Chapter IV: Part 4

It was poetic justice, therefore, that in this house eighteen months later should occur the formal evacuation of the United States by the British. On the afternoon of May 6, 1783, two barges landed at the Ferry. In one was George Washington, Commander-in-Chief; in the other Governor Clinton of New York State. Presently a sloop-of-war appeared, and from it landed General Sir Guy Carleton, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Forces. The three men met in the front room of the Livingston House, and at a sturdy round walnut table which stands in the house today General Sir Guy Carleton signed on the dotted line, renouncing a claim upon America which was first staked out by Sir Walter Raleigh. Good Queen Bess would have sworn like a lady at the spectacle; Guy Carleton, instead, marched out between four companies of American infantry at present-arms, saluted the flag, invited General Washington and Governor Clinton to dine aboard his sloop, and after an exceedingly good dinner fired a seventeen-gun salute for the guest who throughout the war had been scornfully referred to by Parliament as “Geo. Washington, Esqre.”

From Philip Livingston, its Revolutionary occupant, the house passed into the hands of Peter Van Brugh Livingston, a rich, righteous and rigid citizen who was a member of two legislatures, and who acquired most of the real estate in Dobbs Ferry. A small parcel of this real estate he gave to the Episcopal Church. When a local tavern-keeper applied for admission to the church Van Brugh Livingston’s influence and indignant protests almost kept the boniface out of reach of salvation. The house was purchased from Livingston by Stephen Archer, a gentle Quaker. His wife at her death-bed promised him that if he would build a bay window in the house and sit at that window on a Friday night, she would return to him. He built the bay window and every Friday night for twenty years sat peering out, straining his eyes to distinguish her ghostly form from the shadows of the ancient horse-chestnut tree. This is a true story of spiritualism: _she never came back_. Stephen Archer’s daughter married a Dr. Hasbrouck and the house became his property upon her death. His fourth wife succeeded in outliving him, and in the light of Van Brugh Livingston’s prejudice against tavern-keepers, it is interesting to recall the latest episode in the possession of the ancient dwelling.

Messmore Kendall, a lawyer of New York, was driving down Broadway one morning when he saw a sign in the dooryard of the Hasbrouck house advertising it for sale. He stopped. Inquiry from a woman who answered his knock brought out the information that financial stress had forced the sale of the house to a brewer who proposed to open a road house within its sacred walls. Mr. Kendall went on to the city. He learned from the real-estate brokers that the title was to be transferred to the brewer at 12 o’clock of the following day. At 12 o’clock there was no brewer in sight. At 1 o’clock Mr. Kendall had bought the house. At 5 o’clock of the same afternoon the brewer appeared, but the house had been saved forever.

So, instead of the clash of weapons of a dance orchestra, the Livingston House today hears the call of the birds from the garden. Instead of a coat of scarlet paint, a swinging tavern-sign, and the installation of new “service facilities” the house has undergone a complete restoration to its early beauty.

Where a less knowing eye would have altered for the sake of altering, he has directed changes only as they would preserve the feeling of self-effacing Colonial occupancy. Where the austerity of the period might easily have been made inelastic, he has made you sense the vital nearness of the glorious immortals who were there. Where the old frame of the building settled back after a century of service and gave an informal tilt to the door-frames, instead of replacing them with new he has tailored the old doors a trifle. He has left the old floors, for flooring such as men laid in those days was not to be disciplined for little irregularities. Between the drawing room and the study hangs the original front door, with a lock three hands broad, and the great key that turned on the invader’s last good-bye. Even electricity came into the house in a quiet disguise. If it is candle-light, and you should peer into the low-studded dining-room, with its musket and pewter, and its great fireplace, you will be forgiven if your fancy pictures a Continental cavalryman bolting his supper at the end of the long table. Perfectly sane people have heard Lafayette’s light step on the stair.

Given far less to work with than the Jumel Mansion a few miles away, the restorer of the Livingston house has avoided the error of formalizing the restoration. For years he had been collecting rare furniture for just such an emergency. Out of the storage warehouse and into the drawing room came a pair of sofas and a little table from the shop of Duncan Phyfe; two of Thomas Chippendale’s mirrors; a pair of girandoles of unusual grace; a very early and tinkly American piano; and a dozen other things, each wearing a veil of antiquity over her charms. Like a group of delightful reunited old ladies they fell to chirruping and whispering, agreeing that this was so like home, when one--and it was probably one of the mischievous girandoles, who give back your reflection askew--suggested with a sparkle in her eyes: “Let’s pretend we have always been here!” A whisper of assent fled from one to another. The Dutch clock in the hallway chimed agreement, the Queen Anne sofa on the landing heard and sighed happily, and one of Washington’s own chairs in the study, which had left Mount Vernon a century ago, remarked that he had always regarded Dobbs Ferry as a comfortable asylum.

They will hush their chatter when you come in, and you cannot surprise them at it. But on a June night you may sit outside and watch the moon rise through the tracery of an old wistaria on the south portico. Listen sharply: when a white parrokeet waddles in from the blue shadows of the garden, and a voice is singing, and there is the lightest feather of air moving, it will bring their whisper through the window to you. The illusion is yours; they are at home, among their own.

THE LONGFELLOW HOUSE

© D.McK

THE LONGFELLOW HOUSE

It has the requisite dignity of its poet and its general, the well-dressed air of its Tory merchant, the scholarly simplicity of its lexicographer, the open-armed hospitality of its rich apothecary-general, and the grace of the lady who is its present chatelaine.]

