USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 12
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Theodore Parker preach it was estimated that about two hundred persons had been killed in the Territory, and property worth not less than two million dollars destroyed.
For Bostonians and for the future, however, the most far-reaching issue raised by the Kansas question came in the savage attack made on Charles Sumner, in May, 1856, follow- ing what Whittier termed the "grand and terrible philippic " delivered by that senator against the terrible wrong to freedom which had been committed in the Territory by the slave-power. " The Crime Against Kansas " Sumner called his speech, and he attacked with special severity Senator Butler of South Caro- lina. Preston S. Brooks, a representative from that State and a kinsman of Butler, determined to take revenge, and on May 22, while Sumner sat at his desk engaged in writing letters, crept up upon him and struck him again and again over the head with a heavy walking stick. So seriously was Sumner injured by this dastardly attack that he did not recover for a number of years; but the most important result of it all was the indignation which was everywhere fomented in the North against the South by a sympathy for Brooks which was shown by returning him again to Washington. Nothing that had occurred before the outbreak of the war did more to estrange the two sections
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than this. Sumner magnanimously charged the whole thing up where it belonged - to the slaveholders of the South. Years afterward, when walking with George William Curtis in the Congressional Cemetery, his attention was called to the cenotaph of Brooks, which he had not seen. "How do you feel about Brooks? " Curtis asked him. "Only as to a brick that should fall upon my head from a chimney," came the reply. "He was the unconscious agent of a malign power."
That power was soon to array itself definitively against the North. And it was through Kansas, fittingly enough, that the long-delayed struggle was precipitated. For John Brown, as has been said, was the soul of the organization through which it was ere long recognized that slaves could not be held in Kansas. And from Brown's success in this connection it was that he mus- tered resolution for that daring raid upon Har- per's Ferry which cost him his life and per- suaded even Wendell Phillips, - who had spent years of patient effort in the endeavor to avoid a physical conflict between the North and the South, - that the question could be settled for all time in one way only and that way - war.
CHAPTER VI
THEODORE PARKER AND HIS MUSIC HALL PULPIT
W E have already seen that during John Brown's momentous first visit to Boston he went to Music Hall to hear Theo- dore Parker preach. Who else was hearing Parker? And how did it happen that this greatest of Boston Radicals was to be enjoyed on Sundays, only in a hall which had been built for concert purposes?
The answer to these two questions should contain matter of deep interest to us who are now following causes and currents in nine- teenth century Boston. For Theodore Parker is one of Boston's most distinguished sons, though he was born not in Boston but near by in Lexington, and though Boston early repudi- ated him. His grandfather, John Parker, was that captain of minute men who commanded his band of followers, "Don't fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here!" The grandson was to take a similarly indomitable tone concerning resistance to the slave power and to theological tyranny.
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On the mother's side there was good stock, too. "For she was," wrote her famous son in that autobiography which, unhappily, is merely a fragment, "eminently a religious woman. She saw Him in the rainbow, and in the drops of rain which helped to compose it as they fell into the muddy ground, to come up grass and trees and corn and flowers. She took a deep and still delight in silent prayer. The more spiritual part of the Bible formed her favorite reading; the dark theology of the times seems not to have stained her soul at all."
So it was a goodly heritage which Parker had in the predispositions of his character. It was, however, his sole heritage. His father could not afford to support him at Harvard College (which the lad had entered without anybody's advice), and so, though Theodore took all the required studies and passed all the examinations, he got no degree, - because he had never resided in Cambridge nor paid tuition fees. His college days were passed working on the farm and teaching school in North Lexington, Quincy and Waltham! Thus he reached the age of twenty-one. Then (March 23, 1831) the Lexington home life came defini- tively to an end by his acceptance of a position as teacher of a private school in Boston.
