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CHAPTER XV.

OLIVER O. HOWARD.

Can there be a Christian Soldier?—General Howard’s Birth—His Military Education—His Life Before the Rebellion—Resigns in Order to get into the Field—Made Brigadier for Good Conduct at Bull Run—Commands the Eleventh Corps and Joins the Army at Chattanooga—His Services in the Army of the Potomac—Extreme Calmness on the Field of Battle—Services with Sherman—Sherman’s high Opinion of him—Col. Bowman’s Admiration of Howard’s Christian Observances—Patriotic Services while Invalided at Home—Reproves the Swearing Teamster—Placed over the Freedmen’s Bureau—The Central Historic Fact of the War—The Rise of Societies to Help the Freedmen—The Work of the Freedmen’s Bureau—Disadvantages Encountered by it, and by General Howard—Results of the Bureau thus far—Col. Bowman’s Description of Gen. Howard’s Duties—Gen. Sherman’s Letter to Gen. Howard on Assuming the Post—Estimate of Gen. Howard’s Abilities.

The spirit of Christ is all love; it seeks only to enhance the highest good of existence, and to give to every being its utmost of happiness. The spirit of war is all wrath. It seeks to destroy by violence, and as fast as possible, whatever and whoever may oppose it. These two principles would seem so diametrically opposed to each other, that no man could be at once a Christian and a soldier, any more than he could ride at once on two horses going in opposite directions, or turn his back on himself, and at once go forward and backward. Indeed, the cases where the two professions have been united are rare, and may probably depend upon some uncommon conjunction of gifts. But there certainly have been such. Colonel Gardiner was one. General Havelock was another; and Gene-

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ral Howard, who has been surnamed the Havelock of America, is another.

Oliver Otis Howard was born in Leeds, Maine, Nov. 8^th, 1830. His father was a thrifty and independent farmer. The boy lived at home until he was ten, when his father dying, an uncle, Hon. John Otis, of Hallowell, took charge of him. He now attended school, went through Bowdoin College, and then entered the West Point Academy, graduating there in 1854, fourth in general standing of his class. Beginning, as usual, as brevet second lieutenant, he was assigned to the ordnance department; and in 1856 was chief ordnance officer in Florida, during a campaign against the Indians there. He worked steadily on in his profession, and at the beginning of the war was assistant professor of mathematics at West Point, and being desirous to accept the command of a volunteer regiment from his own State, asked leave from the War Department to do so, and was refused. On this he resigned his commission, and the Governor of Maine, in the end of May, 1861, appointed him colonel of the Third Maine Volunteers, which was the first three years’ regiment from that State.

At Bull Run, he commanded a brigade, being senior colonel on the field, and for good conduct there, was in the following September commissioned brigadier-general of volunteers. In December he was placed in General Sumner’s command; and he remained in the Army of the Potomac until the latter part of September, 1863, when, having risen to the command of the Eleventh Army Corps, that and Slocum’s

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corps, both under Hooker, were sent to reinforce the army at Chattanooga.

During this time General Howard was present in all the chief battles of the Army of the Potomac. At Fair Oaks, on the Peninsula, he was twice wounded in the right arm, and had to have his arm amputated; but he got back in season for the next battle—that of the second Bull Run. At Antietam, at Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, he was present and fought his command to the uttermost. At Gettysburg, Howard’s troops held the key of the position, the cemetery; and a soldier who was in the field with him in that tremendous fight, in speaking of his extreme calmness and coolness under fire, said, “General Howard stood there as if nothing at all was the matter. He never takes stimulants, either. Most of the officers do, but he never does. He was so calm because he was a Christian.” Colonel Bowman, in speaking of this same trait in General Howard, testifies to the same point; observing that he is “careless of exposing his person in battle, to an extent that would be attributable to rashness or fatalism if it were not known to spring from religion.”

During his campaign with Sherman he was a most trustworthy and serviceable commander; singularly cool and fearless in battle, and most prompt and thorough in the performance of whatever duty was imposed upon him. After accompanying Sherman in his march for the relief of Burnside, General Howard served in the Atlanta campaign in command of the Fourth Army Corps; after the death of General McPherson, he succeeded him in the important command

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of the Army of the Tennessee; and in Sherman’s Great March, he was placed in command of the right wing, one of the two into which Sherman’s force was divided, and in this position served until the end of the war.

General Sherman quickly liked his trusty and helpful subordinate, and has repeatedly paid high compliments to his soldierly and moral excellence. At the end of the Chattanooga campaign, for instance, in reporting to Gen. Grant, he said, “In General Howard throughout I found a polished and Christian gentleman, exhibiting the highest and most chivalrous traits of the soldier.” Colonel Bowman speaks of General Howard’s practice of Christian observances in the army with a curious sort of admiration which sufficiently shows how uncommon it was, at least among officers of high grade. He says:

“General Howard, it is well known, has been pious and exemplary from his boyhood, was ever faithful and devoted in the discharge of his religious duties, and this even while a student at West Point. He carried his religious principles with him into the army, and was guided and governed by them in all his relations with his officers and men. No matter who was permitted to share his mess or partake of his repast, whether the lowest subaltern of his command or General Sherman himself, no one thought to partake, if General Howard were present, without first the invocation of the Divine blessing, himself usually leading, like the father of a family. General Sherman seems greatly to have admired the Christian character of General Howard, * * * and not only as a Chris-

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tian but as a soldier, preferring him and promoting him to the command of one of his armies.” President Lincoln also valued him very highly, and was his immovable friend.”

General Howard’s unconditional devotion to duty was very strongly shown in the use he made of his time while disable from military duty just after the loss of his arm. One of his companions in the service has described how—

“Weak and fainting from hemorrhage and the severe shock his system had sustained, the next day he started for his home in Maine. He remained there only two months, during which time he was not idle. Visiting various localities in his native State, he made patriotic appeals to the people to come forward and sustain the government. Pale, emaciated, and with one sleeve tenantless, he stood up before them, the embodiment of all that is good and true and noble in manhood. He talked to them as only one truly loyal can talk—as one largely endowed with that patriotism which is a heritage of New England blood. Modesty, sincerity, and earnestness characterized his addresses, and his fervent appeals drew hundreds of recruits around the national standard.”

Howard’s reply to the swearing teamster was a good instance of kind but decided reproof, of just the sort that will do good if any will. The story is this:

“On one occasion, a wagon-master, whose teams were floundering through the bottomless mud of a Georgia swamp, became exasperated at the unavoidable delay, and indulged in such torrent of profanity as can only be heard in the army or men of his class.

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General Howard quietly approached, unperceived by the offender, and was an unwilling listener to the blasphemous words. The wagon-master, on turning around, saw his general in close proximity, and made haste to apologize for his profane outburst, by saying, ‘Excuse me, General, I did not know you were here.’ The General, looking a reprimand, replied, “I would prefer that you abstain from swearing from a higher and better motive than because of my presence.’”

In May, 1865, General Howard was placed at the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau; a position for which he was probably the very best man in the United States, one whose extremely noble and benevolent purpose was wholly in harmony with the loftiest traits of his own character, and whose peculiar difficulties were such as he was exactly the man to encounter, by nature, education and official position.

By imagining one’s self to have passed forward in history for a century or two centuries, and to be taking such a backward perspective view of the southern rebellion as such an advance would give, any mind of historic qualities will perceive more clearly than in any other way the falling off and disappearance of the minor circumstances of the great struggle, and the few great features that remain—the central facts, the real meanings of the war. Of all these, that which will remain most important is, the escape from their modern Egypt of the nation of the slaves. Lives and deeds of individual men will grow obscure. The gigantic battles, the terrific novelties, the vast campaigning combinations of the successive chapters of the war will lose their present strong colors. Even the fact that

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part of the white population of the United States sought in vain to sever their political union with the rest, will lose its present foremost place in the story; for it will have assumed the character of an abortive delusion; a temporary struggle, whose pretended reasons were sophistical and false, whose real ones were kept out of sight as much as possible, and which ended in the speedy re-establishment of the power attacked. But the emancipation of the slaves is an eternal epoch; it marks the point where the race of one vast continent, after centuries of exile into another continent and of the most degrading subjection to another race, is all at once let out into civilization; brought forth from the pens of beasts, to take a place among the sons of men. Yet more; they are admitted to take a place among the sons of God; for American slavery, as if with the devil’s own cunning and cruel power, did really not only exclude the slave from becoming a citizen, but it actually excluded him from the power of becoming a Christian. The emancipation of the slaves was even more than the organization of a new nation; for it was the birth into humanity of a new race.

This view of the case is naturally even now not accepted by large numbers of persons. It was a matter of course that still larger numbers should fail to understand it in the day of it. President Lincoln himself apparently felt more hope than expectation upon the subject; and all know how long he delayed, how unendurably slow he seemed to far-sighted lovers of humanity, before he issued his great proclamation. But there are a few men, who possess at once a powerful instinct of benevolence and an intuitive comprehen-

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sion of the present and the future—qualities which naturally go together, because they are alike pure, lofty, dependent upon peculiarly noble organizations. As soon as the progress of the war rendered any considerable number of freedmen accessible for any permanently useful purpose, societies began at once to be organized in the North to help the freedmen towards his rightful standing of an intelligent Christian citizenship. The first of them were organized in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, in consequence of the information given by General Sherman, Commodore Dupont, and the able Treasury Agent, Mr. E. L. Pierce, of the situation of the freedmen on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Several societies or “commissions” were established, all of which—except some ecclesiastical ones—are now operating in conjunction as “The American Freedmen’s Union Commission.” The “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands,” commonly called the Freedmen’s Bureau, was created by an act of Congress passed in March, 1865, and in form received the freedmen into the express protection and care of the Government; and its creation was to a considerable extent if not altogether the result of the efforts of the energetic men who had established the various private commissions. It is possible that the Bureau might have been earlier established, had the right man been found to take charge of it. When General Howard was thought of, at the conclusion of the war, it was felt that he was in every respect most suitable. His lofty views of duty; his habits of orderly obedience and orderly command; the facilities of his high military position for dealing

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with the body of assistants it was contemplated to secure from the army; and above all, his calm, steady, kindly ways, and his rare characteristic and complete sympathy with the missionary object of securing a real Christian citizenship for the unfortunate colored race, were just the qualities that must have been put together if a man was to have been constructed on purpose for the place.

General Howard has been most earnestly at work in this position ever since, amid great difficulties and obstructions, but with unfailing faith and industry; and although it is easy to see how far more of his great task would have been at this day accomplished had the white people of the South, and the Government itself helped the Bureau earnestly and in good faith, yet very great good has already been done.

Doubtless the freed people have in many things been faulty. It would be strange indeed if a whole race could in the twinkling of an eye, put off the bad habits burned and ingrained into the very texture of their bodies and minds, by a heavy tyranny of two centuries and a half. Generations of freedom must pass before the evils can wholly disappear that generations of slavery have systematically and powerfully cultivated. But already, to a very great degree (to use the words of a recent comprehensive summary of the history of the Bureau,) “labor has been reorganized, justice has been secured, systems of education * * * have been established, the transition period from slavery to liberty has been safely passed, and the freed people have emerged from their state of bondage into that of the liberty of American citizenship.”

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The operations of the Bureau and of the Commission which works in union with it, as a sort of unofficial counterpart—a draught-horse hitched on outside the thills—have sought four objects for the freedmen, in the following order: 1. To provide for their temporal wants; for if they had no food for to-day, and no clothes nor roofs to shelter them, they would be out of the world before they could learn their letters, earn a dollar, or learn to obey the law; 2. To promote justice; 3. To reorganize labor; 4. To provide education.

In his difficult and laborious position, General Howard has had to act without the help of any public funds, by using temporarily certain species of abandoned property, and by means of details of officers and men from the army, who have done their work in the Bureau as part of their military duty, and without other than their usual pay. The good accomplished has been rather by the use of influence, by forbearance, by the exercise of the minimum of absolute authority. But in spite of the good intentions of Congress, the help of the Government of the United States, which, so far as its action upon the Freedmen’s Bureau is concerned, is exclusively the executive, has not in any complete sense been given either to the freedmen themselves, in their toilsome upward road, nor to those who have been striving to aid them in the ascent; but it has rather been felt as a cold, sullen and grudging sufferance, verging even into a pretty distinct manifestation of an enmity like that of the worse class of unfriendly southern whites, and showing more than

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one token of an intention to destroy the Bureau and leave the freedmen helpless as soon as possible.

General Howard has done all that could be done, against these obstacles. It is easy to see what constant exercise he must need, of the Christian virtues of forbearance, patience, kindness, and the overcoming of evil with good, as well as of the moral qualities of honor and justice, and the soldierly attainments of order, promptitude and industry. With some of these he must meet the angry tricks of white enemies; with some, the pitiful faults—which are misfortunes rather—faults of the freedmen themselves—idleness, falsehood, dishonesty, disorder, incapacity, fickleness; with others still, the inactive resistance of his superiors, and the cumbrous machinery of an organization which the nature of the case prevents from coming into good working shape.

In spite of all obstacles, the Missionary General and his Bureau and the Commission have done much. Up to the first day of 1867, fourteen hundred schools had been established, with sixteen hundred and fifty-eight teachers and over ninety thousand pupils; besides 782 Sabbath Schools with over 70,000 pupils; and the freedmen were then paying towards the support of these schools, out of their own scanty earnings, after the rate of more than eleven thousand dollars a month. Within one year, they had accumulated in their savings bank, $616,802.54. Many of them have bought and possess homesteads of their own. Their universal obedience to law would be remarkable in any community in the world, and under such treatment as they have experienced from their former masters since the

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war, would have been simply impossible for the body of freemen in the most law-abiding of the Northern States. And above all, they are with one accord most zealous, most diligent and most successful in laboring to obtain the religious and intellectual culture which alone can fit them for their new position, as self-governing citizens of a free country.

The views of intelligent army officers, of the task which General Howard undertook in accepting this post and of his fitness for it, are not without interest. Col. Bowman thus describes the work:

“He was placed at the head of a species of Poor Law Board, with vague powers to define justice and execute loving kindness between four millions of emancipated slaves and all the rest of mankind. He was to be not exactly a military commander, nor yet a judge of a Court of Chancery; but a sort of combination of the religious missionary and school commissioner, with power to feed and instruct, and this for an empire half as large as Europe. But few officers of the army would have had the moral courage to accept such an appointment, and fewer still were as well fitted to fill it and discharge one-half its complicated and multifarious duties.”

When General Howard, on accepting his new post, advised his old commander by letter, General Sherman, in a friendly reply, thus wrote:

“I hardly know whether to congratulate you or not, but of one thing you may rest assured, that you possess my entire confidence, and I cannot imagine that matters that may involve the future of four millions of souls could be put in more charitable and more

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conscientious hands. So far as man can do, I believe you will, but I fear you have Hercules’ task. God has limited the power of man, and though, in the kindness of your heart, you would alleviate all the ills of humanity, it is not in your power; nor is it in your power to fulfill one-tenth part of the expectations of those who framed the bureau for the freedmen refugees and abandoned estates. It is simply impracticable. Yet you can and will do all the good one man may, and that is all you are called on as a man and a Christian to do; and to that extent count on me as a friend and fellow-soldier for counsel and assistance.” General Sherman more than once repeated to others similar testimonies of his faith in General Howard.

General Howard has not the vast intellect and brilliant genius of General Sherman, nor the massive strength and immense tenacious will of General Grant. But he has qualities which are even loftier; namely, those which are the sure basis for such respect and confidence as General Sherman’s; which alone have enabled him to accomplish what he has in an enterprise wholly discouraging on any merely human principles. Grant and Sherman, in what they have done, had at their backs a people far more intelligent, resolute and wealthy, than those against whom they warred; but a man like Howard, whose soul opens upward and takes in the unselfish strength and love and faith of Almighty God, can do great things for humanity irrespective of money and majorities.

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CHAPTER XVI.

WILLIAM ALFRED BUCKINGHAM.

The Buckinghams an Original Puritan Family—Rev. Thomas Buckingham—Gov. Buckingham’s Father and Mother—Lebanon, the Birthplace of Five Governors—Gov. Buckingham’s Education—He Teaches School—His Natural Executive Tendency—His Business Career—His Extreme Punctuality in Payments—His Business and Religious Character—His Interest in the Churches and Schools—His Benefactions in those Directions—His Political Course—He Accepts Municipal but not Legislative Offices—A Member of the Peace Conference—He Himself Equips the First State Militia in the War—His Zealous Co-operation with the Government—Sends Gen. Aiken to Washington—The Isolation of that City from the North—Gov. Buckingham’s Policy for the War; Letter to Mr. Lincoln—His Views on Emancipation; Letter to Mr. Lincoln—Anecdote of the Temperance Governor’s Staff.

In writing the history of men of our time, we feel that we are only making a selection of a few from among many. We have given the character of one State Governor—we could give many more, but must confine ourselves to only two examples. William Alfred Buckingham, for eight years Governor of Connecticut, and under whose administration the State passed through the war, may be held a worthy representative of the wisdom, energy and patriotism of our state magistracy in the time of the great trials.

Gov. Buckingham is of the strictest old Puritan stock. The first of the name in this country was Thomas Buckingham, one of the colony that planted New Haven, Conn., but who soon removed to Milford in that State, where he was one of the “Seven Pil-

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lars” of the church there, as originally organized. His son, Rev. Thos. Buckingham, was minister of Saybrook, one of the founders of Yale College, and one of the moderators of the Synod that framed the “Saybrook Platform.” Through this branch of the family, this Governor of Connecticut is descended, his father having been born in Saybrook.

William Alfred Buckingham, the son of Samuel and Joanna (Matson) Buckingham, was born in Lebanon, Conn., May 28, 1804. His father was a thrifty farmer, a deacon in the church, a man of remarkably sound judgment and common sense, and a public spirited man, abounding in hospitality. His mother was one of those women in whom the strong qualities of the Puritan stock come to a flowering and fruitage of a celestial quality, a rare union of strength and soundness. She had a mother’s ambition for her children, but always directed to the very highest things. “Whatever else you are, I want you to be Christians,” was one of her daily household sayings. Her memory is cherished in the records of many words and deeds of love and beneficence, written not with ink and pen, “but in fleshy tables of the heart,” in all the region where she lived.

