USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 16
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Before going to college, Mark taught school for a while in the South, where he met and conversed with one of those "monsters called atheists." After his graduation he became a doctor and had started to practice in New York when he was called to be Professor of Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric at Williams College, of which he later became the head. Here his rigid integrity, intellectual breadth, and the nobility of his character, placed him securely among the greatest college presidents in the country.
Albert, who achieved distinction second only to Mark, was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Williams. Later he was Professor of Astronomy as well. His religion always remained of the darker tinge, so that Harry once exclaimed, "If I am forgotten in consequence of his religion then let all the world go, I care not if I die . . . If he is so altered that he will never be Albert to me again, I declare to you that I believe that religion to be false and desire never to know it."
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One day Harry discovered he could draw animals with charcoal on the marble slab in front of the fireplace; also the view from his window at Cherry Cottage. So he decided to become a painter and went to New York, where Robert and Harry Sedgwick, by that time distinguished lawyers, be- friended him. Unfortunately he embarked with them upon a business venture for making bricks out of soft coal, which Mark mistrusted as impractical and so did Catherine Sedgwick. They were right, and Harry came back to Stock- bridge, where, in spite of Mark's offer to send him through college, he remained for some time writing delightful letters to his brothers about the quantity of marriageable girls in the village.
Meanwhile David Dudley Field had left Williams and was ready to start out in the world. Upon the occasion of his leav- ing home, his father behaved with classic simplicity. He gave his eldest son a Bible and $10, and taking him into his study, commended him to the protection of Almighty God. Dudley studied law in Albany and afterwards entered the law office of Harry and Robert Sedgwick in New York.
He did not suffer the pangs of homesickness which afflicted his brother, Cyrus, when, in his turn, he went out to seek his fortune. Despite his father's encouraging words, "I am sure you will succeed, for your playmates never could get you to play until all the work for which you were responsible was done," the fifteen-year-old Cyrus spent many lonely evenings watching the boats go up the Hudson, and thinking of home. He remembered how only a month or two before he had taken a part in She Stoops to Conquer, given by the students at the Stockbridge Academy, and wondered what his school- mates, Henry Dwight and Edward Carter, were doing. He was so miserable that his mother, who did not have time for unnecessary emotions, told one of his brothers that if Cyrus was still so unhappy he had better come home. Mark
THE FIELD BROTHERS DAVID DUDLEY, HENRY MARTYN, CYRUS WEST, STEPHEN JOHNSON
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Hopkins, who chanced to run across the boy one day at his brother Dudley's, was very consoling. "I would not give much for a boy if he were not homesick upon leaving home," he said.
In those days, the business world, still unexploited, was a fat oyster to a capable young man. Cyrus's business career reads like a Horatio Alger story. Upon his arrival in New York, he entered the great dry-goods store of A. T. Stewart, as errand boy. His first year's salary was $50; his board cost him $2 a week. Just as Mark Hopkins had stood ready to help Harry, so Dudley lent Cyrus the money necessary to eke out his earnings. Families stood together, solid clans against the onslaughts of the world. Cyrus kept careful accounts of all his expenditures and sent them home to his father: "From Stockbridge to New York, $2.00 . .. To one vial of spirits of turpentine (used to get spots out of coat) 61/4 cents."
After working at A. T. Stewart's for three years, Cyrus left to go into the paper business. He prospered until, through no fault of his own, the firm failed. Characteristically he assumed, and eventually paid, his partner's debts. He mar- ried Mary Stone and went to live in Gramercy Park, next to his brother Dudley. A door was cut between the two houses so that the family solution would not be diluted.
The Field brothers anticipated the modern conception of the "tired business man," with the difference that they never seemed to be tired. For many years Cyrus's children saw him only occasionally, for he ate his breakfast by lamp- light and had his dinner and supper downtown.
As for Dudley, who shortly became a distinguished lawyer, his day was hardly less crowded. After an early ride in Central Park, he worked steadily until just before dinner after which he took a short nap and then was ready to work on his hobby, the recodification of the laws of New York,
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until late into the night. His evenings, he considered, were merely a "healthy diversion after the strain of the day."
