"It is impracticable for the President and the Cabinet to leave the
capital to attend the funeral.
"The President of the United States and the heads of departments tender
to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts their condolence on the lamented
death of Edward Everett, who was worthy to be enrolled among the noblest
of the nation's benefactors."
Why do you call that man a private citizen, to whom every officer in the
Nation, in the Commonwealth, and in the City, unites in paying homage?
Why do you select the leading man in every class of service to be
present to represent you at his open grave?
The true answer to these questions, and the true explanation of the
universal feeling expressed in public and in private when he died, are
not found without reference to some traits of moral constitution, to
which it is well, I believe, to call attention now. To those traits of
character,--as shown through life,--rather than to specific gifts of
intellectual power, is Mr. Everett's singularly varied success to be
ascribed. You may say, if you please, that it requires a very rare
mental genius and even very rare physical endowment to carry out the
behests of such resolution as I am to describe. This, of course, is
true. But unless you have the moral determination which compels your
vivid mind to plan, and your well-built machine to work for you, you get
no such life. The secret--if it is to be called such--of this wonderful
life, is the determination to do the special thing which at the moment
is to be done. Mr. Everett was no admirer of Carlyle. But long before
Carlyle began to tell men "to do the thing that came next them," Mr.
Everett had been doing it, with a steady confidence that he could do it.
Now the things that come next men in America are very various. That is
the reason why he has been doing very various things. That is the reason
why President and Cabinet, Navy and Army, University, Bench, and
Academy, City and Commonwealth, meet, by their first representatives, at
his grave, in recognition of specific service of the most eminent
character which he has rendered to each of them, and which it would be a
shame for them to fail to own.
In a little sketch of his college life, which he once sent me, there is
an estimate--made at the age of sixty-one--of his own standing when he
was a Sophomore, in comparison with some of his classmates. Some of
those he names have passed on before him; two of them remain with us, to
be honored always for the fruits of that scholarship which he observed
so young. I think there can be nothing wrong in publishing a
recollection, which, by accident, gives a hint as to the method of his
own after-life to which I have alluded.
"I was considered, I believe, as taking rank among the few best scholars
of the [Sophomore] class, although there was no branch in which I was
not equalled--and in several I was excelled--by some of my classmates,
except perhaps Metaphysics. Thus, I was surpassed by Cooper in Latin,
but he was wholly deficient in Mathematics, and regarded with pity, not
altogether unmixed with contempt, all who had a taste for that study.
Story, a brother of Mr. Justice Story, excelled me in Greek, but he
neglected everything else, and seemed to get at the Greek rather by
intuition than study. Fuller, Gray, and Hunt were my superiors in
Mathematics; but in other studies I was the rival of Fuller, and Hunt
made no pretensions to general scholarship;--for the branch in which he
excelled he had a decided genius. Gilman was a more practised writer
than I; so was Damon; and Frothingham greatly excelled me in speaking,
and was in everything a highly accomplished scholar. If I had any strong
point, it was that _of neglecting no branch_ and _doing about equally
well in all_."
He had occasion enough to show in all life that it is a very strong
point, this "of neglecting no branch, and doing equally well in all."
And in his estimates of other men, I think,--though he was more
charitable in his judgments than any man I have ever known,--he always
had latent the feeling that men could do almost anything they really
resolved to do. You could never persuade him that a public speaker could
not learn to speak well. He did not pretend that all men could speak
equally well, but he really thought that it was the duty of a man, who
meant to speak in public, to train himself, in voice, in intonation, in
emphasis, so as to speak simply, and without attracting attention to any
failure. He thought any man could do this as truly as any man could
acquire a good handwriting. And any one who knew him knows that he
considered this art as easily attained as the arts by which we clean our
faces or our hands.[C]
Starting upon life with this principle, that he would do what had to be
done,--if nobody else appeared to do it,--and that he could do it,
too,--he soon found himself with work enough on his hands. English's
flippant attack on the New Testament Scriptures appeared while Mr.
