USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume II > Part 43
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Andrew Green's public service of nearly half a century began when he was elected a member of the Board of Education in 1856. Two years later he was appointed a commissioner of Central Park, an office created for him, carrying with it the management of the park, then a crude expanse of coun- try land. This was the beginning of the colossal task of planning and laying out the upper end of Manhattan as an orderly undertaking, with full regard to a future which has now been attained. Bridges were built under his direc- tion. Lofty Washington Bridge which spans the Harlem is regarded as a monument to his enterprise and genius. Boulevards were laid out.
In 1871 New York was in the hands of the Tweed Ring, and Andrew Green was elected comptroller. He found the city's finances in a deplorable condition. On his own responsibility he raised half a million dollars from the banks and with it reestablished the credit of New York City. He was an active and belligerent factor in smashing the corrupt group of politicians which had had the great city in its clutches.
In 1890 he was appointed by special act of the Legislature to plan for the North River Bridge. And all the time he was working to the end of a Greater New York. As the project came up for action, bitter opposition developed, before the Legislature and at the polls, in press and pulpit. He was frequently attacked, and his motives questioned. But he won his long fight. Greater New York became a reality in 1898, and a gold medal in honor of its "Father" was struck for the city and presented to him. His work had not ended. He was an influential factor in planning for the New York Zoological Gardens, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of
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Natural History. His death was a great tragedy-shot down by a demented negro, who mistook him for his next-door neighbor, Russell Sage. Green Hill Park in Worcester, comprising the entire estate which was his birthplace and summer home, is yet another monument to his memory.
Edward Everett Hale, Author, Reformer, Eminent Unitarian Divine, Founder of the Lend-a-Hand, Friend of Oppressed Peoples, 1822-1909- Edward Everett Hale was not of a Worcester County family, but, as pastor of the Church of the Unity, he spent ten important years of the formative period of his adult life in Worcester, where he closely identified himself with its people and institutions. He was born in Boston, the son of Nathan Hale, proprietor of the Boston Advertiser, and a founder of the North American Review and the Christian Examiner, and, in strange contrast, builder of the Boston and Worcester Railroad. His mother was a sister of Edward Everett. He entered Harvard College at the age of thirteen, graduated in 1839, and studied theology. His first pastorate was in Worcester, where he settled in 1846. Ten years later he was called to the famous South Church of Boston, where he remained as pastor until 1898. For some years afterwards he was chaplain of the United States Senate.
It was in his decade in Worcester that Dr. Hale became so deeply inter- ested in the cause of anti-slavery and became a militant promoter of the Kansas Crusade. There, too, he became a pioneer champion of an inter- national court to insure world peace, and an advocate of civil service reform. Asked to become a member of the Worcester School Committee, he answered that he would rather serve as an overseer of the poor, and a place was made for him on that board. It is believed that the idea which eventuated as the Lend-a-hand movement took root in his mind while he lived in Worcester. He was a founder of the Worcester Natural History Society and the Worces- ter Free Public Library.
Great fame came to him as an author. The best known of his many stories is The Man without a Country, but others of his literary works are as worthy of the man, and are still read, as they will be for generations to come.
Dr. Russell L. Hawes, Inventor, 1823-1867-Dr. Russell L. Hawes, inventor of the machine which revolutionized the manufacture of envelopes, was a native of Leominster. He graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1845, and practiced his profession for a short time in Worcester. He became interested in the envelope industry, then in its infancy, and con- ceived an idea for a machine which would manufacture envelopes and thus reduce their cost. With this end in view, he entered the employ of Goddard, Rice & Company, manufacturers of paper-making machinery at Worcester.
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Visiting New York he saw the first hand-made envelopes produced in America, and, representing his firm in Europe, he examined an envelope- folding machine in operation. Returning to Worcester, he built a machine embodying his own invention, for which a patent was issued to him in 1853.
