CONCORD AND ITS FAMOUS PEOPLE.
The Thoreau family was but newly planted in Concord, to which it
was alien both by the father's and the mother's side. But this wise
town adopts readily the children of other communities that claim its
privileges,--and to Henry Thoreau these came by birth. Of all the men
of letters that have given Concord a name throughout the world, he is
almost the only one who was born there. Emerson was born in Boston,
Alcott in Connecticut, Hawthorne in Salem, Channing in Boston, Louisa
Alcott in Germantown, and others elsewhere; but Thoreau was native
to the soil. And since his genius has been shaped and guided by the
personal traits of those among whom he lived, as well as by the hand
of God and by the intuitive impulses of his own spirit, it is proper
to see what the men of Concord have really been. It is from them we
must judge the character of the town and its civilization, not from
those exceptional, imported persons--cultivated men and women,--who
may be regarded as at the head of society, and yet may have no
representative quality at all. It is not by the few that a New England
town is to be judged, but by the many. Yet there were a Few and a Many
in Concord, between whom certain distinctions could be drawn, in the
face of that general equality which the institutions of New England
compel. Life in our new country had not yet been reduced to the ranks
of modern civilization--so orderly outward, so full of mutiny within.
It is mentioned by Tacitus, in his life of Agricola, that this noble
Roman lived as a child in Marseilles; "a place," he adds, "of Grecian
culture and provincial frugality, mingled and well blended." I have
thought this felicitous phrase of Tacitus most apposite for Concord
as I have known it since 1854, and as Thoreau must have found it from
1830 onward. Its people lived then and since with little display,
while learning was held in high regard; and the "plain living and high
thinking," which Wordsworth declared were gone from England, have
never been absent from this New England town. It has always been a
town of much social equality, and yet of great social and spiritual
contrasts. Most of its inhabitants have lived in a plain way for the
two centuries and a half that it has been inhabited; but at all times
some of them have had important connections with the great world of
politics, affairs, and literature. Rev. Peter Bulkeley, the founder
and first minister of the town, was a near kinsman of Oliver St. John,
Cromwell's solicitor-general, of the same noble English family that,
a generation or two later, produced Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke,
the brilliant, unscrupulous friend of Pope and Swift. Another of the
Concord ministers, Rev. John Whiting, was descended, through his
grandmother, Elizabeth St. John, wife of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of
Lynn, from this same old English family, which, in its long pedigree,
counted for ancestors the Norman Conqueror of England and some of his
turbulent posterity. He was, says the epitaph over him in the village
burying-ground, "a gentleman of singular hospitality and generosity,
who never detracted from the character of any man, and was a universal
lover of mankind." In this character some representative gentleman of
Concord has stood in every generation since the first settlement of
the little town.
The Munroes of Lexington and Concord are descended from a Scotch
soldier of Charles II.'s army, captured by Cromwell at the battle
of Worcester in 1651, and allowed to go into exile in America.
His powerful kinsman, General George Munro, who commanded for
Charles at the battle of Worcester, was, at the Restoration, made
commander-in-chief for Scotland.
Robert Cumming, father of Dr. John Cumming, a celebrated Concord
physician, was one of the followers of the first Pretender in 1715,
and when the Scotch rebellion of that year failed, Cumming, with some
of his friends, fled to New England, and settled in Concord and the
neighboring town of Stow.