Everett was minister of Brattle-Street Church. Because it appeared, he
considered it his place to defend the New Testament against that
specific attack; and he did it. The "Defence of Christianity," which he
then published, is of value, chiefly as a piece of controversy belonging
to the history of opinion in this neighborhood at that moment.
Controversy has long since taken other grounds. For that purpose, at
that moment, the book did its work completely. It exhausted the points
which Mr. English raised, and exhausted them in a way which required
very patient study. Mr. Everett once said that to compile the chapter on
the quotations of the Old Testament by the New Testament writers, he
went through the whole of the Mischna in the edition of Surenhusius, in
six volumes folio. This chapter, I may say in passing, is the chapter of
most permanent value in the "Defence." Now this "Defence," the work of a
boy of twenty years of age, was written in the midst of the demands made
upon the popular preacher in one of the largest parishes in Boston, in a
few months' time,--sent to the printer chapter by chapter. And Mr.
Everett said of it, in after-life, that, if it did not seem like
affectation, he would say that it was relaxation from the work he was
doing in the pulpit. I have no doubt it was. I have no thought that he
was specially fitted for that work. It illustrates rather his moral
force of determination. He thought that particular charge of Mr.
English's ought to be answered. Nobody else answered it. And therefore
he did it himself. He knew he could do it, if it must be done. If he had
not prepared for it, he must prepare for it then.
But the reader will observe, I hope, that he does not in the "Defence"
attempt anything else than the task he had assigned. Here is no general
Apology. It is no discussion of the Evidences. It is a specific
duty,--which he had assigned to himself,--cleanly, neatly, and
thoroughly done. He knew what he was going to do, when he began; and he
knew, when he had finished what he could do. His victories, his life
through, will all be found, I think, to illustrate that sort of steady,
but determined resolution,--determined, in the sense that, before he
began, the bounds were established for the work which was to be done.
When he went to Congress, for instance, in 1824, he had been widely
known, in this part of the country at least, as a scholar who had
travelled in Europe, and as one of the leaders in the movement in favor
of the Greeks. Very naturally, Mr. Taylor appointed him on the Committee
on Foreign Relations, and in that capacity he served all the time he was
in the House. "I devoted myself," he said of that part of his life,
"mainly to the discharge of that part of the public business which was
intrusted to me"; that is, to the foreign relations. There were enough
other interests in those years to which he might have devoted himself.
But this was the sub-department which had been assigned to him, and
therefore he devoted himself to it. If it had been Indian Affairs, or
the Militia, he would have devoted himself to either of those; and I
think he would have distinguished himself in either of them as much as
he did in the other.
In this connection, it is to be observed, that, though few men worked as
rapidly or as easily as he, this same moral determination appeared in
the resoluteness with which he refused to do anything till he was
satisfied with his own preparation. The thing might not require any, and
then he made none. But if it was an occasion which he thought deserved
preparation, no haste nor pressure nor other excuse availed to induce
him to attempt what he had not made the fit preparation for. I think
nothing really made him so indignant with us who were his juniors, as
that we would half do things, instead of taking time to do them as well
as we could. Yet, when the necessity came, he could achieve things that
no other man would have dreamed of on such short notice. There are
stories of his feats in this way which need not be repeated here.