Dr. Hawes established an envelope factory, where his one machine came to produce for him from ten thousand to twelve thousand envelopes daily. It was believed that this capacity would never be much improved upon, yet half a century later the self-gumming plunger folding machines were pro- ducing as many envelopes per hour as the Hawes machine produced in a day, and more envelopes were being manufactured in Worcester than in any other city in the world. Out of the Hawes factory evolved the W. H. Hill Envelope Company, now the W. H. Hill Division of the United States Envelope Company.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Soldier, Reformer, Historian, Essay- ist, 1823-1911-Colonel Higginson belongs to Worcester County, not by birth nor by lifelong residence, but because it was his home in the critically formative years of his life. It was in Worcester that he entered upon a dis- tinguished literary career. In this period was born in him the intense zeal in the Anti-Slavery cause that led to his active, enthusiastic leadership in the Kansas Crusade, as an organizer and then as a brigadier-general of the Free Soil forces of the embattled territory. With the outbreak of the Civil War his first enlistment was in a Worcester County regiment, in which he received the training which permitted his selection later as colonel of the 33d United States colored regiment, the first regiment of slaves to be mustered into the United States Army.
Born in Cambridge, educated at Harvard College and Divinity School, he had been pastor of the Congregational Church at Newburyport before com- ing to Worcester in 1852, at the age of twenty-nine. He was called to become pastor of the Free Church, a congregation of advanced religious thinkers, which had no meetinghouse and held its services in public halls.
In his Cheerful Yesterdays Colonel Higginson tells delightfully of his fondness for his adopted city, as follows :
"Worcester was so important to me as a means of development, my con- nection with the Worcester of fifty years ago was so active and varied, and I was connected with so many of its early enterprises, that it has always remained near my heart. My old friend, Dr. Hale, has described the Worces- ter of that period by calling it 'a western settlement in the Heart of Massa- chusetts.' Its business life, its social life and its intellectual life were all springing up together, and I had even before that time just enough childish recollection of it to feel myself not wholly a stranger there. I still remember
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with delight certain drives I took thither in early childhood with my father, Stephen Higginson, whose first wife had been a Salisbury, and who so cher- ished his connection with the old Worcester families that he named my elder brother Waldo, a name transmitted to my daughter. Our visits there were made primarily that he might call on the Misses Waldo, and I might play with their celebrated kittens. My subsequent life there accordingly seemed to connect itself with the old maidenly household, although my reputation for serious radicalism might justly have led the descendants of those kittens sometimes to show their claws.
"The society of Worcester was, at the time I removed there (1852) singularly agreeable. The town was becoming very prosperous and yet retained its simplicity of tone. There was a circle of very cultivated and active-minded people who worked hard and were thrifty, and yet counted wealth as a secondary thing. Even the aristocracy of employment counted for very little. Some of the most cultivated families were employed in mechanical occupations and made their workshops the very centers of wit and humor. There were the traditions of an earlier aristocracy of birth, but it counted for very little because those who represented it readily accepted the prevailing tone. There was a great deal of pleasant outdoor life and indoor intercourse and great public and private activity.
"It seems to me on looking back, that innumerable enterprises were under- taken, and that I had a hand in almost all of them. There was a Free Church, for instance, the first of various organizations of the kind that were started in Massachusetts in the spirit and on the platform of Theodore Parker, who was still under condemnation as a heretic. Then I served on the school com- mittee, helped organize the Public Library and the Natural History Society, was president of a gymnastic club, a cricket club, a skating club and various minor organizations. It is a wonder that I did not belong to a volunteer engine company, such as then existed everywhere, and I was indeed elected an honorary member of 'Tiger Engine Company, No. 6,' and was only pre- vented from accepting the appointment by the fact that the Tigers got into a general fight meanwhile and were disbanded by the city fathers.
