USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume II > Part 14
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53
In 1837 he wrote "Peter Parley's Universe," a hack history, which had a huge circulation, and "Twice Told Tales." For young readers, he wrote, in 1841, "Grandfather's Chair," "Famous Old People," and "The Liberty Tree." In 1842 he published "Biographi- cal Stories for Children," and a second series of "Twice Told Tales."
Meantime, he had fallen in love with Sophia Peabody, and real- izing his need of money, obtained a position at the Boston Custom House as weigher and gauger. He remained there for two years, till 1841; then he resigned, and spent a year in Brook Farm, milking "the transcendentalist cows."
In July, 1842, he left Brook Farm, married, and went to live in Concord. Extremely happy in his marriage, he did not need the companionship of the Concord intellectuals, among whom he seems to have liked only Thoreau. But the need of money again drove him back to find a job in Salem in 1845 as surveyor of the port. In 1846 he published "Mosses from an Old Manse." Dismissed from his post in 1849, he remained for a while in Salem, finishing "The Scarlet Let-
710
THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
ter," which, published in 1850, had instant success. That year the Hawthornes lived in Lenox. 1851 found them in West Newton, where the "House of Seven Gables" was finished, and also the "Snow Image." With the money from these books he was able to buy a house in Concord. There he wrote "The Blithedale Romance, a Wonder Book for Boys and Girls," and "Tanglewood Tales." "The Life of Franklin Pierce," which he wrote out of a sense of obligation to the man whose influence had obtained for him his other positions, brought him the consulate in Liverpool. He stayed in England for seven years, spent one year in Italy, and, in 1860, returned to Con- cord. In that year he published "The Marble Faun"; and, in 1863; "Our Old Home." He died in his sleep when he was on a walking trip with Franklin Pierce, in Plymouth, Vermont, May 18, 1864, at fifty-nine.
Cut off from the world as Hawthorne was in his youth through solitude, in his later years by his devotion to his wife and family, who were all-sufficing to him, his writings seem to take place in a world of dreams. He said himself :
"Indeed, we are but shadows-we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the tiniest substance of a dream-till the heart is touched. That touch creates us.
And that touch his marriage gave him, but its effect was not to bring his writing into the world of superficial reality, but to permit him to understand the depths of the human heart. Beset always with the sense of sin, obsessed with the images of the skeleton behind the fairest face, of the snake in the whitest breast, he could show the conflicts in the hearts of others-the torment of Dimmesdale, the devouring passion for revenge of Chillingworth in the "Scarlet Let- ter," the sense of inescapably evil doom of Miriam in "The Mar- ble Faun," the blasted hopes of Clifford in "The House of Seven Gables." But whether in time or place, he always set his stories so far away from his own life and the lives of his readers that they were not quite moving.
"The Blithedale Romance" is his one contemporary novel, based on his actual experience in Brook Farm. Alone of all of them, it has the observation, the neat characterization, the penetration of fraud,
7II
LITERATURE IN ESSEX COUNTY
and the vigor of the "Notebooks." Scorning the fanatic's "terrible egotism which he mistook for an angel of God," and the typical con- temporary maiden whose "spiritual" appearance he recognizes as resulting from "hereditary dyspepsia," he turns his admiration to Zenobia. She is a woman such as has not often been acknowledged since Augustine identified women, sex and sin :
"We rarely meet with women nowadays, and in this coun- try, who impress us as being women at all-their sex fades away and goes for nothing in ordinary intercourse. Not so with Zenobia. One felt an influence breathing out of her such as we might suppose to come from Eve, when she was just made, and her Creator brought her to Adam, saying, 'Behold ! here is a woman !' Not that I would convey the idea of espe- cial gentleness, grace, modesty, and shyness, but of a certain warm and rich characteristic, which seems, for the most part, to have been refined away out of the female system."
In the middle of the nineteenth century, and coming, as a French critic once exclaimed in wonder, "De Boston, de Salem, de je ne sais quel trou," Hawthorne had at least one conception which was not to be expressed again until the last years of Henry Adams' life.
Two years after the birth of Hawthorne, on November 5, 1805, in nearby Beverly, Wilson Flagg, the essayist and naturalist was born. He was graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1821; he spent a few months in Harvard, and then studied medicine at the Harvard Medical School and also with a Beverly doctor, though he never practiced. He married Caroline Eveleth on January 2, 1840. His life was divided between Beverly, Boston, and Andover. He was for a time an insurance agent in Boston, and then a clerk at the Custom House. He wrote many articles for the "Atlantic Monthly" and for political and nature magazines.
