ' ' ? While books were extending the inner vision, the powerful agency of commerce was at its work of broadening the outward horizon. A lively trade with other parts of New England, with all the more south- erly colonies, and with the Frenchmen to the north, 48 BOSTON carried Boston boats and Boston men far from their own wharves. In the French colonies Boston, or Baston, as the word came to be written, was used in so broad a sense that the men of all Massachusetts, indeed the English colonists in general, found them- selves described as " Bostonnais." It may be through a survival of this very usage that the Canadians and Indians of the Pacific coast have defined Americans as Bostons up to our own day. It were well if some record of the names which the Indians of eastern Massachusetts called the men of early Boston could be unearthed. In the absence of Indian historians we have to be content with a one-sided story. There is every evidence that the original intentions of the colonists with regard to the Indians were eminently Christian. In the precious charter itself the colonists were counted upon to " winne and incite the natives of that country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind and the christian faith, which is our royall intention and the adventurers free profes- sion is the principall end of this plantation." In spite of this profession there seems to be a reasonable doubt whether so many Englishmen would have come to the new world at all but for their belief that a pestilence had recently taken a large number of the red men out of their way. They doubtless believed, moreover, that the Christian religion would recommend itself more promptly and generally to the savages. If there had been more white men like the " Apostle " COLONIAL BOSTON 49 John Eliot of Roxbury, who estabHshed at Natick his village of "praying Indians," — a shining example of the best missionary work, — the performances of the white men might have talHed better with their inten- tions. As it was, Boston had to send its quota of men to a Pequot war in Connecticut before the town was seven years old. When the Indians refused to turn from certain ignorance to the uncertain choice between the Calvinist heaven or hell, the colonists had little difficulty in persuading themselves that " the enemies of the Puritans" — in the words of Dr. George E. Ellis — " were the enemies of God." The new coun- try could not become God's country until the devil's people were removed from it ; and since God's work could not be done through conversion, it must be wrought by the sword. King Philip's War, culminating in 1676, was the inevitable result of these conditions. Before its out- break, Philip told the Apostle EHot that he cared no more for his religion than for the apostolic coat- button he held in his fingers — and earned for him- self Cotton Mather's epithet of a " blasphemous Leviathan." When the Indian chieftain lay dead at Mount Hope he was no more to Captain Benjamin Church, who led the English against him, than " a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast." Yet the war which he had waged had threatened the very con- tinuance of the whites in New England. Even at the time it was estimated that if he had had the help so BOSTON of the 3000 Indians who had submitted in greater and less degree to the influences of civilization, the English would have been exterminated. Within three hours of the first call to arms Boston mustered no men to go forth into the Plymouth colony and Rhode Island where the conflict chiefly raged. Throughout the war she bore her part with all the valor which was needed even against foes who could be terrified by the aspect of one soldier in the armor he had worn under Cromwell, or of another who hung his wig on a tree that he might fight more coolly, but appeared to the Indians as a marvellous creature who stood in no need of scalping. With all their might the men of Boston helped to keep King Philip's War at a safe distance from their wives and children, and fighting, as they thought, for God and the church, bore themselves like true members of the church militant. Since the Puritan church was militant, so, of course, was its other half, the state. Immediately before and after King Philip's War its conflict was with the crown. We have already seen how the supremacy of Cromwell put a stop to the bout of long- armed fencing over the charter. More than this, the Massachusetts colony had taken the opportunity to intrench itself almost as an independent state. When CromwelFs COLONIAL BOSTON 51 Navigation Act proved disadvantageous to the c olony , the colony disregarded it ; and Cromwell, fri-endly to the Puritans and busy with his enemies, made no ob- jection. When the colony thought it needed money of its own, it took the self-sufficient step, in 1652, of setting up its own coinage. " No other colony," says Hutchinson, " ever presumed to coin any metal into money. It must be considered that at this time there was no king in Israel." The charter under which such courses were even possible was obviously growing less and less a thing to be surrendered. After a king had returned to Israel, and the second Charles came to his own in 1660, he is said to have looked at one of the pine tree shillings, and to have mis- taken John Hull's famous mintage for a well-meaning reproduction of the royal oak. Still more flattering to kingly pride may have been the Address which came to him promptly from Boston. The colonists called them- selves " your poor Mephibo- sheths." Trusting " that he knoweth the hearts of exiles, who himself hath been an exile," they declared humbly, yet elaborately enough, that " the aspect^ of majesty thus ^ing Philip's bowl. extraordinarily circumstanced in possession of the Massachusetts influenceth and animateth Historical society. exanimated outcasts," and prayed for his royal grace. But with this attitude of the colonists came also the opportunity of their, enemies — neither few nor feeble 52 BOSTON — to make complaints. The royal oak on the shilling was shown to be an unwarranted pine tree ; the harbor- ing of the regicides Goffe and Whalley, and the over- stepping of various chartered rights, were set forth in their most disloyal significance. Through agents sent to England from Boston, the King gave orders looking toward a real extension of civil and religious liberty, and they were grudgingly obeyed. Then, in 1664, the crown despatched four Commissioners to look into the affairs of all the New England colonies. In Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Plymouth they were satisfactorily received. In Boston it was different. The Commission- ers and the Court, representing the colony, soon found themselves in a snarl. At the end of a month the Commissioners asked, " Do you acknowledge his Majesty's Com- mission to be of full force to all the intents and purposes therein contained ? " And the Court replied, "We humbly conceive it is beyond our line to declare our sense of the power, intent, or purpose of your Commission. It is enough for us to acquaint you what we conceive is granted to us by his Majesty's royal charter. If you rest not satisfied with our former answer, it is our trouble, but we hope it is not our fault." The Com- missioners saw the futility of further parleying and Pine Tree Shillings. COLONIAL BOSTON S3 departed. Two years later the King called upon the colony' to send four or five persons to England for a conference upon the vexed questions. But when the letter bearing these instructions came without direction or seal, the Court made the most of this omission, and excused itself from acceding to the royal wish. Carry- ing its suaviter in modo principle even further, the colony not long afterwards presented the King with a shipload of masts, which were gratefully accepted. So the unequal conflict went on. There is no occa- sion to follow in detail the devoted efforts of the colony's agents in London, and all the machinations of Edward Randolph, "the evil genius of New Eng- land," against the " Bostoneers." From the time, in 1664, when the colony was obliged to repeal the law restricting the franchise to members of the Puritan churches, it must have been clear that the theocracy was doomed. But its death struggle lasted for more than twenty years. In October of 1684 the Court of Chancery declared the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company vacated. In November of 1685 Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary the sober declaration of a Boston minister, discussing with his brethren the appearance of a dancing master in the town, that "'twas not a time for N. E. to dance." In May of 1686 the Rose frigate, bearing the detested Randolph with commissions for the new administrators of a new rule, sailed into the harbor, — and the government under which Boston as a chartered colony had been founded and firmly established was forever at an end. Ill PROVINCIAL BOSTON BETWEEN the end of the colony and the beginning of the royal province Boston passed through a brief and exciting pe- riod of transition. For the first seven months of it, Joseph Dud- ley, under royal appointment, filled the provisional presidency of New England. Both now, and in his later governorship, Dudley owed much of his unpopularity to the fact that as the son of Winthrop's contemporary, Gov- ernor Thomas Dudley, he was regarded as one who should be standing with the people against the crown instead of taking the contrary position. During the six months of his presidency it was not his least offence that he aided and abetted the Episcopalians in securing the east end of the Town House as their first place of worship in Boston. But a harder trial than seeing any secular building put to this use was yet to come. In all the circumstances it is little wonder that the English clergy- 54 The Cross captured at louisburg, In possession of Harvard University. PROVINCIAL BOSTON ^S man, according to Randolph, was denounced as " Baal's priest," and that Boston ministers, inheriting an accu- mulated prejudice against the established church, de- scribed its prayers as " leeks, garlick, and trash." In December of 1686 the arrival of the fvig3.te King- jisher in Boston harbor marked the end of Dudley's presidency, for its all-important passenger was Sir Edmund Andros, bearing the royal commission of Governor of New England. When James II. was the Duke of York, Andros had served him well as ruler of his province of New York. In other posts, military and civil, Andros had shown himself a faith- ful and efficient royalist. His appointment to the vacant governorship was therefore most natural. In early American history his name has become a byword for royal oppression. It may be doubted, however, whether anybody sent at this time to do the work committed to Andros could have satisfied the people of Boston, smarting under the loss of their first charter, suspicious of all control from England, and as yet without assurance of any permanent form of government, good or bad. Yet Andros might at least have begun his administration more tactfully. Not content with Dudley's appropriation of a por- tion of the Town House for services of the established church, Andros must needs invade one of the very temples of the Puritans. He had not been long in Boston when he inspected the three existing meeting- houses, and decided that the South would suit his purpose best. Utterly against the will of its pro- ^6 BOSTON prietors he took possession of it on the Good Friday following his arrival, and had the English service con- ducted within its walls. This was bad enough, but the distress of the people must have reached a pain- ful chmax on Easter Sunday when the churchmen kept the Puritans waiting nearly an hour outside their own doors until the established worship of England should cease and that of Boston could begin. " 'Twas a sad sight," wrote Sewall, " to see how full the street was with people, gazing and moving to and fro, because [they] had not entrance into. the house." That nothing might be lacking to offend the people he had come to govern, Andros treated them quite as cavalierly in temporal matters as in spiritual. The landholders of the colony he declared to be mere ten- ants at will. As a loyal servant of the crown he main- tained that since their lands had been held under a royal charter, and since that charter had been with- drawn, their titles were at the same time forfeited. Thus, not only was their ecclesiastical structure, built with pious care, dangerously threatened, but the very lands on which they and their houses stood seemed slipping from beneath their feet. It could hardly have helped matters for the colonists to familiarize them- selves with the obverse of the Great Seal of New Eng- land used by Andros ; for here were depicted a white man and an Indian kneeling with gifts before a king, while over their heads a cherub flaunted a Latin legend, " A more pleasing liberty has never existed." Even if Andros through the two years and more of PROVINCIAL BOSTON 57 his administration had devoted himself otherwise to none but conciliatory measures, these two courses would have inflamed the people against him. They were quite ready and eager, then, to accept as true the rumors brought in April of 1689 by a traveller from Nevis that James II had yielded up his throne to William of Orange and Mary. If the King whom Andros had served was overthrown, so must An- dros be himself. Early in the morning of April 18 the people of the North End of the town heard that those of the South End were up in arms. At the South End the same report of the North was spread. The consequence was that each rallied to help the other ; at the same time many troops came in from the country. Royalist officials were seized. Andros promptly betook himself to the fort on Castle Island, now the site of Fort Independence ; but when it appeared quite useless to resist the people's demand for it and him, " it was surrendered up to them with cursings." The Governor himself was made a prisoner, and a provisional government, based upon the old charter, was established. More than a month later the authentic news of the accession of William and Mary was received. In due time came royal orders to return From the Great Seal of New England. 58 BOSTON Sir Edmund with some of his friends to England, and to continue the provisional government for the present. With these mandates there was no unwillingness to com- ply, and for a time the people of Boston found them- selves practically in possession of all their accustomed privileges. So spontaneous, effective, and bloodless a revolution has rarely been accomplished. Whatever its meaning may have been to those who were con- cerned in it, we may fairly regard it to-day as. the first step toward that vastly greater uprising which has made the word Revolution mean but one thing in American history. But the whole provincial period was yet to intervene. It was not till 1691 that Massa- chusetts was definitely established a royal province. Before the overthrow of Andros, Increase Mather, eluding the vigilance of his enemy Randolph, had slipped away to England to plead the restoration of the original charter, or faihng of that, to secure the best form of government that could be got in its place. The record of his work in England, where he attained to his mother's ambition that he should become " a man diligent in business " and so " stand before kings," is not to be retold in these pages. What may be noticed here is that the man chosen sixty years after the founding of the colony to speak for it in England, the man who did so in interviews with two kings, and in adroit negotiations with politicians and courtiers, was the leading minister of Boston, the son of one minis- ter, the son-in-law of no less another than the great John Cotton, — in a word one who in himself and all PROVINCIAL BOSTON 59 his associations represented the old theocratic principle of New England. What this Puritan priest and states- man brought back with him to Boston in 1692 was as good a substitute for the old charter as the unfavoring conditions would permit ; and he secured, moreover, a governor of his own choosing. He could not prevent the change from colony to province, with a governor and lieutenant-governor of royal appointment, or the governor's privilege of vetoing and rejecting impor- tant actions of the legislature to be chosen by the people ; but he could and did secure the incorporation of Maine, Nova Scotia, and the old Plymouth colony into the Province of Massachusetts ; and the first of the royal governors. Sir William Phips, a native of New England, owed, and was not expected to forget that he owed, his office to Increase Mather. Not only as the first of the ten acting governors under the province charter, but also on account of his own picturesque career. Sir William Phips deserves something more than cursory notice. His father was a gunsmith, near the mouth of the Kennebec, in Maine, whose children, of one mother, were said to have numbered twenty-six, — a company large enough to provide at least one person of distinction. Born in 1 65 1, William began his active life as a tender of sheep, from which employment he passed to the building of coasting vessels and sailing in them. Coming thus to Boston he married a widow, and varied his occupations still further by going forth to fight with Indians. Then there was a voyage to the 6o BOSTON Spanish Main in search of a treasure-ship sunk in those fabled waters. The search was unsuccessful, but proceeding to London Phips prevailed upon the King, James II, and the Admiralty to fit him out a vessel well armed and manned to seek again for the treasure. For two years he cruised about the West Indies, avail- ing of many opportunities to prove his adventurous qualities, but gaining nothing beyond what he con- sidered positive information concerning the where- abouts of the sunken treasure. It was an age of adventurers, and though he came back to London empty-handed, he did not fail to persuade still other gentlemen of England to take shares with him in a renewal of his enterprise. This time he met with suc- cess, and out of the deep drew up gold and silver bullion amounting to a million and a half of dollars, besides other treasure in precious jewels. His own share of the haul was about a hundred thousand dollars, — a noble fortune for the times. His valor, or his money, or both, gained him the further prize of knighthood. Mihtary and civil honors in New England followed quickly. The final honor of the governorship, obtained through the mediation of the minister whose preaching had first quickened him to a sense of sin, provides the fitting climax of a career which might adorn a Sunday-school story but for the abundance of those ruder elements from which old ballads were made. In raising such a man to the chief magistracy of the province. Increase Mather could not have been quite PROVINCIAL BOSTON 6i without the sense that even " more than most self- made men" — as Professor Wendell puts it — "Sir William looked up to the clergy, and most of all the clergy to the Mathers." He probably did not realize that any royal governor, from the very nature of his office, was doomed to win something of the very unpopularity which Andros achieved. The clerical cause, therefore, was inevitably destined to lose more than it would gain from close association with the gov- ernorship. Unforeseen also were the intensity and the results of the witchcraft tragedy, in which Phips and Cotton Mather, the greater son of Increase, were conspicuous fellow-actors. Not until Lady Phips herself fell a victim to the delusion, and was suspected of supernatural dealings, did the Governor call a halt in the persecutions. In the revulsion of sentiment against all the wretched business, the chief persecutors were themselves involved. Without this cause for unpopularity. Sir William had enough to contend with in his inherent unfitness for the governorship, his defects of education, his faults of temper, which even led him more than once into pubUc personal encounters with men from whom he disagreed. Taken together, all these things rendered his administration a failure so marked that the news of his death in England in 1695 could have brought little but relief to the people against whose charges he was trying to defend himself at headquarters. Both Increase and Cotton Mather long survived him — for the father lived till 1723, the son till 1728. 62 BOSTON Between Phips and the younger Mather the affairs of witchcraft provided the chief bond of association. It is in connection with these affairs, moreover, that the name of Cotton Mather has its greatest significance for the generations which have followed. From the days of his literal-minded contemporary, Robert Calef, who could see nothing but fraud and credulity in the so- called diabolic manifestations, down to our own gen- eration. Cotton Mather's share in the witchcraft delusion has won him a full measure of obldquy. But since the appearance of Professor Barrett Wendell's study of the man and his times, the candid reader must at least accord him the virtue of sincerity. Even in such a scene as the hanging, at Salem, of the Rev. George Burroughs, a graduate of Harvard, on the charge of witchcraft, when Cotton Mather appeared amongst the spectators on a horse and assured them that the victim's appeahng declaration of his innocence was a mere inspiration of the devil, he seems to have been acting in the confident beHef that he was going about his Master's business. If to-day his records of spiritual phenomena were first appearing as reports of psychical research, they would not stand forth as unprecedented statements, but in many instances would mark the recorder as a careful investigator and historian of occult science. Putting the matter of witchcraft, however, wholly to one side. Cotton Mather remains in important aspects the chief figure of his time in Boston. If scholarship is to be judged by its fruits — and Mather's death-bed PROVINCIAL BOSTON (>3 advice to his son was to bear constantly in mind the word Fructuosus — there are no less than 382 titles of publications from his pen to speak for the indus- try of his mind and hand. Dun- ton, the London bookseller, might have said perhaps more truly of him than of his contem- porary, the Rev. Samuel Willard, " I darken his mer- its if I call him less than a walking li- brary." For his preaching — it must have been partly his power and not wholly his theme, which made it necessary for him, on the occasion of delivering a discourse upon some condemned murderers, to reach his pulpit by climbing over the shoulders of his con- gregation. It is a curious fact that in matters of civil government, to which of course his influence extended, we are said to owe the Mathers our American plan which compels the legislative representative of any district to be an inhabitant of the district which he represents — a measure first introduced for the politi- CoTTON Mather. 64 BOSTON cal advantage of the theocratic party, which had its chief strength in the country regions. This was a more doubtful service to his country than his effort later in life to check the frightful ravages of the epidemics of smallpox in Boston. In 1721 came one of the worst of them. The population of the town was estimated at less than eleven thousand. Of these it is said that nearly six thousand had the disease, and nearly one thousand died. It was high time for vigorous action of some sort. Cotton Mather had read of what inoculation might do, but his proposal to introduce it in Boston " raised an horrid Clamour." In his son Samuel, afterwards a distinguished minister, he found a brave abettor of his plan ; the boy offered himself for experiment. With deep searchings of heart the father, like another Abraham, put his behefs to the test. The boy fell rapidly sick and came so near to death as to fill his father's soul with fear and the town with uproar. But one day his Bible, opened at random, bore him the welcome message, " Go thy way, thy son liveth." And the promise was fulfilled. This was in August. In November his "kinsman, the minister of Roxbury," came to his house for inoculation. One night during the patient's illness some unknown ruffian threw into the window of the room where he lay a heavy iron "grenado" charged with powder and oil of turpentine. By some good chance it did not explode ; and on it was found a paper bearing the words, " Cotton Mather, you Dog ; Dam you ; I'l inoculate you with this, with a pox to PROVINCIAL BOSTON Gs you." The incident is noteworthy to-day chiefly for its showing of the bitterness with which a daring movement forward was resisted. The triumph of the pioneer in the face of such opposition is no less extraordinary. Surely Cotton Mather the minister, the scholar, the man of affairs, the servant of humanity, is to be remembered as something more than a harrier of witches. Upon nearly the whole period through which the Mathers, father and son, occupied the centre of the Boston stage, the clearest contemporary light is cast by the diary kept by Samuel Sewall through most of his long life ending in 1730. Over and above all it tells of other men and of passing events, its interest Ues largely in the faithful, unconscious picture it draws of the writer himself Sewall has been called, so often as to make one almost tired of the name, "the Puritan Pepys"; yet the English and the Boston Samuel have one thing so much in common that the definition justifies itself. Each is at his best in self- revelation. Samuel Sewall shows himself not only a typical Boston citizen of his time, but also a man of quaint and striking individuality. His education re- ceived at Harvard College, and his wealth, acquired in part by marriage with the daughter of the rich mint- master John Hull, gave him place amongst the leaders of the laity. As an officer of town and state he served the people in many capacities, from night-watchman to chief justice of Massachusetts. His open repentance for the part he had played in the witchcraft trials, and 66 BOSTON his publication of the pamphlet, " The Selling of Joseph," the earliest of Boston antislavery documents, spoke for his independence of mind. In affairs of the church he stood for the old against the new order, even to the extent of deserting for a time his own ^Vita (ine Uteris eft Mortis Imago ; At ]^ Vita fine Chrifto eft Morte pejor. ^ Si CHRISTUM J»rcit,mhilejf fi cetera mfelt, ^SsCaRlSTUMmfiu.nihihl^ficatefa Jifw, gSAMUEUS SEWALL ^ Iiber# ^ Anno DominL Samuel Sewai.l's Book-plate. In possession of the Author. minister for the unpardonable sin of cutting his hair and wearing a wig. When the aged schoolmaster, Ezekiel Cheever, died and Sewall came to sum up his virtues, the climax of praise was reached in — " He abominated Periwigs." His piety found private ex- pression in days of fasting, prayer, and self-examination. The diary gives a detailed account of one of these vigils — of which in the end he recorded, "I had a very PROVINCIAL BOSTON 67 comfortable day of it." The funerals he attended, the scarfs, rings, and gloves presented to him, according to the custom of the day, as a mourner, occupy a pro- digious space in Ms chronicles. The mortuary habit of the time provided him even with " an awfuU yet pleasing treat " in visiting his own family tomb and in- specting the coffins of his elders and children. In the church we see him leading the singing for many years until one day a front tooth in his under jaw came out, and he put " this old servant and daughter of Musick " into his pocket with pious reflections that his own career was nearly ended. As the venerable suitor for a second wife, he records one episode of courtship, often quoted, yet well deserving repetition for its ready gallantry : " Ask'd her to acquit me of Rudeness if I drew off her Glove. Enquiring the reason, I told her 'twas great odds between handling a dead Goat and a living Lady." Pepys himself could have made no better retort. Altogether the picture of Sewall, as drawn by his own pen, is one of the indispensable figures in any general view of Boston. It is remarkable, indeed, how much more conspicu- ous in the retrospect is this man who drew his own picture than most of the royal governors, — those truly glittering figures of their successive days. In the matter of portraiture, one must remember, it was their misfortune to be largely at the mercy of others, who could not in the nature of things be wholly friendly. The unhappy Hutchinson, the last of the governors under the civil law, had bitter occasion to 68 BOSTON write in his diary : " Gubernatorum vituperatio populo placet, and every governor of Massachusetts Bay, for near a century past, has by experience found the truth of it." Yet the governors succeeding Sir William Phips — ten, if we include General Gage the military ruler at the end of the period, and exclude the lieuten- ant-governors who held the post ad interim — were frequently men of good intentions and considerable abilities. They brought with them to the democratic town and its Province House, which in 1716 became their home, an atmosphere of courts and society by no means unwelcome to the ever-present Tory element. But with the other and dominant element there was one constant, rather sordid struggle which must have given their assumption of vice-regal state an ironical aspect. The crown did not reward their labors with a definite salary ; the self-sufficing people would have ob- jected to having their magistrates paid from abroad. The payment of the governors was left to the legislature, and that body consistently refused to vote salaries to officials not of their own choice. Year by year they voted a grant larger or smaller according to the ac- ceptability of the governor in office. Here was an obvious source of disagreement between governor and governed. Incessant disputing over an income never yet promoted good feeling, and of this standing quar- rel the annals of the period are full. It is impossible to attempt more than a pass- ing glance at some of the governors and the distin- guishing events and persons of their successive terms. PROVINCIAL BOSTON 69 The second governor, Richard Coote, Earl of Bello- montj whose rule of less than two years ended in 1701, can hardly be noticed without a mention of the Captain Kidd whose memory has never been so successfully buried as his treasure. It was under Bellomont that this notorious character, possessing now that strange if dim reality of a mythical personage, sailed and sailed, and underwent trial in Boston for converting a King's errand to the Spanish Main into a cruise of private piracy. Bellomont was followed by Joseph Dudley, the end of whose administration brings us as far into the century as 171 5. As provisional governor under the first charter and as an associate of Andros, he had won a fair measure of the unpopularity which the native New Englander who became too good a loyalist was sure to attain. As governor of the royal province, he could hardly fail to increase this unpopularity, or to bring the day of utter estrangement between old and new England definitely nearer. It was this unin- tentional service to their countrymen which gained for Dudley and Hutchinson the distinction of being the best hated of their line. What the governors were doing through the some- what monotonous years of their period may well con- cern us less than the interests of the people. The terms of Samuel Shute, William Burnet, and Jonathan Belcher, covering the years from 17 16 to 1741, differ in no important points of administration or popular feeling. Under Shute there was fighting with Indians, under all three fighting about salaries, and at the end 70 BOSTON of Belcher's term came the first visit and preaching of George Whitefield. At this point, then, we may stop a moment to look at the absorbing interest of the pro- vincial church. All the world knows the words of Burke at the time when conciliation with America had to be discussed in England : " The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance ; it is the dissidence of dis- sent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion." And indeed just as the form of civil government was breeding estrangement throughout the provincial period, so this dissenting dissent was constantly nour- ishing in Boston a popular sentiment of independence. The multiplication of churches in Boston tells part of the story. Before 1699, the First, Second, and South churches sufficed for the Puritan congregations. The foundation before the middle of the eighteenth century of the Brattle Street, or Manifesto, the New North, the New South, the New Brick, the Hollis Street, to say nothing of what the Episcopalians, Quakers, Baptists, French Protestants, and Irish Presbyterians were doing, bespeaks a development out of proportion with the growth of the town. It was the fashion of the time not merely to differ in opinion but to express difference in action. The Manifesto Church (1699) took its name from the Manifesto in which it set forth its tendency toward more liberal beliefs and methods. Yet for all its emancipation the church could not bring itself to use the " pair of organs " bequeathed to it by Thomas Brattle in 17 13, and voted, "that they did PROVINCIAL BOSTON 71 not think it proper to use the same in the public wor- ship of God." Troubled by no such scruples, King's Chapel profited by this Puritan rigor, and came into possession of the first organ used in New England. When there was a disagreement about the installation of the Rev. Peter Thacher over the New North in 1720, a schism in the society resulted in the foundation The Old Brick Church, nearly opposite Old State-house. of the New Brick. According to an historian of the New North, quoted by L. M. Sargent in his diverting Dealings with the Dead^ the malcontents " first thought of denominating it [their church] the Revenge Church of Christ ; but they thought better of it, and called it the New Brick Church. However, the first name was retained for many years among the common people. Their zeal was great, indeed, and descended to pueril- ity. They placed the figure of a cock as a vane upon the steeple, out of derision of Mr. Thacher, whose 72 BOSTON The Cockerel Church Vane. Christian name was Peter. Taking advantage of a wind, which turned the head of the cock toward the New North meeting-house, when it was placed upon the spindle, a merry fellow straddled over it, and crowed three times, to com- plete the ceremony." From this weather-vane, now sur- mounting the spire of the Shepard Memorial Church in Cambridge, the New' Brick ac- quired the alternative name of the Cockerel Church. The serious records of the Puritan church are interspersed with many bits of humor, con- scious and unconscious. The clerical habit, for exam- ple, of choosing texts with a personal bearing may or may not have been practised with a humorous intention. It is told of the Rev. Mather Byles, the Tory minister of the Hollis Street Church, that disappointed one day in the expectation that the Rev. Mr. Prince would preach for him, he rose and preached himself from the text, " Put not your trust in princes." Here we may draw our own conclusions, for Mr. Byles was the notorious Boston wit of his time. It helps us to place him as a citizen of the world by remembering that he was a correspondent of Dr. Watts, and of Pope, who sent him a presentation quarto copy of the Odyssey. He it was whom a parishioner once found nailing list on his doors to keep out the cold. " The wind PROVINCIAL BOSTON 73 bloweth wheresoever it listeth, Dr. Byles/' said the parishioner. " Yes, sir," replied the Doctor, " and man listeth wheresoever it bloweth." The puns and quips of the witty minister well repay the search that may readily be made for them. Certainly there was an element of unconscious humor in a fact noted by a traveller, Edward Ward, who, near the beginning of the pro- vincial period, told many questionable tales about the Bostonians : "They keep no Saints Days, nor will they allow the Apostles to be Saints ; yet they assume that Sacred Dignity to themselves, and say, in the Title Page of their Psalm-Book, ' Printed for the Edification of the Saints in Old and New England.'" In so far as this is a matter of printed record, it may be taken more seriously than other ob- servations of this traveller. Many of his statements are palpably false; and we may hope the following story is one of the fabrications : " I was mightily pleas'd one Morning with a contention between two Boys at a Pump in Boston, about who should draw their Water first. One Jostled the other from the Handle, and he would fill his Bucket first, because his Master said Prayers and Sung Psalms twice a Day in his family. Mather Byles's Clock. In possession of the Bostonian Society. 74 BOSTON and the other Master did not. To which the Witty Knave made this reply, Our House stands backward in a Court ; if my Master had a Room next the Street, as your Master has, he'd pray twice to your Master's once, that he wou'd, and therefore I'll fill my pail first, marry will I, and did accordingly." The state of affairs suggested by this anecdote, probably a piece of fiction, was more accurately recorded by the Rev. George Whitefield when he first visited Boston in 1740. He found the town '^remark- able for the external observance of the Sabbath. Men in civil offices have a regard for religion. The Gover- nor [Belcher] encourages them ; and the ministers and magistrates seem to be more united than those in any other place where I have been. I never saw so little scoffing : never had so little opposition." These words were written immediately after Whitefield had brought to Boston his contribution to " The Great Awakening." The fame of the young Church of England preacher had travelled from Georgia to New England, and the Puritan ministers of Boston had sent for him to rouse the people from what was considered their lethargy. In a community which responded as Boston did to the ministrations of Whitefield, there could have been no dearth of religious susceptibility. The crowd that thronged once to hear him in the Old South packed the streets so densely that he had to enter the still familiar building through one of its windows. At the New South one Monday afternoon a panic resulted from a noise in the gallery,, and " several were trod to The Old South Church, with its New Surroundings; CORNER OF Washington and Milk streets. PROVINCIAL BOSTON 77 death." Whitefield led the crowd to the Common, and there preached his sermon. The present-day Sunday afternoon gatherings on the Charles Street Mall are meagre groups compared with the multitudes which this young evangelist, not yet twenty-six years old, gathered about him on the autumnal week days and Sundays of 1740. Once the congregation was reckoned as numbering eight or ten thousand persons, and when he bade farewell to Boston at the end of this first visit, it is said that twenty thousand or more came to the Common to hear him. To this number the neighboring towns must have contributed liberally, for Boston itself at this time was supposed to have only eighteen thousand inhabitants. Controversy regarding the value of Whitefield's services followed his departure ; but one minister bore record that never before, " except at the time of the general earthquake," had the people been " so happily concerned about their souls," and another testified even that " negroes and boys left their rudeness." Perhaps the strongest of all witnesses to the effectiveness of Whitefield's preach- ing is Benjamin Franklin, the Boston boy. It was when he was grown a man in Philadelphia that he had the experience described with characteristic frankness in his Autobiography^ whence it is often quoted. Listen- ing to one of Whitefield's sermons, says FrankHn, " I perceived that he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and ^n^ pistoles in gold. As he 78 BOSTON proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver ; and he finish'd so admirably, that 1 empty'd my pocket wholly into the collection dish, gold and all." But this story be- longs primarily to Philadelphia. In Boston there is the testimony of a lady who heard one of Whitefield's ser- mons on jthe Com- mon. The sun had just risen. The words of the preach- er's text were " If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the utter- most parts of the sea," and his voice, George whitefield. said the hearer, "was like that of an angel when he uttered them, while his arms rose slowly from his sides with an inde- scribable grace. I should have felt no surprise to see him ascend into the air. That would have been no miracle. The miracle was rather that he remained on earth." To the readers of Boston history, the significance of the entire Whitefield episode lies not PROVINCIAL BOSTON 79 only in the marvellous power of the preacher, but also in that general concern about the soul which made the people — apparently more than all contained in Boston itself — eager to go forth and hear him. During the long term of Governor William Shirley, extending from 1741 to 1756, Whitefield paid the second and third of his five visits to Boston. Through the years covered by this governorship the provincial town may be seen in many of its most characteristic aspects. The industries of ship-building and com- merce, though steadily losing their importance as the Revolution drew nearer, throve to an extent which made Boston the chief port of North America. Energy and thrift, on sea and land, brought fortune to the merchants and busy occupation to all. The houses, gardens, dress, and modes of living bespoke widespread comfort and even a degree of luxury which did not mark the families enjoying it as rare excep- tions to the general rule. An Englishman named Bennett, who visited the town in 1740, has left abun- dant record of the pleasant impression made by many things he saw. With his aid, and that of others, one may reconstruct a surprisingly attractive social Hfe, with its afternoon promenades in the Mall on the northwest side of the Common, and its glimpses of gentlewomen who " visit, drink tea and indulge every piece of gentility to the height of the mode, and neglect the affairs of their families with as good a grace as the finest ladies in London." Yet the train- ing of New England housewives was by no means so 8o BOSTON utterly ignored as the Londoner's report might lead one to think. The fourth anniversary of a society for Promoting Industry and Frugality was memorably celebrated in 1749. "Three hundred young female spinsters, decently dressed," brought their spinning- wheels to the Common one afternoon, and plied their homely craft, " a female " at each wheel, to the accompaniment of music and the delight of many spectators. • All this seems strangely re- mote from our own day. Yet the year in which it took place is linked to the present by the very existence of one of the most familiar landmarks of Boston. In 1749 Governor Shirley laid the corner-stone of the present King's Chapel, erected outside the walls of the Episco- pal church building which had its beginning in the time of Andros. The architect of the new structure, Peter Harrison, whose work lives also in Trinity Church, Newport, and Christ Church, Cambridge, planned a spire which has not yet grown out of the sturdy tower. The one important change in the original ap- pearance of the building came with the addition of the portico in 1789. Within, as we shall see, the faith of the worshippers has changed. It is to the Epis- copal parish of Christ Church, whose building, still in use on Salem street, was erected in 1723, that we must The original Faneuil Hall. The Faneuil Hall of To-day. PROVINCIAL BOSTON 83 look for the longest continuity in Boston of forms and place of worship. To the decade in which the present King's Chapel was begun belongs the origin of another building intimately associated with the history of the town. Aside from all its practical use, Faneuil Hall has been of constant service in perpetuating one of the French Huguenot names of eighteenth-century Bos- ton, — names amongst which Brimmer, Revere, Char- don, Sigourney, and Bowdoin are also to be counted. When Peter Faneuil, a prosperous and public-spirited merchant, offered to erect a market-house, a strong local prejudice against buildings of the sort caused the grudging acceptance of the gift implied in a vote of 367 to 360. On the completion of the building one of its first uses was for a town-meeting, in March, 1742-3, immediately after the death of the donor. Then John Lovell, master of the Latin School, pro- nounced a eulogy on Peter Faneuil, and declared the building to be "incomparably the greatest benefaction , ever yet known to our Western shore." As we know it now, the hall has undergone the changes occasioned by a fire which destroyed all but the walls in 1761, and by enlargements through lengthening and adding a third story in 1805. But still the grasshopper — perhaps a nimble emblem of trade, since Peter Faneuil is said to have borrowed it from the Royal Exchange in London — serves for its weather-vane; and still the American schoolboy knows the building not as a market but as the " Cradle of Liberty." To this 84 BOSTON term he will probably cling in spite of the objection raised in the same Dealings with the Dead to which reference has already been made : " The proverbial use of the cradle has ever been to rock the baby to sleep ; and Heaven knows our old fathers made no such use of Faneuil Hall, in their early management of the bantling; for it was an ever-wakeful child, from the very moment of its first, sharp, shrill, life- cry. No benefaction of peace, however, could have done so much to make Shirley's time remembered as the conspicuous act of military prowess which connects his name with the fall of Louisburg, the French "Gibraltar" of Cape Breton. To Shirley belongs much of the credit for sending out the provincial troops which under Pepperell in 1745, with the aid of an Enghsh fleet, laid a six-weeks' siege to the distant and apparently impregnable fortress. The enterprise has not unreasonably been called " a Bos- ton-undertaking." It has also been defined as "an extraordinary piece of good luck, and nothing else." The surrender of 650 soldiers and 1300 civilians was its glorious result, of which many generations of Harvard students have had a tangible reminder in the iron cross brought from the garrison chapel at Louis- burg, and only in recent years moved from its place above the entrance to the college hbrary at Cambridge to a safer lodgment within the walls. Protestant zeal and Anglo-Saxon pride gloried ahke in the victory. Incidentally the provincial soldier learned that he PROVINCIAL BOSTON 85 could make an effective fight against foes more "civilized" than the Indians. The term of Shirley extended eleven years beyond the fall of Louisburg, until 1756. We have looked Present Entrance to Governor Shirley's Mansion, Shirley Street, Dorchester. rather upon the achievements of the time than at its inevitable troubles. The people and the governor were of course frequently at odds, but misunderstand- ings of so much more serious a nature were soon to come that we can afford to emphasize the brighter 86 BOSTON colors of this mid-century picture. Shirley's suc- cessor in office, Governor Thomas Pownall, whose rule began in 1757 and ended at his own request in 1760, made perhaps a more definite effort toward sympathy with those he came to govern. His was the foresight, unusual in a royal governor, to prophesy that the American people would eventually " grow res- tive, and disposed to throw off their dependency upon their mother country ; " and his vision of the future America was that of " an asylum one day or another to a remnant of mankind who wish and deserve to live with poHtical liberty." How near that day was to his own he did not suspect. Immediately after him began the train of circumstances which could culminate only in revolution. Provincial Boston was technically to endure fifteen years longer ; yet the changes in its thought and actions came so quickly after Pownall's withdrawal that a new chapter, under a new title, is needed for their narration. IV REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON CERTAIN places and men in all the history of the world have suddenly emerged from local into national or uni- versal significance. Through the preced- ing years the town records have been the records of town taxes and town disputes ; the citizens have appeared as candidates and voters at this and that election. Indeed they are little or noth- ing more — until, all at once, they find themselves a part of national history. It may not be for long, yet it is long enough to set them definitely apart from the men and the places which have remained merely local. For Boston the Revolutionary period — including the fifteen years leading up to the final catastrophe — was preeminently the time of this distinction. The result is that Bos- ton local history, through the sixth and seventh decades of the eighteenth century, furnishes much of the most familiar material of American history. To regard it here wholly as local or wholly as national history would be to do what has already been done excellently and often. Let us rather, for a while, look 87 NVo SeiLI^EK'GS/ Stamp Act Stamp. 88 BOSTON at some of the successive events as scenes In the lives of representative Boston men of their day. Perhaps a few of the events themselves wiU show even the more clearly for serving as the background of personal activities. In one of the first of these events the principal actor was James Otis^the place of whose burial is familiar to those of the hurrying thousands who look aside from modern Tremont Street into the Old Granary Burying-ground. In 1761 James Otis was no less a person than advocate-general of the province, then governed by Sir Francis Bernard, who had suc- ceeded Pownall the year before, and deserves special remembrance in later generations as the architect of Harvard Hall at Cambridge, and for his reputed ability to recite the whole of Shakespeare's works from mem- ory. As advocate-general it was the duty of Otis to d efend in a test case a government m easure issuing " Writs of Assistance " which enabled the customs officers to search the houses of persons suspected of smuggling. Instead of defending this law Otis resigned his post, and became the spokesman of those who undertook to prove the government's position illegal. The case was tried in February, 1761, before Thomas Hutchinson, recently created chief justice, and his four associate judges. When the King's attorney had said his say, and Oxenbridge Thacher, a Boston lawyer of high repute, had made his scholarly reply, James Otis flashed upon the scene. " Otis," said the diary of John Adams in describing the occasion, " was a flame REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 89 of fire. With a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eye into futurity, and a torrent of impet- uous eloquence, he hurried away everything before him." Taking the good old English position that a man's house is his castle, he made his plea for the true British liberties against which no act of Parliament could prevail. " I oppose that kind of power," he declared, " the exercise of which, in former periods of English history, cost one king of England his head ^ and another his throne." Here were words of a sort to which the ears of Boston men had not yet grown accustomed. But the future was in them. John Adams might well write : " Every man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against the writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition '' to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there ^he child Independence was born. " It made no great matter that Hutchinson, reserving his decision till he could receive instructions from England, adjudged the Writs of Assistance entirely legal. The speech of Otis announced the beginning of a new order, and Otis himself stepped into the full light of popular favor. Yet Otis was by no means of constant service to the American cause. His morbid and uncertain temper rendered him often a difficult inmate even of the house of his friends. From these in turn there are intima- 90 BOSTON tions that self-seeking, and the pique resulting from the appointment of Hutchinson instead of the father of Otis to the chief-justiceship, went far to determine his course of action. Other motives were even more obscure. More than once he is to be seen on the government side of points at issue. In spite of all this it was his, in town-meetings and legislature, to hold and sway the people as only an orator can. From him, at the very first, they to ok their rallying cry, ^^ no taxa - tion_j withQut representation.'