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Writing Dr. Howe in 1860 he describes vividly his early experience in the city he was to help make famous.1 " A raw boy with clothes made by country tailors, coarse shoes, great hands, red lips, and blue eyes, I went to serve in a private school, where for fifteen dollars a month and my board I taught Latin, Greek, subsequently French(!) and mathematics and all sorts of philosophy. ... I taught in the school six hours a day and from May to Sep- tember seven; but I had always from ten to twelve hours a day for my own private studies out of school. . . Judge if I did not work: it makes my flesh creep to think how I used to work, and how much I learned that year and the four next. . . Oh, that I had known the art of life, or found some man to tell me how to live, to study, to take exercise. . But I found none, and so here I am." John White Chadwick, who has written an admirable life of Theodore Parker, calls attention to the self- conscious note in this. The lad from Lexington seems, indeed, to have been an introspective person and one who, though gay, was not very happy. Very likely this was due to the hard- ships he had endured and to his loneliness
1 Culture then came cheap in Boston. In the papers for that year may be found the advertisements for the Boston Lyceum course of lectures, held Thursday evenings at 7 in the Masonic Temple. The price for 22 lectures was $2 (minors under eighteen $1). Rev. Lyman Beecher was the first speaker in the series.
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during those early formative years in Boston. All through his life he studied too hard and too late. During that first Boston year he read all of Homer and much of Xenophon, Demosthenes, and Æschylus, studied German and French until he could write as well as read those lan- guages, and made decided progress, at the same ; time, in mathematics and philosophy! No wonder he shuddered at remembering all this when, in what should have been his prime, he was dying as a result of it.
The next year young Parker branched out and opened a school of his own in Watertown. Here he made friends; came into contact with John Weiss and so with the Transcendental school of thought; was elected superintendent of the Sunday School - and became engaged. At the end of the second year at Watertown his teaching ended and (in April, 1834) he entered the Divinity School at Cambridge for the last term of the junior year. He had saved the two hundred dollars which would put him through this experience and so he settled down with high courage in his snuggery at 29 Divinity Hall, the front corner room towards the college buildings and on the upper floor. His extraordinary command of "foreign tongues " served him well at this stage, for, besides tutoring lads in Greek and German, he was able to earn con- siderable money translating Lafayette's letters
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for Jared Sparks, who was then at work on his Life of Washington. Theologically Parker was quite sound all this time, as we see from the " creed " which he outlined in response to the request of his nephew, Columbus Greene. One sentence in this runs, "I believe that Christ was the son of God, conceived and born in a miraculous manner, that he came to preach a better religion by which man may be saved." Chadwick, who should know, declares that this creed of Parker's - from which I have quoted only one sentence, - was "a neat and com- fortable statement of the conservative Uni- tarianism of the time."
Yet, when the young " theologue " was ready to go forth from the Divinity School we find him writing: " What an immense change has taken place in my opinions and feelings upon all the main points of inquiry since I entered this place!" His theology was now, indeed, so liberal that he found it rather hard work to get a pulpit. His preaching made everywhere a good impression, but since it was rumored that he was a " Transcendentalist," a tag as bewildering to the average intelligence in his time as in ours, committees acting upon candi- dates were inclined to go slow. For Emerson was a "Transcendentalist " and he had just resigned his charge in Boston because he could not conscientiously administer the Lord's Sup-
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per. Finally, however, the young parson was called to the Spring Street Society at West Roxbury, where he had preached acceptably several times, at a salary of $600. Thus a nine years' ministry of deep and far-reaching import began.
Just before this Parker had been married (April 20, 1837) to the Lydia Cabot who had been a teacher in the Watertown Sunday-School when he was superintendent, and the two set up housekeeping in a little white house a mile distant from the church. Their garden plot adjoined the extensive grounds of George R. Russell, a notable parishioner and friend, and was only slightly removed from the estate of Francis Gould Shaw, father of the heroic Robert Gould Shaw. So they were very nobly neighbored, these two.
During his first year in Roxbury, Parker's sermons were simple and practical. He had resolved to " preach nothing as religion " which he had not "experienced inwardly and made my own knowing it by heart." Once he devoted the Sunday morning period to a discourse on " The Temptations of Milkmen!" Of these early efforts he says himself, " The simple life of the farmers, mechanics and milkmen about me, of its own accord turned into a sort of poetry and reappeared in the sermons, as the green woods not far off looked into the windows of
THEODORE PARKER. From a daguerreotype.
