USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume II > Part 16
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Her articles, when published in book form, proved extremely popular. Among her early books were: "Country Living and Coun- try Thinking," 1862; "A New Atmosphere," 1865; "Woman's Wrongs: A Counter-irritant," 1868, in which she maintained the doctrine, which must in her day have been positively revolutionary, and still is not altogether believed by some mothers, that maternity in itself has no moral significance, and also that women should be edu- cated; and "The Battle of the Books," 1870, a vivacious narrative of her experience with her publishers, who, she was convinced, had defrauded her.
In January, 1871, she moved to Washington to stay with her cousin, the wife of James G. Blaine. She was able to meet most of the important politicians of the day, and through her steady stream of articles was herself considerably in the public eye. She was joint editor of "Wood's Household Magazine" from 1872 to 1873; and wrote "Woman's Worth and Worthlessness," 1872; "First Love Is Best," 1877; "Our Common School System," 1880-a plea to pay teachers decently; "A Washington Bible Class," in 1891; a biog- raphy of Blaine in 1895, and "X-rays," in 1896. She was a frequent contributor to the "Atlantic Monthly" and "Harper's Bazaar," and wrote in the "New York Tribune," in 1877, a series of articles advo- cating civil service reform. She died in Hamilton, August 17, 1896.
She was inalterably opposed to woman suffrage, but only because she believed that it was not the best way for women to exert their influence. She spent much of her life battling for the improvement of women's status ; it seemed to her that most women were merely beasts of burden. Intelligent, spirited and sensible, eloquent and persuasive, she scoffed many accepted ideas :
1
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"The nursery has no business to be the mother's chrysalis.
cocoon. If he had, he would have made her a caterpillar. . God never intended her to wind herself up into a
She always wanted to get at the truth that underlies appearances ; she was always suspicious of things "that have the semblance but not the smell of life." Precisely that smell of life was present in all her prose writing.
Had it been present in the short stories and poems of Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford, they might have survived their author. Born in Calais, Maine, April 3, 1835, she was educated at the Putnam Free School in Newburyport and Pinkerton Academy, Derry, New Hampshire. She came into prominence first when her serial, "In a Cellar," was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1859. There- after, she produced novel after novel, and was at the same time a contributor to the "Atlantic Monthly," the "North American Review," "Our Young Folks," "Harper's" and the "Knickerbocker Magazine." In 1865 she was married to Richard S. Spofford, a Boston lawyer, and in 1867 moved to Deer Island, near Newburyport. Her books include : 1859, "Sir Rohan's Ghost"; 1863, "The Amber Gods"; 1864, "Azarian"; 1871, "New England Legends"; 1872, "The Thief in the Night"; 1881, "Poems"; 1882, "Marquis of Carabas" and "Poems"; 1883, "Hester Stanley at St. Mark's"; 1884, "The Servant Girl Question"; 1888, "Ballads About Authors"; 1891, "A Lost Jewel"; 1894, "The Scarlet Poppy"; 1896, "A Master Spirit"; 1897, "In Titian's Garden"; 1898, "Hester Stanley's Friends," "Priscilla's Love Story," and "The Maid He Married"; 1900, "Old Madame and Other Tragedies"; 1906, "Old Washington" and "The Making of a Fortune"; 1920, "The Elder's People." She died in Newburyport, August 15, 1921, at the age of eighty-six .. .
Her early stories have some originality and distinction. "A Scar- let Poppy" is vivacious and neat. Though always conspicuously moral, they are readable, because of Mrs. Spofford's sense of humor and talent for organization. But in later years her work became steadily more informing and uplifting, till "The Elder's People," though set among village people whom she knew, is unconvincing.
None of her simplicity and ease is present in her poems ; she has a fondness for large conventional words and large conventional themes.
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William Winter, critic and editor, was born in Gloucester in 1836 and went to school in Boston and Cambridge. He took his Bachelor of Law degree in Harvard in 1857, when he was admitted to the Boston bar. But he also lectured on literary subjects in Boston, and had two books published : "The Convent and Other Poems," in 1854, and "The Queen's Domain," in 1858.
He decided that he preferred literature to law and in 1859 moved to New York. He became a book reviewer for the "Saturday Press" and, in 1861, assistant editor of the "New York Albion." He married, in Scotland, Elizabeth Campbell. He was literary critic for the "New York Weekly Review," and then from 1865 to 1870, managing editor and dramatic and literary critic of the same paper. In 1865 also he became dramatic critic of the "New York Tribune," a position he still held in 1903.
