USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 2
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ROMANTIC DAYS
it was during his administration (in 1824) that the Public Garden was created by Samuel E. Guild on what had been an unsightly beach of salt mud on the western side of Charles Street.
As Chairman of the School Committee, how- ever, Mayor Quincy took a stand which has caused him to be greatly criticized by women writers. Up to 1825 there had been very scanty provision in Boston for the education of girls at the public expense, and this discrimination against women led Rev. John Pierpont, then Secretary of the School Committee, to propose the establishment in the city of a High School for Girls. He gave as his reason for doing this " general expediency and to make an object of ambition and profitable employment for three years of life now inadequately occupied." The resulting school was such a success that Mayor
Quincy voted its - abandonment. Though the cost for each pupil was only eleven dollars a year, Mr. Quincy seems to have felt that, in too many cases, this appropriation would be employed for the education of wealthy girls whose parents could send them to private schools, and would if there were no public high school. "The standard of public educa- tion," he said, " should be raised to the greatest desirable and practicable height; but it should be effected by raising the standard of the com- mon schools." Boston, it is thus clear, was
JOSIAH QUINCY, SECOND MAYOR OF BOSTON.
From the painting by Gilbert Stuart in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
VIEW OF BOSTON FROM EAST BOSTON IN 1848.
COLONNADE ROW, WHICH STOOD ON TREMONT STREET SOUTH OF WEST STREET, OPPOSITE THE COMMON.
FES
LEONARD VASSALL HOUSE, SUMMER STREET, ON THE SITE NOW OCCUPIED BY HOVEY'S STORE. .
T
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IN OLD BOSTON
by no means ready yet to provide higher education for the poorer classes. There was a great hue and cry because many young Irish girls, who had entered the High School and proved to be fine scholars, were unwilling, after enjoying this taste of culture, to become domestic servants. Public opinion was very
strong on this issue. For the first time, we catch a glimpse of that anti-Irish-Catholic feeling which culminated in the burning of the Ursuline Convent in 1834.
During Mr. Quincy's second term he had the honor of receiving and entertaining General Lafayette, who was made the guest of the city and was sumptuously entertained in the build- ing at the corner of Park and Beacon Streets, later known as the home of George Ticknor. I have elsewhere 1 described in detail the events of this visit of Washington's friend; suffice it here, therefore, merely to say that the General was escorted (Tuesday, August 22, 1824) to the city limits from Roxbury by Governor Eustis and by him presented to Mayor Quincy, with whom he proceeded through streets resplendent with the French and American flags and spanned at intervals with arches bearing diverse patriotic mottoes and inscriptions giving glad WELCOME TO LAFAYETTE.
One incident which took place as the pro-
1 Among Old New England Inns, p. 356 et seq.
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ROMANTIC DAYS
cession moved up Tremont Street towards Boylston is too picturesque not to be told here once again. Amid the throngs of people who crowded the windows and steps of the houses on Colonnade Row the keen-eyed old soldier perceived, on a balcony, the face of Madame Scott, whom he had known well as the wife of pompous Governor Hancock. She had been his hostess away back in 1781 in the elegant Han- cock mansion on Beacon Street, and though Time had wrought many changes in her piquant face and figure, he instantly recognized her and, with the inborn courtesy of a Frenchman, directed his conveyance to stop in front of the place where she sat, and rising, with his hand placed over his heart, made a graceful obeisance which was gracefully returned. d. Then the old lady burst into tears and exclaimed, "I have lived long enough."
Another charming feature of the festival was the singing of the Marseillaise by a throng of schoolchildren on the Common, of whom Wen- dell Phillips, then a fourteen year old lad, was one.
The original letter in which Lafayette an- nounced his intended visit to Boston may be found in the manuscript collection of the Boston Public Library. It reads:
ALBANY, June 12, 1825.
MY DEAR SIR: - Thus far I am come to redeem my sacred and most cordial pledge: We shall reach Boston
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on the fifteenth: I will tell you between us that I have been informed the legislature intend to receive the tribute of my personal respects in which case it becomes proper for me to be arrived two days before the Bunker Hill Ceremony. As to what I am to do I cannot do better than to refer myself to your friendly advices and shall happily offer you and family my most affectionate grateful respects.
LAFAYETTE.
