USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume I > Part 23
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37
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travagant than formerly. Boston exceeds even Tyre; for not only are her merchants princes, but even her tavern keepers are gentlemen! There can be no surer sign of a decay of morals than the tavern keepers growing rich fast."
The Rebirth of the City-Boston is close upon the day when she can celebrate her ter-centenary. Three hundred years of history will come up for review, and few will stop to recall that after half of these three centuries rolled on their way, Boston was a disconsolate settlement of only 2,700, and had to begin its life anew. To Boston, the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the new, marked the beginnings or the rebirth of many of the things which are distinctive of the present city. There was a renewal of immigration, and it was not long before Boston received the first comers from Ireland of the race which was to predominate in the later population of the city. Before this, however, a new class of business men and novel industries were to take the place of the old. Shipbuilding was to more than hold its own, and reach its apogee in the clipper ship. There was to rise a remarkable group of ship-owning merchants, who were to lay the foundations of many of the fortunes which still continue. But manufacturing was to take a seat above all these. During the Revolution, and more especially while the War of 1812 was on, Boston, and the whole of America was to learn the disadvantages of depending upon others rather than upon them- selves for what they needed in the way of manufactures. In 1790 Slater set up from memory, some English spinning machinery. In 1814 Lowell introduced the power loom at Waltham, backed by Boston capitalists, and it was Boston capital which planned and carried through the build- ing of an industrial city at Lowell on the Merrimac. Woolens somewhat slowly followed the manufacture of cotton textiles. Boston was ex- porting shoes by the thousands of pairs by 1810. Boston became, not so much the seat of manufacturing, as the center from which factories were established, and the great middleman who handled and shipped the products. Improved transportation dates from this early part of the century. A canal through Middlesex County from Lowell to Boston was one of the endeavors to break down the isolation of the town. The whole world lay before its harbor, but the country bordering it to the west and south was all but inaccessible. Hence we have the turnpike fever which raged until there was quite a network of reasonably good roads connecting Boston with her neighbors. Gridley Bryant built, in 1826, the first railroad in America. It was from Quincy to Charlestown, and constructed to haul granite to be used in the erection of the Bunker Hill Monument. The railroads which were to make Boston a future rail center were inaugurated within a decade. The Bank of North America
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established a branch in Boston, in 1782, and the first of the banks which have come down to modern times was the Massachusetts Bank of 1784. Once the conflict of 1812 was well passed there began a period of expan- sion in finance and business from which many of the present financial and business institutions date their rise. Commerce was still the life blood of Boston's prosperity and supplied the wealth that was now poured out in the business, transportation and manufacturing schemes of the day. The town, after a somewhat stationary period, began to grow by leaps and bounds. In 1790 the population was 18,320; by 1810, 33,787 ; by 1830, 61,392. Meanwhile, having found its form of government un- suited to its size, in 1822 it became a city.
The "Transition Period"-Historians call this era in Boston's affairs "The Transition period," a title which characterizes it well. Boston was remade, almost reborn, during these decades. The changes in the higher interests of the city were as marked as those in finance and business. And the differences, the advancements in wealth-production reacted upon religion, education, and charity. Boston was still Puritan in many of its religious practices, but revolt had been in the air for some time, and eventuated in what has been called "The Boston Religion," although the word Unitarian conveys the idea better to the present-day citizen. Edu- cation, from being a part-time period of semi-religious study for boys, took on some of the character of the modern public-school system. While Boston was always notable for her care of the needy, few of her char- itable institutions are much more than a century old. With the increase of wealth and population there came to the fore a remarkable number of those who looked beyond personal aggrandizement, and gave of their time and means to seek out the needs of their fellows and of the city, and do what they could to supply them. The reputation which Boston bears for public spirit and private munificence is an inheritance from the so-called transition period.
