at Hamilton College, near Utica, where he figured in the character, very
uncommon at colleges in those days, of rich man's son; a strikingly
handsome, winning youth, with flowing hair and broad Byron collar, fond
of all innocent pleasures, member of a card club, and by no means
inattentive to his dress. It seems, too, that at college he was an
enthusiastic reader of passing literature, although in after days he
scarcely shared in the intellectual life of his time. At the age of
twenty-two he was a married man. He fell in love at college with the
president's daughter, who died after a married life of only seven
months. Married happily a second time a year or two after, he settled at
his well-known house in Peterboro, a village near Oswego, where he lived
ever after. The profession of the law, for which he had prepared
himself, he never practiced, since the care of his immense estate
absorbed his time and ability; as much so as the most exacting
profession. In all those operations which led to the development of
Oswego from an outlying military post into a large and thriving city,
Gerrit Smith was of necessity a leader or participant,--for the best of
his property lay in that region.
And here was his first misfortune. Rich as he was, his estate was all
undeveloped, and nothing but the personal labor of the owner could make
it of value. For twenty years or more he was the slave of his estate. He
could not travel abroad; he could not recreate his mind by pleasure.
Albany, the nearest large town, was more than a hundred miles distant, a
troublesome journey then; and consequently he had few opportunities of
mingling with men of the world. He was a man of the frontier, an
admirable leader of men engaged in the mighty work of subduing the
wilderness and laying the foundations of empires. He, too, bought land,
like his father before him, although his main interest lay in improving
his estate and making it accessible.
In the midst of his business life, when he was carrying a vast spread
of sail (making canals, laying out towns, deep in all sorts of
enterprises), the panic of 1837 struck him, laid him on his beam ends,
and almost put him under water. He owed an immense sum of money--small,
indeed, compared with his estate, but crushing at a time when no money
could be raised upon the security of land. When he owned a million
acres, as well as a great quantity of canal stock, plank-road stock, and
wharf stock, and when fifteen hundred men owed him money, some in large
amounts, he found it difficult to raise money enough to go to
Philadelphia. In this extremity he had recourse to his father's friend
and partner, John Jacob Astor, then the richest man in North America.
Gerrit Smith described his situation in a letter, and asked for a large
loan on land security.
Mr. Astor replied by inviting him to dinner. During the repast the old
man was full of anecdote and reminiscence of the years when himself and
Peter Smith camped out on the Oswego River, and went about with packs on
their backs buying furs. When the cloth was removed the terrible topic
was introduced, and the guest explained his situation once more.
"How much do you need?" inquired Astor.
"In all, I must have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars."
"Do you want the whole of it at once?" asked the millionaire.
"I do," was the reply.
Astor looked serious for a moment, and then said:--
"You shall have it."
The guest engaged to forward a mortgage on some lands along the Oswego
River, and a few days after, before the mortgage was ready, the old man
sent his check for the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Through
the neglect of a clerk the mortgage papers were not sent for some weeks
after, so that Mr. Astor had parted with this great sum upon no other
security than a young man's word. But John Jacob Astor was a good judge
of men, as well as of land.
Thus relieved, Gerrit Smith pursued his career without embarrassment,
and in about twenty years paid off all his debts, and had then a revenue
ranging from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year. He gave away
money continuously, from thirty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars a
year, in large sums and in small sums, to the deserving and the
undeserving. Of course, he was inundated with begging letters. Every
mail brought requests for help to redeem farms, to send children to
school, to buy a piano, to buy an alpaca dress with the trimmings, to
relieve sufferers by fire, and to pay election expenses.
"The small checks," Mr. Frothingham tells us, "flew about in all
directions, carrying, in the aggregate, thousands of dollars, hundreds
of which fell on sandy or gravelly soil, and produced nothing."
He gave, in fact, to every project which promised to relieve human
distress, or promote human happiness. He used to have checks ready drawn
to various amounts, only requiring to be signed and supplied with the
name of the applicant. On one occasion he gave fifty dollars each to all
the old maids and widows he could get knowledge of in the State of New
York--six hundred of them in all. He gave away nearly three thousand
small farms, from fifteen to seventy-five acres each, most of them to
landless colored men.
