VII. HARVARD SIXTY YEARS AGO…

VII. HARVARD SIXTY YEARS AGO

I do not think Harvard College had changed very much when I entered it on my sixteenth birthday in the year 1842 either in manners, character of students or teachers, or the course of instruction, for nearly a century. There were some elementary lectures and recitations in astronomy and mechanics. There was a short course of lectures on chemistry, accompanied by exhibiting a few experiments. But the students had no opportunity for laboratory work. There was a delightful course of instruction from Dr. Walker in ethics and metaphysics. The college had rejected the old Calvinistic creed of New England and substituted in its stead the strict Unitarianism of Dr. Ware and Andrews Norton,--a creed in its substance hardly more tolerant or liberal than that which it had supplanted. There was also some instruction in modern languages,--German, French and Italian,--all of very slight value. But the substance of the instruction consisted in learning to translate rather easy Latin and Greek, writing Latin, and courses in algebra and geometry not very far advanced.

The conditions of admission were quite easy. They were such as a boy of fourteen of good capacity, who could read and write the English language and had gone through some simple book of arithmetic, could easily master in two years. There were three or four schools were the boys were pretty well fitted, so that they could translate Cicero and Virgil, Nepos and Sallust and Caesar and Xenophon and Homer. The Boston Latin School, the Roxbury Latin School, Phillips Academy at Exeter and Phillips Academy at Andover and Mrs. Ripley's school at Waltham were the best schools for this purpose. The boys from the Boston Latin School generally took their places at the head of the class when they entered. Next came the best scholars from the other schools I have named. But the bulk of the pupils were very poorly fitted.

There was, as it seems to me in looking back, little instruction of much value. The good scholars and the bad went to the recitation together. The good ones lost the hour, and the poor scholars got the benefit of hearing the good ones recite. Their mistakes were corrected by the professor. They handed in written exercises in Latin and Greek which were examined by the instructor and the faults corrected, and returned. There were, during the last three years, declamations once a month, where the boy recited some piece of prose or poetry in the presence of the class, but got very little instruction or criticism from the professor. Then, in the last three years, English themes were required. The subjects were given out by Professor Channing, himself a most accomplished and admirable scholar in his line. He seemed to choose his subjects with a view of taxing the ingenuity of the boy to find anything to say about them instead of taking something which the boy knew about and devoting himself to improve his English style in expressing his thought. Channing was a good critic. His published lectures on rhetoric and oratory, now almost wholly forgotten, remind one of Matthew Arnold in their delicate and discriminating touch. He had a face and figure something like that of Punch in the frontispiece of that magazine. His method was to take the themes which the boys handed in one week, look them over himself, then, a week after, meet the class, call the boys in succession to sit down in a chair by the side of his table, read out passages from the theme, and ridicule them before the others. It was a terrible ordeal for a bashful or awkward boy. Those of a more robust nature, or whose performance had nothing ridiculous in it, profited by the discipline. But it certainly took all the starch and courage out of me. I never sat down to write my theme without fancying that grinning and scornful countenance looking at my work. So I used to write as few sentences as I thought would answer so that I should not be punished for failure to bring in any theme at all, and never attempted to do my best.

But the Faculty themselves were certainly an assemblage of very able men. Making all the allowance for the point of view, and that I was then a youth looking at my elders who had become famous, and that I am now looking as an old man at young men, I still think there can be no comparison between the college administrators of fifty years ago and those of to-day. It was then the policy of the college to call into its service great men who had achieved eminent distinction in the world without. It is now its policy to select for its service promising youth, in the hope that they will become great. Perhaps the last method is the best where it succeeds. But the effect of failure is most mischievous. Presidents Quincy, Everett, Walker and Sparks administered in succession the office of President during my connection with the Academic Department and the Law School, although Dr. Walker's inauguration was not until later. Each of them in his own way was among the first men of his time. Quincy had been an eminent statesman, a famous orator, and a most successful mayor of Boston. Edward Everett had been in his early youth one of the most famous pulpit orators of the country, afterward a distinguished Member of Congress, Governor of the Commonwealth, Minister to England, and Senator of the United States. He was a consummate orator, on whose lips thousands and thousands of his countrymen had hung entranced. He was, what is less generally remembered now, perhaps the ablest and most accomplished diplomatist ever in the public service of the United States. Jared Sparks was a profound student of history, somewhat dull as a narrator, but of unerring historic judgment. I suppose he would be placed by all our writers of history with great unanimity at the head of American historic investigators. James Walker was a great preacher and a profound thinker. In the judgment of his hearers, young and old, he was probably deemed nearly or quite the foremost of American preachers.

That I may not be supposed to imply any disparagement of the present accomplished head of Harvard, let me say that while each of the men I have named had done a great work in life and achieved a great fame before he came to the Presidency, President Eliot has, in my opinion, achieved an equal fame and performed an equal work since he came to it.

A like policy prevailed in those days in the choice of instructors in the Law School. Judge Story, the senior professor, died just before I graduated from the College. His fame as a jurist was known throughout Europe. He was undoubtedly the most learned judge in the United States. Chief Justice Marshall and Chief Justice Shaw of Massachusetts doubtless excelled him in intellectual vigor. Chancellor Kent rivalled him as a writer upon law. But he had no other rival among judges or commentators in this country,--few anywhere. He was unquestionably, at the time of his death, the most famous teacher of law in the civilized world. His associate professor, Greenleaf, was an admirable lawyer, who, before he went to Harvard, had had a great practice in Maine, and made some good arguments in the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Story was succeeded by Chief Justice Joel Parker of New Hampshire, a very eminent jurist, who was saturated with the old learning of special pleading and real property. He would have been a fit associate for Coke or Saunders, and would have held his own anywhere with either.

There was nothing in the teaching of Latin or Greek to inspire the student with any love of Greek or Latin literature. The professor never pointed out its beauties or illustrated the text in any way. The students, in succession, were called upon to construe a few lines, reading one or two Greek words and then giving their English equivalents. The time of the good scholar was taken up in hearing the recitation of the poor scholar and so very largely wasted. I had four or five persons in my class who became afterward eminent classical scholars. I do not believe that when we graduated there were more than four men in the class who could write a decent Latin sentence without the laborious use of grammar and dictionary. I doubt whether there was more than one, certainly there were not more than three, who could do the same thing in Greek. I do not suppose there was a man in the class who could have spoken either language with ease.

Yet, somehow, the graduates of Harvard got a good intellectual training from the University. The rough country boy, if he had it in him, came out at his graduation a gentleman in behavior and in character. He was able to take hold of life with great vigor. The average age of graduation I suppose was twenty. Not more than three years were spent in studying a profession. In some few cases, the graduate got a little money by teaching for a year. But the graduates of Harvard College and Harvard Law School were apt to take quite rapidly the high places of the profession. That was true then much more than it is now.

There were many persons who graduated before my time or shortly afterward whose high place in the public life of the Commonwealth and of the country was assured before they were thirty years old. Edward Everett was called to the pulpit of Brattle Street Church at the age of nineteen. He succeeded in that pulpit Joseph Stevens Buckminster, who was himself settled over that important parish at the age of twenty-one and was a wonderful pulpit orator. Edward Everett preached a sermon when he was twenty-four years old before a large audience in the Representatives Chamber at Washington which was heard with breathless silence. Rufus King said it was the best sermon he ever heard, and Harrison Gray Otis was affected to tears. Benjamin R. Curtis was admitted to the bar in Boston when he was twenty-two years old and shortly after was retained in a very important case. It is said that an old deputy sheriff, who had just heard Curtis's opening argument, was met in the street and asked if anything was going on in court. "Going on?" was the reply. "There's a young chap named Curtis up there has just opened a case so that all Hell can't close it." I suppose Edward Everett Hale and James Freeman Clarke were almost as famous in the pulpit when they were twenty-five or twenty-six years old as they ever were afterward. I might extend the catalogue indefinitely. Where is there to be found to-day at the New England bar or in the New England pulpit a man under thirty of whom it can be said that his place among the great men of his profession is assured? It will not do to say in answer to this that it takes a greater man in this generation to fill such a place than it took in other days. That is not true. The men of those generations have left their work behind them. It does not suffer in comparison with that of their successors. There was something in the college training of that day, imperfect as were its instruments, and slender as were its resources, from which more intellectual strength in the pupil was begotten than there is in the college training of the present generation. I will not undertake to account for it. But I think it was due in large part to the personality of the instructors. A youth who contemplated with a near and intimate knowledge the large manhood of Josiah Quincy; who listened to the eloquence of James Walker, or heard his expositions of the principal systems of ethics or metaphysics; or who sat at the feet of Judge Story, as he poured forth the lessons of jurisprudence in a clear and inexhaustible stream, caught an inspiration which transfigured the very soul of the pupil.

Josiah Quincy, "old Quin" as we loved to call him, was a very simple and a very high character. He was born in Boston, February 4, 1772, just before the Revolutionary War. It was said, I have no doubt truly, that the nurse who attended his mother at his birth went from that house to the wife of Copley, the painter, when her son, Lord Lyndhurst, was born. Copley was a Tory, though a patriot and an ardent lover of his country. His departure from Boston made Lord Lyndhurst an Englishman. Quincy entered early into politics. He was a candidate for Congress in the last century before he was twenty-five years old. I heard him say once that the Democrats called for a cradle to rock the Federal candidate. He was a good type of the old Massachusetts Federalist,--brave, manly, sincere, of a broad and courageous statesmanship, but distrustful of the people and not understanding their temper. He made some very powerful speeches in the House of Representatives, attacking the greed and office-seeking of that time. His eloquence was something of the style of the famous Irish orators. One of his passages describing the office-seekers tumbling over each other like pigs to a trough will be long remembered. He hated Jefferson and moved his impeachment in the House of Representatives,--a motion for which he got no vote but his own. He retired disgusted from National public life, became Mayor of Boston, an office which he filled with much distinction, and then was called to the Presidency of Harvard, mainly because of his business capacity. The finances of the University were then in a sad condition. He put them on an excellent footing. He was very fond of the boys and they of him, although he was rough and hasty in his manners. While I was in college (although I happened to be at home that day and did not see the affair) some of the boys had got into some serious rows in Boston one Saturday. They had undertaken to wear the Oxford cap and gown. They were ridiculed by the populace in Boston, and a good many fights were the consequence. They were driven from the streets, and in the afternoon a lot of roughs took hold of a long rope, as if they belonged to an engine company, ran out to Cambridge across the bridge, and proposed to attack the college buildings. Old Quin gathered the students together at the gate and told the boys to keep within the yard and not to attack anybody unless they were attacked, but to permit none of those men to come within the gate. The old fellow was ready to head the students and a fight was expected. But the police gathered, and finally the Boston roughs were persuaded to depart in peace.

The old gentleman's heart always warmed to the son of an old Federalist. I had to visit his study a good many times, I regret to say, to receive some well-deserved admonitions. But the interview always ended in an inquiry after my father and some jolly, or at least kindly utterance about myself. One of my classmates gave an account in rhyme of one of these interviews which I wish I could repeat. I can only remember two lines:

Quin deigned a grin, perforce, And Hoar a roar, of course.

He died in 1864 at the age of ninety-two, preserving to the last his mental vigor and his ardent interest in public affairs. During the darkest period of the War he never lost his hope or faith. He fell on the ice and broke his hip a little while before his death. He was treated by the somewhat savage method of the surgery of the time. Dr. George E. Ellis, from whom I had the story, went to see him one day at his house on Park Street and found the old man lying on his bed with a weight hanging from his foot, which projected over the bed, to keep the bones in their place and the muscles from contracting. He said to Mr. Quincy's daughter: "You have been shut up here a long time. Now go and take a walk round the Common and let me stay with your father." Miss Quincy went out and the old man kept Dr. Ellis so full of interest by his cheerful and lively talk that he never once thought to ask him how he was getting along. When Miss Quincy returned, he took his leave and had got downstairs when the omission occurred to him. He went back to the chamber and said to Mr. Quincy: "I forgot to ask you how your leg is." The old fellow brought his hand down with a slap upon the limb and said: "Damn the leg. I want to see this business settled."

When Felton was inaugurated as President, Gov. Banks in performing his part of the ceremony of presenting the charter and the keys to the new officer alluded in his somewhat grandiloquent way to four of Felton's predecessors, Everett, Sparks, Walker and Quincy, who were upon the stage. Speaking of Quincy he said: "He would be reckoned among honorable men, though their number were reduced to that of the mouths of the Nile or the gates of Thebes."

Felton, the Greek professor, was the heartiest and jolliest of men. He was certainly one of the best examples of a fully rounded scholarship which this country or perhaps any country ever produced. He gave before the Lowell Institute a course of lectures on Greece Ancient and Modern, into which is compressed learning enough to fill a large encyclopaedia. He also edited two or three Greek plays and an edition of Homer, which was extensively used as a text-book.

Professor Felton was a very impulsive man, though of great dignity and propriety in his general bearing. He had some theories of his own as to the matter of pure and correct English and was very much disgusted if anybody transgressed them. His brother, John Felton, of the class of 1847, afterward the foremost lawyer on the Pacific Coast, was altogether the best and most brilliant scholar in his class. He was reported to the Faculty just before his graduation for the offence of swearing in the College Yard, an offence which was punished by what was called a public admonition which involved a considerable loss of rank and a letter to the parent or guardian of the offender. The Faculty, in consideration of John Felton's excellent scholarship, instead of the ordinary punishment directed that Professor Felton should admonish his brother of his fault in private. The professor was some eighteen or twenty years the elder and respected by his brother rather as a father than as a brother. He sent for John to his study and told him the nature of the complaint, and proceeded: "I cannot tell you how mortified I am that my brother, in whose character and scholarship I had taken so much pride, who stood so high in his class, should have been reported to the Faculty for this vulgar and wicked offence." John said, with great contrition: "I am exceedingly sorry. It was under circumstances of great provocation. I have never been guilty of such a thing before. I never in my life have been addicted to profanity." "Damnation, John," interposed the professor, "how often have I told you the word is profaneness and not profanity?" It is needless to say that the sermon ended at that point.

But the most interesting single figure in the Harvard Faculty in my day was James Walker. He was a man of quiet dignity, and of modest bearing. He appeared rather awkward when he walked, as if there were some want of strength in the feet or ankles. He heard the classes in my time in Jouffroy and Cousin and in Butler's "Analogy." His method was to require the boy to get into his mind some account of a system or special course of reasoning of the author and to state it at considerable length in his own language. I think all that I got out of college that was of much use to me came from this training in James Walker's recitation-room, except that I think I got some capacity for cross-examining witnesses which was very useful to me afterward from reading Plato's dialogues and getting familiar with Socrates's method of reducing a sophist ad absurdum. But Dr. Walker's throne was the pulpit of the College Chapel. He used to preach four Sundays in each of the two terms. He had a beautiful head, a deep but clear voice, a deliberate manner and a power of emphasizing his weighty thoughts which I have never seen surpassed by any orator. He had a small and beautiful hand of which it is said, though such a thing is hard to believe of him, he was somewhat vain. But his only gesture was to bring very infrequently the back of his hand down upon the cushion of the pulpit before him. The ticking of the clock in the College Chapel was inaudible when the chapel was empty. But it ticked out clear and loud upon the strained ears of the auditors who were waiting in the pauses of his sentences. I can remember his sermons now. They are admirable to read, although, like other eloquence, their life and sprit is lost without the effect of speech. There was one on the text, "Thou shalt say no," which no hearer, I venture to say, ever forgot to the day of his death. There was another, on the control of the thoughts, from the text, "Leading into captivity every thought." This made a deep impression on the students. I seem to hear the tones of his voice now. The Doctor described with a terrific effect the thinking over in imagination scenes of vice by the youth who seemed to the world outside to fall suddenly from virtue. He said there was no such thing as a sudden fall from virtue. The scene had been enacted in thought and the man had become rotten before the time of the outward act.

"Sometimes the novice in crime thinks himself ready to act when he is not; as appears from his hesitancy and reluctance when the moment for action arrives. If, however, this unexpected recoil of his nature does not induce him to change his purpose altogether, he knows but too well how to supply the defect in training for sin. If we could look into his heart, we should find him at his accursed rehearsals again. A few more lessons, and the blush and the shudder will pass away, never to return."

This is tame enough in the recital. But I dare say there are old men who will read these pages to whom it will bring back the never-forgotten scenes of more than fifty years ago. The Doctor had a great gift of sententious speech, not only in his written discourses, but in his ordinary conversation or his instruction from the professor's chair. He was speaking one day of Combe and of something disrespectful he had said about the English metaphysicians. "What does Mr. Combe mean?" said the Doctor. "I make no apology for the English metaphysicians. They have made their mistakes. They have their shortcomings. But they are surely entitled to the common privilege of Englishmen --to be judged by their peers." He was speaking one day of some rulers who had tried to check the rising tide of some reform by persecuting its leaders. "Fools!" said the Doctor. "They thought if they could but wring the neck of the crowing cock it would never be day."

One of the delightful characters and humorists connected with Harvard was Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, tutor in Greek. He was a native of Thessaly, born near Mount Pelion and educated in the convent of the Greek Church on Mount Sinai. It is said, although such instances are rare, that he was of the purest Greek blood. At any rate, his face and head were of the Greek type. He was a man of wonderful learning, --I dare say the best Greek scholar of his generation, whether in Europe or America. He was a very simple-hearted person in dealing with ordinary affairs. But his conversation and his instruction in the class-room were full of wit and sense. He used to tell a story, whether of his father or his grandfather I am not sure, that one night very late he was sitting in his warehouse alone when two men entered and told him they were come to kill him. He asked them why they wished to kill him, and they told him that they had been hired by an enemy of his. "Well," said the old man, "what are you to be paid?" They told him the sum. He said: "I will give you twice as much to kill him." Accordingly they accepted the offer and went away, leaving the old fellow alive, kept their bargain with him and killed his enemy.

Sophocles had a great love of little children and a curious love of chickens which he treated as pets and liked to tame and to play with, squatting down on the ground among them as if he were a rooster himself. It is said that during his last sickness the doctor directed that he should have chicken broth. He indignantly rejected it, and declared he would not eat a creature that he loved.

In what I have said about Professor Channing I am describing him and his method in instruction faithfully as it seemed to me at the time. It is quite possible I may be wrong. I am sure that the better scholars and the youths who were much better in every way than I was at that time of my life who were his pupils will dissent from my opinion and be shocked at what I say. So it is quite likely that I am in fault and not he. I have read again lately his book on Rhetoric and Oratory since what I said a little while ago was dedicated, and I wish to reaffirm my high opinion of the book. For fresh, racy and correct style, for clear perception and exquisite literary taste, it is one of the best books on the subject, as it one of the best books on any subject ever written by an American. His mistake was, in large measure, the prevalent mistake of the College in his time,--the use of ridicule and severity instead of sympathy as a means of correcting the faults incident to youth. It was the fault of the College, both of instructors and of the students. Dr. Walker in one of his public addresses speaks with commendation of "the storm of merciless ridicule" which overwhelms young men who are addicted to certain errors which he is criticising.

The Latin professor was Charles Beck, Ph.D. He was a native of Heidelberg. He had been compelled to leave Prussia because of his love of liberty. He had studied theology, and had published a treatise on gymnastics, in which he was accomplished. We read with him Terence and Plautus, the Medea of Seneca, Horace, and probably some Latin prose, which I have forgotten. He was a very learned Latin scholar. I do not know whether he cared anything about poetry or eloquence or the philosophy of the Roman authors or no. Certainly he did nothing to indicate to us that he had any such interest or to stimulate any such interest in his pupils. He was strict to harshness in dealing with his class. The only evidence of enthusiasm I ever witnessed in Dr. Beck was this: He brought into the classroom one day an old fat German with very dirty hands and a dirty shirt. He had a low forehead and a large head with coarse curling hair which looked as if it had not seen a comb or brush for a quarter of a century. We looked with amazement at this figure. He went out before the recitation was over. But Dr. Beck said to us: "This is Dr. ----, gentlemen. He is a most admiwable scholar." (This was the Doctor's pronunciation of the r.) "He has wead Cicewo through every year for nearly fifty years for the sake of settling some important questions. He has discovered that while necesse est may be used indifferently either with the accusative and infinitive, or with ut with the subjunctive, necesse ewat can only be used before ut with the subjunctive. I should think it well worth living for to have made that discovery."

I suppose we all thought when we graduated that Dr. Beck was a man of harsh and cold nature. But I got acquainted with him later in life and found him one of the most genial and kind-hearted of men. He was a member of the Legislature. He was a Free Soiler and an Abolitionist, liberally contributing to the Sanitary Commission, and to all agencies for the benefit of the soldiers and the successful prosecution of the war.

