A memoir of Robert C. Winthrop. Prepared for the Massachusetts Historical Society

Prefatory Note

Hon. Robert C. Winthrop died in Boston, November 16, 1894, in his eighty-sixth year. The Massachusetts Historical Society — over which he had formerly presided for thirty years, and of which he had been a member more than half a century — soon after printed and circulated the tributes then paid to him by leading members, and, in accordance with usage, appointed one of their associates to prepare a memoir. This duty fell upon the undersigned, and the reason the performance of it has been so long delayed, in conformity to Mr. "Winthrop' s wishes, is explained in the following pages. For the present volume the Society is in no way responsible. The memoir is issued in a separate form for convenient reference and for distribution among leading public libraries and the libraries of learned institutions. Any such libraries which do not receive it may, if they so desire, communicate with the undersigned.

Several engravings of Mr. Winthrop — none of them wholly satisfactory — have from time to time appeared in different publications. Instead of furnishing one which has been used before, the experiment has been tried of reproducing likenesses of him taken at widely separated periods of his life, and which possess, at least, the merit vi PREFATORY NOTE.

of novelty. The earliest is from a medallion by Ball Hughes in 1841, the latest is from a snap-shot, in his study at Brookline, in 1891. The two which serve as a frontispiece represent him at the respective ages of forty-five and seventy.

It may be well to add that the letters from which extracts are given were written by him either to intimate friends or to near relatives, but it has not been thought worth while to take up space by specifying the name of the person to whom each particular passage was addressed.

ROBERT C. WINTHROP, Jr.

10 Walnut Street, Boston.

September, 1897.

MEMOIR.

DOUBTS have been repeatedly expressed with regard to the wisdom of that rule of this Society which exacts a memoir of a deceased member from one of his associates. In a body numbering never more than one hundred, and often less, it is sometimes difficult to procure such service, and the most suitable person to perform it is not always within our ranks. It seemed to Mr. Winthrop eminently fitting that at some meeting following the death of a member there should be appropriate recognition of his career and character, but he considered that anything of the nature of formal biography should be governed by circumstances and not obligatory. Such a duty is sometimes welcome. It was so to him when he wrote for us with signal success the memoirs of two of his most cherished friends, Nathan Appleton and John Henry Clifford, or when he prepared for a kindred Society one of the most notable of his commemorative productions, his memoir of Henry Clay. He was, moreover, of opinion that memoirs prepared for a historical society should carry with them an air of deliberation, and that a considerable interval should ordinarily elapse between eulogies printed at the time of a member's death and the publication of a detailed narrative of his life. Without seeking to impose his views upon others, he specified with distinctness the course to be pursued in his own case. Aware that the leading events of his career were easily accessible in works of reference, 1 foreseeing that he would not merely become the subject of obituary notices in the newspaper press throughout the country, 2 but that one or more of the institutions with which he had been actively associated would distribute tributes to him in pamphlet form, 3 he preferred that anything farther in the way of biographical commemoration should be postponed. In looking back over his exceptionally long life he felt that he had received, on the whole, ample recognition of any services he might have rendered to the causes of religion and philanthropy, or in the fields of history and oratory. As a statesman, however, he considered that he had not always been fully understood or fairly represented, though he realized that the inaccuracies of which he sometimes complained were the inevitable result of party conflicts, the details of which had been imperfectly appreciated by later writers. During a political career which began as far back as 1833, he had accumulated a mass of correspondence with public men, selections from which, if properly annotated, could hardly

1 The account of him in Appleton's Dictionary of American Biography is the most accurate, as far as it goes.

2 Nearly five hundred such notices, none of them duplicates, were collected for the writer by news-agents.

8 The most important of these separate tributes may also be found in the published Proceedings of this Society and in those of the Peabody Trustees. Others may be met with, either in the annual reports of learned, charitable, educational, and religious institutions, or in the kind words of personal friends, which found their way into print in various forms.

