years of age when he entered the White House as a member of the
President's family. He was a young man after James Madison's own heart,
of gentle manners, handsome person, and singular firmness of character.
In the correspondence both of Jefferson and Madison several letters can
be found addressed to him which show the very high estimation in which
he was held by those eminent men.
Among the many young men who have held the place of private secretary in
the presidential mansion, Edward Coles was one of the most interesting.
I know not which ought to rank highest in our esteem, the wise and
gallant Lewis, who explored for us the Western wilderness, or Edward
Coles, one of the rare men who know how to surrender, for conscience'
sake, home, fortune, ease, and good repute.
While he was still in college he became deeply interested in the
question, whether men could rightfully hold property in men. At that
time the best of the educated class at the South were still
abolitionists in a romantic or sentimental sense, just as Queen Marie
Antoinette was a republican during the American Revolution. Here and
there a young man like George Wythe had set free his slaves and gone
into the profession of the law. With the great majority, however, their
disapproval of slavery was only an affair of the intellect, which led to
no practical results. It was not such with Edward Coles. The moment you
look at the portrait given in the recent sketch of his life by Mr. E. B.
Washburne, you perceive that he was a person who might be slow to make
up his mind, but who, when he had once discovered the right course,
could never again be at peace with himself until he had followed it.
While at college he read everything on the subject of slavery that fell
in his way, and he studied it in the light of the Declaration of
Independence, which assured him that men are born free and equal and
endowed with certain natural rights which are inalienable. He made up
his mind, while he was still a student, that it was wrong to hold
slaves, and he resolved that he would neither hold them nor live in a
State which permitted slaves to be held. He was determined, however, to
do nothing rashly. One reason which induced him to accept the place
offered him by Mr. Madison was his desire of getting a knowledge of the
remoter parts of the Union, in order to choose the place where he could
settle his slaves most advantageously.
While he was yet a member of the presidential household, he held that
celebrated correspondence with Mr. Jefferson, in which he urged the
ex-President to devote the rest of his life to promoting the abolition
of slavery. Mr. Jefferson replied that the task was too arduous for a
man who had passed his seventieth year. It was like bidding old Priam
buckle on the armor of Hector.
"This enterprise," he added, "is for the young, for those who can follow
it up and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my
prayers and these are the only weapons of an old man. But, in the mean
time, are you right in abandoning this property, and your country with
it? I think not."
Mr. Jefferson endeavored to dissuade the young man from his project of
removal. Mr. Coles, however, was not to be convinced. After serving for
six years as private secretary, and fulfilling a special diplomatic
mission to Russia, he withdrew to his ancestral home in Virginia, and
prepared to lead forth his slaves to the State of Illinois, then
recently admitted into the Union, but still a scarcely broken expanse of
virgin prairie. He could not lawfully emancipate his slaves in Virginia,
and it was far from his purpose to turn them loose in the wilderness. He
was going with them, and to stay with them until they were well rooted
in the new soil.
All his friends and relations opposed his scheme; nor had he even the
approval of the slaves themselves, for they knew nothing whatever of his
intention. He had been a good master, and they followed him with blind
faith, supposing that he was merely going to remove, as they had seen
other planters remove, from an exhausted soil to virgin lands. Placing
his slaves in the charge of one of their number, a mulatto man who had
already made the journey to Illinois with his master, he started them in
wagons on their long journey in April, 1819, over the Alleghany
Mountains to a point on the Monongahela River. There he bought two large
flat-bottomed boats, upon which he embarked his whole company, with
their horses, wagons, baggage, and implements. His pilot proving a
drunkard, he was obliged to take the command himself, upon reaching
Pittsburg.
The morning after he left Pittsburg, a lovely April day, he called all
the negroes together on the deck of the boats, which were lashed
together, and explained what he was going to do with them. He told them
they were no longer slaves, but free people, free as he was, free to go
on down the river with him, and free to go ashore, just as they pleased.
He afterwards described the scene. "The effect on them," he wrote, "was
electrical. They stared at me and at each other, as if doubting the
accuracy or reality of what they heard. In breathless silence they stood
before me, unable to utter a word, but with countenances beaming with
expression which no words could convey, and which no language can now
describe. As they began to see the truth of what they had heard, and to
realize their situation, there came on a kind of hysterical, giggling
laugh. After a pause of intense and unutterable emotion, bathed in
tears, and with tremulous voices, they gave vent to their gratitude, and
implored the blessings of God on me. When they had in some degree
recovered the command of themselves, Ralph said he had long known I was
opposed to holding black people as slaves, and thought it probable I
would some time or other give my people their freedom, but that he did
not expect me to do it so soon; and moreover, he thought I ought not to
do it till they had repaid me the expense I had been at in removing them
from Virginia, and had improved my farm and 'gotten me well fixed in
that new country.' To this all simultaneously expressed their
concurrence, and their desire to remain with me, as my servants, until
they had comfortably fixed me at my new home.
