her "capture" of the governor has come down to us almost as a myth, it
is less than fifty years ago that the daughter of the man who fiddled at
Stoodley's and of the girl who went barefooted and ragged through the
streets of Portsmouth, passed in her turn to the Great Beyond. Verily,
we in America have, after all, only a short historical perspective.
AN HISTORIC TRAGEDY
One hundred years ago there was committed in Dedham, Massachusetts, one
of the most famous murders of this country, a crime, some description of
which falls naturally enough into these chapters, inasmuch as the person
punished as the criminal belonged to the illustrious Fairbanks family,
whose picturesque homestead is widely known as one of the oldest houses
in New England.
In the _Massachusetts Federalist_ of Saturday, September 12, 1801, we
find an editorial paragraph which, apart from its intrinsic interest, is
valuable as an example of the great difference between ancient and
modern journalistic treatment of murder matter. This paragraph reads, in
the quaint old type of the time: "On Thursday last Jason Fairbanks was
executed at Dedham for the murder of Miss Elizabeth Fales. He was taken
from the gaol in this town at eight o'clock, by the sheriff of this
county, and delivered to the sheriff of Norfolk County at the boundary
line between the two counties.
"He was in an open coach, and was attended therein by the Reverend
Doctor Thatcher and two peace officers. From the county line in Norfolk
he was conducted to the Dedham gaol by Sheriff Cutler, his deputies, and
a score of cavalry under Captain Davis; and from the gaol in Dedham to
the place of execution was guarded by two companies of cavalry and a
detachment of volunteer infantry.
"He mounted the scaffold about a quarter before three with his usual
steadiness, and soon after making a signal with his handkerchief, was
swung off. After hanging about twenty-five minutes, his body was cut
down and buried near the gallows. His deportment during his journey to
and at the place of execution was marked with the same apathy and
indifference which he discovered before and since his trial. We do not
learn he has made any confession of his guilt."
As a matter of fact, far from making a confession of his guilt, Jason
Fairbanks denied even to the moment of his execution that he killed
Elizabeth Fales, and his family and many other worthy citizens of Dedham
believed, and kept believing to the end of their lives, that the girl
committed suicide, and that an innocent man was punished for a crime he
could never have perpetrated.
In the trial it was shown that this beautiful girl of eighteen had been
for many years extremely fond of the young man, Fairbanks, and that her
love was ardently reciprocated. Jason Fairbanks had not been allowed,
however, to visit the girl at the home of her father, though the Fales
place was only a little more than a mile from his own dwelling, the
venerable Fairbanks house. None the less, they had been in the habit of
meeting frequently, in company with others, en route to the weekly
singing school, the husking bees and the choir practice. Both the young
people were extremely fond of music, and this mutual interest seems to
have been one of the several ties which bound them together.
In spite, therefore, of the stern decree that young Fairbanks should not
visit Miss Fales at her home, there was considerable well-improved
opportunity for intercourse, and, as was afterward shown, the two often
had long walks together, apart from the others of their acquaintance.
One of their appointments was made for the day of the murder, May 18,
1801. Fairbanks was to meet his sweetheart, he told a friend, in the
pasture near her home, and it was his intention at that time to persuade
her to run away with him and be married. Unfortunately for Fairbanks's
case at the trial, it was shown that he told this same friend that if
Elizabeth Fales would not run away with him he would do her harm. And
one other thing which militated against the acquittal of the accused
youth was the fact that, as an inducement to the girl to elope with him,
Fairbanks showed her a forged paper, upon which she appeared to have
declared legally her intention to marry him.
One tragic element of the whole affair was the fact that Fairbanks had
no definite work and no assured means of support. Young people of good
family did not marry a hundred years ago without thinking, and thinking
to some purpose, of what cares and expense the future might bring them.
The man, if he was an honourable man, expected always to have a home for
his wife, and since Fairbanks was an invalid, "debilitated in his right
arm," as the phrasing of the time put it, and had never been able to do
his part of the farm work, he had lived what his stern forebears would
have called an idle life, and consequently utterly lacked the means to
marry. That he was something of a spoiled child also developed at the
trial, which from the first went against the young man because of the
testimony of the chums to whom he had confided his intention to do
Elizabeth Fales an injury if she would not go to Wrentham and marry him.
