USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 18
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The center of mercantile and municipal Boston in 1840 was the Old State House, at the head of State Street. Built in 1748 to house the Province govern- ment, its walls had once resounded with the eloquence of Otis and the Adamses. After the state government had moved to its Bulfinch front on Beacon Hill, the Old State House became the town, and subsequently the city hall. But there was plenty of room to spare. The small size, and still more the modest government of the Boston of 1840, is brought home to us when we find that this three-story brick building, 110 by 38 feet, housed not only the municipal government, but the post-office and a merchants' club. In the ground- floor room at the Washington Street end, Nathaniel
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Greene, with fifteen other deserving Democrats, a messenger and a porter, handled Boston's mail. Over- head was the hall of the Common Council. Opposite, in the old Council Chamber, "the chief magistrate of the city, together with the City Clerk, remain through the day in the discharge of their ordinary duties," and the Board of Aldermen meet on Monday evenings. In the attic, and around the central stairs, were the offices of all other city officials. Under the aldermen's cham- ber, looking down State Street, was Topliff's News Room, a subscription club and reading-room for Bos- ton merchants. Newspapers and periodicals from all parts of the world, a complete register of entrances and clearances in American and foreign ports, and bulle- tins from foreign correspondents, were kept on file. Samuel Topliff had a system of signals from Long Island in the harbor to his house on Fort Hill, to in- form him of arriving vessels, when a swift rowboat that he maintained would put out to obtain the latest for- eign news. The Boston newspapers of 1840, lacking an Associated Press to give them such foreign news as seemed wise for the people to know, used Mr. Topliff as a news bureau.
The Boston merchants still continued their eight- eenth-century custom of meeting on 'change, at one o'clock every week day, to discuss business and politics before going home to their two or three o'clock dinner. That formidable rite over, they 'took the air' in chaise or sleigh on the Mill Dam, or otherwise amused themselves while clerks carried on business in the counting-rooms. 'Change had been somewhat broken up into cliques by the practice of dispersing to adjoin- ing insurance offices in wet or cold weather. In order to restore a community spirit, a new Merchants' Ex- change building was erected on State Street in 1842.
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Thither removed the Topliff News Room, and the pre- vious year the municipal government had moved to the Court-House that Bulfinch built in 1810 on the site of the present City Hall. The Old State House was then given over to shops and offices.
During the generation following the war, fashionable Boston covered the open pastures and spacious gardens of Beacon Hill, with blocks of houses in smooth-faced red brick. Their architecture retained enough im- press of Bulfinch to be vastly superior to anything that followed, but sacrificed his sense of proportion to a fashion for long, high-studded rooms, and ignored the fine detail that gave half its charm to Federal architec- ture. Louisburg Square, and the North side of Mount Vernon Street, are the best surviving examples of this style of the early thirties. In the flush days of the early fifties the newly rich turned toward the newer South End, where they surrounded graceful squares and lined broad avenues with brown-stone fronts and high stoops, which they speedily abandoned when the Back Bay was filled in. Western Avenue or the Mill Dam (now Beacon Street) was completed in 1821 across the Back Bay, which sheet of water, after a further cutting up by railroad embankments, became a veritable open cesspool. After prolonged litigation the filling in of the Back Bay ("with tomato cans and hoop skirts," as the ancient jest records) began in 1858.
Many of the leading merchants had remained faith- ful to the older South End, to be near their counting- rooms and the harbor. Summer Street, with provin- cial and Federal mansions surrounded by gardens and shaded by great elms, was the favorite residence of retired shipowners. A wall of Chinese porcelain screened the house of John P. Cushing from vulgar gaze; the door, opened by Chinese servants, disclosed
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A GROUP OF BOSTON MERCHANTS - 1854 - TRUSTEES OF THE HUMANE SOCIETY
off to right. Charles Amory Francis Bacon William
mory Robert Rennet Forhes
Forbes Jonathan M
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a veritable museum of Eastern art. The first shop in- vaded Summer Street in 1847; Bulfinch's incompa- rable crescent on Franklin Place was replaced by gran- ite business blocks between 1857 and 1859; and by the Civil War this section was almost wholly given over to business.
Despite the rise of manufacturing, merchants con- tinued to dominate the social life of Boston. In the old directories one finds under the heading of "Merchants, principally ship owners and importers of cargoes of Russia, South America, Calcutta, Canton, European and West India Goods, etc.," most of the leading busi- ness men in Boston. Many left fortunes that are still intact; a few left some trace in local history.