He came vigorously to the support of Horace Mann in his famous controversy with Mr. Webster. Mann had vigorously attacked Webster, and Webster in return had spoken of Mann as one of that class of persons known among the Romans as Captatores Verborum, which he supposed to mean one of those nice persons who catch up other person's words for the sake of small criticism and fault-finding. Mr. Mann replied that Webster was wrong in his Latin, and the words Captatores Verborum meant toad- eaters, or men who hang on the words of great men to praise and flatter them, of which he found some conspicuous modern examples among Webster's supporters. Professor Felton, the Greek professor, who was a staunch friend of Webster, attacked Mann and charged him with ignorance of Latin. But Dr. Beck came to the rescue, and his authority as a Latin scholar was generally conceded to outweigh that of Webster and Felton put together.

One of the most brilliant men among the Faculty was Professor Benjamin Peirce. Undoubtedly he was the foremost American mathematician of his time. He dwelt without a companion in the lofty domain of the higher mathematics.

A privacy of glorious light is thine.

He was afterward the head of the Coast Survey. He had little respect for pupils who had not a genius for mathematics, and paid little attention to them. He got out an edition of Peirce's Algebra while I was in college. He distributed the sheets among the students and would accept, instead of a successful recitation, the discovery of a misprint on its pages. The boys generally sadly neglected his department, which was made elective, I think, after the sophomore year. At the examinations, which were held by committees appointed by the Board of Overseers, he always gave to the pupil the same problem that had been given to him in the last preceding recitation. So the boys were prepared to make a decent appearance. He used to dress in a very peculiar fashion, wearing a queer little sack and striped trousers which made him look sometimes as if he were a salesman in a Jew clothing-store. He had a remarkably clear and piercing black eye. One night one of the students got into the belfry and attached a slender thread to the tongue of the bell, contrived to lock the door which led to the tower and carry off the key, then went to his room in the fourth story of Massachusetts Hall and began to toll the bell. The students and the Faculty and proctors gathered, but nobody could explain the mysterious ringing of the bell until Peirce came upon the scene. His sharp eye perceived the slender line and it was traced to the room where the roguish fellow who was doing the mischief thought himself secure. He was detected and punished.

Peirce gained great fame in the scientific world by his controversy with Leverrier. Leverrier, as is well known, discovered some perturbations in the movement of the planet Herschel, now more commonly called Uranus, which were not accounted for by known conditions. From that he reasoned that there must be another planet in the neighborhood and, on turning his glass to the point where his calculations told him the disturbing body must be, he discovered the planet sometimes called by his name and sometimes called Neptune. This discovery created a great sensation and a burst of admiration for the fortunate discoverer. Peirce maintained the astounding proposition that there was an error in Leverrier's calculations, and that the discovery was a fortunate accident. I believe that astronomers finally came to his conclusion. I remember once going into Boston in the omnibus when Peirce got in with a letter in his hand that he had just got from abroad and saying with great exultation to Professor Felton, who happened to be there, "Gauss says I am right."

I got well acquainted with Professor Peirce after I left College. He used to come to Washington after I came into public life. I found him one of the most delightful of men. His treatise "Ideality in the Physical Sciences," and one or two treatises of a religious character which he published, are full of a lofty and glowing eloquence. He gave a few lectures in mathematics to the class which, I believe, were totally incomprehensible to every one of his listeners with the possible exception of Child. He would take the chalk in his hand and begin in his shrill voice, "If we take," then he would write an equation in algebraic characters, "thus we have," following it by another equation or formula. By the time he had got his blackboard half covered, he would get into an enthusiasm of delight. He would rub the legs of his pantaloons with his chalky hands and proceed on his lofty pathway, apparently unconscious of his auditors. What has become of all those wonderful results of genius I do not know. He was invited to a banquet by the Harvard Alumni in New York where he was the guest of honor. Mr. Choate expressed a grave doubt whether the professor could dine comfortably without a blackboard.

John W. Webster gave lectures to the boys on chemistry and geology which they were compelled to attend. I think the latter the most tedious human compositions to which I ever listened. The doctor seemed a kind-hearted, fussy person. He was known to the students by the sobriquet of Sky-rocket Jack, owing to his great interest in having some fireworks at the illumination when President Everett was inaugurated. There was no person among the Faculty at Cambridge who seemed less likely to commit such a bloody and cruel crime as that for which he was executed. The only thing that I know which indicated insensibility was that when he was lecturing one day in chemistry he told us that in performing the experiment which he was then showing us a year or two before with some highly explosive gas a copper vessel had burst and a part of it had been thrown with great violence into the back of the bench where a row of students were sitting, but fortunately the student who sat in that place was absent that day and nobody was hurt. He added drily: "The President sent for me and told me I must be more careful. He said I should feel very badly indeed if I had killed one of the students. And I should."

There was nothing in my time equivalent to what used to be called a rebellion in the older days, and I believe no such event has occurred for the last fifty years. The nearest to it was a case which arose in the senior class when I was a freshman. One of the seniors, who was a rather dull-witted but well-meaning youth, concluded that it was his duty to inform the Faculty of offences committed by his classmates, a proceeding it is needless to say contrary to all the boys' sentiments as to honorable conduct. Some windows had been broken, including his. He informed the Faculty of the person who had broken them, who was rusticated for a short time as punishment. The next day being Saturday, this informer, dressed up in his best, was starting for Boston, when he was seized by six of his classmates and held under the College pump until he received a sound ducking. He seized the finger of one of them with his teeth and bit it severely, though it was protected somewhat by a ring. He complained of five of the six, who were forthwith suspended until the next Commencement, losing, of course, their rank in the class and their chances for taking part in the Commencement exercises. One of them, of whom he omitted to tell, was much disturbed by the omission and demanded of the informer why he left him out. He said that he had rather a pity for him, as he had already been suspended once and he supposed the new offence would lead to his being expelled. Whereupon he said, "I will give you some reason to tell of me," and proceeded to administer a sound caning. That was at once reported to the Faculty. The offender was expelled, and criminal proceedings had which resulted in a fine.

We had some delightful lectures from Longfellow on the literature of the Middle Ages. He read us some of his own original poems and some beautiful translations. All the substance of these lectures I think is to be found in his book entitled "The Poets and Poetry of the Middle Ages." I do not see that we gained anything of solid instruction by having them read to us that we could not have got as well by reading them. We had also a course of lectures from Jared Sparks on American history. They were generally dull and heavy, but occasionally made intensely interesting when he described some stirring event of the Revolutionary War. We hung breathless on his account of the treason of Arnold and its detection and the class burst out into applause when he ended,--a thing the like of which never happened in any time in College. There was a little smattering of instruction in modern languages, but it was not of much value. We had a French professor named Viau whom the boys tormented unmercifully. He spoke English very imperfectly, and his ludicrous mistakes destroyed all his dignity and rendered it impossible to maintain any discipline in the class. He would break out occasionally in despair, "Young zhentlemen, you do not respect me and I have not given you any reason to." A usual punishment for misconduct in those days was to deduct a certain number of the marks which determined rank from the scale of the offending student. M. Viau used to hold over us this threat, which, I believe, he never executed, "Young zhentlemen, I shall be obliged to deduce from you."

He was followed by the Comte de la Porte, a gentleman in bearing and of a good deal of dignity. The Count was asked one day by Nat Perry, a member of the class from New Hampshire who was very proud of his native State and always boasting of the exploits in war and peace of the people of New Hampshire, what sort of a French scholar M. Viau, his predecessor, was. The Count replied: "He was not a fit teacher for young gentlemen. He was an ignorant person from the Provinces. He did not have the Parisian accent. He did not know the French language in its purity. It would be as if somebody were to undertake to teach English who came from New Hampshire or some such place." The Count said this in entire innocence. It was received with a roar of laughter by the class, and the indignation and wrath of Perry may well be imagined.

Another instructor in modern languages was Dr. Bachi. He was a very accomplished gentleman. His translations of Italian poetry, especially of Dante and Tasso, were exquisite. It was like hearing a sweet and soft music to hear him read his beloved poets, and he had a singular gift of getting hold of the most sweet and mellifluous English words for his rendering. "And he did open his mouth, and from it there did come out words sweeter than honey." He once translated to us a passage in the Inferno where the damned are suspended, head downwards, with the burning flames resting upon the soles of their feet. "Ah," exclaimed Bachi, "they do curl up their toes."

My class is not one of the very famous classes of the College. Certainly it does not equal the class of 1802 or the class of 1829. But I think it was, on the whole, very considerably above the average. In it were several persons who became eminent scholars and teachers, and some who have been eminent in other walks of life. I think, on the whole, its two most distinguished members, entitled to hold a greater place than any others in the memory of future generations, were Dr. Calvin Ellis, Dean of the Medical Faculty of Harvard, who died in 1883, and Judge Nathan Webb, of the United States District Court of Maine, who died in 1902. Neither of these had very high rank in the class. The first half of the class used to have parts assigned at Commencement in those days. Ellis's part was very nearly the lowest of the first half. Webb's was higher. Webb entered college very young. He was quite small in his stature and was known all though college as "little Webb." He grew to a stature of about six feet after he left college. He did, I believe, some very hard work indeed in his senior year. Although universally liked and respected by his classmates, he was not regarded as among the eminent scholars. Ellis performed all his duties in College very fairly but did not seem to care much for rank or for scholarship until, in the senior year, some lectures on anatomy were delivered by old Dr. John C. Warren. Ellis was filled with enthusiasm, as were some of the other members of the class. He and I got a skull somewhere and studied bones, processes, and sutures, both meaning to be physicians. My zeal lasted but a few weeks. Ellis's never abated until his death. He was at the head of his profession in the country in his own department, became Dean of the Harvard Medical School, and was loved and revered by his numerous pupils as by the members of his profession. He was one of the most simple-hearted, affectionate, spotless and lovable of men. He died of a lingering and painful disease, never losing his courage and patience, or his devoted interest in science. Webb was exceedingly fond of his home, not being very ambitious of higher office, but content to discharge ably and faithfully and to the universal satisfaction of the profession and the public, the duty of the important place he held. I have seen a good many public men from Maine of both parties. They all unite in this estimate of Judge Webb. There is no doubt that if he had been willing he would long ago have been made Judge of the Circuit Court, and then if the seat on the Supreme Court of the United States held by Mr. Justice Gray of the New England Circuit had become vacant, I suppose he would have been called from the Circuit Bench to that Court by almost universal consent.

Three persons, Child, Lane and Short, all very distinguished scholars in after life, took their place at the head of the class in the beginning. Two of them held the same place when they graduated. Short was outstripped by Edwin Moses Bigelow, who is now living, a lawyer, in Boston. He entered college from the country not so well fitted when he entered as most of the class. But he made his way by an indefatigable diligence until he graduated with great distinction, the third scholar, going a little above Short.

Child was a man of great genius. He seems to me now, as I look back upon him, to have been as great a man at seventeen when he entered college, as he was when he died. He was the best writer, the best speaker and the best mathematician, the most accomplished person in his knowledge of general literature in the class,--indeed, I suppose, in college,--in his day. He was probably equalled, and I dare say more lately excelled, by Lane as a Latin scholar, and by Short as a Greek scholar. He was a great favorite with the class. He spent his life in the service of the College. He was tutor for a short time and soon succeeded Channing as Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. He became one of the most eminent scholars in the country in early English literature and language. He edited a collection of ballads, Little & Brown's edition of the British Poets, and was a thorough student of Shakespeare and Chaucer. To the elucidation of the text of Chaucer he made some admirable contributions. He was shy and diffident, full of kindness toward persons whom he knew and to children, and of sympathy with persons who were in sorrow, but whimsical, grotesque, and apt to take strong prejudices against persons whom he did not know. I suppose some of the best of our American men of letters of late years would have submitted their productions to the criticism of Child as to a master.

Next to him stood Lane, the learned Latin scholar. I do not believe that anybody ever went through Harvard College who performed four years of such constant and strenuous labor. What he did in his vacations I do not know, but there was no minute lost in the term time. It is said that he never missed attendance on morning and evening prayers but once. The class were determined that Lane should not go through college without missing prayers once. So one night a cord was fastened to the handle of his door and attached to the rail of the staircase. But Lane succeeded in wrenching open the door and got to morning prayers in time. He was the monitor, whose duty it was to mark the students who were absent from prayers and who were punished for absence by a deduction from their rank and, if the absences were frequent enough, by a more severe penalty. The next time the measures were more effective. Lane's chum, Ellis, was in the conspiracy. The students bored holes carefully into the door and into the jamb by the side and took a quantity of hinges and screwed them carefully on to the door and the jamb. When Lane got ready to start for prayers in the morning, he found it impossible to open the door. As soon as he discovered what was the trouble, he seized his hatchet and undertook to cut his way out. His chum, Ellis, who had remained quietly in bed, sprang out of bed and placed his back against the door and declared that the door of his room should not be hewn down in that manner. Lane was obliged to desist. He however took his monitor's book, marked himself and his chum absent, and submitted. There were a good many such pranks played by the boys in those days, in the spirit of a harmless and good-natured mischief. I do not know whether the College has improved in the particular or no. I do not think anybody in my day would have defaced the statue of John Harvard.

Whether Lane will go farther down on the path to immortality as the author of the admirable Latin Grammar to which he gave so much of his life or as author of the song, "The Lone Fish Ball," posterity alone will determine.

Charles Short, the third of the three whom I named as standing at the head of the class, became President of Kenyon College and afterward Professor of Latin in Columbia College. He was one of the committee to prepare the revised version of the Scriptures, and contributed largely to the Harpers' excellent Latin Dictionary.

Another of our famous scholars was Fitzedward Hall, who died lately in England. He was a very respectable scholar in the ordinary college studies, but he attained no special distinction in them as compared with the others whom I have mentioned. He became, however, quite early, interested in Arabic and other Oriental languages, a study which he pursued, I think, without the help of an instructor. He had a very remarkable career. After graduating, he sailed for the East Indies with a view to pursue there the study of the Oriental languages and literature. He took with him letters of introduction to influential persons in Calcutta, and, of course, a sufficient supply of funds. But the vessel on which he was a passenger was wrecked as it approached the shore. He got ashore with difficulty, drenched with sea-water, having lost his letters of introduction and of credit, and with no resources but a few coins which happened to be in his pockets. He knew nobody in Calcutta. He disliked very much to present himself to the persons to whom he had been commended by his friends in America in that sorry plight with the possibility that he might be suspected of being an impostor. Accordingly, he determined that he would take care of himself. He walked about the street to see what he could find to do. As he went along he saw the sign of the Oriental Quarterly Review. He went in and inquired for the editor and asked him if he would accept an article. The editor said that he would consider it if it were brought in. Hall then went out and found a bookstore. Going in he spied a copy of Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of America." With a pencil and some sheets of paper, he wrote an article on American literature, filled up with pretty copious extracts. He took it to the editor of the Review who paid him for it, I think five pounds, and told him that he should be happy to have him make other contributions. Hall supported himself by writing for that review and some other periodicals published by the same concern until he could send home, get new letters of introduction and credit and support himself as a gentleman. He spent three years in Calcutta studying Hindostanee and Persian, and afterward, Bengalee and Sanscrit. Later he removed to Benares, where he was appointed to a tutorship in the Government College. Then he became professor and afterward Inspector of Schools for Ajmere and Mairwara. He was in a besieged fort for seven months during the Indian Mutiny. He received the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford in 1860. He went to London afterward to promote the election of Max Mueller as professor at Oxford. While there he was himself made professor of Sanscrit and of Indian jurisprudence in London University. I saw him in England, I think in 1871, when he was librarian of the great library of the East India Company, having in charge not only a vast library, but the archives of the East India Company going back beyond the time of Cromwell. He showed me many interesting letters and documents in manuscript of Cromwell, Nelson and other famous persons. Professor Edward B. Whitney once told me that with the exception of Max Mueller he considered Hall the foremost Oriental scholar in the world. I suppose Hall would have said the same of Professor Whitney.

Hall maintained his sturdy Americanism throughout his long life in England. He was ready at all times to do battle, in public or in private, when his countrymen were attacked. I think, in many cases, if he had been at home, he would have attacked the same things with which the Englishmen found fault. He could not bear Ruskin. He thought he, himself, as an American had to endure much contempt and injury from Englishmen because of Ruskin's bitter and contemptuous speech. But when we consider that he was an American we must admit that England treated him very well. He had, I suppose, the most welcome admission to all their scientific journals. In his time he was employed on the very best and most important work done in England in his line. He was professor of Hindostanee and of Hindoo law and Indian jurisprudence in King's College in London, also of the Sanscrit language and literature, and Indian history and geography. In April, 1865, he was made Librarian of the India Office, having in his charge the best collection of Oriental manuscripts in the world, twenty thousand in number.

While the catalogues of the libraries show a large number of books published under his name, he said that the greater part of his work had been anonymous.

In 1893 he wrote to a London magazine: "Although I have lived away from America upwards of forty-six years, I feel to this hour, that in writing English I am writing a foreign language."

Next in rank to Child, Lane, Bigelow and Short was Judge Soule. Next to him came George Cheyne Shattuck Choate, one of the well-known family of brothers of that name, sons of a Salem physician. Choate became a physician himself. He was at the head of the Massachusetts Institution for the Insane at Trenton. He afterward had an establishment of his own near New York, where Horace Greeley was under his care. I saw little of him after we graduated. But he was nearly or quite at the head of his department in the country. It is said that his testimony in court involving questions of medical jurisprudence was wonderful for its beauty, its precision and its profound analysis.

But I am inclined to think that the one member of our class whose fame will last to remote posterity, a fame which he will owe to a single poem, is Walter Mitchell. He was a very bright and accomplished person in college and a great favorite with his friends. He studied law, but afterward determined to become a clergyman and took orders in the Episcopal Church. I have never heard him preach, but I have no doubt from his distinction as a writer and scholar in college that he is an excellent preacher. But his poem of the sea entitled "Tacking the Ship off Fire Island" is one of the most spirited and perfect of its kind in literature. You can hear the wind blow and feel the salt in your hair as you read it. I once heard it read by Richard Dana to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, and again by that most accomplished elocutionist, E. Harlow Russell. I never read it or hear it without a renewed admiration.

But the brightest, raciest, wittiest, liveliest, spunkiest of all the youths was Daniel Sargent Curtis, one of the race of that name so well known in Boston for excellence in various departments. Curtis was the son, I believe, of Thomas B. Curtis, the merchant, a nephew of Charles P. Curtis, the eminent lawyer, and a cousin of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis. I do not know what he would not have made of himself if he had cultivated his great literary capacity. Certainly if he had performed the promise of his boyhood he would have been one of the foremost men in American literature. He studied law but pretty soon became a banker. Soon after he took up his residence in Italy, where I suppose he is living now. He produced some serious poetry which he read to some college societies. I hope for the credit of the class and for the country and his name he may have done something in later years which will be given to the world. It is said, I know not how truly, that he was for many years a near neighbor and intimate friend of Browning. When he was in college and in the Law School the boys used to enliven all social gatherings by repeating his good jests as, in later years, the lawyers did those of Rufus Choate, or the people in public life in Washington still later, those of Evarts. Such things lose nine-tenths of their flavor in the repetition and nine parts of the other tenth when they are put in writing. Curtis was quite small in stature but he was plucky as a gamecock, and a little dandyish in his dress. It is said that when he was a freshman, the boys at the Cambridge High School, a good many of whom were much bigger than he was, undertook to throw snowballs at him one day as he went by. Whereupon Curtis marched up to the biggest boy and told him if another snowball were thrown at him he would thrash him and he might pass it over to the boy who did it. The result was that Curtis was not troubled again.

You could not attack or rally him without some bright reply. Horace Gray, afterward the judge, went shooting one day and met Curtis as he was coming back with his gun over West Boston Bridge. Curtis asked him if he had shot anything. Gray said, "No, nothing but a hawk in Watertown. I stopped at the Museum as I came by, and gave it to Agassiz." "I suppose Agassiz said 'Accipter,'" said Curtis.

When Professor Greenleaf resigned his place at the Dane Law School, much to the regret of the students, it was proposed to secure a likeness of him for the lecture room. There was some discussion whether it should be a bust or a picture, and if a bust what should be the material. Curtis said: "Better make it Verd Antique. That means Old Green."

Dr. Beck once required his class each to bring a Latin epigram. Dan Curtis, who was not very fond of work unless it was in the line of his own tastes, sent in the following:

Fugiunt. Qui fugiunt? Galli; tunc moriar contentus.