The prisoner's counsel were two very clever young lawyers who afterward
came to be men of great distinction in Massachusetts--no others, in
fact, than Harrison Gray Otis and John Lowell. These men advanced very
clever arguments to show that Elizabeth Fales, maddened by a love which
seemed unlikely ever to end in marriage, had seized from Jason the large
knife which he was using to mend a quill pen as he walked to meet her,
and with this knife had inflicted upon herself the terrible wounds, from
the effect of which she died almost instantaneously. The fact that Jason
was himself wounded in the struggle was ingeniously utilised by the
defence to show that he had received murderous blows from her hand, for
the very reason that he had attempted (unsuccessfully, inasmuch as his
right arm was impaired) to wrest the mad girl's murderous weapon from
her.
The counsel also made much of the fact that, though it was at midday and
many people were not far off, no screams were heard. A vigorous girl
like Elizabeth Fales would not have submitted easily, they held, to any
such assault as was charged. In the course of the trial a very moving
description of the sufferings such a high-strung, ardent nature as this
girl's must have undergone, because of her hopeless love, was used to
show the reasons for suicide. And following the habit of the times, the
lawyers turned their work to moral ends by beseeching the parents in the
crowded court-room to exercise a greater vigilance over the social life
of their young people, and so prevent the possibility of their forming
any such attachment as had moved Elizabeth Fales to take her own life.
Yet all this eloquent pleading was in vain, for the court found Jason
Fairbanks guilty of murder and sentenced him to be hanged. From the
court-room he was taken to the Dedham gaol, but on the night of the
seventeenth of August he was enabled to make his escape through the
offices of a number of men who believed him innocent, and for some days
he was at liberty. At length, however, upon a reward of one thousand
dollars being offered for his apprehension, he was captured near
Northampton, Massachusetts, which town he had reached on his journey to
Canada.
The gallows upon which "justice" ultimately asserted itself is said to
have been constructed of a tree cut from the old Fairbanks place.
The Fairbanks house is still standing, having been occupied for almost
two hundred and seventy-five years by the same family, which is now in
the eighth generation of the name. The house is surrounded by
magnificent old elms, and was built by Jonathan Fairbanks, who came from
Sowerby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, in 1633. The
cupboards are filled with choice china, and even the Fairbanks cats, it
is said, drink their milk out of ancient blue saucers that would drive a
collector wild with envy.
The house is now (1902) the home of Miss Rebecca Fairbanks, an old lady
of seventy-five years, who will occupy it throughout her lifetime,
although the place is controlled by the Fairbanks Chapter of the
Daughters of the Revolution, who hold their monthly meetings there.
[Illustration: FAIRBANKS HOUSE, DEDHAM, MASS.]
The way in which this property was acquired by the organisation named
is interesting recent history. Miss Rebecca Fairbanks was obliged in
1895 to sell the house to John Crowley, a real estate dealer in Dedham.
On April 3, 1897, Mrs. Nelson V. Titus, asked through the medium of the
press for four thousand, five hundred dollars, necessary to purchase the
house and keep it as a historical relic. Almost immediately Mrs. J.
Amory Codman and Miss Martha Codman sent a check for the sum desired,
and thus performed a double act of beneficence. For it was now possible
to ensure to Miss Fairbanks a life tenancy of the home of her fathers as
well as to keep for all time this picturesque place as an example of
early American architecture.
Hundreds of visitors now go every summer to see the interesting old
house, which stands nestling cosily in a grassy dell just at the corner
of East Street and the short "Willow Road" across the meadows that lie
between East Street and Dedham. This road is a "modern convenience," and
its construction was severely frowned upon by the three old ladies who
twenty years ago lived together in the family homestead. And though it
made the road to the village shorter by half than the old way, this had
no weight with the inflexible women who had inherited from their long
line of ancestors marked decision and firmness of character. They
protested against the building of the road, and when it was built in
spite of their protests they declared they would not use it, and kept
their word. Constant attendants of the old Congregational church in
Dedham, they went persistently by the longest way round rather than
tolerate the road to which they had objected.
