USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. II > Part 42
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In his will he says: " I was born in Boston, New England, and owe my first instructions in literature to the free grammar schools established there. I have therefore considered these schools in my will." He left one hundred pounds sterling to the Boston public schools, the interest on which should be spent in silver medals, to be awarded to the best scholars; and ever since the " Franklin medal " has been a favorite object of ambition to the Boston school-boys, more than four thousand of whom have received it.1
In the opening of this chapter, Franklin was characterized as a pre- eminent philosopher, diplomatist, and statesman. This estimate seems to be abundantly proved, even by the rapid array of the salient facts of his life which has now been presented. Franklin was unquestionably great as a philosopher, especially great because his philosophy was above all inventive, practical, various, and fruitful in definite ends and palpable improvements. The American name which ranks nearest to his in the roll of science is that of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford; but no one will urge that name into rivalry with the name of Franklin. His practical inventions, the principal of which have been enumerated, show a breadth, an originality, a many- sidedness, a quickness of scientific perception, to which, combined, Rum- ford could make no claim; and many of those inventions have not since been improved upon. "Franklin," well says Theodore Parker, " had a great understanding, a moderate imagination, and a great reason." The same patience and simplicity of genius which he brought to scientific dis- covery, he also applied with equally unequivocal success to the difficult art of government. He thought upon and arrived at solutions of every problem of this art. His mind, ever practical as well as ceaselessly searching and absorptive, penetrated cause and worked out effect in commerce and trade, in systems of agriculture and finance, in political economy and the structure of politics, in the relations of men to their rulers, and the relations of gov-
1 [See Mr. Everett's address before the As- sociation of the Franklin Medalists, in Speeches, iv. 108. Franklin also provided in his will for a fund, the income of which should be loaned to young Boston mechanics; but the history
of the fund has not shown that its provisions have been of much practical use. Samuel F. McCleary, Esq., the city clerk, published an historical sketch of this fund in 1866. - ED.]
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ernments to liberty. He proposed a union of the colonies; he based the Revolution on eternal principles of feasible and practicable freedom ; he gave concrete form to great theories in the Constitution; even in the ethics of politics he was the most practical and reasonable of reformers.
This same practical, inventive, and keenly perceptive faculty, which was his most distinguishing trait, entered also into that multitude of benevolent schemes in which he engaged with all the ardor of love, even when his time was full to the last hour with public duties. He sought out the material and intellectual needs of the people; and so acute, rather than profound, was the scientific side of his mind, that remedies suggested themselves and schemes developed in his brain forthwith, and were put into immediate operation. His benevolences, too, were broad and catholic in their scope. · They knew no distinction of creed or race or party. They were for all men. They were singularly adapted for universal use and improvement. His love of mankind was not of the impulsive, spasmodic, rhetorical sort. We never find him indulging in dreams of communistic states; he shrinks from rev- olution, and only adopts it when all just means to avert it have become exhausted. He is always equitable, and usually conservative, in his political propositions; looking to that which is feasible rather than to the attainment of perfection of form and principles in an imperfect world. Of all Americans, Franklin was the very genius of common-sense. His aphorisms have always the essence of this trait ; his consummate tact in diplomacy was the outcome of it. He disdained to entertain prejudices; dealt gently with his enemies, as if they might one day become his friends; was, on almost every public occasion of which we read of him, in perfect control of his temper and his emotions.
Franklin's benevolent traits were supplemented by excellent judgment, a very cheerful and hopeful temperament, and a nature affectionate, simple, sincere, and straightforward. His devotion to those whom he loved is seen throughout the volumes of his published correspondence. He delighted, amid the most perplexing duties of statesmanship, to commune with those held dear in his heart. In his moral nature Franklin betrayed, in his early years, lamentable weaknesses, for which he felt keen remorse later in life, speaking often of his youthful "errata" with self-compassionate regret. His conscience awoke long before he had reached middle life; and although his mind never seems to have been sensitively delicate on the subject of morals, the period of his public life was unstained by any blot upon his personal purity. At least, when Franklin perceived the error of his ways he frankly avowed it, and made the whole world his confessional. While cautious and abounding in tact, he was not secretive; above all, not secre- tive in self-judgment, nor sparing in self-condemnation. His harmless vanity, even, was not seldom the subject of his own badinage. He seems never to have been anxious for office, or for public honors; but when they came he was evidently proud of and delighted with them. He had a still nobler pride in well administering them. In making his will he recited in full his
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titles as envoy and as President of Pennsylvania. Franklin seems to have always been singularly free from the passions of envy and of resentment. He rarely retorted sharply to the attacks of his warmest enemies; his hatreds were political hatreds, and did not embitter his heart.