I would have been very happy to celebrate with you1 the Fourth of July, but am obliged to set out on the twentieth to visit the States of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and will proceed down the north river to New York, then to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and the seat of the [manuscript illegible] Virginia expedi- tion so as to embark on the fifteenth August.
MR. QUINCY, Mayor of Boston.
On the day before his departure from Boston the general dined in a marquee on the Common with twelve hundred people, probably the largest number ever seated at a single dinner table in New England. On a previous day a dinner of ceremony was given him at the Exchange Coffee House on State and Congress Streets, not the magnificent building erected by Charles Bulfinch in 1808, but the less pre- tentious structure put up on the same site when that stately edifice had burned. Among the toasts on this occasion was the following
1 Mr. Quincy's house at this time was on Hamilton Place, num- ber 1.
.
.
ב
5
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offered by General Lafayette: " The City of Boston, the CRADLE OF LIBERTY. May Faneuil Hall ever stand a monument to teach the world that resistance to oppression is a duty, and will, under true republican institutions, become a blessing."
The simple social traditions of a community as yet uncomplicated either by a large foreign population or by divisive questions such as the anti-slavery conflict was soon to introduce is reflected in the accounts of this entertainment of Lafayette. Boston at this period was a veritable garden city and Summer Street was a delightful avenue which well merited its name. Here earlier in the century had been the resi- dences of Joseph Barrell, Benjamin Bussey and Governor James Sullivan, whose house at this time belonged to William R. Gray. Nathaniel Goddard, Henry Hill and David Ellis were among his neighbors.
Other famous old gardens on Summer Street and in its vicinity had been those of Edmund Quincy, which ran back to Bedford Street; and Judge Jackson's on the corner of Bedford and Chauncy Streets. Magnificent trees skirted the entire length of the street, overarching the driveway with interlacing branches so that one walked or rode as within a grove in a light softened by a leafy screen. Here, at the inter- section of Bedford and Summer Streets was
HOUSE OF WILLIAM GRAY, WHICH STOOD ON THE CORNER OF SUMMER AND KINGSTON STREETS.
OLD BEACON HILL. From a contemporary drawing by J. R. Smith.
HARRISON GRAY OTIS, THIRD MAYOR OF BOSTON. From a bust by Clevenger
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IN OLD BOSTON
Church Green set off by an edifice (erected in 1814) of Bulfinch design whose spire towered to a height of one hundred and ninety feet from the foundation. "As late as 1815," declares Drake, "there was a pasture of two acres in Summer Street, and the tinkling of cowbells was by no means an unusual sound there. The hospitable residents could set before their guests cider of their own manufacture or butter from their own dairies." One very beautiful
old place which belongs in this category was that (on the site now covered by Hovey's store) long known as the Vassall House and occupied later by the family of Frederick Geyer. At
the wedding here of Nancy W. Geyer, who married Rufus G. Amory (in 1794), the Duke of Kent, son of George III. and father of the late Queen Victoria, was present as a guest.1
Harrison Gray Otis succeeded Mr. Quincy as mayor in 1829. An authentic picture of the social life of Boston during his administration is derived from the Boston correspondence published in the New York Mirror, where, under date of April, 1831, the writer, who appears to have been pining for the freer ether of New York, laments the lack of public places of amusement in Boston. To be sure, he admits, "the gallery of the Athenæum exhibition of paintings is crowded with beauty 1 Drake.
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a week or two in the summer; and our prom- enade place, Washington Street, for a couple of hours every fair day is very proper for loungers and ladies. There are, too, occasional concerts during the winter that attract genteel audiences, and once in a twelvemonth some distinguished singer or tragedian may fill the boxes of the theatre.
" But this absence of public amusements," concedes the correspondent, " is accounted for and in some measure compensated by the nature of our private society and the number of balls, parties and lectures which comfortably occupy the whole compass of the week." It was a very lavish hospitality, too, which was exercised in these Boston homes. That trade with the East which was to bring wealth to so many families of the new city had now been estab- lished for some years, and quaint silken hangings, porcelain, jade and carvings, treasures of teak- wood and bronze from Canton and Hong Kong formed the effective background of elegant receptions and sumptuous feasts.
