USA > Connecticut > The history of Connecticut, from the first settlement of the colony to the adoption of the present constitution, vol. II > Part 52
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A literary friend, in whose accuracy I have entire confidence, has furnished me with the following curious statistics relative to Litchfield county :
" Litchfield County contains less than one-five-hundredth of the population of the United States, and about one-seventieth of that of the state of New York. Yet it has been the birth-place of thirteen United States Senators, which is about one- fortieth of all that have ever been in Congress, from all the states ; viz., Elijah Boardman, Nathan Smith, Perry Smith, and Truman Smith, from Connecticut ; Julius Rockwell, from Massachusetts; James Watson and Daniel S. Dickinson, from New York ; Stanley Griswold, from Ohio ; Josiah S. Johnston, from Louis- iana ; Augustus Porter, from Michigan ; Nathaniel Chipman, Horatio Seymour, and Samuel S. Phelps, from Vermont. Litchfield County has also been the birth- place of twenty-two representatives in Congress from the state of New York, being about one-twenty-eighth of all that have ever been sent from that State; viz., Daniel B. St. John, Victory Birdsey, Edward Rogers, Freeborn G. Jewett, Lewis Riggs, Amasa J. Parker, Samuel M. Hopkins, Thomas R. Gold, Frederick A. Tallmadge, Charles Johnston, Theron R. Strong, Frederick Whittlesey, John M. Holley, Henry Mitchell, Nathaniel Pitcher, John Sanford, Ambrose Spencer, Peter B. Porter, John Bird, Gameliel F. Barstow, John A. Collier, and Graham H. Cha- pin ; of fifteen judges of the supreme court in other states; of nine presidents of colleges ; viz., Jeremiah Day, D.D. LL. D., of Yale; Nathaniel S. Wheaton, D.D., of Washington (now Trinity ;) Rufus Babcock, D.D., Waterville ; Horace Holley, LL. D., Transylvania ; Charles G. Finney, A.M., Oberlin ; J. M. Stur- tevant, D.D., Illinois ; Bennet Tyler, D.D., Dartmouth ; Joseph I. Foote, Wash- ington, (Tennessee;) Ebenezer Porter, D.D., Andover Theological Seminary; of eighteen professors of colleges, (not included in the above list of presidents, most of
599
JUDGE REEVE.
[1744.]
Tapping Reeve was a son of the Rev. Mr. Reeve, minis- ter at Brookhaven, Long Island, and was born at that place in October, 1744. He was graduated at Princeton in 1763. Nine years after, he removed to Litchfield, where he com- menced the practice of the law under the most promising auspices. Before he opened his office for the instruction of students in the elements of his favorite science, he had ac- quired a high reputation for learning and intellect. He was a man of genius, and in early and middle life, when his feel-
whom have been professors ;) viz., Nathaniel W. Taylor, D.D., Matthew R. Dutton, A.M., Samuel J. Hitchcock, LL. D., Henry Dutton, LL. D., Yale; Eli- sha Mitchell, D.D., North Carolina; David Prentice, LL. D., Geneva, N. Y. ; Henry M. Day, A.M., Western Reserve ; Thomas Goodsell, M.D., Hamilton ; Frederick Whittlesey, A.M., Genessee, N. Y .; Joseph Emerson, A.M., Beloit, Wis .; Charles Davies, LL. D., Albert E. Church, LL. D., and William G. Peck, A.M., (Assis't Prof.) West Point, N. Y .; Amasa J. Parker, LL. D., Albany University ; Chester Averill, A.M., Union, N. Y .; Nathaniel Chipman, LL. D., Richard Skinner, LL. D., and Daniel Chipman, LL. D., Middlebury College.
In 1831, the Vice President of the United States and one-eighth of the United States Senators, were either natives of, or had been educated in Litchfield County. In 1850, one-seventh of the whole number of United States Senators were found to have been educated in the county.
