RCISES IN SANDERS THEATRE 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS., UNDER THE AUSPICES 
 
 OF THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY 
 
 CELEBRATING THE ONE HUNDREDTH 
 
 ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF 
 
 RICHARD HENRY DANA 
 
 I 
 
 OCTOBER 20, 1915 
 
 I 
 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 1916 
 
Otz^t^d 
 
 1815-1882 
 
EXERCISES IN SANDERS THEATRE 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS., UNDER THE AUSPICES 
 
 OF THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY 
 
 CELEBRATING THE ONE HUNDREDTH 
 
 ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF 
 
 RICHARD HENRY DANA 
 
 OCTOBER 20, 1915 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 1916 
 
v^°^ 
 
 y<yQp 
 
 Printed in advance from Volume X op the Publications of the 
 Cambridge Historical Society 
 
'^ PROCEEDINGS 
 
 OF 
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY 
 
 DANA CENTENARY 
 
 A SPECIAL public meeting^ of the Cambridge Histori- 
 cal Society was held in Sanders Theatre on Wednes- 
 day, October 20, 1915, at eight o'clock in the evening, to 
 celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of 
 Richard Henry Dana. 
 
 The order of exercises was as follows : 
 
 Introductory Eemarks Et. Eev. William Lawrence 
 
 Dana as a Man of Letters Professor Bliss Perry 
 
 Dana as an Antislavery Leader . . . Moorfield Storey, Esq. 
 Dana as a Lawyer and Citizen . . . Hon. Joseph H. Choate 
 
 The Rt. Rev. William Lawrence, Bishop of Massachu- 
 setts, presided. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 
 
 Bishop Lawrence 
 
 Fellow Citizens: 
 
 We have met this evening to recognize the centenary of 
 Richard Henry Dana. Can any of us recall a similar meet- 
 
 1 In connection with this meeting there was given, in the Treasure Room 
 of the Harvard College Library, during the week of October 14-21, an exhi- 
 bition of books, manuscripts, portraits, and objects of personal or historic 
 interest relating to Mr. Dana. This exhibition was open to the pubUc without 
 charge. See Appendix. 
 
4 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 ing held in memory of one who was a private citizen and who 
 in his day was not the object of popular applause ? Indeed, 
 though a citizen of public spirit and rare devotion to the 
 State, he was defeated in political life and rejected by the 
 Senate for an exalted appointment ; though a man of great 
 ability, he did not meet with the success that his earlier 
 years promised. 
 
 The fact that Mr. Dana's fellow citizens meet one hundred 
 years after his birth to recall his life suggests that he had 
 qualities which are not tested by popular conceptions of 
 success, that he had elements of genius, ideals, and habits of 
 thought which touch the deeper sentiment of mankind in such 
 a way as to make his influence more permanent than that of 
 the men of his time who were conspicuously successful. 
 
 It is that we may recall these ideals and characteris- 
 tics that we are met to-night. As presiding officer, it is 
 for me to do little more than introduce the speakers. I 
 may, however, be pardoned for saying a few introductory 
 words. 
 
 Mr. Dana came of the best and most characteristic New 
 England stock, and he took great satisfaction in that fact. 
 In temperament and ideals he was true to his stock. First, 
 the spirit of liberty and of the equal rights of men before 
 the law were so wrought into the fabric of his character that 
 his soul was afire at any invasion of this principle. When, 
 therefore, a despised black man was about to be carried into 
 bondage, Mr. Dana stood by his side in his defense as natu- 
 rally as if he had sprung to the defense of his own brother. 
 Again, in his law practice the question of the amount in- 
 volved or the fee to be received had no interest for him ; and 
 his sense of duty was such that he never failed to serve the 
 humblest with the best of his time and thought. This imagi- 
 nation and love of liberty compelled him to press out into 
 the field of international relations in the hope that there 
 
 I 
 
1915.] INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 5 
 
 might be built up a system of international comity and 
 justice, which since his day has grown in strength and has 
 won favoring sentiment throughout the world, but which 
 during the past year has been rudely shaken. 
 
 Every boy born upon the coast of Massachusetts has in 
 him the fever for salt air and the sea. Hence when in youth 
 he was compelled to leave home on account of trouble with 
 his eyes, he turned instinctively to the sea, and he wrote a 
 narrative which in its simplicity and directness of expression 
 was a fresh product of literature and has become an English 
 classic. 
 
 Deeper than any other moving force in the New England 
 character has been the mystic power of religious faith. 
 From every line in Mr. Dana's ancestry there was gathered 
 into him a deep and abiding faith in God and in the revela^ 
 tion of Himself through Christ. His personal religious his- 
 tory was similar to that of many a New Englander. His 
 sentiment revolted at the hard and intellectual conception of 
 the faith as expressed in the orthodoxy of his youth. His 
 practical and positive temperament was not satisfied with the 
 transcendental religion which expressed itself in vague as- 
 pirations after the power that makes for righteousness. 
 Hence he was drawn to the expression of Christian faith as 
 found in the Episcopal Church, the daughter of the Church 
 of England. He liked background in his family history, he 
 liked it in his church. Its simplicity and positiveness of 
 faith supported him, and its liturgy and sacraments com- 
 forted and inspired him. Faithful and devoted as a member 
 and officer of the Church, he carried his religion into every 
 detail of his life, — into the slightest duty. He made it also 
 the atmosphere of his home and the support of the members 
 of his family. Prayer and religious conversation were as 
 natural as the converse of children and friends. His re- 
 ligious faith sustained him in days of disappointment and 
 
6 THE CAIMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 carried him in serenity through times of physical danger and 
 lifted him to the great heights of chivalry. 
 
 When Matthew Arnold told the English people that the 
 Memoirs of General Grant were a great piece of English 
 literature they rubbed their eyes and wondered how it was 
 possible for a man so slightly educated, from their academic 
 point of view, to write a great piece of English literature. 
 General Grant had the subtle faculty of observation and of 
 expressing what he observed in such language that others 
 can see what he saw. Mr. Dana had that same genius, the 
 capacity of observation and of revealing to others in simple 
 language what he saw and thus bringing him beside the 
 reader in the vision which he wished to express. That 
 faculty or genius runs all through " Two Years Before the 
 Mast " as it runs through " Robinson Crusoe." 
 
 We have many of us been to a New England funeral in 
 the country, and we have most of us read more or less of 
 Daniel Webster, but if one wants to be carried right into the 
 atmosphere of New England as she was some seventy years 
 ago and to gain a conception of the masterfulness of Daniel 
 Webster, let him read only half a dozen pages of Mr. Dana 
 as he describes the funeral of Daniel Webster at Marshfield. 
 There we seem to enter into the spirit of Massachusetts, into 
 its quaint habits, and there I say we gain a conception of the 
 power of Daniel Webster such as we may not receive from 
 reading volumes descriptive of that power. 
 
 Mr. Dana therefore had a literary genius, and it is that we 
 may gain a fuller conception of that literary genius that we 
 are to listen to Professor Bliss Perry on " Dana as a Man 
 of Letters." 
 
1915.] DANA AS A MAN OF LETTERS 7 
 
 RICHARD HENRY DANA AS A MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 BLISS PERRY 
 
 The popular impression of Richard Henry Dana is that he was a 
 man of one book. Such impressions are not always infallible, and 
 yet the offhand, instinctive judgment upon which they rest is 
 usually right enough for all practical purposes. In Dana's case 
 the popular verdict is not likely to be reversed. It is one of the 
 ironies of literature that this son of a poet, inheriting so much that 
 was finest in the old New England culture, a pupil of Emerson, 
 trained at Harvard, toiling gallantly in a great profession, a public- 
 spirited citizen of a commonwealth which he served nobly and with- 
 out much tangible reward, should be chiefly remembered by his 
 record of an enforced holiday in his boyhood — by what he him- 
 self called a " parenthesis " in his life. 
 
 But the irony, as happens so often with irony, serves to reveal a 
 fundamental law. It explains this author's nature. In that " pa- 
 renthesis," as in the parenthesis or postscript of many of our private 
 letters, Dana unconsciously expressed himself. His two years as a 
 common sailor offered him the magical human chance, and he took it. 
 There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional 
 life of Boston, in the thirty years preceding the Civil War, allowed 
 no place in its scheme. " Two Years Before the Mast " belongs to 
 the literature of escape. In as true a sense as Thoreau's " Walden" 
 or Parkman's "Oregon Trail" it is a record of an excureion into the 
 uncivilized, the actual; or, as Robert Louis Stevenson puts it, "not 
 the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs and colleges, but the world 
 where men still lead a man's life." Here Dana could truly express 
 himself, although self-expression was one of the last things that he 
 had in mind. He intended a descriptive narrative of objective 
 fact, "to present the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is," 
 and the task was perfectly suited to his simple, earnest nature, 
 to his lucid mind and style, to his self-forgetful interest in men 
 and things that lay beyond the horizon of conventionality. 
 
 He was fortunate, then, in the relation of his theme to himself. 
 It was adapted to his powers of observation and description, con- 
 genial to his natural tastes and sympathies. The real romance of 
 
8 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 adventure revealed itself gradually to a temperament hitherto 
 chiefly responsive to the note of literary romanticism. Books had 
 prepared the way. Young Dana knew his Spenser and Byron, 
 Wordsworth and Scott. It is characteristic of his generation that 
 he finds Robinson Crusoe's island, on his outward voyage, " the most 
 romantic spot on earth" his eyes had ever seen; that "San Juan 
 is the only romantic spot in California," and that he experienced 
 here a "glow of pleasure at finding that what of poetry and ro- 
 mance I ever had in me had not been entirely deadened by the 
 laborious and frittering life I had led"; that the solitary grave of 
 the English captain at San Pedro "was the only thing in California 
 from which I could ever extract anything like poetry." His heart 
 beats fast when he discovers at San Pedro a volume of Scott's 
 "Pirate," and when he finds at San Diego, at the bottom of 
 a sea chest, Godwin's "Mandeville, a Romance," he drinks de» 
 light as from a "spring in a desert land." Very real to him was 
 this romantic sentimentalism, and very characteristic of a bookish 
 boy in the year 1835. But was it true that only in such moods 
 lurked the spirit of poetry? Dana's own narrative answers him 
 with a triumphant negative. The unconscious element of his story 
 has outlasted the self-conscious. How about sending down the 
 1 royal yard in Monterey harbor, when the "well done" of the mate 
 j gave him as much satisfaction as he ever felt at Cambridge on see- 
 l ing a " bene " at the foot of a Latin exercise? How about running 
 \ the surf at Santa Barbara? Or swinging off a four-hundred-foot 
 cliff, at San Juan, on a pair of halyards, to save a few hides, and 
 being told for his pains: "What a d — d fool you were to risk your 
 life for half-a-dozen hides ! " How about furling the ice-covered jib 
 while drenched with the long combers off Cape Horn? To Richard 
 Dana's straightforward mind such things were all in the day's work. 
 They were duties that must be done, and he did them, as he described 
 them, in all simplicity. He told the pedagogic Horace Mann that 
 his book "had life," but he could not then realize that to a 
 later generation, taught by Kipling and Conrad, this very day's 
 work was the essence of romance, while the glimpse of Robinson 
 Crusoe's island and the lonely California grave of the forgotten 
 Englishman were only its accidents, its mere fringe of literary 
 association. 
 
1915.1 DANA AS A MAN OF LETTERS 9 
 
 Another good fortune lay in the obvious framework and sequence 
 of the story. Like Defoe's most famous narrative, it had its natural 
 beginning, its natural series of climaxes, and its due return to the 
 starting-point. No artificial literary plot could be better curved 
 than that outward voyage of the brig Pilgrim in August, 1834, the 
 timeless sojourn in the new land of California, then the long beat 
 homeward of the ship Alert around the Horn and up past the 
 equator and into Boston harbor in September, 1836. Fact is an 
 artist, though not always the master artist, and in Dana's case fact 
 served him as faithfully as the north star. He made his selections, 
 of course, from the diary of experience, but that instinct for the 
 essential point, which afterward made him a good lawyer, is evi- 
 dent in the orderliness with which he presents the cardinal features 
 of a complex situation. He was not tempted, like some greater 
 writers of the sea, such as Pierre Loti and Conrad, into over- 
 subtlety. He is sometimes, like Kipling, over-technical, but it is 
 due to an honest boyish enthusiasm for the right name of every 
 rope. 
 
