AN Autobiography! What an absurd request! If all the conditions were
favorable, the story of my public Life could not be made interesting.
It does not seem possible that any will care to read so plain and
uneventful a tale. I see nothing in it for boasting, nor much that could
be helpful. Then I never saved a scrap of paper intentionally concerning
my work to which I could refer, not a book, not a sermon, not a lecture,
not a newspaper notice or account, not a magazine article, not one of
the kind biographies written from time to time by noble friends have
I ever kept even as a souvenir, although some of them may be in my
library. I have ever felt that the writers concerning my life were too
generous and that my own work was too hastily done. Hence I have nothing
upon which to base an autobiographical account, except the recollections
which come to an overburdened mind.
My general view of half a century on the lecture platform brings to me
precious and beautiful memories, and fills my soul with devout gratitude
for the blessings and kindnesses which have been given to me so far
beyond my deserts. So much more success has come to my hands than I ever
expected; so much more of good have I found than even youth’s wildest
dream included; so much more effective have been my weakest endeavors
than I ever planned or hoped--that a biography written truthfully would
be mostly an account of what men and women have done for me.
I have lived to see accomplished far more than my highest ambition
included, and have seen the enterprises I have undertaken rush by me,
pushed on by a thousand strong hands until they have left me far behind
them. The realities are like dreams to me. Blessings on the loving
hearts and noble minds who have been so willing to sacrifice for others’
good and to think only of what they could do, and never of what they
should get! Many of them have ascended into the Shining Land, and here I
am in mine age gazing up alone,
_Only waiting till the shadows
Are a little longer grown_.
Fifty years! I was a young man, not yet of age, when I delivered my
first platform lecture. The Civil War of 1861-65 drew on with all its
passions, patriotism, horrors, and fears, and I was studying law at
Yale University. I had from childhood felt that I was “called to the
ministry.” The earliest event of memory is the prayer of my father at
family prayers in the little old cottage in the Hampshire highlands of
the Berkshire Hills, calling on God with a sobbing voice to lead me into
some special service for the Saviour. It filled me with awe, dread,
and fear, and I recoiled from the thought, until I determined to fight
against it with all my power. So I sought for other professions and for
decent excuses for being anything but a preacher.
Yet while I was nervous and timid before the class in declamation and
dreaded to face any kind of an audience, I felt in my soul a strange
impulsion toward public speaking which for years made me miserable. The
war and the public meetings for recruiting soldiers furnished an
outlet for my suppressed sense of duty, and my first lecture was on
the “Lessons of History” as applied to the campaigns against the
Confederacy.
That matchless temperance orator and loving friend, John B. Gough,
introduced me to the little audience in Westfield, Massachusetts, in
1862. What a foolish little school-boy speech it must have been! But
Mr. Gough’s kind words of praise, the bouquets and the applause, made
me feel that somehow the way to public oratory would not be so hard as I
had feared.
From that time I acted on Mr. Gough’s advice and “sought practice” by
accepting almost every invitation I received to speak on any kind of a
subject. There were many sad failures and tears, but it was a restful
compromise with my conscience concerning the ministry, and it pleased
my friends. I addressed picnics, Sunday-schools, patriotic meetings,
funerals, anniversaries, commencements, debates, cattle-shows, and
sewing-circles without partiality and without price. For the first five
years the income was all experience. Then voluntary gifts began to come
occasionally in the shape of a jack-knife, a ham, a book, and the first
cash remuneration was from a farmers’ club, of seventy-five cents toward
the “horse hire.” It was a curious fact that one member of that club
afterward moved to Salt Lake City and was a member of the committee at
the Mormon Tabernacle in 1872 which, when I was a correspondent, on
a journey around the world, employed me to lecture on “Men of the
Mountains” in the Mormon Tabernacle, at a fee of five hundred dollars.
While I was gaining practice in the first years of platform work, I had
the good fortune to have profitable employment as a soldier, or as a
correspondent or lawyer, or as an editor or as a preacher, which enabled
me to pay my own expenses, and it has been seldom in the fifty years
that I have ever taken a fee for my personal use. In the last thirty-six
years I have dedicated solemnly all the lecture income to benevolent
enterprises. If I am antiquated enough for an autobiography, perhaps I
may be aged enough to avoid the criticism of being an egotist, when I
state that some years I delivered one lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” over
two hundred times each year, at an average income of about one hundred
and fifty dollars for each lecture.
It was a remarkable good fortune which came to me as a lecturer when Mr.
James Redpath organized the first lecture bureau ever established. Mr.
Redpath was the biographer of John Brown of Harper’s Ferry renown, and
as Mr. Brown had been long a friend of my father’s I found employment,
while a student on vacation, in selling that life of John Brown. That
acquaintance with Mr. Redpath was maintained until Mr. Redpath’s death.