* To give a country its watchwords is like writing its ballads. When, there- fore, the attack made upon Otis in 1769 by Captain Robinson, a Commissioner of Customs, resulted in the wrecking of a mind already of uneven balance, the people who had made his words their own were deeply stirred with sorrow and indignation. There were still to be times when Otis, even in public places, was him- self again. One likes to think he was most himself when he refused, after Captain Robinson's acknowledg- ment of fault and contrition, to accept the payment of damages, ^2000 sterling, awarded him by a jury. And surely there was a return of his true spirit, when, armed with a borrowed musket, he appeared amongst the American troops on the scene of the Bunker Hill fight, and, protected by the providence which cares for children, did a man's share of the long day's work. Against the unhappy variations in the course of Otis, one naturally places the consistent steadiness of \ Samuel A dams as the central figure ^f\Re volution ary_ REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 91 Boston . "As Massachusetts led the thirteen colo- nies/' Dr. James K. Hosmer has written in his biog- raphy of Samuel Adams, " the town of Boston led Massachusetts." Of the man who led Boston, the biographer further says : " Of this town of towns Samuel Adams was the son of sons. He was strangely identified with it always. He was trained in Boston schools and Harvard College. He never left the town except on the town's errands, or those of the Province of which it was the head. He had no private business after the first year of his manhood ; he was the public servant simply and solely in places large and small, — fire-ward, committee to see that chimneys were safe, tea collector, moderator of town-meeting, representa- tive. One may almost call him the creature of the town-meeting." Through these words we see him clearly as the democrat, — the man who looked to the people as the true source of authority and power. As early as 1743 when he took his Master's degree at the Harvard Commencement, the subject of his thesis was : " Whether it be Lawful to resist the Supreme Magis- trate, if the Commonwealth cannot be otherwise pre- served." What his argument was we do not know ; but it is easy enough to imagine the conclusion at which he arrived. Of all the leaders of the opposi- tion to royal encrqa chrn^pj on provinciaL rigiits , it was he who first foresaw, cer tainly as early as 1768, the inevitable separation . Through all the stirring scenes in which, with this end constantly in view, he bore a conspicuous part — in town-meeting and legislature, in 92 BOSTON the formation and guidance of the all-important Commit- tee of Correspondence — we cannot undertake to follow him. The story of one day — t he day following the " Bos- ton Massacr e " — is amply illustrative of the quality and effectiveness of his leader- ship. Two regiments of British troops, the 14th and the 29thj had been quartered in the town for a year and a half when, on the night of March 5, 1770, the friction between the soldiers and the people, represented that night by some boys and older mischief- makers, culminated in a volley of bullets from the soldiery. Three of the townspeople were killed, eight were wounded. " Such," says John Fiske, at the conclusion of his detailed description of the event, "was the famous Boston Mas- sacre. All the mildness of New England civilization is brought most strikingly before us in that trucu- lent phrase. The careless shooting of half a dozen townsmen is described by a word which historians Samuel Adams. Statue in Adams Square, by- Anne Whitney. REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 93 apply to such events as Cawnpore and the Sicilian Vespers." On the next morning the Sselectmen waited on Lieu- tenant-governor Hutchinson, acting governor since Bernard's departure in the preceding July, and declared that the troops and the people could no longer live in fRe sam^ fown. Hutchinson put them off by saymg he had no authority to order the removal of the mili- tary. Meanwhile the people had gathered in Faneuil Hall, whither the selectmen were summoned. There a committee of fifteen was appointed to repeat the demand for removal, and a general town-meeting was called for three o'clock in the afternoon. But with Hutchinson the fifteen were no more successful than the selectmen had been. He stood manfully to his guns, declaring that the power to remove the troops lay solely in General Gage, then in New York. Un- fortunately for Hutchinson, \ColonelDalrymple, the senior military officer in Boston at the time, said that^ one of the regiments could be removed if the magis- t rates strongly desired it. This was the message the committee was finally empowered to convey to the anxious town-meeting. So great a throng had come to it that Faneuil Hall, smaller than it is to-day, was inadequate, and an adjournment to the Old South Meeting-house had taken place. It was a short walk, then, that the committee had to take — from the head of King (now State) Street to the head of Milk Street. But it was a walk which Samuel Adams turned to momentous account. Hat 94 BOSTON in hand he passed, with his fellows, between the double row of townspeople overflowing from the meeting- house into the streets. Right and left as he walked, he turned to the eager citizens, and said, and said again, *^ Rnfh rppriment«^ nr none ! " For the purpose of the day it was as good a phrase as any that Otis ever coined for the currency of speech. Once within the Old South, the committee delivered its message : one regiment might go to the Castle in the harbor if the magistrates must have it so. But from all the people, crowding the floor, stairways, doors and galleries, rolled back the words of Adams, " Both regiments or none ! " This was the simple reply which the committee of seven, now chosen, had to bear back to the Lieutenant-governor, his august councillors, and the military authorities. It was only fitting that Sam Adams, having framed in the street the answer which the town-meeting gave in the meeting-house, should deliver it in the council cham- ber. And so he did — in the plainest terms. "Jf you^ or Colonel Dalrymple under you," — he ad- dressed himself to Hutchinson, — " h ave the powe r to r emove one regiment, you have the p ower to remove both; and nothing shgr t. of th eir total remo val wili~ satisfy the peopl ^" ^t- prpcpr^^p fVi p peace o^' the Prov - ince." With such argument as this, he convinced all but Hutchinson. At last the sturdy loyalist himself, persuaded by his secretary, Andrew Oliver, that further resistance was futile, yielded the point, and both regiments were ordered to the Castle. Thus it was KING, A PROCLAMATION, For fuppreffing Rebellion and Sedition. GEORGES, )HEREAS many of Our Subjefts in divers Parts of Our Colonies and Plantations in North America, mifled by dangerous and ill-defigning Men, and forgetting the Allegiance which they owe to the Power that has protefted and fuftained them, after various diforderly Afts committed in Difturbance of the Publick Peace, to the Obftruflion of lawful Commerce, and to the Opprefflon of Our loyal Subje£ls carrying on the fame, have at length proceeded to an open and avowed Rebellion, by arraying themfelves in hoftile Manner to wlthftand the Execution of the Law, and traitoroufly preparingr. ordering, and levying War againft Us; And whereas there is Reafon.to apprehend that fuch Rebellion hath been much promoted and encouraged by the traitorous Correfpondence, Counfels, and Comfort of divers wicked and dcfperatePerfons within this Realm: To the End therefore that none of Our Subjefts may negleft or violate their Duty through Ignorance thereof, or through any' Doubt of the Protedtion which the Law will afford to their Loyalty and Zeal ; We have thought fit, by and with the Advice of Our Privy Council, to iffue this Our Royal Proclamation, hereby declaring that not only all Our Officers Civil and Military are obliged to exert their utmoft Endeavours to fupprefs fuch Rebellion, and to bring the Traitors to Juftice; but that all Our Subje£ls of this Realm and the Dominions' thereunto belonging are bound by Law to be aiding and affifting.iit the SupprelHon of fuch Rebellion, and to difclofe and make known all traitorous Confpiracies and Attempts againft Us, Our Crown and Dignity; And We do accordingly ftridly charge and command all Our Officers as well Civil as Military, and all other Our obedient and loyal Subjeds, to ufe their utmoft Endeavours to withftand and fupprefs fuck Rebellion, and. to difclofe and make known all Treafbns and traitorous Confpi- racies which they fhall know to be againft Us, Our Crown and Dignity ; and for that Purpofe, that they tr'anfmit to One of Our Principal Secretaries of State, or other proper Officer, due and full Information of all Perfons who fhall be found carrying on Correfpondence with, or in any Manner or Degree aiding or abetting the Perfons now in open Arms and Rebellion againft Our Government within any of Our Colonies and Plantations in North America, in order to bring to condign Punifhment the Authors, Perpetrators, and Abettors of fuch traitorous Defigns. Given at Our Court at St. James'i, the Twenty-third Day of Augujl, One thoufand feven hundred and feventy-five, in the Fifteenth Year of Our Reign. God fave the King. LONDON: Prmted by Charla Ejre and IViUiam Sirahan, Printers to »hc King's moft Excclleni Majcfty. 1775. Broadside in possession of Boston Public Library. ^G BOSTON that the 14th and 29th regiments of his Majesty's forces won from the lips of Lord North himself the memorable nickname of the " Sam Adams Regiments." By this title they are still known in local history. In the annals of the British Army the 14th, with a record extending from the siege of Gibraltar and Culloden, through Corunna, Waterloo, and the Crimea down to South Africa, is now the " Prince of Wales's Own " ; the 29th, which fought at Ramillies, in the Peninsular campaign, and against the Boers, has become the " Worcestershire." The name of Sam Adams does not happen to appear in the army list in connection with either regiment. T he energy and power of one man in turning th e tmgedy of the /' Massacre " so quickly into a vi ctory for the people are wo rthy of all admir ation. The re- strained fairness of the town in dealing with the soldiers who fired the fatal shots is perhaps even more admi- rable. Their trial was postponed till time had cooled the immediate passions of revenge. Surely it was a high spirit of justice which brought the patriots, John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., to the legal defence of Captain Preston and his offending soldiers. Robert Treat Paine, no less allied to the patriot cause, con- ducted the prosecution. But Adams and Quincy se- cured acquittal for Preston and for all but two of his soldiers. These, convicted of manslaughter, were merely branded in the hand, and released. Happily, on this occasion the voice of Sam Adams was not heeded ; his counsel was for an earlier trial and An ASSOCIATION, PROPOSED TO THE LOYAL CITIZENS. A GKLE ABLE la the Proclamation ijfued by His. Excellency tbc Honorable Major-General JVILL I AM HOIVE, Commander in Chief of His Majejlfs Forces, (dc. ^c. ^c. WE, His Majefty's loyal Subje(n:s of the Town of Bojlon, being fehiible of the Duty incumbent on us, " to do every thing in our Power, to fupport Order and good Covcrnnient, as well as te contribute our Aid. to the internal Security of the Town ;" — N O W take this Opportunity to profefs our firm Allegiance to His Majefly, and entire Obedience to His Government and Laws. From a Difpofition to toniifpnue quiet and obedient Subjefts, we have generally neglefted. tbj:;^fcf Arms vdiile thofc of diflerenc Charaflers and Sentiments, mUlKn diligently endeavouring to improve themfelves in that A^t- Upon thcfc Principles, we have remained in, or fled to, this Town: Neither do we wifli or delign to leave it, W E confider it as bur ftrongeft Duty to contribute our Aid in Promoting the. Peace, Order and Security of the Town ; and are willing to be em- ployed, to thefe good Purpofes, in the Ways and Means fuited to our Ca- pacities. TO THAT END, we chearfully accept the OiTers of his Ex- cellency, and NOW VOLUNTARILY ASSOCIATE, for the Purpofes mentioned it\ his Proclamation ; hereby Promifing, " that fqch of us as he fhall think proper, or able to perform the Duties therein required, will be formed into Companies, as therein mentiooed: And will, to thectmofl: of our Power, faithfully perform thofe Services, ajadpun^ualiy difcharge the Trufts rcpofcd m us. And, ffiat fuch as are not able to go through thofe Duties^ will freely contribute our Proportions, according to our Abilities, to raife a Sum of Money for promoting this falutary Purpofe, to be applied to the Ufe of thofe, who arc able, in fuch Manner as the General^ or thofe he may appoint, may think proper. Broadside in Response to General Howe's Proclamation calling UPON Boston Tories to organize for Preservation of Order and Good Government. In possession of the Boston Public Library. 98 BOSTON a severer verdict. It remained for him, however, as we shall see, to speak the important word which opened the Boston Tea Party. And it was he who told the private emissary of General Gage, tempting him with promises of royal favor if he would take a less aggres- sive course : " Sir, I trust I have long since made my peace with the King of kings. No personal con- sideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of my country. Tell Governor Gage it is the advice of Samuel Adams to him, no longer to insult the feelings of an exasperated people." It was not till May of 1774 that Gage, as military governor, superseded Hutchinson, the last of the civil chief magistrates of royal appointment. As Otis and Adams stand out as representatives of the American side of the conflict, the figure of Hutchinson may fairly be regarded as typical of all that was best in the native Tory element. It is no longer a heresy in America to regard this element as justified by something other than a purblind conservatism. After a cause is lost it grows easier to see the good in those who have sup- ported it, and to give them credit for sincerity in their way of looking at things. Certainly the later American students of Revolutionary history have done Governor Hutchinson full justice as a man of honest patriotism arrayed on the side where he and some of his fellows thought the right and the best interest of the colonies were to be found. They would be ungrateful his- torians who should fail to thank him for his invaluable History of Massachusetts Bay. With the thanks must REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 99 be mingled some compassion for the small comfort his loyalty to the crown ever brought him. It was indeed a thankless task to rule a people of whom one of their descendants could say with a measure of truth : " It must be frankly admitted that if the mother country had really in right and reason any prerogative authority over us, we were not only indocile, but stiffly self-willed, refractory, and in fact rebellious." The circumstances following the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 show, perhaps better than any other, what Hutchinson, then lieutenant-governor, had to deal with in the way of popular opposition. In England it was urged, not wholly without fairness, that the people of America should assume their share of a burden of debt incurred in defending them against the French and Indians. It was not recognized that the local legislatures might have determined better than Parhament the amount of the tax and the measures for collecting it. Hutchinson himself, be it said, called his Maker to witness that he did everything in his power to prevent the passage of the obnoxious Act. Yet it was passed. The news of it reached Boston in April. By way of celebrating the birthday of the Prince of Wales in August, the " Sons of Liberty " flocked to the Liberty Tree, opposite the foot of the present Boylston Street, hanged in effigy Hutchinson's brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, distributer of stamps, and suspended beside him, in derision of the Earl of Bute, prime minister of England, an old boot from which the unmistakable symbol of head and horns lOO BOSTON The Hutchinson House, Garden Court Street, North End. peered out. Twelve days later, August 16, 1765, a mob plundered the house of Benjamin Hallowell, comptroller of customs, and when with the help of his wine-cellar they "ripened in ebriety '' — to use the Lieutenant-governor's own delightful phrase — they rushed on to the house of Hutchinson himself. " One of the best finished houses in the Province/' as a letter of Hutchinson's describes the issue of that night — " had nothing remaining but the bare walls and floor. Not content with tearing off all the wainscot and hang- ings, and splitting the door to pieces, they beat down the partition walls ; and although that alone cost them near two hours, they cut down the cupola or lanthorn, and they began to take the slate and boards from the roof, and were prevented only by the approaching day- REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON loi light from a total demolition of the building." From Governor Bernard's proclamation we learn, moreover, that all the contents of the house, wearing apparel, jewels, wine and liquors, plate, money to the amount of ^9^^ sterHng, were destroyed and stolen. In the general ruin disappeared also many valuable papers intended for use in Hutchinson's history of the prov- ince. In the winter of 1900 a great black glass bottle of unusual shape was displayed in a Boston curiosity shop as a relic of the sack of Hutchinson's house. The bottle — if it was what it pretended to be — had sur- vived one hundred and thirty-five years. The spirits it once contained, and the still more precious docu- ments and manuscripts of their common owner, pre- sumably shared in 1765 the lot of perishable things. It was of no practical service to Hutchinson that on the day after his house was destroyed the better element of the town expressed itself forcibly in town- meeting in condemnation of the outrage, or that the Stamp Act was subsequently repealed, to the great delight of the people both in Boston and in London. It mattered not that Franklin, by securing and giving forth private letters which Hutchinson had written to England against the popular cause, brought upon him- self in London the bitterest charges of unscrupulous dealings. In the eyes of his own people Hutchinson was made by every circumstance to appear a traitor. After General Gage, supported by his army, became mihtary governor in May of 1774, the last of the civil magistrates sailed away to England, on the first of I02 BOSTON June, regarding himself as an exile. In the mother- country he wrote the pathetic words, " I had rather die in a little country farmhouse in New England than in the best nobleman's seat in Old England, and have therefore given no ear to any proposal of settling here." Yet in Old England he died, homesick and shattered, three years before the Revolution of which he had tried to check the beginnings was ended^ To carry to completeness our plan of looking at separate personages of the Revolutionary period, in Boston, a long gallery even of partial portraits would be required. Tories and patriots with equal claims to New England inheritances, would face each other now as of old. On the one side of the wall John Adams, shrewd and effective, Josiah Quincy, Jr., and Joseph Warren, the young impulsive spokesman of a nation waiting to be born, would look across at such loyal " prerogative men " as Timothy Ruggles and Andrew Oliver on the other. The distinguished form and face of John Hancock, whose wealth and personal grace made him everywhere a commanding figure, ready at the proper moment to write his name where all subse- quent generations must read it, would stand forth conspicuous. Others, great and small, would take their historic places in the picturesque assemblage. But in the perspective of great events, the person becomes of smaller consequence than the thing with which he had to do. Thus for a time Boston itself becomes the central figure of the story. The YCoiajpittee of Correspondence, proposed by REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 103 Samuel Adams in November of 1772, and immedi- ately created by the town-meeting, was e ssentiallythe ex pression, of the town spirit . Berore long indeed it "Became the local government, taking the empty place of the chartered authorities thrust aside in the general upheaval. Its chief service, however, like that of the similar Committee of the Massachusetts Assembly, was to keep the other towns of the province and the other provinces informed of the progress of the strug- gle between the crown and its New England subjects. The importance of the whole network of Committees of Correspondence in placing the scattered resistance of the colonies upon a common ground, and in prepar- ing the way for the Continental Congress has never yet been overrated by the historians who have treated the subject in detail. As a town, also, Boston found itself called upon to deal with the difficult problems presented by the harm- less commodity of tea. Among the articles taxed by the Townshend Revenue Bill, passed by ParHament in 1767, was tea. There appeared no better way to avoid paying these taxes than to refrain from buying and using the articles taxed. Non-importation agreements were so general and so faithfully fulfilled that British commerce began to feel their baleful effect. The w^ear- ing of black for mourning was abandoned because black cloth was imported. That there might be more wool for home manufacture of clothing, lambs were spared, and the people ate mutton or went without the flesh of sheep. With the hope of mending matters Lord fViLLJAM JACKS O N, r^ J M PORT E R'.'xt the B RAZE N HEAD, ; North Side f/thc TOWN-HOUSE/ and Oppofifc the Toizm-Punip^ in •■ Coni'hilly B O S T O N. ; It is delircd that the Soxs an.- DAiciiTERs of L I B E RTj\ would not buy any one th: hin\ h)r m lb doing the)' will br , Difgracc upon ^/vA^yf/wV^, and tn.-- . Poficnfy^ tor (vcr and cva\ AMKN -^ ' ■' • ■ > " Broadside in possession of the Boston Public Library. REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 105 North proposed in 1769, and carried out in 1770, a plan to remove the detested taxes — on everything but tea. To abandon that would have been to admit the possibility that the principle for which the colonists were standing out was right. That the people of Boston were contending for a principle may be inferred from the estimate that in 1768 fifteen hundred families out of the two thousan.d^n the town had totally give n up the use of tea. The most patriotic palate could hardly have found a pleasing substitute in the " Liberty Tea" made from the leaves of the four-leaved loose- strife, basted with the juice from the boiled stalks of the same plant, and dried in an oven. Yet women, young and old, were as ready as the men to register themselves on signed agreements as total abstainers from the more grateful cup. When even the powerful East India Company found itself embarrassed by an excess of unsold tea in its English storehouses, its influence was brought to bear upon Parliarnent, jiid_2ermission was granted in 1773 for the export of tea to America without thejpaj^ment of duties in KngTand. THus^lt was hoped, the price could be made so low in the colonies that the tempta- tion to buy could not be resisted. Yet this was neither the first nor the last time that English authorities have failed to realize how truly the British quality of per- sistence had come to the new world with its settlers. Informed that tea-ships were on the way to Boston, and that tea commissioners or consignees had been ap- pointed to receive their contents, the people promptly T06 BOSTON and squarely faced the problem before them. The tea commissioners were called upon to resign, and refused. The owner and the captain of the first vessel to arrive, November 28, 1773, were told that her entry at the custom-house would be made at their peril. A few days later two other ships ap- peared. The town-meeting, directed by the Committee of Correspondence, was deter- mined that the tea should go back, and that without paying a penny of duty. Only with clear ance papers could the ves^ Francis Rotch, Owner of Tea-ship Dartmouth. Silhouette in possession of the Bostonian Society. sers_JegallyLjeave Boston har- bor an d enter an Englis h port. The collector of customs re- fused l-hpqp papers^ nor y^nnlri Governor Hutchinson grant the pass which would have Furthermore the con- permitted the vessels to sail tents oT the ships, if not discharged within twenty days of arrival, were liable to confiscation. If ever men were between the devil and the deep sea, the con- signees and masters of the tea-ships must have felt themselves in such a plight. On the afternoon of the 1 6th of December the Old South Meeting-house held what it could of the crowd of seven thousand which had gathered from town and country. Before the speeches of Samuel Adams, Quincy, and others were REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 107 ended, a few candles were lighted in the darkening building. At six the owner of the ship Dartmouth entered and announced the Governor's final refusal to permit the vessel to sail. From that moment the working-out of a carefully planned programme was ap- parent. " This meeting can do no more to save the country," said Adams. A war-whoop sounded from the porch, and a band of perhaps fifty men dressed as Indians and known to history as "the Mohawks " hurried from the meeting-house to Griffin's (afterwards Liverpool) Wharf, where the tea-ships lay. ..Jffixbin three hours 342 chests of tea were thrown overboard without noise or opposition All the scenes of the strange little drama Tiad been so well arranged that when the play was done actors and spectators returned to their homes as soberly as if they had taken part in nothing more theatric than a Thursday lecture. But Paul Revere rode fast with the news of it to New York and Philadelphia, which shared the joy of Boston that since the law^ had served the people's purpose so poorly, they had taken it into their own hands with a dignity and eff^ectiveness that left little to be wished. If the whole tea affair best illustrates the manner of Boston in dealing with its problems, the immediate action of the British government shoVs no less clearly how it sought to disciphne its troublesome dependency. In j[;he spring of 1774 Parliame nt passed the Boston^ Port Bill whereby all privileg esjjLf Boston as a. seapori: were annulled. To say nothing of distant commerce. io8 BOSTON every communication by water, even with Charlestown and Dorchester, was cut off. The seat of government was moved to Salem, and Marblehead became the port of entry for the district. Swift on the heels of the Port Bill came the Regulation Acts, providing for the appointment by King or Governor of local officers hitherto elected, abolishing town-meetings except under specific conditions, transferring to Nova Scotia or Eng- land the trial of officials charged with capital offences, and quartering troops on the towns of the province. It is not surprising that General Gage, fresh in the post of military governor, found the laws hard to enforce — even with royal troops behind him. " We were not the revolutionists," declared the orator of the day at Lexington a century after the battle. " The King and Parliament were the ^Revo- lutionists. They were the radical innovators. We were the conservators of existing institutions." The old form of local government gone, the Committee of Correspondence stood ready to fill the gap. How the people bore their part under the new order Lord Percy, stationed in Boston under General Gage, clearly saw. " They say," he wrote home to England, " that since the town-meetings are forbid by the act, they shall not hold them ; but as they do not see any mention made of county meetings, they shall hold them for the future. They therefore go a mile o ut o f town^ do just the same business there they formerly did in Boston^ call it a county meetings and so elu de^ the act ." Thus at Dedham and Milton, in Septem- Christ Church, Salem Street. REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON III ber of 1774, were passed the Suffolk Resolves, a docu- ment looking as frankly toward a broken allegiance — broken first, it held, through the actions of Parlia- ment — as the later Declaration of Independence itself. By that time there was a Continental Congress which could receive with hearty approval these Resolves, car- ried to Philadelphia by the indefatigable Paul Revere. In the next month there was a Provincial Congress of Massa- chusetts, preparing definitely for military defence, and urg- ing the towns to form compa- nies of Minute Men. The fire was laid ; only fiint and tinder were needed to light \t/f For the supply of additional fuel — there was the increase and the conduct of the British troops stationed in Boston. The Puritan town was the last place in which, for the peace of its inhabitants, flagrant camp followers from England should have appeared. Furthermore, " on Sundays," says John Fiske, " the soldiers would race horses on the Common, or play Yankee Doodle just outside the church-doors during services." In a contemporary record one may read of the fate of an honest countryman who came from Billerica into Boston in March of 1775. ^ British soldier sold him a worthless gun. Then the country- Paul Revere. Bust by Robert Kraus. 112 BOSTON man was seized for breaking the law against trading with soldiers. The next morning he was stripped, tarred, and feathered. With the drum and fifes of the 47th Regiment playing Yankee Doodle, a number of officers, sailors, and negroes thereupon paraded him through the principal streets as a spectacle, labelled "American Liberty, or a Specimen of Democracy." All this may have been excellent fooling for his Majesty's soldiery, but at the same time it was pre- cisely the kind of kindling which added brightness to the fires of Lexington and Bunker Hill. The lighting of these fires, with flint-lock and powder, belongs more than almost any other matters of local record in America, to national history. So far as Boston had to do with the embattled farmers of Middlesex, it is perhaps enough that she sent forth Paul Revere to prepare them for Lord Percy's troops which also issued from Boston and so rapidly re- turned to it. Once safely back in the town, they were to remain there, through the vigilance of their American besiegers, for eleven long months after the battle of Lexington ; and the people of Boston, mili- tary and civilian, must still be our chief concern. Of course the prime exploit of the military portion of the population was the costly battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown, two months after Lexington. General Burgoyne's private report of the " victory " to a friend in England sounds almost prophetic of a South African despatch of 1900. Of the list of killed and wounded he said, " If fairly given, it amounts to no less than REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 113 ninety-two officers, many of them an irreparable loss — a melancholy disproportion to the number of private soldiers." The victory won the British a square mile of land in Charlestown ; but it was not of the sort to be "followed up." Indeed it did not even raise the PROSPECT HILL. Seven Dollars a Month. — — IL Frefh Provifions, and in Plenty. — — III. Health. _ w. _ _ IV. Freedom, Eafe, Affluence and a good Farm. BUNKER'S HILL. I. Three Pence a Day. '., II. Rotten Salt Pork. - III. The Scurvy. IV. Slaveiy, Beggary and Want. Handbill circulated by American Sentries and the Wind in the BRITISH Lines at Charlestown Neck. siege. Nor could it have brought either to the Americans or to the British within the town any sense of security in their situation. The Americans whose sympathies were with the army of which Washington, as commander-in-chief of the Continental forces, became the head at Cambridge, July 5, 1775, found themselves in perhaps the most difficult situation of all. In their old homes, cut off from their friends without, they were amongst strangers and enemies. Naturally many of them wished to leave the town, even at the loss of treasured posses- sions ; and terms to this end were made with General Gage. But the civilian Tories of Boston — and the soldiers, too, it may be supposed — felt safer from bombardment while the place was known to shelter 114 BOSTON General Gage's Headquarters, Hull Street, North End. many friends of the American cause. Accordingly Gage's terms for their departure were so modified as to make egress a most difficult matter. In spite of all the obstacles, however, it is estimated that before the end of June not far from twelve thousand persons had managed to quit the beleaguered town. A census taken by Gage's order in July, showed that the remain- ing civilians numbered 6573, and the soldiery 13,500. For all these, and for the Tories from without, who sought and won admission within the lines of siege, bitter times were in store. The question of food supply was vital enough. Beyond what the promontory itself could afford, REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 115 reliance had to be placed upon seizures from the har- bor islands and the arrivals of supply ships fortunate enough to escape the Yankee sailors lying in wait in Massachusetts Bay. In May came one of the disas- trous fires from which Boston has periodically suffered. In November still another of the plagues of old Boston appeared, — an epidemic of smallpox. Scantily pre- pared for a New England winter, hundreds of the poorer people were banished by military order to Chelsea and Point Shirley. The good people left in the town had the misery of seeing their houses of worship desecrated or destroyed. One was used as a stable ; two became barracks, and two storehouses for provisions. Another, torn down, with a hundred wooden dwelling-houses, met the fate of fire-wood. The Old South went the way of a riding-school for dragoons, and in Timothy Newell's diary it is recorded that " the beautiful carved pew with the silk furniture of Deacon Hubbard's was taken down and carried to 's house by an officer and made a hog-stye." Dear as the churches in the eyes of the people was the Liberty Tree. Its fame had spread so far that even in England a friend of the colonies, dying at about this time, left a will devising a comfortable fortune to two persons of his acquaintance if they would surely bury his body in the shadow of the Tree. Through- out the ten years since Andrew Oliver's effigy had hung from its branches, it had been the rallying-point of Liberty. It had become a symbol — Hke the mace to Cromwell, the Bastille to the mob of Paris — and ii6 BOSTON was doomed. In August of 1775 a party of British soldiers proceeded to do away with it. " After a long spell of laughing and grinning, sweating and swear- ing, and foaming with malice diabolical" — wrote an American journalist of the time — "they cut down a tree, because it bore the name of liberty." In the record a week later that one of the soldiers " in attempt- ing to dismantle it of one of its branches, fell on the pavement, by which he was instantly killed," the note of triumph is not hard to detect. It were hard-hearted, however, to grudge the soldiers of General Gage all their diversions. The Constitu- tional Gazette of October i, 1775, quoted the saying that his army was then divided into three companies : " the first company is under ground ; the second is above ground ; the third is in the hospital ; and the general has received express orders from home for the second and third companies to march and follow the first." If the true plight of the men was even suggested by this hyperbole, surely the officers had need of all such cheer as the place could afford. It may be that some of them took comfort in the song they sang about the wife the "Yankee king" had married, after eluding capture on the night of the march to Lexington and making his way to the Conti- nental Congress in Philadelphia : — *' Madam Hancock dreamt a dream : ^ She dreamt she wanted something ; She dreamt she wanted a Yankee king. To crown with a pumpkin." REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 117 For the more definite entertainment of the officers the Tory ladles in Boston did what they could. Dances and assemblies were held in the Concert Hall ; and the very cradle of liberty — Faneuil Hall itself — was devoted to amateur theatricals acted by officers and the less prudish of the ladies. General Burgoyne, who with CHnton and Howe had come to the rehef of Gage in the early days of the siege, directed a series of these performances in the autumn, and wrote pro- logue and epilogue in verse for the tragedy of Zara. On a January evening of 1776, when Gage had been recalled and Howe had held the command for three months, a farce, The Blockade of Boston^ was pre- sented at Faneuil Hall. Howe was one of the audi- ence amused by the appearance on the stage of a caricatured Washington, bearing a rusty sword and attended by a grotesque squire. While these two figures held the boards, a sergeant burst into the hall shouting, " The Yankees are attacking our works on Bunker's Hill." Those who took the interruption for a part of the play were soon undeceived by the sharp command of Howe, " Officers, to your alarm posts ! " With the crowding of the doors, the shriek- ing and fainting of women, the performance came to a sudden end ; and over in Charlestown a glow of fire showed where some Yankee soldiers had succeeded in burning a few houses, and in capturing five and killing one of their enemies. The Blockade of Boston was a bit of realism in advance of its time. While these by-plays of war were going forward. ii8 BOSTON Washington at Cambridge, and Howe in Boston, were struggling with its problems on a large scale. Each felt the weakness of his position, and feared assault from the other. Washington's problem lay in organ- izing what he called his " army of undisciplined hus- bandmen," and in the poverty of his ammunition. When complaints of inaction arose, he could not even silence them, for fear of revealing his true weakness. For Howe the problem was in part geographical and in part — like Washington's — a matter of supplies. For him and for his predecessor the home government could or would do much less than hope and necessity demanded. So the months dragged on, neither com- mander caring or daring to make the first important move. Unimportant skirmishes were frequent throughout the course of the siege. But it was not till the night of the 4th of March, 1776, that Washington could carry out his cherished, hazardous plan of intrenching guns and troops on Dorchester Heights — now South Boston — commanding the harbor and a vulnerable part of the town. The movement, which the British themselves might have achieved more easily, took Howe completely by surprise. . When he woke on the morning of March 5, the anniversary of the " Massacre" of 1770, it was plain that if the Heights could not be wrested from Washington's men, Boston must be abandoned. A large detachment of British troops embarked before nightfall to drive the Conti- nentals from their place of vantage. This time, how- REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 119 ever, the winds which had destroyed an armada fought against England — and while the British boats were driven whither they would not, the Americans gained time to fortify their new posi- tion against all possibilities of capture. The inevitable end of the British occupa- tion of Boston was clearly in sight. It was not wholly a simple matter for Washington and Howe to arrive at the tacit understanding that if his Maj- esty's troops would quietly withdraw from the town there would be no bombard- ment. Direct communication between the two generals was impossible when one of them would address the other by no military title conferred by an upstart congress, and that other, the victor, was, by the law he recognized, no longer plain Mr. Wash- ington. W^hen a British offi- cer afterward suggested that " George Washington, etc., etc., etc.," would include everything^ Washington shrewdly objected that it might no less truly include anything. Nevertheless it was Tower on Dorchester Heights, commemorating the evacu- ATION OF Boston. I20 BOSTON indirectly arranged that if the British would leave the town intact, they might do so unharmed. " It was not like breaking up a camp, where every man knows his duty," wrote one who took part in the evacuation ; " it was like departing your country, with your wives, your servants, your household furniture, and all your incumbrances." To these impedimenta the large number of Tory citizens, with everything to lose if they or their possessions should be left behind, added much. Transports which should have carried the King's goods were filled with their household wares. Aside from all this lifeless freight, there were the mili- tary, nearly nine thousand in number, and eleven hun- dred Tories and their families to be carried away in the seventy-eight available ships and transports. The sight of Washington's batteries kept reminding them all that they were not to loiter. Cannon and stores which could not be embarked must not be left to enrich the Continentals. Even General Gage's chariot was tipped off the end of a wharf into the harbor. Confusion indescribable was everywhere. Yet in twelve days the sorry fleet set sail for Hahfax. To this day the good Bostonian, seeing the flags flying each 17th of March, tells his children that it is not the feast of Saint Patrick, but the final departure of British troops from Boston streets and Common, which has this public sign. There was little to relieve the gloom of the British departure — and much to temper the joy of the Ameri- can recovery. The deserted town, where the entering REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 121 soldiers were followed before long by the civilians, had its story clearly written on its face. On every side was havoc. Disease was in the air. Torture-traps and obstacles stood in the way of the first comers. There were sorrowful reunions of families, which now fell to counting their losses — of property and lives. When Washington himself came over from Dorchester in a boat on the i8thj and dined with James Bowdoin, Jr., we are told that no greater luxury could be set before him than a piece of salted beef. Yet the first great vic- tory was won. If Bos- ton for fifteen years had been the chief thorn in the side of the English colonial authorities, she had paid full measure for the distinction, and had earned the immunity from the uses of a battleground which she enjoyed through all the remainder of the war. When the news of the Declaration of Independence reached Boston, on July i8, the town sheriff read the instrument to the assembled people. Then many such emblems of royalty as the arms from the Town House were brought together and publicly burned. The next Gold Medal commemorating Washing- ton's Victory. In possession of the Boston Public Library. 122 BOSTON year the Fourth of July itself was celebrated with a parade, a sermon before the Legislature, a public dinner, and much cannonading. In the summer of 1778 a French fleet came into the harbor, and though the officers received less attention than Mrs. John Adams thought their due. General Heath, command- ing the American troops stationed at Boston, did what was fitting, and John Hancock gave a " superb ball " in their honor at Concert Hall. The building and fitting out of ships, and the arrival from time to time of British prizes taken by Yankee vessels, marked the gradual return of Boston to its place as the chief sea- port of the new country struggling into existence. But the war itself was elsewhere. To its conduct by Congress, at sea and in the field, Boston gave of its leaders — the Adamses, Hancock, and others — and of its sailors and soldiers. Its people were ready to rejoice at the good tidings of the surrender of Corn- wallis. A sentence of Samuel Breck's brings back the scene on the Common, when " a huge pyramid of cord-wood, fifty feet high, was piled up in the middle of the green and fired at night." With the dying of this fire Revolutionary Boston passes out of view. In its place we see the capital town, no longer of colony or province, but of Massachusetts, ready to take its place in the sisterhood of sovereign states. FROM TOWN TO CITY NO reader of Hawthorne needs to be reminded of the haunt- ing picture of" Howe's Masquerade," in which " the funeral procession of royal authority in New England " passes down the steps of the Prov- ince House into the dark- ness of the night. It is one of those scenes, made for and by the pen of Hawthorne, in which the colors of imagination paint essential truths. With the passing of the royal authority the old order underwent its final change. In the train of the royal authority departed from Boston, as we have seen, more than a thousand Tories, the men and women, in many instances, who had been the foremost persons of the place. The rank and file of the democracy in revolt remained, and, with its handful of leaders, became the democracy in control. But the places hitherto filled by men of wealth and influence were not to stand vacant. The aristocracy of the New England towns in general, unlike that of 123 John Hancock's Tea-kettle and Money Trunk. In possession of the Bostonian Society. 