Chapter XX: Introduction (18)

The other poem, “How Old Brown Took Harper’s Ferry,” recounted the incident of that stern old abolitionist boldly marching with a few men into Virginia and capturing the town of Harper’s Ferry. There was no American poet who might not have felt proud of this production. Bayard Taylor was so pleased with the genius manifested in both these poems that he sought the author’s acquaintance and introduced him to R. H. Stoddard, who in turn, after examining a collection of his verses, recommended them for publication to Charles Scribner, who issued them the next year (1860) under the title of “Poems, Lyric and Idylic.”――Thus was Mr. Stedman introduced into the literary world.

Edmund Clarence Stedman is a native of Connecticut. He was born in the city of Hartford on the eighth day of October, 1833,――and comes of a good family of some poetic reputation. Rev. Aaron Cleveland, one of his ancestors, is said to have been a poet. Arthur Cleveland Cox, well known as a religious writer of verse, was his cousin. His mother was herself a poet, and also the author of the tragedy “Bianco Caprello.” When Stedman was two years of age he was sent to live with his grand-uncle, James Stedman, a jurist and scholar, who looked carefully after the early education of his nephew. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to Yale College, where he was among the foremost in English composition and Greek. But it is said that for some disobedience of the discipline of the institution, he fell under the censure of the college management and left without graduating. The University afterward, however, enrolled him among the alumni of 1853 with the degree of Master of Arts.

Upon leaving Yale, at the age of nineteen, Stedman took the management of a newspaper at Norwich, and the next year married a Connecticut girl and became owner of the Winsted _Herald_, when he was only twenty-one. Under his management, this paper soon rose to be one of the most important of the political papers of the State. Three years later we find him writing on the “New York Tribune,” where he obtained a foot-hold in literature, as we have already indicated by the publication of the two poems above mentioned.

When the “World” was started, in the winter of 1860, Mr. Stedman engaged with that journal and was editor of it when the news came over the wires that Fort Sumter had been fired upon. He wrote a poem on the occasion which was, perhaps, the first poem inspired by the war between the states. Soon after this Mr. Stedman went to Washington as the army correspondent of the “World.” He was at the first battle of Bull’s Run and published a long and graphic letter in the “World” about the defeat of the Union troops which he witnessed. This letter was the talk of the town for days and altogether has been pronounced the best single letter written during the whole war.

Before the close of the war, Mr. Stedman resigned his position as editor and entered the office of Attorney General Bates at Washington; but in January, 1864, he returned with his family to New York and published his second volume of poems entitled, “Alice of Monmouth, An Idyl of the Great War, and Other Poems,” which may be described as a little poetic novel. The opening scene is laid in Monmouth County, New Jersey; the later ones on the battle fields of Virginia.

The titles and dates of Mr. Stedman’s other books are as follows: “The Blameless Prince, and other Poems” (1869); “Poetical Works” (1873); “Victorian Poets” (1875); “Hawthorne and Other Poems” (1877); “Lyrics and Idyls, with Other Poems” (1879); the “Poems of Austin Dobson,” with an introduction (1880); “Poets of America” (1886), and with Ellen Mackay Hutchinson, he edited “A Library of American Literature” (11 vols., 1888–1890).

Many people entertain the notion that a man cannot be at one and the same time, a poet and a man of business. This is a mistake. ♦Fitz-Green Halleck was for many years a competent clerk of John Jacob Astor; Charles Sprague was for forty years teller and cashier in a Boston bank; Samuel Rodgers, the English poet, was all his life a successful banker; Charles Follen Adams, the humorous and dialectic poet, is a prosperous merchant in Boston; and Edmund Clarence Stedman has been for many years the head of a firm of stock brokers with a ♣suite of offices in Exchange Place, New York, dealing in government securities and railway stocks and bonds, and also petroleum, in which fortunes were at one time made and lost with great rapidity. Nevertheless, Mr. Stedman, the stock-broker and banker is still Mr. Stedman, the poet. The most of his splendid verses have been produced while he was depending for a living upon journalistic work or upon some business for support. Mr. Stedman also illustrates the fact, as Edgar Allen Poe had done before him, that a poet may be a practical critic. And why not? If poets are not the best critics of poetry, musicians are not the best critics of music, architects are not the best critics of architecture and painters of painting. Mr. Stedman’s “Victorian Poets” is, perhaps, the most important contribution of all our American writers to the critical literature on the English Poets.

♦ ‘Fitz Green Hallack’ replaced with ‘Fitz-Green Halleck’

♣ ‘suit’ replaced with ‘suite’

The home-life of Mr. Stedman is described as being an ideally happy one. One of his poems entitled “Laura, My Darling,” addressed to his wife, gives us a delightful glimpse into the heart and home of the poet.

* * * * *

BETROTHED ANEW.

“The sunshine of the outer world beautifully illustrates
the sunshine of the heart in the ‘Betrothed Anew’ of Edmund
Clarence Stedman.”――_Morris._

THE sunlight fills the trembling air,
And balmy days their guerdons bring;
The Earth again is young and fair,
And amorous with musky spring.

The golden nurslings of the May
In splendor strew the spangled green,
And hues of tender beauty play,
Entangled where the willows lean.

