E 449 .S2 Copy 1 lass I .(ink JL$ / New Hampshire Biography and Autobiography BY F. B. SANBORN OF CONCORD IN MASSACHUSETTS (1S31 to 1860) PRIVATELY PRINTED CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE JULY, 1905 AlitiK ' (Pefion) PREFACE. The following pages, written at the suggestion of my friend, Henry B. Colby, editor of the Granite Monthly, may sometime be continued, as time is found for those reminiscences which I have often been urged to write. But I close them here for the present, having put on record those facts and impressions which depend on the memories of youth rather than on the writ- ten records that in my case have accumulated during threescore years, and require more leisure than I can now command for their compilation and verification. The mode of printing adopted, though inconvenient in some respects, has enabled me to insert for preservation many scenes and portraits that might otherwise be lost. This form of partial publication may be followed here- after so as to include other illustrations not properly belonging to these chap- ters, or which were not available at the time of their first printing. The "Sanborn Genealogy," mentioned on page 26, is published by my son, Victor Channing Sanborn, at Kenilworth, Illinois, who is now pre- paring a genealogy of the Leavitts and Blands. Concord, Massachusetts, July 4, 1905. CONTENTS. Chapter I. Childhoood ... ... Pages CHAPTER EI. Hereditary Influences . ... 21-31 Chapter [II. Youthful lyove, Marriage ... $2 53 Chapter IV. John Brown and His Friends 51 ; s ERRATA On page i'>, in the sonnet, first line, read: " Being absent, yet thou art not all withdrawn." < )n - ;, line 13, from top of lust column, read : " I can be truer with Prank, he judging," etc. On page ) s , end of verses, read "trait" for "tract- " On pa Brown's letter, [857, should be i< ILLUSTRATIONS. Birthplace of the Sanborns, Hampton Falls Portrait of F. B. Sanborn, 1904 Old House of Benjamin Sanborn, Munt Hill Old Meeting-house, Hampton Falls Interior of the Same .... Oldest House in Hampton Falls (first Cram house) Portrait of Miss Sanborn, set. 40 . Residence of Squire Tom Leavitt . Portraits of T. Leavitt and His Wife (1808) . Neighborhood of the Meeting-house and Parsonage, 1904 Headstone of President Langdon, Hampton Falls Unitarian Church, Hampton Falls (built 1839) Portrait of Charles Henry Sanborn, aet. 25 Portrait of F. B. Sanborn, aet. 17 (1849) Portrait of Senator Norris (about 1854) . Portrait of Thomas Leavitt, Esquire, set. 75 Portrait of F. B. Sanborn, set. 21 (1853) Portrait of Ariana Walker, set. 18 (1847) Portrait of F. B. Sanborn in Harvard College Exeter Main Street in 1850 .... Portrait of Consul-General George Walker, aet. 61 Peterborough Main Street in 1854 . The " Little Wood " on Grove Street, Peterborou Residence of Ariana Walker, Grove Street Ravine and Cascade, Peterborough Autograph of Miss Walker . River Bank behind Miss Putnam's Cottage Autograph of Judge Keyes, 1856 . Portrait of John Brown, set. 57 (beardless) Autograph of John Brown, 1857 Autograph Letter of Brown in Prison (1859) Portrait of John Brown (bearded), 1859 Portrait of Chief-Justice Shaw (W. M. Hunt, 1858) Portrait of F. B. Sanborn, aet. 25 (1857) Portrait and Autograph of Vice-President Wilson Portrait of Captain Avis, Virginian, Jailer of Brown Portrait of General Frank Barlow, aet. 28 Frontispiece. Pasre o 4 5 6 8 9 10 1 1 12 15 16 19 20 22 26 3i 36 37 44 45 48 49 50 5i 5i 52 56 57 58 65 67 72 73 75 76 77 F. B. Sanborn (I 904). HISTORY AND POETRY FROM THE LIFE OF F. B. SANBORN OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS. CHAPTER I. — CHILDHOOD. At the request of the editor of the Granite Monthly, who desires to preserve and publish in this maga- zine all that relates to the colony and state where we were born, I begin these recollections of a long life, in which will be mingled many a strand from earlier times than ours, and many another life which has crossed mine, or flowed beside it to that wide ocean of Eternity, towards which every human existence tends, in its short course through this inscrutable world. We are sent into it without our will, and we stay here a longer or shorter time, with no consent of our own, for the most part ; and the influ- ence of our small contribution of vital- ity and activity, to the infinitude of life around us, we can neither com- pute nor avoid in the final reckoning of human accountability. I can at least say that mine has never been consciously directed, save in the sal- lies of youth, towards aught but the good of others, as I then understood it ; though it may well be that what I thought for their best was in its effect far otherwise. My vitality, but, I hope, not my infant accountability, began in a brisk winter day, December 15, 1831, in FRANK A". SAXHORN. The Old B. Sanborn House. (In Front of Munt Hill ) the southwest lower room of the old house, built in 1743, which is repre- sented in the view of it here given. My mother, Lydia Leavitt by her maiden name, was then approaching thirty-two, having been born at her father's house, under the four elms, (Thomas Leavitt's) in March, 1800, coincident with the new century, and married at the age of twenty. My father, Aaron Sanborn, was then thirty-nine (born November 26, 1 793); and I was the fourth of his children who survived an infant, his first- born, dying in i820-'2i. His oldest son, my eldest living brother, to whom I was much indebted for my early education, Charles Henry San- born, became a physician after many experiences and some adventures, and practised for more than forty years in the old township of Hampton, which was founded in [638 by our earliest American ancestor, Reverend Stephen Bachiler, an Oxford graduate of [586, and the latest of our immediate line to receive a university degree, until 1855 and [856, when Charles and I took our Harvard diplomas of A. B. and M. I)., 270 years later than our clerical forefather. In 1 -'.7 our youngest brother, Joseph Leavitt Sanborn (born in October, 1843 ) , took his Harvard degree. In his educa- tion Dr. Charles and I co-operated, and also his two sisters and elder brother, Lewis Thomas Sanborn (born October 1 1, 1834 ; died June 26, 1904), under whose particular care he was after my leaving New Hampshire in iS54-'55- These sisters were Sarah Elizabeth (born May 23, 1823; died at Hampton Falls, Feb. 25, 1903) and Helen Maria (born March 17, 1S30, and still living in our old home). Our ancestors, with the exception of Mr. Bachiler and his eldest grand- son of the Sanborn line, John, were all born in the first broad township of Hampton, including what are now that town and Hampton Falls, North Hampton, Seabrook, .Southampton, and a good part of Kensington. Most of them, excepting the second John Sanborn and his brother Joseph (of the Sanborn line) were born on the farm of which our old house was near the center, and the Benjamin Sin- born house (represented above) was at the western limit. Another San- born house stood not far from the barn of Dr. .Sanborn's place, and was long the residence of Deacon Benja- min, one of the first of many Hamp- FRANK B. SANBORN. ton Falls deacons ; while a still older house, most likely of hewn logs, stood near the " Pepperidge Bush," which was a landmark for centuries, half way down the hill to the north- west, on the old Exeter road. The original Sanborn farm, taken up, as I suppose, before 1680, ad- joined the farm of Nathaniel Bachel- der, a grandson of Parson Stephen, now occupied (in part) by my cousin, Warren Brown, the historian of the parish and town of Hampton Falls. It was much more extensive than that lately left by my brother, Lewis, and seems to have reached from the cor- ner where the " Old Mill Road " comes out upon the ' ' Back Road ' ' to Hamp- ton, westward about 220 rods, to the Indian hill behind the Benjamin San- born house, on which, traditionally, was the wigwam of an Indian — always known as ' ' Munt Hill, ' ' mean- ing "Mound Hill," as I fancy. This neighborhood center of San- borns, Bachelders, and Prescotts was originally a blockhouse fort against Indian assault, then a school- house, and finally the meeting-house of 1768, here represented. One by one the families removed, and others came in (always excepting the Sauborns and a branch of the Bachelders), so that, at my birth, the neighborhood was made up of Sanborns in two houses, the Browns in two, the Lanes (a con- nection of the Sanborns by the mar- riage of Deacon Lane to my grand- father's aunt, Mary Sanborn), and the Perkinses, Wellses, and Healeys, who had come upon the lands of Deacon Sanborn, and of the Greens and Pres- cotts and Cliffords gone elsewhere. Temporarily the parsonage was empty of a minister (Parson Abbot having gone upon his farm at Windham) and my uncle, Joseph, with his wife and two children were there, tenants of the parish. A few years after my birth they removed to what is now the oldest house in town — an ancient Cram homestead — my uncle's wife The Old Meeting-house. FRANK /-'. SANBORN of the Old Meeting-house. being Betsey Cram, a sister of Porter and Joseph Cram, who were an im- portant influence in my boyhood and youth, as will be seen. Of this house the artist presents a view in connec- tion with the story of my first esca- pade. In my native hamlet I was one of some twenty children-six vSanhorns, one Sanborn-Stevens, adopted by my grandfather; six Healeys, cousins of Mrs. Dallj three Browns, two Lanes, two Wellses, and one Perkins -the other Browns and Perkinses having grown up and gone into the world to make their way. At present there but four children where the twen- ty-one of 1833 gamboled and went to school at the red or the brick school- hon.se. My systematic instruction mi in the red house, on the ridge leading to my Grandfather Leavitt's hill and meadow farm, and half way between his house and my father's. My sisters took me there before 1 was four, and at the age of four and a half f was the pupil of dear'Mary Law- rence, who gave me my first reward of merit, and bestowed on me her sweet smile, which I still remember. She was the daughter of Dr. Law- rence of Hampton, and taught only in summers — the winter schools, fre- quented by the big boys, requiring the muscles of a schoolmaster, who sometimes wielded the rod with manly vigor. I was soon transferred to the brick schoolhouseon the 1 '.\eter road, and there continued my education, summer and winter, till at the age of eleven 1 had begun algebra, and was learning a little Latin from my brother Charles, who read C;csar, Virgil, ami Cicero at the age of twenty, self-instructed, so far as I know. but I have a few recollections earlier than even my alphabetical school years, indeed, 1 must have FRANK B. SANBORN. had the alphabet wheii I went to Mary Lawrence ; for I then read in words of two or three syllables, and could understand the pictured fables in the spelling-book that had superseded Webster's. His " rude boy " steal- ing apples still survived in the newer book, and could be seen in the coarser printed Webster, carefully preserved among other old schoolbooks in the garret. Of this garret I have early souvenirs ; but one of my earliest recollections is of another garret, with very steep stairs, up which my short legs, at three years old, could hardly mount. I remember myself in a short plaid gown, toiling up this mountain pathway, along with another child (Arthur Godfrey, perhaps), and not till many years after did I recog- nize this same stairway in the old Benjamin Sanborn house, then owned by Cousin Nancy, in which my Aunt Dorothy, soon to be mentioned, was brought up by her grandmother as a companion to her younger cousin, early left an orphan. This incident I place in 1835 ; but before that I was the hero of another adventure, of which my mother told me, for I can- not recall it. In 1834, when I was a little beyond two years and a half, if so much, our house was struck by light- ning, and the bolt ran down the big chimney, and diverted itself a little in the ' ' back chamber, ' ' where I was playing alone, near the chimney. My sister ran up to see what had hap- pened to me, but I was found placidly playing with a stick, seated on the floor, and declaring that the great noise had been made by my pounding on the floor with my stick. I believed myself already capable of making some stir in the world. My father was one of five children by the two marriages of my Grand- father Sanborn with two cousins named Blake. By the first was born one daughter, Dolly (shortened from Dorothy), who never married ; by the second, two sons and two daugh- ters, of whom only the younger daughter, Sally, married. The two brothers, Joseph, named for the builder of the house, and Aaron (a new name in the family), had been diligent pupils in the district school, and re- ceived prizes for their skill in mathe- matics, — small American editions of "Pope's Essay on Man," to which his Universal Prayer was annexed. These, together with the "ciphering books" that had won the prize, re- mained in an old chest in the west garret, which contained a medley of ancient literature. Upon these my thirst for reading exercised itself for half a dozen years, — almanacs and school-books, old copies of the New Hampshire Patriot of Isaac Hill, and more recent copies of the first Uni- versalist newspaper in Boston, Thomas Whittemore's Trumpet. But there was more solid food in a " Social Library " founded by Parson Abbot, who had succeeded Dr. Lang- don as the town minister when my father was five years old, and induced his parishioners to take shares in it. Ordinarily it was kept in the parson- age, across the green from my grand- father's house, where now stands the house, about the same size, of my late brother Lewis. Before I was eight years old I began to read those books, particularly " Mavor's Voy- ages" and "Plutarch's Lives," the latter in Langhorne's version, with quotations from Homer given in the words of Pope, and with other poetic passages (in the footnotes) from Dr. FRANK />'. SANBORN. The Old Cram House Johnson anil his contemporaries. For fiction we had the " Popular Tales" of Miss I'.dgeworth and the " Moral Tales" of Hannah More; while ser- mons and biographies, Goldsmith's "Animated Nature, " and an occa- sional volume of poems, — Southey's "Joan of Arc," I remember, for there I first saw Greek verse in the unknown alphabet, and the effusions of Colonel Humphreys and Robert Treat Paine. My Uncle Joseph, a grave and kindly man, who had lived for a tew years in the parsonage after 1 'arson Abbot vacated it in 1827, was now living, a confirmed invalid, in the old Cram house, here represented, and probably built before 1700. He died in December, 1836, before I was five years old, and his funeral sermon was preached by Rev. Stephen Farley, the father of Harriet Farley, one of the founders, and for years the editor, of the once famous Lowell Offering \ written by factory girls, of whom Harriet was one. I was sent to the Fxeter Road school in the summer of 1836, a mile from our house, and more than half a mile from my uncle's; but, beguiled by some boy or girl, I ran up there after school, against the injunctions of my sister Helen, who had the care of me. I remember this incident for two rea- sons, it was the only time I recall seeing this uncle, and I was much afraid of being whipped for my es- capade. My uncle sat in the long dining-room, in his sick chair, and spoke to me in a pleasant manner, while my aunt and cousins were in and out o! the quaint old room. I became well acquainted with the house afterward, but this was the only time I saw my uncle in it. My FRANK B. SANBORN. sister Sarah, whose portrait at a much later date is here given, came up to take me home, and, I suppose, held out prospects of punishment by my father, for when I saw him, and he sent me to wash my feet on the bench at the back door, I had great fears that a whipping would follow. It did not, but my mother put her tired son to bed with many injunc- tions not to do such a thing again. At this time, as near as I remem- ber, I was a chubby boy, with long light hair, which my Grandmother Leavitt used to stroke with her soft hand, and call me her "little Dr. Franklin." I often visited her and my corpulent grandfather, 'Squire Tom Leavitt, living in the white house near the hill, under the four elms, and with his hives of bees be- side the well, in full view from his east door, near which he sat in his justice's chair and read his news- papers, or heard cases brought before him as justice of the peace, an office he held by constant appointment from his first commission by Gov. John Langdon in 1S05 till his death in 1852. His three sons had married and left home, and two of his daugh- ters, my mother being the eldest ; so that his house was kept by my Aunt Hannah, then about twenty, assisted by her mother, who soon became so much an invalid that she could do little except entertain visitors with her pleasant conversation. The farm was carried on by a hired man, — at first David Forsyth, a Yankee, but soon by a north of Ireland Scotch- man, John Cochrane, who remained for many years. With this pleasant homestead many of my most delightful recollections connect themselves. I was a favorite with all, and allowed the range of the house, and the orchard, which in summer and autumn abounded in fruit. There were the bee-hives, from which we got delicious honey, and there were specialties in my aunt's cooking which pleased me more than what I had every day at home. I was first carried there, so far as I remember, in the winter, with my father and mother, — I sit- Sarah Elizabeth Sanborn. ting wrapped up in the bottom of the sleigh, — and as we glided along, drawn by the horse of my own age, or a little older, I noticed how the stone walls seemed to run away back- wards as we passed by. Occasionally I spent the night at this house, and distinctly recall the high-post bed- stead, into the luxurious featherbed of which I had to climb by a chair. There, too, I met my cousins from Boston, half a dozen city girls and boys, who spent some part of their vacations at their grandfather's, — FRANK B. SANBORN. one of them a boy a little older than myself, with whom I learned to swim in the small stream at the foot of the hill. I w r as often sent to carry the news- paper to my political grandfather, who, in return, sent us his agricul- tural weekly, for he was a farmer with specialties, such as the breeding of Durham cattle and bee culture. preferred to sit, and in front of which he died in December, 1901. In the corner opposite the fire stood the tall old clock, and there was the book- case near by, in which I found and learned by heart two or three of the plays of Shakespeare, and from which I took my great-grandmother's " Scots Worthies," with its biographies of Knox and his associate Calvinists, Thomas Leavitt, Esq. (1808 ) He understood the latter better than anybody in town, and dealt with his bees in a way that astonished boys, who did not dare to go near the hives for fear of being stung. In the win- ter he lived by an open fire in a Franklin stove, which came to me afterwards, and furnished my poet- friend Ellery Channing, during the ten years and more that he lived in my house, the cheerful blaze by which he Hannah (Melcher) Leavitt. and the scandalous pamphlet of Howie of Lochgoin, "God's Judg- ments on Persecutors," aimed spec- ially at the Stuart kings and their instruments of oppression in Scot- land. The poetry in our Social Library did not much attract me as a child, nor was it very good, but at a neigh- bor's I found the poems of Burns, and my brother Charles had an Amer- FRANK B. SANBORN. 13 ican edition of Moore's "Melodies," on which I feasted, as I did on a borrowed edition of Campbell's poems. These introduced me to Walter Scott, and one of my own first purchases was a Philadelphia edition of the " Waverley Novels," which I read at the age of twelve with the greatest delight. I had read the " Scottish Chiefs" of Miss Porter earlier, and an edition of ' ' Don Quixote ' ' in four volumes, printed at Exeter in small type, but easily read by young eyes. Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of the Forest " was another novel of which I read the first volume only, and did not learn till many years after how the story came out, for my brother, at a muster-field, where books were sold by a peddler, bought two cop- ies of the first volume, supposing he had the whole book, and was never able to match them with the second. All this time I was going to the district school, and learning all that successive teachers — young women in summer, and young men in winter — could impart to a boy who took to studies of all kinds like a duck to water. From my brother Charles I had got a smattering of Latin before I was ten, and at the age of eleven, a lively young schoolmaster, D. W. Barber, began to teach me Greek in the town school. I learned the alphabet and the declension of the Greek article, but then my careful father declared me too young for that study, and I unwillingly gave it up. At the same time I was learning all the common activities of farming — riding the horse to plow and rake hay, driving oxen, planting and hoeing corn and pota- toes, raking hay and weeding the garden, taking care of the barn, chop- ping wood, and a dozen other things which a boy could do. The work did not press, usually, and there was plenty of time to learn shooting, at first with bow and arrow and after- ward with guns, and for playing the simple games that country boys then understood. Baseball, for instance, — not then the angry and gambling game it has since become, — and the easier games of " one old cat," " two old cat," and "drive," played with balls; and "truck," played with a solid wooden wheel, rolled over the ground. In such games girls did not join ; and the game of cricket, which has long prevailed in England, and in which girls in school now take part there, never was domesticated in New England. But there were many less active games in which girls in Hamp- ton Falls participated. Such were " Hy Spy," a hiding sport, where one boy or girl stood at a tree, the side of a building, or elsewhere, with eyes covered, while the rest of the children sought hiding places during the half minute that the spy was counting a hundred. Then they were searched for, and when seen the one who was " it " called out, " I spy," and both ran for the " gool," which was the tree, etc., where the spy had stood. If the spy got there first, or touched the one espied, he or she was " it," and the game took a new turn. This word " gool " for "goal," figured in another game, called indif- ferent^ "gool,"' "tag," or "co- ram ;" in this two spots were marked and called "gools," between which the children must run, and could be "tagged" or touched anywhere off the gools. To decide who should be the first catcher in such sports, a ' \ FRANK /:. SANBORN. mystic rhyme was recited ; sometimes this ]•.