As a writer, Franklin stands, in many qualities, at the head of the Americans of the eighteenth century. His letters are models of a clear, frank, easy, and interesting literary style. They abound in quaint, shrewd maxims and pleasant homilies on conduct; and in narrative are full of piquancy of humor and acuteness of observation. They are in very simple, straightforward, vigorous English. They are almost quite unadorned, however, by any effort of imagination and fancy. He never approaches poetry of thought or expression. He seems almost devoid of imaginative ardor. He rarely read the poets, indeed, and amid all the range of his self- acquired learning we do not find that he had any enthusiastic admiration for English poesy. If he loved Nature, it was in a serene and equable spirit, rather in thankfulness for its comforts than in love of its beauties. Neither in his writings, nor in such few specimens of his oratory as are still extant, do we find any attempts at flights of rhetoric, nor any indulgence in the dangerous rhetorical arts of simile and trope. He is ever bent, alike as a writer and as an actor on the world's stage, upon that which is practical, tangible, material, attainable. When we consider Franklin's writings on public subjects and for the public eye, we marvel at their directness, their force, their supreme fitness to achieve what it was in his mind to achieve. "At twenty years of age," says Theodore Parker, " he wrote as well as Addison or Goldsmith." He had, with infinite pains and patience, drilled himself into the skilful and rapid use of the purest and most forcible ver- nacular. His command of language became easy and complete. His sentences were full of the most virile solidity and strength. They abounded in the utmost fertility of suggestion, the utmost substantiality of reasoning. He could handle the driest topic with such mastery as made it universally interesting. Beneath this carefully-trained style there was the substance of the most sensible, the most well-considered, the most broadly-conceived and developed argument. In many things Franklin anticipated, in his political writings, the enlightened action of later generations. He proposed the abolition of privateering, and the immunity of peaceful trade in time of war, - principles of international comity which are only just now beginning to be fully recognized. He suggested in his writings many of the bases upon which our political fabric now practically rests. Very rarely was it that he ever projected any scheme, political, scientific, or economical, which was visionary or impracticable. His writings are intrinsically sound and strong, and may be read with as much profit now as they were read in his own time.
Franklin, therefore, was emphatically a man of his own era, and of his own country; he lived in complete and most sympathetic harmony with both; he conferred on both a variety of great services, the results of which
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are still enjoyed in politics, in literature, and in science. No Revolutionary patriot laid broader the foundations of his fame, or accumulated more over- whelming titles to the remembrance of mankind. When he died, Europe vied with America in rendering him every honor which tears, eloquence, and poesy could bestow upon his memory ; and perhaps among all the tributes paid to him none interpreted with more expressive brevity the universal feeling than the couplet of the French poet, who hailed him -
" Legislator of one world ! Benefactor of two ! All mankind owes you a debt of gratitude ! "
Chp20. 1. Powley
EDITORIAL NOTE. - The basis of all lives of Franklin is his Autobiography and other writings. In the ten volumes which constitute Franklin's Works, as edited by Sparks, we follow his career and take his measure at first hand. The Auto- biography has had a curious history, which Dr. Samuel A. Green has traced in a little mono- graph. Mr. Everett, in an address on " The Boyhood and Youth of Franklin," which he delivered in Boston in 1829 (Orations and Speeches, ii. 1), adverts to the fact that for many years the text of this Autobiography, as ordinarily printed, was an English translation (of which there were two) from a French version, and the French have been more or less accustomed to even a third re-translation back into their own language. At all events, there are five distinct French renderings of Franklin's text. The original memoir -and it is our principal reli- ance for Franklin's Boston career -was not printed as written by him till 1818, and even then carelessly, omitting some concluding pages, which were first added by the Hon. John Bige- low in his edition of it, perfected with an intro- duction and notes, and issued in Philadelphia in 1868. Since then Mr. Bigelow has published (1874) a more extensive Life of Franklin, Written by Himself, which is a sequence of ex- tracts from his autobiography, letters, and public writings, so arranged as to tell the story of his life in his own words. In his third volume Mr. Bigelow gives a bibliography. The story of Franklin's life has been told, continuing the Autobiography, by Sparks, -the most important, -by Epes Sargent, by H. H. Weld, and by others ; but no Life of considerable extent had
