USA > Connecticut > Connecticut as a colony and as a state; or, One of the original thirteen, Volume IV > Part 21
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James Hammond Trumbull, ethnologist, philologist, his- torian, who sought out the footprints of the red man beneath the mold of years and rescued for us the fading knowledge of the aborigines, was like one who caught the last words of voices borne away on the wind and almost inaudible to other ears. He became the unquestioned authority on the Algon- quin language, and was at last the only American scholar who could read the Indian Bible of Eliot. He was widely recog- nized and publicly honored as an extremely acute and accurate scholar in his peculiar field of learning, which included a very intimate knowledge of local history.
To turn from art and archeology to dietetics, let it be remembered by all who eat Graham bread that the use of unbolted flour was introduced by Sylvester Graham, a native of Suffield. While lecturing on intemperance, he conceived the idea of controlling the vice by a purely vegetable diet. From that he was led to write "Graham Lectures on the Sci- ence of Human Life," and "Bread and Bread-Making," and lo ! his name was indissolubly connected with unbolted flour ! Such fame was not without its drawbacks: when he was lec- turing in Boston, a mob of bakers and butchers, infuriated by doctrines so undermining to their occupations, attacked him so violently that the mayor lost control, and Graham's friends were obliged to quell the excitement by shoveling slaked lime
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from upper windows on the besiegers below. It is needless to observe that both butchers and bakers have found that the world is large enough for them and Graham flour too. Gra- ham's influence in inducing people to eat more fruit and cereals than had been the custom gives him a deserved place as a benefactor. In a more scientific manner, the researches of Atwater at Wesleyan University and Chittenden at Yale have contributed to a general understanding of the chemistry of nutrition.
Scientific men have so abounded that selection is impractic- able, except where unique service to the world has been ren- dered. The pioneer work of Benjamin Silliman the elder has been touched on in his connection with Yale College. This remarkable man, who was the very head of American science for a half-century, was born in North Stratford in 1779, the family having fled thither from Fairfield during a British raid. He followed his father and grandfather to Yale. While there he was fond of writing poetry, and excelled in all his studies. Duly admitted to the bar, he was on the point of going to Georgia to practice law, when in 1802 he was asked by President Dwight to prepare himself for a prospective professorship of chemistry and natural his- tory. This was when science was in a primitive condition. Chemistry had been "scarcely mentioned," physics little con- sidered, and astronomy was the only science that excited very much interest. The offer was accepted; and the insight of President Dwight and the promise of the young tutor were fulfilled in the great consequences that followed. Professor Silliman at once applied himself to the study of his new science, going to Philadelphia, where he also studied anatomy and surgery. From Dr. MacLean at Prince- ton, he gained many important suggestions. Returning
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to New Haven in 1804, he began the brilliant career there of a half-century as a lecturer and teacher of science. It is noted that in his first class were John C. Calhoun, Gadsden, after- wards Bishop, and John Pierpont. A period of study and travel in Europe enlarged his knowledge and interested him in geology so far as to make a geological survey of his own State, with a resulting report. In sequence from that and the discontinuance of various attempted scientific journals, came the establishment of Silliman's (now the American) Journal of Science. He always felt that this was one of his most important contributions to the progress of science; recognized at home and abroad as an important repository of scientific experiment and observation, it has, in the words of Gilman, "for more than eighty years been published by a single family-three generations of them,-with unrequited sacrifices, unquestioned authority, and unparalleled success." His connection with the Medical School has been recounted elsewhere.
Silliman was pre-eminent as a public expounder of scientific truths, of which most people were then in a state of pro- found ignorance. His preparation for these lectures and for his experiments was so exact and careful that he had perfect confidence and unvarying success ; and his gracious manner of presenting these novel truths and beautiful experiments en- abled him to impart his own enthusiasm to his hearers, often holding the unbroken attention of fifteen hundred peo- ple for two hours with only a short recess. For twenty- three years he went all over the country, responding to calls to thus make science popular. He felt rightly that his mission was no so much that of an investigator as an apostle, and he found pleasure in that mission. He was asked to explore mines, of gold and coal; to examine, for the U. S. Govern-
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ment, the culture and manufacture of sugar; and was every- where regarded as the proper director of scientific enterprise. He was the first president of the association now known as the American Association for the Advancement of Science; he had a positive influence for patriotism and religion in the great questions of his day-the "Silliman Letters" have been elsewhere spoken of; he wrote interesting accounts of his travels as well as of his scientific discoveries, and endeared himself to all by his lovable personal qualities. This "Nestor of American science" died on Nov. 24, Thanksgiving Day, 1864.