fail, he believed, to interest and edify future students of New England history, but he had no desire that they should be printed for a long time to come. His personal relations with some of the bitterest of his opponents grew amicable in after years ; and as it had become his lot to survive both friends and foes, he preferred that his departure should not be signalized by any unnecessary stirring of the embers of by-gone controversies. For the customary memoir for this Society it would, in his judgment, suffice to furnish a succinct narrative of facts and dates for reference, containing comparatively little of personal vindication, and still less of glowing panegyric. At different periods he had prepared a variety of autobiographical material, which he never found leisure to arrange or complete. Portions of it he from time to time made use of in his various productions. Another portion, consisting of reminiscences of European celebrities with whom he had been well acquainted, he condensed and privately printed not long before his death. What remains has been drawn upon when necessary in these pages, and may one day prove of value in editing his correspondence.

I

Of his ancestry it is enough to say that the great Puritan leader, Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, had seven sons who lived to manhood, six of whom left issue ; but the male lines of the five younger ones having gradually become extinct, all descendants of the Governor bearing the name of Winthrop now spring from his eldest son, John Winthrop the younger, who, after having helped to found the Massachusetts Colony, was long Governor of Connecticut, an early Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the most accomplished scholars of his time. At the close of the Revolutionary War this line was represented by six brothers, three of whom preferred to live chiefly in New York, one settled in South Carolina, another cast in his lot with the mother country, while one only saw fit to maintain the hereditary connection of his family with Boston, where he lived and died. This was Thomas Lindall Winthrop, for many years Lieutenant-Governor of this State and President of this Society, who married Elizabeth Bowdoin, daughter of Sir John Temple, and granddaughter of Governor James Bowdoin of Revolutionary memory. 1 The Marquis de Chastellux, in his " Travels in North America," in 1782, alludes to the beauty of this lady when a girl. A portrait by Gilbert Stuart gives some idea of the dignity and grace of her maturer years, while her son Robert bore lifelong testimony to her devotion to her family and earnest, unaffected Christian faith. She died in her fifty-first year, in 1825, having had fourteen children, of whom the subject of this memoir was the youngest ; but he survived his brothers and sisters for so long a period that in his old age few people remembered that he ever had any. It may therefore be well to mention, without naming them all, that his eldest brother, Thomas, had before his early death been in the U. S. Diplomatic

1 For a memoir of Hon. Thomas L. Winthrop, see the third volume of the Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, of which he was also President. A shorter one is in the second volume of the Fourth Series of our own Collections.

Service ; the next, James (who took the name of Bowdoin), was an antiquarian, and an active member of this Society ; the third, WilHam, first scholar of his class at Harvard, at the time of his death was studying for the ministry ; two others, John and Grenville, were members of the Bar and of the Massachusetts Legislature, besides successively commanding the Suffolk brigade of militia; their married sisters having been Elizabeth, wife of Rev. Benjamin Tappan, D. D. ; Sarah, wife of Hon. George Sullivan; Augusta, wife of John Smyth Rogers of New York; and Anne, second wife of Dr. John C. Warren.

Robert Charles Winthrop was born in Milk Street, Boston, May 12, 1809, in the house of his great-uncle, Hon. James Bowdoin, then U. S. Minister to Spain and Associate Minister to France. 1 His mother was his only teacher until he was nearly seven, after which he successively attended two private schools, the first kept by the estimable Deacon Samuel Greele in what was then called Pond Street, the second by an Englishman, John Carlton Fisher, who had been an usher at a public school in his own country, and to whom Mr. Winthrop was always grateful for having instilled into him that love of classical scholarship — more particularly of the Latin poets — which proved one of the most endur-

1 For many years after his marriage in 1786, Hon. T. L. Winthrop occupied a large house, till recently standing though much degraded, on the corner of Sudbury Street and Alden Court. A reverse of fortune broke up this establishment, when the Milk Street house was loaned to him, but on the return of Mr. Bowdoin from Europe his nephew removed to No. 2 Hamilton Place, which then overlooked the Common. Later, in 1824, he purchased and much enlarged a house still standing on the lower corner of Beacon and Walnut streets, where he lived until his death in 1S41.