The first American to reach China after the Revolution was Major Samuel Shaw of Boston, whose romantic career I traced somewhat in the book preceding this.1 His post was that of supercargo, - one whose duty it was to sell the outward cargo and buy another to be taken
1 See Old Boston Days and Ways.
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IN OLD BOSTON
back, - and his name belongs at the head of the long list of men, chiefly from Boston, who, in this capacity, did honor to their native town and made fortunes for their descendants. A very famous house of this kind, which dates from January 1, 1824, was that known as Russell and Company, one early member of which was John Murray Forbes, in whose Personal Remi- niscences may be found a fund of romantic material concerning the life and labors in China of many an enterprising young Bos- tonian. India Wharf, designed in 1808, by Charles Bulfinch, was the Boston headquarters of Russell and Company, and so important was the trade there conducted that in 1844, when the harbor froze over from the wharves to Boston Light and a channel was cut through the ice at an expense of thousands of dollars, to open the water from the Cunard Dock at East Boston, a connecting branch of it was extended to India Wharf for the benefit of the ships operated by the India Wharf Proprietors.
From first to last there were forty-eight mem- bers in the firm of Russell and Company, and when account is taken of the fact that these men not only lived in China a portion of the time but also on some occasions had their wives and daughters there for short visits, it will be seen that no formative influence was of greater importance to Boston than the organization
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of this wealthy and highly successful firm. There were many Bostonians, before the middle of the nineteenth century, who could talk of the East as intelligently as Kipling does now and could echo feelingly Mr. Forbes' verses, beginning
" Know ye the land where the bamboo and queue are -"
and ending
" Where the flowers have no smell and no flavor the fruit,
And 'tis stupid to talk and there's nothing to shoot; Where the earth is burnt mud and the sky is all blaze, Where the dew is death-fog and the air is red haze? 'Tis the land of the East; 'tis the region of curry That slowly we come to and leave in a hurry.
Know ye the land? My good friend, if you do, By the Lord, I don't envy you; I know it too!"
Though Harrison Gray Otis was one of the India Wharf Proprietors, he was never a member of the firm of Russell and Company. He seems indeed to have ceased active efforts to accumu- late wealth, some time before this firm was organized, and his name was now hedged about almost with divinity. For instance, on the day fixed for the organization of the city gov- ernment of 1830 he sent word that he was ill and invited the members of the city council to assemble at his private residence, 45 Beacon Street, for the purpose of being qualified for
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IN OLD BOSTON
office. Though this was quite unprecedented, no one thought of questioning the propriety of holding a municipal inauguration in such a place; an invitation from an Otis was equal to a command. It is altogether likely, too, that the city fathers greatly enjoyed themselves on this occasion, for Otis was a charming enter- tainer and his fine old mansion house with its three beautiful rooms en suite and decorated with pictures by Copley, Blackburn and Smi- bert were of the sort not accessible to all the men in the city government. Samuel Breck hazards the guess that at this time Otis was spending about ten thousand dollars a year upon the conduct of his household, though he adds that twenty-five years earlier "he told me that the utmost extent of his desires as to riches was to be worth ten thousand dollars." The universal opinion seems to have been that the first Harrison Gray Otis was unsurpassed in dress, equipage, entertainment and manners. " He always reminded me," says Augustus T. Perkins, who wrote his biographical memoir, " of a fine old French nobleman, one of those we read of as uniting wit with learning and great eloquence with profound acquirements."
Associated with Harrison Gray Otis in the social chronicles of the time is the name of Emily Marshall, the great Boston beauty, who married the mayor's son, William Foster
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ROMANTIC DAYS
Otis, on May 18, 1831, and who died at the Beacon Street home of her father-in-law August 17, 1836, aged only twenty-nine. Emily Mar- shall was the daughter of Josiah Marshall, who lived on Franklin Street, during the twen- ties and thirties, and for her social charm no less than for her beauty she became very re- nowned. It is said that the hackmen who 'served her were so spellbound with admiration that they forgot to open the door of her car- riage, and at a Fair gotten up by the ladies of Boston, in 1833, to benefit the building fund of the Perkins Institution for the Blind she personally took in $2,000 at her table, - so great was her vogue. The late Mrs. Samuel Eliot of Brimmer Street was the daughter of this famous beauty, the charm of whose features is hinted at but not adequately expressed in the well-known portrait by Chester Harding, still in the possession of the family. There was a time when it was "the thing" in Boston society to write acrostic sonnets to Emily Marshall. One of these, from the pen of N. P. Willis, runs as follows:
" Elegance floats about thee like a dress, Melting the airy motion of thy form Into one swaying grace; and loveliness, Like a rich tint that makes a picture warm, Is lurking in the chestnut of thy tress, Enriching it, as moonlight after storm
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IN OLD BOSTON
Mingles dark shadows into gentleness. A beauty that bewilders like a spell Reigns in thine eyes' clear hazel; and thy brow So pure in veined transparency doth tell How spiritually beautiful art thou - A temple where angelic love might dwell. Life in thy presence were a thing to keep, Like a gay dreamer clinging to his sleep."
