USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 13
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the negro, intellectually and morally, was low. He exaggerated the sensuality of the negro as he did that of the Jew, whom he placed only a little higher in this respect. Moreover, the negro had for him a certain physical re- pulsion. But his humanity easily absorbed the instinctive repulsion and the theoretic doubts. He could see no human creature wronged and not feel the pain in his own side. The limita- tions of the negro, as he conceived them, were not reasons for degrading him. They were appeals to his benevolence and were responded to as such."
Half the leaves in the Scrap-Book already referred to (and called by Parker “ Memoranda of the Troubles Occasioned by the Infamous Fugitive Slave Law from March 15, 1851, to February 19, 1856 ") are devoted to posters warning the fugitives of danger and summoning their friends to the rescue; and many of these bear unmistakably the mark of Parker's hand. In William and Ellen Craft, of which one sees repeated mention, he was especially interested, marrying them at a colored boarding-house in Boston, - and using a Bible and a bowie knife in the place of the usual symbols! These two defences happened to be lying on a table and Parker put them into the husband's hands, telling him to use the one for his soul and the other for his body's safety. When the kid-
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nappers were in hot pursuit of Ellen Craft she was sheltered in his house, and after her marriage Parker started the pair off to England armed with a letter commending them to James Martineau's parochial care. Occasional communications from the Crafts may be found in later numbers of the Liberator.
The year 1852 in Parker's life is marked by two events of note: his Webster funeral oration and his removal to Music Hall. The former antedates the latter by three weeks and this is rather a pity since we may not ascribe to the more dignified background such a sentence as this, in which the complicity of the North with Slavery is described: " Slavery the most hideous snake which Southern regions breed, with fifteen unequal feet came crawling North; fold on fold, and ring on ring, and coil on coil the venomed monster came: then Avarice, the foulest worm which Northern cities gender in their heat, went crawling South; with many a wriggling curl it wound along its way. At length they met and twisting up in their obscene embrace, the twain became one monster." An extraordinary funeral oration this and unspeak- ably bitter in its reproaches of certain public acts of Webster! Yet it is generally conceded to be, in its tenderer passages, as fair an estimate of Webster's private character as any essay or oration of which he is the subject.
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Parker's first sermon in Music Hall was preached November 21, 1852, on " The Position and Duty of a Minister." Therein he told his people with his usual directness and simplicity that he had "great faith in preaching; faith that a religious sentiment, a religious idea will revolutionize the world to beauty, holiness, peace and love." On this occasion, as on many a subsequent one, this immense hall, then brand new, was crowded to the doors, 1500 people in the chairs on the main floor, 700 in the two narrow galleries or balconies and a few hundred more standing or overflowing upon the stage where a kind of body guard of Parker's personal friends usually sat, a little withdrawn from the central figure who dominated the whole. The crowd was promiscuous and there was no collection and no "sittings," the expenses being met by voluntary contributions from an inner circle of devoted friends. The service was very plain: Bible reading with anything omitted which offended the minister's moral sense and hymns sung by the choir from what Parker was wont to call " The Sam Book " - because it was compiled by Samuel Johnson and Samuel Longfellow. The sermon, read from manuscript, was accompanied by no graces either of manner or of delivery. But the preacher had lived and thought and felt and read deeply, and his strong simple sinewy
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Copyright, 1900, by A. H. Rickards.
OLD BOSTON MUSIC HALL, WHERE PARKER PREACHED.
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Copyright, 1901, by A. H. Rickards.
THE CITY HALL OF PARKER'S DAY.
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TP CO.
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WASHINGTON STREET, SOUTH OF MILK STREET IN 1858.
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words went straight to the intelligence of his hearers, of whom more than one went away to say, like a certain plain man whose comment has come down to us, "Is that Theodore Par- ker? You told me he was remarkable but I understood every word he said."