THEODORE PARKER'S CHURCH IN WEST ROX-
BURY.
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CORNER OF TREMONT AND BROMFIELD STREETS ABOUT 1870.
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the meeting-house." That his sermons should have been thus simple in style is greatly to the man's credit inasmuch as he was already the master of twenty languages and of much of the literature in which these twenty are employed. This, too, in an age when German dictionaries were so rare that Parker once walked from Watertown to Professor Ticknor's in Boston to consult one. An ordinary day with this prodigious student, - before his marriage, - has been described thus, "Rising at seven, before the midday meal he read the books of Esther, Nehemiah, Solomon's Song, first twelve chapters of Isaiah; wrote part of a sermon; finished one hundred and fifty pages of Allan's Life. of Scott and two of Herder's Briefe. After dinner read in a desultory manner; walked two or three miles; found a queer plant; gathered chestnuts; geologized a little; went to ride . . . took tea " and reluctantly devoted the evening to social intercourse.
Obviously this man greatly needed a wife who should curb his terrifying devotion to books. Mrs. Parker was of quite different fibre from most of the women we have been encountering in these pages, for she was not at all intellectual. She could not share in the least her husband's passion for books and it was not until his humanitarianism developed that they found a field of common interest. But she
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satisfied at first and always the man's ardently affectionate nature. Early in the Roxbury years, while she was absent on a visit, we find this entry in his journal, " At home nominally; but since wife is gone my home is in New Jersey. I miss her absence - wicked woman! - most exceedingly. I cannot sleep or eat or work without her. It is not so much the affection she bestows on me as that she receives by which I am blessed. I want someone always in the arms of my heart to caress and comfort. . . . I can do nothing without Lydia - not even read."
It is pleasant to realize that Parker, who was soon to be branded as a heretic and carefully avoided as such by almost all of his fellow- clergy, had always at hand the love and the sympathy of this Lydia who satisfied his hungry heart. As he approached his thirtieth year there began to be many and unmistakable signs that he would not be acceptable to the other Unitarians of his day. In 1840 he and his Brook Farm neighbor, George Ripley, walked thirty miles to attend a Groton convention of " come outers " and he made a speech indicting sectarianism and pleading for religious unity and " the Christianity of Christ." That same year he records in his journal the fact that he has repeatedly solicited an exchange with this, that and the other clergyman, but in vain.
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On May 19, 1841, however, he did have an opportunity to preach in another minister's pulpit and he gave an address which has become historic. The place was the South Boston Unitarian Church and the occasion the installa- tion of Rev. Charles C. Shackford. The sermon was an impassioned assertion of the permanence and value of Christianity as embodied in the teachings of Jesus, that "pure ideal religion which Jesus saw on the mount of his vision, and lived out in the lowly life of a Galilean peasant." Yet in the same sermon Jesus was said to have founded no institutions, the preacher vigorously maintaining that "if it could be proved that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, still Christianity would stand firm and fear no evil."
The chief offence of the sermon seems to have been Parker's denial that belief in the miracles is essential to the support of Chris- tianity. Andrews Norton had recently been contending (in The Latest Form of Infidelity) " that no man is a Christian who does not believe in the Christian truth because of some miraculous affirmation." To this Parker replied, by implication, that to believe in Christian truth only as miraculously attested was to do it a great irreverence. Now this was " heresy " and the man promoting it must be ostracized. Mrs. Cheney in her Reminis-
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cences tells an amusing story which indicates the feeling which prevailed in regard to Parker and his South Boston sermon. Miss Cornelia Walter, long editorial director of the Boston Transcript in the place of her brother Lynde Walter, who had broken down in health, was reading the sermon aloud to her invalid when her mother, a sweet old lady, came into the room. " Whose sermon is that? " she asked. " It is by a Mr. Parker," answered her daughter. The name, then unfamiliar, suggested nothing to the questioner, so she inquired, "To what sect does he belong?" Not wishing to shock her, her daughter replied, "I think they call him a Spiritualist." "I should think so," was the old lady's comment, " for it is the most spiritual thing I ever heard." Yet when she learned what sermon it was she had been led to praise she was very indignant.