been written, in which the Autobiography as well as the rest of his writings was used as material, till James Parton produced his Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, in 1864, a book which continues to be popular. Of the many essays and addresses upon Franklin, beside those men- tioned in previous notes, it is only necessary here to refer among American contributions to the sharp characterizations by Theodore Parker in his Historic Americans, and the agreeable por- traiture by Henry T. Tuckerman in his Biograph- ical Essays. The English estimates of Franklin have not as a rule been favorable ; and the dis- like of him which sprung up during the political controversies of the Revolution has had more or less to do with shaping subsequent judgments. Lord Jeffrey, for instance, in his Essays, holds that Franklin's success generally arose from the circumstances of the moment ; and a review of Parton's book in the London Quarterly Review gives a low estimate of him. The reader of Lord Brougham's Statesmen of George the Third, however, will remember that observer's very eulogistic account ; and of late Thomas Hughes, in the Contemporary Review, 1879, has done good service in bringing Franklin before the English people in a more favorable light. The French have always been his eulogists, - as witness the laudations of Condorcet, Cabanis, Mignet, and later of Laboulaye, in his Mémoires de Benjamin Franklin, Écrits par lui-même, Traduits de l'Anglais et Annotés, which appeared in Paris in 1866. " No one," says this author, "ever started from a lower point than the poor apprentice of Boston. No one ever. raised himself higher by his own unaided forces than the inventor of the
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
lightning-rod. No one has rendered greater service to his country than the diplomatist who signed the treaty of 1783, and assured the inde- pendence of the United States. Better than the biographies of Plutarch this life, so long and so well filled, is a source of perpetual instruction to all men. Every one can there find counsel and example." In quoting this, Mr. Bigelow adds: "In my judgment there never was a time in the history of our country when the lessons of humility, economy, industry, toleration, charity,
and patriotism, which are made so captivating in this Autobiography, could be studied with more profit by the rising generations of Ameri- cans than now. All the qualities, moral and intellectual, that are requisite -for a successful encounter with portentous responsibilities were singularly united in the character of Franklin ; and nothing in our literature is so well calculated to reproduce them as his own deliberate record of the manner in which he laid the foundation at once of his own and his country's greatness."
CHAPTER IX.
THE MATHER FAMILY, AND ITS INFLUENCE.
BY THE REV. HENRY M. DEXTER, D.D., Editor of " The Congregationalist."
"THE period during which the famous Mather family, in four generations, was actively engaged in that work which is here to be hinted and esti- mated, lacked but two months of one hundred and fifty years. Richard landed in Boston on Monday, Aug. 17-27, 1635, at the age of thirty-nine; his great-grandson Samuel breathed his last in the same town on Monday, June 27, 1785, at the age of seventy-nine. There were eleven of this lineage trained for the sacred office in these four generations, three of whom - two Samuels and one Nathaniel - exercised their ministry in England ; while one - another Nathaniel - died here, on the threshold of the pulpit ; and seven - Richard, Eleazer, Increase, two Samuels, Cotton, and Warham - together expended about two hundred and fifty years (or an average of more than thirty-five years each) of ministerial labor upon New England, besides publishing more than five hundred different works. The four of these six who, as being chief in influence, come now particularly under review, lived and died within the present limits of Boston. Who were these men, and whence came they?