The little town of Lebanon, like many others of the smaller New England towns, had a fine Academy, which enjoyed the culture of some of those strong and spicy old New England school masters, that were a generation worthy of more praise and celebration than the world knows of. For that reason perhaps, this little town of Lebanon has given to the State of Connecticut five Governors, who have held that State office

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for 37 years out of the past one hundred—more than one-third of the century.

Governor Buckingham’s education was a striking specimen of New England. It was based first on the soil, in the habits and associations of a large, thriving, well conducted farm. It was nourished up at those rural Academies, which are fountain memorials of the enthusiasm for education, of our Puritan fathers. He had a special taste for mathematics, which, united with the promptings of a vigorous and energetic physical nature, and love of enterprise, led him to desire the profession of a practical surveyor, a profession which in those days had some state patronage, and was attractive to young men of that class of character. At the age of eighteen, he taught district school, in Lyme, and gave such satisfaction that his services were earnestly sought for another year. He returned, however, to the practical labors of his father’s farm, and for the last three years performed as much work as any of the laborers whom his father hired. His nature seemed to incline him rather to a dealing with the practical and physical forces of the world, and so he wisely forbore that classical career which would have occupied four years of his life in a college, and began the career of a man of business at once, entering a dry goods store in Norwich as clerk, at twenty. After two years spent there, and a short experience in a wholesale store in New York, he established himself in business as a dry goods merchant at Norwich, Conn. From this time his career has been a successful one in the business circles of the country. Enterprise, prudence, thrift, order and exact punctu-

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ality and spotless integrity have given him a name worth any amount of money. In 1830 he commenced the manufacture of ingrain carpeting, which he continued for 18 years. In 1848 he closed up his dry goods business, discontinued the manufacturing of carpeting, and engaged in the fabrication of India Rubber, a business then in its infancy.

From that time to the present, he has been the treasurer, and an active business director of the Hayward Rubber Company, a company located in Colchester, which has prosecuted an extensive and successful business. He is now a stockholder in eight or ten manufacturing companies, to the general management of quite a number of which he gives his attention.

An important feature in his character in these relations is his great business accuracy and punctuality. With an extended business running through a period of forty years, only two notes drawn, were protested for non-payment, and these cases occurred when he was wholly disabled from business by sickness. It was his custom always to remit money to meet notes due in New York, three days before their maturity. He has always regarded himself as under obligations to pay his debts at the time agreed upon, as much as to pay the amount due.

His unvarying and unfailing accuracy in these respects, had given him a character which enabled him at any time to command the assistance of any bank with which he did business. His name was good for any amount of resources. This particular characteristic made his position as Governor of Connec-

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ticut, in the sudden crisis of the war, of vital value to the country.

No man could so soon command those material resources which are the sine qua non of war, and it is one of many good Providences that the state of Connecticut at this crisis was so manned. Immediately on the news of the war, the banks of the state, and business men in all parts, sent immediate and prompt word to him that he might command their utmost resources. They were even anxious to have their capital at once made serviceable in the emergency, and they felt sure in doing so that they were putting their resources into the hands of a leader every way fitted to employ them to the best advantage.

Governor Buckingham is well known as an exemplary and laborious Christian, a devoted friend of education, a practical and consistent temperance man, and proverbially generous in his charities towards these, and every other good cause. And it has probably been due to this, as much as to his personal and official integrity, that he has been so popular with his friends, and claimed such respect from his political opponents. Indeed nothing could have been more respectful and generous, during all those excited political canvasses which belonged to his public life, than the treatment his private character received from those who were politically opposed to him.

His own strict attention to the proprieties and courtesy’s of life, his bland and urbane manners may go a long way towards accounting for this result.

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In 1830 he united with the Second Congregational Church, under the care of Rev. Alfred Mitchell, and in 1838 made a report to the Ecclesiastical Society, to show the necessity of organizing a new church. Such a church was organized four years after, and is now known as the Broadway Congregational Church. From its organization to the present time, he has been one of its deacons, an active member, and a liberal supporter. He gave them a fine organ when their present church building was completed, and has lately erected a beautiful chapel for one of their Mission Sabbath Schools. He has himself been a Sabbath School Teacher for the last thirty-seven years, except during the four years of the Rebellion.

He was moderator of the National Congregational Council held in Boston, in 1865.

As a friend of Education, he earnestly advocated the consolidation of the School Districts of Norwich, and a system of graded schools to be open to all, and supported by a tax on property, and he was permitted to see such a system established with the most beneficial results. He was deeply interested in the effort to establish the Norwich Free Academy, gave his personal efforts to obtain a fund for its endowment, and has contributed an amount to that fund second only to one subscriber.

Having seen the extended and beneficial influence which Yale College has exerted and its exerting over the political and religious interest of the country, he has felt it a privilege and a duty to contribute largely to the pecuniary necessities of that institution.

He has given a permanent fund to the Broadway

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Congregational Church in Norwich, and to the Congregational Church in Lebanon, with which his parents and sisters were connected, the income of which is to be used for the pastor’s library. Joseph Otis, Esq., who founded a public library in Norwich, selected him for one of the trustees, and he is now President of the Board.

As a politician, he was a Whig. In 1842 he was the candidate of that party for a seat in the lower house of the General Assembly, but was not elected. He was afterwards repeatedly nominated both for the House of Representatives and for the Senate, but declined such nominations, and was never a member of a legislative body. He has, however, frequently accepted municipal offices; was often elected a member of the City Council, sometimes occupying the seat of an alderman, and was elected Mayor of the city of Norwich in 1849 and 1850, and again in the years 1856 and 1857. When the Whig party was broken up, he placed himself with the Republicans, and in 1858 was elected Governor of the State, which position he occupied eight years, and four of them were the years of the Rebellion.

The famous Peace Conference met at Washington one month before the inauguration of Lincoln, wherein were represented thirteen of the free States and seven of the slave States, for the purpose of considering what could be done to pacify the excited feelings of the South, and preserve the existing Union.

Governor Buckingham was not a member of the

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conference, but appointed the commissioners from Connecticut. He was in Washington during its session, and in daily intercourse with members of that body from all parts of the country, and understood their views of questions at issue. But from the very first he was of opinion that the state of things had reached a place where further compromise was an impossibility, or in the words of Lincoln, the Union must now become either in effect all for slavery or all for freedom in its general drift. So this peace conference broke up, effecting nothing.

When the news of the fall of Sumter reached Connecticut, attended by the Presidential call for troops, the State Legislature was not in session. Governor Buckingham, however, had such wide financial relations as enabled him immediately to command the funds for equipping the militia for the field.

From every quarter came to him immediate offers both of money and of personal services, from men of the very first standing in the State—and Connecticut, we think, may say with honest pride that no men went into the field better equipped, more thoroughly appointed and cared for. Governor Buckingham gave himself heart and soul to the work. During that perilous week when Washington stood partially isolated from the North, by the uprising of rebellion in Maryland, Governor Buckingham, deeply sympathizing with the President, dispatched his son-in-law, Gen. Aiken, who with great enterprise and zeal found his way through the obstructed lines to Washington; carrying the welcome news to the President that Connecticut was rising as one man, and all her men and

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all her wealth to the very last would be at the disposal of the country.

The account of Gen. Aiken’s trip to Washington with the dispatches for the government there, brings freshly to mind the intense excitement of those days, and it contains some very striking touches of descriptions of the state of things at Washington. Gen. Aiken left Norwich at 6 A. M., on Monday, April 22d, 1861; on reaching Philadelphia that evening, found that city extremely stirred up, and all regular communication with Washington suspended; met a gentleman who wished to reach Washington, and the two spent most of the night in searching for the means of proceeding. At four next morning they got permission to set out on a special train with a Pennsylvania regiment, and after a very slow journey, in consequence of the danger of finding the track torn up, reached Perryville, on the Susquehanna, at ten. Gen. Butler had carried off the ferry-boats to Annapolis; and after delay and search, our two travelers hired a skiff and crossed to Harve de Grace, where they found, not only that the town was full of reports of railroads and telegraphs broken up in all directions, but that there were plenty of men watching to see how many “d—d Yankees,” as they called them, were going towards Washington. Gen. Aiken and his friend, however, after a time, chartered a covered wagon and rode to Baltimore, arriving about 9 1-2 P. M. The streets were brilliantly lighted, and full of people, some of them in uniform, and most of them wearing rebel badges; and even the few words which the travellers heard as they passed along the crowded

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halls of their hotel, apprized them that no man could avow Unionism there and preserve his life in safety for a moment. They accordingly went at once to their rooms and kept out of sight until morning, when the hotel proprietor, a personal friend of Gen. Aiken’s companion, and also of the leading Baltimore rebels, procured them passes signed by Gen. Winder and countersigned by Marshal Kane. Having these, they paid $50 for a carriage which took them to Washington. Reaching Washington at 10 P. M. on Wednesday, Gen. Aiken found its silence and emptiness a startling contrast to the hot-blooded crowd at Baltimore. He says:

“Half a dozen people in the hall of the hotel crowded around to ask questions about the North. I then began to realize the isolation of the city.” Hurrying to Gen. Scott’s head-quarters, the old chief was found with only two of his staff. “Upon reading the Governor’s letter, he rose and said excitedly, ‘Sir, you are the first man I have seen with a written dispatch for three days. I have sent men out every day to bring intelligence of the northern troops. Not one of them has returned; where are the troops?’ The number and rapidity of his questions, and his very excited manner, gave me a further realization of the critical nature of the situation.”

Calling on Secretary Cameron, Gen. Aiken was received very much in the same manner. A friend in one of the Departments “advised very strongly against a return by the same route, as my arrival was known, and the general nature of my business suspected by

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rebel spies, with whom the city abounded, and in some quarters least suspected.

“How the knowledge of my affairs could have been gained has always been a mystery, for I had realized since leaving Philadelphia, that my personal safety depended entirely upon secrecy and prudence.

“At 10 A. M. I called on the President, and saw him for the first time in my life. It was an interview I can never forget. No office-seekers were about ‘the presence’ that day—there was no delay in getting an audience. Mr. Lincoln was alone, seated in his business room up stairs, looking toward Arlington Heights through a widely opened window. Against the casement stood a very long spy-glass, which he had obviously just been using. I gave him all the information I could, from what I had seen and heard during my journey.

“He seemed depressed beyond measure, as he asked, slowly, and with great emphasis, ‘What is the North about? Do they know our condition?’ I said, ‘No, they certainly did not when I left.’ This was true enough.

“He spoke of the non-arrival of the troops under Gen. Butler, and of having had no intelligence from them for two or three days. * * *

“I have referred to the separation of the city from the North. In no one of many ways was it brought home more practically to my mind than in this: The funds in my possession were in New York city bank notes. Their value in Washington had suddenly and totally departed. They were good for their weight in paper, and no more. During my interview with the

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President, my financial dilemma was referred to. I remarked that I had not a cent, although my pockets were full. He instantly perceived my meaning, and kindly put me in possession of such an amount of specie as I desired. * * * Having delivered my dispatch, and the Governor’s words of encouragement, and enjoyed an interview protracted, by the President’s desire, beyond ordinary length, I left.”

The New York Seventh Regiment reached the city just as Gen. Aiken had walked from the President’s house to the State Department; and when the flag announcing their arrival at the Baltimore station was hoisted, says Gen. Aiken, “such a stampede of humanity, loyal and rebel, as was witnessed that hour in the direction of the Baltimore Railway station, can only be imagined by those who, like myself, took part in it. One glance at the gray jackets of the Seventh put hope in the place of despondency in my breast.”

Gen. Aiken returned by taking a private conveyance, and obscure roads, until, north of the Pennsylvania line, he reached a railroad, and at Hanover, the first telegraph station, reported progress to Governor Buckingham, having been unable to communicate with him during four days, and not having seen the United States flag once during the whole trip from Philadelphia around to the Pennsylvania line, except on the Capitol at Washington. Gen. Aiken, in concluding his account, says, undoubtedly with correctness, “There has been no hour since that when messages of sympathy, encouragement and aid from the loyal Governor of a loyal State were more

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truly needed or more effective upon the mind of our late President, than those I had the honor to deliver.”

The views of Governor Buckingham as to the policy to be pursued with the rebellion may best be learned from the following letter, which he addressed to the President, dated June 25^th, 1861:

“SIR—The condition of out government is so critical that the people of this State are looking with deep interest to measures which you may recommend to Congress, and to the course which that body may pursue when it shall convene on the 4^th day of July next.

“You will not therefore think me presuming if I present for your consideration the views entertained by a large majority of our citizens, especially when I assure you that if they are not approved by your judgment, I shall regard it as evidence that their importance is over-estimated.

“There are to-day probably more than three hundred thousand men organized, armed and in rebellion against the general government. Millions of other citizens, who have been protected by its power, now deny its authority, and refuse obedience to its laws. Multitudes of others, who prize the blessings which they have received under its policy, are so overawed by the manifestations of passionate violence which surround them, that their personal security is found in suppressing their opinions, and floating with the current into the abyss of anarchy. The person and property and liberty of every citizen are in peril. This is no ordinary rebellion. It is a mob on a gigantic

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scale, and should be met and suppressed by a power corresponding with its magnitude.

“The obligations of the government to the loyal, the principles of equity and justice, the claims of humanity, civilization and religion, unite in demanding a force sufficient to drive the rebels from every rendezvous, to influence them to return to their homes and their lawful employments, to seize their leaders and bring them before the proper tribunals for trial, and to inflict upon them the punishment justly due for their crimes. In your message to Congress I trust you will ask for authority to organize and arm a force of four or five hundred thousand men, for the purpose of quelling the rebellion, and for an appropriation from the public treasury sufficient for their support. Let legislation upon every other subject be regarded as out of time and place, and the one great object of suppressing the rebellion be pursued by the administration with vigor and firmness, without taking counsel of our fears, and without listening to any proposition or suggestion which may emanate from rebels or their representatives, until the authority of the government shall be respected, its laws enforced, and its supremacy acknowledged in every section of our country.

* * * * * * * *

“To secure such high public interests, the State of Connecticut will bind her destinies more closely to those of the general government, and in adopting the measures suggested she will renewedly pledge all her

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pecuniary and physical resources, and all her moral power.

“I am, dear sir, yours,

with high consideration,

(signed,) WILLIAM A. BUCKINGHAM.

“To Abraham Lincoln,

President of the United States.”

This gallant and spirited letter shows conclusively that if the first one or two years of the war trailed on in irresolution and defeat, it was not for want of decided spirit in Connecticut and her governor.

Still later in the war, we find Governor Buckingham addressing the following to President Lincoln, in view of his projected Emancipation Policy:

“STATE OF CONNECTICUT, EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT,

HARTFORD, Sept. 26, 1862.

“DEAR SIR:—While my views of your Proclamations issued on the 22d and 24^th instants, may be of little or no importance, yet you will permit me to congratulate you and the country that you have so clearly presented the policy which you will hereafter pursue in suppressing the rebellion, and to assure you that it meets my cordial approval, and shall have my unconditional support.

“Not that I think your declaration of freedom will of itself bring liberty to the slave, or restore peace to the nation; but I rejoice that your administration will not be prevented by the clamors of men in sympathy with rebels, from using such measures as you indicate to overpower the rebellion, even if it interferes with and overthrows their much loved system of slavery.

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“Have we not too long deluded ourselves with the idea that mild and conciliatory measures would influence them to return to their allegiance? They have appealed to the arbitrament of the sword; why should we hesitate to use the sword, and press the cause to a decision? Have we not undervalued their resources, disbelieved in their deep hatred of our government and its free institutions; and, influenced by erroneous ideas of the principles of humanity and mercy, criminally sent our brave sons down to the grave by thousands, without having given them the coveted honor of falling on the battle-field, or without having changed in the least the purpose of our enemies.

“This little State has already sent into the army, and has now at the rendezvous more than one-half of her able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years, and has more to offer, if wanted, to contend in battle against the enemies of our government.

“I trust we shall press with increased energy and power every war measure, as the most economical, humane and Christian policy which can be adopted to save our national union, as well as to secure permanent peace to those who shall succeed us.

“With sympathy for you in your responsible position, and renewed assurance of my cordial support, believe me, with high regard,

your obedient servant,

WILLIAM A. BUCKINGHAM.

“To President Lincoln,

Washington, D. C.

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After eight years of public service, five of which were made arduous by this war, into which, as may be seen by these letters, Governor Buckingham threw his whole heart and soul, and in which he bore equally with our good President, the burdens of the country, he retired at last to that more private sphere which he fills with so many forms of honorable usefulness.

We have but one anecdote in closing, a noble tribute to the Governor’s blameless example in his high station.

The Connecticut Election Day, as it is called, or the day when the Legislature assembles, and the Governor is inaugurated, has always been held in the State as a grand gala day. During the war, especially, the military pomp and parade was often imposing. The Governor’s military staff consists of eight or ten members, and while the war lasted hard work and responsible duties fell to their lot. A friend of the Governor who had usually been with him on these occasions, remarked to one of his staff at the last of them:

“I have often been with you on these occasions, and have never seen any liquor drank. I suppose,” he added pleasantly, “you do that privately.”

“No, sir;” was the reply. “None of the Governor’s staff ever use liquor.”

“Is that so?” was the surprised reply.

“Yes,” was the answer—“it is so.”

Such an example as this, in so high a place, had a value that could not be too highly estimated.

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CHAPTER XVII.

WENDELL PHILLIPS

Birth and Ancestry of Wendell Phillips—His Education and Social Advantage—The Lovejoy Murder—Speech in Faneuil Hall—The Murder Justified—Mr. Phillips’ First Speech—He Defends the Liberty of the Press—His Ideality—He Joins the Garrisonian Abolitionists’—Gives up the Law and Becomes a Reformer—His Method and Style of Oratory—Abolitionists’ Blamed for the Boston Mob—Heroism of the Early Abolitionists’—His Position in Favor of “Woman’s Rights”—Anecdote of His Lecturing—His Services in the Cause of Temperance—Extract with His Argument on Prohibition—His Severity towards Human Nature—His Course During and Since the War—A Change of Tone Recommended.

Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Mass., Nov. 29, 1811.

He is son of John Phillips, first Mayor of Boston. The Phillips family justly rank among the untitled aristocracy of Massachusetts. Liberal views, noble manners, love of learning and benevolent liberality have become in that state associated with the name.

John Phillips, the grand uncle of Wendell Phillips, was the founder of Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire. Besides this he endowed a professorship in Dartmouth College, and contributed liberally to Princeton College, and gave $31,000 to Phillips Academy in Andover.

His nephew Samuel Phillips, planned, founded and organized Phillips Academy in Andover. He was a member of the provincial Congress during the Revolutionary war—a member of the convention to form

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the United States constitution in 1779, and a State Senator for twenty years following the adoption of the constitution, and for fifteen years was president in the Senate, and was from first to last the particular and trusted friend of Gen. Washington. If there be such a thing in America as a just and proper aristocracy it inheres in families in whom public virtues and services have been as eminent as in this case.

Wendell Phillips was a graduate of Harvard College in 1831, and at the Cambridge law school in 1833, and was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1834.

A precise and elegant scholar, gifted with all possible advantages of family, position, and prestige, Wendell Phillips began life with every advantage. But the very year after his admission to the bar, he was a witness of the mob in which Garrison was dragged disgracefully through Boston, for the crime of speaking his conscientious opinions.

The spirit of his Puritan fathers was strong within him—and he was acting in accordance with all his family traditions when he at once espoused the cause of Liberty.

His earliest public speech was made on an occasion befitting a son of old Massachusetts.

On November 7, 1837, the Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, was shot by a mob at Alton, Illinois, while attempting to defend his printing press from destruction. When news of this event was received in Boston, Dr. Channing headed a petition to the Mayor and Aldermen asking the use of Faneuil Hall for a public meeting. It will scarcely be credited by the present generation that a request so reasonable and so natural, headed by

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a name so commanding as that of Dr. Channing, should have been flatly refused. The Mayor and Aldermen of Boston in those days trembled before the rod of southern masters, and however well disposed towards their own distinguished citizens, dared not encourage them in the expression of any sentiments which might possibly be disagreeable to the South. It is true that this was the third printing press which Lovejoy had attempted to defend. It is true that he had a perfect legal right in his own state of Illinois to print whatever he chose. It is true also that the rioters who came from Missouri and attacked his house and shot him, were the vilest and profanest scum of society which a slave state can breed; but for all that, the State of Massachusetts at that time could scarcely find a place or a voice to express indignation at the outrage. Dr. Channing, undismayed by the first rebuff, addressed an impressive letter to his fellow citizens which resulted in a meeting of influential gentlemen at the old court room. Here measures were taken to secure a much larger number of names to the petition. This time the Mayor and Aldermen consented.

The meeting was held on the 8^th of December, and organized with the Hon. Jonathan Phillips for chairman. Dr. Channing opened the meeting with an eloquent address, and resolutions drawn up by him were read and offered.

The attorney general of Massachusetts appeared now as the advocate of the rioters. He compared the slaves to a menagerie of wild beasts, and the Alton rioters to the orderly mob who threw the tea overboard in 1773—talked of the “conflict of laws” between Mis-

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souri and Illinois, declared that Lovejoy was presumptuous and imprudent and died as the fool dieth. Then with direct and insulting reference to Dr. Channing, he asserted that a clergyman with a gun in his hand, or one mingling in the debates of a popular assembly, were equally out of place. This speech produced, as was natural, a sensation in Faneuil Hall, and Wendell Phillips who had come without expecting to speak, rose immediately to his feet and amid the boisterous efforts of the mobocratic party in the house to drown his voice made his first public speech.

Mr. Phillip’s style of oratory is peculiarly solemn and impressive. The spirit of whole generations of Puritan ministers seems to give might to it. There is no attempt to propitiate prejudice—none to throw out popular allurements—it is calm, intense, and commanding.

“Sir,” he said, in the course of this speech, “when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those precious lips, (pointing to the portraits in the hall) would have broken into voices to rebuke the recreant American; the slanderer of the dead. * * * Sir, for the sentiments that he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of the Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up.”

A storm of mingled applause and hisses interrupted the bold young orator—with cries of “take that back—take that back.” The uproar became so great for a time that he could not be heard. One or two gentle-

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men came to Mr. Phillips’ side while the crowd still continued to shout. “Make him take that back—he sha’nt go on till he takes that back.” Mr. Phillips came forward to the edge of the platform, and looking on the excited multitude with that calm, firm, severe bearing-down glance which seems often to have such mesmeric effects, said solemnly:

“Fellow citizens, I cannot take back my words. Surely the attorney general so long and well known here, needs not the aid of your hisses against one so young as I am—my voice, never before heard in your walls.” After this the young orator was heard to the end of his speech without interruption. In this first speech, which was wholly unpremeditated, he showed all that clearness, elegance of diction, logical compactness, and above all, that weight of moral conviction which characterized all his subsequent oratory.

In allusion to the speech of the attorney general he said: “Imprudent! to defend the liberty of the press! Why? Because the defence was unsuccessful! Does success gild crime into patriotism and the want of it change heroic self-devotion into imprudence? Was Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard? Yet he, judged by that single hour, was unsuccessful. After a short exile the race he hated sat again upon the throne.

“Imagine yourselves present when the first news of Bunker Hill battle reached a New England town. The tale would have run thus: ‘The patriots are routed—the red coats victorious—Warren lies dead upon the field.’ With what scorn would that Tory have been received who should have charged Warren with impru-

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dence, who should have said that ‘bred a physician, he was out of place, and died as the fool dieth.’ How would the intimation have been received that Warren and his successors should have waited a better time?’

“Presumptuous! to assert the freedom of the press on American ground! Is the assertion of such freedom before the age? So much before the age as to leave no one a right to make it because it displeases the community? Who invented this libel on his country? It is this very thing which entitled Lovejoy to greater praise. The disputed right which provoked the revolution was far beneath that for which he died. (Here was a strong and general expression of disapprobation.) One word, gentlemen. As much as thought is better than money, so much is the cause in which Lovejoy died nobler than a mere question of taxes. James Otis thundered in this hall when the King did but touch his pocket. Imagine if you can, his indignant eloquence if England had offered to put a gag on his lips. Mr. Chairman, from the bottom of my heart I thank that brave little band at Alton for resisting. We must remember that Lovejoy had fled from city to city—suffering the destruction of three printing presses patiently. At length he took counsel with friends, men of character, of tried integrity, of wide views of Christian principle. They thought the crisis had come—that it was full time to assert the laws. They saw around them, not a community like our own, of fixed habits and character, but one in the gristle, not yet hardened in the bone of manhood. The people there, children of our older States, seem to have forgotten the blood-

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tried principles of their fathers, the moment they lost sight of New England hills. Something was to be done to show them the priceless value of freedom of the press, to bring back and set right their wandering and confused ideas. He and his advisers looked on a community, struggling like a drunken man, indifferent to their rights and confused in their feelings. Deaf to argument, haply they might be stunned into sobriety. They saw that of which we cannot judge, the necessity of resistance. Insulted law called for it. Public opinion, fast hastening on the downward course, must be arrested. Does not the event show they judged rightly? Absorbed in a thousand trifles, how will the nation all at once come to a stand? Men begin as in 1776 and 1640 to discuss principles and weigh characters, to find out where they are. Haply we may awake before we are borne over the precipice.”

From this time Wendell Phillips was identified with the radical abolitionists.

His nature is characterized by an extreme ideality. He is essentially in all things a purist. Had he not thus early in life been absorbed by the exigencies of a moral conflict, Mr. Phillips would have shown himself one of the most thorough and carefully cultivated men of literature in our country. The demand for perfection is one of the most rigorous in his nature, and would have shown itself in an exacting precision in style, orthography, rhetoric and pronunciation. In regard to all these things his standard is that of an idealist. But the moral nature derived from his Puritan ancestry, was stronger than every other por-

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tion of him, and his ideality became concentrated upon the existing conflict in American society. His nature led him at once to take the most strenuous and rigorous ground side by side with William Lloyd Garrison.

Tried by his severe standard, the constitution of the United States, by an incidental complicity with slavery, had become a sinful compact: a covenant with death and an agreement with hell—and with the unquestioning consistency which belonged to his Puritan blood, he did not hesitate to sacrifice to this belief his whole professional future.

He abandoned his legal practice and took leave of the Suffolk bar, because he could not conscientiously take the oath to support the Constitution of the United States. What things were gain to him he counted loss.

Henceforth there was no career open to him but that of the agitator and popular reformer. He brought to the despised and unfashionable cause not only the prestige of one of the most honored Massachusetts names, and the traditions of a family which was among orthodox circles as a Hebrew of the Hebrews, but the power of decidedly the first forensic orator that America has ever produced. His style was so dazzling, so brilliant, his oratory so captivating, that even the unpopularity of his sentiments could not prevent the multitudes from flocking to hear him. He had in a peculiar degree that mesmeric power of control which distinguishes the true orator, by which he holds a multitude subject to his will, and carries them whither he pleases.

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His speeches were generally extempore, and flowed on with a wonderful correctness, and perfect finish of language, without faltering, without the shadow of an inelegance—his sentences succeeding one another with a poised and rhythmical fullness, and his illustrations happily running through the field of ancient and modern history, and the greatest apparent ease selecting whatever he needed from thence for the illustration of his subject. In invective no American or English orator has ever surpassed him. At the bar of his fervid oratory he would arraign, try and condemn with a solemn and dignified earnestness that might almost have persuaded the object of his attack of his own guilt. Warren Hastings is said to have judged himself to be the basest of men while he listened to the denunciations of Burke, and something of the same experience may have befallen those who were arraigned by Phillips.

There was need enough at this time for a man thus endowed to come to the help of liberty in America, for the creeping influence of the despotic South, lulling, caressing, patronizing, promising, threatening and commanding, had gone very nigh to take away the right of free inquiry and free speech through the whole Northern States.

The few noble women, who formed the original Boston Anti-Slavery Society, were a mark everywhere spoken against. Even after the stormy and scurrilous attack of the mob which drove them out from their meeting, and which almost took the life of Garrison, there was not a newspaper in Boston, except the Liberator, which did not, in giving an account of the matter,

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blame the abolitionists instead of the rioters. It was the old story that the lamb had troubled the wolf, and ought to be eaten up forthwith. The Advertiser spoke of the affair, “not so much as a riot, as the prevention of a riot,” and “considered the whole matter as the triumph of law over lawless violence, and the love of order over riot and confusion.” The Christian Register recommended to the ladies to imitate the early Christians of Trajan’s day, and meet in secret, adding, with a sneer, “if the vanity of the ladies would allow.”

A leading orthodox divine shortly after preached a sermon to illustrate and defend the doctrine that no man has a right to promulgate any opinion distasteful to the majority of society where he lives. All, in short, seemed to be going one way—newspapers, pulpits, bar and bench, and the gay world of fashion, were alike agreed that if discussing the condition and rights and wrongs of the slave, was disagreeable to southern people it ought to be put a stop to at once and everywhere, and that the Abolitionists were a pestilent sect, who turned the world upside down.

In Wendell Phillips, at last, the scornful world met its match, for he was fully capable of meeting scorn with superior scorn, and retorting on contempt with contempt, and he stood as high above the fear of man that bringeth a snare, as any of the most unworldly of his Puritan grandfathers.

The little band of Abolitionists that gathered around him and Garrison, men and women, were every one of them heroes. They were of the old revolutionary stock of Boston, and every way worthy of their lineage, and there was need enough it should be so, for

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the struggle was no inconsiderable one—it was for life and death. Cast out of society, looked on as the off-scouring of the earth, hemmed in everywhere with slanders, often alienated from friends once the dearest and most admiring, laboring almost alone with an incessant and exhausting zeal, some of more delicate organization sunk under the trial, and may be said to have given their lives to the cause.

Wendell Phillips speaks of them feelingly in one of his later speeches, delivered on the anniversary of the Boston Mob:

“Many of those who met in this hall at that time are gone. They died as Whittier well says—

‘Their brave hearts breaking slow,

But self-forgetful to the last,

In words of cheer and bugle glow,

Their breath upon the darkness past.’

“In those days, as we gathered around their graves, and resolved that the narrower the circle became the closer we would draw together, we envied the dead their rest. Men ceased to slander them in that sanctuary; and as we looked forward to the desolate vista of calamity and trial before us, and thought of the temptations which beset us on either side, from worldly prosperity which a slight sacrifice of principle might secure, or social ease so close at hand, by only a little turning aside, we almost envied the dead the quiet sleep to which we left them—the harvest reaped, and the seal set beyond the power of change.”

The career of Phillips in those days was often amid threats of personal violence. Assassination, the favorite argument of slavery, was held up before him, and

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the recent death of Lovejoy showed that the threat was not an empty one. At home, his house, in turn with that of other leading abolitionists, was threatened with incendiary violence, notwithstanding it was the shelter of an invalid wife, whose frail life often seemed to hang on a thread. From that shaded and secluded invalid chamber, however, came no weak prayers or faltering purposes, for a braver, higher heart was never given to human being than the one that beat there. In the darkest and most dangerous hours, from that sick room came words of hope and cheer and inspiration, prompt ever to bid him go where the cause called for him, and strengthening him by buoyant fearlessness and high religious trust. Such women are a true inspiration to men.

It is not wonderful that with such rare experience of how noble a being woman may be, and with such superior women for friends and associates, that Wendell Phillips should have formed a high ideal of womanhood, and become early one of the most enthusiastic supporters of all reforms in which the interest of woman is concerned.

On the 15^th and 16^th of October, 1857, he offered at a convention held in Worcester a series of resolutions in relation to the political rights of women which cover all the ground contended for by modern reformers. His speech on this subject is one of the most able and eloquent on record, and forms a part of the permanent literature of the movement.

He speaks of womanhood with a solemn and religious earnestness, with the fervor of knightly times, and pleads against all customs and laws which bear hardly

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upon her delicate organization, which mislead her from following her highest aspirations.

An anecdote in circulation about him shows that he not only held such theories, but that he was helpful in practice. It is so in keeping with his general character as to be extremely probable. Notwithstanding the unpopularity of his abolition sentiments, Mr. Phillips’ power as an orator was such that when lecturing on ordinary subjects he commanded the very highest prices in the literary market. On one of his tours he met in the cars a woman who was seeking a self-supporting career as a lecturer. Mr. Phillips inquired into her success, and found that independent of her expenses she made at the rate only of five dollars a time. He declared that such an inequality with his own success was an injustice, and added that he must beg her to allow him to equalize the account for once, by accepting the proceeds of his last lecture.

Mr. Phillips had a way of making his fame and reputation gain him a hearing on the unpopular subject which he had most at heart. Committees from anxious lyceums used to wait on him for his terms, sure of being able to fill a house by his name.

“What are your terms, Mr. Phillips?”

“If I lecture on anti-slavery, nothing. If on any other subject one hundred dollars.”

The success of his celebrated lecture on the Lost Arts, which has been perhaps more than a thousand times repeated, is only a chance specimen of what he might have done in this department of lecturing, could he have allowed himself that use of his talent.

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Mr. Phillips is far from being a man of one idea. Energetic as was his abolition campaign, he has found time and strength to strike some of the heaviest and most victorious blows for temperance. He has been a vigorous defender of the interests of the Maine Law, endangered in Massachusetts by the continual compliances of rank and fashion. His letter to Judge Shaw and President Walker is a specimen of unfearing and unflinching exposure and rebuke of those practices and concessions of public men, which cast contempt on the execution of law. His oration on Metropolitan Police has powerful arguments in favor of the policy of legislative prevention of intemperance.

We have selected his argument on the subject, both as a good example of his style and manner, and as a powerful presentation of a much needed argument.

“Some men look upon this temperance cause as whining bigotry, narrow asceticism, or a vulgar sentimentality, fit for little minds, weak women, and weaker men. On the contrary, I regard it as second only to one or two others of the primary reforms of this age, and for this reason. Every race has its peculiar temptation; every clime has its specific sin. The tropics and tropical races are tempted to one form of sensuality; the colder and temperate regions, and our Saxon blood, find their peculiar temptation in the stimulus of drink and food. In old times our heaven was a drunken revel. We relieve ourselves from the over-weariness of constant and exhaustive toil by intoxication. Science has brought a cheap means of drunkenness within the reach of every individual. National prosperity and free institutions have put into the hands

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of almost every workman the means of being drunk for a week on the labor of two or three hours. With that blood and that temptation, we have adopted democratic institutions, where the law has no sanction but the purpose and virtue of the masses. The statute-book rests not on bayonets, as in Europe, but on the hearts of the people. A drunken people can never be the basis of a free government. It is the corner-stone neither of virtue, prosperity, nor progress. To us, therefore, the title-deeds of whose estates and the safety of whose lives depend upon the tranquility of the streets, upon the virtue of the masses, the presence of any vice which brutalizes the average mass of mankind, and tends to make it more readily the tool of intriguing and corrupt leaders, is necessarily a stab at the very life of the nation. Against such a vice is marshalled the Temperance Reformation. That my sketch is no mere fancy picture, every one of you knows. Every one of you can glance back over your own path, and count many and many a one among those who started from the goal at your side, with equal energy and perhaps greater promise, who has found a drunkard’s grave long before this. The brightness of the bar, the ornament of the pulpit, the hope and blessing and stay of many a family,—you know, every one of you who has reached middle life, how often on your path you set up the warning, “Fallen before the temptations of the streets!” Hardly one house in this city, whether it be full and warm with all the luxury of wealth, or whether it find hard, cold maintenance by the most earnest economy, no matter which,—hardly a house that does not count, among sons or nephews, some

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victim of this vice. The skeleton of this warning sits at every board. The whole world is kindred in this suffering. The country mother launches her boy with trembling upon the temptations of city life; the father trusts his daughter anxiously to the young man she has chosen, knowing what a wreck intoxication may make of the house-tree they set up. Alas! how often are their worst forebodings more than fulfilled! I have known a case—and probably many of you can recall some almost equal to it—where one worthy woman could count father, brother, husband, and son-in-law, all drunkards,—no man among her near kindred, except her son, who was not a victim of this vice. Like all other appetites, this finds resolution weak when set against the constant presence of temptations. This is the evil. How are the laws relating to it executed in this city? Let me tell you.