Mark how the rippled currents flow;
What lustres on the meadows lie!
And, hark! the songsters come and go,
And trill between the earth and sky.

Who told us that the years had fled,
Or borne afar our blissful youth?
Such joys are all about us spread,
We know the whisper was not truth.

The birds that break from grass and grove
Sing every carol that they sung
When first our veins were rich with love
And May her mantle round us flung.

O fresh-lit dawn! immortal life!
O Earth’s betrothal, sweet and true,
With whose delights our souls are rife!
And aye their vernal vows renew!

Then, darling, walk with me this morn;
Let your brown tresses drink its sheen;
These violets, within them worn,
Of floral fays shall make you queen.

What though there comes a time of pain
When autumn winds forebode decay?
The days of love are born again;
That fabled time is far away!

And never seemed the land so fair
As now, nor birds such notes to sing,
Since first within your shining hair
I wove the blossoms of the spring.

* * * * *

THE DOOR-STEP.

THE conference meeting through at last,
We boys around the vestry waited,
To see the girls come tripping past
Like snow-birds willing to be mated.

Not braver he that leaps the wall,
By level musket-flashes litten,
Than I, who stepped before them all
Who longed to see me get the mitten.

But no, she blushed and took my arm!
We let the old folks have the highway,
And started toward the Maple Farm,
Along a kind of lovers’ by-way.

I can’t remember what we said,
’Twas nothing worth a song or story,
Yet that rude path by which we sped
Seemed all transformed and in a glory.

The snow was crisp beneath our feet,
The moon was full, the fields were gleaming;
By hood and tippet sheltered sweet
Her face with youth and health was beaming.

The little hand outside her muff――
O sculptor, if you could but mould it!
So slightly touched my jacket-cuff,
To keep it warm I had to hold it.

To have her with me there alone,
’Twas love and fear and triumph blended:
At last we reached the foot-worn stone
Where that delicious journey ended.

She shook her ringlets from her hood,
And with a “Thank you Ned,” dissembled,
But yet I knew she understood
With what a daring wish I trembled.

A cloud passed kindly overhead,
The moon was slyly peeping through it,
Yet hid its face, as if it said,
“Come, now or never, do it, do it!”

My lips till then had only known
The kiss of mother and of sister,
But somehow full upon her own
Sweet, rosy, darling mouth――I kissed her!

Perhaps ’twas boyish love, yet still,
O listless woman! weary lover!
To feel once more that fresh wild thrill,
I’d give――But who can live youth over!

GREAT AMERICAN HISTORIANS AND BIOGRAPHERS.

Illustration: GREAT AMERICAN HISTORIANS AND BIOGRAPHERS

JOHN L. MOTLEY • WM. H. PRESCOTT
GEO. H. BANCROFT
JOHN B. McMASTER • JAMES PARTON

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GEORGE BANCROFT.

“THE MOST FAMOUS AMERICAN HISTORIAN.”

THE chief historians who have added lustre to American literature during the nineteenth century are Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, McMaster and John Fiske; and, when we add to these James Parton, the American biographer, we present an array of talent and scholarship on which any nation might look with patriotic pride. They have been excelled by the historians of no other nation of our time, if, indeed――taken from a national standpoint――they have not produced the best historical literature of the present century.

Though Prescott is the oldest, George Bancroft, in the estimation of the great majority, stands first, perhaps, among all the American historians. This eminent writer was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, in October, 1800, the same month and year in which ♦Macaulay, the great English historian, first saw the light, and,――after living one of the most laborious public and literary lives in the history of the world,――died at the ripe old age of ninety-one years (1891). His father, the Reverend Aaron Bancroft, was a minister of the Congregational Church in Worcester for more than a half century and had the highest reputation as a theologian of learning and piety.

♦ ‘Macauley’ replaced with ‘Macaulay’

At the early age of thirteen, George Bancroft entered Harvard College from which he graduated at the age of seventeen with the highest honors of his class. His first inclinations were to study theology; but in 1818, he went to Germany where he spent two years in the study of history and philology, and it was there that he obtained his degree of Doctor of Philosophy. During the next two years, he visited in succession, Berlin, Heidelberg, Rome, Paris, and London, returning home in 1822, the most accomplished scholar for his age which our country, at that time, had produced.

Soon after his return to the United States, Mr. Bancroft was appointed to the chair of Greek in Harvard College and those who had the benefit of his instruction spoke of his zeal, faithfulness and varied learning as a teacher. He afterward established, in conjunction with Joseph G. Cogswell, a school of high classical character at ♦Northampton, Massachusetts. While engaged here, he prepared a number of Latin text books for schools, which were far in advance of anything then used in the country. In the meantime, he had given some attention to politics and had been engaged for several years, incidentally, upon his “History of the United States.”

♦ ‘Northhampton’ replaced with ‘Northampton’

In 1828 Mr. Bancroft joined the Democratic Party, having formerly been a Whig, and began to take an active interest in politics, where his great historic learning and broad statesmanship placed him quickly on the high road to political preferment. He was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1830, but declined, as he was then so much engaged upon his “History of the United States” that he was unwilling to turn aside, at least until the first volume was issued, which appeared in 1834. The first and second and third volumes of this work, comprising the Colonial history of the country, were received with great satisfaction by the public on both sides of the Atlantic, being in brilliancy of style, picturesque sketches of character and incidents, compass of learning and generally fair reasoning far in advance of anything that had been written on the subject.

