HE 
 
 BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
 OF 
 
 JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 
 
Oass 
 Book. 
 
 ■J V I 
 
 Copyright N^. 
 
 cdje:ilright oEPosm 
 
SIX HUNDRED COPIES OF THIS 
 BOOK HAVE BEEN PRINTED — FOR 
 PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION ONLY. 
 
 THIS COPY IS NUMBER 
 
 iiJ.1. 
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 THE SCRIBNER PRESS 
 NEW YORK 
 
THE BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
 OF 
 
 JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 
 
THE 
 
 BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
 OF 
 
 JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 PRIVATELY PRINTED 
 
 1917 
 

 Copyright, I9i7> by 
 Caroline Sterling Choate ^ 
 
 ^=£8 -I 19id 
 
 ©CI.A4921;29 ^ 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 For many years Mr. Choate's family and friends 
 had begged him to write his reminiscences. He in- 
 variably refused to entertain the idea on the ground 
 that, in his opinion, such sketches could be of no value 
 to any one. To the many requests of publishers, 
 editors, and biographers, he likewise — with a char- 
 acteristic lack of vanity — turned a deaf ear. 
 
 In the spring of 1914, however — when he was in 
 his eighty-third year — the convalescence and inac- 
 tion consequent upon the first severe illness of his life, 
 prompted him to begin the dictation of these papers. 
 They were casually and intermittently composed, 
 with no idea of publication in mind, and only in- 
 tended for the eyes of his immediate family. On 
 occasions weeks and even months passed by without 
 his giving them a thought. 
 
 The papers are here printed literally, just as he dic- 
 tated them to his secretary. Mr. Choate made no use 
 of notes in preparing them; he consulted no books, 
 and he never even corrected the manuscript. Had he 
 done so, he would undoubtedly have made many ver- 
 bal alterations — and perhaps excisions — in the text. 
 He began the sketches with slight interest, but, as 
 
[vi] 
 
 they developed, he became more absorbed in the task 
 and looked forward with a good deal of pleasure to 
 going on with it. 
 
 After the celebrations incident to his eighty-fifth 
 birthday, he went back to the work with renewed 
 zest and had started on the chapter entitled "Mar- 
 riage" when there came the break in our diplomatic 
 relations with Germany. From that moment — Feb- 
 ruary 3, 19 1 7 — nothing could induce him to con- 
 tinue his task. His mind seemed to harbor but one 
 thought, the thought of the Great Cause and of the 
 part which he longed to have his country play in it. 
 
 Caroline Sterling Choate. 
 
 Naumkeag, Stockbridge, Mass., 
 October 16, 1917. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Prefatory Note v 
 
 I. Ancient History 3 
 
 II. Hog Island 20 
 
 III. Childhood 33 
 
 IV. Salem 44 
 
 V. Harvard College 66 
 
 VI. Training for the Bar 91 
 
 VII. Early Days in New York 106 
 
 VIII. At the New York Bar 128 
 
 IX. Marriage 150 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Joseph Hodges Choate at the Age of Seventeen 
 
 Frontispiece 
 The original daguerreotype is in the possession of Mrs. 
 Choate, and is the earliest existing picture of Mr. Choate. 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 The Old Witch House, Salem, in 1839 .... 10 
 
 As it looked when it fascinated Mr. Choate as a boy. 
 This house belonged to Lieutenant Nathaniell Ingersalls in 
 1692; and it was here that the men and women under the 
 terrible suspicion of witchcraft were examined. 
 
 The Choate Bridge — Ipswich, Massachusetts . . 10 
 
 Built in 1764 by Colonel John Choate, grandson of the first 
 Choate settler, and brother of J. H. C.'s ancestor. This was the 
 first bridge built on arches in that part of the world, and caused 
 such wonder to the inhabitants that they waited all day when 
 the supports were removed, expecting to see it collapse. 
 
 Hog Island 20 
 
 Named from the shape of the land. The land was acquired 
 by John Choate the original emigrant. In 1690 his son, 
 Thomas, married and lived there for thirty-five years. 
 
 Choate Homestead on Hog Island 20 
 
 Built in 1725 by Francis Choate, great-great-grandfather 
 of J. H. C. Here, in 1799, Rufus Choate was born. The house 
 and farm are still in the possession of his branch of the family. 
 
 Stephen Choate — 1727-1815 26 
 
 Great-grandfather of J. H. C. He held various public offices, 
 was twice married, had thirteen children, and lived to be 
 eighty-eight years old. 
 
 Doctor George Choate 34 
 
 Born at Ipswich, 1796; died at Cambridge, 1880, in the 
 eighty-fourth year of his age — father of J. H. C. This silhou- 
 ette was evidently made as he approached middle age. 
 fix! 
 
[X] 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 House of Doctor George Choate on Essex Street, 
 
 Salem 42 
 
 This house was given to Mrs. George Choate by her father, 
 Gamaliel Hodges, on the occasion of her marriage to Doctor 
 Choate, and here all her six children were born. It was also 
 in this house that Count Rumford served as apprentice to Mr. 
 Appleton before the Revolutionary War. 
 
 Hodges House on Essex Street, Salem .... 42 
 
 A good specimen of the style of the period. Owned by John 
 Hodges, uncle of J. H. C. 
 
 Gamaliel Hodges — 1766-1850 54 
 
 Grandfather of J. H. C. From a pastel portrait painted 
 in Antwerp, when " Captain " Hodges, as a young sea captain, 
 roamed the sea. He lived to be over eighty-four years old, and 
 only survived his wife two months. Their married life lacked 
 but six days of lasting sixty-two years. 
 
 Doctor George Choate — 1 796-1 880 66 
 
 Father of J. H. C. This portrait was made when he was 
 about sixty-six years old. 
 
 Mrs. George Choate 78 
 
 Born at Salem, 1805; died at Stockbridge, 1887. Mother 
 of J. H. C. Margaret Manning Hodges, daughter of Gamaliel 
 and Sarah Williams Hodges, married Doctor Choate in 1825. 
 Their married life lasted fifty-six years and a half, and they 
 had four sons and two daughters. J. H. C. was the fifth child. 
 
 Joseph Hodges Choate at the Age of Twenty . . 90 
 
 This picture was taken with his class at graduation in 1852. 
 The original daguerreotype is in the Harvard Library at Cam- 
 bridge. 
 
 RuFus Choate 98 
 
 Born at Hog Island 1799; died at Halifax 1859. First cousin 
 of Doctor George Choate. This was J. H. C.'s favorite por- 
 trait of his distinguished kinsman, and always hung in his own 
 room over his bed. He had a great admiration and affection 
 for Rufus Choate, and always felt deeply grateful to him for 
 his early kindnesses. 
 
[xi] 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 William M. Evarts io8 
 
 The famous New York lawyer, Attorney-General, Secretary 
 of State, and United States Senator. He invited J. H. C. to 
 become junior partner in the firm of Evarts and Southmayd 
 in 1859, and the relationship then begun was only dissolved 
 by Mr. Evarts's death. This portait, painted by William M. 
 Hunt in the seventies, shows Mr. Evarts in the prime of life. 
 
 Gamaliel Hodges — 1766-1850 120 
 
 This silhouette of Mr. Choate's grandfather was made when 
 he was about seventy years of age. He was a very big man, 
 over six feet and a half tall, and weighed over three hundred 
 pounds; although when he was born he is said to have been 
 so small that he was put in a silver tankard and the top shut 
 down ! 
 
 Joseph Hodges Choate \ 
 
 Caroline Sterling Choate j '3^ 
 
 These photographs were taken in 1863 — two years after their 
 marriage, October 16, 1861. Their married life lasted over 
 fifty-five years. 
 
 Announcement of the Formation of the Firm of 
 
 Choate and Barnes, in 1858 144 
 
 This notice was found among Mr. Choate's papers, and 
 must have been issued just a few months before he joined the 
 firm of Evarts and Southmayd. 
 
 Facsimile of Manuscript of Verses 152 
 
 Written to Mrs. John Jay by Mr. Choate on the day of his 
 engagement — ^July 4, 1861. The verses — printed, in toto, on 
 pages 151 and 152 — are interesting as showing his character- 
 istic handwriting, which never faltered until the day of his 
 death. 
 
THE BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
 OF 
 
 JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 
 
ANCIENT HISTORY 
 
 A long confinement to my room and bed, for the 
 first time in more than eighty years, threw me in 
 upon myself for many weary days and nights, and 
 left me nothing to study but the pictures on the walls 
 of my room; but these served as stepping-stones, as it 
 were, in the progress of a long and happy life, and re- 
 minded me of the many requests of my children and 
 others that I would put upon paper some of its remi- 
 niscences. 
 
 I believe it was Doctor Holmes who said that a 
 child's education should begin a hundred years be- 
 fore he was born, and I think mine began at about 
 the period he indicates. 
 
 To begin with, there is the portrait of my sturdy 
 maternal grandfather, Gamaliel Hodges — Captain 
 Mill Hodges, as he was always called in Salem, where 
 he was born and lived, and where he died in 1850. 
 It is only a silhouette, but represents a sturdy and 
 fine old figure at seventy, full of life and health, and 
 good for many years to come. 
 
 It was he who brought into our line the size and 
 strength and length of days that has stood us so well 
 in hand for three generations at least. It was his 
 twenty-five years before the mast and on the quarter- 
 
 [3] 
 
[4] 
 
 deck, full of fresh air and salt water, that gave us our 
 good constitutions; and if I was able to maintain a 
 very strenuous life at the bar for forty years and at 
 the same time to give to public service all the atten- 
 tion that a private citizen should, I owe it more to 
 him than to anybody else. 
 
 If he had had a full education he would undoubt- 
 edly have been a very prominent character in Massa- 
 chusetts, but he never went beyond the common 
 schools at Salem, which at that date must have been 
 of an extremely primitive character. He told me 
 that in 1776, at the age of ten, he heard the Decla- 
 ration of Independence read on Salem Common, and 
 it made a life-long impression upon him; but what 
 showed the limited quantity of his education was 
 that he never went beyond the three R's — Reading, 
 Writing, and Arithmetic — at the school that he at- 
 tended, and that every day, when the hour came for 
 dismissing school, the boys all rose and recited to- 
 gether, "Honorificabilitudinitatibus," and with the 
 **Bus" all started for the door with a shout. 
 
 That was the sum of all his schooling; for, like all 
 Salem boys of well-to-do families in those days, he 
 took to the sea at fifteen, which served him as college 
 and university through all the grades, as cabin-boy, 
 seaman, supercargo, second mate, first mate, and 
 captain, and only retired when he had become not 
 only the master but owner of his ship. The largest 
 ships of that day were of six or seven hundred tons, 
 which could easily get into Salem Harbor, and per- 
 
[5] 
 
 mitted it to be the chief seaport of Massachusetts. 
 And when larger vessels came in, that could not get 
 in there, commerce moved to Boston and New York, 
 with their commodious harbors. 
 
 I never knew where this unpronounceable word 
 that gave the sign for the dismissal of this school came 
 from until some years afterwards, when I found it 
 in the mouth of Holofernes, the schoolmaster in 
 "Love's Labor's Lost," who seemed to have made a 
 similar use of it. Now my grandfather, I am sure, 
 had never read Shakespeare, and I doubt whether his 
 teacher had. It must have been a word — if we can 
 call it a word — that came down through tradition in 
 the schools, handed from mouth to mouth, and cross- 
 ing the Atlantic with the first settlers. And I have 
 no doubt that for centuries before that it had been 
 used in a similar way in the Latin schools of early cen- 
 turies, for I find that it occurs in manuscripts at least 
 as early as the twelfth century, in the "Catholicon" 
 of Johannes of Janua, 1286, and in Dante's "De vul- 
 gari eloquio," and in late middle Latin dictionaries. 
 The idea seems to have been that any boy who could 
 spell that could spell any word in any language. 
 
 At any rate, Gamaliel Hodges' stalwart form has 
 served us well ever since. He is said to have been the 
 tallest man in Salem, and at his best, or worst, 
 weighed no less than three hundred and fifty pounds. 
 And his brothers were of like stature, for the story is 
 told that when all three — he and Benjamin and 
 George — were standing together on Derby Wharf, the 
 
[6] 
 
 master of a foreign vessel coming up the dock, ex- 
 claimed: "Is this a land of giants?" He had no 
 nerves whatever, and is believed to have gone through 
 his long life of eighty-five years without any illness 
 until that which finally carried him off. 
 
 But the Choates of our line were generally a ner- 
 vous race, full of vitality and mental action, without 
 the Hodges stamina, dying or failing early, and per- 
 haps lingering into old age in a somewhat weakened 
 condition. It was this blend of two such different 
 stocks by the union of my father and mother that 
 proved such a happy one for their posterity. 
 
 There is another portrait of Gamaliel Hodges in my 
 library, representing him as a spruce young American 
 shipmaster, about twenty-five years old, in what ap- 
 pears to have been the sort of uniform for such com- 
 manders at that period. It was painted in Antwerp 
 when he was there in command of a ship, and his 
 cocked hat, red waistcoat, ruffled shirt, with a spy- 
 glass under his arm, set him off to advantage. Strange 
 to say, it bears a striking resemblance to one of his 
 great-grandsons, showing how features are some- 
 times transmitted to distant posterity to one out of 
 many descendants. 
 
 There is a story worth noting about this picture. 
 My lifelong friend, Captain John S. Barnes, who was 
 a naval commander in the Civil War, came into my 
 library one day, and as his eyes fastened upon this 
 picture he exclaimed, with uplifted eyes and hands: 
 "Where did you get that picture.?" 
 
[7] 
 
 Well, I told him I had seen it at least seventy years 
 ago in my grandfather's house in Salem, and it came 
 direct to me from there when that house was broken 
 up. "Why," he said, "that cannot be. That is a 
 portrait of John Paul Jones." 
 
 It seems that Captain Barnes had purchased in 
 Paris a portrait of John Paul Jones, at a high cost, 
 and which he had treasured very carefully ever since 
 out of admiration for that hero, and he said I must be 
 mistaken about the subject of the portrait. Nothing 
 would satisfy him, however, but to bring his own pic- 
 ture and set it side by side with mine. And then it 
 appeared plainly enough that the only resemblance 
 between the two was in the cocked hat, the red waist- 
 coat, the ruffled shirt, the spy-glass under the arm, 
 and a similar air of the sea in both pictures — a ship 
 and the salt water being in the background. 
 
 I have heard that in those days it was the fashion 
 with young American shipmasters, when in foreign 
 ports, to get their portraits painted to bring home to 
 their families, and very likely these two fell into the 
 hands of the same artist. So he kept his portrait, and 
 I mine, both perfectly satisfied with our treasures. 
 
 My grandmother, Sarah Williams, who married 
 Gamaliel Hodges in 1788, was a model of the do- 
 mestic virtues. She had eight children, five sons and 
 three daughters, of whom my mother, Margaret 
 Manning Hodges, born in 1805, was the youngest. 
 
 She was of tiny stature, much less than half the 
 size of her husband, which saved her children and 
 
[8] 
 
 grandchildren from becoming giants by reducing them 
 to reasonable stature. Always serene, placid, and in- 
 dustrious, she lived and thought in the good old style, 
 as if the object of her life was accomplished by taking 
 good care of her husband and children, and she satis- 
 fied the old adage that the best women in the world 
 are those of whom the world hears least. 
 
 She lived to a good old age, being one year younger 
 than her husband and dying three months before 
 him, at the age of eighty-three. But before the end 
 she got tired of life, and for many years I remember 
 her sitting in the chimney-corner and occasionally 
 exclaiming: "The Lord has forgotten me. The Lord 
 has forgotten me." Her husband, with whom she had 
 lived in happy union for sixty-two years, could not 
 bear to live without her, and followed her to the grave 
 in less than three months. 
 
 It is through her that we trace our direct descent 
 from the most distinguished of all our ancestors on 
 either side, Philip English, the first great merchant of 
 Salem and presumably of New England. He intro- 
 duced into our lineage the only strain of foreign blood 
 that I can find on either side. 
 
 He was born in the Island of Jersey and his real 
 name was Phillippe L' Anglais. He was baptized June 
 30th, 165 1, in Trinity Parish, Isle of Jersey, where, on 
 a visit to that island in 1902, I verified the record of 
 his birth. He is said to have been of Huguenot 
 blood, and came to Salem about 1670, where he soon 
 after married Mary Hollingworth, daughter of Wil- 
 
[9] 
 
 Ham Hollingworth by his wife, who is described as 
 *'the accompHshed and beautiful Eleanor Story." 
 
 As I have traced my grandmother's descent from 
 him, it was thus: 
 
 Philip English's daughter Mary married Captain 
 William Brown before 1730. Their son, William 
 Brown, married Abigail Archer, widow of John El- 
 kins of Salem. Their daughter, Abigail, married Cap- 
 tain William Williams, an English master mariner, 
 and their daughter, Sarah Williams, born in March, 
 1767, was my grandmother. 
 
 Strangely enough, two generations before, another 
 Gamaliel Hodges, my grandfather's grandfather, had 
 married another Sarah Williams, through whom we 
 were connected with many interesting Salem fam- 
 ilies. 
 
 Philip English, after his settlement in Salem and 
 marriage with Miss Hollingworth, proved to be its 
 most enterprising and successful citizen. He built 
 and owned twenty-seven vessels and carried on a great 
 commercial trade, acquired large tracts of land, some 
 of them through his wife, and built at the foot of 
 Essex Street, overlooking the harbor across to the 
 Beverly shore and the Marblehead shore, a fine old 
 gabled house of large dimensions for that day, be- 
 sides fourteen other valuable houses, and seems to 
 have been universally respected and honored. 
 
 But "the whirligig of time," as Shakespeare says, 
 ''brings in its revenges," and when the strange witch- 
 craft delusion broke out in 1692 his eminence and 
 
[lO] 
 
 great success brought upon him and his wife, prob- 
 ably because of envy at their success and high char- 
 acter — they were considered as too aristocratic — the 
 charge of being guilty of witchcraft. 
 
 They were both arrested and lodged in Boston jail, 
 from which they managed to escape and took refuge 
 in New York City, which has always been the asylum 
 of the oppressed, where they remained until the de- 
 lusion had subsided. Otherwise their names would 
 certainly have been included with the other twenty 
 victims of that terrible delusion. 
 
 After their return he was for many years an appli- 
 cant to the General Court of Massachusetts for relief 
 and compensation for the injuries that he had sus- 
 tained by reason of the wicked charge. 
 
 But so rapidly did the delusion die out when the 
 awful bubble had once burst, that on their return, in 
 the following year, they are said to have been wel- 
 comed home with bonfires and other marks of re- 
 joicing, and he lived for thirty or forty years longer. 
 
 The warrant for the arrest of English is dated at 
 Salem, April 30th, 1692. It is directed to the mar- 
 shal of the County of Essex and requires him "in 
 their Majesties' names to apprehend and bring before 
 us Phillip English of Salem, merchant, at the house of 
 Lt. Nathaniell Ingersalls in Salem Village [that is the 
 "Witch House" that is still standing] in order to 
 theire Examination Relateing to high Suspition of 
 Sundry acts of witchcraft donne or Committed by 
 them upon ye Bodys of Mary Walcot Marcy Lewis 
 
THE OLD WITCH HOUSE, SALEM, IN 1839. 
 
 As it looked when it fascinated Mr. Choate in boyhood. This house belonged to Lieu- 
 tenant Nathaniell Ingersalls in 1692; and it was here that the men and women 
 under the terrible suspicion of witchcraft were examined. 
 
 THE CHOATE BRIDGE— IPSWICH, MASSACHUSETTS. 
 
 Built in 1764 by Colonel John Choate, grandson of the first Choate settler, 
 and brother of J. H. C.'s ancestor. This was the first bridge built on arches in 
 that part of the world, and caused such wonder to the inhabitants that they 
 waited all day when the supports were removed, expecting to see it collapse. 
 
li the de» 
 lid 
 
 A-t'ir m .MajA8 .aauoH hotiw ajD hht 
 
 fiirnuw bnfi nam srfj jsrfj siad a£w li ban ;s()J>i ni alkaiagnl IbinBdJeM Jncnai 
 
 bant, a 
 
 ni Mriaifi no jl.ud agbnd Jaift arij atw airiT .loJesDni; e'.O .H .1 lo wrijoid bns 
 
 XsHj Jarfj zjnsjidfirfni arft oj isbnow rious baauw bnt .bhow sAj \o n&q ie/Ij 
 
 .aaqslloD li 39a oj aniJDsqz-j .bavomsi 3197/ ajioqqua arij nsrf-w yeb (le bajisv/ 
 
Abigail Williams Ann Putnam and Elizabeth Hub- 
 bert and Susannah Sheldon: viz: upon some or all of 
 them belonging to Salem village or farmes whereby 
 great hurt and dammage hath benne donne to ye 
 Bodys of said persons according to complaint of Capt 
 Jonathan Walcot and Serjent Thomas Putnam in be- 
 half of their Majesties for themselves and also for 
 severall of theire neighbours." 
 
 On the 2d of May, George Herrick, marshal 
 of Essex, reports Philip English cannot be found, 
 whereupon a new warrant was issued to the marshal- 
 general or his lawful deputy, and restating that he 
 cannot be found, the marshal is authorized to appre- 
 hend him and convey him into Salem and deliver him 
 into the custody of the Essex marshal. And the 
 marshal-general's deputy reports that "In obedience 
 to the within written warrant the within remanded 
 Phillip English was arrested and committed by the 
 Marshall General to the Marshall of Essex, on the 
 30th of May instant." But nevertheless he and his 
 wife did escape. 
 