Duncan Ingraham, a retired sea-captain, who had enriched himself
in the Surinam trade, long lived in Concord, before and after the
Revolution, and one of his grandchildren was Captain Marryatt, the
English novelist; another was the American naval captain, Ingraham,
who brought away Martin Kosta, a Hungarian refugee, from the clutches
of the Austrian government. While Duncan Ingraham was living in
Concord, a hundred years ago, a lad from that town, Joseph Perry,
who had gone to sea with Paul Jones, became a high naval officer in
the service of Catharine of Russia, and wrote to Dr. Ripley from the
Crimea in 1786 to inquire what had become of his parents in Concord,
whom he had not seen or heard from for many years. The stepson
of Duncan Ingraham, Tilly Merrick, of Concord, who graduated at
Cambridge in 1773, made the acquaintance of Sir Archibald Campbell,
when captured in Boston Harbor, that Scotch officer having visited
at the house of Mrs. Ingraham, Merrick's mother, while a prisoner in
Concord Jail. A few years later Merrick was himself captured twice on
his way to and from Holland and France, whither he went as secretary
or attaché to our commissioner, John Adams. The first time he was
taken to London; the second time to Halifax, where, as it happened,
Sir Archibald was then in command as Governor of Nova Scotia. Young
Merrick went presently to the governor's quarters, but was refused
admission by the sentinel,--while parleying with whom, Sir Archibald
heard the conversation, and came forward. He at once recognized his
Concord friend, greeted him cordially with "How do you do, my little
rebel?" and after taking good care of him, in remembrance of his
own experience in Concord, procured Merrick's exchange for one of
Burgoyne's officers, captured at Saratoga. Returning to America after
the war, Tilly Merrick went into an extensive business at Charleston,
S. C., with the son of Duncan Ingraham for a partner, and there became
the owner of large plantations, worked by slaves, which he afterwards
lost through reverses in business. Coming back to Concord in 1798,
with the remnants of his South Carolina fortune, and inheriting his
mother's Concord estate, he married a lady of the Minott family, and
became a country store-keeper in his native town. His daughter, Mrs.
Brooks, was for many years the leader of the antislavery party in
Concord, and a close friend of the Thoreaus, who at one time lived
next door to her hospitable house.
Soon after Mr. Emerson fixed his home in Concord, in 1834, a new bond
of connection between the town and the great world outside this happy
valley began to appear,--the genius of that man whose like has not
been seen in America, nor in the whole world in our century:--
"A large and generous man, who, on our moors,
Built up his thought (though with an Indian tongue,
And fittest to have sung at Persian feasts),
Yet dwelt among us as the sage he was,--
Sage of his days,--patient and proudly true;
Whose word was worth the world, whose heart was pure.
Oh, such a heart was his! no gate or bar;
The poorest wretch that ever passed his door
Welcome as highest king or fairest friend."
This genius, in one point of view so solitary, but in another so
universal and social, soon made itself felt as an attractive force,
and Concord became a place of pilgrimage, as it has remained for
so many years since. When Theodore Parker left Divinity Hall, at
Cambridge, in 1836, and began to preach in Unitarian pulpits, he fixed
his hopes on Concord as a parish, chiefly because Emerson was living
there. It is said that he might have been called as a colleague for
Dr. Ripley, if it had not been thought his sermons were too learned
for the Christians of the Nine-Acre Corner and other outlying hamlets
of the town. In 1835-36 Mr. Alcott began to visit Mr. Emerson in
Concord, and in 1840 he went there to live. Margaret Fuller and
Elizabeth Peabody, coadjutors of Mr. Alcott in his Boston school,
had already found their way to Concord, where Margaret at intervals
resided, or came and went in her sibylline way. Ellery Channing, one
of the nephews of Dr. Channing, the divine, took his bride, a sister
of Margaret Fuller, to Concord in 1843; and Hawthorne removed thither,
upon his marriage with Miss Peabody's sister Sophia, in 1842. After
noticing what went on about him for a few years, in his seclusion at
the Old Manse, Hawthorne thus described the attraction of Concord, in
1845:
"It was necessary to go but a little way beyond my
threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men
than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit
of a thousand miles. These hobgoblins of flesh and blood
were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence
of a great original thinker, who had his earthly abode
at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted
upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful
magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to
speak with him face to face. Young visionaries, to whom
just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life
all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clew that
should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment.
Gray-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had
finally imprisoned them in an iron framework, traveled
painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to
invite the free spirit into their own thralldom. People
that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that they
fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering
gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and
value."
The picture here painted still continued to be true until long after
the death of Thoreau; and the attraction was increased at times by the
presence in the village of Hawthorne himself, of Alcott, and of others
who made Concord their home or their haunt. Thoreau also was resorted
to by pilgrims, who came sometimes from long distances and at long
intervals, to see and talk with him.
