A New England boyhood, and other bits of autobiography

Front matter

F

• •••

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

Preface

TO THE EDITION OF 1900

IT seems to me almost by accident that I have ever written the pages of autobiography which the reader will find in this volume. He will see that they have been gathered from many different sources; they have been written under various conditions for different classes of readers, and they make no pretence, therefore, at unity of method or literary style.

But I do not like to leave the sketch of " Boyhood " which was published under the title of " A New England Boyhood," as if my life ended when I was seventeen years old. That sketch, as the reader will see, was written for the Atlantic Monthly, at request of its editor Mr. Scudder, to be, in its way, a companion for the admirable study called " A New England Girlhood," by my charming kinswoman Miss Lucy Larcom. It ends with the day when I took my first degree at Harvard College. Before and after it was written, I had furnished one and another account of experiences in my life, at the request of one or another editor, or other friends.

VI

Preface

In preparing the volume now in the reader's hands, it has proved possible to rescue these narratives from the dust of whatever graves they were buried in, to arrange them in chronological order, and then to connect them by a few stitches, or, shall one say, by a few pair of hooks and eyes.

There are few people who do not like to talk about themselves, if they are approached with sufficient craft by listeners who want to hear, and I find that almost always the fragment of autobiography which a man has written, " for his children," or " for his grandchildren " is the most entertaining part of the published history of his life. I notice also that after a man has written one such autobiography, you might catch him again, when he did not remember much of it, and he would write another, quite as entertaining, but quite different from the first. I know very well that something like this would happen, say if I should write the " New England Boyhood " over again this winter. But this I shall not do. I do not even want to do it. I have only to ask the reader to remember, as he reads, that the statement, opinion, or hopes of a man at one date in his life may rightfully differ from those written down at another date. Mr. Emerson has taught us all, if we did not know it before, that for any man who lives long, there is no desire so foolish, or so mean as the desire for Consistency.

How well I have told my part of the story, I cannot pretend to say. But I may say, that the

Preface vii

years which have passed since 1822, when I uttered my first appeal to a waiting world, have been crowded full of interest. And I may add, that the Massachusetts in which most of my active life has been spent, has done her full share in making these years interesting. I do not think that people of our race have much of that faculty, so hard to describe, of making their memoirs interesting. For that faculty we have to go to France. But whoever has lived here in New England in the last seventy or eighty years has enough to tell, if only he knows how.

EDWARD E. HALE.

RoxBURY, Mass., Dectmber 2, 1899.

Contents

A New England Boyhood p^^^

Introduction xi

Chapter

Introduction

TO "A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD"

A CHARMING writer, Miss Lucy Larcom, published a few years ago a charming book called " A New England Girlhood." She described in it her own early life, first in Beverly, opposite Salem on the seashore of Massachusetts, with its gardens and beaches and fishing boats ; then in Lowell in its infant days, with its river and waterfalls and Arcadian cotton factories.

Mr. Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was as much attracted by this pleasant book as the rest of us. It suggested to him the possibility of another book, which should deal with the same years, now becoming mythical, as a New England boy saw life in the little New England city of those, days — the only city of New England which took that name before 1826, excepting the city of Vergennes in Vermont, that of Hartford in Connecticut, and in old days York in Maine.

Quite leaving Hartford and York out, in my earliest days it was always a joke at home, if anyone spoke of Boston as the only city, for some one to say, " Boston and Vergennes." Vergennes was incorporated in 1788, by the legislature of xii Introduction

Vermont, which was then an independent nation, not belonging either to the Confederacy of the United States or sharing in the dehberations for the new constitution.

Mr. Scudder asked me to furnish some chapters, with the attractive title of " A New England Boyhood," from my own memories, in such form that they might be published in the Atlantic Monthly. And this I was glad to do. Those chapters, published in that magazine in 1892, make more than half of the book now in the reader's hands.

I have to say this by way of introduction, because here is the only excuse for what else seems the conceit of introducing Httle bits of personal experience into my story, of no earthly value to anybody but myself and my children, excepting as they illustrate the simplicity and ease of a phase of New England life, which has now wholly passed away. I do not flatter myself that I have succeeded in presenting to the reader the simplicity and the dignity of that life, so curiously combined as simplicity and dignity were. Those people, in the little seaport of Boston, lived and moved as if they were people of the most important city of the world. What is more, they meant to make Boston the purest, noblest, and best city in the world. And they lived there in some forms of social life which would have become princes of sixty-four quarterings, with some which were identical with those of the log-cabin. Every man of them was an American, and believed to

Introduction xiii

the sole of his feet that there was no fit government for men but that of a republic. All the same, their leaders, men and women, were dignified, elegant, and gracious in their bearing and manner; and there was no prince in the world who better understood the bearing and the customs of gentlemen and gentlewomen.