 And this is some of the evidence which is worth re- 
 lating as showing the horrible character of that de- 
 lusion : 
 
 "The complaint of Susanna Sheldon against Phillip 
 English, the said Susanna Sheldon bieng at meeting 
 on the Sabboth day being the 24 of Aprill shee being 
 aflicted in a very sad manner she saw phillip English 
 step ouer his pew and pinched her and a womane 
 which came from boston wich saith her name is good 
 
[12] 
 
 ne when shee were coming home against WilHam 
 Shaws house their mether PhilHp EngHsh and a black 
 man with a hy crowned hatt on his head and a book 
 in his hand houlding the book to her and PhiUip eng- 
 Hsh told her that Black man were her God and if 
 shee would tuch that boock he would not pinch her 
 no more nor no body els should. 
 
 "on the next day phillip English came again and 
 pinched her and told her that if shee would not 
 toutch the book hee would kill her. 
 
 "On the second day at night apeared to her two 
 women and a man and brought their books and bid 
 her touct them shee told them shee would not shee 
 did not know wher they lined on of them told her 
 they lived at the village and heald the book to her 
 again and bid her touch it. shee told her shee did 
 not know their names on of them told her shee was 
 old Goodman buck lyes wife and the other woman 
 was her daughter Mary and bid her touch the book, 
 shee told no shee had not told her how long shee had 
 beene a witch, then shee told her shee had beene a 
 witch ten years and then shee opened her brest and 
 the black man gau her two little things like yong 
 cats and she pit them to her brest and suckled them 
 they had no hair on them and had ears like a man." 
 
 The whole New England community appears to 
 have gone mad and to have committed at the in- 
 stigation of a handful of malicious and foolish girls a 
 terrible massacre of twenty of their fellow citizens, 
 among them some of the most cultivated, pious, and 
 
[13] 
 
 innocent people in the world. Giles Corey, a man 
 over eighty years old, was pressed to death by order 
 of the court for refusing to plead to the indictment 
 against him. And all this was done at the instiga- 
 tion of the clergy of New England, headed by Cotton 
 Mather, obsessed with the conviction that the Devil 
 was among them laboring in person to corrupt and 
 destroy the State. 
 
 Certainly, my ancestor was extremely fortunate to 
 escape with his life. I read that, not finding his per- 
 son, they seized upon and confiscated 1,500 pounds' 
 worth of his goods, and after many years he recovered 
 judgment against the marshal for 60 pounds and 
 was awarded 200 pounds by the commonwealth for 
 his indemnity, a very sorry satisfaction for all his 
 suffering. 
 
 Choate seems to have been a very old English name 
 among the better sort of English yeomen. I had the 
 pleasure of meeting Lord Acton, a great historical 
 authority, soon after my arrival in England for a long 
 residence, and he said to me: 
 
 **Why, I have seen your name spelled exactly as 
 it is now, in English annals as early as the fourteenth 
 century." 
 
 Foolishly enough, I did not think to ask him for a 
 reference to the book where this could be found, and 
 very soon afterwards he died, and the knowledge of 
 that died with him. 
 
 The name, however, did to a slight extent emerge 
 
[H] 
 
 from obscurity in England early in the seventeenth 
 century, when Thomas Choate, son of Thomas of 
 Essex entered Christ College at Cambridge Univer- 
 sity in the same year with John Milton, 1624. The 
 records also show that he remained there for four 
 years and took his degree with Milton in 1629, and 
 being in the class for four years, they must often have 
 met, and, at least, have become familiar acquain- 
 tances. 
 
 In the Biographical Register of Christ's College, 
 issued in 1913, this entry appears: 
 
 "Choate, Thomas: son of Thomas. Of Essex 
 School: Wethersfield, under Mr. Cosen. 
 Admitted pensioner under Mr. Cell — 
 November 1624 B.A. 1629. 
 
 Probably brother of John Chote or 
 Choate, who went to America and be- 
 came ancestor of Joseph Hodges Choate, 
 United States Ambassador to England, 
 I 899-1905." 
 
 Pensioners at that date represented the sons of 
 well-to-do people like Milton, whose father at that 
 time was a scrivener and stationer in London. 
 
 I have not been able to verify this identification of 
 Thomas as the brother of my ancestor John, but there 
 are many things that tend to confirm it, among these 
 that John named his third son Thomas, and in the 
 settlement of his estate, provision was made for the 
 
[15] 
 
 completion of the education of his youngest son, Ben- 
 jamin, at Harvard. The family tradition has al- 
 ways been that our immigrant ancestor was the John 
 Choate who was baptized by that name in the old 
 church at Groton, in England, on the 6th of June, 
 1624. I verified this record in the parish church, the 
 same church in which Adam Winthrop, father of John 
 Winthrop, was buried. 
 
 Professor Masson, in his elaborate history of Mil- 
 ton, which is really for the period covered by it a his- 
 tory of England, records that Milton was one of 
 forty-three students who commenced their academic 
 course at Christ's College in the year 1624. 
 
 "It will be noted that eight of the students in the 
 above list entered as 'lesser pensioners,' among whom 
 were Milton, Pory and Choate, four as * sizars,' and 
 but one as a * greater pensioner.' The distinction was 
 one of rank. All the three grades paid for their board 
 and education, and in this respect were distinct from 
 the 'scholars' properly so called, who belonged to the 
 foundation. But the 'greater pensioners' or 'fellow- 
 commoners' paid most. They were usually the sons 
 of wealthy families; and they had the privilege of 
 dining at the upper table in the common hall along 
 with the Fellows. The 'sizars,' on the other hand, 
 were poorer students; they paid least; and, though 
 receiving the same education as the others, they had 
 a lower rank and inferior accommodation. Inter- 
 mediate between the greater pensioners and the siz- 
 ars were the 'lesser pensioners'; and it was to this 
 
[i6] 
 
 class that the bulk of the students in all the Colleges 
 at Cambridge belonged. Milton, as the son of a 
 London scrivener in good circumstances, took his 
 natural place in becoming a 'lesser pensioner.' His 
 school-fellow, Robert Pory, who entered the College 
 in the same year and month, and chose the same 
 tutor, entered in the same rank. Milton's father and 
 Pory's father must have made up their minds, in 
 sending their sons to Cambridge, to pay about £50 a 
 year each, in the money of that day which was 
 equivalent to about £180 or £200 a year now" (that 
 is, in 1881), and we must conclude that Thomas 
 Choate's father did the same. 
 
 To have been in the same little college with John 
 Milton continuously for four years must have insured 
 to him a liberal education. 
 
 I have no doubt of the substantial accuracy of the 
 statement that there was a near relationship between 
 Thomas of Christ's and our ancestor John Choate, 
 and we may believe that the family at that date was 
 in fairly good circumstances. 
 
 John Choate, from whom all the people of the name 
 in America, now found in great numbers in all the 
 States of the Union, are descended, appears to have 
 arrived in Ipswich from the old country in or about 
 the year 1643. The earliest mention of him in the 
 records is in 1648, when he appears in a list of one 
 hundred and sixty-one persons who subscribed to a 
 fund to pay Major Daniel Dennison for giving mili- 
 tary instruction. There is a tradition that he came 
 
[17] 
 
 from Sudbury, in England, which is on the border of 
 Suffolk and Essex, but by what vessel he came or for 
 what reason is wholly unknown. 
 
 Like most of the other immigrants of that time, 
 who were in moderate circumstances, he absolutely 
 lost all connection with the relatives whom he had left 
 behind him. There were no mails, no newspapers, 
 no regular communication between the mother coun- 
 try and the colonies. Now and then at rare intervals 
 a vessel from the old country arrived, but it was very 
 easy to lose all association with or knowledge of the 
 relatives and friends they had left behind them. 
 
 That he was of good courage and character is mani- 
 fest from the progress that he made after his arrival 
 in Ipswich. That he went diligently to work and 
 made rapid progress in acquiring property and social 
 connections is clear. In 1660 he married, but as the 
 first records of the church in Ipswich have been lost 
 and the town records at the beginning were very 
 badly kept, there is no register of his marriage and no 
 means of ascertaining the surname of his wife or to 
 what family she belonged. But her Christian name 
 was Ann, by which name she is referred to in his will 
 as "my dear and beloved wife, Ann Choate." That 
 is all that is known of her origin, but it is hoped that 
 her family name will yet be discovered. 
 
 He was diligent in his business and acquired a very 
 considerable estate, so that by his will he was able to 
 give substantial farms or tracts of real estate to four 
 of his five sons and a handsome legacy, as things were 
 
[i8] 
 
 at that time, to each of his two daughters. An in- 
 ventory made of his estate amounted to 405 pounds 
 and 13 shilHngs, and his will was witnessed by the 
 celebrated minister of Ipswich, John Wise, to whose 
 congregation he belonged, and Andrew Brown. 
 
 His eldest son disputed the will because he did not 
 receive by it a double portion, as seems to have been 
 the fashion at that time, and a settlement was made 
 between the widow, representing herself and two 
 minor sons, Joseph and Benjamin, and the other 
 three children. In the agreement by which the estate 
 was settled, provision was made for Benjamin until 
 he "comes to commence Bachelor of Arts, and to 
 help bring up the said Benjamin in and at said Col- 
 lege to that time." We know that he was graduated 
 at Harvard in 1703, the earliest of the name in the 
 catalogue, but this provision which was made by the 
 settlement in 1697 must have covered the period of 
 two years at school before he entered Harvard. 
 
 John Choate and his third son, Thomas, have one 
 truly valuable title to distinction, and that is that at 
 the height of the witchcraft delusion, when almost 
 everybody else was mad, they had the courage to 
 sign a protest in behalf of John Proctor and his wife 
 who are described* as "now in trouble and under sus- 
 pition of witchcraft," which was in the highest degree 
 significant. The protest was headed by John Wise; 
 and the signatures of John Choate, Sr., and Thomas 
 
 * In " Records of Salem Witchcraft," vol. I, W. Elliot Woodward, Roxbury, 
 Mass., 1864. 
 
[19] 
 
 Choate appear among the inhabitants of Ipswich 
 who joined in it for the rescue of two of the most 
 conspicuous victims — their neighbor and his wife. 
 Among other things they say: "What God may have 
 left them to, we cannot go into God's pavilion clothed 
 with clouds of darkness round about; but, as to what 
 we have ever seen or heard of them, upon our con- 
 sciences we judge them innocent of the crime ob- 
 jected." As Upham, in his " History of Salem Witch- 
 craft," has truly said: "It is due to the memory of 
 these signers that their names should be recorded, and 
 their descendants may well be gratified by the testi- 
 mony thus borne to their courage and justice." 
 
 He had another greater title to distinction in that 
 he was the progenitor of a long and widely scattered 
 family that in each generation has done good service 
 for its country. All of the sons and the two daugh- 
 ters married and had children. The families were 
 large in those days and there is no wonder that in 
 two hundred and forty-five years his seed has been 
 widely disseminated. 
 
 His third son, Thomas, from whom we are de- 
 scended, was evidently more enterprising than either of 
 his brothers, for he married three times; first, in 1690, 
 when he was nineteen years old; second, in 1734, at the 
 age of sixty-three; and third, in 1743, at the age of 
 seventy-two; showing that he was not afraid of incur- 
 ring the responsibilities of matrimony and paternity. 
 His nine children all married and all had children, 
 none of them less than four and one as many as twelve. 
 
II 
 
 HOG ISLAND 
 
 Thomas Choate, who was born in 1671 and died in 
 1745 at the age of seventy-four, appears to have been 
 a man of uncommon vigor and enterprise. He was 
 undoubtedly a great farmer and a leading citizen of 
 Ipswich, and their representative in the General 
 Court for four years. He it was who acquired the land 
 on Hog Island where he and his descendants have to 
 this day continually resided. 
 
 Life on the island, as everywhere in Ipswich in his 
 time, must have been extremely simple and primi- 
 tive. The habits and customs of the people cannot 
 have changed much since the earliest settlement of 
 the colony, and the only communication with the 
 outside world appears to have been when the head of 
 the family was sent to represent the town at the 
 meetings of the General Court in Boston. 
 
 The old-fashioned New England discipline pre- 
 vailed. The father was the real head of the family; 
 the mother was the mediator between him and the 
 children, who were entirely subject to his sway. 
 
 His third son, Francis, was my ancestor, born in 
 1701 and died in 1777, and that generation appears 
 to have come into great prominence in local and even 
 State affairs. It has been said that among all the 
 
 [20] 
 
Named from the shape of the land. The land was acquired by John Choate 
 ttrt Tet:™'^^"- '" '^^ "'^ ^°"' '^''°--' ---'^ and'Hifd^the'eTr 
 
 CHOATE HOMESTEAD ON HOG ISLAND. 
 "kirA^^ Francis Choate, great-great-grandfather of J. H. C. Here in 1700 
 brt;^o?rfrmi,^- ^'' "^-^^ ^-'^ '-- -- ^^"' - ^'^ P°--ion o'fl^ 
 
Hno TSIANI) 
 
 ",^^ to hnve hefr; 
 
 .QMA J21 OOH , ; 
 
 ;-■ i.. :-., ;-':,- f." ■■■ \-:..h: a^xO. prniii- 
 
 siBOilD nrfol \A bsiiupps sew bnel sriT iLncI aril \o aqfirfa sifj moil barasH 
 lot sisrfj faavil bnc b9nT8;m.,»«K[aii,Ti^8 eJi(':OQd« flfi :Jflf«8fe»9,lBiH3iid ■s^it' jt 
 
 rn, who were 
 
 son, Fran 
 
 .avfAJ8l OOH MO aA3T83MOH STAOHD 
 
 r ^r. 1 
 ,Q9^i Hi ,9i3H .3 .H .\ \o i9rfjfilBnBi§-lfi9ia-jfi3i3 ,9JeoHD EbneiT -^A ?.i^i ni jliua 
 eirf io nox28388oq aib ni Ilija sib rmBl biiB aaoorf 3tlT .mod 28v/ sjboHO aoluil 
 
[21] 
 
 Choate ancestors none were so illustrious for their 
 piety as were Esquire Francis and his good wife Han- 
 nah. He was a ruling elder and is credited with 
 having been a tower of strength in the Whitefield 
 Movement, and to the end of his life the right-hand 
 man of his pastor, the Reverend John Cleveland. 
 Like many men of his time he was a slaveholder, but 
 in his will he provided for the freedom of his slaves or 
 for their comfortable support should they become 
 aged and unable to work. 
 
 But it was his elder brother. Colonel John Choate, 
 who first of the family enacted a distinguished part in 
 public affairs. In all that concerned the common- 
 wealth he was extremely active and useful and was 
 evidently a forceful character of great ability and 
 activity. Between 173 1 and 1760 he was elected fif- 
 teen times as representative of Ipswich in the House 
 of Representatives, and for five years he was a mem- 
 ber of the Council. During his long term of legisla- 
 tive service, he appears to have been on all important 
 committees and on many special commissions. He 
 was called upon to do duty on all sorts of important 
 subjects. In 1741 he was elected speaker of the 
 House, but Governor Belcher seems to have been dis- 
 pleased and dissolved the House before anything fur- 
 ther was done. 
 
 The subjects on which Colonel John Choate was 
 employed included the Land Bank, the settlement of 
 the boundary between Rhode Island and Massa- 
 chusetts, an inquiry as to who were formerly sufferers 
 
[22] 
 
 as Quakers or on account of witchcraft and what satis- 
 faction had been made by the General Court to such 
 sufferers, on bills of credit, to ascertain their rate with 
 gold and silver, and also on the bills of credit of other 
 provinces, on the payment of taxes and other financial 
 matters. He went on the expedition against Louis- 
 burg with the recruits raised for that service, for 
 which he had leave of the House to be absent, and 
 was commissioned judge advocate of the Court of 
 Admiralty at Louisburg after his arrival there with 
 his troops. He also served on the committee on en- 
 couraging manufactures and other industries of the 
 province. He was chosen by the two Houses com- 
 missioner to meet the Six Nations of New York. 
 From 1735 to the time of his death, thirty years after- 
 wards, he was constantly employed on important 
 business for the commonwealth. 
 
 And this did not distract him from purely local af- 
 fairs, for in 1764, the year before his death, he built 
 the famous Choate bridge over the Ipswich River, a 
 stone bridge of beautiful proportions, which still 
 stands secure as on the day it was opened, although 
 its low arches were such a novelty in that region that 
 its collapse with the first heavy load that went over 
 it was loudly predicted, and great multitudes are said 
 to have gathered to witness the catastrophe. 
 
 His nephew, Stephen Choate, son of his brother 
 Thomas, is also my ancestor, his daughter Susannah 
 having married my grandfather George Choate, her 
 cousin, and this Stephen, born in 1727 and who died 
 
[23] 
 
 in 1 815, was also a great public character, besides 
 having thirteen children and a great troop of descen- 
 dants. 
 
 In 1774 he was elected on the committee of corre- 
 spondence which had so much to do with the origin 
 of the great movements for independence which re- 
 sulted in the establishment of the United States as an 
 independent nation. He entered the General Court 
 as a representative from Ipswich in May, 1776, when 
 the court held its session at Watertown, Boston being 
 in the hands of the British soldiers, and from that 
 time he was annually re-elected until 1779, after 
 which he became a member of the Senate and still 
 later of the Council. He served for many years as 
 county treasurer and was a constant and most useful 
 public servant, and finally he was a member of the 
 State convention that framed the celebrated Con- 
 stitution of Massachusetts of 1780, which created for 
 that State a government of laws and not of men. It 
 was indeed the ideal model for all State constitutions. 
 
 Not only by what he accomplished in life, but by 
 the pictures of him that have come down to us, it is 
 evident that Stephen Choate was a man of strong and 
 robust character and of unyielding tenacity of pur- 
 pose. He had a great old Roman nose, which still 
 reappears occasionally in the family, and a chin that 
 showed his indomitable will. And the charming pic- 
 ture of his wife, Mary Low, which faces his, proves 
 her to have been true to her vow to "love, honor, and 
 oheyy 
 
[24] 
 
 John Choate, the son of Elder Francis, was a dele- 
 gate to the State convention that ratified and adopted 
 the Federal Constitution in 1788, in which he seems 
 to have taken an active part in support of the Con- 
 stitution and seems to have had a clear appreciation 
 of the merits of that great instrument, under which 
 we still live. He participated intelligently in the de- 
 bates, especially on the subject of taxation, as appears 
 in "Elliot's Debates" and in those published by the 
 legislature in 1856. 
 
 But I must resume the story of my direct descent. 
 William Choate, son of Francis, born on Hog Island 
 September 5th, 1730, was the grandfather of my 
 father. For many years he followed the sea, and be- 
 came a shipmaster and owned vessels as well as com- 
 manded them. Retiring from that, he established a 
 school on Hog Island and gave his children an excel- 
 lent education. 
 
 I have in m^y possession his family Bible, not only 
 dog-eared but the corners fairly worn away by the 
 pious hands that turned them, and by this it ap- 
 pears that everything on Hog Island was regulated 
 by the tides, as they could only reach the mainland 
 at highest water. I transcribe the entries of his 
 family from this Bible, as long as he lived on the 
 island: 
 
 "William Choate (son of Francis Choate) & Mary 
 Giddings (daughter of Job Giddings) were married 
 Jan'y i6th, 1756, and October i8th, 1756 had a son 
 
[25] 
 
 born, who lived but about four weeks — since had 
 other children born (viz) 
 
 "David Choate was born November 29th, 1757, 
 Tuesday in ye morning. 
 
 "William Choate was born Friday, August loth, 
 1759 at high water. 
 
 "George Choate was born Wednesday, February 
 24th, 1764, low water in ye morning." 
 
 So inveterate had the habit become of registering 
 and commemorating the births of the children by the 
 tide that, even after they had moved away from the 
 island to the mainland and lived on farms looking 
 across the brook to the island, they continued for 
 a long time to record the births of the children in 
 the same way, for in the same Bible I find the fam- 
 ily record of my grandfather, George Choate, as 
 follows : 
 
 "George Choate, son of Captain William Choate 
 and Susannah Choate, daughter of Stephen Choate, 
 Esq., were married January ist, 1789, and Sunday, 
 October i8th had a daughter still born, and since 
 then had other children namely: 
 
 "William Choate was born Tuesday, October 
 26th, 1790 about eight o'clock in the evening, low 
 water. 
 
 "John Choate was born Monday, July i6th, 1792, 
 about four o'clock in the afternoon and about low 
 water. 
 
[26] 
 
 "George Choate (that was my father) was born 
 Monday, November 7th, 1796, at nine o'clock in the 
 evening about four hours ebb." 
 
 Captain WilHam Choate appears to have been a 
 highly intelligent person. He fitted for college in 
 Salem, and his father desired him to graduate at the 
 university and become a clergyman, but his own 
 taste did not lie in that direction, and yet he was 
 sufficiently self-educated to instruct his own four sons 
 in navigation and other studies. 
 
 They all followed the sea more or less. David 
 (who was the father of Rufus) sailed to Spain and 
 also to southern ports when a young man. His son 
 William went to sea eight or ten years before his re- 
 moval to Derry. George was a captain before he 
 came to the island, and Job was a captain between 
 Europe and America for twenty years. 
 
 The lives of Captain William and his son George 
 appear to have been singularly alike — simple, quiet, 
 and unobtrusive, following the sea at times and farm- 
 ing for the rest, holding important local public of- 
 fices, and employed by their fellow townsmen in the 
 management of their affairs and enjoying their full 
 confidence and esteem. 
 
 George represented the town of Ipswich from 1814 
 to 1 817, and the new town of Essex after it was set off 
 in 1 8 19, and he held various other offices in the town. 
 