« aa, meena, mcma mike, Pestalahni, bony, strike, Huldy, guldy, Boo hild was pointed at with each word, and the first catcher was the one on whom the fatal "Boo" fell. Another and more elaborate incanta- tion was this : Wier, brier, limbei luck. Five mice all in a Hock Sit by thi "K • The last letter fell to the one who was to be "it" in any game. Still another rhyme began. Intery, mintery, cutery corn. Apple-seed, apple-thorn, to which the rhyme just cited could be added. Iu other . games, like "Thread the Needle" or kissing games, these rhymes were chanted by the little girls, who had better notions of song than the boys, — Uncle John is very sick. What will you please to give him ' Three ^ood wish' 3, Three good kisses, And a pint of ginger. ( )r else this, — William 1 : u-courting night and day, :d and pistol by his side, And Fanny Brown shall he his brid In each case the boy was to catch the girl and kiss her if he could. In '•Thread the Needle," which, like most of these sports, was very ancient and traditional, like these rhymes (though the latter had been much changed in passing from one genera- tion to another, never being written down), the boys and girls formed an alley by standing opposite and holding hands above the head of the girl who walked down this laughing alle; this verse was chanted Thi- ve no one can pass, The thread it run- so true ; It has caught many a pretty fail And now it has Caught you. At which last word the linked anus of the last couple dropped down over the head of the last girl, and she was Subject to lie kissed by the boy of that couple. These sports indicate how early the natural relation of the sexes began to show itself in the sim- ple community ; for the boys and girls who taught me to play them could not have been more than seven years old when I learned the rhymes. A little later came the sedentary games for long evenings, — checkers, morrice (which we called " moral "), fox-and- geese, and the simplest forms of card- playing. Chess came in later, and I was twelve at least when I learned that game of skill from the minister's son in the parsonage across the green Whist came about the same time with chess, and was diligently pursued f«r several winters, the boys meeting round at each other's houses and playing in the family sitting-room, under the eyes of the older people. This, in my case, was the "clock room," where still stands the tall clock, one hundred and thirty years old now, which was made by Daniel Balch of Xewburyport, ami has kept good time for five generations of San- borns in the same corner. In other houses we played in the long kitchen, which was apt t<» be the family sitting- room in winter, because better heated than the rest of the house, before air- tight stives or furnaces came into use. The parlor, or "best room," was seldom opened to the children, except when "company" came to FRANK B. SANBORN. l 5 dinner or tea, or for the " nooning " on Sundays, at which time our house, being near the church, became the resort of cousins, aunts, and distant parishioners. Already in my early boyhood, or before, had begun that religious dis- integration which gradually changed the ancient unity of the town or par- ish into a group of warring sects, dis- puting more or less zealously about infant baptism, original sin, eternal punishment, the Trinity, and the other points of contention among be- lievers nominally Christian, and more or less accepting the Bible as the lit- eral word of God, both Old and New Testaments. The last town clergyman who held the whole population together around his tall pulpit in Hampton Falls, was Dr. Samuel Langdon, who came there from the presidency of Harvard uni- versity in 1780, shaking off the dust of that ungrateful "society," as he termed it, and burdened with the debts contracted in the service of the clergy and people of Massachusetts, which the new commonwealth for sev- eral years neglected to pay, and never did pay in full. He was the most learned person who ever lived and died in the town, and one of the most useful ; though his immediate succes- sor, Rev. Jacob Abbot, who succeeded him as my grandfather's nearest neighbor, served the community longer, and wnth rather more of the modern spirit. Dr. Langdon was of the later eighteenth century, parson Abbot of the earlier nineteenth ; both liberal, philanthropic, and devoted to good literature. Before Dr. L,angdon's death, in November, 1797, the revolting Bap- tists had begun to secede from the orthodox Congregationalists in other towns, but hardly in Hampton Falls ; while the Quakers, much more numer- ous then, in the towns which made up old Hampton, than they are now, or have been in my time, had long ab- sented themselves from the parish meeting-houses. Dr. L,angdon brought together in the church edifice, near his parson- age, more than seventy families, and Doctor Langdon's Headstone in Hampton Falls. must have had, on pleasant Sundays, if the weather was not too freezing for the unwarmed house, at least three hundred hearers for his learned ser- mons, expounding Romans or Reve- lations. But it was rumored that he was no Calvinist ; and if he chose his successor, as probably he did, he must have known that young Mr. Abbot was Arminian, and did not insist on endless damnation for a majority of his parishioners. At any rate, such proved to be the fact, and very soon the Baptists began to hold meetings by themselves, and protest against i6 FRANK /»'. SANBORN. the ministerial tax collected by the town authority and paid over to par- son Abbot. A wealthy family of Browns led off in this secession, which in course of twenty years again di- vided, the original seceders calling themselves "Christian " Baptists, and leaving the Calvinists to organize a church later at the "Hill" I as the small village was called), and to con- nect it with a special school, main- tained by Baptists and known, during or twenty years. My other grand- father, Sanborn, and his elder son, Joseph, also joined this society, and the latter was it-, treasurer in [832, when the town's property in the par- sonage lands was sold, and the money (about S3, 000) divided between the four societies then existing. Some- thing more than a fifth part went to the Universalists, and the rest was divided almost equally between the still united Cougregationalists and the The Unitarian Church, Hampton Falls. the twenty-odd years of its existence, as " Rockingham Academy." The secession of the Freewill or Christian Baptists took place in [805, and included several who took that mode of signifying their general dis- sent from the "standing order" of New I'.ngland churches, without at- taching any special significance to the rite of baptism. Among these was my grandfather Leavitt, who, ten rs later, headed a movement for a Universalis! society in the town, to which he and his son-in-law. my father, attached themselves for a dozen two Baptist chinches, the Christians getting more than twice as much as the "Calvin-Baptists." Now, seventy years later, the Universalists have merged in the Unitarians, the two Baptist societies mostly in the Calvin- ists, while the Cougregationalists have divided into 1 nitarian and Trin- itarian, neither of them strong socie- ties In my boyhood the Universal- ists had ceased to hold meetings, and their church library had been divided among the members, my father re- ceiving as his share a two-volume history of Universalism, a Life of John FRANK B. SANBORN. 17 Murray (the Irish Methodist who first preached universal salvation in Rock- ingham county) , and the sermons of Elhanan Winchester, a ' ' Restoration- ist"; who, after preaching in New England awhile went over to L,ondon and founded what became the Fins- bury Square Chapel, where W. J. Fox, and after him my friend, Mon- cure Conway, preached for long years. There were other books from this source ; but these attracted my boy- ish interest, and by reading them — never having heard a sermon on the subject — I became, at the age of nine, a convinced Universalist. But I con- tinued to frequent other churches, — the Unitarian, near home, and the Christian Baptists where now the town library is. In the former I heard good preaching, by educated men, whose books I had read, or was to read. Among the Baptists I heard spontaneous religious utterances, oftentimes from women ; while their ministers, or "elders," were without much education, but often of good natural eloquence. At home I had read the Bible from earliest years, so that I could perhaps have said at the age of twelve that I had read all its books through twice ; of course with- out much understanding of the mys- tical or theological parts. To a certain degree, these sec- tarian divisions in religion repre- sented political opinions also. The "standing order" of Congregation- alists had been patriots in the Revo- lution, Federalists under Washing- ton and Adams, and had become "Whigs" under the classification that I first remember. The seced- ing sects, therefore, being at variance with the parish ministers, took an opposite side in politics ; as the Or- thodox were Federalists, the Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists became Jeffersonian Democrats, — in my time followers of Jackson and Van Buren. Thus, in Hampton Falls, until the Texas question made an issue among these Democrats, the Christian Bap- tists and Universalists, and some of the Unitarians, were mostly Demo- crats, while the Calvinists and most of the Unitarians were Whigs, and supported Harrison in the first presi- dential election that I remember. Even in 1839, at the age of seven, I was taking an interest in politics, as my father, grandfather, and elder brother did. Charles, afterwards Dr. Sanborn, subscribed, in his eighteenth year, to the Congressional Globe, of the elder Blair, and in that quarto record of congressional proceedings I became familiar with the names of all the senators and congressmen, and knew to which party they be- longed. I even recall, though I was but little more than seven, the ex- citement caused by the shooting of Cilley, Hawthorne's classmate, a Maine congressman, by Graves of Kentucky, in a quarrel originating with Colonel Webb of the New York Courier and Enquirer ; and I fol- lowed with interest the contest for the speakership in December, 1839, which ended with the election of Hunter of Virginia. Then came on the noisy log-cabin campaign between Van Buren in power, but burdened with the lack of prosperity in the country, and Harrison, a military candidate (who united in his rather insignificant per- son, the elements of general discon- tent) , and the powerful leaders of the capitalist party of Whigs, such as Webster and Clay, Wilson of New [8 FRANK H. SANBORN. Hampshire, and Evans of Maine-. Knowing nothing of the principles involved it there were any' I was a warm partisan of Van Buren, while the two sons of the new Unitarian minister iu the parsonage, Charles and Henry Shaw, were ardent Whigs. With Henry I had a bet pending on the result,— no less than the olel "fourpence ha' penny," valued at six cents and a quarter, in those days of Spanish and Mexican coins. I lost the bet, of course, but my exultation was great the next summer, when Tyler of Virginia, the accidental president, vetoed the cur- rency and tariff bills of Henry Clay, divided his party, and let the Demo- crats come- into power in the next congress, — even carrying Massachu- setts, or a good part of it. New Hampshire valiantly supported Van Buren, who, on the currency and tariff questions, was right, as I now view it, and steadily sent a s< lid Democratic delegation to cong: in both branches. I saw little of the leaders in these party contests, but Moses Norris, who went to congress in [843, wa= a nephew of my Grandfather I.eavitt, and I remember seeing him in the winter of 1842— '43, when he- was a candidate, coming to our door in his uncle's sleigh to make a call on my mother. It must have been in the summer of [843 that I first saw his . Late, Franklin Pierce, afterwards president, and I remember distinctly how he looked and was dressed. It was in the court house at Exeter, where a criminal trial was going on, and Pierce had come down from Concord to defend Sam George, a wild youth of Seabrook, who was charged with burning his uncle's barn. < >f the merits in the case I know nothing, and it is possible* that Pierce, who was district attorney for Xew Hampshire about that time, may have been prosecuting George in the United States court, but I think not. All that I recall is the elegant figure and pleasing face of the leading Democrat of the state then, and for a do/en years more. He was wearing the fashionable dress of the period, remembered now chiefly because Webster gave it a dignity, — the blue coat with brass buttons and the nankeen trousers strapped over the slender boot. His aspect was what Hawthorne after- wards described in his campaign life of General Pierce : " vivacious, slen- der, of a fair complexion, with light hair that had a curl in it ; his cheer- fulness made a kind of sunshine, yet, with all the invariable gentleness of his demeanor, he perfectly gave the mpressiou of a high and fearless spirit." Norris was of another make, tall and large and dark, of strength almost gigantic, and naturally a leader, without the graces of leadership. Neither of them get full credit now for their talents, because they were exerted in the cause of human slavery, its extension and perpetuation, yet both were men of great humanity, who would rather do a generous ac- tion than a cruel one. The contest over the slavery ques- tion in New Hampshire began in the winter of iS44-'45, and in my very neighborhood, for it was the Demo- cratic member of congress from Rockingham and Strafford, John P. Hale of Dover, who revolted against the dictation of Pierce, Atherton, and Norris in regard to the annexa- FRANK B. SANBORN. 19 tion of Texas. New Hampshire had declared against slavery in 1820, when both political parties had united in passing resolutions in the state legislature, declaring slavery wrong and inconsistent with demo- cratic institutions. The annexation of Texas was favored chiefly by the slave- holders and their political allies, and the extension and protection of slavery was sought to be guaranteed by this expansion of our territory, at the risk of war with Mexico. The New Hampshire Democrats, following the lead of Van Buren, had passed reso- lutions against annexation, but the South had carried its point in 1844, nominated a Tennessee slaveholder for president, rejecting Van Buren, and their national platform favored annexing Texas. Mr. Hale, who had been nominated by the Demo- crats for reelection to congress, came out with a letter explaining his vote against annexion. The "Concord Regency," headed by Pierce, demanded that he should be dropped from the general ticket and another man nominated. When this was done, a few men in Exeter, Portsmouth, the Hamptons, and that neighborhood, called a public meet- ing, which took place at Exeter in February, 1845, and declared that "Independent Democrats" would support Hale. They did so, to such an extent that Woodbury, the sub- stituted nominee, could not be elected, and there was a vacancy in the delegation till a coalition of Whigs and Independents carried the state in the election of 1846. This contest brought my brother Charles, then twenty-three years old, into political activity, and made him one of the younger leaders of the In- dependent Democracy in that part of New Hampshire. He had till then been occupied wholly with farm labors or with teaching, but had been a wide reader of political and social literature, and had many friends and followers in the towns where he was known. Though but thirteen years old, I sympathized entirely with him in his views. I had been much indebted Charles Henry Sanborn (1846). to him for aiding my education, out of school, and teaching me much in the use of tools and the art of shoot- ing, in both of which he had made himself more expert than I ever be- came. He was a good cabinet maker, self-instructed, a good draughtsman, and in other ways handy, which I was not, though willing to learn. He had taught himself Datin and French, and other- wise had qualified himself beyond what was common among the youth of his time and place ; and he had 20 FRANK />'. SANBORN. an ambition, afterwards gratified, to practice a profession. His experi- ences of the heart had been unhap- py : the sweet girl to whom he was attached having died before they could be married. In 1846 he became an assistant in the office of the anti-slavery secretary of state in Concord, and also aided F B Sanborn (1849), /& in editing the party newspaper, the Independent Democrat^ which did much to turn New Hampshire from the pro-slavery Democracy to what was afterwards organized as the Re- publican party. His portrait, here engraved, was taken in Concord at that time. It represents him at the age of (nearly) twenty-five, seriously handsome, and much resembling his mother's family, the Leavitts. My own first portrait was taken three years later, when I was seventeen, ami both were called good likenesses at the time. It will he seen that the portrait above is that of a scholar, or, per- chance, a poet, rather than a finan- cier. My finances up to the age of seventeen were slender, and were chiefly expended for books or maga- zines. They were derived from small payments made to me for small labors on the neighboring farms, or the care of Widow Perkins' barn and wood- shed ; which I had for the most part until I entered college. To this were added small tips from visiting cousin- or other persons who shared the am- ple hospitalities of my father and my two grandfathers ; and the sales which I occasionally made of walnuts gathered in October. When in my twelfth year I visited Boston for the first time, my pocket money must have heen supplied by my father : and was expended in part for an American edition of "Hudibras." which I bought at a book-stall near the Faneuil Hall market. I had made the acquaintance of this hu- morous poem by some citations in "Newman's Rhetoric"; but was much disappointed in the story, which seemed to me, after " Don Quixote," fiat and tiresome. < >n this visit I saw Adelaide Phillips (sub- sequently a famous singer) in a child's part at the Boston Museum, long owned by Moses Kimball who was my associate in later years. CHAPTER HEREDITARY INFLUENCES. SANBORNS, TOWLES AND LEAVITTS- Having established my own ex- istence in the first chapter, with some account of the immediate environ- ment around my childhood and youth, it is proper next to consider the antecedents. Every person, by inheritance, is but a kind of net re- sult of thousands of ancestors, both for his physical and mental structure. We understand heredity, as yet, very little in its details; but of its general effect there can be no doubt. The puzzle is to reconcile multiplicity with unity ; the individual is one, his forefathers are innumerable. Is he, am I, a composite photograph of the multitude, or has some syndi- cate, or some powerful antecedent unit, impressed on me characteristics not of the generality, but specially traceable to him or them ? I incline to the latter alternative, not only from a general survey of the field of heredity, but from special facts in my own genealogy. The Sambornes of England, who came over with their grandfather, the Puritan ejected minister, Rev. Stephen Bachiler, were purely Eng- lish, so far as known; but possibly Norman rather than Saxon, and per- haps with a comparatively recent French admixture, through the Bach- ilers, with their kindred, the Merci- ers, Priaulx, etc. The Leavitts, my mother's ancestors, were also purely English, but from more northern and eastern counties, — Lincoln or Yorkshire, instead of Wilts and Hampshire. No Irish strain ap- pears in either line until some gene- rations after the migration. Bach- ilers and Sambornes and Husseys, all kindred, were among the found- ers of Hampton; Leavitts, of two different stocks, were among the founders of the next town, Exeter. A certain connection by affinity seems to have existed between my ancestor, Thomas Leavitt, and his pastor, Rev. John Wheelwright, who, with the first Wentworth, and two- score others, founded Exeter. But nothing not English appears in that line; the wife of the first Leavitt being the daughter of John Bland, a good English name. Now about 1650 there appeared in Hampton, N. H., a stalwart Irish- man, Philip Towle, called a "sea- man," and of course a Protestant, who in 1657 married a daughter of the same Isabella Bland from whom, through the Leavitts, I am de- scended. At the age of sixty-two he had a son Caleb, who mar- ried Zipporah, daughter of Anthony Brackett (an Indian fighter whom the Indians slew), and had eleven children, all but one leaving families. Caleb's son Philip, grandson of Cap- tain Brackett, married Lydia Dow, and had a daughter Esther, who married Benjamin Leavitt, great- grandson of Isabella Bland, and therefore second cousin of Esther FRANK /•'. SANBORN. Towle. About the same time my otlu-r great-grandfather, Benjamin Sanborn, married Anna Towle, sec- ond cousin of Esther, so that by those two marriages the Towle in- fluence gave me a double chance of inheritance. From the Towles came the great height and size which some of the Sanborns and some of the Leavitts have since shown. A son ot Anna Hon. Moses Norris, Jr. (Towle) Sanborn, my great-uncl< John, was about the stature of Abraham Lincoln, and ot enormous strength. From Esther's daughter, Comfort Leavitt, who married Moses Xorris of Pittsfield, my mother's cousin. Xorris the Congressman and Senator, derived his height and physi- cal strength. My own stature, and such strength as I have had, evi- dently came from the same source, tor neither the Sanborns nor the Leavitts, in their own lines, were above the common size. Moreover, this slight Irish admix- ture seems to have introduced a gay and active turn of mind, often v< ing on eccentricity, which was hardly natural either to the Sanborn, or the Leavitt stock. From old Parson Bachiler the Sanborns might have derived, and doubtless did, vigor and independence, which were his traits: but liveliness, ambition, black hair and fair complexions, with an occa- sional turn for music, and escapades, came to the Leavitts from old Philip Towle. When an old lady, recently, look- ing at me carefully, and hearing me talk with something of the Hibernian liveliness, said to me: " You were intended for a rogue," I said to my- self, as Emerson did on a different occasion, " This is a saying in which I find a household relationship." Therefore, when Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Da.ll, and others fancy thej in me some outward signs of descent from Daniel Webster's " black Bach- iler " ancestor, the old parson. I cannot deny the fact: but know in my own mind that my complexion and physical traits come from the Leavitts. When Esther Leavitt en- tered the Hampton Falls meeting- house with her sons Jonathan, Reu- ben, Brackett, and her daughter Lydia, for whom my mother was named, she could not help showing pride in her handsome children ; and her deep religions sentiment did not make her regard it as a sin. My mother, as I remember her, to the of sixty hail the traditional Irish beauty jet-black hair of great length and thickness, clear blue eyes with long lashes, and a complexion of clear white and red. which descended to several of her children. Others ot FRANK B. SANBORN. 23 them followed the Sanborn type, with equally fair complexions, but with- out the sparkling eyes and thick dark hair. There was an early admixture from another source in the Sanborn line, by the marriage of Mary Gove (daughter of Edward Gove, the pris- oner of London Tower) to Joseph Samborne, son of the first John, and the first of the name to reside where I was born. Although Edward Gove's descendants became peaceful Quakers in considerable number, his own temper was far from peaceful at times, and he had involved him- self in a dispute with his powerful neighbor, Nathaniel Weare, who was long active in the magistracy of New Hampshire. Notwithstanding this, Gove was often chosen to important local office, was a captain in the mili- tia, and a man of property enough to make the confiscation of it a mat- ter of interest to Governor Cranfield, who in 1683 procured his arrest, trial and sentence to death for high trea- son. It was an absurd name for his offence, which was an armed demon- stration against James II and the Tories who then held sway in the new Province of the Weares, Cutts, Husseys and Sambornes. He was sent to England under the escort of Edward Randolph, the great enemy of Puritan rule in New r Eng- land, and lodged in the Tower under strict guard, about the time that the leaders of his party in England, Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, were imprisoned there, preliminary to their execution. But Gove was soon seen to be a harmless man, and nobod) T in England, even in that bloody time, urged his beheading. His neighbor, Weare, visiting England in the in- terest of the planters and merchants of the province, secured the resigna- tion of Cranfield through the influ- ence of Savile, Lord Halifax ; and soon after, the pardon and return of Gove to that part of Hampton which is now Seabrook. He recov- ered his forfeited estate, some part of wdiich seems to have come to his daughter by way of dowry. She was married at the age of sixteen to my ancestor, two short months only before her father's sentence to death, and in the foot company of Hampton which arrested him, and put his mounted men in custody, her father- in-law, Lieut. John Samborne, was an officer. Thirty years before, when this Lieut. John and Edward Gove were young men, they had joined Sam- borne's uncle, Christopher Hussey of Hampton, in a petition to the Massa- chusetts General Court in favor of Robert Pike of Salisbury (where Gove w r as then living), who had given offence by his free speech to the Puritan oligarchy. For this Hussey and Samborne were fined, but Gove seems to have escaped notice. He had been a member of the Provincial Assembly just before his arrest in 1683, and was a lead- ing man. After his return to Hampton he was chosen, along with Weare and others, to frame a temporary consti- tution for the Province, after the imprisonment of Sir Edmund Andros, and his name is signed, January 24, 1690, to the only copy of this brief and sensible document known to exist. Little more than a year later (May 29, 1691) he died. Various legends and traditions survived him, and are still kept alive by credulity ?4 FRANK' /,'. S A N/1 OR N. or ignorance, — that he was a hard drinker, was insane after leaving the Tower, and believed himself to haw- been slowly poisoned in his food there. His important offices before and after his imprisonment discredit these stories. He was probably a person of excitable and rather eccen- tric temper, and in other respects a good citizen, of more than ordinary intelligenoe. His son and his ser- vant, William Healey, joined in his demonstration, and were long in prison for it. His contemporary. Lieutenant Sam borne, had been briefly imprisoned by Cranfield in 1684, for refusing to pay quitrents on his land in Hamp- ton, which Robert Mason claimed to own. He escaped from the Hampton jail, probably by the connivance of the jailer. I thought of these imprisoned an- tors when the I nited States Sen- ate had me illegally arrested in i860, but I was discharged by the Massa- chusetts court the next day, without :^oing to prision. I have since visited main - prisons as their official inspector. By my maternal grandmother's line (Hannah Melcher, descended from Edward Melcher of Portsmouth) I am connected by descent with nearly all those early Hampton fami- lies from whom I am not descended through the Sanborns, Leavitts and Towles. But I still hold the chief part of my heredity as coming from the Lcavitts and their Irish kin. My Othei ancestors were yeomen, deacons, petty officers in the towns, and industrious farmers tilling their own land: but the Leavitts, after the Irish infusion, began to get more education and push their fortunes farther. My grandfather, Thomas Leavitt, and his father, Benjamin, were land surveyors, as George Washington, St. John de Creve- coeur, John Brown and Henry Tho- reau were,- a pursuit that implied education, accuracy, and some knowl- edge of the world. 