Produced by Patricia Peters, Christine P. Travers and The
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all
other inconsistencies are as in the original. Author's spelling has
been maintained.]
[Illustration: C. Carleton Coffin.]
Charles Carleton Coffin
_War Correspondent, Traveller,
Author, and Statesman_
By
William Elliot Griffis, D. D.
Author of "Matthew Calbraith Perry,"
"Sir William Johnson," and
"Townsend Harris, First American Envoy to Japan."
Boston
Estes and Lauriat
1898
_Copyright, 1898_
By Sallie R. Coffin
_Colonial Press.
Electrotyped and Printed by
C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U. S. A._
Dedicated to
The Generation of Young People whom
Carleton
Helped to Educate for American Citizenship.
Preface
Among the million or more readers of "Carleton's" books, are some who
will enjoy knowing about him as boy and man. Between condensed
autobiography and biography, we have here, let us hope, a binocular,
which will yield to the eye a stereoscopic picture, having the
solidity and relief of ordinary vision.
Two facts may make one preface. Mrs. Coffin requested me, in a letter
dated May 10, 1896, to outline the life and work of her late husband.
"Because," said she, "you write in a condensed way that would please
Mr. Coffin, and because you could see into Mr. Coffin's motives of
life."
With such leisure and ability as one in the active pastorate, who
preaches steadily to "town and gown" in a university town, could
command, I have cut a cameo rather than chiselled a bust or statue.
Many good friends, especially Dr. Edmund Carleton and Rev. H. A.
Bridgman, have helped me. To them I herewith return warm thanks.
W. E. G.
Ithaca, N. Y., May 24, 1898.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER Page
I. Introductory Chapter. 13
II. Of Revolutionary Sires. 19
III. The Days of Homespun. 30
IV. Politics, Travel, and Business. 41
V. Electricity and Journalism. 55
VI. The Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln. 66
VII. The War Correspondent. 79
VIII. With the Army of the Potomac. 95
IX. Ho, for the Gunboats, Ho! 107
X. At Antietam and Fredericksburg. 119
XI. The Ironclads off Charleston. 132
XII. Gettysburg: High Tide and Ebb. 141
XIII. The Battles in the Wilderness. 151
XIV. Camp Life and News-gathering. 162
XV. "The Old Flag Waves over Sumter". 175
XVI. With Lincoln in Richmond. 183
XVII. The Glories of Europe. 189
XVIII. Through Oriental Lands. 204
XIX. In China and Japan. 215
XX. The Great Northwest. 229
XXI. The Writer of History. 238
XXII. Music and Poetry. 256
XXIII. Shawmut Church. 268
XXIV. The Free Churchman. 284
XXV. Citizen, Statesman, and Reformer. 294
XXVI. A Saviour of Human Life. 308
XXVII. Life's Evening Glow. 321
XXVIII. The Home at Alwington. 333
XXIX. The Golden Wedding. 341
CHARLES CARLETON COFFIN
INTRODUCTION.
Charles Carleton Coffin had a face that helped one to believe in God.
His whole life was an evidence of Christianity. His was a genial,
sunny soul that cheered you. He was an originator and an organizer of
happiness. He had no ambition to be rich. His investments were in
giving others a start and helping them to win success and joy. He was
a soldier of the pen and a knight of truth. He began the good warfare
in boyhood. He laid down armor and weapons only on the day that he
changed his world. His was a long and beautiful life, worth both the
living and the telling. He loved both fact and truth so well that one
need write only realities about him. He cared little for flattery, so
we shall not flatter him. His own works praise him in the gates.
He had blue eyes that often twinkled with fun, for Mr. Coffin loved a
joke. He was fond to his last day of wit, and could make quick
repartee. None enjoyed American humor more than he. He pitied the
person who could not see a joke until it was made into a diagram, with
annotations. In spirit, he was a boy even after three score and ten.
The young folks "lived in that mild and magnificent eye." Out of it
came sympathy, kindness, helpfulness. We have seen those eyes flash
with indignation. Scorn of wrong snapped in them. Before hypocrisy or
oppression his glances were as mimic lightning.
We loved to hear that voice. If one that is low is "an excellent thing
in woman," one that is rich and deep is becoming to a man. Mr.
Coffin's tones were sweet to the ear, persuasive, inspiring. His voice
moved men, his acts more.