The county has also been the birth-place of thirteen United States Senators, and of eighteen judges of the supreme courts of states. Senators .- Elijah Board- man, Nathan Smith, Truman Smith, and Perry Smith, from Connecticut; Hora- tio Seymour, Nathaniel Chipman, and Samuel S. Phelps, from Vermont ; James Watson and Daniel S. Dickinson, from New York ; Julius Rockwell, from Mas- sachusetts ; Josiah S. Johnston, from Louisiana ; Stanley Griswold, from Ohio ; and (probably) Augustus A. Porter, from Michigan. Judges .- Ambrose Spencer, Freeborn G. Jewett, (chief judges,) Amasa J. Parker, Frederick Whittlesey, Samuel A. Foote, Theron R. Strong, of New York ; Clarke Wood- ruff, of Louisiana ; Rufus Pettibone, Missouri ; Samuel Lyman, of Massachusetts ; Nathaniel Chipman, Richard Skinner, (chief judges ;) Robert Pierpont, Milo S. Bennett, and Samuel S. Phelps, of Vermont, Roger Skinner, United States Judge of the Northern District of New York ; and N. Smith, J. C. Smith, S. Church, and J. Hinman, of Connecticut,"
The Litchfield County Foreign Mission Society was the first auxiliary of the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions.
The following eminent clergymen have officiated as pastors in the county ; viz., Joseph Bellamy, Azel Backus, Jonathan Edwards, Lyman Beecher, Edward Dorr Griffin, George E. Pierce, Daniel Linn Carroll, Ebenezer Porter, Ralph Emerson, Laurens P. Hickok, Nathaniel S. Wheaton, and Samuel Fuller, all of whom have been presidents of colleges or theological seminaries.
600
HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
ings were enlisted in the trial of a cause, he often displayed powers of eloquence which, from the suddenness with which they flashed upon the minds of his audience, and from his impassioned manner, produced an overwhelming effect, and contrasted strongly with the carelessness of his more common- place public efforts. He was very unequal in the exhibition of his powers. He was a man of ardent temperament, ten- der sensibilities, and of a nature deeply religious. His sym- pathies naturally led him to espouse the cause of the op- pressed and helpless. He was the first eminent lawyer in this country who dared to arraign the common law of Eng- land, for its severity and refined cruelty, in cutting off the natural rights of married women, and placing their property as well as their persons at the mercy of their husbands, who might squander it or hoard it up at pleasure. His sentiments did not at first meet with much favor, but he lived long enough to see them gain ground in this and other states. His principles did not die with him. All the mitigating changes in our jurisprudence, which have been made to re- deem helpless woman from the barbarities of her legalized tyrant, may fairly be traced to the author of the first Ameri- can treatise on "The Domestic Relations." His conduct afforded a living example of his views on this important sub- ject. His first wife, who was a daughter of President Burr, was an invalid for twenty years. He bestowed upon her the most unwearied attention, and watched her symptoms with the liveliest solicitude. While writing his celebrated work, he would often sit up with her whole nights, and administer her medicines with the most delicate assiduity. He would often shut up his office and lecture-room to attend upon her.
Judge Reeve was an ardent revolutionary patriot, and, after the war was over, was distinguished as a political writer of the Hamiltonian or Federal school. His features were classically handsome, and his eye bright and expressive of the tenderest and warmest emotions. His fervent piety and well-timed charities, his noble impulses, his truthfulness, his simplicity of character, his disinterestedness, all served to
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601
JUDGE GOULD.
render him a general favorite in a widely extended circle of friends and acquaintances. He died in 1823, at the advanced age of 79 years.
James Gould, one of the most elegant scholars who have adorned American letters, was born in Branford, on the 5th of December, 1770. His family were originally from Devon- shire, England, where they had a valuable estate. Richard Gould, his great grandfather, was the first of the family who came to this country. He settled in Branford, and died there, April 28, 1746, in the 84th year of his age. William Gould, eldest son of Richard, was born in North Fanton, Devonshire, in February, 1692-'3. He came to Branford about the time of his father's death, and died there in January, 1757. He was a respectable physician. His eldest son, William Gould, was born, November 17, 1727, where he died, July 29, 1805. He followed the profession of his father, and was a man of high respectability and great influence in his native town.
Judge Gould was the third son of the last named Dr. Wil- liam Gould, by his third wife, daughter of Richard Guy, of Branford. He was graduated at Yale College in 1791, on which occasion he delivered the Latin Salutatory, then the highest honor for the graduating class. Among his class- mates were Stephen Elliott, of South Carolina; Samuel M. Hopkins, of New York, and Peter B. Porter, afterwards sec- retary of war. In 1793, he was appointed tutor of Yale College, and for nearly two years had the entire charge of the class which was graduated in 1797. Among his pupils were the late Henry Baldwin, judge of the supreme court of the United States, the Rev. Lyman Beecher, D.D., and sev- eral other gentlemen of high distinction. In 1795, Mr. Gould entered the law school at Litchfield, and after his ad- mission to the bar, he became associated with Judge Reeve in conducting that institution.