'Squire Tom's oldest brother, Jonathan Leavitt, was an officer in the Revolution, after- wards a merchant, and one of the first citizens of Passamaquoddy, now Eastport, Me. There he came into acquaintance with the Lesdernier, or Delesdernier, family, of Swiss origin, and still keeping up the French lan- guage, which was that of their na- tive Geneva. When the celebrated Albert Galla- tin, adventuring to America in 1780, reached Boston from Gloucester, where he landed, he was taken in charge by the Lesderniers, went with some of them to Machias, and spent a year on the Maine coast, trading with Indians, paddling in canoes, and learning English from the Les- derniers and their friends. Then he got an appointment in Harvard Col- lege to teach French, and soon found his way to Virginia and Pennsylva- nia, where he became a Democratic leader. The Leavitts were also Democrats, as most of the Revolutionary soldiers in New Hampshire were, and my grandfather, appointed a justice of the peace by John I.an-don. soon became a local leader of the party in his region. A.S a young man he was active and gay, and his sons, Ben- son, Joseph and Anthony Bracken (named by his Grandmother Esther for her ancestor, the slain Indian fighter) had the same activity, and soon left the little town to seek for- tune elsewh( FRANK B. SANBORN. 25 Joseph was to be the heir of his childless uncle, Brackett Leavitt, in Pittsfield, where his cousin Norris, afterwards senator, was growing up and getting an education. But the uncle was cut off by sudden death, and the boy returned home till he was old enough to be taken in charge \>y another uncle, his mother's broth- er, in Boston. Benson also went to Boston ; in time the two brothers became merchants in a prosperous way at the North End, and in 1843, when I first visited my cousins, their children, they were living in the two tenements of a double house in Fleet Street, not far from Father Taylor's Seamen's Chapel. A few years after Dr. Edward Beecher was living in Charter Street, opposite \\\y Uncle Benson's house at that time, and I called on Mrs. Stowe there, fresh from her success in " Uncle Tom's Cabin." A certain sad romance, which could not extinguish my Uncle Brackett's natural gaiety of heart, followed his efforts to establish him- self in the world. He married early and migrated to Ann Arbor in Michi- gan ; was attacked there by the fever of the region, nearly died, and re- turned with his wife and son to his father's house to recover health. There I remember him with his violin, playing and singing — the family all having that gift — and amusing a child like me. Then he disappeared, going this time to Orange, near Hanover, N. H., where he bought a farm and carried it on without much success. Presently'he tried a new move, and w r ent to Illi- nois, some ten years after Ellery Channing had done the same thing in a more northern count v. The California gold fever in i848-'49 attacked my uncle, too ; he left his wife and young family near Peoria, 111., and crossed the Plains to Cali- fornia, where he was prospering, as he wrote ; but presently tidings of him ceased. Long afterwards it was learned that he had been murdered, and his property taken. Not even the place of his death is certainly known to his children, one of whom, Thomas Leavitt, has been a state official of Illinois, after an honorable career in the Civil War. Another Thomas Leavitt, son of my Uncle Joseph, and named, like Brackett's son, for his grandfather, was killed in an Indian fight in what is now Dakota, as a lieutenant of an Iow r a regiment, enlisted for the Civil War, but turned aside to fight the Sioux in the Northwest. His father, whom I was said much to resemble in stature and features, had died of consumption after a long illness, when I was about sixteen. This uncle had the same cheerful turn of mind, and endured his mal- ady w r ith great patience. My grandfather, the old 'Squire, born in 1774, was by 1844 verging on seventy ; the loss of his sons, the illness of his wife, and the compara- tive neglect of his affairs by his ab- sorption in politics, where he did not find the official promotion he hoped for, had combined with increasing age to diminish his natural high spirits. He was somewhat given to bewailing the degeneracy of the times ; his sons, who faithfully looked after his affairs, were Whigs, his grandsons, Charles and myself, were anti-slavery youths ; he remained a Jackson Democrat, as did my father. This caused the old gentleman some 26 FRANK /.'. SANBORN. pangs, but his kindness of heart and his interest in the family continued. !!• visited his descendants in Huston. and carried his snuffbox into their parlors and those of their friends. < )n his last visit, about [850, he -at for his daguerreotype, as lie had sat more than forty years before, to his Carolina friend. James Akin, and this final portrait, as I chiefly remember him, adorns this page. He died in T Leavitt, /Et 75. [852, when I was fitting for college at Exeter, and I was struck, in look- ing at his dead face in the coffin, to see so much of the youthful expres- sion there wit 771 which Akin had caught in his slight sketch of [808. 'file fair and smooth check, the i li cut features, had taken on an earlier expression : and much of this youth- ful look was afterwards reproduced in the features and air of my son Victor, who has investigated the genealogy of his ancestors i n Old England and New. So much for the chapter of hered- ity. I quite agree, however, with old Master John Sullivan, father of two state governors, John of New Hamp- shire (the General), and James of Massachusetts, and grandson, as he said, of four Irish countesses, that men must be valued for what they are, not for what their forefathers may have been. Writing at the age ol to his son, the General, the retired schoolmaster quoted a Latin pair of distichs, which in English run thus : Was Adam all men's -irt.- . and Eve their mother ? Then how can one be nobler than another? Ennobled are we not by sire or dame, Till life and conduct give tis noble faun . Philosophers, who seek to know the causes of things, are apt to be inter- ested, however, in the manifold influ- ences that make men individuals, no two alike, even in the same house hold, — and it is in the ancestry that we must look for certain determining causes, before environment and edu- cation begin to do their modifying work on the newly-arrived inhabitant of earth. Of that environment it is now time to say something. As I re- marked in a chapter on " The New Hampshire Way of Life," which my son, Mr. Victor Sanborn of Kcmil- worth, 111., induced me to write for his copious " Sanborn Genealogy " : "for many years the bulk of the New Hampshire people were farmers arm laborers ; the mechanics, except in the largest towns, worked on their own land, or sonic neigh- bor's, a part of the year ; and the parish minister, the country doi and lawyer, and the village school- master all had farms, large or small. Originally, each parish had its par- sonage or manse, to which more oi less land was attached ; this the par- son and his sons, with a hired man. FRANK B. SANBORN. 27 cultivated, like his parishioners. The shoemaker who made my first pair of boots had a few acres, at- tached to the old house in which he lived and had his bench ; the black- smith at the corner of the road might also be a farmer ; and the carpenters and cabinet-makers, if they prospered at all, became landowners. At first there may have been less of this ' ter- ritorial democracy,' as Lord Beacons- field styled it, in New Hampshire than in Plymouth and some other colonies. A considerable tendency manifested itself among the Cutts, Champernowns, Atkinsons, Wal- drons, Gilmans, Dudleys, Weares, etc., to establish a distinct, class of gentry, such as existed in England ; and the Wentworths and their con- nections maintained an ofshoot of the Anglican church in Portsmouth, as did the royal governors and others in Boston. But the influences of a new country, combining with Calvin- ism, especially where the settlers were chiefly from the yeomanry and tradesmen of England and Northern Ireland, as in New Hampshire, soon brought about a virtual democracy. Education, however, was always highly valued there, and most of the towns in Rockingham county had a learned minister or two, preaching to the majority of the people, catechis- ing the children in church and school, and often promoting the higher edu- cation by opening libraries, giving instruction in Latin, and encouraging the brighter boys to go to the acad- emy or to college. ' ' In my own town much was done in this way by Dr. Langdon, a re- tired president of Harvard College, and his successor in the ministry, Rev. Jacob Abbot, a first cousin of Dr. Abbot of Exeter Academy,— both good scholars of wide reading and public spirit, who from 1781 to 1827 preached in the meeting house near by, and lived in the old parson- age, which was burnt in 1859. At the southern end of the town, after Parson Abbot's retirement, the Bap- tists set up their ' Rockingham Acad- emy, ' a sectarian high school, but not specially sectarian ; so that for a town of 700 people and small wealth, Hampton Falls was well equipped with the means of education. " The old-fashioned district school was in full swing when I was a boy ; in it everything might be taught, from the alphabet upwards, to both sexes and many ages ; there might be pupils of 20 taught in winter by a youth of 15; often by a' college stu- dent, released in the winter term to pay his college bills by the money earned as schoolmaster. Francis Bo wen, the professor and author, while a student in Harvard, taught in our ' Red Schoolhouse,' and boarded with Deacon Dane, rny grandfather's cousin, whose father had inherited Dr. Langdon 's globes and wig. The advantages of such a school were ob- vious ; for though the teacher might have 40 pupils in 30 classes, to be taught in 340 minutes, at the rate of 13 minutes to each class, — yet the 3-ounger learned so much from hear- ing their elders recite, that perhaps as much knowledge, irregularly gained, got into the heads of bright scholars as is now insinuated more methodically by young women skilled in the newer modes of teaching. The terms were short, and arranged to meet the necessities of farm-labor, in which most children, even girls, took some part. They weeded gar- dens, picked apples and potatoes, husked corn, carried grain to mill, and with their mothers did much of the marketing, both buying and sell- ing. In berry time they gathered raspberries, huckleberries, blueber- ries, wild blackberries, cranberries and barberries ; and the women of poorer families carried these about to the farmhouses for sale, taking in payment provisions or clothing for their families, as did the Barrington basket-making gypsies, in their semi- annual rounds. One of the latter class, ' Hippin Pat Leathers ' (a woman) of Whittier's ' Yankee Zin- cali,' used to whine at my grand- father's door, ' Haint ye got nerry •s FRANK /?. SANBORN. nold jacket, nerry nold gaownd, nerry nold pair traowses fur tu gimme fur this "ere basket ? ' The huckle- berry women from Seabrook carried away from the same door salt pork in a pail, butter and cheese, and other means of stocking the Byfield larder." All this I have seen still surviving ; but the worst of the rum-drinking times had yielded, before my recollec- tion, to the efforts of the early tem- perance reformers. I have seen simi- lar cases, but it was in Essex county that Arthur Gilman, the architect (born in Newbury port), used to place the scene of his hero who went about sawing wood for the "forehanded folks," and took his pay in rum. One Saturday he had worked for the village 'squire, and was offered for the task a pint of the beverage. ' 'Oh, now, 'Squire, can't ye make it a quart? Haow kin a man keep Sun- day on a pinto' rum : " " Nonsense, Jim; you haven't earned more 'n a pint, — can't you keep the Sabbath on that much?" "Wa-al, 'Squire, ef you say so, I s'pose I must : but jest think on 't, — haow will it be kep' ? " The seafaring class', who were rather numerous in the old town of Hampton, and in Seabrook, Salisbury and Rye, were specially liable to the tippling habit ; and when they went long voyages were apt to come back with their morals injured. Hut they were notable seamen, and great fight- ers when any naval war gave them a chance. My mother's cousin, Lewis Leavitt, perhaps named lor Lewis -dernier oi Quoddy, where In- lived, was famous in the annals of the family for his skill in navigating from Eastport to Boston in the worst weather and the darkest night. Whether this anecdote of him is fad or fiction I cannot say with confi- dence ; but it was told and believed among his kindred. He was skip- per of a coaster, which in the War of 1812 was captured by a British frig- ate. A prize crew was put on board, and she was headed for Halifax. Captain Leavitt watched his chance, and at night, when only the watch and the man at the wheel were on deck, he applied his great strength to them, threw them successively down the hatchway, fastened the hatches down, took the wheel him- self, and steered his schooner into a friendly port. He was Esther Towle's grandson. In simple communities such as I re- member, maiden aunts were a power and a blessing. One of them, in the neighborhood of Boston, once told Theodore Parker, "The position of a maiden aunt is not to be despised, Mr. Parker ; without maiden aunts the world could not be peopled, sir." In the nursing and pupilage of New Hampshire children the aunt bore a great part. I had three maiden aunts, my mother's youngest sister, who stayed at home and kept her father's house, and after his death carried on the farm ; and two elder sisters of my father, who lived with him in the old house where they were born. Aunt Dolly, his half sister, had been brought up, as I have men- tioned, by her grandmother, Anne Towle Sanborn, who humored her, but kept her in a narrow dom< circle, from which courtship and marriage never emancipated her. She had the ways of the iSth cen- tury, just as she had its dishes and waiming- pans, and ideas of costume. Never did she go farther from the houses of her relatives than to Ken- FRANK B. SANBORN. 29 sington, whence her mother, whom she never knew, had come ; even Exeter, the " Suffield " of Miss Alice Brown, was almost unknown to her, though but five miles away. She was purely domestic ; had certain cooking " resaits " that had come down to her, and that nobody else could manage ; sat in her room or lay in her bed, and knew the ownership of every horse that passed the house, by his step. "I wonder where Major Godfrey was gwine this mornin' ? His horse went down the Hampton road about half-past four." She watched the passer-by with an interest hard for the young to under- stand ; the narrow limits of her exis- tence developed curiosity in a micro- scopic degree. The wayfarer, though a fool, as she was apt to think him, was not an indifferent object to her. She kept track, too, of the minutest family incidents ; would remind me the next morning, when I came in late at night from some visit, or a private cooking-party in the pine- woods, "The clock struck two jest after you shet the door, Frank." But she had sympathy with youth, and withheld such revelations from the head of the family; though you would not have said that discretion was her strong point. She outlived all her brothers and sisters but one, and was a neighborhood oracle as to births, deaths and marriages, without ever leaving the fireside in her latest years. Aunt Rachel was a very different person. Born five years later (1789) and dying some years earlier, she had a most sympathetic, pathetic and at- tractive character. Fair and delicate of complexion, blue-eyed, with pleas- ing features, a sweet, rather sad voice, she spent her later years (when alone I knew her), in caring for others. As a child she had been a favorite at Dr. Langdon's, who lived just across a little common and died when she was but eight years old ; but the family, including Miss Betsy Lang- don, the granddaughter, remained in the parish longer. A little Italian engraving from the parsonage was always hung in her ' 'parlor chamber. ' ' She continued intimate at the parson- age, in the time of the Abbots ; and and their children, of whom there were many, grew up under her eye, and were cared for by her in their earlier and after years. Aunt Rachel was skilled in all household arts, par- ticularly in spinning, weaving and gardening ; had her beds of sage and lavender, her flowers of the older kinds, introduced from Dr. Langdon's garden, I suppose ; and was the maker of simple remedies from herbs, delicious wines from currants, and metheglin from honey and other for- gotten ingredients. Mr. Treadwell's "Herb-Gatherer," that pleasing poem which he sent from Connecticut to Ellery Channing, and which Chan- ning revised until it seemed almost his own, and gave to me to print in the Springfield Republican, had touches that recalled my dear aunt to me, after many years. Aunt Rachel had her romance in youth ; a pretty creature, she had been wooed by one who, wandering about in the wider world little seen by her, found some richer or more bril- liant match, and broke off the engage- ment. This happened long before I was born, and I never saw him ; but I believe the fine musket in which I learned to insert the bullets I had run in the wooden mould, and sometimes 3° FRANK />. SANIWRN. hit the target with them, was his once, anre vailing) from her mother, my grandmother Sanborn, who died eight years before I was born. She per- formed this duty cheerfully : had taken care of her own mother in her last illness, then of her father and i ; and of many invalids who died or recovered. These charities called her much from home, and I saw far less of her than of Aunt Dolly, her half-sister, wdio was as much a part of the old house as the oak arm-chair in the kitchen, or the chimney corner cat. lint she impressed my imagina- tion more ; she was gentle by nature and by grace, and deserves not to be forgotten. Had I been blessed with a daughter, I would have named her Rachel. I have mentioned her spinning. ( M the hundred farmhouses in the town when I was ten years old, more than fifty must have had looms, and all had the large spinning wheel for wool spinning. The garret of every one contained disused (lax wheels, al- though a few farmers still grew llax, lovely with its blue (lowers. But all kept sheep, and sheared them in June ; then had the wool made up in great bundles, wrapt in old linen sheets, spun and woven by an earlier generation, and pinned up with thorns from the bush ol white thorn in the pasture, to be carried to the carding- mill. It was then brought home in "rolls " spun into yarn by the women of the house, and woven into cloth or knit into socks, buskins and mittens for the family. This homespun cloth was then sent to the " fulling-mill " to be dyed and fulled : finally brought back to be cut by the neighborhood tailor and made up into suits for the family, by the "tailoress." who went about from house to house for the purpose. Of the children at the district school, not more than one in twenty wore any- thing in winter but this home-made cloth. In summer they wore the cheap cotton from the New England factories, and calicoes of the "ninepenny" vari- ety. The boys mostly went barefoot till twelve, and the girls sometimes. Gradually, after 1840, the town be- came dotted with shoe shops, where the young men and some of their elders made sale shoes for the manu- facturers of Lynn and Haverhill ; the women in the houses "binding" the uppers before the soles were stitched on in the shoe shops. My brother and I learned this art ; he to perfec- tion, I rather awkwardly ; and it was from the profits of my first box of shoes that I paid the cost of my foot journey to the White Mountains, in September, 1850. Soon after this I began to prepare for Harvard College, at the suggestion of dear friends, and had no difficulty in entering a year in advance, in July, [852. Up to that time I had mostly lived at home in the surroundings described, taking part in the labors and the leisure por- FRANK B. SANBORN. 3i trayed in my first chapter. The ac- companying portrait, from a daguer- reotype taken in 1853, represents the student and lover that I was, during this period of my ' ' obscure and golden youth," as Thoreau says. Amid many anxieties and mortifications, I was happy, by reason of the romantic love which my next chapter will relate. It was a part, and an idyllic part, of my New Hampshire life ; and with its close I became a citizen of Massachusetts and the world. Frank Sanborn (August, 1853), /Et. 21 CHAPTER MOUTHFUL I.OVi: AND MARRIAGE. Up to my eighteenth year I had lived fancy free, though very suscep- tible to the beauty of girls, and slight- ly attached, at school and in the society of my companions, to this maiden or that who had fine eyes, a fair complexion and a social gift. To one pair of sisters, indeed, I was specially drawn by their loveliness and gentle ways. Toward the younger of the two, of my own age almost ex- actly, I had early manifested this in- terest when my years could not have exceeded seven. They had come with their cousin, who was also my cousin, to spend the afternoon and take tea with my two sisters ; it may have been the first time I had noticed the sweet beauty of Sarah C, who was the granddaughter of the former par- son of the parish. So strongly was I impressed by it. that while they were taking tea by themselves, boys not being expected to enjoy their com- pany, I went to my strong box, which contained all my little stock of silver, took from it a shining half dollar, the largest coin I had, and deftly trans- ferred it to the reticule of Sarah, hanging on the back of a chair in the " parlor chamber," all without telling anybody what I had done. The two girls (aged seven and ten) went home unsuspecting what hail occurred, but in emptying the reticule that night, the coin was found, and Sarah know- ing nothing about it, the gift was sent back to the house of the tea- party, and my little scheme of endow- ing her with my worldly goods was discovered, to my confusion. There had been other fancies, but nothing serious until the year i when I was just eighteen. Xor hail I taken the burden of life very seri- ously in other directions. I had formed no scheme of life : my educa- tion had been going on as already described, with no particular plan on my part or that of my family. My mother's cousin, Senator Xorris, be- ing in Congress from 184;, until his death in 1855, it had been suggested that he should appoint me a cadet in the West Point military school; but I had no turn for a soldier's life, and nothing was done to obtain his pat- ronage, which my grandfather, a vet- eran Democrat, could have seemed, perhaps. So I drifted along, working on the farm perhaps half my time, studying, shooting, wandering about the pastures and woods with comrades; and spending my evenings in lively company, playing chess, cards, or, for a few years in the summer, joining a cooking club which met weekly in the thick woods far from houses, and got up a fine supper of chicken and coffee, with a dessert of sponge cake ; which one of our number, afterwards Capt. John Sanborn Godfrey, of Gen- eral Hooker's staff in the Civil War, had the secret of preparing to perfec- tion. This entertainment had begun with FRANK B. SANBORN. 33 my schoolmates, William Healey and Charles Brown, and two or three stu- dents of the Rockingham Academy, Cavender of St. Louis, Yanderveer of New York, and another, but was then transferred to an unfrequented pine wood, near the boundaries of Exeter, Hampton and Hampton Falls, and included two Tiltons and other school- mates on that part of the Exeter road. After I left home to enter college the Exeter congressman, Oilman Mars- ton, afterwards a general in the war, and some others from Exeter were admitted to the mysteries, but I never met with them later than 1850, I think. A more exacting literary society had been established about 1848 in the upper hall of the schoolhouse where I had been a pupil, under the name of the "Anti-Tobacco Society," at the instance, I suppose, of the good minister of the Unitarian parish. We held debates, and soon established a MS. monthly journal, Star of Social Reform, which received contributions, supposed to be anonymous, from the members, male or female, and these were read at the monthly meetings. I early became a contributor, both in prose and verse, and in the summer of 1849 wrote a burlesque on the poem of " Festus," then much read in New England, in mild ridicule of the English author, Philip Bailey. The following winter the editor of the Star (now Mrs. S. H. Folsom of Winchester, Mass.), visiting her friend, Miss Ariana Smith Walker at Peterborough, showed her the "Festus" verses and some others, which she was good enough to like, and sent them to her dearest friend, Miss Ednah Eittlehale of Boston, the late Mrs. E. D. Cheney, with this note: 3 March 30. 