MY father, Samuel Pierce Hawes, was born in the town of Dorchester,
Massachusetts, July 30, 1799.
The homestead, still standing and reckoned among the notable sites of
the region, was built in 1640, by Robert Pierce, who emigrated to the
New World in 1630, having sailed from Plymouth, England, in the _Mary
and John_, in company with others of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On
the voyage, he married Ann Greenaway—registered as “Daughter of Goodman
Greenaway,” a fellow-passenger.
The family trace their descent, by old domestic and town records, from
the Northumberland Percies. Traditions, cherished by the race, affirm
that Godfrey of Bouillon was a remote ancestor. It is unquestionably
true that “Robert of Dorchester,” as he is put down in the genealogy of
the Percies, was a blood relative of Master George Percy, John Smith’s
friend, and his successor in the presidency of the Jamestown colony.
The emigrants had a temporary home in Neponset Village, prospering so
far in worldly substance as to justify the erection of the substantial
house upon the hill overlooking the “village,” ten years after the
landing. So substantial was it, and so honest were the builders,
that it has come down in a direct line from father to son, and been
inhabited by ten generations of thrifty folk who have left it stanch
and weatherproof to this day.
My father’s mother, a handsome, wilful girl of seventeen, ran away
to be married to one whom her father—“Squire Pierce”—considered
a presumptuous adventurer. He was from Maine, a stranger in the
neighborhood, and reputed (justly) to be wild and unsteady. When he
asked for the girl’s hand he was summarily commanded to hold no further
communication with her. He had served as a private in the Revolutionary
War; he had winning ways and a good-looking face, and Ann had a liberal
spice of her sire’s unbending will. She would have him, and no other of
the youths who sued for her favor.
The family genealogy records that “Squire Pierce,” as he was named
by his neighbors, received a captain’s commission from the parent
government at the outbreak of the Rebellion, and on the self-same day
one from the Continental Congress appointing him as a colonel in the
Massachusetts forces. As “Colonel Pierce,” he fought throughout the
eight bloody years to which we owe our national life.
In his home he was a despot of the true Puritan, patriarchal type.
For three years after the elopement the name of his daughter’s husband
was never uttered in his hearing. Nor did she enter the house, until
at twenty, her proud spirit bowed but not broken by sorrows she
never retailed, she came back to the old roof-tree on the eve of her
confinement with her first and only child. He was born there and
received the grandfather’s name in full. From that hour he was adopted
as a son of the house by the stern old Puritan, and brought up at his
knees.
With the shrewd sense and sturdy independence characteristic of the
true New-Englander, the mother was never forgetful of the fact that her
boy was half-orphaned and dependent upon his grandfather’s bounty, and
began early to equip him for a single-handed fight with the world.
Within a decade I have studied an authentic and detailed genealogy of
the Hawes stock from which my grandfather sprang. It is a fine old
English family, and the American branch, in which appear the birth and
death of Jesse Hawes, of Maine, numbers many men of distinction in
various professions. It is a comfort to a believer in heredity to be
assured that the tree was sound at heart, in spite of the warped and
severed bough.
By the time my father was fourteen, he was at work in a Boston
mercantile house, boarding with his employer, Mr. Baker, a personal
friend of the Pierces. The growing lad walked out to Dorchester every
Saturday night to spend Sunday at home and attend divine service in
the “Dorchester Old Meeting-House,” the same in which I first saw and
heard Edward Everett Hale, over forty years later. The youth arose, in
all weathers, before the sun on Monday morning in order to be at his
place of business at seven o’clock. When he was sixteen, his employer
removed to Richmond, Virginia, and took his favorite clerk with him.
From Boston to the capital of the Old Dominion was then a fortnight’s
journey by the quickest mode of travel. The boy could hardly hope to
see his mother even once a year.
At twenty-five he was an active member of the First Presbyterian Church
in Richmond, established and built up by Rev. John Holt Rice, D.D.,
who was also the founder of Union Theological Seminary, now situated
in Richmond. The young New-Englander was, likewise, a teacher in the
Sunday-school—the first of its kind in Virginia, conducted under the
auspices of Doctor Rice’s church—a partner in a flourishing mercantile
house, and engaged to be married to Miss Judith Anna Smith, of Olney,
a plantation on the Chickahominy, five miles from the city.
I have a miniature of my father, painted upon ivory a few years after
his marriage. It is that of a handsome man, with deeply set gray eyes,
very dark hair, and a well-cut, resolute mouth. The head is nobly
shaped, the forehead full and broad. His face was singularly mobile,
and deeply lined, even in youth.
In intellect he was far above the average business man. His library, at
that early date, was more than respectable. Some of the most valuable
early editions of the English classics that enrich my book-shelves
have his book-plate upon the fly-leaves. He had, moreover, a number
of standard French books, having studied the language with a tutor in
the evenings. The range of his reading was wide and of a high order.