Robert Bennet Forbes had the most original brain, and the most attractive personality of any Boston merchant of his generation. His first sea-voyage was made in 18II as a six-year-old passenger with his mother in the fish-laden topsail schooner Midas, to join his father Ralph B. Forbes in France. The whole family, including the baby, James Murray Forbes, afterwards a famous railroad builder, returned in an armed Baltimore clipper in 1813, escaping the British blockading squadron by a running fight. Perhaps it was his short French residence that gave Bennet his frank, impetuous nature, so foreign to his Scots blood and Yankee upbringing.
Although a nephew of the great T. H. Perkins, young Bennet found no short cut to fortune. Shipping before the mast in the Canton Packet at the age of thir- teen, "with a capital consisting of a Testament, a Bowditch, a quadrant, a chest of sea clothes, and a mother's blessing," he rose to be master at twenty, passed but six months ashore in ten years of China trading, and commanded his own ship at twenty-six.
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At twenty-eight he entered the firm of Russell & Co., Canton, and rose to its head in eight years more. In 1840 he became merchant-shipowner in Boston; and engaged in various picturesque and benevolent side activities. An early convert to the screw-propeller and the iron steamer, he would have had Massachusetts lead in steam as in sail; he did introduce auxiliary steamers to the waters of China, and built the first ocean-going twin-screw iron tugboat, which was ap- propriately named R. B. Forbes.
The merchants of Boston were quick to respond whenever disaster came to the toilers of the sea. About 1840 a group of Boston gentlemen sent a cargo of provisions to famine-stricken Madeira, the product of whose vineyards had brought cheer to themselves and gout to their grandfathers. The grateful people re- turned the relief ship Nautilus laden with their choicest wine; and I have happily ascertained that the "Nau- tilus Madeira" is not yet entirely consumed. In 184I a disastrous storm at Cape Ann brought charity nearer home. But the Irish famine of 1846-47 brought the greatest charitable 'drive' of this period. Early in 1847 a New England Relief Committee for the Famine in Ireland and Scotland was organized at Boston, with Mayor Quincy as chairman. Through free advertising and local committees, cash and provisions to the value of over $150,000 (of which $115,500 from Massachu- setts) were quickly collected in New England, and a few hundred dollars additional came in from Yankees in the West, all forwarded to the wharves free of trans- portation charges. Congress, at the request of Robert C. Winthrop, lent the sloops-of-war Jamestown and Macedonian. The former began to load at Boston on St. Patrick's Day. Local Irishmen completed the work in record time, and on March 28 the vessel, laden
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to the danger point and officered by civilian volunteers under R. B. Forbes, caught a fresh northwest breeze from her wharf. Through northeast gales and with roaring westerlies in that boisterous season on the Western Ocean, Captain Forbes drove the Jamestown without mercy, mindful of the starving children of Erin. Fifteen days and three hours out from Boston, he let go both anchors in Cork Harbor. Few sailing packets at any season have made a faster passage. But she had only transported one quarter of New Eng- land's contributions. Captain Forbes, refusing flatter- ing invitations to Dublin Castle and London, drove her back to Boston, and hastened to New York to load the Macedonian, which the New York relief commit- tee had been unable to fill. Four merchant ships and two steamers were required to take the balance. Had Old England shown the same prompt generosity as New England, there need have been no famine in Ireland.
Once more, Boston's bread cast upon the waters returned after many days; in the stomachs of brawny Irishmen who came to build her railroads, tend her looms, and control her politics. Furthermore, the Jamestown's voyage began a regular grain trade be- tween Boston and Great Britain.
Two years after this errand of mercy, Captain Forbes, now aged forty-five, was the hero of a collision at sea between the Cunard side-wheeler Europa and the barque Charles Bartlett of Plymouth, laden with emigrants. Leaping overboard, he passed the end of a rope around a fat German, and clung to him while both were alternately jerked out of water and plunged under it by the rolling of the ship to which the rope was fast. Then taking bow oar in a lifeboat, he helped pull more people out of water. This was only one of a series of
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adventures that make his "Personal Reminiscences" one of the best books of its kind.
