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GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01100 5151
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Edward & Sale 2
Biographical History of Massachusetts
Biographies and Autobiographies of the Leading Men in the State
SAMUEL ATKINS ELIOT, A.M., D.D. Editor-in-Chief
Volume I
With opening chapters on What Massachusetts Stands for in the History of the Nation BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE, S.T.D., LL.D.
ENSE PETIT
OVIETEM
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MASSACHUSETTS BIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 1913
Copyrighted, 1911, by MASSACHUSETTS BIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY All rights reserved
THE . PLIMPTON . PRESS . NORWOOD . MASS . U . S . A
1198117
BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
SAMUEL A. ELIOT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
ADVISORY BOARD
HON. JOHN Q. A. BRACKETT
. Arlington
Ex-Governor.
EDWARD H. CLEMENT, L.H.D. Boston
Editor Boston Transcript
WILLIAM W. CRAPO, LL.D. . New Bedford
President Wamsutta Mills
LOUIS M. DEWEY Westfield
Genealogist
SAMUEL A. GREEN, LL.D.
Boston
Vice-President Massachusetts Historical Society
HON. JOHN R. THAYER . Worcester Member of Congress
WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER, A.M.
. Cambridge
Editor Harvard Graduates Magazine
CALEB B. TILLINGHAST, A.M.
Boston
State Librarian
JOHN C. CROSBY
ยท
.
Pittsfield
Associate Justice Superior Court
" There is properly no history, only biography." - Emerson.
" There can be no true criticism of a great American which is not founded upon the knowledge of his work in daily life. Whether it be in the diary of the frontiersman or in the elegant studies of the university." - Edward Everett Hale.
" To study the lives of great men is to read history from the personal, vital point of view; thus history becomes real, living, and interesting to many for whom abstract history possesses no charms."- Wm. R. Harper.
" Present to the boy such men as he himself would like to be." - Herbart.
" Give us men of Light and Leading." - Lord Beaconsfield.
" The proper study of mankind is man." -Shakespeare.
" Man alone is interesting to man." - Goethe.
" Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at the bottom the history of the great men who have worked here." - Carlyle.
" A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages." - Mencius, Chinese Philosopher.
" The function of the great man is to explain the age, and of the age to explain the man." - Barnes.
" The history of the race is but that of the individual ' writ large.'" - Lewes.
" Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime."
Longfellow.
EDITOR'S PREFACE
I T is a perfectly legitimate curiosity with which people ask about the facts and motives and incentives of a notable life. In every man of distinction men see what is possible for all humanity. A life first lived, then written, and then read, is the best source of inspiration for other lives.
We do not know the real history of any age or country until we have clearly seen its characteristic men. To know the heart of any event we must see it revealed in the achievements, passions, and hopes of individuals.
The men whose struggles and successes are described in this book are not all men of great historic significance, or of special and peculiar gifts. They are men who have displayed the virtues that have made Massachusetts the sturdy and self-reliant Common- wealth that it is; men who possess the healthy and universal qualities of human nature that are close to the heart of all sorts and condi- tions of men. These lives are near enough to the average life of humanity to have lifting power.
The reader of these brief biographies will find his own resolutions and ideals reinvigorated; his own intentions realized, and his own manhood, not swamped, but vitalized and given new direction. He will broaden his horizon and learn how to enter into sympathy with occupations and pursuits that before seemed uninteresting. One realm of human endeavor after another will become vivid as it is seen through the enthusiasm of men who have there worked and suffered and won.
The selection of the names included in this and the succeeding volumes has been made by the Advisory Committee. Most of the men described are now active in business and professional careers, but a few sketches have been added of men whose achievements are still fresh in memory. The biographies have been prepared by experienced writers, and are in no small degree autobiographical,
EDITOR'S PREFACE
for each man, in answer to questions, has described in his own way his inheritances and environment, and the facts of his career.