124 BOSTON Boston, had been for the most part in opposition to the crown. From the country, then, came a new ele- ment of leadership. The confiscated houses of the royalist refugees were in the market, at low prices, and soon were occupied by famihes whose names have long been a part of Boston history. To quote di- rectly Mr. Lodge's catalogue of this peaceful invasion, there were " the Adamses and Fisher Ames of Nor- folk, the Prescotts from Middlesex, and the. Sullivans from New Hampshire ; while from Essex, most pro- lific of all, came the Parsonses, Pickerings, Lees, Jacksons, Cabots, Lowells, Grays, and Elbridge Gerry." Thus for all that Boston lost in the de- parture of its Tory gentry, it gained perhaps more in this accession of new blood, racier of the soil, and quickening the life of the larger town with all the sturdy New England standards of a stock which had flourished in conditions calling for the best strength of manhood. But the newcomers did not all appear immediately upon the scene, and for the management of town and state affairs the people turned instinctively to their old leaders. The local government, interrupted by the King's troops, returned at once to the hands of the town-meeting. In 1779, four years before the treaty of peace was signed, a convention met in Boston to form a state government for Massachusetts. Its pro- visions were adopted at the beginning of 1780, and John Hancock, by far the most conspicuous figure of the town and the state, was chosen the first governor. FROM TOWN TO CITY 125 From this time until his death in 1793, excepting for the two years of 1785 and 1786, he was annually re- elected to the governorship. By his side, as lieuten- ant-governor stood, as of old, that tried servant of the people, Samuel Adams, who succeeded him in the chief magistracy. Through the daily life of John Hancock one may gain many glimpses of the life of Boston in his day. By the very law of contrasts John Adams's disapproval of Hancock's lavish entertainments, and the resulting estrangement between the two friends, indicate the general simplicity of living. The common friend who brought them together again found it necessary to defend Hancock's mode of life in print as " impor- tant to public cheerfulness." Against the reputed charge of John Adams that Hancock was but an "empty barrel," Mr. Lodge arrays the significant words : " He stands out with a fine show of lace and velvet and dramatic gout, a real aristocrat, shining and resplendent against the cold gray background of every-day life in the Boston of the days after the Revolution, when the gay official society of the Prov- ince had been swept away." There is indeed a win- ning picturesqueness in the figure of the handsome host borne by attendants into the dining hall large enough for fifty or sixty guests, and reproving the servant who drops a cut-glass epergne : " James, break as much as you please, but don't make such a con- founded noise about it." Of the "dramatic gout," two episodes in the pubhc 126 BOSTON career of Hancock yield sufficient illustration. In the Life of Josiah ^incy by his son Edmund, it is related that Hancock made his affliction "an excuse for doing as he pleased in political as well as social life. Thus, when the adoption of the Federal Constitution hung doubtful in the balance in the Massachusetts convention of 1788, the gout was made the convenient reason for his staying away, until he was made to see that his indecision must cease, and he interfere to secure the ratification. My father was in the gallery of the Old South Church at the time, and used to describe how Hancock, wrapt in flannels, was borne in men's arms up the broad aisle, when he made the speech which caused the Constitution to be accepted by nineteen majority." It is worth while to note in passing, the influence which brought Samuel Adams to the support of the Federal Constitution, of which at first he was an opponent. Paul Revere and other representatives of the Boston mechanics bore him the report of an enthusiastic meeting of their fellows in favor of the federal scheme. The voice of the people was for him the voice to heed — and thus his influence was secured for the winning side. It was the year after Massachusetts gave her vote for the Federal Constitution, that is, in 1789, that Washington paid his memorable visit to Boston ; and it was then that Hancock made a second effective use of his gout. At the town line vv^here Washington was received, the selectmen and the sheriff representing the invalid governor quarrelled over the control of the pro- The Hancock House, Beacon Street. FROM TOWN TO CITY 129 cession. Hancock's man, after threatening " to make a hole through " certain officials of the town, had his way. The resulting delay gave many persons what was called a " Washington cold." The first Presi- dent's progress through the street, which in different parts was called Orange, Newbury, and Marlborough, and from that time forth has borne the single name of Washington, was indeed triumphal. Crowds of cheer- ing people lined the way, near the end of which an elaborate arch of welcome was erected. At the State House Washington dismounted from his white charger, and took his place on a platform while a chorus sta- tioned in the arch near at hand sang an ode in his praise. When the shouting and the tumult died, where was Hancock? Holding himself to be chief of the local state, he felt that it was Washington's place as a visitor from abroad to come and pay him his respects — and so he waited. On the other hand Washington had never lacked a sense of his own dignity, and justly regarding the state of Massachu- setts as inferior to the Union of which he was presi- dent, he also waited. For a while it looked as if the visit so brilliantly begun might come to an uncomfort- able end. Just here it was that the gout was made to save the situation. There were those indeed who said that the state of Hancock's health was an all-sufficient excuse for his failure to greet the President. The com- mon belief, however, was, and is, that Hancock soon saw himself to be in the wrong, and the next day lay- ing hold on the best available excuse, had himself K ijo BOSTON elaborately swathed and borne on the shoulders of attendants to Washington's lodgings, where he ex- plained away the apparent incivility to the satisfaction of all concerned. The President's visit, after this episode, went prosperously forward, and served to strengthen the popular loyalty to the federal party of which he was the acknowledged head. It is told of Hancock on the occasion of another distinguished visit — that of the French fleet of which he entertained the officers — that needing more milk than his own cows could supply, he gave orders for the milking of all the cows on the Common, regardless of ownership. The absence of all protest against such a proceeding bespoke an almost apostolic community of spirit and property. The people may well have re- joiced to feel themselves represented by their Governor and his lady, both at their own mansion and at the return entertainment on the flagship of the fleet. From the gentlemen of the French navy Hancock could turn with pleasure to one Balch, a Boston hatter, whose shop was a favorite lounging-place. Here the Governor bandied jokes with the hatter and his friends, and with mock seriousness discussed the puzzhng prob- lems of his administration. One of the people again he seems to be while paying his fine for violating the Sunday law by driving not directly home from church. Even so late as the time of Hancock's governorship — in the closing years of the eighteenth century — the Sunday customs retained much of their Puritanic rigor. To recall them is to remind ourselves of one FROM TOWN TO CITY 131 of the most conspicuous social changes wrought by the century that followed. Under the laws which caused Hancock's arrest, it was not permitted to drive a hackney coach in or out of Boston between the Sunday hours of midnight and sunset without a warrant from a Justice of the Peace ; and during the hours of service no vehicle in the town was allowed to move faster than a walk. The enforce- ment in 1802 of the law against Sabbath-breakers for bathing at the foot of the Common called forth some verses in the Centinel, which suggest that everybody in the town was not of one way of thinking : — **In Superstition's days, 'tis said. Hens laid two eggs on Monday y Because a hen would lose her head That laid an egg on Sunday. Now our wise rulers and the law Say none shall wash on Sunday ; So Boston folks must dirty go. And wash them twice on Monday." Outside of Boston this Sunday severity was prob- ably even greater than in the town itself. In Quincy, at the time of Lafayette's visit, when nearly a quarter of the nineteenth century was spent, the people stood silent as the beloved guest drove through the streets on Sunday ; decorum forbade a single cheer. When Samuel Breck in 179 1 was called upon to meet his father one Sunday in Worcester, he anticipated trouble on the journey, "and determined" — as his RecoUec- 132 BOSTON tions say — "to try what could be done under the assumed character of a Frenchman. Having a letter to deliver at the tavern nearest to the meeting-house, and to which I knew I should be sent in case of arrest, I affected not to understand English when I gave in the letter. The house of worship stood upon a hill, at the foot of which I saw the congregation descend- ing. In the very front came the deacon on horseback, ^ with a long staff in his hands and his wife on a piUion behind. He ordered me to stop, and with a magis- terial air inquired why I travelled on the Lord's Day. I answered him in French, upon which he raised his voice to a pitch of authoritative anger and repeated his question. I replied by a string of French words and a shrug of the shoulders, significative of my ignorance of his question ; when, finding himself per- plexed, he motioned to me to go about my business." Less ingenuity was displayed by the judges of the Massachusetts court, travelling with the Attorney- General through the district of Maine before it was a state. To keep a court appointment these interpreters of the law were forced to ignore the statute against Sunday travel. Their train of carriages climbed the hill leading to the Freeport meeting-house while the good people of the village were within. The eyes of the warden, however, were alert, and the Sabbath- breakers found themselves promptly called to account. If they had heeded this officer, the matter might have ended there. But not so ; they drove on, and in due season the grand jury of Massachusetts, at the instance FROM TOWN TO CITY "^33 of the Freeport people, indicted them for their offence. It was only after a petition from the judges to the Legislature, and a full measure of public amusement, that the case was abandoned. For a contrast with present conditions correspond- ing to that which the Sunday customs afforded, we have to look at the beginnings of the drama in Boston. As early as 1750 "An Act to Prevent Stage Plays and other Theatrical entertainments " gave expression to the public sentiment which assured its enforcement. After the Revolution this law was re- enacted, in 1784. But the British officers who walked the boards of Faneuil Hall were not far in advance of a general interest in the theatre. A town-meeting in 1 79 1, influenced by men of enlightened progress, called upon the Legislature to repeal the existing law. The Legislature refused — and in defiance of the statute the lovers of the drama proceeded to erect a stage and to open what they called the "New Exhibition Room " in Board Alley, now Hawley Street. Plays were ad- vertised as " moral lectures," illustrating this or that vice or virtue. Otway's Venice Preserved appeared as such a lecture in five parts, "in which the dreadful effects of conspiracy will be exemplified." To make sure, a little later, that the point of Macbeth should not be missed, it was introduced by "A Dialogue on the Horrid Crime of Murder, by Mr. and Mrs. Smith," Even such precautions, however, did not protect the people of the new playhouse from the consequences of defying the law. Governor Hancock 134 BOSTON called the matter to the attention of the General Court, and on a night of December, 1792, a sheriff with a warrant for the arrest of one of the actors, Harper by- name, suddenly appeared among the dramatis persons of the School for Scandal, The performance came to a sudden end, though the house could not be closed till a portrait of the Governor had been pulled down and trampled under foot by the young men of the audience who knew Hancock's attitude toward the theatre. " Late that same evening," to quote from Mr. Amory's Life of Hancock's Attorney-General, James Sullivan, " the governor was seated in his parlor surrounded by. several gentlemen engaged in discuss- ing the subject of the arrest, when a noise in the hall attracted their attention. Upon opening the door, he found a crowd of persons, many of whom were sailors, who in reply to his inquiry as to the object of their visit, said that they came to know if it was his honor's wish that the playhouse should be pulled down." From such a course the Governor wisely dissuaded them. The next day it appeared clearly that the townspeople in general were not such conservatives as these seafaring men, for the dismissal of Harper after the hearing at Faneuil Hall, where it was argued that the warrant for his arrest was illegal, called forth enthusiastic applause. Stoutly arrayed with Hancock against the repeal of the law was Samuel Adams, who " thanked God," when Harrison Gray Otis took the same side of the controversy, " that there was one young man willing to step forth in the good old cause FROM TOWN TO CITY ^3S of morality and religion." Here, however, was a conservative cause which was doomed. Through the governorship of Adams, following Hancock's death in 1793, the players had much to contend with. Yet it was in 1794 that the first true theatre in Boston, built The Federal Street Theatre, Corner of Federal and Franklin STREETS. on Federal Street from a classic design by Bulfinch, was opened ; and by degrees from that time forth the prohibitory law passed through the stages of dead letter to repeal. It was this Federal Street Theatre in its early days which followed the significant prac- tice of closing its doors on the evening of the regular week-day service in the Boston churches. It may have been by such means that the local theatre took the first steps toward winning its place somewhat unusually near the heart of the people. But changes came, and have always come, slowly in Boston. The eighteenth century is said to have passed before the traces of the siege were entirely removed. 136 BOSTON Meanwhile the energy and caution characteristic of the people were building a sure prosperity, to which a dignified local atmosphere gave a suitable background. It is usual to look for this dignity in the higher places, but signs of a sturdy independence pervading all classes of society are not wanting. There is indeed a world of suggestion in an incident related by William Tudor in his shrewd Letters from the Eastern States^ published in 1820: "A few years ago, at the parade of the artillery election, which takes place on the common in Boston, some confusion took place as the close of the procession was entering the ground appropriated to the ceremony. The crowd was pressing very hard at the entrance, and the bar was put down before all the representatives had got in. Some of these called out to the officer who had charge of the passage, in a tone expressive of their claim to admission, IVe are representatives I A man among the crowd immediately vociferated, in the same tone. We are the people them- selves I " The joining of this spirit with a recognition of authority and leadership in those to whom they justly belonged augured well for the development of the town in the nineteenth century. In the more prosperous houses the formalities of life were carefully observed. Dress, furniture, and the table received their full share of attention, — though perhaps not that more abundant share which character- ized cities farther to the south. The spreading com- merce of the port brought, with furnishings and usages from foreign ports, a healthy modification of local FROM TOWN TO CITY 137 habits. It savors perhaps quite as much of the time as of the place to find that in a representative family at the end of the eighteenth century the children were always expected to use the words " honored papa " ^ and " honored mamma " in addressing their parents. There is a strongly local tint, however, in the little picture of 1806 and thereabouts which Dr. Hale has recently reproduced. It reveals Colonel Perkins, Harrison Gray Otis, William (" Billy ") Gray, and other leaders of commerce and affairs, going home from their offices to an eight o'clock breakfast, carry- ing on their arms the baskets filled at the Faneuil Hall market with provisions for a one o'clock dinner. The informality of such a custom finds its balance in the stately notice sent near the end of the old century to delinquent tax-payers : " The Town Treasurer pre- sents his most respectful compliments to those citizens , who have tax-bills unpaid, and requests the favor of them to pay the same to the collectors immediately, as he has large drafts from the Selectmen and Overseers of the Poor in favor of mechanics, schoolmasters, and others, to whom, especially at the present season, money would be very acceptable." When such urbanity pervades a tax-bill, we may suspect that it stands for something in the life of the town to which the tax is due. An academic influence so near and pervasive as that of Harvard College could not but make itself felt at all stages of Boston history. In the years just before and after 1800 there were important outward evidences 138 BOSTON of this influence. It was a valuable and surely an academic impulse which led to the founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society, incorporated in 1794. To express the consciousness of local existence is for a town what the expression of one*s individuality is to a man. In its proper work the Historical Society has The Tontine Crescent, Franklin Street. certainly exercised this function. In its very dwelling- places it has typified the development of Boston. What the Fenway, where its stately building now stands, is to the present city, Franklin Street and the Tontine Crescent were to Boston at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the rooms over the arch- way leading into Arch Street at the centre of the delightful Crescent which the art of Bulfinch created for too short an existence, the Historical Society had FROM TOWN TO CITY 139 its headquarters for the forty years before 1833, when it moved to the rooms in the granite building north of the King's Chapel burying-ground, occupied till the century was nearly ended. There is an abundance of history in the facts of local geography. Early in the new century came the Anthology Club, long extinct yet living in its diverse offspring, the Boston Athenaeum and the North American Review. The club took its name from a periodical, the Monthly Anthology^ a Magazine of Polite Literature, which after a six months' career under its founder came in 1804 into the control of a small body of young men, locally prominent in the ministry, the law, medicine, and scholarship. The little club met once a week, decided upon manuscripts, and had a simple supper and informal talk. The ten volumes which it issued are described by the historian of the Boston Athenaeum as " constituting one of the most lasting and honorable monuments of the taste and literature of the period. Its labors may be considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country, after that decay and neglect which resulted from the distractions of the Revolutionary War, and so forming an epoch in the intellectual history of the United States." When this Monthly Anthology expired, its place was taken, after the interval of a few years, by the North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, edited at first by one of the Anthology Club, who looked to his former associates as his chief contributors. Beginning as a bi-monthly, the North American soon became the I40 BOSTON quarterly which, for a large portion of the nineteenth century, expressed the best American thought. The "Old North" — not the present New York monthly — was as truly a Boston institution as the Old South itself. For that institution which has never departed from Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, the Anthology Club was also responsible. The club, we are informed, was not more than twenty days old when it passed a vote to form a library. From this beginning the Atlienasum, incorporated February 13, 1807, took its being. The modern public library was then a thing far in the future. A public museum of fine arts was even more remote. Because the Athenaeum was a private institu- tion it did not fail to render a public service both with books and with pictures and sculpture. In a less obvious way it has exerted another strong influence — as a minister to public spirit. In the mere provoca- tion to giving, an institution does good. In 1822 we find Mr. James Perkins giving the Athenaeum his mansion in Pearl Street, where it remained till the Beacon Street library was built in 1849. ^^^ purchase of the Stuart portraits of George and Martha Washing- ton in 1 83 1, and of a goodly portion of Washington's library, through private subscription, in 1 849, definitely enriched the city. In 1846 came the endowment by John Bromfield of a perpetually increasing fund, begin- ning with $75,000 for the purchase of books. In these days of scattered millions the amount of the gift seems hardly worth stopping to record. But the man of the FROM TOWN TO CITY 141 first half of the century who felt the impulse to do something permanently useful for his city, and to do it not by will but during his own lifetime, was some- thing of a pioneer. One likes him none the less for the honest record that, after first planning to remain an unknown giver, he reflected " how almost impossible it was in an inquisitive and intelligent community to keep such a secret long and perfectly ; and, also it seemed to him a species of hypocrisy to pretend to hide what it was, in a manner, certain that time would ultimately and perhaps speedily reveal." But public spirit is shown in other ways than in making acknowledged gifts of money. Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston showed it near the begin- ning of the earlier century in subjecting their own sons to the danger of inoculation. In 1802 the effi- cacy of vaccination, as practised by Jenner in England, and by his follower. Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, in Cambridge and Boston, was still to be tested. Dr. Waterhouse had no fear of trying it in his own family, where he vaccinated four of the children and three servants with excellent results. It was another thing for laymen to offer their children to the same cause. Yet this is what some of the selectmen and citizens of good standing did with nineteen of their boys between eight and fifteen years of age. In the sum- mer of 1802 this company of boys, with an experi- enced nurse, went over to an old barracks on Noddle's island (East Boston), and having been vaccinated were submitted to every exposure, even sleeping in the I4l BOSTON The Athen^um, Beacon Street. same room with patients who had contracted small- pox both in the usual way and through inoculation. The entire success of the experiment, apart from its value as a striking example of public spirit, did much to diminish the fear and the danger of smallpox in Boston. These instances of the private sense of public re- sponsibility and of the effects of a pervading academic FROM TOWN TO CITY 143 influence are perhaps no more typical of the place than a native quality which may draw its illustration from the same period of local history. This is the quality of caution. In the Letters from the Eastern States already cited an " eminent individual " tells the fol- lowing anecdote of himself: "Talking one day with his superior officer, the passionate, impetuous General Charles Lee, the latter exclaimed, ' Why the devil do you stare at me with your mouth open ; why don't you reply quicker }, — I say everything offhand that comes into my head, and by G I am ashamed of my own questions long before I get your answer.' He explained to him (slowly, however) that the habit was inveterate ; that he supposed it grew out of the situation in which the Puritans were placed ; they were persecuted, and obliged to be very cautious with answers they gave, to avoid difficulties ; and that, with many of their habits, had been handed down, and be- come a part of our education." The lineal descendants of those who "were persecuted, and obliged to be very cautious " have not yet vanished from the earth. The writer from whom the words are borrowed refrains from pointing a moral in the fate of the headlong Lee. He does call attention to the fact that the inexpressive New Englander rises to emergencies with action the most effective. The various characteristics which have been sug- gested are eminently those of conservatism. Because the Boston community was intensely conservative, the town stood just where it did in the political differences 144 BOSTON of the young republic. It was the part of conserva- tism to give the right to govern the new state to those who had done most to create it, namely to Hancock and Adams. After the death of Hancock in 1793, Adams held the chief rnagistracy until 1797. One of his contemporaries made a good-natured remark which has been frequently repeated : " Samuel Adams would have the State of Massachusetts govern the Union, the town of Boston govern Massachusetts, and that he should govern the town of Boston, and then the whole would not be intentionally ill-governed." But even before his rule came to an end, the reaction against the " republican" principles for which he stood had begun. The Federalist principles which were soon to prevail belonged rather to a period of building up than to that of tearing down in which Adams's most telling work had been done. Perhaps nothing suggests the change of sentiment more clearly than the attitude of Boston toward the French Revolution, at its begin- ning and its end. The change was typical of that larger conservatism which gave the Federalist party its long preeminence in Boston. The first news of the uprising in Paris was hailed as an evidence that our good friends were following in the fortunate path toward that political freedom which America had secured. Even as late as January of 1793 the enthusiasm found expression in an open-air banquet. A roasted ox weighing a thousand pounds, with gilded horns, raised upon a car twenty feet high, was drawn by fifteen horses through the town as " a FROM TOWN TO CITY 45 peace offering to Liberty and Equality." The table spread for the feast in State Street reached from the Old State House to Kilby Street. From the balconies of the neighboring houses many women looked down upon the scene. In theory it was beautiful. In prac- tice it ended in somewhat the same manner as the Revolution it was celebrating ; at least portions of the ox are said to have been thrown into the air, and even the balconies became coigns of doubtful vantage. The laws of week-day temperance were not always so care- fully observed as those of Sabbath-keeping. All this happened two days after the execution of Louis XVI. In due time the news reached Boston. It was what the more conservative had been fearing, and only strengthened their belief that the people could not be trusted too far. This was a chief article of Federalist faith. The party which held it naturally came to be known as the "English" as opposed to the "French" party, — the anti-Federalists, called first Republicans, then, and in later incarnations. Democrats. The sources of strength for the Federalist party in Boston were obvious. They have been well enumer- ated as " the clergy, shocked at the increasing infidelity in France, capitalists alarmed at the disregard of the rights of property, merchants interested to conciliate England as the mistress of the seas, and loyalists, still cherishing a filial love for the land of their fathers.^:' It may fairly be questioned whether this final cla^ exerted any strong influence. Regarding the others 146 BOSTON there can be no doubt. Numerically surpassed per- haps by those who greeted the French Revolution with the warmest sympathy, they were the classes which clearly saw their interest in stability of every sort ; and since their interest was in large measure that of the community, their political views could hardly have failed to gain and hold important ground. The gov- ernorship of the state may fairly be taken to repre- sent the prevailing sentiment. Immediately following the fifteen Republican terms of Hancock and Adams, the supremacy was divided in the ratio of twenty- one Federalist terms of office against eight for their opponents. In spite of this unequal division of power there was a rivalry between the two parties so keen and constant as to breed the bitterest political feeling. We read of two intimate friends belonging to the opposite parties quarrelling so violently over the election of the Re- publican candidate, James Sullivan, to the governor- ship in 1807, that their intercourse ceased entirely for forty years, when the Federalist lay dying, and his old Republican friend and enemy travelled from far to bid him a peaceful farewell. The Embargo of 1807 and the approach of the War of 18 12 only intensified the divisions. In 181 1 a Boston lady wrote to her brother in England : " The anniversary of American Independence has been lately celebrated with great splendor by both parties, for unhappily we are much divided, long processions and military escorts display- ing the extent of both.'* Another Boston lady \vrote FROM TOWN TO CITY 147 to her Federalist husband in Washington two months before war was declared in 18 12: "Both the clergy- men I heard yesterday preached very orthodox doc- trine, according to your opinion. Mr. Channing's subject was the baneful effect of party spirit. In the treatment of it, he gave much offence to some high- toned partisans." With poUtics affecting both the pulpit and the Fourth of July celebration, there were sure to be results in private life even more tragic than the estrangement of friends. The private tragedy of the Federalist period in Bos- ton was the killing in 1 806 of the son of a distinguished Republican lawyer, Benjamin Austin, by Thomas O. Selfridge, a Federalist lawyer of professional and social prominence. The two men had quarrelled over a matter so trivial that only politics could account for the bitterness aroused. Selfridge called Austin in print " a coward, liar and scoundrel." Austin's son, Charles, just about to graduate creditably at Harvard, took it upon himself one day to avenge the insult. He attacked Selfridge on the sidewalk in State Street at the hour of the day when his deed would be most open. Selfridge drew a pistol, and fired the bullet from the effects of which young Austin immediately died in a shop near by. In the trial which soon followed, political feeling naturally played a prominent part. Republican lawyers, of whom Attorney-General Sullivan was one, argued against Selfridge, who was ^defended by Harrison Gray Otis and others from the front ranks of Federalism. Selfridge was convicted 148 BOSTON merely of manslaughter. On the charge of murder he was judged " Not guilty." Whatever the eloquence of the lawyers, or the sympathies of the jurors, the ver- dict and the true merits of the case seem to have stood together. There was another occasion, a few years earlier, when poHtics were pleasantly forgotten for a moment. Caleb Strong, Federalist candidate for governor, was elected in 1800. On a day soon after this event a pub- lic procession of which he was a part marched through Winter Street, past the house of Samuel Adams, the venerable leader of the defeated party. At Mr. Strong's order the procession halted. With bared head he stepped aside from it, and shook the hand of the ancient champion of popular liberty. It is note- worthy that in this our last glimpse of Samuel Adams, who died three years later, his political opponents are seen doing him reverence. The year after the death of Samuel Adams, Alexan- der Hamilton fell in his duel with Aaron Burr. In other parts of the country Federalism did not long survive this loss. But in Boston, as we have seen, there were causes deeper than adherence to any indi- viduals for constancy to Federalist principles ; and soon the fruits of Jefferson's Embargo of 1807 ripened into effects which held the community in opposition to RepubHcanism. In passing the Embargo Act the authorities were less concerned with the inter- ests of New England than with the hope of injuring England. An act which crippled the commerce of all FROM TOWN TO CITY 149 the states, wrought of course its greatest hardships in Massachusetts, where, before the passage of the Embargo, about one-third of all the shipping in the country was owned. When the Act became a law this shipping must needs rot at the wharves. Owners and sailors were alike the sufferers. One January day a crowd of from eighty to a hundred seamen marched with a half-masted flag to Governor Sullivan's house, and made their plea for either work or bread. A tact- ful speech from the Governor chanced to send them away good-natured. Both in Boston and in other New England seaports public soup-kitchens were opened for the many who needed them. But none of these were things to breed content. Indeed, there were even whispers of secession in the air. Between the repeal of the Embargo in 1808, and Madison's declaration of war with England in 18 12, little or nothing was done to render New England any better satisfied with the course of national affairs. In the nature of things war could not be popular in Boston, nor could the national government be expected to do much for the place which had so bitterly opposed it. Commodore Bainbridge, commanding the Charlestown Navy Yard, had to deal with a committee of civilians demanding the removal of the Constitution and the newly launched Independence to a point in the harbor below the fort, where a possible attack from British ships would not bring destruction upon the town. He gave them his frank opinion of citizens who would let their disapproval of an administration so I50 BOSTON blind them to the interests of the nation at large, and kept the ships where they were. Of their own motion the people of Boston put their old forts in order, and built a new one. Fort Strong, on Noddle's Island. Before the war was ended, Boston was represented at the Hartford Convention by a little group of its leading men who lent their voices to such expressions of states' -rights as fifty years later their grandsons counted treason. Fortunately the end of the war removed many of the causes of Fed- eralist complaint, and in the " era of good feeling '* which immediately followed, political animosities faded away. Even with its commerce paralyzed, Boston was not permitted to forget its importance as a seaport. Ships of war and privateers came and went as they could. The Constitution, launched in 1797 from the shipyard where " Constitution Wharf" now stands, was, as we are soon to see, peculiarly a Boston vessel. Into Boston harbor Commodore Hull sailed her after his escape from the British squadron in the summer of 1 8 12. To Boston again she came after the Guerriere fight a few weeks later ; and when she returned again under Bainbridge, the Java had struck to her, off the Brazihan coast. Over this victory there were public rejoicings worthy of a town in closer sympathy with the war. Still later — on June i, 1813 — the hills and housetops of Boston were crowded with people watch- ing the Chesapeake as she sailed down the harbor and joined in that disastrous conflict with the Shannon, of FROM TOWN TO CITY KI which the distant smoke and sounds were not beyond sight and hearing. To the very crippHng of the merchant marine, how- ever, Boston owed a new phase of its development — the rapid growth of manufactures in the first and second decades of the century. The capital and energy which ^5^^# Removing Beacon Hill. After a Drawing made in 1811, by J. R. Smith. commerce had engaged could not lie inactive, and here was their natural outlet. It was a fortunate circum- stance also that in 1803 the Middlesex Canal, begun in 1794, was opened for traffic. Thus the merchandise of Boston and the products of the valley of the Merrimac, with which the canal joined itself at East Chelmsford, now Lowell, could be freely exchanged. Twenty-seven mile^ in length, navigated In twelve 152 BOSTON hours by boats of twenty-four tons, the canal, a triumph of its day, dwindles to small proportions in the per- spective of a century. There is even a pathos in the trick by which fame has given permanence to the name of the engineer, Loammi Baldwin, who built the for- gotten waterway. It is not for this service that he is remembered, but because while making his survey for the canal, he or one of his associates chanced by the edge of a wood upon an old tree, much damaged by wood-peckers, but bearing a few bright red apples. They were tasted, and the flavor was so agreeable that scions ,were cut, and from these the whole succeeding race of Baldwin apples has sprung. In all these years of transition from town to city, Boston had been growing rapidly. The bridges to Charlestown and Cambridge, opened respectively in 1786 and 1793, had th^ virtual effect of widening the town boundaries. With the nineteenth century be- gan the changes in the outline of ancient Boston which left it a peninsula no longer. In 181 1 one of the Bos- ton ladies already quoted wrote, " Old Beacon hill is taking down to fill up the mill pond," and, with due horror at the removal of the everlasting hill to which her eyes had looked up, she complained that the Hancock heirs in selHng their land for such a purpose " have preferred interest to elegance, not a very new thing." It was in this change that Bulfinch's Beacon monument, recently restored in part to the State House grounds, was displaced from its commanding position on the site of the old beacon, higher than the State FROM TOWN TO CITY 153 House itself. A more important aspect of the change — which took twenty-five years for its full accomplish- ment — was that the filling in of the Mill Pond added about seventy acres to the north end of the town. The traveller arriving at the North Station does not realize that he may be alighting on portions of Beacon, Copp's and Pemberton hills ; but from one or all of these eminences came the land on which the station stands. On the opposite side of the town, meanwhile, growth of a less artificial sort had been going forward. A land speculation on Dorchester Neck (now South Boston) was behind the movement resulting in a bill of the General Court which in 1804 took this territory away from the reluctant Dorchester and added it to Boston. The expected influx of population did not follow the opening of the first South Boston bridge at Dover Street in 1805. All efforts to build a second bridge were fruitless for twenty years. At one period in the quarrel between the rival factions, a boisterous crowd disguised as Indians — unworthy children perhaps of the Tea Party " Mohawks " — floated away the struc- ture over which communication had actually been es- tablished. It was not till after Boston became a city that the second bridge was finally built, and the growth of South Boston began. Even more rapid than the territorial growth through these years of transition was the increase of population. In round numbers the decennial gains were from 18,000 in 1790 to 24,000 in 1800, to 33,000 in 18 to, to 43,000 in 1820. Long before this highest figure 154 BOSTON was reached it became clear that the old and jealously guarded form of government by town-meetings was impracticable. The unwieldy number of voters, the waste and failure of power at many points of making and administering the local laws, a score of considera- HousE OF John Phillips, Birthplace of Wendell Phillips; Corner of Beacon and Walnut streets. tions, made some change imperative. Yet it was not an easy thing to bring about. As early as 1784-5 a plan to effect the change was presented. Again in 1 79 1, in 1804, i^ 1 815, the matter was discussed, — not always in the light of a forthright adoption of city government. One of these compromise plans pro- FROM TOWN TO CITY 155 posed incorporation under the hybrid title of " the Intendant and MunicipaHty of the Town and City of Boston." It was in 1822 that an organization of mayor, aldermen, and council was adopted — not without a struggle. To choose a first mayor was almost as diffi- cult. Harrison Gray Otis and Josiah Quincy, Fed- eralists both, were the leading candidates, and received so nearly the same number of votes that both with- drew. Thereupon John Phillips was readily elected for a single term. The names of these three candidates mean much or little, according to one's knowledge of local conditions. If those with the fuller knowledge require further evi- dence that the real leaders of the place, not in pohtics alone, were the men who sought political office, a list of the aldermen and council for the early years of city government will present a surprising abundance of names then and still associated with the best inter- ests of Boston life. The new city wisely carried on the traditions of the ancient town. Or shall we say that the influence of the town-meeting in keeping the true leaders at the head of local affairs was too strong to be overcome except by slow degrees ? VI THE HUB AND THE WHEEL K EEPING the theme of Place and People steadily in view, we have not yet let the inhabitants of Boston lead us far awayfrom her three hills. But Emerson was more than a maker of pleasant phrases when he wrote of his birthplace : — ** Each street leads downward to the sea Or landward to the west." Down these streets, then, and out into the widest world, some of the people must surely be followed, if the place is truly to be understood. No apology is needed — now or later — for departing for a time from the strict sequence of events to look separately at special phases of the life which has made both place and peo- ple precisely what they have been. Perhaps the fore- most of these phases is that in which the central figures are the men who, in their successive generations, have gone out to the ends of the earth, carrying the local spirit abroad, and enriching the native town and city by all they have brought back. Followers of the sea more than the people of any other place in America before the Revolution, the men of Boston could not but return, in the general restoring 156 \xJ his ./iarhotir of I^gflor, ivilh .t.-'u;icli>igs wihhonl i( ccmi/ui in are !nidc/c/ri7 -as laj^en l_i/ Caplain ."John ^/oL/r ii'cHiir Cnpl. ^\\^^mix!, Jmitli, Qap\'\'^ni!iky . 4nniUw' Capl ".^a.rfph Tlciriclqe. L-r.c'i .j'Vli\munA AnJr^stfGuj;h} Cuplaui §fneiraU (/'n^a-ncat/n 'Mr/pflrv J'i/lajejliej t^ryi ley Sf ir: m t.-t l\fn .y: / ^'v^:yr^a ^uUtz. irtca- ^oiith a„dhj/Zaflmrfn r.i^d.i-S'ujh -ua/c.- fi^fL.iX ri-Ji fjprin0 '.fides tijool H ^rfaal n yi hides at^ojicii. . Earliest Chart of Boston Harbor, 1688-9. In possession of Boston Public Library. 158 BOSTON of normal conditions, to their interest in maritime affairs. How could it be otherwise? At their very feet lay the inviting bay, with its best of harbors, safe from the sea of which it is less an arm than a shoulder. At their very doors lay all the materials for ship-build- ing. How entirely the Constitution, finished in 1797, was a home-made vessel, and therein a typical product, Mr. H. A. Hill has pointed out in his monograph on Boston commerce : " Paul Revere furnished the copper, bolts and spikes, drawn from malleable copper by a process then new ; and Ephraim Thayer, who had a shop at the South End, made the gun-carriages for the frigate. Her sails were made in the Granary building at the corner of Park and Tremont streets ; no other building in Boston was large enough for the purpose. There were then fourteen rope-walks in Boston, so that there could be no difficulty in obtain- ing cordage; and there was an incorporated company for the manufacture of sail-cloth, whose factory was on the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets, and which was encouraged by a bounty on its product from the General Court ; this product had increased to eighty or ninety thousand yards per annum, and is said to have competed successfully with the duck brought from abroad. The anchors came from Hanover in Plymouth county, and a portion of the timber used in what was then looked upon as a mammoth vessel was taken from the woods of Allentown, on the borders of the Merrimac, fifty miles away." Surely the provocation to seafaring was sufficiently strong. ,l:/s viCTf)RYr, OR, HUZZA FQurm . GON:ST!TtJ-X-I.ON^ ^^' * iC ij^B sont-pf S<»d«js, «!««- ear ta Biy ssRgj & -^ Jj^«MJi bofeJ1i<»rtr4 hero bo-* &l UJ> ftir gjius, ' ^»t.-^^ OBJ f«Ofite ««»l«Bcni rag.i4tj- pftSi. - - - - ^^ • .«S-t;j. nian*, . ^- ' »^ ' h ■ ^^s^Ha -fiftc s^rfe^la^ breeze, <«m: s^iJs iJey -wcfe beot, p.^ f«fl »r Joy t»t%e <>4»» -*« »<*?ti **i^ ««JB wfi eaasa ap'aKaig etde j . §Tlie ai>4«>s©«a.kaewfcar, I _ And w« cjr>4 oot i vosp foi tjis saftejf Ga«rtfe«. • Witb flar jiobls tommaniTer -we fooghl 00 i*e naio, J- Asu «c'j! .oaqncr wtia^isi »bc& fa bids os agaia. ^" The >-»}is na« fitw tii^c!., sfl^ gaite winn *as tjjc jjlay, Thejr |jva?fs eb-I tiwir ri^gijjg waj socs fiiot avay, •• '- t We iimMet'd th«f tui! «-itb alf |)0»sii)J? «p««»«» J' Jseftjjpcr* 1^1 fast. fc- Ait -hopes of «3ijdtt.ijg «s BBS? »ei>e ^aSse |ass : 'Piie Brif «»s. ^ *eS«b»>-|K|?ps Ml^^^ -ttM; BJtc, For *« T*kfi W.w^eleaaj &aa/'i no cotarw t« ■«! riks ; So a gan oa &eir foe tfc«f wsf e forCi l» let &f, . ' Cwa* tinii with ««T«a^«l»i ir« fij»|^t tm tfee testis, ^^ And we're »ad? br*»e ^ojSy i» Sgftt ijUfeltfln agifa» ^^ In IseKfy.ftyB iBissrtes^ ihe basiaess W4« (Jyn<"y --^ For tttey dtdn't (jhifc rriisb such fnie Yankee f»a f. _ - Sat «e kiatlly r-eceiT'd-'tW ott board ojjr good iMjij ^ , , .M*oy cursmg tb64aj,»*cR ih^y toofc their last wig. With OBJ- !rrat« nooB^» wjjh a fkf&ong btecsa^ , _^ * As fuf! of good hoiKor itnd afittfe as you jiteiae, - ~ - Kach-tta«-he«'rifds»»k>T p»r(akfi$of (heg!i»i, , AtJd dmks »i« fe*alrB to ta< fafOrUe t»s», Wjta kjw ffi! the te«fi«l!( of gt«f^«&f^a._v ' . ' '" N>^ »8rcc»» tort-? goad Cos*iH!ili(J»».» feoat Which itet fetew »iil tMeai wiilea pfaol: is afioa{^ ."Wio aettf w«S aincti, «r'iii (ftt»y e'er rag. But wit! 8sni, • Aud we'H csn^utfT for fieeiiim »g»ia arf a|»«, . _ W4i«B aga^n we 5h*li.j>}o» o}ii"Ntfptaae»« hhtetK^Sj. JUay feon«tB sufi rtrci.e iJwttows of the fetaif«4 , Atrf skoaii oor b!>ll! show 'tta. tie|E<»^ CaasHtotioo and iHttlSt-- - Acdnow «>Ub^jte<^^£^Jt^J»« 5ai£t«ihej Broadside in possession of Benjamin F. Stevens, Esq. i6o BOSTON All this was in the Revolutionary century. With the coming of peace it might have been expected that the doors of commerce would be thrown immediately open. Yet it would have been hardly human for the mother country to smooth any paths for the child that had cast off all parental authority. The British West India trade was of course subject to English legislation. It was not long before the merchants of Boston, as of all our ports, found themselves forbidden to bring their fish to the islands or to carry the island products to England. These products if brought first to New England could not even be carried to England in British ships. This prohibition was followed in 1784 by that of exporting anything from the West Indies to the United States except in British vessels. Here the citizens of Boston asserted themselves, and entered as of old into agreements to buy none of the wares so imported. The Massachusetts legislature passed meas- ures of retaliation ; and the national laws of navigation and commerce reflected for some years the British policy of restriction. If success is determined by obstacles, the commercial enterprise of Boston could not have had a more favorable beginning. Not content with the difficulties nearest home, the merchants of America, in the earliest days of peace, began turning their eyes to the distant trade of China. To New York belongs the credit of sending out the first vessel in this trade, the Empress of the Seas, which set sail for Canton in February of 1784, and was back in New York in May of the next year. Her super- & i THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 163 cargo was a Boston youth of twenty, Samuel Shaw by name, whose service on General Knox's staff in the Revolution had already won him the rank of major. In his journal of the outward voyage he tells of land- ing at St. Jago, an island of the Cape de Verde group. The officer of the port was a Portuguese. " On telling him," says Shaw, " by the interpreter, a negro, that we were Americans, he discovered great satisfaction, and exclaimed with an air of pleasure and surprise, ' Bostonian ! Bostonian ! ' " With this — and the Boston supercargo — to remember, the New England town may comfortably orient herself with the first of the Chinese traders. It was not long, however, before the town could claim as her own a commercial venture of the first importance and magnitude. The journals of Captain Cook "the navigator" were published in 1784. Through them the great possibilities of the fur trade on the northwest coast of America were made known. Five Boston merchants, including the Bulfinch whose architecture still dominates the local landscape, and one merchant of New York, joined themselves to enter this new field. The vessels they secured for the expe- dition were two ; the Columbia^ a full-rigged ship of two hundred and twelve tons, eighty-three feet in length, and the Washington^ a sloop of ninety tons. Let those who dread six days of the Atlantic on liners of fifteen thousand tons* burden, stop a moment and picture these cockle-shells — as they must appear to-day — and the spirit of the men who embarked in 1 64 BOSTON them for the north Pacific and — In the Columbia — for the complete circling of the globe. Before they set sail, September 30, 1787, they provided themselves plentifully with silver, bronze, and pewter medals com- memorating the expedition, and with useful tools and useless trinkets, — jews-harps, snuff-boxes, and the like. Rounding the Horn, and sailing northward, it was the little Washington which first reached the northwest coast. While waiting for the Columbia^ the sloop's crew had an encounter with natives, who gave them good reason to call their anchorage " Murderers' Harbor." Then the y^ j/ ^=^7^"*!