A half-mile north of the half-way point of the railway between Liver- pool and Manchester, England, lies the rural chapelry of Lowton, included in Winwick parish. There, in the last decade of the sixteenth century, was living, in circumstances reduced "by some unhappy mortgages," Thomas, son of John Mather, with a wife named Margaret, representatives of a yeoman family reputed of long residence. To them, in 1596, was born a son whom they called Richard, and for whom, as he began to grow up a likely and clever boy, they strongly desired advantage of special culture. They sent him, therefore, at a still tender age, to the Winwick grammar school, -he walking the southerly four miles, with the return four, daily in summer-time, and they straining their narrow means to board him on the ground during the inclement months. Here, under a rather hard and dis- couraging master, he studied, often despondingly, until his fifteenth year, VOL. II. - 38.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
when, to his surprise, that master commended him to be teacher of a school just founded at Toxteth Park, adjoining Liverpool, on the northern bank of the Mersey. Here, falling under the influence of the family of one Mr. Edward Aspinwall, he was led, at eighteen, to a new purpose of life, which could hardly be much longer content even with that good success in teach- ing now crowning his diligent labors. As soon as he could well manage it, therefore, he matriculated at Brasenose, Oxford. But when he was scarcely more than twenty-two, the people where he had taught so importuned him to come back to them and be their minister, that, leaving the university without a degree, he preached his first sermon at Toxteth Park late in 1618. The Bishop of Chester (Thomas Morton) ordained him, and, as the story goes, was so impressed with the sweet and serious earnestness of his manner as privately to request a special interest in his prayers, for the reason suggested by the Apostle James (v. 16). In September, 1624, he married a godly and prudent maid from Bury, thirty miles to the north- east,- Katharine, daughter of Edmond Holt,-the fruit of the marriage in fifteen years being Samuel, Timothy, Nathaniel, and Joseph. Richard Mather became fully saturated with the earnestness of the Puritan spirit, and, overflowing the bounds of his parish with his labors, used to go eight or ten miles once a fortnight to Prescot to lecture there. Complaint was made of his Non-conformity, ending in a suspension, by friendly interces- sion at that time made brief; but in the following year the Visitors of the new Archbishop of York renewed the ban. It was at this second trial that, in answer to Mather's frank confession that he had preached fifteen years and had never worn a surplice, the famous declaration was made: "What!" - the visitor swearing as he spoke-" preach fifteen years and never wear a surpless! It had been better for him that he had gotten seven bastards." 1
Scenting calamity in the air at home, and able to entertain no reasonable hope of further free speech there, his thoughts, and soon his plans, turned toward New England; and, strengthened in his growing convictions by letters from John Cotton and Thomas Hooker, travelling in (needful) dis- guise to Bristol, he embarked for New England, May 23-June 2, 1635 ; where he and his (storm-tossed) landed, August 17-27 following. Plymouth, Dorchester, and Roxbury at once sought his pulpit service. In doubt of duty, counselling with judicious ministerial friends, he fell in with their advice to "set upon that great work of gathering a church" in Dorchester ; " the church which was first planted in that place being removed with the Reverend Mr. Warham to Conecticot."2 .This was done Aug. 23-Sept. 2, 1636, " when a Church was constituted in Dorchester according to the Order of the Gospel, by Confession and Profession of Faith, and Mr. Mather was chosen Teacher of that Church."3 Here he labored near three-and-thirty years, until his death (April 22-May 2, 1669), at the age of seventy-three, -
1 Life and Death of Mr. Richard Mather (ed. 1850), p. 56. 2 Ibid., p. 74.
8 Ibid., p. 75.
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THE MATHER FAMILY, AND ITS INFLUENCE.
a hard student,1 with much wise thought on church government and other questions, then living ones, which his pen largely aided to shape con- sistently into the New England way; a muscular Christian,2 with "a voice loud and big, and uttered with a deliberate vehemency ;" 3 abundant, zealous, and powerful in the pulpit; a practical man, with an excellent gift of bring- ing abstract principles and other high things down within the range of humble capacity; and therefore discreet, and much sought in counsel,- being, in fact, seized with his mortal illness when presiding over that ecclesiastical body in Boston by the aid of whose result, through much tribulation, the Old South Church was formed. It is quite possible, in the misty distance through which - looking over the heads of his more renowned offspring - we have been wont to observe him, that Richard Mather has scarcely been comprehended by our time as the man he was. His contemporary, old Mr. John Bishop, of Stamford, styled him 4 -
"_ Doctus, Prudens, Pius, Impiger, atque peritus In Sacris, nec non promptus ad omne Bonum."
