History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 21

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1538

USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I > Part 21

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When Claxton was lecturing on air before his townsmen of Methuen, there was not a rod of steam railway in existence. That potent leveling and cen- tralizing agency had not begun its work. The ques- tion was still an open one whether horse-power or steam would ultimately prove the better motor for the new roadways already being provided with rails of wood, iron and stone. And it was only in 1828-29 that the Stephensons succeeded in applying the tnbu- lar boiler to the traction engine "Rocket," and that the triumph of steam was established. The first locomotive-engine which invaded Essex County ran on a spur track laid by the Boston and Lowell cor- poration to Andover in 1833, and to Haverhill in 1835. The Eastern Railroad reached Salem in 1838. Tops- field was, up to this time, the recognized centre of the county, and its Academy Hall and its famous Stage House, since removed to Phillips' Beach, Swampscott, and there consumed by fire, were the usual meeting- places for all county gatherings. Each town had then a social autonomy of its own, not yet impaired hy the draft on its active citizenship, necessary to meet the business demands of our great railroad centres, build- ing up great hives of industry and bringing together great swarms of population, nor by the superior attractions of city art galleries, concert-halls, lecture- rooms and theatres for our hours of ease. Each was a social centre for itself,-a planet, as it were, revolving with its own satellites in its own sphere, and not yet swung out of its appointed course by the disturbing attraction which, when brought near, the greater body, be it material or social, possesses for the less. Each had its traditions, its ancient families, its lead- ing people,-both those of approved hospitality, of the great house and the long purse, and those who based their claims on superior knowledge, character, discrimination and taste,-its clergymen and deacons, its 'squires, doctors, teachers, ship-masters and own- ers of shipping,-its town elite,-and for better or for worse, its own townspeople must suffice, in the main, for its own needs.

Our county, one of the original four incorporated and set off in 1643, has an area of not far from five hundred square miles which, at the time we speak of, supported a population of about eighty thousand souls, and of these fifty-four or fifty-five thousand lived in thirteen large towns, every one of them incor- porated before 1650, and seven of them as early as 1640. Of the towns in Massachusetts possessed of four thousand inhabitants and upwards, Essex County contained nearly one-half. Of our six prosperous cities the largest, Lynn and Lawrence, held no such places in the census tables then. Lynn, now the

larger of the two, was a town of not half the size of the Salem of that day, and smaller than either New- buryport or Gloucester, while Lawrence, which now bestrides our great water-way like a Colossus, had neither "promise" nor "potency " before 1847. In many ways ours was a peculiar county. Nowhere on this continent, outside the great cities, were so many people brought together in so small a space. Nowhere was there greater average wealth or more generally diffused intelligence, independence, comfort and thrift. Save in a few exceptional situations, as of the counties of Dukes and Barnstable, there was nowhere in the country a population living on an equal area and touched by navigable water at so many points. Be- sides the lordly Merrimac, flanked on either hand with growing towns, turning more spindles than any other river in the world to-day, and weaving miles enough of cloth every three weeks to swathe the earth, which furnished to our thirty miles of northern frontier a cheap highway for freight, the county could claim, within its limits, no less than five val- uable and commodious harbors, at Newburyport, Gloucester, Beverly, Marblehead and Salem, not to omit others of lesser draught, but fully equal to the more moderate demands of local trade. Treading hard upon the heels of the great towns already mentioned came Andover, Haverhill, Newbury, Ipswich and Danvers. Amongst the counties of the State Essex had no rival,-not even Suffolk,-in the aggregate of her population, unless, perhaps, Worces- ter, and probably she overtopped them all. Her lands were held in small hereditary estates by the men who tilled them. Her capital and her enterprise found ready employment at home, or if they looked abroad, turned eager glances to the East, and not as lately toward the setting sun.