The portraits in this book increase its value. Said Thomas Carlyle: "Often I have found a portrait superior in real instruction to half a dozen written biographies, . . . or rather, let me say, I have found that the portrait was as a small lighted candle by which the biographies could for the first time be read, and some human interpretation be made of them."
The volume is submitted to the public in the confidence that the careers herein described will be found stimulating to patriotism and potent to cheer and inspire other lives.
Samme a. Eccion.
INTRODUCTION
WHAT MASSACHUSETTS STANDS FOR IN THE HISTORY OF THE NATION
T HE popular institutions which grew up almost of them- selves in Massachusetts, succeeded so well that they became, one may say, the object lessons for the different American States, as they came into being. For this continent, Massachusetts became somewhat what Switzerland became in Europe, - an ex- ample of Government of the people, for the people, by the people.
After the death of Winthrop till the outbreak of the Revolu- tionary War, no special Leader of the people can be named who directed or gave form to the political or religious institutions of the colony and province. But when an exigency came that exigency was met as well as they knew how to meet it. If a plan for finance or commerce, or manufacture worked well, why it worked well and it became permanent. If it did not work well, why, it did not work well, and it was forgotten. What followed was that the quaint charter of a trading company developed into the government of a State which was independent. The appointment by the Crown of a Governor-general of New England became merely the occa- sion of petty local controversy, but the State governed itself. Mr. Choate was quite within the strictest bounds of history when he said that she showed to the world a church without a bishop and a State without a king.
What she had of the rights and privileges of an independent na- tion appeared when she declared war against George Third, who thought himself the strongest monarch of his time. In the war which followed this State swept the sea with her ships and crippled the commerce of England. For long periods in the war, Massachu- setts had more seamen engaged against King George's navy than were serving in that navy against her.
As history is made up by the lives of the men who direct history, the volumes in the reader's hands are offered as a valuable contri-
INTRODUCTION
bution to the history of the three centuries which have passed since Captain John Smith pronounced the home of the Massachusetts Indians to be the Paradise of New England. The name Massachu- setts seems to appear first in literature when the Massachusetts Indians are thus spoken of by him in 1615.
He names the Massachusetts Indians among forty or fifty other communities which he had seen or heard of in his voyage along the shores of what he called Massachusetts Bay. He sometimes spells the word with u in the third syllable and sometimes with the let- ters ew. The name was then applied to a group of Indians who lived around what we call the Blue Hills, - Matta and chusett, meaning the Great Hills. Smith says that "their home is the par- adise of those parts." The name of the bay has extended since in familiar use so that it now comprehends the great bay between Cape Ann on the north and Cape Cod on the south-east. Gosnold had coasted the shore of that bay as early as 1602. But he does not use the name Massachusetts. The natives of those shores were ac- quainted in a way with Europeans from the visits of French and English fishermen.
In 1621, when the Pilgrim Fathers were established by a resi- dence of a few months in Plymouth, they sent a party to explore the shore north-west and north of them and they speak of this voy- age as their voyage to the Massachusetts. The phrase meant to them what it meant to Smith, the region immediately west of the present city of Boston. And nine years later, when in 1630, John Winthrop came up the bay to judge of its resources for his colony, he speaks of going "from Salem to Massachusetts."
The company under whose charter he had led out his party of emigrants had been called the Massachusetts Company in that char- ter two years before. The Massachusetts charter was granted by Charles the First to a company of Puritan adventurers who fur- nished the capital for the undertaking. Some of them were from London, and the east of England, and some more were friends of John White, of Dorchester, in the south-west of England. They had purchased from an older company, named the New England Company, such rights as they had in the premises. The charter of 1628, which laid the foundation of the present State of Massachu- setts, gave what we should call sovereign rights to a territory run- ning from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Its boundary on the north
INTRODUCTION
was to be a line three miles north of the Merrimac River, and on the south, a line three miles south of Charles River. From the geo- graphical points which showed the northern limit, and the southern limit of this grant, the boundaries were to run west till it struck the South Sea, the name then given to the Pacific Ocean. South- ward, from the very beginning, it was understood that the northern boundary of the old colony of Plymouth was the southern boundary of Massachusetts.