THE LONGFELLOW HOUSE

“The moonlight poet,” a clever Frenchman called him, “having little passion, but a calmness of attitude which approaches majesty.” In a single deft pass of verbal legerdemain he conjures about the venerable head of Longfellow all the cool alluring mystery that veils a far-away mountain peak at night. He waves the magic word “moonlight” and the sun puffs out. In one stroke he has drawn a caricature which is not a character. The brightness of words tempted him into an error of drawing at which he would have paused if he had visited the poet’s house.

For it is a yellow citadel stormed by sunlight from morning to night--sunlight pouring down upon its southerly wall and dancing off the terrace to ripple over the lawn, splashing in minor torrents through the tall windows of Martha Washington’s room, and of the poet’s red-curtained study opposite, slanting its mellow shafts at acute angles into the rooms on the north side, and breaking up at last into a carnival of color in the garden.

No such crisp epigram as the Frenchman’s will dismiss the house. True, he would have found himself at home in the midst of gay colorings and an orderly clutter of interesting and precious garnitures, furniture, books and _objets d’art_. But as his critical faculties were trained upon the interior, as he began to retrace the history of this building, obviously so colonially American, and yet become so definitely of another period without losing its colonial flavor, he would have groped in vain for a bright phrase to polish off his impression.

The Longfellow house is “typical” of nothing, and we may thank heaven for that. It borrows here and there from architectural convention, improves vastly upon it here and there, accepts easily the change in fortunes, in family and in comforts of its successive owners. It has the requisite dignity of its poet and its general, the well-dressed air of its Tory merchant, the scholarly simplicity of its lexicographer, the open-armed hospitality of its rich apothecary-general, and the grace of the lady who is its present occupant. The composite of these qualities is a picture which is almost as familiar and as dear to America as Mount Vernon.

Out of that picture troops a story more varied in human incident than that of Washington’s own home. It begins in 1759, when a Colonel Vassall built a splendid new house on Tory Row, the vulgar name for the _Via Sacra_ of Cambridge, now called Brattle Street. Within a radius of a quarter-mile one might take tea with the Lees, dine with the last of the King’s foresters, discuss politics with Richard Lechmere, or theology with the Reverend East Apthorp, without canvassing more than a small group of the sociable colony of royalists whose residences gave the street its nickname. Administrations change, the Tory “keynote” is perennial, and if your visit to Cambridge had been timed in the early seventies of the Eighteenth Century, the chances are that the prevailing topic of conversation in Tory Row would have been politics, and the keynote would have been--as today--“What are we coming to?”

At that particular season they came to an April forenoon of ’75. A line of red-coats marched out from Boston at the double, past the college, and on into the country toward Lexington, where there was trouble. A few hours later they returned, also at the double, because there had been trouble in the country. On the tail of the British column came the men of Acton and Billerica and Carlisle and Concord, and of every village along the line of pursuit. Four civilians were killed at the corner of Dunster and Winthrop Streets--perhaps because they tried to oppose with well-aimed half-bricks the further retreat of a much-irritated British soldiery. The air of Cambridge became suddenly unhealthy for royalists, and darkness in the fine houses on Tory Row told its own story of the hurried departure of their owners.

The Vassalls fled to Halifax. Cambridge was becoming an armed camp, with incoming militia quartered where they saw fit to alight. The men of Marblehead made themselves very comfortable on the Vassall estate. The battle of Bunker Hill on June 17th, with heavy loss and no tangible advantage to either side, threw the camp into utter confusion and swelled the number of volunteers to fourteen thousand. They swarmed down in a great semi-circle to sever the Boston peninsula from the mainland, while the British retired into the city to await reinforcements. Congress met, chose as commander of the army a young soldier-farmer from Virginia who had shown great intelligence in discussing military plans, and on July 3d he rode down Tory Row from Watertown, made one of the shortest public speeches on record, and took command of his army.

After a fortnight in the residence on Harvard Square, now known as Wadsworth House, he ordered the men of Marblehead out of the Vassall house to make room for his staff and headquarters. For ten months it was his base of operations, the longest period during which he occupied any headquarters during the Revolution. He came there the authorized commander of an undisciplined, inexperienced mob. He left only after he had transformed that mob into an army, fed it, clothed it, armed it, guarded it from small-pox, and finally, with its valor and enthusiasm and skill, ejected the British from Boston for a more hospitable battleground to the southward.

The southeast room was his office. One day in the early winter of ’75–6 an out-rider came in with good news, and presently Martha Washington “arrived in great ceremony, with a coach and four black horses, with postilions and servants in scarlet livery.” She was installed in the sunny room across the hallway, the room from whose walls look down today the interesting faces of Sir William Pepperrell’s children, and the same room in which you may find an exquisite onyx and metal goblet from the studio of that delightful international scamp, Benvenuto Cellini.

As chatelaine of headquarters she presided over a modest celebration of their wedding anniversary, although, Miss Alice Longfellow says, “the General had to be much persuaded by his aides.” And there was a “Twelfth Night party” which is a tradition in the Longfellow family. On rare occasions since it has been repeated, once by a group of youngsters of all ages who impersonated in costume the guests of Washington, and some of those latter-day guests were direct descendants of the earlier dignitaries. On another winter night the Longfellow children dressed in the characters of the successive occupants of the house, and the sword of General Craigie clanked about the boots of a certain Boston lawyer until, as he says “I was no longer Dana; I felt like a regular profiteer!”