“Bancroft, the Historian,” was now the recognition he was accorded, and his fame began to spread. He was made Collector of the Port of Boston in 1838 by President Van Buren, which position he held until 1841. In 1844 he ran as Democratic candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, but was defeated. During 1845 and 1846 he served his country as Secretary of the Navy under President Polk, and while in this office he planned and established the Naval Academy at Annapolis and issued the orders by which California was annexed to the United States. In 1846 President Polk further honored the historian by appointing him Minister-Plenipotentiary to Great Britain, where he represented the United States until 1849. The first three volumes of Mr. Bancroft’s histories had preceded him to England. “The London Monthly Review” spoke in the highest terms of his quality as a historian, praising the sustained accuracy and dignity of his style, referring to him as a philosopher, a legislator, and a historian. He was also honored with the degree of D. C. L., by Oxford University in 1849, and was enrolled as a member of many learned societies.

Thus laden with honors, he returned this same year to his country, made New York his place of residence, and resumed, with renewed energy, the prosecution of his historical labors. The fourth volume of his “History of the United States” appeared in 1852, and the next year the fifth volume was published, which was succeeded by the sixth and seventh, the latter appearing in 1858, bringing the history of our country down into the stirring scenes of the Revolution.

President Andrew Johnson made Mr. Bancroft United States Minister to Russia in 1867, and he was our national representative at the North German Confederation in 1868. General Grant appointed him as our Minister to the German Empire from 1871 to 1874, during which time he enjoyed the closest friendship of Prince Bismarck. Bismarck declares that Bancroft was the foremost representative of American grit that he had ever met. “Think,” said he to Minister Phelps many years afterwards, “of a Secretary of the Navy, a literary man by profession, taking it upon himself to issue orders for the occupation of a vast foreign territory as Bancroft did in the case of California. Again he caused the earliest seizure of Texas by the United States troops, while temporarily holding the portfolio of Minister of War. Only a really great man would undertake such responsibilities.”

Bancroft’s “History of the United States” was completed in 1874; but the last and final revised edition of it was published in 1885, fifty-one years after the first volume had been issued. This great work comprises ten volumes and comes down only to the close of the Revolution. It is a monumental work within itself――a fit monument to the greatest of American historians. The patriotism and eloquence of its author are manifest in nearly every page, and the work has been criticised as a Fourth-of-July oration in ten volumes. It is generally regarded as a standard history of America up to the time of the Constitution.

Other works of Mr. Bancroft are “The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promises of the Human Race” (1854); “Literary and Historical Miscellanies” (1855), and “A Plea for the Constitution of the United States of America, Wounded in the House of its Guardians” (1886), written when the author was eighty-six years of age.

Mr. Bancroft was an orator as well as a historian and politician, one of the best-known of his addresses being the famous oration on Lincoln, delivered before Congress in 1866. During the latter part of his life he had a winter home in Washington, where the national archives and the Library of Congress were always at his hand, and a summer home at Newport, where he had a wonderful garden of roses, which was a great attraction. Rose-growing and horseback riding were his recreations, and the erect and striking form of the historian, with his long gray beard, mounted on a fine horse, was for years a familiar figure at Newport and on the streets of Washington.

It is beautiful to contemplate so long and useful a life as that of George Bancroft. When the old historian was nearly ninety years of age, he journeyed all the way from his northern home to Nashville, Tennessee, to make certain investigations, for historical data, among the private papers of President Polk. The writer of this sketch had the pleasure of witnessing the meeting between him and the venerable wife of James K. Polk at the old mansion which stands near the Capitol. It was a beautiful and impressive sight to see this grand old woman, who had been the first lady of the land forty-five years before, conducting this venerable historian, who had been her husband’s Secretary of War, about the premises. President Polk’s library with all the papers piled upon the table had remained just as he had left it, and into its sacred precincts Mr. Bancroft was admitted, with perfect liberty to select and take away whatever would be of service in his historical labors. What he did with these papers is unknown to the writer. Perhaps his death occurred too soon after to render them of practical service; but that the old historian died in the harness may well be supposed from the following extract taken from a letter written when he was more than eighty years of age: “I was trained to look upon life here as a season for labor. Being more than fourscore years old, I know the time for my release will soon come. Conscious of being near the shore of eternity, I wait without impatience and without dread the beckoning of the hand which will summon me to rest.”

The beckoning hand appeared several years later――in 1891――and he passed quietly “over the river,” only nine years in advance of the death of the century with which he was born, having spent altogether one of the busiest, one of the most honorable, one of the most useful and _the very longest life of all the celebrities in American literature_. His fame is secure. His works will live after him――a proud and lasting monument.

* * * * *

CHARACTER OF ROGER WILLIAMS.