 Dana was fortunate, above all, in his youthfulness. He wrote 
 at twenty-two. The "parenthesis" did not come, as it comes to 
 many men, even if it comes at all, too late in their life-sentence. 
 " Yet we were young " is the best comment upon the hardships of 
 himself and his companions in California. " Yet we were young " ; 
 young enough to "like anything in the way of variety," to feel that 
 the prospect of a change "sets life in motion." Nothing is more 
 touching in Dana's later diaries and correspondence than his belief 
 that this gift of youth, under different circumstances, might still 
 be perennially liis. He writes at the age of thirty-nine, after a sail- 
 ing vo^^age to the Maine coast: "I believe I was made for the sea 
 and that all my hfe on shore is a mistake. I was intended by nature 
 for a general roamer and traveller by sea and land, with occasional 
 edits of narratives, and my duties as lawyer, scholar and publicist 
 are all out of the way." Years afterward he writes to his wife from 
 Minnesota: "We ought to have been travellers; had no profession 
 and no home, and roamed over the world together, like two civilized 
 and refined gypsies." " My life has been a failure," he wrote in 
 1873, "compared with what I might and ought to have done. My 
 great success — my book — was a boy's work, done before I came 
 
10 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 to the Bar," His sojourn at Castellamare in May, 1881, a few 
 months before his death, seemed to him "a dream of life." Such 
 confessions as tliese are the outbreak of an essentially romantic 
 temperament, forced by external circumstances to compete with 
 the persons whom he described perfectly in his first book as the 
 people who never walk in but one line from their cradle to their 
 grave. Boston was full of such people then, as it is still. 
 
 One cannot say whether Dana would have been happier had his 
 desire for a life of romantic travel been granted. Certainly he was 
 denied that other dream of his, equally romantic, equally like cer- 
 tain moods of Chateaubriand, in which Dana, who sighed and wept 
 all day over Charlotte Yonge's "Heir of Redcliffe," desired to give 
 himself "to contemplation, to religious exercises, to nature, to art, 
 to the best of reading and study." This, too, was not to be. He 
 was disappointed, said his law partner, Mr. Parker, in every high 
 ambition of his life. But to dwell upon this phase of his human 
 hunger for the food that is just out of reach is to forget the great 
 good luck of his boyhood, that golden parenthesis of nineteen to 
 twenty-one, to which he chiefly owes to-day the place he holds in 
 human memory. 
 
 I am not forgetful, of course, and no one who has read Dana's 
 published work can be unmindful, of the literary excellence of his 
 miscellaneous writings. He was always the master of a clear, direct, 
 and vigorous style, warmed by broad sympathies and sometimes 
 heightened by passionate feeling. His arguments for the reading 
 of the Bible in public schools, on the Judiciary, and on the Rendi- 
 tion of Anthony Burns are notable even in a generation of notable 
 addresses. The fine irony of his attack upon Webster in the imag- 
 inary "Great Gravitation Meeting," the acute perception and mas- 
 culine force of his " Grasp of War " speech, his exhaustive " Note on 
 the Monroe Doctrine," his ingenious though unsuccessful argument 
 before the Halifax Fishery Commission, in which he describes the 
 men of Gloucester as vividly as Burke, three quarters of a century 
 before, had described the deep-sea fishermen of the Atlantic — these 
 are characteristic examples of his learning and eloquence. His de- 
 lightful narrative of a brief journey "To Cuba and Back" exhibits 
 his dispassionate grasp of complicated political and social condi- 
 tions, the free play of an acute and orderly intelligence. To those 
 
1915.] DANA AS A MAN OF LETTERS 11 
 
 who infer that Dana's harassed and overburdened mature life was 
 without gleams of imagination, let me quote one sentence from his 
 eulogy of Rufus Choate before the Suffolk bar, that bar that had 
 listened, not many years before, to Choate's own eulogy of Webster: 
 
 " Sir, I speak for myself, — I have no right to speak for others, 
 — but I can truly say, without any exaggeration, taking for the 
 moment a simile from that element which he loved as much as I 
 love it, though it rose against his life at last, — that in his presence 
 I felt like the master of a small coasting vessel, that hugs the shore, 
 that has run up under the lee to speak to a great homeward-bound 
 Indiaman, freighted with silks and precious stones, spices and costly 
 fabrics, with sky-sails and studding-sails spread to the breeze, with 
 the nation's flag at her mast-head, navigated by the mysterious 
 science of the fixed stars, and not unprepared with weapons of de- 
 fence, her decks peopled with men in strange costumes, speaking of 
 strange climes and distant lands. ..." 
 
 Such writing lingers in the memory, though it be only the mem- 
 ory of a few. But for one American who has read Dana's " Speeches 
 in Stirring Times" there are thousands throughout the English- 
 speaking world who have shared with the boyish Dana his pleasure 
 in the "perfect silence of the sea" and "the early breaking of day 
 on the wide ocean," his awe at "the cold and angry skies" and 
 "long heavy ugly seas" off the Cape, who have seen with him 
 the "malignant" brightness of the lightning in the tropical storm, 
 tlie yellow California sunsliine and the gray California fog, and the 
 slow, stately motion of the groaning Antarctic icebergs with the 
 whirling snow about their summits. Once, on the homeward 
 voyage, there came to him an experience thus described: 
 
 "One night, while we were in these tropics, I went out to the end of 
 the flying- jib boom, upon some duty, and, having finished it, turned 
 round, and lay over the boom for a long time, admiring the beauty of 
 the sight before me. Being so far out from the deck, I could look at 
 the ship, as at a separate vessel; — and, there rose up from the water, 
 supported only by the small black hull, a pyramid of canvas, spreading 
 out far beyond the hull, and towering up almost, as it seemed in the in- 
 distinct night air, to the clouds. The sea was as still as an inland lake ; 
 the light trade wind was gently and steadily breathing from astern ; the 
 dark blue sky was studded with the tropical stars ; there was no sound 
 
12 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 but the rippling of the water under the stem ; and the sails were spread 
 out, wide and high ; the two lower studding-sails stretching, on each 
 side, far beyond the deck ; the top-mast studding sails, like wings to 
 the top-sails ; the top-gallant studding-sails spreading fearlessly out 
 above them ; still higher, the two roj^al studding-sails, looking like two 
 kites flying from the same string ; and highest of all, the little sky-sail, 
 the apex of the pyramid, seeming actually to touch the stars, and to be 
 out of reach of human hand. So quiet, too, was the sea, and so steady 
 the breeze, that if these sails had been sculptured marble, they could 
 not have been more motionless. Not a ripple upon the surface of the 
 canvas ; not even a quivering of the extreme edges of the sail — so per- 
 fectly were they distended by the breeze. I was so lost in the sight, 
 that I forgot the presence of the man who came out with me, until he 
 said, (for he too, rough old man-of-war's man as he was, had been gaz- 
 ing at the show) half to himself, still looking at the marble sails — 
 'How quietly they do their work !'" 
 
 There, at least, is the magical moment, and what matters it 
 whether the moment comes early or late in a writer's life? It is 
 all the same, said Marcus Aurelius, whether a man looks on these 
 things three years or a hundred. No, it is not quite the same; 
 surely that man is to be envied who has seen the vision of beauty 
 and has had the felicity of recording it, in the days of his youth. 
 
 Bishop Lawrence. One of the greatest tests of moral 
 courage is in the readiness of a man of high social position 
 to throw away his position for a cause. It called for great 
 courage in the early fifties to be an antislavery leader, but at 
 that time the antislavery people, most of them, had very little 
 social position. They were most of them unknown men and 
 women. Mr. Dana took great satisfaction in his descent and 
 in his social position. Therefore when he entered into the 
 ranks of the antislavery leaders he showed exceptional moral 
 courage, — for in those days it meant ostracism from many 
 whose company he counted the dearest and whose regard he 
 highly esteemed. Hence when Mr. Dana entered the list of 
 antislavery leaders he not only risked, and to a certain degree 
 threw away, his social position, but he at the same time 
 
 1 
 
1915.] DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 13 
 
 contributed to the cause of the antislavery advocates some- 
 thing which was of great value to them in bringing their 
 cause before the people. It is the story of Mr. Dana as an 
 antislavery leader that Mr. Moorfield Storey will tell us this 
 evening. 
 
 DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 
 MOORFIELD STOREY 
 
 We are wont to speak of the years when our Fathers were 
 struggling for independence as " the times that tried men's souls," 
 but such times are not peculiar to any generation, and the sons 
 have endured trials quite as severe as those which tested the man- 
 hood of their sires. The leaders of the Revolution had behind 
 them all their friends and neighbors except a small minority. They 
 had the solace of popularity. During the four years of civil war 
 our souls were tried and our hearts were very sore, for we knew 
 that the future of our country and the freedom of a race were at 
 stake, and our hopes rose and fell as the varying fortunes of the 
 war now discouraged and now cheered us. But the people on each 
 side were substantially united and felt that they won or lost with 
 the whole community in which they lived. We had at least that 
 company which " misery loves." 
 
 So to-day in the great struggle for civilization and freedom which 
 desolates Europe, every soldier feels that behind him and beside 
 him are his fellow countrymen, all standing together and fighting 
 for everything that men hold dear. It is far easier to fight with so 
 great a host than to stand with truth on the scaffold and face the 
 opposition not only of the crowd, but of friends whom we love and 
 respect. It takes more courage to lead a forlorn hope than to 
 charge with a triumphant army. 
 
 The souls of the men who began the war against human slavery 
 were put to the supreme test of courage and endurance. No pop- 
 ular sympathy upheld their hands or cheered their efforts. Strange 
 as it seems to us, only fifty years since Richmond fell, the public 
 opinion of the United States before the civil war, supported human 
 slavery, was blind to its atrocities, and regarded its opponents as 
 
14 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIET^T [Oct. 
 
 enemies of society. To tliem the avenues which lead to worldly- 
 success were closed. The great business interests of the country, 
 the great political parties, the church, the universities, the leaders 
 of society, the men to whom their fellow citizens looked for guid- 
 ance frowned upon the advocates of human freedom, while the 
 mobs which murdered Lovejoy and dragged Garrison through the 
 streets of Boston only showed to what personal peril the anti- 
 slavery men were exposed. 
 
 Mr. Emerson in an unpublished diary states the situation in 
 graphic language: 
 
 "'Tis against the plain interest of young men to allow freedom. 
 Young man! the poor Kansas settlers give no elegant suppers, no 
 Saturday dinners, no private box have they at the opera. If you vote 
 to garrote them, and stand by Missouri and the Union, j'ou can just as 
 well praise the Kansas of a thousand years ago, namely Marathon : talk 
 just as glibly of Milton and the Puritans. You can edit Landor : you 
 can, like Guizot and Sparks, write eulogies of Washington. Judges, 
 bank presidents, railroad men, men of fashion, lawyers universally, all 
 take the side of slavery. What a poor blind devil are you to break 
 your shins for a bit of moonshine against the goodwill of the whole 
 community. 'Meanness,' do you say? Yes, but when meanness is in 
 such good company, when the university and the faculty of law and of 
 medicine and of divinity itself are infinitely mean, who knows which is 
 meanness? What a fool, when the whole world has lost its wits, to be 
 the only sane man," 
 
 Is it not strange that in the land of the free, — the hope of the 
 oppressed, among a people brought up to believe that " all men are 
 created equal " and who professed to be Christians, a system so 
 truly described as " the sum of all the villainies " should be ap- 
 proved by men of hght and leading ? When as a junior in Hai'vard 
 College I walked over the Blue Hills on the day that we heard of 
 Lee's surrender, I remember saying to my companion : " It is diffi- 
 cult even now to believe that slavery ever existed in this country," 
 and I have never since ceased to wonder at the state of feeling here 
 in Massachusetts between 1845 and 1860, for she was " kneelin' 
 with the rest." 
 