It was a good place in which to be born, and a good place in which to grow to manhood.

From 1630, when Boston was founded by an important branch of Winthrop's colony, to 1826, when these reminiscences begin, it had grown, slowly and not very regularly, from a little hamlet of settlers, sick and half starved, to a brisk commercial town of about forty-five thousand people. There is no better description than Mr. Emerson's, which I heard him read, fresh from his own notes, on the platform of Faneuil Hall, on the centennial of the Boston Tea-Party, December 16, 1873. It was said that he had written the last verses in the train as he rode from Concord. The notes in his hand were on various bits of paper, and I believe that the poem was born on that day.

The rocky nook, with hill-tops three,

Looked eastward from the farms, And twice each day the flowing sea

Took Boston in its arms. • . ■ « •

The wild rose and the barberry thorn

Hung out their summer pride, Where now on heated pavements worn

The feet of millions stride.

xiv Introduction

Fair rose the planted hills behind

The good town on the bay, And where the western hills declined

The prairie stretched away. • ■ ■ • ■

Each street leads downward to the sea, Or landward to the west.

The first certain description of the place is that in Bradford : " We came into the bottom of the bay ; but being late we anchored and lay in the shallop, not having seen any of the people. The next morning we put in for the shore. There we found many lobsters that had been gathered together."

This camping ground is Copp's Hill at the very northern end of the peninsula. The lobsters were taken near the landing of the ferry, which afterward took men to Charlestown. If Tom, Dick, and Harry had been left to their own devices, if no paternal or fraternal government had protected their industries and done better for them than nature did, if successive generations had been left to do what nature bade, as is now the theory of the " let alones," making head again in the midst of our matchless prosperity — a few hundred of us, who had survived in the struggle for existence, would be trapping lobsters at the North End to-day. Where the other hundred thousand people would be, who now inhabit the old peninsula, I do not know — or, indeed, if they would have been at all. This I know, that no considerable body of men had ever inhabited it before 1630.

Introduction xv

A peninsula it was; but no geographer in his senses would give that name now to the bulging cape which has expanded on either side of the old almost island. At high tides, in gales, the water washed across what was then called the Neck, and is still called so by old-fashioned people. Three hills, of which the highest was 138 feet high from the sea, broke the surface of the peninsula, and of these the top of the highest was broken again by three smaller hills. This highest hill is Beacon Hill. Copp's Hill was at the north, and Fort Hill on the east. For the convenience of trade Fort Hill has been entirely removed, and a little circular bit of greensward marks the place where, in my boyhood, was a hill fifty feet high.

In old days a canal was cut across the town, separating the Copp's Hill elevation from those south of it. A tidal mill was arranged here, by retaining the water at high tide in the mill-pond, and letting it dribble out when the tide had fallen. The average rise and fall of the tide in Boston is about ten feet, so that this contrivance gave power enough for grinding corn when there was corn to grind. The mill-pond was filled up about the period to which the reminiscences in this book belong.

If this book should stray into the hands of persons who do not know the physical Boston of to-day, or the physical Boston of history, it may be worth while, " for the greater caution," as the lawyers say, to give an outline map of both. In xvi Introduction

the sketch in the margin the white nucleus represents the Boston which Bradford found, and where we should have been catching lobsters had there been no paternal government or other government, until to-day. The outline of the larger cape, as I have called it, is the outline of Boston now, when what we called the " flats " have been filled in by successive improvements — if improvements they are. Any person, who desires to know my opinion on such improvements, may consult the study I have made on similar subjects in my book called " Sybaris." I am, however, an optimist, and after a thing has been done I accept it. I dictate these words as I lie on my back on a comfortable sofa in a comfortable room in the vestry of the church which stands where, in boyhood, I could have skated, or could have caught smelts for the next day's breakfast. For the temperature outside, at this moment, is ten degrees above zero, a temperature which was very favorable for the catching of smelts in those days.