His was a manly form. Broad-footed and full-boned, he stood nearly six
feet high. He was alert, dignified, easily accessible, and responsive
even to children. With him, acquaintanceship was quickly made, and
friendship long preserved. Those who knew Charles Carleton Coffin
respected, honored, loved him. His memory, in the perspective of time,
is as our remembrance of his native New Hampshire hills, rugged,
sublime, tonic in atmosphere, seat of perpetual beauty. So was he, a
moral invigorant, the stimulator to noble action, the centre of
spiritual charm.
Who was he, and what did he do that he should have his life-story
told?
First of all, he was the noblest work of God, an honest man. Nothing
higher than this. The New Hampshire country boy rose to one of the
high places in the fourth estate. He became editor of one of Boston's
leading daily newspapers. On the battle-field he saw the movements of
the mightiest armies and navies ever gathered for combat. As a white
lily among war correspondents, he was ever trusted. He not only
informed, but he kept in cheer all New England during four years of
strain. With his pen he made himself a master of English style. He was
a poet, a musician, a traveller, a statesman, and, best of all and
always, a Christian. He travelled around the globe, and then told the
world's story of liberty and of the war that crushed slavery and state
sovereignty and consolidated the Union. With his books he has educated
a generation of American boys and girls in patriotism. He died without
entering into old age, for he was always ready to entertain a new
idea. Let us glance at his name and inheritance. He was well named,
and ever appreciated his heritage. In his Christian, middle, and
family name, is a suggestion. In each lies a story.
"Charles," as we say, is the Norman form of the old Teutonic Carl,
meaning strong, valiant, commanding. The Hungarians named a king Carl.
"Carleton" is the ton or town of Carl or Charles.
"Coffin" in old English meant a cask, chest, casket, box of any kind.
The Latin Cophinum was usually a basket. When Wickliffe translated the
Gospel, he rendered the verse at Matt. xiv. 20, "They took up of that
which remained over of the broken pieces, twelve coffins full."
The name as a family name is still found in England, but all the
Coffins in America are descended from Tristram Coffin, who sailed
from Plymouth, England, in 1642, and in 1660 settled in Nantucket. The
most ancient seat of the name and family of the Coffins in England is
Portledge, in the parish of Alwington. To his house, and last earthly
home, in Brookline, Mass., built under his own eye, and in which
Charles Carleton Coffin died, he gave the name of Alwington.
"Carleton's" grandfather, Peter Coffin, married Rebecca Hazeltine, of
Chester, N. H., whose ancestors had come from England to Salem, Mass.,
in 1637, and settled at Bradford. Carleton has told something of his
ancestry and kin in his "History of Boscawen." In his later years, in
the eighties of this century, at the repeated and urgent request of
his wife, Carleton wrote out, or, rather, jotted down, some notes for
the story of the earlier portion of his life. He was to have written a
volume--had his wife succeeded, after due perseverance, in overcoming
his modesty--entitled "Recollections of Seventy Years." To this, we,
also, that is, the biographer and others, often urged him. It was not
to be.
Excepting, then, these hastily jotted notes, Mr. Coffin never
indicated, gave directions, or prepared materials for his biography.
To the story of his life, as gathered from his own rough notes,
intended for after-reference and elaboration, let us at once proceed,
without further introduction.
CHAPTER II.
OF REVOLUTIONARY SIRES.
The Coffins of America are descended from Tristram Coffin of England
and Nantucket. Charles Carleton Coffin was born of Revolutionary
sires. He first saw light in the southwest corner room of a house
which stood on Water Street, in Boscawen, N. H., which his
grandfather, Captain Peter Coffin, had built in 1766.
This ancestor, "an energetic, plucky, good-natured, genial man,"
married Rebecca Hazeltine, of Chester, N. H. When the frame of the
house was up and the corner room partitioned off, the bride and groom
began housekeeping. Her wedding outfit was a feather bed, a
frying-pan, a dinner-pot, and some wooden and pewter plates. She was
just the kind of a woman to be the mother of patriots and to make the
Revolution a success. The couple had been married nine years, when the
news of the marching of the British upon Lexington reached Boscawen,
on the afternoon of the 20th of April, 1775. Captain Coffin mounted
his horse and rode to Exeter, to take part in the Provincial Assembly,
which gathered the next day. Two years later, he served in the
campaign against Burgoyne. When the militia was called to march to
Bennington, in July, 1777, one soldier could not go because he had no
shirt. Mrs. Coffin had a web of tow cloth in the loom. She at once cut
out the woven part, sat up all night, and made the required garment,
so that he could take his place in the ranks the next morning. One
month after the making of this shirt, the father of Charles Carleton
Coffin was born, July 15.