"For years," said he, "I have indulged the thought that when I had sold
enough land to pay my debts, I would give away the remainder to the
poor. I am an Agrarian. I would that every man who desires a farm might
have one, and no man covet the possession of more farms than one."
I need not say that these farms were of little benefit to those who
received them, for our colored friends are by no means the men to go
upon a patch of northern soil and wring an independent livelihood out of
it. Gerrit Smith was a sort of blind, benevolent Samson, amazingly
ignorant of human nature, of human life, and of the conditions upon
which alone the welfare of our race is promoted. He died in 1874, aged
seventy-seven, having lived one of the strangest lives ever recorded,
and having exhibited a cast of character which excites equal admiration
and regret.
PETER FORCE.
One of the interesting sights of the city of Washington used to be the
library of "Old Peter Force," as he was familiarly called,--Colonel
Peter Force, as he was more properly styled. He was one of the few
colonels of that day who had actually held a colonel's command, having
been regularly commissioned by the President of the United States as a
colonel of artillery in the District of Columbia. He might, indeed, have
been called major-general, for in his old age he held that rank in the
militia of the district. And a very fine-looking soldier he must have
been in his prime, judging from the portrait which used to hang in the
library, representing a full-formed man, tall and erect, his handsome
and benevolent countenance set off by an abundance of curly hair.
His library had about the roughest furniture ever seen in an apartment
containing so much that was valuable. As I remember it, it was a long,
low room, with streets and cross-streets of pine book-shelves,
unpainted, all filled with books to their utmost capacity--a wilderness
of books, in print and in manuscript, mostly old and dingy, and almost
all of them relating in some way to American history. The place had a
very musty smell; and as most of its treasures were in the original
bindings, or without bindings, few persons would have suspected the
priceless value of the collection. I am acquainted with a certain
library in New York of several thousand volumes, most of which are bound
resplendently in calf and gold, and the room in which they are kept is
"as splendid as a steamboat," but old Peter Force could show you single
alcoves of his library which, at a fair valuation, would buy out all
that mass of sumptuosity.
It was not always easy to find the old gentleman in his dusty, dingy
wilderness; but when you had discovered him in some remote recess he
would take pleasure in exhibiting his treasures. He would take down his
excellent copy of Eliot's Indian Bible, a book so faithfully made in
every respect that I question if, as a mere piece of book-making, it
could now be matched in the United States. He lived to see this rarity
command in New York the price of fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. He
would show you forty-one works, in the original editions, of Increase
and Cotton Mather, the most recent of which was published in 1735. He
possessed a large number of books printed and bound by Benjamin
Franklin. He had two hundred volumes of the records of Colonial
legislatures. He could show you a newspaper of almost every month--nay,
almost every week, since newspapers were first published in America. He
had in all nine hundred and fifty bound volumes of newspapers, of which
two hundred and forty-five volumes were published before the year 1800.
He would show you a collection of more than thirty-nine thousand
pamphlets, of which eight thousand were printed before the year 1800.
His collection of maps relating to America was truly wonderful. Besides
all the early atlases of any note, he had over a thousand detached maps
illustrative both of the geography and history of America; for many of
them were maps and plans drawn for military purposes. He would show you,
perhaps, a pen-drawing of date 1779, by a British officer, upon which
was written: "Plan of the rebel works at West Point." He had also
several plans by British officers of "the rebel works" around Boston
during the revolution.
Besides such things (and he had over three hundred plans and maps of
which there was no other copy in existence), he possessed a surprising
number of books printed in the infancy of the printer's art; among them
specimens representing every year from 1467 onward. He had more than two
hundred and fifty books printed before the year 1600, so arranged that a
student could trace the progress of the art of printing from the days of
Caxton. He had also a vast collection of manuscripts, numbering four
hundred and twenty-nine volumes, many of which were of particular
interest. The whole number of volumes in the library was 22,529, and the
number of pamphlets nearly 40,000.
The reader, perhaps, imagines that the collector of such a library must
have been a very rich man, and that he traveled far and wide in search
of these precious objects. Not at all. He never was a rich man, and I
believe he rarely traveled beyond the sight of the dome of the Capitol.