Politically or socially, the period between 1820 and 1835 belongs to the period when Boston was turning to internal commerce and the development of manufacture, and was relinquishing that maritime commerce which had created her. The Southern and Western leaders of the country, not disinclined to thwart the maritime industries of New England, had attempted to build up what Mr. Clay called " the American system " of home manufacture. So soon as this system established

Introduction xvii

itself, the New Englanders adapted themselves to the new conditions, and set up their manufactories on the borders of their streams — Pawtucket, Waltham, Lowell, and, afterwards, Manchester, Lawrence, and Holyoke came into being. The necessity of closer communication with the interior was as distinctly felt in New England as in the Middle States. The Middlesex Canal, an elaborate system of turnpikes, and, later yet, the present system of railroads were established. But in the year 1830 Boston still retained a large East Indian, and European commerce. It is interesting to see how largely the exports were still products of the forests and the fisheries.

And, not to smirch the pages of this little book with any of the ashes of theological controversy which is long since dead, it may be mentioned that, in the years between 1820 and 1840, Boston was the centre of theological discussion, which undoubtedly greatly quickened the religious life of New England. In those years there was a certain expectation of a speedy improvement, not to say revolution, in social order, such as men do not often experience. Dr. Channing was preaching the gospel of the divinity of man. Dr. Tuckerman, Frederick Gray, Charles Barnard, and Robert Cassie Waterston, with others, were introducing practical illustrations of improvement. There was plenty of money, and the rich men of Boston really meant that here should be a model and ideal city. The country was prosperous;

b xviii Introduction

they were prosperous, and they looked forward to a noble future.

At the same time they had the advantage of having a university close under their lee, which they were themselves managing. They had started their Athenaeum, with collections of pictures and statues, and a good library. They had a good deal of leisure ; and a certain interest, not wholly the interest of dilettanti, in fine arts and literature, gave distinction to their little town.

Into such a community it was my good fortune to be born, on the morning of the 3d of April, 1822.

I do not attempt anything so ambitious as an autobiography. But a man sees with his own eyes, and a boy even more than a man ; and what I remember of a New England boyhood is what mine was, not what anyone else lived through in the same time. There will be a certain convenience, then, to the reader if he knows a little of the household and family in which that boyhood was spent which in these chapters is described.

In the ship Lion, in the voyage of Winthrop's fleet, came to Boston Robert Hale, who was, I suppose, of the Hales of Kent. Searching in the wills of that time in Canterbury, in Kent, I found this : —

7. "To my Sonne John Hales, five pounds and my best silver guilt sword, yet nevertheless and on this condition" — that he do not intercept the execution of the rest of the will.

Introduction xix

And I have a fancy that that son was cut off with a " guilt sword " because he was a Puritan, while the rest of the Hales, or Haleses, were very High Church. So High Church have they been in later times that it was one of them, Sir James Hales, who accompanied James H. into exile. Somehow I connect him with the throwing the Great Seal into the Thames. Within my memory Hales Place, near Canterbury, has become the seat of a Jesuit school for training priests. I suppose Robert Hale to have been of his blood.

This Robert Hale is called a blacksmith, and he settled at Charlestown, opposite Boston. He seems to have had the taste for surveying or engineering which crops out in alternate generations in the family. He was of the party which was sent to Winnipiseogee to run the northern line of Massachusetts. The stone which they set there is to be seen to this day. He married Joanna Cutter. He sent his son John Hale to Harvard College, where he was the fourth in social rank of his class of eight. He became the minister of Beverly, is the John Hale who went to Quebec as chaplain and was taken prisoner, and the John Hale of the Salem witchcraft. A missal given him by a Catholic priest in Quebec is in the library of Harvard College to this day. He was the grandfather, by his oldest son, of King Hale, as Robert Hale (H. C, 1686) was familiarly called in Beverly; and by his fourth son, Samuel, was grandfather of my father's grandfather, Richard Hale, who moved to

XX Introduction

Coventry, Conn., and died there in 1802. This Richard Hale was father of Captain Nathan Hale of Revolutionary history, and of Enoch Hale, my grandfather, alluded to in chapter vii. of this book.

In 1636 Richard Everett, or Everard, appears in Watertown, and afterwards in Springfield and Dedham. In Dedham he died. From him came a line of farmers, who are called captain, deacon, and so on till we come to Ebenezer Everett of Tiot, now called Norwood, formerly South Dedham. He was father of Rev. Oliver Everett (H. C, 1772), who was minister of the New South Church in Boston, and was my grandfather on my mother's side.

For my father, Nathan Hale, oldest son of Rev. Enoch Hale above, on a day to be marked with vermilion with me and mine, namely, September S, 1816, married Sarah Preston Everett, my mother, daughter of Rev. Oliver Everett. On that day she was twenty years old ; he was thirty-two.