His other books include: "My Witness" and "The Life of Edwin Booth," 1871; "The Jeffersons," 1881; "English Rambles," 1884; "Henry Irving," 1885; "The Stage Life of Mary Anderson" and "Shakespeare's England," 1886; "Wanderers in Edinburgh," 1888; "Brief Chronicles," 1889-90; "The Life of John Gilbert," "Gray Days and Gold in England and Scotland," "Ada Rehan," and "The Actor," in 1891; "The Life and Art of Joseph Jefferson," 1894; "The Life and Art of Edwin Booth," "Shadows of the Stage," and "Brown Heath and Blue Bells," 1895; and, 1898, "A Wreath of Laurel."
Though he attained eminence in his day, Winter now seems obvious and sententious. It is hard to see how such a pronouncement as this could ever have seemed profound :
"Acting is the presentment of beautiful forms transfused with fire."
Equally thin and ready-made is his poem on Longfellow:
"Wild winds of March, his requiem sing; Weep o'er him, April's sorrowing skies, Till come the tender flowers of spring To deck the pillow where he lies."
"Smug and strident limitedness" is Ludwig Lewisohn's phrase for William Winter.
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LITERATURE IN ESSEX COUNTY
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, a younger contributor to "Our Young Folks" than Lucy Larcom and Mary Abigail Dodge, was born in Boston, August 31, 1844. She moved to Andover, where she attended Mrs. Edwards' Seminary. Her first story came out in the "Youth's Companion" in 1857. She left school in 1863 to do mis- sion work among the factory girls and she became interested in two causes for which she continued to fight till the end of her life-the advancement of women and temperance.
She wrote "Ellen's Idol," 1864; "Up Hill," 1865; "Tiny," 1866; "The Gypsy Series," 1867, and in the same year "Tiny's Sunday Night" and "I Don't Know How"; "Gates Ajar," 1868; "Hedged In" and "Men, Women and Ghosts," 1869, and 1870, "The Silent Partner." She contributed regularly to "Our Young Folks," and also to "Harper's," the "Atlantic Monthly," and "Century Maga- zine." In 1876 she gave a series of lectures on modern fiction at Boston University.
Among her later boks are: "Trotty's Wedding Tour and Story Book," 1873; "Poetic Studies," 1875; "The Story of Avis," 1877; "Sealed Orders," 1879; "Friends : A Duet," 1881; "Doctor Fay," 1882; "Beyond the Gates," 1883; "Songs of the Silent World," 1884; "Old Maids" and "Burglars in Paradise," 1885; "The Madonna of the Tubs," 1886; "The Gates Between," 1887; and "Jack the Fisherman."
She built herself a house in Eastern Point on October 20, 1888. She married Herbert D. Ward, himself a writer, who afterwards collaborated with her in "Come Forth" and "Master of the Magi- cians," in 1890. She wrote, moreover, "Fourteen to One," 1891; "Donald Marcy," 1893; "A Singular Life," 1894; "The Supply at St. Agatha's," 1896; "The Story of Jesus Christ: An Interpreta- tion," 1897; and, in 1909, "The Oath of Allegiance." She died in Newton in 19II.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward's style was simple and readable, but nonetheless well ordered and definite. Among her pleasantest pages are those which deal with her early life in Andover. She had a delightful sense of humor, which she applied even to the things which she regarded with utmost earnestness. Of the popularity of her mystic novel, "Gates Ajar," she said :
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
"There was a 'Gates Ajar' tippet for sale in the country groceries; a 'Gates Ajar' collar; ghastly rumors have reached me of a 'Gates Ajar' cigar."
When she lived on Eastern Point-from which it was her boast that she had shown Norman's Woe for the first time to Longfellow- she crusaded against drink and vice in Gloucester. But there was nothing smug or self-righteous about her crusading, and the people among whom she worked liked her. Her religion, deeply as she felt it, was as little pompous and antagonizing as religion can be. The following poem perhaps best expresses her personality :
"Tired with the little follies of the day, A child crept, sobbing, to your arms to say Her evening prayer; and if by God or you Forgiven and loved, she never asked or knew.
"With life's mistake and care too early old And spent with sorrow upon sorrow told, She finds the father's heart the surest rest- The earliest love shall be the last and best."