WHILE the State was thus connecting by the closest bonds the energy of its faith with its form of government, there appeared in its midst one of those clear minds which sometimes bless the world by their power of receiving moral truth in its purest light, and of reducing the just conclusions of their principles to a happy and consistent practice. In February of the first year of the colony, but a few months after the arrival of Winthrop, and before either Cotton or Hooker had embarked for New England, there arrived at Nantasket, after a stormy passage of sixty-six days, “a young minister, godly and zealous, having precious” gifts. It was Roger Williams. He was then but a little more than thirty years of age; but his mind had already matured a doctrine which secures him an immortality of fame, as its application has given religious peace to the American world. He was a Puritan, and a fugitive from English persecution; but his wrongs had not clouded his accurate understanding; in the capacious recesses of his mind he had revolved the nature of intolerance, and he, and he alone, had arrived at the great principle which is its sole effectual remedy. He announced his discovery under the simple proposition of the sanctity of conscience. The civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control opinion; should punish guilt, but never violate the freedom of the soul. The doctrine contained within itself an entire reformation of theological jurisprudence; it would blot from the statute-book the felony of non-conformity; would quench the fires that persecution had so long kept burning; would repeal every law compelling attendance on public worship; would abolish tithes and all forced contributions to the maintenance of religion; would give an equal protection to every form of religious faith; and never suffer the authority of the civil government to be enlisted against the mosque of the Mussulman or the altar of the fire-worshipper, against the Jewish synagogue or the Roman cathedral. It is wonderful with what distinctness Roger Williams deduced these inferences from his great principle; the consistency with which, like Pascal and Edwards,――those bold and profound reasoners on other subjects,――he accepted every fair inference from his doctrines; and the circumspection with which he repelled every unjust imputation. In the unwavering assertion of his views he never changed his position; the sanctity of conscience was the great tenet which, with all its consequences, he defended, as he first trod the shores of New England; and in his extreme old age it was the last pulsation of his heart. But it placed the young emigrant in direct opposition to the whole system on which Massachusetts was founded; and, gentle and forgiving as was his temper, prompt as he was to concede everything which honesty permitted, he always asserted his belief with temperate firmness and unbending benevolence.

* * * * *

DESTRUCTION OF THE TEA IN BOSTON HARBOR.

On the 28th day of November, 1773, the ship Dartmouth appeared
in Boston Harbor, with one hundred and fourteen chests of
tea. The ship was owned by Mr. Rotch, a Quaker merchant. In a
few days after, two more tea-ships arrived. They were all put
under strict guard by the citizens, acting under the lead of
a committee of correspondence, of which Samuel Adams was the
controlling spirit. The people of the neighboring towns were
organized in a similar manner, and sustained the spirit of
Boston. The purpose of the citizens was to have the tea sent
back without being landed; but the collector and comptroller
refused to give the ships a clearance unless the teas were
landed, and Governor Hutchinson also refused his permit,
without which they could not pass the “Castle,” as the fort at
the entrance of Boston Harbor was called. The ships were also
liable to seizure if the teas were not landed on the twentieth
day after their arrival, and the 16th day of December was the
eighteenth day after.

THE morning of Thursday, the 16th of December, 1773, dawned upon Boston,――a day by far the most momentous in its annals. Beware, little town; count the cost, and know well if you dare defy the wrath of Great Britain, and if you love exile, and poverty, and death, rather than submission. At ten o’clock, the people of Boston, with at least two thousand men from the country, assembled in the Old South. A report was made that Rotch had been refused a clearance from the collector. “Then,” said they to him, “protest immediately against the custom-house, and apply to the Governor for his pass, so that your vessel may this very day proceed on her voyage to London.”

The Governor had stolen away to his country-house at Milton. Bidding Rotch make all haste, the meeting adjourned to three in the afternoon. At that hour Rotch had not returned. It was incidentally voted, as other towns had done, to abstain wholly from the use of tea; and every town was advised to appoint its committee of inspection, to prevent the detested tea from coming within any of them. Then, since the governor might refuse his pass, the momentous question recurred, whether it be the sense and determination of this body to abide by their former resolutions with respect to not suffering the tea to be landed. On this question, Samuel Adams and Young¹ addressed the meeting, which was become far the most numerous ever held in Boston, embracing seven thousand men. There was among them a patriot of fervent feeling; passionately devoted to the liberty of his country; still young, his eye bright, his cheek glowing with hectic fever. He knew that his strength was ebbing. The work of vindicating American freedom must be done soon, or he will be no party to the great achievement. He rises, but it is to restrain; and, being truly brave and truly resolved, he speaks the language of moderation: “Shouts and hosannas will not terminate the trials of this day, nor popular resolves, harangues, and acclamations vanquish our foes. We must be grossly ignorant of the value of the prize for which we contend, of the power combined against us, of the inveterate malice and insatiable revenge which actuate our enemies, public and private, abroad and in our bosom, if we hope that we shall end this controversy without the sharpest conflicts. Let us consider the issue before we advance to those measures which must bring on the most trying and terrible struggle this country ever saw.” Thus spoke the younger Quincy. “Now that the hand is to the plough,” said others, “there must be no looking back;” and the whole assembly of seven thousand voted unanimously that the tea should not be landed.

¹ Dr. Thomas Young, a physician, and afterwards an
army-surgeon, was a zealous patriot, and a leading
speaker and writer of the time.