When the news of Stark's victory at Bennington came, the call was for
every able-bodied man to turn out, in order to defeat Burgoyne. Every
well man went, including Carleton's two grandfathers, Captain Peter
Coffin, who had been out in June, though not in Stark's command, and
Eliphalet Kilborn. The women and children were left to gather in the
crops. The wheat was ripe for the sickle, but there was not a man or
boy to cut it. With her baby, one month old, in her arms, Mrs. Peter
Coffin mounted the horse, leaving her other children in care of the
oldest, who was but seven years old. The heroine made her way six
miles through the woods, fording Black Water River to the log cabin of
Enoch Little, on Little Hill, in the present town of Webster. Here
were several sons, but the two eldest had gone to Bennington. Enoch,
Jr., fourteen years old, could be spared to reap the ripened grain,
but he was without shoes, coat, or hat, and his trousers of tow cloth
were out at the knee.
"Enoch can go and help you, but he has no coat," said Mrs. Little.
"I can make him a coat," said Mrs. Coffin.
The boy sprang on the horse behind the heroic woman, who, between the
baby and the boy, rode upon the horse back to the farm. Enoch took the
sickle and went to the wheat field, while Mrs. Coffin made him a coat.
She had no cloth, but taking a meal-bag, she cut a hole in the bottom
for his head, and two other holes for his arms. Then cutting off the
legs of a pair of her stockings, she sewed them on for sleeves, thus
completing the garment. Going into the wheat field, she laid her
baby, the father of Charles Carleton Coffin, in the shade of a tree,
and bound up the cut grain into sheaves.
In 1789, when the youngest child of this Revolutionary heroine was
four months old, she was left a widow, with five children. Three were
daughters, the eldest being sixteen; and two were sons, the elder
being twelve. With rigid economy, thrift, and hard work, she reared
her family. In working out the road tax she was allowed four pence
halfpenny for every cart-load of stones dumped into miry places on the
highway. She helped the boys fill the cart with stones. While the boy
who became Carleton's father managed the steers, hauled and dumped the
load, she went on with her knitting.
Of such a daughter of the Revolution and of a Revolutionary sire was
Carleton's father born. When he grew to manhood he was "tall in
stature, kind-hearted, genial, public-spirited, benevolent, ever ready
to relieve suffering and to help on every good cause. He was an
intense lover of liberty and was always true to his convictions." He
fell in love with Hannah, the daughter of Deacon Eliphalet Kilborn,
of Boscawen, and the couple lived in the old house built by his
father. There, after other children had been born, Charles Carleton
Coffin, her youngest child, entered this world at 9 A. M., July 26,
1823. From this time forward, the mother never had a well day. After
ten years of ill health and suffering, she died from too much calomel
and from slow starvation, being able to take but little food on
account of canker in her mouth and throat. Carleton, her pet, was very
much with her during his child-life, so that his recollections of his
mother were ever very clear, very tender, and profoundly influential
for good.
The first event whose isolation grew defined in the mind of "the baby
new to earth and sky," was an incident of 1825, when he was
twenty-three months old. His maternal grandfather had shot a hawk,
breaking its wing, and bringing it to the house alive. The boy baby
standing in the doorway, all the family being in the yard, always
remembered looking at what he called "a hen with a crooked bill."
Carleton's recollection of the freshet of August, 1826, when the great
slide occurred at the White Mountains, causing the death of the
Willey family, was more detailed. This event has been thrillingly
described by Thomas Starr King. The irrepressible small boy wanted to
"go to meeting" on Sunday. Being told that he could not, he cried
himself to sleep. When he awoke he mounted his "horse,"--a
broomstick,--and cantered up the road for a half mile. Captured by a
lady, he resisted vigorously, while she pointed to the waters running
in white streams down the hills through the flooded meadows and
telling him he would be drowned.
Meanwhile the hired man at home was poling the well under the sweep
and "the old oaken bucket," thinking the little fellow might have
leaned over the curb and tumbled in. Shortly afterwards he came near
disappearing altogether from this world by tumbling into the
water-trough, being fished out by his sister Mary.
In the old kitchen, a pair of deer's horns fastened into the wall held
the long-barrelled musket which his grandfather had carried in the
campaign of 1777. A round beaver hat, bullet, button, and spoon
moulds, and home-made pewter spoons and buttons, were among other
things which impressed themselves upon the sensitive films of the
child's memory.