“First, there has been great discussion of this evil,—wide, earnest, patient discussion, for thirty-five years. The whole community has been stirred by the discussion of this question. Finally, after various experiments, the majority of the State decided that the method to stay this evil was to stop the open sale of intoxicating drink. They left moral suasion still to address the individual, and set themselves as a community to close the doors of temptation. Every man acquainted with his own nature or with society knows that weak virtue, walking through our streets, and meeting at every tenth door (for that is the average) the temptation to drink, must fall; that one must be a moral Hercules to stand erect. To prevent the open sale of intoxicating liquor has been the method selected by

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the State to help its citizens to be virtuous; in other words, the State has enacted what is called the Maine Liquor Law,—the plan of refusing all licenses to sell, to be drunk on the spot or elsewhere, and allowing only an official agent to sell for medicinal purposes and the arts. You may drink in your own parlors, you may make what indulgence you please your daily rule, the State does not touch you there; there you injure only yourself, and those you directly influence; that the State cannot reach. But when you open your door and say to your fellow-citizens, ‘Come and indulge,’ the State has a right to ask, ‘In what do you invite them to indulge? Is it in something that helps, or something that harms, the community?’”

* * * * * * * * *

In our recent war it is scarcely needful to say that Mr. Phillips has always been a counsellor for the most thorough, the most intrepid and most efficient measures.

During the period of comparative vacillation and uncertainty, when McClellan was the commander-in-chief, and war was being made on political principles, Mr. Phillips did his utmost in speeches and public addresses in the papers, to stir up the people to demand a more efficient policy.

Since the termination of the war and the emancipation of the slave, Mr. Phillips seems to show that the class of gifts and faculties adapted to rouse a stupid community, and to force attention to neglected truths are not those most adapted to the delicate work of reconstruction. The good knight who can cut and hew in battle, cannot always do the surgeon’s

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work of healing and restoring. That exacting ideality which is the leading faculty of Mr. Phillips’ nature leads him constantly to undervalue what has been attained, and it is to be regretted that it deprived him of the glow and triumph of a victory in which no man than he better deserved to rejoice.

Garrison hung up his shield and sword at a definite point, and marked the era of victory with devout thankfulness; and we can but regret, that the more exacting mind of Phillips was too much fixed on what yet was wanting to share the well earned joy.

When there is strong light there must be shadow, and the only shadow we discern in the public virtues of Mr. Phillips is the want of a certain power to appreciate and make allowances for the necessary weaknesses and imperfections of human nature.

He has been a teacher of the school of the law rather than that of the Gospel; he has been most especially useful because we have been in a state where such stern unflinching teachings have been indispensable.

Mr. Phillips’ methods indeed, of dealing with human nature, savor wholly of the law and remind us forcibly of the pithy and vigorous account which John Bunyan puts into the mouth of his pilgrim.

“I saw one coming after me swift as the wind, and so soon as the man overtook me, it was but a word and a blow, for down he knocked me and laid me for dead. But when I was a little come to myself I asked him wherefore he served me so. He said because of my secret inclining to Adam the first, and with that he struck me another deadly blow on the breast, and beat me down backward, and so I lay at

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his foot as dead as before. So when I came to myself, I cried him mercy; but he said, I know not how to show mercy, and with that he knocked me down again. He had doubtless made an end of me but that one came by and bid him forbear.

Who was he that bid him forbear? I did not know him at first but as he went by, I perceived the holes in his hands and his side.”

There is a time for all things, and this stern work of the land had to be done in our country. Almighty God seconded it by awful providences, and pleaded against the oppressor in the voice of famine and battle, of fire and sword.

The guilty land had been riven and torn, and in the language of scripture, made an astonishment and a desolation!

May we not think now that the task of binding up the wounds of a bruised and shattered country, of reconciling jarring interests thrown into new and delicate relationships, of bringing peace to sore and wearied nerves, and abiding quiet to those who are fated to dwell side by side in close proximity, may require faculties of a wider and more varied adaptation, and a spirit breathing more of Calvary and less of Sinai!

It is no discredit to the good sword gapped with the blows of a hundred battle fields, to hang it up in all honor, as having done its work.

It has made place for a thousand other forces and influences each powerless without it, but each now more powerful and more efficient in their own field.

Those who are so happy as to know Mr. Phillips personally, are fully aware how entirely this unflinch-

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ing austerity of judgment, this vigorous severity of exaction, belong to his public character alone, how full of genial urbanity they find the private individual. We may be pardoned for expressing the hope that the time may yet come when he shall see his way clear to take counsel in public matters with his own kindly impulses, and that those genial traits which render his private intercourse so agreeable, may be allowed to modify at least his public declarations.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

Mr. Beecher a Younger Child—Death of his Mother—His Step-Mother’s Religious Influence—Ma’am Kilbourn’s School—The Passing Bell—Unprofitable Schooling—An Inveterate School Joker—Masters the Latin Grammar—Goes to Amherst College—His Love of Flowers—Modes of Study; a Reformer—Mr. Beecher and the Solemn Tutor—His Favorite Poetry—His Introduction to Phrenology—His Mental Philosophy—Doctrine of Spiritual Intuition—Punctuality for Joke’s Sake—Old School and New School—Doubts on Entering the Ministry—Settlement of Lawrenceburg—His Studies; First Revival—Large Accessions to the Church—“Tropical Style”—Ministerial Jokes—Slavery in the Pulpit—The Transfer to Brooklyn—Plymouth Church Preaching—Visit to England—Speeches in England—Letters from England—Christian View of England—The Exeter Hall Speech—Preaches an Unpopular Forgiveness.

HENRY WARD BEECHER was the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24, 1813. The first child of a family is generally an object of high hope and anxious and careful attention. They are observed, watched—and if the parents are so disposed, carefully educated, and often over-watched and over-educated. But in large families, as time rolls on and children multiply, especially to those in straitened worldly circumstances, all the interest of novelty dies out before the advent of younger children, and they are apt to find their way in early life unwatched and unheralded. Dr. Beecher’s salary was eight hundred dollars a year, not always promptly paid. This made the problem of feed-

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ing, clothing and educating a family of ten children a dark one. The family was constantly enlarged by boarders, young ladies attending the female academy, and whose board helped somewhat to the support of the domestic establishment, but added greatly to the cares of the head manager. The younger members of the Beecher family therefore came into existence in a great bustling household of older people, all going their separate ways, and having their own grown-up interests to carry. The child, growing up in this busy, active circle, had constantly impressed upon it a sense of personal insignificance as a child, and the absolute need of the virtue of passive obedience and non-resistance as regards all grown-up people. To be statedly washed and dressed and catechized, got to school at regular hours in the morning, and to bed inflexibly at the earliest possible hour at night, comprised about all the attention that children could receive in those days.

The mother of Henry Ward died when he was three years old; his father was immersed in theological investigations and a wide sphere of pastoral labors and great general ecclesiastical interests, his grown-up brothers and sisters in their own separate life history, and the three younger children were therefore left to their mortal pilgrimage, within certain well-defined moral limits, much after their own way. The step-mother, who took the station of mother, was a lady of great personal elegance and attractiveness, of high intellectual and moral culture, who from having been in early life the much admired belle in general society, came at last from an impulse of moral heroism

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combined with personal attachment, to undertake the austere labors of a poor minister’s family. She was a person to make a deep impression on the minds of any children. There was a moral force about her, a dignity of demeanor, an air of elegance and superior breeding, which produced a constant atmosphere of unconscious awe in the minds of little ones. Then her duties were onerous, her conscience inflexible, and under the weight of these her stock of health and animal spirits sunk, so that she was for the most part pensive and depressed. Her nature and habits were too refined and exacting for the bringing up of children of great animal force and vigor, under the strain and pressure of straitened circumstances. The absurdities and crudenesses incident to the early days of such children appeared to her as serious faults, and weighed heavily on her conscience. The most intense positive religious and moral influence the three little ones of the family received was on Sunday night, when it was her custom to take them to her bed-room and read and talk and pray with them. At these times, deep though vague religious yearnings were created; but as she was much of her time an invalid, and had little sympathy with the ordinary feelings of childhood, she gave an impression of religion as being like herself, calm, solemn, inflexible, mysteriously sad and rigorously exacting.

In those days none of the attentions were paid to children that are now usual. The community did not recognize them. There was no child’s literature; there were no children’s books. The Sunday school was yet an experiment, in a fluctuating, uncertain

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state of trial. There were no children’s days of presents and fetes—no Christmas or New Year’s festivals. The annual thanksgiving was only associated with one day’s unlimited range of pies of every sort—too much for one day, and too soon things of the past. The childhood of Henry Ward was unmarked by the possession of a single child’s toy as a gift from an older person, or a single fete. Very early, too, strict duties devolved upon him; a daily portion of the work of the establishment, the care of the domestic animals, the cutting and piling of wood, or tasks in the garden strengthened his muscles and gave vigor and tone to his nerves. From his father and mother he inherited a perfectly solid, healthy organization of brain, muscle and nerves, and the uncaressing, let-alone system under which he was brought up, gave him early habits of vigor and self-reliance.

Litchfield was a mountain town, where the winter was a stern reality for six months of the year, where there were giant winds, and drifting snows if immeasurable depth, and ice and sleet storms of a sublime power and magnitude. Under this rugged nursing he grew outwardly vigorous. At nine years of age, in one of those winter droughts common in New England towns, he harnessed the horse to a sledge with a barrel lashed thereon, and went off alone three miles over the icy top of the town hill, to dip up and bring home a barrel of water from a distant spring. So far from taking this as a hardship, he undertook it with a chivalric pride. His only trial in the case was the humiliation of being positively commanded by his careful step-mother to wear his overcoat; he departed

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obedient, but with tears of mortification freezing on his cheeks, for he had recorded a heroic vow to go through a whole winter without once wearing an overcoat.

For education, technically so called, there were small advantages. His earliest essay of letters was to walk over to West street, to a widow Kilbourn’s, where he sat daily on a bench kicking his heels in idleness, and said his letters twice in the day, and was for so long out of the way of the grown folks, which was a main point in child schooling. There was a tinner’s shop hard by, and the big girls, some of them, contrived to saw off some of his long golden curls with tin shears contrived from the fragments cast out of the shop. The child was annoyed, but dared not complain to any purpose, till the annoyance being stated at home, it was concluded that the best way to abate it was to cut off all the curls altogether, and with the loss of these he considered his manhood to commence. Next, a small, unpainted, district school-house being erected within a stone’s throw of the parsonage, he graduated from Ma’am Kilbourn’s thither. The children of all the farming population in the neighborhood gathered there. The exercises consisted in daily readings of the Bible and the Columbian Orator, in elementary exercises in arithmetic, and hand-writing. The ferule and a long flexible hickory switch were the insignia of office of the school mistress. No very striking early results were the outcome of this teaching. Henry Ward was not marked out by the prophecies of partial friends for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organization which often passes for dullness

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in early boyhood. He had great deficiency in verbal memory, a deficiency marked in him through life; he was excessively sensitive to praise and blame, extremely diffident, and with a power of yearning, undeveloped emotion, which he neither understood nor could express. His utterance was thick and indistinct, partly from bashfulness and partly from an enlargement of the tonsils of the throat, so that in speaking or reading he was with difficulty understood. In forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble then to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted for him would have been that of an orator. “When Henry is sent to me with a message,” said a good aunt. “I always have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he spoke Choctaw; the second, I catch now and then a word; by the third time I begin to understand.”

Thus, while Dr. Beecher victoriously demonstrated the consistency of decrees and accountability, and the elder brother was drawing all the hopes of the family as the first in his college class, and his elder sisters were writing poetry and receiving visits, and carrying on the cheerful round of Litchfield society, this bashful, dazed-looking boy pattered barefoot to and from the little unpainted school-house, with a brown towel or a blue checked apron to hem during the intervals between his spelling and reading lessons. Nobody thought much of his future, further than to see that he was safe and healthy, or even troubled themselves to inquire what might be going on in his life.

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But the child most let alone, is nevertheless being educated gradually and insensibly. The calm, inflexible, elegant breeding of the step-mother, her intense solemnity of religious responsibility, indicating itself in every chance look or motion, fell on the sensitive child-nature like a constant moral stimulant. When a little fellow, whose small feet could not touch the bottom of the old family chaise, he was once driving with her on an errand. The bell tolled for a death, as was then the custom in rural places. “Henry, what do you think of when you hear a bell tolling like that?” she said. Astonished and awe-struck at having his thoughts inquired into, the child only flushed, and colored and looked abashed, and she went on as in a quiet soliloquy, “I think, was that soul prepared? It has gone into eternity!” The effect on the child’s mind was a shiver of dread, like the being turned out without clothing among the icy winds of Litchfield hills. The vague sense of infinite, inevitable doom underlying all the footsteps of life, added to a natural disposition to yearning and melancholy. The scenery around the parsonage fed the yearning—Chestnut Hill on one side, with its lovely, softly wooded slopes, and waving grain-fields; on the other, Mount Tom, with steel-blue pines and a gleaming lake mirror at its feet. Then there was the piano always going, and the Scotch airs, Roslin Castle, Mary’s Dream, and Bonnie Doon, sounding out from the parlor windows, and to which the boy listened in a sort of troublous and dreamy mixture of sadness and joy, and walked humming to himself with tears in his eyes.

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The greatest trial of those days was the catechism. Sunday lessons were considered by the mother-in-law as inflexible duty, and the catechism as the sine qua non. The other children memorized readily and were brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused and hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required or forbidden by this or that commandment, his mouth chocking up with the long words which he hopelessly miscalled; was sure to be accused of idleness or inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in quickening his dormant faculties.

When he was ten years old, he was a stocky, strong, well-grown boy, loyal in duty, trained in unquestioning obedience, inured to patient hard work, inured also to the hearing and discussing of all the great theological problems of Calvinism, which were always reverberating in his hearing; but as to any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward state—a poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and a bashful reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity. He was now placed at a private school in the neighboring town of Bethlehem, under the care of the Rev. Mr. Langdon, to commence a somewhat more careful course of study. Here an incident occurred which showed that the boy even at that early age felt a mission to defend opinions. A forward school-boy, among the elder scholars, had got hold of Paine’s Age of Reason, and was flourishing largely among the boys with objections to the Bible, drawn therefrom. Henry privately looked up Watson’s Apology, studied up the

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subject, and challenged a debate with the big boy, in which he came off victorious by the acclamation of his school-fellows.

His progress in book-learning, however, was slow, though his year at the place was one of great happiness. One trait of the boy, as it has been with the man, was a peculiar passion for natural scenery, which he found full liberty to indulge in his present surroundings. He boarded with a large-hearted, kindly, motherly woman, in a great comfortable farm-house, where everything was free and unconstrained. The house was backed by a generous old orchard, full of fruits and blossoms in spring and summer, and where the partridges drummed and whirred in winter. Beyond that were dreamy depths of woodland, and Henry’s studies were mostly with gun on shoulder, roving the depths of those forests, guiltless of hitting anything, because the time was lost in dreamy contemplation. Thence returning unprepared for school, he would be driven to the expedient of writing out his Latin verb and surreptitiously reading it out of the crown of his hat, an exercise from whence he reaped small profit, either mentally or morally. In short, after a year spent in this way, it began to be perceived by the elders of the family, that as to the outward and visible signs of learning, he was making no progress. His eldest sister was then teaching a young lady’s school in Hartford, and it was proposed to take the boy under her care to see what could be made of him.

One boy of eleven in a school of thirty or forty girls has not much chance of making a durable impression, but we question if any of Henry’s school mates easily

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forgot him. If the under stratum of his nature was a dreamy yearning melancholy, its upper manifestation was in constant bubbling, restless effervescence of fun and practical joking. The school room was up a long flight of stairs, and one wet day Henry spent a recess when he was supposed to be studying grammar, in opening every umbrella brought to school, and so disposing them on the stairs that the luckless person who opened the outside door would witness a precipitate rush of the whole series into the street—which feat was successfully accomplished to the dismay of the late comer, and the tittering of the whole school, who had been somewhat prepared for the catastrophe.

The school room was divided into two divisions in grammar, under leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews were contests for superiority in which it was vitally important that every member should be perfected. Henry was generally the latest choice, and fell on his side as an unlucky accession—being held more amusing than profitable on such occasions.

The fair leader on one of these divisions took the boy aside to a private apartment, to put into him with female tact and insinuation those definitions and distinctions on which the honor of the class depended.

“Now Henry, A is the indefinite article, you see—and must be used only with a singular noun. You can say a man—but you can’t say a men, can you?” “Yes, I can say Amen too,” was the ready rejoinder. “Father says it always at the end of his prayers.”

“Come Henry, now don’t be joking; now decline He.” “Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.” “You see, His is possessive. Now you can say, His book—

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but you can’t say ‘Him book.’” “Yes I do say Hymn book too,” said the impracticable scholar with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made his young teacher laugh, which was the victory he wanted.

“But now Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive voice. Now ‘I strike’ is active, you see, because if you strike you do something. But ‘I am struck,’ is passive, because if you are struck you don’t do any thing do you?”

“Yes I do—I strike back again!”

Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered gratuitously. Being held rather of a frisky nature, his sister appointed his seat at her elbow, when she heard her classes. A class in Natural Philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling through the theory of the tides. “I can explain that,” said Henry. “Well, you see, the sun, he catches hold of the moon and pulls her, and she catches hold of the sea and pulls that, and this makes the spring tides.

“But what makes the neap tides?”

“Oh, that’s when the sun stops to spit on his hands,” was the brisk rejoinder.

After about six months, Henry was returned on his parents’ hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker, and an indifferent scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent lying about loosely in him if he could only be brought to apply himself.

When he was twelve years of age his father moved to Boston. It was a great change to the two younger boys, from the beautiful rural freedom of a picturesque

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mountain town to the close, strait limits of a narrow street in Boston.