Some Important Dates-For those who are interested in dates, and not enough so to look through other chapters to find them, some may be given here. Unitarianism had its first outright exponent in James Freeman, who lacking ordination from the church he asked, was handed a Bible with appropriate words by members of his King's Chapel con- gregation, in 1787, and thus became the first professedly Unitarian minister in America. In 1820, a decision in the test case of the Dedham Parish, practically established the legal status of the denomination; in 1833 the Massachusetts law formally separated the functions of the church and town, thus disestablishing the Puritan church, although this had really been accomplished many years earlier. It is claimed that even in 1800, the clergy were nearly all unorthodox in faith, whatever they
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might be in polity. If one would like to know when the first of the many philanthropic institutions of Boston was founded, it is the "Scot's Charit- able Society" of 1657, which was revived in 1684. The Quarterly Charity Lecture was started by Cotton Mather on March 6, 1720, and was the first of the numerous funds founded for the aid of the poor, irrespect- ive of class.
The Massachusetts General Hospital is the earliest establishment of that description, being incorporated in 1811. A branch of this, an insane asylum, was set up in Somerville in 1818. Of the later more important institutions in this class, their names and dates of establishment are: Eye and Ear Infirmary, 1824; Institution of the Blind, 1829; Lying-in Hospital, 1832; nearly all the vast remainder date from just before Civil War times and later. It must not be forgotten that at the Massa- chusetts General Hospital the success of the discovery of the anaesthetic properties of ether were first established and publicly demonstrated to the world. The monument in the Public Gardens to William Thomas Green Morton is that of the man usually remembered in connection with this remarkable advance in medicine, but there is a second, a Boston physician, Charles T. Jackson, who is claimant for equal honors. Cer- tainly for the benefits, the relief of suffering brought to mankind by the discovery, there is gratitude enough for both. All this was in 1846, Sep- tember 30 and August 16-the first major operation under ether being performed by Doctor John C. Warren on this latter date. Quite as inter- esting and even more courageous was the vaccination against smallpox of four of his children by Dr. Waterhouse in 1802. The doctor desired to try it on himself, but his friends thought him too valuable to the com- munity to risk the loss of his services if death followed in the train of this new thing.
The Academic Influence of Harvard-Howe draws attention to the fact that Harvard College made its academic influence felt in Boston throughout all stages of its history, and mentions the Massachusetts Historical Society, incorporated in 1794, as one of the evidences of this. It is the oldest historical society in the United States, and according to its own explanation of the reason for its being, "it had its origin in the new life inspired by the adoption of the National Constitution." The chief founder was Rev. Jeremy Belknap, minister of the Federal Street Meeting-house, and author of a history of New Hampshire. With him were associated "four other students of early American history, all of them under fifty." The Reverend John Eliot, minister of the New North Church ; the Reverend Peter Thacher of the Brattle Street Church ; Wil- liam Tudor, a lawyer of note; and James Winthrop, of Cambridge. These four invited and received in the organization the cooperation of
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five other historical scholars: the Reverend James Freeman, of King's Chapel ; James Sullivan, later Governor of the Commonwealth; Thomas Wallcut, the antiquary; William Baylies, a well-known physician, and George Richards Minot, author of several historical works. The serv- ice which the society has rendered in the preservation and making acces- sible New England historical materials has been invaluable.
The Boston Athenaeum might also be said to have grown out of the academic influences of Harvard. It was incorporated February 13, 1807, before public libraries, as we know them, had been thought of, and when free art galleries were things far in the future. Although a private insti- tution, it was both library and art gallery, and the pioneer of both in Boston. Back of it, was the old Anthology Club, taking its name from a monthly periodical which, in 1804, came into the hands of a set of young intellectuals who were prominent in the ministry, law, medicine and scholarship. The ten volumes issued by the club are described by the historian of the Boston Athenaeum as "constituting one of the most lasting and honorable monuments of the taste and literature of the period. Its labors may be considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country, after that decay and neglect which resulted from the distrac- tions of the Revolutionary War, and so forming an epoch in the intel- lectual history of the United States." The reference made to the Ath- enaeum as the fore-runner of the free public library must not be inter- preted to mean that Boston was without libraries until 1807. On the contrary, mention has been made earlier in this chapter of one referred to in the will of Robert Keayne dated 1653. Winsor estimates that in 1776 there were at least twenty-nine collections of books, "fairly called in some sort public ones," in the colonies, but that they contained in whole less than fifty thousand volumes. The Massachusetts Historical Society was a kind of library organization; the Social Law Library dates from 1804. But the Athenaeum stands out as the principal of the proprietary libraries, one more of the modern type, and soon the largest. By 1820, when the Boston Mercantile Library was established, the first of its class, the Athenaeum had nearly twenty thousand volumes on its shelves.