A bright, diligent boy grew up in Farmington under the oversight of Governor Treadwell and the elder Dr. Noah Porter, who became an alert and inspiring teacher of astro- omy and natural Philosophy at Yale,-Denison Olmsted. To his early text-books on those subjects, which filled a great void, reference has been made. They carried his name over the land, his Astronomy reaching nearly fifty editions. Pa- tient as a teacher, he had many original ideas,-as when, in 1816, he advocated a training-school for teachers, long before others admitted the necessity. While in North Carolina, he gratuitously made a geological survey of the State as a vaca- tion work. His observations of meteoric showers, and his theories concerning them and the progressive motion of ocean gales are in great measure still accepted. He and Professor Loomis were the first to observe the return of Halley's comet in 1835, which led him to urge the need of larger telescopes, and observatories for scientific research. His kind interest in his students and his fine character made him greatly beloved.
While he was teaching, the boy Chester Lyman, born in Manchester in 1814 was making astronomical apparatus, and
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computing tables of eclipses without any teacher before he came to Yale. His blameless character fitted him for his profession of the ministry, but his bent towards astronomy was too strong to be resisted; and after a visit to the Sand- wich Islands, where he had charge of the Royal School at Honolulu for a few months, and where his exploration of Kilauea established a new theory of volcanic eruptions; and a sojourn in California during its romantic '49 period, enabling him to give authentic accounts of the discovery of gold,-he settled down for a long professorship in the Shef- field Scientific School, where his pure face seemed like a bene- diction of science. He invented some valuable astronomical instruments and apparatus, and he was the first to observe some special phenomena of Venus.
John Strong Newberry, the geologist, made the govern- ment surveys of the country between San Francisco and the Colorado in the days when it was an untamed wilderness; during the Civil War, directed the operations of the Sani- tary Commission in the Mississippi Valley; and after that thrilling period had passed, was again absorbed in science; and was for twenty-five years the professor of Geology and Palæontology at the Columbia School of Mines. Professor Newberry was very prominent as a writer on his subjects, and as an organizer and president of some of the great scientific associations. He was born in Windsor, died in New Haven, and was much identified with his native State.
In New Haven was born and is buried Charles Goodyear, whose pathetic struggles, in spite of poverty and opposition, to perfect his invention of vulcanizing rubber resulted in incalculable benefit to mankind.
Dr. Horace Welles was too retiring to push his claims, even if he had lived to realize their vast importance; but it
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must not be forgotten that by the suggestion of his own mind after seeing Dr. Colton's exhibition of the effects of laughing gas, and by personal experiment in Hartford on himself and others, he proved that pain could be annihilated by anæs- thetics, and thus led the way to the most momentous change in the history of surgery.
To Alexander Lyman Holley, the son of Governor Holley of Lakeville, is owing the introduction into this country of the Bessemer process of making steel, thereby increasing our steel product more than tenfold. Mr. Holley's great knowledge and his writings on the uses of iron and steel in "American and English Railways" and in "Ordnance and Armor," made him an authority on such matters, and his death while in the midst of useful activity was deeply regret- ted. The American Institute of Mining Engineers and the British Iron and Steel Institute of London combined to place in New York a bronze bust of Holley, by J. Q. A. Ward, as a testimonial of their admiration.
To Frederick Law Olmsted was given a special mission for the people of this country, in opening the parks which are now the pride and delight of our cities all over the land. Begin- ning with an intense love of Nature and a practical knowl- edge of farming, his theories sprang from a genuine root and had a genuine growth. Wide travel, with a definite object of learning from other lands, trained his originally good taste so that it became almost faultless. Other men might have had his enthusiasm, and the power of imparting it; but he had the right conception of the possibilities of each piece of land that was presented to his attention, and he knew how to bring out its salient features and combine them in a har- monious whole.