There was a pure and vigorous atmosphere of moral innocence about the mountain towns of Connecticut in those days, which made the breeding up of children on the let-alone system quite feasible. There was no temptation to vice or immorality. The only associate of doubtful character forbidden to Henry, for whose society he craved, was Ulysses Freeman, a poor, merry, softly giggling negro boy, who inhabited a hut not far off, and who, it was feared, might indiscreetly teach him something that he ought not to know—but otherwise it was safe to let him run unwatched, in the wholesome companionship of bob o’links and squirrels and birch woods and huckleberry bushes. There was not in all Litchfield in those days any thing to harm a growing boy, or lead him into evil.

But in Boston, the streets, the wharves, the ship yards, were full of temptation—the house, narrow and strait. The boy was put into the Boston Latin School, where the whole educational process was a solid square attempt to smite the Latin grammar into minds of all sorts and sizes, by a pressure like that by which coin is stamped in the mint. Educated in loyal obedience as a religion and a habit, pushed up to make the effort by the entreaties of his father, by appeals to his gallantry in overcoming difficulties, his sense of family honor, and the solemn appeals to conscience of his mother, Henry set himself doggedly to learn lists of prepositions and terminations, and bead-rolls of nouns that found their accusatives or genitives in this way

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or that, except in the case of two dozen exceptions, when they formed them in some other way, with all the other dry prickly facts of language with which it is deemed expedient to choke the efforts of beginners.

It was to him a grim Sinaitic desert, a land of darkness without order, where he wandered, seeing neither tree or flower; a wilderness of meaningless forms and sounds. His life was a desolation, a blind push to do what was most contrary to his natural faculties, repulsive to his tastes, and in which with utmost stress and strain of effort he could never hope to rise above mediocrity. One year passed in this way, and with the fear of disgrace in the rear and conscience and affection goading him on, Henry had actually mastered the Latin grammar, and could give any form or inflection, rule or exception therein, but at an expense of brain and nerve that began to tell even on his vigorous organization.

The era of fermentation and development was upon him, and the melancholy that had brooded over his childhood waxed more turbulent and formidable. He grew gloomy and moody, restless and irritable. His father, noticing the change, got him on a course of biographical reading, hoping to divert his thoughts. He began to read naval histories, the lives of great sailors and commanders—the voyages of Captain Cook, the biography of Nelson; and immediately, like lightning flashing out of rolling clouds, came the determination not to rest any longer in Boston, learning terminations and prepositions, but to go forth to a life of enterprise. He made up his little bundle, walked the wharf and talked with sailors and captains, hovered irresolute on the verge of voyages, never quite able

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to grieve his father by a sudden departure. At last he wrote a letter announcing to a brother that he could and would no longer remain at school—that he had made up his mind for the sea; that if not permitted to go, he should go without permission. This letter was designedly dropped where his father picked it up. Dr. Beecher put it in his pocket and said nothing for the moment, but the next day asked Henry to help him saw wood. Now the wood-pile was the Doctor’s favorite debating ground, and Henry felt complimented by the invitation, as implying manly companionship.

“Let us see,” says the Doctor, “Henry, how old are you?”

“Almost fourteen!”

“Bless me! how boys do grow!—Why it’s almost time to be thinking what you are going to do. Have you ever thought?”

“Yes—I want to go to sea.”

“To sea! Of all things! Well, well! After all, why not?—Of course you don’t want to be a common sailor. You want to get into the navy?”

“Yes sir, that’s what I want.”

“But not merely as a common sailor, I suppose?”

“No sir, I want to be midshipman, and after that commodore.”

“I see,” said the Doctor, cheerfully, “Well, Henry, in order for that, you know, you must begin a course of mathematics, and study navigation and all that.”

“Yes sir, I am ready.”

“Well then, I’ll send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant, and then you’ll begin you prepar-

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atory studies, and if you are well prepared, I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment.”

And so he went to Mount Pleasant, in Amherst, Mass., and Dr. Beecher said shrewdly, “I shall have that boy in the ministry yet.”

The transfer from the confined limits of a city to the congenial atmosphere of a beautiful mountain town brought an immediate favorable change. Here he came under the care of a mathematical teacher, educated at West Point, a bright attractive young man of the name of Fitzgerald, with whom he roomed. Between this young man and the boy, there arose a romantic friendship. Henry had no natural talent or taste for mathematics, but inspired by a desire to please his friend, and high ambition for his future profession, he went into them with energy, and soon did credit to his teacher at the blackboard, laboring perseveringly with his face towards the navy, and Nelson as his beau ideal.

Here also he was put through a strict drill in elocution by Professor John E. Lovell, now residing in New Haven, Conn. Of him, Mr. Beecher cherishes a grateful recollection, and never fails to send him a New Year’s token of remembrance. He says of him, that “a better teacher in his department never was made.” Mr. Beecher had many natural disabilities for the line of oratory; and their removal so far as to make him an acceptable speaker he holds due to the persevering drill of Mr. Lovell. His voice, naturally thick and husky, was developed by most persevering, systematic training. His gestures and the management of his body went through a drill corresponding to that which the

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military youth goes through at West Point, to make his body supple to the exigencies of military evolution. As an orator, this early training was of vital importance to him. He could never have attained success without it.

At the close of the first year, a revival of religion passed through the school, and Henry Ward and many others were powerfully impressed. It was in fact, on the part of the boy, the mere flashing out into visible form of that deep undercurrent of religious sensibility which had been the habit of his life, and the result of his whole home education. His father sent for him home to unite with the church on a great communion season; and the boy, trembling, agitated, awe-struck, full of vague purposes and good resolutions and imperfectly developed ideas, stood up and took on him irrevocable vows, henceforth in his future life to be actively and openly on the side of Christ, in the great life battle.

Of course the naval scheme vanished, and the pulpit opened before him as his natural sphere. With any other father or education, this would not have been an “of course;” but Dr. Beecher was an enthusiast in his profession. Every word of his life, every action or mode of speaking, had held it up before his boys as the goal of all his hopes, that they should preach the gospel, and the boy therefore felt that to be the necessary obligation which came upon him in joining the church. He returned to Amherst, where his classical education was continued for two years longer, with a view to fit him for college.

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The love of flowers, which has always formed so marked a branch of his general enthusiasm for nature, developed itself at this time in a friendship with a rather rough man who kept a garden. He was so pleased with the boy’s enthusiasm that he set apart a scrap of ground for him which he filled with roses, geraniums and other blooming wonders, and these Henry tended under his instructions.

At this time the love of nature was little cultivated among the community. By very many good people, nature was little spoken of except as the antithesis to grace. It was the tempter, the syren that drew the soul from higher duties. The chaplain of Mount Pleasant Institute, a grave and formal divine, found Henry on his knees in his little flower patch, lost in rapturous contemplations of buds and blossoms. He gave him an indulgent smile, but felt it his duty to improve the occasion.

“Ah, Henry,” he said condescendingly, as one who makes a fair admission, “these things are pretty, very pretty, but my boy, do you think that such things are worthy to occupy the attention of a man who has an immortal soul?” Henry answered only by that abashed and stolid look which covered from the eyes of his superiors, so much of what was going on within him, and went on with attentions to his flowers. “I wanted to tell him,” he said afterwards, “that since Almighty God had found leisure to make those trifles, it could not be amiss for us to find time to look at them.” By the time that Henry had been three years in Amherst he was prepared to enter Sophomore in College. Thanks to his friend and teacher Fitzgerald, his math-

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ematical training had given him the entire mastery of La Croix’s Algebra, so that he was prepared to demonstrate at random any proposition as chance selected—not only without aid or prompting from the teacher, but controversially as against the teacher, who would sometimes publicly attack the pupil’s method of demonstration, disputing him step by step, when the scholar was expected to know with such positive clearness as to put down and overthrow the teacher. “You must not only know, but you must know that you know,” was Fitzgerald’s maxim; and Henry Ward attributes much of his subsequent habit of steady antagonistic defence of his own opinions to this early mathematical training.

Though prepared for the Sophomore class, his father however, deemed it best on the whole, that he should enter as freshman, and the advanced state of his preparation therefore gave him leisure the first year to mark out and commence a course of self-education by means of the college libraries, which he afterwards systematically pursued through college life. In fact he gave no more attention to the college course than was absolutely essential to keep his standing, but turned all the power of study and concentrated attention he had acquired in his previous years, upon his own plan of culture. As he himself remarks, “I had acquired by the Latin and mathematics, the power of study. I knew how to study, and I turned it upon things I wanted to know.” The Latin and Greek classics did not attract him. The want of social warmth in the remove at which they stood from the living

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present, alienated them from the sympathies of one who felt his mission to be among the men of to-day, and by its living literature. Oratory and rhetoric he regarded as his appointed weapons, and he began to prepare himself in the department of how to say—meanwhile contemplating with uncertain awe, the great future problem of WHAT TO SAY.

For the formation of style he began a course of English classical study; Milton’s prose works, Bacon, Shakspeare, and the writers of the Elizabethan period were his classics, read and re-read, and deeply pondered. In common with most of the young men of his period, he was a warm admirer of the writings of Robert Hall, and added him to his list of favorite authors. His habits of study were somewhat peculiar. He had made for himself at the carpenter’s, a circular table, with a hole in the middle, where was fixed a seat. Enthroned in this seat with his English classics all around him, he read and pondered, and with never ceasing delight.

The stand he took in college, was from the first that of a reformer. He was always on the side of law and order, and being one of the most popular fellows in his class, threw the whole weight of his popularity in favor of the faculty, rather than against them. He and his associates formed a union of merry good fellows, who were to have glorious fun, but to have it only by honorable and permissible means. They voted down scraping in the lecture rooms, and hazing of students; they voted down gambling and drinking, and every form of secret vice, and made the class rigidly temperate and pure. Mr. Beecher had received from family descent what

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might be called a strictly temperance organization. In no part of his life did he ever use, or was he ever tempted to use tobacco or ardent spirits in any shape. All his public labors, like those of his father before him, have been performed by the strict legal income of ordinary nervous investment; they have not been those deep ruinous drafts on the reserved principal of vital force, which are drawn by the excitements of extra stimulants.

He also maintained the character of a Christian student, by conscientious attention to the class prayer meetings, in which he took his part, as well as by outside religious and temperance labors in the rural population in the neighborhood. He very early formed an attachment to a beneficiary in the college, a man, as he says, of the Isaiah type, large-souled, and full of devotion, who took the boy round with him on his tour of religious exhortation, insisting with paternal earnestness that it was his immediate duty to begin to practice for the work of the Christian ministry. Having brought him once or twice to read and pray, in a little rural meeting, held in a school-house in the out-skirts of the village, he solemnly committed the future care of the meeting to the young disciple, and went himself to look up another fold. This meeting Henry religiously kept up among his others, with varying success, during his college career.

The only thing which prevented him from taking the first rank as a religious young man, was the want of that sobriety and solemnity which was looked upon as essential to the Christian character. Mr. Beecher was like a converted bob-o’link, who should be brought to

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judgment for short quirks and undignified twitters and tweedles, among the daisy heads, instead of flying in dignified paternal sweeps, like a good swallow of the sanctuary, or sitting in solemnized meditation in the depths of pine trees like the owl.

His commendation from the stricter brethren generally came with the sort of qualification which Shakspeare makes,—

“For the man doth fear God, howbeit it doth not always appear, by reason of some large jests which he will make.”

In fact, Mr. Beecher was generally the center of a circle of tempestuous merriment, ever eddying round him in one droll from or another. He was quick in repartee, an excellent mimic, and his stories would set the gravest in a roar. He had the art, when admonished by graver people, of somehow entrapping them into more uproarious laughing than he himself practiced, and then looking innocently surprised. Mr. Beecher on one occasion was informed that the head tutor of the class was about to make him a grave exhortatory visit. The tutor was almost seven feet high, and solemn as an Alpine forest, but Mr. Beecher knew that like most solemn Yankees, he was at heart a deplorable wag, a mere whited sepulcher of conscientious gravity, with measureless depths of unrenewed chuckle hid away in the depths of his heart. When apprised of his approach, he suddenly whisked into the wood-closet the chairs of his room, leaving only a low one which had been sawed off at the second joint, so that it stood about a foot from the floor. Then he crawled

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through the hole in his table, and seated meekly among his books, awaited the visit.

A grave rap, is heard:—“Come in.”

Far up in the air, the solemn dark face appears. Mr. Beecher rose ingenuously, and offered to come out.

“No, never mind,” says the visitor, “I just came to have a little conversation with you. Don’t move.”

“Oh,” says Beecher innocently, “pray sit down sir,” indicating the only chair.

The tutor looked apprehensively, but began the process of sitting down. He went down, down, down, but still no solid ground being gained, straightened himself and looked uneasy.

“I don’t know but that chair is too low for you,” said Beecher meekly; “do let me get you another.”

“Oh no, no, my young friend, don’t rise, don’t trouble yourself, it is perfectly agreeable to me, in fact I like a low seat,” and with these words, the tall man doubled up like a jack-knife, and was seen sitting with his grave face between his knees, like a grass-hopper drawn up for a spring. He heaved a deep sigh, and his eyes met the eyes of Mr. Beecher; the hidden spark of native depravity within him was exploded by one glance at those merry eyes, and he burst into a loud roar of merriment, which the two continued for some time, greatly to the amusement of the boys, who were watching to hear how Beecher would come out with his lecture. The chair was known in college afterwards, by the surname of the “Tutor’s Delight.” This overflow of the faculty of mirthfulness, has all his life deceived those who had only a shallow acquaintance with him, and men ignorant of the depth of yearning earnest-

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ness and profound strength of purpose on which they rippled and sparked.

But at the time that he passed for the first humorist of college, the marks along his well worn volumes of the old English poets show only appreciation of what is earnest, deep and pathetic. He particularly loved an obscure old poet of whom we scarcely hear in modern days, Daniel, who succeeded Edmund Spenser as poet laureate, and was a friend of Shakspeare.

Some lines addressed by him to the Earl of Southampton, are marked by reiterated lines in Mr. Beecher’s copy of the old English poets, which showed enthusiastic reading. He says, “This was about the only piece of poetry I ever committed to memory, but I read it so much I could not help at last knowing it by heart:”

“TO THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON.

“He who hath never warred with misery,

Nor ever tugged with fortune in distress,

Hath no occasion and no field to try

The strength and forces of his worthiness.

Those parts of judgment which felicity

Keeps as concealed, affliction must express,

And only men show their abilities

And what they are, in their extremities.

“Mutius the fire, the tortures Regulus,

Did make the miracles of faith and zeal;

Exile renowned and graced Rutilius.

Imprisonment and poison did reveal

The worth of Socrates, Fabricius’

Poverty did grace that common weal

More than all Sylla’s riches got with strife,

And Cato’s death did vie with Caesar’s life.

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“He that endures for what his conscience knows

Not to be ill, doth from a patience high

Look on the only cause whereto he owes

Those sufferings, not on his misery;

The more he endures the more his glory grows,

Which never grows from imbecility;

Only the best composed and worthiest hearts

God sets to act the hardest and constant’st parts.”

Such an enthusiasm shows clearly on what a key the young man had set his life purposes, and what he was looking for in his life battle.

Another poem which bears reiterated marks and dates, is to Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, of which these lines are a sample:

“He that of such a height hath built his mind,

And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong

As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame

Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind

Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong

His settled peace, or to disturb the same;

What a fair seat hath he! from whence he may

The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey!

“And while distraught ambition compasses

And is compassed; whilst as craft deceives

And is deceived; while man doth ransack man,

And builds on blood, and rises by distress;

And the inheritance of desolation leaves

To great expecting hopes; he looks thereon,

As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,

And bears no venture in impiety.”

These verses are so marked with Mr. Beecher’s life habits of thought, with his modes of expression, that they show strongly the influence which these old poets had in forming both his habits of thought and expres-

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sion. His mind naturally aspired after heroism, and from the time that he gave up his youthful naval enthusiasm he turned the direction of the heroic faculties into moral things.

In the course of the sophomore year, Mr. Beecher was led, as a mere jovial frolic, to begin a course of investigation which colored his whole after life. A tall, grave, sober fellow had been reading some articles on Phrenology, on which Spurzheim was then lecturing in Boston, and avowed himself a convert. Quick as thought, the wits of college saw in this an occasion for glorious fun. They proposed to him with great apparent earnestness that he should deliver a course of lectures on the subject in Beecher’s room.

With all simplicity and solemnity he complied, while the ingenuous young inquirers began busily arming themselves with objections to and puzzles for him, by reading the scoffing articles in Blackwood and the Edinburgh. The fun waxed hearty, and many saw nothing in it but a new pasture ground to be ploughed and seeded down for an endless harvest of college jokes. But one day, one of the clearest headed and most powerful thinkers in the class said to Beecher, “What is your estimate of the real logical validity of these objections to Phrenology?” “Why,” said Beecher, “I was thinking that if these objection were all that could be alleged, I could knock them to pieces.” “So I think,” said the other. In fact, the inanity of the crusade against the theory brought forth converts faster than its direct defence. Mr. Beecher and his associates formed immediately a club for physiological research. He himself commenced reading

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right and left, in all the works of anatomy and physiology which he could lay hands on, either in the college or village libraries. He sent and bought for his own private use, Magendie’s Physiology, Combe’s Phrenology, and the works of Gall and Spurzheim. A phrenological union was formed to purchase together charts, models and dissecting tools, for the study of comparative anatomy. It was even planned, in the enthusiasm of young discipleship, to establish a private dissecting room for the club, but the difficulties attending the procuring of proper subjects prevented its being carried into effect. By correspondence with his brother Charles, however, who was then in Bowdoin College, an affiliated phrenological club was formed in that institution, and his letters of this period were all on and about phrenological subjects, and in full phrenological dialect. Mr. Beecher delivered three lectures on the subject in the village lyceum, and did an infinity of private writing and study.