 I transcribe from the notice which the Salem Ga- 
 zette published of him at the time of his death, as fol- 
 lows: 
 
STEPHEN CHOATE— 1727-1S1S. 
 
 Great-grar.dfather of J. H. C. He held various public offices, was twice married, had 
 thirteen children, and lived to be eighty-eight years old. 
 
[27] 
 
 "Few men have so well discharged the duties of 
 husband, parent and citizen as Mr. Choate. He was 
 for many years a member of the Legislature from Ips- 
 wich, and the first representative from Essex, and was 
 much employed by his townsmen in the management 
 of their concerns, deservedly enjoying their highest 
 confidence, respect and esteem. By them his useful- 
 ness will be long remembered. To a strength and pu- 
 rity of mind there was united a quiet, peaceful and 
 amiable disposition, which greatly endeared him to 
 his friends and acquaintances. So mindful was he of 
 the rights of others that, as he never made an enemy, 
 so certainly he has not left one; and we cannot but 
 admire and wish to imitate that discipline of mind 
 and feeling, which he so eminently manifested, and 
 which enabled him to perform the duties and sustain 
 the fatigues and ills of life without a murmur or com- 
 plaint. The virtues of honest fidelity and benevo- 
 lence will not perish with the body. For the upright 
 and faithful there remaineth a rest. He was always 
 deeply interested in the cause of education, and gave 
 his hearty and constant support to the institutions of 
 religion." 
 
 He appears to have been the leading spirit in the 
 movement for the separation of the Chebacco Ward in 
 the town of Ipswich and its incorporation as a sepa- 
 rate town in 1818, although such separation was 
 steadily resisted by the inhabitants of the rest of the 
 town. 
 
 ******** 
 
 And there hang the portraits of my father and 
 
[28] 
 
 mother, looking down upon me from the wall, photo- 
 graphs taken at about the age of sixty, both very- 
 handsome, very earnest and a little anxious, the rea- 
 son for which will appear. 
 
 My father. Doctor George Choate, born at Che- 
 bacco, November 7th, 1796, was the sixth in descent 
 from the original settler. He was prepared for col- 
 lege under the tuition of the Reverend Doctor Wil- 
 liam Cogswell, then master of the North District 
 School in Chebacco, supplemented by a year in 
 Dummer Academy and another year in Atkinson 
 Academy. 
 
 He entered Harvard in 18 14 and graduated in the 
 class of '18, which numbered eighty-one members, 
 the largest at Harvard up to that time and until my 
 own class of '52, which numbered eighty-eight, both 
 in striking contrast to the enormous numbers in more 
 recent classes. 
 
 When he presented himself for examination, his 
 name seemed to give great trouble to the examiners, 
 for the Latin professor, who thought there must be 
 one syllable for every separate vowel, in calling the 
 list addressed him, as he told me, as "Co-a-te." 
 
 His classmates included such men as Professor John 
 Hooker Ashmun, Sidney Bartlett, Francis Brinley, 
 William Emerson (the brother of Ralph Waldo Emer- 
 son), the Reverend Doctors Farley and Noyes, and 
 General Henry K. Oliver. 
 
 The curriculum and routine of education, from 
 what he told me, seems not to have changed much 
 
[29] 
 
 from the earliest period, chiefly consisting of learning 
 by rote and recitations from the books studied. 
 
 Upon the subsequent settlement of his father's 
 estate, which was inconsiderable in amount, a few 
 years afterwards, it was found that George had re- 
 ceived the whole amount of his share to pay for his 
 education. In fact, from the time of his graduation 
 he had to rely wholly upon his own resources, which 
 made his professional and personal success in life cer- 
 tain. 
 
 To obtain the means of prosecuting his professional 
 studies he was for two years master of the '* Feoffee's 
 Latin School" in Ipswich, and at the same time was 
 engaged in the study of medicine with the late Doctor 
 Thomas Manning, a celebrated practitioner of his 
 day, and two years more were spent in the office of the 
 late Doctor George C. Shattuck, of Boston, one of the 
 most eminent physicians of his time. His relations 
 with Doctor Shattuck continued until the latter's 
 death to be of a most friendly and cordial character. 
 I well remember the kindly hospitality of the old gen- 
 tleman at his stately residence at the corner of Cam- 
 bridge and Staniford Streets in Boston, where he 
 often entertained my brothers and myself while in 
 college in the most paternal and friendly way. 
 
 In 1822 he received the degree of M.D. at the Har- 
 vard Medical School and immediately entered upon 
 the practice of his profession in Salem. His success 
 from the start was pronounced and continued for a 
 period of nearly forty years. His practice extended 
 
i3C 
 
 trn-mioT ti^ nei^baring tavmi anc m^or^ec tnt most 
 -— — ' ' ''01- Dili Bf: wat not conxent wnh profes- 
 
 alone, for iit was a man of genuine 
 public bpi iiL ?mr took an artivt part in all tii£ afiairs 
 of tiif: cannmmitT, wiiidi conHtamiy relied npon iii£ 
 advis: and assistance. 
 
 Jot many y^rrs iit "v^^s presidem of tiit Lraex 
 SoctL District Medical Society and of the Salem 
 Atnensmn. After "v^Ttiiorawing from practice, lie rep- 
 resented Saiem for several years in the General 
 Court, and previousiy iie served efecientiy as chair- 
 man of the school committet aid as an active mem- 
 ber of the Board of Aldermen. 
 
 fie was S!. piliar of the First Churdi, the churdi of 
 Jxancis Hig^nhrjTi and Hu^i Peters and Roger Wil- 
 liams. He was deeph' interested in all the historical 
 tr'i of that ancient congregation, and at the 
 
 iastaiiatioc of a nev cierg}'marj in 1848 he officiated 
 
 as '.' ' — - ' ' ' — ' nittee, and, after the manner 
 
 acio :. - - - - . - at the installation of Higgin- 
 
 sorj a:. /mm 1629, made the address which in- 
 
 ducted the new pastor into office, in exact conformity 
 -«wth what was done in the church at its foundation 
 tv' -ed and nineteerj years before. 
 
 -rrest m educatiorj was ver}' remarkable and 
 lie- : j; and i^e heartily sustained the efforts of 
 
 Hora', for the reform of the school system of 
 
 Mastachusetts, which wrouglit such a wonderful 
 changie in that system. I well remember his taking 
 fl^with him in liis chaise to 'J opshcld, where ht went 
 
[31] 
 
 to attend a teachers' convention at which Mr. JMann 
 was to be present. And as the distinguished reformer 
 was desirous of getting to Salem that night my 
 father invited him to drive home with him, and as 
 there was no other place for me I sat all the way 
 upon Mr. Mann's lap, which I have always regarded 
 as the actual beginning of my education. 
 
 The lives of my father and mother were truly 
 heroic in the matter of the training of their own chil- 
 dren. Having four sons and two daughters, they de- 
 termined at all hazards to give them the best educa- 
 tion that the times afforded, and in so doing they set 
 them a wonderful example of self-control, self-denial, 
 and self-sacrifice. Everything else was subordinated 
 to this high ideal and they denied themselves ever\-- 
 thing else to accomplish this lofty purpose. 
 
 At that period I cannot recall my father ever taking 
 a holiday, except for one hot afternoon in summer, 
 when he drove the whole family in a carr>'-all to 
 Phillips's Beach for a sail and a fish supper. All the 
 rest of the time, summer and winter, was devoted 
 without stint to constant work. 
 
 Social enjoyments were ver>" limited and our family 
 life was in striking contrast to that which prevails 
 among well-to-do people to-day. But they succeeded 
 to a very remarkable degree and gave their children 
 an inheritance which was far more precious than any 
 amount of wealth would have been. Many a time 
 have I seen him pay out what was nearly his last 
 dollar for the settlement of our college bills, and 
 
[32] 
 
 all he had to give us by will was a hundred dollars 
 apiece. 
 
 But his triumph was of the most signal character, 
 for the Harvard College annual catalogue of 1848-49 
 contained the names of all his four sons, one a medical 
 student, one a senior, and two freshmen. And when 
 I recall that all this was accomplished out of his nar- 
 row professional income, when his ordinary fee for a 
 visit was seventy-five cents and seven dollars and a 
 half for bringing a new child into the world, it is 
 hardly possible to conceive how he could have done it. 
 
 But they had their reward in the success of their 
 sons and daughters and in their most fervent grati- 
 tude. I remember that when my brother William 
 and I graduated at Harvard in 1852, William was the 
 first scholar in the class; so much so that there was 
 really nobody second, and the faculty with an un- 
 usual manifestation of sentiment gave him at com- 
 mencement the Valedictory Oration which was his as 
 a matter of right, and to me, although I was only the 
 fourth scholar, the Salutatory Oration, which did not 
 belong to me at all, so that we sandwiched the class 
 between us in the exercises of that day. 
 
 And when my mother appeared, with her character- 
 istic modesty and shyness, Mrs. Sparks, the wife of 
 the president, greeted her with the question: "Why, 
 Mrs. Choate, how did you come up from Salem .?" 
 
 My mother answered: "I came in the usual way, 
 by the train to Boston and to Cambridge in the om- 
 nibus." 
 
[33] 
 
 Mrs. Sparks exclaimed: "You ought not to have 
 come in that way; you ought to have come in a 
 chariot drawn by peacocks. Such a thing as this has 
 never been known before in the history of Harvard — 
 two brothers sandwiching the class on the commence- 
 ment programme!" 
 
 I suppose there may be many similar examples of 
 parental devotion and self-sacrifice among us to-day, 
 but they are not apparent. In those days the rule 
 was duty first and pleasure afterwards, and if duty 
 occupied all the time it must be performed at all 
 risks and let the pleasure go. Nowadays, so far as I 
 can observe, among successful people pleasure oc- 
 cupies a much more prominent place and is not neces- 
 sarily sacrificed to duty. When I look around me and 
 see fathers and mothers devoted to pleasure, to 
 bridge-parties and dancing and the various other 
 forms of social entertainment, I often wonder what 
 the moral effect will be upon their children who can- 
 not help seeing it all. 
 
 At any rate, the old way created an indissoluble 
 bond between parents and children, and for one, 
 throughout life I have never made any important de- 
 cision without wondering what my father and mother 
 would have said about it. 
 
 Some day the present carnival of sport and plea- 
 sure will be checked and an era of self-denial and sacri- 
 fice will come again. Fathers and mothers such as I 
 have described mine to have been do really constitute 
 the pride and glory of the commonwealth, as they 
 
[34] 
 have been from the earUest days of the colony, when 
 everything else was subordinated to working out the 
 salvation of themselves and their children. Of course, 
 it is money that is doing the mischief, and fortunately 
 does not affect nine-tenths of the people of the coun- 
 try, who have really to work for their daily bread; 
 among whom must in every generation be found 
 thousands of instances of parents who sacrifice the 
 present to the future and forego everything else to 
 make sure of the education of their children. 
 
 My father at last paid a fearful penalty for the 
 constant overwork and nervous tension of his earlier 
 years, for at about the age when his father and grand- 
 father had died, his health failed entirely, and he 
 lived an invalid for more than seventeen years. It 
 was here that the supreme patience and fortitude of 
 my mother, which she had derived constitutionally 
 from her father, proved such a priceless blessing in 
 enabling her during that long period to comfort and 
 care for him. 
 
DOCTOR GEORGE CHOATE. 
 
 Born at Ipswich, 1796; died at Cambridge, 1880, in the eighty-fourth year of 
 his age — father of J. H. C. This silhouette was evidently made as he approached 
 middle age. 
 
hfii Oi iht p€Oi 
 
 irk for ' 
 
 :ver\^' ;. to 
 
 .STAOHD 30^030 HOTDOa 
 
 lo TS9V dnuol-xJrigb srfj ni ,0881 .agbhdms'J ts bsib ;d^vi ,rfo)«3qI ;s moS 
 bsilDsoiqqs id 3B sbim xljnsbivs saw 9jj3ooiili2 2iHT .3 .H -L lo isHjsl—sss »iA 
 
 .»g£ slbbini 
 
I 
 
Ill 
 
 CHILDHOOD 
 
 And now I come to my own birth, which took place 
 at Salem on the 24th of January, 1832. I have never 
 had my horoscope cast, but it must have been pro- 
 pitious to account for the cheerful temperament 
 which has marked my whole life, always looking on 
 the bright side and making the best of everything as 
 it came, which has been in itself a great fortune, 
 worth more than many millions. 
 
 The earliest written record of my appearance in the 
 world is contained in a letter written on the following 
 Sunday by one of my aunts to another, in which she 
 says: 
 
 "Margaret was confined last Tuesday with the 
 largest boy she ever had. She continued comfortable 
 for three days. Since I have not heard, but pre- 
 sume she remained so. She has put her child out to 
 nurse." 
 
 As I was the fifth child and the fourth boy, the 
 oldest not yet five, my size spoke well for me at the 
 start, and the reason that I was put away so sum- 
 marily was that all the other children at the time had 
 the whooping-cough, for in those days it was sup- 
 posed, as I believe it is now, that the whooping-cough 
 was fatal to new-born infants. 
 
 [35] 
 
[36] 
 
 At any rate, I was wrapped up in a blanket im- 
 mediately after my birth and carried over to the 
 banks of the North River, where the selected nurse, 
 Mrs. Law, dwelt, and there I remained for seventeen 
 months, which can only be accounted for on the 
 theory that I was regarded at home as one too many, 
 who would be only in the way if returned to the pa- 
 rental mansion. 
 
 There was once a malicious suggestion that during 
 this protracted separation from the family my iden- 
 tity was in some mysterious way changed, and that 
 I was only a changeling after all. But one had only 
 to look at my mother's features, which were exactly 
 like my own, to see how groundless this suspicion was. 
 It only had its origin in the fact that I was really 
 quite unlike all the rest of the children in temper and 
 disposition. 
 
 This must have had some effect upon my character 
 at that early day, for my mother, writing to her sister- 
 in-law on the loth of February, 1834, says: "I have 
 no baby you know to keep me at home, for Joseph is 
 two years old, although rather troublesome. He was 
 seventeen months old when we took him home. He 
 had been indulged so much we found him rather diffi- 
 cult to manage," a condition which, I fear, continued 
 some time afterwards; but, anyhow, I had to fight for 
 my place in the family and gradually secured it. 
 
 But I was not long to enjoy undisturbed the do- 
 mestic felicity of home which I had thus regained. 
 In those days, when servants were few and nurses for 
 
[37 1 
 
 the children almost unknown, the sooner they were 
 sent to school the better for all concerned, and it 
 must have been an immense relief to my mother for a 
 great part of the day when all the five children were 
 already in school. My earliest recollection is of being 
 taken by the hand by my brother William, who was 
 a year and a half older — I was two and a half — and 
 led to the Dame's School, which I attended until I was 
 seven years old. 
 
 It was the simplest affair possible, kept by an aged 
 spinster, Miss Lewis, and her widowed sister, Mrs. 
 Streeter, and attended by some twenty boys and 
 girls, the children of our neighbors and friends. 
 
 I perfectly remember my first morning at the 
 school, when I was put in charge of the biggest girl 
 among the scholars, who afterwards became a digni- 
 fied matron of the city, the wife of a distinguished 
 lawyer and the mother of a considerable family. 
 The schoolroom was of moderate dimensions, the 
 boys upon one side of the stove, which occupied the 
 centre, and the girls upon the other. 
 
 The only punishment that I remember at the school 
 for any boy who misbehaved was to be put over to sit 
 among the girls. This was a little awkward at first, 
 but I soon got used to it and liked it very much. 
 
 It was like a modern kindergarten without the ap- 
 paratus, but we did learn to read and write and cipher 
 there, so that I cannot recall the time when I could 
 not do all of those things. 
 
 Mr. William M. Evarts, with whom I long after- 
 
[38] 
 
 wards became associated, is recorded in the life of his 
 father to have read the Bible perfectly well at three 
 years old. I do not think that I was quite equal to 
 that, but certainly had begun to read at that age. 
 
 The surroundings of the school were attractive. 
 Across Sewall Street, where it was situated, and this 
 was within a stone's throw of my father's house, there 
 was a wheelwright, and it was great fun for the chil- 
 dren to gather about this skilful mechanic and watch 
 his work. His name was Ira Patch. At the corner, 
 as we turned into Sewall Street from Essex Street, 
 was quite a noted hardware store kept by Robert 
 Peele, and his shop-window with its wonderful collec- 
 tion of all kinds of hardware was a constant attrac- 
 tion. But best of all, in immediate contiguity with 
 the schoolhouse, was a famous blacksmith shop kept 
 by Benjamin Cutts, whose forge in active operation 
 it was a daily delight to watch. He was something 
 more to us than a mere neighbor, for sometimes, when 
 one of the boys, who was constitutionally refractory, 
 became unmanageable the schoolmistress called out: 
 "Send for Mr. Cutts ! Send for Mr. Cutts !" and the 
 sturdy blacksmith came in to the rescue and sup- 
 pressed the offender. 
 
 These dame's schools were a peculiar and very im- 
 portant institution of New England and had been so 
 from its foundation. Each was entirely independent, 
 related in no way to any other school, and contributed 
 substantially to the support of otherwise helpless 
 dames and to the welfare of their little charges. I 
 
[39] 
 
 have no idea or recollection of what the tuition-fees 
 were, but they must have been infinitely small. And 
 yet they constituted all that my father ever paid for 
 my education until I entered Harvard College. 
 
 The town schools at that time were in an extremely 
 rude and primitive state, very much as they must 
 have been for two hundred years at least. I remem- 
 ber perfectly well being taken by the hand by my 
 father the morning I was seven years old and taken 
 to the public school, an alarming experience, indeed, 
 for the master, Abner Brooks, had the reputation of 
 being a perfect terror. He was a weakly man and 
 made up for that infirmity by a liberal use of the cow- 
 hide, which he applied very freely. 
 
 The Centre School, as it was called, was in Wash- 
 ington Street, and was kept in one large room, where 
 there must have been about fifty boys from seven 
 years old to fifteen. We sat on benches, which 
 stretched across the room from front to rear with an 
 aisle between, on a sloping floor, and as the youngest 
 boys were on the back seat, I was marched up in the 
 face of the whole room to my place there. It was 
 really a terrible experience. 
 
 All the teaching was done by this one man, who 
 heard the successive classes recite from nine to twelve 
 in the morning and from two to five in the afternoon. 
 At the close of every day a group of offenders were 
 stopped after school to receive the application of the 
 rod, and this was in addition to the use of the long 
 rod which would reach the backs of half a dozen boys 
 
[40] 
 
 on the same bench and was apphed from the central 
 aisle. 
 
 On the whole, it was a pretty brutal affair. There 
 were no games and no recreation at the school. The 
 only thing that might be so considered was when a 
 new load of wood came. The best boys were allowed 
 to get it in, which was regarded as a special privilege. 
 Certainly there must have been much waste of time 
 in the years that I spent at that school. 
 
 The master had no special gift for teaching. It 
 certainly was a dreary routine, with little to mitigate 
 the rudeness and dreariness of it. But now and then, 
 when our school-teacher felt uncommonly well, he 
 would make us a little speech and say that hereafter 
 he was going to rule by love, and as proof of it he 
 would cut up both his cowhides and have them burned 
 up in the stove. But in a few days this did not prove 
 satisfactory, and new rods were purchased and never 
 spared for fear of spoiling the children. 
 
 Happily for us all, Horace Mann soon came to the 
 rescue and convinced the people of Massachusetts 
 that decent and sanitary schoolhouses and humane 
 treatment and skilled teachers really qualified for 
 their task, were the best investment that the State 
 could make. New schoolhouses of fine proportions, 
 built on sanitary principles, began to rise throughout 
 the State of Massachusetts, normal schools came into 
 being, and a board of education was created which 
 bore the responsibility of the general conduct of these 
 schools throughout the State. The ancient town of 
 
[41 ] 
 
 Salem, at the time of my birth not yet a city, was a 
 unique and most wholesome place in which to be 
 born and bred. It was a place of about fifteen thou- 
 sand inhabitants, fourteen miles from Boston, to and 
 from which city the stage ran every day but Sunday. 
 It had two newspapers. The Salem Register and The 
 Salem Gazette^ printed by hand-presses, and published 
 each twice a week, so that we were comparatively se- 
 cluded from the rest of the world, hearing from Boston 
 every afternoon, from New York about twice a week, 
 and from Europe about once a month. Consequently 
 our people were thrown very much upon themselves 
 and took an intense interest in local affairs, and had 
 but a scanty knowledge of what was going on in the 
 rest of the world. Steam and electricity had not yet 
 begun their wonderful work there, friction-matches 
 were just invented and regarded as a great curiosity, 
 and I remember my father bringing home a piece of 
 anthracite coal, a kind of fuel hitherto wholly un- 
 known, and making great complaint because, when 
 put in the fireplace, it would not burn. 
 
 We lived in an old brick house of large dimensions, 
 looking out upon the west upon the grounds of Bar- 
 ton Square Church with their fine elm-trees and with 
 a great garden in the rear. There was no furnace in 
 the house, the only mode of heating being by stoves 
 and open grates and fireplaces for wood, of which I 
 remember only three, one in my father's office, one in 
 mother's room, and one in a large sitting-room, where 
 we all sat and lived and worked together. There was 
 
[42] 
 
 no gas as yet and our only lights were candles, brass 
 oil-lamps, and astral lamps with glass chimneys and 
 shades, which gave the best light we had. 
 