Of this power, Morningside Park in New York is a fine
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illustration. A rocky strip of land, steep, narrow, and small, unavailable for building or traffic, to some minds fit only for a dumping-place, was transformed by his genius into a thing of beauty which excites the surprise and admiration of cura- tors of foreign parks. The same genius knew how to treat the wide expanses of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. During the Civil War, he was one of the founders of the Union League Club and an active manager of the working details of the Sanitary Commission. The war over, he and his coadjutor, Calvert Vaux, laid out Central Park, barely snatched from the march of the city's growth, an achievement that made 1866 an epoch in New York's history. They also laid out the parks of cities all over the land, besides Mount Royal Park in Montreal. He was chairman of the Yosemite Park Com- mission, he was one of the landscape architects of the Chi- cago Exposition, and to his advice public and private grounds all over the country owe much of their beauty.
His pen was not idle; and his early books on the South, "The Cotton Kingdom," "The Seaboard States" and had much influence on opinion at the beginning of the war. When he died, the country joined with Hartford in mourning a valued son; and it was aptly said that his best monument was the Central Park.
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CHAPTER XVI CONNECTICUT'S HONORED SONS ABROAD
F ROM the State have gone forth some men who have become illustrious through their work in other states. Such was that grand old divine, Dr. Nathaniel Emmons, one of a species almost extinct now. The quiet little village of Haddam was the birthplace not only of Emmons, but of David and John Brainerd, of Dr. Griffin, of the jurist Jeremiah Gates Percival, of David Dudley Field's two great sons, Stephen and David Dudley, besides other men who have left their impress on the busy world. Dr. Emmons distinguished him- self at Yale, and took lasting impressions from his teacher in theology, Dr. Smalley of New Britain, himself a pupil of Dr. Bellamy. He early removed to Franklin, Massachusetts, where he was the pastor for fifty-four years. Thus his life, with the exception of his college years, was paseed in two small villages, with no especial associations with public affairs; and yet through his writings he became a power in the relig- ious world and the founder of a new school of Calvinism, his fame extending even to other lands. Between eighty and one hundred young men studied theology with him, sometimes being called Emmonites; and of them forty-six have been counted among truly eminent men. His three-cornered hat, to which he clung throughout his life, was an outward sym- bol of his tenacity of opinion. He had the courage to espouse an unpopular cause or to attack a popular one according to his conviction of right; as when in a Fast-Day sermon, he made the famous reference to President Jefferson as Jeroboam. Yet he numbered among his friends the great divines of the day, to whom his wit, keen analysis, and definite opinions must have made him an exhilarating companion. His ser- mons, often printed and widely disseminated then, fill nearly seven volumes; and he aroused great interest by his skill in
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reconciling views held by many to be irreconcilable. In his habits of life, too, he harmonized things ordinarily incompati- ble : for sixty-five years he studied from ten to fourteen hours a day, took no exercise, and was always well, living to the middle of his ninety-sixth year.
A contemporary of Emmons was Alexander V. Griswold, born in Simsbury, who became the first Episcopal bishop of the Eastern Diocese, which included Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, besides Connec- ticut. His labors were various; besides bearing the responsi- bility of his diocese, and the charge of three parishes in Litchfield County, he eked out his scanty salary by teaching and farming. In course of time, he became the third presid- ing bishop of the United States.
Samuel Nott, one of the early graduates of Union College, and a native of Franklin, Connecticut, was one of the first pioneer missionaries sent out to India by the American Board of Foreign Missions.
We all know how America was honored by the fearless eloquence of Henry Ward Beecher in his five great addresses in England in 1863. When he unflinchingly stood the storm of hostile audiences, and with all his powers of wit and earnestness and oratory held under perfect control, turned the course of public opinion in Great Britain against the slave- power, he effected a "result unparalled in modern oratory."
Other men have not lacked courage to assert their convic- tions of right; such as Henry B. Stanton, who, fifty years a journalist, able and upright, knew not how to bend his course for friend or foe; and, as champion of the anti-slavery cause, had to face many an angry mob. In the quiet village of Tor- rington, stands the house which was the birthplace, and for
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five years the home, of John Brown, who rests at North Elba after his stormy life, and whose name will not soon perish.