 In 1845 Mr. Dana was only thirty years old. He had been mar- 
 ried for four years and had childi-en. He was dependent on his 
 
1915.] DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 15 
 
 earnings, but his social connections were of the best, his reputation 
 for ability was established, and his professional success seemed 
 assured. He was conservative by nature, and had no sympathy 
 with the abolition movement, as is shown by the following entry 
 in his diary made in June, 1843, after seeing something of the pro- 
 ceedings in " the anti-slavery convention." 
 
 " The elements of which the convention was composed are dreadful. 
 Heated, narrow-minded, self-willed, excited, unchristian, radical energies 
 set to work upon a cause which is good, if rightly managed, but which 
 they have made a hotbed for forcing into growth the most dangerous 
 doctrines to both church and state. They are nearly all at the extreme 
 of radicalism, socialism and infidelity." 
 
 Yet he was a Free Soiler, and in a letter to Daniel Lord of New 
 York he gave his reasons for his faith. From this letter I quote : 
 
 "1. I am a Free Soiler by inheritance. I am the son and grandson 
 of Federalists. The northern Federalists were decided Free Soilers. 
 The exclusion of slavery from the Northwest territory is owing to them. 
 In New England they opposed the Missouri compromise to the last. 
 The yielding to the South on that point in 1820, the parent of so much 
 evil, was by the Democrats. . . . 
 
 " 2. I am a Free Soiler by education. I was educated a Whig. The 
 Whig party of New England has been a decided Anti-slavery and Free 
 Soil party up to and through the contest of 1848. I will agree to adopt 
 no positions on the slave question, or any great matter, for which I 
 cannot vouch the unanimous or all but unanimous resolves of the Whig 
 legislatures and conventions of Massachusetts. . . . 
 
 " 3, My conservatism leads me to it. There is a compound of self- 
 ishness and cowardice which often takes to itself the honored name of 
 Conservatism. That false conservatism I call Hunkerism. Now, 
 hunkerism, of all names and sections. Whig or Democratic, making ma- 
 terial prosperity and ease its pole star, will do nothing and risk nothing 
 for a moral principle. But not so conservatism. Conservatism some- 
 times requires a risking or sacrificing of material advantages. Radi- 
 calism, also, will do nothing to resist the growth of slavery, because 
 that is purely an act of justice to others. It is not our freedom that is 
 at stake. If it were, the Tammany Hall mob would be on our side and 
 beyond us. But in a case for liberal, comprehensive justice to others, 
 with only a remote and chiefly moral advantage, conservatism is more 
 reliable than radicalism. . . ." 
 
16 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 He stated his position publicly on taking the chair at a Free Soil 
 meeting in July, 1848, after the antislavery agitation had become 
 intense. He then said: 
 
 " I am a Whig, a "Whig of the old school: I may say, without affecta- 
 tion, a highly conservative Whig. ... I am in favor of supporting 
 all the compromises of the Constitution in good faith, as well as in 
 profession. 
 
 "Why then am I here? I understand this to be no meeting for 
 transcendental purposes, or abolition purposes, or politico-moral re- 
 form. . . . The ' subject of our story ' is simply this. Massachusetts 
 has deliberately taken a position in favor of excluding slavery from new 
 territories, leaving each state now in the Union to manage its own 
 slavery. . . . The Convention at Springfield last autumn unanimously 
 passed the resolution I hold in my hand : 
 
 " Resolved, That if the War shall be prosecuted to the final subjuga- 
 tion and dismemberment of Mexico, the Whigs of Massachusetts now 
 declare, and put this declaration of their purpose on record, that Mass- 
 achusetts will never consent that American territory, however acquired, 
 shall become a part of the American Union, unless on the unalterable 
 condition that ' there shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude 
 therein, otherwise than in the punishment of crime.' Now, we are here 
 because we intend to adhere to this resolution." 
 
 The Whig leaders having made it apparent by their silence as 
 well as by their speeches for General Taylor, the Whig candidate 
 for President, that they either did not "think the Free Soil ques- 
 tion of consequence enough to speak upon," or that they did not 
 feel at liberty to speak upon it, Dana refused to follow them. 
 
 Stated briefly, his position was that slavery was so great an evil 
 that it could not be tolerated in territories where it did not exist, 
 but that under the Constitution we could not interfere with it in the 
 states where it was already established. This was the platform on 
 which the Republican party was founded and upon which it made 
 the contests in 1856 which resulted in the defeat of Fremont, and 
 in 1860, when its victory made Abraham Lincoln president. In 
 1848, however, there were few who were ready to accept this doc- 
 trine. Mr. Dana was one of the few who left the Whig party and 
 attended the Free Soil convention at Buffalo which nominated 
 Van Buren and Adams. Into this independent movement he 
 
1915.] DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 17 
 
 threw himself with all his might ; and while the result of the effort, 
 measured by the votes cast at the election, was insignificant, nev- 
 ertheless it sounded the knell of the Whig party and sowed the 
 seed from which the Republican party was so soon to spring. Its 
 seeming defeat was really a glorious victory. The men who met 
 in Buffalo made the antislavery movement practical, and began 
 the campaign which ended in the emancipation proclamation and 
 in Appomattox. 
 
 Throughout this struggle Dana stood firmly with the Free S oil- 
 ers and Republicans, but he supported them as a citizen and not as 
 a politician, though generally in close touch with the Republican 
 leaders. A brilliant political career was open to him, his abilities 
 fitted him to lead, and his inclination prompted him to enter political 
 life, but on the other hand the demands of his family made him stick 
 to his profession, and in 1852, when he was asked to preside at the 
 meeting held in Faneuil Hall to ratify the Free Soil nominations, 
 he made his choice and refused, but his diary records his difficulty 
 in reaching his conclusion : 
 
 " Never more distressed in my life to make a decision. Talked with 
 Adams, Wilson and others. All wanted me to speak. Very reluctantly 
 and quite unsatisfied determined to decline. Did so. I do not know 
 that I ever so much regretted the want of property to enable me to do 
 a great public duty." 
 
 "His poverty but not his will" declined, and the community 
 lost the services of an able, brave, and sincere man whose presence 
 in the public councils would have been invaluable during the great 
 struggle which was then impending. 
 
 As I have said, every instinct of this conservative lawyer and 
 churchman, this believer in constitution and law, made him a 
 supporter of existing institutions and an opponent of agitators and 
 fanatics ; but when Texas had been annexed and the slave owners, 
 growing more arrogant, passed the Fugitive Slave law, he rose to 
 the emergency. This law permitted a man to swear before any 
 obscure magistrate in a slave state that another man was his slave, 
 and then required the marshals and commissioners of the United 
 States, without considering whether this ex 'parte affidavit was true, 
 to arrest the alleged slave and deliver him to the claimant on proof 
 
18 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 only that the person arrested was the person mentioned in the affi- 
 davit, giving the commissioner if he remanded the slave a fee of 
 ten dollars, and if he decided against the claimant a fee of only 
 five, — a small bribe, you will say, but this was the day of small 
 things, and the men who framed the law thought the difference 
 worth making. By express provision of the law the testimony of 
 the alleged fugitive could not be admitted, but, in the case of An- 
 thony Burns, his casual replies to questions asked by the claimant 
 after his arrest were admitted against him to establish his identity. 
 His word could be taken to keep him a slave, but his oath would 
 not avail to make him free. Had any one under such a law sought 
 to take another's horse the community would have risen in arms 
 against it, but when it was used to deprive a man and his descend- 
 ants forever of freedom, the American people as a whole approved. 
 There were men who could not submit to such a travesty of law, 
 men in whose hearts and minds the spirit of Anglo-Saxon freedom 
 was too deeply rooted, and among them Mr. Dana was a leader. 
 His opportunity came when a negro living in Boston as Frederick 
 Jenkins was arrested as a fugitive slave under the name of Shad- 
 rach, and Mr. Dana in his diary states what followed : 
 
 "While in my office at about 10:30 Mr. Charles Davis, Parker and 
 others came in and told me that the marshal had a fugitive slave in 
 custody in the United States court room before Mr. George T. Curtis 
 as commissioner. I went immediately over to the Court House." 
 
 He did not wait for a summons, but without hesitation volun- 
 teered to defend the unfortunate negro against the power of the 
 United States, a step which affected his whole future, as he was 
 soon to realize. 
 
 He was accepted by Jenkins as his counsel, and at once " pre- 
 pared a writ of ' de homine replegiando ' and a petition for a habeas 
 corpus addressed to Chief Justice Shaw." Quoting again from 
 Mr. Dana's diary : 
 
 "With this petition I called on the Chief Justice and stated to him 
 that it was a case of an alleged fugitive slave, and that our object was 
 to test the constitutional power of the commissoner to issue a warrant. 
 The Chief Justice read the petition and said in a most ungracious man- 
 ner, 'This won't do. I can't do anything on this,' and laid it upon the 
 table and turned away to engage in something else." 
 
1915.1 DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 19 
 
 Dana persisted and forced the Chief Justice from one objection 
 to another, and as we read them we share Dana's opinion that they 
 were " frivolous and invahd " ; but finding the judge determined not 
 to grant the writ, he withdrew to consider what further steps to 
 take. Judge Metcalf, a man little inclined to speak, was present 
 at Dana's interview with Judge Shaw, "and expressed himself very 
 much disturbed by the conduct of the chief," and it is melancholy 
 to think that the Chief Justice of Massachusetts should make every 
 attempt to evade his duty in a case of such vital importance. While 
 .Dana was considering the situation, Jenkins or Shadrach was res- 
 cued, and so the case ended. 
 
 From that time on, to quote his own words, he had " the privi- 
 lege of being counsel for every fugitive slave and for most of those 
 who were indicted for rescue," and he discharged his duty as coun- 
 sel with unflinching courage, great ability, and in most cases with 
 success. It is impossible for us now to realize against what obsta- 
 cles and at what a sacrifice he did this work. 
 
 When Sims, the next alleged fugitive slave, was arrested, " Mr. 
 Sewall applied to the Supreme Court for a habeas corpus, and it 
 was refused without argument. After it was refused Mr. Sewall 
 asked leave to address the court in favor of the petition, and was 
 refused." This was no pettifogger seeking to raise a frivolous 
 question, but an eminent member of the bar representing all that 
 was best in Massachusetts, of ancient descent and singularly high 
 character, whom the court refused even to hear on a great question 
 of human freedom. No wonder that during the following Saturday 
 and Sunday leading lawyers like Charles G. Loring and Franklin 
 Dexter spoke privately to the court, and that on their urgency an 
 intimation was given that argument would be heard. Accordingly 
 on the next day, without preparation, Mr. Dana addressed the court, 
 and Mr. Rantoul followed, and within a few hours the court re- 
 fused the writ. Such proceedings make us hesitate to speak of the 
 " good old times," but they lend force to every argument against 
 an elective judiciary or the recall of decisions or judges, since they 
 prove that even a magistrate like Chief Justice Shaw could not 
 rise above the political feeling of his time. This was a single in- 
 stance of weakness, a single blot on a great judicial career. How 
 much worse would our conditions be if, as a rule, a seat on the 
 
20 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 bench could be obtained or held only by adopting the political 
 views of the popular majority for the moment ! 
 