It is pity of pities that we never made him write " A New England Boyhood " as he saw it. For he was born in 1784, the year after the peace with England. He grew up in the very purest conditions of the simplest and, indeed, the best life of New England. His father had been for eight years the minister of a frontier town, Westhampton, in the days when the minister was chosen by the town in open town meeting, was paid by the town, and regarded himself as personally responsible

Introduction xxi

for the moral and spiritual life of everybody in the town.

Hoeing corn or potatoes one day in the summer of 1800 my father, a boy of sixteen, was called into his father's study, where he found Dr. Fitch, then the president of Williams College, which had been established as a college seven years before. Dr. Fitch had stopped in a journey across country, to accept the hospitalities of the parsonage. The boy was told to show Dr. Fitch how well he could read Latin ; then he read to him from the Greek Testament, and Dr. Fitch said he was ready to enter Williams College. His father and he had not expected that he would enter until the next year. But this fortunate visit of the president carried him to Williamstown that summer, and he graduated there in the class of 1804.

He and the other boys from that region used to ride across Berkshire County on horseback when the college terms began. A younger boy drove the horses back in a drove, and, when vacation came, took them to the college again for the students to ride back upon. A part of the road was a turnpike where tolls were collected. When they approached the gate they would all dismount, and on foot drive the horses in front of them, and demand the right of passing at the rate for a drove of horses or cattle. Nothing, as they said, was said about saddles or bridles. When I asked once if the toll-keeper submitted meekly to this, I was told that they generally had to pay the full toll, xxii Introduction

but that the tollman expected to treat them to cider all round.

The college was divided into two societies — the Philomathian and the Philotechnian. I think the latter exists in Williamstown in some form still. I have seen the records of debates : " Question, Whether the purchase of Louisiana is desirable. Decided in the negative, 17 to i." For they were high and hot Federalists.

I have my father's part when he graduated. It is on the improvements in social order made in the last fifty years.

So soon as he left college he engaged as tutor in the family of John J. Dickinson in Troy, not far from Williamstown. But he went home first, and on his way to Troy went to the city of New York for the first time. The population was only about seventy-five thousand. It was three years before Fulton's Clermont, his first steamboat, went up the Hudson, and the tradition in our family is that my father went up the river in a sloop to Troy, was a fortnight in going, and read through Gibbon's " Decline and Fall " on the way.

Judging from his accomplishments Williams College must have done its work well. He read Latin well and with pleasure to the end of his life. He did not keep up his Greek with the same interest, but he was an accurate Greek scholar. He was a mathematician of high rank in the mathematics of those days, and was afterward quite the peer in those lines of the engineers with whom he

Introduction xxiii

worked on the great public works of which he had the charge. He studied some Hebrew in college, and could always read a little. I asked him once if this was with any thought of being a minister, but he said, " No, but there was nothing else to study." He had to learn his French and German afterward, and did. I think that in my boyhood there were perhaps more German books in our house than in any other house in Boston. But that is saying very little; as late as 1843 I could buy no German books, even in Pennsylvania, but Goethe and Schiller and the Lutheran hymn-book. After a year in Troy he received the appointment of preceptor in mathematics in Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He crossed Massachusetts to Boston on his way to Exeter. Here is a memorandum of the way in which this was done:

The arrangement of the stages was that if the stages coming from Springfield and Northampton had more passengers than could go on one stage some of them had to stop ; and those who got on last were the ones who had to stop.

I arrived at Brookfield at night, having left Northampton in the morning. The person who had come the shortest distance was a lady. She was in great distress that she could not go on. I had a sort of desire to stay there to see Howe and Henshaw, but I should not have thought of staying a day but to let this lady go on.

At Exeter, in the charming society of that place, he met the Peabodys and Alexander Hill Everett, xxiv Introduction

who was the other " preceptor," the preceptor of Greek and Latin. He graduated at Harvard in 1806. These two young men became very fond of each other, and when, in 1808 my father determined to leave Exeter and come to Boston to study law, he became acquainted with all Mr. Everett's Boston friends.

Meanwhile, when he was twelve years old, my mother had been born, in Dorchester, now a part of the municipality of Boston. Her father, in delicate health, had left his charge in 1792. Her mother was a Boston girl, one of the daughters of Alexander Sears Hill and Mary Richey of Santa Cruz. The tradition was that Alexander Sears Hill had gone to Philadelphia for a milder climate in winter, had fallen in love with Mary Richey, and that they had married without the knowledge of their parents. A handsome couple they were, as the full-length portraits by Copley attest to this day. They both died young. I have the love-letters which passed between Lucy Hill and Oliver Everett; it was a happy marriage until his death, but he died in consumption in 1802. After this the family lived sometimes in the North End of Boston, sometimes in the old house in Dorchester. In 1812 Edward Everett, the third son, was ordained minister of Brattle Street Church in Boston. He was not married — was, indeed, but twenty years old. His mother and sister moved into the parsonage in Court Street, where are now the offices of Adams Express.