Far back in the colonial days, in 1759, was born in New Haven Jared Mansfield, the fourth son of Captain Stephen Mansfield. He was one of the class which Yale graduated in the war-troubled year of 1777, he showed his ability in teaching as rector of the Hopkins Grammar School in his native town, and as head of the Friends' School in Philadel- phia. His taste for mathematics led him to publish a volume. of his essays, which not only were the first original mathe- matical researches published in America, but attracted the attention of that great man, Abraham Baldwin, who was naturally interested in the production of a man of his own State and college, and showed the book to Jefferson. He was so favorably impressed that he appointed Mansfield a captain of engineers in the United States Army, from which he was promoted to be lieutenant-colonel. After a term at West Point as professor of Natural Philosophy, he was pro- posed by Baldwin as Surveyor-General of the United States, an office which involved surveying Ohio and that vast region then known as the "Northwest Territory," now resolved into numerous flourishing States. These exacting duties he per- formed faithfully and accurately, and his name is perpetu- ated in the town of Mansfield in Ohio.
Another Connecticut man, Francis Granger, from Suffield, went to the State of New York, was called by Jefferson to his service as Postmaster General, and filled the same office under Madison and the first Harrison, resigning when Tyler became President. A party was named for him, the "silver-grays," in allusion to the color of his hair.
In lonely grandeur on the top of the North Carolina mountain whose name commemorates his fatal zeal for scien-
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tific exploration, sleeps a son of Litchfield County, Elisha Mitchell. What a trio of bright men was that which went from New Haven to the University of North Carolina in the early nineteenth century,-Denison Olmsted, Ethan Allen Andrews, Elisha Mitchell! Mitchell was a native of the vil- lage of Washington ,and was descended through his mother, from John Eliot. He was a classmate of Olmsted at Yale, and together they accepted professorships at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Mitchell, as professor first of mathematics and then of natural science, remained there for thirty-nine years; and his labors redounded greatly to the renown of the University. He was an ardent naturalist, and his own valua- ble researches among the fauna and flora, the soils, and rocks, and river-courses and mountains of North Carolina, were published in Silliman's Journal of Science and other period- icals, and gave him a great reputation. His instruction, based so largely on personal experience, was most illuminating. His especial fame rests on his exploration of Black Mountain, which now rightly bears his name. Five times did he toil through the wilderness to establish by scientific means the fact that it was the highest point of the Appalachians. On the fifth and last exploration, in 1857, he became lost, and perished in the storm and darkness of the night. His body was found in the pool at the foot of the precipice down which he had slipped; and now it rests, near the balsam tree which he had climbed for a point of observation, on the summit of the mountain which is his monument.
Asaph Hall, who discovered the moons of Mars in 1877, and was long the astronomer in charge of the United States Naval Observatory, was also of Litchfield County birth.
Thomas Sterry Hunt, the famous chemist and geologist, had a curious connection with the financial history of the coun-
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try, in perfecting the green ink which has given name and permanence to our "greenbacks." He was born in Nor- wich, and was one of the elder Silliman's youthful assistants, although most of his working life was spent in Canada, Bos- ton, and New York. Prominent in organizing Laval Univer- sity, he was the professor of chemistry there and at McGill University; and afterwards he took the chair of geology at the School of Technology in Boston. Many of Professor Hunt's geological designations have been permanently accepted. His knowledge of chemistry inspired him to important speculations; he was regarded as the ablest Amer- ican exponent of the "Substitution" theory; and by his numerous writings, which were translated into foreign languages, and his very acceptable lectures, he became one of the best known authorities of his day in chemistry, miner- alogy, and geology, winning the honors of a scholar at home and abroad.
Jedidiah Morse, in his noted "Geography," remarks that in his day the people of Connecticut were frequent in their appeals to law. Whether this were the cause or effect of an abundance of lawyers, it is certain that both bench and bar have had notable representatives from the State. There was Jeremiah Mason, another distinguished son of Lebanon and Yale, who became the Attorney-General of New Hampshire, her senator at Washington; and, still greater honor, was the foeman worthy of the steel of Daniel Webster. The legal combats of these intellectual giants increased their mutual admiration, and Webster was undoubtedly often spurred on to his great performances by those trials of strength with his friend and opponent. One of the Notts of Saybrook, Abra- ham, the grandson of Abraham Nott of Wethersfield, after his graduation from Yale in 178 1, turned his steps southward
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and became one of the leading lawyers of South Carolina, and an able judge there.