There were prayers, too, at this " church," " talks with God " which heartened all who heard them, so simply beautiful were they. Louisa Alcott first heard Parker when he was preaching to "laborious young women " and the sermon helped her and inspired her. Yet her most appreciative word is for the prayer, " unlike any I had ever heard; not cold and formal as if uttered from a sense of duty, not a display of eloquence nor an impious directing of Deity in his duties towards humanity. It was a quiet talk with God, as if long intercourse and much love had made it natural and easy for the son to seek the Father . . . and the phrase, 'Our Father and our Mother God ' was inexpressibly sweet and beautiful, seeming to invoke both power and love to sustain the anxious overburdened hearts of those who listened and went away to labor and to wait with fresh hope and faith."
Parker was very happy at Music Hall and he gave himself more devotedly than ever to his Sunday preaching. Sometimes his sermons were roughly blocked out four years in advance!
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And the crowds continued to come gladly be- cause, as Lowell puts it in his Fable for Critics,
" Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest: . . . You forget the man wholly, you're so thankful to meet With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street." Nothing that is a part of human life seemed to Parker beyond the pale as pulpit matter. Like Whitman he believed in the excellence of the human body; his sympathy with Mother Nature in her manifold aspects was likewise akin to Whitman's. And often he would preach of these things, exalting as part of the God- given scheme man's passional nature and all that marriage should mean to the young people who sat at his feet. "A real happy marriage of love and judgment between a noble man and woman is one of the things so very handsome," he once said in a sermon, " that if the sun were, as the Greeks fabled, a god, he might stop the world and hold it still now and then in order to look all day long on some example thereof and feast his eyes on such a spectacle." Yet, when all is said, the strength of Parker's preach- ing lay chiefly in the fact that he was the exalter of righteousness. It was in this, of course, that the poignant appeal of his anti- slavery sermons lay.
Such a man as Parker, with a strong grasp on the homely verities, with profound scholar-
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ship, - which he yet knew how to adapt to a popular audience, - and with an impelling ethical ideal would be sure of a warm welcome on the hospitable lyceum platform of the day. During the winter following his return from Europe he lectured forty times and from that time on an ordinary year with him ranged anywhere from fifty lectures to ninety-eight, his record. When the comparatively slow means of transportation is taken into account and the fact recalled that he almost always preached in his own pulpit on Sunday it will be seen that this represents enormous activity. More- over, he was a voluminous correspondent, writing exhaustive letters with his own hand to scholars who wanted criticism, students who wanted suggestions, common folk who wanted advice and friends who wanted - him. In the biographies of celebrities of this period one encounters scores of these letters. One which I have just happened to see in a " Life " of Parkman embodies long and careful criticism of the most stimulating kind of The Con- spiracy of Pontiac which had just been published. And this was only one of a thousand such letters written by Parker that year in the scant leisure left after his many other more pressing duties were performed!
Partly because it gives a good picture of Parker at work and partly because of its in-
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teresting observations on the Lyceum as an institution I want to quote here from a letter once sent to his friend, Miss Sarah Hunt, while en tour: " The business of lecturing is an original American contrivance for educating the people. The world has nothing like it. In it are combined the best things of the Church, i. e., the preaching, and of the College, i. e., the informing thought, with some of the fun of the Theatre. . . . But none know the hard- ships of the lecturer's life. . .. In one of the awful nights in winter I went to lecture at It was half charity. I gave up the Anti-Slavery Festival, rode fifty-six miles in the cars, leaving Boston at half-past four o'clock and reaching the end of the railroad at half-past six - drove seven miles in a sleigh, and reached the house of - who had engaged [me] to come. It was time; I lectured one hour and three-quarters and returned to the house. Was offered no supper before the lecture, and none after, till the sleigh came to the door to take me back again to the railroad station seven miles off [near which] I was to pass the night and take the cars at half-past six the next morning.