From Andover, too, came Arthur Sherburne Hardy, civil engi- neer, mathematician, diplomat, poet and novelist, who was born there August 13, 1847. He went to school in Switzerland; he traveled to Spain some years later on his father's ship, the "Young Turk"; he went to Boston Latin School, Phillips Academy in Andover, and stayed for a year in Amherst. Then he went to West Point, from which he was graduated in June, 1869. He spent some time there as instructor, and then received a post on the Dry Tortugas. This he endured one year; then he resigned from the army. He was profes- sor of civil engineering in Iowa College (now Grinnell College) from 1871 to 1873 ; he studied in Paris and at École des Ponts et Chaussees and the Conservatoire des arts et métiers; he was professor of civil engineering at Dartmouth from 1874 to 1878 and from 1878 to 1893 professor of mathematics. He was a good teacher and in the years between 1881 and 1890 wrote five text books on abstruse scientific subjects.
Meantime, he was also writing books of far wider appeal. In 1878 he wrote a long poem on Francesca da Rimini; in 1883 his
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LITERATURE IN ESSEX COUNTY
first novel, "But Yet a Woman," appeared and met with great suc- cess. It was followed by "The Wind of Destiny," a tragedy, 1886; "Passe Rose," a romance of Charlemagne's time, 1889; "The Life and Letters of Joseph Hardy Neesima," 1891; and from 1893 to 1895 he edited the "Cosmopolitan Magazine."
Then he launched himself on yet another career; Mckinley made him minister to Persia from 1897 to 1899. He was minister to Greece, Roumania, and Servia in 1899 and 1901, to Switzerland in 1901 to 1903, and Spain from 1903 to 1905. Replaced at Madrid, he retired to Woodstock, Connecticut, the home of his wife, Grace Aspinwall Bowen, whom he had married in Athens in 1898, and spent the rest of his life there.
He continued to write novels and poems, but none of them had the success of his earlier work. Among them were: "His Daughter First," 1903; "Aurélie," 1912; "Diane and Her Friends," 1914; "Helen," 1916; "Number 13, rue du bon diable," 1917, and, in 1923, a volume of reminiscences, "Things Remembered."
"But Yet a Woman," which made his reputation, follows a well- known formula, creating a sense of foreign glamour, of worldliness, only to end by the beautiful heroine's getting religion and entering a convent. His style is smooth, readable, and, it must be admitted, cheap :
"A few glasses of champagne; the glitter and perfume of the ball, a clinging fold of lace or the contours of a piece of satin, lustrous and soft as what it covers-what an empire they have !"
His thin and scraggly volume of reminiscences revived no inter- est, and by the time he died, in Woodstock, on March 13, 1930, the world of letters had forgotten him.
George Edward Woodberry, critic and poet, similarly outlived his popularity. He was born in Beverly, May 12, 1855, of a family which had already been in Beverly for two hundred years. He had his schooling in Phillips Academy, Exeter, and Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1877. He became professor of Eng- lish and history at the University of Nebraska in 1877, was a member of the editorial staff of "The Nation" in 1878, and returned to Nebraska from 1880 to 1882. He was literary editor of the "Bos-
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ton Post" in 1888, and professor of comparative literature in Colum- bia from 1891 to 1904. He was very widely known as a critic and poet.
Among his published works are: "The Life of Edgar Allan Poe," 1885; "The North Shore Watch, a Threnody," 1890, and in the same year "Studies in Letters and Life"; in 1892 he edited the complete works of Shelley and the "Essays of Elia"; in 1894, the works of Edgar Allan Poe (with E. C. Stedman) ; in 1895, Aubrey de Vere's "Selected Poems," and in 1898 Tennyson's "Princess"; in 1899 he wrote "National Studies in American Letters," "Heart of Man," and "Wild Eden," and from 1899 to 1903 brought out the "Columbia Studies in Comparative Literature." His other books are : "Makers of Literature," 1900; "Bacon's Essays," 1901; "Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne," 1902; "Collected Poems," 1903; "Sid- ney's Defense of Poesie," 1908; "European Years" and "Letters of an Idle Man," in 1911, and "New Letters of an Idle Man," in 1913; "North Africa and the Desert" and "The Flight and Other Poems," 1914; "The Collected Works of Rupert Brooke," 1916; "Ideal Pas- sion," 1917; "Literary Essays" and the "Roamer and Other Poems," 1920; and "Literary Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century," 1921.
He died in his beloved Beverly, January 2, 1930.
Woodberry was a traditionalist, hating the changes that he saw in the world around him. Walter de la Mare said of him:
"Only on the borderland of our modern 'civilization' was he really at home and in peace. . . . . He was a practiced and punctilious writer, a poet, scholar, critic and observant lover of humanity."
The moral sense of his Puritan forebears was strong within him :
"Life remains in all its conditions an opportunity to know God and exercise the soul in virtue. . . . All well brought up New England boys who are specially intellectual or sensi- tive want to save the world, but the ways of saving it resolve themselves into ways of serving it, and these are thousand- fold."