It had been dark for more than an hour. The church in which they met was dimly lighted; when, at a quarter before six, Rotch appeared, and satisfied the people by relating that the governor had refused him a pass, because his ship was not properly cleared. As soon as he had finished his report, Samuel Adams rose and gave the word: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” On the instant, a shout was heard at the porch; the war-whoop resounded; a body of men, forty or fifty in number, disguised as Indians, passed by the door, and, encouraged by Samuel Adams, Hancock, and others, repaired to Griffin’s Wharf, posted guards to prevent the intrusion of spies, took possession of the three tea-ships, and in about three hours, three hundred and forty chests of tea――being the whole quantity that had been imported――were emptied into the bay, without the least injury to other property. “All things were conducted with great order, decency, and perfect submission to government.” The people around, as they looked on, were so still that the noise of breaking open the tea-chests was distinctly heard. A delay of a few hours would have placed the tea under the protection of the admiral at the Castle. After the work was done, the town became as still and calm as if it had been holy time. The men from the country that very night carried back the great news to their villages.

* * * * *

CHIVALRY AND PURITANISM.

HISTORIANS have loved to eulogize the manners and virtues, the glory and the benefits, of chivalry. Puritanism accomplished for mankind far more. If it had the sectarian crime of intolerance, chivalry had the vices of dissoluteness. The knights were brave from gallantry of spirit; the Puritans, from the fear of God. The knights were proud of loyalty; the Puritans, of liberty. The knights did homage to monarchs, in whose smile they beheld honor, whose rebuke was the wound of disgrace; the Puritans, disdaining ceremony, would not bow at the name of Jesus, nor bend the knee to the King of kings. Chivalry delighted in outward show, favored pleasure, multiplied amusement, and degraded the human race by an exclusive respect for the privileged classes; Puritanism bridled the passions, commanded the virtues of self-denial, and rescued the name of man from dishonor. The former valued courtesy; the latter, justice. The former adorned society by graceful refinements; the latter founded national grandeur on universal education. The institutions of chivalry were subverted by the gradually increasing weight, and knowledge, and opulence of the industrious classes; the Puritans, rallying upon those classes, planted in their hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty.

* * * * *

THE POSITION OF THE PURITANS.

TO the colonists the maintenance of their unity seemed essential to their cordial resistance to English attempts at oppression. And why, said they, should we not insist upon this union? We have come to the outside of the world for the privilege of living by ourselves: why should we open our asylum to those in whom we can repose no confidence? The world cannot call this persecution. We have been banished to the wilderness: is it an injustice to exclude our oppressors, and those whom we dread as their allies, from the place which is to shelter us from their intolerance? Is it a great cruelty to expel from our abode the enemies of our peace, or even the doubtful friend? Will any man complain at being driven from among banished men, with whom he has no fellowship? of being refused admittance to a gloomy place of exile? The wide continent of America invited colonization; they claimed their own narrow domains for “the brethren.” Their religion was their life: they welcomed none but its adherents; they could not tolerate the scoffer, the infidel, or the dissenter; and the presence of the whole people was required in their congregation. Such was the system inflexibly established and regarded as the only adequate guarantee of the rising liberties of Massachusetts.

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JAMES PARTON.

WRITER OF BIOGRAPHY.

THERE can be no higher public service than that of the man who gives to his fellows, and particularly to the rising generation, good biographies of noble men. If this be true, then James Parton must be ranked among those who have done most for Americans, for the series of books which began many years ago with a life of Horace Greeley and which ended, only two months before the author’s death with the biography of Andrew Jackson, has made the heroes of American history real live men for thousands of readers, has stirred the patriotism and aroused the ambition of many a boyish student, and has won for himself the respect and esteem which belong to literary achievements.

The ancestry of James Parton was French; his family having emigrated to England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

He was born in Canterbury, England, in 1822, and could just remember walking across the fields, in black clothes, at his father’s funeral. The solemn memory which thus took a strong hold upon his mind, was, perhaps, partly responsible for his dislike for ecclesiastical forms and particularly for the practice of formal “mourning.” His mother brought her little family to New York a year after her husband’s death, and James was educated in the schools of that city and at White Plains, New York. At the latter place he was in a boarding school where so much attention was paid to religion that nearly every boy who passed through it was a member of the church. He seems to have found something repellent in the manner of presenting Christianity, and although he became a teacher in the school and later held for some years a similar position in Philadelphia, he sympathized less and less with it until he came avowedly to give up all belief in supernatural religion. He was a very successful teacher and took great delight in his work and would probably have devoted his life to the schoolroom, had he not found himself unable to continue the custom of opening the sessions of school with prayer and on this account been compelled to give up his position. Returning to New York he became associated with N. P. Willis in conducting the “Home Journal” and thus began his career as a literary man. While so employed he remarked one day to a New York publisher, that a most interesting book could be made of the career of Horace Greeley, then at the summit of his power and fame as an editor.

The suggestion resulted in his being commissioned to prepare such a biography, the publisher advancing the funds which enabled Mr. Parton to spend several months in collecting materials among the people in New Hampshire and Vermont, who had known Mr. Greeley in his early life. The book made a great sensation and at once gave its author high standing in the literary world. He began to contribute to a number of leading periodicals on political and literary topics, and soon appeared as a public lecturer and found himself one of the most notable men of the day.