" Luckily, I always carry a few little creature comforts in my wallet. I ate a seed-cake or two and a fig with lumps of sugar. We reached a tavern at eleven, could get nothing to eat at that hour, and as it was a temperance house
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not a glass of ale which is a good night-cap. It took three-quarters of an hour to thaw out: - went to bed in a cold room, was called up at five, had what is universal - a tough steak, sour bread, potatoes swimming in fat, - wanted me to deduct from my poor fifteen dollars the expenses of my nocturnal ride, but I ' could not make the change.'" Usually Parker's fee for lecturing (after he had reached his full intel- lectual stature, that is) was " F. A. M. E., i. e., Fifty And My Expenses." Thus he was able to buy himself more and more books and to cut down voluntarily his salary at Music Hall.
Very reluctantly he now (1847) gave up his white cottage in West Roxbury and made his home in Exeter Place, his house there touching yards with that of Wendell Phillips. Phillips records that often, as he looked from his own chamber window late at night, when some lecture engagement had kept him out until the " wee sma' hours," he would see in Parker's study the unquenched light which meant that the insatiable student was still hard at work. These night vigils ere long were to cost the man his life. By the time he was forty-three Parker had warnings that he was not to live to be an old man, and three years later, while lecturing in New Bedford, sight, hearing and speech suddenly gave out. Yet after taking a glass of sherry at a nearby drug-shop he was
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able to return and finish his lecture. He would not allow himself, indeed, the luxury of being ill, and the result was that, in January, 1859, he was told that the consumption which he knew to be a family tendency, had obtained such a hold upon him that there was only one chance in ten of his recovery. In pursuit of this chance he spent a year in Italy and there, in Florence, he died May 10, 1860. Among his last words were, " There are two Theodore Parkers now: one is dying here in Italy; the other I have planted in America." Neither are forgotten. For pilgrimages are constantly being made to his grave in the Protestant cemetery at Florence and, every year, his moral beauty be- comes more and more revered in the America for which he did so much.
CHAPTER VII
BOSTON'S SHARE IN THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT
I T was William H. Seward who, in a speech delivered October 25, 1858, spoke of the long fight which he saw coming as "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and en- during forces." He meant the force that believed in slaveholding and the force that did not, but there were those - and they included Wendell Phillips - who gave his phrase a larger interpretation. Phillips saw that the war was really a contention as to whether Aristocracy or Democracy should rule in America and, being the man he was, he exulted over the impending struggle. Franklin Sargent, who as the son of Rev. John Sargent and Mrs. Sargent of the Radical Club, had rare opportunities in his youth to know the great men and women of Boston in its romantic era, has recently characterized Wendell Phillips to me as " a handsome aristocrat turned plebeian from principle." And T. W. Higginson, who also knew Phillips well, has told me that the great orator was never more aristocratic in
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aspect than when walking through the streets of his own Boston with an ugly mob howling at his heels; yet this was the man who five days after the attack on Fort Sumter was giving war a warm welcome in Boston Music Hall, saying, "I rejoice ... that for the first time in my anti-slavery life, I stand under the stars and stripes 1 and welcome the tread of Massachusetts men marshalled for war."
The spirit in which Phillips said these words and had all his life been calling out to the young people with whom he came in contact, " Throw yourself upon the altar of some noble cause! To rise in the morning only to eat and drink and gather gold - that is a life not worth living," is the spirit of '61 in Boston. The noble youth of the time welcomed with out- stretched arms the possibility of doing something to show their love of the Union. The sense of romantic possibilities near at hand made them feel, to quote Higginson again, " as if one had learned to swim in air and were striking out for some new planet."
Even Emerson was caught up in the whirl of enthusiasm. While John Brown lay in prison awaiting execution a meeting was held
1 Cf. the lines in John Boyle O'Reilly's poem on Phillips (written after his death February 2, 1884):
" A sower of infinite seed was he, a woodman that hewed to the light, Who dared to be traitor to Union when the Union was traitor to Right!"