1850. I don't know that I should have written you today if I had not wanted to send you the enclosed. It purports to be a newly discovered scene from "Festus," and is written by a person who does not altogether like the book, as you will see from the last part, especially. I want you to read it first, and then read the little note which will tell you about the author, /think it is capital; tell me how it strikes you. Please return it to me in your next. A. S. W. A few weeks later, April 26, she added : I send you herewith some poetry of Frank S., the author of the new scene from "Festus.'' The little ballad, is, I think, very pretty. He called it " Night Thoughts," but I like "The Taper " better, — do not you? And now I will tell you that he is a Hampton Falls boy, and that his name is Sanborne. I will send you all I can of his writing, and I want you to write a criticism upon the " Festus," etc., for the Star, a paper written by the young people at H. Falls. They shan't know who writes it ; but won't you sometime send me a sort of laughing notice of this " new Poet"? I want 3 t ou to, very much. Do you not get a pretty picture of the maid " who her needle plies," etc.? It reminded me of your " Gretchen." The ballad was the subject, after- wards, of a commendatory notice in the Star by A. S. W. which pleased the young poet, and led him to antici- pate the arrival of the critic; who also had some curiosity to see the youth about whom her friend had told her many things. When they first saw each other in the small church at Hampton Falls, she was sitting be- side her friend in the pew, and I was opposite, facing them, but only 30 feet away, so that our eyes met. She wrote on her folding fan, with a pin, " I don't dare look at Frank S.; he- has a poetic face." In her next let- ter to Ednah she said (July 22, 1850): I have seen F. S., the young poet, — a face like the early portrait of Raphael, only Frank's eyes and hair are very dark. I don't care, now I have seen him, to speak or meet with him. [In fact two days after he called on her and was welcome.] When we began to talk earnestly I 34 FRANK B. SANBORN. Birthplace of Georg ■ everytmng else in my surprise and pleas- ure. I was astonished and delighted. There charm about everything he said, bd he has thought more wholly for himself than any one I ever met. ... In bonks, too, I teas astonished at his preferences, ft seemed strange thai -hould be the favorite poet of an uncultivated, I should say, self-cultivated boy; but so it is, and he talked of him and of the poems as 1 never heard any one talk, after his own fashion. ... He stayed until n, and yet I was neither weary nor sleepy, rathei refreshed and invigorated. The "laughing notice " of the Fes- tus scenes, obligingly written by Miss Littlehale. and sent to the editor of the Star, was this, followed by Miss Walker's comment on the ballad: The following not nt effusions we the liberty of quoting foi tin bi aefit of the ers of the Star. This first, a very brief ■ on the London Enquirei I from a notice of "The Supplementary Scene to tus," which appiai.d in the [uly (1849) num- • the Slat the second " Nik'ht Thoughts," from a source less foreign. The New Scene or Fes tus. Tin- burlesque is capital; the similes are some of them so like " FestUS " one could easi- ly cheat another into the reality of certain Who this young devotee of St. Crispin is, we cannot divine. The lines show an admi- rable tact at verse making; we hope t" something which has the writer's soul in it, too. So promising a genius should be cultivated, not spoiled. I have elsewhere spoken of this love- ly vision of youth and spiritual grace first fairly seen by me in the Hamp- ton Falls church, July 20, 1850. She was the daughter of James Walker of Peterborough, a first cousin of Presi- dent Walker of Harvard College, and her mother, Sarah Smith, was the favorite niece of Judge Smith of Exe- ter. She had died in 1841, and Mr. Walker had remarried a daughter of Rev. Jacob Abbot of Hampton Falls. A lima, named for Judge Smith's FRANK B. SANBORN. 35 daughter, was born in the Carter house on the steep Peterborough hill- side, overlooking the river Contoocook from the northeast, and commanding, as all the hills thereabout do, a noble prospect of Monadnock. Her brother, George Walker, afterwards bank commissioner of Massachusetts and consul-general of the United States at Paris, was born five years earlier in the same house, and the brother and sister tripped down this hill in early childhood, near the mansion of their uncle, Samuel Smith, the judge's manufacturing brother, to attend the private school of Miss Abbot, now Mrs. Horatio Wood of Lowell, whose younger sister James Walker married in 1844. Her uncle, Rev. Dr. Abiel Abbot, pastor at Peterborough, had earlier in his ministry, at Coventry in Connecticut, persuaded Jared Sparks, the future historian, then a carpenter in Mr. Abbot's parish, to go to the Phillips Acadeni}' at Exeter in 1809. Mr. Abbot going to make a visit to his brother, the successor of President Langdon in the Hampton Falls pul- pit, slung the young man's box un- der his parson's chaise, while Sparks himself walked all the way to Exeter; whither his box preceded him, to the care of Dr. Benjamin Abbot (a cousin of the Hampton Falls pastor), then Principal of the famous Academy. It was this intermarriage between the Abbot and Walker families that led, as above mentioned, to my first ac- quaintance with Anna Walker. Her stepmother had a sister, Mrs. Cram, married in their father's old parish, and living next door to the old house then occupied by Mrs. Joseph San- born, my uncle's widow, with her two children, who were cousins of Mrs. Cram's children. Indeed the two houses once had belonged to the Cram family, with only a garden between them; the later built of the two being more than a hundred years old, and soon to give place to a new house, in which many of my inter- views with Miss Walker were after- wards held. But the old house, in its large parlor, was the memorable scene of our first interview, briefly described above by Anna herself. In a fuller entry in her journal she said : F. stayed until n and yet I was neither weary nor sleepy, but rather refreshed and invigora- ted. He excused himself for sta5 r ing so late, but said the time had passed rapidly. C. seemed very much surprised that he had spoken so freely to a stranger ; I think he himself will wonder at it. The conversation covered so many subjects that I could not help laughing on looking back upon it; he might have discov- ered the great fault of my mind, a want of method in my thoughts, as clearly as I saw his to be a want of hope. But talking with a new per- son is to me like going for the first time into a gallery of pictures. We wander from one paint- ing to another, wishing to see all, lest some- thing finest should escape us, and in truth see- ing no one perfectly and appreciatingly. Only after many visits and long familiarity can we learn which are really the best, most suggestive and most full of meaning ; and then it is before two or three that one passes the hours. So we wander at first from one topic of conversation to another, until we find which are those reaching farthest and deepest, and then it is these of which we talk most. My interest in Frank S. is peculiar; it is his intellectual and spiritual nature, and not himself that I feel so much drawn to. I can't say it rightly in words, but I never was so strongly interested in one where the feeling was so little personal. This was by no means my own case. I had the strongest personal interest in this young lady, whose life had been so unlike my own, but who had reached in many points the same conclusions, literary, social and religious, which were my own, so far as a youth of less than nineteen can be said to have reached conclu- sions. We met again and again, and 36 FRANK />'. SANBORN. discussed not only Shelley, but Plato and Emerson, of whom we were both eager readers. She had received from her father the winter before Emer- son's " Representative Men," just after she had been reading Plato with Ednah I.ittlehalc, and she was also familiar with several of the other characters in that volume, — her stud- ies in German having advanced fur- ther than mine. Two years earlier she had read Emerson's first book, " Na- ture," more than once, and at the age of [8 thus wrote of it to Ednah : April i, 1848. [ am glad you hav< nail tun-.'' [t has long been "in- of my books, it lie- .a this moment on my little table, ami m-i_ dom does a day pass without my finding th< n thing that chimes with tin day's thought. Bmerson always gives me a feeling >>i quiet, simple strength. I go to him, therefore, when I am weak ami feeble,- not when I am full of unrest ami disquiet. My soul is at times the echo of his; like the echo, however, it can only give back a single word. I how in quiet 1 his grander thought; but, like him, I do not therefore yield my own. The light of his spirit does notdazzle my ey< - so that all seems dark elsewhere; on the contrary, the world around me, reflecting hack that rail, smiles in a new-horn glory. 1 love the whol< earth more, that 1 know him more truly. ( )f the crayon by Morse, here en- graved, which remained in Boston some- weeks after it was finished, that winter of [847 -'48, she thus wrote to Ednah, February <>, [8 i s : Walkel is veiv enthusiastic about Morse and the picture. "It is almost too fine," I rom uliat In- told me I should think it decidedly the finest of Worst s pictures. Tell him I could not have been more glad if the pic- F B. SANBORN IN COLLEGE, 1853 38 FRANK' />'. SANBORN. ture bad been my own. Greenough, the sculp- tOT, Bays it 18 the finest crayon ever dime in Boston. Shall I tell you what I felt when I read George 's letter?- a deep regret that I was not beautiful. I could wish myself lovely/ for Morse - sake, foi the sake of his fame; because then the piciure would have been liner. No one ever found this portrait other than beautiful. When I first saw her, two years after Alpheus Morse had finished it, her expression had changed from the serene, saintly look which Morse depicted, to one of more vivacity and gayety, which in her periods of comparative health was her natural expression, and which made her even more charming than in the earlier portrait. She had just reached [8 when it was drawn, and it was made for her brother, herself re- taining only a daguerre from it. Our second evening was that of August i, and this is the record of it in her journal : Last night F. S. was here again. We had been wishing he would come but did not expect him. He was in a fine mood, but one or two things I regret in the evening's talk. He had spoken of many things earnestly, and at last he mentioned James Richardson's proposal that he should enter into the ministry. We all laughed. I wanted to say something of his future life; but I seemed to have no right. He said "That is the last thing I should choie." "No," said I, with decision, "preaching is not your mission." I felt as if I must go on, but I n strained myself and was silent. He must have thought we ridiculed the idea of his becom- ing a minister, because we thought him un- equal tO the work. I did not feel this so fully then as I did after he was gone; but it hurts me to have so repulsed him, for I think be wished us to say something more — to talk with him of himself and of his future. O golden opportu- nity! I feai it is Inst and will not come again. We talked of many things — I more of pie than formerly. His mind is analytic, the in- tellect predominating and governing the heart ; feelings do not often get the mastery. He is calm and searching, with a very keen insight into the merits or demerits of a style. This is characteristic of his mind. He is unsparingly just to his own thought. He is not at all a dreamer; or, if he is ever so, his dreams are not enervating. He is vigorous, living, strong. Calmness of thought is a large element of his nature; it extends to the feelings as well as the intellect. Yet there is fire under the ice, and I imagine if it should be reached it would flame forth with gnat power and intensity. \\V talked of Plato and Herbert and Shelley, and many others. He says it is not the thought of "Alastor" that makes it his favorite, but the versification. I do not think now that he is wanting in severity. He went away after eleven. "I have stayed even laterthan the other night, said he, "quite too late." "Oh, no, not at all,'' said I. I think he liked to come again. It may seem vain to say so, but I suspect he had seldom talked with any one exactly as he did with us tonight. C. is the only person here who would care to talk with him on such Bub jects; and her gentle modesty would not allow her to sit deliberately down to draw any one out as I have done with Frank. C. said she did not know he could talk so finely. I belief that to him it was a relief. He has a rich nature, and yet my interest in him has little to do with feelings, less so than I could have supposed possible for vie. Ah, how little do we at such times know ourselves ! The next few weeks showed that nothing so interested her feelings as the fortunes of this youth. As I wrote the above, Mrs. Cram asked me why, if I felt that F. had misunderstood what I said of his becoming a minister, I did not write him a note, and tell him what I then wished BO much to say. She urged my doing so, and at last I wrote the following, which I showed to her, and which she advised my sending: NOTE. win n you spoke last night of Mr. R.'s prop- osition that you should enter the ministry, I have thought that what I replied might and must have given you a wrong impression. When I said with decision that 1 did not think preach- ing your mission, it was not because I fe.m d you would fail in that or, in anything for which yon should heartily strive; but because it s. to mi .is if no one should take such a mission upon himself unless he feels a decided call, and is s, nsible of a peculiar fitness. Your work in life seems to me more clearly pointed out than that of most men; it conn B uudei that last head in " Representative Men;" we need yon is a writer. I know how much of struggle and even of suffering such a life must contain, but l'lato says, "When one is attempting noble things it is surely noble also to suffer whatever it may befall him to suffer. " I feel that there is that within you which cannot rightfully be hidden; and your si ; , seems to me sure, if you will but bend your whole energies to this end. I wish I were wise enough to suggest something more than the goal to be reached; but I am sure you will have FRANK B. SANBORN. 39 other and more efficient friends who will give you the aid of experience. Perhaps you will think I presume upon a short acquaintance to say all this; but it is often given to us "to foresee the destiny of another more clearly than that other can," and it seems to me only truth to strive "by heroic encour- agements to hold him to his task." Will you pardon my boldness? I give you God-speed. Your friend, Anna W. The next day the journal goes on: We rode to the Hill (the post-office) and left Frank's note with his little brother, Josey, at school. I felt sorry I had sent it the moment it was fairly gone, and if I could have recalled it I certainly should. It contained little of my thought, and would do harm if not received earnestly. It is difficult to do good. I hope I shall see and talk with F. before I go to Glou- cester. August 3. This evening, as I lay wearily on the sofa, for I had been sick all day, Charles Healey came in, and immediately afterward, Frank. I felt not at ease, for we could say nothing of what was in both our thoughts often and often, I am sure. I seemed stupid, talked, but said nothing. Frank was gay — he is seldom that; C. said when he had gone, "Anna, I saw your influence in all F. said to- night, — he was happy." I don't know what to think- Why did he come and why has he said nothing about my note? It requires speed3' answer. August 6, Tuesday. I felt all day as if some- thing was going to happtn to me, and in the afternoon F. C. brought me a letter from Frank. It was calm, manly, kind, sincere, ear- nest ; not warm — apart from feeling. I felt it very much. A note which came with it, and which contained little in words, gave me an impres- sion of feeling w T hich the letter did not. A son- net F. sent me also, which I like. He added some marginal notes which rather made a jest of it; but I think the sonnet was written ear- nestly, and the notes were an afterthought to conceal that earnestness. How deeply, how strongly I am interested in Frank! I feel as if I must help him. He has hardly been out of my thoughts an hour since I wrote the note. And now his frankness gives a new tone to my thought ; for I feel as if I might perhaps do something for him. THE SONNET. Our life — a casket of mean outward show, Hides countless treasures, jewels rich and rare, Whose splendid worth, whose beauty, won- drous fair, Only the favored few may see and know On whom the partial Gods in love bestow, To ope the stubborn lid, the silver key; And such methinks, have they bestowed on Thee. Or shall I say? o'er all things base and low Thou hast the blessed power of alchemy, Changing their dross and baseness into gold; And in all vulgar things on earth that be. Awakening beauty, as the Greek of old Wrought vase and urn of matchless symmetry From the downtrodden and unvalued mould. August 6, 1850. F. B. S. Wednesday, Aug. 7. I went to the Sewing Circle on Munt Hill. I had three reasons for going — to be with Cate, to sit under the green trees once again, and to see Frank, who I felt sure would be there. I had a beautiful but wearisome afternoon. I liked to sit under the green arches of the oaks and maples, and to watch the play of faces, and read through them in the souls of those around me. Cate is the best, and most beautiful and worthy to be loved; and next to her I was drawn to Helen Sanborn. She is cold and self-centered, but she interests me. I want to know what all that coldness covers and conceals. Frank came; he greeted me last, and then almost distantly — certainly coldly. He was gay and witty, and we had a little talk together, sitting after tea in the doorwa} 7 . Miss (Nancy) Sanborn's house* is prettily located, but there is something really mournful in such a lonely life as hers. Heaven save me from so vacant, so desolate a life as that of most unmarried women! We had a pleasant ride home, and I thought F. might come up in the evening. If he does not I shall probably not see him again. I hope he will come. August 8. He did come up last night, and we talked very earnestly and freely together. I think I never spoke with more openness to any one; we forgot we were Frank and Anna, and talked as one immortal soul to another. The conversation began by Cate's showing him my Analyses. I sat in a low chair at C.'s feet, and watched his face while he read. It was steady; I could not read it, and I admired his composure, because I do not think it arose from a want of feeling. He said, when he had fin- ished, that he should not like to say whose the first analysis was; it might apply in parts to many ; and then turned to his own, and began to talk of it; not easily, but with difficulty and re- serve. . I gave him a pencil and asked him to mark what he thought untrue. He made three or four marks, and explained why he did so; but not for some time did he say that it was himself of whom he spoke. He said I overrated him; he was quick but confused, and he complained of a want of method, strictness and steadiness *The old Sanborn house near Munt Hill, in Chap- ter 1. 40 FRANK A'. SANBORN upom , in In- intellectual nature. I thought these rathei faults of habit than of nature; few minds left s<> wholly to themselves, with bo little opportunity, would have been oth< i than moment. 1 thought Bible he might mean Cate or myself by "that person"; but 1 did not f< • •; capab choosing for him, even if he had thought of me when he -poke, and of that I greatly doubt. So no reply was made, but the final result -eemed to be, that if his health would allow private lessons or school would be the best thing open to him. In looking again at the Analysis,*— I told him that it would not bear severe intellectual crit- icism; it must necessarily have many and great fault-. He said, " It is almost perfect, 1 that you stood at too high a point of view, -o that some defects were concealed,"— and -eemt d surprised that he should have laid him self open so far in BO short a time. But "I see that I must have done BO, unless you have much clearer eyes than most people." "Not that," said I, "but I have a habit of studying BOUls; persons are more to me than to most. I read in them as you read in books. 1 have -ecu in you tonight some new traits of charac- ter." He then a-ked me to add them to the analysis; but I would not promise to do BO. " I hope," he said, " that you are not going to conceal anything. Talk to me as if I were a chair or a table; I can bear any truth, — do not fear to wound me." " I am not afraid t e with you," said I. 'I'he conversation turned upon many things which I cannot w lite here, — upon pride, upon faith in a future life, etc. It was not till after midnight that he said he must go; and then it was evidently only because he felt he ought; the conversation held him. " When," he asked, "-hall you be in Hampton Palls again? Perhaps in one year, perhaps not foi Bev< said I. "Then it is doubtful when we shall see one another again. I shall not be likely to meet you anywhere else." id I. " when I see you next, your destiny will prob ably be decided." "I will promise you," he said, " that my choice shall be made as quickly as possible." I told him I hoped I should hear of it when he did so. He said he might not be in Hamp ton Palls at that time, and seemed, I half thought, to wish me to ask him to tell me him- self of his decision; but I hesitated to do so, and so said nothing. "And so," he said again, a- lu bad* me good-by, "it is uncertain whethei we shall see each other again for •The close "i tin- i- as follows " Has many aspirations mi unsatisfied. Mill seeking, seeking, groping in the dark. He wants a.defintU end lor which to strive heattily; then hi- au would be soke, Much executive power, exi better than he plana. " I.ove- the beautiful in all things. He has much originality; his thoughts and tastes are peculiarly lu- own is impatient of wrong, and almost equally r. [a gentle in Bplteofa certain cold- ness about him; h.i- strong passions In -piteof in- .•.<.:' calmness of intellect ami affection. A nature not likely to End rest, Struggle i- its native element; wants a lUady aim. »ui I work. standing still is impossible but he must have a K><^i! motive lot which to strive. Many contradictions in this analysis, but not than there are in the character itself" FRANK B. SANBORN. 