ing pleasures of his life. As Dr. Fisher confined his instruction to the ancient languages, Mr. Winthrop at the same time studied other branches, first with a young William Apthorp, but longer with Warren Colburn, afterward a well-known mathematician. His final preparation for College was at the Boston Latin School, the head-master of which was then the much respected Benjamin Apthorp Gould, of whom Mr. Winthrop was the favorite pupil. More than all the prizes of his school and college days he valued two sets of volumes which came to him unexpectedly at this period. One was Murray's edition of the works of Washington Irving, a parting personal gift from Master Gould, inscribed on the fly-leaf, "Roberto Carolo Winthrop, juveni ingenuo, omnibus caro, ac omne laude digno, hoc parvulum amoris pignus atque diligentise urbanitatisque premium, datum est ab amico et tutore B. A. G. Scholce Latins Bostoniensis, A. D. MDCCCXXIV." The other was a fine edition of Sophocles, presented to him publicly, with some very complimentary expressions, by Mayor Quincy on the platform of Faneuil Hall before the dinner to the Franklin Medal scholars, and inscribed, " Scholre LatinaB Filio Digno Roberto C. Winthrop, ab Urbe, pro meritis datum. MDCCCXXIV."

Although prepared to pass the entrance examination for Harvard at the age of fourteen, he had waited a year by his father's desire in order not to precede an elder brother less studious than himself; but he now took up his residence in Cambridge, which he left in 1828 with the third honors of a class whose foremost scholar was his chum, the short-lived Charles Chauncy Emerson, younger brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, in the opinion of many of his contemporaries, a man of stronger intellect. In mathematics Mr. Winthrop excelled all his classmates, who elected him their "S President, but, as Professor Channing told him, he " did too many things " to be within reach of a First Part. He commanded the military company of the -p College, the famous but long extinct " Harvard Washington Corps." He presided over the select convivial reunions of the Porcellian Club and the Knights of the Square Table. He was Orator of the Hasty Pudding Club, was alike enrolled among the notorious Med. Fac. and the exemplary Phi Beta Kappa ; sang bass in the Chapel choir, played a subordinate musical instrument in the concerts of the Pierian Sodalitv, and not infrequently stole away to town (quite a little journey in those days) to attend some theatrical performance or social gathering. The only wonder was that with all this he managed to secure the Third Part, which he signalized by a Commencement oration entitled " Public Station." } Immediately after the exercises Hon. T. L. Winthrop gave in his son's honor, at Porter's Tavern, a large reception, which was attended by John Quincy Adams, then President, . and other persons of distinction, but Andrew Stevenson, Speaker of the U. S. House of Eepresentatives, was conspicuous by his absence, though he had expressed an intention of coming and had been seen among the audience. It turned out, drolly enough, that he had taken umbrage at a passage in Mr. "Winthrop's oration,

1 This production, which attracted favorable notice at the time of its delivery, was never considered by its author worthy of a place in his collected works, but is to be found in the late R. G. Parker's " Aids to English Composition."

where, quoting from the Psalms of David, " promotion " had been described as coming " neither from the East, nor from the West, nor yet from the South." The Virginia statesman, perhaps half asleep and probably more familiar with politics than Holy Writ, had got it into his head that this was intended as a compliment to President Adams and the North, in disparagement of other sections of the Union.

I find but five letters written to Mr. Winthrop at this period by college friends. Three of them are little notes from Charles Emerson; the fourth is an entertaining account of a night passed in a Methodist camp meeting on Cape Cod, by Thomas Kemper Davis; the fifth a scrap which I insert here only because the writer, with other titles to remembrance, became a valued Recording Secretary of this Society.