"What is that, Curtis?" said the Doctor. "Dying words of Wolfe, sir," replied Curtis. "Ah," said the Doctor with great satisfaction. He thought it was Wolf the famous Greek scholar, and thought the epigram highly to Curtis's credit.

I have still in my memory a very bright poem of his. I do not think I ever saw or read it written or in print. But I remember hearing it read in one of the college clubs more than fifty years ago. He has Longfellow's style very happily, including the dropping from a bright and sometimes a sublime line to one which is flat and commonplace, as for instance in the ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington.

Meantime without the surly cannon waited, The sky gleamed overhead. Nothing in Nature's aspect indicated That a great man was dead.

This is Curtis's poem:

Wrapped in musing dim and misty, Sit I by the fitful flame; And my thoughts steal down the vista Of old time, as in a dream.

Here the hero held his quarters, Whom America holds dear; He beloved of all her daughters, Formerly resided here.

Here you often might have seen him, Silvery white his reverend scalp, Frowned above a mighty chapeau Like a storm-cap o'er the Alp.

Up and down these rooms the hero Oftentimes would thoughtful stray, Walking now toward the window, Stalking then again away.

By the fireside, quaintly moulded Oft his humid boots would lie; And his queer surtout was folded On some strange old chair to dry.

In the yard where now before me Underclothes, wind-wafted hang Waved the banners of an army; Warriors strode with martial clang.

These things now are all departed, With us on the earth no more, But the chieftain, noble-hearted, Comes to visit me once more.

In he comes without permission, Sits him down before mine eyes, Then I tremble and demnition Curious thoughts within me rise.

Slow he speaks in accents solemn, Life is all an empty hum, Man, by adulation only Can'st thou ever great become.

I ought perhaps to mention a young man of most brilliant promise, an excellent scholar and a great favorite, who died before the class graduated, on a voyage to the East Indies which he undertook in the hope of restoring his health,-- Augustus Enoch Daniels. He left behind him one bon mot which is worth recording. We were translating one day one of the choruses in AEschylus, I think in the Agamemnon, where the phrase occurs [Greek omitted], meaning "couches unvisited by the wind," which he most felicitously rendered "windlass bedsteads." Such is the vanity of human life that it is not uncommon that some hardworking, faithful and bright scholar is remembered only for one single saying, as Hamilton in the House of Commons was remembered for his single speech. Another instance of this is that worthy and excellent teacher of Latin and Professor of History, Henry W. Torrey. He was an instructor in college in our time, afterward left the college to teach a young ladies' school and came back again later as a Professor. I presume if any member of the class of 1846 were asked about Torrey he would say: "Oh, yes. He was an excellent Latin scholar, an excellent teacher in elocution and in history. But all I remember of him is that on one occasion a man who professed to be learned in Egyptian antiquities advertised a course of lectures, one of which was to be illustrated by unrolling from a mummy the bandages which had been untouched since its interment, many centuries before Christ. The savant claimed to be able to read the inscription on the cloth in which the mummy was wrapped and declared that it was the corpse of an Egyptian princess, whose name and history he related. Having given this narrative and excited the expectation of his auditors, the wrappers were taken off and, alas, it turned out to be the body of a man. The poor professor was, of course, much disconcerted and his lectures, I believe, came to a sudden ending. Mr. Torrey said that 'it was undoubtedly the corpse of Spurius Mummius.'"

But no account of my class ought to omit the name of Henry Whitney. He was a universal favorite. In all the disputes which arose in all the divisions of sets or sections, Whitney maintained the regard and affection of the whole class.

After graduating he was a very successful and influential business man in Boston and was President of the Boston & Providence Railroad, which under his masterly administration, attained a very high degree of prosperity. I think he corresponded with every member of the class, and did more to preserve and create a kindly class feeling than any other member. It seemed when he died as if half the college had died. He was a man of great refinement and scholarship, and was fond of collecting rare books. He had a great many editions of Milton which he liked to exhibit to his friends. He had a most delightful wit, and was the author of some very good songs and other humorous poetry.

I do not of course undertake to give sketches of all my classmates, either the living or the dead, or those who have attained distinction as useful and honorable members of society. So far as I know their career since they left college, there is none of them of whom the class or the college need be ashamed.

The different classes had not much intercourse with each other unless it happened in the case of boys who came from the same town, or who came from the same school, until late in the college course, when the members of the Hasty Pudding Club and the Porcellian, the two principal secret societies, formed intimacies beyond their own class in the meetings of those clubs. There were some persons in the classes near mine, both below and above me, with whom I had an acquaintance in college which grew into a cordial friendship in the Law School or in later life. Perhaps, taking him all together, the most brilliant man in Harvard in my time was John Felton. He went to California and became afterward unquestionably the greatest lawyer they have ever had on the Pacific Coast. He was in the class after mine. I knew him slightly in our undergraduate days. But when I went to the Law School in September, 1847, we boarded together in the same house. We speedily became intimate and used to take long walks together of three or four hours every day. We rambled about Watertown and Brighton and Somerville and West Cambridge and had long discussions about law and politics and poetry and metaphysics and literature and our own ambitions and desires. We were constantly in each other's rooms, and often sat up together, sometimes until the constellations set, with the wasteful, time-consuming habits of boyhood.

Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights, How oft, unwearied, have we spent the nights In search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence and poetry,-- Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.

John came of a distinguished family. His brother Cornelius was a famous Greek professor, one of the most striking figures about Cambridge. Another brother was Samuel M. Felton, the most distinguished civil engineer in the country of his time; builder of the Fitchburg railroad, afterward builder and President of the Pennsylvania Railroad; the man who conceived the plan of getting the New England troops into Washington by the way of Annapolis when Baltimore was in the power of the Rebels. Another brother was quite distinguished in college in the class of 1851. John after he graduated went to California and never came back from the Pacific Coast or kept up his communication with his old friends, although he received them with great hospitality, I am told, when they went out there. I think he had a fancy that he would keep to himself until he could come back in some great place, like that of Senator or Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was a candidate for the Senate at one time, but was defeated by a much inferior man. He was fond of argument; never was contented without challenging somebody and was a very tough customer to encounter, whatever side of a question he chose to take. He liked, however, nothing better than a sturdy resistance. To yield to him was never the way to win his good will. The first day when we went to live at the same boarding-house, I got into a hot dispute with him at dinner over the Wilmot Proviso, and the constitutional power of Congress to legislate against slavery in the territories, which was then a burning question. John took the Southern side of that question, although I dare say he would have taken the other if a Southerner had introduced it, and we got pretty zealous on both sides and walked home together continuing the argument as we walked. As we separated, Felton said: "We will continue this discussion to-morrow. Meantime, won't you look up the history of the matter a little?" "Yes," said I, "and won't you study up a little on Whately's Logic?" The answer seemed to delight Felton, and he took me into high favor. I never knew a man of such ready wit, although I have known a good many famous wits in my day. But all these things evaporate with time. Or, if you remember them, they are vapid and tasteless in the telling, like champagne which has been uncorked for a week. We were one day discussing some question of law at the table, and John, who had not yet begun to study law himself, put in his oar as usual, when Charles Allen, afterward Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, turned on him with some indignation. "What do you know about it, Johnny? You don't know what a quantum meruit is." "If you had it, 't would kill you," said Felton. He was invited to the dinner given by the people of Nevada in honor of their admission as a State, and there was some discussion about a device for a State seal. Felton suggested that the Irish emblem would be the most appropriate, the "Lyre and shamrock." Once after deciding a case in his favor, Mr. Justice Field said to him: "Felton, I have made great use of your brief in my opinion." "Always do that, Judge," said Felton. He possessed considerable capacity for poetry, although I do not know that he cultivated it much after he left college. He delivered a very successful poem at Commencement, and gave the Phi Beta Kappa poem the next year and read some very witty verses at the Society's dinner the same day. He was much distressed over choosing a subject, and put off and put off writing his poem till within a few days of the time when it was to be delivered. And he finally resolved, in a fit of desperation, that he would go into his room, shut his eyes, turn round three times and take for his subject the first object on which they rested when he opened them. That happened to be a horseshoe which he had picked up in the street and hung over his fireplace for luck. He made a charming poem from this subject, on Superstition. The opening lines are:

Just over the way, with its front to the street, Up one flight of stairs, is a room snug and neat, With a prospect Mark Tapley right jolly would call;-- Two churches, one graveyard, one bulging brick wall, Where, raven-like, Science gloats over its wealth, And the skeleton grins at the lectures on health. The tree by the window has twice hailed the Spring Since we circled its trunk our last chorus to sing. Maidens laughed at our shouts, they knew better than we; And the world clanked its chains as we cried, "We are free." On the wall hangs a Horseshoe I found in the street; 'Tis the shoe that to-day sets in motion my feet 'Tis a comfort, while Europe to freedom awoke Is peeping like chickens just free from their yolk To think Pope and Monarch their kingdoms may lose; Yet I hang my subject wherever I choose.

He goes on in a more serious strain to sketch the history of superstition and ends with an eloquent aspiration for a day of universal peace:

As now my thoughts like clustering bees have clung To thee, my Horseshoe, o'er the lintel hung, The future bard, with song more richly fraught,-- Some reverenced wrong the nucleus of his thought, Some relic crown or virtuoso's gun, Some nation's banner when all earth is one,-- Back through the past in mournful strain shall wind Where demon fancies vex the darkling mind, Where light but faintly streaks the dappled sky, Nor Morn has shot his glittering shafts on high; Trembling with grief and hope, his lyre shall thrill To twilight times of blending good and ill, Where whizz of bullets, and the clanking chain, Jar on the praise of Peace and Freedom's reign. In louder strains shall burst the exulting close, That sounds the triumph o'er the struggling foes,-- The slave unbound, War's iron tongues all dumb,-- His glorious Present, our all hail To Come, All hail To Come, when East and West shall be-- While rolls between the undividing sea-- Two, like the brain, whose halves ne'er think apart, But beat and tremble to one throbbing heart!

He took what was then an unusual method of making himself a good lawyer. That was to begin to deal with a legal principle in historic order, going back to the first case where it was announced and tracing it down through the reports, making no use of text-books. That was the way the old lawyers before Blackstone got their training. I have been told, though that happened after I left Cambridge, that he and Professor Langdell, the eminent teacher at Harvard who had introduced that method with so much success, studied together. Whether it was Felton's plan or Langdell's I do not know.

John Felton died suddenly in May, 1877. Everybody who comes to Washington from California who is old enough speaks with pleasure of his knowledge of Felton and is full of stories of his brilliant wit. He had probably the largest fees ever received by an American lawyer. He is said by his biographer to have received a fee of a million dollars in one case. His death was received with universal sorrow. All the places of business and amusement were closed and the flags displayed at half mast on the day of his funeral.

Another rather interesting figure among the men of the classes above me was Thomas Hill, afterward President of the College. He was a good mathematician and a good preacher. But he was not as successful in the Presidency as his friends hoped. The only thing I remember about him of any importance is highly to his credit. One winter's day a little gaunt-looking and unhappy pig that had strayed away from a drove wandered into the College Yard just as the boys were coming out of evening prayers. The whole surface of the yard was covered with a sheet of thin and very slippery ice. It was rather hard to stand up on it. The boys came across the pig, which was frightened and attempted to run. After running a little, he would slip on the ice and slide and tumble over, and then gather himself up again and try once more. There was a general shout and a general chase. Poor piggy strove to elude his pursuers. His own tail was a little slippery, so that if a boy caught it he did not hold it long. The whole college, pretty much, engaged in the pursuit, which certainly seemed to be great fun. But, on a sudden, there was a loud, angry shout from a stentorian voice as Tom Hill jumped in among the pursuers, who were just on the point of conquering the bewildered animal. "For shame. Take one of your size." The boys saw the point, were filled with mortification, desisted, and allowed the poor creature to go in peace.

The boys generally boarded in the College Commons, where they could board for $2.25 a week on one side, and on the other called "starvation commons" for $1.75 a week. In the latter they had meat only every other day. A few of the sons of the wealthier families boarded in private houses where the rate of board varied from $3 to $3.50 a week. The rooms were furnished very simply, almost always without carpets, though in rare instances the floors would be covered with a cheap carpet which did not last very well under the wear and tear of boyish occupation. The students generally made their own fires and blacked their own boots and drew their own water. But there was a family of negroes named Lewis who performed those services for such boys as desired, at a compensation of $5 or $6 a term. The patriarch of this race was a very interesting old character. He was said to be one hundred years old. He was undoubtedly very near it. One morning, just as we were coming out of the morning prayers, shortly after six o'clock, old Mr. Lewis drove by with a horse which he was said to have bought for $5, and a wagon of about the same value. He had a load of all sorts of vegetables which he had raised in his little garden near where the Arsenal stood and was carrying into Boston to market. One of his old wheels broke and the wagon came down, spilling the old fellow himself and his load of vegetables. He lay there flat on his back, unable to get up, surrounded by turnips and squashes and onions and potatoes, etc. As he lay with his black face and his white, grizzled poll, he was a most ludicrous spectacle. One of us asked him: "Why, Mr. Lewis, what is the matter?" "Well," he said with a mournful tone, "I laid eaout to go into Boston."

I suppose there was more turbulence and what would be called rowdyism in my day than now. At any rate I do not hear of such things very often nowadays. But it was usually of a harmless character. There were very few instances indeed of what would be called dissipation, still fewer of actual vice. The only game which was much in vogue was foot-ball. There was a little attempt to start the English game of cricket and occasionally, in the spring, an old-fashioned, simple game which we called base was played. But the chief game was foot-ball, which was played from the beginning of the September term until the cold weather set in, and sometimes, I believe, in the spring. It was very unlike the game as at present carried on. After evening prayers, which were over about five or ten minutes after six, the boys repaired to the foot-ball ground and ranged themselves on sides nearly equal in number. If one side thought they were not fairly matched they would shout, "More, more," until enough went over to them from the other side to make it about equal. Then one of the best kickers gave the ball a kick toward the other side of the field, and there was a rush and an attempt to get it past the goal. Nobody was allowed to pick up the foot- ball, or to run with it in his hand. A fast runner and good kicker who could get the ball a little outside of the line of his antagonists could often make great progress with it across the field before he was intercepted. It was allowable to trip up one of the other side by thrusting the foot before him. But touching an opponent with the hand would have been resented as an assault and insult. The best foot-ball players were not the strongest men but the swiftest runners, as a rule.

The practice of hazing freshmen during a few weeks after their entering was carried on sometimes under circumstances of a good deal of cruelty. One boy in my class was visited by a party of sophomores, treated with a good deal of indignity, and his feelings extremely outraged. He was attacked by a fever shortly afterward of which he died. During his last hours, in his delirium, he was repeating the scenes of this visit to his room. His father thought that the indignity caused his death. Another was taken out from his room in his night clothes, tied into a chair and left on the public commons in the cold. It was a long time before he was discovered and rescued. A heavy cold and a fit of sickness were the consequence.

There was an entertaining custom of giving out what were called mock parts when the real parts for the exhibitions or Commencement were announced. They were read out from a second-story window to an assemblage of students in the yard, and after the real parts had been given some mock parts were read. Usually some peculiarity of the person to whom they were assigned was made the object of good-natured ridicule in the selection of the subject. For example, one boy, who was rather famous for smoking other fellows' cigars and never having any of his own, had assigned to him as a subject, "The Friendships of this Life all Smoke."

When the parts were assigned for the Commencement, which were given usually to the first half of the class, there was a procession of what was called the Navy Club and an assignment of honors which were in the reverse order of excellence to that observed in the regular parts. The Lord High Admiral was supposed to be the worst scholar in the class,--if possible, one who had been rusticated twice during the college course. The laziest man in the class was Rear Admiral. Then there was a Powder Monkey and a Coxswain, and other naval officers, who were generally famous for what used to be called demerits. The members of the class to whom parts were assigned were called "digs" and marched in the procession, each with a spade on his shoulder, the first scholar, who in our class was Child, as the "dig of digs," having a spade of huge dimensions. I believe James Russell Lowell was the Lord High Admiral in his class. The Rear Admiral in mine was borne about on a couch or litter, supported by four men, having another one marching by his side to carry his pipe, which he was supposed to be too lazy to put into his mouth or take out of his mouth himself. The procession had banners bearing various devices and went around to take leave of the President and the different professors, giving them cheers at their houses. President Everett, who was a serious-minded person, was much offended by the whole proceeding. He sent for some members of the class and remonstrated; told them he had been obliged to apologize to his English servant-girl for such an exhibition. I believe our class was the last one which performed this harmless and highly entertaining ceremony.

One of my classmates, afterward a worthy physician, was a tall man, older considerably than the rest of the class. He used to wear an old-fashioned blue, straight-bodied coat with brass buttons, a buff vest, and nankeen pantaloons which were said to have come down as an heirloom in his family from a remote generation. He was addicted to rather a pompous style of speech. He was very fond of playing the bass-viol, of which he was by no means a very skilful master. He had, as a subject for his mock part, "The Base Violation of all Rules of Harmony." One Sunday evening he had a few friends with him who were singing psalm tunes to the accompaniment of his bass-viol. They made a prodigious noise, not at all to the liking of the proctor who had the care of the discipline of that entry, which was in Holworthy. He went to the room from which the noise issued. It was locked and he had some difficulty in getting in. The persons assembled, instead of maintaining their place, betook themselves to hiding places in the inner rooms. My classmate, however, stood his ground like a Roman and told the officer that his room was his castle and that he had no right to come in. The matter was reported to the Faculty and the musician sent for. Instead of submitting himself, however, he maintained very sturdily that the visit of the official to his room was an outrage which he ought not be asked to endure. He made quite an oration to the Faculty. Thereupon he was sentenced, more for his contumacy than for the original offence, to suspension from the college for two or three months. The class were very indignant and determined to manifest their indignation in a way that should be understood. They got a chariot with six white horses which drove up to his door in Holworthy at midday. Nearly the whole college assembled to see him off. He came out and took his seat in solitary state in the chariot. Some eight or ten of the class on horseback accompanied him as outriders. They drove into Boston to the front door of the Tremont House in great state. It was just at the time the Governor-General of Canada, I think Lord Elgin, was expected in Boston on a great occasion in the history of the city. The waiters and landlord at the Tremont House thought the English nobleman had arrived and hurried down the steps to open the door and meet him. But he got out of his carriage with his carpet-bag in his hand and disappeared in a humble fashion round the corner. The Faculty were very indignant and thought of disciplining severely the members of the class who had got up the burlesque, especially the outriders. Edward Everett then had under consideration the question whether he would accept the Presidency of the College. It was thought that if a rebellion occurred then he would decide against undertaking the responsibility. So they let the whole matter pass.

The principal figure in this scene used to be a thorn in the flesh of Professor Channing. He used to insert very pompous and magniloquent sentences in his themes, much to Channing's disgust. One day Channing took up a theme and held it up and called out, X. X. came to the chair by the Professor's side, and the Professor read, in his shrill voice: "'The sable sons of Afric's burning coast.' You mean negroes, I suppose." He admitted that he did. The Professor took his pen and drew a line over the sentence he had read and substituted the word "negroes" above the line, much to X.'s mortification.

I was guilty of one practical joke of which I have repented all my days, but for which the poetical justice of Providence administered to me, many years afterward, a punishment in kind. There was a classmate who sat next to me in the recitation in the sophomore year, whom everybody knew and liked, but who was not very much interested in study. He got along as he best could by his native wits and such little application as he found absolutely necessary. One day we were reciting in Lowth's Grammar. The Bishop says that in English the substantive singular is made plural for the most part by adding s. Professor Channing called up this classmate of mine, who stated this as follows: "The author says that the distinction between nouns in the singular and plural is that the latter end in s." "Is that a good distinction?" asked the Professor. My neighbor answered with great confidence, "No, sir," as he was well warranted in doing from the form of the question. "Can't you give us some instance of words in the singular number that end in s?" said the Professor. My friend, who was considerable embarrassed, stammered, was staggered, and hesitated a moment. I whispered in his ear, "Hoss," on which he, without any reflection, blurted out, "Hoss." There was a roar of laughter from the class, and the poor fellow sat down, much distressed at his blunder. Channing dismissed the class, and the next day gave us a lecture. He said our uproarious laughter had disturbed Dr. Walker's recitation in the neighboring room, "especially you, Curtis, with your pit laugh." I ought to have risen up instantly and avowed myself the guilty cause of my classmate's innocent blunder. But, much to my own shame and disgrace, I did not do it. But some forty years afterward, I was engaged in an earnest discussion in the Senate Chamber with Butler of South Carolina, at the time of the passage of the first Civil Service law. Butler favored the law and his whole bearing in the discussion was exceedingly proper and creditable. We were talking of some prohibition, of some clause forbidding the imposing assessments upon office-holders for political purposes, and it was proposed to except from the prohibition voluntary contributions for proper election purposes. Butler asked me what I should consider improper election purposes. I hesitated a moment when Miller of California, who was a man of a good deal of fun, whispered in my ear, "Buying shotguns to shoot negroes with," which I, without reflecting and indeed hardly conscious of what I was saying, repeated aloud. Butler, who was a man of high spirit, and quick temper, was furious. He came down upon me with a burst of wrath. I tried to interrupt him. But he was so angry that it was impossible to interrupt him and said something which made it seem to me impossible either to explain or apologize. But I regretted the transaction exceedingly, and have always considered that I was well punished for my joke at the expense of my unhappy classmate.