He read the old English dramatists, particularly Ben Jonson, Massinger, Webster, Ford and Shakspeare, and wrote out analyses of their principal characters on phrenological principles. The college text-book of mental philosophy was Browne, and Mr. Beecher’s copy of Browne is marked through and through, and interlined with comparative statements of the ideas derived from his physiological investigation. With these also he carefully read and analyzed Locke, Stuart, Reid, and the other writers of the Scotch school. As a writer and debater, Mr. Beecher was acknowledged the first of the class, and was made first president of the Athenian Society, notwithstanding it had

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been a time-honored precedent that that distinction should belong only to the presumptive valedictorian. The classics and mathematics he had abandoned because of his interest in other things, but that abandonment settled the fact that he could never aspire to high college honors. He however, wrote for one of his papers in a college newspaper a vigorous defence of mathematical studies, which won the approbation and surprise of his teachers. It was a compliment paid by rhetoric to her silent sister.

The phrenological and physiological course thus begun in college was pursued by few of the phrenological club in after life. With many it died out as a boyish enthusiasm; with one or two, as Messrs. Fowler of New York, it became a continuous source of interest and profit. With Mr. Beecher it led to a broad course of physiological study and enquiry, which, collated with metaphysics and theology, has formed his system of thought through life. From that day he has continued the reading and study of all the physiological writers in the English language. In fact, he may be said during his college life to have constructed for himself a physiological mental philosophy out of the writings of the Scotch metaphysical school and that of Combe, Spurzheim, and the other physiologists. Mr. Beecher is far from looking on phrenology as a perfected science. He regards it in relation to real truth as an artist’s study towards a completed landscape; a study on right principles and in a right direction, but not as a completed work. In his view, the phrenologists, physiologists and mental philosophers of past days have all been partialists, giving a lim-

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ited view of the great subject. The true mental philosophy, as he thinks, is yet to arise from a consideration of all the facts and principles evolved by all of them.

Thus much is due for the understanding of Mr. Beecher’s style, in which to a great extent he uses the phrenological terminology, a terminology so neat and descriptive, and definite in respect to human beings as they really exist, that it gives a great advantage to any speaker. The terms of phrenology have in fact become accepted as conveniences in treating of human nature, as much as the algebraic signs in numbers.

The depth of Mr. Beecher’s religious nature prevented this enthusiasm for material science from degenerating into dry materialism. He was a Calvinist in the earnestness of his intense need of the highest and deepest in religion. In his sophomore year there was a revival of religion in college, in which his mind was powerfully excited. He reviewed the almost childish experiences under which he had joined the church, as possibly deceptive, and tried and disciplined himself by those profound tests with which the Edwardean theology had filled the minds of New England. A blank despair was the result. He applied to Dr. Humphrey, who simply told him that his present feelings were a work of the spirit, and with which he dared not interfere. After days of almost hopeless prayer, there came suddenly into his mind an ineffable and overpowering perception of the Divine love, which seemed to him like a revelation. It dispelled all doubts, all fears; he became buoyant and triumphant, and that buoyancy has been marked in his religious teachings ever since.

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Mr. Beecher’s doctrine upon the subject is that the truths of the Divine nature are undiscoverable by the mere logical faculties, that they are the province of a still higher class of faculties which belong to human nature, the faculties of spiritual intuition; that it is through these spiritual intuitions that the Holy Spirit of God communes with man, and directs through them the movements of the lower faculties. In full faith in the dependence of man on the Holy Spirit for these spiritual intuitions, he holds substantially the same ground with Jonathan Edwards, though he believes that Divine influence to be far more widely, constantly and fully given to the children of men than did that old divine.

During his two last college years, Mr. Beecher, like other members of his class, taught rural schools during the long winter vacations. In this way he raised funds of his own to buy that peculiar library which his tastes and studies caused him to accumulate about him. In both these places he performed the work of a religious teacher, preaching and exhorting regularly in stated meetings, giving temperance lectures, or doing any reformatory work that came to hand. In the controversy then arising through the land in relation to slavery, Mr. Beecher from the first took the ground and was willing to bear the name of an abolitionist. It was a part of the heroic element of his nature always to stand for the weak, and he naturally inclined to take that stand in a battle where the few were at odds against the many.

In 1832 Dr. Lyman Beecher moved to Cincinnati, two years before the completion of Henry’s college course.

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He graduated in 1834, and went out to Cincinnati. The abolition excitement at Lane Seminary had just ended, by the departure of a whole class of some thirty students, with Theodore Weld at their head.

Dr. Beecher was now the central point of a great theological battle. It was a sort of spiritual Armageddon, being the confluence of the forces of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Calvinistic fatalism, meeting in battle with the advancing rationalism of New England new school theology. On one side was hard literal interpretation of Bible declarations and the Presbyterian standards, asserting man’s utter and absolute natural and moral inability to obey God’s commands, and on the other side, the doctrine of man’s free agency, and bringing to the rendering of the declarations of the scriptures and of the standards, the lights of modern modes of interpretation.

Dr. Wilson, who headed the attacking party, was a man in many points marvellously resembling General Jackson, both in person and character, and he fought the battle with the same gallant, headlong vigor and sincere unflinching constancy. His habits of thought were those of a western pioneer, accustomed from childhood to battle with Indians and wild beasts, in the frontier life of an early state. His views of mental philosophy, and of the modes of influencing the human mind, were like those of the Emperor Constantine when he commanded a whole synod of bishops to think alike without a day’s delay, or those of the Duke of Wellington, when he told the doubting inquirers at Oxford, that “the thing to be done was to sign the thirty-nine articles, and believe them.” The party he

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headed, were vigorous, powerful and with all that immense advantage which positive certainty and a literal, positively expressed belief always gives. With such an army and such a general, the fight of course was a warm one, and Dr. Beecher’s sons found themselves at once his armor bearers in the thickest of the battle. The great number of ascending judicatories in the Presbyterian Church gave infinite scope for protracting a contest where every point of doctrine could first be discussed and voted on in Presbytery, then adjourned to Synod, then carried to General Assembly, and in each had to be discussed and decided by majorities. What scope for activity in those times! What racing and chasing along muddy western roads, to obscure towns, each party hoping that the length of the way and the depth of the mud would discourage their opponents, keep them away and so give their own side the majority. Dr. Beecher and his sons, it was soon found could race and chase and ride like born Kentuckians, and that “free agency” on horse-back, would go through mud and fire, and water, as gallantly as ever “natural inability” could. There was something grimly ludicrous in the dismay with which Dr. Wilson, inured from his boyhood to bear-fights, and to days and nights spent in cane-brakes, and dens of wolves, found on his stopping at an obscure log hut in the depth of the wilderness, Dr. Beecher with his sons and his new school delegates, ahead of him, on their way to Synod.

The study of theology at Lane Seminary, under these circumstances, was very largely from the controversial and dialectic point of view. It was, to a great extent,

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the science of defence of new school and against old school.

Mr. Beecher was enthusiastically devoted to his father, and of course felt interested in his success as a personal matter, but in regard to the whole wide controversy, his interest was more that of a spectator than of a partisan on either side. He had already begun his study of mental and moral philosophy on a broad eclectic basis, taking great account of facts and phenomena which he saw to be wholly ignored by the combatants on both sides. The mental philosophy of Reid and the Scotch school, on which Dr. Beecher based his definitions, he regarded as only partially true, and had set down in his own mind at a definite value. The intense zeal and perfect undoubting faith with which both sides fought their battle, impressed him as only a strange and interesting and curious study in his favorite science of anthropology.

He gave his attention to the system, understood it thoroughly, was master of all its modes of attack, fence and defence, but he did it much as a person now-a days might put on a suit of mediaeval armor, and study mediaeval tactics.

Mr. Beecher had inherited from his father what has been called a genius for friendship. He was never without the anchor of an enthusiastic personal attachment for somebody, and at Lane Seminary, he formed such an intimacy with Professor C. E. Stowe, whose room-mate for some length of time he was, and in whose society he took great delight. Professor Stowe, a man devoted to scholarly learning and Biblical criticism, was equally with young Beecher standing as a

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spectator in the great theological contest which was raging around him, and which he surveyed from still another stand-point, of ecclesiastical history and biblical criticism. It was some considerable inconvenience to the scholarly professor, to be pulled up from his darling books, and his interjections were not always strictly edifying when he was raced through muddy lanes, and rattled over corduroy roads, under the vigorous generalship of Dr. Beecher, all that he might give his vote for or against some point of doctrine, which, in his opinion, common sense had decided ages ago. He was also, somewhat of a strict disciplinarian and disposed to be severe on the discursive habits of his young friend, who was quite too apt to neglect or transcend conventional rule. The morning prayers at lane were at conventual hours, and Henry’s devotional propensities, of a dark cold winter morning, were almost impossible to be aroused, while his friend, who was punctuality itself, was always up and away in the gloaming. One morning, when the Professor had indignantly rebuked the lazy young Christian, whom he left tucked in bed, and, shaking the dust from his feet, had departed to his morning duties, Henry took advantage of his own habits of alert motion, sprang from the bed, dressed himself in a twinkling, and taking a cross-lot passage, was found decorously sitting directly under the Professor’s desk, waiting for him, when he entered to conduct prayers. The stare of almost frightened amazement with which the Professor met him, was the ample reward of his exertions.

Though Professor Stowe never succeeded in making him an exact linguist, or shaping him into a bibli-

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cal scholar, yet he was of great service to him in starting his mind in a right general direction in the study of the Bible. The old and the new school were both too much agreed in using the Bible as a carpenter does his nail-box, going to it only to find screws and nails to hold together the framework of a theological system. Professor Stowe inspired him with the idea of surveying the books of the Bible as divinely inspired compositions, yet truly and warmly human, and to be rendered and interpreted by the same rules of reason and common sense which pertain to all human documents.

As the time drew near in which Mr. Beecher was to assume the work of the ministry, he was oppressed by a deep melancholy. He had the most exalted ideas of what ought to be done by a Christian minister. He had transferred to that profession all those ideals of courage, enterprise, zeal and knightly daring which were the dreams of his boyhood, and which he first hoped to realize in the naval profession. He felt that the holy calling stood high above all others, that to enter it from any unholy motive, or to enter and not do a worthy work in it, was a treason to all honor.

His view of the great object of the ministry was sincerely and heartily the same with that of his father; to secure the regeneration of the individual heart by the Divine spirit, and thereby to effect the regeneration of human society. The problem that oppressed him was, how to do this. His father had used certain moral and intellectual weapons, and used them strongly and effectively, because employing them with undoubting faith. So many other considerations had

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come into his mind to qualify and limit that faith, so many new modes of thought and inquiry, that were partially inconsistent with the received statements of his party, that he felt he could never grasp and wield them with the force which would make them efficient. It was no comfort to him that he could wield the weapons of his theological party, so as to dazzle and confound objectors, while all the time conscious in his own soul of objections more profound and perplexities more bewildering. Like the shepherd boy of old, he saw the giant of sin stalking through the world, defying the armies of the living God, and longed to attack him, but the armor in which he had been equipped for the battle was no help, but only an incumbrance!

His brother, who studied with him, had already become an unbeliever, and thrown up the design of preaching, and he could not bear to think of adding to his father’s trials by deserting the standard. Yet his distress and perplexity were so great that at times he seriously contemplated going into some other profession.

What to say to make men Christians,—how to raise man to God really and truly,—was to him an awful question. Nothing short of success in this appeared to him success in the Christian ministry.

Pending these mental conflicts, he performed some public labors. He was for four or five months editor of the Cincinnati Journal, the organ of the N. S. Presbyterian Church, during the absence of Mr. Brainard. While he was holding this post, the pro-slavery riot which destroyed Birney’s press occurred, and the editorials of the young editor at this time were copied

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with high approval by Charles Hammond, of the Cincinnati Gazette, undoubtedly the ablest editor of the West, and the only other editor who dared to utter a word condemnatory of the action of the rioters. Mr. Beecher entered on the defence of the persecuted negroes with all the enthusiasm of his nature. He had always a latent martial enthusiasm, and though his whole life had been a peaceful one, yet a facility in the use of carnal weapons seemed a second nature, and at this time, he, with a number of other young men went to the mayor and were sworn in as a special body of police, who patrolled the streets, well armed. Mr. Beecher wore his pistol, and was determined, should occasion arise, to use it. But as usual in such cases, a resolute front once dissolved the mob entirely.

In his last theological term he took a Bible class in the city of Cincinnati, and began studying and teaching the evangelists. With the course of this study and teaching came a period of spiritual clairvoyance. His mental perplexities were relieved, and the great question of “what to preach,” was solved. The shepherd boy laid aside his cumbrous armor, and found in a clear brook a simple stone that smote down the giant, and so from the clear waters of the gospel narrative, Mr. Beecher drew forth that “white stone with a new name,” which was to be the talisman of his ministry. To present Jesus Christ, personally, as the Friend and Helper of Humanity, Christ as God impersonate, eternally and by a necessity of his nature helpful and remedial and restorative; the friend of each individual soul, and thus the friend of all society; this was the one thing which his soul rested on as a

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worthy object in entering the ministry. He afterward said, in speaking of his feelings at this time: “I was like the man in the story to whom a fairy gave a purse with a single piece of money in it, which he found always came again as soon as he had spent it. I thought I knew at last one thing to preach, I found it included everything.”

Immediately on finishing his theological course, Mr. Beecher married and was settled in Lawrenceburg. He made short work of the question of settlement, accepting the very first offer that was made him. It was work that he wanted, and one place he thought about as good as another. His parish was a little town on the Ohio river, not far from Cincinnati. Here he preached in a small church, and did all the work of the parish sexton, making his fires, trimming his lamps, sweeping his house, and ringing his bell. “I did all,” he said whimsically, “but come to hear myself preach—that they had to do.” The little western villages of those days had none of the attractions of New England rural life. They were more like the back suburbs of a great city, a street of houses without yards or gardens, run up for the most part in a cheap and flimsy manner, and the whole air of society marked with the impress of a population who have no local attachments, and are making a mere temporary sojourn for money-getting purposes. Mr. Beecher was soon invited from Lawrenceburg to Indianapolis, the capital of the State, where he labored for eight years.

His life here was of an Arcadian simplicity. He inhabited a cottage on the outskirts of the town, where he cultivated a garden, and gathered around him

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horse, cow and pig; all that wholesome suite of domestic animals which he had been accustomed to care for in early life. He was an enthusiast on all these matters, fastidious about breeds and blood, and each domestic animal was a pet and received his own personal attentions. In the note-books of this period, amid hints for sermons, come memoranda respecting his favorite Berkshire pig, or Durham cow. He read on gardening, farming, and stock-raising, all that he could lay hands on; he imported from eastern cultivators all sorts of roses and all sorts of pear trees and grape vines, and edited a horticultural paper, which had quite a circulation.

All this was mainly the amusement of his leisure hours, as he preached always twice on Sunday, and held at an average five other meetings a week in different districts of the city. For three months of every year, by consent of his people, he devoted himself to missionary duty through the State, riding from point to point on horseback, and preaching every day of the week.

In his theological studies he had but just two volumes—the Bible and human nature, which he held to be indispensable to the understanding each of the other. He said to himself, “The Apostles who first preached Christ, made converts who were willing to dare or do anything for him. How did they do this?” He studied all the recorded discourses of the Apostles in the book of Acts, in his analytical method, asking, to what principles of human nature did they appeal? What were their methods of statement? He endeavored to compose sermons on similar principles, and

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test them by their effects on men. He noticed that the Apostles always based their appeals to men on some common truth, admitted by both parties alike; that they struck at the great facts of moral consciousness, and he imitated them in this. He was an intense observer and student of men as they are. His large social talent, his predominating play of humor and drollery, were the shields under which he was constantly carrying on his inquiries into what man is, and how he can be reached. Seated in the places where men congregate to loaf and talk, he read his newspaper with his eyes and ears open to more than its pages. His preaching began to draw listeners as a new style of thing. Its studies into human nature, its searching analysis of men and their ways, drew constant listeners. His fame spread through the country, and multitudes, wherever he went, flocked to hear him. Still, Mr. Beecher did not satisfy himself. To be a popular preacher, to be well spoken of, to fill up his church, did not after all satisfy his ideal. It was necessary that the signs of an Apostle should be wrought in him by his having the power given to work the great, deep and permanent change which unites the soul to God. It was not till about the third year of his ministry that he found this satisfaction in a great revival of religion in Terre Haute, which was followed by a series of such revivals through the State, in which he was for many months unceasingly active. When he began to see whole communities moving together under a spiritual impulse, the grog-shops abandoned, the votaries of drunkenness, gambling and dissipation reclaimed, reformed, and sitting at the feet of Jesus,

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clothed and in their right mind, he felt that at last he had attained what his soul thirsted for, and that he could enter into the joy of the Apostles when they returned to Jesus, saying, “Lord, by thy name even the devils were made subject unto us.”

His preaching of Christ at this time was spoken of as something very striking in its ceaseless iteration of one theme, made constantly new and various by new applications to human want and sin and sorrow.

A member of his church in Indianapolis, recently, in writing the history of the church with which he was connected, thus gives his recollections of him:

“In the early spring of 1842, a revival began, more noticeable, perhaps, than any that this church or this community has seen. The whole town was pervaded by the influences of religion. For many weeks the work continued with unabated power, and at three communion seasons, held successively in February, March and April, 1842, nearly one hundred persons were added to the church on profession of their faith. This was God’s work. It is not improper, however, to speak of the pastor in that revival, as he is remembered by some of the congregation, plunging through the wet streets, his trousers stuffed in his muddy boot-legs, earnest, untiring, swift; with a merry heart, a glowing face, and a helpful word for every one; the whole day preaching Christ to the people where he could find them, and at night preaching still where the people were sure to find him. It is true that in this revival some wood and hay and stubble were gathered with the gold and silver and precious stones. As in all new communities, there was special danger

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of unhealthy excitement. But in general the results were most happy for the church and for the town. Some of those who have been pillars since, found the Saviour in that memorable time. Nor was the awakening succeeded by an immediate relapse.

“Early in the following year, at the March and April communions, the church had large accessions, and it had also in 1845. There was, indeed, a wholesome and nearly continuous growth up to the time when the first pastor resigned, to accept a call to the Plymouth Congregational church, in Brooklyn, New York. This occurred August 24^th, 1847, and on the nineteenth of the following month Mr. Beecher’s labors for the congregation ceased.