In. May, 1816, Mr. Gould was appointed a judge of the superior court and supreme court of errors of Connecticut. In 1820, Judge Gould received from Yale College the
602
HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
honorary degree of doctor of laws, at the same time with his classmate Mr. Elliott .*
Judge Gould was one of the most finished and competent writers who have ever treated upon any branch of the Eng- lish jurisprudence. His great work upon pleading is a model of its kind. It is at once one of the most condensed and critical pieces of composition to be found in the language, and is altogether of a new and original order. He had at first contemplated writing a much more extended treatise, but while he was preparing the materials for it, the appear- ance of Chitty's work on the same title induced him to change his plan. As it was presented to the public, Gould's Pleading is, therefore, only an epitome of the original design, but for clearness, logical precision, and terseness of style, it does not suffer in comparison with the Commentaries upon the laws of England.
As a lawyer, Judge Gould was one of the most profoundly philosophical of that age. He carried into the forum the same classical finish which appears upon every page of his writings. It would have been as impossible for him to speak an ungrammatical sentence, use an inelegant expression, or make an awkward gesture, in addressing an argument to a jury, as it would have been for him to attempt to expound the law when he was himself ignorant of it, to speak disrespect- fully to the judge upon the bench, or to exhibit any want of courtesy to the humblest member of the profession who might happen to appear as his opponent. His arguments also, like his writings, were expressed in the most brief forms in which a speaker can convey his thoughts to his hearers. He sel- dom spoke longer than half an hour, and in the most complex and important cases never exceeded an hour. He had the rare faculty of seizing upon the strong points of a case and
* Judge Gould was married in October, 1798, to Sally McCurdy Tracy, eldest daughter of the Hon. Uriah Tracy, of Litchfield, by whom he had eight sons and one daughter, all of whom survived him except his third son, James Reeve Gould, a young man of the highest promise, who died in Georgia, in October, 1830. A younger son, John W. Gould, has since died.
603
MISS SARAH PIERCE.
presenting them with such force as to rivet the attention of the jury and carry conviction to their minds. Like a skillful archer, he could shoot a whole quiver of shafts within the circle of the target with such certainty and force that they could all be found and counted when the contest was over.
As a judge, his opinions are unsurpassed by any which ap- pear in our reports, for clearness and that happy moulding of thought so peculiar to him at the bar and in social conversa- tion. The position of this eminent jurist and of his venera- ble associate was truly enviable. To them, flocked from every part of the union, the youth who were to shape the jurisprudence of their respective states. They looked upon these renowned teachers with almost as much reverence as the youth of Athens regarded the features of the philosophers who prepared their minds for the strifes of the Agora, the debates of the council, or the shades of contemplative retire- ment. To this pleasant little village among the hills came the very flower and nobility of American genius. Here might be seen Calhoun, Clayton, Mason, Loring, Woodbury, Hall, Ashley, Phelps, and a host of others, who were prepar- ing themselves for the high places of the cabinet, the senate and the bench.
The influence of these sages upon the laws of the country was almost rivaled by the efforts of Miss Sarah Pierce, in another department of learning. This lady opened a school for the instruction of females, in the year 1792, while the law school was in successful operation, and continued it under her own superintendence for nearly forty years. During this time she educated between fifteen hundred and two thousand young ladies. This school was for a long period the most celebrated in the United States, and brought together a large number of the most gifted and beautiful women of the con- tinent. They were certain to be methodically taught and tenderly cared for, and under her mild rule they could hardly fail to learn whatever was most necessary to fit them for the quiet but elevated spheres which so many of them have since adorned. Miss Pierce lived to the advanced age of 83.
604
HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
She was small in person, of a cheerful, lively temperament, a bright eye, and a face expressive of the most active benev- olence. She was in the habit of practicing herself all the theories that she taught to her pupils, and, until physical in- firmities confined her to her room, would take her accus- tomed walk in the face of the roughest March wind that ever blew across our hills. The intelligence of her death cast a shade of sadness over many a domestic circle, and caused many a silent tear to fall.
While these two schools were in full and active life, Litch- field was famed for an intellectual and social position; which is believed to have been at that time unrivaled in any other village or town of equal size in the United States .*
* Several excellent and flourishing literary institutions have been established in our state since the date of the adoption of the constitution.