Art and Music-The fine arts could hardly be expected to thrive in a Puritan society which frowned upon graven images or "likenesses," but in the years of provincial government, particularly the later ones of pros- perity, Boston blossomed feebly but vividly as an art center. John Smy- bert arrived in 1728, well recommended to society, and limned some of the memorials we have of the early fathers, their wives and their daugh- ters. From then through to the Revolution, there was Blackburn, who painted half a hundred portraits, and departed in 1765 to be more than
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replaced by the Copley of whom something has already been written in this chapter. The other notable artist of that period was Gilbert Stuart, born in Rhode Island in 1755, and who closed a remarkable career with his death in Boston in 1828. Two years before Stuart's demise, the first art gallery in Boston was conducted by the Athenaeum when it opened an artist's room, and began the giving of annual exhibitions. Music, except the singing of psalms, met with little more favor in Puritan Boston than did art. Nevertheless, the first important step in musical progress was taken by an organization formed in the Park Street Church, of Puritan traditions. Church music had been somewhat varied and more attractive after the Revolution, and church choirs were the main outlet for the musically inclined. The Park Street Church had a most excellent choir of fifty voices. The celebration which marked the conclusion of the War of 1812 was featured by the rendition of an Oratorio by a large chorus. It was this chorus joined with the choir which made up the Handel and Haydn Society of 1815.
Of the landmarks, social and other, of Boston the city, other chapters than this must tell. There is the story of transportation which is a tale of constant change. A height is no sooner reached in Boston's ways of travel than there is the descent into the valley out of which, by long hard climbing, another summit is attained. Perhaps the most romantic page in Boston's history is that of the day when a forest of masts filled the harbor, and the clipper ships were making records still unsurpassed by sails. It was the age of the wooden ship, but there was a new epoch about to begin, for in the late 1830's, iron was to take the place held by wood, and steam shove canvas in the background.
The Romance of Transportation-Boston profited by this for a time. New York was the first to greet the first line of steam packets, but Bos- ton quickly came to the fore and persuaded Mr. Cunard to make the city the American destination of his mail-carrying steamers. In this it was successful, and for a few years held the early supremacy over the other ports in this country as the destination of transatlantic steamers. Lind- bergh received no more enthusiastic welcome when he made his tri- umphal entry into Paris in his airplane, than the city of Boston gave to the first of the Cunarders. One of the odd incidents of this time was the freezing over of the harbor in 1844, preventing the advertised sailing of the "Britannia." The New York papers poked all manner of fun at Boston, and drew comparisons of the two ports decidedly unfavorable to Boston. But the Yankee spirit was not downed by such a calamity as a foot of ice. A channel was cut for ten miles out toward open water. People gathered from far and near to see the curious spectacle of a harbor covered with little houses, skaters, workmen and even horses and sleighs, while a road
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was being opened for a great ship. On February 3, thousands gathered along a lane of open water to clear the departure of the slow steaming "Britannia."
The advent of metal vessels sent the ship-building industry down into depths from which it never found its way out. Even the priority in the matter of establishment of steamship lines failed to keep Boston at its peak in ocean shipping. Writing of the time when the first Cunarder came, Mr. Hill remarked "that the trains starting from Boston then reached their limits respectively at Newburyport, Exeter, Nashua, Springfield, Stonington, and New Bedford." Of western feeders for the port of Boston, there were none. Boston capital built great rail systems in the West, but thereby aided the development of other ports than home. By 1868 the Cunard Company transferred all its mail steamers to New York, and even the freighters which loaded at Boston went on their way only after completing their loads in New York. Meanwhile the East India commerce had fallen from its high estate. From this depression Boston has climbed, even though it has failed to overtake New York. Railroads have long since been connected with those of the West, and it is but a matter of time when the advantages of Boston as the nearest large port to Europe will be grasped, and the present large volume of exports and imports be greatly increased.