Among his books are "Analysis of Female Beauty," which alter- nates verse and prose; "The Tailor's Shop: or Crowns of Thorns and Coats of Thistles": a series of books on various aspects of nature; "Studies in Field and Forest," 1857; "A Prize Essay on Agricultural Education," 1858; "Mount Auburn," a contemplation of the gloomy and edifying spectacles to be seen in that cemetery, in 1861; "Woods and By-Ways of New England," 1872; and "Birds and Seasons of New England," 1875.
712
THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
He was a popular lecturer and writer, a scientist who observed carefully and took a genuine interest in his subjects. He was aware that his experience was limited :
"My life has been too retired for that sort of personal adventure which inspires enthusiasm. . . I have lived entirely without honors and have never rejected any."
His prose style is rather dull, full of Latinisms and conventional expressions. "The Tailor's Shop," his most ambitious poetical work, a satire in couplets, is fairly skillful, lively, and its malice has occa- sionally a bite to it, but for the most part he is not really witty.
He died in Cambridge, where he had lived the last eighteen years of his life, in 1884.
No greater contrast to the life of Wilson Flagg than the life of William Lloyd Garrison, his contemporary, could well be found, for Garrison's whole history was "that sort of personal adventure which inspires enthusiasm." He was born in Newburyport, Decem- ber 10, 1805. His father deserted his family, and the boy had a hard childhood and very little schooling. At thirteen he was appren- ticed to Ephraim W. Allen, the editor of the "Newburyport Herald"; he worked for him for seven years as a printer, and occasionally con- tributed articles to the paper.
In 1826 he became editor of the "Free Press." It was then that, receiving the earliest poems of Whittier, he sought out the author, and made a lifelong friend. Two years later, when the "Free Press" failed, Garrison went to Boston as a journeyman printer, and there assisted N. H. White in editing "The National Philanthropist," a paper dedicated to the suppression of "intemperance and its kindred vices." A crusader from the first, Garrison also attacked many other venial pleasures, including war, lotteries, and Sabbath-breaking. It was then, too, that he began to be interested in the slavery question ; and on the Fourth of July, 1829, he made his first public address against slavery, in Park Street Church, to which his stern and burning eloquence must have seemed familiar.
He went to Baltimore and worked with Benjamin Lundy on the "Genius of Universal Emancipation." A fanatic, and a dreamer, he rejected the idea of compromise; he demanded instant and complete emancipation. So violent were his articles that one of them sent him
713
LITERATURE IN ESSEX COUNTY
to jail for libel. Freed by a friend's intercession, he toured the East making speeches; then he founded "The Liberator," "in a small chamber, friendless and unseen." He and his partner, Isaac Knapp, had almost no money between them; and though "The Liberator" was one of the most important influences of the time, its editors-who were also its printers-found themselves constantly facing a deficit which the revenues from the circulation of 3,000 did not meet.
Denounced in the South, bitterly hated in most of the North, Gar- rison never quailed. Rather he delighted in the struggle; he smelled the battle far off, the thunder of the cannons and the shouting. It is hard today to realize how very great a battle it was, even in the free states; how much vituperation, and even physical violence, the abolitionist incurred in those days. Till the battle was won, Gar- rison was always in the thick of it; almost the symbol of the cause, as the State of Georgia recognized when it offered $5,000 for his arrest as an inciter of the slaves.
In 1832 he worked on the constitution for the New England Anti- slavery Society, of which he soon became corresponding secretary. That same year he published his "Thoughts on African Coloniza- tion," opposing the scheme of restoring the slaves to Africa. His trip to England, in 1833, was his opportunity to meet English sympa- thizers with his cause. In December he met with 50,000 other dele- gates to form the American Anti-slavery Society. The principles it propounded were obviously those of Garrison; he was never a believer in force or, indeed, in legislation -- he voted only once in his lifetime- but in moral principles; and the society declared that it rejected the "use of carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage," preferring the "potency of truth."
In September, 1834, he married Helen Eliza Benson and settled in Roxbury in a house called "Freedom's Cottage." They had seven children. When the following year Garrison's friend, the English abolitionist, George Thompson, came to attend a meeting of the Bos- ton Female Anti-slavery Society, a mob of "gentlemen of property and standing" stormed the hall with the intention of tarring and feathering him. He escaped, but the mob consoled itself with drag- ging Garrison through the streets with a rope around his neck until the mayor rescued him.