Content in earlier years with the hard fare and meagre earnings of the fisheries and the export trade in fish, and later trained on the gun-decks of ships of war, or of their own privateers, the people of Essex County had come, since the days of peace, to push their ambitious ventures into every sea. Foreign commerce, which is in itself a liberal education, had taught them what the bold and strenuous life of the fishing-smack or the man of-war could never have engrafted upon their sturdy, Puritanic thought, and they brought home from their distant voyaging a freight more remunerative than silks, or gums or spices, made up of broadening views of life and liberal esti- mates of men and things. Geography and ethnol- ogy they studied at first hand. The populations which their enterprise employed, and the trade which their successes and their hospitality invited, built up large markets for the consumption of all that the interior sections of the county could produce. The popula- tion was singularly homogeneous, the few mills there were being operated by the sons and daughters of Essex County farmers and mechanics, amongst whom the average of intelligence and character was not a

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HISTORY OF ESSEX COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

whit lower than where mills did not exist. This high average was not reduccd-possibly it was advanced- by another manufacture which formed a peculiar fea- ture of the industry of the county. Shoes were then made by hand, and as the occupations of husbandry and the fisheries left much of the inclement season unemployed, these callings were very generally sup- plemented in the winter months by the making of a coarse kind of shoe for the southern market. This was a craft which called for little capital, since the shoe-stock was distributed in weekly portions from Lynn or Haverhill, the great centres of this pe- culiar industry, nor did it require any great degree of dexterity or skill. And thus the frugal yeomanry of Essex, whose summers were employed on the Grand Banks or on their ancestral acres, clubbed together by half-dozens to build the little box-like shoe-shops which once dotted all our country roads, and in which they wrought lustily all winter with lapstone and awl, in a temperature less conducive to longevity, perhaps, then stimulating to cerebration. And here all unconscious of the dictum of Pliny-"ne sutor ultra crepidam "-they were so effectually over -ruling, as well as of the supercilious slurs of Cicero, and Plautus and Horace on their indoor habits and un- military pose, they passed judgment from the bench, so to say, on the latest sermon, newspaper leader, po- litical harangue and local gossip, with as much crit- ical acumen, and as deep, earnest consideration of each passing topic as though, in very truth, time's noblest offspring were the last.

I do not know that I need sketch in further detail the salient features of this sturdy people. General the Baron von Riedesel's remark upon the Bay Colo- ny in Revolutionary days,-high praise from an ene- my,-" the inclination of the people is for commerce, navigation and the military art," as well described them half a century later, and no local community could with less presumption take to itself the glowing encomium of Burke upon the commerce and fisheries of New England. Theirs was the county which had produced the Pickerings, the Cabots, the Crownin- shields, the Lowell-,-Nathan Dane, Manasseh Cut- ler, Rufus King, Theophilus Parsons, Joseph Story, -- the Derbys, the Thorndikes, the Peabodys, the Jacksons, the Grays, the Lees, the Pickmans, the Hoopers, the families of Cleaveland and Phillips and Bowditch, and, earlier than all these, the fine old stocks of Lynde, of Sewall and of Dummer. Theirs was the sod upon which Endicott and Higginson and Saltonstall and Winthrop first stepped ashore. Theirs was the soil upon which Gage had mus- tered his myrmidons, in the vain hope to quench the insurgent spirit flaming up in a Provincial Assembly which defied his sovereign from the old town-house in Salem. And while it may be the fact that no actual collision of troops ever conse- crated in blood the soil of Essex County, although we suffered from Indian butcheries in the valley of

the Merrimac, and felt the shots of British cruisers along our seaboard, and saw from the north shore of the bay the smoke of battle between the "Shannon " and her doomed antagonist,-that unequal contest over which English school-boys still regale their drooping spirits in the chorus,-

"The Chesapeake, 80 bold, out of Boston. I am told, Came to take a British frigate neat and handy, And the people of the port came out to see the sport, With their music playing ' Yankee doodle dandy !' "

-while all this may be true, certain it is that no equal number of people had borne a heavier share in Indian, French or British hostilities, or contributed more victims to the horrors of Mill Prison, Dartmoor and the slave-pens of Algiers, from the gloomy days of Bloody Brook, of the Pequots and the Narragan- setts,-from the days of the brilliant assaults upon Port Royal, Louisburg and Quebec,-down through the times when Washington took command of the Conti- nental forces and called on us, without waiting for the action of Congress, to improvise a navy,-the times when Mugford and Manly and Harraden and Hugh Hill were afloat,-when Marblehead set her amphib- ious regiment on foot,-down to that later day when all our seahoard towns vied with each other to do homage to the naval heroes of the second war of Independence. The doubtful claim to the first bloodshed of the Revolution on that Sunday afternoon in February, 1775, at the old North Bridge in Salem, might be worth contesting in another county, but not here, for our people have twice sought out and attacked, on her own choseu field, the naval power which claims to rule the waves, closing with her wherever they could find her, be it in the Indian Ocean or the Irish Channel, or in whatever waters her red flag pro- claimed her the terror of the seas, and giving battle until she cried enough. Facts like these go far to justify the ancient boast that Essex County produces more history to the acre than any equal area in the country. Antecedents like these had well prepared the people of the county for the new educational dis- pensation of which we speak, and they were as ready as any of their neighbors to distinguish the wheat from the chaff in Holbrook's singular proposals.