I have heard people speak of his political life, especially of late
years, as if it were a great riddle; and, in eulogies on him since his
death, I find men speaking as if he underwent some great revulsion of
character when Fort Sumter was attacked in 1861. I think there is no
such mystery about it. The secret--if secret it is to be called--of his
politics was blazoned in almost every speech he ever made, if people
could only train themselves to think that a public man really believes
what he says. It was this, that at heart he believed in the people. He
believed they had virtue enough and good sense enough to carry them
through any difficulty they would ever get into. He did not believe in
total depravity. He did not, therefore, believe in theirs. And when he
had any appeal to make to the people, he appealed to their supposed
virtue, and not to their supposed vices,--he spoke to their good sense,
and not to their folly. Mr. Emerson says somewhere, that he gave people
no new thoughts. I do not think this is true. It is, however, very
certain that he gave them no _buncombe_. He believed in them, in their
good sense, and in their average virtue. He knew that everything
depended on them. He was eager to educate the people, therefore, and all
the people. He did not believe it possible to educate any of them too
well. And if you had asked him, the day he died, what had been the
central idea of his life, he would have said it was the education of the
people. His life was full of it. His speeches were full of it. Nothing
so provoked him as any snobbism which wanted to hinder it. When he was
President of the College,--I think in 1848,--there was a black boy in
the High School at Cambridge, fitting for college. Some gentlemen in
Alabama, who had sons there, or on their way there, wrote to Mr. Everett
to remonstrate against the boy's entering. He replied, that the College
was endowed to educate all comers; that, if the black boy could pass his
examination, as he hoped he could, he would be admitted; and that, if,
as they seemed to suppose, all the white students withdrew, the College
would then be conducted on its endowments for the black boy alone. And
that was no exceptional reply. It was his way of looking at such things.
Now it is very true that a man like that makes no demagogue appeals to
the people. He will not be apt to ally himself with any specially
radical party. He will never say that an unwashed man has as good chance
for godliness as a washed man, because he will not believe it. He will
never say that an ignorant man's vote is as good as a sensible man's,
because he will not believe that. But in any question where the rights
of men are on one side and the rights of classes on the other, he will
pronounce for the rights of men. Accordingly, his verdict was stiffly
against the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and 1821. He said it was unwise
and unjust. When, in 1836, it came time, under that Compromise, to admit
the State of Arkansas,--the next Slave State after Missouri,--he said
that we were not bound to admit her with slavery, that the Compromise
was not binding, and never could be made binding; it was unwise and
unjust. Because he had said so, he considered himself estopped from
saying that it was binding, and sacred, and inviolable, and all that, in
1854, when the rest of us made it into a new-found palladium of liberty.
He would not argue the Nebraska question on the Compromise, but on the
original principles of the popular rights involved. It is the same
confidence in the people which shines through the letter to Baron
Hülsemann, which he wrote at the request of Mr. Webster, and through his
answer to the proposal of the Three Powers that we should guaranty Cuba
to Spain. It may be necessary for popular freedom that Spain shall not
have Cuba. The same thing is in all his reviews of the Basil Halls and
other travellers. I do not suppose he liked a dirty table-cloth better
than Mrs. Trollope did. I do not suppose he liked a Virginia fence
better than Cobbett did. But he knew that table-cloths could be washed,
and Virginia fences changed in time for hedges and walls. And he was
willing to wait for such changes,--even with all the elegance people
talk of,--if he were sure that the education of the people was going
forward, and the lines of promotion were kept open.
When, therefore, the issue of 1861 came, there was no question, to
anybody who knew him well, where he would stand. He would stand with the
democratic side against the aristocratic side. And the issue of this war
is the issue between democracy and oligarchy. Persons who did not
believe in the people did not stand on the democratic side. Persons who
thought a republican government had been forced on us by misfortune, and
that we must simply make the best of it, did not stand there. They did
not believe that this time the people could get through. So they thought
it best to stop before beginning. He knew the people could go through
anything. So he thought it best to hold firm to the end.
Some of the most amusing of the details of his early life, which, with
his wonderful memory, he was rather fond of relating, belong to his
experiences in education.
Here is his account of his first attendance at the central town-school
of Dorchester, after he had left a dame-school.