/^ Columbia came, with /%0'^k/i^ ^^^y(y scurvy on board. ^ /y But the cargo of furs ^ was secured, and, in pursuance of the owners' plan, was carried to Canton for sale. Stopping on the way at Hawaii, Captain Gray took on board the Columbia a young chief, Attoo, promising to send him back from Boston so soon as might be. From China the ship loaded with teas sailed for home by way of the Cape of Good Hope. In August of 1790 she dropped anchor in Boston harbor, the first American vessel to circumnavigate the earth. There were salutes from the castle and the town artillery, formal greetings by the collector of the port and Governor Hancock. Beside Captain Gray young Attoo marched up State Street, wearing " a helmet of gay feathers, which glittered in the sun- light, and an exquisite cloak of the same yellow and THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 167 scarlet plumage." Never before had the ends of the earth and the "happy town beside the sea" been brought so near together. In spite of the fact that this unprecedented voyage of the Columbia was not a financial success, four of her six owners proved their faith in the undertaking by sending her directly back to the northwest coast. This second voyage, on which she sailed September 28, 1790, was destined to write the good ship's name on the map of the country. It was nearly two years later when, having taken Attoo back to Hawaii in the humble capacity of cabin-boy, and having spent a winter on the coast, Captain Gray, cruising to the southward, saw what he took to be the mouth of a mighty river. There were breakers to warn him against entering it. To this forbidding aspect of things we may owe the entry in Vancouver's journal at the same point : " Not considering this opening worthy of attention, I continued our pursuit to the northwest." For Captain Gray the breakers were an obstacle only to be overcome. After several efforts he drove the ship through them, and found himself in a noble stream of fresh water. Up this river he sailed some twenty-four miles and having assured himself that he might continue farther if he chose, returned to the sea. The headlands at the mouth of the river he named, like a true son of Boston, Cape Hancock and Point Adams. He raised the American flag, buried some coins of his young country, and named the river after his vessel, the Columbia. Upon this dis- i68 BOSTON covery and the explorations of Lewis and Clark in the next decade, the American government based its suc- cessful claim to the Oregon country. Yet for the Boston merchants whose enterprise wrought such momentous results, the second voyage, like the first, was but a small success. In spite of the abundant salutes and cheers which greeted the Columbia when she sailed into Boston harbor in July of 1793, the ship and her inventory were sold at once by auction at a Charlestown wharf. It was hers, however, to open the way to an important commerce. In the years immediately following, a lucrative trade, largely in the hands of Boston merchants, was carried on in direct pursuance of the Columbia s example, even in the matter of circumnavigation, with stops at the Sandwich Islands and China. The slender tonnage of such vessels as the Columbia and the Washington allies them closely with the infancy of commerce. From the extreme youthfulness of many of the shipmasters and supercargoes of Boston ships saihng to distant seas, the reader of later years draws the same impression of beginnings. Mere boys found themselves filling posts of responsibiUty which could not but bring the man in them to the quickest possible development. Edward Everett, in his sketch of the chief marine underwriter of the early days of Boston commerce, has given us this bit of record : " The writer of this memoir knows an instance which occurred at the beginning of this century, — and the individual concerned, a wealthy and respected banker of Boston, THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 171 is still living among us, — in which a youth of nineteen commanded a ship on her voyage from Calcutta to Boston, with nothing in the shape of a chart on board but the small map of the world in Guthrie's Geogra- phy." In the service of the Messrs. Perkins, John P. Gushing went out to China, at the age of sixteen, in 1 803, as clerk to the agent of the firm's business, a man but little older than himself. This superior in office soon died, leaving to young Cushing's care the conduct of large sales and purchases, which he managed so well as promptly to win himself a place in the important firm. Captain Robert Bennet Forbes — another nephew of the Messrs. Perkins, and a typical merchant of the somewhat later time in which he flourished — gives this summary of his early career : " At the age of sixteen I filled a man's place as third mate ; at the age of twenty I was promoted to a command ; at the age of twenty-six I commanded my own ship ; at twenty- eight I abandoned the sea as a profession ; at thirty- six I was at the head of the largest American house in China." This was the boy who at thirteen began his nautical life " with a capital consisting of a Testament, a ' Bowditch,' a quadrant, a chest of sea-clothes, and a mother's blessing." To this equipment should be added the advice of another uncle, Captain William Sturgis : "Always go straight forward, and if you meet the devil cut him in two, and go between the pieces ; if any one imposes on you, tell him to whistle against the northwester and to bottle up moonshine." It was a rough, effective training to which boys like 172 BOSTON young Bennet Forbes were put. If in instances like his own, family influence had its weight, — for his kinsmen, the Perkinses, Sturgises, Russells, and others, were long in virtual control of the China trade, — yet the youths to whom opportunity came were equal to it. We are used to hearing our own age called that of the young man. These Boston bays, and Farragut in command of a prize at twelve, spare us the burden of providing precedents for the future. Over against these triumphs of youth may well be set another picture — taken from the memoir by Edward Everett already drawn upon. He writes of Thomas Russell, who died in 1796, the pioneer of the Russian trade, the foremost merchant of his time : " According to the fashion of the day, he generally appeared on 'Change in full dress ; which implied at that time, for elderly persons, usually a coat of some light-colored cloth, small clothes, diamond or paste buckles at the knee and in the shoes, silk stockings, powdered hair, and a cocked hat ; in cold weather, a scarlet cloak. A scarlet cloak and a white head were, in the last century, to be seen at the end of every pew in some of the Boston churches." Thus between land and sea, youth and age, the balance of picturesqueness is fairly struck ; and withal there is a suggestion of old world dignity without which any impression of the early Boston merchants would be incomplete. It is not to one of these dignified gentlemen that one looks for such projects as Lord Timothy Dexter's THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 173 proverbial shipping of warm- ing pans to the tropics. Yet it was a Boston mer- chant, Frederic Tudor, who began to carry the pecul- iarly northern commodity of ice to the West Indies. Even at the centre of "Yankee notions" he was regarded as a person of unbridled fancy. Indeed, the story of this traffic in ice is one of the strangest episodes of Boston com- merce. As related chiefly in an old number of Scrib- ners Monthly y it is that in 1805 a plague of yellow fever wrought havoc in the Bust by H. Dexter. In possession of the West India Islands: Mr. Massachusetts Historical society. Tudor saw how grievously ice was needed, and de- termined to supply it. Cutting two or three hun- dred tons from a pond at Saugus, he had it hauled to Charlestown, and loaded the brig Favorite for Marti- nique. This, in his own words, " excited the derision of the whole town as a mad project.'* Ridicule and opposition, however, were the surest means of fixing his purpose. Though at first without financial suc- cess, he proved that ice could be carried to a warm climate. Then the British government saw what ^^^.;v^^^T^..vvv^^--- Frederic Tudor. PAR PRIVILEGE DU GOUVERNEMENT. ./iL V^ i i» jnLujouRD'Hui 7 mars et pendant trois jours consecutifs, il sera depose en vente par petites quantites une cargaison de Glace , tfes-bien conservee apportee en ce port , de Boston, parle brick Favorite, capitaine Pearson ; cette vente se fera abord, et ne durera que ces trois jours seulement^ le brick devant se rendre a cefte epoque dans une autre ile. MM. les habitans de St-Pierre. trouve- ront ici Toccasion de demontrer ( en con- courant a en, faire Tacquisition ) que cet article pent devenir un objet dimporta- tion reguliere dans la Colonic. Le prix est de 3o sons la livre. N. B, II est necessaire de faire apporter avec soi une etofFe de laine , ou un morceau de couverture pour enve- lopper la glace ; ce moyen la fait conserver plus longtems. Saint-Pierjc Martinique, chez J.-B. THOUNENS, Pebe et Fils, linprimeurs, da Gouveraemcnt. Advertisement of Ice offered for Sale in Martinique, 1806. From F- Tudor's Journal, in possession of F. Tudor, Esq. THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 175 cooling benefits might thus be brought to its West Indian subjects. Accordingly, Mr. Tudor secured the monopoly, with further special advantages, for the sale of ice in Jamaica. At Kingston he built his ice- 4u -io ^;-^ <-^ '^^^ f^ /Vve-4>-«^x-^ MOITO FROM F. TUDOR'S JOURNAL. houses. Havana and other Cuban ports were opened to him on similar terms. By degrees he built up also a large traffic with our own southern cities, — Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. Then followed, in 1833, — at the request of English and American mer- chants in Calcutta, — the " ice-king's " invasion of the Far East. From small beginnings the ice trade with Calcutta grew to proportions which made it long an important element in holding for Boston the suprem- acy in all the commerce between Calcutta and the United States. Rio Janeiro must be added to the list of tropical cities to which the Tudor ships carried their cargoes of ice. The bald recital of the facts in the story of this merchant's success is sufficient to stir the imagination. To do such things with the tools at hand — sailing vessels and none of the modern imple- 176 BOSTON ments of labor-saving — called for a species of ability in which imagination itself must have played no trifling part. It may be that this quality of imagination was lack- ing in the Boston and Salem merchants who attempted in 1842 to introduce American ice into London. One of them tried to attain this end by demonstrating the merits of iced American drinks. He hired a hall, as the story goes, and trained a number of men to mix the cool beverages of his native land. The members of the Fishmonger's Association — presum- ably as fond of turtle as aldermen themselves — were the guests. The waiters made an imposing entry — but alas ! the first sound that met the ear of the American "promoter," expecting a chorus of approval, was that of an English voice calling for hot water, and saying, " I prefer it 'alf 'n 'alf." The American com- pletes the story, " I made a dead rush for the door, next day settled my bills in London, took train for Liverpool and the steamer for Boston, and counted up a clear loss of ^1200." The counting of losses has doubtless had its con- stant place in the calculations of merchants. To the commoner counting of profits on Boston wharves may be ascribed the practice, very general a hundred years ago and less, among persons of every sort and condi- tion, of sending out " adventures." The sea was the Wall Street of the time, and the time was that when even the uncertainties of the lottery were in good repute. It is in no way surprising, then, to find in THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 177 a newspaper of 1788, in the advertisement of two ships about to sail for the Isle of France and India, this announcement : " Any person desiring to adventure to that part of the world may have an opportunity of sending goods on freight." In executing these commissions, the supercargo became, besides the owners' agent, almost a public servant. Professional men, women, boys, all classes of the community, took this inviting road to profit. At the age of eight (i 82 1) John Murray Forbes wrote in a letter, " My adventure sells very well in the village." A foot-note to the pas- sage in Mr. Forbes's Life explains that the boy was in the habit of importing in the Perkins vessels, with the help of older relatives, little adventures in tea, silk, or possibly Chinese toys. Thus by the time he sailed to China himself, at seventeen, he had accumulated more than a thousand dollars of his own. That there were heavy risks to be run both by owners and by private speculators, the high rates of insurance, and the fortunes built up by marine under- writers, clearly testify. The difficult navigation laws of England and France during the Napoleonic wars provided an important element in these risks. Our own Embargo and War of 18 12 brought dangers amounting to prohibitions, with effects upon Boston commerce which have been touched upon in the pre- ceding chapter. Among the first vessels to arrive in Boston after the restoration of peace were the New Hazard and the Catch-me-if-you-can, whose very names bespoke the anxiety of the commercial class. With lyS BOSTON the confidence which came with peace, new opportunities were so firmly grasped that for forty years the com- merce of Boston continued to spread to every near and distant port of the world. So early as 1791 there is the record of seventy sail leaving Boston harbor in a single day. Yet in 1846 one may read of a hundred and twenty-nine arrivals in the same brief period. That one great risk of the earlier time — the risk of piracy — should have extended so far as it did into the later, we of these more shielded days cannot easily realize. There is nothing of anachronism in the story of the Atahualpa, sailing for Canton in 1808, commanded by Captain William Sturgis, carrying more than three hundred thousand Spanish milled dollars, and winning a desperate battle with Chinese pirates at the mouth of Canton River. The ship had previously been in the Indian trade on the northwest coast, and had then been pierced for musketry and armed with four six-pound cannon. To these, which Captain Sturgis had carried with him to China, contrary to the orders of Theodore Lyman, the chief owner of the vessel, the defeat of the pirates was largely due. It savors of the stern and strenuous time, however, to find it reported — whether credibly or not — that on reaching Boston Sturgis was obliged to pay freight on the cannons. " Obey orders if you break owners," was a motto not to be treated lightly. Less remote in time and place than these Chinese pirates stand the twelve Spaniards brought to Boston and tried on the charge that " piratically, feloniously, THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 179 violently, and against thewill '* of the captain of the brig Mexican^ which sailed from Salem in August, 1832, for Rio, they " did steal, rob, take, and carry away " the ^20,000 in specie with which a homeward cargo was to have been purchased. This the pirates of the schooner Panda^ sailing the Spanish Main, undoubtedly did. A copy of the Salem Gazette, containing an account of the affair, somehow fell into the hands of Captain Trotter, commanding H.B.M. brig Curlew on the African coast. A vessel lying in the river Nazareth, and answering the description of the Panda, excited Captain Trotter's suspicions. With considerable difficulty he captured her and her crew, whom he brought to Salem. The trial in Boston occupied two weeks. William C. Codman, then a schoolboy, has recalled the excitement it produced: "Every morning the 'Black Maria* brought the prisoners from the Leverett Street Jail to the court room. The wooden fence around the Com- mon was perched upon in every possible place from which a view of the pirates could be obtained. The streets and malls were so filled with eager spectators that the police had great difficulty in keeping the crowd back.'' The captain, mate, and five of the crew were found guilty. President Andrew Jackson reprieved the £rst officer on the ground of a previous act of humanity to American citizens. The other pirates were executed in Boston, June 11, 1835. It is this date, so Uttle beyond remembrance of many men now living, which brings the " old, unhappy, far-off things " of peril by sea well into what seems our own time. i8o BOSTON To guard against the risks which foresight could avert, it was the custom of ship-owners to give their captains, on setting sail, letters of instructions as minute in particulars as the orders of a mihtary or naval com- mander to a subordinate setting forth on a difficult expedition. Many things which might now be said by cable or rapid mails were then thought out and committed in advance to paper ; and nothing that the old merchants have left behind them speaks more clearly for their breadth of vision and clearness of thought and expression than these characteristic pro- ductions. Their calling, as they practised it, both required and enriched that thing of many definitions — a liberal education. With the superseding of sails by steam it was inevi- table that much of what would be called, but for McAndrew, the romance of the sea, must disappear. One of the changes from the old to the new conditions has hardly yet ceased to manifest itself. The " forest of masts " with which such a harbor side as that of Boston used to be lined, is still gradually dwindling away. In the place of the old tangle of spars and cord- age now appear gigantic funnels, comparatively few, and slender pole-masts innocent of yards. A single funnel, however, may rise above a cargo of fifty times greater tonnage than that of a sailing ship a century ago. Add to this the considerations of speed and fre- quent voyages, of the quick lading and discharging of cargoes by modern methods, and the new romance of magnitude belongs wholly to our epoch of steam. THE HUB AND THE WHEEL i8i For what the new epoch was to bring in the way of rapid transatlantic service, Boston was in some meas- ure prepared by the Hnes of Liverpool saihng packets estabHshed in 1822 and in 1827. Of one of the ves- sels of the earlier line, the Emerald, there is a tradition that once she made the voyage to Liverpool and back ' in thirty-two days. Besides speed these sailing packets offered to patrons what was considered at the time a high degree of comfort. In this matter of packets sailing at regular intervals, however. New York was somewhat in advance of Boston. New York, more- over, had the distinction of greeting the steamers Sirius and Great Western on their arrival on consecu- tive April days of 1838. It was the successful return of these two ships to England that stirred the British admiralty to action — with what good results to Boston we shall see. The action of the admiralty was to invite proposals for carrying the royal mails from Liverpool to Halifax, Quebec, and Boston. Mr. Samuel Cunard, an enter- prising merchant of Halifax, had long been considering . the possibilities of transatlantic steam service. Here was his opportunity, and the bid which he promptly made for this postal route was accepted at a contract price of ^55,000 a year. Halifax was to be the east- ern terminus, from which smaller boats were to run to Boston and Quebec. To this arrangement some ener- getic citizens of Boston entered an immediate protest. The resolutions which they passed, April 20, 1839, a week after the promise of the new line reached i82 BOSTON Boston, pointed out the advantage of using Halifax merely as a place of call and making Boston the true terminus. It happened that just at that time the north- eastern boundary dispute, over the line between Maine and New Brunswick, was at a critical point. Shrewdly enough the Boston resolutions, referring to this dis- pute, expressed the faith of the meeting in the new " enterprise as a harbinger of future peace, both with the mother country and the provinces, being persuaded that frequent communication is the most effectual mode to wear away all jealousies and prejudices which are not yet extinguished." The resolutions hastily de- spatched to Mr. Cunard reached him on the point of his leaving London for America. He lost no time in taking them to the Lords of the Admiralty, offering, as Mr. H. A. Hill has summed it up, **^ to increase the size and power of his ships, and to extend the main route to Boston, promising also, half jocosely, to settle the northeastern boundary question, if they would add ten thousand pounds per annum to the subsidy. His proposition was accepted, and a new contract was signed in May." So it was that Boston, destined to fall far below New York as a port for transatlantic steamers, secured the early supremacy, and perhaps made its own contribution to the settlement of the boundary dispute. So used is the human mind becoming to the mar- vellous in triumphs over nature that the first comers from Europe by air ship — if they ever come — will probably receive a less enthusiastic welcome than that THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 183 which the city of Boston extended to the first arriving Cunarders. In June and July of 1840 the Unicorn and the Britannia came safe to the new docks of the company in East Boston. Banquets, salutes, and many flags celebrated the events. No doubt local pride played an important part in the Boston sentiment of this time. Within four years this pride was put to the test. The New York papers had been pointing out all the contrasts, unfavorable to Boston, between the ports of the two cities. As if indeed to adorn their tale, Boston harbor froze over in January of 1844, and the advertised sailing of the Britannia then in dock seemed surely to be impossible. But the merchants of Boston would not have it so. They met and voted to cut a way, at their own expense, through the ice, that the steamer might sail practically on time. The contract for cutting the necessary channels was given to merchants engaged like Frederic Tudor in the ex- port of ice — not from the harbor. Their task was to cut within the space of three days a channel about ten miles long. For tools they had the best machinery used in cutting fresh-water ice, and horse-power was employed. The ice was from six to twelve inches in thickness. As the Advertiser of February 2, 1844, described the scene : " A great many persons have been attracted to our wharves to witness the operations, and the curious spectacle of the whole harbor frozen over, and the ice has been covered by skaters, sleds, and even sleighs. Tents and booths were erected upon the ice, and some parts of the harbor bore the appear- 1 84 BOSTON ance of a Russian holiday scene." On February 3 the work was done, and the Britannia, steaming slowly through the lane of open water, lined on either side by thousands of cheering spectators, made her way to the sea. Whatever the New York critics may have thought, the English managers of the company must have felt that the people di Boston were good friends to have. In the natural course of events other lines besides the Cunard were established ; and if the outreaching spirit of Boston had travelled as rapidly overland to the west as it had always moved by sea, there would probably be nothing but progress to record of Boston as a port. Writing of the time when the first Cunard- ers came, Mr. Hill reminds us " that the trains start- ing from Boston then reached their limits respectively at Newburyport, Exeter, Nashua, Springfield, Stoning- ton, and New Bedford." It was not long before the western railroad frontier was pushed from Springfield to Albany and the Hudson. But here, unhappily, it stopped, and for nearly thirty years, so far as through lines were concerned, it went no farther. During this period quarrels between the two lines that trav- ersed Massachusetts, and the deadening influence of state aid where private enterprise should have been at work, had the most untoward results. Far to the west the development of the Michigan Central and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroads, largely through Boston capital and energy, spoke for what might have been done nearer home. Meanwhile the THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 187 western railroad connections with New York were wisely and rapidly improved. To quote from Mr. Charles Francis Adams : " While the great corpora- tions which served other cities were absorbing into themselves the thoroughfares in the valley of the Mississippi, the Legislature of the State of Massachu- setts kept its eyes steadily fixed on the Hoosac Moun- tain.'* To this, with other causes, was due the decline of Boston shipping. The important commerce with Calcutta reached its climax in the years between 1856 and 1859, and thereafter gradually fell away, to the advantage of New York. So it was with other branches of maritime trade. In 1868 the Cunard Company, which for the first eight years of its exist- ence had run no vessels to New York, transferred all its mail steamers to the rival port, and sent to Boston only freighters, which after loading in Boston pro- ceeded to New York to complete their cargoes. For nearly three years not a single steamer sailed from Boston direct to Liverpool. Then came the revival. The representatives of railroads, steamships, and the Board of Trade put their heads together, and matters began to mend. Year by year the volume of exports and imports showed a steady, healthy growth, until Boston has found. herself, if not as of old* the first port of America, yet one which at last reaps the commercial advantages belonging to the town of Emerson's defini- tion, with its streets leading not only " downward to the sea," but also, as the railroads tardily did their work, " landward to the west." i88 BOSTON It is a partial view of the outreaching spirit of Bos- ton — especially as Boston may be taken as typical of New England — which ignores the expression that spirit found in the establishment of Christian missions in the islands of the sea and the kingdoms beyond. Whatever one may think of that work, its means and its ends, the facts remain that the nineteenth century saw its beginnings in America, that the " orthodox " churches of New England were the pioneers in the work, and that the men at home whose financial sup- port made it possible were" frequently of that commer- cial class in whose interest the ships of Boston sailed abroad. This is not to say that the " merchant princes " of Boston were largely imbued with the spirit which has been most active in carrying Christianity to foreign lands. They were not. But throughout the nine- teenth century there was a constant element in the community — in Boston and all New England towns — which derived from its Puritan ancestry so firm a faith in its modes of spiritual life as inherently the life for every man of every race that the maintenance^of American missions became a vital duty. It is not the least significant aspect of this portion of New England history that the secular record of it is extremely meagre. This may probably be ascribed to the fact that the men and women for the records of whose zeal and generosity we look in vain were not of the class which either writes or becomes the theme of biography. They were of the rank and file, and for that reason surely should not be overlooked. THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 189 Whether we turn, then, to the great merchants or to the clerks and gentlewomen who sent forth their small adventures, or yet to that other class whose adventures were for spiritual ends, we find in the Boston community a constant quality of distant vision belying the reputation of the town for contented ab- sorption in its own affairs. The Autocrat's image of the hub, adopted by all the world, carried with it an inevitable picture of the " tire of all creation." It would be but a sorry hub that was no better for the wheel at the end of its spokes. To those who have determined the relations of Boston with the world at large, the town has owed many of its best things. The distinguished merchants won their distinction not so much by their wealth as by the integrity which earned it and the generosity which devoted it to public uses. A list of the foundations for charitable and educational purposes in and about Boston — such as a " Perkins Institution," a " Parkman Professorship," a " Bromfield Fund" — would reveal to the statistical mind a large proportion of names identified with the mercantile history of the place. To bring silk and spices from over seas, to win the fight with pirates, to open a frozen harbor to the early steamships, to tunnel a mountain and reach the west — all these are fine, brave things. Yet it is more to make your native town the richer by the spirit which has triumphed over such difficulties and by the fruits of that spirit. This is what the merchants of Boston have done. VII THE BOSTON RELIGION '* IT is a fact worth noticing that the Boston minister who in 1750 preached a political ser- mon which has frequently been called " the morning gun of the Revolution " was, after Roger Williams, the first prominent dissenter from the established church of New England. Both the Unitarians and the UniversaHsts claim the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew as their first representative in the Boston ministry. A person is often the best illustration of a tendency, and that which the minister of the West Church illustrates is the parallelism of freedom in political and religious thought. The American revolt from the established civil authority began and amazingly throve in Boston. It was but natural, therefore, that the first and most conspicuous departure from the accepted order of things in religion should have the same local background. The fact that the severity of the Puritan order of New England gave wider room for reaction than could be found elsewhere, only enhances the fitness of the scene. Local in its causes and conditions, the ecclesiastical 190 - |J - 1o:NAT1U.\ MAYIJIiVV. 1)})-PAST( ,;1£- IX BOSTON, L\ M-7»V ENlikLM)^ W AND TlKLHilOVS LlBERTiES OF ; f^y^ ^VHO.OVS'JKPfJEI) BY PVBIJC EVER(^! >.' ivf.y v!nj,Aj])c/'.?.xvi,Ai 14 F T}!].: WE.SI'l-.in'llC.M \SSFRTOR OF THE CIVIE ( H'X'i'RY an: > >i AXKLXJ >, .DIED OFAMr.W()VS YWm. ID XXXXV -^ - "THE BOSTON RELIGION*^ 193 revolution which followed the political belongs yet more intimately to local history. But it is so inter- mingled with the history of religious progress in the last century that once again the local records take on a broader significance. How truly the Calvinistic Congregationalism of New England was the established church, we hardly need remind ourselves. It was the faith once delivered to the saints, the Puritan fathers, and duly received from them ; it was guarded by civil laws taxing the whole community for church support, and dealing with eccle- siastical affairs as they are treated only where church and state are one. Into the ministry of this order gradually crept during the closing years of the eigh- teenth century many doubts regarding doctrines hitherto accepted without question, especially the doctrine of the Trinity and of human depravity. From the " Great Awakening," before the middle of the century, there must needs have been a re-awakening with revulsions of feeling. Free political inquiry doubtless played its own part in the change. Perhaps, too, the general emancipation of thought which the first burst of sym- pathy with the French Revolution brought to many Americans had its indirect influence. The similar change of sentiment in Salem has been said to have come " through its navigators even more than through its critics and theologians. As soon as they came into those warm latitudes, their crusts of prejudice melted and cracked from them like films of ice ; and in place of the narrow tradition they carried out with them, they 194 BOSTON brought home the germs of a broad religion of human- ity." The conservatism of the inland towns as com- pared with the seaports — Boston even more than Salem — lends some color to this theory of a Unita- rian writer. Whatever the local influences may have been, it is declared that by the year 1800 there was hardly a single occupant of a Congregational pulpit in Boston whose orthodoxy would have stood unchal- lenged fifty years later. The zeal of the minority in the open division soon to come between the' old and the new theology is the more remarkable when these unequal numbers are remembered. When the nineteenth century began there was but one church in Boston avowedly Unitarian. That was King's Chapel, and its case was anomalous. The mere statement that " the first Episcopal Church in New England became the first Unitarian Church in Amer- ica" sums up the strange situation. With the departure of the Tories, who before the Revolution had formed a large part of the congregation, its use for the services of the Church of England seemed to come to a natural end. Even its name of King's Chapel was changed by the people of Boston, though never by vote of the parish, to the " Stone Chapel," and so it was com- monly called well into the nineteenth century. For five years before 1782 it was used by the Old South congregation. Then the young James Freeman took charge of the reassembled flock as "reader." But the strong Unitarian influences of the time rendered many formulae of the Book of Common Prayer difficult for "THE BOSTON RELIGION'* 95 him and the people to repeat with sincerity. Accord- ingly they authorized him to revise the Prayer-book. Revision was in the air. Only a few years later a minister vigilant for the ancient faith discovered in a Boston bookstore a version of the Divine and Moral Songs of Dr. Watts, out of which the doctrines of the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ had been carefully edited. The good man promptly exposed it in a news- paper article under the title " Beware of Counterfeits." Of the Prayer-book revision it may be said that the Protestant Episcopal Church of America had as yet no definite organization, and the King's Chapel congrega- tion — always in dissent from the established church of New England — felt itself under no obligation to wait till the new Episcopal Church adapted the Eng- lish Prayer-book to American use. This was not accomplished till 1789. Mr. Freeman, however, did wish to remain in the Anglican communion, and applied for Episcopal ordination both to Bishop Seabury of Connecticut and to Bishop Provoost of New York. Their only course was to refuse his application ; for revising the Trinity out of the liturgy, which they were sworn to support, was not atoned for even by so com- mendable an addition to the catechism as the question, " In what manner should we treat the inferior animals ?" Denied Episcopal ordination, Mr. Freeman did not find it difficult to persuade himself and his congregation that laymen could ordain him with equal validity. Whereupon, in 1787, certain members of the Chapel congregation handed him a Bible, with appropriate 196 BOSTON words, and he became their minister — the first pro- fessedly Unitarian minister in America. There were protests from Episcopal clergymen and from some of the proprietors of the church, expressing a sense of wrong and loss which time has not wholly removed. Later on there were com.plications, both serious and amusing, in the administering of moneys bequeathed by loyal churchmen before the Revolution. But Mr. Freeman's step was never retraced ; indeed, subsequent revisions have removed the Chapel liturgy even farther than he carried it from that of the King. What the constant use of a liturgy, with a fixed form of words, obliged Mr. Freeman to do openly, the other ministers of Boston, left to their own devices in the conduct of public worship, could and did achieve almost unnoticed. Instead of denying the doctrine of the Trinity and other tenets more purely Calvinistic, it became their practice to ignore such matters. There were still many points upon which teachers of Chris- tianity were agreed, and on them the emphasis was laid. So it might have gone on in peace and quietness for years to come, but for the fatal propensity of small causes to lead to great effects. The filling of the vacant Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard in 1805 was one of these causes. The election of the Rev. Henry Ware, whose spoken and written words had shown him a pro- nounced Unitarian, was bitterly contested, but without avail. The orthodox Overseers and friends of the college saw in Mr. Ware's appointment nothing but King's Chapel, corner of School and Tremont streets. THE BOSTON RELIGION" 99 danger and disaster. Their spokesman was the Rev. Jedidiah Morse of Charlestown, father of the in- ventor of the Morse alphabet of telegraphy. His pamphlet on The True Reasons for opposing Mr. Ware's election set forth the undoubted Calvinistic orthodoxy of Mr. Hollis, the London merchant whose bequest supported the professorship, and the particular pains he took, even to receiving a bond from the cor- poration, to insure the administration of the fund in accordance with his views. Dr. Morse further com- plained that he was not permitted to present these reasons to the Overseers, and that in spite of Mr. Ware's known antagonism to the theology specified in the Hollis bequest, the college did not trouble itself to examine into his views. The pamphlet was the first of many trumpet calls ringing with the question, " Who is on the Lord's side ? " Thenceforth it was hard for the neutral- minded to escape taking some definite position. Ten years after the pamphlet was written. Dr. Morse wrote of it : " It was then and has been ever since, considered by one class of people as my unpardonable offence, and by another class as the best thing I ever did. One of the former party is said to have declared soon after its publication that it was so bad a thing that it would more than counterbalance all the good I had done or should do if I lived ever so long ; and one of the other party said, if I had never done any good before I made that publication nor should do any afterward, that single deed would of itself produce 200 BOSTON effects of sufficient importance and utility to mankind to be worth living for." When an atmosphere is charged with opposing con- victions of such positivenesSj the next disturbance is merely a question of time. Meanwhile, in natural sequence from the HoUis Professorship dispute, came the founding of the Andover Seminary {1808) and the Park Street Church (1809), as strong pillars of Ortho- doxy. The explosion that soon followed, in 18 15, was due in large measure again to the hand of Dr. Morse. In Belsham's life of the English Unitarian, Lindsey, appeared a chapter on American Unitarianism, contain- ing letters from Boston which showed how many of the ministers outwardly Orthodox were at heart Uni- tarian, and in this word, as used by an Englishman, there was implied a much lower conception of the divine nature of Christ than that which really prevailed in Boston. Here, thought Dr. Morse, was damaging testimony. He caused the chapter to be reprinted in Boston as a pamphlet, which he proceeded to review in his magazine, The Panoplist. The upshot of his con- tention was that the time had come for calling things by their right names : if the Boston ministers were Unitarian, let them be known as such, and let the Orthodox deny them Christian fellowship, or pulpit exchanges. Are you of the Boston religion or of the Christian religion ? was his crucial question ; to which, after the Yankee fashion, a Boston layman, John Lowell, made answer by a counter-question in the pamphlet, Are you a Christian or a Calvinist ? "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 201 Thus the dividing lines were clearly drawn at last, and those who most wished to avoid partisanship and controversy found themselves involved in both. To the Unitarians especially a controversy was unwelcome. They objected to the very name of Unitarian. As Dr. G. E. Ellis has expressed their feeling, " The term Orthodoxy covers the whole faith of one party ; the term Unitarian is at best but a definition of one of the doctrinal tenets of the other party." There were those who preferred and used the name of " liberal Christians." Against this term stood the feeling of those for whom Dr. N. L. Frothingham said, " To insinuate that others are illiberal is certainly a strange way of proving one's generosity." To set themselves off as a sect at all was indeed the last thing they wanted. Their very pride was in individual judg- ment — the protestant's right to everlasting protest. " If any two of us, walking arm in arm on one side of a street," said their historian, " should find that we perfectly accorded in opinion, wx should feel bound to separate instantly, and the strife would be as to which should get the start in crossing." Yet if these differing brothers were drawn into controversy against their will, our sympathy must not be all with them ; the more united body which had to contend with so elusive a foe is also to be remembered. To them the sermon which William Ellery Channing, the recog- nized leader of the " liberals," preached at the ordina- tion of Jared Sparks at Baltimore, in 18 19, must have been a welcome production. It gave them something 202 BOSTON definite to attack. Under the characteristic text, " Prove all things ; hold fast that which is good," it stated clearly the beliefs and disbeliefs of Unitarian Christianity, though it does not appear that the name by which his sect was to be known once passed the preacher's lips. None had been more reluctant than Dr. Channing to see a new sect founded. As Wesley at first would have kept Methodism within the Church of England, so Channing would have preferred to see the Congre- gational body undivided, but leavened by Unitarianism. To his opponents, on the other hand, the Baltimore sermon served as the signal gun of a pamphlet war. The Andover professors, Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, came briskly on the field with Letters to Unitarians and Letters to Dr. Channing. To Dr. Woods, the Rev. Henry Ware made prompt reply, and typical of the persistency of the combatants stand the titles in Dr. Woods's collected works of a Reply to Dr. Ware's Letters (1821) and Remarks on Dr. Ware's Answer (1822). To follow the war- fare, even in such lists of battlefields, would be no small task. Of its rancorous temper on both sides there is too abundant testimony. As in most religious disputes, there was no initial agreement upon the terms of controversy. Each side maintained that the other misrepresented its views, and treated as its own pecuHar possessions, beHefs and sacraments com- mon to all Christians. The Unitarians complained especially that the Calvinists refused to interpret fairly "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 203 or abide by the words of Calvin. On the other hand, a Unitarian historian has written even of the gentle, honest, Channing's Baltimore sermon, " No believer in the Trinity that ever lived, it may be, would admit his statement of it to be correct." Still another historian. Dr. Ellis, admits with regret " the super- ciliousness and effrontery even, with which some Unitarians took for granted that the great change in religious opinions and methods advocated by them could perfect and establish itself in this community as a matter of course. . . . The most assured and con- fident of the new party did not scruple to declare that Orthodoxy was past apologizing for, and ought to retire gracefully with the bats and owls." All this was disturbing enough to a town in which the church, the clergy, and religious matters had been from the first of paramount importance. But to the theological odium and ill temper were added the complications of the civil law. If there was ground for Orthodox complaint in the administration of the Hollis legacy, there was ample provocation to action at law when the conservatives saw the church buildings, lands, and plate pass into the hands of the hberals. The process of change from the old to the new faith came about in various ways, frequently through the death or retirement of the old and more conservative minister, and the election of a young apostle of the new from Cambridge. Thus Lyman Beecher saw and described the means by which the Unitarians won their ends : " They have sowed tares while men slept, and 204 BOSTON Lyman Beecher. grafted heretical churches on Orthodox stumps, and this is still their favorite plan. Everywhere, when the minister dies, some society's committee will be cut and dried, ready to call in a Cambridge student, split the church, get a majority of the society, and take house, funds, and all." The minority defeated in such divi- sions resisted and sometimes established a new parish. "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 205 To this they felt, and contended, that the prop- erty of the church should pass. But the courts of Massachusetts upheld the opposite contention. In the test case of the Dedham parish (1820), which provided precedents for future decisions, the Supreme Court put itself on record with a ruling highly favora- ble to the claims generally made by the Unitarians in such disputes. In 1830 Chief Justice Shaw handed down a decision, in the case of a country parish, that although only two church members remained with the church when the Orthodox minister and all the rest of his people seceded, those two were the church, and retained all its property. As Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing of the period of Lyman Beecher's Boston ministry, regarded such verdicts: "The judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving decisions by which the peculiar features of church organization, so care- fully ordained by the Pilgrim fathers, had been nulli- fied." Even after the middle of the century, an Orthodox critic of the controversy wrote : " Church after church was plundered of its property, even to its communion furniture and records. We called this proceeding plunder thirty years ago. We call it by the same hard name now. And we solemnly call upon those Unitarian churches, which are still in pos- session of this plunder, to return it. They cannot prosper with it. And we call upon the courts of Massachusetts to revoke these unrighteous decisions, and put the Congregational churches of the state upon their original and proper basis." 2o6 BOSTON In 1833 the Massachusetts law formally separated the functions of church and town. Thus the dis- establishment which had already been virtually ac- complished in Boston became a fact throughout the commonwealth. Of course the believers in the old order regarded the whole change with genuine pain and sorrow. In every process of evolution it is the fate of the minority to suffer something at the hands of the greater number. Here the simple fact, in Boston and the towns most directly under its influence, rather than in the state at large, was that the majority of those who inherited the best traditions of Puritanism had come to prefer a less rigid form of faith, which took its form, natural to the time and place, in Unitarianism. It was not through any infusion of new blood into the community that the change came about. In the straitest sect of New Englanders the " liberals " found their best strength. From whatever cause, they " looked about them,'' as Professor Wendell has said, " and honestly found human nature reassur- ing." It was not in their Calvinistic neighbors that they discovered any such encouragement. Dr. Chan- ning in his Baltimore sermon delivered the following opinion of the Orthodox theology : " By shocking, as it does, the fundamental principles of morality, and by exhibiting a severe and partial Deity, it tends strongly to pervert the moral faculty, to form a gloomy, for- bidding, and servile religion, and to lead men to substitute censoriousness, bitterness, and persecution for a tender and impartial charity." Nearly fifty years "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 207 Willi A.M Ellery Channing Monument, Arlington Street. Bronze by Herbert Adams. later, we find Dr. Ellis making what he justly calls a " frank assertion " : " We do not like the strictly Orthodox type of character, certainly not till it has been modified, humanized, and liberalized. We deem it harsh, ungenial, narrow, repulsive, not winning, gracious, expansive, or attractive. It is in our view but an inadequate expression of our ideal of a Christian character." Here are words as uncompromising as the Orthodox attitude toward " plunder." They are 2o8 BOSTON worth recalling if only as evidences of the honest con- viction held by each party that the other was hope- lessly in the wrong. Furthermore, by learning where the reassuring qualities of human nature were not found, we may readily infer where they were. There is no doubt that as the Boston Unitarians — say of the third decade of the century — looked upon their clergy, they beheld admirable types of Christian gentlemen. They were in an important sense leaders in the community, men of that personal distinction which is due both to breeding and to scholarship, car- rying names long identified with the best things of New England life, — Channing, Frothingham, Palfrey, Lothrop, Parkman, Gannett, Pierpont, Lowell, Ripley — true representatives of Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin caste." In Josiah Quincy's Figures of the Past it is said ; " On the topmost round of the social ladder stood the clergy ; for although the lines of theological separation among themselves were deeply cut, the void between them and the laity was even more impassable." From the same source we learn that Dr. Channing deeply regretted this obstacle to familiar intercourse, and envied those who could know men just as they are. " My profession," he said, " requires me to deal with such men as actually exist, yet I can never see them except in disguise." It was this very desire to get at the essential man which found its expression in the Unitarian sermons of the time. The ministers are described as " absorbed in the endeavor to apply Christianity to personal con- "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 209 duct, taking men and women one by one and trusting to their influence for the regeneration of society." The preaching, therefore, was strongly ethical rather than doctrinal ; the dignity, not the depravity, of human nature was, as it has since more generally grown to be, the quality which every listener must be taught to recognize in himself, to the end that indi- vidual excellence might by degrees redeem the world. Withal, a supernatural element in religion, a divine reve- lation of Christian truth, were by no means discarded. Under such teaching, to which the laity really gave attention, a definite type of character was produced. It is described by Dr. O. B. Frothingham in his Boston Unitarianism, and, making all allowance for the fact that he wrote of the men who shared most intimately the influences of his own training, it would probably be hard to frame a more accurate description: "In meditating on the character of these men, one is re- minded of the good Samuel Sewall. Of course the softening influence of one hundred and fifty years had produced its effect. There was less reference to divine interposition, less literalness in interpreting Scripture, less bluntness, less superstition, if we may use so harsh a word in speaking of that sweet soul. But there was the same integrity, the same conscientiousness, the same directness of dealing, the same respect for learning, the same reverence for piety, the same punctiliousness of demeanor, the same urbanity. They were not re- formers, or ascetics, or devotees. All idealists were visionaries in their esteem. Those who looked for a 2IO BOSTON * kingdom of heaven ' were dreamers. They went to church ; they had family prayers as a rule, though by no means universally. It was customary to say grace at meat. They wished they were holy enough to adorn the communion; they beUeved the narratives in the Bible, Old Testament and New." That these nineteenth-century Samuel Sewalls and their spiritual teachers believed they had attained the best and ultimate form of religion is perhaps not sur- prising. The most respectable local opinion did every- thing to confirm this belief. Harvard College and nearly all the influences of wealth and fashion in Bos- ton were powerful allies of the new faith. " When Dr. Beecher came to Boston," wrote his daughter, Mrs. Stowe, " Calvinism or Orthodoxy was the de- spised and persecuted form of faith. It was the dethroned royal family wandering like a permitted mendicant in the city where once it had held court, and Unitarianism reigned in its stead." The ministry of Lyman Beecher at the Hanover Street Church, from 1826 to 1832, during the first half of which time his son Edward had charge of the Park Street Church, may be taken to mark the end of the active contro- versy between the conservatives and the liberals. The spirit with which this " Philistine Giant " came out of Connecticut to fight for the old order is best expressed in his own words : " It is here," he wrote of Boston in 1826, "that New England is to be regenerated, the enemy driven out of the temple they have usurped and polluted, the college to be rescued, the public sen- Park Street Church about 1850. "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 213 timent to be revolutionized and restored to evangelical tone." It was a difficult task he set himself. " The Unitarians," he declared, " with all their principles of toleration, were as really a persecuting power while they had the ascendency as ever existed. Wives and daughters were forbidden to attend our meetings ; and the whole weight of political, literary, and social in- fluence was turned against us, and the lash of ridicule laid on without stint." Against these obstacles he labored manfully, with sermons, writings, and revival meetings. How terribly vital was the faith for which he contended one may realize by reading the letters which passed between him and his children struggling toward a full acceptance of that faith. Yet with all his zeal and brilliant gifts it was beyond his power to stem the tide — to expel the enemy, save the college, and turn public sentiment into its old channels. No single man, or band of men, could have accomplished such results. Even before he came to Boston, the Unitarians, many of them reluctantly, had set up the machinery of a sect — a name, periodicals of their own, and a definite organization. Less than ten years after his departure. Dr. Channing is found lamenting the fact that the denomination, pledged originally to progress, had grown stationary, that at last there was a Unitarian Orthodoxy. The discovery that one set of opinions is orthodox and another not is never made till some new protestant arises with his fresh protest. So the " Unitarian con- troversy " had begun ; so the second controversy. 