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in Boston to raise funds for the relief of his impoverished family, and Emerson, no less than Phillips, was on hand. John A. Andrew pre- sided, and it was on this occasion that Rev. J. M. Manning of the Old South Church declared, "I am here to represent the church of Sam Adams and Wendell Phillips; and I want all the world to know that I am not afraid to ride in the coach when Wendell Phillips sits on the box." Many a man became similarly outspoken about his personal con- viction now that the moment for such demon- stration had arrived. Woodbury says that throughout the war Emerson was deeply moved in his patriotic feelings and rejoiced in it not only as a cause of civilization but for its rein- vigoration of the spirit of the people. "The effect of it upon his own thought was remark- able," he adds. " The anti-social and anar- chistic sentiments which were to be plentifully found in his writings before this time cease; and in their place there is a powerful grasp of the social unities embodied in the state as a main source of the blessings of civilization."
On the stone erected on Soldiers' Field, Cam- bridge, - an athletic ground given to Harvard University by Henry L. Higginson to the memory of James Savage, Jr., Charles Russell Lowell, Edward Barry Dalton, Stephen George Perkins, James Jackson Lowell and Robert
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Gould Shaw, all of whom died for their country, - is this quatrain of Emerson's:
" Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, - 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die."
This high call to sacrifice was never more , courageously answered than in the case of the Boston men who enlisted for the Civil War. The very morning of the attack upon Sumter forces began to rally and individuals came forward with offers of all kinds of help. The Hon. William Gray immediately sent $10,000 to the State House, and the banks of Boston offered to lend the State $3,000,000 in advance of legislative action. Physicians and lawyers volunteered to take charge gratuitously of the families of men who went to war, and the organ of the Democrats, whose sympathies had long been with the South rather than with the North, advised the postponement of all other issues until " this self-preserving issue is settled." The total amount of money expended by the city, exclusive of State aid, is set down at a little over $2,500,000.
Yet money was the smallest part of what Boston gave to this war. Twenty-six thousand one hundred and seventy-five men out of a population of about 178,000, meant a much larger share of the city's wealth than its financial
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contribution represented. Moreover, the work done for the Northern army by those two noble Boston women Dorothea Dix and Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis cannot in any way be estimated. Of Mrs. Otis I shall be speaking at some length in a later chapter, so let us here take brief account of Dorothea Lynde Dix's unique work.
As a young woman Dorothea Dix had main- tained at the home of her grandmother in what is now Dix Place, Boston, one of those famous girls' schools which in the early part of the nine- teenth century, did so much for the character of sensitive young women. Too much, indeed, for this school had a kind of Protestant version of the Roman Catholic system of the confes- sional, - a shell post-office into which daily, if possible, letters were to be dropped recording the results of the searching introspection re- quired by the young schoolmistress and by her followed up. No wonder Miss Dix was a wreck at thirty-three as a result of such strenuousness. Yet it was during the ensuing visit to England, for the recovery of her health, that the horrible treatment then accorded the insane first came to this earnest woman's attention. Up to so late a date as 1770 Bethlehem Hospital in London, popularly known as " Old Bedlam," was regarded as the prime show in the city, superior even in the attractions it offered the pleasure seeker to a bull-baiting or a dog fight.
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Country cousins of the average citizen were taken for a hearty laugh to Bedlam to see the en cursing, raving and fighting. The annual fees derived from this public entertain- ment amounted to several hundred pounds. A mad house was a menagerie - nothing more. Against the cruelties of the place Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review, 1815-1816, wrote: "Even in the new building the windows of the patients' bedrooms were not glazed nor were the latter warmed."
Barbarous England? Yes, but let us look nearer home and see what Miss Dix saw a whole quarter of a century later. One pleasant Sunday morning as she was coming out of Dr. Lowell's church after a fine sermon she over- heard two gentlemen speaking in such terms of indignation and horror of the treatment to which the prisoners and lunatics in the East Cambridge, Massachusetts, jail were subjected that she forthwith determined to go there and look into the matter herself. She had now returned from abroad comparatively well, and, through the will of her grandmother, had come into a sufficient competency to enable her to live comfortably and in a leisurely fashion. At this time it was her intention to enjoy a quiet ladylike life, devoting herself to literature and study and to the social intercourse which was always so delightful to her.