 The men whom Dana served belonged to the weakest class in 
 the world. They had neither votes, influence, nor property, nor 
 even the rights of human beings. They could give him no com- 
 pensation for his services, and when it was offered by others he 
 returned it in a letter from which I quote the following : 
 
 " They [the donors] give me more credit than I am willing to receive. 
 The good fortune which is said to attend early rising made me one of 
 the first of the members of the bar, if not the first, to hear that there 
 was a man in custody as a slave in the court room. To render myself 
 at once on the spot and to offer my professional services to him and to 
 those who were coming forward as his friends was an act I trust natural 
 to me, and requiring no effort or sacrifice. ... I have done so in the 
 cause of alleged slaves in Boston heretofore, and so have others, and 
 I hope the members of the bar in Massachusetts will never fail to be 
 ready to render this service gratuitously to the cause of humanity and 
 freedom. A portion of my time and the application of such influence 
 and ability as I may possess is the only contribution I have to make. . . . 
 
 "Besides my own feeling in the matter, which would be conclusive 
 with me, I would not have the force of the precedent, which has been 
 set in the trials for freedom in Massachusetts thus far, impaired in the 
 least for the honor of my profession and the welfare of those in peril." 
 
 These are words which it is pleasant to read in these days. 
 
 His course exposed him to serious personal danger. On the 
 evening of the very day when Anthony Burns was carried back to 
 slavery through the sullen streets of Boston, Dana was attacked 
 on his way home by a ruffian hired to assault him, and received 
 a blow which, had it fallen a very little to the right or left, would 
 have blinded and perhaps killed him. The history of the attack 
 and the capture and conviction of his assailant is a very interesting 
 story, unhappily too long to be related here. 
 
 Having nothing to expect from his clients or their friends, he 
 had on the other hand to face not only the frowns of the court and 
 the hostility of society, but, as Mr. Adams says: "From the pro- 
 fessional point of view this open and conscientious adhesion to the 
 unpopular side affected Dana much more. . . . Nearly all the 
 wealth and the moneyed institutions of Boston were controlled by 
 
1915.] DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 21 
 
 the conservatives, and among the moneyed institutions were the 
 marine insurance companies. The ship-owners and merchants were 
 Whigs ahnost to a man. It is, therefore, safely within the mark 
 to say that Dana's political course between 1848 and 1860 not only 
 retarded his professional advancement, but seriously impaired his 
 income. It kept the rich clients from his office. He was the 
 counsel of the sailor and the slave, — persistent, courageous, hard- 
 fighting, skilful, but still the advocate of the poor and the unpop- 
 ular. In the mind of wealthy and respectable Boston almost any 
 one was to be preferred to him — the Free Soil lawyer, the counsel 
 for the fugitive slave, alert, indomitable, always on hand. The 
 Boston Advertiser even published an article signed by ' The Son 
 of a Merchant ' calling on all merchants to withdraw their business 
 from Mr. Dana and to proclaim non-intercourse. It is impossible 
 to say how many clients were prevented from going to Dana dur- 
 ing his years of active practice by considerations of this sort; but 
 the number was unquestionably large, and the interests they repre- 
 sented larger still. Indeed, brilliant as was his career at the bar, 
 he never had what would be considered a lucrative practice ; and 
 that he did not have such a practice was due to prejudice connected 
 with his early political associations. He too suffered for his advo- 
 cacy of the poor and the oppressed. . . . Up to 1848 he was on 
 exactly the right path, — the path to distinctive professional emi- 
 nence. Had he adhered to it, he not improbably would at least 
 have attained, had he so desired, that foremost place in the judiciary 
 of Massachusetts once held by his grandfather. Most assuredly he 
 would have risen to the front rank of his profession as a jurist of 
 national fame." 
 
 His partner, Francis E. Parker, wrote after Mr. Dana's death : 
 
 "Baffled as he had been for more than twenty years, disappointed in 
 every high ambition of his Ufe, fallen in evil times and evil tongues, 
 how bravely he kept his courage ! " 
 
 It is true that he won neither great wealth nor high office, and 
 that in his own commonwealth he saw many win both who were in 
 no way superior to him in ability or character, like his arch-enemy 
 Benjamin F. Butler ; but " the wise years decide." Weighed in 
 the true scales, could any fortune, however large, or any office, 
 
22 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 however high, — could anything that he won for himself outbalance 
 the unselfish service which he rendered to others ? Is self-sacrifice 
 failure ? ShaU we measure success by what a man gets or by what 
 he gives ? Shall we forget the immortal words, " Inasmuch as ye 
 have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have 
 done it unto me ? " 
 
 Let us rather hold him up to the generous youth of this country 
 as an example of the highest success, and say with Mr. Adams: 
 " His connection with those cases was the one great professional 
 and political act of his life. It was simply superb. There is noth- 
 ing fairer or nobler in the long, rich archives of the law ; and the 
 man who holds that record in his hand may stand with head erect 
 at the bar of final judgment itself." 
 
 Bishop Lawrence. No son of Harvard is more welcome 
 than Mr. Choate. His loyalty to Harvard is expressed in a 
 characteristic remark some years ago when he said, "When 
 in London if I heard the name of any young man rising to 
 distinction in America, no matter what part of America, I 
 always took up the Quinquennial and looked to see in what 
 year he graduated." 
 
 We have just heard the eulogy of Rufus Choate by Mr. 
 Dana, and we can be confident that if Mr. Dana could speak 
 he would be much gratified to know that his position as a 
 lawyer and a jurist was to be presented by Joseph Choate. 
 
 DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 
 JOSEPH H. CHOATE 
 
 I REGARDED it as a great honor to be asked to prepare a paper 
 about Richard H. Dana, as a lawyer and citizen, for the celebration 
 of the centenaiy of his birth. 
 
 He has been dead for thirty-four years, and sleeps in the old 
 Protestant cemetery at Rome in company with Shelley and Keats 
 in a land which he loved to visit and where his closing years 
 were spent. 
 
1915.] DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 23 
 
 At such a distance of time the professional life and work of any 
 lawyer, however distinguished, ceases to be of general interest 
 unless connected with events which have become historical and of 
 surpassing human interest. Fortunately for Mr. Dana, his active 
 professional and public life of twenty-five years embraced the pe- 
 riod of the Civil War and the thrilling events which preceded and 
 followed it, and he was able to render signal services to the state 
 and the nation which ought never to be forgotten. 
 
 The unusual fame which he had acquired as a very young man 
 by the publication of " Two Years Before the Mast," which still 
 reads like a romance and a companion-piece to " Robinson Crusoe," 
 and the publication of the "Seaman's Friend," which naturally 
 followed it, necessarily brought him a sort of maritime practice 
 when he was admitted to the bar and opened a law office in 1841 
 at the age of twenty-six. 
 
 He had just married, was without independent means, and had 
 every incentive, as he had abundant ability, to take a leading place 
 in the profession for which his keen intelKgence, his habits of pro- 
 found thought, and his soaring ambition naturally fitted him. 
 There was another thing which doubtless stimulated his hope and 
 desire for the rapid advance in professional and public affairs, which 
 might well have been expected from his brilliant talents and his 
 undisputed ability. He was justly proud of his distinguished lin- 
 eage, which ran back into colonial days. Several of his direct an- 
 cestors, whose names can be found in the Harvard Catalogue, had 
 taken part in the public life of New England. His grandfather, 
 Francis Dana, had been a delegate from Massachusetts to the Con- 
 tinental Congress, had signed the Articles of Confederation, had 
 been appointed minister to Russia during the Revolutionary War, 
 and after the adoption of the Constitution was for fifteen years 
 Chief Justice of Massachusetts. There were, also, in the maternal 
 line of his ancestry two colonial governors and a signer of the 
 Declaration of Independence. 
 
 It cannot be denied, however, that he had a certain fastidiousness 
 of manner which kept him aloof from the ordinary run of men. 
 He had a natural liking for the best company, which he always 
 frequented, and no desire to cultivate miscellaneous acquaintances, 
 none of the hail-fellow-well-met to everybody, which naturally 
 
24 THE CMIBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 tends to promote a young man's rapid advancement in the profes- 
 sion or in public life. But for all that he had a genuine enthusiasm 
 for popular liberty and equality under the law, and an abiding faith 
 in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as 
 it was advocated by Lincoln. 
 
 I doubt, too, whether he had that all-absorbing love of the law 
 which is necessary to a highly sustained professional career. He 
 loved to travel, and was particularly fond of the society of superior 
 men and women. He evidently had a strong liking for public Hfe, 
 and an ambition for high office, which he was admirably qualified 
 to fill, so that he followed the law rather as a means of livelihood 
 than as an exalted vocation to which he could devote all his strong 
 and manly qualities, and strive for success in it as though there 
 were no other object worth living for. 
 
 His personal devotion to Washington AUston, who had married 
 his father's sister, was strikingly characteristic, and I think he 
 derived from AUston some of his habits of thought and of action. 
 
 Allston, besides being a great artist, was a man of rare and 
 delicate and sensitive personality, quite likely to impress strongly 
 a high-toned youth like Dana. 
 
 The latter says of him in his Journal : " He says that if things 
 go on as they promise now that * in eighty years there will not be 
 a gentleman left in the country.' He says that the manners of 
 gentility, its courtesies, its deferences, and graces are passing away 
 from among us. Whether they pass away or no, he is a good 
 specimen of them. Born of a distinguished family in Carolina, 
 and educated in the feelings and habits of a gentleman, with a 
 noble nature, a beautiful countenance, and a graceful person, what 
 else could he be ? " 
 
 And on the occasion of AUston' s sudden death, he takes leave 
 of him in these words : " The exquisite moral sense, the true spir- 
 ituality, the kindUness and courtesy of heart as well as of manner, 
 the corresponding external elegance, the elevation above the world 
 and the men and things of it, where have these ever been so com- 
 bined before ? " And the same question might well be asked about 
 Mr. Dana. 
 
 His own early and even precocious literary success had some- 
 thing, I think, to do with shaping his subsequent life. It gave 
 
1915.] DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 25 
 
 him an easy footing in the society and friendship of the best men, 
 such as Mr. Webster, Judge Story, George Ticknor, Charles Fran- 
 cis Adams, Franklin Dexter, Charles Sumner, George S. Hillard, 
 and others who were the leaders of New England life, and he stood 
 well with them all. Indeed, literature must have been his first 
 love, which was evinced by his signal success in that direction 
 even before he came of age, and by his devotion in later years to 
 the company of those choice and kindred spirits and men of letters 
 who composed the famous Saturday Club. 
 
 Mr. Horace Mann he did not altogether like ; and no wonder, for 
 there could hardly be two more opposite natures than theirs. 
 When Mann was at the head of the Board of Education, he pro- 
 posed to Mr. Dana that the Board of Education should publish his 
 " Two Years Before the Mast " if he would practically rewrite it 
 to suit Mr. Mann's practical ideas, and his account of their inter- 
 view at which the matter was discussed is most amusing. It 
 ended in Mr. Dana positively refusing to make any substantial 
 changes in the book, and Mr. Mann being contented with nothing 
 less than changes which would entirely destroy its character. 
 
 Too strenuous labor, after he reached the age of forty-five, seems 
 frequently to have overtaxed Mr. Dana's strength. Up to that 
 time he had a remarkable buoyancy and vigor which had been 
 splendidly fortified by his two years at sea. A weakness of the 
 eyes had compelled him to take the voyage of which his book is 
 the record, out of the very heart of his college life, coming back to 
 graduate with a class two years later than that which he had en- 
 tered. From the beginning to the end of his professional life, 
 whatever his hands found to do he did it with his might. His 
 attention to details was extraordinary, and thus he was always in 
 danger of overwork, which compelled him to take frequent vaca- 
 tions to counteract that danger. 
 
 There was one great hero with whom these vacation rambles 
 brought him into close and interesting contact, and that was John 
 Brown, not yet John Brown of Ossawatomie, but a plain and 
 rugged farmer of North Elba in the Adirondacks, where he ran 
 an active branch of the famous underground railroad, over which 
 he was constantly conducting fugitive slaves to freedom. 
 