There was in the village, too, a consular man, for many years the
first citizen of Concord,--Samuel Hoar,--who made himself known abroad
by sheer force of character and "plain heroic magnitude of mind." It
was of him that Emerson said, at his death in November, 1856,--
"He was a man in whom so rare a spirit of justice visibly
dwelt that if one had met him in a cabin or in a forest
he must still seem a public man, answering as sovereign
state to sovereign state; and might easily suggest Milton's
picture of John Bradshaw, that he 'was a consul from whom
the fasces did not depart with the year, but in private
seemed ever sitting in judgment on kings.' He returned from
courts or congresses to sit down with unaltered humility,
in the church or in the town-house, on the plain wooden
bench, where Honor came and sat down beside him."
In his house and in a few others along the elm-planted street, you
might meet at any time other persons of distinction, beauty, or
wit,--such as now and then glance through the shining halls of cities,
and, in great centres of the world's civilization, like London or
Paris, muster
"In solemn troops and sweet societies,"
which are the ideal of poets and fair women, and the envy of all who
aspire to social eminence. Thoreau knew the worth of this luxury, too,
though, as a friend said of him, "a story from a fisher or hunter was
better to him than an evening of triviality in shining parlors, where
he was misunderstood."
There were not many such parlors in Concord, but there was and had
constantly been in the town a learned and social element, such as
gathers in an old New England village of some wealth and inherited
culture. At the head of this circle--which fell off on one side
into something like fashion and mere amusement, on another into the
activity of trade or politics, and rose, among the women especially,
into art and literature and religion--stood, in Thoreau's boyhood and
youth, a grave figure, yet with something droll about him,--the parish
minister and county Nestor, Dr. Ezra Ripley, who lived and died in the
"Old Manse."
Dr. Ripley was born in 1751, in Woodstock, Conn., the same town in
which Dr. Abiel Holmes, the father of the poet Holmes, was born. He
entered Harvard College in 1772, came with the students to Concord
in 1775, when the college buildings at Cambridge were occupied by
Washington and his army, besieging Boston, and graduated in 1776.
Among his classmates were Governor Gore, Samuel Sewall, the second
chief-justice of Massachusetts of that name, and Royal Tyler, the
witty chief-justice of Vermont. Governor Gore used to say that in
college he was called "Holy Ripley," from his devout character. He
settled in Concord in 1778, and at the age of twenty-nine married the
widow of his last predecessor, Rev. William Emerson (and the daughter
of his next predecessor, Rev. Daniel Bliss), who was at their marriage
ten years older than her husband, and had a family of five children.
Dr. Ripley's own children were three in number: the Reverend Samuel
Ripley, born May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss Ripley, born August 1, 1784;
and Miss Sarah Ripley, born August 8, 1789. When this daughter died,
not long after her mother, in 1826, breaking, says Mr. Emerson, "the
last tie of blood which bound me and my brothers to his house," Dr.
Ripley said to Mr. Emerson, "I wish you and your brothers to come to
this house as you have always done. You will not like to be excluded;
I shall not like to be neglected." He died himself in September, 1841.
Of Dr. Ripley countless anecdotes are told in his parish, and he was
the best remembered person, except Thoreau himself, who had died in
Concord, till Emerson; just as his house, described so finely by
Hawthorne in his "Mosses," is still the best known house in Concord.
It was for a time the home of Mr. Emerson, and there, it is said, he
wrote his first book, "Nature," concerning which, when it came out
anonymously, the question was asked, "Who is the author of 'Nature'?"