Nevertheless, slavery was growing increasingly unpopular. But the American Anti-slavery Society was no longer united behind Gar-
714
THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
rison ; a whole group felt that more practical measures than his would be necessary for success. It was only by packing the house that Gar- rison managed to wrest the presidency of the society from James G. Birney, who headed the new faction.
Not content with his slavery activities, Garrison was always tak- ing up other causes; when, in 1840, he attended the world slavery convention in London, he refused to take his seat because female dele- gates were excluded; the condition of women, capital punishment and intemperance were all evils against which he warred.
Under his influence the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, in 1843, declared for secession for the North if slavery continued; and dismissed the Constitution as "a covenant with death and an agree- ment with hell." Under his influence, too, but against the wish of many members, the American Anti-slavery Society also called for disunion.
His "Sonnets and Poems" came out in 1843; in 1846 he went to England again; and in 1847, with Frederick Douglass, he went on a lecture tour all through the country speaking against union.
By 1850, however, the tide of anti-slavery sentiment was strong: yet Garrison stood alone. He disapproved heartily of all measures of compromise; to him Webster's seventh of March speech was "infa- mous." On the Fourth of July, 1854, he burned the Constitution in Framingham, crying: "So perish all compromises with tyranny."
But he still urged a peaceful separation of the states, and when secession came, in 1860, he welcomed it. When the war was over he moved that the Anti-slavery Society dissolve, and when they refused, feeling that they still had to win the vote for the negro, he rejected the presidency. In December, 1865, he published the last number of "The Liberator."
For the rest of his life, venerated where he had been vilified, he went on fighting for other causes. He was given an ovation in Eng- land in 1867; in 1868, $30,000 was raised by admirers as a testimonial fund for him. On the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of his apprenticeship, he set type for three sonnets of his in the "Newbury- port Herald." He died in New York, May 24, 1879.
In his later years Mary Abigail Dodge saw him as
"a bland old man with a shining white head, a few sidelocks brushed smoothly down by his ears, a conservative, solid man
715
LITERATURE IN ESSEX COUNTY
of Boston looking person, with not the smallest evil design against the existing order."
Wendell Phillips, his successor as president of the Anti-slavery Society, declared :
"I never saw him unhappy. I never saw the moment that serene abounding faith in the rectitude of his motive, the soundness of his method, and the certainty of success did not lift him above all possibility of being reached by any clamor about him."
"He did the work of a man of iron in an iron age" [said Thomas Wentworth Higginson]. "His reason marched like an army without banners. His invective was scathing, but it was almost always scriptural. It did not carry an impli- cation of personal anger, but simply seemed like a newly dis- covered chapter of Ezekiel."
And Lincoln himself said :
"I have been only an instrument. The logic and moral power of Garrison and the anti-slavery people of the country and the army have done all."
Only slightly younger than Garrison, and one of his staunchest allies in his great cause, was John Greenleaf Whittier, Essex County's most famous poet. Born in Haverhill, December 17, 1807, the son of a poor farmer, he had by the age of seventeen so overworked him- self that he was thereafter never very strong. During his childhood he had little schooling and few books; but when he was thirteen his teacher lent him Burns' poems, which at once stimulated him to write. His first poems appeared in the "Newburyport Free Press" in 1826, where, as we have seen, they attracted the attention of the editor, William Lloyd Garrison, scarcely older than himself.
Encouraged by his praise, Whittier earned the money to go to the Haverhill Academy in 1827 and 1828, while he taught at the dis- trict school in West Amesbury. He continued to contribute to various newspapers. From December, 1828, till August, 1829, he was editor of the "American Manufacturer" of Boston, a journal devoted to the interests of Henry Clay. He managed his father's farm through his
716
THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
last illness, meantime editing the "Haverhill Gazette" for the first six months of 1830. Thereafter he was, till 1832, editor of the "New England Review" of Hartford, Connecticut.
His "Legends of New England," in prose and verse, had appeared in 1831. In 1832 he returned to Haverhill and devoted himself to politics. A great admirer of Garrison, he threw his talents into Gar- rison's service, and until abolition was won, constantly wrote prose and verse in its behalf. "Justice and Expediency," his first anti- slavery pamphlet, appeared in 1833; he was a delegate to the anti- slavery convention in Philadelphia in December, 1833; correspond- ing secretary of the Haverhill Anti-slavery Society in 1834 ; he repre- sented Haverhill in the General Court in 1835, and was for a time in 1836 editor of the "Haverhill Gazette" once more. He became editor of the "National Enquirer" of Philadelphia, an anti-slavery paper, until 1840, when his health failed and he retired.