 More than twenty years afterward Dana wrote an account of it 
 
26 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 for the Atlantio 3IontJdi/, and it is pleasant to read of Mr. Dana, 
 fastidious though he was, sitting down to dinner with Mr. Brown 
 and " his unlimited family of children, from a cheerful, nice healthy 
 woman of twenty or so and a full-sized, red-haired son, who seemed 
 to be foreman of the farm, through every grade of boy and girl to 
 a couple who could hardly speak plain," and among them two 
 fugitive negroes whom he had just brought in and whom he intro- 
 duced to Mr. Dana as Mr. Jefferson and Mrs. Wait, as persons of 
 entire social equality. 
 
 Little did he think, as he sat at that rude feast of " Ruth's best 
 bread, butter, and corn cakes, with some meat and tea," that in a 
 few years the rugged farmer, who sat at the head of the table and 
 entertained him so cordially, would have become the great martyr 
 of freedom, so that his name and his spirit would lead the embat- 
 tled hosts of America to the final triumph of liberty and union ! 
 
 Mr. Dana's first venture in politics, in his thirty-third year, in 
 1848, marked clearly his independence of spirit, his love of the 
 right, and determination to maintain it at whatever cost, and his 
 clear foresight into the political future. He had, like almost all 
 Massachusetts boys, grown up as a disciple of Mr. Webster. He 
 hated the Abolitionists who were altogether too unconventional for 
 him, but he made his d^but in political life as chairman of the Free 
 Soil meeting at the Tremont Temple. He declared: "I am a 
 Free Soiler, because I am (who should not say so) of the stock of 
 the old northern gentry, and have a particular dislike to any sub- 
 serviency, or even appearance of subserviency, on the part of our 
 people to the slaveholding oligarchy. I was disgusted with it in 
 college and at the law school, and have been since, in society and 
 politics. The spindles and day-books are against us just now, for 
 Free Soilism goes to the wrong side of the ledger. The blood, the 
 letters, and the people are our chief reliance." 
 
 It was a bold step for a young lawyer and statesman to come out 
 in this way in 1848 in Boston, where Webster was still lord of the 
 ascendant and where all the best people, with whom Dana had 
 always been associated, were his devoted followers, and where 
 there was a strong affiliation, as Charles Sumner put it, " between 
 the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom." But Dana was 
 not dismayed. He went to the B uffalo convention as a delegate 
 
1915.] DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 27 
 
 and came back to advocate the election of Martin Van Buren for 
 President and Charles Francis Adams for Vice-President, and from 
 August to November he laid aside his law practice and devoted 
 himself to making speeches for this seemingly hopeless cause, 
 which he had the foresight to see would result by and by in the 
 collapse of the Whig party and the prevention of the further ex- 
 tension of slavery. From this time forward he was generally 
 recognized as one of the most brilliant and promising antislavery 
 men of the country, rather to the horror and disgust of many of 
 his old associates; and some of his social relations that had been of 
 the warmest and closest character were broken off. 
 
 The wealth of Boston, its merchants and manufacturers and 
 shipowners, were against him, and his success as a lawyer, which 
 had been good at the start, must have been seriously interfered 
 with ; but little did he care for that, for he knew he was right and 
 meant to stick to it, and presently, by the very reason of his po- 
 litical secession, his great opportunity came in the fugitive slave 
 cases, which enabled him as a lawyer to render memorable service 
 to the good of mankind. 
 
 I think myself that when the first attempts to enforce the fugi- 
 tive slave law of 1850 were made in Boston, the great majority of 
 the educated people, and, indeed, of all the people of Massachusetts, 
 would have preferred that the enforcement of the odious law should 
 be quietly submitted to without any demonstration against it. The 
 compromise measures of 1850, of which that law was a part, had 
 been accepted, strangely enough, as a finality. They had been 
 advocated by Mr. Webster, Mr. Clay, and Mr. Calhoun, all of them 
 already old men, who had desired nothing so much as that the 
 slavery question should be settled for once and forever, while they 
 were still upon the political stage. They beheved that the fugitive 
 slave law was practically guaranteed by the Constitution, and that 
 attempts to enforce it would result in no serious harm. In this, as 
 the result showed, they proved to be blind leaders of the bhnd ; but 
 the people of Massachusetts generally were still inclined to follow 
 their lead. But not so with Mr. Dana and Charles Sumner and 
 Robert Rantoul. They appear to have recognized the binding 
 force of the constitutional provision, that "no person held to serv- 
 ice or labor in one State under the laws thereof, escaping into 
 
28 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 another state, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, 
 be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up 
 on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due " ; 
 but they believed also that this did not dispense with essential 
 safeguards for the protection of persons involved, and especially 
 that they were entitled to a trial by jury and to such other protec- 
 tion as might be afforded to them by legislative provisions of the 
 states which would not be in conflict with the Constitution of the 
 United States. 
 
 So when the first seizure under the odious law was made by the 
 arrest of Shadrach in Boston on the 15th of February, 1851, Mr. 
 Dana, having heard of it, instantly repaired to the Court House, 
 and, offering his services to the fugitive, prepared and presented 
 to Chief Justice Shaw a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in his 
 behalf. But the learned Chief Justice was not inclined to inter- 
 fere, and while Mr. Dana was considering going before another 
 judge, a mob of negroes invaded the Court House and rescued the 
 prisoner and enabled him to make his way to freedom. The arrest 
 and the rescue and the attack upon the Court House made a tre- 
 mendous sensation, and the federal authorities made strenuous 
 efforts to punish somebody for the escape of the prisoner. 
 
 Among others they made a wholly unwarranted attack upon 
 Mr. Charles G. Davis, who had assisted Mr. Dana in the pro- 
 posed defense of Shadrach, charging him with aiding and abet- 
 ting in the escape of the fugitive slave, with which he had no 
 more to do than the man in the moon; but his trial before the 
 United States commissioner occupied four days, and he was ably 
 defended by Mr. Dana, whose argument in his defense is a model 
 of forensic eloquence, a perfect gem ; and Mr. Davis was discharged 
 by the commissioner, who found no case against him. 
 
 In the meantime, Mr. Dana and Mr. Sumner were busily em- 
 ployed in drawing up laws to meet what they regarded as the 
 dangers and outrages of the Fugitive Slave Bill, at the request of 
 a committee of the legislature. 
 
 On the 7th of April in the same year another fugitive slave, Sims, 
 was arrested by the marshal and his posse and locked up in the 
 Court House, which was guarded by a huge force of policemen, and 
 a chain was stretched entirely around it, so that everyone that 
 
1915] DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 29 
 
 entered it, including the judges of the Supreme Court and parties 
 having business before that tribunal, must go under the chain. 
 Mr. Rantoul and Mr. Dana appeared in the Supreme Court and 
 moved again for a writ of habeas corpus, which was promptly- 
 denied, the Chief Justice giving the opinion of the court refusing 
 the writ. The opinion held that "the only question was whether 
 the Commissioner could constitutionally act: — that the act of 1793 
 gave the same powers to magistrates which this act gives to Com- 
 missioners, and was acquiesced in for more than fifty years, and 
 recognized, or at least was not decided to be unconstitutional by 
 any court. So the court held that the point must be considered as 
 settled by lapse of time, acquiescence, and recognition." And again 
 Mr. Sumner and Mr. Dana went before a federal judge and made 
 an ineffectual effort for release of the fugitive, and the next 
 day, as Mr. Dana relates, between four and five o'clock in the 
 morning "the poor fellow, with tears in his eyes, was marched on 
 board a vessel, escorted by a hundred or more of the city police 
 under orders of the United States marshal, armed with swords and 
 pistols, and in a few minutes she sailed down the harbor." 
 
 In connection with this case it is pleasant always to remember 
 that Judge Devens, who was the marshal on the occasion and had 
 such an unpleasant duty to perform, afterward, when he became 
 Attorney General of the United States in 1877, employed Sims as 
 a messenger in the Department of Justice, which position he held 
 for several years while Devens remained in office. 
 
 But one startling and immediate result of these two cases was the 
 election, within a fortnight after the rendition of Sims, of Charles 
 Sumner as United States Senator to fill the seat which Mr. Webster 
 had occupied. Meanwhile Mr. Dana continued for several months 
 the defense of the rescue cases, as they were called, and nobody 
 that he defended was ever convicted. 
 
 One of the most singular of these cases was that of Elizur 
 Wright, the celebrated journalist and linguist. He was tried for 
 complicity in the rescue of Shadrach, and as he was absolutely in- 
 nocent, he refused to have any counsel, but defended himself. The 
 jury disagreed, standing eleven for conviction and one for acquittal, 
 but on a new trial he was acquitted, being defended this time by 
 Mr. Dana, who says that Wright was entirely clear of all connection 
 
30 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 "with the rescue in fact, although he was delighted with the result. 
 The result of his trial, Mr. Dana says, showed the importance of 
 the professional services of an advocate. 
 
 Mr. Dana's services in the cause of freedom continued as long as 
 there was any slave-hunting upon the soil of Massachusetts, and 
 ended on Boston's Black Friday, the 2d of June, 1854, when 
 Anthony Burns, the last fugitive slave arrested under the act, was 
 consigned by Judge Loring to the custody of the marshal to be 
 escorted back to slavery. 
 
 Mr. Dana in his Diary thus describes it: "This was a day of in- 
 tense excitement and deep feeling in the city, in the State, and 
 throughout New England, and indeed a great part of the Union. 
 The hearts of millions of persons were beating high with hope, 
 or indignation, or doubt. The Mayor of Boston has ordered out 
 the entire military force of the city, from 1500 to 1800 men, and 
 undertaken to place full discretionary powers in the hands of 
 General Edmands. These troops and the three companies of reg- 
 ulars fill the streets and squares from the Court House to the 
 end of the wharf where the revenue cutter Hes, in which Burns, 
 if remanded, will be taken to Virginia. " 
 
 Mr. Dana labored very hard for the acquittal of this fugitive, 
 and his argument at the conclusion of the case, which occupied 
 four hours in its delivery, is so incisive and convincing that but 
 for his adamantine conservatism Judge Loring, the magistrate, 
 who was the learned Judge of Probate and a professor in the Dane 
 Law School, might well have decided in favor of freedom and dis- 
 charged the prisoner. 
 
 I have laid great stress upon the services of Mr. Dana in his 
 fugitive slave cases, not only because of the intense interest in 
 that exciting period of our history, but also because they placed 
 him in the very front rank of his profession in Massachusetts and 
 made him an exceedingly prominent figure among the public men 
 of New England ; and we should, I think, have expected that his 
 aspirations for public office would have been sooner gratified. 
 These services of his brought him no pecuniary reward, for they 
 were rendered in behalf of those who were wholly without means 
 or credit, and in the case of Anthony Burns, which was the most 
 important of all, he absolutely declined all pecuniary compensation. 
 
1915.] DANA AS A LAWlilER AND A CITIZEN 31 
 
 1 have described these labors of Mr. Dana's as great services 
 rendered not only to the State but to the Nation, because they 
 aroused universal attention to the fact that the boasted compro- 
 mise measures of 1850, which were designed to settle the slavery 
 question forever, were not final, but a total failure; that freedom 
 would not down at the bidding of Congress, even when led by the 
 great statesmen of a past age. Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster both 
 died in 1852, Mr. Calhoun having preceded them to the grave in 
 1850. Their compromise measures were buried with them, and 
 the whole question had to be fought out in blood under the lead 
 of Lincoln. 
 
 In the midst of these exciting and unrewarded professional 
 labors, Mr. Dana spent three months in the summer of 1853 as 
 a member of the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts, 
 of which many of the leading men of the state were members, 
 and among whom, from his first appearance, although it was his 
 first experience in a deliberative body, he at once came to the 
 front. 
 