"I told them, no. I had made up my mind to give to them immediate and
unconditional freedom; that I had long been anxious to do it, but had
been prevented by the delays, first in selling my property in Virginia,
and then in collecting the money, and by other circumstances. That in
consideration of this delay, and as a reward for their past services, as
well as a stimulant to their future exertions, and with a hope it would
add to their self-esteem and their standing in the estimation of others,
I should give to each head of a family a quarter section, containing one
hundred and sixty acres of land. To this all objected, saying I had done
enough for them in giving them their freedom; and insisted on my keeping
the land to supply my own wants, and added, in the kindest manner, the
expression of their solicitude that I would not have the means of doing
so after I had freed them. I told them I had thought much of my duty and
of their rights, and that it was due alike to both that I should do what
I had said I should do; and accordingly, soon after reaching
Edwardsville, I executed and delivered to them deeds to the lands
promised them.
"I stated to them that the lands I intended to give them were unimproved
lands, and as they would not have the means of making the necessary
improvements, of stocking their farms, and procuring the materials for
at once living on them, they would have to hire themselves out till they
could acquire by their labor the necessary means to commence cultivating
and residing on their own lands. That I was willing to hire and employ
on my farm a certain number of them (designating the individuals); the
others I advised to seek employment in St. Louis, Edwardsville, and
other places, where smart, active young men and women could obtain much
higher wages than they could on farms. At this some of them murmured, as
it indicated a partiality, they said, on my part to those designated to
live with me; and contended they should all be equally dear to me, and
that I ought not to keep a part and turn the others out on the world, to
be badly treated, etc. I reminded them of what they seemed to have lost
sight of, that they were free; that no one had a right to beat or
ill-use them; and if so treated they could at pleasure leave one place
and seek a better; that labor was much in demand in that new country,
and highly paid for; that there would be no difficulty in their
obtaining good places, and being kindly treated; but if not, I should be
at hand, and would see they were well treated, and have justice done
them.
"I availed myself of the deck scene to give the negroes some advice. I
dwelt long and with much earnestness on their future conduct and
success, and my great anxiety that they should behave themselves and do
well, not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of the black race
held in bondage; many of whom were thus held because their masters
believed they were incompetent to take care of themselves and that
liberty would be to them a curse rather than a blessing. My anxious wish
was that they should so conduct themselves as to show by their example
that the descendants of Africa were competent to take care of and govern
themselves, and enjoy all the blessings of liberty and all the other
birthrights of man, and thus promote the universal emancipation of that
unfortunate and outraged race of the human family."[1]
After floating six hundred miles down the Ohio, they had another land
journey into Illinois, where the master performed his promises, and
created a home for himself. A few years after, he was elected governor
of the State. It was during his term of three years that a most
determined effort was made to change the constitution of the State so as
to legalize slavery in it. It was chiefly through the firmness and
masterly management of Governor Coles that this attempt was frustrated.
When his purpose in moving to Illinois had been completely accomplished,
he removed to Philadelphia, where he lived to the age of eighty-two.
Though not again in public life, he was always a public-spirited
citizen. He corresponded with the venerable Madison to the close of that
good man's life. Mr. Madison wrote two long letters to him on public
topics in his eighty-fourth year. Governor Coles died at Philadelphia in
1868, having lived to see slavery abolished in every State of the Union.
I have been informed that few, if any, of his own slaves succeeded
finally in farming prairie land, but that most of them gradually drifted
to the towns, where they became waiters, barbers, porters, and domestic
servants. My impression is that he over-estimated their capacity. But
this does not diminish the moral sublimity of the experiment.
[1] Sketch of Edward Coles. By E. B. Washburne. Chicago. 1882.
PETER H. BURNETT.
When an aged bank president, who began life as a waiter in a backwoods
tavern, tells the story of his life, we all like to gather close about
him and listen to his tale. Peter H. Burnett, the first Governor of
California, and now the President of the Pacific Bank in San Francisco,
has recently related his history, or the "Recollections of an Old
Pioneer;" and if I were asked by the "intelligent foreigner" we often
read about to explain the United States of to-day, I would hand him that
book, and say:--
"There! That is the stuff of which America is made."
He was born at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1807; his father a carpenter and
farmer, an honest, strong-minded man, who built some of the first
log-houses and frame-houses of what was then the frontier village of
Nashville, now a beautiful and pleasant city. While he was still a child
the family removed to Missouri, then on the outer edge of civilization,
and they spent the first winter in a hovel with a dirt floor, boarded up
at the sides, and with a hole in the middle of the roof for the escape
of the smoke. All the family lived together in the same room. In a year
or two, of course, they had a better house, and a farm under some
cultivation.