Mr. Parton was married in 1856 to Mrs. Sara Payson Willis Eldredge, whose brother, the poet, N. P. Willis, was his former associate. Mrs. Willis was a popular contributor to “The New York Ledger” and other papers, under the pen-name of “Fanny Fern,” and Mr. Parton was soon engaged in similar work, and later became a member of the editorial staff of the “Ledger” and closely associated with Mr. Robert Bonner. This was of the greatest advantage to him, as it furnished a steady income, while allowing him leisure in which to devote himself to the more serious works which were his real contribution to literature and upon which his fame rests. His next book was “The Life and Times of Aaron Burr,” which was prepared from original sources, and which made Burr a somewhat less offensive character than he was at that time generally thought to be. He next prepared a “Life of Andrew Jackson,” which finally met with great success, but which, being published at the beginning of the War of the Rebellion and being subscribed for largely in the South, involved both author and publisher in considerable immediate loss. For twenty years he labored upon a “Life of Voltaire,” giving to the study of the great European Liberal of the last century all the time and energy he could spare from the contributions which he must regularly supply to the “Ledger” and “The Youth’s Companion.” The “Life of Voltaire” was his only biography of a European character, and while he thought it his best work, and while it is a wonderful picture, not only of the life and character of the great Frenchman, but of manners and morals in Europe in the eighteenth century, the public interest in its subject was not so great, and its success by no means so complete as that which greeted his American biographies. He was greatly interested in the robust character of Gen. Benjamin Butler, and his next book was the story of the administration of the city of New Orleans, by him. He then offered to the public the first comprehensive study of the “Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin” that had appeared. This is, by many, thought to be his best book. It was followed by a “Life of Jefferson,” and later by three books drawn from his contributions to periodicals, “Famous Americans of Recent Times,” “Noted Women of Europe and America,” and “Captains of Industry.” His last work was a volume upon “Andrew Jackson” for the “Great Commanders” series.

After the death of “Fanny Fern” Mr. Parton took up his residence in Newburyport, Massachusetts, with Miss Eldredge, his wife’s daughter, who was charged with the care of an orphaned niece. This child had for several years been a member of his family, and had closely engaged his affection. The relations thus established resulted presently in the marriage of Mr. Parton to Miss Eldredge, a union, which, until his death in 1892, filled his life with joy and happiness. Mr. Parton took an active interest in the social life about him, joining frankly in every village enterprise and gradually acquiring very great influence in the community.

* * * * *

OLD VIRGINIA.

WHEN John Rolfe, not yet husband of Pocahontas, planted the first tobacco seed in Jamestown, in 1612, good tobacco sold in London docks at five shillings a pound, or two hundred and fifty pounds sterling for a hogshead of a thousand pounds’ weight. Fatal facility of money-making! It was this that diverted all labor, capital and enterprise into one channel, and caused that first ship-load of Negroes in the James to be so welcome. The planter could have but one object,――to get more slaves in order to raise more tobacco. Hence the price was ever on the decline, dropping first from shillings to pence, and then going down the scale of pence, until it remained for some years at an average of about two pence a pound in Virginia and three pence in London. In Virginia it often fell below two pence; as, during brief periods of scarcity, it would rise to six and seven pence.

Old Virginia is a pathetic chapter in political economy. OLD Virginia, indeed! She reached decrepitude while contemporary communities were enjoying the first vigor of youth; while New York was executing the task which Virginia’s George Washington had suggested and foretold, that of connecting the waters of the great West with the sea; while New England was careering gayly over the ocean, following the whale to his most distant retreat, and feeding belligerent nations with her superabundance. One little century of seeming prosperity; three generations of spendthrifts; then the lawyer and sheriff! Nothing was invested, nothing saved for the future. There were no manufactures, no commerce, no towns, no internal trade, no great middle class. As fast as that virgin richness of soil could be converted into tobacco, and sold in the London docks, the proceeds were spent in vast, ugly mansions, heavy furniture, costly apparel, Madeira wine, fine horses, huge coaches, and more slaves. The planters lived as though virgin soil were revenue, not capital. They tried to maintain in Virginia the lordly style of English grandees, WITHOUT any Birmingham, ♦Staffordshire, Sheffield or London docks to pay for it. Their short-lived prosperity consisted of three elements,――virgin soil, low-priced slaves, high-priced tobacco. The virgin soil was rapidly exhausted; the price of negroes was always on the increase; and the price of tobacco was always tending downward. Their sole chance of founding a staple commonwealth was to invest the proceeds of their tobacco in something that would absorb their labor and yield them profit when the soil would no longer produce tobacco.

♦ ‘Stafordshire’ replaced with ‘Staffordshire’

But their laborers were ignorant slaves, the possession of whom destroyed their energy, swelled their pride, and dulled their understandings. Virginia’s case was hopeless from the day on which that Dutch ship landed the first twenty slaves; and, when the time of reckoning came, the people had nothing to show for their long occupation of one of the finest estates in the world, except great hordes of negroes, breeding with the rapidity of rabbits; upon whose annual increase Virginia subsisted, until the most glorious and beneficial of all wars set the white race free and gave Virginia her second opportunity.

All this was nobody’s fault. It was a combination of circumstances against which the unenlightened human nature of that period could not possibly have made head.