Dearly Beloved, — As touching the points of faith and conduct whereof you have enquired of me, it has seemed good to me to vouchsafe the following reply. As to the time when, good. As to the place where, very excellent good. As to the quantity, half a dozen. As to the brand, Forrest Rheims. As to the place from which, Parker and Codman's. And now, most excellent Theophilus, having resolved thy doubts and confirmed thy faith, I commend me to thee and commend thee.

Edmund, to my brothers and sisters, Quince, to my familiars, and Edmund Quincy, Esquire, to all Europe.

Having thus obtained a bachelor's degree at the age of nineteen, he soon after entered the law-office of Daniel Webster, where his fellow-student was his friend Davis, and where he remained until his admission to the

ROBERT C. WTNTHROP. 9

Suffolk Bar in 1831. "Webster was then Senator from Massachusetts and necessarily much in Washington, the local business being attended to by his junior partner. Even when at home he was generally too busy to give much attention to his students, whose duties were to copy papers, look up cases, and prepare briefs ; but he repeatedly complimented them on their diligence and on one occasion magnanimously assured them that he had won a case in the United States Supreme Court with a brief prepared by them, which he had only found time to read at the last moment. At very long intervals he discoursed a little on the great principles of jurisprudence, more often favored them with a passing insight into contemporary politics, but whatever he touched upon was always interesting and impressive. To Mr. Winthrop, who had listened with enthusiasm to Webster's address on Bunker Hill in 1825 and to his immortal eulogy on Adams and Jefferson in the following year, conceiving thereby a profound admiration for his intellect and oratory, this daily association with that illustrious man during a large part of three successive years was a source of unmixed pleasure. He cannot, however, be said to have consumed any appreciable amount of midnight oil in that unwearying study of the law which has characterized so many of its votaries. After dark and even before dark he cultivated fashionable society with some degree of assiduity, became a manager of subscription-balls, wore some of the most conspicuous of the party-colored waistcoats then in vogue, and, according to one of his sisters, devoted an unconscionable time to the art of tying voluminous cravats. He exhibited, too, a martial ardor on receiv-

M ing a commission in the State Militia, serving first as ensign and then as lieutenant in the Boston Light Infantry, familiarly known as " Tigers," a corps which he soon after commanded. He contributed now and then to periodical literature, the first sum of money he ever earned having been eight dollars (at the regular compensation of one dollar a page) for an article on " American Annals " in the " North American Review ; " but a previous article on " Temperance Pledges," in the " New England Magazine," not only elicited no pay at all, but became the subject of some animadversion from teetotalers. When the time came for putting up a sign in Court Street, as was the custom of young counsellors in those days, he met with the average success of a beginner, but did not regret being soon drawn into politics; and though he kept his office open until he entered Congress, it grew more and more to be frequented by place-hunters than by clients. For a part of the time, moreover, his attention was distracted from other pursuits by an attachment which resulted in his marriage, March 12, 1832, to Eliza, only child of Francis Blanchard of Boston by his wife Mary Anne Cabot, mother by a former marriage of the late John Clarke Lee of Salem. Mrs. Winthrop, a young woman of marked personal attractions and great vivacity, having lost both her parents in early childhood, had been brought up in the family of her great-uncle and guardian, Samuel Pickering Gardner, a former member of this Society and one of the best of men, to whose widow (Rebecca Russell Lowell) many of Mr.

Winthrop's entertaining descriptions of Congressional life were subsequently addressed. The happy pair devoted much of y their honeymoon to a trip to Maryland and Virginia, where they were received with true Southern hospitality, among the houses at which they were successively the guests for one or more days having been those of two exceptionally distinguished statesmen, James Madison and James Barbour, both great talkers and full of the most interesting reminiscences. " You see us," said ~ the ex-President to Mr. Winthrop, "surrounded by negroes. They are eating us out of house and home, and gladly would I emancipate them, but I cannot make up my mind to what would be a cruelty. They are utterly helpless but for us, and they are as much attached to the homestead as we are. I cannot drive them from our doors unprovided for, and there seems no practicable mode of securing them from want in a state of freedom." Pursuing the topic, he added, "I am beginning to hope, however, that slavery will in some way come to an end at no very distant day. The debates in our State Convention of 1830 were full of encouragement, exhibiting a revolution in opinion on this subject hardly second in importance to anything which had occurred since the Revolution of 1776. These debates gave me the first confident hope that domestic slavery in this country would not be eternal." In Washington Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop came into contact with the actual President, Andrew Jackson, a very different type of ruler, and in Baltimore they had a touching interview with Charles Carroll, last survivor of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, then ninety-five years old.