 This house had been purchased by my grandfather 
 Hodges just before the marriage of my father and 
 mother, as the deed of record in the Registry of Deeds 
 shows. It had already some historic interest, for it 
 was there that Count Rumford, then known as Ben- 
 jamin Thompson, served his apprenticeship in the 
 general store of Mr. Appleton, who then owned the 
 house. This must have been a few years before the 
 outbreak of the Revolutionary War, for his biography 
 says that he was at the age of fourteen sufficiently 
 advanced in algebra, chemistry, astronomy, and even 
 the higher mathematics to calculate a solar eclipse 
 within four seconds of accuracy. Certainly he was 
 one of the earliest of infant phenomena. It is fur- 
 ther recorded that in 1776 he was apprenticed to a 
 storekeeper in Salem, and while in that employment 
 occupied himself in chemical and mechanical experi- 
 ments, as well as engraving, in which he attained 
 some proficiency. The outbreak of the Revolution- 
 ary War put a stop to the trade of his master, and he 
 thereupon left Salem and went to Boston, where he 
 engaged himself as assistant in another store, and 
 began his wonderful and most romantic career, marry- 
 ing at nineteen a woman of property, his senior by 
 fourteen years, sailing for England on the evacuation 
 of Boston by the royal troops in 1776, knighted by 
 George the Third, and all the time making very im- 
 
HOUSE OF DOCTOR GEORGE CHOATE ON ESSEX STREET, SALEM. 
 
 This house was given to Mrs. George Choate by her father, Gamaliel Hodges, on the 
 occasion of her marriage to Doctor Choate, and here all her six children were 
 born. It was also in this house that Count Rumford served as apprentice to 
 Mr. Appleton before the Revolutionary War. 
 
 HODGES HOUSE ON ESSEX STREET, SALEM. 
 
 A good specimen of the style of the period. Owned by John Hodges, uncle 
 of J. H. C. 
 
i\o gas as yet anH c 
 oii"ian:ps. ar 
 
 iight we had. 
 I been purchased by my 
 ji= .. -^c'ore the marriage of my lXi.^-i 
 , . cT, as the deed of record in the Registry of D^ . . 
 shov/s. It had already some historic interest, for it 
 was there that Count Rumford, then known as Ben- 
 iamii 
 
 .U3.dhZ .TaH5IT2 X3a83 MO 3TA0H3 3051030 MOTJOG 30 38UOK 
 
 srft no ,83sboH bHiimsO .laifjel i3r! \d sJfioriO agioaO .siM oj nsvlg eaw aaoori eirfT 
 
 313V/ nsibliila xia -.3d lie aisit fane .alBori'J loJaoG oJ sgEinfiin isd lo noisBDjo 
 
 ol saijnsiqqB 88 Lavisa biolmuH JnuoO Jfidl aeuod gjjij ni bajs bbw |1 . -Hwd : , •. 
 
 MC itttaillCO 
 
 •levoiution- 
 ar. ^. :..: ;..,. >« ^ ,. ..s- ■■. . .., . .,:txSter, and he 
 
 tliereupon left Salem a to Boston, where he 
 
 engaged himself as assistant in another store, 
 began his wonderful and most romantic career, m.^ 
 'og at nineteen a woman of property, h- 
 
 ,M3JA2 .Taa5iT2 xa28a MO 32UOH aaoaoH 
 
 sbno .augboH ndol yd bsnwO .boiisq adJ lo sIxJb adJ 5o namiaaqa booa A 
 .0 .H .1 \o 
 
[43] 
 
 portant inventions and discoveries, many of which 
 have lasted until the present day, made a count of 
 the Holy Roman Empire by the King of Bavaria, and 
 marrying for his second wife the wealthy widow of 
 Lavoisier, the great French chemist who was guil- 
 lotined by Robespierre for his great services to man- 
 kind. I am sorry to say that with his last wife he led 
 an extremely uncomfortable life, until at last they 
 agreed to separate, and he died in peace in 1814, 
 having established Rumford Medals in the Royal 
 Society and the American Academy of Arts and 
 Sciences, and the Rumford Professorship in Harvard 
 University. How much of this erratic and successful 
 career was due to his long residence as apprentice in 
 our house, it is hard to say, but we may claim the 
 credit of all that was creditable in it. 
 
IV 
 SALEM 
 
 Salem, which continued to be my home for the first 
 twenty-three years of my Hfe, was a most unique and 
 dehghtful place. It was so old, so queer, so different 
 from all other places upon which the sun in his west- 
 ern journey looked down, so full of grand historical 
 reminiscences, so typical of everything that has ever 
 occurred in the annals of American life, that it was a 
 great piece of good fortune to be born there. The 
 natives of the place were a little older to the cubic 
 inch than men born at exactly the same moment in 
 any other part of America. It could not possibly be 
 otherwise with human beings born and bred in those 
 old houses, which have cradled so many of our race 
 for upwards of two centuries, that humanity itself 
 had got used to being started there, and found itself 
 an old story at the beginning. Comparing a new-born 
 Salem baby with an infant born at the same moment 
 in Kansas, or Colorado, or Montana, I venture to say 
 that the microscope would disclose a physical differ- 
 ence, a slight — perhaps a very slight — mould of an- 
 tiquity, which all the waters of Wenham Pond could 
 never wash away. 
 
 It was the very spot where Endicott had landed in 
 
 [44] 
 
[45] 
 
 1628, and John Winthrop, the leader of the great 
 Puritan host which came over in 1629. It had been 
 the scene of the terrible witchcraft delusion in 1692, 
 when all the people of Massachusetts, from the gov- 
 ernor down, led by the infernal doctrines of the 
 clergy of that day, headed by the notorious Cotton 
 Mather, really believed that satan himself was actu- 
 ally present among them seeking whom he might de- 
 vour; all which resulted in the cruel slaughter upon 
 the gallows of twenty of the most respectable people 
 of the place, and left a cloud upon its good name 
 which will never be effaced. 
 
 In the early part of the eighteenth century Gov- 
 ernor Burnett had transferred the General Court to 
 Salem, but they refused to do any business there be- 
 cause it was not their proper place, and again when 
 General Gage, in 1774, arrived he attempted to trans- 
 fer the legislature to Salem, which was the scene of 
 great activity and conflict between the royal author- 
 ities and the people during that year. It has always 
 been claimed by the people at Salem that the first 
 blood of the Revolution was shed there at the old 
 North Bridge when Colonel Leslie one Sunday morn- 
 ing led a company of royal troops from Marblehead 
 to capture a quantity of arms and munitions stored 
 there, but was dissuaded from making the seizure by 
 the influence of its leading citizens. 
 
 From the beginning the port had been the scene of 
 a steadily growing commerce, Salem ships being the 
 first to penetrate the distant regions of India and 
 
[46] 
 
 China, and bringing home cargoes of fabulous value, 
 which enriched many of the leading people. Many 
 great fortunes had been made there, most of which 
 had already been transmitted to the second genera- 
 tion before my birth. 
 
 The First Church in Salem, in which I was brought 
 up (being required to attend two sessions there every 
 Sunday, summer and winter, rain or shine), had 
 maintained its position on the same spot from the 
 earliest days of the colony. It was the church of 
 Francis Higginson and Roger Williams and Hugh 
 Peters, all of whom had been driven from England in 
 the days of the tyranny of Archbishop Laud, as non- 
 conformists. It was within the walls of this church 
 that Anne Hutchinson and the Quakers had made 
 their unseemly demonstration, for which they had 
 been expelled from the colony, but non-conformity 
 seemed to be deeply rooted in the soil of the church, 
 and in my boyhood it was one of the most pronounced 
 Unitarian churches in the whole commonwealth. 
 
 All these historical reminiscences and traditions 
 hung over the place and made a deep impression upon 
 the minds of sensitive and impressionable children 
 who were brought up there even down to my time, 
 and these impressions were greatly confirmed by the 
 wonderful writings of Hawthorne in all his books re- 
 lating to colonial history. We loved to wander at 
 large within the narrow limits of the old town, en- 
 deavoring to locate the places where its notable celeb- 
 rities in former generations had acted their parts. 
 
[47] 
 
 At the time of my birth Salem was an extremely- 
 isolated place, practically shut in from the rest of the 
 world. There was daily stage communication from 
 Boston, which ran on to the eastward through the 
 town, and the life there was extremely simple. The 
 commerce of the place had practically dried up, and 
 there was only the local trade for the supply of the 
 necessities of the inhabitants and of those who came 
 in from the neighboring country to do their shop- 
 ping. The population was homogeneous, pure English 
 throughout. The great tide of Irish immigration had 
 hardly begun, although a few straggling Irish girls 
 could be found in the kitchens, but I can only recall 
 two foreigners among the better class of the people, 
 one an Italian music-master, and another a French 
 refugee, both gentlemen of excellent quality. 
 
 Neither steam nor electricity had yet been intro- 
 duced in any form, but they were soon to come, for 
 one of my very earliest recollections was in 1837, when 
 I was five years old, being taken by my father to the 
 top of Castle Hill, which lay to the south of the town, 
 to see the first railroad-train come in from Boston. 
 Compared with any railroad-train now known it was 
 a very petty and puny affair, a little engine with two 
 small-sized passenger-cars and what was called a 
 ''nigger car" attached for colored people to ride in. 
 Samples of such primitive trains are always shown 
 now as exhibits from the earliest railroads as examples 
 of the beginning of the transportation system of the 
 United States. 
 
[48] 
 
 That was truly the beginning of the Hfe of the place 
 which had been slumbering for years since its sea- 
 board and seaborne life had died away. I was liter- 
 ally born into a wholly different life from any that 
 we know anything about to-day. The town was dead 
 before this first railroad-train arrived, and from that 
 moment it really began to wake up. In fact, for a 
 time, the coming of the train from Boston was the sig- 
 nal for a great assemblage of the younger people at 
 the station to see the train come in. There were no 
 time-tables, and the coming and departure of trains 
 was announced by an old Revolutionary soldier, a 
 veteran corporal, who became well known to all the 
 boys in town. Corporal Pitman, and the local rhyme 
 ran: 
 
 "Who rings the eastern railroad bell, 
 
 And makes its notes with power tell, 
 
 And who can do it half so well 
 As Corporal ?" 
 
 Two years afterwards the eastern railroad was ex- 
 tended to Beverly, two miles beyond, and to accom- 
 plish this, what appeared to our childish imaginations 
 to be an enormous tunnel was dug through the centre 
 of the town from river to river, at least fifty feet deep 
 and still more broad, which cut the town in halves, 
 and when it was finished and the trains ran through 
 to Beverly and beyond, Salem had awakened from 
 its lethargy and was really in touch with the rest of 
 the world. 
 
 We were very proud of our local celebrities, es- 
 
[49] 
 
 pecially if they had attained to great national and 
 pubhc reputation, and one of my earHest reminis- 
 cences is being sent home from church one hot Sun- 
 day afternoon, at the close of the service, to make 
 room for a grown person to attend the eulogy to be 
 pronounced upon Doctor Bowditch, the great mathe- 
 matician and navigator. I could not have made room 
 for a very large person, because I was then only six 
 years old, but every inch of space in the First Church 
 was required for so celebrated an occasion. 
 
 Life in those days was a steady round of work, even 
 for the young people, with very little play and still 
 less decoration. The clothes of all classes and both 
 sexes were very plain, and the cuisine and the food 
 were very simple. It is true that there were some 
 very rich people in the town, who had inherited and 
 divided the wealth of the great merchants of the 
 previous age, but the rest of the people who were en- 
 gaged in earning their own living and ours had not 
 much to do with them. They had some pictures and 
 statuary that, I believe, were of no great account, and 
 there was no opportunity for the study of art except 
 at the famous East India Marine Museum, which was 
 organized in the early part of the century and com- 
 posed of seafaring men who had navigated Cape Horn 
 or the Cape of Good Hope as master or supercargo, 
 and had brought home curiosities from distant parts 
 of the world, which were the chief riches of their mu- 
 seum. But it did hold two wonderful casts that made 
 a great impression on my mind, one of the Laocoon, and 
 
[50] 
 
 the other of the boy seated and picking a thorn out of 
 his foot, which are still very famous among the artistic 
 treasures of Europe, and there also were products of 
 Chinese and Indian art which compared well with 
 more modern importations from those distant regions. 
 
 I believe that Salem in the time of my boyhood 
 could boast of a greater proportion of living Harvard 
 graduates than any other town in the State, for those 
 old merchants had had the wit to send their sons to 
 college, and every year a liberal contingent of candi- 
 dates were sent to Cambridge. 
 
 For a place of its size, too, Salem was well supplied 
 with local newspapers, which held a high reputation 
 in the ranks of the American press, The Salem Regis- 
 ter and The Salem Gazette. The Gazette had had a long 
 career and was a dignified paper of somewhat aristo- 
 cratic tone, while The Register had started as a Demo- 
 cratic paper and was much patronized by Judge 
 Storey, who, I believe, had something to do with 
 editing it in his early days, and who wrote the verse 
 which it always maintained at its head: 
 
 "Here shall the press the people's rights maintain 
 Unawed by influence, and unbribed by gain 
 Here patriot truth its sacred precepts draw 
 Pledged to Religion, Liberty and Law." 
 
 Each of these came out twice a week. The Register 
 on Monday and Thursday, and The Gazette on Tues- 
 day and Friday, and that was about all the people 
 could bear, for an attempt to convert The Gazette into 
 
[51] 
 
 a triweekly paper after we began to have daily papers 
 from Boston proved an entire failure, and was stig- 
 matized by the boys with a contemptuous verse: 
 "Triweekly, but try in vain." Like the local press 
 of every suburban town, it had to yield at last to the 
 greater success and value of the metropolitan jour- 
 nals. 
 
 Our sports consisted in the winter of an occasional 
 sleigh-ride, and in the summer of a few rude games at 
 school during recess, and ranging over the great pas- 
 tures, which were a relict of colonial days when rights 
 were acquired by the inhabitants who kept cows, 
 which gave them right to pasture them within its 
 limits. These pastures extended all the way from 
 Salem to Lynn, and were great places of resort. My 
 father also kept cows, never less than two, which we 
 took care of and milked and drove to pasture, and 
 thought we enjoyed it, and I had special opportu- 
 nities for driving about, as my father often took me in 
 his chaise, on his round of professional visits, to hold 
 the horse. 
 
 We also had much to do with assisting my mother 
 about the household work, for servants were very 
 few in those days and large families were brought up 
 with the aid of not more than one or two servants 
 with occasional help of chorewomen called in for the 
 purpose, but we did have a good, sound, wholesome 
 training and education in schools of a high character 
 which then sprang up all over the State under the in- 
 spiration of Horace Mann, and the brutality that had 
 
[52] 
 
 been maintained steadily in the first grammar-school 
 that I attended, with its squalid accompaniments, 
 was speedily put an end to. Flogging which had 
 there prevailed to an unlimited extent was practi- 
 cally abolished, although the right to punish in that 
 way was still reserved for serious cases. 
 
 I have said that our education was all without cost 
 to my father until we entered Harvard, but I do not 
 mean training in the accomplishments of life, for 
 I was sent to three institutions of that kind, the 
 dancing-school under the famous Papanti, the sing- 
 ing-school under Jacob Hood, and a drawing-school 
 under Robert Conner, who was, I believe, an imported 
 Irishman and a very good teacher; but the results in 
 these three establishments were not very flattering 
 to my pride, for I remember on one occasion, after a 
 serious trip-up, being sent home by Papanti with a 
 message to my parents that I was a disgrace to my 
 family, and after I had cultivated the art of drawing, 
 as I supposed with success, for about two years, Mr. 
 Conner took my father aside and whispered to him 
 confidentially that he need not send me any more to 
 the school, because he really could not teach me any 
 more, and in singing-school I never reached the dig- 
 nity of singing alone, but only in very bad school 
 choruses. 
 
 As my youthful years progressed there was one 
 form of entertainment that I found most useful and 
 instructive. I mean the lyceum lectures that at that 
 time prevailed generally throughout New England in 
 
[53] 
 
 the larger towns and cities in the winter season. We 
 regarded it as a great thing to have the most distin- 
 guished men of letters in the country come and de- 
 liver discourses on interesting subjects, and I believe 
 that I was always a faithful attendant in all the later 
 years of my school days on these courses. When such 
 men as Doctor Holmes and Mr. Emerson, James Rus- 
 sell Lowell, and their distinguished colleagues in 
 Boston came, we hung upon their lips with the most 
 devout attention. I believe that this form of enter- 
 tainment afterwards declined, owing, I suppose, to 
 the universal introduction of magazines and weeklies 
 which brought home to every house instruction in 
 similar subjects as those to which we had been so long 
 used in the lectures of the lyceum. 
 
 There was also another form of entertainment 
 which, as the years advanced, I found especially fas- 
 cinating and which, perhaps, had some influence in 
 shaping my subsequent career, and that was atten- 
 dance upon the sessions of the higher courts of record, 
 the business of which, so far as it pertained to any- 
 thing like local importance in Essex County, had not 
 yet been absorbed, as it now is, by the greater city of 
 Boston. The sessions of the Supreme Court, pre- 
 sided over by Chief Justice Shaw and his associates, 
 were always a great attraction, especially in the jury 
 trials, where the jurors were selected, two panels for 
 each term, and composed of citizens of high char- 
 acter, and these drew for their professional labors men 
 of distinction from other counties besides Essex. 
 
[54] 
 
 I remember well seeing and hearing Samuel Hoar, 
 of Concord, Rufus Choate, of Boston, Benjamin F. 
 Butler and Thomas Hopkinson, of Lowell, Otis P. 
 Lord, who was afterwards a valuable judge of the 
 Supreme Court, and many other distinguished men, 
 and it was a special treat to me to hear their dis- 
 cussions and contests with each other and with the 
 members of the Salem bar, which was then still of 
 great importance, and in the absence of theatres, 
 which were up to that time unknown in Salem, these 
 sessions of the court afforded quite as much tragedy 
 and comedy as any ordinary theatre would have 
 done. 
 
 The preparation for college was of the best quality 
 then known, and I think quite as good as any that 
 has succeeded it up to the present time. After a full 
 course in the common schools and three years in the 
 high school, covering the ordinary branches of Eng- 
 lish school education, we had a special school where 
 nothing was taught but Greek, Latin, and mathe- 
 matics, and all by a single teacher who was a special 
 expert in the preparation of boys for college, although 
 his original training in English must have been some- 
 what imperfect, as it had not rescued him from the 
 frequent use of the double negative, and the boys in 
 the school amused themselves by getting up an exag- 
 gerated example of this as illustrative of his mode of 
 addressing blockheads that came under his hands, 
 something like this: 
 
 "You don't know nothing, and you never did know 
 
GAMALIEL HODGES— 1766-1850. 
 
 Grandfather of J. H. C. From a pastel portrait painted in Antwerp, when 
 "Captain" Hodges, as a young sea captain, roamed the sea. He lived to be 
 over eighty-four years old, and only survived his wife two months. Their 
 married life lacked but six days of lasting sixty-two years. 
 
Bulk. 
 
 was a special treat to me to hear their dis- 
 cussions ai?d contest? with each other and with the 
 members which was then still of 
 gr. ' theatres, 
 
 -ir-l 
 
 cx y cu though 
 
 hi - ■ . i .-• ■- been some- 
 
 w» ot rescued him from the 
 
 frequv he double negative, and the boys in 
 
 the school amused t^^^T^m^^fJ^^/'Jl!?*?^^!^^^^ up an c\ 
 
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 lisilT .arfJuorn owJ 3]iw sid bsvivioE x'no ^d* <t>Io aisav luol-XJnS's la''-' 
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[55] 
 
 nothing, and it don't seem as if I could not never 
 teach you nothing nohow apparently." 
 
 But he was a splendid teacher, nevertheless, and 
 got us all into college with flying colors. I believe 
 that this school has been absorbed now and made a 
 part of the high school, which, in my judgment, was 
 a sad departure from the very best method as it then 
 prevailed in Salem, in Boston, and in Roxbury, the 
 Latin schools of which sent the best-prepared stu- 
 dents to enter at Harvard. 
 
 This school was claimed to be the first public school 
 in the colony of Massachusetts, although I think that 
 the claim of the Boston Latin school to have preceded 
 it in its origin may have some foundation, but as 
 Salem was founded some ten years before Boston, I 
 have always been inclined to believe that this school 
 was the first in the colony, and that in some way or 
 other it had been continued uninterruptedly down to 
 my time. 
 
 At any rate there was inscribed upon the wall of 
 the schoolroom the words *'Schola publica prima," 
 and the name of George Downing as its first pupil. 
 Of this antiquity we members of the school were not 
 a little proud, as it seemed to give a sort of historical 
 renown and certainly an interesting tradition to the 
 school. 
 
 This George Downing afterwards became a mem- 
 ber of the first class that graduated at Harvard Col- 
 lege in 1642, where his name is entered "George 
 Downing, Knight 1660, Baronet 1663, Tutor, Am- 
 
[56] 
 
 bassador to Netherlands from Cromwell and Charles 
 Second, M. P.," and as the names of the members of 
 the class were then entered according to social dis- 
 tinction of their family his name appears second, as 
 he was a nephew of John Winthrop, the founder of the 
 Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We always en- 
 joyed the idea of having been schoolmates of this 
 celebrity, although two hundred years apart. 
 
 I remember referring to this at a lord mayor's din- 
 ner in London, in 1902 I think it was, when I was 
 called upon to speak for the diplomatic corps, and I 
 gave them the history of George Downing as I had 
 studied it out for the occasion; how he had been 
 secretary of the treasury in England in 1667, and had 
 represented England at the Netherlands as ambas- 
 sador from Charles the First, from Cromwell, and 
 from Charles the Second; what a wonderful turncoat 
 he had been to be permitted to represent the Pro- 
 tector as well as the two Stuart Kings who preceded 
 and followed him; how by the favor of Charles the 
 Second he had acquired a vast tract of land in Lon- 
 don, in close proximity to what is now the very seat 
 of government, all of which had disappeared except 
 the little cul-de-sac called Downing Street, which 
 leads in to the Foreign Office, so that his name is 
 stamped indelibly upon the very seat and centre of 
 the British Empire, as I had hoped that it would be 
 upon the school which he and I attended. 
 