 Mr. Adams very justly says that "there was no man in the 
 convention who rose more rapidly, or into greater prominence as 
 a debater, than did Dana." And Charles Sumner, who was also 
 a member, subsequently spoke of him as "the man of by far the 
 greatest legislative promise," criticising only his tendency to over- 
 debate, due to excessive readiness and facility. He took an active 
 part in all the serious discussions, and in that which was the most 
 important of all, the judiciary question, he made a most effective 
 and conclusive argument, which Mr. Choate, who the next day 
 made one of the great speeches of his life in the convention on 
 the same subject, declared to be "such a speech as one hears once 
 in an age." He spoke in favor of the proposition that it was in- 
 expedient to make any change in the appointment or tenure of 
 judges. There was some popular demand that Massachusetts 
 should follow the example that had then been set by many of the 
 states of the Union to have her judges elected by the people in- 
 stead of appointed by the governor for life or during good behavior. 
 There was also a proposition that the judges should be appointed 
 by the governor and council for a term of ten years. 
 
 To both of these propositions Mr. Dana, from beginning to end. 
 
32 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 made strenuous and unceasing opposition, culminating in the argu- 
 ment to which I have abeady referred. 
 
 Unfortunately, almost all the states of the Union have abandoned 
 the ancient system of appointing judges for life or during good 
 behavior, which has worked so admirably in England since the 
 Revolution of 1688, in the United States federal system since the 
 foundation of the government, and to this day remains intact in 
 Massachusetts; and it is largely owing to the loyal and powerful 
 exertions of such men as Mr. Dana and Mr. Choate that this com- 
 monwealth owes the retention of that system, which makes its 
 judiciary, to say the least, compare favorably with that of the other 
 states of the Union, and puts its courts side by side in the adminis- 
 tration of the common law with those of England and with the 
 Supreme Court of the United States. 
 
 If the people of Massachusetts understand their true interest 
 and set a proper value upon the high-toned administration of 
 justice as it prevails to this day in its courts, they will always re- 
 ject all attempts from whatever quarter to make their judiciary 
 elective. There is always a danger of efforts being made in that 
 direction, and nothing shows more clearly the imminent character 
 of that danger than the fact that in this very Constitutional Con- 
 vention of 1853, the last, I believe, that has been held in Massachu- 
 setts, the Constitution, as adopted and submitted to the people, pro- 
 posed the appointment of judges for the term of ten years, wliich 
 led to its defeat by a majority of about six thousand in a total 
 popular vote of 125,000, so that to-day your people stand on this 
 question as they have stood ever since the adoption of the Constitu- 
 tion of 1780, and will, as I hope, stand forever. You have to-day 
 an absolutely independent judiciary, as impartial as the lot of 
 humanity admits, which helps to make the government of the 
 commonwealth a government of laws, and not of men. 
 
 After all these labors Mr. Dana took a holiday, and had his first 
 glimpse of Europe, to which he had long looked forward with 
 eager anticipation. To be sure, it only lasted for two months, but 
 he saw and enjoyed and recorded everything. He was just at 
 the age to make the most of it, and so thorough and constant had 
 his reading been all his life about England, that he seemed to know 
 it all by heart, and revelled most heartily in all the places and 
 
1915.] DANA AS A LA^^^ER AND A CITIZEN 33 
 
 people with which his reading had made him so familiar. In Eng- 
 lish history especially he was thoroughly versed, and he lost no 
 time in his haste to visit all the great and interesting historical 
 places, — Westminster Hall, the Houses of Parliament, the Inns of 
 Court, Kenilworth and Warwick Castle, the Courts of Justice, 
 Stonehenge and Wilton, Greenwich and the Zoo, and St. James's 
 Park,— and he happily fell in with many of the leading Enghsh 
 men and women of the day, whom he appreciated, and they mani- 
 festly appreciated him. Nothing could possibly have been more 
 to his liking, and he returned at the end of his perfect vacation 
 thoroughly refreshed and renewed, to resume the daily work of 
 his profession, which must have seemed to him after the supreme 
 delights of the summer a little more arduous toil than ever before. 
 
 From 1856 to 1860 was the best and richest period of his pro- 
 fessional life. He had some great cases, which attracted wide 
 attention, in one of which, the Dalton case, the cause eelehre of 
 the time, he proved himself a match single-handed against two 
 great leaders of the bar, Rufus Choate and Henry F. Durant, who 
 together opposed him, and but for the twelfth dissenting juror he 
 would have won the case. 
 
 Those were the days of overwork for all eminent lawyers, for 
 Mr. Choate, in summing up, talked for ten hours, taking two entire 
 days of the court's time, and Mr. Dana followed and spoke for 
 twelve', hours, occupying parts of three days. Fortunately for us 
 to-day time is more precious, the pressure upon the courts vastly 
 more intense, and the two-hour rule would be strictly applied. 
 
 Those four years were much the hardest of Mr. Dana's life, and 
 his constitution proved in the end wholly unequal to the strain; 
 for at the end of them, in spite of occasional holidays and voyages, 
 he completely collapsed in the midst of the argument of an excit- 
 ing cause, and recalling the experience of his two years before the 
 mast, he wisely concluded that nothing less than a voyage around 
 the world would save him; and after a lapse of fifteen months, 
 in which he made the circuit of the globe, concluding with a brief 
 glimpse again of England, he returned home, once more in good 
 health, to find his country in the midst of that great campaign of 
 1860 which resulted in the election of Lincoln and brought on the 
 Civil War. 
 
34 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 Through all that anxious period he held the office of United States 
 Attorney for the district of Massachusetts, a position which he 
 greatly magnified by his wonderful qualifications in character and 
 abilitj^ and he argued with a consummate power the prize causes 
 in which the legality of the whole conduct of the government 
 during the Civil War was directly challenged. Both in the Dis- 
 trict court of Massachusetts and in the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, where he opened, and Mr. Evarts, the companion of his 
 boyhood and his lifelong friend, closed, he cleared up all the diffi- 
 cult and knotty questions involved. Mr. Adams records that 
 one who was present at the final hearing, after Mr. Dana had closed 
 his argument, happened to encounter Judge Grier, who had retired 
 to the corridor in the rear of the bench, and whose clear judicial 
 mind and finely cultivated hterary taste had keenly enjoyed the 
 speech; in a burst of unjudicial enthusiasm he said: "Well 
 your little 'Two Years Before the Mast' has settled that question; 
 there is nothing more to say about it." Judge Grier shortly af- 
 terward stated the opinion of the court, affirming at almost every 
 point the positions of the government, and giving the highest legal 
 sanction to President Lincoln's acts. This was undoubtedly Mr. 
 Dana's greatest professional achievement and the one to which he 
 looked back to the end of his life with the utmost elation. 
 
 I should be doing great injustice to Mr. Dana if I failed to 
 mention the famous speech he delivered in Faneuil Hall on June 
 21, 1865, at an important meeting called to consider the subject of 
 the reorganization of the states lately in rebellion, and the ad- 
 dress to the country which he prepared on that occasion, and which, 
 like the speech, attracted wide notice. 
 
 Mr. Dana to the end of his days justly took great pride in this 
 address, in which he seems to have led the way in claiming that 
 the government, having put down the rebellion by force of arms, 
 and holding all the rebel states in the " grasp of war," as he called 
 it, might continue its military occupation of the conquered territory 
 until it could secure what it regarded as a just solution of the 
 tremendous questions involved. 
 
 He said : " We stand upon the ground of war, and we exercise 
 the powers of war. I put that proposition fearlessly : The conquer- 
 ing party may hold the other in the grasp of war until it has secured 
 
1915.] DANA AS A LAWTER AND A CITIZEN 35 
 
 whatever it has a right to require. Having succeeded in this war, 
 and holding the rebel states in our military occupation, it is our 
 right and duty to secure whatever the public safety and the public 
 faith require." 
 
 But he by no means justified those portions of the measures of 
 reconstruction which led for a while to the shocking negro domina- 
 tion in several of the southern states, and in the same speech, and 
 in the memorable address to the people of the United States, which 
 was drawn by him, he did not ask that the nation should insist on 
 an unconditioned universal suffrage for the freedmen, but that the 
 right of suffrage should be given to them in such manner as to 
 be impartial, and not based in principle upon color, but to be 
 reasonably attainable by intelligence and character, putting them 
 on the same ground of equality as prevails in Massachusetts, where 
 the right to vote is secured alike to black men and white who can 
 read and write. 
 
 It is safe, I think, to say that if the doctrines laid down by Mr. 
 Dana in this speech and address had been more closely followed, 
 great mischiefs would have been avoided and the terrible task of 
 reconstruction would have been made more easy. 
 
 After the close of the war Mr. Dana resigned his office, and was 
 not engaged in any more serious forensic conflicts, but he devoted 
 two continuous years to his edition of Wheaton's " Elements of 
 International Law," which he greatly enriched by a series of most 
 learned and elaborate notes, and it may fairly be said that, until 
 the outbreak of the present horrible war, this book of his, in which 
 he embodied all the rich fruits of his learned and laborious life, 
 was a great standard authority on the subject of which it treated, 
 and was valued as such, not only in his own country, but in Eng- 
 land and among the continental nations. 
 
 At this moment international law must be admitted to be in a 
 state of suspense ; at any rate when peace comes it will have to 
 be restated and remade with all the changes necessitated by the 
 exigencies of the war and its results. Even if it ends as we hope, 
 international law cannot be taken up where it stood in August, 
 1914; but Dana's notes to Wheaton's Elements will form a most 
 valuable stepping-stone to its future progress, by which, as we 
 hope, the permanent peace of the world will be secured. 
 
36 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 Let me give you a single illustration of how international law has 
 failed to deal by any possibility with the difficulties presented by 
 the present war, on the single subject of aeroplanes and Zeppelins, 
 which have been causing so much havoc and dismay throughout 
 the world during the last twelve months. When the Emperor of 
 Russia issued his call for the first peace congress he referred to the 
 subject of aircraft and commended it to the study of the first 
 conference^ The first conference met in 1899. They discussed 
 the subject very fully, and finally concluded that the world was 
 not ripe for action on their part ; but they prohibited the throwing 
 of projectiles from dirigible balloons or any other aircraft for the 
 period of five years, expecting that the second conference would 
 meet by that time and take the subject up with better knowledge. 
 Well, no conference was called until eight years, in 1907. And 
 there we had a great discussion on the subject. England and Ger- 
 many were of one mind, to prohibit the throwing of these projec- 
 tiles. Lord Reay, one of the leading Enghsh delegates, made a 
 brilliant speech in support of the proposition to prohibit, in which 
 he said that two elements, the land and the sea, were enough 
 for war ; that the air and the sky ought to be reserved for peace. 
 And the result was that we, with consummate wisdom, as we 
 thought, but with what seems to have been utter folly, renewed 
 the prohibition for a period that should terminate with the adjourn- 
 ment of the third Hague conference, which has never met and 
 perhaps wi\i never meet. So it is all left in the air. 
 
 Mr. Dana still cherished his lifelong ambition for high political 
 office, for which he was so admirably qualified, but this ambition 
 was doomed to bitter disappointment, which, however, he never 
 allowed to cloud his later years, for these were always cheerful, 
 happy, and devoted to good works. 
 
 He accepted the nomination for Congress in the Essex district 
 ao^ainst the notorious General Butler, with whom he maintained 
 an unequal contest single-handed. He proved to be no match for 
 the general in the latter's characteristic rough-and-tumble methods 
 of warfare, and came out at the end of the poll with an unhappily 
 small vote. But he had the satisfaction of standing for the public 
 credit against the avowed champion of repudiation. 
 