In fact, no very accurate account was kept in London of these grants. And when it subsequently proved desirable to assign to the Duke of York that territory which is still called New York, its eastern limit ran north to Canada, and thus were extinguished practically, our claims by royal patent to the States of Michigan and Wisconsin and other sovereignties west of them as far as Ore- gon. The kindred title of Connecticut to territory west of her sur- vived far enough to give to that State the property which is still called "the western reserve" in the State of Ohio.
The colony of Massachusetts Bay thus chartered was united with the colony of Plymouth under the second charter in the year 1691. As the province of "Massachusetts Bay" with which was connected the Province of Maine, Massachusetts declared war against the King in the next century. When in 1780 she estab- lished her own constitutional government, the word bay was dropped from the title and it is as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that she is one of the United States formed by the Federal Constitution in 1787.
The space occupied by the State upon the map is not consider- able. As Mr. Everett said on a celebrated occasion of the domin- ions of the House of Hapsburg, it is but a speck on the map of the world. But from the very first she has made herself known in the rest of the world, and her sons feel that the rest of the world has profited by what she has taught them. In the volumes in the reader's hands some attempt is made to show her influence in the development of the civilization of the world as some of her dis- tinguished sons have lived for mankind.
It should be remembered by all who read American history or American biography that the colonists who came into Massachusetts Bay with Winthrop and those who followed them in the next ten years were led by idealists who had very distinct views as to the
INTRODUCTION
government, whether of the church or of the State. These views were the advanced views of their time, and that reader is very much in the dark who supposes that the radicalism of these men is to be traced simply in their theological or ecclesiastical opinions. No! They were Independents of the Independents; they were such men as Cromwell delighted in. Those of them who chose to go back to England to join in the great contest of the century generally allied themselves at once to Cromwell's party, the party of the Independ- ents. In many instances they led that party. As their ecclesias- tical leaders in the Westminster Assembly proved to be leaders in the proposals for the church, so such men as Hopkins and Sedgwick proved to be leaders in the direction of the war and of Cromwell's administration. Edward Hopkins, the same whose prizes are now distributed at Harvard College every year, the godfather of Hopkinton in Massachusetts, was the head of Crom- well's Board of Admiralty, which continues as the Board of Admi- ralty of England to this day. It was under his direction, for instance, that the English took Jamaica which they hold to-day.
The accurate reader should recollect that the term New England for the States which grew up east of New York is first used by John Smith after his voyage of 1614. It is now of no great importance but it is worth remark that the name Mattachusetts with tt instead of ss in the first syllable is retained in official documents almost al- ways for the first century. In the Algonquin dialects these letters are sometimes interchanged, as where Miss-issippi means the great river to this day. The root is the same as that used in Massachu- setts, - the great mountain.
About ten thousand persons crossed the ocean westward under the impulse given by the Massachusetts Company within the first ten years after John Winthrop's voyage. But when in 1642, Har- vard College sent out eight young men with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, four of them "returned home," as they would have said, meaning to England. They went back to play their part in the country in which they were born, so soon to lose its name as a king- dom. And in the twenty years which followed, one of the writers of the time says that more persons had emigrated from New England to old England than had come westward expecting to find homes here.