That their neighbours called them "set in their ways" goes, of course,
without saying, but the women of the Fairbanks family have ever been
rigidly conscientious, and the men a bit obstinate. For, much as one
would like to think the contrary true, one seems forced to believe that
it was obstinacy rather than innocency which made Jason Fairbanks
protest till the hour of his death that he was being unjustly punished.
INVENTOR MORSE'S UNFULFILLED AMBITION
The first house erected in Charlestown after the destruction of the
village by fire in 1775 (the coup d'état which immediately followed the
battle of Bunker Hill, it will be remembered), is that which is here
given as the birthplace of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of
the electric telegraph. The house is still standing at 203 Main Street,
and in the front chamber of the second story, on the right of the front
door of the entrance, visitors still pause to render tribute to the
memory of the babe that there drew his first breath on April 27,
1791.
[Illustration: EDES HOUSE, BIRTHPLACE OF PROFESSOR MORSE, CHARLESTOWN,
MASS.]
It was, however, quite by accident that the house became doubly famous,
for it was during the building of the parsonage, Pastor Morse's proper
home, that his little son came to gladden his life. Reverend Jedediah
Morse became minister of the First Parish Church on April 30, 1789, the
very date of Washington's inauguration in New York as President of the
United States, and two weeks later married a daughter of Judge Samuel
Breese, of New York. Shortly afterward it was determined to build a
parsonage, and during the construction of this dwelling Doctor Morse
accepted the hospitality of Mr. Thomas Edes, who then owned the "oldest"
house. And work on the parsonage being delayed beyond expectation, Mrs.
Morse's little son was born in the Edes house.
Apropos of the brief residence of Doctor Morse in this house comes a
quaint letter from Reverend Jeremy Belknap, the staid old doctor of
divinity, and the founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which
shows that girls over a hundred years ago were quite as much interested
in young unmarried ministers as nice girls ought ever to be. Two or
three months before the settlement of Mr. Morse in Charlestown, Doctor
Belknap wrote to his friend, Ebenezer Hazard, of New York, who was a
relative of Judge Breese:
"You said in one of your late letters that probably Charlestown people
would soon have to build a house for Mr. Morse. I let this drop in a
conversation with a daughter of Mr. Carey, and in a day or two it was
all over Charlestown, and the girls who had been setting their caps for
him are chagrined. I suppose it would be something to Mr. Morse's
advantage in point of bands and handkerchiefs, if this report could be
contradicted; but if it cannot, oh, how heavy will be the
disappointment. When a young clergyman settles in such a town as
Charlestown, there is as much looking out for him as there is for a
thousand-dollar prize in a lottery; and though the girls know that but
one can have him, yet 'who knows but I may be that one?'"[10]
Doctor Morse's fame has been a good deal obscured by that of his
distinguished son, but he seems none the less to have been a good deal
of a man, and it is perhaps no wonder that the feminine portion of a
little place like Charlestown looked forward with decided interest to
his settling among them. We can even fancy that the girls of the sewing
society studied geography with ardour when they learned who was to be
their new minister. For geography was Doctor Morse's passion; he was,
indeed, the Alexis Frye of his period. This interest in geography is
said to have been so tremendous with the man that once being asked by
his teacher at a Greek recitation where a certain verb was found, he
replied, "On the coast of Africa." And while he was a tutor at Yale the
want of geographies there induced him to prepare notes for his pupils,
to serve as text-books, which he eventually printed.
Young Morse seconded his father's passion for geography by one as
strongly marked for drawing, and the blank margin of his Virgil occupied
far more of his thoughts than the text. The inventor came indeed only
tardily to discover in which direction his real talent lay. All his
youth he worshipped art and followed (at considerable distance) his
beloved mistress. His penchant for painting, exhibited in much the same
manner as Allston's, his future master, did not meet with the same
encouragement.