An anecdote came down from a class before my time which I think ought not to be lost. One of the boys when the cold weather came on in the first term of his freshman year took out from the college library a book which was nearly the largest and thickest volume it contained. It was the works of Bishop Williams, who I think was one of the seven bishops persecuted by James II. The book contained an exceedingly dull treatise on theology. The youth had no special literary tastes, of which anybody knew, and that was the only book he was ever known to take out. He kept it out the six weeks which were allowed, and then renewed it, not taking it back to the library until the hot weather of the following summer. He repeated this in his sophomore and junior and senior years. Dr. Harris, the librarian, was very much puzzled and asked some of the boys if they could tell him why this young man kept Bishop Williams's works so constantly. None of the boys knew. They used to see it lying on his table, but never saw any signs of his reading it. At last one winter night late in the senior year something happened which caused a good deal of excitement. Several of the boys who were down in the yard rushed up in great haste to this classmate's room. It happened to be unlocked. They got in without knocking and found him undressed with nothing on but his nightgown. His bed happened to be near the fire, and standing up on the edge in front of the fire was Bishop Williams's works. It turned out that he was in the habit of thoroughly warming the book and then of putting it in the bed before he got in himself, so that it would serve the function of a warming-pan. The young gentleman turned out in after life to be a very distinguished Bishop himself, an eminent champion of the doctrines of the Episcopal Church, which he had doubtless acquired by absorption.

The boys were always ready for mischief and always kind and easily moved to sympathy. One day just before prayers there was found on the square in front of Willard's Hotel a large load of straw. The owner had stopped and unhitched his horses to feed them at Willard's stable. Some mischievous boy set fire to the load and it burned with a blaze which illuminated the whole neighborhood. Pretty soon the owner appeared in a state of great distress; said he was a very poor man; that he was moving his household furniture and that his beds, chairs, and all the goods he had in the world were in the cart covered up with the straw. The boys immediately took up a subscription and sent the fellow off well satisfied with his sale. It was said he got about twice as much as the value he set on all his goods, and that about a week after he appeared with another load of straw which he left exposed in the same place at the same time in the afternoon. I believe that was not molested.

The people of Cambridge in those days were a quiet folk. The students did not go much into the society of the town unless they happened to have some kindred there. There were a great many old houses, some of which are standing now, built before the Revolutionary War. Some had been occupied by old Tories. Among them was the Craigie House still standing, having been Washington's headquarters, and now more famous still as the residence of Longfellow. There were a few old gentlemen wandering about the streets who were survivors of the generation which just followed the Revolutionary War, among them Dr. Jennison, the old physician, and Dr. Popkin, the old Greek professor, of whom a delightful life was written by President Felton. Mr. Sales, an old Spaniard, had given lessons in Spanish from time immemorial. He was a queer looking old gentleman, who had his gray hair carefully dressed every day by a barber, wearing an ancient style of dress, covered with snuff, but otherwise scrupulously neat. He had a curious bend and walk, which made him seem a little like a dog walking on his hind legs. He was very fond of the boys and they of him. He made full allowance for the exuberance of youth. Two careless students who were driving in a sleigh ran against him in the street and knocked him over and injured him severely. But the old fellow would not betray their names and had nothing to say when somebody talked severely of their carelessness but "Oh, oh, young blood, young blood." I never saw him in the least disturbed or angry with anything the boys said or did except on one occasion. Henry Whitney said, in reciting in Don Quixote, in the course of some discussion, "By Jingo, Mr. Sales." Sales was struck with horror. He said it was the most horrible phrase that ever came from the lips of mortal man, and he should think the walls of the building where they were would fall down on Whitney's head and overwhelm him. What awful and mysterious meaning the words "by Jingo" had for the old Spanish gentleman we never could discover. He declined to give any explanation and treated the subject as one to be avoided with horror ever after. I commend the question to the consideration of philologists.

The treatment of the students in general by the authorities and the college was stern, austere and distant. The students had little social intercourse with the families or the professors, except such of them as had relatives in Cambridge, which allowed intercourse with the families of the professors. The professors did nothing to encourage familiarity, or even to encourage any request for help in the difficulties of study. Indeed a boy who did that fell into disfavor with his companions, and was called a fish.

President Eliot in some speech, I think before the graduates of the Latin School, speaking of his life as a boy, said he had a great respect for his little self. I cannot say that of my young self at Harvard. My time was largely wasted in novel reading or reading books which had not much to do with the college studies, and lounging about in my own room or that of other students. I am not sure that the period of growth from sixteen to twenty is one when it is good for a youth to study hard. So far as my observation extends the poor scholars who have graduated at Harvard become as useful and eminent men in after life as the good scholars. I do not now think of any person, who has graduated first scholar since Edward Everett, who became in after life a very great man, although some of them have been very respectable. Judge Thomas Russell, who was first in the class before mine, was a very successful and brilliant man, performing admirably everything that he undertook. He was a good judge of the Superior Court, a good minister to Venezuela, a good advocate, and an excellent political speaker. But he never attained a place in the world equal to that of his classmate Gray, who, if I remember right, did not have a part at Commencement. Professor Child gained great distinction in his chosen field, but, I incline to think, would have gained the same distinction if he had devoted himself to the same pursuits and had never entered college at all. The first scholar in the class of 1843, the first class that graduated after I entered, was Horace Binney Sargent, a brave soldier, and the author of some beautiful and spirited war lyrics. But there were several of his classmates, including Thomas Hill, John Lowell and Octavius B. Frothingham, who attained much greater distinction. In the class of 1844 the first scholar was Shattuck Hartwell, a highly respectable and worthy gentleman, many years an officer in the Boston Custom House, who spent a large part of his life fitting pupils for college, while Francis Parkman, the historian, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, the mathematician, and Dr. John Call Dalton, the eminent physician, neither of whom had a very high record, became distinguished in after life. Among my own classmates, as I have already said, Judge Webb, Fitzedward Hall and Calvin Ellis attained very great distinction, although no one of them stood very high in rank. In the next class John Felton, Judge Endicott, Judge Charles Allen, and Tuckermann, the naturalist, were the persons who have been most famous in after life. I believe no one of them, except Felton who graduated the second scholar, ranked very high in college. I myself graduated with a fairly decent rank. I believe I was the nineteenth scholar in a class of sixty- six. When I graduated I looked back on my wasted four years with a good deal of chagrin and remorse. I set myself resolutely to make up for lost time. I think I can fairly say that I have had few idle moments since. I have probably put as much hard work into life as most men on this continent. Certainly I have put into it all the work that my physical powers, especially my eyes, would permit. I studied law in Concord the first year after graduation. I used to get up at six o'clock in the morning, go to the office, make a fire and read law until breakfast time, which was at seven in the summer and half- past in the winter. Then I went home to breakfast and got back in about three-quarters of an hour and spent the forenoon until one diligently reading law. After dinner, at two o'clock, I read history until four. I spent the next two hours in walking alone in the woods and roads of Concord and the neighboring towns, went back to the office at seven, read a little geometry and algebra, reviewing the slender mathematics which I had studied in college, and then spent two hours in reading Greek. I read through Thucydides, Homer and Xenophon's Hellenica and some other Greek books in that year. Sundays I went to church twice, but shut myself up in a room at home the rest of the day and read a great quantity of English literature, including Milton, Spencer, Chaucer, George Herbert, South's Sermons and other English classics, reading over again Butler's Analogy and Jouffroy. It has been said that if a man wish to acquire a pure English style he should give his days and nights to Addison. I say that if a law student wish to acquire a vigorous and manly English style, the fit vehicle for conveying weighty thoughts to courts or juries or popular assemblages, let him give his days and nights to Robert South.

I spent two years at the Law School after graduating from the College. I cannot state too strongly my great debt to it, and to Franklin Dexter, Simon Greenleaf, Joel Parker, and Theophilus Parsons. I have no remorse for wasted hours during those two years. The time in a Law School is never likely to be wasted if the youth have in him any spark of generous ambition. He sees the practical relation of what he is learning with what he has to do in life. The Dane Law School was then, and I suppose it is even more true of it now, a most admirable place for learning the science of law and preparing for its practice. The youth breathed a legal atmosphere from morning till night all the year round. He had the advantage of most admirable instruction, and the resources of a complete library. He listened to the lectures, he studied the text-books, he was drilled in the recitations, he had practice in the moot courts and in the law clubs. He discussed points of law in the boarding-house and on his walks with his companions. He came to know thoroughly the great men who were his instructors, and to understand their mental processes, and the methods by which they had gained their success. The title of old Nathan Dane to a high place on the roll of his country's benefactors, and to the gratitude of the profession of the law, and of all lovers of jurisprudence throughout the country cannot be disputed.

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VIII. 1846 TO 1850. FOUNDATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. DANIEL WEBSTER

The foundation of the Republican party, and my personal memories of Daniel Webster, belong to the same period. I will not try to separate them.

The story I am to tell may seem trivial enough to my readers. But it is to me a very tender and sacred memory. The time was ripe for the great movement that abolished slavery. If no one of the eminent men of that day had ever lived other men would have been found in abundance for the work. If Massachusetts had failed in her duty some other State would have taken her place. But in the Providence of God it was given to Massachusetts to lead in this great battle and it was given to these men whom I have to name to be leaders in Massachusetts. I thank God that it was given to my eyes to behold it. The American people have had many great affairs to deal with since that day. They have had great trials and great triumphs. They have won renown among the nations. They have grown in wealth and in power. They have subdued a mighty rebellion. They have carried their flag in triumph to the ends of the earth. They have wrested the last vestige of power in this hemisphere from an old and proud nation who once occupied the place that England has since occupied and which it seems likely we are to occupy hereafter. They have resisted many strong temptations and acquired much glory. I am afraid they have of late yielded for a time to one strong temptation and missed an opportunity for still greater glory, that never will come back. But there was something in that struggle with slavery which exalted the hearts of those who had a part in it, however humble, as no other political battle in history.

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

And, surely, to be young was far nearer Heaven than Wordsworth found France in the opening of the French Revolution.

I became of age at just about the time when the Free Soil Party, which was the Republican party in another form, was born. In a very humble capacity I stood by its cradle. It awakened in my heart in early youth all the enthusiasm of which my nature was capable, an enthusiasm which from that day to this has never grown cold. No political party in history was ever formed for objects so great and noble. And no political party in history was ever so great in the accomplishment for liberty, progress and law.

I breathed a pure and bracing atmosphere in those days. It was a time of plain living and high thinking. It was a pretty good education, better than that of any university, to be a young Free Soiler in Massachusetts. I had pretty good company, not in the least due to any merit or standing of my own, but only because the men who were enlisted for the war in the great political battle against slavery were bound to each other by a tie to which no freemasonry could be compared. Samuel G. Howe used, when his duties brought him to Worcester on his monthly visit, to spend an hour or two of an afternoon in my office. I was always welcome to an hour's converse with Charles Allen, the man who gave the signal at Philadelphia for breaking away from the Whig Party. Erastus Hopkins occasionally spent a Sunday with me at my boarding house. When I went to Boston I often spent an hour in Richard Dana's office, and was sure of a kindly greeting if I chanced to encounter Sumner. The restless and ubiquitous Henry Wilson, who, as he gathered and inspired the sentiment of the people, seemed often to be in ten places at once, used to think it worth his while to visit me to find out what the boys were thinking of. In 1851 I was made Chairman of the Free Soil County Committee of Worcester County. I do not think there was ever so good a political organization in the country before, or that there ever has been a better one since. The Free Soilers carried all but six, I think, of the fifty-two towns in that county. I was in correspondence with the leading men in every one of them, and could at any time summon them to Worcester, if there were need.

We acquired by the Mexican War nearly six hundred thousand square miles of territory. When the treaty was signed, the struggle began between freedom and slavery for the control of this imperial domain. No reader of the history of Massachusetts will doubt her interest in such a struggle. Three things stood in the way of lovers of liberty in the Commonwealth.

First, the old attachment to the Whig party; Second, her manufacturing interests; and Third, her devotion to Daniel Webster.

Massachusetts was a Whig State. There were many things which tended to give that great political organization a permanent hold on her people. Its standard of personal character was of the highest. Its leading men--Saltonstall, Reed, Lawrence, Lincoln, Briggs, Allen, Ashmun, Choate, Winthrop, Davis, Everett, and their associates--were men whose private and public honor was without a stain. Its political managers were not its holders of office or its seekers of office. It contained a large body of able and influential men who wielded the power of absolute disinterestedness. They were satisfied if they could contribute, by counsel or labor, to the well-being of the State by the advancement of their cherished political principles. They asked no other reward. The Whigs were in favor of using wisely, but courageously, the forces of the Nation and State to accomplish public objects for which private powers or municipal powers were inadequate. The Whigs desired to develop manufacture by national protection; to foster internal improvements and commerce by liberal grants for rivers and harbors; to endow railroads and canals for public ways by grants of public lands and from the treasury; to maintain a sound currency; and to establish a uniform system for the collection of debts, and for relieving debtors by a National bankruptcy law.

The Whig policy had made Massachusetts known the world over as the model Commonwealth. It had lent the State's credit to railroads. It had established asylums for the blind and insane and deaf and dumb, and had made liberal gifts to schools. The Massachusetts courts were unsurpassed in the world. Her poor laws were humane. All her administrative policies were wise, sound, and economical.

They asked from the National Government only a system of protection that should foster home manufacture, and that they might pursue their commercial and manufacturing occupation in peace.

Daniel Webster was the idol of the people. He was at the fulness of his great intellectual power. The series of speeches and professional and political achievements which began with the oration at Plymouth in 1820 was still in progress. The Whigs of Massachusetts disliked slavery; but they loved the Union. Their political gospel was found in Webster's reply to Hayne and his great debates with Calhoun. It was the one heart's desire of the youth of Massachusetts that their beloved idol and leader should be crowned with the great office of the Presidency.

Mr. Webster tried to avert the conflict by voting against the treaty with Mexico, by which we acquired our great territory in the far West; but in vain. The Whigs feared the overthrow of the Whig Party. The manufacturer and the merchant dreaded an estrangement that would cause the loss of their southern trade, and with it all hope of a law that would protect their manufactures.

It was in this condition of things that I cast my first vote in November, 1847, shortly after I became of age. It was for the Whig Governor. The Whig Party was already divided into two sections, one known as "Cotton Whigs," and the other as "Conscience Whigs." These names had been suggested in a debate in the State Senate in which Mr. Thomas G. Carey, an eminent Boston merchant, had deprecated some proposed anti- slavery resolutions by saying that they were likely to make an unfavorable impression in the South, and to be an injury to business interests; to which Mr. E. R. Hoar of Middlesex answered, that "he thought it quite as desirable that the Legislature should represent the conscience as the cotton of the Commonwealth."

Both parties struggled for the possession of the Whig organization, and both parties hoped for the powerful support of Mr. Webster. The leader of the manufacturing interest was Mr. Abbott Lawrence, a successful, wealthy manufacturer of great business capacity, large generosity, and princely fortune. He had for some years chafed under Mr. Webster's imperious and arrogant bearing. He was on terms of personal intimacy with Henry Clay, and was understood to have inspired the resolutions of the Whig State Convention, a few years before, which by implication condemned Mr. Webster for remaining in President Tyler's Cabinet when his Whig colleagues resigned. But the people of Massachusetts stood by Webster. After the ratification of the Ashburton Treaty, he came home to reassert his old title to leadership and to receive an ovation in Faneuil Hall. In his speech he declared with a significant glance at Mr. Lawrence, then sitting upon the platform: "I am a Whig, a Massachusetts Whig, a Boston Whig, a Faneuil Hall Whig. If any man wishes to read me out of the pale of that communion, let him begin, here, now, on the spot, and we will see who goes out first."

The first time I remember seeing Daniel Webster was June 17, 1843, at Bunker Hill. The students of Harvard, where I was a freshman, had a place in the procession. We marched from Cambridge to Boston, three miles and a half, and stood in our places for hours, and then marched over to Charlestown. We were tired out when the oration began. There was a little wind which carried the sound of Mr. Webster's voice away from the place where we stood; so it was hard to hear him during the first part of his speech. He spoke slowly and with great deliberation. There was little in the greater part of that weighty discourse to excite a youthful auditor; but the great thing was to look at the great orator. Waldo Emerson, who was there, said of him:

"His countenance, his figure, and his manners were all in so grand a style that he was, without effort, as superior to his most eminent rivals as they were to the humblest. He alone of men did not disappoint the eye and the ear, but was a fit figure in the landscape. There was the Monument, and there was Webster. He knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric signified nothing; he was only to say plain and equal things--grand things, if he had them; and if he had them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things--and the whole occasion was answered by his presence."

He went almost through his weighty discourse without much effect upon his auditors other than that which Emerson so well described. But the wind changed before he finished, and blew toward the other quarter where the boys stood; and he almost lifted them from their feet as his great organ tones rolled out his closing sentences:

"And when both we and our children shall have been consigned to the house appointed for all living, may love of country and pride of country glow with equal fervor among those to whom our names and our blood shall have descended! And then, when honored and decrepit age shall lean against the base of this monument, and troops of ingenuous youth shall be gathered around it, and when the one shall speak to the other of its objects, the purposes of its construction, and the great and glorious events with which it is connected, there shall rise from every youthful breast the ejaculation, 'Thank God, I also--AM AN AMERICAN!'"

Mr. Webster came to Concord in the summer of 1843 as counsel for William Wyman, President of the Phoenix Bank of Charlestown, who was indicted for embezzling the funds of the bank. This was one of the causes celebres of the day. Wyman had been a business man of high standing. Such offences were rare in those days, and the case would have attracted great attention whoever had been for the defence. But the defendant's counsel were Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, Franklin Dexter, and my brother, E. R. Hoar, a young man lately admitted to the bar. Mr. Webster, notwithstanding his great fame as a statesman, is said never to have lost his eager interest in causes in which he was retained. When he found himself hard pressed, he put forth all his strength. He was extremely impatient of contradiction. The adulation to which he had been so long accustomed tended to increase a natural, and perhaps not wholly unjustifiable, haughtiness of manner.

The Government was represented by Asahel R. Huntington, of Salem, District Attorney for the district which included Essex and Middlesex. He was a man of great intellectual vigor, unquestioned honesty and courage, possessed of a high sense of the dignity and importance of his office, very plain spoken, and not at all likely to be overawed by any opposing counsel, whatever his fame or dignity. Yet he had a huge reverence for Daniel Webster, whom, like the other Massachusetts Whigs of that day, he probably thought as another described him--

The foremost living man of all the world!

The case was tried three times: The first time at Concord, the second time at Lowell, and the third time at Concord. Mr. Webster had several quite angry encounters with the court and with the prosecuting attorney. He was once extremely disrespectful to Judge Washburn, who replied with great mildness that he was sure the eminent counsel's respect for his own character would be enough to prevent him from any disrespect to the court. Mr. Webster was disarmed by the quiet courtesy of the judge, and gave him no further cause for complaint. At Lowell, where Wyman was convicted, Webster saw the case going against him, and interrupted the charge of the judge several times. At last Judge Allen, who was presiding, said: "Mr. Webster, I cannot suffer myself to be interrupted." Mr. Webster replied: "I cannot suffer my client to be misrepresented," To which the judge answered: "Sit down, sir." Mr. Webster resumed his seat. When the jury went out, Judge Allen turned to the Bar where Mr. Webster was sitting and said: "Mr. Webster." Mr. Webster rose with the unsurpassed courtesy and grace of manner of which he was master, and said: "Will the court pardon me a moment?" He then proceeded to express his regret for the zeal which had impelled him to a seeming disrespect to His Honor, and expressed his sorrow for what had occurred; and the incident was at an end.