Trinity (formerly Washington) College, an episcopal institution, was founded at Hartford, 1824, and in- 1850, had nine professors, sixty-six students, and a library of nine thousand volumes. At the latter date, its alumni numbered two hundred and fifty-seven, of whom one hundred and seventeen had taken orders in the church.
This institution has already taken a high rank among the colleges of the United States, and is believed to be inferior to none of them in the order of its discipline and the faithfulness of its officers. It has already sent forth from its halls many able clergymen and accomplished scholars. Its buildings are handsome and look off upon a landscape as lovely as can be found in the valley of the Connecticut. A more minute account of it will be given in the appendix-Title, " Trinity College."
The Wesleyan University at Middletown was founded in 1831. The build- ings and land connected with them, estimated at from thirty to forty thousand dol- lars, were presented to the New York and New London conferences by the Lite- rary and Scientific Society of Middletown, on condition that forty thousand dollars more should be raised, for the purpose of establishing a university, to be under the control of the two conferences named, and any others that might unite with them in the enterprise. These conditions were complied with, and a board of trustees were elected by the New York and New England conferences. The state legis- lature soon after gave a very liberal charter to the institution. The buildings, which are of stone, are delightfully situated on an eminence in the western part of the city, having a commanding view of the Connecticut river and of the adjacent country. As I have elsewhere stated, the Rev. Wilbur Fisk, D.D., was elected the first president of the university, and with the assistance of a corps of learned and able professors, the institution went into operation under the most favorable auspices. In 1850, the number of its alumni was 402, and of its students 116. The library contains over 12,000 volumes.
605
THE POETS.
But Connecticut has not been less distinguished for genius than for scholarship. In poetry she may well claim to be the Athens of America. Trumbull, Barlow, Humphreys, and Dwight, were in their day the first poets of the western world. But since their time, there have sprung up a class of writers whose genius and artistic finish place them among the first ornaments of our literature. 'Of those who have passed from the stage of life, Hillhouse is by far the most clas- sical and stately. He wrought his poetical compositions to a degree of polish which until his day had never been attained by the western muse. His conceptions are of that large order, belonging only to men of high genius, and his imagination has a breadth and sweep of wing that remind the reader of " Paradise Lost."
Brainerd, with less magnificence of drapery, was perhaps not inferior to Hillhouse in vigor of imagination. His lines on " the Falls of Niagara," inartificial as they are in con- struction, are probably not surpassed by any poem in the world of equal length, for the vastness of the thoughts and the boldness of the grouping. The mighty flow of the cataract, its voice sounding on like a perpetual anthem, the bow that hangs upon its " awful front," the sublime scrip- ture imagery that clothes it, and the marks of centuries " notched in the eternal rocks," as if by the finger of God, all present a picture of condensed power and terrible sublimity.
The names of Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, Elihu Hubbard Smith, Mrs. Laura Thurston, Miss Martha Day, James Otis Rockwell, Hugh Peters, Mason, and others, are familiar to all readers of American poetry, and are embalmed in the affections of the people.
Upon all former pages of this work, the acts and characters of living men have been left out of view or treated of only in notes, as was sometimes necessary to explain the text. But in relation to literature, which may be said to be " an immor- tality rather than a life," and which is not liable to the con- ditions of ordinary decay, the adoption of a different rule will hardly offend the taste of any one.
606
HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
Not inferior to the works of any other living poet, are the productions of the author of " Marco Bozzaris." Since the death of him who wrote the "Elegy in a country church- yard," no other writer has appeared who dared commit his fame to the keeping of so few lines, and no poet has seemed to be so well aware that to write little and well, is to write much. His poem upon Connecticut, the one which recalls with the breath of a faded rose plucked from " Alloway's witch-haunted wall," the fragrant memories and suffering poverty of Scotland's best poet, and the precious tribute, half epitaph and half sigh, that tells the gentle fate of Rodman Drake,-" like flower-seeds by the far winds sown," will bloom in all lands to the end of time.