Histories, biographies, books of travel, and essays had a prominent
place in his store of “solid reading.” That really good novels were
not included in this condemnation we learn from a brief note to
his betrothed, accompanying a copy of Walter Scott’s _Pirate_. He
apologizes for the profanity of certain characters in semi-humorous
fashion, and signs himself, “Your friend, Samuel.”
Doctor Rice, whose wife was my mother’s first cousin, appreciated young
Hawes’s character and ability; the parsonage was thrown open to him at
all times, and within the hospitable precincts he first met his future
wife.
She was a pretty, amiable girl of eighteen, like himself an omnivorous
reader, and, like him also, a zealous church-worker.
Her father, Capt. William Sterling Smith, was the master of the
ancestral estate of Olney, rechristened in the latter part of the
eighteenth century by an ardent admirer of William Cowper. I am under
the impression that the change of name was the work of my grandmother,
his second wife, Miss Judith Smith, of Montrose, and a second cousin
of “Captain Sterling,” as he was familiarly called.
Late in the seventeenth century, William Smith, of Devonshire, a lineal
descendant of the brother and heir of Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas
fame, married Ann Sterling in England, and, emigrating to America,
pitched his moving tent, first in Gloucester, then in Henrico County.
His cousin, bearing the same name, took up land in Powhatan, naming his
homestead for the hapless Earl of Montrose. The questionable custom of
the intermarriage of cousins prevailed in the clan, as among other old
Virginia families.
My maternal grandmother was petite, refined in feature, bearing, and
speech, and remarkable in her day for intellectual vivacity and moral
graces. Her chief associates of the other sex were men of profound
learning, distinguished for services done to Church and State. Among
them were the founders of the Presbyterian Church in Virginia. The
Smiths had seceded from the Established Church of England before Thomas
Jefferson rent it from the State.
There lies at my elbow a time-worn volume bound in unpolished
calf-skin, and lettered on one side, “D. Lacy’s Letters”; on the
reverse, “Friendship Perpetuated.” It contains one hundred and
forty-two letters, copied from the original epistles and engrossed in
exquisitely neat and minute characters. They represent one side of a
correspondence maintained by the scribe with my grandmother before
and after her marriage. The writer and copyist was the Rev. Drury
Lacy, D.D., then a professor in Hampden Sidney College, and destined
to become the progenitor of a long line of divines and scholars.
The Hoges, Lacys, Brookeses, and Waddells were of this lineage. The
epistles are Addisonian in purity of moral teaching and in grammatical
structure, Johnsonian in verboseness, and interfused throughout with
a pietistic priggishness all their own. We are glad to carry with us
through the perusal (in instalments) of the hundred and forty-two,
the tales current in that all-so-long-ago of the genial nature and
liveliness of conversation that made him a star in social life. One
wonders, in hearing of the “perpetuation” of the brotherly-and-sisterly
intimacy, begun months before he wedded the “Nancy” of the Montrose
group, who, from all I have been able to gather, was a very commonplace
personage by comparison with “Judith”—one marvels, I say, that the
affection never ripened into a warmer sentiment. They had themselves
better in hand evidently than the “affinities” of the twentieth century.
Old people I knew, when a child, delighted in relating how, when “Mr.
Lacy” held meetings in country churches in Powhatan and Prince Edward,
and his sister-in-law was in the congregation, everybody listened for
the voices of those two. His was strong, flexible, and sweet, and he
read music as he read a printed page. While she, as an old admirer—who
up to his eightieth year loved to visit my mother that he might talk
of his early love—used to declare, “sang like an angel just down from
heaven.”
She added all womanly accomplishments to musical skill and literary
tastes. An embroidered counterpane, of which I am the proud owner, is
wrought in thirteen varieties of stitch, and in patterns invented by
herself and three sisters, the only brother contributing what may be
classed as a “conventional design” of an altar and two turtle-doves
perched upon a brace of coupled hearts—symbolical of his passion for
the beauty of the county, Judith Mosby, of Fonthill, whom he married.
Our Judith held on the peaceful tenor of her way, reading all the
books she could lay her shapely hands upon, keeping up her end of
correspondences with Lacys, Rices, Speeces, Randolphs, and Blaines,
and gently rejecting one offer after another, until she married at
thirty-three—an advanced stage of spinsterdom, then—honest Capt.
Sterling Smith, the widower-father of three children.
Her husband was the proprietor of broad acres, a man of birth and fair
education, high-minded, honorable, and devoted to his delicate wife.
Nevertheless, the dainty _châtelaine_ must, sometimes, have missed her
erudite admirers, and wished in her heart that the worthy planter were,
intellectually, more in tune with herself.
My own mother’s recollections of her mother were vivid, and I never
wearied of hearing them. My grandmother’s wedding night-gown, which I
have, helps me to picture her as she moved about the modest homestead,
directing and overseeing servants, key-basket on arm, keeping, as
she did, a daily record of provisions “given out” from store-room
and smoke-house, writing down in her hand-book bills-of-fare for the
week (my mother treasured them for years), entertaining the friends
attracted by her influence, her husband’s hospitality, and his two
daughters’ charms of person and disposition.