The reply was, of course, "God and Ralph Waldo Emerson." The Old Manse
was built about 1766 for Mr. Emerson's grandfather, then minister
of the parish, and into it he brought his bride, Miss Phebe Bliss
(daughter of Rev. Daniel Bliss, of Concord, and Phebe Walker, of
Connecticut). Miss Mary Emerson, youngest child of this marriage, used
to say "she was in arms at the battle of Concord," because her mother
held her up, then two years old, to see the soldiers from her window;
and from his study window her father saw the fight at the bridge. It
was the scene of many of the anecdotes, told of Dr. Ripley, some of
which, gathered from various sources, may here be given; it was also,
after his death, one of the resorts of Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller,
of Ellery Channing, of Dr. Hedge, and of the Transcendentalists in
general. His parishioners to this day associate Dr. Ripley's form
"with whatever was grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted,
uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four iron-gray
deacons in their little box under the pulpit; with Watts's hymns;
with long prayers, rich with the diction of ages; and, not less, with
the report like musketry from the movable seats."[1] One of these
"iron-gray deacons," Francis Jarvis, used to visit the Old Manse with
his children on Sunday evenings, and his son, Dr. Edward Jarvis, thus
describes another side of Dr. Ripley's pastoral character:--
"Among the very pleasant things connected with the Sabbaths
in the Jarvis family were the visits to Dr. Ripley in the
evening. The doctor had usually a small levee of such
friends as were disposed to call. Deacon Jarvis was fond
of going there, and generally took with him one of the
children and his wife, when she was able. There were at
these levees many of the most intelligent and agreeable men
of the town,--Mr. Samuel Hoar, Mr. Nathan Brooks, Mr. John
Keyes, Deacon Brown, Mr. Pritchard, Major Burr, etc. These
were extremely pleasant gatherings. The little boys sat
and listened, and remembered the cheerful and instructive
conversation. There were discussions of religion and
morals, of politics and philosophy, the affairs of the
town, the news of the day, the religious and social gossip,
pleasant anecdotes and witty tales. All were in their best
humor. Deacon Jarvis [adds his son], did not go to these
levees every Sunday night, though he would have been glad
to do so, had he been less distrustful. When his children,
who had no such scruples, asked him to go and take them
with him, he said he feared that Dr. Ripley would not like
to see him so frequently."
According to Mr. Emerson, Dr. Ripley was "a natural gentleman; no
dandy, but courtly, hospitable, and public spirited; his house open
to all men." An old farmer who used to travel thitherward from Maine,
where Dr. Ripley had a brother settled in the ministry, used to say
that "no horse from the Eastern country would go by the doctor's
gate." It was one of the listeners at his Sunday evening levees, no
doubt, who said (at the time when Dr. Ripley was preparing for his
first and last journey to Baltimore and Washington, in the presidency
of the younger Adams) "that a man who could tell a story so well was
company for kings and for John Quincy Adams."
When P. M., after his release from the State Prison, had the
effrontery to call on Dr. Ripley, as an old acquaintance, as they
were talking together on general matters, his young colleague, Rev.
Mr. Frost, came in. The doctor presently said, "Mr. M., my brother
and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with me. I regret very
much the causes (very well known to you), which make it impossible
for me to ask you to stay and break bread with us." Mr. Emerson, his
grandson (by Dr. Ripley's marriage with the widow of Rev. William
Emerson) relates that he once went to a funeral with Dr. Ripley, and
heard him address the mourners. As they approached the farm-house the
old minister said that the eldest son, who was now to succeed the
deceased father of a family in his place as a Concord yeoman, was in
some danger of becoming intemperate. In his remarks to this son, he
presently said,--
"Sir, I condole with you. I knew your great-grandfather;
when I came to this town, in 1778, he was a substantial
farmer in this very place, a member of the church, and an
excellent citizen. Your grandfather followed him, and was
a virtuous man. Now your father is to be carried to his
grave, full of labors and virtues. There is none of that
old family left but you, and it rests with you to bear up
the good name and usefulness of your ancestors. If _you_
fail--Ichabod!--the glory is departed. Let us pray."
He took Mr. Emerson about with him in his chaise when a boy, and in
passing each house he would tell the story of its family, dwelling
especially on the nine church-members who had made a division in the
church in the time of his predecessor; every one of the nine having
come to bad fortune or a bad end. "The late Dr. Gardiner," says Mr.
Emerson, "in a funeral sermon on some parishioner, whose virtues did
not readily come to mind, honestly said, 'He was good at fires.' Dr.