4i years. Well, — I shall always remember that there is one person in the world who thinks more highly of me than I do of myself." We shook hands, and he went away. Intellectually, or by a certain fitness between us, I seemed to draw near to him, and I think he was sorry that our acquaintance should have been so transient, and should have terminated so suddenly. It seems strange to think of now, and not quite real to me; but I feel it has been of great service to me, however little I have done to help him. I have never seen any one like Frank. It is good to have a new interest in life, and in him I shall always feel strongly interested. I believe the journal of this evening is very poor; it gives not the least idea of what I consider as almost the most sin- gular conversation in my life, — and the end of a strange experience. Ah, no ! it was the beginning of that experience of which Dante wrote in his Vita Nuova, — " Behold a Spirit cometh mightier than thon, who shall rule over thee." This gentle maiden had not been averse to L,ove, but now he came in his full armor. The tell- tale journal goes on: When he was gone I felt so full of regret that I had not spoken more wisely to him that I covered my face with my hands and let the warm tears flow fast, — but it was only for a moment. I was excited as I seldom am; felt strong and free, and as I looked out of the window had an inclination to throw myself down on the cool gTass below. The girls would not let me talk; they went to their rooms, — but I lay waking all the night through. How I wished for some divining power to give me a knowledge of Frank's thoughts ! Had I helped him ? was this meeting of ours to have any influence upon his life? and if so, would it work for good or evil ? was this the beginning or the end of some new life? Lastly, how had he thought of met finely and highly, or had I seemed poor and bold? Upon his thought of me all the power of this evening to help him must depend; and I felt doubtful what it had been. Are we really to see each other no more? and is this to end our acquaintance? Have I been forbearing enough ? Should I not have waited to be sought, and not have gone out to meet him? But my motive was pure and disinterested; does he know that? Of course he could not seek me. There certainly was feeling in him tonight, — I saw it in his face. It is true then that he loves X.? These and a thousand other questions I went on asking, while the night wore away. I rose ill and fee- ble, and all day have suffered much; though not more than I expected last night. I have written F. a note, the principal object of which is to ask him to tell me himself when his deci- sion is made as to his future life. I shall send it with the Analysis. Mrs. C. has seen and approved of it, and I trust to her judgment. There is much more feeling in it than in his letter; but it seemed to me not to touch upon sentiment. Beside, F. is not vain, — the strange boy ! There was no occasion to doubt how I had received all this inspira- tion and encouragement to a more active life. It had been taken exactly as it was meant, and no thought un- worthy of the most ideal friendship occurred to me. But the arrow of Love had wounded me also, and I was not so unconscious of it as Anna was. We continued to correspond, and I w y ent on my projected trip to the White Mountains early in Sep- tember, with my head and heart both enlisted in her service. In one of my letters I sent her these lines, which, after the avowal of my love in Novem- ber, I completed to a sonnet, by the lines of the final couplet: SONNET II. As calmest waters mirror Heaven the best, So best befit remembrances of Thee Calm, holy hours, from earthly passion free, Sweet twilight musing, — Sabbaths in the breast: No stooping thought, nor any groveling care The sacred whiteness of that place shall stain, Where, far from heartless joys and rites pro- fane, Memory has reared to Thee an altar fair; Yet frequent visitors shall kiss the shrine, And ever keep its vestal lamp alight, — All noble thoughts, all dreams divinely bright, That waken or delight this soul of mine. So Love, meek pilgrim ! his young vows did pay, With glowing eyes that must his lips gainsay. In the meanwhile she had gone to spend the rest of August with her dear Ednah at Gloucester by the sea- side, and from there, two weeks after 42 FRANK B. SANBORN. this parting at Hampton Falls, she wrote to her friend Cate what I may call Al>\ in TO A VOUNG STUDENT. ( I U ENTY lo KI'.II l : Gloi cester, August 22nd, 1850. . . . And now, dear, — I want to talk to you about Frank, — about whose future I have had much anxious thought. There seem to me to be many objections to both the plans we men- tioned in that evening's conversation, which were not as clear to me then as now, — I mean the go- ing to college or the studying with Mr. Richard- son.* Amid the sedentary habits of Cambridge I really fear for Frank's health, — so many have I seen sink under them who were more vigorous than he; and so often have I mourned over earthly promise lost, — ruthlessly thrown away, — amid influences like those, where everything was sacrificed to the intellect With all the ex- ternal struggles which Frank would be forced to undergo in addition to these, I fee.1 as if it were hardly possible for him to go through a course at Cambridge without impaired health, — and, as a necessarv consequence, inevitable, diminished powers; for let no one dream that he can break one of God's laws without the wliole being suffer- ing therefrom. Frank's health wustbe preserved; his work in life must not be hindered or marred by bodily weakness. He owes it to the good God who has given so much to him not to "lay waste his powers," — that he may remain here with us, and help u> to live, as long as he can. Is it not so, darling ? With regard to Mr. Richardson, even if that should be open to Frank, I doubt if it would really bt for the best. James Richardson's faults of mind are so exactly those which F. complains of in himself, that I fear he would not obtain from him that discipline which he most needs. There is not enough reality about J. R. to satisfy the wants of a true and strong nature; not that I fear contagion, for Frank has more power of self-preservation than any prison I ever met, and he might as well (east- to be, as cease to be true; but his teacher should be a man of stiict and accurate mind, with an element even of intellectual severity in it, — with a soul open to fames Richardson, ■ classmate ofThoreau at Harvard, was then settled at Haverhill, Mass ami, preaching at Hampton Halls the preceding April had met !•'. B. 8. and urged bim to go to col- lege, — promising to aid him. if needful. Nothing had come "! this, or was likely to. Prof. J. G. Hoyt was the teacher of Creek and mathematics at Hit- ter Academy, — an active anti-slavery man also. enthusiasm but not possessed by it, — and ready and willing to impart its wealth to others. Such a man Mr. R. is not, and I do not say this from my own knowledge, merely, but from the better knowledge of those who have known him long and intimately. And now, after all this, dear, I want to make a new suggestion to Frank,— which is that in- stead of either of these things he should remain at Hampton Falls, and take private lessons of Mr Hoyt at Exeter, during this winter at least. Going into F.xeter once or twice a week would be easy for him, and all that would be needful in his case. And from all I hear of Mr. Hoyt he is admirably fitted to be Frank's guide. Ed- nah, who knows him, says he is just the person, she should think, to do F. good ; I only judge of him through others. If I were Frank I should go to Mr. H. and tell him just how it was with me, — that it was the discipline of education that I wanted, and not to be fitted for any particular profession; and I should ask his advice as t.> the studies best to pursue. If Frank would do this, I do not fear for the result; if I am not mistaken in my opinion of Mr. H. at the end of the winter he would no longer stand in need of that friend who is awenough to choose for him his future course in life. I >oes not this seem to you the best and most possible present course for Frank ? It does seem so to me; and I have thought of this with far more anxiety and effort than I have bestowed even upon my own winter, and all that must de- pend thereon. Can I say more? or will you understand fully that this is my best judgment, — which can only pass for what it is worth ? though I would it were of a thousand times more value than it is. . After all, this can only be a suggestion, — for it is made without a full knowl- edge of facts, and there may be many objections known to Frank, of which I am wholly ignorant. I would only offer it as all that 1 have to give. Frank's course in life, as it lies clearly in my thought, seems to be this: To devote the next four or five years to as severe study (and I do not mean by study mere getting of lessons) as a strict obedience to the laws of health will allow; to take for thi> time intellectual discipline as the principal, though not the exclusive end and aim of life, — and for this purpose to make use of all and the best means in his power. At the end of those years he may work with his hands at any- thing he pleases; there is no labor which a noble soul cannot dignify. He shall make shoes "i be a farmer, or whatever else he finds easiest, — if he will give us his best thoughts through pen and paper, — if he does also his appointed FRANK B. SANBORN. 43 spiritual and intellectual work. He shall even settle down quietly in H. F. if so his choice lead him (for place will be little to him when he has obtained full possession of himself), — so that he do but let his light so shine before men that they may see his good works and give thanks to the Father therefor. I would not condemn him to the hard struggles of the merely literary man, even if his physical strength would allow ; for in this money-loving Yankee land want and suffer- ing are the sure accompaniments of such a life; but I would have him fitted to use to the full those powers of mind which God has given him for the benefit of others; and I would have this work of a writer the highest end and aim of life, — although other things may be the needful and even beautiful accessories. And now I wish you to show this part of my letter to Frank; and I should like him to con- sider it without any reference to its being my opinion (for I think it would have not more but less weight, perhaps, on that account), but sim- ply as a suggestion worthy of thought, while he is making his decision with regard to his future life, and the immediate steps to be taken therein. " If I were to proffer an earnest prayer to the gods for the greatest of earthly privileges," says Mr. Alcott in his Journal, "it should be for a severely candid friend." That, at least, I am and have been to Frank; and even should he think me inclined to force and intrude my opinions upon him, I will not selfishly shrink from doing what I think right, because I may thereby suffer the loss of his good opinion. I am very anxious that Frank should now and quickly have some intellectual guide and friend ; and such, I hope, Mr. H. might become to him. Hitherto he has stood alone, for he is strong and cheerful, — but now he wants a helping hand, though it do but touch him gently, so that he may feel himself a link in the great chain that binds humanity to- gether. For this he appears to me not yet to have felt quite clearly. He himself says " A little child might lead me", — but he cannot be led, — only guided, — and even that must be by his superior. I incline to think he has never learned much from any one soul ; for his life has been rather in thoughts than persons ; but all things, ani- mate and inanimate, have been his unconscious teachers; and should I seem to flatter if I said that, like his own Pilgrim, he has in him "some- thing of the universality of Nature herself ? " I think I do but use the expression with his own meaning. I have spoken to you dear, often, of the suffering of Frank's probable life, — but not from any feeble wish to hold him from it. He must go upward by the " steep but terrible way " — by the precipice — and not by the winding path, — and I say God speed. There is one other person in Exeter who would take Frank as a pupil, I have no doubt, — and that is Mr. Hitchcock.* In belles lettres he is far superior to Mr. Hoyt, and indeed to most men, — and I think he might gratify Frank's tastes more fully ; but I doubt if he has so strict and accurate a mind as Mr. Hoyt, or would prove so good a guide for F. I should like him to be Frank's friend, and not his teacher. I followed this very wise counsel, took lessons # in Greek of Mr. Hoyt for a year, and then entered Phillips Exeter Academy for seven months, and from that entered at Harvard a year in advance, — having read much Eatin before going to Exeter. The arrangement had the incidental ad- vantage, not foreseen by either of us, that I could receive my letters and parcels from Anna, and send my own without attracting too much notice from friends and relatives, — who were generally excluded from knowledge of the correspondence. I have sometimes thought that a young man of less vanity than F. B. S. might be excused for hoping that a lady, who evidently took so deep an interest in his character and future career, had at least a slight personal reason for so doing. But that w r ould have been unjust to this rare person- age, who certainly was the most un- selfish, altruistic and just of all women. The disclosure of love was truly as great a surprise to her three months after this as anything could have been ; but that it was not unwelcome the event proved. * Rev. Roswell Hitchcock was then pleaching at the old church in Exeter, but afterwards became the head of the Calviuistic Union Theological Sem- inary at New York. Anna's judgment of him was very just; what her observation had been I know not ; but once taking tea with him would have given her this perception, so remarkable was her insight. +4 FRAA'R />. SAN/iORN. Soon after ray return from the White Mountains I made the arrange- ment with Prof. J. G. Hoyt of the Exeter Academy, by which I was to recite to him in Greek for a year be- fore entering regularly as a student in Exeter. My visits to his study were weekly, and this was the beginning of a friend- ship with a noble man, which contin- ued so long as he lived. Years afterward he wished rae to take a po- sition with him in the Washington University at St. Louis; as the late at Hampton Falls, she wrote me a letter early in November, asking my confidence in the matter. To con- vince her what the truth was, I con- fessed my ardent love for her. She received the avowal as it was meant, but in a spirit of self-denial, she de- ferred the acceptance for a time. The journal, as formerly, received her con- fession : I opened the note (November 21, 1S50) and read the first two or three lines, and covered my face with my hands. It seemed impossible to believe in the reality of what I saw. That Exeter Street in I 850. Amos Lawrence had offered me, a few years earlier, the head mastership of the Lawrence Academy in Kansas, which has become the State Univer- sity. For good reasons, I declined both offers. Miss Littlehale, whom I first met at Exeter in the spring of 1852, was in the autumn of 1850 seriously ill for a long time at her father's house, 44 Bowdoin street, Boston ; and there Miss Walker visited her in October and November of that year. Misap- prehending some circumstances in my relations with her particular friends Frank could love me, — weak, feeble, unworthy as I am, — I had never even dreamed. When I could read the little note, i( wis so clear, so like Frank, that I could only thank Ciod that he loved me. Had he been near me then, — could not but have told him that I loved him. I, the lonely, felt myself no more alone; and life looked fair to me in this new radiance. So early and so bold an avowal fixed the fate of both ; they could never afterward be other than lovers, how- ever much the wisdom of the world pleaded against a relation closer than friendship. But the world must not at first know the footing upon which they stood ; even the father and brother FRANK B. SANBORN. 45 must imagine it a close friendship, such as her expansive nature was so apt to form, and so faithful to maintain. One family in Hampton Falls and one friend in Boston, Miss Littlehale, were to be cognizant of the truth ; and it was not clear, for years, to the self-sacrificing good ment of marriage, to be fulfilled when my college course should be ended, and my position in the world established. The announcement was made in 1853, following a recurrence of the mysterious illness from which she had suffered more or less since 1846, and of which she died in 1854. George Walker in Paris, 1886. sense of the maiden, what her ulti- mate answer to the world might be. Hence misunderstandings and remonstrances from those who saw more clearly than the young lovers could, how many outward obstacles opposed themselves to this union of hearts. But the union remained un- broken, and could at last be pro- claimed to the world as an engage- In the intervening four years since our first meeting, great happiness had been ours, and also much suffering, from the uncertainties of life and the divided allegiance which she owed to her family and to her lover. Finally this source of unhappiness was re- moved, and it was seen by all that her choice was to be accepted, whatever the results might be. Her brother 4 6 FRANK B. SANBORN. George was her confidant after a little. His relation to his sister after the death of their mother, and in the feeble health and engrossing occupa- tions of their father, was peculiarly admirable. When she found herself more closely bound to another, this new tie was not allowed to weaken the fraternal affection. He adopted the youth who had so unexpectedly become dear, as a younger brother ; and his delicate generosity in circum- stances which often produce estrange- ment was never forgotten. In pub- lic life he was the same consider- ate and high-minded gentleman ; not regardless of the advantages which social position and moderate wealth give, but ever ready to share his blessings, instead of engrossing all within reach to himself and his circle. Without the commanding talents or decisive character which make men illustrious, and secure unchanging fortune, he had, as Channing said of Henry Thoreau, " what is better, — the old Roman belief that there is more in this life than applause and the best seat at the dinner table, — to have moments to spare to thought and imagination, and to those who need you." Vet this affectionate brother seemed at first to stand like a lion in the path that was to bring two lovers together. A month after the declaration, Anna wrote to Ednah Littlehale, her dear- est friend Aii'l vet, my Ednah, even you are not d to me than Frank is. I cannot hear to tell < reorge "i .ill this until F, has a< hieved t < >r him- o much thai it will not seem mere madness I think I i annot speak of t him until this is bo. I cannol more than myself to the pain thai would follow; and ■ m say it would not be tight to keep this a uld not ask a longer waiting of Frank; how shall it be with us? Will you help me as much as human love can aid, and tell me what you think of all this? I, your child, ask it ol von as I would have clone of my mother, were she living and near me; will you refuse me? " Will F. be able to like you *' ? Yes, yes, yes, — as much as I do; he would love you, — you would wit : only you must see each other first under favorable circumstances, — not in Town, not ceremoniously. I send you inclosed I 's letters: I wish you to return them at once, and write to me of them some time, frankly, — just what you feel, — this, dearest, at your leisure. . . . Believe me that I do not muse and dream; the only time when I am ever guilty of tlii— is in the very early morning, — when I have waked sometimes from dreams of F., and, half waking, half sleeping, have fancied what we should say to one another when we met. And to show that I was no better in that respect, she enclosed to Ednah my last sonnet : SONNET III. Being absent yel thou ait not wholly gone, For thou hast stamped thine image on the world ; It shines befoie me in the blushing dawn, And sunset clouds about its grace are curled ; And thou hast burthened every summer breeze With the remembered music of thy voice, Sweeter than linnet's song in garden trees, And making wearisome all other joys. Sleep vainly strives to bar thee from his hall. — Thou win'st light entrance in a dream's dis- guise, And there with gentlest sway thou rulest all 1 1 is gliding visions and <|iiick fantasies ; The busy i\a\ is thine; the quiet night Sleeps in thy radiant e, as the skies in light. "These I thought you would like," she adds at the foot ; " tell me if you do." The topic was never far from her mind, wherever she might be. At Westford, visiting her stepmoth- er's sister, the aunt of her Hampton Falls confidante, she wrote to Ednah i J an. jo, 1S51) : One thin lis me, that I am very glad of. She says that last summer Frank gave all the letters he had had from me to his Sarah ' hei t" 1 cad them, and tell him FRANK B. SANBORN. 47 if there was any peculiar feeling in them ? She did so, and said to him that she did not think there was. Then he told her the way he was going, — that he felt he had no power to resist, — that he saw himself daily passing into deeper waters ; that every day he loved me more and more, and could not go back a single step. And he asked her to read the letters again, with refer- ence to his feeling for me, and tell him what she thought of them. She gave them back to him, and only said, "Frank, you must watch over your- self unceasingly." It is a help to me that Sarah knows of this. I can be truer with frank judg- ing of actions and words through her. . It is possible that I may not go to H. Falls at all next summer; and it is possible that I may spend some weeks there. This last she did. Among the verses of the first year were these, which she also copied and sent to Kdnah ; indicating another mood of her young admirer : SONNET IV. One with sad, wrinkled brow said unto me : " Why will thou strive, since struggle is so vain ? Thou dost but fret and chafe thee with thy chain, — Thou canst not break it. No, — still waits for thee The common sorrow of mortality, — Restless to live, unsatisfied to die, Pining for freedom, and yet never free." " Yet will I never weep," calm answered I, " But wreathe these heavy fetters round with flowers; And through my grated window from the sky Catch cheering glimpses of the heaven's great eye, To shorten or to gladden my dull hours." And lo ! the prison walls bound me no more; One breath of Hope has opened wide the door. Our correspondence was incessant, and the Exeter post-office gave the opportunity to mail and receive letters without exciting gossip. Something like valentines passed in February, and on the 24th she wrote to Ednah : May I talk to you of F. ? I find him mingling more and more in my life; find it daily more difficult to turn my thoughts from him. I believe he is dearer to me now than ever before. I hear often from him ; he writes two letters to my one, generally; is he not good? I said to to C, " I did not suppose Frank's pride would let him do that." "Ah," said she, " his pride is great, but his love is greater, and has quite overcome it." She has seen all the letters. F. thinks it not right to send them through her otherwise, and it is through him that it has been so. I told her I did nor dare to speak to him as warmly as I felt; that by great effort I had compelled my- self to answer quietly, when he had lavished love upon me. This is to show you that I am truer than I feared. . . His winter seems to be much to him ; he writes fully of his life out- wardly as well as inwardly. I can't well realize that the Frank who cuts wood all day in the pine woods " where the birds are not afraid to come, and where the crows fly so near that one can hear their wings creak and rustle as they hurry along; and the sun shines through the trees, and over their tops at noon," is the same person who sits at night studying Greek, or talk- ing with me of Schiller and Emerson, Shelley and Plato ; doesn't it seem strange to you, too ? (March 19, 1851.) If it is finally decided that I do not go to H. Falls next summer, as seems likely now, I see no other way but for F. to come here in June. The excuse must be a pilgrimage to Monadnock, — not very difficult to see through, but sufficient to make no explanations necessary. I hate equivocation, but I am forced to it ; and if it is possible for F. to come, it would be possible for me to receive him. There is another way which may be open to me. I might go to H. F. and slay two or three weeks, spending only a fortnight with you at the beach. If any- thing should happen to prevent my being with your family, or if you were in Dublin, I should think this the best plan for me, apart from any thoughts of F. Put if I went to H. Falls, I know busy tongues would say it was for F.'s sake, and report would occupy itself about us both. Should I hesitate for that? What do you say ? There could be but one issue to all this ; the heart governs in such mat- ters, and I knew very early that her heart was mine. Nevertheless, there was the usual alternation of hope and fear, of jealousies and misunderstand- ings, out of which we always emerged with increased affection. I have -IS /■RAXh- II. SANBORN. never heard of a love more roman- tic and unselfish ; no permanent thought of ways and means, of foes or friends, came between us. I had been gifted with the power of winning friends without effort, — a gift that in her was carried to its highest point. She was beloved wherever she was seen, and had no enemy but her own self-accusing tenderness. Her life had inspired. Emerson's " Hermi- one " pictured the process : I am of ;i Mm That each for each doth fast In old Bassora's walls I seemed Hermit vowed to books and gloom, — III I" ■ 'om. I was by thy touch redeemed ; When thy meteor glances came, We talked at large of worldly fat< . And drew truly every tract. Peterborough had been such as to arouse compas- sion for one so endowed, and so fet- tered by illness : but that very afflic- tion had chastened her to a saintlineSS that was charmingly mingled with coquetry. "I love to be praised," -.he said ; "I love to be loved " . and tew were ever more beloved. By Heaven's direction her favor lighted on me ; and, as usual, she exagger- ated the qualities in me that herself It was so from the beginning with her. At her first visit to my town, years before 1 saw her, she wrote to a Boston friend I reached Hampton Falls safely and found my friend Cate just the same— deal good girl! - i . and pr< ifening h< i me Here have I tx ore, durin last week, living in true farmei like style, with but two or three neighbors, and no village within three miles. The situation is a pleasant itumn landsi api FRANK B. SANBORN. 