"In this school, on first entering it, I was placed at the bottom of the
lowest class; but even that was a position beyond my previous
attainments. Unable to spell the words which formed the lesson, I used,
when they came down to me from the boy above, to say just what he did,
not being far enough advanced to insinuate a blunder of my own. But in
the course of a few months I made great progress. In writing I was
rather forward. I can remember writing 1799 at the bottom of the page in
my copybook; and this is the oldest date which as a date I can
recollect. I was then five years old.[D] My father having, as a reward
for my improvement, promised me a boughten 'writing-book,' as it was
called, instead of a sheet of paper folded at home, with which children
usually began, the brilliant prospect melted me almost to tears.
"Each boy in those days provided his own 'ink-horn,' as it was called.
Mine was a ponderous article of lead, cast by myself at the kitchen
fire, with a good deal of aid from the hired man who was employed in the
summer to work the little farm. For pens we bought two goose-quills
fresh from the wing, for a cent; older boys paid that sum for a single
'Dutch quill.'...
"In the year 1802, a new district school-house was built near our
residence, to which I was transferred from the school on the
meeting-house hill. It was kept by Mr. Wilkes Allen, afterwards a
respectable clergyman at Chelmsford. I was now between eight and nine
years old. My eldest brother had left school, and was in a counting-room
in Boston; my second brother had entered college; and as we were, almost
all of us little folks at Mr. Allen's, I was among the most advanced. I
began the study of arithmetic at this time, using Pike as the text-book.
I recollect proceeding to the extraction of the cube-root, without the
slightest comprehension of the principle of that or any of the simplest
arithmetical operations. I could have comprehended them, had they been
judiciously explained, but I could not penetrate them without aid. At
length I caught a glimpse of the principle of decimals. I thought I had
made a discovery as confidently as Pythagoras did when he demonstrated
the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid. I was
proportionately annoyed when I afterwards discovered that I had been
anticipated in finding out that 'a decimal is a fraction whose
denominator is a unit with as many ciphers annexed as the numerator has
places,' or rather in finding out precisely what this meant."
He entered college in 1807, and thus describes his first experiences
there.
"I was thirteen years old in April, and entered a Freshman the following
August, being the youngest member of my class. I lived the first year
with my classmate, Charles P. Curtis, in a wooden building standing at
the corner of the Main and Church Streets. It was officially known as
the 'College House,' but known by the students as 'Wiswall's Den,' or,
more concisely, 'The Den,'--whether from its comfortless character as a
habitation or from some worse cause I do not know. There was a tradition
that it had been the scene of a horrid domestic tragedy, and that it was
haunted by the ghosts of the Wiswalls; but I cannot say that during the
twelvemonth I lived in 'The Den' this tale was confirmed by my own
experience.
"We occupied the southwest corner-chamber, up two flights of stairs,--a
room about fourteen feet square, in which were contained two beds and
the rest of our furniture, and our fuel, which was wood, and was kept
under the beds. Two very small closets afforded a little additional
space; but the accommodations were certainly far from brilliant. A good
many young men who go to college are idlers; some, worse than idlers. I
suppose my class in this respect was like other classes; but there was a
fair proportion of faithful, studious students, and of well-conducted
young men. I was protected in part, perhaps, by my youth, from the
grosser temptations. I went through the prescribed studies of the
year--which were principally a few books of Livy and Horace for the
Latin, and 'Collectanea Græca Majora' for the Greek--about as well as
most of the class; but the manner in which the ancient languages were
then studied was deplorably superficial. It was confined to the most
cursory reading of the text. Besides the Latin and Greek languages, we
had a weekly recitation in Lowth's English Grammar, and in the Hebrew
Grammar, _without points_; also in Arithmetic and History, the last from
Millot's Compend as a text-book. In all these branches there was an
entire want of apparatus; and the standard, compared with that which now
exists, was extremely low. And yet, in all respects, I imagine a great
improvement had taken place, in reference to college education, on the
state of things which existed in the previous generation. The intense
political excitement of the Revolutionary period seems to have unsettled
the minds of men from the quiet pursuits of life."