At the first trial at Concord, Mr. Webster had frequent altercations with District Attorney Huntington. In his closing argument, which is said to have been one of great power, and which he began by an eloquent reference to the battle of Concord Bridge, which, he said, was fought by Concord farmers that their children might enjoy the blessings of an impartial administration of justice under the law, he said that it was unlikely that Wyman could have abstracted large sums from the bank and no trace of the money be found in his possession. He was a man of small property, living simply and plainly, without extravagant habits or anything which would have been likely to tempt him to such crime. When Huntington came to reply he said, very roughly: "They want to know what's become of the money. I can tell you what's become of the money. Five thousand dollars to one counsel, three thousand dollars to another, two thousand to another," waving his hand in succession toward Webster and Choate and Dexter. Such fees, though common enough now, seemed enormous in those days. Choate smiled in his peculiar fashion, and said nothing; Franklin Dexter looked up from a newspaper he was reading, and exclaimed: "This is beneath our notice"; but Mr. Webster rose to his feet and said with great indignation: "Am I to sit here to hear myself charged with sharing the spoils with a thief?" The presiding judge said: "The counsel for the Government will confine himself to the evidence." That was all. But Mr. Webster was deeply incensed. The jury disagreed. Mr. Webster came to the next trial prepared with an attack on Huntington, in writing, covering many pages, denouncing his method and conduct. This he read to my brother. But Huntington who, as I have said, adored Webster, was unwilling to have another encounter-- not in the least from any dread of his antagonist, but solely from his dislike to have a quarrel with the man on earth he most reverenced. Accordingly, Mr. Wells, the District Attorney of Greenfield, was called in, who conducted the trial at Lowell and succeeded in getting a conviction. My brother, who was very fond of Huntington, took an occasion some time afterward to tell Mr. Webster how much Huntington regretted the transaction, and how great was his feeling of reverence and attachment for him. Mr. Webster was placated, and afterward, when an edition of his speeches was published, sent a copy to Huntington with an inscription testifying to his respect.

The general reader may not care for the legal history of the trial, but it may have a certain interest for lawyers. Mr. Wyman was indicted for embezzlement of the funds of the bank under the Revised Statutes of Massachusetts, which provided that "if any cashier or other officer, agent or servant of any incorporated bank shall embezzle or fraudulently convert to his own use the property of the bank, he shall be punished," etc. It was earnestly contended that a president of a bank was not an officer within the meaning of the statute; but this contention was overruled by the presiding judge, who was sustained in that view by the Supreme Court on exception. There was, however, no such offence as embezzlement known to the common law. So a person who fraudulently converted to his own use the property of another could only be convicted of larceny; and the offence of larceny could not be committed where the offender had been entrusted with the possession of the property converted, the essence of larceny being the felonious taking of the property from the possession of the owner. Further, nobody could be convicted of larceny except on an indictment or complaint which set forth the time and place of each single conversion. So, if a servant or agent appropriated the fund of his principal, the embezzlement extending over a long period of time, and it was not possible to set forth or to prove the time, place, and circumstances of any particular taking, the offender could not be convicted. The statute to which I have just referred was intended to cure both these difficulties; first, by making persons liable to punishment who fraudulently appropriated the property of others, notwithstanding they had come rightfully into possession; and next, the necessity of setting forth the particular transaction was obviated by an enactment that it should be enough to prove the embezzlement of any sum of money within six months of the time specified in the indictment.

After the conviction of Wyman, the case was carried to the Supreme Court, which held that the statute making bank officers liable included bank presidents. But the court held that the other part of the statute, providing for the mode of setting forth the offence in the indictment, did not apply to bank officers; and that they could only be held on an indictment which described the particular transaction, with time and place. So the verdict of guilty against Wyman was set aside, and a new trial ordered.

Before the new trial came on at Concord, a statute was passed by the Legislature for the purpose of meeting this very case, extending the provisions of the Revised Statutes as to the mode of pleading in such cases to officers of banks. It was claimed and argued by Mr. Choate, with great zeal, eloquence, and learning, that this was an ex post facto law, which could not, under the Constitution, be made applicable to transactions which happened before its passage. Mr. Choate argued this question for several hours. The court took time for consideration, and overruled his contention. There seemed nothing for it but to go to trial again on the facts, upon which one verdict of guilty had already been had. As they were going into the court-house in the morning, Mr. Choate said to Mr. Hoar, whose chief part in the trial, so far, had been finding law books, hunting up authorities, and taking notes of the evidence: "You made a suggestion to me at the last trial which I did not attend to much at the time; but I remember thinking afterward there was something in it." Mr. Hoar replied: "It seems to me that Wyman cannot be convicted of embezzlement unless the funds of the bank were entrusted to him. They must either have been in his actual possession or under his control. There is nothing in the office of president which involves such an authority. It cannot exist unless by the express action of the directors, or as the result of a course of business of the bank." The facts alleged against Wyman were that he had authorized the discount of the notes of some friends of his who were irresponsible, and that he had, in some way, shared the proceeds. Mr. Choate seized upon the suggestion. The Government witnesses, who were chiefly the directors of the bank, were asked in cross-examination whether they had not consented that Mr. Wyman should have the right to dispose of the funds of the bank, or to give him power or authority to dispose of them. They supposed the question was put with the intent of making them morally, if not legally, accomplices in his guilt, or of charging them with want of fidelity or gross carelessness in their office. Accordingly, each of them indignantly denied the imputation, and testified that Wyman had no power or authority to authorize the discount or to meddle with the funds. When the Government case closed, the counsel asked the court to rule that as the funds were never entrusted to the possession of Wyman he could not be convicted of embezzlement. The court so held and directed an acquittal. This is another instance, not unusual in trials in court, of the truth of the old rhyme, with which the readers of "Quentin Durward" are familiar;

The page slew the boar, The peer had the gloire.

Mr. Webster always had a strong and kindly regard for my brother. When Mr. Hoar visited Washington in 1836, Webster received him with great kindness, showed him about the Capitol, and took him to the Supreme Court, where he argued a case. Mr. Webster began by alluding very impressively to the great changes which had taken place in that Tribunal since he first appeared as counsel before them. He said: "No one of the judges who were here then, remains. It has been my duty to pass upon the question of the confirmation of every member of the Bench; and I may say that I treated your honors with entire impartiality, for I voted against every one of you." After the argument was over Mr. Webster gave Mr. Hoar a very interesting sketch of the character of each of the judges, and told him the reasons which caused him to vote against confirmation in each case.

The next time I saw Daniel Webster was on July 4, 1844. He made a call at my father's house in Concord. I was near one of the front windows, and heard a shout from a little crowd that had gathered in the street, and looked out just as Mr. Webster was coming up the front steps. He turned, put his hand into his bosom under his waistcoat and made a stately salutation, and then turned and knocked on the door and was admitted. He was physically the most splendid specimen of noble manhood my eyes ever beheld. It is said, I suppose truly, that he was but a trifle over five feet nine inches high, and weighed one hundred and fifty-four pounds. But then, as on all other occasions that I saw him, I should have been prepared to affirm that he was over six feet high and weighed, at least, two hundred. The same glamour is said to have attended Louis XIV., whose majesty of bearing was such that it never was discovered that he was a man of short stature until he was measured for his coffin.

Mr. Webster was then in the very vigor of his magnificent manhood. He stood perfectly erect. His head was finely poised upon his shoulders. His beautiful black eyes shone out through the caverns of his deep brows like lustrous jewels. His teeth were white and regular, and his smile when he was in gracious mood, especially when talking to women, had an irresistible charm. I remember very little that he said. One thing was, when the backwardness or forwardness of the season was spoken of, that there was a day--I think it was June 15--when, in every year vegetation was at about the same condition of forwardness, whether the spring were early or late. A gentleman who was in the room said: "You have the cool breezes of the sea at Marshfield?" "There, as at other sea places," replied Mr. Webster. When he rose to go, he said: "I have the honor to be a member of the Young Men's Whig Club of Boston. I must be in my place in the ranks."

I heard him also in Faneuil Hall, in the autumn of 1844, after the elections in Maine and Pennsylvania and in the South had made certain the defeat of Mr. Clay. I remember little that he said, except from reading the speech since. What chiefly impressed the audience was the quotation from Milton, so well known now:

What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, And what is else not be overcome.

I also saw Mr. Webster at the inauguration of Edward Everett as President of Harvard, April 30, 1846. It was perhaps the proudest period of Webster's life. It was also, perhaps, the greatest day of the life of Edward Everett. Webster had been Everett's great over-shadower. Gov. Everett would have been, but for him, the chief public man and the orator of Massachusetts at that time. He had returned from the Court of St. James crowned with new laurels, and had been called to succeed Josiah Quincy as the head of the University. By a simple but impressive inaugural ceremony the Governor had just invested Mr. Everett with his office, and delivered to him the keys and the charter. Everett was stepping forward to deliver his inaugural address when Webster, who had come out from Boston a little late, came in upon the stage by a side door. President and orator and occasion were all forgotten. The whole assembly rose to greet him. It seemed as if the cheering and the clapping of hands and the waving of handkerchiefs would never leave off. The tears gushed down the cheeks of women and young men and old. Everything was forgotten but the one magnificent personality. When the din had subsided somewhat, Mr. Everett, with his never-failing readiness and grace, said: "I would I might anticipate a little the function of my office, and saying--Expectatur oratio in vernacula-- call upon my illustrious friend who has just entered upon the stage to speak for me. But I suppose that the proprieties of the occasion require that I speak for myself."

It is to the credit of Mr. Everett and of that other Massachusetts orator, Rufus Choate, that no tinge of jealousy or of envy ever embittered in the smallest degree their hearty love and support of their friend. They were his pupils, his companions, his supporters, his lovers, while he lived, and were his best eulogists when he died.

I heard another speech of his, which I think was never reported. He appeared before a Committee of the Legislature as counsel for the remonstrants against the scheme to fill up the Back Bay lands.

I do not think the employment of a Senator of the United States as counsel before the Legislature would be approved by public opinion now.

I do not know what year it was, but probably 1849 or 1850. He had grown old. But I learned more of the fashion of his mental operations than could be learned from his speeches on great occasions, especially after they had been revised for publication. He spoke with much contempt of a petition signed by many of the foremost merchants and business men of Boston. He described with great sarcasm the process of carrying about such petitions, and the relief of the person to whom they were presented on finding he was not asked to give any money. "Oh, yes, I'll sign--I'll sign." He then read out one after another the names of men well known and honored in the city. He threw down the petition with contempt, and the long sheet fell and unrolled upon the floor.

He had a singular habit, which made it wearisome to listen to his ordinary speech, of groping after the most suitable word, and trying one synonym after another till he got that which suited him best. "Why is it, Mr. Chairman, that there has gathered, congregated, this great number of inhabitants, dwellers, here; that these roads, avenues, routes of travel, highways, converge, meet, come together, here? Is it not because we have here a sufficient, ample, safe, secure, convenient, commodious, port, harbor, haven?" Of course when the speech came to be printed all the synonyms but the best one would be left out.

Mr. Webster seemed rather feeble at that time, and called upon his friend Mr. William Dehon to read for him the evidence and extracts from reports with which he had to deal. His tome was the tone of ordinary conversation, and his speech, while it would not be called hesitating, was exceedingly slow and deliberate. I have been told by persons who heard him in the Supreme Court in his later years that the same characteristic marked his arguments there, and that some of his passages made very little impression upon the auditors, although they seemed eloquent and powerful when they came to be read afterward.

His is frequently spoken of as a nervous Saxon style. That is a great mistake, except as to a few passages where he rose to a white heat. If any person will open a volume of his speeches at random, it will be found that the characteristic of his sentences is a somewhat ponderous Latinity.

A considerable number of Democrats joined the Free Soil movement in 1848. Conspicuous among them was Marcus Morton, who had been Governor and one of our ablest Supreme Court judges, and his son, afterward Chief Justice, then just rising into distinction as a lawyer. The members of the Liberty Party also, who had cast votes for Birney in 1844, were ready for the new movement. But the Free Soil Party derived its chief strength, both of numbers and influence, from the Whigs. The Anti-Slavery Whigs clung to Webster almost to the last. He had disappointed them by opposing the resolution they offered at the Whig State Convention, pledging the party to support no candidate not known by his acts or declared opinions to be opposed to the extension of slavery. But he had coupled his opposition with a declaration of his own unalterable opposition to that extension, and had said, speaking of those who were in favor of the declaration: "It is not their thunder."

He declared in the Senate, as late as 1848: "My opposition to the increase of slavery in the country, or to the increase of slave representation in Congress, is general and universal. It has no reference to lines of latitude or points of the compass. I shall oppose all such extension, and all such increase, at all times, under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all combinations, against all compromises."

So the Anti-Slavery Whigs eagerly supported him as their candidate for the Whig nomination in 1848.

If Mr. Webster had been nominated for the Presidency in 1848, the Free Soil Party would not have come into existence that year. There would have been probably some increase in the numbers of the Liberty Party; yet the Anti-Slavery Whigs of Massachusetts would have trusted him. But the nomination of General Taylor, a Southerner, one of the largest slaveholders in the country, whose laurels had been gained in the odious Mexican War, upon a platform silent upon the engrossing subject of the extension of slavery, could not be borne. The temper of the Whig National Convention was exhibited in a way to irritate the lovers of freedom in Massachusetts. When some allusion was made to her expressed opinions, it was received with groans and cries of "Curse Massachusetts." But, on the whole, the Massachusetts Whigs shared the exultant anticipation of triumph, and of regaining the power from which they had been excluded since the time of John Quincy Adams, except for the month of Harrison's short official life. But as the convention was about to adjourn, intoxicated with hope and triumph, Charles Allen, a delegate from Massachusetts, a man of slender figure, rose, and with a quiet voice declared the Whig Party dissolved. Never was a prediction received with more derision; never was prediction more surely fulfilled. He was reinforced by Henry Wilson, afterward Vice-President of the United States.

Immediately on their return from Philadelphia, a call was circulated for a convention to be held at Worcester of all persons opposed to the nomination of Cass and Taylor. The call was written by E. R. Hoar. My father, Samuel Hoar, was its first signer.

This is the call. It should be preserved in a form more enduring than the leaflet, of which I possess, perhaps, the only copy in existence.

"TO THE PEOPLE OF MASSACHUSETTS.

"The Whig National Convention have nominated General Taylor for President of the United States. In so doing they have exceeded their just authority, and have proposed a candidate whom no Northern Whig is bound to support.

"HE IS NOT A WHIG, when tried by the standard of our party organization. He has never voted for a Whig candidate, has declared that the party must not look to him as an exponent of its principles, that he would accept the nomination of the Democratic Party, and that he would not submit his claims to the decision of the Whigs, acting through their regularly constituted Convention.

"HE IS NOT A WHIG, if judged by the opinions he entertains upon questions of public policy. Upon the great questions of currency and Finance, of Internal Improvements, of Protection to American Industry, so far from agreeing with the Whigs, he has distinctly avowed that he has formed no opinion at all.

"HE IS NOT A WHIG, if measured by the higher standard of principle, to which the Whigs of Massachusetts and of the North have pledged themselves solemnly, deliberately, and often. He is not opposed to the extension of Slavery over new territories, acquired, and to be acquired, by the United States. He is a Slave-holder, and has been selected because he could command votes which no Whig from the free States could receive.

"To make room for him, the trusted and faithful Champions of our cause have all been set aside.

"The Whigs of Massachusetts, by their Legislature, and in their popular assemblies, have resolved, that opposition to the extension of Slavery is a fundamental article in their political faith. They have spoken with scorn and upbraiding of those Northern Democrats who would sacrifice the rights and interests of the Free States upon the altar of party subserviency.

"The Whigs of the Legislature have recently declared to the country, 'that if success can attend the party, only by the sacrifice of Whig principles, or some of them,' they did not mean to be thus successful; that they are determined 'to support a candidate who will not suffer us to be over- balanced by annexations of foreign territory, nor by the further extension of the institution of Slavery, which is equally repugnant to the feelings, and incompatible with the political rights of the Free States'; and that they 'believe it to be the resolute purpose of the Whig people of Massachusetts, to support these sentiments, and carry into effect the design which they manifest.'

"Believing that the support of General Taylor's nomination is required by no obligations of party fidelity, and that to acquiesce in it would be the abandonment of principles which we hold most dear, treachery to the cause of Freedom, and the utter prostration of the interests of Free Labor and the Rights of Freemen:

"The undersigned, Whigs of Massachusetts, call upon their fellow-citizens throughout the Commonwealth, who are opposed to the nomination of CASS and TAYLOR, to meet in Convention at Worcester, on Wednesday, the 28th day of June current, to take such steps as the occasion shall demand, in support of the PRINCIPLES to which they are pledged, and to co-operate with the other Free States in a Convention for this purpose."

My first political service was folding and directing these circulars. The Convention was held, and Samuel Hoar presided. It was addressed by men most of whom afterward became eminent in the public service. Among them were Charles Sumner, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Wilson, E. R. Hoar, Edward L. Keyes, Charles Allen, Lewis D. Campbell, of Ohio, and Abraham Payne, of Rhode Island. Richard H. Dana was present, but I think he did not speak. William Lloyd Garrison and Francis Jackson were present, but took no part whatever. I rode to Boston in a freight car after the convention was over, late at night. Garrison and Jackson were sitting together and talking to a group of friends. Garrison seemed much delighted with the day's work, but said he heard too much talk about the likelihood that some of the resolutions would be popular and bring large numbers of votes to the party. He said: "All you should ask is, what is the rightful position? and then take it." Among the resolutions was this:

"That Massachusetts looks to Daniel Webster to declare to the Senate and to uphold before the country the policy of the Free States; that she is relieved to know that he has not endorsed the nomination of General Taylor; and that she invokes him at this crisis to turn a deaf ear to 'optimists' and 'quietists', and to speak and act as his heart and his great mind shall lead him."

Daniel Webster's son Fletcher was present, and heartily in accord with the meeting; and this resolution was passed with his full approval. It met great opposition from the men who had come into the movement from the Liberty Party and from the Democratic Party. The shouts of "No, no; too late" were nearly, if not quite, equal to the expressions of approval. But the president declared that it was passed.

Mr. Webster sulked in his tent during the summer, and at last, September 1, 1848, made a speech at Marshfield, in which he declared the nomination of Taylor not fit to be made, but gave it a half-hearted support. My brother, Judge E. R. Hoar, had been an enthusiastic admirer of Webster, who had treated him with great personal kindness; and, as I have said, he had been associated with Mr. Webster in the famous Wyman trial. Mr. Webster made a speech in the Senate in August, declaring his renewed opposition to the extension of slavery. Mr. Hoar wrote a letter expressing his satisfaction with that speech, and urging him to take his proper place at the head of the Northern Free Soil movement. This is Mr. Webster's reply. It is interesting as the last anti-slavery utterance of Daniel Webster.

MARSHFIELD, August 23, 1848.

My Dear Sir:

I am greatly obliged to you, for your kind and friendly letter. You overrate, I am sure, the value of my speech, it was quite unpremeditated and its merit, if any, consists I presume in its directness and brevity. It mortified me to see that some of the newspaper writers speak of it as the "taking of a position"; as if it contained something new for me to say. You are not one of them, my dear sir, but there are those who will not believe that I am an anti-slavery man unless I repeat the declaration once a week. I expect they will soon require a periodical affidavit. You know, that as early as 1830 in my speech on Foote's resolution, I drew upon me the anger of enemies, and a regret of friends by what I said against slavery, and I hope that from that day to this my conduct has been consistent. But nobody seems to be esteemed to be worthy of confidence who is not a new convert. And if the new convert be as yet but half converted, so much the better. This I confess a little tries one's patience. But I can assure you in my own case, it will not either change my principles or my conduct.

It is utterly impossible for me to support the Buffalo nomination. I have no confidence in Mr. Van Buren, not the slightest. I would much rather trust General Taylor than Mr. Van Buren even on this very question of slavery, for I believe that General Taylor is an honest man and I am sure he is not so much committed on the wrong side, as I know Mr. Van Buren to have been for fifteen years. I cannot concur even with my best friends in giving the lead in a great question to a notorious opponent to the cause. Besides; there are other great interests of the country in which you and I hold Mr. Van Buren to be essentially wrong, and it seems to me that in consenting to form a party under him Whigs must consent to bottom their party on one idea only, and also to adopt as the representative of that idea a head chosen on a strange emergency from among its steadiest opposers. It gives me pain to differ from Whig friends whom I know to be as much attached to universal liberty as I am, and they cannot be more so. I am grieved particularly to be obliged to differ in anything from yourself and your excellent father, for both of whom I have cherished such long and affectionate regards. But I cannot see it to be my duty to join in a secession from the Whig Party for the purpose of putting Mr. Van Buren at the head of the Government. I pray you to assure yourself, my dear Sir, of my continued esteem and attachment, and remember me kindly and cordially to your father.