Few men saw anything wrong in slavery. No man knew much about the laws that control the prosperity of States. No man understood the science of agriculture. Every one with whom those proud and thoughtless planters dealt plundered them, and the mother country discouraged every attempt of the colonists to manufacture their own supplies. There were so many charges upon tobacco, in its course from the planter’s packing-house to the consumer’s pipe, that it was no very uncommon thing, in dull years, for the planter to receive from his agent in London, in return for his hogsheads of tobacco, not a pleasant sum of money, nor even a box of clothes, but a bill of charges which the price of the tobacco had not covered. One of the hardships of which the clergy complained was, that they did not “dare” to send their tobacco to London, for fear of being brought into debt by it, but had to sell it on the spot to speculators much below the London price. The old Virginia laws and records so abound in tobacco information that we can follow a hogshead of tobacco from its native plantation on the James to the shop of the tobacconist in London.

In the absence of farm vehicles――many planters who kept a coach had no wagon――each hogshead was attached to a pair of shafts with a horse between them, and “rolled” to a shed on the bank of the stream. When a ship arrived in the river from London, it anchored opposite each plantation which it served, and set ashore the portion of the cargo belonging to it, continuing its upward course until the hold was empty. Then, descending the river, it stopped at the different plantations, taking from each its hogsheads of tobacco, and the captain receiving long lists of articles to be bought in London with the proceeds of the tobacco. The rivers of Virginia, particularly the James and the Potomac, are wide and shallow, with a deep channel far from either shore, so that the transfer of the tobacco from the shore to the ship, in the general absence of landings, was troublesome and costly. To this day, as readers remember, the piers on the James present to the wondering passenger from the North a stretch of pine planks from an eighth to half a mile long. The ship is full at length, drops down past Newport News, salutes the fort upon Old Point Comfort, and glides out between the capes into the ocean.

* * * * *

How little the planters foresaw the desolation of their Province is affectingly attested by many of the relics of their brief affluence. They built their parish churches to last centuries, like the churches to which they were accustomed “at home.” In neighborhoods where now a congregation of fifty persons could not be collected, there are ruins of churches that were evidently built for the accommodation of numerous and wealthy communities; a forest, in some instances, has grown up all around them, making it difficult to get near the imperishable walls. Sometimes the wooden roof has fallen in, and one huge tree, rooted among the monumental slabs of the middle aisle, has filled all the interior. Other old churches long stood solitary in old fields, the roof sound, but the door standing open, in which the beasts found nightly shelter, and into which the passing horseman rode and sat on his horse before the altar till the storm passed. Others have been used by farmers as wagon-houses, by fishermen to hang their seines in, by gatherers of turpentine as storehouses. One was a distillery, and another was a barn. A poor drunken wretch reeled for shelter into an abandoned church of Chesterfield County――the county of the first Jeffersons――and he died in a drunken sleep at the foot of the reading-desk, where he lay undiscovered until his face was devoured by rats. An ancient font was found doing duty as a tavern punch-bowl; and a tombstone, which served as the floor of an oven, used to print memorial words upon loaves of bread. Fragments of richly-colored altar-pieces, fine pulpit-cloths, and pieces of old carving used to be preserved in farm-houses and shown to visitors. When the late Bishop Meade began his rounds, forty years ago, elderly people would bring to him sets of communion-plate and single vessels which had once belonged to the parish church, long deserted, and beg him to take charge of them.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

FRANCIS PARKMAN.

HISTORIAN OF THE FRENCH AND INDIAN CONFLICT.

TO FRANCIS PARKMAN, as much as to any one man, we owe the revival of interest in American history. His story of “The Pioneers of France in the New World,” “The Jesuits in North America,” “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West,” “The Old Régime in Canada,” “Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.” “A Half-Century of Conflict,” “Montcalm and Wolf,” and “The Conspiracy of Pontiac,” form a connected account of the rise and fall of the French power in America. They may well be described as one work, almost as one book. It was a great design formed when he was still a Harvard student, and held so tenaciously that no trials or disappointments could discourage him and no mountain of labor be too great for his untiring powers.

He was born in Boston in 1823, and was so fortunate as to inherit wealth which not only set him free to devote himself to his vocation, but enabled him to command an amount and kind of assistance absolutely essential to his peculiar work, and in his peculiar circumstances, and which could be secured only by large expenditure. He had traveled a year abroad before he graduated in 1844 and had made himself master of the French language and familiar with French history and institutions. By repeated summer journeys into the wilderness of northern New England, he had acquainted himself with the conditions of pioneer life and, to some extent of Indian warfare. He pursued the study of law for two years, but it may well be supposed that these studies yielded larger results in a knowledge of the history of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and of the facts in that history bearing upon the great conflict in the new world, than in any definite grasp of the intricacies of the law itself.