He loved beauty and poetry, both of which he saw almost personi- fied. He addressed this poem to poetry :
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"Fortune and fame and love be never mine, Since, seeking these, to her I were less dear, Albeit she hides herself in the divine, Always and everywhere I feel her near."
When first he began to write he had considerable reputation as poet and critic. But as his life went on the modern world he despised neglected him; and his poetry which had once seemed lovely, now seemed only sentimental and conventional. Ludwig Lewisohn said of him :
"The substance of his teaching had no relation to the fundamental realities of life and hence none to those of literature."
Yet his prose was simple and readable, without the rhetoric of his verse, and perhaps the present age has been too unkind to him.
Literature in Essex County finds its stronghold in Ipswich in 1935 as it did three hundred years ago. Ferris Greenslet, equally distinguished as the editor of Houghton-Mifflin Company, which has published so many Essex County authors, and as the biographer of Joseph Glanvill, Walter Pater, James Russell Lowell, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, lives there. Near him is Major A. W. Smith, who, like Anne Bradstreet and Nathaniel Ward, has come to Ipswich from England. His books are laid in the far places with which he is familiar; his latest is "A Captain Departed." His wife, Isadore Luce Smith, has contributed to the "Atlantic Monthly." Another neighbor is George Brewer, Jr., whose play, "Dark Victory," ran on Broadway last winter; and still another, Homer White, magazine writer and translator. The late Dr. Charles W. Townsend, distin- guished ornithologist, author of "Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes," and other books about Essex County and its birds, for many years lived near the dunes of Ipswich Beach.
Second only to that of Ipswich is the literary achievement of Ando- ver. Dr. Claude Moore Fuess, since 1933 headmaster of Phillips Academy, is known for his biographies of Caleb Cushing, Rufus Choate, Daniel Webster, and Carl Schurz., and he is at present work- ing on the lives of Calvin Coolidge and the elder Henry Cabot Lodge. Edwin T. Brewster, writer on religion, creation, and vocational guid- ance, whose latest book was "This Puzzling Planet," is his neighbor,
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as is also Edna Adelaide Brown, writer of novels and juveniles, who last wrote "Polly's Shop."
Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," which since its foundation in 1857 has published countless works by Essex County authors, summers in Centerville, in Beverly; and Robert B. Choate, of Danvers, edits the "Boston Herald."
Topsfield boasts two historians who make a specialty of New England, George Francis Dow, whose most recent book was "The Sailing Ships of New England," and J. Duncan Phillips, author of "Salem in the Seventeenth Century."
Cape Ann authors include Allen Chamberlain, historian of Bea- con Hill, who lives in Pigeon Cove, and Warren Hastings Miller, author of books of travel and adventure, in East Gloucester.
Lucien Price, critic of music and plays, and writer of books on general subjects, lives in Nahant. In Danvers is Caroline Atwater Mason, novelist and short story writer; in Rowley, John Harvey Whitson, author of stories of adventure and mystery; and in New- buryport, Dorothea Castlehun, novelist.
And from Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus" to Percy Mac- kaye's "Dogtown Common," Essex County has heard its praises sung by alien poets as well. Among its distinguished summer inhabitants have been: Henry Adams, who for many years summered in Bev- erly Farms, Oliver Wendell Holmes, of "Beverly-by-the-Depot," and Agassiz and N. P. Willis, who loved Nahant.
BIBLIOGRAPHY-"Dictionary of American Biography." "Build- ers of the Bay Colony," Samuel Eliot Morison. "Expression in America," Ludwig Lewisohn.
The Bench and Bar
CHAPTER XVIII
The Bench and Bar
By Robert K. Vietor
The first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them from their native land traditions and principles of law and jus- tice which had been centuries in developing. The heritage of English common law made Essex County, as well as the other sections of the Colony, from the first, a place governed by law designed, if its natu- ral growth can be called design, to secure a remarkable degree of individual justice. The area now included within the bounds of Essex County never suffered from the lack of organized discipline, amount- ing almost to anarchy, which has since made life in many other pioneer regions so hazardous. Where, in the California of 1849, men involved in a dispute over property would have "shot it out," in the earliest settlements of Massachusetts Bay they would have had, and probably would have taken, recourse to the courts of law.