For the end of the Revolution was the beginning of a large period of hospitality in the life of General Andrew Craigie. He had been apothecary-general to the Continental army, and in the light of the recent war, it must be evident that purveying to any victorious army is profitable. The Vassall House, during the seventeen years after Washington’s departure, had been occupied by two good patriots: Nathaniel Tracy, who gave a hundred ships to the government during the war, and Thomas Russel, the same who set Timothy Dexter an example for making a fortune. Then Andrew Craigie (General, if you like) bought the house, and it bears his name as commonly today as that of the poet.

Hawthorne, the quiet, handsome young writer who used to visit the house years later, should have known General Craigie. For all his garden parties at Commencement time, with their distinguished guests, like Talleyrand, and Admiral d’Estaing, and Prince Edward (the father of Queen Victoria), for all the refinishing and painting he did in the house, for all the splendor of the organ which he installed in the northeast room between two fine Corinthian columns, and the rare girandole in the study, and the Adam mantels--for all his creature magnificence, he had a scenario or two concealed about his person.

Hark!

“I am the ghost of Madame Craigie. I loved an impetuous youth from the south, then a student. We parted, for my family forbade me. But we swore to write each other. He did not write; I pined; then, desperate, obeyed my parents’ mandates, and married General Craigie. And as we sat at table in his great house, a letter came to me, in my maiden name--the name, ah me! now forfeit--saying ‘I have no word of you, no word since I went away. Why do you not write?’ And _then_ I knew that they had kept his letters from me, and mine from him! And from that day I never spoke to my husband save on matters of essential business.”

Hawthorne could have made something out of that.

Or this: the poet was surprised one morning as he came downstairs to see lying on one of the lower treads a letter. It was a fervent letter, with no clue to the addressee nor to its source. Inquiry disclosed nothing from any member of the household. The next morning another letter--also fervent. When it happened again and still again, he set himself to solve the mystery. And it was no mystery, for in the Craigie dynasty there had been an affair, which Andrew was only too anxious not to pile on his wife’s already considerable grievance. So he walled the letters up under the stairs, and thought them safe. But as the sea gives up her dead, the gradual settling of the staircase and the tapping of feet upon it slowly and inexorably provoked a crack through which revenge fed the letters, one by one, confiding the story piecemeal, to a poet.

Capricious investments sent Craigie to his grave in 1818 a poor man. If Madam Craigie was in the slightest degree relieved at his departure, her obligation to him was diluted by the fact that she must now support herself. By “taking in boarders” she could manage to live on in the old house, and make ends meet. For those who could pass her rather rigid inspection it offered accommodation far better than the average. Naturally such folk as Edward Everett and his bride, and President Jared Sparks of Harvard and Josiah Worcester, who wrote a dictionary, needed no references. With strangers it was different. A gentle young fellow with light hair and deep-set eyes, and a clean, aquiline profile, appeared one afternoon in 1837 and asked for lodgings. She said she had none vacant. In the temporizing dialogue which followed it developed that his name was Longfellow and that he was the author of a book she had quite recently been reading, and her manner thawed so readily that he got the room.

He was not much trouble, really--only a polite young man from Maine who had lost his wife a year or two before, and who had just been made professor of modern languages in the College. He was usually up in his room writing at night, while Mrs. Craigie read Voltaire or Madame de Sevigné down in the library, or played an old song on an old pianoforte. Another paying guest was a Miss Sally Lowell, whose talented nephew, James Russell Lowell, was beginning to be heard from; a third was the lexicographer Worcester, who was so taken with the house that he later bought it. For Longfellow’s part, they were amiable neighbors, but not so exacting as to interrupt the absorbing routine of a man of thirty embarking upon a full professorship.

For nearly twenty years he served the College in this capacity. The College was thrifty, and anxious to get the most out of his teaching; Longfellow’s health was not good, and the duties of his position asked more of him than he could sometimes give. He had resolved as a youth to become an eminent man of letters, just as determinedly as any man in business ever set his face toward the height of power. He kept a diary of progress, as scrupulous a record in its own line as the balance sheets of an industry, and he never allowed himself to be diverted by praise or ill-health from the pursuit of his ambition. Steadily and smoothly there came from his pen an output toward which the public looked with growing anticipation. Now it was experimental, now political, now religious. The best of it came from the warmest corner of a warm patriotic heart, where he kept a great treasure of the legends of his own country.

When _Hiawatha_, _Evangeline_, and _The Courtship of Miles Standish_ had appeared, his fame had crossed boundaries and oceans. Word-mongers say they are not his finest work, but they went straight, from his heart to the heart of plain people everywhere. His enthusiasm for the Indian tradition that is our only native folklore found utterance in _Hiawatha_; the story of Evangeline he got from Hawthorne; the romance of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins he picked from his own family tree. As a poet he gave the lie to the precious though fashionable complaint that nothing real in art need be expected from America until she had had a century or two of sandpapering. His enthusiasm of race drew occasional outbursts of a greater quality--the thing that made him a great citizen as well as a great national artist--the immortal spirit which went into such majestic songs as _The Building of the Ship_. “In neither case,” observes Higginson, “was this Americanism trivial, wasteful, or ignoble in its tone.” Will the professional hucksters of 100-per-centism please copy?