Indeed, the most wonderful thing about his collection was that he, who
began life a journeyman printer, and was never in the receipt of a large
income, should have been able to get together so vast an amount of
valuable material. Part of the secret was that when he began to make his
collection these things were not valued, and he obtained many of his
most precious relics by merely taking the trouble to carry them away
from the garrets in which they were mouldering into dust, unprized and
unknown.
A wise old New York merchant, long ago himself mouldered into dust, used
to say:--
"Men generally get in this world exactly what they _want_."
"How can that be?" asked a youngster one day. "Almost everybody in New
York wants to be rich, but very few of them ever will be. I _want_ a
million or so myself."
"Ah, boy," the old man replied, "you want a million; but you don't want
it enough. What you _want_ at present is pleasure, and you want it so
much that you are willing to spend all your surplus force, time, and
revenue to get it. If you wanted your million as much as you _want
pleasure_, by and by, when you have a bald head like mine, you would
have your million."
Peter Force was a very good illustration of the old merchant's doctrine.
He got all these precious things because he wanted them with a sustained
passion of desire for half a century. There never was a time when he
would not have gladly got up in the middle of the night and walked ten
miles, in the face of a northeasterly storm, to get a rare pamphlet of
four pages. He was a miser of such things. But, no; that word does not
describe him; for one of the greatest pleasures of his life was to
communicate his treasures to others; and he communicated to the whole
American people the best of his collections in massive volumes of
American Archives. He was a miser only in the strength of his desire.
"More than once," he said to Mr. George W. Greene, "did I hesitate
between a barrel of flour and a rare book; but the book always got the
upper hand."
To the same friend he made a remark which shows that his desire to
communicate was quite as strong as his desire to obtain.
"Whenever," said he, "I found a little more money in my purse than I
absolutely needed, I published a volume of historical tracts."
It was interesting to hear the old man relate how this taste for the
treasures of history was formed in his mind. His father, who served,
during the revolution, in a New Jersey regiment, retired after the war
to the city of New York, and at his house the Jersey veterans liked to
meet and talk over the incidents of the campaigns they had made
together. Peter, as a boy, loved to hear them tell their stories, and,
as he listened, the thought occurred to him one evening, Why should all
this be forgotten? Boy as he was, he began to write them down, under the
title of "The Unwritten History of the War in New Jersey." He made
considerable progress in it, but unfortunately the manuscript was lost.
The taste then formed grew with his growth and strengthened with his
strength. At ten he left school forever, and went into a printing
office, which has proved an excellent school to more than one valuable
American mind. He became an accomplished printer, and at twenty-two was
elected president of the New York Typographical Society, an organization
which still exists.
Then the war of 1812 began. Like his father before him, he served in the
army, first as private, then as sergeant, then as sergeant-major, then
as ensign, finally as lieutenant. The war ended. He went to Washington
as foreman of a printing office, and at Washington, as printer, editor,
publisher and collector, he lived the rest of his long and honorable
life; never rich, as I have before remarked, though never without a
share of reasonable prosperity. The most important work of his life was
the publication of the American Archives, in which he was aided by
Congress; he furnishing the documents and the labor, and Congress paying
the cost of publication. Through the nine volumes of this work a great
number of the most curious and interesting records and memorials of
American history are not only preserved, but made accessible to all
students who can get near a library. He had all the state-houses of the
country ransacked for documents, and a room was assigned him in the
Department of State in which his clerks could conveniently copy them.
All went well with the work until William Marcy became Secretary of
State, whose duty it was to examine and approve each volume before it
went to the printer. When Peter Force presented the manuscript of the
tenth volume to Secretary Marcy he received a rebuff which threw a cloud
over several years of his life.
"I don't believe in your work, sir," said the secretary. "It is of no
use to anybody. I never read a page of it, and never expect to."
"But," said Mr. Force, "the work is published in virtue of a contract
with the government. Here is the manuscript of the tenth volume. If
there is anything there which you think ought not to be there, have the
goodness to point it out to me."
"You may leave the papers, sir," said the secretary.