"At any rate, when the storm of the Civil War approached, I was found to have popularity enough among the younger generation in Worcester to enlist without difficulty a company in the 5Ist Massachusetts, and afterward I learned, as I have always thought, from that admirable officer, now General A. B. R. Sprague, enough of the rudiments of military life to carry me through two years of actual service without discredit.
"During my absence at the front, my wife removed to Newport, Rhode Island, for her health and I ceased with some regret to be a resident of Worcester.
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"It was during my life in Worcester that my literary career, such as it is, began. It dates back, properly speaking, to a paper in the Atlantic Monthly, March, 1858, entitled, 'Saints and Their Bodies.' After this there followed a number of papers on outdoor life and pursuits, the scene of all of which was laid in the vicinity of Worcester, and which included April Days, Water Lilies, My Outdoor Study, The Procession of the Flowers, The Life of Birds, Gymnastics, and others which were published subsequently under the name of Outdoor Papers in a variety of editions."
George Frisbie Hoar, Statesman, Scholar, Orator, Wit, United States Senator, 1826-1904-George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts was an out- standing figure in American public life through a long period of years which ended soon after the coming of the twentieth century. He achieved distinc- tion in the practice of his profession of the law. He won fame as a states- man and legislator, as a scholar and an orator. Many honors came to him. He served his Worcester district in the National House of Representatives for seven years, and the State of Massachusetts in the United States Senate for twenty-seven years, until his death in 1904. Twice he declined a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. Both President Hayes and President Mckinley urged upon him the distinguished office of Ambassador to England, but as he had no considerable private fortune, in each instance he was compelled to put aside what would have been a most congenial inter- lude in his career, for he had many friendships among English statesmen, judges and scholars. He ranked high in the esteem of great educational and historical institutions, and occupied important places in their counsels. His was a full life. Its usefulness to his country and to his fellowmen could hardly be exaggerated.
Mr. Hoar was born in Concord, in which, and in the neighboring town of Lincoln, were the homes of his forebears. From both the paternal and mater- nal sides of his house his intellectual and moral inheritance was most unusual. His ancestors on the Hoar side from the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were men of action and courage, humane and always in advance of their times, but never so radical as to be parted in sympathy from their con- temporaries. John Hoar, ancestor in direct line, was one of three brothers who came to Massachusetts from Gloucestershire, England, among the early Colonists. He was a friend and co-laborer of John Eliot, apostle of the Indians. It was he who went through the wilderness with only a praying Indian as companion, bearing the ransom for Mary Rowlandson, captive of Lancaster, and braving the horde of defeated and angry Indians at Redemp- tion Rock in Princeton. His brother, Leonard Hoar, was among the first presidents of Harvard College.
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Worcester.
Rural Cemetery Chapel. R.C.S.
ROGERS-KENNEDY MEMORIAL CHAPEL, RURAL CEMETERY, WORCESTER
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On the 19th of April, 1775, the Senator's grandfather and two great- grandfathers, and three of his father's uncles were at Concord Bridge with the Lincoln Company, of which his grandfather was lieutenant.
Senator Hoar's father, Samuel Hoar, was one of the great lawyers of Massachusetts, contemporary of Webster, Choate and Mason. He served in Congress, and Massachusetts chose him to journey to Charleston and protect in the courts of South Carolina colored citizens who were unjustly imprisoned there. But he was not permitted to discharge his mission, but was expelled from Charleston by force.
The Senator's mother was the youngest daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and could remember as a child sitting on the knees of George Washington. Roger Sherman was a very great man, and the only American whose signature is attached to the four great State papers, the Association of 1774, the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States. George Frisbie Hoar illustrated full well the meaning of Emerson's words, when he said: "We are quotations from our ancestors."