49 Little Wood Opposite." from tr\ ' 'dow at my side, whose gentle beauty cic le good. There is much of bless" ing in«Jfat" re ' s silent sympathy. At night, too' we ha "Si^de view of the glorious stars, which seem to have been peculiarly beautiful these last two evenings. I have thought of you all as I looked for my favorite constellations. Dear, you showed me the Scorpion, — you, Corny, Cas- siopeia, and Ednah the Pleiades. All these were visible last night, and I am glad I can never look upon them without thoughts of you; is it not a pleasant association. Here too (as every- where else), have I met much kindly sympathy. Strangers greet me like a long expected friend; rough, old farmers speak with a softened tone to the invalid stranger; and though the grasp of their hand be somewhat rough, it is full of heart-warmth, and, therefore very pleasant to me. One evening I had a treat which I had not anticipated here,— really good music. A pretty Mrs. Tilton* sang like a woodland bird, and with Cate's sweet low voice for a second, it was beautiful. I love music dearly, andgood voices *This was Susan Jordan from Boston, who had been living at the same farmhouse (now gone), one of the oldest in the township, but was now mar- ried to a neighbor-farmer; she was a protegee ot the late Dr. Henrv Bowditch, and died in this ham- let, halfway from Exeter to Hampton Falls village. 4 are sweeter without an instrument than with it; so I did not miss the piano at all. This was written in the tame and lovely scenery of Hampton Falls, a lew miles from the seashore, in which this lover of nature always delighted, and which she needed to visit every summer. Her own native region of swift streams and mountains she once described thus: Yesterday I walked out for the first time for a long season. (February 24, 1S51.) I went on the snowcrust into the grove by the river, part way over the steep hill; and rested on a great rock which juts out over a high bank, and from which I looked down into the water just below me. Great twisted pines grow out of this bank, huge old sons of the forest; and thro' their thick branches I could see the gleaming of the first fall, which was close to me. The river is beautiful now, very full and swift; not a brook, as it is in the summer, but a rapid, rushing river. The sunshine coming into where I was sitting, through the pines overhead, made a kind of checquered light on the snow, and bright- ened into rainbow colors the icicles which fell 5° FRANK B, SANBORN. from the trees yesterday and lay still on the crust. Add to this a perfect stillness of the win- ter woods, broken only by the noise of the water; and you will have the best of mv Sun- day. So much, darling, for the outward world. ( >ur French progresses pretty well. Mi. Krone is my principal amusement; oh, that man! he is too funny for anything, as Mrs. Thompson would say. I have read the life of Dr. Chal- mers, which contains much that you would en- joy. I think, however, it is too long, a com- mon fault with Memoirs. lie was a tiery spirit. 1 am reading Agassiz too. It was this house, in Grove Street, Peterborough, with its "little wood opposite" upon which her windows looked out, which is associated with her in my memory, and that of her surviving sister and her friends, — now alas ! but few, out of the many who rejoiced in her love. The engrav- ing shows it much as it then was, — one of two houses built by McKean, a skilful carpenter, about 1844, and both now owned by the Livingston family. But when we visited the Walkers there, it had a green bank sloping clown to the river, unobstruct- ed by the railway and its apparatus; across the amber water was the flower- encircled cottage of Miss Putnam, the "Lady Bountiful" of the village then, who gave Putnam Park to the public, and preserved the fine trees on her terraced river bank. On the oppo- site side from this west front was the garden, — small but neatly kept, and blooming in the season with Anna's favorite roses ; while the pine trees overhung the narrow street, and waved a sober welcome. This fac-simile of one of her small pages to Kdnah shows how she passed from one topic to another, in her let- ters; and how uncertain was her spell- ing and punctuation. In our four fill w n 11 III MHIIIH '' Jill I ' mm mill"'' 1 " u - , AT* V .• '•■3 1 t/0B Residence of Anns Walker, Grove Street Ravine and Cascade, Peterborough ^ *y fZ*-**.' «~2_ — ~?~~IZ- ^-p -&~i^L*^C<^i<^- '^>»/^ &L jn^>^ A&uJ Ihuj syz^ **!^--T^~-tt£&^J 52 FRANK' A. SANBORN. years' correspondence she never quite mastered the difficult spelling of Tues- day, — indeed, her education had been interrupted by frequent illness, and was desultory, though remarkable for the many fields into which it led her, in five languages, — English, Italian, French, German and Latin. But in the reading of human life and character she was unsurpassed, and that, as she told me, was her chief study. To quote again from "Her- tact with graces like hers, native and untaught, but lacking in nothing of the perfection of good breeding. In no company, high or low, was she ever out of place. She was the delight of every circle in which she moved; and would have been, had her range of experience been world-wide. Her praise and her blame were equally useful and courteous; the impatience of which she complained in herself, and which had been a fault of her The River Bank. mione" (for Emerson was our daily library): C>nce I dwelt apart ; \"\v I live with all ; -hepherd's lamp, on far hillside, Seems, by the traveler espied, iot into the mountain's heart, — So didst thou quarry and unlock Highways for me through the roi k. To love this daughter of rural New Hampshire was more than "a liberal education," as Sir Richard Steele said of Lady Elizabeth Hastings; nothing, as mere intellectual training, was more stimulating and elevating than con- wayward childhood, was now trained to a fascinating caprice, which made her ever a surprise to her friends. In one of my visits, when she thought she was withdrawing herself into the cool grotto of friendship (which she kept saying was what she wished), suddenly she became as attractive as any of the Sirens, and I said to her, "Anna, how little I expected this; I did not even hope for it ; what has brought you into this dear mood ? I never find you twice the same ; when I think I have become sure of you, FRANK B. SANBORN. 53 and accustomed to some phase of you, — thinking it to be you, — suddenly you seem to me wholly other than I thought, and I feel as if I had never known you." Amid all these chang- ing moods, she never failed to be what the French quaintty term attachante ; and it was of her own sweet will that she was so. Never, in a long life, — now half a century since her death, — have I found another so truly a woman. Meantime my actual education at school and college went on ; though I was often called away by the phases of her illness, which, like everything about her, was strange and unexpect- ed. From the depths of what seemed a mortal illness, and which no physi- cian thoroughly understood, she would rally to a hopeful prospect of full recov- ery. But at last the forces of nature and her will were exhausted; she gradually passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and perished in my arms, August 31, 1854. We had been married eight days before, at her wish, and in her father's Peter- borough house, where I had attended all the changes of her last summer on earth, and done all that true love could do to make the pathway easier. It was long before I could return to my college studies; but she had for- seen and directed all that, and even provided in her will that I should study in Germany. Yet the pressure of the conflict between Freedom and Slavery in Kansas, after I had graduated at Harvard in July, 1855, kept me in America, and brought me into relations with one as remarkable among men, as she I, had loved was among women — John Brown, of Kansas and Virginia. Of him and the events of his last three years my next chapter will treat. I have given much space to this four years' episode in my career, because I write for readers in New Hampshire. This romance of our lives was wholly of New Hampshire ; Boston was only an occasional scene for its development, when we met there at the houses of her friends or mine. Nearly all of them are now dead, — Mrs. Cheney, one of the last to pass away, after a long life of public and private usefulness. I have often said of my Ariana, — what Ivandor so modestly sung of his Ianthe, — Jane Swift, — in that verse addressed to the River Swift: Thou mindest me of her whose radiant morn Lighted my path to love; she bore thy name; She whoni no grace was tardy to adorn, Whom one lota voice pleased more than louder fame. Or that perfect distich in honor of the same Ianthe: Vita brevi fugitura! prior fugitura venustast Hoc saltern exiguo tempore duret amor. CHAPTER IV. JOHN BROWN AND BIS FRIENDS. I have noticed, in looking back upon my three and seventy years, what others must have observed, — how one marked event in early life leads to another marked event, and that to a third, and so on; as if by a chain of sequences arranged before- hand upon a scheme of life. It is this no doubt which has led so many men to view their careers as something foreordained, — a map shown of their destinies, which pointed out the way they were to go ; not compelling them to a given course, but indicating that as the line of least resistance. It was through the fact that my fathers had been parishioners of Parson Abbot, and the acquaint- ance had been kept up between the families, that I became the lover of Ariana Walker. It was she who de- termined my college education ; it was our mutual interest for the op- pressed that made me active in the cause of social and political freedom ; ami it was her brother George, a year or two after her death, who sent John Brown of Kansas to me with a letter of introduction, late in the year i Six years later it was this same brother-in-law. then in the state gov- ernment of Massachusetts I when the John Brown episode had been closed by the emancipation proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, and the victory at Gettysburg I, who suggested to me an appointment on the newly-created Board of State Charities, in i which has largely shaped the course of my public life for forty years. And it was through the acquaintance formed with his circle at Springfield, from 1853 to 1865, which led to my selection by his intimate friend, Sam- uel Bowles, as one of the editors of the Springfield Republican, — then and since one of the most influential journals in the United States, whose staff I had joined in 1S56, as a cor- respondent, and of which I became an editor in 1S6S. I cannot believe, therefore, that our human lives are subject to blind chance, or fortuitously directed by accident. Too many incidents in my own career, and those of my associ- ates, have shown me a more intelli- gent directing power, aside from the individual human will : what it is, in direct activity, I have hot too curi- ously inquired. But I have followed its intimations when they were clearly revealed, and have found my little bark steered by a hand wiser than my own. This is one aspect of that philoso- phy to which mere accident may have en, in America, the name of " Transcendental," and of which my long-time friends, Alcott and Emer- son, were the best representatives — unless it might be some simple-hearted Quakeress, illumined by the Inner it. John Brown, that descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims, held this faith also, and it led him into those dark. heroic ways whose issue was the forci- ble destruction of negro slavery, and FRANK B. SANBORN. 55 his own immortality of fame, as one of the two grand martyrs of that cause, — Abraham Lincoln being the other. I have met many men and women of eminent character, and of various genius and talents, among whom Brown stands by himself, — an occasion for dispute and blame as well as for an apotheosis of unselfish hero- ism, — but a man not to be passed over without comment by those w r ho read or hear the story of our times. At my graduation from Harvard in July, 1855, the slavery question had assumed a very alarming aspect. The slaveholding oligarchy who had ruled the land for a quarter-century, but whose policy had been threatened by the Missouri Compromise and the unexpected result of the Mexican War, had boldly repealed that Com- promise, and entered upon a course intended to make negro slavery a national and no longer a sectional evil. Against this violation of a com- pact supposed to be final, the whole North had risen up in wrath, and the administration of a New Hampshire president w T as deserted by his own state. He still adhered to the rash policy of Jefferson Davis and Caleb Cushing, then in his cabinet, and al- lowed the oligarchy to introduce their slave system from Missouri into the just organized territory of Kansas. The freemen of New England, Ohio and the Northwest set out at once to thwart this mischievous attempt, by colonizing Kansas with free laborers, owning their own farms, and tilling them with their own hands, or with labor honestly paid for. From the first I had taken an active interest in this conflict between freedom and chattel slaver}- ; had voted steadily in New Hampshire against President Pierce's party (including my grand- father and his nephew Norris), and in support of Hale, the bold and popu- lar Independent Democrat. Voting for the first time in Massachusetts, I joined the party of Charles Sumner and his friends, and shared their in- dignation at the brutal attack made on our senator by Brooks of South Carolina. Almost at the same point of time, the Missouri slaveholders, passively supported by Pierce and Jefferson Davis, had destroyed by violence the rising town of Lawrence (May, 1856), and kindled civil war in Kansas by their outrages. The peo- ple of Massachusetts, by a large majority, were supporters of the Free State cause in Kansas, and were also earnest in assisting their own young men who had gone to settle in that territory. Consequently, soon after the attack on Lawrence I assisted in raising a large subscription in aid of Kansas, and became secretary, first of the Concord town committee, then of a Middlesex county committee, and finally, before 1856 closed, of State Kansas Committee, of which my friend George Stearns was chair- man, and Dr. S. G. Howe, Dr. Sam- uel Cabot and the late Judge Russell of Plymouth were active members. Of the county committee John Nes- mith, afterwards lieutenant-gov- ernor, was chairman, and C. C. Esty, afterwards member of Congress, Charles Hammond, a distinguished teacher, and James Jennison, a Har- vard tutor, were members, with others. During my absence in Illi- nois, Iowa and Nebraska, in August, 1856, my neighbor, John S. Keyes (later sheriff and judge of a local court), acted as secretary, for a single meeting, of the county committee, 56 FRANK />. SLAVIC A' X. /Wtccs S^~- ^fe^, /tiC^c^ J^^^, <^fe^z£2^«^/ ^ ^^k and his record is worth citing in fac simile : This county committee took meas- ures to canvass all Middlesex for funds, and I spent the first half of my summer vacation (I had gone to Con- cord in March, [855, before graduat- ing, to teach the children of Emerson, Judge Hoar and their friends) in driving over half the county in a chaise to organize town committees and raise money. The effect of this was that in February, 1857, when I reported the financial results of our work, we had raised $17,383 in money and supplies from a population of 195,000 then living in Middlesex. Of this sum, Concord had given $2,242, from a population of 2,251. The money raised had been turned over mainly to the state committee of Stearns, Howe and Cabot, — 54,677 going to them directly from the giv- ers, and $5,550 by vote of the Middle- sex committee. But Si , 100 was voted to the national committee at Chicago. S900 to Colonel Higginson, who led a party of free state men into Kansas, to the Emigrant Aid Company, and something like $225 to lecturers at public meetings, for their service and expenses. The clothing and FRANK B. SANBORN. 57 other supplies were turned over either to the Emigrant Aid Company or the state committee, to be forwarded. Besides giving $100 in the Concord subscription (as did Judge Hoar, his venerable father, and J. S. Keyes) I had visited Chicago, Iowa and Ne- braska City in August, at my own expense, to see that the way for emi- grants through Iowa and Nebraska was open, and to confer with Messrs. Dole, Harvey Hurd and Captain Webster (a New Hampshire officer, afterwards General Webster of Grant's staff), of the National Com- mittee, and with young Horace White, their secretary. The ending of my vacation would not let me go through to Lawrence ; nor did I meet John Brown on his visit to southwestern Iowa early in August, nor again in early October. He had gone back to southern Kansas before I reached Iowa in August, and I had returned home early in September, 1856. In October I arranged with the State Kansas Committee to become their corresponding secretary, and for the winter sessions of my school em- ployed a student in Harvard to take my place while I kept the office of the committee in Niles's Block on School Street, Boston. There, early in January, 1857, Brown called on me one morning, bringing a letter of introduction from my brother Walker, who had been chairman of a Kansas committee for Hampden county, but who had known Brown intimately as a wool merchant in , Springfield ten years before. I intro- duced Brown to Dr. Howe and Theo- dore Parker, to various public audi- ences, and to a legislative committee of Massachusetts in the state house. The first draft of Brown's speech, in answer to the questions of the legisla- tors, is in my hands, as follows, in part : (See next page.) I have found here and there a per- son, in my .wanderings over two con- tinents, who did not believe freedom was a good thing for others ; but I never happened to meet one who did not think it an excellent thing for himself. Persons naturally slavish I have seen, as old Aristotle had; but even they, in their hearts, chose free- dom, while in act they submitted to bondage. If by chance they had escaped, they would have said to any one who asked, as the fugitive in Canada was asked, "Why did you run away from a good home, where you had plenty to eat and wear, a kind master and not much to do?" "Why, Boss, dat sitiwation is open right now, if you wants to go and apply for it." In short, freedom is * * * • »/ -n^ij/y ^^ lor? v 4 (jU^t-tynA^ /fit. '/Ua,1\} to Ax< ■ •'■ /ai.'W^vO, ^ «^.j'7^>vcc <►/ J 5 9ko/is> 4J-'Afi+<- L,-~C J l^rx,f ms /b- Jirt^y^j ff l*x M t^>- un//%s An.< ^^tlA im*y^qY7 flu. ■>t <-^^ >- txVA J Jfi IJula^ 'rf i+lu h to* /LJ S~(Hr &*^ Jhfc- stw"- /<^ri*vL f t ft O^h/r "^ If /SO f*~ cO^y x^L^c-^ v^D^A^CeC cUs /> d^s ti^-^i^r^ 4i t ((f. t V- rruu. £-*-*£ %<'■> froC**^ &/&»- a-^u^U- M*t ^ i\ fib- Cl*<.w^ «sLU4. p^. 4 fk^ v^ *£tu. . i-c^^/i fy> . , l^ FRANK B. SANBORN. 59 the natural desire of mankind, — even where servitude is their natural con- dition. And I belong to a small and fast dwindling band of men and women, who fifty, sixty and seventy years ago resolved that all other per- sons ought to be as free as ourselves. Many of this band made sacrifices for the cause of freedom, — the free- dom of others, not their own. Some sacrificed their fortunes and their lives. One man, rising above the rest by a whole head, gave his life, his small fortune, his children, his rep- utation — all that was naturally dear to him — under conditions which have kept him in memory, although other victims are forgotten or but dimly remembered. John Brown fastened the gaze of the whole world upon his acts and his fate ; the speeding years have not lessened the interest of man- kind in his life and death ; and each succeeding generation inquires what sort of man he truly was. The time is coming — and has already arrived in some regions — when Brown will be regarded as a mythical personage, incarnating some truth or some desire dear to the human race, but not a flesh-and-blood man at all. His career had elements of romance and improbability, such as make us doubt the actual existence of legendary he- roes, like Hercules, Samson, Arthur, Roland and the Spanish Cid. But he was a very real and actual person — only a peculiar and remarkable one, like Joan of Arc — one of those who appear from time to time, to verify the saying, " Man alone can perform the impossible." What more impos- sible than that a village-girl of France should lead the king's armies to vic- tory ? — unless it were that a sheep- farmer and wool-merchant of Ohio should foreshow and rehearse the for- cible emancipation of four millions of American slaves. Historians have not dealt very sage- ly with this typical character. They have looked at him through the wrong end of the telescope, with colored lenses and ill-adjusted focus ; they have not seen that he was one of those rare types, easily passing into the mythical, to which belonged David, the shepherd, Tell, the mountaineer, Wallace, the outlaw, and Hofer, the Tyrolese innkeeper. Born of the peo- ple, humble of rank and obscure in early life, these men (if men they all were) drew towards them the wrath of the powerful, the love of the mul- titude ; they were hunted, prisoned, murdered, — but every blow struck at them only made them dearer to the heart of the humble. By these, and not by coteries of scholars in their libraries, the fame of heroes is estab- lished. In heroes, faults are par- doned, crimes forgotten, exploits mag- nified, — their life becomes a poem or a scripture, — they enter that enviable earthly mortality which belongs to the story of a race, and can never be left out of literature. I first met John Brown, a little less than fifty years ago, when he was not quite 57 years old ; my acquaintance with him continued hardly three years ; yet I seem to have known him better, and to have seen him oftener than those who have journeyed beside me in life's path for sixty years. My actual intercourse with him hardly exceeded a month ; my correspond- ence was some two and a half years (from February, 1857, to September, 1859), and that infrequent; yet the momentous events in which he had a share give to that brief intercourse 6o FRANK /?. SANBORN. the duration of a lifetime. Nay, Thoreau was literally as well as fig- uratively right when he ascribed to Brown a practical immortality: "Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seems to me that John Brown is the only one who has not died. I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.'' It is true that Brown worked in secret all the time that I knew him, yet he had no aims but public ones ; and nothing which he did needs now to be concealed. Men are not yet agreed that all he did was perfectly right : it would be strange if they had been ; but there is a general agree- ment that he was himself right, as Governor Andrews said on a memo- rable occasion. He knew the inward cancer that was feeding on this repub- lic ; he pointed to the knife and the cautery that must extirpate it ; he even had the force and nerve to make the first incision. Lord Rosebery, speaking of cer- tain national junctures, said, "What is then wanted is not treasures, nor fleets, nor legions, but a man, — the man of the moment, the man of des- tiny." "In such men," he added, with Wallace chiefly in mind, "there is. besides their talents, their spirit, their character, that magnetic fluid which enables them to influence vast bodies of their fellow-men, and makes them a binding and stimulating power outside the circle of their own fasci- nation." This character Brown had, ami it grew out of his courage, his self-sacrifice and his implicit faith in God. These traits cannot long be simulated; nor is it easy to disguise selfishness in a mask of generosity. The less courage, the more self-love men have, the more easily do they recognize the opposites, sometimes only to hate and belittle them ; but the mass of men, and nearly all women, finally or speedily admire, and then worship. There was wis- dom, as well as bitter wit, in a reply of Talleyrand to some French invent- or of a new religion, who asked him how it could best be propagated. "Nothing easier ; get yourself cruci- fied for it." It was a religion by no means new which inspired Brown. Early in my acquaintance with him he said, "I believe in the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence ; to me they both mean the same thing. It would be better that a whole genera- tion — men, women and children — should pass away by a violent death, than that one jot of either should fail in this country." It may be asked if from the first the greatness of Brown's nature was to be recognized. It is not given young men to know all things — though they are mercifully kept from seeing this ; but there is a certain divining quality in youth which lets it behold more in simple men than the hardened veteran can discern. From our first meeting it was clear to me that Brown was ho common man ; his face, his walk, his whole bearing proclaimed it. Like Cromwell, whom in certain traits he much resembled, he had cleared his mind of cant ; the hollow formulas of scholars, priests and poli- ticians had no force with him. He had a purpose : knew what it was, and meant to achieve it. Who shall say that he did not? The emancipa- tion of our slaves could not be the FRANK B. SANBORN. 