Dudley was fond of saying that the only men who made a lasting impression upon the world were fighters, and his life bore out this idea. Tall, straight and handsome, he had the look of a sulky mastiff who could take up his enemies one by one, shake them, and throw them off. He was brilliant, arbitrary, and ruthless. The cases he argued before the Supreme Court have passed into history. Yet, accused of illegally arranging an election for his shady clients, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, in the Erie Railroad litigation, his conduct was questioned by the bar of New York. No vote was ever taken, however, on the report of the investigating committee. Acting upon the principle that every man has a right to be defended, Field incurred further criticism when he served as chief counsel for the notorious Boss Tweed.
Law reform, however, remained his chief interest. After years of struggle he succeeded in getting the legislature of New York to appoint a commission to "reduce into a written and systematic form the whole body of the law of this State." Dudley did most of the commissioners' work, and although his Penal Code was not adopted by New York until 1880, his Civil and Criminal Codes were accepted in many other states, and he drafted an outline of an international code and helped to form the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations.
Meanwhile, in Stockbridge, the family continued to grow up. The beautiful Emilia Ann was married to Josiah Brewer from Tyringham. Josiah had previously been sent by the American Board of Missions to look into the con- dition of the Jews in Turkey and perhaps it was due to his influence that Stockbridge became sufficiently aroused to the plight of the Jewish race to found a society for "meliorating their condition." How much was accomplished on this
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ambitious program no one can say, but Josiah decided to shift his interest to the Greeks, and came home only long enough to carry off Emilia Ann. They went to live in Smyrna, where he opened the first Greek school for girls. In 1837, Cyrus could write that The Ladies' Greek Associa- tion of Stockbridge held their fair on the Fourth of July on Little (Laurel) Hill and raised all of $127. Perhaps they had the Brewer school in mind.
The Brewers' oldest son, David Jonathan, was later to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. There he was welcomed by another member of his family, his uncle, Stephen Johnson Field. As a young man, Stephen had gone out to California in the gold rush. He early displayed the family business capacity by selling chamois skin he had bought in New York for gold-dust bags at an excellent profit. He became the leading lawyer in the boom town of Yubaville, and in 1864 was elected Chief Justice of California and finally Justice of the Supreme Court, where he served for fifty-four years.
Henry Martyn, the youngest of the "four famous Field Brothers," was smaller and more delicate than the rest. Perhaps because of his relatively small size, he put on a pom- pous front and would walk into a room, stiff-legged, rubbing his hands together in self-congratulatory appreciation of a pleasant world. After all, even he had gone to college at twelve years of age, and had delivered an address on temper- ance in Tyringham at the age of fourteen.
Henry, like his father, became a minister, but of the broader, nineteenth century brand. He had European aspirations, and his brother Dudley, always ready to help his family, offered him money that he might study in Germany, an offer negatived by the elder David Dudley because of the dangerous rationalistic tendencies there. New Haven was considered a safer substitute.
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Henry managed to get to Europe, however. He went to Paris and observed the Revolution of 1848. He went to Rome, observed Roman Catholicism and lamented it. Anxious to burst New England swaddling bands, he was delighted that his first parish was in St. Louis, where he was pastor of the Presbyterian Church. Later he became editor and owner of The Evangelist, an important Presbyterian periodical. He was also the family biographer and from his Victorian pen the massive Dudley, the inexorable Cyrus, emerge like Titans resting on pink clouds.
There was one respect in which the little Henry outtopped his brothers. Field wives heretofore had fitted into the Field picture, in no way disturbing the masculine preponderance of its composition. Dudley had had three of them, the first, a Stockbridge girl, Lucinda Hopkins, one of the Hopkins cousins raised under Archibald's roof. But Henry's wife stuck right out of her setting. Little Stockbridge children used to call her "the French Mrs. Field."