 Another visit to England and Scotland, again for health's sake, 
 
1915.] DANA AS A LA\V1^ER AND A CITIZEN 37 
 
 brought him back to America to resume in a quiet way the practice 
 of his profession. After his misadventure in the congressional 
 election he had substantially abandoned all hope of public life, 
 when suddenly, to his great surprise. President Grant in 1876 sent 
 in his name to the Senate for the very office which of all others it 
 would have given him the greatest pleasure to fill, and which, as I 
 think, of all Americans he was then the most fit to fill and to adorn 
 — the English mission. But here again he encountered obstacles 
 which neither he nor the President could have expected. Politics 
 of a very questionable character overwhelmed his nomination, and 
 his old and doughty antagonist, with all the hostile company that 
 he could muster, venomously besieged the Senate Committee on 
 Foreign Affairs, to whom the nomination had been referred. The 
 nomination was reported adversely as the result of a very sorry 
 chapter in senatorial politics. 
 
 Had his nomination been confirmed, Mr. Dana's appointment as 
 minister to England would have been a perfectly ideal one. His 
 character, his education, his sympathies, and all the associations of 
 his life would have made him a most acceptable and popular repre- 
 sentative of the United States in the mother country, and he in 
 turn would have revelled in the duties and pleasures of the office. 
 I regard his defeat as having worked a very serious loss to the 
 governments and the people of both nations. 
 
 His defeat, however, did not prevent the State Department, of 
 which Mr. Evarts was then the head, from selecting Mr. Dana as 
 one of the counsel of the United States Government before the 
 international commission appointed to meet at Halifax to dispose 
 of the fisheries questions between the two countries, where again 
 he rendered most excellent service, after wliich he bade farewell 
 to the profession and spent his remaining days in Europe, contem- 
 plating and preparing for a new work upon international law, 
 which unhappily he never lived to complete. 
 
 I confess my inability, in the space of time allotted, to do justice 
 to Mr. Dana's lofty character and to his signally noble career, which 
 was guided from first to last by high principle, an indomitable 
 courage, a lofty independence of spirit, and a mind always con- 
 scious to itself of right. He met with many cruel disappointments, 
 his aspiring dreams were not realized, but take him for all in all 
 
38 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 he was a man of whom his native state and country may well be 
 proud and give him a liigh place among their immortals. 
 
 I have said nothing of his private and domestic relations, but I 
 cannot refrain from quoting what Mr. Parker, his partner for many 
 years, said when he heard of his death : " He was the steadiest of 
 friends, the most indulgent and affectionate to those whom he once 
 honored with his friendship.'* 
 
 We may well close this celebration of the centenary of Mr. Dana's 
 birth by commending the study of his pure and dignified life and 
 character to the young men of coming generations ; — from first to 
 last the perfect gentleman. 
 
 Bishop Lawrence. In behalf of the Cambridge Historical 
 Society may I thank you for your presence. It is appro- 
 priate that this meeting should be here in honor of a citizen 
 of Cambridge, an Overseer of Harvard College, and a Presi- 
 dent of the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa. And 
 in your behalf I thank the Cambridge Historical Society for 
 being the means of giving us such a beautiful revelation of 
 the life and character of Richard Henry Dana. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 EXHIBIT IN CONNECTION WITH THE 
 
 DANA CENTENARY 
 
 IN THE TREASURE ROOM OF HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 October 14-22, 1915 
 
 Portrait of Richard Dana (1700-1772) by John Singleton Copley. 
 
 Harvard A.B. 1718. Trial justice, leading barrister with James Otis at 
 the Boston Bar; frequently presided at Faneuil Hall meetings of the Sons 
 of Liberty; drafted resolutions for the Massachusetts Legislature addressed 
 to the King and Parhament; took the affidavit of Andrew Oliver not to 
 enforce the Stamp Act, in 1765. Great grandfather of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
 
 The frame originally held a portrait of Governor Hutcliinson, presented 
 by him to Judge Edmund Trowbridge of Cambridge. Judge Trowbridge 
 being a Tory, his family, afraid of an attack by the mob or of a visit from 
 the Sons of Liberty, cut out and bm-ned the portrait and put into the frame 
 this portrait of Richard Dana, Trowbridge's brother-in-law. 
 Original affidavit of Andrew Oliver, commissioner of the Crown, taken before 
 Richard Dana in 1765, binding laimself not to enforce the Stamp Act. Haw- 
 thorne's "Grandfather's Chan-" gives a description of the scene. 
 Portrait of Francis Dana (1743-1811) by Walter M. Brackett, from two old 
 pastels (one by Sharpies). 
 
 Harvard A.B. 1762. Son of Liberty, on special mission to Great Britain 
 just before and in the early days of the Revolution, member of the Massa- 
 chusetts Legislature and Continental Congress, signer of the Articles of 
 Confederation, chairman of the committee of Continental Congress on war, 
 on special mission with John Adams to France and Holland, appointed min- 
 ister to St. Petersburg, where he went in 1781, member of the United States 
 Constitutional Convention and of the Massachusetts Convention adopting 
 the same. Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Grandfather of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
 Framed ink sketch copied from sketch by Jacob Bigelow of Dana house on Dana 
 Hill, built in 1785 by Chief Justice Francis Dana. Burned down in 1839. 
 R. H. Dana, Jr., was one of the Cambridge Volunteer Fire Department and 
 was very active on the occasion. Lent by Miss E. E. Dana. 
 Portrait of Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879) by William M. Hunt. 
 
 Harvard A.B. 1808. Lawyer, member of Massachusetts Legislature, 
 poet, essayist, and one of the editors of the North American Review. Father 
 of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
 Photograph of R. H. Dana, Sen., at the age of eighty-five. 
 
40 THE CMIBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 Portrait of R. H. Dana, Jr. (1815-1882), by G. P. A. Healy in 1876. (Upper half 
 of the face is very good, but mouth and chin are not satisfactor5%) 
 
 Photograph of another portrait of R. H. Dana, Jr., by G. P. A. Healy, belonging 
 to the estate of his daughter, Charlotte (Dana) Lyman of Chicago. 
 
 Silhouette of R. H. Dana, Jr., in his boyhood. 
 
 Daguerreotype of R. H. Dana, Jr., taken in 1840. 
 
 Tliree daguerreotypes of R. H. Dana, Jr., taken in 1840, one of them with sailor 
 cravat, and the others ■w^th the cravats of the time. 
 
 Photograph standing w-ith left arm on chair, in full dress-suit, costume worn in 
 addressing the Supreme Judicial Com-t, taken about 1848-1850. 
 
 Framed photograph of R. H. Dana, Jr. (enlarged), taken in the early fifties, 
 about the time of the fugitive slave cases. 
 
 Three photographs of R. H. Dana, Jr., taken about 1870, 1872 and 1879. 
 
 Pen and ink sketch of the brig Pilgrim by J. Hem-y Blake, taken from a large 
 water color which belonged to Captain Bangs Hallett, who commanded the Pil- 
 grim in 1830, now in the possession of Judge Fred C. Swift of Yarmouthport. 
 Presented by J. H. Blake. 
 
 Oil painting of the brig Pilgrim, made in 1911, by S. M. Chase, following accu- 
 rately every detail of the description. The Pilgrim was built in 1825, at Med- 
 ford, Mass., length 85 ft. 6 in., breadth 21 ft. 7J^ in., depth 10 ft. 9M in., 180 >^ 
 tons. 
 
 Picture of the Alert in a storm, painted by Charles H. Grant. This painting 
 belonged to Captain William Dane Phelps, who commanded the Alert, 1840- 
 1843. Lent by liis daughter, Mrs. Charles E. Goodwin of Lexington. 
 
 Water color of the Alert, painted for Captain Phelps, when on the coast of Cali- 
 fornia in 1840. Lent by Mrs. Goodwin. 
 
 Oil painting of the Alert by S. M. Chase, 1911, following accurately every detail 
 of the description. The Alert was built in Boston in 1828, length 113 ft. 4 in., 
 breadth 28 ft., depth 14 ft., 399 tons. Builder, Noah Brooks of Boston. 
 
 Large, fully rigged model of the Alert lent by Mrs. Henry F. Wild, Dana's daugh- 
 ter. (The deck not quite correct.) 
 
 Photograph of Captain Faucon who commanded the Alert and afterward the Pil- 
 grim on the coast of California, taken in 1894 at the age of eighty-seven. Cap- 
 tain Faucon was frequently favorably mentioned in "Two Years Before the 
 Mast." 
 
 Photograph of the Cliffs of San Juan Capistrano and Dana's Cove, California. 
 Down these cliffs Dana risked his life to save a few hides, on the captain's call 
 for a volunteer. 
 
 Photograph of the De la Guerra house, Santa Barbara, California. 
 
 Framed painting of the daughters of a Spanish Don in California in the early 
 
 forties, supposed to be Doiia Anita and Doiia Angustias de la Guerra de Noriego 
 
 y Carrillo, described in "Two Years Before the Mast." Lent by Mrs. Charles 
 
 E. Goodwin. 
 
 Long panoramic photograph of San Diego Bay, seen across the site of the old 
 
 hide houses. Lent by Mrs. H. F. Wild. 
 Photograph of doorway of mission at San Luis Rey, California. 
 
1915.] EXHIBIT — HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 41 
 
 Large wTought iron nail from hide house at San Diego, California. Lent by Mrs. 
 
 H. F. Wild. 
 Tarpaulin hat worn by R. H. Dana, Jr., while at sea. These hats were worn on 
 
 the back of the head, the sea fashion of those days. It was sewed and covered 
 
 by Dana. (See chapter 26 of "Two Years Before the Mast.") 
 Flannel jacket and trousers cut and sewed by R. H. Dana, Jr., while at sea, as 
 
 told in "Two Years Before the Mast." 
 Some of his other sea-clothes. 
 Personal log of Andrew B. Amazeen, chief mate of the Pilgrim, kept on passage 
 
 home in the Alert, 1836. Lent by Edward C. Amazeen of Melrose. 
 Seaman's papers of Andrew B. Amazeen. Lent by Edward C. Amazeen. 
 Porcellian and Phi Beta Kappa medals of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
 Manuscript dissertation of R. H. Dana, Jr., "Moral and Literary Character of 
 
 Bulwer's Novels," winning the Bowdoin prize, at Harvard College, 1837. 
 Harvard College catalogues in which Dana's name appeared. 
 Dana's Diary (kept diuing the voyage), from which the manuscript of "Two 
 
 Years Before the Mast" was written out. 
 From the manuscript of "Two Years Before the Mast," the account of the 
 
 flogging. 
 Fugitive slave case. Brief and notes of R. H. Dana, Jr., in the trial of the negro 
 
 Scott and others, 1851, for rescuing the slave Shadrach. 
 Short brief (about the size of one's hand) being the notes from which a four hours' 
 
 argument was made by Dana against the rendition of Anthony Burns, the fugi- 
 tive slave, 1854. 
 Notes taken by Mr. Dana during the trial of the same. 
 Silver salver presented May 2, 1854, to R. H. Dana, Jr., by Wendell Phillips and 
 
 others, for his defense of Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave, Mr. Dana having 
 
 refused any compensation for his services in that or any other fugitive slave 
 
 case. 
 "Specimens of the British Poets." Presented to Mr. Dana in 1853 by a colored 
 
 woman — "As a small token of my Respect for your untiring exertions not only 
 
 in my cause, but in being a friend in all cases to a proscribed race. 
 
 Respectfully 
 
 RosANNE Taylor." 
 A London edition of Hallam's works, in eight volumes, presented to Mr. Dana 
 
 by Robert Morris, the first colored lawyer of Boston, and others of his race, 
 
 with a grateful inscription. [This was not found in time for the exhibit.] 
 Commission of R. H. Dana, Jr., as United States District Attorney, signed by 
 
 Lincoln and Seward. 
 Draft of a letter from R. H. Dana, Jr., to William M. Evarts, advising against 
 
 the trial of Jefferson Davis for treason. Evarts and Dana had been appointed 
 
 counsel by the government to conduct the trial in 1868, but their advice against 
 
 the measure was accepted. 
 Vertical folder case containing letters received, newspaper clippings of speeches, 
 
 resolutions and articles prepared by R. H. Dana, Jr., arranged cloronologically. 
 Six bound volumes of letters received by R. H. Dana, Jr., from 1838 to December, 
 
 1860. 
 