Following out the usual small boy's instinct of destruction, he once
sallied out down to the "karsey" (causeway) to spear frogs with a
weapon made by his brother. It was a sharpened nail in the end of a
broomstick. Stepping on a log and making a stab at a "pull paddock,"
he slipped and fell head foremost into the mud and slime. Scrambling
out, he hied homeward, and entering the parlor, filled with company,
he was greeted with shouts of laughter. Even worse was it to be dubbed
by his brother and the hired man a "mud lark."
Carleton's first and greatest teachers were his mother and father.
After these, came formal instruction by means of letters and books,
classes and schools. Carleton's religious and dogmatic education began
with the New England Primer, and progressed with the hymns of that
famous Congregationalist, Doctor Watts. When five years old, at the
foot of a long line of boys and girls, he toed the mark,--a crack in
the kitchen floor,--and recited verses from the Bible. Sunday-school
instruction was then in its beginning at Boscawen. The first hymn he
learned was:
"Life is the time to serve the Lord."
After mastering
"In Adam's fall
We sinned all,"
the infantile ganglions got tangled up between the "sleigh" in the
carriage-house, and the act of pussy in mauling the poor little mouse,
unmentioned, but of importance, in the couplet:
"The cat doth play,
And after slay."
Having heard of and seen the sleigh before learning the synonym for
"kill," the little New Hampshire boy was as much bothered as a Chinese
child who first hears one sound which has many meanings, and only
gradually clears up the mystery as the ideographs are mastered.
From the very first, the boy had an ear sensitive to music. The
playing of Enoch Little, his first school-teacher, and afterwards his
brother-in-law, upon the bass viol, was very sweet. Napoleon was
never prouder of his victories at Austerlitz than was little Carleton
of his first reward of merit. This was a bit of white paper two inches
square, bordered with yellow from the paint-box of a beautiful young
lady who had written in the middle, "To a good little boy."
The first social event of importance was the marriage of his sister
Apphia to Enoch Little, Nov. 29, 1829, when a room-full of cousins,
uncles, and aunts gathered together. After a chapter read from the
Bible, and a long address by the clergyman, the marital ceremony was
performed, followed by a hymn read and sung, and a prayer. Although
this healthy small boy, Carleton, had been given a big slice of
wedding cake with white frosting on the top, he felt himself injured,
and was hotly jealous of his brother Enoch, who had secured a slice
with a big red sugar strawberry on the frosting. After eating
voraciously, he hid the remainder of his cake in the mortise of a beam
beside the back chamber stairs. On visiting it next morning for secret
indulgence, he found that the rats had enjoyed the wedding feast, too.
Nothing was left. His first toy watch was to him an event of vast
significance, and he slept with it under his pillow. When also he had
donned his first pair of trousers, he strutted like a turkey cock and
said, "I look just like a grand sir." Children in those days often
spoke of men advanced in years as "grand sirs."
The boy was ten years old when President Andrew Jackson visited
Concord. Everybody went to see "Old Hickory." In the yellow-bottomed
chaise, paterfamilias Coffin took his boy Carleton and his daughter
Elvira, the former having four pence ha'penny to spend. Federal
currency was not plentiful in those days, and the people still used
the old nomenclature, of pounds, shillings, and pence, which was
Teutonic even before it was English or American. Rejoicing in his
orange, his stick of candy, and his supply of seed cakes, young
Carleton, from the window of the old North Meeting House, saw the
military parade and the hero of New Orleans. With thin features and
white hair, Jackson sat superbly on a white horse, bowing right and
left to the multitude. Martin Van Buren was one of the party.
Another event, long to be remembered by a child who had never before
been out late at night, was when, with a party of boys seven or eight
in number, he went a-spearing on Great Pond. In the calm darkness they
walked around the pond down the brook to the falls. With a bright
jack-light, made of pitch-pine-knots, everything seemed strange and
exciting to the boy who was making his first acquaintance of the
wilderness world by night. His brother Enoch speared an eel that
weighed four pounds, and a pickerel of the same weight. The party did
not get home till 2 A. M., but the expedition was a glorious one and
long talked over. The only sad feature in this rich experience was in
his mother's worrying while her youngest child was away.
This was in April. On the 20th of August, just after sunset, in the
calm summer night, little Carleton looked into his mother's eyes for
the last time, and saw the heaving breast gradually become still. It
was the first great sorrow of his life.