Those pioneer settlements were good schools for the development of the
pioneer virtues, courage, fortitude, handiness, directness of speech and
conduct. Fancy a boy ten years old going on horseback to mill through
the woods, and having to wait at the mill one or two days and nights for
his turn, living chiefly on a little parched corn which he carried with
him, and bringing back the flour all right.
"It often happened," says Governor Burnett, "that both bag and boy
tumbled off, and then there was trouble; not so much because the boy was
a little hurt (for he would soon recover), but because it was difficult
to get the bag on again."
There was nothing for it but to wait until a man came along strong
enough to shoulder three bushels of corn. Missouri was then, as it now
is, a land of plenty; for besides the produce of the farms, the country
was full of game, and a good deal of money was gained by the traffic in
skins, honey, and beeswax. The simplicity of dress was such that a
merchant attending church one day dressed in a suit of broadcloth, the
aged preacher alluded to his "fine apparel," and condemned it as being
contrary to the spirit of the Gospel. Fighting with fists was one of
the chief amusements. At a training, some young bully would mount a
stump, and after imitating the napping and crowing of a cock, cry out:--
"I can whip any man in this crowd except my friends."
The challenge being accepted, the two combatants would fight until one
of them cried, Enough; whereupon they would wash their faces and take a
friendly drink. Men would sometimes lose a part of an ear, the end of a
nose, or the whole of an eye in these combats, for it was considered
within the rules to bite and gouge.
In this wild country Peter Burnett grew to manhood, attending school
occasionally in summer, and getting a pretty good rudimentary education.
Coming of intelligent, honest, able ancestors, he used his opportunities
well, and learned a great deal from books, but more from a close
observation of the natural wonders by which he was surrounded. His acute
and kindly remarks upon the wild animals and wild nature of this
continent could be profitably studied by almost any naturalist. It is
surprising that one who has almost all his life lived on the advanced
wave of civilization in this country should have acquired, among his
other possessions, an extensive knowledge of literature, as well as of
life and nature. Nor is his case by any means uncommon.
When he was nineteen his father gave him a horse three years old, a
saddle and bridle, a new camlet cloak, and twenty-six dollars, and his
mother furnished him with a good suit of jeans. Soon after, he mounted
his young horse and rode back to his native State, and took charge of
the tavern aforesaid in the town of Bolivar, Hardiman County, of which
tavern he was waiter, clerk, and book-keeper. Here he had a pretty hard
time. Being very young, gawky, and ill-dressed, he was subject to a good
deal of jesting and ridicule. But he was fond of reading. Finding, by
chance, at the house of an uncle, Pope's translation of the Iliad, he
was perfectly entranced with it.
"Had it been gold or precious stones," he tells us, "the pleasure would
not have equaled that which I enjoyed."
Nevertheless, he fancied that his ignorance, his country dress and
uncouth manners caused him to be slighted even by his own relations.
"I was badly quizzed," he says, "and greatly mortified; but I worked on
resolutely, said nothing, and was always at the post of duty."
Promotion is sure to come to a lad of that spirit, and accordingly we
soon find him a clerk in a country store earning two hundred dollars a
year and his board, besides being head over ears in love with a
beautiful girl. At first he did not know that he was in love; but, one
day, when he had been taking dinner with her family, and had talked with
the young lady herself after dinner a good while, he came out of the
house, and was amazed to discover that the sun was gone from the sky.
"In a confused manner," he relates, "I inquired of her father what had
become of the sun. He politely replied, 'It has gone down!' I knew then
that I was in love. It was a plain case."
In those good old times marriage did not present the difficulties which
it now does. He was soon married, obtained more lucrative employment,
got into business for himself, failed, studied law, and found himself,
at the age of thirty-six, the father of a family of six children,
twenty-eight thousand dollars in debt, and, though in good practice at
the bar, not able to reduce his indebtedness more than a thousand
dollars a year. So he set his face toward Oregon, then containing only
three or four hundred settlers. He mounted the stump and organized a
wagon-train, the roll of which at the rendezvous contained two hundred
and ninety-three names. With this party, whose effects were drawn by
oxen and mules, he started in May, 1843, for a journey of seventeen
hundred miles across a wilderness most of which had never been trodden
by civilized men.
For six months they pursued their course westward. Six persons died on
the way, five turned back, fifteen went to California, and those who
held their course towards Oregon endured hardships and privations which
tasked their fortitude to the uttermost. Mr. Burnett surveyed the scenes
of the wilderness with the eye of an intelligent and sympathetic
observer. Many of his remarks upon the phenomena of those untrodden
plains are of unusual interest, whether he is discoursing upon animate
or inanimate nature.