The large number of cases of civil nature taken to court during the fifty or sixty years after the first settlement of Essex County is remarkable, especially when the comparative simplicity of life in those days is considered. In the "Commonwealth History" the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony are branded "a litigious people . . even without lawyers to foment a controversy."1 That the contentious nature of the people of Essex County entitled them to share the reputation of the Colony as a whole, for the first fifty years at least, can easily be seen after a casual perusal of the early court records. The Essex Institute at Salem has collected and pub- lished, in eight large and closely printed volumes, the records of the
I. "The Commonwealth History of Massachusetts," Albert Bushnell Hart, editor, The States History Co., N. Y., 1928, Vol. II, p. 161.
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
Quarterly Courts of Essex County from 1636 to 1683, a study of which indicates both the prevalence of civil suits, and the surprising number of prosecutions for crimes both great and small.
That our Puritan forebears should have fallen into crimes and misdemeanors so frequently at first thought seems odd, since the stern moral and religious tenets which first brought them to this country would appear to make such a contingency unlikely. But the great number of limitations placed upon personal conduct by the Puritan leaders set standards impossible in any community, and hence many people of robust though in no sense criminal nature overstepped the narrow bounds. Then, too, the large class of indentured serv- ants, many of whom came to the Colony to escape the workhouse, the prison, or their creditors, tended to swell the number of offenses. These people, besides being subject to hereditary and environmental defects of mind and character, were denied by the terms of indenture, for several years at least, the settled life customary among the free- men and their families. Where the energies of the freemen were gen- erally absorbed by the management of their own affairs and by early marriage, those of the servants found no such convenient outlet, and hence it is not difficult to understand why they so frequently violated the strict Puritan regulations.
The legal status in which the early settlers found themselves was profoundly affected by the original charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As interpreted by the colonists themselves, the charter was a social compact guaranteeing them against any encroachment on their powers by Crown or Parliament. They considered themselves to have all the rights and privileges of Englishmen, such as the com- mon law safeguards of personal liberty and justice, but asserted the right of self-government in domestic affairs. The attitude of the colonists toward Parliament and toward their charter rights is clearly shown by the General Court's rebuke, in 1646, to a group of petitioners who "did impudently and falsely affirm that we are obliged by those laws (of England) by our general charter and oath of alle- giance."2 The General Court further stated: "Our allegiance binds us not to the laws of England any longer than while we live in Eng- land for the laws of the Parliament of England reach no further."3
2. "The Commonwealth History of Massachusetts," op. cit.
3. Ibid., p. 161.
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THE BENCH AND BAR
The common law of England, which the colonists brought with them and employed in their self government, was the basis for a large part of the permanent legal structure of the colony, and served as a guide for the development of the common law of Massachusetts. The conscious intention to employ English common law in colonial courts of justice is demonstrated by the fact that the General Court, in 1647, ordered the purchase of several standard works on the subject, to be placed at the disposal of the courts." Although the lack of a trained bench and bar in many cases caused justice to be poorly administered, the importation of English common law was responsible for a great deal of good in the early days of the colony.
The Puritan theocracy, as the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony can properly be termed, administered the common law largely as the "Law of God," and made some attempt to incorporate Mosaic law into the legal structure. The Puritan clergy constituted the most learned and powerful class in seventeenth century Massa- chusetts, and, with a few others of wealth, breeding, and education, controlled the development of all phases of life. Governors and judges frequently called upon clergymen for advice in administrative, judicial, and legislative questions. That some of them, at least, were competent to advise on such subjects is indicated by the statement of Rev. Nathaniel Ward, of Ipswich, in his "Simple Cobbler of Aga- wam," that he had read almost all the common law of England. When the need for a code of laws of some kind, as a guide for the magistrates, was felt, Ward was among those delegated, in 1641, to plan such an instrument. The two most favored codes drawn up at this time were those of Rev. John Cotton and Rev. Nathaniel Ward. Cotton's code was based almost exclusively on the law of Moses, while Ward's was mainly a codification of the principles of common law as expounded in the works of Sir Edward Coke, although refer- ences to substantiative points in Mosaic law were made.3 Mr. Ward's able effort was selected, and after some revision was passed by the General Court, not exactly as a law, but with the request that all in
4. "It is agreed by the Court, to the end that we may have better light for making and proceeding about laws, that there shall be these books following procured for the use of the Court from time to time: Two of Sir Edward Coke upon Littleton; two of the Book of Entries; two of Sir Edward Coke upon Magna Charta; two of the New Terms of the Law; two of Dalton's Justice of the Peace; two of Sir Edward Coke's Reports." See Vol. II, p. 159, of "The Commonwealth History of Massachusetts," by Albert Bushnell Hart, the States History Co., N. Y., 1928.
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