“The pastorate, thus terminated, had extended through more than eight years. During this time much had been accomplished. The society had built a pleasant house of worship. The membership had advanced from thirty-two to two hundred and seventy-five. What was considered a doubtful enterprise, inaugurated as it had been amidst many prophecies of failure, had risen to an enviable position, not only in the capital but in the State. The attachment between pastor and people had become peculiarly strong. Mutual toils and sufferings and successes had bound them fast together. Only the demands of a wider field, making duty plain, divided them, and a recent letter proves that the pastor’s early charge still keeps its hold upon his heart. It is not to be wondered at that the few of his flock who yet remain among us always speak of ‘Henry’ with beaming eyes and mellowed voices.”

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One expression in this extract will show a peculiarity which strongly recalls the artless, unconventional freshness of Western life in those days. The young pastor, though deeply and truly respected by all his elders and church members, was always addressed as “Henry,” by them with a sort of family intimacy and familiarity. It was partly due to the simple, half woodland habits of the people, and partly to that quality in the pastor that made every elderly man love him as a son and every younger one as a brother.

Henry’s tastes, enthusiasms, and fancies, his darling garden, with its prize vegetables and choice roses, whence came bouquets for the aesthetic, and more solid presents of prize onions or squashes for the more literal—all these seemed to be part and parcel of the family stock of his church. His brother Charles, who from intellectual difficulties had abandoned the ministry, and devoted himself to a musical life as a profession, inhabited, with his wife and young family, a little cottage in the same grounds with his own, and shared his garden labors, and led the music of his church. “Henry and Charles” were as familiarly spoken of and known in Indianapolis circles as Castor and Pollux among the astronomers. In one of the revivals in Indianapolis, Charles, like his brother before him, found in an uplift of his moral faculties a tide to carry him over the sunken rocks of his logic. By his brother’s advice, he took a Bible class, and began the story of the life of Christ, and the result was that after a while he saw his way clear to offer himself for ordination, and was settled in the ministry in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Thus that simple narrative had power to

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allay the speculative doubts of both brothers, and to give them an opening into the ministry.

Mr. Beecher has always looked back with peculiar tenderness to that Western life, in the glow of his youthful days, and in that glorious, rich, abundant, unworn Western country. The West, with its wide, rich, exuberant spaces of land, its rolling prairies, garlanded with rainbows of ever-springing flowers, teeming with abundance of food for man, and opening in every direction avenues for youthful enterprise and hope, was to him a morning land. To carry Christ’s spotless banner in high triumph through such a land, was a thing worth living for, and as he rode on horse-back alone, from day to day, along the rolling prairie lands, sometimes up to his horse’s head in grass and waving flowers, he felt himself kindled with a sort of ecstacy. The prairies rolled and blossomed in his sermons, and his style at this time had a tangled luxuriance of poetic imagery, a rush and abundance of words, a sort of rich and heavy involution, that resembled the growth of a tropical forest.

“What sort of a style am I forming?” he said to a critical friend, who had come to hear him preach.

“Well, I should call it the ‘tropical style,’” was the reply.

The Western people, simple and strong, shrewd as Yankees, and excitable and fervent as Southerners, full of quaint images and peculiar turns of expression derived from a recent experience of back-woods life, were an open page in his great book of human nature, where character revealed itself with an artless freshness. All the habits of society had an unconven-

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tional simplicity. People met with the salutation, “How are ye, stranger?” and had no thought of any formal law of society, why one human being might not address another on equal terms, and speak out his mind on all subjects fully. When invited to supper at a thrifty farmer’s, the supper board was spread in the best bed-room, the master and mistress stood behind the chairs of their guests and waited on them during the meal, and the table groaned with such an abundance of provision as an eastern imagination fails to conceive of. Every kind of fowl, choicely cooked, noble hams, sausages, cheese, bread, butter, biscuit, corn cakes in every variety, sweet cakes and confections, preserved fruits of every name, with steaming tea and coffee, were all indispensable to a good supper.

Of poverty, properly so called, there was very little. There were none of those distressing, unsolvable social problems which perplex the mind and burden the heart of a pastor in older states of society.

Mr. Beecher’s ecclesiastical brethren were companions of whom he never fails to speak with tender respect and enthusiastic regard. Some of them, like Father Dickey, were men who approached as near the apostolic ideal, in poverty, simplicity, childlike sincerity, and unconquerable, persevering labor, as it is possible to do. They were all strong, fearless anti-slavery men, and the resolutions of the Indiana Synod were always a loud, unsparing and never-failing testimony against any complicity with slavery in the Presbyterian church.

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As to the great theological controversy that divided the old and new school church, Mr. Beecher dropped it at once and forthwith, being in his whole nature essentially uncontroversial. It came to pass that some of his warmest personal friends were members of the Old School church in Indianapolis, and offspring of the very fiercest combatants who had fought his father in Cincinnati.

Mr. Beecher was on terms of good fellowship with all denominations. There were in Indianapolis, Baptists, Methodists, and an Episcopal minister, but he stood on kindly social terms with all. The spirit of Western society was liberal, and it was deemed edifying by the common sense masses that the clergy of different denominations should meet as equals and brothers. Mr. Beecher’s humorous faculty gave to him a sort of universal coin which passed current in all sorts of circles, making every one at ease with him. Human nature longs to laugh, and a laugh, as Shakspeare says, “done in the testimony of a good conscience,” will often do more to bring together wrangling theologians than a controversy.

There was a store in Indianapolis, where the ministers of all denominations often dropped in to hear the news, and where the free western nature made it always in rule to try each others metal with a joke. No matter how sharp the joke, it was considered to be all fair and friendly.

On one occasion, Mr. Beecher, riding to one of the stations of his mission, was thrown over his horse’s head in crossing the Miami, pitched into the water, and crept out thoroughly immersed. The incident of

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course furnished occasion for talk in the circles the next day, and his good friend the Baptist minister proceeded to attack him the moment he made his appearance.

“Oh, ho, Beecher, glad to see you! I thought you’d have to come into our ways at last! You’ve been immersed at last; you are as good as any of us now.” A general laugh followed this sally.

“Poh, poh,” was the ready response, “my immersion was a different thing from that of your converts. You see, I was immersed by a horse, not by an ass.”

A chorus of laughter proclaimed that Beecher had got the better of the joke for this time.

A Methodist brother once said to him, “Well now, really, Brother Beecher, what have you against Methodist doctrine?”

“Nothing, only that your converts will practice them.”

“Practice them?”

“Yes, you preach falling from grace, and your converts practice it with a vengeance.”

One morning as he was sitting at table, word was brought in that his friend, the Episcopal minister, was at the gate, wanting to borrow his horse.

“Stop, stop,” said he, with a face of great gravity, “there’s something to be attended to first,” and rising from table, he ran out to him and took his arm with the air of a man who is about to make a serious proposition.

“Now brother G--, you want my horse for a day? Well, you see, it lies on my mind greatly that you don’t admit my ordination. I don’t think it’s fair. Now if you’ll admit that I’m a genuinely ordained minister,

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you shall have my horse, but if not, I don’t know about it.”

Mr. Beecher took ground from the first that the pulpit is the place not only for the presentation of those views which tend to unite man’s spiritual nature directly with God, but also for the consideration of all those specific reforms which grow out of the doctrine of Christ in society. He preached openly and boldly on specific sins prevailing in society, and dangerous practices which he thought would corrupt or injure.

There was a strong feeling in Indianapolis against introducing slavery into the discussions of the pulpit. Some of his principal men had made vehement declarations that the subject never should be named in the pulpit of any church with which they were connected. Mr. Beecher, among his earliest motions in Synod, however, introduced a resolution that every minister should preach a thorough exposition and condemnation of slavery. He fulfilled his part very characteristically, by preaching three sermons on the life of Moses, the bondage of the children of Israel under Pharaoh and their deliverance. Under this cover he gained the ear of the people, for it has always been held both orthodox and edifying to bombard the vices and crimes of old Testament sinners, and to show no mercy to their iniquities. Before they were aware of it however, his hearers found themselves listening to a hot and heavy attack on the existing system of American slavery, which he exposed in a most thorough, searching manner, and although the oppressor was called Pharaoh and the scene was Egypt, and so

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nobody could find fault with the matter of the discourse, the end and aim was very manifest.

Nobody was offended, but many were convinced, and from that time, Mr. Beecher preached Anti-Slavery sermons in his church just as often as he thought best, and his church became an efficient bulwark of the cause.

The Western states at this time were the scenes of much open vice. Gambling, drinking, licentiousness were all rife in the community, and against each of these, Mr. Beecher lifted up his testimony. A course of sermons on those subjects preached in Indianapolis and afterwards published under the title of “Lectures to Young Men,” excited in the day of their delivery a great sensation. The style is that of fervid, almost tropical fullness, which characterized his Western life. It differs from the sermons of most clergymen to young men, in that free and perfect knowledge it shows of all the details of the evil ways which he names. Mr. Beecher’s peculiar social talent, his convivial powers, and his habits of close Shaksperian observation, gave him the key of human nature. Many a gambler or drunkard, in their better hours were attracted towards a man who met them as a brother, and seemed to value and aim for the better parts of their nature. When Mr. Beecher left Indianapolis some of his most touching interviews and parting gifts were from men of this class, whom he had followed in their wanderings and tried to save. Some he could save and some were too far in the whirlpool for his arm to pull them out. One of them said when he heard of his leaving, “Before

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any thing or any body on earth, I do love Beecher. I know he would have saved me if he could.”

Mr. Beecher was so devoted to the West, and so identified with it, that he never would have left what he was wont to call his bishopric of Indiana, for the older and more set and conventional circles of New York, had not the health of his family made a removal indispensable.

He was invited to Brooklyn to take charge of a new enterprise. Plymouth Church was founded by some fifteen or twenty gentlemen as a new Congregational Church.

Mr. Beecher was to be installed there and had to pass an examination before Eastern theologians. He had been, as has been shown, not a bit of a controversialist, and he had been so busy preaching Christ, and trying to save sinners, that he was rather rusty in all the little ins and outs of New England theology. On many points he was forced to answer “I do not know,” and sometimes his answer had a whimsical turn that drew a smile.

“Do you believe in the Perseverance of the Saints?” said good Dr. Humphrey, his college father, who thought his son was not doing himself much credit in the theological line, and hoped to put a question where he could not fail to answer right.

“I was brought up to believe that doctrine,” said Mr. Beecher, “and I did believe it till I went out West and saw how Eastern Christians lived when they went out there. I confess since then I have had my doubts.”

On the whole, as Mr. Beecher’s record was clear from the testimony of Western brothers, with whom he had

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been in labors more abundant, it was thought not on the whole dangerous to let him into the eastern sheepfold.

Mr. Beecher immediately announced in Plymouth Pulpit the same principles that he had in Indianapolis; namely, his determination to preach Christ among them not as an absolute system of doctrines, not as a by-gone historical personage, but as the living Lord and God, and to bring all the ways and usages of society to the test of his standards. He announced to all whom it might concern, that he considered temperance and anti-slavery a part of the gospel of Christ, and should preach them accordingly.

During the battle inaugurated by Mr. Webster’s speech of the 7^th of March, and the fugitive slave law, Mr. Beecher labored with his whole soul.

There was, as people will remember, a great Union Saving Committee at Castle Garden, New York, and black lists were made out of merchants, who, if they did not give up their principles, were to be crushed financially, and many were afraid. Mr. Beecher preached, and visited from store to store, holding up the courage of his people to resistance. The advertisement of Bowen & McNamee that they would “sell their silks but not their principles,” went all through the country, and as every heroic sentiment does, brought back an instant response.

At this time Mr. Beecher carried this subject through New England and New York, in Lyceum lectures, and began a course of articles in the Independent, under the star signature, which were widely read. It is said that when Calhoun was in his last illness, his secretary

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was reading him extracts from Northern papers, and among others, one of Mr. Beecher’s, entitled “Shall we compromise?” in which he fully set forth the utter impossibility of reconciling the two conflicting powers of freedom and slavery.

“Read that again!” said the old statesman, his eye lighting up. “That fellow understands his subject; he has gone to the bottom of it.” Calhoun as well as Garrison understood the utter impossibility of uniting in one nation two states of society founded on exactly opposite social principles.

Through all the warfare of principles, Plymouth Church steadily grew larger. It was an enterprise dependent for support entirely on the sale of the seats, and Mr. Beecher was particularly solicitous to make it understood that the buying of a seat in Plymouth Church would necessitate the holder to hear the gospel of Christ unflinchingly applied to the practical issues of the present hour. Always, as the year came round, when the renting of the pews approached, Mr. Beecher took occasion to preach a sermon in which he swept the whole field of modern reform with particular reference to every disputed and unpopular doctrine, and warned all who were thinking of taking their seats what they must expect for the coming year.

When the battle of the settlement of Kansas was going on, and the East was sending forth her colonies as lambs among wolves, Mr. Beecher fearlessly advocated the necessity of their going out armed, and a subscription was raised in Plymouth Church to supply every family with a Bible and a rifle. A great commotion was then raised and the inconsistency of

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such a gift from a professedly Christian church was much insisted on. Since then, more than one church in New England has fitted out soldiers and prepared munitions of war, and more than one clergyman has preached warlike sermons. The great battle had even then begun in Kansas. John Brown was our first great commander, who fought single handed for his country, when traitors held Washington and used the United States army only as a means to crush and persecute her free citizens and help on the slavery conspiracy. During the war Mr. Beecher’s labors were incessant. Plymouth Church took the charge of raising and equipping one regiment, the First Long Island, and many of its young men went out in it. Mr. Beecher often visited their camp during the time of their organization and preached to them. His eldest son was an officer in it, and was afterwards transferred from it to the artillery service of the regular army.

At this time Mr. Beecher took the editorship of the Independent, a paper in which he had long been a contributor. He wished this chance to speak from time to time his views and opinions to the whole country. He was in constant communication with Washington and intimate with the Secretary of War, in whose patriotism, sagacity and wonderful efficiency he had the greatest reliance.

The burden of the war upon his spirit, his multiplied labors in writing, speaking, editorship, and above all in caring for his country, bore down his health. His voice began to fail, and he went to Europe for a temporary respite. On his arrival he was met on the steamer by parties who wished to make arrange-

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ments for his speaking in England. He told them that he had come with no such intention, but wholly for purposes of relaxation, and that he must entirely decline speaking in England.

In a private letter to his sister at this time, he said, “This contest is neither more nor less than the conflict between democratic and aristocratic institutions, in which success to one must be defeat to the other. The aristocratic party in England, see this plainly enough, and I do not propose to endeavor to pull the wool over their eyes. I do not expect sympathy from them. No order yet ever had any sympathy with what must prove their own downfall. We have got to settle this question by our armies and the opinions of mankind will follow.”

He spent but a short time in England, enjoying the hospitality of an American friend and former parishioner, Mr. C. C. Duncan. After a fortnight spent in Wales, he went into Switzerland through Northern Italy and Germany.

Mr. Beecher always had side tracks to his mind, on which his thoughts and interests ran in the intervals of graver duties. When he came to the life of a city, and left his beloved garden and the blooming prairies of the West behind, he began the study of the arts as a recreation, and prosecuted it, as he did every thing else, with that enthusiasm which is the parent of industry. He bought for himself quite an art library, consisting of all the standard English works on the subject, and while up and down the country on his anti-slavery lyceum crusade, usually traveled with some of these works in his pocket, and read them in the cars.

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He also made collections of pictures and choice engravings, with all the ardor with which before he collected specimen roses. At intervals he had lectured on these subjects. His lecture on the Uses of the Beautiful, was much called for throughout the country. He was therefore in training to enjoy the art treasures of Europe.

He had a period of great enjoyment at Berlin, where, in the Berlin Museum, under the instructions of Waagen the director of arts, he examined that historical collection, said to be the richest and most scientifically arranged series to mark the history of art which can be found in Europe. The scenery of Switzerland and the art galleries of Northern Italy also helped to refresh his mind and divert him from the great national affliction that weighed on his spirit.

At Paris, he met the news of the battle of Gettysburg and the taking of Vicksburg, and recognized in them the only style of argument which could carry the cause through Europe. Grant was a logician after his own heart.

Mr. Beecher, on his return to England, was again solicited to speak in public, and again declined. So immutable was his idea that this was a battle that Americans must fight out, and which could not be talked out.

He was at last, however, made to see his duty to that small staunch liberal party who had been maintaining the cause of America against heavy odds in England, and he felt that if they wished him to speak, he owed himself to them; that they were brave defenders hard beset; and that their cause and ours

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was one. Such men as Baptist Noel, Newman Hall, Francis Newman and others of that class, were applicants not to be resisted.

He therefore prepared himself for what he always has felt to have been the greatest effort and severest labor of his life, to plead the cause of his country at the bar of the civilized world. A series of engagements was formed for him to speak in the principal cities of England and Scotland.

He opened Friday, October 9^th, in the Free Trade Hall, in Manchester, to a crowded audience of 6,000 people. The emissaries of the South had made every preparation to excite popular tumult, to drown his voice and prevent his being heard. Here he treated the subject on its merits, as being the great question of the rights of working men, and brought out and exposed the nature of the Southern confederacy as founded in the right of the superior to oppress the inferior race. Notwithstanding the roar and fury and interruptions he persevered and said his say, and the London Times next day, printed it all with a column or two of abuse by way of condiment.

October 13^th, he spoke in the city hall at Glasgow, discussing slavery and free labor as comparative systems. The next day, October 14^th, he spoke in Edinburgh in a great public meeting in the Free Church Assembly Hall, where he discussed the existing American conflict from the historical point of view.

This was by far the most quiet and uninterrupted meeting of any. But the greatest struggle of all was of course at Liverpool. At Liverpool, where Clarkson was mobbed, and came near being thrown off the

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wharf and drowned, there was still an abundance of that brutal noisy population which slavery always finds it useful to stir up to bay and bark when she is attacked.

Mr. Beecher has a firmly knit vigorous physical frame, come down from back generations of yeomen, renowned for strength, and it stood him in good service now. In giving an account afterwards, he said, “I had to speak extempore on subjects the most delicate and difficult as between our two nations, where even the shading of my words was of importance, and yet I had to outscream a mob and drown the roar of a multitude. It was like driving a team of runaway horses and making love to a lady at the same time.”