He left the papers; but neither Marcy nor his successors ever found time
to examine that tenth volume, though on the first day of every official
year the compiler called their attention to it. For seven years he was a
suitor on behalf of his beloved tenth volume, and then the war occurred
and all such matters were necessarily put aside. He was now seventy-one
years of age, and his great desire was to dispose of his library in such
a way that its treasures would not be scattered abroad, and perhaps lost
forever to the country. At length, Congress having sanctioned the
enlargement of their own library, their librarian, Mr. Spofford, induced
them to purchase the whole mass, just as it stood, for one hundred
thousand dollars, and the collection now forms part of the Congressional
library.
Colonel Force lived to the year 1868, when he died at Washington,
universally beloved and lamented, in the seventy-eighth year of his age,
enjoying almost to the last two of the things he loved best--his books
and his flowers.
JOHN BROMFIELD,
MERCHANT.
John Bromfield's monument is more lasting than brass. It was he who left
to the city of Newburyport, in Massachusetts, ten thousand dollars for
planting and preserving trees in the streets, and keeping the sidewalks
in order. The income of this bequest would not go far in any other sort
of monument, but it has embowered his native city in beautiful trees.
Every spring other trees are planted, and, as long as that bequest is
faithfully administered, he cannot be forgotten.
Nothing brings a larger or surer return than money judiciously spent in
making towns and cities pleasant. It not only yields a great revenue of
pleasure and satisfaction to the inhabitants; it not only benefits every
individual of them every hour, but it invites residents from abroad; it
is a standing invitation to persons of taste and good sense. The wisest
thing the city of New York ever did, next to the introduction of the
Croton water, was the creation of the Central Park; the one feature
which redeems the city from the disgrace of its dirty streets and its
agonizing tenement region.
This John Bromfield, merchant, was just such a thoughtful and benevolent
man as we should naturally expect to find him from his bequest. He
belonged to a class of merchants which is rapidly becoming extinct. The
cable telegraph and the steam freight ship are superseding the merchants
of moderate capital, and are concentrating the great business of
interchanging commodities in the hands of a few houses who reckon their
capital by millions. Born at Newburyport, in 1779, he was brought up by
excellent parents near Boston, who practiced the old-fashioned system of
making him hardy and self-helpful. His mother used to say that when he
was old enough to wear leather shoes she bored holes in the soles in
order to accustom him to wet feet, so that he might be made less liable
to catch cold from that cause. This appears to have been a custom of
that generation, for it is recorded of the mother of Josiah Quincy that
she would never let him take off his wet shoes, regarding it as an
effeminate practice.
On approaching the time of entering college his father met with
misfortunes and could not bear the expense. Two aunts of his, who could
well afford it, offered to pay his expenses in college. He firmly
declined the offer. The foundation of his character and career was a
love of independence. He asked to be apprenticed, as the custom then
was, to a mercantile house, and remained in it as long as it held
together. After its failure he tried for months to obtain a clerkship,
but, not succeeding, he arranged with a carpenter to learn his trade.
Just before putting on the carpenter's apron an opening occurred in his
own business, and he became a merchant. About the year 1801 he went out
to China as supercargo, and continued to visit that part of the world in
similar capacities for many years, occasionally making small ventures of
his own, and slowly accumulating a little capital. He had a series of
the most discouraging misfortunes. In the year 1813 he wrote to his
sister from Cadiz:--
"It is a melancholy truth that in the whole course of my life I never
arrived at a good market."
On that occasion everything promised well. He had a ship full of
valuable goods, and the market to which he was carrying them was in an
excellent condition for his purpose, but within twenty-four hours of his
port he was captured, and detained ten weeks a prisoner. After the peace
of 1815, merchants could send their ships across the ocean without fear
of their being taken by English or French cruisers. From that time he
had better luck, and gradually gained a moderate fortune, upon which he
retired. He never kept a store, or had any sort of warehouse, but made
his fortune by sending or taking merchandise from a port which had too
much of it to one that was in want of it.
On one of his winter passages to Europe he found the sailors suffering
extremely from handling frozen ropes, as they were not provided with
mittens. Being a Yankee, and having been brought up to _do_ things as
well as read about them, he took one of his thick overcoats and made
with his own hands a pair of mittens for every sailor.