In the spring of 1846, he joined his cousin, Quincy A. Shaw, in the hazardous experiment of spending the summer with the Dacotah Indians, then living in an entirely savage condition east of the Rocky mountains. The two young men carried out their undertaking at the continuous risk of their lives, but it supplied Parkman with a minute knowledge of Indian thoughts and Indian ways which equipped him, as probably no other man was ever equipped, for writing the history in which Indians were among the chief actors. But the cost was very great. While among the Indians he was attacked by serious illness and it was one of the savage customs of his Indian companions that he who confessed sickness was to be immediately tomahawked. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to fight off his disease as best he could and make what show was possible, of health and vigor. He succeeded, but the strain was so great that it left him apparently disabled. His physicians assured him that he could not live, and for three years he was compelled to suspend all intellectual work and live a life as absolutely quiet as was possible. The remainder of his life was devoted to the books which we have named. For the greater portion of this fifty years he could not use his eyes for more than five continuous minutes, and he was compelled to exercise the greatest care not to bring on final collapse by exceeding the few hours per day which he could safely devote to mental labor. Every one of his books was dictated to a relative, who cared for every detail of its preparation for the press. In gathering the materials for his histories he visited Europe seven times, and constantly employed a number of experts in copying important documents for his use. He very early became master of everything that had been printed which bore upon his subject, and realized that his main dependence must be upon manuscripts――private letters, public documents, official reports――scattered through public and private libraries in Europe and America, often unknown and frequently almost inaccessible. An interesting example of his persistency is in his continuing to search for fifteen years for a volume of letters from Montcalm in Canada, which Montcalm had requested to have burned, but which Parkman believed to exist, and which was finally discovered in a private collection of manuscripts.

The Massachusetts Historical Society possesses an oaken cabinet in which are stored some two hundred folio volumes of manuscript copies of important documents, the gift of Mr. Parkman; to Harvard College he gave a most interesting collection of fac-simile maps.

Mr. Parkman was not a recluse, but on the contrary delighted in society, and indulged his liking as far as was possible with a due regard to saving his strength for his beloved work. He took the most lively interest in public affairs, and for a number of years was one of the corporation of Harvard University.

An interesting side of Mr. Parkman’s life was his interest in horticulture. He became the owner in 1854 of a property on the shore of Jamaica Pond, and in this beautiful place devoted himself in the intervals of literary labor, and during the several periods of two or three years when he was absolutely compelled to abstain, to the culture of flowers. He made long continued and careful experiments in hybridizing lillies and other flowers and produced a number of new varieties one of which, a magnificent lilly was given his name by the English horticulturist who undertook to put the beautiful plant upon the market. He published “The Book of Roses,” held a professorship in the Bussey Institution, and was in 1886 president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. But his principal workshop was a plain, comfortable room at the top of his sister’s house on Beacon Hill, in Boston, where with an open fire and convenient bookshelves and the willing help of friends and relatives he completed his task in 1892. It was at his suburban home which had supplied occupation and entertainment when driven from his work and whose beauties were so largely his own creation, that, two years later, he passed away.

This, in brief, is the life of the man who has made La Salle and Montcalm live again for delighted thousands of nineteenth century readers. The study of our nation’s history is coming to take its proper position in our colleges and schools, our libraries are compelled to set apart more and more shelf-room for books which tell the story of the making of America and of our national life. There is no chapter in all this history more vivid, more full of action, more crowded with the conflict between high and ignoble purpose, nor one which bears a more important relation to our national development than that which tells how the Frenchman came, how he made friends with the Indian, how he contended for empire and was defeated. And no one of these chapters has been written with more absolute fidelity to the actual facts in their proper relation. It is written in a style whose grace and elegance of diction, clearness and dignity of expression, completeness and accuracy of statement bring back the Indian and the Frenchman, the priest and the _voyageur_ and make them live and move before our eyes. It was a field unoccupied, a period of history interesting, inviting, and complete in itself. Few historians have embraced such an opportunity, of still fewer can it be said that their work is so well done that it need never be done again.

He was half a century at his work, untiringly; as has been well said, “Nowhere can we find a better illustration of the French critic’s definition of a great life――a thought conceived in youth and realized in later years.”

* * * * *

THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES.

THE four northern colonies were known collectively as New England; Massachusetts may serve as a type of all. It was a mosaic of little village republics, firmly cemented together, and formed into a single body politic through representatives sent to the “General Court,” at Boston. Its government, originally theocratic, now tended towards democracy, ballasted as yet by strong traditions of respect for established worth and ability, as well as by the influence of certain families prominent in affairs for generations. Yet there were no distinct class-lines, and popular power, like popular education, was widely diffused.

Practically Massachusetts was almost independent of the Mother Country. Its people were purely English, of good ♦yeoman stock, with an abundant leaven drawn from the best of the Puritan gentry; but their original character had been somewhat modified by changed conditions of life. A harsh and exacting creed, with its stiff formalism, and its prohibition of wholesome recreation; excess in the pursuit of gain――the only resource left to energies robbed of their natural play; the struggle for existence on a hard and barren soil; and the isolation of a narrow village life――joined to produce in the meaner sorts qualities which were unpleasant, and sometimes repulsive.

♦ ‘yoeman’ replaced with ‘yeoman’

Puritanism was not an unmixed blessing. Its view of human nature was dark, and its attitude was one of repression. It strove to crush out not only what is evil, but much that is innocent and salutary. Human nature so treated will take its revenge, and for every vice that it loses find another instead. Nevertheless, while New England Puritanism bore its peculiar crop of faults, it also produced many sound and good fruits. An uncommon vigor, joined to the hardy virtues of a masculine race, marked the New England type. The sinews, it is true, were hardened at the expense of blood and flesh――and this literally as well as figuratively; but the staple of character was a sturdy conscientiousness, an understanding courage, ♦patriotism, public sagacity and a strong good sense.

♦ ‘partiotism’ replaced with ‘patriotism’