42 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 Letter of Mr. Lee Warner introducing to R. H. Dana, Jr., his "young friend J. 
 Bryce," the present Lord Bryce. 
 
 Letters from Lord Chancellor Cranworth, Chief Justice Campbell, and the Duke 
 of Argyll, selected from letters received by R. H. Dana, Jr., while in England 
 in 1856. 
 
 Letter of Lafayette to William EUery, a signer of the Declaration, great grand- 
 father of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
 
 Proclamation of Count Rochambeau, commander of the French fleet during the 
 Revolutionary War, presented to William Ellery. 
 
 Letter from William Wordsworth, and copy of poem in hand^^Titing of Mrs. 
 Wordsworth, to Washington AUston, imcle-in-law of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
 
 Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Washington Allston, 
 
 Editions of "Two Years Before the Mast" 
 
 1840. New York, Harper & Bros. (Harper's Family Library, No. 106.) Bound in 
 black cloth. 
 
 The first edition, published anonymously. This copy is full of pencil notes of 
 correction and suggestion by the author's father, R. H. Dana, Sen. 
 The same. Bound in brown linen. 
 
 The same edition appeared subsequently with different dates in the imprint. 
 
 1841. London, Edward Moxon. Bound in half calf. 
 
 An author's edition, Moxon having voluntarily paid more for the privilege 
 in England than Dana got from Harper & Bros, in America, though there 
 was then no international copyright. 
 
 1854. London, G. Routledge & Co. 12th thousand. 
 
 1869. Boston & New York, Ticknor & Fields. 
 
 With illustration at head of first chapter. 
 
 Other copies of the same date have imprint, Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 
 successors to Ticknor and Fields. 
 
 The preface to this "New edition" reads: "After twenty-eight years, the 
 copyright of this book has reverted to me. In presenting the first 'author's 
 edition' to the public, I have been encouraged to add an accoimt of a visit to 
 the old scenes, made twenty-four years after, together with notices of the sub- 
 sequent story and fate of the vessels, and of some of the persons with whom the 
 the reader is made acquainted. R. H. D., Jr. Boston, May 6, 1869." 
 
 1869. London, Sampson Low, Son & Marston. 
 
 With frontispiece, and chapter "Twenty-four Years After." 
 
 1871. Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., late Ticknor & Fields and Fields, Osgood & Co. 
 
 With illustration at beginning of first chapter, and additional chapter " Twenty- 
 four Years After." 
 
 1872. The same. 
 
 1873. The same. 
 187.5. The same. 
 
 1877. Edinburgh, Adam & Charles Black. 
 
 With frontispiece and vignette on title page; contains glossary of sea terms 
 
 and drawings of ships evidently taken from Dana's Seaman's Manual. 
 1879. Boston, Houghton, Osgood & Co. 
 
 Same as James R. Osgood & Co.'s editions. 
 1890. New York, Worthington Co. 
 1894. London, Glasgow and Dublin, Blackie & Son, Ltd. (Blackie's School and Home 
 
 Library.) 
 
1915.] EXHIBIT — HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 43 
 
 1895. Boston & New York, Houghton, MiflBin & Co. 
 
 With illustration at head of first chapter and chapter "Twenty-four Yeare 
 After." 
 
 1895. Boston & New York, Houjjhton, Mifflin & Co. 
 
 The same as the last, but with portrait of R. H. Dana, Jr., as frontispiece (from 
 daguerreotype of 1840, with sailor necktie). 
 Another copy. 
 
 Illustrated with photographs taken on the spot in California and maps in- 
 serted. Handsomely bound in leather, with manuscript index. Presented 
 to the widow of the author in 1896 by her nephew and niece. Full-rigged 
 ship embossed on cover. 
 
 [1895.] Boston & New York, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. (Riverside Literature Series.) 
 
 1895. Philadelphia, Henry Altemus. 
 
 With picture of full-rigged brig as frontispiece. Title page in red and green. 
 A few wood-cut illustrations through the book. Abridged. 
 
 1896. New York, Boston and New Orleans. University Publishing Co. Paper cover. 
 
 Abridged for school reading with an introduction and notes. (Very much 
 abridge<l.) 
 1896. Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. (Riverside School 
 Library.) 
 
 1899. London, Adam & Charles Black. 
 
 With illustrated cover in colors; illustration on back and front; frontispiece 
 and title page with illustrations of vessels and a glossary of sea terms; ship's 
 sail and rigging evidently taken from Dana's Seaman's Manual. 
 
 1900. New York, D. Appleton & Co. (World's Great Books Series, Aldine edition.) 
 
 Bound in green buckram. With critical and biographical introduction by 
 Charles Warren Stoddard ; with chapter " Twenty-four Years After." Portrait. 
 
 1909. New York, P. F. Collier & Son. (Harvard classics.) 
 
 With introduction, notes and illustrations; photograph from portrait by Miss 
 Pertz opposite title page. 
 
 1909. New York, Macmillan Co. (Pocket American & English Classics.) 
 
 Frontispiece portrait and autograph. School edition with glossary. With in- 
 troduction and notes by Homer Eaton Keyes. 
 
 1911. New York, Macmillan Co. 
 
 With introduction by Sir Wilfred Grenfell and illustrations by Charles Pears. 
 Handsome edition with colored illustrations and good type. 
 
 1911. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 
 With a supplement by the author, and introduction and additional chapter 
 entitled "Seventy-six Years After," by his son. Indexed; appendix with 
 information regarding the vessels, their crews and officers. Colored illustra- 
 tions by E. Boyd Smith. Front cover illustration from S. M. Chase's pic- 
 ture of the Alert (colored). Charts of the voyage and of the coast of Cali- 
 fornia on fly-leaves at the beginning and end of book. 
 The same in two volumes. Bound in canvas. 
 
 Edition de luxe, with many additional drawings and sketches, etc. Limited 
 edition, large paper. 
 
 Undated Editions 
 
 Philadelphia, Henry Altemus. 
 
 With frontispiece portrait marked Richard H. Dana, Jr., but in reality a pic- 
 ture of his father. Somewhat abridged. A picture of the brig was substituted 
 as frontispiece in a later edition. 
 
44 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 
 
 New York, Hearst & Co. 
 
 Illustrated cover back and front. 
 New York, F. M. Lupton Publishing Co. Green paper cover. 
 New York, A. L. Burt. 
 
 Full-page illustration of a barkentine opposite title page. 
 New York, Merrill & Baker. (The Levant edition.) 
 
 Full-page illustration of fishing boat hailing ship in fog opposite title page. 
 
 Title page in red and black. 
 New York, John W. Lovell Co. 
 
 Date of purchase, December, 1889. 
 New York, Lovel, Coryell & Co. 
 New York, American Publishers' Corporation. 
 London, New York and Melbourne, Ward, Lock & Co. 
 
 Frontispiece a full-page illustration of the brig. 
 London, J. M. Dent & Sons; New York, E. P. Dutton & Co. (Everyman's 
 
 Library, edited by Ernest Rhys.) 
 London, Milner & Sowerby. 
 
 With frontispiece of brig and irrelevant picture on title page. With additions 
 
 and appendix not by the author. 
 London, Frederick Warne & Co. Paper cover. 
 
 Includes a glossary of sea terms. 
 London, T. Nelson & Sons. (Sixpenny Classics.) 
 
 Photogravure of brig before the wind with full sail set. Much abridged. This 
 
 copy bought in Glasgow, 1913. 
 The same. 
 
 With wrapper marked " Price in France 1 fr." This copy from Paris, 1915. 
 
 In the Congressional Library there is a Dutch translation printed in Holland, 
 
 In a catalogue of foreign books is advertised a German translation, e\'idently 
 
 taken from Harper's anonymous edition, but attributed to James Fenimore 
 
 Cooper, and a French translation, anonymous. 
 
 Fifty-four editions or more, issued by thirty-two different publishers, are 
 
 known. 
 
 Editions of "The Seaman^ s Friend" 
 
 The Seaman's Friend; containing a treatise on practical seamanship, with 
 
 plates; a dictionary of sea terms; customs and usages of the merchant service; 
 
 laws relating to the practical duties of master and mariners. 
 1841. Boston, Charles C. Little & James Brown and Benjamin Loring & Co.; New 
 
 York, Dayton & Saxton, and E. & G. W. Blunt; Philadelphia, Carey & Hart. 
 1847. Boston, Thomas Groom & Co. 5th edition. 
 
 Interleaved, with a few notes by the author. 
 18,51. Boston, Thomas Groom & Co. 6th edition, revised and corrected. 
 1854. Boston, Thomas Groom & Co. 7th edition. 
 
 An 8th edition was issued in 1856, and a 9th in 1857. 
 1861. Dana's Seamen's Friend. New edition revised and corrected; and with notes 
 
 by James Lees. London & Liverpool, George Philip & Son. 
 1871. The Seaman's Manual. r2th edition, revised and corrected in accordance A\nth 
 
 the most recent acts of Parliament. By John J. Mayo, registrar general of 
 
 shipping and seamen. London, E. Moxon, Son & Co 
 
1915.] EXHIBIT — HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 45 
 
 Editions of " To Cuba and Back. A Vacation Voyage" 
 
 1859. Boston. Ticknor & Fields. 
 
 Two copies, one a presentation copy, "Sarah W. Dana, from her husband, 
 the author. May 20, 1S59." One, with autograph of author. 
 1859. London. Smith, Elder & Co. 
 1887. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Fourteenth edition. 
 
 Wheaton's Elements of International Law. Eighth edition. Edited, with 
 notes, by R. H. Dana, Jr. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1866. 
 
 Presentation on fly leaf to Edmund T. Dana, brother of the author in the 
 author's handwriting. 
 Reprint of Richard Henry Dana's Note (215) to Wheaton's International Law, 
 illustrating the rights of law as to neutrals, printed by the executive department 
 for the use of the agents and attorneys of the United States at the arbitration 
 at Geneva, with a letter from J. C. Bancroft Davis, Department of State, Wash- 
 ington, August 3, 1871. 
 
 A full collection of arguments, reports, and articles in magazines and in pam- 
 phlet form including Lexington Centennial oration; the Old South argument; the 
 defense of Rev. I. S. Kallock; the argument in the Dalton divorce case; tribute 
 to Judge Sprague; address on Edward Everett; argument against the proposed 
 removal of Judge Loring; speech at Manchester, N. H., just before the opening 
 of the Civil War; Faneuil Hall address on the question of reconstruction; 
 Enemy's territory and alien enemies; trial of Rev. O. S. Fresco tt; the Bible 
 in schools; usury laws and several reprints; argument before the Halifax 
 Fisheries Commission; argument in the Amy Warwick prize cause; defense of 
 Charles G. Davis charged with attempt to rescue fugitive slave; argument 
 against the incorporation of the town of Belmont; argument on the judiciary; 
 report of Overseers; article on Francis Dana, grandfather of R. H. Dana, Jr.; 
 on the discovery of ether; argument in defense of Anthony Burns; speech on 
 the reorganization of the rebel states, June 21, 1S65; voyage on the Grand 
 Canal, Atlantic Monthly, May, 1891; Allston and his unfinished picture, At- 
 lantic Monthly, 1889; On Leonard Woods, Scribner's Monthly, November, 
 1880; sketch of American diplomacy, Scribner's Monthly, August, 1880; how 
 we met John Brown, Atlantic Monthly, 1871. 
 
 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Speeches in Stirring Times and Letters to a Son, 
 edited with introductory sketch, a bibliography and notes by Richard H. Dana, 
 3d. Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1910. 
 
 With a bill of sale of slaves inserted. 
 
 Richard Henry Dana. A Biography: By Charles Francis Adams. Boston, 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890. 2 vols. 
 A later revised edition of the same. 
 
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