The ministers in the South Boston Church that morning the sermon was delivered appear to have been very like Mrs. Walter in their attitude towards it. All the hue and cry about its heresy came after the event and in response to the demand of an ultra-orthodox parson who demanded Parker's arrest for heresy. Whereupon a Unitarian layman wrote in the Boston Courier, "I would rather see every Unitarian congregation in our land dissolved and every one of our churches occupied by
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other denominations or razed to the ground than to assist in placing a man entertaining the sentiments of Theodore Parker in one of our pulpits." This was so general a sentiment that exchanges for which Parker had arranged were cancelled and those solicited were refused until, by the beginning of the year 1843, gather- ings of Unitarian ministers were asking this very particular question in regard to him, " Can a believer in Christianity who rejects the miracles or does not believe because of them be considered a Christian? "
Happily, the West Roxbury people, who could have turned Parker out of his parish, declined to persecute as a heretic their greatly beloved pastor. Instead, they made their faith in him and their affection for him clearer than ever and granted him the year's leave of absence he desired in order that he have in Europe the much-needed rest for which a kind friend had furnished the means. It was during this trip abroad that Parker called, in Berlin, on Bettine von Arnim, whose friendship with Goethe had made glorious her long-vanished girlhood.
He was not even shocked when Bettine told him that she prayed to Jupiter and that, in her opinion, Christ the person had done more harm to the world than any other man. "I found, however, that for the man Jesus of Nazareth and for all the great doctrines of religion she had
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the profoundest respect," Parker writes, and he adds simply, "I told her there was, to my thinking, but one religion, - that was being good and doing good."
Boston greatly needed a strong man who should preach this religion and a little group who so believed resolved " that Theodore Par- ker should be heard." Accordingly, soon after his return from Europe he began that series of Sunday morning sermons in the Melodeon Theatre, Washington Street, which continued for seven years or until the Twenty Eighth Con- gregational Society of Worship, popularly known as "the Twenty Eighth," secured the larger quarters at Music Hall with which Parker's fame is indissolubly linked.
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The first Sunday in Boston was cold, dark and rainy with the streets full of slush and a de- pressing air of gloom everywhere. But the hall was crowded, for lovers of truth had flocked in from the suburban towns and from all parts of Boston to hear what this "heretic " should have to say. Ere long there were 7000 (!) names on the parish register and to this multitude Parker aspired to be as much a pastor as he had been to the sixty families in his Roxbury church. For more than a year, too, he continued to keep up the Roxbury work.
Glad as he was to be preaching in Boston
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there were many things in his new environment that jarred upon Parker. He had the New England minister's love for the homely decencies of worship and his new flock's habit of reading their newspapers while waiting for the service to begin accorded ill with his inherited church traditions. The place, too, was dingy and unattractive. In the last sermon given there we get a picture of it as it appeared to Parker: " We must bid farewell to these old walls. They have not been very comfortable. All the elements have been hostile. The winter's cold has chilled us; the summer's heat has burned us; the air has been poisoned with contamina- tions, a whole week long in collecting; and the element of earth, the dirt, that was everywhere. As I have stood here, I have often seen the spangles of opera dancers, who beguiled the previous night, lying on the floor beside me. . Dancing monkeys and 'Ethiopian sere- naders ' making vulgar merriment out of the ignorance and wretchedness of the American slave have occupied this spot during the week and left their marks, their instruments and their breath behind them on Sunday."
This passage is significant for its reflection of Parker's tremendous sympathy with the slave and his interest in the movement which was struggling to set him free. In the same year with his South Boston sermon he had
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preached for the first time on the Great Ameri- can Evil, but his most important early contri- bution to the anti-slavery cause was not a sermon at all but a "Letter to the People of The United States Touching the Matter of Slavery." This document (dated December 22, 1847) is a masterly presentation of the case against Slavery. Ten pages are given to the history of slavery, eight to the condition and treatment of slaves, ten to the effects on in- dustry, two to effects on population, ten to effects on education, fifteen to effects on law and politics and five to "Slavery Considered as a Wrong." Though dignified and dispassionate the thing is simply overwhelming in its presen- tation of facts and figures. The closing para- graph of the " Letter " well illustrates Parker's forceful style.