And it may be doubted if old Mr. John Bishop went in this so far beyond the exactness of the truth as the encomiastic courtliness of the epitaphic verse of the seventeenth century was apt to go.
Of his six sons four followed the profession of their father, chief of whom was the youngest, after the quaint fashion of that day named in recognition " of the great Increase of every sort which God favored the country with about the time of his nativity."5 Entering Harvard at twelve, but on account of his weakly constitution becoming for a time a private pupil of John Norton, he took his first degree in 1656, at seventeen; his Latin oration being in such "Ramæan strains," that President Chauncy would have set him down had not Jonathan Mitchel cried out : 6 " Pergat, quaeso, nam doctissime disputat." On his nineteenth birthday he preached his first sermon " at a village belonging to Dorchester," and twelve days after sailed for the old country; took his M.A. at Trinity College, Dublin, where his eldest brother was minister; preached to the church of the famous John Howe (then chaplain to the Lord Protector) at great Tor- rington, and further at Guernsey, Gloucester, and Weymouth, declining a living of £400 a year because he could not conform; and, the times grow- ing steadily more unfavorable for Dissenters, in 1661, when scarcely more than twenty-two, came home by way of Newfoundland. For three years here he held himself aloof from permanent engagement, desiring to return to England; but at last, -out of "as many [offered] places as there are
1 " Incertum est utrum Doctior an Melior." - Epitaph.
2 " There being few men of so great strength of body as he." - Life, etc., p. 86.
8 Magnalia, iii. 127.
4 Ibid., p. 131.
5 Memoirs, etc. (1725), p. 2. [Increase was born in Dorchester, June 21, 1639, the youngest of the family. His mother died in 1655, and Richard Mather married in 1656, for his second wife, Sarah, widow of John Cotton. - ED.]
6 Parentator, as cited by Sibley, i. 412.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
signs for the sun in the Zodiac,"1- he was ordained, May 27-June 6, 1664, pastor of the Second (usually then called the North) Church of Boston; a relation only severed by his death at the advanced age of eighty-five.2 In 1622 he married Maria, daughter of John Cotton, who bore him three sons and seven daughters. The first child was named after his maternal grandfather, and became the famous man of the family.
A student, whose habit it was to spend sixteen hours a day in his library ; for well-nigh sixty years the acceptable and honored pastor of one of the two most important churches in New England; as a preacher clear, attrac- tive, practical, and forcible, - sometimes rising to " such a Tonitruous Cogency that the Heavens would be struck with an Awe, like what would be Produced on the Fall of Thunderbolts ;"3 as a general Christian laborer so popular, that even in his old age "the Churches would not permit an Ordination to be carried on without him, so long as he was able to Travel in a Coach unto them; "4 for seventeen years of this pastorate also President of Harvard College, until displaced in the first throes of that theological convulsion which was to shake New England; over all its lay- men as well as its ministers the choice of the Massachusetts Colony for its special agent to England when in 1688 there was danger of the sub- version of its liberties, and serving four years in that capacity with distinguished ability; finding time and strength with all these multi- farious labors to issue publications, which -the small with the great - Mr. Sibley estimates to number one hundred and sixty; and, at the end of all, honored " with a greater Funeral than had ever been seen for any Divine in these (and some Travellers at it said, in any other) parts of the World," 5- Increase Mather was, questionless, the greatest, though not the most noted, of his name.
Cotton Mather seems to have inherited his father's and grandfather's precocity, graduating at Cambridge in 1678, when less than fifteen years and six months old, with the prediction which President Oakes, referring to his two eminent grandfathers, had the bad taste to utter in his presence in the Commencement oration, that, in the lad, " Cottonus atque Matherus tam re quam nomine coalescant et reviviscant."6 Teaching for a time, and by diligent labor overcoming an impediment of speech which had threat- ened to disqualify him for the family profession, after acting as his father's assistant for more than two years, he was ordained, May 13-23, 1685, to the (joint) pastorate, -a position vacated only by his death (Feb. 13-24, 1728), at sixty-five, after a service of nearly three-and-forty years.
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