A little later, from Bozrah went out Reuben Hyde Wal- worth, for twenty years the chancellor of New York, whom Story called "the greatest equity judge of his time," and who accomplished a needed simplification of the equity laws. John Pierpont, of Litchfield birth and Litchfield Law-School training, was the Chief Justice of Vermont; and of the North Haven branch of the same family, although with a variation in the spelling of the name, was our able diplomat, Edwards Pierrepont. He was one of the class of 1837 at Yale, which included Evarts and Waite; was a graduate of the Yale Law School in 1840, and continued his life in New Haven by a tutorship. His talents as a jurist and his loyalty to the Union brought him to Lincoln's assistance in many crises during the Civil War. He was among those sent to Washington to con- fer with the Government after the attack on the troops in Baltimore; in 1862 he was appointed by the President, with General Dix, to try political offenders, and he appeared for the Government in the prosecution of John N. Surratt after Mr. Lincoln had fallen by the assassin's bullet. He was At- torney-General during Grant's administration, declined the mission to Russia, and accepted the similar appointments to St. James and the Quirinal, where he discharged his diplo- matic duties with distinction and ability.
Amasa Parker went from Sharon to Union College and thence to Albany, where he attained great eminence as a lawyer, particularly in disposing in a short time of the numer- ous trials involved in the anti-rent troubles,-two hundred and forty persons being tried in three weeks.
Although he spent most of his life in his native State, of which he was one of the honored governors, Roger Sherman
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Baldwin, a native of New Haven, ranked among the great lawyers of his day. He advocated the right of Prudence Crandall to teach whom and where she pleased; and in 1839- 40, his able and unwearied defence of the Amistad Captives against the demands of Spain, gave him a national reputation as a leader at the bar and a master of legal learning. While in the U. S. Senate, he made a memorable speech in defence of his State against the aspersions of Mason of Virginia.
Lyme has indeed been a home of governors and judges; as is illustrated in the "Family Circle" of Mrs. Ursula Wol- cott Griswold, who was the daughter of Major-General Gov- ernor Wolcott, the sister of the first Governor Oliver Wol- cott, the aunt of the second Governor Oliver Wolcott, the wife of Governor and Chief-Justice Matthew Griswold, and the mother of Matthew Griswold and Governor Roger Gris- wold, the latter a man of high distinction, both sons being judges; besides numbering in that circle ten more gover- nors of this and other States, including the late much hon- ored Governor Roger Wolcott of Massachusetts; and forty- three distinguished judges.
Among these judges, Lyme has furnished three chief jus- tices of the Supreme Court of the State, Henry M. Waite, Matthew Griswold, Jr., Roger Griswold, the last two, sons of Mrs. Griswold; Charles Johnson McCurdy, Judge of the same court, her great-grandson; and Morrison Remick Waite, Chief Justice of the United States.
Judge McCurdy conferred a lasting benefit on the Eng- lish-speaking world by the memorable change which he effected in 1848 in the common law, whereby persons inter- ested in the event of lawsuits were allowed to testify, a right never before granted. This fundamental improvement in the administration of justice was greatly approved by David
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Dudley Field, who the next year, placed it in his code; and it was generally adopted throughout the Union, and became a part of the English law. Judge McCurdy's eminence as a lawyer and patriotism as a citizen kept him in public office for many years; and in 1851 he was sent to Austria as our chargé d'affaires. It was a troubled time, and the American welcome of Kossuth had caused irritation in Vienna; but Mr. McCurdy's course was so wise and tactful as to win great praise; and his rescue of the Rev. Charles L. Brace from unjust arrest as a spy was as successful as it was discreet. Judge McCurdy was a member of the Peace Commission in 1861, and was of great service to the Yale Law School at a time when it was languishing. He was in the class of 1817 at Yale, of which he was for some time the oldest living gradu- ate, retaining remarkable vigor till his death in his ninety- fourth year. Of very fine personal appearance, and noble character, witty, charitable, and courteous, he was indeed a fine specimen of the "gentleman of the old school."
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