" Across the Stage of Time the nations pass in the solemn pomp of their historical proces- sion. What kingly forms sweep by, leading the peoples of the past, the present age! Let them pass - their mingled good and ill. A great People now comes forth, the newest born of nations, the latest Hope of Mankind, the Heir of sixty centuries, - the Bridegroom of the virgin West. First come those Pilgrims, few and far between, who knelt on the sands of a wilderness. .. Then comes the One with venerable face, who ruled alike the Senate and
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the Camp, and at whose feet the attendant years spread garlands and laurel wreaths calling him First in War and First in Peace and First in his Country's Heart, as it is in his. Then follow men bearing the first fruits of our toil, the wealth of sea and land, the labors of the loom, the stores of commerce and the arts. A happy People comes, some with shut Bibles in their hands, some with the nation's laws, some uttering those mighty Truths which God has writ on Man and men have copied into golden words. Then comes to close this long historic pomp - the panorama of the world - the Negro Slave, bought, bonded, beat."
Parker could occasionally be very effective as a satirist. In his "Anti-Slavery " Scrap Book (now in the Boston Public Library) may be found " Another Chapter in the Book of Daniel," written for the New York Tribune apropos of the capture of Shadrach. The bitter allusions to Webster make this lampoon very interesting. " Now it came to pass in the latter days that Daniel was King over all the children of Jonathan, which had waxed many and fat in the land. And by reasons which the prophet detaileth not Daniel's head was turned and he went after the strange gods. Then comes an account of Daniel's gradual surrender to these gods of the " Southernites " followed by several very telling
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paragraphs about " the great city of the North- ernites which lieth to the eastward on the sea shore, as thou goest down to the old country and it is called Boston. . .
" And in that city there was a street called Milk, peradventure because it is the dwelling place of so many of the babes and sucklings of commerce. And also another called State, wherein be the priests' offices, and the temples of their chief gods.
"For in that city they did worship many strange gods, whereof the chief was called Money, an idol whose head was of fine gold, the belly of silver and legs of copper; but second thereto was another notable idol called Cotton.
" Unto this latter they did sacrifice, and built him high places and factories, by the brooks that run among the hills, and bowed down and worshipped him saying, Cotton, help us! Cot- ton, help us! . ..
" Then they held a meeting and cried out, ' Great is Cotton of the Bostonians; there is no God but Money, no Lord but Cotton; no King but Daniel; nothing better than Riches; and no Justice but only the laws of Daniel.' Then said they, we be a great people." After which comes a description of the capture of Shadrach, " a servant in an inn " whom they " took away from his frying pans and his skillets and his ovens and his gridirons and
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his spits " but whom, none the less, the Lord delivered. Whereupon
" The Worshippers of Money and of Cotton fell down on their faces and wept sore, and they said, Alas for us, the Lord has triumphed and Cotton has fallen down! Lo Daniel will hate us, and will make a proclamation and send a message and the Southernites will be upon us and take away our hope of a tariff. We will be all dead men! And their hearts became as a dog's heart when he barketh, but knoweth not whom he may bite."
Parker's later service to the anti-slavery cause came largely in his sermons. Every event bearing on this great topic was "improved " by him. Thus his enormous following heard the annexation of Texas, the rendition of fugitive slaves, the war with Mexico and every related event discussed with the fiery ardor which marked his pulpit style. At Faneuil Hall and on the lecture platform throughout the Free States he was frequently heard in the same cause. Unlike Garrison and Phillips he de- fended the Union as the instrument by which slavery would be abolished, thus showing his clear vision. He differed from Garrison, also, in his estimate of the negro character. Chad- wick says: " Edward Everett had a more favorable opinion of it. Emerson's was more genial and more just. Parker's estimate of
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