Introduction xxv

Mr. Everett left that church in the year 1815, and my grandmother and her family established themselves in a house in Bumstead Place — a " court " which exists no longer — and there my mother was married.

The newly married couple lived first in Ashburton Place, then called Somerset Court, in a house now standing. A year or two after they removed to Tremont Street to a house which has been absorbed by Parker's Hotel, the second from where the Tremont Theatre was built in 1827. Here I was born. The family afterwards lived at the corner of School Street in a house which also has been absorbed by Parker's. In 1828 we removed to No. i Tremont Place, a house still standing; and in 1833 to one of Mr. Andrews's houses in Central Court, a property now covered by Jordan & Marsh's, just behind where old Judge Sewall lived most of his life. It is in the four houses last named that the scenery of the home life described in these chapters is to be placed.

To this introduction, written in 1893, I need only add a few words in 1899.

Like other people interested in the subject, I now suppose that we were all mistaken, who supposed, with Dr. Young and the older writers, that Bradford landed at and ate his lobsters at Copp's Hill. M. C. F. Adams has shown that the bluff xxvi Introduction

here described was that at Squantum, There is no reference to the landing of any man on this peninsula before William Blaxton. We do not know when he landed. We only know that he lived here.

The chapters of "A New England Boyhood," first printed in 1893, bring up the biographical narrative to 1839. For sixty years between that date and this, I add, in this edition, several papers, written and printed since then, which are, in a way, biographical.

EDWARD E. HALE.

CHAPTER I 'tis seventy years since

THE reader and I ought not to begin without my reminding him that the Boston of which I am to write was very different from the Boston of to-day. In 1825 Boston was still a large country town. I think someone has called it a city of gardens; but that someone may have been I. As late as 18 17, in a description of Boston which accompanied a show which a Frenchman had made by carving and painting the separate houses, it was said, with some triumph, that there were nine blocks of buildings in the town. This means that all the other buildings stood with windows or doors on each of the four sides, and in most instances with trees, or perhaps little lanes, between ; as all people will live when the Kingdom of Heaven comes. To people in this neighborhood to-day, I may say that the upper part of the main street in Charlestown gives a very good idea of what the whole of Washington Street south of Winter Street was then. And, by the way, Washington Street was much more often called Main Street than by its longer name.

The reader must imagine, therefore, a large, pretty country town, where stage-coaches still clattered in from the country, and brought all the strangers who did not ride in their own chaises. Large stables, always of wood, I think, provided for the horses thus needed. I remember, as I write, Niles's stable in School Street, a large stable in Bromfield Street, afterward Streeter's, the stables of the Marlborough Hotel in Washington Street, and what seemed to us very large stables in Hawley Street — all in the very heart of the town, and on a tract which cannot be more than twelve acres. When, in 1829, it was reported that the new Tremont House was to have no special stables for its guests, the announcement excited surprise almost universal ; and to us children the statement that there was to be a tavern, or a hotel, without a sign, was still more extraordinary. We were used to seeing swinging signs on posts in front of the taverns. Thus I remember "The Indian Queen" in Bromfield Street, " The Bunch of Grapes " in State Street, " The Lamb " I think where the Adams House now is, " The Lion " where the Boston Theatre is, and nearly opposite these the Lafayette Tavern. This means that large pictures of an Indian queen, a bunch of grapes, a lamb, a lion, and of Lafayette swung backward and forward in the wind. There was a sign in front of the Marlborough Tavern, and one nearly opposite, south of Milk Street, but I do not remember what these were. All these inns would now be thought small. They were then called taverns, and to New Englanders seemed very large. Of course they were large enough for their purpose. When I was nine or ten years old my father, who was thought to be a fanatic as a railroad prophet, offered in Faneuil Hall the suggestion that if people could come from Springfield to Boston in five hours an average of nine people would come every day. This prophecy was then considered extravagant. I have told the story, in the Introduction, of his coming to Boston for the first time, in 1805, when the Northampton passengers joined the Springfield passengers at Brookfield. There was room in the carriage for six only. He therefore gave up his seat to a lady who had pressing duties, and waited in Brookfield twenty-four hours to take his chances for the next stage.