"I heard that a neighbor three miles off, had borrowed from a still
more distant neighbor, a book of great interest. I started off,
barefoot, in the snow, to obtain the treasure. There were spots of bare
ground, upon which I would stop to warm my feet. And there were also,
along the road, occasional lengths of log fence from which the snow had
melted, and upon which it was a luxury to walk. The book was at home,
and the good people consented, upon my promise that it should be
neither torn nor soiled, to lend it to me. In returning with the prize,
I was too happy to think of the snow on my naked feet."
This little incident, related by Thurlow Weed himself, is a sample of
the means by which he gained that knowledge and power which made him
not only the "Nestor of American Journalists," but rendered him famous
in national affairs as the "American Warwick" or "The King Maker."
There were no long happy years of schooling for this child of the
"common people," whose father was a struggling teamster and farmer; no
prelude of careless, laughing childhood before the stern duties of life
began.
Thurlow Weed was born at Catskill, Greene County, New York, in 1797, a
period in the history of our republic when there were very few
educational opportunities for the children of the poor. "I cannot
ascertain," he says, "how much schooling I got at Catskill, probably
less than a year, certainly not a year and a half, and this was when I
was not more than five or six years old."
At an early age Thurlow learned to bend circumstances to his will and,
ground by poverty, shut in by limitations as he was, even while
contributing by his earning to the slender resources of the family, he
gathered knowledge and pleasure where many would have found but thorns
and bitterness.
How simply he tells his story, as though his hardships and struggles
were of no account, and how clearly the narrative mirrors the brave
little fellow of ten!
"My first employment," he says, "was in sugar making, an occupation to
which I became much attached. I now look with great pleasure upon the
days and nights passed in the sap-bush. The want of shoes (which, as
the snow was deep, was no small privation) was the only drawback upon
my happiness. I used, however, to tie pieces of an old rag carpet
around my feet, and got along pretty well, chopping wood and gathering
up sap."
During this period he traveled, barefoot, to borrow books, wherever
they could be found among the neighboring farmers. With his body in the
sugar house, and his head thrust out of doors, "where the fat pine was
blazing," the young enthusiast devoured with breathless interest a
"History of the French Revolution," and the few other well-worn volumes
which had been loaned him.
Later, after he left the farm, we see the future journalist working
successively as cabin boy and deck hand on a Hudson River steamboat,
and cheerfully sending home the few dollars he earned. While employed
in this capacity, he earned his first "quarter" in New York by carrying
a trunk for one of the passengers from the boat to a hotel on Broad
Street.
But his boyish ambition was to be a journalist, and, after a year of
seafaring life, he found his niche in the office of a small weekly
newspaper, the Lynx, published at Onondaga Hollow, New York.
So, at fourteen, owing to his indomitable will and perseverance, which
conquered the most formidable obstacles, Thurlow Weed started on the
career in which, despite the rugged road he still had to travel, he
built up a noble character and won international fame.