Meantime, in 1837, his "Poems Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States" came out, and the next year a second volume was published by the Anti-slavery Society of Pennsylvania. He was a founder of the Liberty party and even ran for Representative on their ticket in 1842. By now, too, he had some- what broken with Garrison's policies; he was in favor of political action rather than moral suasion.
In 1843 he published "Lays of My Home"; for the next two years he was editor of the "Middlesex Standard" (later the "Essex Transcript"), the voice of the Liberty party. He was a delegate to the Liberty convention in Washington in 1845. His position as cor- responding editor of "The National Era," from 1847 to 1860, gave him his first financial security. "Ichabod," his only really good politi- cal poem, occasioned by Webster's seventh of March speech, appeared in 1850, and caused a great sensation with its round denunciation :
"Of all we loved and honoured, naught Save power remains ; A fallen angel's pride of thought, Still strong in chains."
He was a presidential elector on Lincoln's ticket in 1865, and vice- president of a meeting called at Faneuil Hall, in June, 1865, to make plans for Reconstruction.
717
LITERATURE IN ESSEX COUNTY
His other published works are "Moll Pitcher," 1832; "Mogg Megone," 1836; "Miscellaneous Poems," 1844; "The Stranger in Lowell," 1845; "Voices of Freedom," 1846; "The Supernaturalism of New England," 1847: "Poems" and "Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal," 1849; "Poetical Works," 1850; and also "Poems of Labor" and "Old Portraits and Modern Sketches"; "The Chapel of the Hermits" and other poems, 1853; "Literary Recollections and Miscellanies," 1854; "The Panorama," 1856; "Poetical Works" and "The Sycamores," 1847; "Home Ballads, Poems and Lyrics," 1860; "Snowbound," 1866, and in the same year, "Prose Works"; "Maud Muller" and "Nature Lyrics," 1867; "Ballads of New Eng- land" and "Two Letters on the Present Aspect of the Society of Friends," 1870; "Miriam," 1871; "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim." 1872; "Mabel Martin," 1874; "Hazel Blossoms," 1875; "The Vision of Echard," 1878; "The River-path," 1880; "The King's Mission," 1881; "The Bay of Seven Islands," 1883; "Poems of Nature" and "Saint Gregory's Guest and Recent Poems," 1886; and "At Sundown," 1892.
He also edited: "The Literary Remains of John G. C. Brain- erd," 1832; "Views of Slavery and Emancipation," by Harriet Mar- tineau, and "Letters from John Quincy Adams to His Constituents," 1837; "The North Star, the Poetry of Freedom by Her Friends," 1840; "A Visit to the United States in 1841," by Joseph Sturge. 1841 : "The Patience of Hope," by Dora Greenwell, 1863; "The Journal of John Woolman," 1872; "Child Life in Prose," with Lucy Larcom. 1874, and, also with her, the anthology "Songs of Three Centuries," 1876; "The Letters of Lydia Maria Child," 1883, and "American Literature and Other Papers," by E. P. Whipple.
He died in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, September 7, 1892.
Mary Abigail Dodge said of him: "He is the king of men, and what is the good of talking?" Throughout the whole latter part of his life, he awakened in his friends this sort of reverence, in spite of his extreme modesty and Quaker gentleness.
Because of the singsong measures of much of his poetry, because a great deal of it was written to forward the cause of abolition rather than to express a genuine poetic idea, and because of his moralizing, he is for most people today only a dreary name in the history of our literature. But a close and unprejudiced examination of his work
718
THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
shows that though most of it indeed deserves oblivion, there are still many poems which are worth remembering. As Ludwig Lewisohn said :
"About Whittier there is something clear and authentic, something of brooks and trees rather than of horse-hair furni- ture and anti-macassars."
He had a clear idea of his own limitations :
"Nor mine the seer-like power to show The secrets of the heart and mind; To drop the plummet-line below Our common world of joy and woe, A more intense despair or brighter hope to find.
"Yet here at least an earnest sense Of human right and weal is shown; A hate of tyranny intense And hearty in its vehemence
As if my brother's pain and sorrow were my own."