Merely to be seen in the company of this beauty gave one a chance of immortality. Quincy in his Figures of the Past speaks of seeing "Beau Watson " walking (in 1821) on the Dover Street Bridge, then a favorite prom- enade place, with the fair Emily, who must then have been a girl in her teens. " Beau " Wat- son later came to be no less a person than the Rev. John Lee Watson, D. D., assistant minister of Trinity Church.
Under Mayor Otis Boston introduced mu- nicipal concerts on the Common, the project being engineered by the Society for the Sup- pression of Intemperance, who declared that " such a practice would have in their judgment a tendency to promote order and suppress an inclination to riot and intemperance." This same year (1830) cows were excluded from the Common. Ever since 1660 rights of pasturage on this public ground had been enjoyed by certain householders, but latterly the kine had not been invariably respectful to the ladies,
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ROMANTIC DAYS
and Mayor Otis, who was nothing if not gallant, signed their decree of banishment. It was also under Harrison Gray Otis, and upon his recom- mendation, that the Old State House was so altered as to provide accommodation for the mayor, aldermen, common council and other city officers.
So far all the mayors had been aristocrats addicted to an elegant mode of life and a magnificent manner of doing things. As a kind of protest against them and their ways Charles Wells was now (1832) put in as the representative of the middle classes. He served without distinction and, after two years, was succeeded by Theodore Lyman, Jr., whose term of office will always be associated (though perhaps through no fault of his) with two of the most disgraceful affairs ever per- petrated in an American city. The first of these culminated in the burning of the Ur- suline Convent in Charlestown (now Somer- ville) on the night of August 11, 1834. The other, treated at length in the chapter devoted to the rise of the Anti-slavery Movement, came in the same month of the following year.
Adequately to tell the story of " The Burning of the Convent " would take much more space than I can here command. Besides, it has recently (August 29, 1909) been very beauti-
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fully told 1 by Miss Mary Boyle O'Reilly, daughter of the poet, who has made a special study of the subject. Miss O'Reilly attributes the ugly spirit which fired the building on Mount Benedict to labor troubles in the first place, and to an injudicious sermon preached by Rev. Lyman Beecher in the second. A quarter of a million Irish had landed in America between 1830-1835, and as ten thousand of these had settled in Boston they naturally displaced a large number of native workmen. These men resented the coming of the immi- grants and caught eagerly at any opportunity which should offer to "put them down." They found their occasion in a kind of penny- dreadful, published as the work of a girl who had been a member of the nuns' community, the same production which supplied Lyman Beecher with his text. And the preacher's inflammatory words, in turn, served to give specious authority to the acts of these sore- headed truckmen who had constituted them- selves the " defenders " of Boston against the corrupting (?) influence of a little band of nuns whose sole offence seems to have been that they were offering rare and very precious educa- tional opportunities to the girls of eastern New England. The truckmen had given notice, on wretchedly printed posters scattered through-
1 In the Boston Globe.
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out the city, that they would demolish the nunnery on a certain date, and there seems to have been no reason - except that of criminal negligence - for the failure of the authorities to have a stout guard on duty that night at the convent. No wonder five thousand good Bos- ton citizens assembled in Faneuil Hall (after the damage was done! ) to protest against what they might well call " an unparalleled outrage." But though such men as Robert C. Winthrop, William Appleton, Theophilus Parsons, David Child, Nathan Appleton and many more signed a paper and
Resolved, That in the opinion of the citizens of Boston the late attack on the Ursuline convent, in Charlestown, occupied only by defenceless females, was a base and cowardly act, for which the perpetrators deserve the contempt and detestation of the community.