Arrived in Oregon, an eight months' journey from Washington, the
settlers were obliged to make a provisional government for themselves,
to which the Tennessee lawyer lent an able hand. He relates an incident
of the first collision between law and license. They selected for
sheriff the famous Joseph L. Meek, a man of the best possible temper,
but as brave as a lion. The first man who defied the new laws was one
Dawson, a carpenter, scarcely less courageous than Meek himself. Dawson,
who had been in a fight, disputed the right of the sheriff to arrest
him. The sheriff simply replied:--
"Dawson, I came for you."
The carpenter raised his plane to defend himself. Meek wrested it from
him. Dawson picked up his broad axe, but on rising found himself within
a few inches of Meek's cocked revolver.
"Dawson," said the sheriff, laughing, "I came for you. Surrender or
die."
Dawson surrendered, and from that hour to the present, Oregon has been
ruled by law. In the course of five years the pioneer had brought under
cultivation a good farm in Oregon, which supported his family in great
abundance, but did not contribute much to the reduction of those
Tennessee debts, which he was determined to pay if it took him all his
life to do it.
The news of the gold discovery in California reached Oregon. He
organized another wagon-train, and in a few months he and another lawyer
were in the mining country, drawing deeds for town lots, from sunrise to
sunset, at ten dollars a deed. They did their "level best," he says, and
each made a hundred dollars a day at the business. Again he assisted in
the formation of a government, and he was afterwards elected the first
governor of the State of California. At present, at the age of
seventy-five, his debts long ago paid, a good estate acquired, and his
children all well settled in life, he amuses himself with discounting
notes in the Pacific Bank of San Francisco. Every person concerned in
the management of a bank would do well to consider his wise remarks on
the business of banking. When a man brings him a note for discount, he
says, he asks five questions:--
1. Is the supposed borrower an honest man? 2. Has he capital enough for
his business? 3. Is his business reasonably safe? 4. Does he manage it
well? 5. Does he live economically?
The first and last of these questions are the vital ones, he thinks,
though the others are not to be slighted.
[Illustration: Gerrit Smith]
GERRIT SMITH.
For many years we were in the habit of hearing, now and then, of a
certain Gerrit Smith, a strange gentleman who lived near Lake Ontario,
where he possessed whole townships of land, gave away vast quantities of
money, and was pretty sure to be found on the unpopular side of all
questions, beloved alike by those who agreed with him and those who
differed from him. Every one that knew him spoke of the majestic beauty
of his form and face, of his joyous demeanor, of the profuse hospitality
of his village abode, where he lived like a jovial old German baron, but
without a baron's battle-axe and hunting spear.
He was indeed an interesting character. Without his enormous wealth he
would have been, perhaps, a benevolent, enterprising farmer, who would
have lived beloved and died lamented by all who knew him. But his wealth
made him remarkable; for the possession of wealth usually renders a man
steady-going and conservative. It is like ballast to a ship. The slow
and difficult process by which honest wealth is usually acquired is
pretty sure to "take the nonsense out of a man," and give to all his
enterprises a practicable character. But here was a man whose wealth was
more like the gas to a balloon than ballast to a ship; and he flung it
around with an ignorance of human nature most astonishing in a person so
able and intelligent. There was room in the world for one Gerrit Smith,
but not for two. If we had many such, benevolence itself would be
brought into odium, and we should reserve all our admiration for the
close-fisted.
His ancestors were Dutchmen, long settled in Rockland County, New York.
Gerrit's father owned the farm upon which Major André was executed, and
might even have witnessed the tragedy, since he was twelve years old at
the time. Peter Smith was his name, and he had a touch of genius in his
composition, just enough to disturb and injure his life. At sixteen this
Peter Smith was a merchant's clerk in New York, with such a love of the
stage that he performed minor parts at the old Park theatre, and it is
said could have made a good actor. He was a sensitive youth, easily
moved to tears, and exceedingly susceptible to religious impressions.
While he was still a young man he went into the fur business with John
Jacob Astor, and tramped all over western and northern New York, buying
furs from the Indians, and becoming intimately acquainted with that
magnificent domain. The country bordering upon Lake Ontario abounded in
fur-bearing animals at that period, and both the partners foretold
Rochester, Oswego, and the other lake ports, before any white man had
built a log hut on their site.
Astor invested his profits in city lots, but Peter Smith bought great
tracts of land in northern and western New York. He sometimes bought
townships at a single purchase, and when he died he owned in the State
not far from a million acres. His prosperity, however, was of little
advantage to him, for as he advanced in life a kind of religious gloom
gained possession of him. He went about distributing tracts, and became
at length so much impaired in his disposition that his wife could not
live with him; finally, he withdrew from business and active life, made
over the bulk of his property to his son, Gerrit, and, settling in
Schenectady, passed a lonely and melancholy old age.