Ripley had many virtues, and yet, even in his old age, if the firebell
was rung, he was instantly on horseback, with his buckets and bag." He
had even some willingness, perhaps not equal to the zeal of the Hindoo
saint, to extinguish the Orthodox fires of hell, which had long blazed
in New England,--so that men might worship God with less fear. But
he had small sympathy with the Transcendentalists when they began to
appear in Concord. When Mr. Emerson took his friend Mr. Alcott to see
the old doctor, he gave him warning that his brilliant young kinsman
was not quite sound in the faith, and bore testimony in particular
against a sect of his own naming, called "Egomites" (from _ego_ and
_mitto_), who "sent themselves" on the Lord's errands without any due
call thereto. Dr. Channing viewed the "apostles of the newness" with
more favor, and could pardon something to the spirit of liberty which
was strong in them. The occasional correspondence between the Concord
shepherd of his people and the great Unitarian preacher is full of
interest. In February, 1839, when he was eighty-eight years old and
weighed down with infirmities, he could still lift up his voice in
testimony. He then wrote to Dr. Channing:--
"Broken down with the infirmities of age, and subject to
fits that deprive me of reason and the use of my limbs, I
feel it a duty to be patient and submissive to the will of
God, who is too wise to err, and too good to injure. My
mind labors and is oppressed, viewing the present state
of Christianity, and the various speculations, opinions,
and practices of the passing period. Extremes appear to be
sought and loved, and their novelty gains attention. You,
sir, appear to retain and act upon the sentiment of the
Latin phrase,--
"'Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines.'
"The learned and estimable Norton appears to me to have
weakened his hold on public opinion and confidence by his
petulance or pride, his want of candor and charity."
Six years earlier, Dr. Channing had written to Dr. Ripley almost as if
replying to some compliment like this, and expressed himself thus, in
a letter dated January 22, 1833,--
"I thank God for the testimony which you have borne to
the usefulness of my writings. Such approbation from one
whom I so much venerate, and who understands so well the
wants and signs of the times, is very encouraging to me.
If I have done anything towards manifesting Christianity
in its simple majesty and mild glory I rejoice, and I am
happy to have contributed anything towards the satisfaction
of your last years. It would gratify many, and would do
good, if, in the quiet of your advanced age, you would look
back on the eventful period through which you have passed,
and would leave behind you, or give now, a record of the
changes you have witnessed, and especially of the progress
of liberal inquiry and rational views in religion."[2]
Dr. Ripley's prayers were precise and undoubting in their appeal for
present providences. He prayed for rain and against the lightning,
"that it may not lick up our spirits;" he blessed the Lord for
exemption from sickness and insanity,--"that we have not been tossed
to and fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a
terror to ourselves and to others." One memorable occasion, in the
later years of his pastorate, when he had consented to take a young
colleague, is often remembered in his parish, now fifty years after
its date. The town was suffering from drought, and the farmers from
Barrett's Mill, Bateman's Pond, and the Nine-Acre Corner had asked
the minister to pray for rain. Mr. Goodwin (the father of Professor
Goodwin, of Harvard University) had omitted to do this in his morning
service, and at the noon intermission Dr. Ripley was reminded of the
emergency by the afflicted farmers. He told them courteously that Mr.
Goodwin's garden lay on the river, and perhaps he had not noticed how
parched the uplands were; but he entered the pulpit that afternoon
with an air of resolution and command. Mr. Goodwin, as usual, offered
to relieve the doctor of the duty of leading in prayer, but the old
shepherd, as Mr. Emerson says, "rejected his offer with some humor,
and with an air that said to all the congregation, 'This is no time
for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious; I
will pray myself.'" He did so, and with unusual fervor demanded rain
for the languishing corn and the dry grass of the field. As the story
goes, the afternoon opened fair and hot, but before the dwellers in
Nine-Acre Corner and the North Quarter reached their homes a pouring
shower rewarded the gray-haired suppliant, and reminded Concord that
the righteous are not forsaken. Another of Mr. Emerson's anecdotes
bears on this point:--
"One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield, helping
him, with his man, to rake up his hay, I well remember his
pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky, when the
thunder-gust was coming up to spoil his hay. He raked very
fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, 'We are in the
Lord's hand,--mind your rake, George! we are in the Lord's
hand;' and seemed to say, 'You know me; this field is
mine,--Dr. Ripley's, thine own servant.'"