While observing the Revolution of 1848, Henry had met a young woman who had been implicated in one of the country's most famous murder trials. Henriette Desportes had been a governess in the family of the Duc de Praslin. He and his wife were unhappily married and, when the duchess was found murdered, Henriette was accused of instigating the crime. The trial had far-reaching political implications, and did much to shake Louis Philippe's already tottering throne. Henriette was acquitted, however, and sailed for America, where she again met the young American who had been so kind to her during the harrowing period of her imprisonment. They were married in 1851, an act which took courage on Henry's part, for it could not have been easy to bring a French wife with such an equivocal background into the solid phalanx of the Fields. She was undoubtedly charming, with soft brown hair framing a serious, intellectual
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face, and her knowledge of the world, of books and of paint- ing far exceeded that of most well-turned-out American young ladies. In New York everyone went to her parties. She would never allow Henry to be overshadowed by his more famous brothers.
"Where is dear Henry?" asked Mrs. Cyrus one day.
"Dear Henry is upstairs," was the quick reply, "writing dear Cyrus's speeches."
The story of the Field brothers was running its usual, well- regulated course when in 1854 came its most dramatic and unpredictable chapter. Cyrus, at the age of thirty-four, had succeeded in paying back all his debts and considered retiring on the comfortable fortune he had accumulated. Life was hanging slack on his hands when his brother Matthew intro- duced him to a man named Gisborne, who had conceived the idea of running a telegraph line between St. John's, Nova Scotia, and the mainland of America. When Cyrus heard about it, another idea, more romantic, more impossible, lodged in his shrewd Yankee brain and was held there immovably for thirteen years.
Few adventure stories equal that of the laying of the Atlantic cable. Even Henry's gentle flow of words is power- less to clog the excitement of its action. Gisborne was first bought out and a company of solid millionaires were placed in charge, shepherded by the guardian brother, Dudley. After two and a half years spent, among other things, in cutting down the primeval forest and in putting a road through the wilderness of Newfoundland, the optimistic promoters con- sidered that now only the actual laying of the cable remained.
Such an event, like big-game hunting later on, promised plenty of excitement. The latest of modern wonders was to be shown. Consequently the arrival of the ship from London carrying the first portion of the cable, which was to stretch from St. John's to the mainland, was a great social event.
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One of the most modern steamships, the James Adger, flags flying, set out from New York for Newfoundland with a crowd aboard. There was Peter Cooper, one of the million- aires; there was Professor Morse, and several gentlemen of the press. There were a great number of ladies, "whose presence gave life and animation to the party." There was the ubiquitous Henry, flying hither and thither with words of wonder and of praise. There, too, was a white-haired old gentleman, with burning eyes, who had come down from Stockbridge to see how this wild scheme of his son Cyrus would turn out.
It was some time before the big steamer discovered the little cable ship, which was hidden among the rocks, but when it did, the two started across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the cable ship in tow. Halfway across a storm came up and the cable had to be cut.
A second attempt at laying a cable from Newfoundland was successful and Cyrus went to work to organize a company in England, to which it became fashionable to subscribe. Finally, in 1857, two ships set out from England with the first Atlantic cable. Several hundred miles out at sea it broke and half a million dollars were literally at the bottom of the ocean. Three times more the experiment was repeated; each time a different method was used and each time it failed. Many people now wanted to call the whole thing off. It was so obviously a harebrained scheme and Cyrus was either a knave or a fool. After a fourth attempt, however, he was able to send his father the laconic message: "Cable successfully laid. All well." Cyrus's mother broke the news to his wife simply and to the point, after the Field manner: "Mary, the cable is laid"; and then, "Thomas, believest thou this?"
The bells were rung and guns were fired. Children let out of school shouted, "The cable is laid! The cable is laid!" And the rest of the country echoed Stockbridge's wild joy.
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A special celebration was planned by the village for the receipt of the first cable message: "Europe and America are united by telegraphy. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will toward men." This was sent by the directors of the company in England to those in America, and was followed by a long message of congratulation from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. In order that the New York papers might have a detailed account of the Stockbridge celebration, a telegraph line was put through from Pittsfield to Jonathan Edwards Field's law office, the little white building next to Mr. Treadway's present house, in order that the New York papers might have an account of the proceed- ings, and the story goes that young Stephen Field, Cyrus's nephew, took the message when it came. For Stockbridge the cable was still a family affair.