214 BOSTON this time within the denomination itself, was intro- duced by Emerson and Theodore Parker. In 1838 Emerson delivered his " Divinity School Address " at Lyman Beecher's Church, Bowdoin Street; now The Church of St. John the Evangelist. Harvard — a declaration of individualism which was held heretical even at the headquarters of heterodoxy. A year later the Rev. Andrews Norton, the interpreter of Scripture whose scholarly word was almost authori- "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 215 tative in the Unitarian body, deplored, in a discourse on " The Latest Form of Infidelity," the current tendencies of theological thought. But Emerson had already separated himself from the Unitarian ministry by reason of an imperfect sympathy with his Boston parishioners regarding the administration of the Lord's Supper. He could speak, therefore, as one somewhat outside the fold. Not so Theodore Parker, in 1841 minister of the First Church in West Roxbury. In this year he delivered his South Boston sermon on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity. Parker had been known hitherto chiefly as the most practical and ethical of preachers. He had even taken for his theme on one occasion the duties, temptations, and trials peculiar to milkmen. In the South Boston sermon, fairly entering the field of doctrinal contro- versy, he startled all conservative Unitarians by the bold declaration that Christianity needed no support from miracles, and that it could still stand firm, as the absolute religion, even if it could be proved that its founder had never lived. The disestablishment of the Puritan Church in Boston was, of course, a thing of the past at the time of Theodore Parker's South Boston sermon. Yet the treatment his radicalism received presents so close a parallel to the effects of the original dissent from Calvin- ism as to afford a significant sequel to the earlier story. Indeed, the very phrases of the outcry of twenty and thirty years before repeat themselves. Channing doubted whether Parker could even be called a Chris- 2i6 BOSTON tian. " Without miracles/' he declared, " the historical Christ is gone." From Dr. Frothingham came the complaint : "The difference between Trinitarians and Unitarians is a difference in Christianity ; the dif- ference between Mr. Parker and the Association [of Unitarian ministers] is a difference between no Chris- tianity and Christianity." A Unitarian layman wrote to a secular paper : " I would rather see every Unita- rian congregation in our land dissolved, and every one of our churches occupied by other denominations or razed to the ground, than to assist in placing a man entertain- ing the sentiments of Theodore Parker in one of our pulpits." The Orthodox looked on, no doubt with a certain natural satisfaction, and asked, "What could you expect ? " Some of his fellow-ministers raised the question of expelling Parker from their local Asso- ciation. This was not carried, but, forced to recognize the strong feeling in the Association that he should withdraw, Parker absented himself from the meetings. Meanwhile the old familiar method of " denying Chris- tian fellowship," and refusing pulpit exchanges, came into play, and Parker found himself standing practi- cally alone. When James Freeman Clarke showed the independence to exchange pulpits with him, it was with the result that fifteen of his most powerful parishion- ers, with their families, joined themselves to another church. The Orthodox question, " What could you expect? " had more reason behind it than the conservative Unitarians, in the security of what they believed an "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 217 ultimate faith, would have been willing to admit. Theodore Parker, with his indifference to all bonds of tradition and his inability to hold a strong belief with- out uttering it, needed only the atmosphere in which he lived to make him just what he was. The same condition which made him, in the telling local phrase, a " come-outer," had pre- pared a very considerable body of " come-outers," eager to hear and follow him. If the Unitarian movement in Boston stood for any one thing above all others, it was for lib- erty of thought and speech, the " dissidence of dis- sent " carried over from the time of Burke into the nineteenth century. So it was that Theodore Parker was an entirely characteristic local figure, adding free- dom of political thought, when the slavery question became paramount, to his freedom of religious discus- sion. So it was that the independent Sunday services which he held in Music Hall filled an important place in the lives of the large radical following drawn by his fervid personality to desert the orthodox Unitarianism. Heretic of heretics as he was in his day, his latest Theodore Parker. Bust by W. W. Story, in the Boston Public Library. 2i8 BOSTON biographer, the Rev. John White Chadwick, who may be held to speak as authoritatively as any individual may for his denomination, declares : " From then till now Unitarian progress has been along the line illumi- nated by his beacon-light." To follow that line would be to depart far from the central theme of this chapter, — the disestablishment of the Puritan church. A full treatment of that theme alone would demand a volume. Here it has seemed sufficient to point out some of its mdst signifi- cant facts and aspects. They belong peculiarly to Boston history. The whole Unitarian movement, in its outward manifestations, has meant much more to Boston than to any other community, in America or elsewhere. With Boston must be reckoned also the eastern part of Massachusetts : much that has been said about the disestablishment applies to the sur- rounding towns quite as much as to the city itself. In the remote parts of Massachusetts, as in the country at large, the movement, judged by outward results, has gone on rather as an eddy by the side of the stream than as the main action of the tide. The " Unitarian controversy " itself is now far enough in the past for men to ask and answer the question, which party won ? If to win means to per- suade your antagonist that he is wrong, then we must call it a drawn battle, for it is certain that those who argued for and against the Calvinistic faith ended practically where they began. The very process of argument served to strengthen their convictions. If "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 219 Channing could have had his way, to let the liberal leaven work within the established fold, we may well imagine that there never would have been that stiffen- ing of Orthodoxy which only in recent years has begun to relax. How far, on the other hand, the progress of liberalism would have been checked, no man can say. If victory or defeat is to be measured by denomina- tional growth — a development which had only a sec- ondary interest for those who formed the Unitarian denomination — our later view must differ from that which the middle of the nineteenth century would have presented. In 1850 there were within the limits of what is now Boston, thirty-two Unitarian churches ; there are now (1903) twenty-seven. In 1850 there were within the same limits twenty-one Congregational Trinitarian churches ; to-day there are thirty-three. The rapid growth of the Episcopal and other Trinitarian Protestant churches might also fairly be added to the reckoning. Thus it appears that the Unitarian body was no richer in the seeds of outward growth than its opponents and some of its friends predicted. But these are all external and arbitrary methods of counting success or failure. Mrs. Stowe herself sug- gested a truer way of regarding the matter when she wrote : " This party, called for convenience Unitarian, was, in fact, a whole generation in the process of reac- tion." The process has been one in which all Protes- tant denominations have, in greater and less degree, shared. From the Unitarians few will now withhold 220 BOSTON the credit of framing the concrete form in which this influence has made itself most effectively felt. Their early claim that Calvinism soon showed signs of modi- fying itself was duly resented by the Orthodox. In the commemorative discourse at the fiftieth anniversary of the Andover Seminary Dr. Leonard Bacon, looking back upon the divisions which had rent the church, expressed pity for the comfort the Unitarians took in the changes of Calvinistic belief: " Orthodoxy, they say, has become liberal and has renounced the horrid dogmas which it was charged with holding ; and there- fore Unitarianism may be regarded as having accom- plished its mission. Well, if they are satisfied with this result, let us be thankful for them that they are so easily satisfied. ... If now at last our Unitarian friends have really learned, to their own satisfaction, that the New England Orthodoxy does not hold the obnoxious and oft repudiated dogmas which they have so long imputed to it, we may thankfully accept the fact as one more proof that the world moves." It is in quite a different spirit that the present minister of the New Old South speaks, nearly fifty years later, of " the vast service that Unitarianism has rendered to the Christian belief of the century " ; and he writes : " This overdone sense of depravity, hardened into dogma, stood for centuries against the truth that the morality of God in Christ is the morality for mankind. The truth has at last prevailed, and at this point of belief Christian people everywhere are under an im- mense debt to the great Unitarian leaders." It is in "THE BOSTON RELIGION" 221 admissions^ or rather hearty acknowledgments, of this sort, that the true outcome of the Unitarian contro- versy may be said to He. And to those who are glad to associate Boston with the progress of mankind, there is satisfaction in the thought that these great Unitarian leaders were eminently the product of local conditions. VIII THE " LITERARY CENTRE TheWic{ed mans Portion. A SERMON rPteached at the lt^«re in Beflctt m Kta Engtind the »8th diyofthe 1 Moneih i674.wlitnt»oraeo were ixk""^, ^^o ^■'^ aunhind iheit Mailer.} Wherein is (hewed Thatexcefetnxsk^edtiefi doth hr'm% mt'mely Death. Z^ INCREASE M4THEX,7acha of a Church of Chrift. Prov. 10. 17. Tie fttr tfihe Itri frtlnntth dsjii, hi thi jttn iflhi wuksifitUhtlhirttiid. Epb.6.i, J. HstunTiif Failitr ai ity M ilitr (which u th fi-fi CcmmtJidmtnl -mili frcmlfi) tktl it nay tl wit vith tin, tndlhtttii/jl livllvS cnlblEtrlh. Pana ad piucos, mttus ad omnes. OUOTATION marks are safe enclosures for words in danger of losing their pl^ce. The words at the head of this chapter have been dragged relentlessly from one American city to another, and have before them a prospect of endless migra- tion. Their meaning, too, is subject to indefinite change. The centre may be that of the writing, the printing, or the read- ing of books. A cour- ageous confidence is needed to say that this, that, or the other place is or will be the " literary centre of America." It is the fortune of the present writer to be dealing with what has been, and the assertion that Boston was the literary centre — without quotation marks — during the period in which American litera- ture acquired a shelf of its own in the library of the race is hardly open to dispute. The production of 222 S S TO N^ Printed by 7«1» Fcfln. i 6 7 J . Title-page of the First Book PRINTED IN Boston. THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 223 books possessing something like permanence is perhaps the most characteristic mark of a centre to which the term literary ^ in its true meaning of " related to litera- ture," may be applied. Name the American writers whose work has stood the test of half a century, and with a few notable exceptions they belong to Boston and its neighborhood. All this is thrice familiar. The record of it, in outline or detail, is a story which has been told by many tongues and many pens. If we look rather at the significance of the story, and try to give it its place in the longer story of Boston, the more immediate purpose will be served. Amongst the many fields of activity into which Bos- ton has made an early or the earliest entry, the field of creative writing — not for instruction or argument — can hardly be counted. It is to other places that we must look for the first important contributions to what is called American literature. Yet in Phila- delphia and New York the first-comers, Charles Brockden Brown, Irving, and Cooper, each enjoyed some of the distinction of the sohtary. Brown has become a mere name in literary history ; the others live. But when they made their appearance, it was rather as detached luminaries than as planets or fixed stars belonging to a system. The life of the commu- nities in which they lived had not reached the organic state demanding expression in literature, and finding it through the medium of a body, however small, which could be called a literary class. In Boston at this early period the condition was much the same, with the two 224 BOSTON differences that the individual writers of distinction were yet to appear, and that influences were at work, perhaps more powerfully than anywhere else in America, toward making a definite expression through literature at some later time almost a necessity. We have seen how these influences called into being the Anthology Club, the Athenaeum, and the North Ameri- can Review. The unremitting influence of Harvard BpMBSK In possession of the Boston Public Library. College, sending its sons year by year into the pulpit, the counting-houses, and professional offices of Boston, has also been touched upon. For the devotion of any considerable number of these or other men to the pursuit of literature, the time was not yet ripe. Ques- tions of politics laid claim to much of the best thought of the best thinkers. As before the Revolution, so in the active days of the Federalist party, the news- paper press abounded in contributions, frequently over THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 225 classic pseudonyms, from the ablest men in the com- munity. Thus the place which the Federalist ^ farther south, won for itself in the early literature of the coun- try was not wholly without its counterpart in the cur- rent productions of Boston writers. It was a Boston editor, by the way, who is said to have coined the phrase, " the era of good feeling," adopted with una- nimity by historians of the United States. The influ- ences of journalistic writing, however, being those which Boston shared with her sister towns, are not of present concern. Mr. Howells has spoken of the " Augustan age " of literature in Boston as " the Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic seed-time." It is a good defini- tion ; but in the seed-time should surely be included the earlier years of the nineteenth century, when Uni- tarianism was making its way. One who reads not only a chapter on the " Unitarian controversy," but also the writings of the leaders in the new movement, cannot fail to be impressed with the mere Hterary skill of these writers. Besides having ideas which they wished to urge, they knew how to urge them. Their grace and cogency of style implied both an effective training in the use of the writer's tools and the exist- ence of an audience capable of appreciating such use. Butterflies are not deliberately brought to a wheel for breaking. The very nature of a controversy which meant so much to so large a portion of the community bespoke the presence of a class to which the things of the mind and the spirit were of high importance — Q 226 BOSTON a class from which the evolution of a smaller " literary class " was easily possible. Of the rise of the Transcendental movement the Unitarian body as such would have held itself inno- cent. A shrewd observer of the intellectual life of Boston, the Rev. Dr. O. B. Frothingham, once wrote of the place : " It was always remarkable for explo- sions of mind." By the conservative element Tran- scendentalism was frankly regarded as one of these explosions. Of its practical value as a moral agency, Father Taylor, the Methodist missionary to sailors, probably spoke for many of his contemporaries when he said of a Transcendental discourse he had just heard : " It would take as many sermons like that to convert a human soul as it would quarts of skimmed milk to make a man drunk." In looking back upon TranscendentaHsm, however, and upon the influences surrounding its birth, the spirit which animated the Unitarian movement, if not Unitarianism itself, stands forth conspicuous. As the later religious thought of Theodore Parker carried to its conclusion one ten- dency of Unitarian thinking, so the philosophic thought of Transcendentalism seized upon and car- ried out another. The dropping of many traditions was the best preparation for that omitting of all tradi- tions from the mind, which Emerson considered the essence of the new philosophy. To the local causes must be added those French and German influences which led to the suggestive saying that Transcendentalism was " imported in foreign THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 227 packages." The very origin of its name, as used in Boston, seems to be unknown. For its meaning George Ripley, about to superintend the experiment of Brook Farm, spoke clearly in the summer which ended his ministry at the Unitarian church in Pur- chase Street : " There is a class of persons who desire a reform in the prevailing philosophy of the day. These are called Transcendentalists, because they beheve in an order of truths which transcend the sphere of the human senses. Their leading idea is the supremacy of mind over matter. Hence they maintain that the truth of religion does not depend on tradition nor historical facts but has an unerring wit- ness in the soul." A less restrained utterance of the same philosophy is made by Alcott in one of his " Orphic Sayings," in the first number of the Tran- scendental Dial : " Believe, youth, that your heart is an oracle ; trust her instinctive auguries, obey her divine leadings ; nor listen too fondly to the uncertain echoes of your head." In words no less characteristic of Emerson than the fragment just quoted is of Alcott, the magazine is introduced to the world : " Let it be such a Dial, not as the dead face of a clock, hardly even such as the Gnomon in a garden, but rather such a Dial as is the Garden itself, in whose leaves and flowers and fruit the suddenly awakened sleeper is in- stantly apprised not what part of dead time, but what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving.'* These passages, taken together, will suffice to sug- gest the aims of Transcendentalism. It is not needed 228 BOSTON here to trace the rise and fall of Brook Farm (i 841-7), the application of Transcendental philosophy to the problem of living ; or of the Dial (1840-4), the chief organic expression of the movement. All that has been abundantly done elsewhere. What is more use- ful at this point, in regarding Transcendentalism as an influence, is to bear in mind the marked youthfulness of many of its followers. Before the Dial appeared Emerson commended it to Carlyle for what it would show him about " our young people." Again he tells ' Carlyle that it is " a fact for literary history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so " — that is as the Transcendentalists take it. When the Dial ceased to mark the time, and Brook Farm was approaching dissolution, the Harbinger, of which the first number was published in June of 1845, joined the voices of Transcendentalism in a farewell chorus. Of the chief contributors to this number George Ripley, the dean in years and service, was forty-three years old. Horace Greeley and Cranch were respectively thirty-four and thirty-two. Parke Godwin was twenty-nine ; Lowell, Story, and Charles A. Dana were each twenty-six ; T. W. Higginson was twenty-two, and George William Curtis twenty-one. Because the entire movement of Transcendentalism was so largely a movement of youth it mattered less that, as an outward expression of thought and feeling, it came to a definite end. Its influence was stamped indelibly on many minds, which in their growth would naturally outgrow " ideal^ THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 229 ism as it appeared in 1842," — to use Emerson's defi- nition of the philosophy, — but must carry its effects through Hfe and spread its influence in many broaden- ing circles. Those who acknowledge the greatest debt to it recognize its influence not only in literature, but in art, religion, politics, equalization of the sexes, and every forward movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. In spite of its follies and extrav- agances, few will deny its general service as a stimu- lus to clear thinking and pure living, and therein as an educational force felt directly and indirectly through- out the community in which it throve. Of all the representatives of Transcendentalism, Emerson was naturally felt to be the most important, and of course has exerted the most enduring personal influence. What saved him from complete identifica- tion with the movement was his pervading sanity and humor. Loyal friend of his Orphic neighbor as he was, he could yet record with a certain relish the remark of one puzzled auditor of a " Conversation " by Alcott : " It seemed to him like going to heaven in a swing.'* It was he also who made what is prob- ably the most familiar definition of Brook Farm, — "a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan." To Ripley, when Brook Farm was only a plan, he could write, " If not the sunrise, it will be the morning star." But when Ripley sought definitely to secure his participation in the ven- ture, his sound common sense prompted the answer : " My feeling is that the community is not good for 230 BOSTON me, that it has little to offer me which with resolution I cannot procure for myself. ... It seems to me a circuitous and operose way of relieving myself to put upon your community the emancipation which I ought to take on myself I must assume my own vows." The same spirit of practical conservatism made him a late comer amongst the active opponents of slavery. It also marked his point of contact with the element of intellectual and social life in Boston from which the chief recruits to the ranks of literature were drawn. It may fairly be questioned whether the poets, his- torians, and other writers of any place besides Boston, through a whole period of marked productiveness, have represented so clearly as the writers of Boston for the second third of the nineteenth century, whatever was best in the inheritances and current life of the place. Grub Street and Bohemia, often merging into the territory of newspapers and publishing offices, have elsewhere been a fruitful source of authorship. It is an alien criticism of Boston that there " Respecta- bility stalks unchecked." The justice of the charge is certainly supported by a mere list of the writers who brought distinction to their town — a list in which Bohemia might expect to be represented if at all. The fact is that this undefined country, to which all true inheritors of the tavern spirit of Ben Jonson and his fellows have owed allegiance, has never had any im- portant place within the boundaries of New England. The background of the Boston writers was eminently that of the circle described in the privately printed THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 231 volume From Books and Papers of Russell Sturgis: "In the first place, then, Boston society was exclusive, as by a law of nature ; it was the simple coming together of certain families, the younger men and women to dance or talk, the elder to talk or dine. It was like a large family party ; and there were many who could announce the precise degree of relationship between any two people in any assembly." This was the Bos- ton of the generation born near the beginning of the nineteenth century, — a generation which Mr. Julian Sturgis, writing the words just quoted, considered " exceptionally fortunate in the time of their birth." Of a slightly earlier time he writes : " Young Copley (afterwards Lord Lyndhurst), revisiting his native town in 1796 wrote home to his sister: ' Shall I whis- per a word in your ear ? The better people are all aristocrats. My father is too rank a Jacobin to live among them.' Indeed, it must be confessed that the idea of equality in social matters had not even occurred to any one ; and that even in the political world it was held a matter of course that an Adams or an Otis should exercise an influence other and far greater than that of one mere voter." Into a society maintaining these views and standards for the better part of a cen- tury the chief writers of Boston were born. It is worth while, then, to look at some of them in their relation to the life of which as men they formed a part. The name of George Ticknor is not one of the first which come to mind in thinking of the Boston writers. Yet the very length of his life (1791-1871) and its 232 BOSTON The Ticknor House, 1903; Corner of Beacon and Park streets. constant identification with learning and with people, render him a typical figure. It is not chiefly as the predecessor of Longfellow in the Smith professorship at Harvard or as the accomplished historian of Spanish literature that this figure presents itself. We think of him rather as the master of the hospitable mansion at the head of Park Street, now given over to a score of trades and arts. Here, overlooking the Common, was his study, rich in the Spanish and Portuguese treasures now preserved in the Boston Pubhc Library, toward the firm establishment of which he became one of the most zealous workers. To the Art Mu- seum has descended from the walls of this scholar's THE ^'LITERARY CENTRE ^33 library, the portrait of Scott for which at Ticknor's request after a visit to Abbotsford Sir Walter sat to Leslie. The picture is a tangible expression of that familiarity with the most interesting persons and places of Europe which was characteristic of Ticknor and his immediate circle. His Life abounds in the records of friendship with travelHng and home-keeping foreigners of the first distinction. On reading Ticknor's Memoirs Edwin P. Whipple complained that the names of such men as Emerson, Whit- tier, Theodore Parker, and Sumner were notice- ably absent from the pages of the book. " It was not to be supposed," said Whipple, " that Mr. Ticknor could, as a man of eminent respectability, have any sympathy with their audacities of thought and conduct." Even Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell do not, in the critic's view, receive their just share of attention in comparison with " some titled European medioc- rities." Another passage from Whipple's pages on Ticknor is suggestive : " His position (after his return from Europe in 1838) was so assured that one of his House of Charles Sumner, Hancock Street. 234 BOSTON friends, Nathan Hale, pleasantly suggested that the name of Boston be changed into Ticknorville. In New York and other cities the good society of Boston was for a long time regarded as the select circle of cultivated gentlemen and ladies in which Ticknor moved, and to which he almost gave the law." It is in the blending of the man of the world, a positive social force, and the man of letters, not a mere dilettante but an industrious scholar, that Ticknor takes his place as a representative figure in the life of Bostorr. To the hand of Ticknor naturally fell the biography of his friend and neighbor, William Hickling Prescott. It is a book reflecting the same life of " eminent respectability." On the westward slope of Beacon Street, also overlooking the Common, the house of Prescott, a structure of marked dignity and beauty, stands to typify, as architecture may, the quality of past generations of builders and occupants. From Prescott's Life one bears away the impression of some- thing more than agreeable surroundings and distin- guished achievement. President Walker of Harvard, a classmate of Prescott, wrote of him, " I have never known one so little changed by the conventionalities of society and the hard trial of success and prosperity." This is indeed a trial of character. In meeting it and at the same time overcoming the handicap of practical bhndness, Prescott put his inheritances of courage to a victorious test. So it is that his Life makes its strong- est impression as a record of heroic struggle, a docu- ment in evidence of the sterner qualities sometimes THE "LITERARY CENTRE" ^3S transmitted with other gifts of fortune by the fathers of New England to their sons. If these quaHties were characteristic of the class to which the Boston writers belonged, so also were the inherent qualities of the gentleman. Of the generous sacri- fices of scholarship Prescott both re- ceived and gave. When Irving found that the young writer was at work on the theme which he him- self had made ex- tensive preparations to treat — the Con- quest of Mexico — he withdrew, and, besides leaving the field to Prescott, did everything possible to forward his labor in it. The example set by Irving was not wasted upon one with instincts like his own. After the failure of Motley's venture in fiction, he came to Prescott for advice about the work he was planning to do in the history of the Dutch Republic. Prescott's studies in Spanish history had prepared him for the same task which, unknown to Motley, he was about to undertake. House of W. H. Prescott (in fore- ground), Beacon Street. 236 BOSTON Instead of going on with it, he placed his precious Hbrary at Motley's disposal, and, but for the dissuading voice of Ticknor, would have done the superfluous kindness of offering Motley the manuscript collections of which he afterward made use in his own Philip the Second. Hawthorne's making over of the Acadian theme to Longfellow is another of the instances of generosity which are useful reminders of what it was — and is — to be both a gentleman and an author. Of Motley, another favored son of the place, with brilliant personal gifts rarely qualifying him for the high diplomatic posts he was called to fill ; of Park- man, his junior, whose disabilities of eyesight at once restricted his intercourse with the world and demanded of his own life a strain of heroism as genuine as any his pen recorded of others ; of nearly all the company of Boston writers, — a detailed account would present an inevitable monotony of background. In the matter of early influences, Longfellow stood somewhat apart from the rest, for Portland and Bowdoin College took the more famihar places of Boston and Harvard. But then came the period of study and travel in Europe, for which Everett and Bancroft had set an example increasingly followed, — and after that Longfellow, though living in Cambridge, became, especially when his second marriage allied him closely to Boston so- ciety, an habitual figure therein. His journals tell the story of this constant intercourse with the best repre- sentatives of fashionable life in the little Boston world, at dinners, at Nahant, — to which his witty brother-in- THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 237 law, T. G. Appleton, gave the enduring name of " cold ' roast Boston," — even at the dancing assemblies in the hall of the Papantis, deserted only in recent years by the arbiters of local fashion. In his own historic house at Cambridge he enjoyed to the full the pleas- ures of hospitahty ; and the frequent entries of the names of guests, native and foreign, produce a pano- rama of uncommon variety and interest. The benig- nant light which Longfellow's personality threw upon all his surroundings is reflected in nearly everything that has been written about him. The personality and the work he did are so in harmony that W. J. Stillman's definition of his nature, as " the most ex- * quisitely refined and gentle " he ever knew, brings to mind the double picture of the man and his writings — characteristic, the one and the other, of "the ' World ' of there and then." Of all the group of Boston writers Oliver Wendell Holmes stands obviously possessed of the strongest local flavor. The manifestations of it in his prose and verse are too many and too famiHar to require any fresh recital. The reader who needs reminding may well turn, for a single significant instance, to the char- acter of " Little Boston " in The Professor at the Break- fast Table. His thoughts and words could have been put on paper only by one who was saturated with the local spirit and traditions. It is good to hear the crooked little man glorying in his birthplace — " full of crooked little streets ; but I tell you Boston has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead 238 BOSTON straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than any other city of Hve men or dead men, — I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their steeples ! " The sense of humor which gave this character of " Little Boston " its full measure of eccen- tricity was the sense which generally saved Dr. Holmes in his proper person from letting himself confuse the local and the universal. " We have been in danger," he wrote in 1876, "of thinking our local scale was the absolute one of excellence — forgetting that .212 Fah- renheit is but 100 Centigrade." Of course he did not always escape this danger himself. His biographer, Mr. J. T. Morse, Jr., is of the opinion that if Dr. Holmes had travelled more, the famous Saturday Club, which embodied the best masculine society of the place, " would have assumed proportions more accu- rately adapted to the universe in general." But all such contentions are capable of argument. Dr. Holmes himself maintained that "identification with a locality is a surer passport to immortality than cosmopolitanism is." His own case seems indeed to justify this belief. In the very point at which the spirit of his writing reflected with special clearness the spirit of his com- munity, he at once incurred the strongest displeasure of some of his contemporaries, and produced his most important results in American thought. " The Pro- fessor," putting into popular form much of the local spirit of liberal theology, must be counted amongst the emancipating agencies of the nineteenth century. The depolarization of words has become both a phrase and THE "LITERARY CENTRE" ■39 a fact by reason of this book. Its successive instal- ments, as they appeared in The Atlantic Monthly^ brought down upon the magazine and its chief con- tributor charges of extreme and dangerous radicahsm. " If one could believe many of the newspapers," Mr. Scudder has said, "Dr. Holmes was a sort of reincar- nation of Voltaire, who stood for the most audacious enemy of Christianity in modern times." Yet Dr. Holmes, the chapel-going descendant of the " meeting- going animals " who, according to John Adams, had populated New England, had little in common with the " come-outers." The local honors of class and Phi Beta Kappa poet. Harvard professor, physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital, meant much to him. It even gratified a local whimsical pride to re- flect, after the great fire of 1872, that in the "Great Fire" of 1760 his great-grandfather had lost forty build- ings. There is significance, too, in noticing how much completer a sympathy he brought to his biography of Motley than to that of Emerson. For all his appre- ciation of Emerson's unique greatness, the well-ordered scholarship and career of the historian must have typi- fied more clearly to him what one of his own Bostoni- ans should be and do. The enlightened conservatism in him spoke nowhere more characteristically than when he wrote, " I go politically for equality, — I said, — and socially for the quality," a sentiment to which many of his fellows would have subscribed. To his place among the New England classics Lowell came by somewhat different paths from those 240 BOSTON of Longfellow and Holmes. Besi'des being a man of letters and a man of the same world to which his dis- tinguished contemporaries belonged, he had formed early and dubious alliances with the antislavery agita- tors. His own magazine, The Pioneer^ opening with his plea for a natural rather than a national literature, was a closed book after three numbers. For many years thereafter his editorial labors identified him closely, through The Pennsylvania Freeman and The Antislavery Standard, with the opponents of existing conditions. The scholar who is not primarily a poet may usually be found in the ranks of the cautious and contented. The poet, the idealist, in Lowell's nature made him inevitably also something of a reformer. It was not till Longfellow tired of academic duties in 1 854 that Lowell assumed any such definite connection with the established order of things as a Harvard professor- ship implied. His completed fame derives so much from his work as an essayist and student of literature that there is danger of forgetting the unstinted service of his early muse in the cause of reform, a cause which could not at first be either conventional or popular. The figure of Lowell is, however, in this very aspect, char- acteristic and important, for he represented one of the most vital forces which in the final blending rendered the highest literary expression of Boston in the nine- teenth century precisely what it was. The year 1857 is a convenient date by which to mark the blending of elements resulting in this expres- sion. In that year The Atlantic Monthly was founded. THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 241 The story of its origin, due in large measure to the enthusiasm of Francis H. Underwood, representing the pubHshing house of Phillips, Sampson & Co., has been frequently told in recent years. The magazine was rarely fortunate in having Lowell for its first editor. His sympathies, personal, intellectual, political, had perhaps a broader national scope than those of any other man to whom this task might have fallen. He could therefore better give and receive what would have been impossible to one of somewhat parochial limitations. Yet it was from the writers of the imme- diate vicinity that the magazine won its early distinc- tion. The editor had but to stretch out his hand to seize an embarrassment of riches. In the twenty-five years of interruption between the Autocrat's early appearance in the short-lived New England Magazine and the resumption of his talk in The Atlantic^ Dr. Holmes had been storing his treasures of fancy and wisdom, and ripening the skill with which he finally brought them forth. Emerson and those who were most affected by his influence stood ready to provide the mellowed best results of Transcendental thought. Lowell himself, Edmund Quincy, Whittier, and others brought a fine element of fervor for the antislavery cause which still had its ultimate victories to win. In the field of criticism Edwin Percy Whipple, lecturer and writer, whose vanished authority and vogue are pathetic emblems of the value of contemporary fame, contributed with others the best obtainable comment and opinion. Apart from their individual interests. 242 BOSTON it is obvious that most of the writers — let us add Longfellow, and Hawthorne, soon to return from Europe — could be relied upon for definite additions to literature itself. Thus more or less directly from the spiritual cause of TranscendentaHsm, from the politico-moral cause of antislavery, from the intellec- tual and artistic interest of purely creative writing — each represented by spirits and sometimes by minds of the first order — there came a union of strangely powerful forces. It was the function of The- Atlantic to provide a full and free opportunity for the expres- sion of these forces. The more thoughtful element, not only in Boston but in the country at large, was ready for just this influence — all the more perhaps because the system of lyceum lectures had not yet gone into decay. The frequent lecturing tours of the Boston leaders of thought and reform had made their personalities familiar throughout New England and many Southern and Western states. To find them assembled in the pages of The Atlantic was, for a large audience, like a reunion of honored friends. In its second editor, James T. Fields, The Atlantic was also fortunate. Within a little more than two years of its founding, the magazine fell into the hands of the firm of which he was then a member. Begin- ning as a bookseller's clerk who astonished his fellow- salesmen at the " Old Corner " by whispering a correct prophecy of what each customer entering the shop would demand, he had become a publisher well skilled in gauging the public taste. At the same time he was THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 243 sufficiently a maker of books by his own pen to meet his writers on even a broader common ground than his unusual gifts of friendship could alone have provided. It was impossible that a man with so many decisions to render should make nothing but friends ; and there is at least one volume, by a vigorous feminine writer, which will reproduce for those who seek it the note of discord in the harmonies of the time and place. For the far more general feeling, Dr. Holmes, soon after the death of Mr. Fields, in 1881, spoke in words which amply suggest the influence an editor and publisher may wield : "How many writers know, as I have known, his value as a literary counsellor and friend ! His mind was as hospitable as his roof, which has accepted famous visitors and quiet friends alike as if it had been their own. . . . Very rarely, if ever, has a publisher enjoyed the confidence and friendship of so wide and various a circle of authors." From all the record of this " harvest-time " of letters, one carries away a vivid impression of a happy family. Its members rejoiced like brothers in the successes won by each in turn. Working apart, yet side by side, they met like brothers for relaxation and play. The project of The Atlantic itself was at once launched and lunched into being, for it was round a table at Parker's that the plan for the new magazine first took definite form. It was the habit of the most important early contributors to meet frequently in the same informal way. But the " Atlantic Club " was soon over- shadowed by the more conspicuous and comprehensive 244 BOSTON "Saturday Club/' also begun in 1857. This monthly gathering at Parker's, which had as its nucleus Emer- son and a few friends who made a practice of meeting him at the midday dinner-table when he came in from Concord, appears and reappears, always with an affec- tionate mention, in the journals and letters of the time. Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Haw- thorne, Whittier, Agassiz, Motley, Fields, Dana, — in whose Life, by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the best account of the club is to be found, — these, with a few others not in general so closely related to lit- erature, made up the membership. Distinguished visitors were entertained, without the sensation of lions on exhibition. The intercourse of friendship and good talk received no check from the reading of papers. Dr. Holmes rejoiced in the blessed freedom from speechmaking. It is told of Emerson that " in 1864, when the club held a Shakespearian anniversary meeting, he rose to speak, stood for a minute or two, and then quietly sat down. Speech did not come, and he serenely permitted silence to speak for him." This incident may be more characteristic of Emerson than of his club; yet it reveals a perfect understanding and fellowship which help one to accept all that is said of the separate place this formless organization held in the hearts and lives of its members. Another club of Emer- son's, deriving its name from the Unitarian periodical of which it was the outgrowth, though now containing representatives of the Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches, was the " Examiner Club." " The easy ^. (?C6^,/P^4.^//. 'c>«^^, 1^ ^^^^ Diagram of a Saturday Club Dinner, in the handwriting of John S. Dwight. 246 BOSTON talk of such men as Emerson, the elder Henry James, Governor Andrew, Dr. Hedge, Whipple, and others of distinguished ability," is said by one of its older members to have " touched the higher possibilities of conversation when the art was more in evidence than at present." In the Saturday Club at its best those possibili- ties may well have been even more frequently attained. It was entirely natural for such a body of men to win from outsiders the name of "The Mutual Admi- ration Society." If no mutual admiration existed, it was, as Dr. Holmes declared, "a great pity, and implied a defect in the nature of men who were other- wise largely endowed." Elsewhere he wrote : " I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is out of fashion among them. This could never be, if they were in the habit of secret anonymous puffing of each other. That is the kind of underground machinery which manufactures false reputations and genuine hatreds. On the other hand, I should like to know if we are not at liberty to have a good time together, and say the pleasantest things we can think of to each other, when any of us reaches his thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth birthday." Here in all sincerity speaks the member of that happy family of which the Saturday Club was the accepted meeting-place. The Atlantic the recognized organ, and the considerable contribution of these Boston writers of the nineteenth century to American literature the permanent memorial. THE "LITERARY CENTRE'' 247 It was not until the year 1894 that the death of Dr. Holmes bore away the latest survivor of this group of contemporary friends. Lowell and Whittier had also seen the beginning of the last decade of the cen- tury. In the next to the last Emerson and Long- fellow had gone — following Motley in 1877 and Hawthorne in 1864. With the eighties the group may be said to have been disintegrated. A few of their younger brothers, such as Dr. Hale, Professor Norton, and Colonel Higginson, have remained to typify the older to the younger generation. In them, as in many of those who will be their successors, abides the old-time qi^ality of representing the best social and academic traditions of the place. With the gradual passing of the older brotherhood, Boston unquestion- ably lost its preeminence as the " literary centre " of the country. Where this wandering spot has fixed itself, or where it may be found ten years hence, one may not assert too confidently. There is one point, however, at which the student of local conditions rests with some assurance. The best expression of Boston thought and life in Hterature has never come from a class set apart as writers. There has been — so far as the best writing is concerned — no restricted "lit- erary set," despising and despised of its neighbors. Authorship has never been so general as to require the adoption of the formula said by the scornful to be used in Cambridge as the best of morning greetings — " How is your book coming on ? " Yet the emphasis laid upon the backgrounds of such lives as Prescott's 248 BOSTON and Longfellow's will have been in vain if there is need of further testimony to the identification of the writers with the most characteristic and agreeable life of the town. A representative author, in other words, was perhaps even more likely to appear where one would least expect him than in the surroundings asso- ciated with the commoner traditions of authorship. Massachusetts Historical Society Building, Boylston Street AND f'ENWAY. In the Boston Custom-house, for example, Bancroft and Hawthorne were to be found at the same time. For WilHs, on the other hand, fresh from college and full of zeal for the life of editor and author, there seemed no place in Boston. Upon the scholarly hard work done by the men of letters who were also men of the world it has not been thought necessary to dwell. This is rendered superfluous by what they have written. THE "LITERARY CENTRE'^ 249 The writer's frank intention, moreover, has been to keep in view the local quality of his theme. The lit- erary product touched upon so cursorily and with so many obvious omissions happens to form an integral part of American literature. Here it is regarded in its relation to local conditions. The advantages gained through these conditions are perhaps evident. So should the limitations be. Respectability, freedom from the bitter struggle of those who have nothing but their pens and their wits to rely upon, a certain remoteness and separation, in a mere geographical sense, from elements elsewhere characteristic of Amer- ican life, — these may work to helpful or harmful ends. Their influences, both for good and its opposite, may be traced in the work of the Boston writers. They go far, in any event, to explain the total product. If that product and the life from which it sprang justify the frequent likening of Boston in its prime as a "literary centre " to Edinburgh under similar conditions, it is at least to be added that Boston was an Edinburgh with- out a London. IX THE SLAVE AND THE UNION W Lock and Key of Leverett Street Jail, 1835. HEN Lafayette visited Boston in 1 824 and was welcomed by a great multitude, he turned to Josiah* Quincy, mayor of the city, and asked, " But where is the mob ? " In- deed there was nothing more mob-like to show than the crowds which suggested to the visitor " a picked population out of the whole human race." From many accounts of the "mob" which nearly killed William Lloyd Garrison in the streets of Boston eleven years later, we are led to suppose that it had the same blameless ap- pearance. " This mob," says Henry Wilson, " came not from the purlieus of Fort Hill and Ann Street, but from the counting-rooms of State Street and the parlors of Beacon Street." It is this topographical fact which renders the mere existence of a statue of Garrison at the very centre of the later social life of Boston the significant thing it is. For a more striking emblem of the changes wrought within the lifetime of the arch-abolitionist, one would look in vain. From the men of 1835 his living body was narrowly rescued. 250 THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 251 Now for nearly twenty years the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these very men have used the reformer's effigy as a nucleus for their laughing games. Such changes do not come without struggle and resist- William Lloyd Garrison, Commonwealth Avenue. Bronze by Olin L. Warner. ance. The story of them is but another of the local records with a meaning that is fairly national. The " Garrison mob " of 1835 may be taken as the first action of concrete warfare between the hostile camps which Garrison, more than any other single man, had already arrayed against each other — the camps of abolition and of laiss ex-fair e. Let us see exactly what 252 BOSTON his Liberator, of which the first number was published in Boston, January i, 1 83 1, proposed to do. It is all a tale that has been told again and again. All the more, perhaps, we need to remind ourselves of its essential points. The very word Liberator, then, meant pre- cisely what it saido Garrison set the simple definition of slavery as " the holding of a human being as prop- erty " clearly before him, uncompromisingly felt the wrong in such an institution, and devoted his life to the cause of " immediate emancipation" — ?t phrase to which he attached quite as literal a meaning as the word Liberator conveyed to his mind. In the first number of his paper he made a salutatory address which so accurately gives the spirit in which his work was undertaken that it cannot escape frequent quota- tion : " I am aware that many object to the severity of my language ; but is there not cause for severity ? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On the subject of slavery I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No ! no ! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm ; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher ; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen, — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard.'' A native of Essex, with a brief experience of Baltimore and the South, the prophet of twenty-six spoke with all a prophet's THE SLAVE AND THE UNION ^S3 ®ut Counttg is tijt ajEorlB, our Countrgmcn att all iKanftinli. Final Heading of Libehatob. fervid conviction. He had deliberately chosen Boston as the place for the utterance of The Liberator s mes- sage because he felt that Richmond or Charleston stood scarcely more in need of it. He assumed and held his tone of vehement aggression with a full con- sciousness of what he was about. When a friend in private, urging him to keep more cool, said, " Why, you are all on fire," Garrison's confident reply came, " I have need to be all on jire^ for I have mountains of ice about me to melt." He knew the Boston which surrounded him. A year after the beginning of The Liberator^ the New England Antislavery Society, the first American organization of its kind, was estabHshed in Boston. Here, in its simplest form, was another of the agencies by which the ice was to be melted. The meeting at which the constitution of the society was adopted was held on the night of a bitter snowstorm, in the school- room under a negro church. The instrument had twelve signers, one of whom, Oliver Johnson, has left 254 BOSTON the record of his belief that " there were not more than one or two who could have put a hundred dollars into the treasury without bankrupting them- selves." The whole enterprise would have seemed to a student of human chances as impossible as it was obscure. We have seen the spirit in which Garrison began the work of his Liberator. It will be equally well to know exactly what the first organized aboli- tionists set before themselves as their ideal and their task. This is presented in the preamble to their con- stitution, modified a year later, but clearly setting forth the chief articles of the primitive abolitionist faith : " We, the undersigned, hold that every per- son, of full age and sane mind, has a right to imme- diate freedom from personal bondage of whatsoever kind, unless imposed by the sentence of law for the commission of some crime. We hold that man can- not, consistently with reason, religion, and the eternal and immutable principles of justice, be the property of man. We hold that whoever retains his fellow- man in bondage is guilty of a grievous wrong. We hold that mere difference of complexion is no reason why any man should be deprived of any of his natural rights, or subjected to any political disa- bility. While we advance these opinions as the principles on which we intend to act, we declare that we will not operate in the existing relations of society by other than peaceful and lawful means, and that we will give no countenance to violence or insur- rection." THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 255 Here, in spite of the pacific flavor of the last sentence, were sentiments to which neither North nor South could turn a heedless ear. To the South, Garrison, naturally enough, typified the new agitation ; and the following editorial expression represented the calmer Southern view : " We know nothing of the man ; we desire not to have him unlawfully dealt with ; we can even conceive of his motive being good in his own opinion : but it is the motive of the man who cuts the throats of your wife and children." Of a Northern attitude that was largely typical, and of the abolitionist manner of meeting it, a single concrete instance, taken from the " Recollections " of the Rev. S. J. May, is more illustrative than pages of generalization could be. Mr. May, an ardent fellow-worker with Garrison, was speaking at a New York antislavery meeting in 1835, and saw a man enter whom he recognized as a partner in one of the chief mercantile firms of the city. He beckoned Mr. May to the door, and when they stood together on the sidewalk, said : — "' Mr. May, we are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a great evil, a great wrong. But it was consented to by the founders of our Republic. It was provided for in the Constitution of our Union. A great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under its sanction ; and the business of the North, as well as the South, has become adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from South- erners to the merchants and mechanics of this city alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized 1S6 BOSTON by any rupture between North and South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates succeed in your endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principle with us. It is a matter of business necessity. We cannot afford to let you succeed. We mean, sir,' said he, with increased emphasis, — 'we mean, sir, to put you abolitionists down, — by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.' " After a minute's pause I replied : ' Then, sir, the gain of gold must be better than that of • godliness. Error must be mightier than truth ; wrong stronger than right. The Devil must preside over the affairs of the universe, and not God. Now, sir, I believe neither of these propositions. If holding men in slavery be wrong, it will be abolished. We shall succeed, your pecuniary interest to the contrary not- withstanding.' " Borrowed from New York, this dialogue has no peculiar local flavor. It is characteristic merely of the North, and is cited here at length, with the Garrison utterance and the abolitionist preamble, in order to suggest yet another important element in the bewilder- ing case that had to be argued, through deed and word, in every American city. In addition to what all the North had in common, the slavery question in Boston had local flavor enough and to spare. To Garrison and his comrades the place owed its distinction of being the headquarters of agitation. Through the " good principle of rebellion " constantly at work in Boston, Garrison never wanted supporters who refused with THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 257 him to accept the conditions accepted by others. In the conservative forces, on the other hand, no less than in the radical, Boston had its own characteristics. If the unchecked stalking of respectability told upon letters, its effect upon the social and political order was even more pronounced. The growth of the cotton manufacturing industry in Massachusetts brought the powerful commercial class of Boston into close relations with the powerful cotton-raising, slave-owning class at the South. Southern planters coming to the Boston hotels, as to those of a summer resort, received abun- dant hospitality at the best private houses. Their sons at Harvard, with large allowances and engaging manners, formed Northern friendships which forbade the chosen youth of New England to regard all slave- holders with aversion. It was rather the reformer, the abolitionist, himself outside the social pale and hostile to existing institutions, who needed to be abolished. The people of Boston, says the biographer of Sumner, " had a keen sense of legality, sharpened at times by material interests." Nearly every influ- ence persuaded the average citizen to the letting of well enough alone. Among the strongest of those conservative forces were, of course, the clergy. Throughout the North the abolitionists were confronted from the first by the clerical influences, which lent all their strength to the Colonization Society and its somewhat Utopian plan of carrying blacks to Africa. It may be, as Mr. May declared, — in defence of his cloth, — that a greater 258 BOSTON proportion of clergymen than of either of the other "learned professions" embraced the cause of "imme- diate emancipation." Certainly as the conflict went on, this cause was palpably the stronger for the help espe- cially of Unitarian ministers in New England. But in the earner stages the churches in general, and the Boston Unitarian leaders in particular, could see little or nothing to commend in the purposes and methods of the Garrisonians. There were, of course, many who drew a clear line of distinction between " antislavery " and " abolition." Like the New York merchant, they saw the wrong and evil of slavery ; they were ready to do even more than he toward making things better — but not according to the abolitionist programme. Their sentiments found expression in these words of Dr. Gannett's : " The general strain of language of the abolitionists toward, — not only slaveholders, of whom I mean not now to say anything, — but toward Northern men who do not agree with them, is, I think, unchristian, bitterly and fiercely unchristian. With a party which glories in such a course I can- not strike hands. I may sympathize in their objects, while I dread and abhor their spirit." To such com- ment the more heated advocates of abolition made their retort by calling the clergy the " brotherhood of Thieves." Indeed, why should not the typical Boston Unita- rian, minister or layman, have dreaded and abhorred the abolitionist spirit ? The prevailing habit of thought and feehng was to dwell so lovingly on the THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 259 good qualities of human nature that tragedy and evil came to look almost as remote as in daily experience they were. Dr. Frothingham has told the story of a Boston clergyman whose subscription was asked for a charity on behalf of prisoners ; he took out his pocket- book, saying, " I will give you something, for evidently you need it, but I have no faith in your cause ; my preference is for people who don't get into jail." Of Dr. Walker, the distinguished Unitarian minister who became president of Harvard College, Dr. Frothing- ham's book preserves the report that he would not even vote — " lest he should be associated in the public mind with political opinions. He was a clergyman, and as such pledged to the single duty of educating people in character." Nor did the influence, accord- ing to Dr. Frothingham, flow all in one direction — from the pulpit to the pews. The fact that the Uni- tarian congregations contained the chief men of affairs and of thought, merchants, politicians, judges, the dignified figures representing stability and order, could not but have its effect. The ministers would have been something more than human if, in the august presences of Webster, Everett, Ticknor, Prescott, and the rest, they had proclaimed the opinions of these men on one point of pubHc order to be utterly at fault, and the voice of the people, for whom the abolitionists came more and more to speak, to be the true voice of God. It is easy to see, therefore, why by the summer of 1835, when The Liberator had been fulminating against the forces of respectability for four years, and i6o BOSTON antislavery meetings had steadily increased in frequency and violence of speech, there were fifteen hundred citi- zens of Boston ready to sign a call for a pubhc meet- ing in Faneuil Hall to denounce the agitators of the slavery question for endangering the Union itself. The mayor of the city, Theodore Lyman, Jr., presided at the meeting ; Abbott Lawrence was one of its vice- presidents, and Harrison Gray Otis a speaker. The abolitionists were roundly denounced ; and a few days later The Liberator placed the blame for -whatever trouble might spring from such unrestrained speeches squarely on the shoulders of the distinguished speakers. The premonition of trouble was correct. The day of the "Garrison mob'' — to call the riot by its historic name — has left one of the darkest spots in the whole calendar of Boston history. It was not entirely the sporadic thing one would naturally think it. Only the summer before (August ii, 1834), a mob, stirred up by a false report that a young woman was restrained against her will in the Ursuline Con- vent at Charlestown, attacked that institution, pillaged its property, and destroyed the building by fire. This cowardly attack upon unprotected women and girls had the poor excuse that it proceeded from fellows of the baser sort, excited by the powerful stimulant of religious prejudice. The Garrison mob had no such excuse. In practically every account of it, beginning with that of Garrison himself, the rioters have been described as " gentlemen of property and standing." Only a year earlier Channing had deplored the com- Q P, S o K H u b S g 1 O ,o Q 3 g 3 u^ cL c T^tr^ /^^^k^^ ciless of speech, he ^ ^^^^ ,^v^^ felt behind him the I T^ * /» moral, rather than CT^u^H^ yOl^^^H. the social and com- ^ mercial forces of his ^^ * ^^ state. Amongst thinking persons, in their turn, the principle of resist- ance to the constituted authorities, when abstract right seemed to require it, was steadily gaining ground. Through the effective workings of the Underground Railway system, to cite a single example, this principle expressed itself in Boston as throughout the North — and the law was steadily defied. Not only the rank and file, but men of leading and of education found themselves in the unaccustomed place of law-breakers. 276 BOSTON When it was feared that the fugitive Crafts, married by Theodore Parker during their stay in Boston, would be captured and returned to slavery. Dr. H. I. Bowditch, having occasion to drive Craft to Brookline one Sun- day, carried a loaded pistol in one hand ready to repel Old Court House, Court Square. slave-catchers. While the two fugitives had the pro- tection of Theodore Parker's house before they were sent to England, he wrote his sermons at a desk in which a drawn sword and a pistol lay ready for instant use. Almost as a part of the marriage ceremony, he gave the pair a Bible apiece and a bowie-knife, for de- fence of soul and body. These typical instances of the antislavery readiness to fight if necessary point to the condition which could not but follow the Southern vic- tory in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854. THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 277 More than to any other single cause, perhaps, it was due to this measure that the "Burns riot" had so different a purpose from that of the " Garrison mob," and that the rendition of Burns was so much greater a tragedy in the view of Boston than the rendition of Sims, three years earlier. On May 24, 1854, Anthony Burns, a recent fugitive from slavery, was arrested in Boston. Through the mediation of Theodore Parker he was induced to accept the legal services of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., in his defence. His extra-legal defence was immedi- ately undertaken by the antislavery " Vigilance Com- mittee." A small sub-committee, including Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Samuel G. Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, set about devising a plan for the rescue of Burns. At the last moment it was decided to stampede a public meeting to be held in Faneuil Hall on Friday evening. May 26, and direct its whole physical force, after its righteous indignation was aroused, against the Court House, where Burns was confined. In Colonel Higginson's own words, " It was one of the very best plots that ever — failed." The Faneuil Hall meeting was large, to the point of unwieldiness. Mr.^ Higginson, and a few supporters, were ready to lead the attack upon the Court House, when the reenforcement of friends should arrive from Faneuil Hall. The signal for the stampede was imperfectly understood by Phillips, Parker, and Howe, and the intended leaders were among the last to reach the Court House. There, meanwhile, an official had 278 BOSTON locked the main door; and Mr. Higginson with a few others began battering the west door with a joist. When it gave way, it admitted the attacking party merely into the arms of a band of policemen, who plied their clubs with such zeal that further progress was out of the question. In the scrimmage a shot was fired which killed one of the marshal's deputies. Here was the tragic note. Over against it may be set the appearance a few moments later of the imperturbable Alcott at the stairway guarded by armed deputy mar- shals. " Why are we not within ? " asked the sage. In the blame which Mr. Higginson's answer laid upon those who had failed to render support the failure of the whole venture was involved. For all its futility it had not failed to demonstrate that scholars, clergymen, and philanthropists were ready on occasion to resist the slave-power vi et armis^ as vigorously as the "gentlemen of property and standing" nineteen years before had assailed the advocate of emancipation. The wholesale reversal of familiar standards was suggested by the com- ment on Mr. Higginson in Dana's diary the day after the riot : " I knew his ardor and courage, but I hardly expected a married man, a clergyman, and a man of education to lead the mob." On the Monday after the Burns riot, the fugitive's trial began. Fearing further trouble the authorities had the Court House fairly garrisoned with soldiers and police. Dana fervently pleaded the prisoner's case, but though technicalities might have set him free, he was evidently the claimant's slave, and on June i THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 279 the United States Commissioner, Edward G. Loring, rendered a verdict in the owner's favor. It is a signifi- cant footnote to the history of the time that the women of a neighboring town promptly sent Loring thirty pieces of silver, of the smallest denomination minted. In an antislavery daily paper objection was made "even to the addition of ninety cents to the legal fee of ten dollars which Loring has received for his inhuman job." So much of local sympathy went out to the surrendered slave that little was left for the official who administered the law. If it was difficult to protect Burns within the Court House, the problem of getting him on board the revenue cutter which should bear him away was far more perplexing. The show of force was the surest measure of safety. Dr. Bowditch saw his removal, and has thus described it : " In full broad daylight, in the middle of the day, in front of the assembled merchant princes of State Street, with a right royal cortege of two companies of United States troops, and cannon loaded with grape, and all the mili- tary of SuffiDlk County, the poor slave was escorted, as with royal splendor, to the end of Long Wharf." But the splendor was all in the procession, not in its sur- roundings. Shops and offices were closed and draped in black. Flags with the union down were hung across State Street. Swinging in air near the Old State House hung a huge coffin, bearing the legend, " The funeral of liberty." Hisses and cries of " Shame ! Shame ! " met the procession throughout its line of march. A brother of a member of the 28o BOSTON Corps of Cadets, later a distinguished officer in the Civil War, tells the story that when this young soldier came home at evening, he flung himself down and cried like a child for very sorrow at the part his military duty had forced him to play in that day's work. The sense of defeat and shame was bitter throughout the community. Even at the South there were those who saw their victory as the British had seen the winning of Bunker Hill. " We rejoice at the recapture of Burns," wrote a Southern editor, quoted by 'Mr. J. F. Rhodes, " but a few more such victories and the South is undone." It was not foreseen at the time of the rendition of Burns that after him no slave would be sent from Boston back to slavery. Accordingly the friends of the slave made ready to prevent a repetition of the Sims and Burns affairs. Their organization, fully de- scribed in the Life of Dr. Bowditch, was called the Anti-Man-Hunting League. Its plan was to affiliate lodges in Boston and throughout the state with the purpose of seizing slave-hunters who would not for a consideration give freedom to their fugitives. In the event of refusal, the slave-hunter was to be kidnapped and sent to one out-of-town lodge after another. In the smaller cities and towns of Massachusetts, it should be remembered, a more united antislavery feeling was generally to be found than in Boston. For the seizure of the slave-hunter a definite drill was practised. A sturdy member was chosen to represent the enemy, and a committee was appointed to kidnap him. Arms, Ip-^ti^ Old State House, State Street. THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 283 legs, and head, were assigned to this, that, and the other member. The meetings of the League were in effect rehearsals of seizure, in which, despite the strength of the muscular corpus vile, the kidnappers acquired great proficiency. The point of significance in the record of the League is that the kidnappers were not ruffians but men of refinement and orderly tradition. Of kindred service in the cause of emancipation Boston stood ready to give its generous share to " bleeding Kansas," after the Kansas-Nebraska Law permitted the settlers in these territories to determine by their votes whether the two new states should be slave or free. The New England Emigrant Aid Society was well within the law in smoothing the path of emigrants who might be expected to vote against slavery. In Bishop Lawrence's Life of his father, Amos A. Lawrence, it may be seen how freely money and sympathy flowed to Kansas from sources hitherto strongly conservative.- There is a fine flavor of romance, moreover, in the picture of the first party, twenty-nine strong, singing as the train rolled out of Boston, Whittier's words to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne" : — "We cross the prairie as of old The pilgrims crossed the sea. To make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free ! ' ' Though private members of the Emigrant Aid Society sent rifles to the settlers — some thirteen 284 BOSTON hundred in all — there were frequent injunctions against using these arms to resist United States authority. The cause of Kansas, however, grew to be in the eyes of some of its chief supporters the cause of John Brown. The rifles conveyed to him under the borrowed name of " hardware " were pro- vided by men who did not ask too many questions, and later would have joined heartily in John A. Andrew's declaration, " Whatever might be thought of John Brown's acts, John Brown himselPwas right." Here again, amongst the Boston men who stood nearest to Brown, were those who in common times would have followed all the paths of peace. When war came they were of those who stood nearest to Governor Andrew. From the hanging of John Brown at the end of 1859 ^^ ^^^ outbreak of the Civil War, the interval was brief, both in time and in the change of spirit which the less timid were obliged to undergo. , . It was only four months before the fall of Sumter, however, that Tremont Temple was the scene of a conservative demonstration almost as violent as the " Garrison mob." The anniversary of the death of John Brown was chosen as the occasion for a meeting, called chiefly by young men, including Mr. F. B. Sanborn of Concord, to discuss the question, " How can Slavery be abolished ? " The powerful element in Boston which even at this eleventh hour believed that Slavery should be let alone packed the meeting, with mahce aforethought. An eye-witness thus de- THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 285 scribed the intruders : " They looked like the frequent- ers of State Street, and of the avenues of wholesale trade in cotton goods. They resembled the famous mob of 1835, of which I also was a witness." Mr. Sanborn, Frederick Douglass, and others who at- tempted to speak were shouted down. A new chair- man was tumultuously chosen, and resolutions were passed condemning John Brown's "piratical and bloody " work, and thanking Virginia for the con- servative spirit it had manifested. Constant coUisions between the rival forces took place, the police con- tributing their own element of confusion. A more complete upsetting of the plans for the meet- ing could hardly have been achieved. Such was the effect upon the municipal author- ities that in January of 1 861 the mayor refused police protec- tion in a hall hired for an antislavery meet- ing. It was at this time that Wendell Phillips, walking to and from the Music Hall, where he was addressing Theodore Parker's Sunday congregations, had to be shielded by a body- guard against the crowd that followed him ; and for Tablet at Corner of Essex Street AND Harrison Avenue Extension. 286 BOSTON many nights his house was similarly protected from violence. In moments of discouragement the anti- slavery workers might well have questioned the local value of their thirty years' labor. To describe with anything like completeness the years before the war in Boston would be to write much about Theodore Parker as the fiery apostle of antislavery. The conservatives who regarded his theology with horror could not admire the taste and discretion of many of his words and deeds: The ser- mon, for example, preached on the Sunday after Webster's death, and characterized by Mr. Rhodes as "indecent," was possibly even more obnoxious to respectable local sentiment than his cavalier treatment of miracles ten years earlier. Yet the influence of his spoken and printed word was far-reaching. It is told, even, that Lincoln's law-partner, Herndon, carried from Boston to Illinois pamphlet sermons by Parker, and that in one of these Lincoln marked with his pen- cil a phrase so nearly identical with his "government of the people, by the people, for the people " that to Parker its origin must fairly be attributed. In the complete record, also, there would be many pages with Webster for their theme. Against an imposing background of wealth and consideration such figures as those of Edward Everett, Robert C. Winthrop, and the representatives of commercial and social stabil- ity, would move with dignity by Webster's side. Still more, perhaps, would these records have to say of Charles Sumner, chosen by Preston S. Brooks of THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 287 Charles Sumner. Photograph in possession of F. J. Garrison, Esq. South Carolina as the most harassing pubHc foe of slavery, and made the victim of that assault in the Capitol at Washington which even at its late day won, like the Dred Scott decision a year later, many new friends to the cause at which both blows were aimed. But here, as before, the temptation to quit the field of 288 BOSTON local for that of national history must be resisted. If the two fields frequently coincide, at least it is well to reserve for special emphasis the points at which the local characteristics are most marked. For this reason the thirty years before the war have been more care- fully regarded — though all too cursorily — than the years of civil warfare need to be. Indeed, it may fairly be said that the experiences of Boston throughout these years of doubt, devotion, and hope were essentially the experiences of all Northern cities. The call and the response of patriotic feeling were simultaneous. When Sumter fell, the flags broke forth from every height and corner, and the spirit of the people was in them. It was the spirit which breathed through the vigorous action of Governor Andrew. On Monday, April 15, 1861, came Lin- coln's first call for troops. On Tuesday the soldiers Andrew had been preparing for this very emergency were gathered in Boston. On Wednesday three regi- ments were started for the front, the Sixth to pass through Baltimore. Ten days later Edward Everett, the recently defeated candidate for Vice-President on one of the tickets arrayed against Lincoln, declared : "All former difi^erences of opinion are swept away. We forget that we ever have been partisans : we re- member only that we are Americans, and that our country is in peril." This was the dominant feeling of the place. Yet it was the union rather than emanci- pation which stirred and held the general loyalty. If in these early days of the war there were doubters, they THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 289 indulged their doubts in secret. Later they expressed themselves more freely, as at the time of McClellan's visit to Boston when the war was two years old, and the Boston fainthearts feared that Lincoln could never end it. They then gave McClellan a sword with a Latin inscription which their spokesman translated, " For the administration, when it behaves itself; for the country always." Of the small class which was slowest to move forward with the time, Mr. Charles Francis Adams has written : " Even when there was hardly a family in the city which did not count father, brother, son, or husband in the field, talk as treason- able as it was idle was daily and hourly heard in the fashionable clubhouse of Beacon Street." But Mr. Adams attaches no more importance to this talk than the vital men of the sixties did, in Boston and other places where its counterpart was heard. None the less we may believe that Governor Andrew's secretary, Albert G. Browne, recorded a fact when he wrote : " Many a gallant young officer went down from Massachusetts into Virginia to battle, an unconscious hostage for the loyalty of men at home who in times of disaster might otherwise easily have fallen into indif- ference or opposition." Of the things which Northern cities had in common, it is of greater moment to recall those which most truly typified the time. Here was the national spirit of courageous sacrifice, whether of life or of those who made life most dear. Here, as elsewhere, the regiments marched away, the women dried their tears, waited and worked, as that great u 290 BOSTON agency of good, the Sanitary Commission, enabled them to work, for the comforting of the boys at the front. Here the news of battles brought the griefs and joys which came with a common vividness to North and South. Here, in a word, the war-time generation lived those years of reahty which have made so many of our later days seem trivial and pale. It would have been strange, however, if the )fears before the war had borne no dis- tinctive local fruits. Since war was to come, the place was fortunate in having men of authority who had profited by the vigorous thought and action of the antislavery pe- riod. Chief among these stood John Albion Andrew, the war governor, whose im- mediate response to Lincoln's first call for troops was typical of his leadership of Massachusetts throughout his five years in office. To his more radical anti- slavery friends, and to those who, like John Murray Forbes, had the scantest patience with the abolition- ists. Governor Andrew turned for the help he sorely needed. From the Pen Portraits of " Warrington '' (Wilham S. Robinson) it is worth while to repro- duce a picture of Mr. Forbes in the war-time, " more than any other man, the confidential adviser and Governor Andrew. THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 291 helper of Governor Andrew. He attends to every- thing, writes letters, raises money (liberally contribut- ing himself), sends messages to Washington to direct and organize congressional opinion, makes or persuades editors to write leading articles to enforce his views, hunts up members of Congress in vacation time, dines them at the club, and sends them back full of practical suggestions, which reappear in bills and resolves the month after." In the allusion here made to editors, it is entirely probable that the work of the New Eng- land Loyal Publication Society was at the back of the writer^s mind. This work was begun in Mr. Forbes's office, and seemed to him afterwards his best contribu- tion to the Union cause. As organized and carried out by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton and James B. Thayer, subsequently professor in the Harvard Law School, it consisted in sending to the editors of some nine hundred newspapers throughout the country broadside sheets containing the soundest loyal doctrine in politics and finance taken from the best speeches and articles of the day. Reprinted by the editors, the contents of these sheets reached approximately a mill- ion readers. The best intelligence of the place thus gave its effective service to a great democratic purpose. But of all the good work in which Governor Andrew and Mr. Forbes were associated, that which stands as the fullest flowering of thirty years of antislavery agitation in Boston was the raising of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry, Colored. This was the first of all the negro regiments raised in the 292 BOSTON Northern states. From the outbreak of the war Gov- ernor Andrew had eagerly wished to enlist colored troops ; but for two years the War Department with- held its consent. When permission was finally granted, it became a point of pride with the Governor to show the country that Massachusetts was ready to give of its best to the work, coldly regarded by many at the North and detested through the South, of officering a regiment of negroes. His choice for the colonelcy fell upon young Robert Gould Shaw, an officer of rare power, charm, and promise, who was already winning himself distinction in the Second Massachusetts. Turning his back on sure advancement there, and doubtful of his ability to command the new regi- ment, he gave himself heart and soul to the trial. His fellow-officers were of gentle birth and breeding like his own, and they were fellow-abolitionists. In the camp at Readville the spring days of 1863 were given to grounding the black command in the elements of soldiery. On the 28th of May they took steamer from Boston to South Carolina. Let Major Henry L. Higginson bring the day and its spirit back to us : " Can you see those brave men well-drilled and disci- plined, proud of themselves, proud of their handsome colonel (he was only twenty-six years old) and of their gallant, earnest young white officers, marching through crowded streets in order to salute Governor Andrew, their true friend, standing before the State House sur- rounded by his staff of chosen and faithful aids ; and then once more marching to the steamer at Battery THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 295 Wharf, while thousands of men and women cheered them — the despised race — to the echo as they went forth to blot out with their own blood the sin of the nation ? Every negro knew that he ran other and greater risks than the soldiers of the white regiments ; and still more, every one of those white officers knew that even at the hands of many, many Northern offi- cers and men he would not receive equal treatment." In less than two months the regiment led the attack upon Fort Wagner, where the " fair-haired Northern hero " and nearly half his " guard of dusky hue " fell together and were buried in a common trench. On Memorial Day of 1897 the Shaw Monument, marking the scene of Andrew's farewell to the Fifty- fourth, was unveiled and presented to the city of Boston — a piece of sculpture which led the mother of Shaw to say to Mr. Augustus Saint Gaudens, its creator, " You have immortalized my native city, you have immortalized my dear son, you have immortalized yourself." In accepting the gift on behalf of the city, and truly interpreting the moment which the bronze has rendered perpetual, the Hon. Josiah Quincy, the third mayor of his name, said : " The outward and visible sign of the enfranchisement of a race was here given when the fugitive slave, transformed into a soldier by authority of a liberty-loving state, went forth to bear his part in maintaining the union of the nation and winning the freedom of his people." Thus it is that Shaw and his men typify the ending of the work which Garrison began. Garrison was the voice, and Shaw the 296 BOSTON arm. To the voice — to Garrison and his associates, says Mr. Rhodes, it was due that slavery became a topic of discussion at every Northern fireside. The voice was not for action, political or physical, so long as slavery remained a part of the national system under which the action must take place. It was this aloof- ness, this leaving of many practical labors to others, which contributed to the doubt and scorn wherewith many good men, as hostile to slavery as Garrison him- self, looked upon the Garrisonians. But the extremists had their work to do, and did it. So did the less radical perform theirs, with votes, through parties, the Liberty, the Free Soil, and finally the Republican. It was no small part of their work to bring the voice of the mere reformer and the arm of the mere soldier into common service for a great and single purpose. In Boston the blending elements through which this purpose was fulfilled must be remembered so long as Garrison, Sumner, and Shaw rise in bronze above the daily paths of citizenship. MEN AND MONUMENTS T HE monuments of a city tell much of its story, for in them the men whose lives have been at various times the dominant lives of the place are kept in continual memory. Stone and bronze are good reminders. So, too, are those other monuments which take their form in a perpetual hu- man activity — an institution or any enrichment of man- kind — through which the generous spirit of a founder, discoverer, or leader is typified for generations to come. Civic pride does a valuable work when it preserves the name of a man together with the good that he has done. The public places and the daily life of Boston are full of me- morials of citizens who have helped to give the place its individuality. When cast in the form of bronze, these memorials are of widely varying artistic merit. A 297 Washington. By Thomas Ball, in the Boston Public Garden. . 298 BOSTON poor statue, as we know too well, may stand for the best of men and deeds. To recall a few of the marked personages and achievements of the nineteenth century in Boston, whether the monument be a disappointment in bronze or a fulfilment of human purpose, is the undertaking of the present chapter. The names of Josiah Quincy and Edward Everett come instantly to mind as representative of a time which has passed away, — a time in which the most emi- nent men in a community were not, as noW, the great specialists in finance, science, politics, or the arts, but attained an all-round development which had more in common with classic than with modern American standards. Thus when Lowell wrote his essay on Josiah Quincy he could give it, and its subject, no better title than " A Great Public Character." When Everett was called " The First Citizen of the Republic," the definition went unchallenged. These are two names which cannot be ignored. Josiah Quincy, separable as president of Harvard College from others of his name, himself the son of one Josiah Quincy, Jr., and father of another, who was in turn the grandfather of the third mayor of Boston bearing the same name, came of a race identified throughout the history of Massachusetts with public service. The dates of his birth and death, 1772 and 1864, justify Lowell's sentence: "The same eyes that had looked on Gage's red-coats saw Colonel Shaw's negro regiment march out of Boston in the national blue." This length of years was measured almost from MEN AND MONUMENTS 299 end to end by the fulfilment of public duties. Their variety included service in both houses of the General Court of Massachusetts, nine years in the national House of Repre- sentatives, where he became the leader of the Federalist party, five years in the mayoralty of Boston, — a post in which his only pred- ecessor had held office for a single year, leaving to the " great mayor " the chief burden of or- ganizing the new city government, — and sixteen years in the presidency of Har- vard. After perform- ing a large service of organization for the college as for the city, there were still many years to be accounted for. All these were honorably filled by labors of scholarship, in history and biography, by active interest in whatever concerned the good of his city and country, and by the pursuits of a farmer and gentleman of the school to which the definition " old " must be reluctantly JOSIAH QUINCY. Miniature by Malbone, in possession of J. P. Quincy, Esq. 300 BOSTON attached. The biography of Josiah Quincy by his son Edmund gives a picture of unwearying industry and a simple, even austere, dignity of private Hfe. The son cannot refrain from giving an amusing instance of the result of his father's practice of rising at four o'clock every morning. " This excess in early hours," says the biographer, " like every other excess, brought its penalty along with it." The penalty lay in falling asleep through the hours of the day. John Quincy Adams indulged the same excess. Once when he was visiting President Quincy in Cambridge, the two at- tended a lecture of Judge Story to his law class. The lecturer placed the visitors on a platform facing the students, and proceeded with his lecture. He soon saw that they were both sound asleep, and that his class saw it. " Pausing a moment in his swift career of speech, he pointed to the two sleeping figures, and uttered these words of warning : * Gentlemen, you see before you a melancholy example of the evil effects of early rising ! ' " The laughter of the class awakened the sleepers, but it is not told that the disaster had more than a momentary effect upon either of them. Indeed we should not wish to see any changes in the strongly individual outlines of the classic figures in American life. It is better to recall them in that completeness which Motley suggested when he wrote from Vienna to Edmund Quincy soon after the death of his venera- ble father: "I shall borrow the expression of our friend Wendell Holmes and speak of him as the type and head of the Brahmins of America. A scholar, a MEN AND MONUMENTS 301 gentleman, descended of scholars and gentlemen, a patriot and a son of a patriot, well known to all who knew America, — an upright magistrate, an eloquent senator, a fearless champion of the Right, a man of the world, a man of letters and a sage, with a noble pres- ence from youth onwards, which even in extreme old age did not lose its majesty, and which gave a living and startling contradiction to the great poet's terrible picture of man's ^ seventh age,' — what better type could those of us w^ho are proud of America, and who believe in America, possibly imagine ? " It was in a letter to Motley that Dr. Holmes likened Edward Everett to the yardstick by which men were measured in Boston. Even more than his contemporary, Josiah Quincy, Everett left a record of variety in achievement which makes our age seem an era of narrow specialism. An application of the Everett yardstick would reveal a striking change of standard between past and present measures. A bare list of his successive labors tells the story. Graduat- ing at the head of his class at Harvard at the age of seventeen, he was made a tutor in the college the next year. Before twenty he was ordained minister of the Brattle Street Church, where he proved himself a worthy successor of the eloquent Buckminster. At twenty he was chosen professor of Greek at Harvard, with an unprecedented four years' leave of absence for Euro- pean study. After his return he added the duties of editor of The North American Review to those of teaching. From 1825 to 1835 ^^ ^^^ ^ member 302 BOSTON of Congress. This term was followed by four years, ending in 1840, in the governorship of Mas- sachusetts. The next year he was appointed minis- ter to the Court of St. James. Then for three years from 1 846, he filled the presidency of Harvard College, the immediate successor of Josiah Quin- cy. His public career was rounded out after Web- ster's death by holding the posts of Secretary of State, under Fillmore, and of Senator from Massa- chusetts. Against his per- sonal wishes he ran for the vice-presidency, in oppo- sition to the ticket on which Lincoln was first elected. When the Civil War broke out he brought the best gift at his com- mand — the gift of oratory — to the service of the Union. To swell the fund for the purchase of Mount Vernon he had already delivered in many parts of the country a lecture on the character of Washington, in which the " preservation of the Union of these States " Edward Everett. MEN AND MONUMENTS 303 was urged with all his ripened power. In 1861 he pre- pared a new address on " The Causes and Conduct of the Civil War." Within eight months from its first delivery in Boston, on October 16, he gave it in most of the large cities outside the hostile lines — no less than sixty times in all. In 1862 he reached his sixty- eighth year ; but bearing the burdens of age, besides those of feeble health and private bereavement, he went about this public business, travelling as far south and west as St. Louis. When he died in January of 1865 this unique patriotic service, with further offer- ings of oratory up to the very week before his death, was freshly remembered by his countrymen. It is the common testimony of those who heard Everett that in hearing him they learned the meaning of the word eloquence. Distinction in the waning art of oratory demands many gifts, of which a retentive memory is not the least. In this possession Everett was endowed to an extent which relates him rather to such men as Macaulay than to the scholars and speak- ers of a later day. An exhibition of Everett's memory which naturally excited the wonder of his fellow-mem- bers of the Massachusetts Historical Society was made in his address to that body on the life and benefactions of Thomas Dowse. These benefactions were a collec- tion of paintings in the Athenaeum Gallery, and a library presented to the Historical Society. Without a note in his hands, and without a moment's hesitation for the recalling of a word, Everett recited a list of painters and writers in nearly every ancient and modern 304 BOSTON language, one hundred and eighty names in all. If that was a heavy load for a speech to carry, it had, at least, an extraordinary interest as a feat of memory. Another instance of the same power had its occasion in the special acknowledgment of a privately printed history of an English county sent by its author, an English gentleman, to the Boston Public Library. Besides thanking the donor on behalf of the institution, Everett recalled the fact that he was present at Oxford when the gentleman received his degree ; "'that he lis- tened " — in the words of Dr. Waterston's version of the story — " with great pleasure to a Poem which that gentleman recited at that time, and that he was par- ticularly impressed by the following lines. Here he quoted a passage from a poem which had never been published, and which Mr. Everett heard incidentally from a young man at that time quite unknown, and in connection with the various pubHc exercises of a Liter- ary Festival, and yet years after he could recall those lines, and send them across the Atlantic to their author, who was as much astonished as if he had heard a voice coming down to him from the heavens." But it is not for memory and scholarship, put even to the uses Everett made of these rich gifts of his, to win for their possessor the securest fame. Through leaving no single " great work " behind him, he has shared the fate of many orators. The permanence of Webster's fame as an orator, of course, owes much to the contribution many of his speeches made to the history of his generation. But MEN AND MONUMENTS 30. for his political eminence, even his towering personal- ity might not have preserved this fame. The other Boston orator, Rufus Choate, in whose spoken words our grandfathers took a pleasure both contemporary and equal with that afforded by Everett and Webster, House of Daniel Webster, Summer Street. has perhaps been even less fortunate with posterity than Everett. Yet it used to be said, " Webster is like other folks, only there is more of him ; but as to Choate, who saw or ever knew his like ? " The witty, learned lawyer, of incomparable quickness and power in winning a jury to his views, known in his day as the leader of the American bar, in local and national 3o6 BOSTON politics a pillar of the Whig party, in private life the most delightful of companions, has come in less than half a century from his death to be strangely little more than a name. Through all of Everett's oratorical career he had no better opportunity to test his power of moving an audience than in the early occasion of Lafayette's pres- ence at the Phi Beta Kappa celebration at Harvard in 1824. Everett was the orator of the day. Whatever his words of welcome may have owed in their effect to Lafayette himself, that effect was little short of tumul- tuous. For some minutes, at one point of the speech, the excitement was such that Everett was silenced. Old men leapt to their feet weeping for joyful memory of what the French hero of our Revolution had done for us. In the diary of one who was present are found the words, " Every man in the assembly was in tears." It is even told that Lafayette, lacking proficiency in the English tongue, missed the application of the ora- tor's words to himself, and when the tears were fol- lowed by deafening applause joined in it as lustily as the best. The college commencements at Cambridge in these earlier years of the century took place in August. On the 17th of the following June, fifty years after the Battle of Bunker Hill, the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument was laid. For this occasion Lafayette returned to Boston where, the summer be- fore, he had met with a reception of which Everett's address of welcome was but one of the incidents of an MEN AND MONUMENTS 307 enthusiasm kindling the community in all its classes. The semi-centennial celebrations of great events in our national life had a freshness and fervor which have been lost as the occasions commemorated have gone farther into the past. The same flavor of youth that pervaded the maritime exploits of our early commerce entered the observance of days for public rejoicing. With the joy of the Bunker Hill day of 1825 was blended a solemnity due in part to the presence of Lafayette, and to the dignity of Webster's oration ; but also in great measure to the participation of the "venerable men" who had survived both the Bunker Hill fight and other Revolutionary battles. A stage- driver of the time