These details of the Senator's inheritance are important in placing him as the type of public man, rare in his day, who started life with every advan- tage of family and intellectual environment, and took full advantage of his opportunities. His beginnings were in violent contrast with those of many of his great contemporaries, who achieved success in spite of the absence of all that was given the Massachusetts Senator. He was the cultured scholar, one who, with hardly a doubt, would have won fame even had he not entered upon a political career. He was a lover of the best in literature, both English and classical. He was a wit and master of repartee, in which quota- tions out of the vast store of his memory played no unimportant part. It was characteristic of him that he knew almost by heart his Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress, and liked to draw from them apt words to illustrate his point.
Few of his associates in his long years in House and Senate liked to cross swords with him in forensic retort, for it was not often that he came out sec- ond best in these encounters. His contemporaries at Washington did not have to wait long to learn that a man to be reckoned with had come among them. One day S. S. Cox, "Sunset" as he was known, acknowledged wit of the House, undertook to badger the new member by carping at Massachusetts. Cox turned to the veteran Dawes and bade him come to the defense of the Bay State Commonwealth. "Troy," he declared, "was defended by Hector, yet Troy fell." Quoth Congressman Hoar, "Troy did not need her Hector to repel an attack led by Thersites."
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These incidents for the most part were friendly and kindly. Senator Hoar's nature was not one to enjoy inflicting wounds. Yet, on occasion, a shaft of biting wit administered effectual, even stern rebuke. But his friends in Congress were many, and his enemies, excepting as political foes, were few.
After his school days passed in an environment which in that day could not have been duplicated in America, the young man entered Harvard Col- lege from which he was graduated in 1846. He studied law at the Harvard Law School and in the office of Judge Benjamin Thomas in Worcester. There, following his admission to the bar in 1849 he began practice in Worcester, which remained his home through the rest of a long life. His partnerships were with Judge Emory Washburn, General, afterwards Supreme Court Judge Charles Devens, and J. Henry Hill. He rapidly rose in his profession, and in 1869, after twenty years, his practice was probably the most valuable in the State, west of Middlesex County. It should not be forgotten that his elder brother, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar of Concord, like- wise attained eminence as a lawyer, as Attorney-General of the United States, and judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
The Senator's beginning in politics was in folding and directing the call prepared by his father and brother for the convention which launched the Free Soil party in Massachusetts. His first speech was for that party, deliv- ered at the meeting in Worcester City Hall on the night of its birth. He was made chairman of the Free Soil committee in Worcester County, which was said to have been best organized in all the United States.
The young man, whose personal ambition had been of the most modest character, and for whom his friends had never prophesied a great career, was early in coming to the front. In 1851, at the age of twenty-five, we find him a representative in the General Court, the youngest member of that body. It was manifested that, should he so choose, he might succeed Charles Allen in the National Congress, but he declined to consider the opportunity, realizing that to do so might mean making politics and not law his profession. But he served again in the Massachusetts House and in the Senate. He was an early advocate of women's suffrage, and delivered an address for the cause as early as 1868. His political addresses were many. His public spirit was always in evidence before, as well as after, he began to devote his life chiefly to national affairs.
In 1869, during his absence in England, he was elected as a Republican to Congress and served in the House until 1877, when the Massachusetts Legislature elected him to the Senate. Reëlected four times, he continued to represent Massachusetts in the Upper House until his death.
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His first term in Washington was as a member of the Forty-second Con- gress. He immediately came into public notice as a member of the Commit- tee on Elections. It was he who drew the report in the case of Cesana against Myers, in which many questions of vital importance were discussed and decided. The document has been accepted as authority ever since, and has been cited many times in election cases, not only in America but in England. In this particular case, the report assigned the disputed seat to Myers, the Democrat.
Mr. Hoar's dealings with election cases in this Congress and in the next were recognized by his associates of both parties as judicial and conscientious, and when the charge of undue partisanship was afterwards brought against him, he was defended by Giddings, a Texas Democrat. In the Democratic Forty-fourth Congress, Mr. Hoar wielded a large influence, in spite of the dominance of an unfriendly party. He was one of the managers of the impeachment of Secretary of War Belknap, and it was through his suggestion that the Ead's jetty bill was passed, which opened New Orleans to ocean commerce.