Yours, etc., DANIEL WEBSTER

Honorable E. Rockwood Hoar.

Mr. Hoar had before had a somewhat interesting interview with Mr. Webster to the same effect. Late in the winter, before the convention at Philadelphia, some young Whigs had a dinner at the Tremont House, to concert measures to support his candidacy. There were forty or fifty present. Mr. Webster was expected to speak to them, but his daughter Julia was very ill. He sent them a message that he would see them at the house in Summer Street where he was staying. So when the dinner was half over, the party walked in procession to Mr. Paige's house. As Judge Hoar described the interview, he seemed very glum. He shook hands with the young men as they passed by him, but said very little. There was an awkward silence, and they were about to take leave, when the absurdity of the position struck Mr. Hoar, who was the youngest of the party, rather forcibly. Just then he heard Mr. Webster say to somebody near him: "The day for eminent public men seems to have gone by." Whereupon Hoar stepped forward and made him a brief speech, which he began by saying that the object of their coming together was to show that, in their opinion, the day for eminent public men had not gone by, and some more to the same effect. Webster waked up and his eyes flashed and sparkled. He made a speech full of vigor and fire. He spoke of his name being brought before the Whig convention at Philadelphia, and of his fidelity to the party. He said that whether his own name should be in the judgment of the convention suitable or the best to present to the country the convention would determine, and added: "If the convention shall select anyone of our conspicuous leaders, trained and experienced in civil affairs, of national reputation as a statesman, he will receive my hearty support. But if I am asked whether I will advise the convention at Philadelphia to nominate, or if nominated I will recommend the people to support for the office of President of the United States, a swearing, fighting, frontier colonel, I only say that I shall not do it."

Many people think that if Mr. Webster would have supported General Taylor's policy of dealing with the questions relating to slavery it would have prevailed, and that the country would have been pacified and the Civil War avoided. I do not think so. The forces on both sides who were bringing on that conflict were too powerful to be subdued by the influence of any individual statesman. The irrepressible conflict had to be fought out. But Mr. Webster's attitude not only estranged him from the supporters of General Taylor in his own party, but, of course, made an irreparable breach between him and the anti-slavery men who had founded the Free Soil Party. He was the chief target for all anti-slavery arrows from March 7, 1850, to his death.

When I was in the Harvard Law School, Mr. Webster was counsel in a very interesting divorce case where Choate was upon the other side. The parties were in high social position and very well known. Mr. Choate's client, who was the wife, was charged with adultery. I did not hear the closing argument, but my classmates who did reported that Mr. Webster spoke of the woman with great severity and argued the case with a scriptural plainness of speech. He likened the case of the husband bound to an adulterous wife to the old Hebrew punishment of fastening a living man to a corpse. "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" But Judge Fletcher, who held the court, decided in favor of the wife.

The meeting which gathered at Worcester in pursuance of the above call, inaugurated for the first time a party for the sole object of resisting the extension of slavery. The Liberty Party, which had cast a few votes in the presidential election of 1840, and which, in 1844, had turned the scale in New York and so in the nation against Mr. Clay, was willing to support the candidates of other parties who were personally unobjectionable to them in this respect. But the Free Soil Party, of which the present Republican party is but the continuation under a change of name, determined that no person should receive its support for any national office, who himself continued his association with either of the old political organizations.

The Free Soil Party of Massachusetts cast in the presidential election of 1848 only about 37,000 votes, but it included among its supporters almost every man in the Commonwealth old enough to take part in politics who has since acquired any considerable national reputation. Charles Sumner who had become known to the public as an orator and scholar by three or four great orations, was just at the threshold of his brilliant career. Charles Francis Adams, who had served respectably but without great distinction, in each branch of the Legislature, brought to the cause his inflexible courage, his calm judgment, and the inspiration of his historic name. John A. Andrew, then a young lawyer in Boston, afterward to become illustrious as the greatest war Governor in the Union, devoted to the cause an eloquence stimulant and inspiring as a sermon of Paul. John G. Palfrey, then a Whig member of Congress from the Middlesex District, discussed the great issue in speeches singularly adapted to reach the understanding and gratify the taste of the people of Massachusetts, and in a series of essays whose vigor and compactness Junius might have envied, and with a moral power which Junius could never have reached. Anson Burlingame, afterward Minister to China, captivated large crowds with his inspiring eloquence.* Samuel G. Howe, famous in both hemispheres by his knightly service in the cause of Greek independence, famous also by his philanthropic work in behalf of the insane and blind, brought his great influence to the party. Henry Wilson, a mechanic, whose early training had been that of the shoemaker's shop, but who understood the path by which to reach the conscience and understanding of the workingmen of Massachusetts better than any other man, had been also a delegate to the Convention at Philadelphia, and had united with Judge Allen in denunciation of its surrender of liberty. Stephen C. Phillips, a highly respected merchant of Salem, and formerly Whig Representative from the Essex District, gave the weight of his influence in the same direction. Samuel Hoar, who had been driven from South Carolina when he attempted to argue the case for the imprisoned colored seamen of Massachusetts before the courts of the United States, one of the most distinguished lawyers of the Massachusetts bar, came from this retirement in his old age to give his service in the same cause; of which his son, E. R. Hoar, was also a constant, untiring, and enthusiastic champion. Richard H. Dana, master of an exquisite English style, the only Massachusetts advocate who ever encountered Rufus Choate on equal terms, threw himself into the cause with all the ardor of his soul. On the Connecticut River, George Ashmun, the most powerful of the Whig champions in western Massachusetts, found more than his match in Erastus Hopkins. William Claflin, afterward Speaker, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor of Massachusetts, member of the National House of Representatives, and Chairman of the Republican National Committee, was then in his early youth. But he had already gained a competent fortune by his business sagacity. He brought to the cause his sound judgment, his warm and affectionate heart, and his liberal hand. He was then, as he has ever since been, identified with every good and generous cause. His stanch friendship was then, as it has been ever since, the delight and comfort of the champions of freedom in strife and obloquy.

[Footnote] * Shortly after Burlingame came into active life, he made a journey to Europe. The American Minister obtained for him a ticket of admission to the House of Commons. He was shown into a very comfortable seat in the gallery. In a few minutes an official came and told him he must leave that seat; that the gallery where he was was reserved for Peers. They are very particular about such things there. Burlingame got up to go out when an old Peer who happened to be sitting by and had heard what was said, interposed. "Let him stay, let him stay. He is a Peer in his own country." "I am a Sovereign in my own country, Sir," replied Burlingame, "and shall lose caste if I associate with Peers." And he went out. [End of Footnote]

Each of these men would have been amply fitted in all respects for the leader of a great party in State or Nation. Each of them could have defended any cause in which he was a believer, by whatever champion assailed. They had also their allies and associates among the representatives of the press. Among these were Joseph T. Buckingham, of the Boston Courier, then the head of the editorial fraternity in Massachusetts; John Milton Earle, the veteran editor of the Worcester Spy; William S. Robinson, afterward so widely known as Warrington, whose wit and keen logic will cause his name to be long preserved among the classics of American literature.

I have spoken of some of these men more at length elsewhere. I knew them, all but two, very intimately. I only knew Joseph T. Buckingham by sight. He edited the Boston Courier with great ability. He was a member of both Houses of the Massachusetts Legislature. He was a member of the State Senate in 1850 and 1851. He left the Courier in June, 1848, about the time the Free Soil movement begun, and was not active in politics afterward.

I had no personal acquaintance with Charles Francis Adams. I have known his son, Charles Francis Adams, President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, pretty well. He inherits a great deal of the ability and independence which belongs to his race. He would undoubtedly have taken a very high place in the public and official life of his generation if he had found himself in accord with either of the great political parties.

I do not think anybody, except the very intimate friends of Charles Francis Adams, was aware of his great abilities until he manifested them amid the difficulties of the English Mission. They were known, however, to a few men who were intimate with him. I was quite astonished one day when I called on Dr. Palfrey, at his house in Cambridge in 1852, and he told me Mr. Adams was entirely competent for the office of President of the United States.

Mr. Adams was rather dull as a public speaker. He was apt to announce commonplaces slowly and deliberately, as if they were something he thought his audience was listening to for the first time. But the influence of his historic name was very great. His marvellous resemblance to his father and grandfather made a great impression. When he said at Worcester on the 28th of June, 1848: "I say, in words to which I have a hereditary right, 'Sink or Swim, Live or Die, Survive or Perish, I give my hand and my heart to this movement,'" it seemed to the audience as if old John Adams had stepped down from Trumbull's picture of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence to give his benediction.*

[Footnote] * I like very much the epitaph which his sons placed over him in the burial place at Quincy. Every word of it is true.

THIS STONE MARKS THE GRAVE OF CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS SON OF JOHN QUINCY AND LOUISA CATHERINE (JOHNSON) ADAMS BORN 18 AUGUST 1807 Trained from his youth in politics and letters His manhood strengthened by the convictions Which had inspired his fathers He was among the first to serve And among the most steadfast to support That new revolution Which restored the principles of liberty To public law And secured to his country The freedom of its soil During seven troubled and anxious years Minister of the United States in England afterward arbitrator at the tribunal of Geneva He failed in no task which his Government imposed Yet won the respect and confidence of two great nations Dying 21 November 1886 He left the example of high powers nobly used and the remembrance of a spotless name. [End of Footnote]

Besides these more conspicuous leaders, there was to be found, in almost every town and village in Massachusetts, some man eminent among his neighbors for purity of life, for philanthropy, and for large intelligence who was ready to join the new party. The glowing hopes and dreams and aspirations of youth were inspirited by the muse of Whittier and Longfellow and Lowell and Bryant. The cause of free labor appealed to the strongest sympathies of the mechanics of Essex and the skilled laborers of Worcester.

Four years afterward Daniel Webster, as he lay dying at Marshfield, said to the friend who was by his side: "The Whig candidate will obtain but one or two States, and it is well; as a national party, the Whigs are ended."

The Whig Party retained its organization in Massachusetts until 1856; but its intellect and its moral power were gone. Mr. Winthrop, as appears from the excellent "Life" published by his son, had no sympathy with Mr. Webster's position. Mr. Webster died, a disappointed man, in the autumn of 1852. He took no part in political affairs in Massachusetts after 1850. Mr. Choate, who was to follow his great leader to the grave within a few years, transferred his allegiance to the Democrats. Mr. Everett, after a brief service in the Senate, a service most uncongenial to his own taste, resigned his seat in the midst of the angry conflict on the Nebraska bill, and devoted himself to literary pursuits until, when the war broke out, he threw himself with all his zeal, power, and eloquence into the cause of his country.

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IX. LIFE IN WORCESTER

After leaving college I studied for a year in my brother's office in Concord, then for two years at the Harvard Law School, and afterward for four months in the office of Judge Benjamin F. Thomas in Worcester. I was led to choose Worcester as a place to live in chiefly for the reason that that city and county were the stronghold of the new Anti-Slavery Party, to which cause I was devoted with all my heart and soul. I have never regretted the choice, and have spent my life there, except when in Washington, for considerably more than half a century. In that time Worcester has grown from a city of fifteen thousand to a city of one hundred and thirty thousand people. I can conceive of no life more delightful for a man of public spirit than to belong to a community like that which combines the youth and vigor and ambition of a western city with the refinement and conveniences, and the pride in a noble history, of an old American community. It is a delight to see it grow and a greater delight to help it grow,--to help improve its schools, and found its Public Library, and help lay the foundations of great institutions of learning. Worcester had an admirable Bar, admirable clergymen, and physicians of great skill and eminence. Among her clergymen was Edward Everett Hale, then in early youth, but already famous as a preacher throughout the country. There was no Unitarian pulpit where he was not gladly welcomed. So his congregation here, by way of exchange, heard the most famous pulpit orators of the country.

Among the physicians was Dr. Joseph Sargent, a man then without a superior in his profession in Massachusetts. The friendship I formed with him in 1849 lasted till his death, more than forty years afterward.

The mechanics of Worcester were unsurpassed for their ingenuity anywhere on the face of the earth. Worcester was the centre and home of invention. Within a circle of twelve miles radius was the home of Blanchard, the inventor of the machine for turning irregular forms; of Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine; of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, which doubled the value of every acre of cotton-producing land in the country; of Erastus B. Bigelow, the inventor of the carpet machine; of Hawes, the inventor of the envelope machine; of Crompton and Knowles, the creators and perfectors of the modern loom; of Ruggles, Nourse and Mason, in whose establishment the modern plow was brought to perfection, and a great variety of other agricultural implements invented and improved. There were many other men whose inventive genius and public usefulness were entitled to rank with these. The first house-warming furnace was introduced here, and the second cupola furnace was set up near by.

These inventors and mechanics were all men of great public spirit, proud of Worcester, of its great achievements, and its great hope. They got rich rapidly. They and their households made social life most delightful. There was little pride of family or wealth. Men and women were welcomed everywhere on their merits.

The City of Worcester was the heart of one of the foremost agricultural counties in the country. The county stood fourth among American counties in the value of its agricultural products, and the proportion of the value of the product to the value of the lands. It was the spot on the face of the earth where labor got the largest proportion of the joint product of labor and capital. The farmers made an excellent living. They made excellent legislators, excellent town officers, excellent jurors, and excellent clients. I have been at some time or other in my life counsel for every one of the fifty-two towns in Worcester County. I had a large clientage among the farmers. In the intimacy of that relation I got a knowledge of the inmost soul and heart of a class of men who I think constituted what was best in American citizenship, a knowledge which has been a great educational advantage to me and valuable in a thousand ways in my public and professional life.

From the first of December, 1849, until the fourth of March, 1869, I was diligently employed in my profession, save for a single year's service in each house of the Massachusetts Legislature. But during all that time I kept a very zealous interest in political affairs. I was Chairman of the County Committee for several years, made political speeches occasionally, presided at political meetings, always attended the caucus and was in full sympathy and constant communication with the Free Soil and Republican leaders.

The Worcester Bar in my time afforded a delightful companionship. It was like a college class in the old days. My best and most cordial friends were the men whom I was constantly encountering in the courts. The leaders of the Bar when I was admitted to it,--Charles Allen, Emory Washburn, Pliny Merrick, Benjamin F. Thomas, Peter C. Bacon,--would have been great leaders at any Bar in the United States, or on any circuit in England. Study at a law school is invaluable to the youth if he is to rise in his profession; but there is no law school like a court-house when such men are conducting trials. The difficult art of cross-examination, the more difficult art of refraining from cross-examination, can only be learned by watching men who are skilled in the active conduct of trials.

The Supreme Court of Massachusetts at that day with Chief Justice Shaw at its head was without an equal in the country and not surpassed by the Supreme Court of the United States itself. I can conceive of no life more delightful than that of a lawyer in good health, and with good capacity, and with a sufficient clientage, spent in that manly emulation and honorable companionship.

The habit of giving dissenting opinions which has become so common both in the Supreme Court of the United States and of late in the Massachusetts Supreme Court did not then exist. If there were a division on an important question of law the statement of the result was usually "a majority of the Court is of opinion." That was all. I do not believe any court can long retain public confidence and respect when nearly all its opinions in important matters are accompanied by a powerful attack on the soundness of the opinion and the correctness of the judgment from the Bench itself. The Reporter of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is, I believe, authorized to report the decisions of the court more or less at length at his discretion. If he would exercise that discretion by an absolute refusal to print dissenting opinions, except in a few very great and exceptional cases, he would have the thanks of the profession. It may be harder to put a stop to the practice in the Supreme Court of the United States. That will have to be done, if at all, by the good sense of the Judges. The recent opinions of the Court in what are known as the Insular Cases have shocked the country and greatly diminished the weight and authority of the tribunal. This was not because of public disapproval of the opinion of the Court. It was because upon one of the greatest questions of Constitutional law and Constitutional liberty that ever went to judgment, there could be found no single reason for the decision of the Court strong enough to convince any two judges.

The fact that I have been for nearly thirty-five years in public life, and likely to be, if I live, in public life a few years longer, is an instance of how--

The best laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley.

Down to the time I was admitted to the Bar, and indeed for a year later, my dream and highest ambition were to spend my life as what is called an office lawyer, making deeds and giving advice in small transactions. I supposed I was absolutely without capacity for public speaking. I expected never to be married; perhaps to earn twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, which would enable me to have a room of my own in some quiet house, and to earn enough to collect rare books that could be had without much cost. I can honestly say with George Herbert: "I protest and I vow I even study thrift, and yet I am scarce able, with much ado, to make one half year's allowance shake hands with the other. And yet if a book of four or five shillings come in my way, I buy it, though I fast for it; yea, sometimes of ten shillings."

But I happened one night in the autumn of 1850 to be at a great mass meeting in the City Hall, at Worcester, which Charles Allen was expected to address. It was the year of the Compromise Measures, including the Fugitive Slave Law, and of Daniel Webster's 7th of March speech. Judge Allen, as he was somewhat apt to do, came in late. A vast audience had gathered and were waiting. Nobody seemed ready to speak. Somebody started the cry, "Hoar! Hoar!" My father and brother were known as leaders in the Free Soil Party, and that I suppose made somebody call on me. I got up in my place in the middle of the hall in great confusion. There were shouts of "platform," "platform." I made my way to the platform, hoping only to make my excuses and get off without being detected. But the people were disposed to be good-natured, and liked what I said. Dr. Stone, the famous stenographic reporter, was present and took it down. It was printed in the Free Soil papers, and from that time I was in considerable demand as a public speaker. The coalition between the Free Soilers and Democrats carried the State of Massachusetts that year and elected Sumner Senator and Boutwell Governor. The next year Worcester failed to elect her representatives to the Legislature, which were voted for all on one ticket and required a majority, and there was to be a second election on the fourth Monday of November. There was a delegate convention to nominate representatives, of which I was a member. When the vote was announced, to my surprise and consternation, I was one of the persons nominated. Nobody had said a word to me about it beforehand. That was Friday night. I told the Convention I could not accept such a nomination without my father's approval. I was then twenty- five years old. It was proposed that the Convention adjourn until the next evening, and that meantime I should go down to Concord and see if I could get my father's leave. Accordingly the Convention adjourned to see if the infant candidate could get permission to accept. My father told me he thought that to go to the Legislature once would be useful to me in my profession; I should learn how laws were made, and get acquainted with prominent men from different parts of the State. So he advised me to accept, if I would make up my mind that I would go only for one year, and would after that stick to the law, and would never look to politics as a profession or vocation. I accepted the nomination, was elected, and was made Chairman of one of the Law Committees in the House.

I declined a reelection and devoted myself to my profession, except that I served in the Massachusetts Senate one year, 1857, being nominated unexpectedly and under circumstances somewhat like those which attended my former nomination. I was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee that year. I devoted all my time, day and even far into the night, to my legislative duties. I was never absent a single day from my seat in the House in 1852, and was absent only one day from my seat in the Senate, in 1857, when I had to attend to an important law suit. It so happened that there was a severe snow storm that day, which blocked up the railroads, so that there was no quorum in the Senate. I could not myself have got to the State House, if I had tried. I suppose I may say without arrogance that I was the leader of the Free Soil Party in each House when I was a member of it. In 1852 I prepared, with the help of Horace Gray, afterward Judge, who was not a member of the Legislature, the Practice Act of 1852, which abolished the common law system of pleading, and has been in principle that on which the Massachusetts courts have acted in civil cases ever since. I studied the English Factory legislation, and read Macaulay's speeches on the subject. I became an earnest advocate for shortening the hours of labor by legislation. That was then called the ten-hour system. Later it has been called the eight-hour system. I made, in 1852, a speech in favor of reducing the time of labor in factories to ten hours a day which, so far as I know, was the first speech in any legislative body in this country on that subject. My speech was received with great derision. The House, usually very courteous and orderly, seemed unwilling to hear me through. One worthy old farmer got up in his seat and said: "Isn't the young man for Worcester going to let me get up in the morning and milk my caouws."

When a member of the Senate in 1857, I was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I made a very earnest and carefully prepared speech against the asserted right of the jury to judge of the law in criminal cases. It is a popular and specious doctrine. But it never seemed to me to be sound. Among others, there are two reasons against it, which seem to me conclusive, and to which I have never seen a plausible answer. One is that if the jury is to judge of the law, you will have as many different laws as you have juries. There is no revision of their conclusion. They are not obliged to tell, and there is no way in which the court can know, what their opinion was. So a man tried on one side of the court-house may be held guilty, and another man tried on the other side of the court-house may be held innocent for precisely the same act.