Enough has been said to indicate in a general way what these proposals were. It must be remembered that the first scientific survey of an American State was Hitchcock's survey of Massachusetts, the report of which became public in 1833; that we had no State Board of Education before 1837, and no author- ized map of the commonwealth until 1842, and that our first Normal School, established at Lexington in 1839, and which it had been proposed, the year be- fore, to establish at Dummer Academy, was the first in America, although the Prussians had known them for a century. The Lyceum was accordingly hailed as a cheap and much needed training-school and ex- amining board for common-school teachers, while its semi-annual county gatherings were to serve the pur-

THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY LYCEUMS.

Ixxxix

poses now met by Teachers' Institutes and Conven- tions. It was the impression of its projectors that scientific topics were to prove the most attractive, and that by adhering rather exclusively to these they were to escape at once both the Scylla and the Charybdis of religious and political contentions. To suppose, however, as is common, that at any time troublesome questions were successfully excluded from the Lyceum platform is to accept an error. No question was more generally discussed from the outset than that of the relative disadvantages of a free black and a slave population, the Colonization Society's methods, and abolition in the District of Columbia, and while the heat engendered was probably less than it would have been a little later,-the Garrison mob was in October, 1835,-I am convinced that the most volcan- ic topics were not interdicted, from reading a letter now before me, addressed by the Hon. Horace Mann to my father, both being members of Governor Ev- erett's first Board of Education, in which is reported an attack made in a lecture before one of the best- conducted and most conservative Lyceums of the county, denouncing the board "as a machination of the Devil,-showing the preponderance of Unitarian- ism in it,-that the next element in point of strength was infidelity, two members being infidels, and its orthodoxy confided to one poor, weak old man !"

Another mode proposed to quicken the public mind was through " cheap and popular " publications. The Middlesex County Lyceum, under the Presidency of Edward Everett, began the publication of a series of treatises, of which the first was a popular Lyceum lecture on taxation by Andrew P. Peabody. It is now before me, and is designated on its title-page as Vol. I., No. 1, of the "Workingmen's Library." A prospectus follows, from which it appears that the publications were intended, in part, for reading as Lyceum lectures in small towns where there might be difficulty in procuring speakers. They were to be published monthly, and furnished by a com- mittee of five. They were not to fail for want of being "plain and intelligible;" each writer to be "answerable for his own statements and opin- ions ;" the price to be seventeen cents each. In a letter to my father, who was associated with him on the board of management of the Middlesex County Lyceum, Mr. Everett, whose clerical hahit had not wholly worn off, although he franks his letter as a member of Congress, speaks of these publica- tions as " tracts," is "more and more favorably im- pressed " with the plan, "if it be made sufficiently cheap to penetrate the community," and recommends " short tracts, such, for instance, as may be read thro' aloud in an hour & a quarter at the farthest,"-offers as his own contribution a lecture lately repeated at Charlestown, Waltham and Framingham,-hopes it "might do as one of the tracts," and thinks "the rule should be to put them as low as they can possi- bly be afforded." Henry Brougham was promoting

publications of a similar character at this time in Great Britain.

One marked result of the Lyceum system, the pro- duction of a school of trained and able debaters in every town, does not seem to have been anticipated by its projectors. Among the long lists of prospective benefits I do not find this enumerated. But it was plain from the start that the Lyceum was to afford a free-school of debate for questions calculated to shape public opinion, questions involving expediency and policy, quite as much as questions of pure science. Thus Emerson seems to have found in the Lyceum the freedom denied him in the pulpit. How far he shaped the Lyceum, how far the Lyceum shaped him, is a question upon which we may not enter here. His biographer, Cooke, states that at once upon his return from Europe in 1833 "he took advantage of the interest in this new mode of popular instruction and working with many others served to mould the Lyceum into a means of general culture; helped make it a moral and intellectual power, a quickening influ- ence on life and thought," while his admirer, Marga- ret Fuller, lets us see that in his lectures he was en- listing a following which made the later essays possi- ble. Whether, without the Lyceum, Wendell Phil- lips and Henry Ward Beecher would have achieved their triumphs in the mastery of popular audiences, is a debatable question. Even of such men as Garri- son and Parker,-men whose natures are an endoge- nous rather than an exogenous product,-it is not quite safe to say that they would have been just what they were without the Lyceum. But I had better let Mr. Emerson tell his own story.