But his most distinguished service in the House of Representatives was that with which it closed-his work for and as a member of the Electoral Commission. He was a member of the committee which prepared the bill establishing the commission, was its advocate in the House, and was chosen by the House a member of it, and as such helped to determine the outcome of the Hayes-Tilden controversy in 1877. In 1873 he was chairman of a spe- cial committee which investigated governmental conditions in Louisiana.
In the Senate his most effective work was done upon measures of a pro- fessional or an administrative character rather than upon more popular polit- ical measures. In his own opinion his most important service to the country was on the committee on claims, where he exercised great influence in deter- mining the doctrines which guided the Senate's action on Civil War claims of individuals, corporate bodies, and states. For more than twenty-five years he served continually on the committee on privileges and elections, and his opinions are cited as authoritative. For twenty years he was a member of the committee on judiciary and during much of the time its chairman. At the request of this committee he waited upon President Mckinley to protest against the practice of appointing Senators upon commissions whose work was later to come before the Senate for approval. In character, in speech, and in bearing he upheld the highest traditions of the Senate, and was the author of two of its rules demanding decorum in debate. His speeches in opposition to the election of Senators by popular vote were among the weightiest arguments on that side of the question. He was the author of the law of 1887 which repealed the portion of the "tenure-of-office" act then in
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force and of the Presidential succession act of 1886, and he had large power in framing bankruptcy and anti-trust legislation.
Moral issues won his prompt and tireless support. In the House he opposed the "salary grab" of 1873 and he turned over every penny which that brought to him to found a scholarship in the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In the Senate he was the chief sponsor for laws to curb lotteries. His contempt for the bigotry of "A. P. A." movement led him, against the advice of his friends, to write a scathing letter which helped bury that move- ment "in the 'cellar' in which it was born."
Reckless of the possible political effect upon his future, he fought most strenuously against the Republican administrators' Philippine policy. Although his stand upon the question was disapproved in Massachusetts, yet so great was the admiration for his sincerity that he was reelected in 1901 by a very large majority.
Senator Hoar played an important part in the counsels of many great institutions. For twelve years he was an overseer of Harvard University. In his home city, he exercised a great influence as a trustee of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Clark University, from their foundations until his death. He served as a regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and as presi- dent of the American Antiquarian Society and the American Historical Association. The degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by Harvard University, William and Mary College, Amherst and Yale.
Senator Hoar's life flowed through the years in two channels. In the one he was the statesman, United States Senator from Massachusetts, pub- licist, one of the greatest powers in the political life of the Nation in all its important phases, and, of course, the lawyer, leader of the bar. In the other he was the scholar who ranked with the elect. And when his influence at Washington or elsewhere could be exerted to further a cause of intellectual advancement, or to bring light and understanding upon matters of history, and particularly of the early history of the American Colonies, he used it indefatigably. A notable example of this was his recovery for the Com- monwealth of Massachusetts of the precious Bradford Manuscript, the His- tory of the Plymouth Colony by William Bradford, its Governor for thirty years following its founding. It had been taken from the archives by the British at the evacuation of Boston.
Shortly after the death of the Senator, Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale, an old and intimate friend, read a paper before the American Antiquarian Society on his literary and historical interests, from which we quote extracts :
"Of these he never lost sight even in the darkest gloom of the great polit- ical questions of half a century. He says himself in a sentence which is pathetic: 'Down to the time when I was admitted to the bar, and, indeed for
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a year later, my dream and highest ambition were to spend my life as what is called an office lawyer, making deeds, and giving advice in small transac- tions. I supposed I was absolutely without capacity for public speaking.'
"So little does a man know himself. So little does a young man forecast his own future. I can remember those days. And I know how sincere this statement of his is. He really thought that he could not speak extemporane- ously, and yet I lived to hear him make some of the most quick retorts which were ever listened to in either House or Congress.
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