This gown is of fine cambric, with a falling collar and a short,
shirred waist. The buttons are wooden moulds, covered with cambric, and
each bears a tiny embroidered sprig. Collar and sleeves are trimmed
with ruffles, worked in scallops by her deft fingers. The owner and
wearer was below the medium height of women, and slight to fragility.
Her love of the beautiful found expression in her exquisite needlework,
in copying “commonplace-books” full of poetry and the music she loved
passionately, and most healthful of all, in flower-gardening. Within my
memory, the white jessamine planted by her still draped the window of
“the chamber” on the first floor. Few Virginia housewives would consent
to have their bedrooms up-stairs. “Looking after the servants” was
no idle figure of speech with them. Eternal vigilance was the price
of home comfort. A hardy white-rose-tree, also planted by her, lived
almost as long as the jessamine—her favorite flower.
In the shade of the bower formed by these, Mrs. Judith Smith sat with
her embroidery on summer days, her little name-daughter upon a cricket
beside her, reading aloud by the hour. It was rather startling to me to
learn that, at thirteen, the precocious child read thus _Pamela_, _The
Children of the Abbey_, and _Clarissa_ to the sweet-faced, white-souled
matron. Likewise _The Rambler_, _Rasselas_, Shakespeare, and _The
Spectator_ (unexpurgated). But Young’s _Night Thoughts_, Thomson’s
_Seasons_, _Paradise Lost_, Pope’s _Essays_, and the Book of Books
qualified whatever of evil might have crept into the tender imagination
from the strong meat, spiced. Cowper was a living presence to mother
and girl. My mother could repeat pages of _The Tas_ from memory fifty
years after she recited them to her gentle teacher, and his hymns were
the daily food of the twain.
The Olney family drove in the heavy coach over heavy roads five miles
in all weathers to the First Presbyterian Church of Richmond. My
grandfather had helped raise the money for the building, as his letters
show, and was one of the elders ordained soon after the church was
organized.
Thither they had gone on Christmas Sunday, 1811, to be met on the
threshold by the news of the burning of the theatre on Saturday night.
My mother, although but six years old, never forgot the scenes of that
day. Doctor Rice had deviated from the rutted road of the “long prayer”
constructed by ecclesiastical surveyors along the lines of Adoration,
Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication (“A, C, T, S”)—to talk as man to
man with the Ruler of the universe of the terrible judgment which had
befallen the mourning city. He had even alluded to it in his sermon,
and it was discussed in awe-stricken tones by lingering groups in the
aisles when service was over. Then, her little hand locked fast in that
of her mother, the child was guided along the valley and up the steep
hill to the smoking ruins, surrounded by a silent crowd, many of them
in tears. In low, impressive accents the mother told the baby what had
happened there last night, and, as the little creature began to sob,
led her on up the street. A few squares farther on, my grandfather and
a friend who walked with him laughed slightly at something they said or
saw, and my grandmother said, sorrowfully:
“How can you laugh when sixty fellow-creatures lie dead over there—all
hurried into Eternity without warning?”
I have never passed the now-old Monumental Church without recalling the
incident engraved upon my childish mind by my mother’s story.
In the volume of “D. Lacy’s Letters” I found, laid carefully between
the embrowned leaves for safest keeping, several letters from Capt.
Sterling Smith to his “dear Judy,” and one from her to him, written
while she was on a visit to Montrose, her birthplace, with her only
son. We have such a pretty, pathetic expression of her love for husband
and child, and touches, few but graphic, that outline for us so clearly
her personality and environment, that I insert it here:
“MONTROSE, _September 5th, 1817._
“(Ten o’clock at night.)
“MY DEAR MR. SMITH,—I am sitting by my dear Josiah, who
continues ill. His fever rises about dark. The chills are
less severe, and the fever does not last as long as it did a
week ago. Still, he suffers much, and is very weak. He has
taken a great deal of medicine with very little benefit. His
gums are sore. The doctor thinks they are touched by the
calomel. He was here this morning, and advised some oil and
then the bark.
“We have been looking for you ever since yesterday. Poor
fellow! He longs to see you—and so do I! I was up last
night, and I have been to-night very often—indeed, almost
constantly—at the door and the window, listening for the
sound of your horse’s feet. I have written by post, by John
Morton, and by Mr. Mosby. I think if you had received either
of the notes I should see you to-night, unless something
serious is the matter. I am so much afraid that you are ill
as to be quite unhappy.
“My love to my dear girls and all the family. My dear! my
heart is sore! Pray that God may support me. I am too easily
depressed—particularly when you are not with me. I _long_ to
see you! I hope I shall before you receive this. God bless
you!
“Your very affectionate—your own