So close was Cromwell's interest in the New England of that day
INTRODUCTION
that after his conquest of Jamaica, he wrote an official letter to the magistrates of Massachusetts to propose to them that the New England Colony should remove to Jamaica. In a conversation with Governor Leverett, of which we have Leverett's account in detail, "His Highness, the Protector" urged his plan upon the New Eng- landers. Leverett replied sturdily that in no plantation of Eng- land were settlers so well established as in New England. And the General Court, at Leverett's suggestion, wrote a respectful letter to the Protector on the 12th of October, 1656, declining his proposal. From the whole of the interesting correspondence it is evident that the State of Massachusetts was well established, that its rulers were confident that they could hold their position, and that while they wished to deal with the Protector with all courtesy, they felt that they were in no way dependent upon the home government. Their complete satisfaction with this position appeared definitely when Philip's War broke out in 1674. They never asked the gov- ernment of England for a soldier or an ounce of powder or of lead, nor for the slightest assistance of any sort by which they should maintain their position here.
The reader must remember from the date of the very first settle- ment that every Englishman in Plymouth or in Massachusetts was here because he did not want to be in England. They did not like the way in which things were done in England. They came here because they did not like it. And they found very soon that they had white paper to write upon. If the English forms were disagree- able, why, they could drop the English form and who should say nay? An amusing instance is that of the halberds which poor Governor Winthrop tried to use in his escort on state occasions. The halberds were "unpopular," as we should say to-day. Winthrop had to order his own servants to carry them, and from that moment there were no halberdiers.
It is true that they could hardly appeal to the authority of Eng- land if they would. Often, the early settlers were six months with- out news from England. But we must observe also that they did not want to appeal there. Years after Winthrop's settlement, when they were asked to show the royal colors on the arrival of one of the King's ships, they had no royal colors to show. They did not want to have any.
This is to say, in other words, that they could carry out their
INTRODUCTION
own plans for self-government. And they did. When the hun- dred persons who established Plymouth arrived in Provincetown, in August, 1620, they met together and the men signed the compact which has become famous, by which they agreed to obey their own governor and to make their own laws. Very soon they had to make deeds and wills which transferred real property from one owner to another. Now, this matter of probate of wills was one of those which in England was left to the ecclesiastical courts, - and is left so to this day. But these people had come here because they detested the English church and its establishments. The people, therefore, established their own courts of registry and for the pro- bate of wills. The system which they established has gone over all America and no ecclesiastic, as such, has anything to do with it.
Cases not unlike this turned up constantly in the early legisla- tion of the General Court of Massachusetts. That court attended to such affairs and very soon had to make their own code. As early as May, 1635, it was agreed that a committee should "frame a body of grounds of laws in resemblance to a Magna Charta which being allowed by some of the ministers and the General Court should be received for fundamental laws." In 1641, what is now known as the "Body of Liberties" of Massachusetts had got itself prepared. Nineteen copies of it were made and they were sold to the separate towns for ten shillings a piece for each copy. The session of the General Court for December continued three weeks and established the code by authority. But this code did not satisfy the people and from year to year the "Body of Laws" was enlarged and im- proved upon until they were printed in 1660.
Now of this Body of Laws, as Hon. Francis Calley Gray says "in the main, it is far in advance of the times and in several respects in advance of the common law of England to this day." The author, John Ward of Ipswich had studied the English law carefully. He knew what he was about, and if he went beyond its requisitions, so much the worse for the common law of England. The common law of New England meant to go farther.
From the restoration of the royal family in England, down to the outbreak of the American Revolution, there intervenes a cen- tury of history in which so far as political allegiance went the men of Massachusetts were not apt to repair to England to establish their homes. For, simply, while the principles of feudalism had, on
INTRODUCTION
the whole, prevailed in England, the principles of the Common- wealth had prevailed in New England. The Anglican Church was the Established Church of old England, the Congregational Church was the Established Church of New England. Such reasons there were for chilling the ardor with which the New Englanders of the first generation "went home" as a resident on the Pacific coast to-day may go back to the Atlantic coast to die.
But the commercial relations of New England with Old England were still very close. The first governor of Massachusetts had had the wisdom to see what were the remarkable facilities of the bay for the building of ships. He tempted some of the first shipbuilders of the time to come to America, and from this time, for a hundred and fifty years, the export of ships was a great feature in our in- dustries. When Lord Bellomont became the Governor-general of New England, at the end of that century, he wrote home in an official letter that the maritime commerce of the port of Boston was larger than that of all Scotland, that more ships were built and owned here than sailed from all the ports of Scotland.