In "The Eternal Goodness," too, every word is felt, and the effect is poetry :
"I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air ; I only know I cannot drift Beyond his love and care."
"Snowbound" succeeds at moments in recapturing precisely the feeling of the New England winter, while "Among the Hills" shows Whittier to have been capable of neatness, wit, and dangerously clear perception :
"Church-goers, fearful of the unseen Powers, But grumbling over pulpit-tax and pew-rent, Saving, as shrewd economists, their souls And winter pork with the least possible outlay Of salt and sanctity."
Probably he could never have been a great poet; but if his fluency had not been encouraged by the necessity of writing constantly, because of his poverty and because of his devotion to the anti-slavery
719
LITERATURE IN ESSEX COUNTY
movement, and, even more, if he had not lived in an age of poetic homilies, he might more often have written really good poems.
Apart from the political turmoil of his day was Cornelius Conway Felton, intent on the study of the classics. He was born November 6, 1807, in West Newbury, of an old Essex County family. Tutored by Simeon Putnam, in North Andover, he was graduated from Har- vard in 1827. Since he was very poor, he taught while he was still a student. After his graduation he taught in several schools and then, in 1829, was recalled to Harvard as a tutor of Latin. The next year he was appointed tutor of Greek; two years after that, professor of Greek, and in 1834 Eliot professor of Greek, a chair which he filled for twenty-six years. In 1838 he married Mary Whitney; she died in 1845, and in 1846 he married Mary Louise Carey.
He edited many classical texts and made selections from Greek writers for school book use. He delivered four courses of Lowell lectures, in 1852, 1853, 1854, and again in 1859, which were pub- lished after his death under the name "Greece: Ancient and Mod- ern," in 1867. In 1866 were published his "Familiar Letters from Europe." Besides his scholarship, he was very interested in adminis- trative matters. He was appointed, in 1849, the first regent of Harvard-an office roughly corresponding to that of dean, and so successful was he in his dealings that in 1860 he was made president. But his health failed under the strain and he died on February 26, 1862.
His academic precepts were sound and sensible; he believed in a thorough grounding in the language itself, and then a study of the people who spoke the language. Though he advocated the teaching of more science, yet knowledge of the classics was for him always the essential. A thorough scholar, it was through his teaching rather than through his writing that he was able to exert his influence; for his style was so dull and lifeless, so chastened, as he would have said, by study of the classical models, as to have no vigor of its own.
No similar lack of vigor was present in the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose "Uncle Tom's Cabin" made the English-speak- ing world weep. She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on the four- teenth of June, 1811. Daughter of Reverend Lyman Beecher, sister of Henry Ward Beecher, she came of an unusually gifted family. She herself was precocious : at twelve she wrote a paper called "Can Immortality of the Soul Be Proved by the Light of Nature?"
720
THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
The story of her life, written by her son, Calvin E. Stowe, and her grandson, Lyman Beecher Stowe, says :
"No Jewish maiden ever grew up with a more earnest faith that she belonged to a consecrated race, a people spe- cially called and chosen of God for some great work on earth."
She was educated first in Litchfield and then in Hartford, at the school at which her sister, Catherine, was teaching and at which she later taught.
In 1832 Catherine and Harriet and their father went out to Cin- cinnati-an experience which was to have a profound effect on Har- riet. For while she was there she was able to see the evils of slavery in Kentucky; she watched rioting mobs; she had friends who were concerned in the Underground Railway; and she talked with liberated slaves who told her their stories. Henceforth, slavery was for her not a theoretical problem, but a hideous condition which must at all costs be changed.
She was married in 1836 to the Reverend Calvin E. Stowe, who taught in the seminary in Cincinnati. While they were still there, she wrote "The Mayflower," her first attempt to portray slavery. In 1850 the Stowes moved to Brunswick, Maine, for a short time, and then settled down for fourteen years in Andover.
When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, Mrs. Stowe was horrified. She saw that the people of the free states did not under- stand how very great an evil slavery was; to show them, she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Serialized first in the "National Era," it was published in 1852. "It was the kindling of a mighty conflagration." Abolition, which not so far in the past had been a bugbear, became in the free states a cause for which all right thinking people must work. It was received with equal seriousness in the South, where it was denounced from every pulpit. Within a year 300,000 copies were sold in the United States alone. But there was also a tremendous popularity in England, the fruits of which she tasted when, in 1853, she visited England and was received by all the great of the land. Her "Sunny Memories of England" was published the next year.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.