The Benefactions of Merchant Princes-Upon the social structure of the city, transportation has wrought great changes. From the inside, it, or the commerce which it produced, has given the city a community of merchants or "merchant princes," broadened by their contact with the peoples and products of all the world, who have given a new flavor to the life of the city. A Puritan voyaging to India or China, in his youth, there to make his way when most impressionable, must on his return in maturity play an important rôle in the affairs of the home town. Many of the best of the altruistic institutions or "foundations" of Boston were established by these merchants, such as the Perkins Institute for the Blind, a Parkman Professorship, a Bromfield, and a dozen others. It stirs the imagination simply to see the portrait of John Lowell in his great turban, with an oriental tower ranged in the background. He died March 4, 1836, at Bombay, India, when only thirty-four. By his will, he gave half of his large property for the support of public lectures for the benefit of Boston's citizens. Abbott Lawrence, "merchant prince" and many-sided man, gave great sums to establish professorships in Harvard, as well as to schools elsewhere. Or going farther back, Peter Faneuil was in the foreign trade, and was as Thomas Hancock said, the "topmost merchant in all the town." To him Boston owed its first market place and the "Cradle of Liberty." Howe sums up the situation when he says :
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"To bring silks and spices from over seas, to win the fight with pirates, to open a frozen harbor to early steamships, . . . all these are fine, brave things. Yet it is more to make your native town the richer by the spirit which has triumphed over such difficulties and by the fruits of that spirit. This is what the merchants of Boston have done."
All this is going beyond the limits of this one article. More important than the effect transportation and commerce have had upon the mind and spirit of the city are the peaks to which these had risen in times of stress. For example there was the rise of new and broader religions, when any of them failed to be expansive enough to retain growing ideas. Boston became catholic enough to have room for discoverers or preachers of unique faiths ; have we not the Emmanuel Movement started by Rev- erend Elwood Worcester in 1906, and the Christian Science Church founded by Mrs. Baker Eddy? Boston has been very fertile in religious ideas, ideals and organizations.
Reform Movements-Then there was the rise of reform movements which have shaped local and national legislation, and contributed to the settlement of problems that troubled the whole country. Witness the unexpected attitude of Boston towards the slavery question. The city was one of those closest associated with the business and the people of the South. Southerners not only visited the metropolis of New England often, but came to leave their sons in Harvard, to sell their cotton at the textile center of the North, to spend money and to borrow it. They could not conceive of the "Hub" becoming unsympathetic with Southern and slavery ideas; for that matter neither could the average citizen of the city. When Garrison set up the "Liberator" and dinned his abolition doctrine into the unwilling ears of the Bostonians, they grew weary and mobbed him. This "Garrison mob" was one of the darkest blots on the pages of Boston history, for it was a mob made up of "gentlemen of prop- erty and standing." Fortunately the mayor was able to smuggle Gar- rison into jail and prevented a worse stain. But the sense of fair play which has marked much of Boston's later history brought about a hear- ing of the anti-slavery preachments. The very persecution of Garrison won for his cause more adherents than did all the years of the "Liberator" preceding. When negro fugitives were arrested in the city, sympathy and determination were added to fair play, and the pro-slavery Boston of the early 1830's became abolitionist in sentiment, and after Sumter fell, Governor Andrew found a united city to follow his lead in all war meas- ures. The full flower of the movement begun by Garrison three decades before, was seen the day when Robert Gould Shaw marched from the city at the head of the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts, "colored," the first of all negro regiments raised in the North.