Captain Forbes was also one of the pioneer yachts- men of New England. Yachting in Massachusetts re- sulted from a new custom of the merchants, a summer residence by the sea. In Colonial and Federalist days, Boston and Salem were so salty themselves that the few who felt the need of a "change of air" took it' in- land, at a country seat. Horticulture was the gentle- manly hobby for a shipowner. But as Massachusetts turned inland for profit, she returned seaward for pleas- ure. Thomas Handasyd Perkins set a new fashion when, in 1817, he built a stone cottage just above the Spouting Horn at Nahant.
This rugged peninsula at the north margin of Boston Bay, a miniature, even rockier Marblehead, had re- mained a mere sheep-pasture for lack of a proper har- bor. After the war several Boston families began boarding in the few native houses, and in 1818 crowds of excursionists came by the steamboat Eagle to view Swallow Cave, Pulpit Rock, Natural Bridge, and other features that appealed to a romantic age in literature. Samuel A. Eliot erected a worthy example of the Greek revival in 1821; Frederic Tudor, the ice king, built a tasteful stone cottage in 1825, established a remark- able garden, and set out elm-trees.1 The first Nahant Hotel, also of stone, was built on East Point in 1820, on the site of Senator Lodge's present voting residence; and quickly became the center of fashionable summer life on the New England coast. Other mercantile fam- ilies followed the dean of their order; and by 1860 Nahant exhibited every known atrocity in cottage
1 Like almost everything else Mr. Tudor did, the setting out of elms was scoffed at - "no tree would grow on Nahant." The Tudor elms now make one of the most handsome avenues of trees in New England.
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architecture, and had fairly earned its jocose subtitle of "Cold Roast Boston."
This peaceful capture of Nahant by the merchant princes began a process that has utterly transformed the New England sea-front. Swampscott, for exam- ple, was a poor fishing village until 1815, and mainly that for another forty years. 'Farmer' Phillips began taking a few summer boarders the year of peace. In twenty years this business had so expanded 1 that one of our earliest barrack-like summer hotels was erected, on the site of the present Ocean House. In 1842 a mer- chant of Boston offered four hundred dollars an acre for a farm next the hotel, and the astonished native threw down his rake and ran for a lawyer to get the deed signed before the Bostonian came to his senses! 'Cottages' began to spring up along the picturesque bluffs and beaches; and to-day Swampscott is part summer resort, part bourgeois suburb of Lynn and Boston.
The nucleus of the present Gold Coast from Beverly Cove to Eastern Point began between 1844 and 1846, when four Bostonians of mercantile stock, and a retired Salem shipmaster, purchased the better part of the shore-front of Beverly Farms; and Richard Henry Dana established the first summer estate in Manchester. The native who sold his hundred-acre seashore farm to Charles C. Paine for six thousand dollars (possibly a hundredth part of its value to-day), felt rather badly about the price. "These city men don't know nothing about farming land," he said, and threw in a yoke of white oxen to square the bargain with his conscience! It was not the fault of these newcomers that the North
1 'Aunt Betsey' Blaney, for room and board in 1830 charged three dollars a week, "which was considered high, as the boarders often waited upon themselves."
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Shore eventually became a millionaires' club. They only asked to be let alone in their simple pleasures of boating and fishing, and driving along the twisty lanes of Essex County - weather-rusted houses of the seven- teenth century with tiny detached shoe shops, elbowed apple-trees dropping their fruit over stone walls, dark pine woods where witches used to lurk, glimpses of sea and islands and white sails from close-nibbled sheep- commons.
, About the same time the picturesque shore-line and excellent shooting at Cohasset attracted thither a few Boston families; and Daniel Webster maintained his magnificent physique by fishing and farming on his Marshfield estate. J. Murray Forbes acquired a foot- hold at Naushon in 1843, and the whole island fifteen years later.
"What can be more magnificent," wrote this same Forbes at sea in 1830, "than a strong gale (right astern, mind) of a clear winter's day - the ship springing for- ward under reefed topsails, and nothing to be seen but the white foamy tops of the waves. There is nothing that elevates the spirits so much as this, it is like riding a fiery horse,he goes at his own speed, but he carries you where you guide." Memories of these halcyon days led the Boston merchants to yachting, after their re- tirement from the sea. Others, like Captain Charles Blake, of the barque Griffin, returned to the ocean after acquiring from her bounty the privilege of leis- ure; trading about the Mediterranean and South Sea for the mere joy of it. Yachting, at best, is a poor imi- tation; yet even a sail in sheltered waters, if the breeze be brisk, gives something of that mental uplift of which Forbes speaks, and the skipper of the smallest sail- boat that boasts a crew is kin to the proudest clipper ship commander.