Contrary to persistent tradition, a poet is not a sulky hermit plucking ideas from empty air and full bottles. Longfellow had about him a laboratory full of elixirs of association, to which his sensitive spirit was a quick reagent. His second marriage gave him a beloved wife, his wife’s father gave Mrs. Longfellow the Craigie house to live in always, and Mrs. Longfellow gave her husband the children who were the Alpha and Omega of his affection for children in general. The familiar portrait of the children hangs in the dining-room; a pretty picture, painted by Reed, the same who wrote “Sheridan’s Ride.”

Harvard activities supplied him with a circle of friends which spread like ripples in a pond with every new literary production he cast forth. Come into his study and meet the best of them. A fine white room on the front of the house, high ceiling, tall windows, bright turkey-red curtains falling from borders scalloped like a flounce from Godey’s _Ladies’ Book_. An orange-tree flourishing in a tub at a sunny window--as it was when he stood at his high desk and wrote of Spain. Most of his writing was done at a round Duncan Phyfe table, whose graces are hidden under a faded green felt cover. On its dusty self-pattern of ivy leaves are the articles he left there as he died: _item_, a miscellany of books; _item_, an ornate ink-well of Coleridge which Longfellow treasured; _item_, a historic ink-well which had been the successive property of Moore and Crabbe, which Longfellow venerated; and, _item_, a little tupenny glass ink-bottle which Longfellow himself used! Even the quill pens are there with which he formed that calm, round graceful handwriting.

You came to see his friends. You shall. Here is a spare young man with a sensitive, kindly smile about the eyes--from Concord he is, and his name is Emerson. Over in that extraordinarily long armchair by the hearth sits (on his shoulder-blades) a handsome chap, the only man who fits the chair--six feet and more of Charles Summer. On the walls are the crayon portraits customary as gifts before the days of the camera: here is Felton, whom Dickens called “the heartiest of Greek professors”; here that fascinating Agassiz, always shuttling between Cambridge and some tropic or other; here Hawthorne’s grave dark eyes.

Picture him later in life chatting before the fire with Lowell, Holmes, John Lothrop Motley, or Whittier. Shift the scene to a Boston tavern with the same company, and three or four more of their stature, engaged in starting _The Atlantic Monthly_, and ask yourself where a poet could seek more inspiration. Gossips who knew this group only from outside called it the “Mutual Admiration Society,” and you may find in the Boston Athenaeum a review of _Evangeline_ written by Felton on which some scoffing contemporary has pencilled “_Insured at the Mutual_.” There is good authority for picturing Longfellow and a pair of younger cronies returning under the moon from a good dinner at Porter’s, singing in harmony--“I am a Rajah!! Putterum!” And in the years when the Saturday Club was flourishing, the poet was a regular attendant, and a modest, dry-spoken commentator on discussions in which the Olympians matched wits.

Every eminent visitor to Boston paid him court and even Oscar Wilde paid him a patronizing call. Many came who were not eminent, and the poet often invited aimless tourists in to see the house. To one such couple he exhibited the Coleridge ink-well, explaining helpfully that Coleridge had written _The Ancient Mariner_. “Oh,” said the bridegroom, and nodded. Then, puzzled, he said: “Say! who done the _Old Oaken Bucket_?” There were memorable evenings spent in the Howe tavern at Sudbury with Ole Bull, the fiddler, and an ingenious group of story-tellers whose yarns took shape in “The Tales of a Wayside Inn.”

Longfellow in his later years was the chief figure of Cambridge. Great men and women came to pay him tribute and to find his modesty unimpeached. When the undergraduates started a mutiny over in the College and riotous language was echoing from the red brick of old “Mass.” hall, it was quieted when one youth cried: “Let’s hear what Mr. Longfellow has to say about it--he’s fair, at any rate.” And when the spreading chestnut tree over Dexter Pratt’s smithy fell, the children of Cambridge gave their pennies to fashion him an armchair of its wood, and used to traipse fearlessly into the Longfellow house from time to time to call on the poet and see that the chair gave him good service. Without question it is one of the homeliest chairs in the world--and one of the finest.

One cannot leave the house without a glance at his other friends, his closer intimates, nor enter the house without remarking them. Books, books, books--heavy Italian walnut cases of them, white shelves of them, heaps of them, in the study, the halls, the dining-room, the drawing room, a vault full of the rarest of them in the east entry. I have not visited the pantry, but I will make a small wager that there are books on the cake-box. It is a judicious collection by a man who was a hungry reader and a lover of beautiful volumes. There are ranks of Italian folios, Tasso and Ariosto in white vellum--and of apparently everything else in equally rich costume, for the years of the poet’s great public appreciation built for him a formidable library of handsomely bound presentation copies and he was no mean purchaser himself.

They are where the poet left them, and so they will stay. When the actual tenancy of the house by the Longfellow heirs comes to a period, it will be held securely in trust just as it is, just as he left it one March day in 1882. Those generous and tactful heirs have already given the city of Cambridge the park which affords the house a clear vista to the Charles, and have given Longfellow land across the Charles to make up most of Soldiers Field, the great playground of Harvard. Now they have wisely provided that the house shall not become a museum, but that it shall remain the home of whose atmosphere and influence they cherish so acute an appreciation.

Longfellow’s bust stands in Westminster Abbey, the first American so to be honored. It is made of marble, and is a good likeness. Longfellow’s soul lives in Cambridge, in his home. The house is a better likeness than the bust, and of warmer stuff. His children’s trust will perpetuate their generosity for our children’s children.