In his later years Dr. Ripley was much distressed by a schism in his
church, which drew off to a Trinitarian congregation several of his
oldest friends and parishioners. Among the younger members who thus
seceded, seventy years ago, were the maiden aunts of Thoreau, Jane and
Maria,--the last of whom, and the last of the name in America, has
died recently, as already mentioned. Thoreau seceded later, but not
to the "Orthodox" church,--as much against the wish of Dr. Ripley,
however, as if he had. In later years, Thoreau's church (of the
Sunday Walkers) was recognized in the village gossip; so that when I
first spent Sunday in Concord, and asked my landlord what churches
there were, he replied, "The Unitarian, the Orthodox, and the Walden
Pond Association." To the latter he professed to belong, and said
its services consisted in walking on Sunday in the Walden woods. Dr.
Ripley would have viewed such rites with horror, but they have now
become common. His Old Manse, which from 1842 to 1846 was occupied
by Hawthorne, was for twenty years (1847-1867) the home of Mrs.
Sarah Ripley, that sweet and learned lady, and has since been the
dwelling-place of her children, the grandchildren of Dr. Ripley. Near
by stands now the statue of the Concord Minute-Man of 1775, marking
the spot to which the Middlesex farmers came
"In sloven dress and broken rank,"
and where they stood when in unconscious heroism they
"Fired the shot heard round the world,"
and drove back the invading visitor from their doorsteps and
cornfields.
Dr. Ripley, however, seldom repelled a visitor or an invader, unless
he came from too recent an experience in the state prison, or offered
to "break out" his path on a Sunday, when he had fancied himself
too much snow-bound to go forth to his pulpit. The anecdote is
characteristic, if not wholly authentic. One Sunday, after a severe
snow-storm, his neighbor, the great farmer on Ponkawtassett Hill, half
a mile to the northward of the Old Manse, turned out his ox-teams and
all his men and neighbors to break a path to the meeting-house and
the tavern. Wallowing through the drifts, they had got as far as Dr.
Ripley's gate, while the good parson, snugly blocked in by a drift
completely filling his avenue of ash-trees, thought of nothing less
than of going out to preach that day. The long team of oxen, with much
shouting and stammering from the red-faced farmer, was turned out of
the road and headed up the avenue, when Dr. Ripley, coming to his
parsonage door, and commanding silence, began to berate Captain B.
for breaking the Sabbath and the roads at one stroke,--implying, if
not asserting, that he did it to save time and oxen for his Monday's
work. Angered at the ingratitude of his minister, the stammering
farmer turned the ten yoke of cattle round in the doctor's garden, and
drove on to the village, leaving the parson to shovel himself out and
get to meeting the best way he could. Meanwhile, the teamsters sat in
the warm bar-room at the tavern, and cheered themselves with punch,
flip, grog, and toddy, instead of going to hear Dr. Ripley hold forth;
and when he had returned to his parsonage they paraded their oxen
and sleds back again, past his gate, with much more shouting than at
first. This led to a long quarrel between minister and parishioner,
in course of which, one day, as the doctor halted his chaise in
front of the farmer's house on the hill, the stammering captain came
forward, a peck measure in his hand, with which he had been giving his
oxen their meal, and began to renew the unutterable grievance. Waxing
warm, as the doctor admonished him afresh, he smote with his wooden
measure on the shafts of the chaise, until his gentle wife, rushing
forth, called on the neighbors to stop the fight which she fancied was
going on between the charioteer of the Lord and the foot-soldier.
Despite these outbursts, and his habitual way of looking at all things
"from the parochial point of view," as Emerson said of him, he was
also a courteous and liberal-minded man, as the best anecdotes of
him constantly prove. He was the sovereign of his people, managing
the church, the schools, the society meetings, and, for a time,
the Lyceum, as he thought fit. The lecturers, as well as the young
candidates for school-keeping--Theodore Parker, Edward Everett, and
the rest--addressed themselves to him, and when he met Webster, then
the great man of Massachusetts, it was on equal terms.