Mr. Emerson stepped from the pulpit to the Ly- ceum platform. He describes his appearance in the new field, which occurred in the winter of 1833-34, as his " first attempt at public discourse after leaving the pulpit." His subjects had at that time a marked leaning towards natural science. Two years later he detailed to Carlyle the reasons which ought to bring the latter to America. "Especially Lectures. My own experiments for one or two winters, and the readiness with which you emhrace the work, have led me to expect much from this mode of addressing men. In New England, the Lyceum, as we call it, is al- ready a great institution. Besides the more elaborate courses of lectures in the cities, every country town has its weekly evening meeting, called a Lyceum, and every professional man in the place is called upon, in the course of the winter, to entertain his fellow- citizens with a discourse on whatever topic. The topics are miscellaneous as heart can wish. But in Boston, Lowell and Salem courses are given by indi- viduals. I see not why this is not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness, permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of prescription. The pulpit of our age certainly gives forth an obstructed and un- certain sound, and the faith of those in it, if men of

HISTORY OF ESSEX COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

genius, may differ so much from that of those under it as to embarrass the conscience of the speaker, be- cause so much is attributed to him from the fact of standing there. In the Lyceum nothing is presup- posed. The orator is only responsible for what his lips articulate. Then what scope it allows! You may handle every member and relation of humanity. What could Homer, Socrates or St. Paul say that can- not be said here ? The audience is of all classes, and its character will he determined always by the name of the lecturer. Why may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, your philosophy, and become that good despot which the virtuous orator is ?

"Another thing. I am persuaded that if a man speak well, he shall find this a well-rewarded work in New England. I have written this year ten lec- tures; I had written as many last year, and for read- ing both these and those at places whither I was in- vited, I have received this last winter about three hundred and fifty dollars."

The next year he wrote to Carlyle : " I find myself so much more and freer on the platform of the lec- ture-room than in the pulpit. . . . But I preach in the Lecture-Room and there it tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer or pray according to your genius. It is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern countrymen. This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than ever ; two or three every night of the week. When will you come and redeem your pledge ?" And again, "I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the Lecture-Room, so free and so unpretending a platform, a Delos not yet made fast. I imagine eloquence of infinite variety, --- rich as conversation can be with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confes- sion." In an earlier letter, dated April, 1835, he had said to Carlyle: " If the lectures succeed in Boston, their success is insured at Salem, a town thirteen miles off, with a population of fifteen thousand. They might, perhaps, be repeated at Cambridge, three miles from Boston, and probably at Philadel- phia, thirty-six hours distant. ... They might be delivered, one or two in cach weck. And if they met with sudden success, it would be easy to carry on the course simultaneously at Salem, and Cambridge, and in the City."

To all which solicitations, Carlyle, not taking very kindly to the proposal, though thinking "I could really swim in that element were I once thrown into it," "a thing I have always had some hankering af- ter," " could any one but appoint me Lecturing Pro- fessor of Teufelsdröckh's Science,-'Things in gen- eral'!" replies from time to time with an occasional growł, and they keep the plan "hanging to solace ourselves with it, till the time decide," until, in De- cember, 1841, he writes in this characteristic strain of Emerson's "Lectures on the Times", "Good speed to the Speaker, to the Speech .! Your Country is luck-

ier than most at this time ; it has still real preaching ; the tongue of man is not, whensoever it begins wag- ging, entirely sure to emit babblement, twaddlement, sincere cant and other noises which awaken the pas- sionate wish for silence."