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The visit to Cambridge was the turning point of her life. She found among the prisoners a few insane persons with whom she talked. She noticed that there was no stove in their room, and no means of proper warmth. She saw at once that only by resorting to legal measures could this be righted, so, without delay, she caused the matter to be brought up before the court then in session. Her request was granted; the cold rooms were warmed.
Thus was begun her great work, the work at which she labored steadily for the next twenty years, or until these abuses had been reformed in nearly all the States of the Union.
When the War broke out, however, Dorothea Dix saw that the preservation of the Union must take precedence over everything else and within a week after the attack on Sumter she had offered herself and been accepted for free hospital service. Her commission from the Secretary of War declared her "Superin- tendent of Women Nurses, to select and assign women nurses to general or permanent military hospitals, they not to be employed in such hospitals without her sanction and approval except in cases of urgent need." Naturally, her twenty years' experience in conquering obstacles of every kind made her invaluable to the Surgeon-General. For she everywhere demanded efficiency and sentimentalism she
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simply would not have. Higginson, in his Cheerful Yesterdays, raises whimsical objection to Miss Dix's ruling that no woman under thirty need apply to serve in government hos- pitals and that all nurses should be plain- looking persons content to be garbed in brown or black " with no bows, no curls, or jewels, ; and no hoopskirts." Yet such prohibitions appear to have been needed. Hardly had the first shot been fired when scores of women, many of whom were obviously unfit for any- thing useful, presented themselves at head- quarters saying, " We've come to nurse " and seeing no reason why they should not be as- signed work.
Even before she had organized the nurses, however, Miss Dix rendered a signal service to the Union cause. She it was who revealed to the proper authorities a bit of Southern strategy which contemplated the seizing of Washington as the headquarters of the Con- federacy and the prevention of Lincoln's in- auguration. Miss Dix would never allow herself to be praised for this act nor would she accept the public demonstration for her services as superintendent of war nurses which Mr. Stanton wished to give her at the close of the war. Yet, now that she can no longer object, it seems a great pity that her unique services to humanity should not be adequately recognized.
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Let Congress put through with a rush that bill to appropriate $10,000 for a memorial to her with which they have been dallying for years!
Massachusetts was exceedingly fortunate in having as governor, when the war broke out, a man of the calibre of John A. Andrew. Com- mitted heart and soul to the anti-slavery cause Andrew was yet keen for the preservation of the Union, - and he strongly believed in the potentiality of the negro as a soldier. Through him it was that the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, colored, of which Robert Gould Shaw was colonel, came into being. Not easily did he secure the consent of the War Department to raise such a regiment and when he had got it he was a little at a loss where to turn for a commander. Then he lighted on Robert Gould Shaw, who at the time was an officer in the Second Massachusetts Infantry. At first the young man refused the command, doubting his own capacity. But after he had been assured by his superior officer of his entire fitness for the task he telegraphed Governor Andrew his acceptance of the offer and wrote to his mother, " I feel convinced I shall never regret having taken this step, as far as I my- self am concerned, for while I was undecided I felt ashamed of myself, as if I were cowardly."
The task of training this colored regiment was
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taken up by Colonel Shaw in February, 1863, and in three months his men were ready for service. On May second he was married to Miss Anna Haggerty and on May twenty-eighth the Fifty- fourth broke camp and came to Boston to take the steamer for South Carolina. Shaw was only twenty-six at this time, a handsome, well- made man with a fine complexion, blue eyes and golden hair. He must have been a striking figure as he marched with his black men and his white officers, - among them Norwood 1 and Edward Hallowell, to salute Governor Andrew, standing on the State House steps directly opposite the present site of the beautiful St. Gaudens monument, which was erected to Shaw's memory by his friends in 1897. " I know not," said Governor Andrew as he handed the colors to the Fifty-fourth, "when, in all human history, to any thousand men in arms has there been given a work, so proud, so precious, so full of hope and glory, as the work committed to you."
Shaw was immensely proud of his men and exceedingly anxious to " get them," as he wrote, " alongside of white troops and into a good fight if there is to be one." When the chance came to lead the attack on Fort Wagner, - July 18, 1863, - he seized it eagerly. But
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