Daniel Webster was never a lyceum lecturer in Concord, and he did not
often try cases there, but was sometimes consulted in causes of some
pecuniary magnitude. When Humphrey Barrett died (whose management of
his nephew's estate will be mentioned in the next chapter), his heir
by will (a young man without property, until he should inherit the
large estate bequeathed him), found it necessary to employ counsel
against the heirs-at-law, who sought to break the will. His attorney
went to Mr. Webster in Boston and related the facts, adding that his
client could not then pay a large fee, but might, if the cause were
gained, as Mr. Webster thought it would be. "You may give me one
hundred dollars as a retainer," said Webster, "and tell the young man,
from me, that when I win his case I shall send him a bill that will
make his hair stand on end." It so happened, however, that Webster was
sent to the Senate, and the case was won by his partner.
In the summer of 1843, while Thoreau was living at Staten Island,
Webster visited Concord to try an important case in the county court,
which then held sessions there. This was the "Wyman Trial," long
famous in local traditions, Webster and Choate being both engaged in
the case, and along with them Mr. Franklin Dexter and Mr. Rockwood
Hoar, the latter a young lawyer, who had been practicing in the
Middlesex courts for a few years, where his father, Mr. Samuel Hoar,
was the leader of the bar. Judge Allen (Charles Allen of Worcester)
held the court, and the eminent array of counsel just named was for
the defense.
The occasion was a brilliant one, and made a great and lasting
sensation in the village. Mr. Webster and his friends were entertained
at the houses of the chief men of Concord, and the villagers crowded
the court-house to hear the arguments and the colloquies between the
counsel and the court. Webster was suffering from his usual summer
annoyance, the "hay catarrh," or "rose cold," which he humorously
described afterward in a letter to a friend in Concord:--
"You know enough of my miserable catarrh. Its history,
since I left your hospitable roof, is not worth noting.
There would be nothing found in it, either of the sublime
or the beautiful; nothing fit for elegant description or a
touch of sentiment. Not that it has not been a great thing
in its way; for I think the _sneezing_ it has occasioned
has been truly transcendental. A fellow-sufferer from the
same affliction, who lived in Cohasset, was asked, the
other day, what in the world he took for it? His reply
was that he 'took eight handkerchiefs a day.' And this,
I believe, is the approved mode of treatment; though the
_doses_ here mentioned are too few for severe cases.
Suffice it to say, my dear lady, that either from a change
of air, or the progress of the season, or, what is more
probable, from the natural progress of the disease itself,
I am much better than when I left Concord, and I propose to
return to Boston to-day, feeling, or hoping, that I may now
be struck off the list of invalids."
Notwithstanding this affliction, Mr. Webster made himself agreeable
to the ladies of Concord, old and young, and even the little girls,
like Louisa Alcott, went to the courthouse to see and hear him. He
was present at a large tea-party given by Mrs. R. W. Emerson in
his honor, and he renewed his old acquaintance with the Dunbars and
Thoreaus. Mr. Emerson, writing to Thoreau September 8, 1843, said,
briefly, "You will have heard of our 'Wyman Trial,' and the stir it
made in the village. But the Cliff and Walden, which know something of
the railroad, knew nothing of that; not a leaf nodded; not a pebble
fell;--why should I speak of it to you?" Thoreau was indeed interested
in it, and in the striking personality of Webster. To his mother he
wrote from Staten Island (August 29, 1843):--
"I should have liked to see Daniel Webster walking about
Concord; I suppose the town shook, every step he took.
But I trust there were some sturdy Concordians who were
not tumbled down by the jar, but represented still the
upright town. Where was George Minott? he would not have
gone far to see him. Uncle Charles should have been
there;--he might as well have been catching cat-naps in
Concord as anywhere. And, then, what a whetter-up of his
memory this event would have been! You'd have had all the
classmates again in alphabetical order reversed,--'and
Seth Hunt and Bob Smith--and he was a student of my
father's--and where's Put now? and I wonder--you--if
Henry's been to see George Jones yet? A little account
with Stow--Balcolm--Bigelow--poor, miserable t-o-a-d
(sound asleep). I vow--you--what noise was that? saving
grace--and few there be. That's clear as preaching--Easter
Brooks--morally depraved--how charming is divine
philosophy--somewise and some otherwise--Heighho! (Sound
asleep again.) Webster's a smart fellow--bears his age
well. How old should you think he was? you--does he look as
if he were two years younger than I?'"