 When I sat down. Lord Salisbury, who was then 
 prime minister and had made the great speech of the 
 
[57] 
 
 evening, turned to me and said: "Where did you find 
 out all that ? I never heard anything about it." And 
 I replied: "Why, I made a special study of it, as I 
 felt I ought to know the history of the spot on which 
 all my official business in England was conducted." 
 
 Before I bid farewell to Salem I ought to say that 
 Salem as I knew it when I left to go to Harvard, in 
 1848, still remains practically unmarred and undis- 
 turbed by the late terrible conflagration there. All 
 the streets, highways, and byways that I knew as a 
 boy still remain as they were, and only a great ex- 
 terior range of buildings, stores, and residences which 
 had been built up since that day were destroyed in 
 the fire, which called the attention of the whole world 
 in 191 2 to that ancient town. 
 
 There must have been something in the air of 
 Salem or in the tone of the school which gave special 
 vitality to the boys who were educated there, for of 
 my class at Harvard, which consisted of eighty-eight 
 members, gathered from all parts of the country, 
 there are at the time of the present writing five sur- 
 vivors, four of whom entered with me at the Salem 
 Latin School, and from there we proceeded together 
 to the college. 
 
 I think that like the other towns on the eastern 
 shore of Massachusetts, which were all of purely Eng- 
 lish origin, Salem must have retained by tradition 
 many usages of transatlantic origin or derived from 
 the customs of the first settlers. For instance, the 
 curfew bell which, I believe, still rings regularly as it 
 
[58] 
 
 has for the last two hundred and seventy-five years 
 was certainly an importation from the old country, 
 and the town crier must have been of similar origin. 
 He was employed to give notices of sales, losses of 
 children, losses of dogs, and other important local 
 events. He carried a hand-bell and would stop at 
 each corner as he passed down Essex Street and ring 
 the bell with all his might, and we gathered about him 
 with great interest to hear the news, whatever it 
 might be, as with a stentorian voice that could be 
 heard the length of a block he would utter his im- 
 portant intelligence, while we all listened with mouths 
 and ears wide open. And then there was the local 
 vendor, a quaint old Frenchman, old Monarque, 
 whose name must be added to our foreigners of dis- 
 tinction, for he dealt in a very limited number of ar- 
 ticles as he drove his push-cart all about the town, 
 shouting in broken English: "Pickledy limes, and 
 tamadirinds, two for a cent a piece." This, too, must 
 have been an old English mode of advertising before 
 the days of newspapers. 
 
 In the First Church, of which my father was a pillar, 
 which had become under the influence of Channing a 
 very strong Unitarian body, when they came to in- 
 stall a new clergyman in 1848, instead of having a 
 clerical array of participants to administer the laying 
 on of hands, the service was performed by Doctor 
 Choate, who delivered an address on the occasion, 
 and it was said that the proceedings were exactly like 
 those which had taken place two hundred and nine- 
 
[59] 
 
 teen years before when the church was first es- 
 tabUshed. 
 
 Wednesday afternoon, Hke Saturday afternoon, 
 was always a general holiday for the schools, because 
 in the early colony days there was a religious lecture 
 delivered every Wednesday, and from that time down 
 the Wednesday holiday was called lecture afternoon. 
 
 So, also, for hundreds of years all work on Sunday 
 was prohibited, even the necessary cooking for the 
 family. There were public bakehouses to which pri- 
 vate families on Saturday afternoon sent their pots 
 of pork and beans, of Indian pudding, and brown 
 bread, which were ready for them hot on Sunday 
 morning and delivered to those who had sent them, 
 and you would see a long string of callers every Sun- 
 day morning at the entrance of each of the bake- 
 houses. Sunday began at sundown on Saturday, and 
 nothing but good books were allowed to be read by 
 the children until the sun had set on Sunday after- 
 noon. 
 
 We had one great political excitement, the first in 
 which I took an interest at the premature age of 
 eight, having been born in the administration of An- 
 drew Jackson, in his second term, and survived that of 
 Martin Van Buren, which embraced the almost fatal 
 panic of 1837. The nomination of "Tippecanoe and 
 Tyler too," William Henry Harrison and John Tyler 
 for President and Vice-President, excited the en- 
 thusiasm of all of us boys, which was brought to a 
 white heat when a huge log cabin was erected, with a 
 
[6o] 
 
 hard-cider barrel in the rear and a Hve coon at the 
 front door, where the constant meetings of this cam- 
 paign were held. I think nearly all the people of 
 Salem who had suffered from the hard times were for 
 the Whig ticket and were strongly tempted by the 
 cry of "Two dollars a day and roast beef," which was 
 the catchword of that campaign. All the distin- 
 guished orators of the country came to speak, among 
 whom I remember notably Tom Corwin, of Ohio, 
 who, after a life of great distinction, afterwards voted 
 against supplies for the army during the Mexican 
 War and came to an end of his political career. In 
 the election of our candidates there was great uni- 
 versal exultation until, a month after his inaugura- 
 tion, President Harrison died, and John Tyler turned 
 traitor to his party and led the democracy. I well re- 
 member attending the funeral ceremonies of Presi- 
 dent Harrison and listening to a eulogy of the de- 
 ceased President on Salem common with a crape band 
 on my arm nearly a foot wide, and while I was listen- 
 ing this band was snatched away by some under- 
 serving Democrat, and I went home in tears, whether 
 more for the President or the lost band I cannot at 
 this distance of time state. 
 
 I have said that we were not much given to sport, 
 or not at all, but I must make one exception. We 
 played cards a great deal. Father had a theory that 
 if he taught us all the games of cards that he knew or 
 could learn himself, there was no danger of any of the 
 children taking to gambling when they grew up, and 
 
[6i] 
 
 SO it proved. There was not a well-known game of 
 cards that we were not taught, and the result was just 
 as he had calculated. This, I think, would be a very 
 wise example to follow in every family, especially in 
 these days of auction bridge, which is, I believe, do- 
 ing much mischief in many a community. It oper- 
 ated just as well as his theory about work did, that 
 if he established a habit of regular work among the 
 children they would become lovers of work for its own 
 sake when they grew up, and so again it proved. 
 Nothing could be more simple, wholesome, and 
 healthy than our bringing up was, and we all had 
 abundant reason to be grateful for it in our subse- 
 quent life. 
 
 Our family at Salem consisted not only of the four 
 brothers, of whom I have already said so much, but 
 we had two sisters, Elizabeth and Caroline, one older 
 and one younger than myself, who, like their mother, 
 proved to be women of sterling character and of the 
 highest ideals. Elizabeth was born in September, 
 1829, nearly two years and a half before me. They 
 were both very important members of our family. 
 Beyond the public schools at that time there was no 
 provision for the higher education of women. Col- 
 leges for women had not yet been thought of, and the 
 only recourse was to select private schools for girls, 
 with which Salem for two or three generations had 
 been richly provided. In my mother's time there was 
 a very celebrated teacher of very high grade named 
 Thomas Cole, to whom the daughters of all the lead- 
 
[62] 
 
 ing families of Salem were sent and reared with great 
 success. He turned them out well-educated and ac- 
 complished women, and was very much assisted, as I 
 believe, by Professor Louvrier, who at the same time 
 trained them in foreign languages, and they were fol- 
 lowed in subsequent years by a very famous school, 
 kept by Miss Ward, to whom my sisters, with other 
 choice girls of that period, were intrusted with the 
 same success. 
 
 Elizabeth was a girl of really fine genius, to whom 
 the acquisition of knowledge came easily by nature. 
 She also came to be a very excellent musician, and 
 was a very bright feature of the family, warm-hearted 
 and most devoted to the rest of us. When she came 
 of age, in 1850, there was every prospect of a brilliant 
 career for her, and she aspired to follow the example 
 of Miss Ward, whose reputation was exceedingly high, 
 and become herself a teacher. For a short time she 
 did assist General Henry K. Oliver, with whom she 
 had been a pupil, in his classes, but, unfortunately, to 
 the great distress of the family, she within a very few 
 years showed symptoms of that insidious disease, 
 tuberculosis, of which at that time the medical fac- 
 ulty had very little control, and it seemed to be taken 
 for granted that the disease must take its course and 
 that a fatal result, sooner or later, was inevitable. 
 Every effort was made to resist the progress of her 
 trouble by long summers in the country in the hope 
 that the fresh-air cure would benefit her, as it un- 
 doubtedly did for a while, but at the age of thirty we 
 
[63] 
 
 met with an infinite loss in her death, which caused 
 the first break in our family circle, and which was 
 sadly deplored by us all. Strange to say, my mother, 
 who lived to be such a noble pillar of health and 
 strength, lost her elder sister at about the same age 
 and from the same hopeless malady. In both in- 
 stances the surviving sister and all the brothers were 
 wholly free from any manifestations of the infirmity, 
 and were lifelong models of robust health. 
 
 My sister Caroline, who was nearly three years 
 younger than I and was very charming and hand- 
 some, was educated in the same way as her elder 
 sister, and was much beloved and admired, not only 
 in her own family but by every one who met her. At 
 the age of twenty-six she married a charming Ger- 
 man, Doctor Ernst Bruno de Gersdorff, who had 
 settled in Salem as a practising physician some ten 
 years before, and he also had become a very great 
 favorite among Salem's best people. He was born 
 at Eisenach in the Duchy of Saxe- Weimar in the year 
 1825, and was very highly educated and accomplished 
 before he came to this country. His father was for 
 many years chief justice of the Duchy of Saxe- 
 Weimar, and moved in that wonderful circle of learn- 
 ing and culture of which Goethe had been recognized 
 leader, and as the young de Gersdorff was twelve 
 years old before the death of Goethe he must have 
 been deeply affected and influenced by the wonderful 
 impression which that great poet and philosopher 
 made upon the community in which he lived, and to 
 
[64] 
 
 which youthful minds were so receptive and suscep- 
 tible. When the stirring times of 1848 came on in 
 Europe and the revolutionary spirit broke out in Ger- 
 many, which captivated and involved so many young 
 men, de Gersdorff's elder brother was mixed up with 
 some transactions which excited the attention and 
 censure of the government, and he had to leave Ger- 
 many. As the suspicion of complicity was supposed 
 to have extended to the younger brother also, his 
 father thought best that he should come to America, 
 and he accompanied his younger son to this country, 
 where he settled, as I have said, at Salem. He was 
 full of sentiment, poetical, musical, and devoted to 
 all high accomplishments. He was devoted to art, 
 and was himself no mean artist. After a long and 
 useful life, for a while in Salem and afterwards in 
 Boston, he died in 1883. He was of the same type as 
 Carl Schurz, Doctor Jacobi, and other famous Ger- 
 man exiles for freedom, and had the same German cul- 
 ture of Goethe's day, a genial and estimable and 
 highly accomplished gentleman, and left a delightful 
 memory among the people of all classes without dis- 
 tinction of medical schools. His father had been, I be- 
 lieve, an intimate friend of Hahnemann, the famous 
 founder of homoeopathy, and he had been brought 
 up as a follower of that leader. He had been educated 
 at Jena and Leipsic, and, of course, was all ready for 
 the practice of his profession when he arrived in 
 America. 
 
 Mrs. de Gersdorff was a most devoted and always 
 
[65] 
 
 anxious mother, and at the early age of fifty-five she 
 fell a victim of her own solicitude. One of her sons 
 had been operated upon at Saint Luke's Hospital, in 
 New York, and she insisted, against the protest of her 
 friends, in taking a room at the hospital to watch his 
 recovery, where she took cold and died in a very few 
 days of pneumonia. She had a splendid constitution 
 and ought, like her mother, to have lived to a very 
 ripe old age. She is still remembered by many sur- 
 viving friends, to whom she had greatly endeared 
 herself. She left two sons, who graduated at Harvard 
 in 1887 and 1888, and who hold well-recognized 
 positions in New York. 
 
V 
 
 HARVARD COLLEGE 
 
 We were taught to look forward to graduation at 
 Harvard as the only possible way of entering upon 
 active life, and my first visit to that renowned seat of 
 learning was at the commencement in 1846, when my 
 oldest brother graduated, and I drove up with Thomas 
 Drew, a famous caterer in Salem, who carried a 
 wagon-load of table furniture and supplies for the 
 simple spread of that day. In the church as the ex- 
 ercises proceeded I saw a distinguished-looking man 
 on the front of the platform with a shiny, pointed, and 
 very bald head, and when I asked who that was, it 
 proved to be ex-President John Quincy Adams, who 
 was the earliest President of the United States whom 
 I ever saw, and as he had been the sixth President it 
 seemed to carry us a very great way back. 
 
 My brother William and I were always together at 
 school as long as I can remember, for some early ill- 
 ness had retarded his progress at the start, and we 
 went up for our examinations at last in the summer of 
 1848, and now as I am writing all but five of those 
 who had then graduated at that ancient university 
 have passed away. The examinations for entrance at 
 that date were not formidable, although they cov- 
 
 [66] 
 
DOCTOR GEORGE CHO ATE— 1796-1880. 
 Father of J. H. C. This portrait was made when he was about sixty-six years old. 
 
\/ 
 
 ^8i-^^^i— 3TA.0.HD ap«P50 fiOTDOQ 
 
 ,j tor «^ur examinations at last in the 
 
[67] 
 
 ered, I believe, a portion of two succeeding days, and 
 were partly oral and partly in writing. At the close 
 of the second day the list was read off of those who 
 had successfully passed the examinations in the order 
 of the marks they had received, and I was quite sur- 
 prised to find my name led all the rest, but William, 
 who was a far better scholar, soon took the lead and 
 held it without any mishap for the whole four years' 
 course. 
 
 The transition from the narrow and limited life of 
 our boyhood to the broader and freer life at Harvard at 
 the age of sixteen was quite a startling one. We were 
 now comparatively our own masters, and, subject to 
 the rules and requirements of the college, could do as 
 we pleased, and our eyes opened wide to see what our 
 new freedom really meant. The routine of our phys- 
 ical lives was new and most interesting. Athletics as 
 yet were practically unknown, although there was, if 
 I rightly recollect, a small gymnasium already upon 
 the Delta, where those who wished could exercise 
 every day, but if there was one thing that I hated 
 then and always afterwards more than another it was 
 practising in the gymnasium, and so I had little to do 
 with that. Boston, four miles away, was the great at- 
 traction, with all its historical associations and places 
 to visit. I do not recollect ever having been there 
 more than twice or even outside the bounds of Essex 
 County before I entered Harvard, and as there was 
 no conveyance to Boston but the omnibus we almost 
 always walked. Walking I have always found to be 
 
[68] 
 
 very nearly the best exercise for health and recrea- 
 tion that anybody could take. 
 
 There had been, I believe, a boat club in existence 
 in previous years, but as the members committed 
 some excesses after rowing into Boston to the theatre 
 the club was suppressed with a strong hand by Presi- 
 dent Everett, and was not renewed until Charles W. 
 Eliot, of the class after mine, with his splendid phys- 
 ical vigor, succeeded in reviving it. Football was not 
 unknown, but it was limited in our time to a single 
 game on the first Monday of the year between the 
 freshmen and sophomores, and consisted simply of 
 seeing which could force the ball beyond the goal of 
 the other side, without any of the modern devices or 
 contrivances which have brought the game to such 
 perfection under the leadership of Percy Haughton as 
 trainer. There was an attempt, also, to introduce 
 the game of cricket, which had had such distinction 
 always in England, but this also came to nothing. 
 
 The walks to Boston and a daily walk to Mount 
 Auburn, with an occasional excursion farther afield, 
 sufiiced to keep us in good condition. I took what I 
 thought one very long walk in these excursions 
 abroad. One hot summer night, near the close of the 
 term, in early June, I was walking with my friend 
 and classmate David Cheever, afterwards the cele- 
 brated surgeon in Boston, and we got out on the 
 turnpike to a sign that said, *' Cambridge two miles 
 and a half; Concord twelve miles and a half," and in 
 a rash moment I said to him: ''Cheever, I will stump 
 
[69] 
 
 you to walk to Concord." "All right," he said, and 
 as it was my challenge I could not very well back out, 
 and we walked on. We got up to Concord, having 
 lost our way in going through Lexington, some time 
 after midnight, I could not say exactly when, and 
 being slightly fatigued we stopped at the hotel and 
 asked for a glass of whiskey or brandy, but it was in 
 the days of the Maine law, and the landlord said that 
 it was an absolute impossibility, however we pressed 
 our claim and told him that we had got to get back to 
 the college for morning prayers at six o'clock. He 
 finally yielded and said, "Come with me," and gave 
 us a delightful illustration of how the Maine law was 
 executed. He led us through a labyrinth of cellars, 
 up against what appeared to be a blank wall, but he 
 touched a spring and a door opened, and inside was 
 found a barrel with a board across it, a pitcher of 
 water, a bowl of sugar, and bottles of whiskey and 
 brandy, and we took a very refreshing drink. After a 
 tramp of somewhat over thirty miles, as we reckoned 
 it, we got back to morning prayers just as the bell 
 was ringing, and after that we got breakfast and 
 slept for the rest of the day. 
 
 I always regretted that the Harvard Washington 
 Corps, which had been in existence in my father's 
 time in college and had given its members a good deal 
 of military training, had long before been abandoned. 
 How much better it would have been for us all if it 
 had maintained its healthful and inspiring existence 
 until now ! 
 
[70] 
 
 Our first year was the last year of the college com- 
 mons, which down to that time had been maintain- 
 ing a somewhat precarious existence, and at the end 
 of our freshman year was abandoned forever. It 
 was quite exciting, however, for us to find ourselves 
 for the first time taking all our meals with a large 
 number of our fellow collegians, although the fare was 
 very moderate. The tables were spread in the base- 
 ment of University Hall, the building in which at 
 that time almost all the college exercises of every kind 
 were conducted, for it held not only the dining-rooms 
 but the chapel, and nearly all the recitation and lec- 
 ture rooms. The commons were divided into two 
 branches, one at what now seems the moderate price 
 of two dollars and fifty cents a week, and the other, 
 where we had meat one day and pudding the next, 
 and which was, therefore, commonly called "Star- 
 vation Hollow," at two dollars a week, but my 
 brother William and I and several of our classmates 
 from Salem of equally moderate financial ability ate 
 in "Starvation Hollow," and found it quite whole- 
 some and sufficient. 
 
 The necessary expenses in our first year were mod- 
 erate enough to startle any modern members of the 
 university as compared with the present schedule. 
 The tuition was seventy-five dollars a year, and all 
 it cost William and myself, who always roomed to- 
 gether, for room rent during our whole four years at 
 Harvard was ninety dollars, which happened in this 
 way. The first year we roomed in Holworthy, and 
 
[y] 
 
 our apartment seemed to us to be royal, for there was 
 a parlor, very simply but comfortably furnished, of 
 course at our expense, and two bedrooms, and the 
 only service we had or thought of was that of the 
 "goody," so-called, who came every day to make the 
 beds and clear up the rooms. The freshman year 
 we were what was called ** Tutor's Freshmen," that 
 is to say, Francis J. Child, that famous scholar, who 
 had just returned from abroad and had been made 
 tutor in English, was the parietal officer in the middle 
 entry of Holworthy, and had the best room on the 
 second floor, and we were his freshmen and subject 
 to his call at any time, but the only call that I can 
 remember during that year that he made upon us 
 was a single summons to a student to whom he wished 
 to administer admonition, and for this service we had 
 our rooms free. 
 
 The next year we roomed in HoUis, where we had 
 a single room together, of reasonably large dimen- 
 sions. The third year in Stoughton, where we were 
 similarly accommodated, and the fourth year as 
 seniors again we got into the third story of Hol- 
 worthy in the east entry, and paid for each of these 
 years the same rent of thirty dollars, fifteen dollars 
 apiece, rooms that I think now rent for many times 
 that amount. But the college then was not so much 
 in need of money, and treated the rooms in the vari- 
 ous dormitories, as they had been intended to be 
 treated by their munificent donors fifty or one hun- 
 dred years before, as the practically free homes of 
 
[72] 
 
 the students whom they housed. To maintain a fair 
 equity the dean or steward, who had the distribu- 
 tion of the rooms from year to year, assigned those 
 who had the poor rooms, as we had had in the junior 
 and sophomore years, to the better rooms in the 
 senior year, thus bringing us back to Holworthy. 
 
 Our dress did not differ substantially from what 
 we had been accustomed to, except that by the col- 
 lege statute, which had been in existence probably 
 from the beginning, each student was required to 
 have for Sundays and exhibitions "a black coat with 
 buttons of the same." 
 
 Our first president, who signed our admittatur after 
 six months probation, as the rule then was, was no 
 less a person that the very distinguished orator and 
 statesman Edward Everett, who as a scholar also 
 had had a very remarkable career. I do not agree 
 with those who seek from time to time to belittle this 
 great and distinguished man. He had entered Har- 
 vard, I believe, at the age of thirteen, graduated at 
 seventeen at the head of his class, had been pastor 
 of the Brattle Street church at Boston at the age of 
 nineteen, had followed that up with deep study 
 abroad for several years, and then became in turn 
 tutor and professor at the college, and had been a 
 member of Congress, senator, secretary of state of 
 the United States, United States minister to Great 
 Britain, and governor of Massachusetts, and was one 
 of the best-informed scholars of his time and the 
 great orator of the day. Somehow or other, with all 
 
[73] 
 
 that, he was not well suited to be president of the 
 university, and only held the office for three years, 
 retiring on the ist of February, 1849, when he was 
 succeeded by the Reverend Jared Sparks, author of 
 the "Life of Washington," who held the office for 
 four years. In the latter part of his time he became 
 disabled, and the office was filled by that great man, 
 the Reverend Doctor James Walker, so that our col- 
 lege papers were signed by three successive presi- 
 dents. 
 