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In New York a huge parade was followed by a magnificent banquet. Churches were covered with flags, placards posted in store windows, modestly stating, "Our Field is the Field of the World." The festivities were hardly over when news arrived that the cable had ceased to work.
The world swung into reverse. The adventure was dis- credited and before long the Civil War occupied everyone's attention. Cyrus Field's business was in a state of collapse. His New York office and warehouse were burned. During these years his face became more and more like that of a Hebrew prophet and a sweetness softened its fine, unyielding lines. Those who worked with him never heard him grumble. Undaunted he formed another company. Again he chartered a steamship, this time the Great Eastern, the largest in the world, again obtained a cable, better insulated than its pred- ecessors, and again put to sea. Not only once, but two and three times more, was his work in vain. It was not until 1866 that the first Atlantic cable was finally successfully laid.
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Despite their individual achievements, the Fields, remain primarily a family, and as a family they reached their apotheosis in 1853, when the Field parents celebrated their golden anniversary. Thirty-five members of the clan met in Stockbridge and a room called the Golden Wedding Room was added to the Rectory for the occasion. There were Dudley and his wife and three children. There were Emilia Ann and Josiah Brewer home from Smyrna with six of their seven children. There was Matthew, who had made a name for himself building suspension bridges, with his wife and six children. There was Jonathan Edwards, with his wife and two of his five children. Jonathan Edwards had come back from Ann Arbor, where he had practiced law, to live in Stockbridge and go into politics. Although a Democrat, he was so popular that the Republicans elected him President of the Senate three times. In 1862, he took the lead in putting the first water system into the town.
Cyrus, with four of his seven children, Henry with his charming Henriette, and Mary Elizabeth, the youngest of the family, were there also. Only Stephen Johnson, who had not been able to get back from California, and Timothy Beals, reputed the most brilliant of them all, who as a young man had enlisted in the navy and disappeared at sea, were missing links in the chain. The same strongly marked features, the blue eyes, high brows, and sandy hair could be found in different sizes all up and down the line. A blurred daguer- reotype recalls them, and in the midst of the group Submit Dickinson's face shines with the quiet radiance of fulfillment. Her children were together as in the old days, and as in the old days her husband rose and commended them to the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.
Chapter X
THE VILLAGE BECOMES LITERARY
I N the 1820's, just as Stockbridge had become sophisticated to the pioneers of the Western Reserve, it underwent the inspection of visitors from the East who put it in its place. Cultivated Europeans, wishing to study the habits of the strange New World, got out their field glasses and recorded their observations, which were apt to be unfavorable.
William Ashburner was the first to arrive but he, surpris- ingly, did not have to be coaxed into liking America. He had brought his family over from England with the avowed purpose of leaving the decadent Old World behind and putting his agricultural theories into practice in the new. His daughter Anne did not share either his theories or his enthusiasm. When their forlorn little party stopped at the Red Lion Inn, the red-faced owner, Mr. Hicks, and his fat, good-natured wife seemed the "essence of vulgarity and just the persons to keep such an inn." Anne could not bring herself to do anything but curtsy until her father told her to shake hands, and it was in her new country that she learned her first lesson in democracy-to be ready for "general cor- diality without distinction of person."
The Ashburners took lodgings with the Widow Jones, in an ugly, unpainted house where the front door led without ceremony into the parlor. Here the talk seemed to Anne dull, consisting mostly of questions and answers and she
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would be nonplused by a shrill "What say?" to her attempts at making conversation.
She saw nothing pretty about the village street and much to criticize. The irregularly planted maple trees gave an occasional patchy shade to the ragged footpaths that ran along their base. Some people didn't even bother to clear away the garbage from the front of their houses, and the cemetery was an open eyesore, unfenced and sprawling. There were other drawbacks as well. Mrs. Jones had no flowers, only vege- tables, in her garden. Anne's little sisters were given altogether too much pie. In winter the large Franklin stove in the parlor hardly served to counteract the cold air which poured in at the doors and windows of the boarding house. During school vacations, great oafs of farmers' sons filled the kitchen, and Anne felt left out of the discussions concerning new churches, missionary meetings, and lectures. Her polite inquiry, "Have you been for a walk this fine day?" met with no response in a community where leisure for such idleness was unknown.