Resolved, That the destruction of property and the danger of life caused thereby calls loudly on all good citi- zens to express individually and collectively the abhor- rence they feel in this high-handed violation of the laws.
Resolved, That we, the Protestant citizens of Boston, do pledge ourselves, collectively and individually, to unite with our Catholic brethren in protecting their persons, their property and their civil and religious rights. THEODORE LYMAN, JR., Chairman. FANEUIL HALL, Aug. 12, 2 p. m., 1834.
no judgment was ever brought in against those who committed the nefarious deed and no indemnity was ever paid to the poor nuns
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who had been made " the innocent victims of a public calamity." Obviously the new city of Boston had still much to learn about justice and effective government.
CHAPTER II
BROOK FARM: AN ESSAY IN SOCIALISM
N OT a single Brook Farmer was ever known to admit that this experiment in communism was not a success. Even Dana and Hawthorne and George William Curtis bore testimony, years afterwards, that they had passed in this Arcady, nine miles from Boston's Beacon Hill, some of the hap- piest days of their lives and had brought away from their sojourn there an enduring impulse to high and noble things.
The only Brook Farmer with whom I have had an opportunity to talk (almost all who were members of the community have now passed away) is Mrs. Rebecca Codman Butterfield, a lady of eighty-five, who spent five years of her young womanhood at the community and who today speaks of it with the utmost enthusiasm and with a deep glow of reminiscent happiness in her still fine dark eyes. "My husband was a Brook Farmer, too," she said proudly, " one of the printers of the Harbinger, the organ of the movement, and we used often to say, after
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IN OLD BOSTON
our children began to come, that we wished ardently that it were possible for us to give them anything like what we had got at Brook Farm. It was a place where the humblest could fulfil their deepest aspirations. The cobbler was a fine Shakespeare scholar, and Mr. Ripley loved above everything to work in the barn with the animals. Mrs. Ripley used to wash hours at a time, and I recall that when one particularly disagreeable piece of work on the place had to be done volunteers were called for, with the result that two of the finest young men of the community accomplished a 'drainman ' chore one night while the rest of us slept."
Mrs. Butterfield's brother, Dr. John Thomas Codman, has written in Historic and Personal Memoirs of Brook Farm the only long account of the community's ups and downs ever put out by one who had intimately shared its life. Ripley would have been the natural person to write such a story and there is reason to believe that he contemplated doing so. But the work was never done, perhaps because the whole thing meant so much more to him than it could possibly have meant to anybody else.
Carlyle described Ripley, who once called on him in England, as " A Socinian minister, who had left the pulpit to reform the world by cul- tivating onions." This gibe always makes me hate Carlyle; Ripley's essay in brotherhood
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ROMANTIC DAYS
was so heroic without at all meaning to be! That Ripley had a pulpit which he was glad to abandon is true; he found himself (in 1840) far from comfortable in his Purchase Street Church and took counsel with the members of the Transcendental Club, so-called, to see whether it might be possible " to bring culti- vated, thoughtful people together, and make a society that deserved the name." There is mention, in this connection, of a conference at the house of Dr. John C. Warren, which ended " with an oyster supper crowned by excellent wines." One does not wonder, after hearing the setting for his appeal, that the ex-minister did not win many converts that night and that all his hearers found themselves with other things to do.
Even Emerson, when approached in the matter, replied negatively, giving as his frank reason for so doing that investments in Concord were securer than they were likely to be at Brook Farm. (Later, he compared Brook Farm to "a French Revolution in small.") Yet his refusal seems to have been due less to disin- clination to venture his money than to his inherent dislike of organization, and to his exaggerated reverence for his own selfhood. A discerning woman once said that it would not be difficult to confess to Mr. Emerson, " but that he would be shocked at the proposition
MRS. REBECCA CODMAN BUTTERFIELD WHEN AT BROOK FARM. From a daguerreotype.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IN 1840. From the painting by Charles Osgood.
COPYRIGHT 1910
BROOK FARM BUILDINGS.
Copyright, 1910, by M. G. Cutter.
After a contemporary drawing.
16€
BROOK FARM PHALANX.
Good for 5 Cents
Traswer
201010 010106
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IN OLD BOSTON
to take charge of even one soul." Certainly he shrank, almost with horror, from the as- sociative life implied in the Brook Farm proposi- tion, though, all the while, the idealist in him gave the movement secret encouragement and applause.
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