 I always regarded Jared Sparks as the model presi- 
 dent of the college of that day, and his three years 
 were truly a halcyon period for the students. He 
 took no trouble about them himself, and did not 
 allow anybody else to trouble them, and when com- 
 plaint was made of misconduct his usual mode of 
 treating it was to say: *'0h, let the boys alone. 
 They'll take perfectly good care of themselves." 
 And so it proved; but I suppose that according to 
 the standard of an Eliot or a Lowell, especially in 
 later years, the brief terms of Everett and Sparks 
 would be regarded as singularly inefficient. 
 
 Mr. Everett was noted for his extreme formality 
 and the great dignity which he maintained, far out 
 of the reach of the students. I had hardly been at 
 college a week when I was greatly alarmed at re- 
 ceiving a summons to come to the office of the presi- 
 dent's secretary. I went at the time appointed with 
 fear and trembling, fear that I had committed some 
 unpardonable offense, and trembling lest I should be 
 
[74] 
 
 dismissed, and this conversation took place: "Mr. 
 Choate, the president observed with great regret that 
 you passed him in Harvard Square yesterday with- 
 out touching your hat. He hopes that this offense 
 will never again be repeated." It never was, but 
 no punishment was inflicted, because down at Salem 
 hat-touching was not very common and the formali- 
 ties of life were not very strictly observed; but it is 
 an illustration of his relation to the students, very 
 different from that of Jared Sparks, who was always 
 very glad to see us and never put himself out of 
 the way to trouble us, or that of President Eliot in 
 later years, who stalked through the College Yard 
 without taking notice of anybody, and apparently 
 hoping that nobody would take notice of him, and 
 really a stranger to most of the students. 
 
 There were several great public events that hap- 
 pened while I was in college : the arrival of Professor 
 Louis Agassiz, the renowned naturalist, and his em- 
 ployment as professor and lecturer in the college; 
 the introduction of Cochituate water into Boston; 
 the arrival of Louis Kossuth, and the election of 
 Taylor and Fillmore as President and Vice-President 
 of the United States. At any rate they were re- 
 garded by us students as very great events, because 
 we had never been witnesses of anything so important 
 before. 
 
 I have always believed that the accession of every 
 man of great genius to the teaching force of the uni- 
 versity is the most important thing that can happen 
 
[75] 
 
 to It, and that by the prestige of his great name and 
 reputation he does more for the college than almost 
 anything else can do. Exchange professors had not 
 been thought of at that time, and to get the man 
 who was certainly one of the most noted naturalists 
 in the world into our academic body was of truly 
 unique importance. We listened to Agassiz's lec- 
 tures with the profoundest attention, and he did 
 much to expand our minds and thoughts. 
 
 How the people of Boston with its then rapid 
 growth ever got along without pure water it is not 
 easy to conceive, and it is no wonder that all the 
 civic bodies in and around Boston took part in the 
 celebration. I remember that the whole student 
 body joined in the great procession, which marched 
 through Boston, to celebrate the event of the intro- 
 duction of Cochituate water, and as I was made 
 marshal of my class with Russell Sturgis I naturally 
 attributed tenfold consequence to the occasion. As 
 Boston has grown its water-supply that then began 
 has grown steadily with it, and now comes from many 
 sources and reservoirs that decorate a large tract of 
 country to the west. 
 
 The election of Taylor was one of the immediate 
 results of the Mexican War, in which he had won 
 great distinction, but he was probably as unfitted 
 for the presidency as General Harrison, whom I had 
 assisted in electing as a boy of eight in 1840. His 
 nomination had been declared by Mr. Webster, who 
 should have had it, as one not fit to be made, but 
 
[76] 
 
 as he advised his friends, nevertheless, to vote for 
 Taylor as a safer alternative than the Democratic 
 candidate, we all joined in celebrating the prospect 
 of his election. I remember marching in a torch- 
 light procession the whole length of Boston to the 
 Roxbury line, where, seeing a vacant lot, I made 
 haste to throw my torch into it and returned to 
 Cambridge quite satisfied with my part. 
 
 Then in the midst of my college career came the 
 great compromises of 1850, sustained by Webster, 
 Clay, and Calhoun, which we foolishly thought had 
 settled the slavery question forever, although within 
 four years they were ripped to pieces, and the great 
 events that followed led rapidly to the election of 
 Lincoln. The utter collapse of these compromises 
 so quickly after they were made, although they were 
 thought at that time to be of the greatest historical 
 importance, shows how unreliable is the judgment 
 of old leaders, who have outlived their best powers 
 and have no appreciation of the direction which the 
 nation's progress is taking. Clay and Calhoun both 
 went to their graves in 1850, and Webster followed 
 them two years afterwards, on the 24th of October, 
 1852. 
 
 The reaction of public opinion was instantaneous 
 and almost universal. The great New England 
 statesman's 7th of March speech, in which he took 
 the ground that it was not necessary to re-enact the 
 prohibition of slavery in regions from which, as he 
 contended, the laws of nature and of climate had 
 
[77] 
 
 made its existence impracticable, was a great dis- 
 appointment to the mass of the people at the North 
 and was construed by them as a bid for the presi- 
 dency in the next federal election, and as an aban- 
 donment of the splendid position that he had pre- 
 viously occupied as the representative of New 
 England sentiment and a lifelong advocate of the 
 restriction of slavery, so far as the Constitution 
 would permit. The doors of Faneuil Hall, that his- 
 toric cradle of liberty, were closed against his friends, 
 who wished to do him honor by a reception there, a 
 very stupid blunder, for they took to the streets and, 
 erecting a great platform in front of the Revere 
 House, they received him on his return from Wash- 
 ington with unbounded enthusiasm and applause. 
 I was present on that occasion, for I had no sym- 
 pathy with those who would denounce and destroy 
 him after his wonderful record in the past, and it 
 was a great satisfaction to hear the brief address of 
 welcome, which was pronounced by Judge Benjamin 
 R. Curtis, and Webster's reply. He was still a mag- 
 nificent specimen of manhood and a noble orator, 
 and as we listened to him we could not but think 
 of the immense services which he had rendered to 
 the country; especially how for two entire genera- 
 tions he had done all that one man could possibly do 
 to arouse in the hearts of the young men of the 
 nation an intense spirit of nationality and an undy- 
 ing devotion to the great cause of liberty and union. 
 This service did not and could not die with him and 
 
[78] 
 counted largely, ten years afterwards, in the grand 
 uprising of the North for the defense of the national 
 existence and honor when the rebel assault upon 
 Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of our 
 terrible Civil War. 
 
 The other event to which I have referred, the ar- 
 rival of Louis Kossuth, in 1849, was an event of sur- 
 passing interest to all the people of America. We 
 had sympathized with the splendid struggle for free- 
 dom which he had so valiantly maintained, just as 
 we are sympathizing to-day with the great struggle 
 of the Entente nations for the overthrow of the same 
 destructive militarism which succeeded then in 
 crushing this great champion of freedom, just as it 
 is now seeking, but without success, to dominate the 
 entire world. 
 
 I remember that we were having one of our semi- 
 annual exhibitions, as they were called, in the chapel, 
 in University Hall, on the day when Kossuth ar- 
 rived in Cambridge at the invitation of the authori- 
 ties of the university. These college exhibitions 
 usually consisted of addresses or the recitation of 
 parts, by meritorious students, and took place semi- 
 annually as rewards of merit. I happened to be 
 upon the programme but had finished my part when 
 Kossuth arrived and was ushered into the chapel by 
 a committee of citizens, and delivered an address in 
 as perfect English as I have ever heard from any 
 English or American orator. As he had acquired this 
 knowledge of our tongue while a prisoner in an Aus- 
 
MRS. GEORGE CHOATE. 
 Born at Salem.. 80s; died at Stockbridge. Mass.. 1887. Mother of J. H. C Margaret 
 
 Do«r^hoat'r„% :r'TH °' ""^^.^^Irf ^^""^ WilHams Hodges. .S 
 th^v t=.H f ^; '7 "'""^'^ '"^^ '^^^^'^ fifty-six years and a half and 
 
 they had four sons and two daughters. J. H. C. was the fifth child. 
 
n the rebel << 
 Fort Sumtr the si(rnal for the opening i> 
 terrible Civil War. 
 The other e^ h i have reiened, ti 
 ' ■• -'^ ' . ill 1849, was an : 
 
 h:ifl 'd 5^tP-7';!;'f;lc for fref*- 
 
 usually -3 or the recitation of 
 
 parts, b cudents, and took place semi- 
 
 ". ;.u iK.,.ixd.- •i^TiDMa.sofloJlo hifc^'P'^ned to be 
 
 - bsh^feM^^sa^boH itnmm A.^st hna bllcmsO' h «jrf8"E6 -esaboH sninLw 
 
 ^nrrnttee of citi/ertft aTid delivered an addre*:? in 
 
 iieard froj^ 
 sehad 
 vica^c prison' 
 

 ^ 
 
 ^1. 
 
[79] 
 
 trian dungeon, after the collapse of his great enter- 
 prise, we were lost in wonder at the readiness of the 
 faculty by which he had acquired such complete 
 knowledge of a new language. 
 
 I have seen it several times repeated that on his 
 sudden advent into the chapel I was delivering my 
 part, and that having been brushed aside by his en- 
 try, I in some way addressed him after his speech 
 with a tribute of admiration. It was only yesterday 
 (November 27th, 19 16) that I read in the personal 
 recollections just published by one of my contem- 
 poraries at Harvard, this extraordinary statement, 
 that during the interruption caused by his entrance 
 and address, I "seated on the stage formed a Latin 
 period containing a graceful reference to the guest's 
 career, and on arising to resume my part, opened 
 with the extemporaneous compliment in Latin, which 
 brought the Magyar orator again to his feet and, 
 amidst a new explosion of applause, Kossuth replied 
 in faultless Latin, speaking as though it were his 
 native tongue. Nothing could have been finer.'* 
 This was a pure outbreak of my friend's imagination. 
 I had absolutely nothing to do with it, for Addison 
 Brown, who afterwards was our much-admired ad- 
 miralty judge in New York for twenty-five years, was 
 on the platform when Kossuth entered, and no ad- 
 dress or reference to him was made, as the programme 
 proceeded, except a few words of reception by the 
 president of the university, but it only shows how 
 dangerous it is for men in the ninth decade to write 
 
[8o] 
 
 and publish reminiscences, which, up to this time, 
 I have always tried to avoid. 
 
 Harvard College at the time I entered it was a 
 comparatively small affair, and as provincial and 
 local as could well be imagined, and the idea of its 
 ever becoming the great national university had, I 
 think, never entered into anybody's head. The stu- 
 dents in my first year numbered only 549, including 
 all the professional schools, there being theological 
 students, 19; law students, 96; medical students, 
 139; special students in chemistry and mathematics, 
 and citizens attending lectures in scientific school, 
 16; and resident graduates, 6, amounting together 
 to 276; and the undergraduates being divided be- 
 tween seniors, 75; juniors, 58; sophomores, 68; and 
 freshmen, 72, amounting in all to 273; the whole 
 comparing strangely with modern years, when a single 
 graduating class has numbered over 500, or nearly 
 twice as many as the entire body of undergraduates 
 at that early period, and the growth of the profes- 
 sional and graduate departments has increased pro- 
 portionally. 
 
 My own class and all the classes of that time were 
 composed chiefly of New England boys, a very few 
 coming from New York, and about an equal number 
 from the South, whose people of wealth had long 
 been in the habit of sending their boys to Harvard. 
 I call it provincial and local because its scope and 
 outlook hardly extended beyond the boundaries of 
 New England. Besides which it was very denomina- 
 
[8i ] 
 
 tional, being held exclusively in the hands of Uni- 
 tarians. The president and all the fellows constitut- 
 ing the corporation were Unitarians, a majority of 
 the overseers were Unitarians, and I think that a 
 majority of the officers of instruction and govern- 
 ment were of the same faith. This caused it to be 
 looked upon askance by the rest of the United States, 
 where that faith had not extended far, and they hesi- 
 tated to send their sons to Harvard for fear of what 
 they called its heretical tendencies. It is true that 
 at that time the people of Massachusetts were largely 
 of that faith, and the clergy of that body in that 
 commonwealth far exceeded in intellectual and per- 
 sonal force those of all the other denominations. 
 There was a freshman, when I was a senior, who was 
 destined to exercise tremendous influence in breaking 
 down these narrow barriers and vastly broadening 
 the character and the influence of the college. I 
 mean Bishop Phillips Brooks, of the class of '55, 
 whom I remember perfectly well as a freshman, a 
 tall and slender stripling overtopping the rest of his 
 class, in a distant corner of the chapel, and I followed 
 his course with admiration and enthusiasm until, 
 with other men of similar liberal tendencies, he had 
 made the college entirely undenominational and 
 opened its doors, its curriculum, and its associations 
 very wide, so as to admit men of all faiths, and of no 
 faith, and men of all nations to be enrolled in the 
 undergraduate classes. We had compulsory college 
 prayers, held at the unearthly hours of seven o'clock 
 
[82] 
 
 in the morning in winter, and six in the summer, and 
 the rush from our beds at the sound of the bell to 
 the chapel was most unseemly, but Phillips Brooks 
 lived to be the instrument of removing all compul- 
 sion, and made the college in a religious point of view 
 absolutely free. Instead of being limited to Uni- 
 tarian preachers at prayers and on Sundays, it now 
 has a body of religious teachers gathered from all 
 sects and faiths, and various parts of the country, 
 and commands for the service the greatest ability to 
 be found in all, and the annual catalogue now contains 
 the names of boys of all countries and all religions, 
 Christians and Jews, Asiatics, Europeans, South 
 Americans, and those who have had their birth in 
 the islands of the sea, and already it has contributed 
 much by the education of Japanese and Chinese to 
 the modernization of those ancient lands. The sug- 
 gestion of such a result in my time would have been 
 received as an absolute impossibility. 
 
 Many experiments have been made and much 
 improvement, undoubtedly, has been accomplished 
 in the last seventy years in methods of education, 
 but after all I am inclined to the belief that these 
 varying methods have resulted chiefly in the better 
 development of the youth of inferior and average 
 capacity and ability, and that under them all the 
 men of natural superiority of talents and faculty, de- 
 termined to get an education and relying chiefly upon 
 their own efforts for this, have risen naturally to the 
 top, and subsequently taken their lead in the life of 
 
[83] 
 
 their time. That is to say, take the ten classes from 
 1846 to 1856, and they can furnish, as the catalogue 
 shows, a group of men educated at Harvard who can 
 compare favorably with the best men of any subse- 
 quent decade in the history of the university. Let 
 me mention a few in this older decade for whom I 
 would challenge comparison with any similar num- 
 ber in any later period. There were Professors Fran- 
 cis James Child, George Martin Lane, and Charles 
 Eliot Norton, and Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of 
 the class of '46; William C. Endicott, of '47; Professor 
 Cook, the great chemist, and Dean Hoffman, of '48; 
 my brother, Charles Francis Choate, first scholar in 
 the class of '49, and his classmate, Horace Davis, 
 president of the University of California; James C. 
 Carter, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, and John Noble, 
 in the class of '50; Professors Dunbar, Goodwin, and 
 Langdell, of '51; my brother, William Gardner 
 Choate, first scholar in the class of ^52, and his class- 
 mates Judge Addison Brown, Doctor David Williams 
 Cheever, Professor Gurney, dean and fellow of the 
 university; Professors James Bradley Thayer and 
 William Robert Ware; Charles William Eliot, and 
 Professors Adams Sherman Hill, James Mills Peirce, 
 and Justin Winsor, of the class of '53; Horace How- 
 ard Furness, of the class of '54; Theodore Lyman and 
 Chief Justice James Tyndale Mitchell, of the class of 
 '55; and Charles Francis Adams, Governor George 
 D. Robinson, and Judge Jeremiah Smith, of the class 
 of '56. Take these men as examples, and where in 
 
[84] 
 
 any subsequent decade can you find an equal num- 
 ber to excel them, or perhaps to match with them as 
 the fruit of varying systems of training and educa- 
 tion, allowing always for the immense growth in the 
 numbers of the classes from which selection might be 
 made ? 
 
 There was one immense advantage which the boys 
 of our time at Harvard enjoyed over those of recent 
 years, the classes were so small in number that we 
 became intimately acquainted with each other, much 
 more intimately than at any subsequent period of 
 life with any similar number of acquaintances, under- 
 stood one another's character perfectly, and formed 
 the closest ties of friendship and a strong class-feeling 
 that continued unbroken through life; while now, 
 as I understand, where the classes are numbered by 
 hundreds, no such state of things is possible, and very 
 few members of any class know in a similar way the 
 whole or even half of their associates. Groups and 
 cliques of friends are formed, but there is no genuine 
 class-feeling in which all unite as in the old days. I 
 think, too, that there was then no such distance be- 
 tween the professors and the students as now pre- 
 vails. We came to know them well, and it was quite 
 possible for any professor or tutor to become ac- 
 quainted with and to become familiar with the men- 
 tal and moral qualities of the members of each divi- 
 sion of the class, for in almost all the courses the class 
 was divided alphabetically into two divisions. 
 
 No friendships of after-life begin to equal in ardor 
 
[85] 
 
 and intensity those of college days, and no names 
 ever become so familiar as those of the associates of 
 that early period of life. I have in my bedroom the 
 photographs of eighty-five of our members, all but 
 three of the entire number, in all the beauty and 
 freshness of youth, just as they appeared on Com- 
 mencement Day in 1852, when we graduated and 
 parted, never to meet again in full ranks. The cos- 
 tumes of that day seem a little peculiar now, for we 
 all wore long hair and high collars and huge neck- 
 handkerchiefs, which long since passed out of fashion. 
 I often put myself to sleep by calling the roll of my 
 classmates, whose names are as familiar now as then. 
 In our freshman year all the studies were required, 
 consisting chiefly of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, 
 which I still regard as of extremely great value in the 
 training of youthful minds. Our study of the lan- 
 guages was in the main limited to the correct con- 
 struction of the Greek and the Latin, so as to get 
 the correct and full meaning out of every sentence, 
 and to do that necessarily required great concentra- 
 tion and accuracy and perseverance, traits of enor- 
 mous value in any subsequent pursuits, and without 
 which any real success in them is hardly possible, 
 but we were sadly lacking in any intelligent study 
 of the glorious history and literature of Greece and 
 Rome, which would have made our studies so much 
 more delightful. Afterwards, with increasing free- 
 dom from year to year, our programme of studies 
 was made more and more liberal, and the elective 
 
[86] 
 
 system began to show its effect, although not nearly 
 so much as in later years, for still many subjects were 
 required. A diligent student was kept pretty busy, 
 for I see by the tabular view of our exercises during 
 the year 1851-52 that our recitations began at eight 
 in the morning and continued with more or less in- 
 terruptions until six at night, and the hour of morn- 
 ing prayers was at seven o'clock from September to 
 April, and at six o'clock from the first Monday in 
 April until Commencement; breakfast was immedi- 
 ately after morning prayers, and dinner at one 
 o'clock throughout the year. 
 
 I chose for my special studies Latin and Greek 
 throughout my college course, and never had occa- 
 sion to regret it, for the same mental exercises that 
 required perfection in those subjects stood me well 
 in hand all through the rest of my life in solving prob- 
 lems of law and diplomacy, or anything else that I 
 had to work upon. I also found that committing to 
 memory, although never required, was of infinite 
 value as a mental discipline, and have always won- 
 dered why it has not been more generally kept up. 
 When I graduated I could repeat from memory the 
 whole of the first book of Milton's *' Paradise Lost," 
 and many other valuable gems of English literature, 
 and I wish that I had continued it until the present 
 day, for I am sure that such a habit continued through 
 a long life would keep the mind well stored with the 
 most precious passages of English literature of all 
 times and of every variety, and would be an infinite 
 
[87] 
 
 solace and satisfaction. But I gave up the habit 
 when I left college and became busy in what seemed 
 at that time to be more important matters, and while 
 much that I then learned in that way still lingers in 
 my memory, the most of it has vanished, so that ex- 
 cept for the few opening sentences of ** Paradise Lost " 
 the only sentence that I can now recall is the one 
 that I found it most difficult to commit to memory 
 and fix in the gray matter of the brain, and which 
 when once lodged there has never escaped: 
 
 "From Aroer to Nebo, and the wild 
 Of southmost Abarim; in Hesebon 
 And Horonaim, Seons Realm, beyond 
 The flowry Dale of Sibma, clad with vines. 
 And Eleale to the Asphaltic Pool." 
 