On another occasion, in the ship Atahualpa, in 1809, bound to China, the
vessel was attacked off Macao by pirates, in twenty-two junks, some of
them being twice the tonnage of the vessel. Captain Sturgis, who
commanded the vessel, defended her with signal ability and courage, and
kept the pirates off for forty minutes, until the vessel gained the
protection of the fort. John Bromfield, a passenger on board, took
command of a gun, and seconded the endeavors of the captain with such
coolness and promptitude as to contribute essentially to the protection
of the vessel.
In retirement he lived a quiet life in Boston, unmarried, fond of books,
and practicing unusual frugality for a person in liberal circumstances.
He had a singular abhorrence of luxury, waste, and ostentation. He often
said that the cause of more than half the bankruptcies was spending too
much money. Nothing could induce him to accept personal service. He was
one of those men who wait upon themselves, light their own fire, reduce
their wants to the necessaries of civilized life, and all with a view to
a more perfect independence. He would take trouble to oblige others,
but could not bear to put any one else to trouble. This love of
independence was carried to excess by him, and was a cause of sorrow to
his relations and friends.
He was a man of maxims, and one of them was:--
"The good must merit God's peculiar care,
And none but God can tell us who they are."
Another of his favorite couplets was Pope's:--
"Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,
Lie in three words: health, peace, and competence."
He used to quote Burns's stanza about the desirableness of wealth:--
"Not to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant;
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent."
He was utterly opposed to the way in which business was then
conducted--hazardous enterprises undertaken upon borrowed capital. The
excessive credit formerly given was the frequent theme of his
reprobation.
How changed the country, even in the short space of sixty years! In 1825
he made a journey from Boston to New Orleans, and his letters show
curious glimpses of life and travel as they then were. Leaving Boston at
four o'clock on a Friday morning, he reached New York at ten o'clock on
Saturday morning, and he speaks of this performance with astonishment.
Boston to New York in thirty hours! He was in New York November 4, 1825,
when the opening of the Erie Canal was celebrated. He did not care much
for the procession.
"There was, however," he adds, "an interesting exhibition of steamboats,
probably greater than could be found at any other place in the world;
say, _from twenty-five to thirty_, and most of them of a large class."
He was in the valley of the Ohio that year, and he spoke of it "as the
land of cheapness:" flour, two dollars and a quarter a barrel; oats,
twelve and a half cents a bushel; corn and rye, twenty cents; coal,
three cents. He found all the region from Louisville to Louisiana "one
vast wilderness," with scarcely any settlements, and now and then a log
hut on the banks, occupied by the people who cut wood for the
steamboats. On the prairies of Missouri he rode miles and miles without
seeing a house. Indiana was an almost unbroken wilderness: corn ten
cents a bushel, a wild turkey twelve and half cents, and other things in
proportion.
Nevertheless, travelers at that day had some pleasures which could be
advantageously compared with the ease and comfort of the Pullman car.
The Alleghanies were then crossed by open wagons drawn by splendid
Pennsylvania horses, six in a team, gayly decorated with ribbons, bells,
and trappings. He used to repeat, in a peculiarly buoyant and
delightful manner, a popular song of the day, called "The Wagoner,"
suggested by the apparently happy lot of the boys who rode and drove
these horses. Some readers may remember the old song, beginning:--
"I've often thought if I were asked
Whose lot I envied most,
What one I thought most lightly tasked
Of man's unnumbered host,
I'd say I'd be a mountain boy
And drive a noble team--wo hoy!
Wo hoy! I'd cry,
And lightly fly
Into my saddle seat;
My rein I'd slack,
My whip I'd crack--
What music is so sweet?
Six blacks I'd drive, of ample chest,
All carrying high their head.
All harnessed tight, and gaily dressed
In winkers tipped with red.
Oh, yes! I'd be a mountain boy,
And such a team I'd drive--wo hoy!
Wo hoy! I'd cry;
The lint should fly.
Wo hoy! Dobbin, Ball.
Their feet should ring,
And I would sing,
I'd sing my fal-de-roll."