* * * * *

A dignified old clock stands on the stairs, and ticks:

“_Forever--never
Never--forever._”

CLIVEDEN

© D.McK

CLIVEDEN

One of Maxwell’s six-pounders spoke, and a ball passed in the front window of the Chew house, through four partitions and heaven knows how many British, and out a rear window. The battery hammered at the steps, the windows and the door, while snipers fired at the flash of a rifle from the upper stories. Infantry charged across the lawn and was beaten back, artillery punctured but did not dislodge. Reed was all for chasing the rest of the retreating British toward the city, but Knox said it was against the rules to leave an enemy fort in the rear. “What!” Reed exclaimed, “Call this a fort and lose the happy moment?”]

CLIVEDEN

A daughter of the Quincy house saw the beginning of the Revolution. Mount Vernon was the home of its chief figure. From the Jumel Mansion he retreated to Westchester when the Continental army suffered its first major reverse. In the Kendall house at Dobbs Ferry he conceived the campaign which was to end the war, and there finally he saw the British evacuate the United States. Five houses in America punctuate the Revolutionary career of Washington, and the fifth is the house where the cause of freedom entered the dark hours, the period of terrible ordeal.

Cliveden was built in 1761 on “the worst road in America,” the main street of Germantown. The village, whose houses dotted some three miles of the street, was already becoming a fashionable summer retreat for prominent Philadelphians, and William Chew, the attorney general of the province, made Cliveden large enough for a family that totalled fourteen children, with the appropriate retinue of servants and household pets. The house is three stories high, as severely rectangular as a mill, with a plain extension built to the rear, and a further detached addition connected only by an underground passage. It might easily have been commonplace, but the dapple-gray native stone of which it is built is interesting, the doorway, to which you ascend by a flight of six stone steps, is dignified and inviting, and dormer windows, fat chimneys, and stone urns strike notes of real character on an otherwise plain roof. It makes no great bid for beauty, but its aspect of substance is as honest as a Philadelphia lawyer--and that is what William Chew was.

Although he became chief justice of Pennsylvania under the crown, he was no more of a loyalist than his position required. As a model of astute straddling, where can you cite a statement which quite compares with his decision, rendered in answer to the question: What is to become of those who meet the mandates of the crown with armed resistance?

“I have stated,” he answered, “that an opposition by force of arms to the lawful authority of the King or his Ministry is high treason, but in the moment when the King or his Ministers shall exceed the authority vested in them by the Constitution submission to their mandate becomes treason.” The same tolerance he showed toward the uprising of the colonies he showed to their leaders in Philadelphia, and you may take it from John Adams’ diary that he was a rare and upright judge of food as well as of treason.

“Thursday. Dined with Mr. Chew, Chief Justice of the Province, with all the gentlemen from Virginia ... and many others. About four o’clock we were called down to dinner. The furniture was all rich. Turtle and every other thing, flummery, jellies, sweet-meats, of 20 sorts, trifles, whipped sillabubs, floating islands, fools, etc., and then a dessert of fruits, raisens, almonds, pears, peaches, wines most excellent & admirable. I drank Madeira at a great rate & found no inconvenience in it.”

However much the members of the Continental Congress enjoyed his hospitality in 1775, they could no longer endure his presence as chief justice in Philadelphia in 1777, and in August of that year he and Governor John Penn were arrested and escorted to Burlington, New Jersey. Within a month Washington had met the British in force at the Brandywine in a doubtful effort to check their march on Philadelphia, and had been defeated. For a fortnight he played hide-and-seek with Howe on the banks of the Schuylkill, and if the countryside had been as communicative to him as it was to the enemy, the enemy would not have marched, as he presently did, unmolested into Philadelphia. Howe placed his major force at Germantown, and Washington came in as near as he dared and sat down to watch and wait. Strategically, the Revolution was a distinctly suburban war. With Philadelphia, the national capital, in the hands of the British, and winter coming on, American morale was quoted at .001, with no sales.

On the night of October 2–3, the American forces marched quietly down the main road toward Germantown, with flanks thrown out, on the right to the Wissahickon ravine, on the left to the old York pike. Dawn brought Sullivan of Maine into contact with the enemy. The enemy retreated, gaining speed as he scampered down Mount Airy into Germantown, with Sullivan, Conway and Reed at his heels. Colonel Musgrave, of the Fortieth Regiment of the British, saw the retreat coming, and with one hundred and twenty men swarmed into Cliveden, closed the shutters on the lower floor, barred the doors, and prepared to stand. Washington himself was in the pursuit, and he ordered Maxwell and four cannon to the ground across the street from Cliveden, where Upsala now stands. A thick fog had gathered, making it nearly impossible to determine where the enemy was, or in what strength. The utmost confusion prevailed. One of Maxwell’s six-pounders spoke, and a ball passed in the front window of the Chew house, through four partitions and heaven knows how many British, and out a rear window. The battery hammered at the steps, the windows and the door, while snipers fired at the flash of rifles from the upper stories. Infantry charged across the lawn and were beaten back, artillery punctured, but did not dislodge. Reed was all for chasing the rest of the retreating British toward the city, but Knox said it was against the rules to leave an enemy fort in the rear. “What!” Reed exclaimed, “call this a fort and lose the happy moment?”