Of course there were objectors and doubters, and the Lyceum was opposed on the very grounds upon which its promoters supported it. For those who shook their heads over Pope's line,

" A little learning is a dangerous thing,"

and Bacon's warning,

" A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism,"

the answer was ready,-that we cannot have much unless we first have little, and that the having of lit- tle begets the desire for much. If these organiza- tions might not hope to carry higher aloft the apex of the pyramid of human knowledge, they might hope to be able to broaden out its base and set the vener- able pile upon a more firm, stable and comprehensive footing. It was the diffusion of information, primar- ily, and not the advancement of science, which the Lyceums aimed at. The systems of education they recommended were always described as practical, and were pretty sharply antagonized with those of the colleges and higher schools. They seem to have had a strong leaning towards manual labor academies, which were then much in vogue, and one of which enjoyed a brief career at the Cherry Hill Farm, in North Beverly. They proposed to insist, amongst other branches, upon instruction in practical politics, and called for the study of the State and Federal Con- stitutions, and for text-books on familiar principles of law. The lottery was one vulnerable member of the hydra-headed monster, and they proposed to attack that. Intemperance was another, and they proposed to have a tilt at that. As a Board of Education, as a Lecture Bureau, as an Agricultural, Geological and Topographical Survey, they made no doubt, the Ly- ceum was to prove invaluable. They proposed a great central School, for the dissemination of their ideas, connected with which a central work-shop was to manufacture and send forth at cost, school appar- atus, philosophical, astronomical and geometrical in- struments and chemical and other scientific prepara- tions. They went so far as to propose, in much the same spirit in which we have set apart a Labor Day and an Arbor Day, to consecrate the second Monday of December to the interests of the Lyceum. The Lyceum was to do for the head, if not perhaps for the moral nature, what religion was doing for the heart, and one of our judges, holding a criminal term of court, charged his grand jury to go home and devote themselves to the establishment of town Lyceums, as a measure of prevention against crime. The mistakes they made were due in part to san- guine temperament, and partly to the spirit of the times, which was a spirit of unrest. These were the days of Fourier and of Owen, of Brook Farm and the

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THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY LYCEUMS.

Phalansteries, when phrenology and mesmerism were struggling hard for a place among the sciences, and all sorts of experimental sociology were in the air. By undertaking a great deal too much; by claiming a great deal more than they could maintain, the pro- jectors of the system had well nigh obscured the real merits of their conception. They had discovered a valuable specific, but it was not a panacea for all humau ills. They had found a pearl of great price. It was not the philosopher's stone. Fortunately there were not wanting keen-eyed scholars who could ap- preciate the value of the discovery, and Essex Coun- ty had her share of these.

It was in November, 1826, that Holbrook addressed thirty or forty of the farmers and mechanics of Mill- bury, a little town of a thousand inhabitants just south of Worcester, and at the close of a lecture on natural science induced them to organize themselves for mutual improvement, and to assume the somewhat pretentious title of "Millbury Lyceum, No. 1, Branch of the American Lyceum." This little group of per- sons,-there is no reason for supposing they ever met earlier than September, 1826,-included among its number several marked characters of whom perhaps Thomas Blanchard, the great inventor, was the most conspicuous. The United States Government had, at that time, a manufactory of small arms at Millbury, under the supervision of a very ahle mechanic named Morse, and with the co-operation of Blanchard and another mechanic named Andrews, who had correctly calculated an eclipse of the moon, he established this society. It was by no means the first of the kind, nor the first to take the name of Lyceum, but it was the first in Holbrook's system. Troy, N. Y., had maintained its Lyceum since 1818, but it was a col- lection of curiosities and specimens, such as we of- tener call a museum. Gardiner, Me., had a Lyceum in 1822, but that was an academy established by a benevolent gentleman of the town hent on trying the experiment of the manual labor system. Professor Hitchcock may have applied the name as early to one of the natural history societies at Amherst Col- lege, but what Holbrook knew of these things or what guided him in the choice of this classic word he has not told us. It was so new and strange a word that we are instructed by the Journal of Education to pro- nounce it "Li-seè-um." To designate a new thing he had a right to a new word, and these Greek names have been most arbitrarily impressed into the service of modern ideas. An Athenæum with us is likely to be a library, but this is not what it was at Athens nor what it means in England. A Gymnasium with us imports a place for physical training, but the Greeks used it much more comprehensively to cover all sorts of culture, especially mental, and the Germans follow them. The word Museum, quite divorced from the muses who gave it once a graceful significance and an affiliation with music, generally designates with us a gathering of rather dry subjects. In Ger

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History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 21

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1 Publication date: 1888 Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co. Number of Pages: 1538

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1538