A caricature (founded upon some fracas among the students at Yale), in
which the faculty were burlesqued, was seized during Morse's student
days, handed to President Dwight, and the author, who was no other than
our young friend, called up. The delinquent received a severe lecture
upon his waste of time, violation of college laws, and filial
disobedience, without exhibiting any sign of contrition; but when at
length Doctor Dwight said to him, "Morse, you are no painter; this is a
rude attempt, a complete failure," he was touched to the quick, and
could not keep back the tears.
The canvas, executed by Morse at the age of nineteen, of the landing of
the Pilgrims, which may be seen at the Charlestown City Hall, is
certainly not a masterpiece. Yet the lad was determined to learn to
paint, and to this end accompanied Allston to Europe, where he became a
pupil of West, and, it is said, also of Copley.
West had become the foremost painter of his time in England when our
ambitious young artist was presented to him, but from the beginning he
took a great interest in the Charlestown lad, and showed him much
attention. Once in after years Morse related to a friend this most
interesting anecdote of his great master: "I called upon Mr. West at his
house in Newman Street one morning, and in conformity to the order given
to his servant Robert always to admit Mr. Leslie and myself even if he
was engaged in his private studies, I was shown into his studio.
"As I entered a half-length portrait of George III. stood before me on
an easel, and Mr. West was sitting with his back toward me copying from
it upon canvas. My name having been mentioned to him, he did not turn,
but pointing with the pencil he had in his hand to the portrait from
which he was copying, he said, 'Do you see that picture, Mr. Morse?'
"'Yes, sir,' I said, 'I perceive it is the portrait of the king.'
"'Well,' said Mr. West, 'the king was sitting to me for that portrait
when the box containing the American Declaration of Independence was
handed to him.'
"'Indeed,' I answered; 'and what appeared to be the emotions of the
king? What did he say?'
"'His reply,' said Mr. West, 'was characteristic of the goodness of his
heart: "If they can be happier under the government they have chosen
than under me, I shall be happy."'"[11]
Morse returned to Boston in the autumn of 1815, and there set up a
studio. But he was not too occupied in painting to turn a hand to
invention, and we find him the next winter touring New Hampshire and
Vermont trying to sell to towns and villages a fire-engine pump he had
invented, while seeking commissions to paint portraits at fifteen
dollars a head. It was that winter that he met in Concord, New
Hampshire, Miss Lucretia P. Walker, whom he married in the autumn of
1818, and whose death in February, 1825, just after he had successfully
fulfilled a liberal commission to paint General Lafayette, was the great
blow of his young manhood.
The National Academy of Design Morse helped to found in New York in
1826, and of this institution he was first president. About the same
time we find him renewing his early interest in electrical experiments.
A few years later he is sailing for Europe, there to execute many
copying commissions. And on his return from this stay abroad the idea of
the telegraph suggested itself to him.
Of the exact way in which Morse first conceived the idea of making
electricity the means of conveying intelligence, various accounts have
been given, the one usually accepted being that while on board the
packet-ship _Sully_, a fellow passenger related some experiments he had
witnessed in Paris with the electro-magnet, a recital which made such an
impression upon one of his auditors that he walked the deck the whole
night. Professor Morse's own statement was that he gained his knowledge
of the working of the electro-magnet while attending the lectures of
Doctor J. Freeman Dana, then professor of chemistry in the University of
New York, lectures which were delivered before the New York Atheneum.
"I witnessed," says Morse, "the effects of the conjunctive wires in the
different forms described by him in his lectures, and exhibited to his
audience. The electro-magnet was put in action by an intense battery; it
was made to sustain the weight of its armature, when the conjunctive
wire was connected with the poles of the battery, or the circuit was
closed; and it was made to 'drop its load' upon opening the circuit."
Yet after the inventor had made his discovery he had the greatest
difficulty in getting a chance to demonstrate its worth. Heartsick with
despondency, and with his means utterly exhausted, he finally applied
to the Twenty-seventh Congress for aid to put his invention to the test
of practical illustration, and his petition was carried through with a
majority of only two votes! These two votes to the good were enough,
however, to save the wonderful discovery, perhaps from present
obscurity, and with the thirty thousand dollars appropriated by Congress
Morse stretched his first wires from Washington to Baltimore--wires, it
will be noted, because the principle of the ground circuit was not then
known, and only later discovered by accident. So that a wire to go and
another to return between the cities was deemed necessary by Morse to
complete his first circuit. The first wire was of copper.