It was in effect a fort, but it was as truly the happy moment to leave the fort to be cleaned out later and press the British retreat. For the American wings had not driven the British back (the American left wing failed because General Stephen was drunk), and the British, unopposed, marched obliquely toward the center of the fighting at Cliveden. Thus the battle became, instead of the conflict of bow-shaped forces, the meeting of two great arrowheads, and the point where the arrows met and the sparks were flying thickest was the lawn of the Chew house. Smith of Virginia, a colonel, set out for the house with a flag of truce to demand Musgrave’s surrender, and was shot from a window. Major White, one of Sullivan’s aides, tried to set fire to the house, and a shot from a cellar window killed him. Musgrave hung on. Every minute that passed brought British troops nearer, and increased the odds against the Americans.

Our army left five hundred dead and wounded in Germantown and then retreated to Whitemarsh. The King’s forces, reduced by five hundred dead and wounded, remained in the bloody fog of the village. The townsfolk began to come out of their cellars and examine the damage. A field hospital was set up at Wyck, a fine old house down Germantown Road. At Johnson House you can see today the hole in a window-frame through which a frantic pet squirrel, forgotten in the flight to the cellar, gnawed his way to freedom. Stray bullets pierced every house within a quarter-mile, and of all the houses within that radius, Cliveden, its center, took the worst punishment.

Five carpenters worked all that fall and winter repairing the damage. Holes gaped through the inner walls, hardly a pane of glass was intact, statues were chipped, mirrors splintered, furniture reduced to expensive kindling. What was not stained with blood was streaked with smoke, and the second floor ceilings were sprayed with bullets by Continentals who dashed into the shelter of the building and fired through the upper windows.

Across the span of the years we can still hear the echo of an outraged protest--the hymn of hate of the daughters of William Chew, sung with all the cordial detestation that could be uttered by a group of sisters who came out to Germantown under British escort and found their lovely home in ruins at the hands of the army that had already made their father a prisoner. None can blame them for the gayety with which they entered into the social life of that winter in the occupied city, with never a thought for Washington’s men shivering in the snow at Valley Forge. Knyphausen, Cornwallis, and the two Howes picked out comfortable quarters in the deserted houses of the patriots who had fled, and Major André settled down with a “rapacious crew” in the home of Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin’s daughter returned after the British evacuation the next June she reported to him in Paris: “They stole and carried off with them some of your musical instruments, viz., a Welsh harp, ball harp, the set of tuned bells which were in a box, viol-de-gamba, all the spare harmonica glasses and one or two spare cases.” Tuneful was the life of the army of occupation.

André was paying diligent court to Peggy Chew. He was her champion in the fête of Mischianza, and her gallant protector when a marauding force of ragged Continentals marched down from Valley Forge and broke up the party. He wore her ribbon, with the legend “No Rival,” presented her with an aquarelle of himself in costume, wrote an account of the affair in verse, and filled in his spare hours by inditing to her rhapsodies inspired in the orchard at Cliveden, in apple-blossom time. Then came the parting; within a few short years

“The youth who bids with stifled pain
His sad farewell tonight”

was dead with a rope around his neck, and although Peggy married a soldier of the Republic, she remembered the enemy gallant. She was never so impishly amused as when she could say a kind word for André, for it guaranteed an explosive protest from her husband. “Major André,” said Peggy, demurely, with a certain dangerous sadness in her eyes, “was a most witty and cultivated gentleman,” and Colonel Howard, seizing a visitor’s arm, exclaimed “He was a damned spy, sir! Nothing but a damned spy!”

The house had been restored only two years when William Chew sold it to Blair McClenahan, but in 1787 he bought it back. In August of 1787 Washington, then president of the Constitutional Convention, rode out to see the encampment at Whitemarsh to which he had retreated ten years before, and dined with McClenahan in the Chew house. Despite his Royalist relations, the close of the Revolution restored Benjamin Chew to good standing in his community and the judicial profession, and he served as justice of the High Court of Errours and Appeals until its abolishment in 1808. During the period when the Federal Congress sat in Philadelphia it was no infrequent thing to see the Father of His Country in company with the father of Peggy and of Harriet, who was soon to marry a Carroll of Doughoregan.

It was at Germantown that Stephen’s drunkenness left his division without a commander, and opened a vacancy for Lafayette’s assumption of an active command as major-general. Naturally, therefore, when Lafayette returned to America in 1825, he could not ignore Germantown. He was received with a military escort and drawn “in an open barouche” to Cliveden. Let Miss Ann Johnson, of Upsala, across the way, carry on the story as she did in a letter to her mother:

“Last 4th. day morn I had the honour of breakfasting with Lafayette at Mr. Chew’s. I wish you had been here--the house both up and down stairs was crowded with men, women and soldiers--and around the house. Mrs. and two of the Miss Morris’s and myself were the only invited ladies that sat down to Breakfast--about 16 sat down at first, and when they had finished others took their place, and so on till I believe nearly all the soldiers had breakfast--those that did not come in had something in the kitchen. I heard that they eat everything they had till at last the cook had to lock the doors.

“I was introduced to LaFayette twice and shook hands with him three times. Ann Chew regretted M. was not there to enjoy the scene--it was quite delightful to see anything so animated in G--pp. There was so much noise that I could not hear a word the General said; every person seemed so anxious to see him eat that a centinal had to keep guard at the door with a drawn sword--it was very fine indeed. When he departed the shouts of the multitude and the roaring of the cannon was almost deafening. A. L. Logan said I could give you a very fine description of it--but I told him I would have to leave it to your imagination, it would be impossible for me to describe everything.”