The colonies, however, were still receiving most of their man- ufactured articles from England. Inventories and advertisements show that after the year 1700 the Massachusetts people were reading English books and were sometimes reprinting them. Bunyan tells us that the first edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress" was reprinted in America. Alas, not a single copy of the edition seems to have escaped the destructive hands of so many readers. Cotton Mather printed the "Magnalia" in London. The first edition bears the date of 1702. Its circulation, however, was of course, principally in New England and no American edition was printed until 1820. Among theologians, Jonathan Edwards's work on "The Will" had attracted attention in England and was reprinted there.
It was, then, with a certain surprise that the thoughtful men in England read the first American State Papers which appeared in 1760 and later down regarding the subjects at issue between the Province of Massachusetts and the King of England. Papers written by such men as the two Adamses, James Otis, and Frank- lin might challenge comparison easily with any writings of any Eng- lishmen of their time. And these papers came from a colony which had been most known in General Wolfe's despatches and which sent to England ships and furs and potash and fish. As Sir George Tre-
INTRODUCTION
velyan has recently shown us, the friends of America in England at that time were more in number than the advocates of the Crown's proposals. Among them there was a little handful of officers who had served in the colonies who were not surprised by the dignity and effectiveness of the State Papers which came from America in the next thirty years.
This ignorance was due not simply to the condescension which Mr. Lowell observes with which to his time all Europe regarded all America. It was the personal ignorance in each continent of the inhabitants of the other. Illustrations of this ignorance may be found even in Lord Chatham's well-known speech in which he re- views the American State Papers and in Edmund Burke's acknowl- edged surprise when he studied the resources of New England. It is pathetic, indeed, to read in the diaries of the loyalists who took up their homes in London while the Revolution went on, that the men of England regarded them with a sort of pity, only too plainly expressed, and wondered what was their business in England.
Such considerations, although briefly stated, are enough to account for the pride with which Massachusetts men look back on their own history. They have been encouraged in their pride in the history of the Commonwealth by thoughtful men in all parts of the world. Carlyle said truly that "Democracy announced on Bunker Hill that she is born and will envelope the whole world." And in one way and another, that statement is assented to by the modern students of history. I was in London in 1859, when we heard the news of John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry. At that time the London Times was the most constant enemy of lib- eral institutions; and yet that journal, in a leading editorial said, " the sympathy of the people of Massachusetts has a title to the consideration of the world. No community of which we have any knowledge approaches in enlightenment or morality to the inhab- itants of this part of the Union."
"Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would prob- ably have disappeared from the world."
This is the brief summary by Mr. John Fiske of the demonstra- tion with which he shows that the settlement of Plymouth and Massachusetts was not simply one little chapter in the series of in- teresting adventures, but that it laid the foundation of what we call constitutional liberty in all the world. In the carefully considered
INTRODUCTION
chapters in which this distinguished philosopher introduces his book on the beginnings of New England, he justifies completely the epigram of Rev. Mr. Zincke to which Charles F. Adams and Edwin D. Mead have called such wide attention. Every event in history is to be judged of more or less importance according as it is more or less closely connected with the voyage of the Mayflower.
The leading men in Massachusetts and the men who have written their biographies in these volumes are well aware that for victory Massachusetts is different in foundation and in principle from the history of any other part of the world. They are apt to acknowl- edge, with a proper pride, this distinction of their position. They are often charged with arrogance because they are willing to acknowl- edge it. But we cannot help that. History is history. And we of Massachusetts gladly accept its verdict with the belief that Gov- ernment of the people, for the people, by the people, as it is attempted now in the world finds some of its earliest and most important lessons in our history.
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