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A SCENE AT THE NAHANT REGATTA OF 1845
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Apart from the two famous yachts owned by George Crowninshield, Jr., and small undecked pleasure boats, Massachusetts yachting begins in 1832 when Benja- min C. Clark, a Boston Mediterranean merchant who passed his summers at Nahant, purchased the pilot schooner Mermaid. John P. Cushing, just returned from China, then had built for him the sixty-foot pilot schooner Sylph and made his young kinsman Robert Bennet Forbes her sailing master. Her first cruise, with Captains 'Bill' Sturgis and Daniel C. Bacon as guests, was a night run from Boston around the Cape to Wood's Hole, which she made in fourteen hours. Before returning, the Sylph won the first recorded American yacht race, from Vineyard Haven to Tarpaulin Cove, against the schooner yacht Wave, owned by Commodore John C. Stevens, of Ho- boken.
In 1835 R. B. Forbes was elected commodore of the Boat Club, an association of young merchant-ship- owners and gentlemen of leisure, which owned a thirty- ton schooner yacht, the Dream. Three years later, with Daniel C. Bacon and Willaim H. Bordman, Forbes built another schooner, the Breeze, which started her career by racing the Dream from Boston to Marblehead for lunch, and then home; the Breeze flying an empty champagne bottle in lieu of ensign. The following year came a famous ocean race, from Long Island to Halfway Rock off Marblehead and back, between the New York sloop Osceola and Mr. Clark's new thirty-six-foot schooner Raven, which won.
Off Nahant, on July 19, 1845, was held the first open yacht race in Massachusetts. A contemporary painting, here reproduced, gives a scene at this pioneer regatta. From left to right the contestants are the
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Stars and Stripes, a Swampscott fisherman; the sloop Evergreen, owned by an aboriginal Johnson of Na- hant; Mr. Clark's Raven, the schooner Avon (on the port tack), owned by Edward Phillips; the Northern Light; 1 and the schooner Quarantine, owned by the City of Boston. Of these only the Avon and Raven started in the race, but there were nine other contestants not shown in this picture. Wind was steady, from the S.S.E., the hotel was full of guests, the rocks covered with spectators, and a fisherman's dory race (shown in the foreground) furnished additional sport. The course was triangular, around a stake-boat off the Graves, around Egg Rock, and thence to the starting- line off Nahant. The schooner Cygnet, owned by John E. Thayer, a Long Wharf boatman, finished first, but the little Raven came in only four minutes later, and won on a time-allowance.
The fame of this regatta, the boats owned by her summer residents, and a huge new hotel, made Nahant the yachting center of Massachusetts Bay until the Civil War; although some very fast yachts, including the Cygnet, were kept for hire by the Long Wharf boat- men, who took many a party of jolly fellows for a Sun- day cruise down harbor and bay. For many years almost all the yachts were of schooner rig, and differed not from the prevailing type of pilot-boat and clipper fishing schooner; indeed, a pilot-boat was often pur-
1 This schooner yacht (62 feet, 8 inches, by 17 feet by 7 feet, 3 inches, 70 tons), designed by Lewis Winde, a Danish naval architect, settled in Boston, who made a specialty of pilot boats, was built at Boston in 1839 at a cost of $7000, and owned by William P. Winchester, a beef-packer. She was the largest and smartest yacht in Massachusetts waters for many years. Her bends were scraped bright and varnished, she had black topsides with a crimson stripe, and her crew wore red shirts and white trousers. She was lost in the Straits of Magellan in 1850, when on her way to San Francisco.
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chased' for a yacht, or vice versa; and several yachts were sent to Pacific waters to be used as pilot-boats or opium clippers.1. Light sails and outside ballast were unknown. But in 1854 the centerboard sloop James Ingersoll Day, built at Stonington, Connecticut, came around the Cape, beat everything in Massachusetts Bay, and forced the local designers to create a yacht- ing type. Although George Steers, of New York, with his America had the start of them, the Boston yacht designers pulled ahead after the Civil War. Corin- thian yachting is the only maritime activity, save fishing, in which Massachusetts still retains her pre- eminence.
Summer vacations and summer yachting were the privilege of a very few, until after 1870. Almost every Boston boy learned to swim, to pull an oar, and to sail a small spritsail-rigged boat. His education was not complete until he had gotten lost in the fog, and spent the night on an island in Boston harbor. But another half-century passed before the income or the taste of bourgeois and mechanic allowed acquisition of summer camp and catboat.