Reminiscences like these of his own lead one to speak of his memory,
which was of all kinds, and wonderful in all. His memory for things was
as remarkable as that for words,--a parallel I have known in very few
men. In this double memory lay his power, which often excited the
surprise of other speakers, of introducing into a discourse which he had
written out, and, as men said, committed to memory, a passage purely
extempore, so precisely that no patch could be observed at the
junctures. The truth is, that it was not a matter of much account with
him whether he had written out a statement of a fact or not. He was sure
of the fact. And in simple narrative he was as willing to use extempore
language as language prepared. Mr. Emerson says, in some not very
flattering criticisms on him,--"It was remarked, for a man who threw out
so many facts, he was seldom convicted of a blunder." I do not think he
had any system of training memory, beyond that of using it and calling
on it pitilessly, which is, I believe, the central rule regarding it.
Here is a curious story of a feat of memory, in his sketch of his
Sophomore year.
"I have mentioned Metaphysics as a study in which I succeeded. I mean,
of course, only that I prepared myself thoroughly in the text-books.
Watts's Logic was the first book studied in this branch,--not a very
inviting treatise, compared with that of Archbishop Whately, but easily
comprehended, and not repulsive. The account of the syllogistic method
amused me; and the barbarous stanza describing the various syllogistic
modes and figures dwelt for a long time in my memory, and has not wholly
faded away. Locke's 'Essay concerning Human Understanding' came next.
This was more difficult. I recollect we used to make sport of the first
sentence in the 'Epistle to the Reader,' which was, 'I here put into thy
hands what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours: if
it has the good luck to prove so of any of thine, and thou hast but half
so much pleasure in reading as I had in writing it, thou wilt as little
think thy money, as I do my pains, ill bestowed.' I cannot say that we
any of us derived much diversion from it; but I overcame its difficulty
by the resolute purpose to accomplish whatever was required. We recited
from it three times a day, the four first days of the week, the
recitation of Thursday afternoon being a review of the rest. We were
expected to give the substance of the author's remarks, but were at
liberty to condense them, and to use our own words. Although the style
of Mr. Locke is not remarkably compact, it required a greater maturity
of mind than is possessed by many boys of fourteen to abridge his
paragraphs, or state his principles or their illustrations more
concisely than he does himself. I had at that time a memory which
recoiled from nothing; and I soon found that the shortest process was to
learn the text by heart nearly _verbatim_. I recollect particularly, on
one occasion of the review on Thursday afternoon, that I was called upon
to recite early, and, commencing with the portion of the week's study
which came next, I went on repeating word for word and paragraph after
paragraph, and finally, not being stopped by our pleased tutor,[E] page
after page, till I finally went through in that way the greater part of
the eleven recitations of the week. The celebrated passage on the Memory
happened to be included. A portion of it, after the lapse of forty-seven
years, remains in my recollection as distinctly as it did the day after
I learned it. I refer to the passage beginning, 'Thus the ideas, as well
as children, of our youth often die before us; and our minds represent
to us those tombs to which we are approaching, where, though the brass
and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the
imagery moulders away.'
"I may observe, that, beautiful as is this language beyond anything else
in the work of Locke, it will not stand the test of criticism. There is
no resemblance between what befalls the ideas and the children of our
youth; and supposing there were such a resemblance, there is not the
slightest analogy between the premature decease of the ideas and the
children of our youth and the disappearance of monumental inscriptions
and imagery from the brass and marble of tombs. But I feel ashamed of
this attempt to pick flaws in this beautiful passage."
But I must not dwell on these reminiscences. I am tempted to refer any
reader interested in his work in the education of the people to an
article on that subject in the seventh volume of Mr. Barnard's "Journal
of Education."
I once heard him say that the mental faculty which had been of most use
to him and had given him most pleasure was his facility in acquiring
language. He said this on occasion of a visit to a county prison, where
they had taken him to the cell of a person whom no one could understand.
I think he had been called a Greek; but he proved to be an Italian. Mr.