 I am sorry to say that until Mr. Lane returned 
 from abroad to become tutor in Latin we had no 
 first-class teaching in either that or Greek. Too 
 much of our work was routine work, studying the 
 texts of prescribed volumes and reciting by rote, 
 and lectures at first were very scarce, indeed. I re- 
 member in our freshman year only one course of 
 three lectures by Professor John Ware, on the 
 ** Means of Preserving Health," which were very wise 
 and very good; but as we progressed in later years 
 we had better luck, and by the time we came to be 
 juniors and seniors it was our great good fortune to 
 be able to listen to lectures from Professor Channing 
 on rhetoric, Longfellow on modern literature, Lover- 
 
[88] 
 
 ing on electricity, Gray on botany, and, above all, 
 the great Agassiz on geology. From all these we 
 really felt that we were learning a great deal, but the 
 most unique, critical, and delightful of all the pro- 
 fessors of our time was Professor Edward Tyler Chan- 
 ning, who was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and 
 Oratory from 1819 to 1851, a period of thirty-two 
 years, during which, as I believe, he did more to form 
 what I may call the Harvard style of speech and 
 writing than any other individual influence. One of 
 the greatest joys of life was to attend his hours, when 
 our themes and forensics, for which he had given us 
 subjects two weeks before, were before him for ex- 
 amination and criticism. He was a deadly foe of all 
 splurging and extravagance of expression, and to all 
 obscurity of language, and his criticisms were as 
 piercing and caustic as they were delightful. Prun- 
 ing and weeding out and sarcastic elimination were 
 his great weapons, and if the Harvard men of that 
 time were, as I think they were generally, given to 
 clearness, force, and earnestness, he is very chiefly 
 entitled to the credit of it all. 
 
 Our examinations did not amount to much, and I 
 think never did until long after we left college. We 
 were pretty carefully examined on entering to test 
 our qualifications for admission, but never after that, 
 that I can recall, were we subjected to any serious 
 examination or to any written examinations at all. 
 Every year the corporation appointed a board of ex- 
 aminers in each of the subjects into which our cur- 
 
[89] 
 
 riculum was divided. They were gentlemen of dis- 
 tinction from various parts of the State of Massa- 
 chusetts, and I think none from any other part of the 
 country. They were not specially versed, as a rule, 
 in the subjects on which they were appointed exam- 
 iners. On the day appointed for examination some 
 of them would appear in each department and have 
 seats assigned them on the platform, and sit in silence 
 while the professor or instructor examined us on 
 something that we had recently learned. I do not 
 remember any one of them ever asking any question, 
 and, of course, it was not difficult to receive their 
 approval and even commendation, and it never re- 
 quired any examination to get out of college. Every- 
 thing went by marks in those days, the accumulation 
 of marks through the four years (eight, I believe) 
 being the highest mark, and from there graded down 
 to zero. It was well said in one of our mock parts 
 that the Gospel of Mark was the guide to the scholar, 
 and the declaration of Tom Whitridge, of the class 
 of 'i8, of which my father was a member, that if it 
 had taken as severe an examination to get out of 
 college as it had to get in, he would have laid his 
 bones there, continued traditional and true down to 
 our time. 
 
 We got absolutely nothing from the morning and 
 evening prayers. They served merely as contri- 
 vances for getting the boys out of bed in the morning 
 and preventing their leaving the college before night. 
 The prayer-makers did not seem to take much more 
 
[90] 
 
 interest in them than the boys themselves, ahhough 
 it was sometimes difficult for them to stop when they 
 got under way, and the story went that at one of the 
 morning prayers the minister delivered himself in 
 this way: "O Lord, we pray thee to make the in- 
 temperate temperate, the insincere sincere, and the 
 industrious 'dustrious." So when Phillips Brooks 
 arose in his might and insisted upon abolishing all 
 requirements, it must have been a great relief to the 
 college, and a blessing to all who afterwards cared 
 to attend, as they did in great numbers. 
 
 On the whole, my four years at Harvard, from 
 1848 to 1852, were the best and happiest period of my 
 life, as I believe that they were of most of the boys. 
 We were blessed with all the spirits of youth, with 
 no responsibilities, no cares, and with only the in- 
 spiration of our individual ambition. Upon the 
 whole. Harvard College, with its delightful memories 
 and associations, its lofty and well-maintained stand- 
 ards, and its ever-growing greatness and power, has 
 been the best and most wholesome influence upon 
 my life, from the day of graduation, when I was one 
 of the youngest of her children, until to-day, when I 
 stand upon the catalogue Number 14 among her 
 14,000 surviving graduates, and to receive the ap- 
 proval of Harvard men throughout the world has 
 always been a sufficient satisfaction and reward. 
 
JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE AT THE AGE OF TWENTY. 
 
 This picture was taken with his class at graduation in 1852. The original 
 daguerreotype is in the Harvard Librarj' at Cambridge. 
 
/es, al: 
 
 ter !"»e 
 
 industrioii Uen F; 
 
 arc ted upon aboiisiiing all 
 
 iber 14 among hin 
 
 U, ng gni e the ap~ 
 
 pr<= .,|.^_ .:,/c^frr%dtvUJ«o 83o^oft Hifggold ha-. 
 
VI 
 
 TRAINING FOR THE BAR 
 
 The Law School, when I entered it in 1852, was, 
 like each of the other departments of the university, 
 a comparatively small affair. In our entering class 
 there were only forty-seven, and the other two classes 
 were of smaller numbers. What there was of teach- 
 ing was done by two professors, and a university lec- 
 turer. Judge Joel Parker, who had been chief justice 
 of New Hampshire, and Theophilus Parsons, who 
 had been a very successful lawyer in Boston, and was 
 the son of the chief justice of Massachusetts of the 
 same name. Judge Parker, the Royal Professor of 
 Law, was an exceedingly profound and learned law- 
 yer. He was so erudite and profound that we of the 
 lighter minds really could not successfully follow the 
 action of his, although men of sterner faculties, like 
 Carter and Langdell and my two brothers, got very 
 much out of him; but to me the great light of the 
 Law School, while I was there, was Professor Parsons, 
 a lawyer of much smaller caliber and lighter vein, 
 but who, having had great experience at the bar, 
 had a delightful way of giving us the general prin- 
 ciples of law in a manner that made a lasting im- 
 pression upon our minds, and gave me many points 
 
 that I remembered and made use of in all my subse- 
 
 C91] 
 
[92] 
 
 quent career at the bar. The university lecturer, 
 Judge Loring, probate judge in Boston, came out 
 for three or four lectures a week on such subjects as 
 did not come within the programme of the two pro- 
 fessors. The only course of his that I can remember 
 attending was on the domestic relations, and I can 
 only recall that he was an exceedingly conservative 
 man, and a good deal behind the age, even for that 
 time. The gist of his discourse upon the marital re- 
 lations may be judged from the fact of his saying re- 
 peatedly the stereotype utterance: "The husband 
 and wife are one, and that one is the husband.'* The 
 standard at the school was very low at that time. 
 There were absolutely no examinations to get in, or 
 to proceed, or to get out. All that was required was 
 the lapse of time, two years, and the payment of the 
 fees, and not to have got into any disgrace while in 
 the school. With that we were sure of the degree of 
 Bachelor of Laws at the end of the second year. I 
 see that there was a Committee on Visiting the Law 
 School, consisting of very eminent lawyers and judges, 
 all of Massachusetts, but I do not recall their ever 
 visiting the school, individually or collectively, or 
 exercising any of the powers of examiners. Our right 
 to the degree consisted in having attended more or 
 less of the lectures and paid our fees, as I have said. 
 Nevertheless, we did learn a great deal of law. 
 The library for the time was exceedingly good, and 
 we formed among ourselves law clubs, in which moot 
 courts were held, and cases tried and argued, and 
 
[93] 
 
 briefs prepared and submitted, the elder members 
 acting as judges, and once, at the end of the year, 
 there was a mock trial in which members of the junior 
 class of the college were impanelled as jurors, and 
 members of the graduating class, selected for the 
 purpose, tried the case before them. And what was 
 more, Boston was very near, where the courts were 
 constantly in session, and to which we resorted freely 
 for instruction and entertainment. 
 
 It was while at the Law School that I formed a 
 more intimate acquaintance with Mr. Rufus Choate, 
 then at the head of the profession in Massachusetts, 
 and, I should say, in the whole country, and became 
 very much interested in his personality and in his 
 methods. It is needless to say that he was a won- 
 derful orator, but besides that he was one of the 
 most fascinating personalities that I had ever known. 
 To hear him in court or on the platform, or in private 
 conversation was a very great treat, and he was one 
 of the most affectionate and warm-hearted of men. 
 In my last year in the Law School he invited me to 
 go with him on a journey to the White Mountains, 
 and, of course, I eagerly accepted the rare oppor- 
 tunity, and in those three days I learned how fast he 
 was using up his life and his powers. We started 
 from his house in Boston very early on Thursday 
 morning, and got back there very late on Saturday 
 night. We seemed to be going at full speed all the 
 time. The railroads at that date had not opened all 
 the way to the Crawford House, or from there through 
 
[94] 
 
 the mountains, but we took special wagons from the 
 railroad terminus and went at the best speed that 
 could be made, although he seemed to be very much 
 afraid of horses, I remember that when we got to 
 the Crawford House, late at night, it was very cold 
 (and he was always oppressed by the cold), but when 
 we entered the door of the hotel and saw a grand fire 
 of great logs burning in the fireplace, he warmed up 
 at once, and turning to me he said : " Do you remem- 
 ber that grand verse in Isaiah: 'Aha, I am warm, I 
 have seen the fire' ?" The mere sight of the blazing 
 logs seemed to penetrate his body at once. Even 
 for that short journey he carried a trunkful of books, 
 as it seemed to me, in Greek, Latin, and English, and 
 although there was not much time to read as we trav- 
 elled, I have an impression that he overhauled them 
 during the night and made much use of them. His 
 conversation at all times was most edifying and en- 
 joyable, full of references to delightful things that he 
 had read in books, and lighted up by genuine wit and 
 humor, but he really made a labor of the journey in 
 endeavoring to cover such considerable distances, and 
 to crowd into three days what might well have taken 
 as many weeks in that era that knew nothing of rapid 
 transit. When we reached Boston and got back to 
 his house he said to me: "Now, that is my vacation 
 for this year." It was at this rate that he had 
 worked from the time he left the United States Sen- 
 ate in 1845, and that he continued to work to his 
 untimely end in 1859, when he was a little short of 
 
[95] 
 
 sixty. He ought to have Hved to a serene old age, 
 but he literally crowded into his sixty years the work 
 of, at least, eighty, winning great renown, giving vast 
 delight to the men and women of his own time, and 
 leaving such an impress upon the age that succeeded 
 him that, as Mr. Dana well said, the lawyers of 
 America, when they met for mutual conversation and 
 entertainment, found that they could do better by 
 reminiscences of Rufus Choate than by anything that 
 they could themselves present. 
 
 It was during my time in college and at the Law 
 School that the trial of the famous fugitive slave cases 
 took place in Boston, upon which the eager attention 
 of the whole nation was turned. The general feeling 
 of the collegians and the members of the Law School 
 tended to be very conservative, for we had been 
 brought up, you may say, at the feet of Daniel Web- 
 ster, who was chiefly responsible for the compromise 
 measures of 1850, including the fugitive slave law, 
 which professed to be properly devised to carry out 
 the provisions of the Constitution of the United 
 States, requiring the return from one State to an- 
 other of persons held to service or labor. I do not 
 think that, with the exception of the extreme aboli- 
 tionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell 
 Phillips, there was much dispute as to the necessity 
 of a proper law for that purpose, if we intended to 
 stand by the Constitution, but there was great ground 
 for contention on the subject of the method of bring- 
 ing about the return of fugitive slaves. All that the 
 
[96] 
 
 Constitution said was that they should be deHvered 
 up, and it was well maintained by the opponents of 
 the law of 1850 that that did not dispense with the 
 usual safeguards and guarantees of personal freedom, 
 and that, instead of being tried before a single com- 
 missioner, the fugitives were entitled to a trial by 
 jury, as I think they certainly were. But the statute 
 had made no such provision, and so a small number of 
 fugitives were surrendered and carried back by force 
 to their original masters in the South. These few in 
 number, however, had a very great effect in arousing 
 the popular indignation, and were a very important 
 factor in bringing about in a few years the overthrow 
 of the whole system of slavery under the wise ad- 
 ministration of Lincoln. 
 
 During my two years at the Law School I earned, 
 for the first time, my own living by preparing boys 
 for entrance to Harvard, which consumed about two 
 hours of each day, and in which I found great benefit 
 in reviving and keeping alive my knowledge of the 
 classics, and I discovered that in teaching one learned 
 more than he knew before. 
 
 After leaving the Law School, as a third year was 
 required and an examination before admission to the 
 bar, I was privileged to enter the office of Hodges and 
 Saltonstall, in Boston, and spent a year at my father's 
 home at Salem, going up every day for the purpose 
 by train. Business was not then so driving among 
 lawyers as it afterwards became, and a very consid- 
 erable portion of my time during that year was spent 
 
[97] 
 
 in attending the courts, where I learned more than 
 I had learned anywhere else as to the trial and argu- 
 ment of cases. There was almost always during the 
 greater part of the year some important trial going 
 on, and in this trial two or three leaders were always 
 engaged. These were Rufus Choate, Sidney Bart- 
 lett, and Charles G. Loring. It is needless to say 
 that the trials in the Supreme Court were conducted 
 with the greatest dignity and decorum, and nothing 
 could be more instructive to a student of the law 
 than to sit in the presence of such a tribunal and 
 listen to the trial and argument of cases by three 
 such eminent men. They were nearly the same age, 
 but their styles were very different. 
 
 Mr. Choate's exuberant eloquence, with a mind 
 richly stored with a vast wealth of reading and knowl- 
 edge, and an unbounded human sympathy, made 
 him, I think, the greatest advocate that America has 
 ever known. In the argument of questions of law 
 he was a very close reasoner, with a rich gift of illus- 
 tration, so that it was almost impossible for him to 
 lose a case that could by any possibility have been 
 won; but it was his fascinating personality that car- 
 ried all before him with the jury. He never over- 
 looked a fact or an incident that could by any possi- 
 bility aid his side of the case, and would form a 
 theory upon the facts presented which would com- 
 mend itself to his conscience and judgment, and win, 
 if it was possible to win, the approval of the jury. 
 His patience, tenacity of purpose, and exceeding good 
 
[98] 
 
 humor would carry the day over any ordinary ad- 
 versary. He would not only address the jury as a 
 whole body, but would fasten upon each individual 
 juryman in turn, of whose sympathy he was not al- 
 ready sure, and stick to him until he had mastered 
 him, so that I have no doubt he occasionally won a 
 verdict which any other man would have lost, and 
 which, perhaps, he ought to have lost, although from 
 a long experience in jury trials I am satisfied that in 
 nine cases out of ten the jury decide right upon the 
 evidence, whoever tries the case. 
 
 Mr. Bartlett was as unlike Mr. Choate as one man 
 could possibly differ from another. Cold and sharp, 
 and glittering as steel, he would push aside all that 
 the fancy and imagination of his adversary had 
 brought into the case, and hold the courts to the 
 main point, and the jury to one or two cardinal facts, 
 which would compel them, if the case made it pos- 
 sible, to find a verdict for his side. He was very 
 learned, too, but had never, I believe, been such a 
 student as his more celebrated adversary, and he had 
 the rare advantage (I say rare to a great lawyer) of 
 extraordinary business experience and faculties, and 
 an extreme common sense, which, after all, is the 
 thing which ought to govern both courts and juries. 
 With a vast business always on hand, he never wore 
 himself out by travelling on his nerves, to die at fifty- 
 nine, as his chief opponent did, but lived a long, use- 
 ful, and happy life in the very front rank of the pro- 
 fession, and after arguing an important case in the 
 
RUFUS CHOATE. 
 
 Born at Hog Island, 1799; died at Halifax, 1859. First cousin of Doctor George 
 Choate. This was J. H. C.'s favorite portrait of his distinguished kinsman, and 
 always hung in his own room over his bed. He had a great admiration and af- 
 fection for Rufus Choate, and always felt deeply grateful to him for his early 
 kindnesses. 
 
•1 upon each indh 
 i uryma 
 
 . m; I.U-L .V have I) ■ 't: .• 
 
 let which any o and 
 
 h, perhaps, h- 'honel 
 
 s and J 
 \ he never 
 oy traveiiiD- c-n iii- nerv. ;. to die at fifty- 
 
 ": . ., .^TAOHD zij'iua. I , . . ^ 
 
 •igwsO' loJDoO l6 ahi}f<o JsiiT' .pjS'i .lelilsH is baib ;P9^I .bnElsl'soH Jc nioSi 
 
 )i; hrifinoirs-^Jnifafi fESig b fa'fi'rf sH' '.bad eirf -.lavo hiooi nwo aiit ni anud cyewlB 
 <li.i ii:l loV mill pj lubjfiia xlqsab ]h\ &'i&vile. ba& ,3j«ciilJ siiluH lol aoi:j3l 
 
[99] 
 
 Supreme Court at Washington at the age of ninety, 
 went home and died of old age. 
 
 Mr. Loring was wholly unlike either of the other 
 two great protagonists at the Boston bar. He com- 
 manded the confidence of the whole community by 
 his great weight of character. He, also, had great 
 business ability and experience, and was always mas- 
 ter of his case, so that when he spoke to court or 
 juries they not only believed every word he said, but 
 received it with open minds, ready to be convinced. 
 There was never any nonsense about him. Indeed, 
 there was a total want of the sense of humor, 
 and he proved always to be a most formidable an- 
 tagonist. 
 
 No theatre that I have ever attended offered so 
 great an intellectual treat as to sit at the feet of these 
 three great masters of the law, and listen to them 
 from beginning to end of a great argument or trial. 
 It is a wonderful thing for a law school to be in close 
 proximity to a great city, where the students can see 
 and hear justice administered according to the high- 
 est and best standards, in courts presided over by 
 learned judges, appointed for life by the chief execu- 
 tive, as up to this day has been the case in Massa- 
 chusetts, and has secured for the people of that 
 State, at any rate, a government of laws and not of 
 men. 
 
 The office of Hodges and Saltonstall, in which I 
 spent a year from October, 1854, to October, 1855, 
 was a most agreeable one. Mr. Hodges was highly 
 
skilled in all the departments of the law, but was at 
 that time somewhat out of health, so that we did 
 not see him constantly, but Leverett Saltonstall was 
 one of the most charming, honorable, and high-toned 
 men that I have ever known. He was justly proud 
 of his most distinguished ancestry, running far back 
 to colonial days, and first represented on the Har- 
 vard College catalogue by Doctor Henry Saltonstall 
 in the first class of 1642, who received his medical 
 degree at Padua in 1649, and became a Fellow of 
 New College, Oxford, in 1650. He was of a high- 
 strung and nervous temperament, which made the 
 trial of causes (in which, if he had continued in them, 
 he would have had great success) a very severe strain 
 upon him, although then he was very young at the 
 bar, but it was a great privilege to be associated and 
 in daily contact with him, and I have always looked 
 back upon that year's experience with him with the 
 greatest satisfaction. 
 
 It was while with him that I had my first case and 
 earned my first fee, which has always afi^orded me 
 great pleasure to recall. We were sitting in the 
 office together, one cold winter's day, when two 
 rugged farmers from Vermont came in with a case, 
 which they briefly stated to Saltonstall. They had 
 each had a carload of potatoes come down by rail- 
 road from Vermont, and they were found to be com- 
 pletely frozen on arrival, and the farmers had brought 
 an action against the railroad company for the value 
 of the potatoes so destroyed. The question was 
 
[lOl] 
 
 whether it was by the act of God or by the neghgence 
 of the railroad company that they had been frozen. 
 Certainly the act of God was the immediate cause in 
 creating or permitting the extreme frost, but behind 
 that was the negligence of the railroad company, 
 which should have protected the potatoes more per- 
 fectly. It was rather a small affair, and Mr. Salton- 
 stall hardly thought the case was up to his personal 
 position and rank at the bar, but he turned them 
 over to me, saying: "Here is Choate. Perhaps he 
 will take it." As I had never had a case I was very 
 glad to do so. It seemed that the evidence was to 
 be taken before a commissioner in Boston on the 
 second day after, which would give an intervening 
 day for preparation, and I very gladly undertook the 
 job. It so happened that Mr. Rufus Choate at that 
 time was laid up with a lame knee, but was driving 
 out every day, and on the following day he happened 
 to call at the office for me to drive with him through 
 Brookline, and so we spent an hour together and I 
 told him about my first case. He was very much 
 delighted at the idea, and gave me quite a lot of ad- 
 vice about cross-examination of witnesses, in which 
 he was a wonderful adept, so that I went the next 
 day with the two farmers before the commissioner 
 and spent the whole day in taking the evidence, 
 which I thought would enable them to establish suc- 
 cessfully the proposition before a country jury, at 
 any rate, that the loss of the potatoes was wholly 
 due to the negligence of the railroad company, and 
 
[ I02] 
 
 that the act of God had nothing to do with it. On 
 our return to the office the farmers raised the ques- 
 tion of my fee — what it would be. Well, I had never 
 had a fee, and I had no means of ascertaining the 
 value of my services, which I thought were consid- 
 erable, and I said to them: "Well, it has taken all 
 day. It seems to be a matter of some importance 
 to you. I wish to be entirely reasonable, and I 
 should think that three dollars would be about 
 right." 
 
 "Well," they said, "we talked that matter over 
 on the way down from Vermont, and we kinder 
 thought that there were two cases, two carloads of 
 potatoes, and that a dollar a case, a dollar a load, 
 would be about right." Not wishing to have a con- 
 test over my first fee, I gladly accepted it, and they 
 handed me two of the little gold dollars that were 
 current at that time. One of them I gave to my 
 friend and classmate, Darwin Erastus Ware, who, 
 like myself, had never had a fee, and I must have 
 spent the other, but the romance of it was that forty- 
 five years afterwards, after Ware had died, his widow, 
 looking over his papers, found something wrapped 
 up in paper, and marked on the outside, "Half of 
 Joe Choate's first fee," which she very kindly sent 
 to my daughter, who has since worn it as a charm 
 upon her watch-guard. But this, my first experience 
 in fees, taught me to be forever after very moderate 
 in all that matter. 
 