accounted for the extraordinary crowd which thronged the city by saying, " Every- thing that has wheels and everything which has legs used them to get to Boston." The extent to which the community as a whole took part in the exercises is revealed by the record that the head of the civil and military procession to the site of the monument reached Charlestown Square before its rear on the Common had started. Indeed the spirit of contem- porary annalists of the occasion is rather that of per- sons who are themselves making history than of mere commemorators of the past. The building of the monument proceeded slowly. The leisurely growth of what was then almost an eighth wonder, was due, we may believe, not so much to the temperate speed of the total abstinence work- men who alone were employed in the undertaking, 3o8 BOSTON as to the slow accumulation of the needed funds. The Bunker Hill Monument Association had the matter in hand, but the completion of Solomon Willard's design, based practically upon a model submitted by Horatio Greenough while a collegian, would have been still longer delayed but for the ladies of Boston. In 1840 they organized a fair which cleared ^30,000 for the patriotic purpose. On the 17th of June, 1843, Webster delivered his second Bunker Hill oration, on the completion of the monument. President Tyler and his cabinet came from Washington for the occa- sion, and again the city gave itself over to general rejoicing. The pageantries of other days can be but partially imagined, yet for what they typify they are at least worth trying to recall. Within a decade from the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument there were two celebrations in Boston which expressed an honest naivete of local pride that would be almost impossible in our more sophisticated time. So many gigantic tasks are begun and ended by our contemporaries that perhaps we could not take with sufficient seriousness such achievements as the installation of a new system of water-works or the completion of railroads connect- ing Boston with Canada and the West. The first of these events — the introduction of water from Lake Cochituate into the streets and houses of Boston — took place October 25, 1848. The day was opened by the pealing of bells and a salute of one hundred guns. The chief glory of the holiday lay, of course, in the MEN AND MONUMENTS 309 procession. It Is difficult to imagine the occasion of our own times which could bring into a single line of march the elements which were blended on this autumn day of 1848. There were the dignitaries of the city, of the state, and of other states ; the presi- dent and officials of Harvard College, officers of the army and navy, the reverend clergy, the medical faculty, editors of newspapers throughout New Eng- land, representatives of many trades, secret orders, charitable and temperance organizations, sailors and marine societies, the city fire department, children from schools and asylums, and, to cut short a longer list, the members of the Handel and Haydn Society. This extraordinary cavalcade passed through streets adorned with bibhcal texts and inscriptions giving piecemeal the whole history of the water enterprise. Opposite the Boston Museum a Moorish arch bore such appropriate lines from Shakespeare as, " There will be a world of water shed." Amongst the moving trade displays were a complete printing-office in busy operation, and a provision-shop conducted by Faneuil Hall marketmen. Twenty-five representatives of the Seamen's Bethel manned a full-rigged sloop of war, with Father Taylor on the quarter-deck. The Salem East India Society provided an elaborate palan- quin borne by eight men in oriental costumes. The list might be extended almost indefinitely. Such a procession could move but slowly, and it was four o'clock before the dignitaries mounted a platform in the middle of the Frog-pond, and the multitude 3IO BOSTON spread itself over the nearer and remoter slopes of the Common. Of course, there were speeches, and the Mayor, Josiah Quincy, Jr., ended his address by asking the great assembly if it were their pleasure that the water be turned on. A roaring "Ay" was the response. Then the water-gates were opened, and a column from sixty to eighty feet in height rose into the air. Even the city document, recording the doings of the day, preserves this enthusiastic record of that final scene : " The sun was just sinking -below the horizon, and its last rays tinged the summit of the watery column, the bells began to ring — cannon were fired — and rockets streamed across the sky. To the multitude around, the scene was one of intense inter- est and excitement, which it is impossible to describe, but which no one can forget. After the first moment of surprise most of the spectators looked around upon their neighbors — some laughed aloud — the men swung their hats and shouted — and some even wept." The Mayor informed the children that the schools would be closed and the fountain would play all the next day. Fireworks in the evening brought the cele- bration to a ghttering close. Three years later the Railroad Celebration aroused the city to similar rejoicing, which covered a period of three days. There were banquets and speech-mak- ing, a harbor excursion, and a yacht race for the enter- tainment of visitors and natives. President Fillmore and Lord Elgin, Governor-general of Canada, were the most eminent of many distinguished guests. But MEN AND MONUMENTS 313 the details are insignificant beside the meaning of such festivals as these — that here was a community grow- ing like a youth from strength to strength, and, with all that engaging freedom from self-consciousness which marks the youthful period, frankly rejoicing in its own achievements. While these spectacular public works, announced by the flourish of trumpets, were going forward, there were, through the same years of the nineteenth century in Boston, many quieter yet perhaps even more impor- tant undertakings on foot. Concerning one of them, the work of the Lowell Institute, Dr. Holmes made the following statement : " When you have said every enthusiastic thing that you may, you will not have half filled the measure of its importance to Boston — New England — the country at large." After all allowances are made for the zeal of a Bostonian, this declaration is enough to provoke either reflection or inquiry. The inquirer will learn that since 1840 the Lowell foundation has provided the people of Boston with free lectures, now numbering between five and six hundred each year, by the foremost scholars and thinkers of the English-speaking world. Reflection, aided by a long memory, will recall the early popular- ity of lectures in Boston. It is recorded that here, during the season before the Lowell Lectures were instituted, no less than twenty-six courses, not includ- ing those of less than eight lectures, were delivered, at an expense of more than $12,000, to audiences aggre- gating about 13,500 persons. The opportunity for 314 BOSTON the permanent filling of the want implied by these figures was therefiDre made in advance. The man whose generous provision fiDr posterity filled it was John Lowell, Jr., son of Francis Cabot Lowell, the pioneer of the great cotton industry of Massachusetts. John Lowell, Jr., a first cousin of James Russell Lowell, belonged to a family which for many genera- tions has given of its best to the life of the community. In 1 83 1, before he was thirty, he found himself, through the death of his wife and two children, irr the lonely possession of a large fortune. The accumulation of greater wealth in the mercantile career he had begun did not appeal to him, and he prepared himself for ex- tensive travel. A tour of the West came first. Then he went to Europe, where he made elaborate plans for visiting the countries of Asia. Proceeding to Egypt on his way thither, he was taken ill. His will had been drawn before he left America. At the village of Luxor, amongst the ruins of Thebes, he wrote a codi- cil, putting into final form his wishes with regard to the great bequest. When the first course of Lowell Institute Lectures was opened, Edward Everett in his address of dedication spoke of " the testamentary pro- visions drawn up in the land of Egypt, on the ruins of one of the oldest seats of art and civilization of which ruins remain, — provisions in which a great and liberal spirit, bowed down with sickness, in a foreign and a barbarous land, expressed some of its last aspirations for the welfare of his native city." Convalescent from the attack of illness in Egypt, Lowell made his way. MEN AND MONUMENTS 315 John Lowell, Jr. Painting by Gleyre, in possession of A. Lawrence Lowell, Esq. through shipwreck and many hardships, toward Bom- bay, where he died May 4, 1836, thirty-four years old. The will put aside nearly ^250,000 for the establish- ment of the lectures which have preserved this young man's name. It was provided that no part of princi- pal or income could be invested in buildings, and each year one-tenth of the income must be added to the principal. Though the trustees of the Boston Athenaeum were appointed "visitors," the entire 3i6 BOSTON management of the Institute was vested in one trustee, who, within a week of his assuming office, must name his successor. The testator, besides naming his cousin John Amory Lowell as the first trustee, made this provision : " In selecting a successor the trustee shall always choose in preference to all others some male descendant of my grandfather, John Lowell, provided there be one who is competent to hold the office of trustee, and of the name of Lowell." Equally notice- able was the emphasis laid by John Lowell, Jr., upon the necessity of lectures dealing with Christianity and "the moral doctrines of the gospel." It was written, " No man ought to be appointed a lecturer, who is not willing to declare and who does not previously declare his belief in the divine revelation of the Old and New Testaments, leaving the interpretation thereof to his own conscience." The importance of scientific and literary subjects seems indeed to have been secondary in the testator's mind. In the progress of years it is evident that a liberal interpretation must have been placed upon these wishes of the founder, yet the trus- tees have constantly taken a broad view of the truly vital interests in the world of thought, and have been wise in excluding crude theories of which the value is still to be proved. The generous income from the fund has made the best remuneration possible. In early days a single course would sometimes yield the lecturer a larger reward than the annual salary of the most em.inent professor in any American college. The list of lecturers, beginning with Benjamin Silliman of MEN AND MONUMENTS 317 Yale, proceeds through all the years with a shining catalogue of names. No less remarkable is the list of books which were first given to the public in the form of Lowell Lectures. The response of the Boston public to the privileges of the Institute has always been eager. In the second season so great a crowd applied for tickets to a course by Silliman that the windows of the Old Corner Book- store, where the distribution took place, were broken in. Sometimes there were eight or ten thousand appli- cants for a single course, and it became necessary to dispense the tickets by lot. When the rule to close the doors of the lecture room at the very beginning of a lecture was first adopted, it met with violent opposi- tion. So keen a desire for knowledge was displayed by one respectable gentleman that he attempted to kick his way through the closed door, — an attempt which led him to the lock-up, not the lecture room. More peaceful methods have come to prevail, and all the while the Lowell Institute has been making those contributions to the intelligence of the community which compelled Professor Drummond, after he came to Boston and could measure at closer range the capac- ity of the audience he must face, to rewrite entirely the course of lectures he had prepared. To the same general end of diffused intelligence for which Lowell wrought by his liberality, Horace Mann rendered an important service by his labors. We have grown accustomed to the name of educator and his work. To Horace Mann as an orgranizer of educa- 3i8 BOSTON tional forces a memorable debt is due. The town of Franklin, not far from Boston, was his birthplace. There is a story that when the town was young, Ben- jamin Franklin, after whom it was named, received word from the citizens that they would build a meeting- house if he would present it with a bell. His character- istic response was that they had better save their money and build no steeple. Instead of the bell he offered them books — " since sense was preferable to sound." Ac- cordingly, books to the value of ^25 were sent from Lon- don, and from these Horace Mann learned some of his first lessons in Benjamin Frank- lin's wholesome doctrine. Not at Harvard, like so many of his fellows, but at Brown, he received his collegiate education. To Massachusetts he returned for the prac- tice of law, first in Dedham, then in Boston. In both branches of the Massachusetts General Court he did the work of a legislator. The State Board of Education was created in 1837. For twelve years Mann was its secretary, and a most active member. To friends sur- prised that he should abandon the law for what seemed so indefinite a post he made answer : " The interests of a client are small compared with the interests of the Horace Mann. MEN AND MONUMENTS 319 next generation. Let the next generation, then, be my client." This client he served faithfully and well. It is said that when he came into office two-thirds of the teachers in Massachusetts got their places without examination. The schools were in need of many re- forms, modernizing, enriching, and lifting to the high democratic point of excellence which should make them good enough for rich and poor aUke. These were re- forms which could not be made without opposition. It came from the Orthodox who dreaded the Unitarian influence of Mann, and feared that " godless schools " would result from the reading of the Bible without comment. It came from Boston school-teachers who could not follow the leadership of one who himself had not taught. With these warring elements Mann found himself in more than one acute controversy. The weapons of the fighter with words were completely in Mann's control, and so violently did he use them at times that even his friends had cause to tremble. But the agitation of which he was the centre produced an awakening of interest in the public schools of Boston which resulted entirely in good, and has not yet subsided. Throughout the state his work for primary and sec- ondary education, for normal schools and the district libraries which paved the way for the free public libra- ries of Massachusetts, yielded fruit for his clients in more than one generation to come. All that he did in the cause of antislavery in and out of Congress, where he became the successor of John Quincy Adams, bore but an indirect relation to his work as an educator. 320 BOSTON To this work he returned, devoting the closing years of his life to the presidency of Antioch College in Ohio. Now that his years of conflict are far in the past he takes the place his biographer, Mr. B. A. Hinsdale, has assigned him as the opportune man who put the cause of popular education in America truly on its feet, and made Massachusetts " the leader in educa- tional reform, holding a position among the states com- parable to Mr. Mann's position among educational men." On the issues of politics he differed so widely from Daniel Webster that there is an ironic humor in the companionship of the statues of the two men be- fore the State House on Beacon Hill; but the right of the pioneer in education to this place of honor is no more questioned than that of the defender of the Con- stitution. Though the intimate friend of Horace Mann in the flesh. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, lacks a monument of bronze in the streets of Boston, he has his more living memorial in the work of "The Perkins Institu- tion and Massachusetts School for the Blind." Like Mann, he was prepared at Brown University for the work he chose to do. It would be easy to fill many pages with the story of his varied activities. One of the earliest and most romantic of them was his per- sonal enlistment, like Byron's, in the cause of Greek liberty. It was prophetic of his lifelong devotion to one or another movement for the emancipation of his less fortunate fellow-men. Through all the anti- slavery agitation there was no more consistent friend MEN AND MONUMENTS 321 of the enslaved than Dr. Howe. Yet if we may accept the comparison Dr. Hedge once drew between him and too many of the race of reformers, he deserves to be remembered for a quahty of tolerance that is rare indeed. " Advocates of temperance I have known," said Dr. Hedge, " who reeled and staggered and wanted to intoxicate you with their heady politics ; champions of abolition I have known who wanted to fasten the yoke of their method on your neck ; and even apos- tles of non-resistance who handled their olive-branch as if it were a war club. Dr. Howe was not of that line. He was that excep- tional character, — a tolerant enthusiast, a fair advocate of a righteous cause." The cause with which his name is chiefly associated is the rescue of the deaf-blind from their imprisonment behind the barriers of silence and darkness. As a young man he made his second journey to Europe for the purpose of studying the methods of educating the blind in Paris and elsewhere. In 1832 his first school, with Y Thomas Handasyd Perkins. Painting by Gambardella. 322 BOSTON half a dozen pupils, was opened in modest quarters. The raised type for teaching the bhnd to read was laboriously made by pasting twine on cardboard. Exhi- bitions of the skill rapidly acquired by the pupils soon began to attract attention. Among those most inter- ested was Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins, merchant and ship-owner, in whom the power of wealth and the spirit of liberality were blended in fortunate proportion. One who saw him first as an old man remarked that then his face itself seemed an institution of benevolence. The great service he rendered the Institution for the Blind was in offering it a mansion and grounds in Pearl Street, valued at ^25,000, on the condition that others should raise $50,000 for the same good object. Within a month the sum was raised, partly through private subscriptions, partly through a fair in Faneuil Hall conducted by ladies, and drawing contributions of many an article for sale from the great source known as "everybody." In 1839 the land speculations which were to have made South Boston the " court end " of town brought into the market at a low figure the hotel building which, with enlargements, the institution has occupied from that time to the present. In this year of 1839 ^^* Howe's annual report made the statement : " This is certain, that when audiences in England and Scotland were uttering by shouts their astonishment and pleasure that blind children could read books in raised letters, it had ceased altogether to be a matter of sur- prise in this country, so common had it become." In the institution at South Boston Dr. Howe wrought MEN AND MONUMENTS 323 what seemed, and was, the miracle of leading to intelli- gent womanhood the deaf, dumb, and blind child, Laura Bridgman, whom he found in a New Hamp- shire farmhouse, doomed, but for his loving patience, sympathy, and insight, to the steadily contracting life of the unaided defective. If his work had begun and ended with Laura Bridgman, it would have been extraordinary ; but it has served as the ground of hope and the starting-point of effort on behalf of so many whose misfortunes have been turned almost into advantages, that Dr. Howe must be admitted to the company of the true pioneers in human progress. While his great work was going forward in South Boston, there was demonstrated in the opposite, or West End of the town, a discovery which has put the world itself in the debt of a Boston dentist. The Massachusetts General Hospital, incorporated in 181 1, and established ten years later, in one of the best build- ings of Bulfinch's design, was the scene of the first surgical operations upon patients made insensible to pain by the beneficent use of ether. When a dis- covery has brought to the human race such blessings as those of modern surgery — of which the very pos- sibility depends upon anaesthetics — it is lamentable that the record of the great forward step must be in large measure a record of controversy. The monument to William Thomas Green Morton in the Boston Public Garden may be taken to represent the award of posterity in the dispute between the two chief claimants to the glory of the discovery. The 3^4 BOSTON second of these men was a Boston physician, Charles T. Jackson. He was the same Dr. Jackson who con- tended with Samuel F. B. Morse for the honors of invention in telegraphy — with such success as the comparative familiarity of his name and that of Morse implies. The chief points of the ether story, as told in pamphlets and testimony carried even to a com- mittee appointed by Congress to decide between the claimants, are these : Dr. Morton had practised den- tistry under Dr. Horace Wells of Hartford, an experimenter with anaesthetics, for whom also the disputed honors have been claimed. After coming to Boston Dr. Morton studied under Dr. Jackson. Later, when seriously considering the possibilities of anaesthesia in dentistry, he went to Jackson for advice, and the use of rectified sulphuric ether was recom- mended. This was not a discovery of Jackson's. Several years before, acting on a suggestion of Sir Humphry Davy, he had himself inhaled sulphuric ether, with the result of unconsciousness. He had not tried it for the prevention of pain. Morton immediately proceeded with the experiment, first upon himself, then, September 30, 1846, on a patient will- ing to attempt unconsciousness during the extraction of a tooth. On the next day Morton hastened to Jackson with the news of his success. This time Jackson advised the dentist to lay the matter before the surgeons of the Massachusetts General Hospital. He did so, and on October 16, 1846, was permitted to administer ether to a patient upon whom Dr. John MEN AND MONUMENTS 3^S C. Warren performed an operation with such success that the painless removal of a tumor and the amputa- tion of a leg, within three weeks of Dr. Warren's ini- tial venture, established beyond doubt the inestimable value of the new achievement. Then it was that Dr. Jackson and his friends came into prominence. Though Morton offered the free use of his discovery to hospitals, the army and the navy, he expected to ask of general practitioners a moderate annual payment. To whom did the dis- coverer's rewards of fame and fortune really belong ? The friends of Jackson recognized in him a Columbus, and in Morton merely the sailor who first shouted " land " from the masthead. Morton was willing to yield and Jackson to accept one-tenth part of the profits. In the end it mattered little, commercially, what arrangements were made, for the use of ether became so general and essential that Morton waived his rights, and called himself " the only person in the world to whom this discovery has so far been a pecun- iary loss." In 1848. the trustees of the Massachu- setts General Hospital and other citizens of Boston presented him, as the true discoverer, with a box con- taining $1000. When the French Academy made its award of 2500 francs to Jackson and to Mor- ton alike, it distinguished between the recognition of a scientific fact by the one and its application by the other. Thus, as the trustees of the hospital foretold, there must remain an indissoluble, though reluctant, copartnership between the two men. How 326 BOSTON petty the controversy would appear to succeeding generations the parties to it could hardly have im- agined. But to them the burden of suffering lifted from men and women in every quarter of the globe could not appear as the historic and the daily fact we know it to be. For the foundation of this fact we turn with gratitude to what was done in Boston on the last day of September, 1846. This fourth decade of the nineteenth century was uncommonly fruitful of good things in Boston. Some of them have been touched upon. Incomplete indeed would be the list if the Boston Public Library were omitted from it. Though it was not till the fifties that the institution from which the present library has grown took definite form, its real beginnings were in the forties. As early as the seventeenth century there are allusions to a public library in the town house. There were large private collections, especially in the eighteenth century, made by such clergymen as the Mathers and Thomas Prince, and to these books the public had some access. As time went on various learned bodies built up libraries of their own. In 1794 the "Boston Library," a private proprietary institution, came into being. Still later, as a previous chapter has shown, the Athenaeum made a larger entrance to the same field. Thus, and through many subsidiary channels, the reading habit, characteristic of the place from its earhest years, was nourished. The idea of free books for the whole public was yet to be born. When the military awaited the arrival of k! en MEN AND MONUMENTS 329 Lafayette at the city line, free punch was provided, together with more soHd refreshments. " Had any one proposed to provide free books at the expense of the tax-payers," wrote the second Mayor Quincy regarding this circumstance, " there would have been much indignation. We should have been aghast at the impudence of such a proposal ; but a few glasses of punch was another matter." It is a fact of curious interest that the first stimulus to a public awakening on the subject of free books came from a Parisian, and the first substantial contribution to the project from a London banker. By reason of this fact Vattemare and Bates have their rightful place amongst those distin- guished local names which, written in letters of brass, help to pave the entrance hall of the present Library building. Alexandre Vattemare was an unusual person. He has been variously defined as a charlatan, a conjurer, and a personator. The last appears to be the truest definition, for his employment, under the name of Alex- andre, was that of entertaining audiences by the assump- tion of different characters, sometimes more than forty in a single evening. His powers of imitation made him a welcome and familiar figure throughout Europe. During his travels, it has been written, he was " feted by three emperors, and by quite a rabble of kings." Sir Walter Scott was among his warm admirers. A strange trait for one of his occupation was a keen inter- est in books. Wherever he went, he visited the local libraries, and generally found them of scant public 330 BOSTON usefulness. To remedy this condition he devised an elaborate plan for international exchanges of books, and used all his powers to further it. " When Vatte- mare failed," he said, " to interest the attention or gain admission to important personages, Alexandre took his place and carried the day." Having done much for his system in Europe he came, first in 1839, at the instance of Lafayette, to America. Both houses of Congress and several state legislatures indorsed his project. In 1841, and again in 1847-8, he was in Boston urging his plan, involving the establishment of a free public library, upon all in authority who would give him audience. Exchanges of books were actually made between the municipal authorities of Boston and of Paris, and a room was set aside in the City Hall for the French collection and the other con- , tributions to a pubhc library which it provoked. Be- tween 1843 ^^^ 1852 successive committees of the city government dealt with the library question, which assumed a steadily growing importance in the public mind. In 1854 the city opened a public reading-room and library in the Adams Schoolhouse on Mason Street. The plan of international exchanges came to little or nothing ; but the greater cause for which the zealous Frenchman labored was fairly launched. Shortly before this small beginning, the London banker, Joshua Bates, head of the Barings firm, entered the history of the library. Bates was a Massachusetts boy, born in Weymouth, and in his young manhood had been associated with a Boston shipping house. MEN AND MONUMENTS 331 After a disastrous attempt at business on his own account in Boston, he went to Europe in a mercantile position of trust, and came by such steps to his connec- tion with the great banking house. In 1852 the city of Boston was negotiating a water loan with the Bar- ings. With other city documents the latest report of the library committee was sent to London. There it happened to fall under the eye of Joshua Bates, who recognized amongst the signers the names of gentlemen he knew and trusted. On October i, 1852, he wrote to the mayor, saying in effect that in so liberal and wealthy a community as Boston the recommendations of the library report were of course sure to be carried out ; but in order to hasten the desired day, he made an immediate gift of ^50,000 for the purchase of books. To the gift was attached the condition that the library building should be an ornament to the city and should contain a room large enough to accommodate from 100 to 150 persons at reading tables. The letter which he wrote at the same time to a Boston friend reveals some- thing of the impulse behind the gift. " My own expe- rience as a poor boy,'* he said, " convinced me of the great advantage of such a library. Having no money to spend and no place to go to, not being able to pay for a fire or light in my own room, I could not pay for books, and the best way I could pass my evenings was to sit in Hastings, Etheridge, & Bliss's bookstore, and read what they kindly permitted me to." Bates Hall, crowded day and night with eager readers both in the old building and in the new, has therefore had a greater 332 BOSTON significance than the mere words which define it can suggest. A second gift from Joshua Bates added another ^50,000 to the funds of the Library. The impression that Paris and London provided the entire impetus for the new undertaking would, however, be quite false. There were, besides municipal appropriations, liberal gifts of money from Boston citizens, and liberal expendi- tures of time and thought. Ticknor and Everett were especially active in the enterprise. The purchase of books from the income of Bates's first gift required a journey to Europe. When it was decided that Tick- nor rather than Everett should go, he consulted such men as Agassiz, Felton, Holmes, Benjamin Peirce, and Wilham Barton Rogers regarding the compilation of a list of books most needed in all departments of knowl- edge. Between Ticknor and Everett there was also a friendly disagreement about the free circulation of popular books. In the end the views of Ticknor in favor of this course prevailed. The decision was in keeping with the identification of the Library from its earhest years with the public school system of the city. The growth of the institution from the modest rooms in Mason Street into and out of the Boylston Street building, deemed at its opening sufficient for a century to come, has been unbroken. The present structure in Copley Square, where more than eight hundred thousand volumes are housed, and whence the work of ten branch libraries and twenty-one stations for the delivery of books is directed, has become an object of MEN AND MONUMENTS 335 pilgrimage, scholarly, educational, and artistic, for a population extending far beyond the limits of Boston itself. Another Boston institution, a near neighbor of the Public Library, owing much in its inception and prog- ress to men who have been Bostonians only by adop- tion, is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To the forties also must be ascribed its very begin- nings. In this period of the century it became evident that the industrial development of New England de- manded a species of practical education which the older colleges were not supplying. Between William Barton Rogers, a professor in the University of Virginia, and his brother Henry, temporarily in Boston, letters were exchanged in 1846, carefully considering the possibilities of establishing a great polytechnical school, and the preeminence of Boston as the place for it. The marriage of Professor W, B. Rogers, in 1849, ^^ the daughter of a Boston family, naturally led to his removal a few years later from Virginia to Boston. Through all the fifties the project of a technical school was in the air. In 1859 a meeting for the purpose of bringing it to earth was held in the rooms of the Bos- ton Society of Natural History. It was proposed to reserve for the new institution a considerable tract of the Back Bay, then undergoing conversion from water into land ; and one of the gentlemen present urged the project on the grounds that residents of Beacon Hill, used to the cooling summer breezes from the Back Bay, would appreciate the effect of open spaces in the 33^ BOSTON Tablet in the Rogers Building, Massachusetts Institute OF Technology. new land. Another thought the purchase of the Han- cock House, then on the market, would provide suf- ficient accommodations. A far larger plan prevailed, and the resulting petition to the legislature was for four squares of land, to be devoted to an elaborate " Conservatory of Art, Science, and Historical Relics," with the ends of popular education held clearly in view. This memorial, and a second of similar nature, bore no direct results. A third memorial, represent- MEN AND MONUMENTS 337 ing in large measure the thought and labors of Pro- fessor Rogers, produced a bill which passed both branches of the legislature, and received, April lo, 1 86 1, the signature of Governor Andrew. With this act the labors of Rogers, in whom the governor had unbounded confidence, were redoubled, for it was pro- vided that within a year the friends of the new institu- tion must raise one hundred thousand dollars. With the cloud of war filling the whole southern horizon, it was a hopeless time to beg for a cause so purely of peace. At the end of the year, an extension of another year was asked and granted. .When the second year was nearly ended, only ^40,000 had been pledged, and further delay seemed inevitable. On the very last of the days of grace came the dramatic announcement from President Rogers, as he had been called for a year, that Dr. William J. Walker, formerly of Boston, then of Newport, had made over to the Institute a piece of property worth at least the indispensable sum of ^60,000. The service of public lectures on scien- tific subjects had already been undertaken. In the winter of 1865 the School of Industrial Science, which to-day performs the chief work of what has long been called " The Tech," received its first pupils in a private house on Rowe Place, and in rooms of the Mercantile Library Association in Summer Street, buildings which were both destroyed in the fire of 1872. If it has been an uphill work to carry over the financial crisis of 1873, and through nearly forty other years an institution so near the oldest seat of learning 338 BOSTON in America, making, as it naturally does, the first and strongest appeals to the affection and generosity of the community, the Institute has been signally fortunate in those who have had the work to do. Interrupted only by ill health. President Rogers, a true teacher and enthusiast in the application of scientific fact to daily life, wisely guided the great undertaking from the years in which it was a mere dream to that com- mencement of 1882 when he died in the very act of handing his leadership over to General Francis A. Walker. Like Rogers, his successor had the advan- tage of a training — in the army, in the national offices of Statistics, Indian Affairs, and the Census — which knew no local bounds. In Boston he took his place as a citizen of broad interests, ready to respond to the many calls for useful participation in local affairs which came to him. Through the continuous leadership of such men the Institute, with all its " specializing," has exerted a strong influence of liberaUzation in its neigh- borhood. The methods of instruction it has steadily pursued could hardly have had another effect. It is thus that a member of the Corporation of the Institute has defined them : " By means of ever developing and enlarging laboratories, the Institute has maintained the principle that a student shall not take on the word of his teacher what is reasonably possible for him to prove himself This simple, but far-reaching, principle has acted as an extraordinary leaven upon education, modi- fying the entire system." During all this progress of the practical, the arts. MEN AND MONUMENTS 339 scantily nourished by the Puritans and their immedi- ate offspring, were gradually coming to their own in Boston. Of the alternately stormy and solemn be- ginnings of the drama we have already had a glimpse. House of Edwin Booth, Chestnut Street. The theatrical history of Boston does not differ mate- rially from that of other seaboard cities in America. There were the same meteoric visits of foreign actors, prophetic of a later system of stars. There was the same satisfaction and sense of proprietorship in the stock companies which long continued to instruct and 340 BOSTON delight our audiences with classic English comedy. Through all the changing conditions the strong local interest in the drama has been accompanied by a healthy pride in local actors. The city of Boston did not wait for the death of Charlotte Cushman to build a schoolhouse on the site of her birthplace and to give it her name. To the memory of Mrs. Vin- cent, a beloved member of the stock company which for many years gave the Boston Museum its distinc- tion, a free hospital for women stands not far from where she lived. William Warren, her fellow-player in the theatre only this year demolished, has his local monument in the portrait hung where every visitor to the Museum of Fine Arts must see it. The Boston theatre-goer likes to remember that on the stage of the Boston Museum Edwin Booth, in 1849, made his first theatrical appearance, and that in his house on Chestnut Street, now devoted to the instruction of youth, some of the most tranquil of his troubled years were passed. Music, excepting psalmody, met with little more favor in earlier Boston than the drama itself It is a strange association, therefore, which links the Park Street Church, a central support of Puritan tradition, with the first important step of musical progress in Boston. This was the formation of the Handel and Haydn Society, in 18 15. The Park Street Church had an excellent choir of some fifty voices, and from this number many of the singers for the new organization were drawn. The chorus which a month before had MEN AND MONUMENTS 343 sung the oratorio at the Peace Jubilee in the " Stone Chapel " to celebrate the conclusion of the War of 18 1 2 may be regarded as the immediate forerunner of the Handel and Haydn. Though it was primarily sacred music to which the Park Street singers lent themselves, a constant improvement in the musical standard of the place resulted from the unbroken work of this society. Thus the people were ready for the secular orchestral concerts provided by the Boston Academy of Music and the Musical Fund Society's orchestras, especially in the fourth decade of the century. Itahan opera, never fully domesticated, had its periods of enthusiastic welcome. In 1850 Barnum, with his showman laurels still to win, brought Jenny Lind to Boston for two concerts in the Fitch- burg railroad station. The zeal of his agent and of the community were well matched, for tickets were sold to a thousand persons more than the station could hold. To this circumstance and its untoward results the building of the Boston Music Hall, as a place in which Jenny Lind's unexampled power over American audi- ences could properly be exercised, is said to have been due. In 1852 the Music Hall was opened. In 1863 the great organ, so long the special glory of musical Boston, was dedicated therein. By this time, indeed, there was a musical Boston, towards the making of which a single individual, John Sullivan Dwight, and a single club, the Harvard Musical Association, the outgrowth of a college musical society, had done all that one person and one organization could accom- 344 BOSTON ^ y ^ ._, Copyright, 1899, by Bela L. Pratt. From a Copley Print, copyrig-tit, 1899, by Curtis & Cameroa. Phillips Brooks. Bust by Bela L. Pratt. plish. In 1867 ^^ New England Conservatory of Music, whose pupils have carried its lessons into all regions of the country, was established. Early in the eighties the Boston Symphony Orchestra, founded and steadily supported by individual generosity, began its all-important work of teaching the public to expect and to know the best in orchestral music. Through MEN AND MONUMENTS 345 all these agencies, strengthened by the devotion of musicians and amateurs of music whose names would make too long a catalogue, the progress of their art in Boston since the days of the Park Street choir and the Peace Jubilee of 1815 has kept an even pace with the passing years. The annals of painting and sculpture in Boston pre- sent for most of the nineteenth century a list of names not long but memorable. What may be called the organization of these arts has been accomplished chiefly within the past thirty years. With the name and work of John Singleton Copley, albeit transplanted from Boston to England for the second half of his long life, an inspiring tradition passed from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. It was carried on by Washington Allston, a South Carolinian by birth, allied to Boston through marriage into the Channing and the Dana families, and by residence, after his two returns from Europe, in Boston and in Cambridgeport. For more than twenty years also the Rhode Islander, Gilbert Stuart, made his home in Boston, and enriched its more fortunate houses with many of his best por- traits. From Boston Horatio Greenough went to Florence, first of the long-lived Italian colony of ^ American sculptors. To Boston, after years of study in Europe and a shorter period of painting in New- port, came William Morris Hunt in 1862, and here much of his most characteristic work was done. The short list of names might be made a little longer, yet these will serve to show that the end of the century, 346 BOSTON with its troop of painters, was not needed to bring to Boston the influences of foreign masters and methods. The annual and permanent exhibitions of paintings and sculpture in the Athenaeum gallery, for half a century from 1826, did their service in cultivating a pubhc taste for art. In 1869 a bequest of arms and armor to the Athenaeum collection presented difficulties of exhibition which only a new building could solve. Thus the Museum of Fine Arts became a necessity. Before it was completed the armor went the way of many valu- ables in the fire of 1872. But subscriptions for the new Museum, in sums from ^25,000 down to contri- butions of less than a dollar, had secured the erection of the building, now almost outgrown, which was opened to the pubhc on July 3, 1876. The best of the Athenaeum collection was transferred to its walls and corridors. Private bequests and loans have helped in establishing its present usefulness to the few and to the many, for it has never been forgotten that both the many and the few gave according to their abihty toward its creation, and to this Boston public the Museum conspicuously belongs. As there are institutions belonging to a whole com- munity, so there are men. Of these, in later years, the figure standing forth most vividly is that of Phillips Brooks — and with him this rambhng survey of men and monuments of the nineteenth century must come to a close. In his singleness of effiDrt and achievement he clearly typified the diflference between the earlier and later years of the century. Quincy and Everett could Trinity Church Tower. MEN AND MONUMENTS 349 excel, as public characters, in a dozen pursuits. Phillips Brooks, rector of Trinity Church and bishop of Massachusetts, devoted his undivided energies to the calling of the Christian ministry. Yet in another and a true sense he too was a public character. In an age of specialism, he was the specialist in religion, — a subject happily broad enough, as he saw it, to save one of his nature from the perils of narrowness. His per- sonal background, hke that of the writers who made the Boston of their day our "literary centre," related him in every way to the best traditions of the place. Like the leaders of " the Boston ReHgion," in an ear- lier generation, he was inherently and by inheritance a true leader of men. Unlike them he had the advan- tage of accepting a system of faith defined, not by a local term, nor yet too rigidly, as he and many others have thought, for application to the needs of modern life. Thus in many ways a typical product of local conditions, he could yet bring to the local life an influ- ence which greatly broadened its limits. Surely in a special degree for those amongst whom he lived, he wrought a quickened spiritual sense, a richer tolerance and understanding between man and man. The space before Trinity Church may still afford to wait the monument which is to stand there, for the people of Boston hardly need to be reminded yet that their city is a better place because Phillips Brooks lived in it. XI WATER AND FIRE w r W E have regarded many manifes- tations of the spirit of Boston. It remains to consider two important aspects of its present outward form. Within little more than the period ascribed to a single generation of men, it has become a new city, 'f both in the favorite region of '^*^'' residences and in the district in or near which the chief busi- ness of the city is conducted. In the making of the present Boston, the conquests of water and fire have played an impor- tant part. Just as the early town was " wharfed out with great industry and cost *' into the sea, so has the modern city grown over the waters that for more than two centuries separated it, but for a slender neck of earth, from the southern and western uplands of Roxbury and Brookline. The early settlement, devastated so often by fires that, according to Cotton Mather, it gained the proverbial name of Lost-Town, recovered and renewed itself time after time. In like manner the generation now passing has witnessed the destruc- 350 Trinity Church, Summer Street, after Great 'Fire. WATER AND FIRE 351 tion and rebuilding of a great commercial quarter. The story of these two changes must be told in every account of Boston. There is no stronger proof of the true citizenship of a Boston man of fifty years or more than his point- ing out the street corners, in the Back Bay district, where as a boy he used to swim, fish, or shoot. The tidal flats and waters which have grown into paved avenues and luxurious dweUing-houses must have been well populated — if we accept all the reminiscences — with adventurous youth in every stage of undress. We read of Colonel T. H. Perkins, in a still earlier genera- tion, shooting snipe on the present playground of the Common, and gunning for teal in August, with Harri- son Gray Otis, on a creek about where Dover Street is now to be found. It is still more difficult to realize that only a year or two before i860 the western boundary of the Public Garden was a brown picket fence, with a muddy beach at its foot. It was the happy thought of a few boys — now men in the prime of life, some of whose names have become familiar to the American public — to use this beach, near the present beginning of Commonwealth Avenue, for an elaborate game of buried treasure. Their practice of mystery was to bury at this spot an old trunk, containing coin finally amount- ing to two or three dollars, and at a later day joyfully to discover and exhume it. Other boys of meaner spirit must have seen them at their dark work, for the day came when the digging brought no trunk to light. Each member of the secret brotherhood suspected his 2S^ BOSTON fellows of treachery, and like all true diggers for doub- loons and pieces of eight, they quarrelled and dis- banded. The catalogue of unconventionalities in what has so rapidly become the very home of convention might be extended indefinitely. Their chief value would lie in emphasizing a remarkable transformation. Yet the change from happy hunting-ground to modern city has not been the work of a day. The initial step in the great change was taken in 1 8 14, when the General Court granted a charter em- powering the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation to build a dam from the Charles Street end of Beacon Street to the opposite point of land in Brookline, and a cross-dam from a point in Roxbury to this main structure which became known as the Mill-Dam, or Western Avenue. Each dam was to be also a road- way, with toll-gates for tribute from travellers. An important element of the project was the use and leasing of power from the confined tide-water for mill purposes. The undertaking had a purely commercial basis. In 1821 the Mill-Dam was opened for passen- gers, and the spokesman of the occasion reminded his hearers of the time when Boston had but one connec- tion with the main land. " Then," he said, " our town resembled a hand, but it was a closed one. It is now open and well spread. Charlestown, Cambridge, South Boston, and Craigie's bridges have added each a finger, and lately our enterprising citizens have joined the firm and substantial thumb over which we now ride.'