The other reason is that the court must always decide what evidence shall be admitted. So if the jury are to be the judges of the law, one authority must determine what evidence they shall consider, and another determine what law shall be applied to it. For instance, suppose a defendant charged with homicide offers to prove certain facts which as he claims justify the killing. The Judge says these facts do not, under the law, justify the killing and excludes the evidence. That may be the real point in the case, and the jury may believe that those facts fully justify the homicide; still they cannot be permitted to hear them. It is preposterous to suppose that so logical and reasonable a system as the Common Law could ever have tolerated such an absurdity. My friend, Mr. Justice Gray of the United States Supreme Court, an admirable judge and one of the great judges of the world, in his dissenting opinion in Sparf et al. v. U. S., 156, U. S. Reports, page 51, etc., has little to say on this point, except that of course there must be some authority to regulate the conduct of trials.

I declined a reelection to the Senate. I was twice nominated for Mayor by the Republicans of Worcester, when the election of their candidate was sure; once by a Citizens' Convention, and once by a Committee authorized to nominate a candidate, and another year urged by prominent and influential citizens to accept such a nomination. But I preferred my profession. I never had any desire or taste for executive office, and I doubt if I had much capacity for it.

When Charles Allen declined reelection to Congress, in 1852, I have no doubt I could have succeeded him if I had been willing, although I was but twenty-six years old, only a year past the Constitutional age.

As I found myself getting a respectable place in the profession my early ambitions were so far changed and expanded that I hoped I might some day be appointed to the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that there could be no more delightful life for a man competent to the service than one spent in discussing with the admirable lawyers, who have always adorned that Bench, the great questions of jurisprudence, involving the rights of citizens, and the welfare of the Commonwealth, and helping to settle them by authority. This ambition was also disappointed. I have twice received the offer of a seat on that Bench, under circumstances which rendered it out of the question that I should accept it, although on both occasions I longed exceedingly to do so.

Shortly after I was admitted to the Bar, good fortune brought me at once into the largest practice in the great County of Worcester, although that Bar had always been, before and since, one of the ablest in the country. Judge Emory Washburn, afterward Governor and Professor of Law at Harvard, and writer on jurisprudence, had the largest practice in the Commonwealth, west of Boston, and I suppose with one exception, the largest in the Commonwealth outside of Boston. He asked me to become his partner in June, 1852. I had then got a considerable clientage of my own. Early in 1853 he sailed for Europe, intending to return in the fall. I was left in charge of his business during his six months' absence, talking with the clients about cases in which he was already retained, and receiving their statements as to cases in which they desired to retain him on his return. Before he reached home he was nominated for Governor by the Whig Convention, to which office he was elected by the Legislature in the following January. So he had but a few weeks to attend to his law business before entering upon the office of Governor. I kept on with it, I believe without losing a single client. That winter I had extraordinarily good fortune, due I think very largely to the kindly feeling of the juries toward so young a man attempting to undertake such great responsibilities.

My professional life from January 1, 1850, until the 4th of March, 1869, was a life of great and incessant labor. When the court was in session I was constantly engaged in jury trials. Day after day, and week after week, I had to pass from one side of the court-house to the other, being engaged in a very large part of the important actions that were tried in those days. The Court had long sessions. The judges who came from abroad were anxious to get their work done and go back to their homes. So the Courts sat from half past eight or nine o'clock in the morning until six in the afternoon with an intermission of an hour, or an hour and a quarter, for dinner. The parties to the suits came from all over Worcester County. Frequently it was impossible to see the witnesses until the trial came on, or just before. So the lawyer had to spend his evenings and often far into the night in seeing witnesses and making other preparations for the next day. General Devens and I had at one term of the Supreme Court held by Chief Justice Bigelow twenty trial actions. The term resulted in a serious injury to my eyes and in my being broken down with overwork. So I was compelled to go to Europe the following year for a vacation.

But I found time somehow, as I have said, to keep up a constant and active interest in politics. I was also able to contribute something to other things which were going on for the benefit of our growing city. I got up the first contribution for the Free Public Library, of which I was made President. I took a great interest in the founding of the famous Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and I was the first person named in its Act of Incorporation. The first meeting of its Trustees was held in my office, and I am now the only surviving member of that Board, in which I have retained a warm interest ever since. In 1869 I made before the Massachusetts Legislature, on a petition which was successful for a legislative grant to that school, what I believe is the first public address ever made in behalf of Technical Education in this country. I was for some time President of the Board of Trustees of the City Library and while President planned the excellent reading room connected with the Library, for which I obtained a handsome endowment by personal solicitation.

I was also Trustee of Leicester Academy.

The Worcester Lyceum, which furnished the principal course of lectures in the city in those days, was in the hands of some very worthy and conservative old Whigs. They would not permit any politics or religion, or what was called Radicalism, either in religious or social matters, to be discussed on their platform. So we had to listen to very respectable and worthy, but rather dull and tame conservative gentlemen, or stay away, as we preferred. A few of the young men, of whom I was one, conspired to get possession of the Lyceum. They turned out in force for the election of officers, chose me President, and we got Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson and other shining lights of a newer philosophy, much to the indignation of the old Whig magnates. But the lectures were very successful, and at the end of my Presidency, which lasted two or three years, we had an ample balance in our treasury.

If I were to give an account of my professional life for twenty years, I must make another book. It was full of interest and romance. The client in those days used to lay bare his soul to his lawyer. Many of the cases were full of romantic interest. The lawyer followed them as he followed the plot of an exciting novel, from the time the plaintiff first opened his door and told his story till the time when he heard the sweetest of all sounds to a lawyer, the voice of the foreman saying: "The jury find for the plaintiff." Next to the "yes," of a woman, that is the sweetest sound, I think, that can fall on human ears.

I used to have eighteen or twenty law cases at the fall term each year. The judges gave their opinions orally in open Court, and the old judges like Shaw and Metcalf, used to enliven an opinion with anecdotes or quaint phrases, which lent great interest to the scene. If Walter Scott could have known and told the story of the life of an old Massachusetts lawyer from the close of the Revolution down to the beginning of the Rebellion, there is nothing in the great Scotch novels which would have surpassed it for romance and for humor.

I think I may fairly claim that I had a good deal to do with developing the equity system in the courts of Massachusetts, and with developing the admirable Insolvency system of Massachusetts, which is substantially an equity system, from which the United States Bankruptcy statutes have been so largely copied.

The great mass of the people of Massachusetts, Whigs and Democrats as well as Republicans, were loyal and patriotic and full of zeal when the war broke out. A very few of the old Whigs and Democrats, who were called "Hunkers" or "Copperheads," sympathized with the Rebellion, or if they did not, were so possessed with hatred for the men who were putting it down that they could find nothing to approve, but only cause for complaint and faultfinding. Andrew, the Governor, Sumner and Wilson, the Senators, most of the members of Congress, most of the leaders in the Legislature and in the military and political activities, were of the old Free Soil Party. There was a feeling, not wholly unreasonable, that the old Whigs had been somewhat neglected, and that their cooperation and help were received rather coldly. This feeling led to the movement, called the People's Party, which begun at a large public meeting in Cambridge, where my dear old friend and partner, ex-Governor Washburn, was one of the speakers. That party called a State Convention and nominated Charles Devens for Governor. Devens had been an old Whig. He had become a Republican in 1856, and had been one of the earliest to enlist in the War, in which he became afterward the most famous Massachusetts soldier. He was a man of spirit, very affectionate and generous, always ready to stand by his friends, especially if he suspected that anybody had treated them unjustly. The People's Party sent a Committee to the seat of war in September, 1862. The Committee found Devens in his tent, repeated to him the plans of his old Whig friends, and induced him to accept the nomination of the People's Party for Governor.

I was called to the battlefield of Antietam, where a near kinsman of mine had been mortally wounded, just about the same time. I entered Devens's tent just as this Committee was leaving it with his written acceptance in their hands. I told him the other side of the story, told him how the whole people were alive with enthusiasm, and that Governor Andrew was doing the very best possible, and that these petty jealousies, while there was some little reason for them, ought not to affect the public action of the people. Devens regretted very much what he had done. He told me that if he could recall the letter, he would do it. But it was too late.

Governor Andrew was triumphantly reelected, and Devens was ever after an earnest and loyal Republican.

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X. POLITICAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS FROM 1848 TO 1869

In 1848, the Free Soil Party in Massachusetts nominated candidates for State officers. It was made up of Whigs, Democrats and members of the Liberty Party. It had made no distinct issue with the Whig Party upon matters of State administration. Governor Briggs, the Whig Governor, was a wise and honest Chief Magistrate, highly respected by all the people. But the Free Soil leaders wisely determined that if they were to have a political party, they must have candidates for State officers as well as National. It is impossible to organize a political party with success whose members are acting together in their support of one candidate and striving with all their might against each other when another is concerned. My father was urged to be the Free Soil candidate for Governor. Charles Francis Adams and Edmund Jackson visited him at Concord to press it upon him as a duty. Charles Allen wrote him an earnest letter to the same effect. But he was an old friend of Governor Briggs and disliked very much to become his antagonist. He looked to the Whig Party for large accessions to the Free Soil ranks. A large plurality of the people of the community were still devoted to that party. He doubted very much the wisdom of widening the breach between them by a conflict on other questions than that of slavery. So he refused his consent. Stephen C. Phillips, an eminent Salem merchant, and a former Member of Congress, was nominated. The result was there was no choice of State officers by the people, and the election of the Whig candidates was made by the Legislature.

The next year it occurred to the leaders of the Free Soil and Democratic Parties that they had only to unite their forces to overthrow the Whigs. The Free Soil leaders thought the effect of this would be the eventual destruction of the Whig Party at the North,--as afterward proved to be the case,-- and the building up in its place of a party founded on the principle of opposition to the extension of slavery. So in 1849 there was a coalition between the Free Soil and the Democratic Parties in some counties and towns, each supporting the candidates of the other not specially obnoxious to them, neither party committing itself to the principles of the other party or waiving its own. In the fall of the next year, 1850, this policy was pursued throughout the State and resulted in the election by the Legislature of a Democratic Governor, Mr. Boutwell, and of Charles Sumner as the successor of Daniel Webster in the Senate. The experiment was repeated with like success in the fall of 1851.

These two parties had little in common. They could not well act together in State matters without some principle or purpose on which they were agreed other than mere desire for office and opposition to the Whig Party. They found a common ground in the support of a law providing for secrecy in the ballot. There had been great complaint that the manufacturers, especially in Lowell, who were in general zealous Whig partisans, used an undue influence over their workmen. It was said that a man known to be a Democrat, or a Free Soiler, was pretty likely to get his discharge from the employ of any great manufacturing corporation that had occasion to reduce its force, and that he would have no chance to get an increase of wages. I do not now believe there was much foundation for this accusation. But it was believed by many people at the time. So a law requiring secrecy in the ballot was framed and enacted in spite of great resistance from the Whigs. This has undoubtedly proved a good policy, and has prevailed in Massachusetts ever since, and now prevails largely throughout the country.

But this one measure was not enough to hold together elements otherwise so discordant. So the Democratic and Free Soil leaders agreed to call a convention to revise the Constitution of the Commonwealth, which had remained unchanged save in a few particulars since 1780. There had been a Convention for that purpose in 1820, made necessary by the separation of Maine. But the old Constitution had been little altered. The concentration of the population in large towns and cities had caused a demand for a new distribution of political power. Many people desired an elective judiciary. Others desired that the judges should hold office for brief terms instead of the old tenure for life. There was a great demand for the popular election of Sheriffs and District Attorneys, who under the existing system were appointed by the Governor. Others desired the choice of Senators, who had before been chosen by the several counties on a joint ticket, by single districts. A proposition for a Convention was submitted to the people by the Legislature of 1851. But the people were attached to the old Constitution. There was a special dread of any change in the independent tenure of the judiciary. So although the coalition had a majority in the State the proposition for a Constitutional Convention was defeated.

The scheme was renewed the next year in the Legislature of 1852, of which I was a member. Several of the Free Soilers, among which I was included, were unwilling to have the matter tried again without a distinct assurance that there should be no meddling with the judiciary. This assurance was given in the report of a joint committee of the Legislature to whom the matter was committed, consisting of the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties, who reported that there was no purpose to change the judicial tenure with which the people were well satisfied. Accordingly I voted for it. The measure got a bare majority in the House which it would never would have had without that stipulation. The plan was submitted to the people again with a proposition that the choice of delegates to the Constitutional Convention should be by secret ballot. The people approved the plan by a substantial majority.

I have no doubt that the pledge above mentioned was made in good faith and that the men who made it meant to keep it. But before the Convention met two things happened which changed the conditions. The coalition was wrecked. There were two causes for its overthrow. One of them was the appointment by Governor Boutwell of Caleb Cushing to a seat on the Supreme Bench of Massachusetts. General Cushing was a man of great accomplishment, though never a great lawyer. He could collect with wonderful industry all the facts bearing on any historic question and everything that had been said on either side of any question of law. But he never had a gift of cogent argument that would convince any judge or jury. He owed his success in life largely to the personal favor of men who knew him and were charmed by his agreeable quality. He was regarded by the people of Massachusetts as a man without moral convictions and as utterly subservient to the slave power. So his appointment was a great shock to the Anti-Slavery men and made them believe that it was not safe to put political power in Democratic hands. General Cushing vindicated this opinion afterward by the letter written when he was Attorney- General in the Cabinet of President Pierce declaring that the Anti-Slavery movement in the North "must be crushed out," and also by a letter written to Jefferson Davis after the beginning of the Rebellion recommending some person to him for some service to the Confederacy. The discovery of this letter compelled President Grant who had been induced to nominate him for Chief Justice to withdraw the nomination. The other cause was the passage of the bill for the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, known as the Maine law. This measure had passed the Legislature, containing a provision for its submission to the people. It was vetoed by Governor Boutwell. The reason assigned by him was his objection to the provision for its submission to the people, without the secret ballot. The referendum, a scheme by which men charged with political duties avoid responsibility by submitting to the people measures which they fear may be unpopular, --has never found much favor in Massachusetts. After many changes of sentiment, and after passing, modifying, and repealing many laws, the people of the Commonwealth seem to have settled down on a policy which permits each town or city to decide by vote whether the sale of liquor shall be permitted within their limits. The bill was then passed, without the reference to the people. But the measure sealed the fate of the coalition. Some of its provisions, especially that for seizing and destroying stocks of liquor kept for sale in violation of law, were very severe, and were held unconstitutional by the Court. The liquor sellers, almost all of them, were Democrats. They would not readily submit to a law which made their calling criminal.

So the Whigs were restored to power by the fall election in 1852. Their heads were turned by their success. They did not quite dare to repeal the law providing for a Constitutional Convention, but they undertook to repeal so much of it as required that the choice of delegates should be by secret ballot. The minority resisted this repeal with all their might. They alleged with great reason that it was not decent for the Legislature to repeal a provision which the people has expressly approved. But their resistance was in vain, and after a long and angry struggle which stirred the people of the Commonwealth profoundly the provision for the secret ballot was abrogated. But the result of the contest was that the Whigs were routed at the special election for delegates to the Convention. That body was controlled by the Coalition by a very large majority. Their triumph made them also lose their heads.

So when the Convention assembled in 1853, they disregarded the pledges which had enabled them to get the assent of the people to calling the convention, and provided that the tenure of office of the Judges of the Supreme Court should be for ten years only, and that the Judges of Probate should be elected by the people of the several counties once in three years. It is said, and, as I have good reason to know, very truly, that this action of the Convention was taken in consequence of a quarrel in Court between the late Judge Merrick and General Butler and Mr. Josiah G. Abbott, two eminent leaders of the Democrats, members of the Convention. They had neither of them agreed to the proposition to change the judicial tenure. They were absent from the convention for several days in the trial of an important cause before Merrick, and returned angry with the Judge and determined to do something to curb the independent power of the Judges. The proposition was adopted.

These schemes were a distinct violation of the pledge which had been given when the Legislature submitted to the people the proposition for calling the Convention. Of course it was a fair answer to this complaint to say that the members of the committee who made that report could in such a matter bind nobody but themselves. That was true. But I think if the men who signed that report, and the men who joined them in giving the assurance to the people, had been earnest and zealous in the matter it is quite likely they could have prevented the action of the Convention.

The scheme for a new constitution passed the Convention by a large majority and was submitted to the people. The Whig leaders, who seemed to have had all their wisdom and energy taken out of them when the Free Soilers left them, were much alarmed by the strength of the discontent with the existing order of things manifested by the coalition victory in the election of the Constitutional Convention. Many of them concluded that it would be unwise to resist the popular feeling. One Saturday afternoon during that summer I was in the office of Francis Wayland, a great friend of mine, long Dean of the New Haven Law School, when Henry S. Washburn, a member of the Whig State Central Committee, came into Wayland's office and told me he had just attended a meeting of the Committee that day and that it determined to make no contest against the new Constitution. The Springfield Republican, then a Whig journal, had an article that day, or the following Monday, to the same effect. I was very much disturbed. I hurried to Concord by the first train Monday morning, and saw my brother, who was then a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. He agreed with me in thinking that the proposed scheme of government a very bad one. He went at once to Cambridge and saw John G. Palfrey, a very able and influential leader of the Free Soilers. Mr. Palfrey agreed that the Constitution ought to be defeated, if possible. Judge Hoar and he sat down together and prepared a pamphlet, the Judge furnishing all the legal argument and Mr. Palfrey the rest, clothing it all in his inimitable style. It was published under Dr. Palfrey's name. Judge Hoar, being then upon the bench, did not think it becoming to take any more public action in the matter, although he made his opinion known to all persons who cared to know it. Charles Francis Adams and Marcus Morton also made powerful arguments on the same side. My father, Samuel Hoar, also made several speeches against the Constitution. At this defection of so many Free Soilers the Whig leaders took heart and made a vigorous and successful resistance.

The result was that the people voted down the whole constitution. Several of the most eminent leaders of the Free Soilers and Democrats separated themselves from their party and joined the Whigs in defeating it. Among them were Marcus Morton, formerly Governor and Judge of the Supreme Court; John G. Palfrey, who had been the Free Soil candidate for Governor; Charles Francis Adams, afterward member of Congress and Minister to England, and Samuel Hoar.

I was myself, at this time, an enthusiastic Free Soiler, and was, as I have said, Chairman of the Republican County Committee, but I joined the rebels against the dominant feeling of my party.

The defeat of the Constitution was aided, however, undoubtedly by a very just and righteous proposal which was submitted to a separate vote of the people, but which had its effect on the feeling in regard to the whole scheme, to prohibit the use of any money raised by taxation for sectarian schools. To this the Catholic clergy were opposed, and the Catholic vote, not however then very important in Massachusetts, was cast against the whole scheme.

But the Whigs did not entirely get over the feeling that something must be done to propitiate the desire for change. Accordingly they, through the Legislature, submitted to the people propositions for the election by the people of the counties of Sheriffs and District Attorneys who before that time had been appointed by the Governor. These proposals were ratified by the people and became part of the Constitution. I have always thought the change a bad one. I think the Governor likely to make quite as good if not a better choice of Sheriffs and District Attorneys than the people. But the objection to the new system is this. So long as the State makes the laws, the State, whether acting by a popular vote or through its executive, should have the power to enforce them and select the instrumentalities for that purpose. Now if the particular law which the State enacts be unpopular in a particular county, and the people be determined to defeat it, no Sheriff or District Attorney can be elected who will enforce it. That has been shown in the case of the legislation to prohibit or regulate the sale of intoxicating liquors in Suffolk County. Those laws have been always unpopular and since the change in the mode of appointment of District Attorneys and Sheriffs have not been enforced until they were modified to meet the popular objections. This difficulty applies also to the enforcing of laws for the employment of children in factories. The Legislature undertook to meet this difficulty by creating officials, called State Constables, to be appointed by the Governor and to enforce the liquor laws and the laws regulating child labor. But that did not wholly cure the evil. The officials appointed solely to enforce a law against which there are strong objections in any quarter are always themselves unpopular. The Sheriffs have been from the beginning officials of great dignity, commanding popular respect and confidence. So if it were difficult to enforce the law the character of the Sheriff was a great force on its side. But in the case of these particular laws persons of less dignity and authority, often quite obscure when they are appointed, whose whole duty is odious to the persons to be affected by it, instead of giving dignity to the law tend to make it unpopular by their attempts to enforce it. Indeed in my opinion the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 was as nearly a perfect system of government as was ever devised. Some changes in it were made necessary by the separation of Maine. I suppose the abrogation of the provision that every man should pay a tax for the support of public worship somewhere was demanded by a public sentiment it would have been impossible to resist, and undoubtedly the aggregation of population in the large cities and towns required a change in the system of representation. But I think the old method of electing Senators, where it was necessary that a man should have a reputation through an entire county to be chosen, to be better than the system of electing them by small single districts, and I think the slight property qualification was highly useful as a stimulant to saving and economy.