Mrs. Samuel Chew is the present owner of the estate, and an appreciative custodian of its legend. Hers are the Washington letters; the portraits of illustrious Chews who have been eminent in the law, medicine, and public affairs since John Chew sailed into Jamestown in the _Charitie_ in 1621; the shot-holes, the stains of the powder-kegs on the floor; the immaculately carved columns and stair rail of the hallway, and the hundred other fragments of the Cliveden story. Cliveden is hers--its story is the nation’s.

THE WENTWORTH MANSION

© D.McK

THE WENTWORTH MANSION

I like to think of the house as a family group of all the
Wentworths, each little excrescence on the original nucleus
being one of the useful but obscure members posed kneeling
or sitting on the outskirts of the family as it pyramids up
to the bulk of the council-room Benning Wentworth built,
the council-room being in my mind’s eye none other than the
formidable, homely, well-fed and hard-drinking Benning himself.
]

THE WENTWORTH MANSION

“These tales you tell are one and all
Of the Old World,” the Poet said,
“Flowers gathered from a crumbling wall,
Dead leaves that rustle as they fall;
Let me present you in their stead
Something of our New England earth, ...”

--_Lady Wentworth._

It was almost as original in Colonial New Hampshire to be a Wentworth as it is today to be a Biddle in Philadelphia. The descendants of Samuel Wentworth, the first of his name in the province, were conspicuously numerous in the small population of their community. As individuals they were energetic, persevering, and not without a certain amount of dignity. To say that they were politicians is to say that they were business men. Individually they were better than average citizens, collectively they contributed enough to the progress and the story of New Hampshire to invite a glimpse into the house which is today the chief memorial to the family.

Except for its size you might pass it by in a countryside full of rambling buildings silvered by the weather. It has neither the warm, open-armed welcome of Doughoregan Manor, nor the smug comfort of Cliveden, nor the exalted location of Monticello, nor the decorative dignity of its rival, the Pepperrell House across the harbor. A plain man built it somewhere back in the seventeenth century, built it close by the bright water of Little Harbor because there were codfish there as sacred to New Hampshire revenue as any goldfish that ever inspired faith in Massachusetts. Built it out of big timber to cut the northeasters whipping in over the Isles of Shoals, built a sharp roof to shed snow. Built it to live in. Another generation, with perhaps a larger family, wanted more room, and built on. When Mark Hunking owned it he did the same. In the south our colonies’ increased demands upon the facilities of a growing estate were met by outbuildings set well apart from the great house, but in this sharp climate outbuildings raised the unpleasant prospect of wading to and fro through shoulder-high drifts, and involved separate heating-plants and no end of inconvenience. So gradually the house sprouted a plain ell here and a humble jog there, a shed around the corner, and enough additions to effect a total of nearly fifty rooms. I like to think of the house as a family group of all the Wentworths, of each little addition to the original nucleus as one of the useful but obscure members posed kneeling or sitting on the outskirts of the family as it pyramids up to the great bulk of the council-room Benning Wentworth built, the council-room being in my mind’s eye none other than the formidable, homely, well-fed and hard-drinking Benning himself.

To paint for yourself the picture of the prime of the house you must recall certain facts about the Portsmouth of the beginning of the eighteenth century. Twenty miles inland Indians scalped white men and women, and white men scalped Indians. As many miles to the eastward, and more, the men of Portsmouth sailed in ships for fish and returned with a catch to pay the storekeeper’s bill for groceries and clothing--a bill which always seemed just out of reach, and which kept these men sailing until they died, while the merchants prospered. From the outer world came small-pox. Over on Great Island, at the Walton place, there were genuine witches; if you don’t believe this you may read it in a pamphlet published in London in 1698, whose title says it is

“an Exact and True Account of the various actions of infernal
Spirits, or (_Devils Incarnate_) Witches, or both; and the
great Disturbance and Amazement they gave to _George Walton’s_
Family at a place called _Great Island_ in the Province of
_New Hampshire_ in New England, chiefly in throwing about (by
an Invisible hand) _Stones_, _Bricks_, and _Brick-bats_ of
all sizes, with several other things, as _Hammers_, _Mauls_,
_Iron-Crows_, _Spits_, and other domestick utensils, as came
into their Hellish Minds, and this for the space of a Quarter
of a Year.”

The Province, though a royal property as distinguished from a chartered colonial settlement, was not encouraging to the farmer, not ready for the miller. Its governorship was for the king’s favorite candidate, and in size and importance it was a homely stepsister of the well-to-do colony of Massachusetts to the southward.

John Wentworth bought the lieutenant-governorship and made it profitable until he died. From his widow, Mark Hunking’s daughter, Benning Wentworth inherited the Mansion at Little Harbor. As a young graduate of Harvard who had brought home a Boston bride, and as the owner of a prosperous business and a fine house, he was popular enough, and his path was paved into politics. The Assembly applauded his protests against the Governor of Massachusetts who also governed New Hampshire. As a member of the council his youthful oratory soon moderated to the whisper of the boss who is learning how to do things smoothly, for there was much to be gained if London could be persuaded to appoint a distinct governor for New Hampshire who would not be responsible to Massachusetts. In 1744 the opportunity came to prove his point.