The printed record of this speech, as it came from England, has constant parentheses of wild uproars, hootings, howls, cat calls, clamorous denials and interruptions; but by cheerfulness, perfect fearless good humor, intense perseverance, and a powerful voice, Mr. Beecher said all he had to say in spite of the uproar.

Two letters, written about this time, show the state of his mind during this emergency:

SUNDAY, Oct. 18, 1863. LONDON.

MY DEAR FRIEND:

You know why I have not written you from England. I have been so full of work that I could not. God has been with me and prospered me. I have had health, and strength, and courage, and what is of unspeakably more importance, I have had the sweetest experience of love to God and to man, of all my life. I have been enabled to love our enemies.

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All the needless ignorance, the party perversions, the wilful misrepresentations of many newspapers, the arrogance and obstinacy too often experienced, and yet more the coolness of brethren of our faith and order, and the poisoned prejudices that have been arrayed against me by the propagation of untruths or distorted reports, have not prevented my having a love for old England, an appreciation of the good that is here, and a hearty desire for her whole welfare. This I count a great blessing. God awakened in my breast a desire to be a full and true Christian towards England, the moment I put my foot on her shores, and he has answered the prayers which he inspired. I have spoken at Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Liverpool, and am now in London, preparing for Exeter Hall, Tuesday next. I have been buoyant and happy. The streets of Manchester and Liverpool have been filled with placards, in black and white letters, full of all lies and bitterness, but they have seemed to me only the tracery of dreams. For hours I have striven to speak amid interruptions of every kind—yellings, hootings, cat calls, derisive yells, impertinent and insulting questions, and every conceivable annoyance—some personal violence. But God has kept me in perfect peace. I stood in Liverpool and looked on the demoniac scene, almost without a thought that it was me that was present. It seemed rather like a storm raging in the trees of the forests, that roared and impeded my progress, but yet had matters personal or wilfil in it, against me. You know, dear friend, how, when we are lifted by the inspiration of a great subject, and by the almost visi-

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ble presence and vivid sympathy with Christ, the mind forgets the sediment and dregs of trouble, and sails serenely in an upper realm of peace, as untouched by the noise below, as is a bird that flies across a battlefield. Just so I had at Liverpool and Glasgow, as sweet an inward peace as ever I did in the loving meetings of dear old Plymouth Church. And again and again, when the uproar raged, and I could not speak, my heart seemed to be taking of the infinite fullness of the Saviour’s pity, and breathing it out upon those poor, troubled men. I never had so much the spirit of continuing and unconscious prayer, or rather, of communion with Christ. I felt that I was his dear child, and that his arms were about me continually, and at times that peace that passeth all understanding has descended upon me that I could not keep tears of gratitude from falling for so much tender goodness of my God. For what are outward prosperities compared with these interior intimacies of God? It is not the path to the temple, but the interior of the temple that shows the goodness and glory of God. And I have been able to commit all to him, myself, my family, my friends, and in an especial manner the cause of my country. Oh, my friend, I have felt an inexpressible wonder that God should give it to me to do something for the dear land. When sometimes the idea of being clothed with power to stand up in this great kingdom, against an inconceivable violence of prejudice and mistake, and clear the name of my dishonored country, and let her brow shine forth, crowned with liberty, glowing with love to man, O, I have

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seemed unable to live, almost. It almost took my breath away!

“I have not in a single instance gone to the speaking halls without all the way breathing to God unutterable desires for inspiration, guidance, success; and I have had no disturbance of personality. I have been willing, yea, with eagerness, to be myself contemptible in men’s sight if only my disgrace might be to the honor of that cause which is entrusted to our own thrice dear country. I have asked of God nothing but this—and this with uninterrupted heart-flow of yearning request—“Make me worthy to speak for God and man.” I never felt my ignorance so painfully, nor the great want of moral purity and nobility of soul, as when approaching my tasks of defending liberty in this her hour of trial. I have an ideal of what a man should be that labors for such a cause, that constantly rebukes my real condition, and makes me feel painfully how little I am. Yet that is hardly painful. There passes before me a view of God’s glory, so pure, so serene, uplifted, filling the ages, and more and more to be revealed, that I almost wish to lose my own identity, to be like a drop of dew that falls into the sea, and becomes a part of the sublime whole that glows under every line of latitude, and sounds on every shore! ‘That God may be all in all,’—that is not a prayer only, but a personal experience. And in all this time I have not had one unkind feeling toward a single human being. Even those who are opposers, I have pitied with undying compassion, and enemies around me have seemed harmless, and objects of charity rather than potent foes to be destroyed

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God be thanked, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

“My dear friend, when I sat down to write, I did it under this impulse—that I wanted somebody to know the secret of my life. I am in a noisy spectacle, and seem to thousands as one employing merely worldly implements, and acting under secular motives. But should I die, on sea or land, I wanted to say to you, who have been so near and dear to me, that as God’s own very truth, ‘the life that I have lived in the flesh, I have lived by faith of the Son of God.’ I wanted to leave it with some one to say for me that it was not in natural gifts, nor in great opportunities, nor in personal ambition, that I have been able to endure and labor, but that the secret and spring of my outward life has been an inward, complete, and all-possessing faith in God’s truth, and God’s own self working in me to will and to do of his own good pleasure!

“There, now I feel better!

“Monday, 19^th. I do not know as you will understand the feeling which led to the above outburst. I had spoken four times in seven days to immense audiences, under great excitement, and with every effort of Southern sympathizers, the newspapers, street placards, and in every other way to prevent my being heard. I thought I had been through furnaces before, but this ordeal surpassed all others. I was quite alone in England. I had no one to consult with. I felt the burden of having to stand for my country, in a half hostile land; and yet I never flinched for a moment, nor lost heart. But after resting twenty weeks, to begin so suddenly such a tremendous strain upon

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my voice, has very much affected it. To-day I am somewhat fearful I shall be unable to speak to-morrow night in Exeter Hall. I want to speak there, if the Lord will only let me. I shall be willing to give up all the other openings in the kingdom. I cannot stop to give you any sort of insight into affairs here. One more good victory, and England will be immovable. The best thinkers of England will be at any rate.

“I hope my people will feel that I have done my duty. I know that I have tried. I should be glad to feel that my countrymen approved, but above all others I should prize the knowledge that the people of Plymouth Church were satisfied with me.

“I am as ever, yours,

H. W. BEECHER.”

“OCT. 21, 1863. LONDON.

“MY DEAR FRIEND:

Last night was the culmination of my labor, in Exeter Hall. It was a very fit close to a series of meetings that have produced a great sensation in England. Even an American would be impressed with the enthusiasm of so much of England as the people of last night represented for the North. It was more than willing, than hearty, than ever eager, it was almost wild and fanatical. I was like to have been killed with people pressing to shake my hand; men, women, and children crowded up the platform, and ten and twenty hands held over and struck through like so many pronged spears. I was shaken, pinched, squeezed, in every way an affectionate enthusiasm could devise, until the police actually came to my

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rescue, and forced a way, and dragged me down into the retiring room, where a like scene began, from which an inner room gave me refuge, but no relief, for only with more deliberation, the gentlemen brought wives, daughters, sons, and selves for a God bless you! And when Englishmen that had lived in America, or had sons in our army, or had married American wives, took me to witness their devotion to our cause, the chairman of the meeting, Mr. Scott, the Chamberlain of London, said that a few more meetings, and in some other parts of England, and the question would be settled! You will have sent to you abundant accounts, I presume.

“Lastly; England will be enthusiastically right, provided we hold on, and gain victories. But England has an intense and yearning sense of the value of success.

Yours, ever lovingly.”

Mr. Beecher returned from England much exhausted by the effort. All the strength that he had accumulated he poured out in that battle.

Events after that swept on rapidly, and not long after Mr. Beecher, in company with Lloyd Garrison, and a great party of others, went down to Fort Sumter to raise again the national flag, when Richmond had fallen, and the conflict was over. During his stay at the South, he had some exciting experiences. One of the most touching was his preaching in one of the largest churches in South Carolina to a great congregation of liberated slaves. The sermon, which is in a recently printed volume of sermons, is full of emotion and records of thankfulness.

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Returning, he was met by the news of the President’s death, at which, like all the land, he bowed as a mourner. Not long after, he felt it his duty to strike another key in his church. The war was over, the victory won. Mr. Beecher came out with a sermon on forgiveness of injuries, expounding the present crisis as a great and rare OPPORTUNITY.

The sermon was not a popular one. The community could not at once change the attitude of war for that of peace; there were heart-burnings that could not at once be assuaged. But whatever may be thought of Mr. Beecher’s opinions in the matter of political policy, there is no doubt that the immediate and strong impulse to forgive, which came to him at once when his party was triumphant, was from that source in his higher nature whence have come all the best inspirations of his life.

Mr. Beecher’s views, hopes, wishes, and the policy he would have wished to have pursued, were very similar to those of Governor Andrew, and the more moderate of the republicans, and he did not hesitate at once to imperil his popularity with his own party, by the free expression of his opinions. Those who have been most offended by him cannot but feel that the man who defied the slaveholder when he was rich, haughty and powerful, had a right to speak a kind word for him now when he is poor, and weak, and defeated. The instinct to defend the weaker side is strongest in generous natures.

Mr. Beecher has met and borne the criticisms of his own party with that tolerance and equanimity with which he once bore rebuke for defending the cause of

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the slave. In all the objects sought by the most radical republicans, he is a firm believer. He holds to the equal political rights of every human being—men and women, the white man and the negro. He hopes to see this result yet established in the Union, and if it be attained by means different from those he counseled, still if it be attained, he will sincerely rejoice.

Though Mr. Beecher has from time to time entered largely into politics, yet he has always contemplated them from the moral and ministerial stand-point. His public and political labors, though they have been widely known, are mere offshoots from his steady and habitual pastoral work in his own parish.

Plymouth Church is to a considerable degree a realization externally of Mr. Beecher’s ideal of what a protestant church ought to be—a congregation of faithful men and women, bound together by a mutual covenant of Christian love, to apply the principles of Christianity to society. It has always been per se, temperance and an anti-slavery society. The large revenue raised by the yearly sale of pews, has come in time to afford a generous yearly income. This year it amounts to fifty thousand dollars. This revenue has, besides the pastor’s salary and current expenses, been appropriated to extinguishing the debt upon the church, which being at last done, the church will devote its surplus to missionary operations in its vicinity. Two missions have been largely supported by the funds derived from Plymouth Church, and the time and personal labors of its members. A mechanics’ reading-room is connected with one of these. No church in the

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country furnishes a larger body of lay teachers, exhorters, and missionaries in every department of human and Christian labor. A large-minded, tolerant, genial spirit, a cheerful and buoyant style of piety, is characteristic of the men and women to whose support and efficient aid in religious works, Mr. Beecher is largely indebted for his success.

The weekly prayer-meeting of the church is like the reunion of a large family. The pastor, seated in the midst, seems only as an elder brother. The various practical questions of Christian morals are freely discussed, and every member is invited to express an opinion.

In one of these meetings, Mr. Beecher gave an autobiographical account of the growth of his own mind in religious feeling and opinion, which was taken down by a reporter. We shall give it as the fitting close of this sketch.

“If there is any one thing in which I feel that my own Christian experience has developed more than in another, I think it is the all-sided use of the love and worship which I have toward the Lord Jesus Christ. Every man’s mind, that acts for itself, has to go through its periods of development and evolution. In the earlier part of my Christian career and ministry, I had but glimpses of Christ, and was eagerly seeking to develop in my own mind, and for my people, a full view of his character, particularly with reference to the conversion of men; to start them, in other words, in the Christian life. And for a great many years I think it was Christ as the wisdom of God unto salvation that filled my mind very much;

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and I preached Christ as a power, not at all too much, perhaps, but almost exclusively.

“Well, I think there has been going on in me, steadily and gradually, a growing appropriation of Christ to all needs; to every side and phase of experience; so that at no period of my life was I ever so conscious of a personal need, so definite, and at so many points of my nature, as now. I do not know that I experience such enthusiasm as I have at some former periods of my life; but I think that at no other period did I ever have such a sense of the special point at which this divine all-supply touches the human want.

“A few points I will mention, that are much in my mind.

“The love of Christ, as I recollect it in my childhood, was taught almost entirely from the work of redemption. That work of redemption was itself a historical fact, and it was sought to stir up the heart and the affections by a continual review and iteration of the great facts of Christ’s earthly mission, passion, atonement and love. I became conscious, very early in my ministry, that I did not derive—nor could I see that Christians generally derived—from the mere continued presentation of that circle of facts, a perpetual help, to anything like the extent that life needs. There would come to me, as there come to the church, times in which all these facts seemed to be fused and kindled, and to afford great light and consolation; but these were alternative and occasional, whereas the need was perpetual. And it was not until I went be-

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yond these—not disdaining them, but using them rather as a torch, as a means of interpreting Christ in a higher relation—that I entered into a train of thought that revealed to me the intrinsic nature of God. I had an idea that he loved me on account of Calvary and Gethsemane, on account of certain historical facts; but I came, little by little, through glimpses and occasional appreciations, to that which is now a continuous, unbroken certainty, namely, a sense of the EVERLASTING NEED OF GOD, IN CHRIST, TO LOVE. I began to interpret the meaning of love, not by contemplating a few historical facts, but by running through my mind human faculties, exalting them, and imagining them to have infinite scope in the divine mind. I began to apply our ideas of infinity and almightiness to the attributes of God, and to form some conception of what affection must be in a Being who had created, who had sustained in the past, and who was to sustain throughout the endless future, a race of intelligent creatures such as peopled the earth. In that direction my mind grew, and in that direction it grows. And from the inward and everlasting nature of God TO LOVE, I have derived the greatest stimulus, the greatest consolation, and the greatest comfort in preaching to others. I find many persons that speak of loving Christ; but it is only now and then that I meet those who seem to be penetrated deeply with a consciousness of CHRIST’S LOVE TO THEM, or of its boundlessness, its wealth, its fineness, its exceeding delicacy, its transcendency in every line and lineament of possible conception. Once in a while, people have this view break upon them in

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meeting, or in some sick hour, or in some revival moment. That is a blessed visitation which brings to the soul a realization of the capacity of God to love imperfect beings with infinite love, and which enables a man to adapt this truth to his shame-hours, his sorrow-hours, his love-hours and his selfish hours, and to find all the time that there is in the revelation of the love of God in Christ Jesus all-sufficient food for the soul. It is, indeed, almost to have the gate of heaven opened to you. The treasure is inexhaustible.

Out of that has grown something besides: for it is impossible for me to feel that Christ loves me with such an all-surrounding love, and to feel, as I do every day of my life, that he has to love me with imperfections, that he never loves me because I am symmetrical, never because I am good, never because I deserve his love, never because I am lovely, but always because he has the power of loving erring creatures—it is impossible for me to feel thus, and not get some insight into divine charity. Being conscious that he takes me with all my faults, I cannot but believe that he takes others with their faults—Roman Catholics, Swedenborgians, Unitarians, Universalists, and Christians of all sects and denominations; and of these, not only such as are least exceptionable, but such as are narrow-minded, such as are bigoted, such as are pugnacious, such as are unlovely. I believe that Christ finds much in them that he loves, but whether he finds much in them that he loves or not, he finds much in himself of capacity to love them. And so I have the feeling that in all churches, in all denominations, there

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is an elect, and Christ sees of the travail of his soul, and is satisfied.

That is not all. Aside from this catholicity of love of Christians in all sects and denominations, I have a sense of ownership in other people. It may seem rather fanciful, but it has been a source of abiding comfort to me for many years, that I owned everybody that was good for anything in life.

I came here, you know, under peculiar circumstances. I came just at the critical period of the anti-slavery movement; and I came without such endorsement as is usually considered necessary in city churches in the East. Owing to those independent personal habits that belonged to me, and that I acquired from my Western training, I never consulted brethren in the ministry as to what course I should pursue, but carried on my work as fast and as far as I could according to the enlightenment of my conscience. For years, as you will recollect, it excited remark, and various states of feeling. And so, I felt, always, as though I was not particularly acceptable to Christians beyond my own flock, with the exception of single individuals here and there in other churches. But I have felt, not resentful, and hardly regretful; for I have always had a sort of minor under-feeling, that when I was at home I was strong and all right, though I was conscious that outside of my own affectionate congregation I was looked upon with suspicion. This acting upon a nature proud enough, and sensitive enough, has wrought a kind of feeling that I never would intrude upon anybody, and never would ask any favor of anybody—as I never have had occasion

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to do; and I stood very much by myself. But I never felt any bitterness towards those who regarded me with disfavor. And I speak the truth, when I declare that I do not remember to have had towards any minister a feeling that I would have been afraid to have God review in the judgment day, and that I do not remember to have had towards any church or denomination a feeling that Christ would not approve. On the other hand, I have had positively and springing from my sense of the wonderful love with which I am loved, and with which the whole church is loved, the feeling that these very men who did not accept me or my work, were beloved of Christ, and were brethren to me; and I have said to them mentally, “I am your brother. You do not know it, but I am, and though you do not own me, I own you. All that is good in you is mine, and I am in sympathy with it. And you cannot keep me out of your church.” I belong to the Presbyterian church. I belong to the Methodist church. I belong to the Baptist church. I belong to the Episcopal church. I belong to any church that has Christ in it. I go where he goes, and love what he loves. And I insist upon it that though those churches exclude me, they cannot keep me out. All those I have reason to believe Christ loves, I claim by virtue of the love that Christ has for me. Hence, I have a great sense of richness. I rejoice in everything that is good in all these denominations, and sorrow for everything that is bad, or that hinders the work of Christ in their hands. And I look, and wait, and long for that day when all Christians shall recognize each other.

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I think that people in the church are like persons riding in a stage at night. For hours they sit side by side, and shoulder to shoulder, not being able in the darkness to distinguish one another; but at last, when day breaks, and they look at each other, behold, they discover that they are friends and brothers.

So we are riding, I think, through the night of this earthly state, and do not know that we are brethren, though we sit shoulder to shoulder; but as the millennial dawn comes on, we shall find it out and all will be clear.”

THE END.