The accident of Henry Clay's decision to visit Boston in the autumn of 1833 first drew marked attention to

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Mr. Winthrop's gifts as a public speaker. Clay had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency in the preceding year; but neither this defeat, nor his more recent differences with Webster on the subject of the Tariff, had cooled the ardor of his Boston followers, the younger portion of whom arranged a special demonstration in Ins honor. Mr. Winthrop was made chairman of a committee to escort him to his hotel, where he made him an address of welcome and, before his departure, presided at a banquet at which the guest of the evening was presented with a pair of silver pitchers. The felicity of Mr. Winthrop's utterances on these two occasions was so much commented on that, a few weeks later, he was invited to make the principal address at Faneuil Hall at a caucus of the anti-Jackson or National Republican party (soon to adopt the famous name of Whigs) prior to the State election for Governor. Our former associate, Hon. William Sullivan, author of the " Political Class-Book " and " Letters on Public Characters," was among his audience and wrote a friend as follows : —

" I rejoice we have a young orator to keep up the holy flame of old Faneuil Hall. I may be allowed, without the charge of vanity, to consider myself a judge of such performances, and I consider this not merely a good speech for a first effort, but one which any practised man might have been proud to make. It was pertinent to the occasion ; it was gentlemanly and decorous in language ; it was well digested and regular in order; singularly free from embarrassment and highly pleasing in manner." 1

1 It was never printed in full, but may be described as having coupled an effective arraignment of Jackson's policy with an earnest

Soon after appointed to the staff of the Governor elect, John Davis, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, he also became a member of the State Central Committee of his party, — a post with which he was long identified. Both as junior member and subsequently chairman of this influential body, his colleagues placed so much reliance upon his pen that for a number of years the Addresses to Electors and the Resolutions for Conventions were written wholly or in part by him. Now to be found only in the form of rare pamphlets, or in bound volumes of newspapers, they are well worth the careful perusal of any student of Massachusetts history. 1 Having in the spring of 1834 been placed at the head of a committee of the young men of Boston to memorialize Congress on the subject of the removal of the government deposits from the Bank of the United States, Mr. Winthrop made a vigorous speech in Faneuil Hall in opposition to the Administration, following it up by others in different places during the ensuing twelve months. In the spring of 1835, the Whig members of the Legislature having nominated Daniel Webster for the Presidency, he actively supported that nomination by an effective speech at Faneuil Hall at the outset, by similar speeches there and elsewhere during the Presidential campaign of 1836, and by the preparation of a variety of printed circulars and resolutions on the same appeal to the conservative young men of Massachusetts to give more active attention to their political interests and their political duties.

1 It was the custom to submit them to the approval of the partyleaders, and on some of Mr. Winthrop's private copies I find such pencilled memoranda as, " Webster wrote opening paragraphs, next mine," and "Webster and Everett both had a finger in this pie, but were not thought to have much improved its flavor."

T subject, including the greater part of an Address to the People of the United States, written for a public meeting in New York at the request of Hiram Ketchum. These campaign speeches of Mr. Winthrop, with many others delivered by him between the last-named year and 1840, — some uttered in different parts of New England, some in New York, — while they were rapturously greeted by his audiences and much lauded by newspapers of his own way of thinking, were very imperfectly reported. As most of them now exist, if they exist at all, only in manuscript, I quote a few passages from those just mentioned in order to give some idea of what might be termed his " early manner."