61 work of any one man, or of a million men ; it was finally wrought by Lincoln with a stroke of his pen ; but even then it cost thousands of lives and the patient work of years to confirm what Lincoln had written. John Brown convinced the leaders of opinion on both sides that slavery must die or the nation could not live ; and that was the first long step towards our emancipation. He came to me as mentioned, with a note of introduction from George Walker of Springfield — both of us being Kansas committee-men, work- ing to maintain the freedom of that territory, and Brown had been one of the fighting men there in the summer of 1856, just before. His theory required fighting in Kansas; it was the only sure way, he thought, to keep that region free from the curse of slavery. His mission now was to levy war on it, and for that to raise and equip a company of a hundred well-armed men who should resist aggression in Kansas, or occasionally carry the war into Missouri. Behind that purpose, but not yet disclosed, was his intention to use the men thus put into the field for incursions into Virginia or other slave states. Our State Kansas Committee, of which I was secretary, had a stock of arms that Brown wished to use for this company, and these we voted to him. They had been put in the custody of the National Committee at Chicago, and it was needful to follow up our vote by similar action in the National Committee. For this purpose I was sent to a meeting of that committee at the Astor House, in New York, as the proxy of Dr. Howe and Dr. Sam- uel Cabot — both members of the National Committee. I met Brown there, and aided him in obtaining from the meeting an appropriation of $5,- 000 for his work in Kansas, of which, however, he only received $500. The committee also voted to restore the custody of two hundred rifles to the Massachusetts committee which had bought them ; well knowing that we should turn them over to John Brown, as we did. He found them at Tabor, Iowa, in the following September, and took possession ; it was with a part of these rifles that he entered Virginia two years later. At this Astor House meeting Brown was closely questioned by some of the National Committee, particularly by Mr. Hurd of Chicago, as to what he would do with money and arms. He refused to pledge himself to use them solely in Kansas, and declared that his past record ought to be a sufficient guarantee that he should employ them judiciously. If we chose to trust him, well and good, but he would neither make pledges nor disclose his plans. Mr. Hurd had some inkling that Brown would not confine his warfare to Kansas, but the rest of us were willing to trust Brown, and the money was voted. In the following February — the Astor House meeting was Jan. 23 and 24, 1857 — I introduced Brown before a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, where he made the speech just quoted in aid of a state appro- priation by Massachusetts to protect the Free-State settlers who had gone from that state to Kansas. Such an appropriation had been voted in Ver- mont ; and we also came near carry- ing one ; it was finally voted down. Brown spoke forcibly, reading much from the paper above cited, describ- ing: the losses inflicted in Kansas on 62 FRANK D. SANBORN. the free-state men. He afterwards spoke at a public meeting in Concord, and in course of the winter at Wor- cester also, and in other places. Latein March I met him again in New York, and we went together to Kaston in Pennsylvania, where ex-Governor Reeder of Kansas was living, to per- suade him to return to Kansas, and become the head of our Free-State party there in the spring ot [857. Shortly before this journey Brown had visited me in the house of Ellery Channing, at Concord, where I had been living with my sister for two years ; it stood opposite the house of Henry Thoreau's father and mother, with whom he was then living, and where he died five years later. It was on Friday that he came up from Boston, and at noon we went across the street to dine with the Thoreau family. All Concord had heard of Brown's rights and escapes in Kansas the summer before, and Thoreau wished to meet him. As I had engage- ments in the afternoon, I left Brown talking with Thoreau, who easily saw what manner of man he was, and to whom he narrated in detail his most noted fight in Kansas — the Black Jack engagement, where, with nine men. he captured twenty-two men under Captain Pate. While they sat conversing, in the early afternoon, Emerson, who lived at the other (eastern) end of the Village, came up to call on Thoreau, and was there introduced to Brown. From this day's conversation, and what followed the next night, which Brown spent as Emerson's -nest, came that intimate acquaintance with Brown's character and general purposes which enabled Thoreau and Kmerson in 1859 to make those addresses in praise of him that did so much to turn the tide of sentiment in his favor, after his cap- ture at Harper's Ferry. But to ueither of them, nor to me at that time, did he open his Virginian plans ; and he would never unfold them fully to Wendell Phillips, much as they valued each other. The reason he gave me, a year later, for this reti- cence with Phillips, was noteworthy. He had charge d me to make his plan known to Theodore Parker, Dr. Howe and Col. Higginson, on my return from Gerrit Smith's house in Peter- boro, X. Y., where he had communi- cated it to me, after making Mr. and Mrs. Smith acquainted with it. I asked him if I should mention it to Mr. George Stearns or to Mr. Phillips. He replied that he would himself talk with Mr. Stearns when he saw him; as for Mr. Phillips, "I have noticed," said Brown, " that men who have the gift of eloquence, as our friend has it, seldom are men of action : now it is men of action I wish to con- sult ; and so you need say nothing to Wendell Phillips." On the Sunday morning following this interview between Brown, Tho- reau and Iiruerson, I called in a chaise at lunersou's house, where Brown had breakfasted, and drove with him across the country from Concord to Medford to visit Mr. Stearns, who then and afterwards was one of his most devoted and efficient friends. As we went along through Lexington and West Medford, talking of his campaigns in Kansas, and of his visits to Kuropean battlefields in [849, Brown directed my attention to places similar to those he had chosen for encampment or fortification on the prairies ; alleging that it was not the strongest positions that are usually FRANK B. SANBORN. 63 taken on hilltops, but that a ravine, well guarded on the flanks, was often a better military post. This was strange doctrine to me, and I remind- ed him of the clansman's remark in "Waverley," — "Even a haggis (God bless her ! ) can charge down hill ; ' ' but he maintained his opinion. He told me of the battlefields he had seen in Europe, Waterloo among them, and criticised the Austrian and French soldiers, whose reviews he had seen, saying (what the sequel soon verified) that the Austrians, with all their drill and precision, would be beaten by armies that moved more rapidly. His mind was then much occupied with plans of warfare, defensive and aggres- sive ; but he did not fail to note all common things which passed under his eagle's eye. His habit of reflec- tion and comparison was inborn and long cultivated. His conversation was modest but singularly instructive ; his manner was grave and diffident, yet full of respect and consideration. I have often heard and seen it said that Brown was unbalanced in mind — even insane. At the age of twenty- five I had no great personal experi- ence with insane persons, but since 1863 I have seen and talked with many thousands in manj^ states and countries, in different phases of insan- ity. Looking back I see clearly what I then felt instinctively, that no man had more fully the control of his own mind than Brown. Not the least of the many indications by which I can now recognize even slight aberrations of mind, were visible in him ; firmness and steadiness of soul, under the guidance of an inflexible will, but one in humble submission to a foreseeing, just and benign Divine will — these were conspicuous traits. From what is called ordinary prudence he was not exempt ; but he had in full meas- ure that higher, extraordinary pru- dence which teaches the superior man how to live and when to die, for accom- plishing a grand purpose . This higher prudence overrides the lower, as the higher law, at which Webster scoffed, overrules ordinary statutes ; and Brown was the greatest example the nine- teenth century saw of Emerson's lofty maxim — Though Love repine — and Reason chafe, There comes a voice without reply — " 'Tis man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die." In the conversations of Brown at Concord his ultimate plans were not revealed, but his spirit and character were fully seen. A casual glance, a frivolous mind might be deceived in John Brown ; his homely garb and plain manners did not betoken great- ness, but neither could they disguise it from penetrating eyes. That antique and magnamimous character which afterwards, amid wounds and fetters and ferocious insults, suddenly fas- tened the gaze of the whole world ; those words of startling simplicity then uttered among the corpses of his men and the ruin of his desperate enterprise, before his partial judges, or in his prison cell — all things that were peculiar to this man, and dis- tinguished him among the multitude — lost nothing of their force when he was seen at nearer view, and heard within the walls of a library. His impressive personality, whose echoes so long filled the air of our armed camps, and are still heard in strains of martial music, lacked nothing of its effect on the few who came within his influence before the world recosrnized him. 64 FRANK B. SANBORN. He first unfolded his extreme plans for attacking slavery in Virginia, on the evening of Washington's birth- day, [858, in an upper chamber of Gerrit .Smith's villa at Peterboro, where, amid his inherited acres which he managed with noble generosity, that baronial democrat lived and bore his part in our struggle for liberty. I mean, he unfolded them to me and my college classmate, Edwin Morton of Plymouth ; for he had already opened them to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in more private conversations, and they had signified a general approval. Now he read us the singular constitu- tion recently drawn up by him (in Frederick Douglass' house at Roch- ester), for the government of the ter- ritory, small or large, which he might rescue by force from the curse of slavery, and for the control of his own little band. It was an amazing proposition — desperate in its charac- ter, wholly inadequate in its provi- sion of means, and of very uncertain result. Such as it was, Brown had set his heart on it ; he looked upon it as the shortest way to restore our slave- cursed republic to the princi- ples of the Declaration of Indepen- dence ; and he was ready to die in its execution — as he did. We dissuaded him from what we thought certain failure ; urging all the objections that would naturally occur to persons desiring the end he- was seeking, but distrusting the slender means and the unpropitious time. Hut no argument could pre- vail against his fixed purpose ; he was determined to make the at- tempt, with many or with few, and he left us only the alternatives of betrayal, desertion or support. We chose the last, but more from a high regard for the man than with much hope of success. The results of our support and of Brown's action in Virginia are well known of all men. He struck at American slavery the severest blow it had ever received ; and his tragic ex- periment, though for a few months it seemed to have failed, was a great hastening cause of that bloody rebel- lion in which slavery perished. Brown was executed December 2, 1859; three years and thirty days afterward, President Lincoln issued the final decree of emancipation ; and in six years from the date of Brown's death, not a slave remained in bondage, of the four millions for whose redemption he had died. Seldom in human his- tory have such great results so rapidly followed magnanimous deeds. With- out claiming for Brown more than he modestly claimed for himself, I have always said he was an instrument in the hands of Providence, to uproot and destroy an evil institution : which had never appeared more boastful, more flourishing or more permanent than when, only eight years before final emancipation, Brown entered the broad domain of Kansas, which the slaveholders, by force and fraud, were holding as their own. I had aided, in a small way, to estab- lish freedom in Kansas ; and I assisted, to the extent of my power, the des- perate undertaking of Brown against slavery in the entire .South. Others contended against the monstrous mis- chief in other ways, and it is impossi- ble to estimate the exact share which Garrison, Phillips, Parker, Mrs. Stowe and the anti-slavery champions in general had in the final victory. But we may well say that to none except John Brown and Abraham Lincoln FRANK B. SANBORN. 65 was it granted to make the initial and walking ghost of 50 years ago, rises the final attack on the very seat of up to defend— not slavery itself but slavery's power, and to die in the some of its accessories. In doing this hour of victory, winning the double they naturally turn aside to belittle glory of champions and of martyrs, and abuse the memory of John Brown. That contest is long since over : our Ineffective must all their malice and country is free from chattel slavery, misprision be; his place is taken, and only a few embittered or fantas- once for all, among immortal names, tical persons now regret its disap- What he thought of himself five days pearance. Here and there a college before his death may be read on the professor, a belated editor or some next two pages : «<^Cjtk^ /^t Ct^ »ry ^k_ ^t^Ji^tZ' J ' h*AH ^^ ^~ &*/ Aa- hn^rh* fact ' OnvuJ ^n^v/7ruy^ suetlsrfjf' £utd,ei<7Ks -un.< levm. ttitoA tt-*-± . to cJ^/KaU^M^ U^JUtry'tiu C . T< Ur>^J<7&ot (fix*. : ^£ e^2^'^/^ C ^^ ~^~~ fc-^lJL *Jh» : £ erf Ax- i*™JL.~krv^~te vU^L^^^U^^nrf^. ow *&*- A^^tO- JfcUjt J *siUO U^cL ^a-o^ itn-Jk. toS7*>uJ&- yrOL. f4^/i*Z^ pi/t^y u - ^ -^ nslit'L )lu*A~ jut- LtS^tfttyrf $ri+un^. J1'. SANBORN. In my "Life and Letters of John will be fully explained. Col. Hig- Brown " (Boston, 1885) and in my ginson has yet to publish his final memoir of Dr. Howe (New York, account of his own relation to the 1 891) I have narrated quite fully my conflict in Kansas and its strange connection with Brown's enterprises, sequel at Harper's Ferry and Charles- and given my estimate of his charac- town. The estimate made of Brown ter. In a recent number of the by Emerson and Thoreau has been Ctitic magazine I have shown the widely read, and I have quoted some relation of Gerrit Smith to the foray passages from Bronson Alcott on the in Virginia; and in the forthcoming subject. But he showed me, forty biography of Major Stearns by his years a.^o, other entries in his diary son, F. P. Stearns, my former pupil, which preserve interesting facts as his father's connection with Brown well as opinions. FRANK B. SANBORN. 67 John Brown in I 859. From Alcott's Diary of 1859. Tuesday, Oct. 23. More about Captain Brown in today's papers; the trial at Charlestown, Va. f and its incidents. I am pleased to read that his friends here are obtaining good counsel for his defence, if the trial can be conducted with any fairness in that slave state. But an unbiased jury, a righteous judge cannot be got there, and he must take the extreme penalties, we are sure. Oct. 26, Evening. See Sanborn at Emerson's house; he ha! come home from looking into Capt. Brown's affairs. He was Brown's friend and entertained him here last May, as well as on a former visit in 1857. Ellery Channing is at Emerson's also, and we discuss the matter at length, I defending the deed, under the circum- stances, and the Man. His rescue would be difficult, even if he would consent to be taken. And the spectacle of a martyrdom such as his must needs be, will be of greater service to the country, and to the coming in of a righteous rule than years of agitation by the Press, or the voices of partisans, North and South. 'Twas a bold stroke, this of his, for justice universal, and it damages all (political) parties beyond repair. Even the Republicans must in some sense claim him as theirs in self defence, and to justify Republicanism in the people's eyes as freedom's defender. Wednesday, 9th November. Thoreau calls on me at the Orchard House. He thinks some one from the North should see Gov. Wise, or write concerning Brown's character and motives, to influence the governor in his favor. Thoreau is the man to write, or Emerson. But there seems little or no hope of pleas for mercy. Slavery must have its way and Wise must do its bidding on peril of his own safety. Nov. 28. Evening at the Town Hall, a meet- ing being called there to make arrangements for 68 FRANK B. SANBORN. celebrating by appropriate services the day of Captain Brown's execution. Simon Brown, I>r. Bartlett, Keye>. Emerson and Thoreau ad- dressed the meeting; and Emerson, Thoreau, Brown and Keyes are chosen a committee to prepare the service proper for the occasion. Sanborn is present also. Thoreau has taken a prominent part in the movement and chiefly arranged for it. Nov. JO. See Thoreau again, and Emerson, concerning the brown services on Friday, I'ec. 2. We do not intend to have any speeches made on the occasion, but have selected appro- priate passages from brown's words, from the - and from the scriputres, to be read by Thoreau, Emerson and myself, chiefly. The selection and arrangement is our. Dec. /. Again see Thoreau and Emerson. It is under- stood that I am to read the Martyr's Service. Thoreau the selections from the poets and Emerson those from Brown's words. I copy the passages I am to read from the Wisdom of Solomon, David's Psalms and also from Plato. Sanborn has written a dirge, which will be sung, and Rev. E. II. Sears from Wayland, will otter prayer. These arrangements were carried out in the presence of a large audi- ence. My dirge was sung ; but a more prophetic verse was indited by Mr. Sears, writing on his hymn book as the service proceeded. It was this: Not any space six feet by two Will hold a man like thee; John Brown will tramp the shaking earth From blue Ridge to the sea, Till the strong Angel come at last And opes each dungeon door, And God's Great Charter holds and waves O'er all His humble poor. Hardly had this funeral service been performed, and the body of Brown slowly made its way to its forest grave in the Adirondacs, where it is now included in the State Park of New York, when the Senate at Washington organized a special committee, headed by James M. Mason of Virginia and Jefferson I >avis of Mississippi to investigate the Vir- ginia foray, and fasten the responsi- bility of it, if possible, on Seward, Chase, Sumner and the other leaders of the Republican party. This com- mittee issued writs for the presence of witnesses, among them John Brown, Jr. and myself. My subpieua does not seem to have been preserved ; but here is a copy of that one served on Brown's eldest son at Dorset in Ohio. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Committee Room of the Select Committee of the Senate of the United States, Januarv 20, i860. To John brown, Jr. of Ashtabula Countv, Ohio. Greeting : Pursuant to the annexed resolution of the Senate of the United States, passed on the 14th of December, A. I). 1S59. you are hereby com- manded to appear before the Committee there- in named, in their room at the capitol, in the city of Washington, on Monday, the 30th day of January next, then and there to testify what you may know relative to the subject matter em- braced in the said resolution. Hereof fail not, as you will answer your default under the pains and penalties in such cases made and provided. Given under my hand and seal, by order of the Committee, this 20th day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty. (Signed) J. M. Mason, Chairman of the Select Committee of t lie Senate of the States. Resolved, That a committee be appointed to inquire into the facts attending the late invasion and seizure of the armory and arsenal of the United States at Harper's Ferry in Virginia, by a band of armed men. . . And that said committee have power to send for persons and papers. (i >n the reverse.) To Dunning R. McNair, Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate of the United States: You are hereby commanded to serve and return the within subpoena according to law. Dated at Washington this 20th day of Janu- ary in the year of our Lord i860. I. M. Mason. Chairman if the Select Commit- tee. Mr. McXair did not take the trouble to serve this writ, but sent it to H. Johnson, the U. S. marshal of the FRANK B. SANBORN. 69 Northern district of Ohio (in my case to Marshal Freeman of Sandwich, Mass.), who sent it to Mr. Brown with a letter containing this interest- ing assurance from Senator Mason : If you can get an interview or other means of communication with him, he may be induced to come under the assurance you can give — that, by a late law of Congress, no person who has been summoned as a witness before a com- mittee of Congress can afterwards be held to answer upon a criminal charge, for any fact or act done or committed by him, to which his tes- timony may refer. Thus should the witness have done anything in connection with the Har- per's Ferry affair, which might subject him to prosecution, by testifying before the Committee he will be thenceforth exempt from prosecu- tion. Notwithstanding this, John Brown, Jr. , refused to go to Washington for two reasons, — first, because he would be liable to seizure in passing through Virginia or Maryland ; and next because he would not testify against others at the price of his own exemp- tion. I received no such previous assurance from Mason, but when I offered to testify in Massachusetts, through fear of lack of protection in Washington, Mason assured me that he would be personally responsible for my safety. I was not so much concerned for that as resolved never to testify before slaveholders in regard to my friends. Senator Mason refused my pro- posal to testify in Massachusetts, as I supposed he would, and I then wrote him that under no conditions would I appear before his committee, but throw myself on my rights as a citizen of Massachusetts, reminding him also that I could hardly rely on his offer of protection, since my friend, Senator Sumner, had been brutally assaulted a few months earlier, in the senate chamber it- self. He then reported me in con- tempt of the authority of the senate, which, in February (the 16th), voted my arrest. I retired for a few weeks from general observation, until I had drawn up and forwarded my for- mal protest against the illegal action of the senate, sending two copies of it to Washington, — one to the vice- president, Breckenridge of Ken- tucky, and the other to the New Hampshire senator, J. P. Hale. During my absence from Concord I visited the family of John Brown in North Elba, N. Y., and arranged that his daughters, Anne and Sarah, should come to Concord and enter my school as pupils. Returning home I visited Boston and my native town in New Hamp- shire, where I gave a public lecture, and some time in March took up my daily business as head master of the Concord school. After so long an interval and so many opportunities for my arrest, which I was now quite ready for, I naturally concluded that the officers of the senate had given up any purpose they might have had to carry me to Washington, and dis- missed the matter from my mind. My neighbors and friends, however, were solicitous about it, and I was once or twice notified from Boston that I might be visited by the officers. In the meantime John Brown, Jr., had successfully defied arrest in Ohio ; James Redpath had done the same and neither was mo- lested. On the night of April 3, i860, I had been out making calls in the village of Concord, returning to my house on Sudbury Street, about 9 o'clock, and was sitting quietly in my study up stairs when the door- 7 o FRANK' /». SANBORN. bell rang. The one servant, Julia Leary, had gone to bed. My sister Sarah, who was then my house- keeper, was in her chamber, and, without anticipating any harm, I went down stairs into the front hall and answered the bell myself. A young man presented himself and handed me a note, which I stepped back to read by the light of the hall lamp. It said that the bearer was a person deserving charity, and I am satisfied that he was so before he got away from Concord that night. When I looked up from reading the note four more men had entered my hall, and one of them, Silas Carleton by name (a Boston tipstaff, as I afterwards learned), came forward and laid his hand on me, saying, " I arrest you." I said, ''By what authority? If you have a warrant read it, for I shall not go with you unless you show your warrant." Carleton, or the youth who had begged my charity, then began to read the order of the senate for my arrest. But my sister, who had feared, as I did not, what this visit meant, now rushed down the stairs, opened the other door of the hall and began to alarm the neighbors. See- ing that they were likely to be inter- rupted in their mission, my five callers then folded up their warrant, slipped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists before I suspected what they were doing, and tried to force me from the house. I was young and strong and re- sented this indignity. They had to raise me from the floor and lie- an to carry me (four of them) to the door where my sister stood, raising a con- stant alarm. My hands were pow- erless, but as they approached the door I braced my feet against the posts and delayed them. I did the same at the posts of the veranda and it was some minutes before they got me on the gravel walk at the foot of my stone steps. Meanwhile, the church bells were ringing a fire alarm, and the people were gather- ing by tens. At the stone posts of the gateway I checked their progress once more, and again, when the four rascals lifted me to insert me, feet foremost, in their carriage (a covered hack with a driver on the box), I braced myself against the sides of the carriage door and broke them in. By this time it was revealed to them that my unfettered feet were making all this trouble, and one of the four, named Tarleton, wearing a long black beard, grasped my feet and brought them together, so that I could no longer use them in resistance. They had got me into their hack as far as my knees, when my sister, darting forward, grasped the long beard of my footman and pulled with so much force that the pain of it compelled him to lose his grasp, and my feet felt the ground again, outside of the carriage. Now while all this was going on a great crowd had collected, among them old Colonel Whiting, with his daughter Anne, and his stout cane,' with which he began to beat the horses, while Miss Whiting climbed to the box beside the driver, and assured him that she was going as far as he and his horses went. They began to start at the repeated strokes of the good colonel's cane, and my bearers were left a rod or two behind the hack into which they had not been able to force me. They saw at FRANK B. SANBORN. 