The first message, now in the custody of the Connecticut Historical
Society, was dictated by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, and the words of it
were "What hath God wrought?" The telegraph was at first regarded with
superstitious dread in some sections of the country. In a Southern State
a drought was attributed to its occult influences, and the people,
infatuated with the idea, levelled the wires to the ground. And so
common was it for the Indians to knock off the insulators with their
rifles in order to gratify their curiosity in regard to the "singing
cord," that it was at first extremely difficult to keep the lines in
repair along the Pacific Railway.
To the man who had been so poor that he had had a very great struggle to
provide bread for his three motherless children, came now success. The
impecunious artist was liberally rewarded for his clever invention, and
in 1847 he married for his second wife Miss Sarah E. Griswold, of
Poughkeepsie, the daughter of his cousin. She was twenty-five when they
were married, and he fifty-six, but they lived very happily together on
the two-hundred acre farm he had bought near Poughkeepsie, and it was
there that he died at the age of seventy-two, full of honours as an
inventor, and loving art to the end.
Even after he became a great man, Professor Morse, it is interesting to
learn, cherished his fondness for the house in which he was born, and
one of his last visits to Charlestown was on the occasion when he took
his young daughter to see the old place. And that same day, one is a bit
amused to note, he took her also to the old parsonage, then still
standing, in what is now Harvard Street, between the city hall and the
church--and there pointed out to her with pride some rude sketches he
had made on the wall of his sleeping-room when still a boy. So, though
it is as an inventor we remember and honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse
to-day, it was as a painter that he wished first, last, and above all to
be famous. But in the realm of the talents as elsewhere man proposes and
God disposes.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: Drake's "Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex."
Little, Brown & Co., publishers.]
[Footnote 11: Beacon Biographies: S. F. B. Morse, by John Trowbridge;
Small, Maynard & Co.]
WHERE THE "BROTHERS AND SISTERS" MET
No single house in all Massachusetts has survived so many of the
vicissitudes of fickle fortune and carried the traditions of a glorious
past up into the realities of a prosperous and useful present more
successfully than has Fay House, the present home of Radcliffe College,
Cambridge. The central portion of the Fay House of to-day dates back
nearly a hundred years, and was built by Nathaniel Ireland, a prosperous
merchant of Boston. It was indeed a mansion to make farmer-folk stare
when, with its tower-like bays, running from ground to roof, it was, in
1806, erected on the highroad to Watertown, the first brick house in the
vicinity.
To Mr. Ireland did not come the good fortune of living in the fine
dwelling his ambition had designed. A ship-blacksmith by trade, his
prospects were ruined by the Jefferson Embargo, and he was obliged to
leave the work of construction on his house unfinished and allow the
place to pass, heavily mortgaged, into the hands of others. But the
house itself and our story concerning it gained by Mr. Ireland's loss,
for it now became the property of Doctor Joseph McKean (a famous Harvard
instructor), and the rendezvous of that professor's college associates
and of the numerous friends of his young family. Oliver Wendell Holmes
was among those who spent many a social evening here with the McKeans.
The next name of importance to be connected with Fay House was that of
Edward Everett, who lived here for a time. Later Sophia Willard Dana,
granddaughter of Chief Justice Dana, our first minister to Russia, kept
a boarding and day school for young ladies in the house. Among her
pupils were the sisters of James Russell Lowell, Mary Channing, the
first wife of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and members of the
Higginson, Parkman, and Tuckerman families. Lowell himself, and Edmund
Dana, attended here for a term as a special privilege. Sophia Dana was
married in the house, August 22, 1827, by the father of Oliver Wendell
Holmes, to Mr. George Ripley, with whom she afterward took an active
part in the Brook Farm Colony, of which we are to hear again a bit
later in this series. After Miss Dana's marriage, her school was carried
on largely by Miss Elizabeth McKean--the daughter of the Doctor Joseph
McKean already referred to--a young woman who soon became the wife of
Doctor Joseph Worcester, the compiler of the dictionary.