This uncle was Charles Dunbar, of course, who was in fact two years
older than Webster, and, like him, a New Hampshire man. He and his
sisters--the mother and the aunt of Henry Thoreau--had known Webster
in his youth, when he was a poor young lawyer in New Hampshire; and
the acquaintance was kept up from time to time as the years brought
them together. Whenever Webster passed a day in Concord, as he did
nearly every year from 1843 to 1850, he would either call on Miss
Dunbar, or she would meet him at tea in the house of Mr. Cheney,
a college classmate of Mr. Emerson, whom he usually visited; and
whose garden was a lovely plot, ornamented with great elm trees,
on the bank of the Musketaquid. Mrs. Thoreau was often included in
these friendly visits; and it was of this family, as well as of the
Emersons, Hoars, and Brookses, no doubt, that Webster was thinking
when he sadly wrote to Mrs. Cheney his last letter, less than a year
before his death in 1852. In this note, dated at Washington, November
1, 1851, when he was Secretary of State under Fillmore, Mr. Webster
said:--
"I have very much wished to see you all, and in the
early part of October seriously contemplated going to
Concord for a day. But I was hindered by circumstances,
and partly deterred also by changes which have taken
place. My valued friend, Mr. Phinney (of Lexington), is
not living; and many of those whom I so highly esteemed,
in your beautiful and quiet village, have become a good
deal estranged, to my great grief, by abolitionism,
free-soilism, transcendentalism, and other notions, which I
cannot (but) regard as so many vagaries of the imagination.
These former warm friends would have no pleasure, of
course, in intercourse with one of old-fashioned opinions.
Nevertheless, dear Mrs. Cheney, if I live to see another
summer, I will make a visit to your house, and talk about
former times and former things."
He never came; for in June, 1852, the Whig convention at Baltimore
rejected his name as a Presidential candidate, and he went home to
Marshfield to die. The tone of sadness in this note was due, in part,
perhaps, to the eloquent denunciation of Webster by Mr. Emerson in
a speech at Cambridge in 1851, and to the unequivocal aversion with
which Webster's contemporary, the first citizen of Concord, Samuel
Hoar, spoke of his 7th of March speech, and the whole policy with
which Webster had identified himself in those dreary last years of his
life. Mr. Hoar had been sent by his State in 1846 to protest in South
Carolina against the unconstitutional imprisonment at Charleston of
colored seamen from Massachusetts; and he had been driven by force
from the State to which he went as an envoy. But, although Webster
knew the gross indignity of the act, and introduced into his written
speech in March, 1850, a denunciation of it, he did not speak this out
in the Senate, nor did it appear in all the authorized editions of
the speech. He could hardly expect Mr. Hoar to welcome him in Concord
after he had uttered his willingness to return fugitive slaves, but
forgot to claim reparation for so shameful an affront to Massachusetts
as the Concord Cato had endured.
Mr. Webster was attached to Concord--as most persons are who have ever
spent pleasant days there--and used to compliment his friend on his
house and garden by the river side. Looking out upon his great trees
from the dining-room window, he once said: "I am in the terrestrial
paradise, and I will prove it to you by this. America is the finest
continent on the globe, the United States the finest country in
America, Massachusetts the best State in the Union, Concord the best
town in Massachusetts, and my friend Cheney's field the best acre in
Concord." This was an opinion so like that often expressed by Henry
Thoreau, that one is struck by it. Indeed, the devotion of Thoreau
to his native town was so marked as to provoke opposition. "Henry
talks about Nature," said Madam Hoar (the mother of Senator Hoar, and
daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut), "just as if she'd been born
and brought up in Concord."