7i once that their kidnapping game was defeated, but they still held me, hatless and in my evening slippers, in the street in front of my house. At that moment, my counsel, J. S. Keyes, appeared by my side, asking me if I petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus. "By all means," said I, and he hurried off to the house of Judge Hoar,. some 20 rods away. The judge, hearing the tumult, and suspecting what it was, went to his library and began filling out the proper blank for the great writ of personal replevin. In less than 10 minutes after my verbal petition the writ, was in the hands of the stalwart deputy sheriff, John Moore, who at once made the formal demand on my captors to surrender their prisoner. Stupidly, as they had acted all along, they refused. The sheriff then called on the 150 men and women present to act as his posse comitatus, which some 20 of the men gladly did, and I was forcibly snatched from senatorial custody. At the same time my Irish neighbors rushed upon them and forced them to take to their broken carriage, and make off towards Lexington, the way they had driven up in the early evening. They were pursued by 20 or 30 of my townsmen, some of them as far as Lexington; but got away with no very serious bruises. I was committed to the custody of Capt. George L. Prescott (in the Civil War, Colonel Prescott, killed at Petersburg) and spent the night in his house not far from the Old Manse, armed, for my better defense, with a six-shooter, which Mr. Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape (then chairman of the selectmen), insisted I should take. I slept peacefully all the rest of that night, from about 11 o'clock, when the fray ended. In the morning I was taken to Boston by Sheriff Moore and carried to the old court house, near the pres- ent City Hall, where the justices of the Supreme Court were holding a law term. My counsel, who volun- teered for the case, were John A. Andrew, soon afterwards governor ; Samuel Sewall, a cousin of Mrs. Alcott, and my college classmate, Robert Treat Paine. The case was argued by Andrew and Sewall in my behalf, and by C. L. Woodbury, son of the distinguished Justice Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire, who had been dead for some years, but whose son was the Democratic dis- trict attorney. The court room was filled with my Concord and Boston friends, among them Wendell Phillips and Walt Whitman ; and in the afternoon Chief Justice Shaw, the most eminent jurist in New England, delivered the following decision, setting me free: OPINION OF THE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT. F. B. Sanborn vs. Silas Carleton. Shaw, C. J. This arrest was made by Silas Carleton, a citizen and inhabitant of Massachu- setts ; and in his answer under oath, he shows a warrant to Dunning R. McNair, sergeant-at- arms of the Senate of the United States, and says that the sergeant-at-arms entered an order upon it, delegating the power to Carleton to make the arrest. There is therefore no conflict in this case between the authority of an execu- tive officer of the United States and an officer of this Commonwealth. It appears by the answer of the officer, which stands as part of the return to the writ of habeas corpus, that Carleton claims to have arrested Sanborn under a warrant purporting to have been issued under the hand and seal of the vice- president of the United States and president of FRANK D. SANBORN. the Senate. It recites the appointment of a com- mittee of the Senate to inquire into the circum- stances of the attack made by a body of men upon the arsenal of the United States at Har- per's Ferry; the citation of Sanborn to answer as a witness before such committee ; that he re- fused to attend according to such summons ; that he was thereby guilty of a contempt; and directing Dunning R. McN'air, sergeant-at-arms of the Senate, to arrest the said Sanborn, wher- ever he could find him. and bring him before the Chief Justice Shaw //'. M. Hunt. Taken a Senate to answer for such contempt. This warrant seems to have been issued on the l6th of February last. There is an indorsement of the same date, by the sergeant-at-arms, author- izing and empowering the said <"arleton, the re- spondent, to make such arrest ; and the respond- ent justifies the arrest made on the jd April, instant, under that process. The question is whether this arrest is justified by this return. This question is a very broad and a very im- portant one, and opens many interesting ques- tions as to the functions and powers of the United States Senate, as a constituent part both of the legislative and executive departments of the United States government; and the modes in which they are to be exercised, and the limits by which they are qualified. It is admitted in the arguments that there is no express provision in the Constitution of the United States, giving this authority in terms; but it is maintained that it is necessarily inci- dental to various authorities vested in the Senate of the United States, in its legislative, executive and judicial functions, and must therefore be held to be conferred by necessary implication. These questions manifestly requiring great de- liberation and research in order to come to a sat- isfactory conclusion, and some preliminary ques- tions having been suggested by the petitioner's counsel, it was proposed, and not objected to by the learned district attorney and assistant district attorney of the United States, by whom the court were attended in behalf of the respondent, to consider these preliminary questions first ; because, if the objections, on the face of them, were sustained, it would supersede the necessity of discussing the other questions arising in the case. These points have been argued. For obvious reasons, we lay out of this inquiry the case of the Senate, when acting in their judi- cial capacity, on the trial of an impeachment laid before them by the House of Representa- tives; and we suppose the same considerations would apply to the case of the House of Repre- sentatives in summoning witnesses to testify be- fore them, as the grand inquest of the United States, with a view to an impeachment. Then the objections taken to this warrant, as apparent on the face of it, as rendering it in- sufficient to justify the arrest of the petitioner, are three : i. That the sergeant-at-arms, in his capacity as an officer of the Senate, had no authority to execute process out of the limits of the Dis- trict of Columbia, over which the United States have, by the Constitution, exclusive jurisdiction. 2. That a sergeant-at-arms is not an officer known to the Constitution or laws of the United States, as a general executive, of known powers, like a sheriff or marshal ; that he is appointed and recognized by the rules of the Senate as an officer exercising powers regulated by the rules and orders of the Senate, and can only exercise such powers as are conferred on him by such general rules and orders, made with a view to the regular proceedings of the Senate; or such as may be conferred by the Senate by special resolves and acts, as a single department of the government, without the concurrence of the other members of the government. FRANK B. SANBORN. 73 3. That by the warrant returned, the power to arrest the respondent was in terms limited to McNair, the sergeant-at-arms, and could not be executed by a deputy. In regard to the first, it seems to us that the objection assumes a broader ground than it is necessary to occupy in deciding this preliminary question. We are not prepared to say that in no case can the Senate direct process to be served beyond the limits of the district, by an authority expressly given for that purpose. The case of Anderson v. Dunn, 6 Wheat. 204, cited in the argument, has little application to this question. It is manifest that that was a writ of error from the circuit court for the Dis- trict of Columbia, and it appears that the alleged contempt of Anderson, in offering a bribe to a member of the House of Representatives, was committed in the District of Columbia, the act complained of as the trespass was done therein, and the process in question was served therein. In that case the process was served by the ser- geant-at-arms in person, under an express author- ity given by the House of Representatives, by their resolve for that purpose, in pursuance of which the speaker's warrant was issued. The second question appears to us far more material. The sergeant-at-arms of the Senate is an officer of that house, like their doorkeeper, appointed by them, and required by their rules and orders to exercise certain powers, mainly with a view to order and due course of proceed- ing. He is not a general officer, known to the law, as a sheriff, having power to appoint gen- eral deputies, or to act by special deputation in particular cases ; nor like a marshal, who holds analogous powers, and possesses similar func- tions, under the laws of the United States, to those of sheriffs and deputies under the state laws. But even where it appears, by the terms of the reasonable construction of a statute, conferring an authority on a sheriff, that it was intended he should execute it personally, he cannot exercise it by general deputy, and of course he cannot do it by special deputation. Wood v. Ross, 11 Mass. 271. But, upon the third point, the court are all of opinion that the warrant affords no justification. Suppose that the Senate had authority, by the resolves passed by them, to cause the petitioner to be arrested and brought before them, it ap- pears by the warrant issued for that purpose that the power was given alone to McNair, sergeant- at-arms, and there is nothing to indicate any intention on their part to have such arrest made by any other person. There is no authority, in fact, given by this warrant to dele- gate the authority to any other person. It is a general rule of the common law, not founded on any judicial decision or statute provision, but so universally received as to have grown into a maxim, that a delegated authority to one does not authorize him to delegate it to another. Delegata potestas non potest delegari. Broom's Maxim's (3d ed.) 755. This grows out of the nature of the subject. A special authority is in the nature of a trust. It implies confidence in the ability, skill or discretion of the party in- trusted. The author of such a power may extend it if he will, as is done in ordinary pow- F. B. Sanborn. (1857.) ers of attorney, giving power to one or his sub stitute or substitutes to do the acts authorized. But when it is not so extended it is limited to the person named. The counsel for the respondent asked what au- thority there is for limiting such warrant to the person named; it rather belongs to those who wish to justify under such delegated power, to show judicial authority for the extension. On the special ground that this respondent had no legal authority to make the arrest, and has now no legal authority to detain the petitioner in his custody, the order of the court is that the said Sanborn be discharged from the custodv said Carleton. 74 FRANK B. SANBORN. I was then taken by my enthusias- tic friends to Mast Cambridge in a carriage (to avoid rearrest in Boston), and from there returned to Concord, where a public meeting was held that evening to protest against the outrage offered to a citizen and to the town. No further effort was made to arrest me, the time and manner of my seiz- ure having put the public opinion of Massachusetts wholly on my side. Citizens of Boston presented my sis- ter with a handsome revolver in rec- ognition of her tact and courage. The next September I had the satis- faction of helping to nominate Mr. Andrew for governor of Massachu- setts in the Worcester Convention, to which I was sent as a Concord dele- gate. We elected and reelected him, and three years later he appointed me secretary of the Board of State Charities, a new and important office. This year, i860, was the last of Judge Shaw's life, and he had no opportunity, even had he wished it, to modify this decision. It agreed with the sentiments of two thirds of the people of Massachusetts, and made me popular in quarters where I was not known before. The Democratic mar- shal of New Hampshire, a distant cousin of mine, sent me word that, if I chose to visit my native state, he should not be able to find me, in case a second warrant for my arrest should issue. But I had no occasion to ac- cept his suggestion, being from that time forward as safe from arrest as the marshals themselves. Indeed, I brought suit against the five kidnap- pers who visited Concord, and also had them indicted at the next term of the Middlesex County court for the criminal offence of kidnapping, which had been carefully defined in our laws. But the Civil War coming on, early in 1S61, and several of my kid- nappers, with their council (General B. F. Butler), having volunteered or gone to the front, I withdrew my suit, and requested the district attorney to nolpros. the indictment. By this time, June, 1861, there was a strong reaction in the ranks of the Republican politicians in favor of Brown and his cause. At first, in the few weeks before the fall elections of 1859, there was much anxiety and trepidation among these leaders. The New York Herald and the pro-slavery Democratic committees charged Sew- ard, Greeley, Giddings and other Re- publicans of prominence with having known and approved Brown's plans in advance, and the Herald in Octo- ber, 1859, went so far as to say: We have ascertained one curious fact which must not be overlooked. The outbreak was ex- pected to have taken place several months ago ; and in that expectation W. H. Seward went to Europe and Horace Greeley expected to have done so, but afterwards changed his destination to the Pacific coast. After Brown and his un- fortunate comrades shall have been disposed of, the turn of Seward and the other Republican senators and members of congress will come. If they be not impeached and condemned, then neither should a hair of John brown's head suf- fer, for he is really less guilty than they. Charles Sumner was also in Eu- rope when Brown's attack was made, but his movements and those of Sew- ard had nothing to do with Brown's foray. Henry Wilson, however, Sum- ner's colleague in the Senate, a very impressible statesman, who needed the steadying touch of Sumner to hold him to his task, was much con- cerned at these attacks, which did not spare him. At a campaign rally in New York City, just before the election of 1S59, he undertook to re- FRANK B. SANBORN. 75 ply to the Herald and other pro-sla- very slanderers thus: At present, after other states have spoken, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Massachusetts — and spoken gloriously —an effort is being made, a poor, miserable, abortive, futile effort, to assail the cause of Republican liberty in New York by charging the responsibility of an insane ing to the slave oligarchy which Brown had given them, as he lay wounded on the armory floor at Har- per's Ferry, supposed to be dying. Mr. Cleveland said : The Southern party— they are not a Demo- cratic party— want to govern the whole Union old man's act at Harper's Ferry upon the 275,- 000 liberty-loving, patriotic Union-saving men of this state. He was going on to deprecate this, and to charge the pro- slavery Demo- crats with being really responsible for the anti-slavery agitation, when an attack of vertigo cut his speech short. Governor Cleveland of Con- necticut then took up the same thought, and exaggerated the warn- and every state in it, and to extend slavery all over it. I pray them, and every man should pray them, to desist from their insane policy. We advise them to concert with their Northern brethren some plan for the full emancipation of their slaves, and not continue to strive for the reopening of the Africa slave-trade. With such new slaves, who would be imported by thou- sands, they want to take the free soil of our land and give it over to African cultivators. When that has been long going on, we do not want, hereafter, to see some other John Brown breaking up this entire Union, and scattering woe and desolation North as well as South. 7 6 FRANK D. SANBORN. This was a more reasonable alter- native than most men in that excited time contemplated ; but there was great exaggeration in it. What Brown contemplated was such a dem- onstration as would compel North and South to face the real issue of slavery's existence in a democracy, and settle the question once for all. His active efforts to retaliate on Mis- souri, meant the same thing ; the Mis- souri plan and the Virginia plan were at heart the same, their object being to make slaveholding unsafe, and to give the slave a chance to fight for his freedom under rigid discipline, and not in the wild tumult of an in- surrection. This very policy of Brown's was adopted in 1861 by Gen- eral Fremont, in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, and in i863-'6.| by Secretary Stanton, after pressure from Governor Andrew and other earnest men in all parts of the North. It was this that finally overcame the Rebellion, and put an end to the long Civil War. John Brown led the way in this pol- icy, and the great heart of the people, wiser in its impulses than the states- men in their councils, early responded to the appeal that Brown had made. Nothing else made the name and fate of Brown the watchword and rallying song of our armies. Hardly had the Civil War begun in good earnest, when a regiment of Massachusetts soldiers, with a son of Daniel Web- ster at their head, came marching up State Street (where, ten years before, fugitive slaves were dragged back to slavery under Webster's Fugitive Slave Bill), singing, for the first time in the presence of an audience, the famous "John Brown Song ; " and it was soon heard from the lips of myriads wherever the Union armies were encamped or marching. Its sentiment inspired the North and en- couraged Lincoln to abolish slavery by proclamation, but little more than three years after Brown's death at Charlestown. I visited the scene of his imprison- ment and execution, in the spring of 1875, and met his honorable jailer, John Avis, whose later portrait is here given. He had been a captain in the Confederate army under Lee, and had ceased to be prison-keeper ; but was the same composed, friendly man that Brown had found him, in the six weeks he lived in that prison. So much was Brown affected by his kindness that when a rescue was pro- John Avis. ' o/yohn Brown. Takiu about 1SS0. posed to him by friends at the North, he refused to consider it ; saying that it would not be fair to Captain Avis to attempt aught of the kind. Not until 1882 did I visit Kansas and examine the scene of Brown's FRANK B. SANBORN. 77 deeds there. I found his name asso- ciated in the popular tradition with many acts he could hardly have per- formed, — a sure sign that tradition and myth were doing their work, as always after a hero has appeared. I lingered longest around Osawatomie, near which prairie town Brown and his sons had dwelt on their farms, and where the first of his sons was killed in the conflict which cost his own life and that of three of his children. A mile or so northwest of the village was the log-cabin of Rev. S. L. Adair, who had married a half sister of Brown, and had built the cabin be- fore the Kansas troubles began. No one spot in Kansas was more often visited by the hero than this ; and his sons, John, Owen, Jason and Salmon, were also often there. The funeral of his son Frederick was held in the great living room of this cabin, — his mangled body having been brought in there from the high prairie farther west, where he was shot by the invading Missourians. I took tea with Mr. Adair and his daughters, and inquired particularly about the flourishing white pine tree that was seen near the cabin. Mr. Adair told me that when he last visited his native New York, in the pine-growing region, he had taken up two young pines and brought them to shade a part of his dooryard, — and these large trees were the re- sult. They seemed to flourish as well in the rich limestone soil of the high prairie as in the rocky hills of northern New York. Among the many who congratu- lated me on my successful resistance to the arrogance of the pro-slavery majority in the senate, was my col- lege classmate, Francis Channing Barlow, with whom I had kept up a correspondence since we graduated in 1855, — he in New York City, prac- tising law, and I in Concord, teach- ing Greek and Latin, which we had read together in Cambridge. Re- Gen. F. C. Barlow. cently I have acquired, through the kindness of another classmate, Gen. S. C. Lawrence of Medford, a rare portrait of General Barlow; in his uniform, as he fought and was wounded at Gettysburg. It may fitl5 T adorn this warlike chapter. " I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method," said Thoreau, " who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave." Can any method be found that could have done that work quicker than Brown's ? Within .six years from his execution there was not a slave held in bondage in the United States ; but for Brown's career it might have been sixty years before we reached that result. His attack and its consequences showed 78 FRANK B. SANBORN. both North ami South the gulf on whose brink they were standing : the infuriated slave-masters made haste to break up the Union, which they saw might ultimately destroy their system. Put thus to the test, our millions of the North were not slow to say, " We choose union without slavery, even at the cost of indefinite bloodshed, to any further union with slave-masters and trai- tors." The mobs of our cities, which, in January, [86i, were howl-' ing against the abolitionists, six months later were dangerous to com- promisers that counseled peace with dishonor. The ancient belief that in battle that army must win in whose vanguard the first victim devoted himself to death, was once more jus- tified. Led on by a foreordination he felt but did not understand. Brown gave his life for the cause destined to succeed. Unlike that French mar- shal who " spent a long life carrying aid to the stronger side," Brown lent his good sword to that which seemed the weaker, but which had God for its reserve. Standing on the battlefield of Get- tysburg less than four years after Brown's public murder (November 19, 1863), Lincoln pronounced the funeral oration, more eloquent than Pericles, of those who "gave their lives that the nation might live." Not many months later Lincoln him- self fell, — the last great victim in the cause of which Brown was the first great martyr. But the brave men commemorated at Gettysburg went forth to battle at the call of a grand people ; they were sustained by the resources and the ardor of millions. I must still recall the sacrifice of my old friend, — lonely, poor, persecuted, making a stand on the outpost of Freedom, — our own guns trained upon him, as the furious enemy swept him to death in the storm of their vengeance ; and now I see that History cannot forget him, but exalts him among the liberators of mankind, who sealed the testament of their ben- efactions with the blood of noble hearts. Pitied by gentle hearts Kilmarnock died ; The brave, Balmerino! were on thy side. NEW HAMPSHIRE BIOGRAPHY and AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY F. B. SANBORN OF CONCORD IN MASSACHUSETTS (183 1 to 1860) PRIVATELY PRINTED CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE JULY, 1905 *N=- Agl2