My great-grandfather became "a Friend by Convincement," as the Quakers
called the Friends not born in their Society; but I do not know whether
it was before or after his convincement that he sailed to Philadelphia
with a stock of his Welsh flannels, which he sold to such advantage
that a dramatic family tradition represents him wheeling the proceeds in
a barrel of silver down the street to the vessel which brought him and
which took him away. That was in the time of Washington's second
Presidency, and Washington strongly advised his staying in the country
and setting up his manufacture here; but he was prospering in Wales, and
why should he come to America even at the suggestion of Washington? It
is another family tradition that he complied so far as to purchase a
vast acreage of land on the Potomac, including the site of our present
capital, as some of his descendants in each generation have believed,
without the means of expropriating the nation from its unlawful
holdings. This would have been the more difficult as he never took a
deed of his land, and he certainly never came back to America; yet he
seems always to have been haunted by the allurement of it which my
grandfather felt so potently that after twice visiting the country he
came over a third time and cast his lot here.
He was already married, when with his young wife and my father a year
old he sailed from London in 1808. Perhaps because they were chased by a
French privateer, they speedily arrived in Boston after a voyage of only
twenty-one days. In the memoir which my father wrote for his family, and
which was published after his death, he tells that my grandmother formed
the highest opinion of Boston, mainly, he surmises, from the very
intelligent behavior of the young ladies in making a pet of her baby at
the boarding-house where she stayed while her husband began going about
wherever people wished his skill in setting up woolen-mills. The young
ladies taught her little one to walk; and many years afterward, say
fifty, when I saw her for the last time in a village of northwestern
Ohio, she said "the Bostonians were very nice people," so faithfully had
she cherished, through a thousand vicissitudes, the kind memory of that
first sojourn in America.
I do not think she quite realized the pitch of greatness at which I had
arrived in writing for the _Atlantic Monthly_, the renowned periodical
then recently founded in Boston, or the fame of the poets whom I had met
there the year before. I suspect that she was never of the literary
taste of my English great-grandmother; but her father had been a
school-teacher, and she had been carefully educated by the uncle and
aunt to whom she was left at her parents' early death. They were
Friends, but she never formally joined the Society, though worshiping
with them; she was, like her husband, middle-class Welsh, and as long as
they lived they both misplaced their aspirates. If I add that her maiden
name was Thomas, and that her father's name was John Thomas, I think I
have sufficiently attested her pure Cymric origin. So far as I know
there was no mixture of Saxon blood on her side; but her people, like
most of the border Welsh, spoke the languages of both races; and very
late in my father's life, he mentioned casually, as old people will
mention interesting things, that he remembered his father and mother
speaking Welsh together. Of the two she remained the fonder of their
native country, and in that last visit I paid her she said, after half a
century of exile, "We do so and so at home, and you do so and so here."
I can see her now, the gentlest of little Quaker ladies, with her white
fichu crossed on her breast; and I hesitate attributing to her my
immemorial knowledge that the Welsh were never conquered, but were
tricked into union with the English by having one of their princes born,
as it were surreptitiously, in Wales; it must have been my father who
told me this and amused himself with my childish race-pride in the fact.
She gave me an illustrated _Tour of Wales_, having among its steel
engravings the picture of a Norman castle where, by favor of a cousin
who was the housekeeper, she had slept one night when a girl; but in
America she had slept oftener in log cabins, which my grandfather
satisfied his devoted unworldliness in making his earthly tabernacles.
She herself was not, I think, a devout person; she had her spiritual
life in his, and followed his varying fortunes, from richer to poorer,
with a tacit adherence to what he believed, whether the mild doctrine of
Quakerism or the fervid Methodism for which he never quite relinquished
it.
He seems to have come to America with money enough to lose a good deal
in his removals from Boston to Poughkeepsie, from Poughkeepsie to New
York City, from New York to Virginia, and from Virginia to eastern Ohio,
where he ended in such adversity on his farm that he was glad to accept
the charge of a woolen-mill in Steubenville. He knew the business
thoroughly and he had set up mills for others in his various sojourns,
following the line of least resistance among the Quaker settlements
opened to him by the letters he had brought from Wales. He even went to
the new capital, Washington, in a hope of manufacturing in Virginia held
out to him by a nephew of President Madison, but it failed him to his
heavy cost; and in Ohio, his farming experiments, which he renewed in a
few years on giving up that mill at Steubenville, were alike disastrous.
After more than enough of them he rested for a while in Wheeling, West
Virginia, where my father met my mother, and they were married.
They then continued the family wanderings in his own search for the
chance of earning a living in what seems to have been a very grudging
country, even to industry so willing as his. He had now become a
printer, and not that only, but a publisher, for he had already begun
and ended the issue of a monthly magazine called _The Gleaner_, made up,
as its name implied, chiefly of selections; his sister helped him as
editor, and some old bound volumes of its few numbers show their joint
work to have been done with good taste in the preferences of their day.
He married upon the expectation of affluence from the publication of a
work on _The Rise, Progress and Downfall of Aristocracy_, which almost
immediately preceded the ruin of the enthusiastic author and of my
father with him, if he indeed could have experienced further loss in his
entire want of money. He did not lose heart, and he was presently living
contentedly on three hundred dollars a year as foreman of a newspaper
office in St. Clairville, Ohio. But his health gave way, and a little
later, for the sake of the outdoor employment, he took up the trade of
house-painter; and he was working at this in Wheeling when my
grandfather Dean suggested his buying a lot and building a house in
Martin's Ferry, just across the Ohio River. The lot must have been
bought on credit, and he built mainly with his own capable hands a small
brick house of one story and two rooms with a lean-to. In this house I
was born, and my father and mother were very happy there; they never
owned another house until their children helped them work and pay for it
a quarter of a century afterward, though throughout this long time they
made us a home inexpressibly dear to me still.
My father now began to read medicine, but during the course of a
winter's lectures at Cincinnati (where he worked as a printer
meanwhile), his health again gave way and he returned to Martin's Ferry.
When I was three years old, my grandmother Dean's eldest brother,
William Dock, came to visit her. He was the beloved patriarch of a
family which I am glad to claim my kindred and was a best type of his
Pennsylvania-German race. He had prospered on through a life of kindness
and good deeds; he was so rich that he had driven in his own
[Illustration: _The Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia. Mr. Howells's
father worked in Wheeling before he moved across the river to Martin's
Ferry_]
carriage from Harrisburg, over the mountains, and he now asked my father
to drive with him across the state of Ohio. When they arrived in Dayton,
my father went on by canal to Hamilton, where he found friends to help
him buy the Whig newspaper which he had only just paid for when he sold
it eight years later.