To General Charles H. Taylor, with whom I was employed for a time as
reporter for the Boston _Daily Traveler_, I was indebted for many acts
of self-sacrificing friendship which soften my soul as I recall them. He
did me the greatest kindness when he suggested my name to Mr. Redpath
as one who could “fill in the vacancies in the smaller towns” where the
“great lights could not always be secured.”
What a glorious galaxy of great names that original list of Redpath
lecturers contained! Henry Ward Beecher, John B. Gough, Senator Charles
Sumner, Theodore Tilton, Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore,
Bayard Taylor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with many of the great preachers,
musicians, and writers of that remarkable era. Even Dr. Holmes, John
Whittier, Henry W. Longfellow, John Lothrop Motley, George William
Curtis, and General Burnside were persuaded to appear one or more times,
although they refused to receive pay. I cannot forget how ashamed I felt
when my name ap-peared in the shadow of such names, and how sure I was
that every acquaintance was ridiculing me behind my back. Mr. Bayard
Taylor, however, wrote me from the _Tribune_ office a kind note saying
that he was glad to see me “on the road to great usefulness.” Governor
Clafflin, of Massachusetts, took the time to send me a note of
congratulation. General Benjamin F. Butler, however, advised me to
“stick to the last” and be a good lawyer.
The work of lecturing was always a task and a duty. I do not feel now
that I ever sought to be an entertainer. I am sure I would have been an
utter failure but for the feeling that I must preach some gospel truth
in my lectures and do at least that much toward that ever-persistent
“call of God.” When I entered the ministry (1879) I had become so
associated with the lecture platform in America and England that I could
not feel justified in abandoning so great a field of usefulness.
The experiences of all our successful lecturers are probably nearly
alike. The way is not always smooth. But the hard roads, the poor
hotels, the late trains, the cold halls, the hot church auditoriums, the
overkindness of hospitable committees, and the broken hours of sleep
are annoyances one soon forgets; and the hosts of intelligent faces,
the messages of thanks, and the effects of the earnings on the lives of
young college men can never cease to be a daily joy. God bless them all.
Often have I been asked if I did not, in fifty years of travel in all
sorts of conveyances, meet with accidents. It is a marvel to me that
no such event ever brought me harm. In a continuous period of over
twenty-seven years I delivered about two lectures in every three days,
yet I did not miss a single engagement. Sometimes I had to hire
a special train, but I reached the town on time, with only a rare
exception, and then I was but a few minutes late. Accidents have
preceded and followed me on trains and boats, and were sometimes in
sight, but I was preserved without injury through all the years. In the
Johnstown flood region I saw a bridge go out behind our train. I was
once on a derelict steamer on the Atlantic for twenty-six days. At
another time a man was killed in the berth of a sleeper I had left half
an hour before. Often have I felt the train leave the track, but no one
was killed. Robbers have several times threatened my life, but all came
out without loss to me. God and man have ever been patient with me.
Yet this period of lecturing has been, after all, a side issue. The
Temple, and its church, in Philadelphia, which, when its membership was
less than three thousand members, for so many years contributed through
its membership over sixty thousand dollars a year for the uplift of
humanity, has made life a continual surprise; while the Samaritan
Hospital’s amazing growth, and the Garretson Hospital’s dispensaries,
have been so continually ministering to the sick and poor, and have done
such skilful work for the tens of thousands who ask for their help each
year, that I have been made happy while away lecturing by the feeling
that each hour and minute they were faithfully doing good. Temple
University, which was founded only twenty-seven years ago, has already
sent out into a higher income and nobler life nearly a hundred thousand
young men and women who could not probably have obtained an education
in any other institution. The faithful, self-sacrificing faculty, now
numbering two hundred and fifty-three professors, have done the
real work. For that I can claim but little credit; and I mention
the University here only to show that my “fifty years on the lecture
platform” has necessarily been a side line of work.
My best-known lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” was a mere accidental
address, at first given before a reunion of my old comrades of the
Forty-sixth Massachusetts Regiment, which served in the Civil War and in
which I was captain. I had no thought of giving the address again, and
even after it began to be called for by lecture committees I did not
dream that I should live to deliver it, as I now have done, almost five
thousand times. “What is the secret of its popularity?” I could never
explain to myself or others. I simply know that I always attempt to
enthuse myself on each occasion with the idea that it is a special
opportunity to do good, and I interest myself in each community and
apply the general principles with local illustrations.
The hand which now holds this pen must in the natural course of events
soon cease to gesture on the platform, and it is a sincere, prayerful
hope that this book will go on into the years doing increasing good for
the aid of my brothers and sisters in the human family.