Percival, who sports with the boughs of ocean-groves the foliage of which was never " wet with falling dew ;" Pierpont who has identified his name with that of Warren, and con- secrated his song to hymn the first arrival of the emigrant to the New England coast, and who has recorded the tenderest and holiest emotions that can thrill a parent's heart for the loss of sainted infancy ; and Prentice, smoothing from his forehead the distracting wrinkles of business, and at intervals withdrawing to some sequestered spot,
" Where billows mid the silent rocks, Are brooding o'er the waters mild,"-
these poets can no longer be circumscribed by the limits of our state, for they " are Freedom's now, and Fame's."
Nor let us be unmindful of that daughter of song whose pages have recorded the privations of " the Western Emigrant" by the hoarse waters of the Illinois ; whose name is blistered upon the title-page by the fast-falling tears of the poor girl who muses with the book in her hand over the warbled notes of the robin that she petted, and the " fresh violets " that she tended, by the bank of the Connecticut; nor of her whose woman's ear listened not unwillingly to the whispers of fame, and whose eye saw its hues of promise as she looked upward through the branches of " The old Apple-tree;" nor yet of her whose playful pen has made us almost wish
607
JOHN TRUMBULL
that the days of "Bride Stealing" might return .* Other names, like those of Goodrich, Nichols, Wetmore, Hill, Brown, Dow, Burleigh, Park, and William Thompson Bacon, who may well be called our Wordsworth, gather around this bright constellation, and make a galaxy which is to be still further extended, as one orb of song after another is evolved from the chaos of darkness, and takes its place in the firmament of letters.
But poetry is not the only field of art that has been suc- cessfully trodden by our citizens.
When Master John Trumbull, the youngest son of our first Governor Trumbull, was secretly learning how to use the brush and to mix colors, and while he was still in the hands of his sisters, who on account of his feeble frame and delicate constitution regarded him as little more than a plaything, his father, so wise and discriminating in all other matters of public concern, and in most matters of private interest, used his best endeavors to dissuade the boy from such pursuits. At a later period, when the youth had broken away from the domestic circle, and was at Harvard, in the early part of his academical career, the governor wrote to Mr. Kneeland, who had charge of his son : "I am sensible of his natural genius and inclination for limning, an art which I have frequently told him will be of no use to him." Little did the statesman know that the art, the in- fluence of which he so much deprecated, would, in the hands of that son, transfer to canvas the features of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and sketch as if with the beams of the sun, the very likeness and action of the great battles of the Revolution. Yet John Trumbull, scarcely less important than his father, was born to paint his country's history. Nothing could divert his attention from this great purpose. New as the subject was, devoid of all the romantic associations which a long lapse of time is sup- posed to throw over events, he looked at the history of his
* Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, and Mrs. Emma Willard are among the most gifted and eminent writers in our country.
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HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
country through the medium of great principles, political and social, developed and illustrated by great characters, and saw in them, what none but genius can see, new combinations of greatness and new forms of beauty. As the result has proved, the choice was wise as it was brave .*
While engaged in fighting the battles of American liberty and unfolding the germs of literature, learning, and art, Con- necticut has not lost sight of the great demands of the age for a practical application of the physical sciences to the com- mon place uses of life, and for that moral machinery which has at last been made to turn all the wheels of our complex society. Eli Whitney, ours by education and choice, in- vented the cotton-gin, and although the money which the two Carolinas had the justice to pay him for the labors of his brain, was expended in litigating his claims in some other states, yet the world which denied to his heirs the property of which they had been robbed, has done justice to his memory. John Fitch was the first to apply steam, now the common drudge of man, to the uses of navigation. Junius Smith was the originator of the grand project of navigating the ocean by the same motive power. Morse, of a Con- necticut parentage and culture, invented, the magnetic telegraph, and thus gave to the world a courier swifter than the light, and more certain than the carrier-dove. Jared Mansfield originated the present mode of surveying
* Colonel John Trumbull was born in Lebanon, June 6, 1756, graduated at Cambridge in 1773, and was appointed adjutant of the first Connecticut regi- ment under General Spencer previous to the Battle of Bunker Hill. At the age of nineteen years he was aid-de-camp to General Washington and major of brigade ; and at twenty, he was appointed adjutant general with the rank of colonel. Soon after he commenced painting, he took up his abode in London as a pupil of Mr. West, in 1780, where he was arrested and imprisoned on a charge of high treason. After being confined for eight months he was liberated. He re- ceived various diplomatic appointments abroad, and resided in England and France for several years. He became one of the most eminent artists of his day. Many of his historical paintings and other works of art are preserved in the " Trumbull Gallery," New Haven. He died in New York in 1843 aged 87.
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