* The more liberal image, drawn by Mather Byles, of WATER AND FIRE 353 ** Boston, Mistress of the Towns, Whom the pleas' d Bay, with am'rous arms surrounds,'* had already been rendered obsolete. Before long it became evident that the Mill Cor- poration had enough to do in caring for the new roadways, which, planted with straggling trees, became popular drives in and out of the city. Accordingly, the stockholders organized the Boston Water-Power Company, which in 1832 assumed control of the mills, the water power, and the lands to the south of the main dam, leaving the roads and the northerly lands in charge of the older corporation. The conflicting interests of the companies, the city, and private land- owners, were adjusted by compromises — the first of many to be made — before the complete transforma- tion of the region could be brought about. The rail- roads to Providence and Worcester were incorporated in 1 83 1. The Mill Corporation and the Power Com- pany resented the encroachments on their preserves — all the more because their stock, legitimately allied with water, lost half its value. But the railroads were inevi- table : so were the consequences of their coming. The worst of these was that the Back Bay, with its impaired flowage, became, according to a report on drainage to the city council in 1849, "nothing less than a great cesspool." A sentimental attachment to the sheet of water as it had been, kept many persons from realizing what had come to pass. Yet a true foresight demanded the adoption of radical measures. To the state authorities of Massachusetts belongs the 2s6 BOSTON credit of framing these measures and patiently bringing them to a practical issue. The reports of the Back Bay Commissioners tell a long story of preparation and action. In 1852 they pointed out the success with which the Mill-Dam immediately below Charles Street had been extended for the building of houses now facing the Public Garden. A vast extension of the same methods, they said in effect, would solve the double problem of sanitation and space for the growing city. According to an ancient colonial ordinance the commonwealth could lay a just claim to all lands adjoining its shores, below the line of private rights. In the Back Bay there were two hundred acres waiting for the state to redeem. Before any definite steps could be taken, however, it was necessary to untangle complications, almost hopeless, with the corporations, with private owners, and, worst of all, with the city government. By an unfortunate tripartite agreement in 1856 between the state, the city, and the Water-Power Company, the city acquired an unrestricted right in a narrow " gore " of land skirting the Public Garden on the west. For a time there was grave danger that the municipal authorities, pursuing their general policy of obstruction, would dispose of this land for buildings quite unworthy of the greater project of the state. The difficulty was settled by an exchange between city and state, through which the state was enabled to lay out Arlington Street as planned, and the city became pos- sessed of a tract of equal value farther to the westward. Even as late as June of 1858, when the work of filling WATER AND FIRE 357 in had begun, Arthur Gilman, an architect deeply inter- ested in the undertaking, wrote an open letter to the Mayor, protesting against the course of the obstruc- tionists, and putting the desperate inquiry, " When Charles Street has become the ^ Charing Cross ' — eastward of which is devoted to the business city alone — where are we to look for the Westminster of that day ? " So far as the city stood in the way of progress, its policy is at this day difficult of comprehension ; for Boston had everything to gain, and the state was incur- ring every financial risk. In January of 1857 the Commissioners appointed in the year just ended could inform the legislature that the chief obstacles had virtually been cleared away. A brief passage from their report shows that they at least had a full realization of the importance of what they were doing. " The territory in question," they said of the Back Bay, "is now a useless and unsightly waste. There is, at the same time, a palpable lack of room for dwelling-houses in and near the city of Boston. Stores are usurping the streets formerly occupied by mansions, rents are enormously high, and it is becoming a serious problem where the people whose business draws them to the metropolis of New England and the capital of the state shall be accom- modated. The commonwealth's lands in the Back Bay are situated in precisely the most eligible location for dwelling-houses. The conversion of a waste of water into a magnificent system of streets and squares, with dwelling-houses for a numerous population, is 358 BOSTON a transformation dictated by the soundest statesman- ship and the wisest political economy." So indeed the event proved it to be. There were doubts in plenty about the very possi- bihty of handling the great undertaking with success. Even in i860 the Transcript quoted "the sagacious prediction of a ' young' old fogy," that within the next twenty years a dozen houses might be built in the new territory. In the same year the following sceptical suggestion was brought forward : " There can be no question but that a vast quantity of this land will re- main unpurchased for thirty, forty, or even fifty years. It has taken forty years to build forty houses on the Western Avenue, with their unrivalled advantages of air and view, both in front and rear, and there are not now, and will not be for some years to come, a hun- dred men in Boston who are prepared to build those ' first-class houses ' to which the plan is exclusively adapted." These words are taken from the preface to a pamphlet containing the petition which George H. Snelling offered to the legislature in 1859. -^^^ plea, embodying the belief that " water is to the land- scape what the eye is to the face," was that the plan of the Commissioners should be modified by substituting for Commonwealth Avenue and the house-lots on each side of it a broad basin of water running east and west through the lands of the state. The prevalence of southwest winds in summer was warmly urged as a reason for leaving this space unfilled. The plan re- ceived the cordial support of certain newspapers and WATER AND FIRE 359 men of influence. A letter from Charles Sumner expressed his gratitude for Mr. Snelling's " timely intervention to save our Boston Common, by keeping it open to the western breezes and to the setting sun." But the Common was reserved for subsequent salva- tions, and the Commissioners' plan remained unaltered. ^-m- Site of Mechanics' Fair Building, 1871. For the actual labor of filling the territory the Com- missioners entered into arrangements with a firm of railroad contractors, Goss and Munson, who began their work about the middle of May, 1858. The hills of Boston had by this time yielded all the earth they could spare to the surrounding waters. It was neces- sary, therefore, to go afield for the gravel demanded for the new work. To expedite its transportation from Needham, whence it was digged, the contractors built six miles of railroad. Their trains of thirty-five cars each made sixteen trips a day, and nine or ten by night. Steam excavators, filling a car with two disgorgements, could load a train in ten minutes. Every forty-five min- utes one of these trains arrived at the Back Bay. In a single day the space of about two house-lots was filled. The contractors received their first payment out of the proceeds of the sale of flats to the pioneer 36o BOSTON buyers, William W. Goddard and T. Bigelow Law- rence. Later payments were made through the dis- posal of lands actually filled, and by the transfer of unfilled spots to the contractors themselves, who in time turned them into money. Before the work had gone far there were scenes more characteristic of a western " boom " town than of the long-established seaboard city. In October of i860, for example, the Advertiser pictures the auctioneer of house-lots taking " his station at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Berkeley Street, upon a platform of boards laid across the corner of the rough fence which has been put up to protect the park in the middle of the avenue." Nine months earlier the same " respectable daily " had made the report : " The whole area east of Berkeley Street is now entirely filled. We say that the comple- tion of the remainder is a matter of perfect certainty." In May of the same year the Transcript reported the houses on Arlington Street nearing completion, and " Dr. Gannett's church six or eight feet above ground." Through all this period of early building the sales of still newer land were going steadily forward. The Mill Corporation, with its holdings on the water side of Beacon Street, and the Water-Power Company, with the tract south of the building lots on Boylston Street, — including the districts of Columbus and Hunt- ington avenues, — had been converted by events into great land companies. By an early arrangement with the Water-Power Company, the Commissioners had brought the most desirable parts of what is now called WATER AND FIRE 363 the Back Bay into the hands of the state. The record of its success as a land company is brief and convinc- ing. Without the expenditure of a dollar its treasury was enriched by three millions. Amongst the good uses to which its gains were put, should be remembered the liberal grant of land to the Institute of Technology and Society of Natural History, the great increase of the state school fund, and the outright grants of 1 1 00,000 to the Agassiz Museum at Harvard, 1 50,000 to Tufts College, ^2 5,000 each to Williams, Amherst, and the Wesleyan Academy at Wilbraham. The land speculators, private and corporate, thus paid their in- direct tribute to the cause of education. The entire history of the enterprise presents a conspicuous ex- ample of the successful conduct of a local improve- ment by the government of a state. Though the city authorities offered for a time more of hindrance than of help, their successors in office have found themselves ruling what has grown to be a new city. Many inhabitants, following Dr. Holmes's example of "justifiable domicide," quitted the older overcrowded regions for the new. To the transformation of the Back Bay the city, exclusive of outlying districts ac- quired from time to time, owes much of its increase from the 783 acres of the original peninsula to its present extent of 1829 acres. The annexations from without — South Boston in 1804, East Boston in 1830, Roxbury in 1868, Dorchester in 1870, Brighton, Charlestown, and West Roxbury in 1874 — have in- creased the city territory by more than twenty thousand 364 BOSTON additional acres. But by steady degrees the "made land " has become the site not only of the best resi- dences, but of pleasure-grounds, museums, libraries, churches, clubs, hotels, auditoriums, and nearly all things that contribute to " the humanities " of modern Boston. When Cotton Mather put on record the sobriquet of Lost-Town, he went on to say of Boston, as Robert C. Winthrop reminded the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1872: "Never was any town under the cope of heaven more liable to be laid in ashes, either through the carelessness or the wickedness of them that sleep in it. That such a combustible heap of contiguous houses yet stands, it may be called a standing miracle. It is not because the watchman keeps the city. . . . No, it is from Thy watchful pro- tection, O Thou keeper of Boston, who neither slum- bers nor sleeps." In 1872, when the greatest of the " Great Fires " to which Boston has been subject visited the city, there was no Cotton Mather to put his inter- pretation upon it. The work of less than twenty-four hours, however, was comparable in its importance to the labor of years in the Back Bay, and the record of its causes and effects has been written with even greater fulness of detail. It was soon after seven o'clock on the evening of Saturday, November 9, 1872, that the fire — its origin still unknown — was first discovered in a wholesale dry-goods house at the corner of Summer and Kings- ton streets. The quarter in which this building stood WATER AND FIRE ;^6s had been occupied through much of the first half cen- tury by the most comfortable residences in Boston — square brick mansions often surrounded by gardens, to be recalled more vividly perhaps by certain streets in Salem, Providence, and Portsmouth than by any other existing regions. About 1840 trade began to invade the district, and in thirty years had come the change creating the need which the Back Bay was satisfying. The new business buildings — the head- quarters of the wool, cotton, leather, and other indus- tries — were dignified structures of granite and brick, surmounted too often by mansard roofs of wooden construction. When the fire broke out the alarm, for some reason, was not rung till the flames had gained vigorous headway. A further misfortune lay in the fact that the horses of the city, including those of the fire department, were suffering from the epidemic disease known as epizootic. The entire transportation busi- ness of the city had been seriously crippled. " It was no uncommon sight," an observer has written, " to see the porters, clerks, messengers, and stevedores taking upon themselves the service of draught animals, drag- ging heavy loads from store or warehouse to the various depots." What they took as a joke in the prosecution of work by daylight became a serious matter in the emergency of fire on Saturday night in a deserted business region. The fire department, however, had guarded against this danger by providing a force of extra men to take the place of the incapacitated horses, and the seriousness of the handicap has probably been i^GG BOSTON overrated. Be that as it may, the firemen summoned by rapidly succeeding calls immediately saw that they were confronted with difficulties of the first magnitude. From the fireman's point of view it was a grave matter that the water-pipes and hydrants had not been enlarged to meet the demands involved in the change from residence to business streets. In a com- mon fire this would have been bad enough ; but here, as the veriest amateur could see, was a fire of extraor- dinary fury and danger. With incredible speed the flames spread up and down Summer Street, extended along the lower side of Washington Street as far as the Old South Church — upon which many spectators thought they were looking for the last time — and crossed Milk Street, though less violently than if the Post-Office building, in process of construction, had not blocked the way. Eastward and northward they extended to the water front and beyond Pearl Street, where all the buildings were aflame in hardly ^Yt minutes from the time when the first fire appeared in them. Engines had come from many neighboring places. The skies themselves were said to have been a beckoning Hght for sixty miles inland. The Sunday trains brought thousands of visitors to the panic-stricken city. Thieves from without and within pHed their trade. Extra police and a brigade of militia were called out to keep the confusion within bounds. Through the night and early morning hours poor families from the threatened region to the south of Summer Street were seen dragging their household WATER AND FIRE 369 goods to the Common. Merchants and their clerks were bearing what they could rescue of valuable papers and wares to the same and more remote places of safety. When horses could not be got to help in the work, oxen were pressed into service. The nearly continuous roar of falling walls, explosions of gas and of gunpowder, used with doubtful effect to remove the materials for further progress of the fire, added their terrors to the night. It was not till four o'clock on Sunday after- noon that the fire was really under control. " When the sun went down at evening," wrote a contemporary annalist of the great disaster, whose words are a warn- ing specimen of the kind of writing it immediately called forth, " the fire fiend, who had slowly but surely wormed himself through the commercial loins of our city, eating out the very vitals of our trade and our industries, was chained, and the pale moon came slowly up to throw its lambent rays into smoky clouds that rose from the vast domain of smoulder- ing ruins." In the language of cold fact, sixty-seven acres of land, thickly covered with buildings to the number of 767, were laid waste. The estimated loss of prop- erty was more than ^75,000,000. In this figure is included the value not only of buildings destroyed but of the merchandise stored in them. In addi- tion to the raw materials and many manufactured products which were lost, it happened that the store- houses of the district contained the valuable libraries, paintings, and collected treasures of art belonging to a 370 BOSTON number of persons who were travelling abroad or for other reasons had stored their possessions for safe-keep- ing. Many of these objects which nothing could re- place were swept out of existence, and fourteen lives were lost. Yet the disaster was chiefly commercial. Bankrupted insurance companies, whose worthless shares were held in many instances by the very mer- chants whose more tangible wealth had gone up in smoke, were melancholy types and monuments of the wholesale ruin. Even while the fires were burning, however, the losers were preparing to recover themselves. The Mon- day morning papers told the public where the wares of dispossessed merchants might be found. In hotel dining-rooms dry-goods were offered for sale, and tailors made ready to continue their work. Rough temporary buildings of corrugated iron went up here and there. For the wage-earners thrown out of employment — an army of shop-girls was disbanded — charitable plans were at once made and acted upon. The basement of the Park Street Church, as in the war- time days of the Sanitary Commission, became a dis- tributing centre for organized help. Local subscriptions for those who suffered most directly from the disaster quickly rose beyond the sum of 1300,000. Chicago, grateful for the help it had received from Boston a year before under a similar affliction, made generous but superfluous offers of aid. " We will share with you whatever we have left," was the message from the western city. Looking farther into the future, the state WATER AND FIRE 371 and the city passed building and other laws calculated to reduce to a minimum the chances of such another disaster. The calamity was turned into good account also by seizing the opportunity it offered to straighten and widen streets, some of which it was difficult even to find under the heaps of fallen buildings. The period of rebuilding, promptly undertaken, was not the most fortunate in American architecture. But the mansard' roof, fatally responsible for the rapid spread of the flames, had received its deathblow. Thus a new quarter, better in every way than the old, came into being. It was not a matter of outward form alone, for the spirit of Boston had truly shown itself in the brave recovery. As from the waters of the Back Bay, so from the ashes of the Great Fire, rose one of the most familiar portions of the city as it is known to men to-day. XII THE MODERN INHERITANCE 1^^ I N the pages before this final chapter the attempt has been made to pass in re- view the sahent facts of Bos- ton history, and to gain some 11 ^ '* *!iii i i\ acquaintance with the persons chiefly concerned in them. It has been seen how the place had its beginning as the chief settlement in a col- ony of rare independence, due both to the character of its founders and to conditions in contemporary England. In the local life of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centu- ries the circumstances have been found which made the community ripe for the events of the revolutionary period. It was not only the fact, but almost the inevitable fact, that Samuel Adams and other chieftains of revolt were Boston men. With the establishment of independence we have seen the reasserted primacy of maritime inter- 372 Entrance to South Terminal Station. THE MODERN INHERITANCE 373 ests, and the growth of a powerful commercial class naturally allied with the political party doomed to overthrow in the progress of national life. The impor- tant influences of foreign commerce and domestic trade and manufacture have been regarded with some refer- ence to their effect upon the people of Boston. So in the domain of spirit and mind the peculiar debt of the community to the Unitarian movement and to the nineteenth-century flowering of literary tendencies has been recognized. We have found at the same time that the greater preachers and writers were not of a race apart, but truly represented the best element of the na- tive citizenship, the better for their leaven. To all these phases of life was added the flavor of moral enthusiasm which could not be absent from the headquarters of a scheme of reform so far-reaching as that which went by the name of antislavery. In less coordinated form stood the separate works of men whose monuments hold a conspicuous place in the community. Finally, the topographic changes wrought by the elements which create and destroy a landscape have been noticed. If a scientist can reconstruct an unknown fish from a single bone, it should require no occult sense to trace in the existing city of the twentieth century the results of the various forces which for nearly three hundred years have in turn directed the men and women of the place. There is yet another influence to be noted, though with nothing of the detail required for the points already enumerated. It is almost enough merely to 374 BOSTON say that the geographical relation of Boston to the rest of the country accounts for many things, historic and present, in its condition. It is placed in a corner, not on the main line to anywhere in particular, unless it be a destination to be reached by sea. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington stand like the separated houses of a country street, not far enough apart to prevent the occupants of each from holding neighborly relations with all the others. ' Boston is over in the next township, and the people of our eastern seaboard have not acquired that western in- timacy with the sleeping-car which encourages its use as a convenience rather than a necessity. It may be that Boston owes to a certain self-sufficiency, which has grown out of this partial separation from the main currents of national life, some of its reputation for aloofness and indifference to the broader interests of the country. Such a reputation is not gained without cause. Here the cause seems not far to seek in the critical spirit keenly developed by local circumstances. The critical spirit is peculiar to the looker-on. It renders him sometimes a useful, sometimes an ob- structive, seldom a popular member of society. He is suspected of holding notions of superiority which frequently are quite foreign to him. It may be that he is a critical spectator more because he cannot than because he would not like to be something else. He has his uses — perhaps in setting and maintaining standards to which others pay an unconscious regard. He has also his serious limitations. Thev are reflected THE MODERN INHERITANCE 375 — if Boston and Massachusetts be taken as represen- tative abodes of the critical spirit — in the striking fact that for all their wealth of men of light and lead- ing, these places have not, since the time of Adamses, yielded a single President to the United States. In- deed, through all this period, Franklin Pierce and Chester A. Arthur — and they by something like accident — have been the only men of New England birth to occupy the White House. The witty division of Boston itself into " Boston " and " Boston Proper " was made some years ago. A fuller definition of " Boston Proper " is found in a few words spoken by one who knew it well, but saw beyond its limits. The term was used, said this speaker, to distinguish the " core and centre of in- tellectual Boston from its more or less vulgar and outlying dependencies. . . . And truly in those good old days — back some thirty or forty years in the past — there was a Boston within Boston, cultured, moral, conservative, and — proper. I feel great ten- derness for this dead Boston proper. I was brought up in it — or, I might more modestly say, on the out- skirts of it — and should like nothing better than to chronicle its many virtues, of which I am fully con- scious. It had provincial characteristics, good as well as bad, and it is to our loss that we have fallen away from some of its standards of living. Nevertheless, there was in it a certain narrowness of perception, which could not easily admit the merit of contem- porary character which influenced the world outside 376 BOSTON its own very respectable boundaries. It was apt to take its own notions of what was proper as a criterion for the rest of mankind; it would in all honesty say its Sunday prayer ' for all sorts and conditions of men/ but found some difficulty in a week-day effort to understand them and to do them justice." Especially in the last two of these sentences quoted from the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, November, 1884, there is abundant food for contemporary thought. What was true of Boston fifty and sixty years ago has not grown entirely false. There are still the "typical Bostonians" — as the term is questionably used — who confuse their local crite- rions with those of the world at large. They are the persons who maintain toward the stranger the attitude which imparts to him a sense of being under suspicion, until he explains himself or is adequately explained. When, with due caution, the explanation is accepted, the stranger also may meet with an acceptance so hearty that he will forget his period of suspense. This, perhaps, is merely the characteristic to be ex- pected in the American city which bears the strongest outward resemblance to a city of the British mother island. The social a ttribute of caution and the al oof- ness from na tional life already noted are but synTEol s of a common and continuing spirit — the spirit of " Boston Proper." The more distinctive attributes of Boston, likable and unlovely, blend in the minds of men to create the idea for which the name of Boston stands. The idea THE MODERN INHERITANCE 377 is such that the definition of Boston as a state of mind rather than a city readily takes the fancy. For greater accuracy, let us say that the present community is a city — very much a city — with a state of mind very much its own. The outward and visible sign of it is in the streets, the parks, the wharves, the institutions, occupied and controlled by citizens in whom, to an uncommon degree, dwells a spirit which may be called characteristic, a spirit which makes Boston Boston, and not a chance assemblage of houses and persons. How, then, does the Boston state of mind express itself in the twentieth-century city ? Surely, for one thing, in a keen sense of civic responsibility, which has brought many good things to pass, and promises well for the future. The tangible fruits of this spirit are to be sought rather in public works than in private undertakings. We find a system of parks controlled by state and city, providing thousands of acres of wood- land, hill, river-bank and stream, sea beaches and play- grounds, within and just beyond the city Hmits. We find the passenger service of railroads entering the city from north and south brought together in two great stations, one of them the largest terminal in the world. An elaborate system of street transit, combining surface, elevated, and subway methods, now extending by means of a tunnel under the harbor itself, has been developed by private and municipal enterprise, and ratified at suc- cessive steps by the popular vote. As in other cities, the rapid growth of electric power has had its effect in uniting the interests of the city with those of all the 378 BOSTON surrounding country. But the exceptional good for- tune of Boston has lain in the nearness of suburbs of uncommon attractiveness, now rendered more than ever habitable by those who have their daily work to do on the crowded promontory of old Boston. In all these developments the vision of the men of action has been fixed on the future with a sense of responsibility as true as that of Horace Mann when he chose posterity for his client. Cause and effect are easily confused in the figures of population. It is the fact, however, that although Boston with its little more than half a million inhabitants stands in the census of 1900 as the fifth city in the country, the closely contiguous towns and cities included in what is called Greater Boston make it the centre of a population numbering well above a million. In a radius of fifty miles from this centre there is a population so near to three millions that the territory about the city of New York is in America the only corresponding area more densely populated. Like all American cities, Boston has seen the char- acter of its population undergo extraordinary changes. A careful student of the subject, Mr. Frederick A. Bushee, pointed out, as the nineteenth century was ending, just what had happened since 1 845. Of the four elements in the population at that time, " those born in other parts of the United States," he said, " ranked first, those born in Boston of American parentage second, the foreign born come next, and, the children of foreigners last." The transformation that had come in 1899 ^^^ ^^^^ summarized: "The foreign born THE MODERN INHERITANCE 381 rank first, the children of foreigners second, persons born in other parts of the United States come next, and the old Bostonians are last." The great change began with the Irish invasion immediately following the Irish famine of 1846—7. The city which made so prompt and generous a gift as that of Boston to the sufferers, and placed the management of it in hands so efficient as those of Captain Robert Ben net Forbes, commanding the "Jamestown" expedition, must have seemed a source of all cohifort. Accord- ingly, the Irish hastened to its shores. Coming first as laborers, with sisters and sweethearts in domestic service, the men soon showed their native aptitude for politics. It is now more than twenty years since the first of the two Boston mayors of Irish birth entered upon his four years in office. The city government, judged by the names of aldermen and council, has long been virtually an Irish organization ; and " the Boston Religion," if the numerical test be applied to it, is no longer Protestant. Indeed, the Irish have grown to be the largest single element in the population, outnumbering even the Americans born in all parts of the United States. Another important English-speaking, semi-foreign element is that of the British-Americans who have naturally come in the greatest numbers to the large city lying nearest the Canadian border. For other races, Boston makes no attempt to vie with New York and Chicago as a Pentecostal gathering place. Yet the recent rapid immigration of Russian and Polish Jews, Italians and 382 BOSTON representatives of many other races, confronts the city with the puzzHng problems common to all the Ameri- can centres of population. To cope with these new conditions the same efforts are making in Boston as elsewhere in America. The attempt to amalgamate the diverse elements into a common citizenship goes forward through hundreds of agencies, — the pubHc schools, the social settlements, the organization of charities, secular and religious, de- signed to meet every conceivable need of the unfortu- nate, but in such a way as to create citizens instead of paupers. The municipality itself assumes its share in the great undertaking by such means, beyond the pubHc schools, as the highly developed system of public baths, where the individual, observing simple rules for the good of all, may learn the alphabet of responsibility and its good results. At every turn this principle of responsibility presents itself. Yet the best of qualities have their grave de- fects, and in Boston it is no rare phenomenon to see the sense of responsibility so overplied as to become either futile or morbid. The tendency has its pleasing manifestation in the fulfilled desire of men and women of every common interest to meet for weekly or monthly dinners followed by the talking of shop. The same tendency is expressed less happily in the needless multiplication of agencies for doing nearly the same thing. Not only in the field of benevolence and reform may this be seen, but in the more practical domain of trade and commerce, where boards and THE MODERN INHERITANCE 385 chambers and associations proceed with scattered shots and consequently impaired authority. The root of the matter lies in a widespread impulse amongst individ- uals to " do something about it," which frequently means no more than to " talk it over." To the critical attitude and the sense of responsi- bility, as characteristics of Boston, must finally be added that "good principle of rebellion" which we have found Emerson noting in the people of the place "from the planting until now." Here we have seen rebellion against many accepted things, — royal author- ity, the national policy of 18 12, the established religion of New England, and the constitutional order of sla- very. The rebels have never represented the whole community, nor always those elements of it which seemed surest to prevail. They are still to be seen and heard. The Sunday orators on Boston Common vent their grievances against an uaequal world, gather their audiences under the very windows of the clubs and dwelling-houses which symbolize the inequalities — and are in no wise let or hindered. Rebelling against the accepted relations between the spiritual and the material in a world compacted of both, another element of the community establishes and maintains in Boston the " Mother Church " of " Christian Science." In quite another sphere of thought and condition the Anti-imperialists, true descendants of the good Boston Federalists who opposed the JefFersonian policy of aggression and expansion, rebel against the prevailing I theories of government. THE MODERN INHERITANCE 387 There is, moreover, a constant rebellion in Boston against the accepted American belief that life consists largely in the abundance of possessions. The anxious getting and the lavish spending of money cannot be added to the catalogue of local qualities. In spite of the glittering exceptions which a few names bring to mind, there was truth at the bottom of the observation recently made and published by an " English New Yorker." " On the whole," he said, " I should sum up my impressions of Boston by saying that compared with the other leading American cities, she stands much less in need of the reminder that the life is more than meat and the body than raiment." It may be added truly to these words that the things of the mind and spirit — books, pictures, music, practical religion, the love of nature and the healthy sports which bring body and spirit together — all these are characteristic interests of the place. And they are characteristic just because they are so vitally interesting to so large a portion of the population of Boston. It would be utterly unprofitable to make compari- sons in points like these between Boston and other places. Comparisons and theories are less important than facts. The city as it stands to-day is in many respects an outgrowth, a reconstruction, of the very facts which the preceding chapters have related. The community is but a larger individual in having many of its characteristics determined by the generations that have gone before. The descendant may not have entire freedom to pick and choose between the 388 BOSTON ancestor who rose to the bench and that other who should have climbed the gallows. But the people of Boston are rich in the inheritances that are good to cultivate and to transmit. What shall be winnowed out of them all for posterity, none may say. There is yet no reason to fear a discontinuance of that state of mind which is informed pecuHarly with the fruitful qualities of responsibility and rebellion. INDEX Academy, French, 325. Academy of Music, Boston, 343. "Act to Prevent Stage Plays, An," 133. Adams, Charles Francis, 187, 244, 289. Adams, John, 14, 88, 89, 96, 102, 125, 239, 375- Adams, Mrs. John, 122. Adams, John Quincy, 300, 319, 375. Adams, Samuel, 90, 98, 106-107, 125, 126, 134, 135, 144, 146, 148, 372. Adams Schoolhouse, 330. " Adventures," 176. Advertiser^ Boston Daily, 183, 360. Agassiz, Louis, 244, 332. Agassiz Museum, Harvard University, 363- Alcott, Amos Bronson, 227, 229, 278. Allston, Washington, 345. Ambrose, ship, 6. Amherst College, 363. Amory, Thomas Coffin, 134. Ancient and Honorable Artillery Com- pany, 25. Andover Seminary, 200, 220. AndreviT, John Albion, 246, 284, 288-295, 337- Andros, Sir Edmund, 37, 55-58, 69, 80. Annexations, 363. Anthology Club, 139, 140, 224. Anti-Man-Hunting League, 280. Antinomian Controversy, 14-24. Antioch College, 320. . Antislavery Fair, 266. Antislavery movement. -5*^1? The SLAVE AND THE Union. Antislavery Standard, 240, 266, 271. Appleton, Thomas Gold, 237. Arbella, ship, 6. Arthur, Chester Alan, 375. Assistants, Court of, 10, 11-12, 25, 28, 32. Atahualpa, ship, 178. Athenaeum. See Boston A. Atlantic Club, 243, Atlantic Motithly, 239-243, 246. Attoo, Hawaiian chief, 164, 167. Austin, Benjamin, 147. Austin, Charles, 147. Austin, James Trecothick, 271. Back Bay, 335, 350-365, 371. Bacon, Leonard, 220. Bainbridge, William, 149, 150. Balch, hatter, 130. Baldwin, Loammi, 152. Bancroft, George, 236, 248. Barings, banking-house, 330, 331. Barnum, Phineas Taylor, 343. Bates, Joshua, 330-333. Beacon Hill, 9, 31, 47, 152, 153, 274, 320, 335- Beacon monument, 152. Beecher, Edward, 210. Beecher, Lyman, 203-205, 210. Belcher, Jonathan, 69, 74. Bellomont, Earl of, Richard Coote, 69. Belsham, Thomas, 200. Bennett (" Boston in 1740"), 79. Bernard, Sir Francis, 88, loi. Biglow Papers, 272. Billerica, Mass., iii, Blackstone, William, 9, 33. Blockade of Boston, ivy. " Body of Liberties," 13, 44. Booth, Edwin, 340. Boston : first step toward independent control, 3 ; named, 10 ; early interest in education, 35 ; changes in outline and area, 38, 152, 350-364; local and national history, 87, 112, 251, 287-288 siege, 113-120; evacuation of, 120 new element of leadership in, 124 Sunday observance, 74, 130-133 drama in, 133-135, 339-340; social observances, 136 ; simplicity of life, 389 390 INDEX 137; academic influence, 137; sense of responsibility, 142, 377, 382; cau- tion, 143, 376 ; Federalism in, 145- 150; city government adopted, 155; maritime interests, 158 ; missionary enterprise, 188 ; respectability, 230 ; conservative and radical, 256-257; women reformers, 265 ; loyalty to Union, 288; reading habit, 326; music in, 340, 343-345 ; painting and sculpture in, 345-346; geographical position, 374; critical spirit, 374; "Boston Proper" and, 375; popula- tion, 378; principle of rebellion in, 385, 387. Boston Academy of Music, 343 ; Athe- naeum, 139, 140, 224, 303, 315, 326, 346; Common, 33, 41,78, 79, III, 120, 131. 307. 309-310, 351, 359, 369. 38s; Custom-house, 248; Female Anti- slavery Society, 263 ; Latin School, 35 ; Library, 326 ; Massacre, 92, 96 ; Museum, 309, 340 ; Museum of Fine Arts, 232, 340, 346 ; Music Hall, 217, 285, 343 ; Musical Fund Society, 343 ; Public Library, 232, 304, 326-335 ; Society of Natural History, 335, 363 ; Symphony Orchestra, 344 ; Tea Party, 98, 105-107, 153 ; Water-Power Com- pany, 353. 356, 360. Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation, 352-353. 360. " Boston Religion, The," 190-221. Boston Unitarianism, 209. Boston, England, 10. " Bostonnais," 48. Bowditch, Henry Ingersoll, 267, 273, 276, 279-280. Bowdoin, James, Jr., 121. Bowdoin College, 236. Boylston, Zabdiel, 141. Bradstreet, Simon, 6. Brattle, Thomas, 70. Breck, Samuel, 122, 131. Bridgman, Laura Dewey, 323. Brighton, Mass., 363. Britannia, ship, 183-184. Bromfield, John, 140. Brook Farm, 22j~2,2.g. Brooks, Phillips, 7, 346-349. Brooks, Preston Smith, 286-287. Brown, Charles Brockden, 223. Brown, John, 284-285. Brown University, 318, 320. Browne, Albert Gallatin, Jr., 289, Buckminster, Joseph Stevens, 301. Bulfinch, Charles, 135, 138, 152, 163, 323, Bunker Hill, 112, 117, 280, 306. Bunker Hill Monument, 306-308 ; Asso- ciation, 308. Burgoyne, John, 112, 117, Burke, Edmund, 70, 217. Burnet, William, 69. Burns, Anthony, 275, 277-280. Burr, Aaron, 148. Burroughs, George, 62. Bushee, Frederick A., 378. Bute, Earl of, 99. Byles, Mather, 72-73, 352. Cadets, coips of, 280. Calef, Robert, 62. Cambridge, England, 3. Cambridge, Mass., 36, 47, 72, 113, 118, 141, 152, 236-237, 247. Cape Breton, 84. Cape Hancock, 167. Carlyle, Thomas, 228. Castle Island, 31, 57, 94. Catch-me-if-you-can, ship, 177. Centinel, Columbian, 131. Chadwick, John White, 218. Chancery, Court of, 53. Channing, William EUery, 147, 201, 202, 206, 208, 213, 219, 260, 268-270. Chapman, Maria Weston, 265-269. Charles I, 7, 26, 27. Charles H, 41, 51-53. Charles River, 9-10, 34. Charles Street Mall, 77. Charlestown, Mass., 9, 108, 112-113, 117, 152, 173, 307, 363. Cheever, Ezekiel, 66. Chelsea, Mass., 115. Chesapeake, ship, 150. Chicago, 111., 370. Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, 184. Child, Lydia Maria, 265-266. Choate, Rufus, 273, 305-306. INDEX 391 " Christian Science," 385. Church, Benjamin, 49. Church, Brattle Street, 70, 301. Christ, 80. Cockerel, 72. First, 6, 70. First, West Roxbury, 215. Hanover Street, 210. Hollis Street, 70, 72. Manifesto, 70. New Brick, 70-71. New North, 70-72. New South, 70, 74. Old South, 70, 74, 93-94, 106, 115, 126, 140, 220, 366. Park Street, 200, 210, 269, 340, 345, 370- Revenge, 71. Second, 70. Shepard Memorial, Cambridge, 72. Trinity, 349. West, 190. City Hall, 330. Clarke, James Freeman, 216. Clinton, Sir Henry, 117. Cochituate, Lake, 308. Coddington, WiUiam, 6. Codman, William C, 179. Colonial Boston, 26-53. Colonization Society, 257. Columbia, ship, 163-168. Columbia River, 167. Columbus Avenue, 360. Commerce, Trade and. See THE HUB AND THE Wheel. Committee of Correspondence, 92, 102- 103, 106, 108. Common. See Boston C. Commonw^ealth Avenue, 351, 358, 360. Concert Hall, 117, 122. Connecticut, 52. Constitution, Federal, 126. Constitution, frigate, 149, 150, 158. Constitution Wharf, 150. Constitutional Gazette, 116. Continental Congress, 103, iii, 116. Cook, James, 163. Cooper, James Fenimore, 223. Coote, Richard, Earl of Bellomont, 69. Copley, John Singleton, 345. Copley Square, 332. Copp's Hill, 38, 153. Cornhill, 274. Cornwallis, surrender of, 122. Cotton, John, 7, 13, 17, 58. Court House, 274, 277-279. "Covenant of Grace," 17-19; of " Works," 18. Cradock, Mathew, 27, 28. Craft, William and Ellen, 276. Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 228. C romyyell. Oliver. q x._SQ. iic;^ Cunard, Samuel, 181-182. Cunard Company, 187. Curlew, brig, 179. Curtis, Benjamin Robbins, 273. Curtis, George William, 228. Gushing, John P., 171. Cushman, Charlotte, 340. Custom-house, 248. Dalrymple, William, 93, 94, Dana, Charles Anderson, 228. Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 244, 273, 277, 278. Dartmouth, tea-ship, 107. Davy, Sir Humphry, 324. Dealings with the Dead, 71, 84. Declaration of Independence, The, iii, 121. Dedham, Mass., 108, 205, 318. Dexter, Timothy, 172. ^ial, 227, 228. Divine and Moral Songs, 195. Dorchester, Mass., 108, 121, 153, 363. Dorchester Heights, 118. Douglass, Frederick, 285. Dowse, Thomas, 303. Drama, 133-135. 339-340- Dred Scott decision, 287. Drummond, Henry, 317. Dryden, John, 17. Dudley, Joseph, 54-55, 69. Dudley, Thomas, 32-33, 54. Dunton, bookseller, 47, 63. D wight, John Sullivan, 343. Dyer, Mary, 41, East Boston (Noddle's Island), 141, 150 183, 363. 9-% 39' INDEX East India Company, 105. Elgin, Lord, 310. Eliot, John, 49. Ellis, George Edward, 49, 201, 203, 207. Embargo of 1807, 146, 148-150, 177. Emerald, packet, 181. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 14, 39, 156, 187, 214, 215, 226, 229, 233, 239, 241, 244, 246. 247, 385. Etnpress o/the Seas, ship, 160. Endicott, John, 8, 41, 44. Everett, Edward, 168, 172, 236, 259, 267, 286, 288, 298, 301-307, 314, 332, 346. Examiner Club, 244. Faneuil Hall, 83, 84, 93, 117, 133, 134, 137, 260, 266, 270, 277. Faneuil, Peter, 83. Farragut, David Glasgow, 172. Favorite, brig, 173. Federal St. Theatre, 135. Federalist, 225. Federalist party, 145-150, 299, 385. Felton, Cornelius Conway, 332. Female Antislavery Society, Boston, 263. Fenway, 138. Fields, James Thomas, 242-244. Fifty-fourth Mass. Regiment, 291-296. Figures of the Past, 208. Fillmore, Millard, 302, 310, Fire, Water and, 350-371. Fiske, John, 92, iii. « Forbes, John Murray, 177, 272, 290- 291. Forbes, Robert Bennet, 171, 172, 381. Fort Hill, 38, 250. Fort Independence, 57. Fort W^agner, 295. Foster, John, 47. Foundation and Early Years, 1-25. Franklin, Benjamin, 77, loi, 318. Franklin, Mass., 318. Freeman, James, 194-196. Freeport, Maine, 132. French Revolution, 144-145, 193. Frog-pond, 309. From Books atid Papers of Russell Sturgis, 231. From Town to City, 123-155. Froth ingham, Nathaniel Langdon, 201, 216. Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, 209, 226, 259- Fugitive Slave Law, 272-273. Gage, Thomas, 68, 93, 98, loi, 108, 113- 114, 116, 120. Gannett, Ezra Stiles, 258, 360. Garrison, William Lloyd, 250-274, 295- 296. Gazette, Salem, 179. General Court, 13, 20, 25, 28, 31, 52-53, 134. 153. 158. 299, 318, 352. Gilman, Arthur, 357. Glover, Goody, 42. Goddard, William W., 360. Godwin, Parke, 228. Goffe, regicide, 52. Goss and Munson, contractors, 359. Granary Building, 158. Granary Burying Ground, Old, 88. Gray, Robert, 164-167. Gray, William, 137. Great Seal of New England, 56. Great Western, steamship, 181. Greeley, Horace, 228. Greenough, Horatio, 308, 345. Griffin's (Liverpool) Wharf, 107. Guerriere, ship, 150. Hale, Edward Everett, 137, 247. Hale, Nathan, 234. Halifax, 120, 181, 182. Hallowell, Benjamin, 100. Hamilton, Alexander, 148. Hancock, John, 102, 122, 124-131, 133- 135, 144, 146, 164. Hancock House, 336. Handel and Haydn Society, 309, 340, 343- Harbinger, 228. Harper, actor, 134. Harrison, Peter, 80. Hartford Convention, 150. Harvard, John, 47. Harvard College, 36, 137, 210, 224, 299, 302, 309. Harvard Hall, 88. Harvard Musical Association, 343. INDEX 393 Hastings, Etheridge and Bliss's book- store, 331. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 10, 20, 33, 44, 123, 236, 242, 248. Heath, William, 122. Hedge, Frederic Henry, 246, 321. Herbert, George, 4. Herndon, William Henry, 286. Higginson, Henry Lee, 292, 295. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 228, 247, 277-278. Hill, Hamilton Andrews, 158, 182, 184. Hinsdale, Burke Aaron, 320. History of Massachicsetts Bay, Hutchin- son, 98. History of New Eijgland, Winthrop's Journal, 7. HoUis, Thomas, 199. Hollis Professorship, 196, 200. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 208, 233, 237- 239, 240, 243, 244, 246, 247, 300, 313, 332, 363. Hosmer, James Kendall, 91. Howe, Samuel Gridley, 277, 320-323. Howe, Julia Ward, 265. Howe, Sir William, 117, 118-120. " Howe's Masquerade," 123. Howells, William Dean, 225. Hub and the Wheel, The, 156-189. Huguenot families, 83. Hull, Isaac, 150. •Hull, John, 51, 65. Hunt, William Morris, 345. Huntington Avenue, 360. Hutchinson, Anne, 14-23. Hutchinson, Thomas, 51, 67, 69, 88-90, 93-94, 98, 99-101, 106-107. Hutchinson, William, 17, 23. Ice trade, 173-176. Ichabod, 273. Independence, ship, 149. Irish element, 381. Irving, Washington, 223, 235. Jackson, Andrew, 179. Jackson, Charles Thomas, 324-326. James 11,55, 57. 60. James, Henry, Sr., 246. Jamestown expedition, 381. Java, ship, 150. Jenner, Edward, 141. Jewel, ship, 6. Johnson, Lady Arbella, 6, 10. Johnson, Isaac, 6, 10. Johnson, Edward, 37-38. Johnson, Oliver, 253, 266. Jonson, Ben, 230. Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 276, 283* Keayne, Robert, 25. Kemble, Captain, 44. Kidd, William, 69. King Philip's War, 49-50. King's Chapel ("Stone Chapel"), 71, 80-83, 139, 194. 343- Kingfisher, frigate, 55. Knox, Henry, 163. Lafayette, Marquis de, 131, 250, 306, 307, 329, 330- " Latest Form of Infidelity," 215. Latin School, 35. Laud, Archbishop, 7, 27, 28. Lawrence, Abbott, 260. Lawrence, Amos Adams, 283, Lawrence, T. Bigelow, 360. Lawrence, WiUiam, 283. Leddra, William, 41. Lee, Charles, 143. Leslie, Charles Robert, 233. Letters from the Eastern States, 136, 143- Letters to Dr. Chatifiitig, 202. Letters to Unitarians, 202. Leverett Street jail, 264. Lewis and Clark Expedition, 168. Lexington, Mass., 112. Liberator, 252-254, 260, 267, 272, 274. Liberty Bell, 266-267. " Liberty Tea," 105. Liberty Tree, 99, 115. Library, Boston, 326. Library, Boston Public, 232, 304, 326-335. Lincoln, Abraham, 286, 288, 290, 302. Lincoln, Earl of, 6. Lincolnshire, 10, 17. Lind, Jenny, 343. Lindsey, Theophilus, 200. " Literary Centre," The, 222-249. 394 INDEX Liverpool Wharf, 107. Lodge, Henry Cabot, 35, 124, 125. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 232, 233, 236-237, 240, 242, 248. Loring, Edward Greely, 279. Louis XVI, 145. Louisburg, 84, 85. Lovejoy, Elijah Parish, 270-271. Lovell, John, 83. Lowell, Francis Cabot, 314. Lowell, James Russell, 228, 233, 239-240, 241, 244, 247, 267, 271, 272, 298, 314. Lowell, John, 200. Lowell, Judge John, 316. Lowell, John, Jr., 314-317. Lowell, John Amory, 316. Lov/ell, Mass., 151. Lowell Institute, 313-317. Lyman, Theodore, 178. Lyman, Theodore, Jr., 260, 263. Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 303. Macbeth, 133. Madison, James, 149. Maine, 59, 132. Manhattan, 23. Mann, Horace, 317-320, 378. Marlboro Chapel, 266. Martinique, 173. Massachusetts Bay Company, 3, 6, 8, 27, 52-53- Massachusetts General Hospital, 239, 323-325. Historical Society, 138, 303, 364, 376. Institute of Technology, 335-338, 363- Massacre, Boston, 92, 96. Mather, Cotton, 40, 42, 49, 61-65, I4i> 326, 350, 364. Mather, Increase, 58-61, 65, 326. Mather, Samuel, 64. May, Samuel Joseph, 255, 257-258, 268. Mayhew, Jonathan, 190. McClellan, George Brinton, 289. Men and Monuments, 297-349. Mercantile Library Association, 337. Merrymount, 10. Mexican, brig, 179. Michigan Central Railroad, 184. Middlesex Canal, 151. Mill-Dam (Western Avenue), 352, 358. Mill Pond, 152, 153. Milton, John, 19. Milton, Mass., 108. Minute Men, iii. Missions, foreign, 188. Modern Inheritance, The, 372-388. Monthly Anthology , 139. Morse, Jedidiah, 199, 200, Morse, John Torrey, Jr., 238. Morse, Samuel Finley Breese, 324. Morton, Thomas, lo-ii, 26. Morton, William Thomas Green, 323- 326. Motley, John Lothrop, 10, 235, 236, 239, 244, 300, 301. Mount Vernon, 302. Mount Wollaston, 10. Munson, Goss and, contractors, 359. Museum, Boston, 309, 340. Museum of Fine Arts, 232, 340, 346. Music, 340, 343-345- Music Hall, 217, 285, 343. Musical Fund Society, 343. Nahant, Mass., 236-237. Narragansett Bay, 33. Natick, Mass., 49. Navigation Act, 51. Needham, Mass., 359. New England Antislavery Society, 253. New England Conservatory of Music, 344. New England Emigrant Aid Society, 283. New England Loyal Publication Society, 291. New Efiglafid Magazine, 241. " New Exhibition Room," 133. New Hazard, ship, 177. Noddle's Island, 141, 150. North American Review, 139, 224, 301. North End, 41. North Station, 153. Norton, Andrews, 214. Norton, Charles Eliot, 247, 291. Nova Scotia, 59. " Old Corner Bookstore," 17, 242, 317. Old State House, 145, 264, 279. INDEX 395 Oliver, Andrew, 94, 99, 102, 115. Otis, Harrison Gray, 134, 137, 147, 155, 260, 351. Otis, James, 88-90, 94, 98. Oxenbridge, John, 47. Paine, Robert Treat, 96. Painting and sculpture, 345-346. Panda, schooner, 179. Panoplist, 200. Papanti, 237. Tarkman, Francis, 236. Parker House, 243, 244. Parker, Theodore, 214, 215, 217, 226, 233, 276, 277, 285, 286. Peace Jubilee (1815), 343, 345. Peirce, Benjamin, 332. Pemberton Hill, 153. Pen Portraits, 290. Pennsylvania Freeman, 240. Pepperell, Sir William, 84, Pequot War, 49. Percy, Lord, 108, 112, Perkins, James, 140. Perkins, Thomas Handasyd, 273, 322, 351. Perkins, Messrs., 171, 172. " Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind," 320-323. Philip the Second, 236. Phillips, John, 155. Phillips, Wendell, 265-266, '2.'j