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The "Forty Immortals"-Although the intent of this chapter has been to indicate some of the social landmarks in the early career of Boston, and to mark for attention a few of the representative men of their times, it seems but fitting to add the names of some of the notables who have given distinction to the city since it forsook the status of a town. Any list of such must fail of completeness, and the deliberate limiting of the number will leave out many whose lives rank with the highest. For the sake of brevity thumb nail sketches will follow of men whom a recent brochure lists among the "forty of Boston's Immortals." This work was issued by the State Street Trust Company of Boston, which has pub- lished so many interesting and valuable historical brochures. The selec- tion of the forty who were deemed to merit a place in a Boston Hall of Fame are the result of a consensus of opinion and the men named are those "who have spent the greater part of their lives in Boston or Greater Boston, or have accomplished their work here." For the most of the data for the sketches which follow the author is indebted to the above mentioned brochure, than which there is no better condensed set of biographies of Boston's leading men of the nearly three centuries of her existence. About half of these forty "Immortals" have already been given a place in this chapter, and nearly all of the rest have been men- tioned, usually at length in chapters given over to the professions or special subjects. They are re-grouped here, more for their relation to the growth of Boston on the social side of things, than because of their pro- fessional or business success.
Boston Statesmen-Boston has been peculiarly the mother of states- men, if not of Presidents. Even in the latter respect she has furnished her share of those who have sat in the highest place that is the gift of the Republic. There have been two Adamses who were, respectively, the second and the sixth Presidents of the United States. John Quincy Adams, born at Braintree, Massachusetts, July II, 1767, and died at Washington, D. C., February 23, 1848, was a successful lawyer and bril- liant writer before entering public life in a large way. He held many offices, having been minister to Holland, England and Prussia, the Sen- ator for the State in Congress, Commissioner at the Treaty of Ghent, Secretary of State of the United States and its sixth President, from 1825 to 1829. . Even after his retirement from the Presidency he continued to serve the Commonwealth in the National Congress until his death.
Joseph Storey, born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, September 18, I779, and died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 10, 1845, was more noted as a jurist than statesman, probably because he was more interested in the administration of laws rather than in making them. He was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, and speaker of the
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House in 1811 ; a member of Congress and a delegate to the State Con- stitutional Convention in 1820. In 1811 he was appointed a justice in the Supreme Court of the United States, and in 1829 was elected to the Dane Chair of Law at Harvard University, holding this office to his death. Of the several notable works of which he was the author, his "Commentaries" is the best known and is still a standard on the Consti- tution. He belongs rather to Cambridge than to Boston.
Daniel Webster, born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, January 28, 1782, died in Marshfield, Massachusetts, October 24, 1852, was admitted to the bar of Boston in 1805, and made his great legal success in connec- tion with the Dartmouth College case, of which school he was a gradu- ate (1801). He was elected a member of Congress in 1813; moved to Boston and was sent from there to Congress again in 1816. From this time dates his career as the foremost public figure of his time, serving at various periods as United States Senator, and as Secretary of State dur- ing the administrations of Presidents Harrison and Fillmore. Why he should never have been chosen President is one of the puzzles of history of which there have been many unsatisfactory solutions offered. Web- ster's fame as an orator and statesman "has never been surpassed in the United States," says the writer of the State Street Trust Company's brochure. So much has been written concerning the "Defender of the Constitution" that little more than the mention of his name is re- quired here.
Edward Everett, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, died in Boston, January 15, 1865, is decidedly one of Boston's great sons. A contempo- rary of Webster whom he succeeded as Secretary of State under Presi- dent Fillmore, many hold him to have been the more eminent orator. As one historian, M. A. DeW. Howe has it, "The permanence of Webster's fame as an orator, owes much to the contribution many of his speeches made to the history of his generation. But for his political eminence, even his towering personality might not have preserved his fame." And again, "It is the common testimony of those who heard Everett that in hearing him they learned the meaning of the word eloquence." He had the commanding presence, the marvelous voice, and the tremendous memory and command of words, associated with oratory, and his gifts were ones never used for ignoble purposes. He, after graduating from Harvard in 1811, became successively the pastor of the Brattle Street Church, Boston, professor of Greek literature at Harvard, following this in many positions of trust, including the presidency of Harvard, the governorship of the Commonwealth, Senator from Massachusetts, and Secretary of State of the United States. Against his wishes he ran for the vice-presidency on the ticket opposed to Lincoln, but when the con- flict with the South broke, his services, both as orator and leader, were
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