Everett was then Governor of the Commonwealth, and this was an official
visit. It was a pretty illustration of republican institutions, that
this poor prisoner in his solitude should first hear his own language
from the chief magistrate. Mr. Everett addressed him first in the
language of his supposed country,--I think in Greek,--and changed to
Italian, when the prisoner spoke to him. He spoke French, German,
Italian, and the Romaic with ease. He read the whole Hebrew Testament in
his youth, and in Germany made considerable progress in Arabic; but I do
not think that he kept up his Oriental languages in later years. He was
fond of exercising himself in the other languages named, and almost
always had some stated correspondence on his hands in each of them.
Unless he really loved correspondence, as some men do, I believe, I
cannot conceive that even so conscientious a man as he should have kept
his correspondence in such perfect order, answered letters of every kind
so faithfully, so fully, and so agreeably. The last day of his life, a
sick man as he was, he seems to have written a dozen letters. Everybody
had an answer, and a kind one. He was, I think, the last man living who
courteously acknowledged printed documents. Certainly there is no one
left to do so among men whose habits I have heard of. But he would not
fail in any kindness or courtesy. At times his correspondence rose into
a position of real dignity. Thus, after Fort Sumter, while we still
carried the Rebels' mails for them, he wrote steadily through all his
working-hours of every day to his Southern correspondents, who were
sending him all sorts of Billingsgate. And he wrote them the truth. "It
is the only way they see a word of truth," he said. "Look at that
newspaper, and that, and that." Till the mails stopped, they had not to
blame him, if they were benighted. I wish that series of letters might,
even now, be published separately.
In such duties, coming next his hand, he spent a busy life. Every life
has a dream, a plan, of what we are going to do, when we can do what we
will. I think his was the preparation of his work on International Law.
As I have said, it became his duty to study this as early as 1825. I
remember hearing him speak of his plans regarding it in 1839. He set his
work aside, most unwillingly, when, in face of his own first
determination and the advice of his best friends, he became President of
Harvard College. As soon as he was released from that position he turned
to it again. During this last winter he had hoped to deliver at the Law
School a course of lectures on the subject; and a part of these are
certainly in form ready for delivery. But from this thread, or this
dream, the demands of present duty have constantly called him away. He
has done, from day to day, what had to be done, rather than what he
wanted to do. A better record this, though men forget him to-morrow,
than the fame of any Grotius even, if Grotius had not deserved like
praise, better than the fame of any book-man of them all.
The brave man,--and he was a brave man, though in personal intercourse
he was really shy,--the brave man, who, with all his might, and all
God's strength assisting, will lend body and mind to such daily duty for
other men, earns his laurels, when he wins them, in more fields than one
or two. It is because Mr. Everett so lived, that in his death his memory
receives such varied honors. He had served the Navy; the last
interruption to his favorite study had been the devotion of the autumn
months to the great charity which builds the Sailors' Home. He had
served the Army, not merely by sending a son into it,--by "personal
representatives," I know not how many, whose bounties he had paid,--but
by the steady effort in all the charities for the wounded, and by the
counsel, private as often as public, for which every department of the
State turned to him. He had served the Union, all men know how. He had
served the Bench, not simply as a student of the branch of law which he
had chosen to illustrate, but in the steady training of the people to
the sacredness of law. He had insisted on the higher education of the
people; and so had fairly won the honors of the Academy, in those early
days when men believed that there were Moral Sciences, and did not
debase the name of Science by confining it to the mere chaff of things
weighed and measured. His studies of History are remembered, for some
special cause, in almost every Historical Society in the land. He had
served the University in every station known to her constitution. He was
in the service of the City in that Public Library of which he was, more
than any man, the founder, which completes her system of universal
education. He had served the State as her chief magistrate. And in every
work of life he served the Nation as her first citizen. These varied
lines of duty--in which "he neglected no branch, but did about equally
well in all"--were fitly called to men's memories, as they saw the
circle of distinguished friends and fellow-laborers who met around his
grave.