It is, however, a great pity that the labors of this Constitutional Convention were wasted. It was a very able body of men. With the exception of the Convention that framed the Constitution in the beginning, and the Convention which revised it in 1820, after the separation from Maine, I doubt whether so able a body of men ever assembled in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or, with very few exceptions indeed, in the entire country. The debates, which are preserved in three thick and almost forgotten volumes, are full of instructive and admirable essays on the theory of constitutional government. Among the members were Rufus Choate, Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, George N. Briggs, Marcus Morton, Marcus Morton, Jr., Henry L. Dawes, Charles Allen, George S. Hillard, Richard H. Dana, George S. Boutwell, Otis P. Lord, Peleg Sprague, Simon Greenleaf, and Sidney Bartlett.

There were a good many interesting incidents not, I believe, recorded in the report of the debates, which are worth preserving.

One was a spirited reply made by George S. Hillard to Benjamin F. Butler, who had bitterly attacked Chief Justice Shaw, then an object of profound reverence to nearly the whole people of the Commonwealth. Butler spoke of his harsh and rough manner of dealing with counsel. To which Hillard replied, pointing at Butler: "While we have jackals and hyenas at the bar, we want the old lion upon the bench, with one blow of his huge paw to bring their scalps over their eyes."

Hillard was an accomplished and eloquent man, "of whom," Mr. Webster said in the Senate of the United States, "the best hopes are to be entertained." But he lacked vigor and courage to assert his own opinions against the social influences of Boston, which were brought to bear with great severity on the anti-slavery leaders.

Hillard was not so fortunate in another encounter. He undertook to attack Richard H. Dana, and to reproach him for voting for a scheme of representation which somewhat diminished the enormous political power of Boston. She elected all her representatives on one ballot, and had a power altogether disproportionate to that of the country. He said, speaking of Dana: "He should remember that the bread he and I both eat comes from the business men of Boston. He ought not, like an ungrateful child, to strike at the hand that feeds him." Dana replied with great indignation, ending with the sentence: "The hand that feeds me--the hand that feeds me, sir? No hand feeds me that has a right to control my opinions!"

A bon mot of Henry Wilson is also worth putting on record. Somebody, who was speaking of the importance of the Massachusetts town meeting, said that it was not merely a place for town government alone, but that it was a place where the people of the town met from scattered and sometimes secluded dwelling- places to cultivate each other's acquaintance, to talk over the news of the day and all matters of public interest; and that it was a sort of farmers' exchange, where they could compare notes on the state of agriculture, and even sometimes swap oxen. Governor Briggs, who had been beaten as a candidate for reelection by the Coalition, replied to this speech and said, referring to the Coalition, "that the gentlemen on the other side seemed to have carried their trading and swapping of oxen into politics, and into the high offices of the state." To which Henry Wilson answered, referring to Briggs's own loss of his office, "that so long as the people were satisfied with the trade, it did not become the oxen to complain."

Undoubtedly the ablest member of the Convention was Charles Allen. He spoke seldom and briefly, but always with great authority and power. Late in the proceedings of the Convention a rule was established limiting the speakers to thirty minutes each. Hillard, who was one of the delegates from Boston, made a very carefully prepared speech on some pending question. Allen closed the debate, making no reference whatever to Hillard's elaborate and most eloquent argument, until he was about to sit down, when he said: "Mr. President, I believe my time is up?" The President answered: "The gentleman from Worcester has two minutes more." "Two minutes!" exclaimed Allen. "Time enough to answer the gentleman from Boston." And he proceeded in that brief period to deal a few strokes with his keen scimitar, which effectually demolished Hillard's elaborate structure.

There is nothing in the political excitements of recent years which approaches in intensity that of the period from 1848 until the breaking out of the War. The people of Massachusetts felt the most profound interest in the great conflict between slavery and freedom for the possession of the vast territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific. But almost every man in Massachusetts felt the Fugitive Slave Law as a personal dishonor. I think no great public calamity, not the death of Webster, not the death of Sumner, not the loss of great battles during the War, brought such a sense of gloom over the whole State as the surrender of Anthony Burns and of Sims. Worcester, where I dwelt, was the centre and stronghold of the anti-slavery feeling in Massachusetts. This odious statute was, perhaps, the greatest single cause of the union of the people of the North in opposition to the further encroachments of slavery. Yet but two slaves were taken back into slavery from Massachusetts by reason of its provisions. I will not undertake to tell the story of those years which will form an important chapter in the history of the country. But I had a special knowledge of two occurrences which are alluded to by Colonel Higginson in his charming essay entitled, "Cheerful Yesterdays," in regard to which that most delightful writer and admirable gentleman has fallen into some slight errors of recollection.

The first person seized under the Fugitive Slave Law was a slave named Shadrach. He was brought to trial before George T. Curtis, United States Commissioner. One of the chief complaints against the Fugitive Slave Law was that it did not give the man claimed as a slave, where his liberty and that of his posterity were at stake, the right to a jury trial which the Constitution secured in all cases of property involving more than twenty dollars, or in all cases where he was charged with the slightest crime or offence. Further, the Commissioner was to receive twice as much if the man were surrendered into slavery as if he were discharged. Horace Mann, in one of his speeches, commented on this feature of the law with terrible severity. He also pointed out that the Commissioner was not a judicial officer with an independent tenure, but only the creature of the courts and removable at any time. He also dwelt upon what he conceived to be the unfair dealing of the Commissioners who had presided at the trial of the three slaves who had been tried in Massachusetts, and added: "Pilate, fellow-citizens, was at least a Judge, though he acted like a Commissioner."

Elizur Wright, a well-known Abolitionist, editor of the Chronotype, was indicted in the United States Court for aiding in the rescue of Shadrach. While the hearing before Geo. T. Curtis on the proceedings for the rendition of Shadrach was going on, a large number of men, chiefly negroes, made their way into the court-room by one door, swept through, taking the fugitive along with them, and out at the other, leaving the indignant Commissioner to telegraph to Mr. Webster in Washington that he thought it was a case of levying war. I went into the court-room during the trial of Mr. Wright, and saw seated in the front row of the jury, wearing a face of intense gravity, my old friend Francis Bigelow, always spoken of in Concord as "Mr. Bigelow, the blacksmith." He was a Free Soiler and his wife a Garrison Abolitionist. His house was a station on the underground railroad where fugitive slaves were harbored on their way to Canada. Shadrach had been put into a buggy and driven out as far as Concord, and kept over night by Bigelow at his house, and sent on his way toward the North Star the next morning. Richard H. Dana, who was counsel for Elizur Wright, asked Judge Hoar what sort of man Bigelow was. To which the Judge replied: "He is a thoroughly honest man, and will decide the case according to the law and the evidence as he believes them to be. But I think it will take a good deal of evidence to convince him that one man owns another."

It is not, perhaps, pertinent to my personal recollections but it may be worth while to tell my readers that Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and some others were indicted afterward for participation in an intended rescue of Anthony Burns, another fugitive slave. The indictment was quashed by Judge Curtis, who had probably got pretty sick of the whole thing. But Parker, while in jail awaiting trial, prepared a defence, which is printed, and which is one of the most marvellous examples of scathing and burning denunciation to be found in all literature. I commend it to young men as worth their study.

Some time after the Shadrach case, Asa O. Butman, a United States Deputy Marshal, who had been quite active and odious in the arrest and extradition of Burns, came to Worcester one Saturday afternoon, and stopped at the American Temperance House. This was October 30, 1854. It was believed that he was in search of information about some fugitive negroes who were supposed to be in Worcester, and I suppose that to be the fact, although it was claimed that his errand was to summon witnesses against persons concerned in the riot which took place when Burns was captured. The fact of his presence became known in the course of the day on Sunday, and a pretty angry crowd began to gather in the streets in the neighborhood of the American House. Butman learned his danger, and took refuge in the City Marshal's office in the City Hall, where the police force of the city were gathered for his protection. No attack was made during the night, but it was not deemed prudent to have Butman leave his shelter. I had been to Concord to spend Sunday with my kindred there. I got to Worcester at nine o'clock Monday morning, and was told at the station of the condition of things. I went immediately to the City Hall, made my way through the crowd to the building, and was admitted to the police office by the City Marshal, who was my client, and apt to depend on me for legal advice. I found Butman in a state of great terror. It was evident that the crowd was too large for any police force which the little city had in its service. Unless it should be pacified, something was likely to happen which we should all have much regretted. I accordingly went out and addressed the crowd from the steps of the City Hall. They listened to me respectfully enough. I was pretty well known through the city as an earnest Free Soiler, and as sharing the public feeling of indignation against the delivering up of fugitives. I reminded the crowd that my father and sister had been expelled from Charleston, S. C., where he had gone at the risk of his life to defend Massachusetts colored sailors who were imprisoned there, and appealed to them not to give the people of South Carolina the right to excuse their own conduct by citing the example of Massachusetts. There were shouts from the crowd: "Will he promise to leave Worcester and never come back?" Butman, who was inside, terribly frightened, said he would promise never to come to Worcester again as long as he lived. I did not, however, repeat Butman's promise to the crowd. I thought he ought to go without conditions. The time approached for the train to pass through Worcester for Boston. It went from a little wooden station near the site of the present Union Depot, about half a mile from the City Hall. It was determined, on consultation, to take advantage of an apparently pacific mood of the crowd, and to start Butman at once for the station in time to catch the train. I took one arm and I am quite sure Colonel Higginson took the other; a few policemen went ahead and a few behind; and we started from the back door of the City Hall. The mob soon found what we were after and thronged around us. It has been estimated that a crowd of two thousand people at least surrounded Butman and his convoy. I suppose he had no friend or defender among the number. Most of them wanted to frighten him; some of them to injure him, though not to kill him. There were a few angry negroes, I suppose, excited and maddened by their not unnatural or unjustifiable resentment against the fellow who had been the ready and notorious tool of the slave-catchers, who would have killed him if they could. He was kicked several times by persons who succeeded in the swaying and surging of the crowd, in getting through his guard, and once knocked onto his knees by a heavy blow in the back of the neck which came from a powerful negro, who had a stone in his hand which increased the force of the blow. I believe he was hit also by some missiles. He reached the depot almost lifeless with terror. The train was standing there, and started just after we arrived. It was impossible to get him into it. It was then endeavored to put him into a buggy which was standing outside of the depot, but the owner, a young business man of Worcester, seized the bridle of his horse and stoutly refused to allow the horse to start. Butman was then thrust into a hack, into which one or two other persons also got, and the hack was driven rapidly through the crowd with no damage but the breaking of the windows. Mr. Higginson thought Butman was left at Westboro'; but my recollection, which is very distinct, and with which I think he now agrees, is that Lovell Baker, the City Marshal, followed with his own horse and buggy, and took Butman from the hack after he got a short distance out of Worcester. Butman implored him not to leave him at the way-station, fearing that the crowd would come down in an accommodation train, which went also about that time, and waylay him there. So Baker drove him the whole distance to Boston, forty miles. When Butman got to the city, he was afraid that the news of the Worcester riot might have reached Boston, and have excited the people there; and, by his earnest solicitation, Baker took Butman by unfrequented streets across the city to a place where he thought he could be concealed until the excitement abated. Baker, who died a short time ago in Worcester, aged over ninety, told me the whole story immediately on his return.

The proceeding undoubtedly was not to be justified; but it was a satisfaction to know that no slave-hunter came to Worcester after that occurrence. Five or six people--including, if I am not mistaken, Mr. Higginson himself, certainly including Joseph A. Howland, a well-known Abolitionist and non-resistant, and also including Martin Stowell, who was afterward indicted for killing Batchelder, a Marshal who took part in the rendition of Burns--were complained of before the police court, and bound over to await the action of the grand jury. The grand jury returned no indictment, except against one colored man. Mr. District Attorney Aldrich was quite disgusted at this, and promptly nol prossed that indictment. And so ended the famous Butman riot.

The Whigs were in a minority in Massachusetts after the year 1848. But the constitution required a majority of all the votes to elect a Governor; and, in the case of no choice, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Executive Council, and the Senators from counties where there had been no election were chosen on joint ballot by the members elected to the two Houses. The Whigs were able to carry the Legislature, and in that way chose their Governor and Lieutenant Governor, elected Councillors, and filled vacancies in the Senate. But the Free Soil and Democratic leaders were not content to leave the power in the hands of the Whig minority. In 1849 a few Representatives and Senators were chosen to the Legislature by a union of the Free Soil and Democratic Parties. In the autumn of 1850 this arrangement was extended through the State. The Whigs were in a minority in the Legislature, and the coalition proceeded to elect a Democratic Governor and Lieutenant Governor and an Executive Council. In consideration of giving these offices to the Democrats, it was agreed that Mr. Sumner should be chosen Senator. A few of the Democrats, who desired to keep their party relations with the South, refused to agree to this arrangement. Mr. Winthrop was the Whig candidate. The Senate, on its part, promptly elected Mr. Sumner, but there was a long contest in the House of Representatives, extending through three months. Twenty-six ballots were cast, of which no candidate had a majority until the last. Mr. Sumner several times came within two or three votes of an election. At last it was apparent that some member had cast more than one vote; and an order was offered by Sidney Bartlett, an eminent Whig member from Boston, requiring the members to bring in their votes in sealed envelopes. This resulted in the choice of Sumner.

Another contribution to Mr. Sumner's election ought not to be forgotten. The town of Fall River was represented by Whigs; but it was a community where there was a strong anti-slavery feeling. A town-meeting was called by the friends of Mr. Sumner, and a motion made to instruct their representatives, according to the right of the people declared in the constitution of Massachusetts, to vote for Sumner. An earnest and eloquent speech in favor of the resolution was made by Robert T. Davis, a young Quaker, since a distinguished member of Congress. The resolution was carried, which Mr. Borden, one of the Representatives from Fall River, obeyed. The result was Sumner's election by a single vote.

As stated in the preceding chapter, I was a member in 1852 of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, then consisting of about four hundred and twenty members. It was, I think, as admirable a body of men for the training of a public speaker as I ever knew. The members were honest. The large majority was made up of sensible, strong-headed country farmers, rather slow in making up their minds, but making them up always on considerations of what was best for the Commonwealth. There was a time, when the opinion of the House seemed to be precipitating or crystallizing, not too early in the debate and not too late, when a vigorous and effective speech had great influence. I was made Chairman of the Committee of Probate and Chancery, the second law committee in the House; and I suppose it is not presumptuous to say that I did as much of the hard work of the body and had as much influence in leading its action and shaping its legislation as anybody.

In the year 1856 I was, with Eli Thayer, sent from Worcester as a delegate to a Convention held at Buffalo to concert measures to help the settlers from the Free States in their contest with slave owners led by Atchison and Stringfellow, of Missouri, for the possession of Kansas. Atchison had been President pro tempore of the Senate of the United States. The slave holders had organized a formidable body of men to drive out the Free State settlers from the Territories, which had just been opened after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. We met at Buffalo some gentlemen, among whom was Zachariah Chandler, of Michigan, then in the vigor of early manhood. We made arrangements for getting large contributions of money and arms with which the Northern emigrants were equipped, and which undoubtedly enabled them to maintain successfully their resistance and establish their free State.

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XI. THE KNOW NOTHING PARTY AND ITS OVERTHROW

The political history of Massachusetts from 1846 to 1865 is, in general, the history of the share of the Commonwealth in the great National contest with Slavery; the beginning and growth of the Free Soil or Republican Party and the putting down of the Rebellion. The rise and dominion for three years, and the final overthrow of the Know Nothing Party is an episode which should not be wholly omitted, although it is an episode which might be omitted without injury to the sense.

There have been, ever since the Irish immigration which begun somewhere about 1840 down to to-day, a great many worthy people who have been afraid of the Pope and the influence of Catholicism in this country, and have been exceedingly jealous of the influence of foreigners, especially of those of the Roman Catholic Church. Self-seeking political adventurers and demagogues have not been slow to take advantage of this feeling for their own purposes. They have, for some reason, always preferred to make their political movement in secret societies. The Catholic vote had generally been cast for the Democrats, and was supposed to be largely influenced by the Catholic clergy. It was thought that this influence had a good deal to do with defeating Mr. Clay in 1844. A movement of this kind swept over the country after the Presidential election of 1852. It had nearly spent its force by 1856. It made little headway at the South, except in two or three States. There was a struggle with it in Virginia, where it was defeated by the superhuman energy of Henry A. Wise. The party organized for the purpose of excluding men of foreign birth from any share in the Government, sometimes called the American Party, was generally called the Know-Nothing Party, a name which came from the answer each member was expected to make to any inquiry from an outsider, "I know nothing about it."

This party swept Massachusetts in the autumn of 1854. It elected in that year Governor, Lieutenant Governor, all the officers of the State Government, every member of both Houses of the Legislature, except two from the town of Northampton, and every member of Congress. Its candidate for Governor was Henry J. Gardner, a very skilful political organizer. He had a book in which he had the names of men in every town in the Commonwealth whom he attached to his personal fortunes by promises, or flattery, or because in some cases of their sincere belief in the doctrine. He understood better than any other man I ever knew the value of getting the united support of men who were without special influence, even the man who were odious or ridiculous among their own neighbors, but who united might be a very formidable force. He organized with great skill and success the knave-power and the donkey- power of the Commonwealth.

But a good many Anti-Slavery men who thought the party feeling of the Whigs and Democrats was a great obstacle to their cause, joined the movement simply in order that they might get rid of the old parties, and prepare the State as with a subsoil plow for a new one. They had no belief in the proscriptive doctrines, and were willing that men of foreign birth and Catholics should have their just rights, and expected to destroy the Know Nothing Party in its turn when it had destroyed Whiggery and Democracy. Of these was Henry Wilson, who owed his first election to the Senate to the Know Nothing Legislature; and Eli Thayer, who had been the organizer of the Emigrant Aid Society, and the movement for the deliverance of Kansas and Nebraska. Both these gentlemen abandoned the Know Nothing Party the year after its formation. Mr. Thayer was elected as a Republican to Congress in 1856, and reelected in 1858. But he separated from his political associates and espoused the squatter sovereignty doctrines of Stephen A. Douglas. He, I have no doubt, was a sincere Anti-Slavery man. But he liked to do things in peculiar and original ways of his own, and was impatient of slow and old-fashioned methods. So he got estranged from his Republican brethren, was defeated as a candidate for Congress in 1860, took no part in public activities during the time of the war, became somewhat soured, and landed in the Democratic Party. I always had a great liking for him, and deem him entitled to great public gratitude for his services in the rescue of Kansas from what was known as Border Ruffianism.

Neither Charles Sumner nor Charles Allen ever tolerated the Know Nothing movement or made any terms with it. Its proscriptiveness and its secrecy were alike repugnant to their honest, brave and liberty-loving souls. Sumner was advised, as the question of his reelection was coming on in January, 1857, to keep silent about Know Nothingism. He was told that the Slavery question was enough for one man to deal with, and that if he would only hold his peace all the parties would unite in his reelection. He answered the advice with his brave challenge. He went about the Commonwealth, denouncing the intolerant and proscriptive doctrine of the Know Nothings. He told them: "You have no real principle on which you can stand. You are nothing but a party of Gardnerites."

Charles Allen addressed a little company, of which I was one, in the City Hall at Worcester in the autumn of 1854, when Know Nothingism was in the height of its strength. He said:

"Perhaps I am speaking too boldly, but I learned to speak boldly a long time ago. I will speak my sentiments in the face of any organization; or, if it does not show its face, though its secret mines are beneath my feet, and unseen hands ready to apply the match, I will declare those sentiments that a freeman is bound to utter."

The people of Massachusetts elected Gardner Governor in 1854, 1855 and 1856. But in the autumn of 1857 he was beaten under the leadership of General Banks. The party lingered until 1856 when there was an attempt to keep it alive in the Presidential campaign of that year when Millard Fillmore was its candidate for the Presidency.

But it was destroyed in the consuming fire kindled by the Civil War, and has not since been heard of by its old name.

The proscriptive and intolerant opposition to Catholicism, especially against men of foreign birth, has shown its head occasionally. It appeared in its most formidable shape in a secret organization known as the A. P. A., of which I shall speak later. It is utterly uncongenial to the spirit of true Americanism, and will never have any considerable permanent strength.

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