What, sir, has been the course of the President ? I will not trouble this meeting with a detailed statement of it, but what one power that he fairly has, has he not abused, and what one that he has not, has he not usurped or grasped at ? Look at the veto power, — that awful attribute of kings, but which hardly any king has dared to wield almost within the memory of man, — it is matter of record that it has directly or indirectly been employed by our present Chief Magistrate a greater number of times than in all the other years since the creation of the Constitution. Take, too, the power of removal from office, — a merely constructive power at the best, thrown into the Executive hand by the mere casting vote of a Vice-President in the early days of our government, — it is ascertained with indisputable accuracy that it has been used by our present Chief Magistrate to the full of three times as often as by all his predecessors put together. And then, sir, his course as to the Bank. . . . There are some deposits more sacred than the public funds, deposits which money cannot pay for, which gold cannot redeem, — certainly not that gold which has been shorn of the badge of our liberty and the motto of our Union. Liberty and the Constitution which secures it, what are these but sacred, precious deposits, intrusted to our keeping by our fathers for our enjoyment and that of our posterity, and who that has an eye to the condition of his country can fail to see the vulture hand of Andrew Jackson hanging over and clutching at these deposits?

His whole career has clearly manifested the tyrannous design to set up his arbitrary and despotic will as the sole standard of government and to make himself the master instead of the servant of the American people. With the sanction of the party by whom he is supported, the Constitution has been violated, the laws have been trampled on, the public treasure has been seized, the judiciary has been menaced, the people's interests have been overlooked, the people's rights have been overleaped, the people's money has been squandered, and the people's will has been defied ; while in the intimation that he is to be supported for a third term unless some supple tool of his own dictation can be made certain of success, we find a new manifestation of that utter disregard which he has all along evinced for the precepts and practice of our immortal Washington, and of all the other great and good men who have presided over the Republic. But one single act of his whole administration have the people of Massachusetts found it in their consciences to approve. But one ray of pure and patriotic light has gleamed to illumine and render visible the blackness of darkness in which all the rest has been enveloped. And even this, while we are pronouncing it an emanation of patriotism, flames and flickers so fitfully that we are almost constrained to regard it rather as the baser issue of selfish passion. Who doubts that but for the fortunate personal collision between Mr. Calhoun and the President, Nullification in South Carolina would have met the same encouragement and countenance it had before met in Georgia, and would have been, so far as the President could make it, the settled construction of the Constitution ? . . .

The country is before long to decide whether he alone shall descend from his proud elevation while the sordid slaves of his will, the slimy spawn of his creation, still cling to and defile it ; or whether it shall be wholly and at once purified and become again the source of a rightful, wholesome authority, instead of the sink of a corrupt and arbitrary misrule. Shall the long-expected hour display to us the mere shifting of masters, or shall it bring about the substitution of a good old-fashioned President for an obstinate and despotic Chief? 1 Shall the Capitol in that day be likened only to the house in that sacred parable from which indeed one unclean spirit was cast out, but into which seven others worse than himself otherwise entered, or shall the whole legion be at once expelled and extirpated ? Shall that change be a mere change from one degree of corruption to another, or shall this corruption put on incorruption and our liberties be again restored to a sound, healthy constitutional basis ? . . .

No one who prizes the great principles for which we are contending can be ignorant who has been their most able and effective assertor. No one who values the safety of the Constitution or has trembled at the perils by which it has been environed, can have failed to recognize its most successful and powerful champion. No one who has marked with disgust and indignation the frequent violations of liberty and law which have been attempted by the present administration, can have been deaf to the voice of thunder which has rebuked, confronted, and driven them back. It is not as the most distinguished son of Massachusetts, it is not merely as a great man — the world over, a great man — that he has been selected as our candidate. We are not called upon as the Webster party, bent upon the elevation of an individual person, nor as a Northern party, seeking the gratification of a sectional prejudice. But we are called upon in the simple faith of the Constitution, in the unmingled love of our Republican Union, to select and support for its highest post him 1 Jackson's admirers liked to call him " the old chief."