After a year or so, William Ashburner built a house just outside the village under Bear Mountain, which brought Stockbridge a step nearer European sophistication. Built upon an English plan and designed by an architect in India, it was called Bombay Hill and bore no possible relation to Berkshire requirements. There was a long hall leading from the kitchen so that cooking smells, all too prevalent in America, could not penetrate into the dining room. The house required more servants than the family could afford to employ and by the time Captain Basil Hall of the King's Royal Navy and his wife came to visit them from England the Ashburners had fallen partially into low American ways. They breakfasted between five and six. Mrs. Hall, however, showed so plainly that "to get up at that hour was an effort beyond her nature," that the meal was postponed until eight.
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During Basil Hall's sojourn in this country, he formed definite opinions upon the moderate intelligence of its people, their limited information, and their incapacity for self-government. His American friends, anxious to shine in English eyes, had begged him to go to their villages and talk to their farmers, where, they were sure, he would find the high-minded and intelligent citizens of the country, and the Captain, willing, if not anxious, to give the devil his due, con- sented to try this broad-minded experiment in Stockbridge.
During his visit, he was taken to the meeting of the Agricultural Society, an affair of great local importance. Here farmers brought their oxen and sheep, their peaches and apples, to be exhibited. William Ashburner wanted to show his fancy Mangel Wurzel and Rutabaga grown in specially drained fields, and importations never seen here before. Harry Hopkins came down from Cherry Cottage to compare notes about farming implements and to get new ideas on planting. His nature responded to the flutes and drums, the flags, and the bright muskets of the militia which added a note of gaiety to the occasion and he didn't mind, as Basil Hall did, even when it rained.
When the ploughing match, the chief feature of the fair, was over, the men repaired to the tavern and the women went home. Basil Hall felt there should be more mingling and gaiety between the sexes. "The Americans," he remarked, "are a very grave people . . . they appear woefully ignorant of the difficult art of being gracefully idle." The smell of tobacco smoke and whisky was so unpleasant at the tavern that, although treated with gratifying courtesy, he found the meal, like many others in America, "a mere business to be got over, not a rational pleasure to be enjoyed." Afterwards, a long procession filed into the church and listened to a sermon pointing out the fact that a proportion of more than two-and-a-half gallons of liquor to every man, woman, and
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child was consumed annually in the village. The Captain was not in the least surprised. He considered America the only place he had ever traveled where the use of ardent spirits was not confined exclusively to the vulgar.
Altogether the Captain left in full possession of his original ideas. Unlike Anne, he conceded that the village was a pretty one, and the houses gave entirely the impression of belonging to gentlemen. He admitted, too, that he had come in contact with "instances of that character for which New Englanders are so deservingly distinguished," but at the same time he had not seen anything so peculiarly remarkable in the people as they themselves were continually leading him to expect.
The Captain was followed by Lord Morpeth. A kindly, solid, squarely-built man, he wore a bright red waistcoat and exuded the beef and port of Old England. When he asked to see a typical American, Theodore Sedgwick took him to call on Captain Roswell Palmer, who lived upon the Hill where John Bacon's house had stood. Two old soldiers, Lord Morpeth and the Captain compared notes about the Revolutionary War, and Morpeth carried away so high an opinion of American sturdiness and independence that he won a grateful place in hearts peculiarly sensitive to English criticism.
At about the time of Lord Morpeth's visit, two elegant Frenchmen, Conte Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, arrived. Their curiosity had been so piqued by the rumor that a real authoress lived in this American wilder- ness that they had put themselves out considerably to call upon her. Even Basil Hall would have shared their interest. Stockbridge had more lures than cattle shows, and he had pronounced himself "gratified to a very high degree by making acquaintance with the accomplished author of several admirable works of fancy."
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