Benning Wentworth sold a cargo of lumber to an agent of the King of Spain. When it reached Cadiz the agent had resigned, and his successor refused the cargo. On the return voyage the ship foundered, and Wentworth and a handful of sailors counted themselves lucky to be rescued. He went at once to London to beg the government to enforce his claim on Spain. With similar complaints from other British merchants a bill was presented at Madrid which Spain honored but did not pay, and under economic pressure England declared war upon her. At home, meanwhile, Governor Belcher had fallen into every trap his enemies set for him, and was removed, but not before the King had been prevailed upon to separate Massachusetts and New Hampshire once and for all, re-survey their boundaries, and set up a new governor not only in Boston but in Portsmouth.

Theoretically, John Thomlinson, the agent of New Hampshire in London, brought this about, but, as a matter of fact, it was Thomlinson’s good aim and Benning Wentworth’s timely cartridges which shot Governor Belcher’s support from under him. What more natural, therefore, than that Benning Wentworth return to Portsmouth as governor of New Hampshire. He was received with cheers, and made a hearty address to his Assembly, suggesting that they make him a guaranteed annual grant of salary. The Assembly replied with fulsome cordiality and said they would grant him whatever they found themselves able to pay. It proved to be £500 a year, and to this Thomlinson presently managed to add the job of Surveyor of the Woods, which he bought from the previous surveyor for two thousand pounds and turned over to Wentworth for a consideration not mentioned. In order to accept the post the Governor had to surrender his claims for $56,000 against the Court of Spain, and the prospects were so bright in his new position that he was glad enough to do it in favor of additional income of £800, and to settle down to a smooth program of political patronage.

It happened that he was not to be allowed to forget the Court of Spain, nor to get rich without making enemies. England’s war with Spain dragged France in, and Governor Shirley of Massachusetts, full of enthusiasm for his new charge, looked on a map for the nearest French stronghold, found it to be Louisburg, on Cape Breton Island, and shouted for money, arms, and men for an expedition. Benning Wentworth, who liked Shirley and often asked his advice, heard the cry, and offered New Hampshire help. Shirley took the help, and appointed a rival merchant in Portsmouth, William Pepperrell, as general in command.

Here was a delicate situation. Shirley, having securely appointed Pepperrell, wrote: “It would have been an infinite satisfaction to me, and done great honor to the expedition if your limbs would have permitted you to take the command.” Wentworth was so charmed with the idea that he forgot his gout and volunteered! To this Shirley replied, with more truth than tact, that “any alteration of the present command would be attended with great risque, both with respect to the Assembly and the soldiers being entirely disgusted.” “You was made General,” wrote a friend to Pepperrell, “being a popular man, most likely to raise soldiers soonest. The expedition was calculated to ESTABLISH Shirley and make his creature Wentworth Governor of Cape Breton, which is to be a place of refuge for him from his creditors. Beware of snakes in the grass and mind their hissing.” About four thousand men rallied, a fleet of a hundred vessels assembled, and the voyage began, planned by a Governor, and commanded by a merchant, to storm a citadel called the “Gibraltar of America.”

Contemporaries called it a “Cambridge commencement,” and without a wild sort of undergraduate enthusiasm it must have failed. An enthusiastic preacher gave Governor Shirley a plan for investing the fortress which he had worked out himself. Another amateur gave him a model of a flying bridge to be used in scaling the walls--it only needed twelve hundred feet of rope to operate, and a thousand men might pass over it in four minutes. Shirley took his own counsel, drew his own beautifully-timed plans, and designed his own scaling ladders and pikes. The men were growing restless when George Whitefield, the eminent Newburyport counterpart of our own Billy Sunday, devised a motto “nihil desperandum Christo duce,” and the expedition sailed like fanatic crusaders out of Boston Harbor, unscathed by a severe epidemic of small-pox in the port.

Every plan Shirley made went wrong. The fortress, instead of being surprised by the fleet, woke up the morning of April 29 to see it lying off the harbor. Yet on June 17 the well-scared commander of the citadel hauled down the French flag. The Yankees took the city, hauled the Tricolor up again, and lured several valuable prizes into port in this way. Pepperrell was made a Baronet, Commodore Warren an Admiral. England forced France to make peace, and gave Louisburg back. Do you, perhaps, see now why they called it a Cambridge commencement?

Governor Wentworth, though not a participant, shared vicariously in the glory of the expedition, and kept busy at home directing the fighting in the west against French Indians who raided the frontier stockades from the New York lakes. Gradually and thoroughly he installed his relatives in lucrative positions of the provincial government. An occasional quarrel with his Assembly brought forth a protest to the King to remove him and place Pepperrell in his stead. Unruffled, he would call his council to the mansion at Little Harbor, set out an enormous punch-bowl on the council-room sideboard, and conduct the affairs of state as swiftly as a governor should who wants to move on to the card-rooms for a friendly game.

From his office above he could keep a weather eye on the ships out for the West Indies with lumber and livestock and fish and oil, and could tick off those inward-bound with molasses and coffee and rum. Toward town he could glimpse the stocks where more ships were building to tie his wilderness province, with its twenty miles of seacoast, to the outside world. If the Assembly lost its manners and had to be attended to, he stepped to the landing at the council-room door, and was royally wafted away to town in his official barge. His aims were not all selfish by any means. He gave a grant of land in the Connecticut valley on which to build Dartmouth College, he drew from the Assembly a grant of 300 pounds to restore a part of the burned library of Harvard. If his wife and his son had been spared to him, his life would have been very happy. But they were not spared, and thus innocently they contribute to the story of the house its most entertaining episode.