Bourgeois Boston inhabited the West End, the filled- in Mill Pond land and South Cove, and overflowed to South and East Boston. The proletarian quarters were the Broad Street-Fort Hill section, and the North End, east of Hanover Street. Here were the sailors' boarding-houses and dance-halls, and here lived the longshoremen, truckmen, and Irish laborers. Over half were foreign-born; congestion and the infantile
11 The pilot schooner Fanny (7 feet by 18 feet, II inches, by 7 feet, 2} inches, 82 tons), designed by William Kelly and built by his brother Daniel at East Boston in 1850, made San Francisco ma the Straits of Magellan in 108 days from Boston, and served as pilot-boat to the Golden Gate for twenty-six years.
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death-rate were becoming a public scandal. For Bos- ton had no city water supply until 1848,1 nor until then one scrap of plumbing.
In North Square, the heart of the workers' district, Father Taylor set his net for sinners. This remarkable man was born in Virginia in 1793, went to sea at seven, and sailed the globe for ten years. In 1810, still a foremast hand, a vessel brought him into Boston. Strolling along Tremont Street, he heard the bell toll- ing in the new steeple of Park Street Church, where, to use his own words, he "put in, doffed hat and pennant, scud under bare poles to the corner pew, hove to, and came to anchor." A Methodist preacher completed his conversion. War followed, and Edward T. Taylor experienced privateering and Dartmoor. Returning to Boston, he peddled tinware about the country-side, exhorted sinners in the Old Rock school-house at Saugus, rode the Methodist circuit of eastern Massa- chusetts, and was called by the Boston Port Society to its seamen's chapel. A new Sailors' Bethel was erected for him on North Square in 1833, and for the next thirty-eight years he walked its pulpit like a quarterdeck.
"I have never heard but one essentially perfect orator," wrote Walt Whitman in his "November Boughs." "During my visits to 'the Hub,' in 1859 and '60 I several times saw and heard Father Taylor. In the spring or autumn, quiet Sunday forenoons, I liked to go down early to the quaint ship-cabin-looking church where the old man minister'd - to enter and leisurely scan the building, the low ceiling, everything strongly timber'd (polish'd and rubb'd appar- ently), the dark rich colors, the gallery, all in half-light - and smell the aroma of old wood - to watch the auditors, sailors, mates, 'matlows,' officers, singly or in groups, as they came in - their physi- ognomies, forms, dress, gait, as they walk'd along the aisles -
1 Save a supply piped in hollow pine logs from Jamaica Pond, which reached comparatively few homes.
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their postures, seating themselves in the rude, roomy, undoor'd, uncushioned pews and the evident effect upon them of the place, occasion, and atmosphere ....
"Father Taylor was a moderate-sized man, indeed almost small (reminded me of old Booth, the great actor, and my favorite of those and preceding days), well advanced in years, but alert, with mild blue or gray eyes, and good presence and voice. Soon as he open'd his mouth I ceased to pay any attention to church or audience or pictures or lights and shades; a far more potent charm entirely sway'd me. In the course of the sermon, (there was no sign of any MS., or reading from notes), some of the parts would be in the high- est degree majestic and picturesque. Colloquial in a severe sense, it often lean'd to Biblical and Oriental forms. Especially were all allu- sions to ships and the ocean and sailors' lives, of unrivall'd power and life-likeness. Sometimes there were passages of fine language and composition, even from the purist's point of view. A few arguments, and of the best, but always brief and simple .... In the main, I should say, of any of these discourses, that the old Demosthenean rule and requirement of 'action, action, action,' first in its inward and then (very moderate and restrain'd) its outward sense, was the quality that had leading fulfilment.
"I remember I felt the deepest impression from the old man's prayers, which invariably affected me to tears. Never, on any similar or other occasions, have I heard such impassion'd pleading - such human-harassing reproach (like Hamlet to his mother, in the closet) - such probing to the very depths of that latent conscience and remorse which probably lie somewhere in the background of every life, every soul. For when Father Taylor preach'd or pray'd, the rhetoric and art, the mere words, (which usually play such a big part), seem'd altogether to disappear, and the live feeling advanced upon you and seiz'd you with a power before unknown. Everybody felt this marvellous and awful influence. One young sailor, a Rhode Islander (who came every Sunday, and I got acquainted with, and talked to once or twice as we went away), told me, 'that must be the Holy Ghost we read of in The Testament.' . ..
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