 After going through with the usual examination 
 
[ I03] 
 
 for admission I was enrolled in the Massachusetts 
 bar in October, 1855, and although I have never 
 practised in that State, I have always regarded it as 
 a great privilege from that day to this to have been 
 a member of the Massachusetts bar. 
 
 Having got ready for the practice of my profession 
 and, as I supposed, being qualified to undertake any 
 service in it, however intricate and difficult — a young 
 lawyer is never so good as those just admitted to the 
 bar imagine themselves to be — William and I con- 
 cluded that before determining where to settle we 
 should make a tour of the Western country to see 
 what the prospects of young professional men were 
 in the various cities of the West. The extreme West 
 then occupied, was bounded by the Mississippi River, 
 for when we got to Davenport, in Iowa, the railroad 
 went no farther; but Cook and Sargent, the bankers 
 there to whom we had letters, kindly said that they 
 were building a new road beyond the river, which 
 already had reached Cedar Rapids, and they were 
 running construction trains on it, and that they 
 would give us a ride on one of these so that we could 
 say that we had reached the farthest possible point 
 West, which we gladly accepted. We did visit many 
 of the principal cities, but to our primitive minds, 
 accustomed only to the comparatively finished East, 
 everything seemed very crude and rough, and we 
 found that either we were not ready for the West, 
 or the West was not ready for us, although I am 
 satisfied that, if we had concluded to remain any- 
 
[ I04] 
 where in that region, we should have soon got used 
 to it, and growing up with some young community 
 would have attained similar positions to those which 
 we afterwards reached nearer home. 
 
 Chicago, I remember, seemed to us to be a very 
 unsatisfactory place. It had ceased to be the "dirty 
 little dog-hole," which Judge Parker had described 
 it to us at the Law School to have been, when he 
 first reached it some twenty or thirty years before. 
 It had all the appearance of a great city yet to be, 
 but it was still in its infancy. I remember that the 
 sidewalks were of plank, and sometimes as we walked 
 upon them the muddy water spurted up between the 
 planks. 
 
 We were not attracted by the methods of the courts 
 and bar in the cities which we visited. At one then 
 frontier town we heard that the supreme court was 
 in session, and, as our wont was, made haste to visit 
 it. The administration of justice seemed to be going 
 on all right. The jury were in their places, the wit- 
 ness on the stand was being examined or cross- 
 examined by the lawyer, and the bar was reasonably 
 full with something of an audience on the outer circle 
 of the court-room, but there did not appear to be 
 any judge. A close inspection, however, soon re- 
 vealed the soles of a pair of slippers on the bench, 
 and the judge was reclining behind them, doubtless 
 taking in all the evidence and conducting the case 
 with the same authority, but with much less dignity 
 than we had been accustomed to see in the courts 
 
[105] 
 
 of Massachusetts, especially in Boston; and so we 
 very easily made up our minds to seek our fortunes 
 nearer home, William, who was much more of a 
 home-body than I, to return to Salem. 
 
VII 
 
 EARLY DAYS IN NEW YORK 
 
 I had long been fascinated with the idea of Hfe 
 in New York, and was convinced that the biggest 
 place offered the best possible chance for a young 
 lawyer. I had been there once before, in 1851, on 
 a visit, and I remember that the trains from Boston 
 on that occasion stopped at Forty-second Street, and 
 individual cars were dragged by horses from there 
 down to Canal Street, and discharged their passen- 
 gers who were going farther. I knew almost nobody 
 in the great city. A graduate of the Harvard Law 
 School nowadays coming to New York would find 
 thousands of New Englanders here, and among them 
 hundreds of his personal acquaintances, but at that 
 time it was a comparatively rare thing for emigrants 
 from New England to settle here, especially edu- 
 cated men, and I do not think that there were more 
 than twenty-five Harvard graduates then residing 
 in this city. I brought with me one letter of intro- 
 duction, however, which proved to be an opening 
 wedge for my professional career. It was from Rufus 
 Choate, who took quite an interest in my fortunes, 
 and addressed to Mr. William M. Evarts, and read 
 as follows: 
 
 [106] 
 
[ I07] 
 
 "Boston, 24 Sept. 1855. 
 "My dear Mr. Evarts 
 
 "I beg to incur one other obligation to you by 
 introducing the bearer my friend and kinsman to 
 your kindness. 
 
 "He is just admitted to our bar, was graduated 
 at Cambridge with a very high reputation for schol- 
 arship and all worth, and comes to the practice of 
 the law, I think, with extraordinary promise. He 
 has decided to enroll himself among the brave and 
 magnanimous of your bar, with a courage not un- 
 warranted by his talents, character, ambition and 
 power of labor. There is no young man whom I 
 love better, or from whom I hope more or as much, 
 and if you can do anything to smooth the way to 
 his first steps the kindness will be most seasonable 
 and will yield all sorts of good fruits. 
 
 "Most truly 
 "Your servant and friend 
 
 "RuFus Choate." 
 
 This, certainly, was a very emphatic letter and 
 manifested wonderful confidence and aff^ection on 
 the part of the writer, and I had to do my best to 
 live up to it in all the after-years. 
 
 Mr. Evarts had not at that time attained the 
 zenith of his great fame, for he was then only thirty- 
 seven years old, but he and his firm of Butler, Evarts 
 and Southmayd were already in the front rank of 
 the profession, and, perhaps, the busiest office in 
 
[io8] 
 
 New York, with a remarkable clientage. He rose 
 very rapidly to the leadership of the American bar, 
 and was engaged in all the greatest causes of his 
 time, before entering public life and holding the great 
 offices of attorney-general, secretary of state, and 
 senator. He received me very warmly, but it was 
 several months before he could make a place for 
 me in his office. During this time I had quite an 
 opportunity to study New York and to become 
 acquainted with the habits of life there, which were 
 so different from the New England ways, and in 
 the meantime, in the offices of my classmates, 
 Waring and Norris, and of James Carter, I was 
 studying up the code and learning something about 
 practice. 
 
 New York was a very different city from what it 
 is to-day. Instead of being Greater New York, 
 with what the papers to-day say to be a population 
 of five and a half millions, it was simply the Island 
 of Manhattan, with a population of five hundred 
 thousand only, and Brooklyn and the other boroughs, 
 instead of being accessible by tubes in a few minutes, 
 seemed almost as far away as Boston. There was 
 no congestion and no rush anywhere. I remember 
 that shortly afterwards, when the Sixth Avenue rail- 
 road with its horse-cars was opened as far as Forty- 
 second Street, which was then the upper limit of the 
 city, it was thought that the final achievement of 
 rapid transit had been reached. You could get into 
 their cars at the Astor House and reach Forty-second 
 
WILLIAM M. EVARTS. 
 
 The famous New York lawyer, Attorney-General, Secretary of State, and United 
 States Senator. He invited J. H. C. to become junior partner in the firm of 
 Evarts and Southmayd in 1859, and the relationship then begun was only dis- 
 solved by Mr. Evarts's death. This portrait, painted by William M. Hunt in 
 the seventies, shows Mr. Evarts in the prime of life. 
 
New York, \ remark ientage. He rose 
 
 very rapidly to the ieadership of the American bar, 
 and was engaged in all the greatest causes of his 
 time, before entering public life 3nd holding the great 
 offices of attorney-general, secretary of state, and 
 senator. He received me very warmly ^ but it was 
 several months before he could make a place for 
 me in his office. During this time I had quite an 
 opportunity to study New York and to become 
 acquaihtf- here, which were 
 
 n OU-. liyn and the other bo- 
 
 insteacl oi u;.iiig ncce&Sxbie by tubes in a few mmiites>, 
 seemed almost as far away as Boston. There was 
 no congestion and no rush anywhere. I remember 
 that shortly afterwards, when the Sixth Avenue rail- 
 road with its horse-cars ^^^^^-^ WW^^n as Forty- 
 
 1 p bsJtnU fane, .aJslS io ■^ElaiosZ .kiansD-ysmoJlA ,isynB\ JioY waVI aoomfil sHT 
 second ot.]\> mid sAj nl isBiieq loiani smoDad oJ .6 .H -l bssivoi sH .lolaaaZ 83Jej2 
 -eib ylflo 8BW nugsd iisrii qlHanoijElai arfj bas ,Qj8i ni bxemrfJuog bas enBv3 
 Cif flf:3niffl[;*M,n(S«|niW t^ ^iwnifiq .Jieinoq aiilT .dresb g'eflsva .tM xd bovfoi 
 
 .■a\H \o anihq srfj ni enEvH .iM tworia .esi.'navae srfj 
 
 and reach Forty- • 
 

[ I09] 
 Street in forty minutes, which was thought to be 
 wonderful. 
 
 My father said to me, when I left home, "I sup- 
 pose that you will want some money," and kindly 
 offered to furnish me with what I needed, and mea- 
 suring the probable cost by the standard that I had 
 known in Salem and Cambridge, and not realizing 
 that New York even then was a more expensive place, 
 I said to him that I thought that forty dollars a 
 month would be ample, which I duly received. I 
 found it a very close cut, but was too proud to ask 
 for more, so I found a boarding-place in which my 
 classmate, Addison Brown, was already established, 
 at the corner of Bleecker Street and Thomson Street, 
 which had previously been the residence of General 
 Scott. After he left it several stories had been 
 added, and one or two adjoining houses taken in, so 
 that it was quite a caravansary. I took a room on 
 the fourth floor, for which I had to pay five dollars 
 a week, for board and room. The room was so 
 small, however, that when I invited anybody to 
 come in I had to stand on the outside, so I soon 
 ventured upon a larger room on the top floor at five 
 dollars and a half a week for room and board, and 
 made myself very comfortable, and the walk morn- 
 ing and evening from Bleecker to Wall Street gave 
 me just a comfortable amount of exercise. 
 
 The social world of the city began to open to me 
 in various directions, although in all it was very 
 simple and unpretentious. My earliest acquain- 
 
[I.O] 
 
 tances were with the Quakers, whose welcome was 
 exceedingly cordial, and I have cherished the recol- 
 lection of it at a very high value from that day to 
 this. The Gibbonses, the Hoppers, and the Hay- 
 docks were very remarkable and interesting people. 
 
 Mrs. Abby Hopper Gibbons was a wonderful 
 woman with a heart as strong and warm as her head 
 was clear. She was engaged in many charities, and 
 exerted a wide and very powerful influence in the 
 city; and her brother, John Hopper (they were chil- 
 dren of the famous Quaker, Isaac T. Hopper), was a 
 miracle of fun and drollery, and at the same time a 
 marvel of devoted loyalty and aff^ection, and he did 
 a vast deal to make my early days in New York 
 extremely enjoyable. He was a lawyer, besides 
 being the agent of the New England Life Insurance 
 Company, and was the soul of hospitality. He was 
 noted for his wit and sprightliness, from boyhood in 
 Philadelphia and all his life in New York. 
 
 Philadelphia must have been a very quiet place 
 at that time, for after his father had moved to New 
 York, when he was about twelve years old, complaint 
 was made to the mayor of the city by two venerable 
 spinsters, sisters who dwelt together in one of the 
 Philadelphia houses, that mysterious visitations were 
 being made to them at night, which they could not 
 possibly account for. It seems that knowing all 
 about them, on a return to the city of Brotherly 
 Love, he had carefully watched their habits and dis- 
 covered at just about what time they were going to 
 
[Ill] 
 
 bed, and as their light was put out the window-sash 
 of the room in which they slept together was raised 
 by no visible hands, to their very great terror. 
 When this had happened for three nights in succes- 
 sion they could stand it no longer and complained 
 to the chief magistrate, who replied: "Oh, ladies, 
 you must not be frightened. I think John Hopper 
 must have returned to town." 
 
 I remember that Carter, Thayer, and I used to 
 assemble at his house very often on Saturday nights, 
 where he treated us most royally. His wife was a 
 woman of great beauty and of splendid character, 
 who would have graced any station in life. She was 
 the daughter of William Henry de Wolfe, one of the 
 famous family of that name at Bristol, Rhode Island, 
 and the young couple had made a runaway match. 
 The indignant father had pursued them, but over- 
 took them too late to prevent the marriage, and con- 
 tented himself with dealing John a violent blow; but 
 John survived that, and lived to take into his own 
 house his father-in-law with his wife and invalid 
 daughter, and Mr. de Wolfe finally died in his arms. 
 They had been for twelve years without children, 
 when, to the surprise and delight of everybody who 
 knew them, a fine son appeared in the person of De 
 Wolfe Hopper, now such a distinguished comedian, 
 well known throughout the United States. John was 
 so wild with joy at the idea of being a father that he 
 could hardly contain himself, and when the boy was 
 about a week old one summer morning, finding him 
 
[112] 
 
 lying naked on the bed, just as his nurse had given 
 him his bath, and wishing the whole world to partic- 
 ipate in his happiness, he took him by the leg and 
 held him out of the window. Until the boy grew 
 old enough to run about for himself he used to carry 
 him all over the city every fine day, making a seat 
 for him upon his cane with the crook of his elbow, 
 and in that way they wandered from Forty-second 
 Street to the Battery almost daily. One day he 
 came near losing the boy, for, entering Madison 
 Square with him on his arm (a square which at that 
 time was very greatly given up to nurses and chil- 
 dren) he went about among them, exclaiming: "See 
 what a fine boy I have found. Who's lost a boy .?" 
 Oddly enough, there was a woman there who had 
 recently lost a baby, and was crazy from the efi^ects 
 of her affliction, and hearing this outcry she seized 
 the baby and claimed it for her own, and John had 
 great difficulty with the aid of police in rescuing him- 
 self and the child from her attack. As the boy grew 
 up he thought of nothing but life upon the stage, 
 and I have always thought that all of his comic 
 faculty came to him by heredity from his father. 
 
 In fact, his father had always been a devotee of 
 the theatre in spite of his Quaker surroundings. 
 When the celebrated Fanny Kemble made her first 
 appearance in New York he became very much fas- 
 cinated by her, and was a constant attendant upon 
 her performances. He would exchange his shad- 
 belly Quaker coat for a world's people jacket at the 
 
[■•3] 
 
 shop of an apothecary, in the neighborhood of the 
 theatre, and buy a ticket to the shilHng gallery. One 
 night his father on his return home caught him going 
 up-stairs at midnight, shoes in hand, and took him 
 to task, and the following colloquy took place: "John, 
 where has thee been?" Now John was always 
 truthful; under every circumstance you could de- 
 pend upon his telling the truth, so he said: "To the 
 theatre, father." The old gentleman was very much 
 shocked. "What theatre was it, and whom did thee 
 see.?" John gave the name of the theatre and the 
 name of the famous actress, which disgusted his 
 father still further, and he exclaimed: "John, I hope 
 this is the first time thee has been to see her." And 
 John replied: "No, father. It is the sixty-third 
 time." The old gentleman was so overwhelmed that 
 he took to his bed again and inflicted no chastisement. 
 Nothing could be more simple and almost idyllic 
 than the life that these Quakers led, and the house 
 of Mrs. Gibbons was a great resort of abolitionists 
 and extreme antislavery people from all parts of the 
 land, as it was one of the stations of the underground 
 railroad by which fugitive slaves found their way 
 from the South to Canada. I have dined with that 
 family in company with William Lloyd Garrison, and 
 sitting at the table with us was a jet black negro who 
 was on his way to freedom. The Haydocks, too, 
 were splendid people, and were the progenitors of the 
 Hallowells, who have since held such a distinguished 
 place in Boston. Lucretia Mott, the celebrated fe- 
 
[ >H] 
 
 male preacher of that day, was also a frequent guest, 
 and I have been to hear her preach at the Quaker 
 meeting-house, which still stands in East Fifteenth 
 Street. 
 
 But I was not confined to Quakerdom, for I rapidly 
 met many delightful acquaintances in the city. At 
 the houses of the leaders of the bar, like Daniel Lord, 
 and Mr. Evarts, and others, I found warm friends, 
 and I remember at a reception at Mr. Lord's being 
 introduced to ex-President Martin Van Buren and 
 his attorney-general, Benjamin F. Butler, who both 
 died within a few months afterwards. The families 
 of Hamilton Fish, and Mrs. Fish's sister, Mrs. Grif- 
 fin, and George L. Schuyler, and John Jay, and 
 Daniel Leroy were among my earliest friends in New 
 York. 
 
 At the house of Mr. Jay, at Bedford, I always 
 found a most cordial welcome from him and his de- 
 lightful family. He retained unchanged the resi- 
 dence of his grandfather, the first chief justice of the 
 United States, whose name he bore, and there many 
 fascinating historical reminiscences were recalled by 
 him. The grandson, John Jay, was in all respects 
 as high-toned and patriotic as his grandfather, and 
 delighted in nothing so much as in public service. 
 He was one of the founders of the Union League Club, 
 and intensely interested in all measures of reform 
 that came up at that exciting period, which led to 
 the club's formation, and his public services after- 
 wards as minister to Austria were of great value. 
 
["5] 
 
 Gouverneur Morris was an eccentric character, but 
 a man of very noble nature, as his acts testified, and 
 he, too, loved to indulge in memories of the early days 
 of the republic. I had always supposed that all the 
 public men of the revolutionary period were spotless 
 patriots, and worthy of all praise, but I have a sus- 
 picion that the world has progressed in every gen- 
 eration, for Mr. Morris told me that in his boyhood 
 his father, of the same name, who was our minister 
 at Paris during the French Revolution and the days 
 of the Terror, used to take him with him in his yearly 
 drives from Morrisania to Bedford to visit the chief 
 justice, and there he overheard their conversation, 
 as they dwelt upon their early experiences at the time 
 of the formation of the government, and had much to 
 say about the performances of the "damned rascals 
 of the first Congress," as they called them. 
 
 I think that it would now be hard to find the spot 
 at Mott Haven where stood the hospitable mansion 
 of Gouverneur Morris, which I often visited. It was 
 a somewhat sequestered rural retreat on the banks 
 of the Kills, where it was quite practicable at that 
 time to fish, but now the whole region has become a 
 part of the city, compactly built and without the 
 possibility of discovering the remains of the Morris 
 mansion. I remember that it contained in one of 
 the parlors a complete set of furniture which had 
 come from the Tuileries, where it had been used by 
 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and was justly 
 regarded as a most interesting treasure. 
 
[1.6] 
 
 The marriage of Mr. Morris's father, I beheve, 
 had not suited his relatives of the Morris family, who 
 had hoped to be his heirs, as he had long remained a 
 bachelor, and he told me that, when they assembled 
 to celebrate his birth, the health of the new-born 
 child was proposed under the name of Kutusoff, who 
 had at that time become a distinguished Russian 
 general in the wars of Napoleon, and as commander- 
 in-chief of the First Corps of the Russian army against 
 the French had gained a victory, and afterwards 
 commanded the allied army under the Emperor 
 Alexander at Austerlitz. 
 
 Mr. George L. Schuyler and his noble wife, a 
 granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, were among 
 the most delightful people that I have ever known. 
 They were both of really famous historical descent, 
 and their home was an extremely attractive and 
 happy one. Mr. Schuyler was the most genial and 
 delightful of men, never assuming anything or taking 
 on airs by reason of his illustrious pedigree and alli- 
 ance, and always extremely affable and interesting. 
 He told me that he had shaken hands with every 
 President except George Washington. His father, 
 who had been a member of Congress, and was the 
 son of General Philip Schuyler, took George, when he 
 was about ten years old, on a visit to Quincy to call 
 upon John Adams, and shortly afterwards to Mon- 
 ticello to call upon Thomas Jefferson, to be presented 
 to those famous founders of the Republic, both of 
 whom shortly afterwards died on the same day, on 
 
["7] 
 
 the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declara- 
 tion of Independence, which one of them had drawn, 
 and the other had done all he could to promote. 
 This was one of the most striking historical coin- 
 cidences ever known, for in those days, so long be- 
 fore the era of travel by steam and communication 
 by telegraph, Monticello and Quincy were as far 
 apart as New York and China are to-day, and al- 
 though John Adams with almost his dying breath had 
 said, "Thomas Jefferson still lives," it was not so, for 
 they died together on the same Fourth of July. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler exercised a most graceful 
 hospitality, especially avoiding all ostentation or dis- 
 play, but giving most agreeable dinners, for one of 
 his favorite maxims was that eight was the ideal 
 number for a dinner-party, so that all the company 
 at table could take part in all the conversation. 
 These occasions were very happy ones to remember. 
 He lived to a green old age, always taking a warm 
 interest in public affairs, and transmitting to his chil- 
 dren not only the memory of his unspotted life, but 
 a taste for public service of the highest character. 
 
 His son Philip took part in the Civil War on the 
 staff of General Wool, and his daughter, Miss Louisa 
 Lee Schuyler, has exercised a great and most whole- 
 some influence in the promotion of many measures 
 that tended to advance the welfare of the community. 
 I remember taking part with her in her splendid cru- 
 sade for the rescue of the dependent insane of the 
 State from the prisons and poorhouses of counties 
 
[1.8] 
 
 and towns, and transferring them to the care of the 
 State itself, which has provided homes of a permanent 
 character for them in all respects suitable for their 
 condition. It was a fight of many years against all 
 sorts of corrupt influences, and she led the way most 
 triumphantly from beginning to end. In many other 
 services she has shown a tact and power worthy of 
 her distinguished progenitors, so that when Columbia 
 University, in 1914, conferred upon her the rare honor 
 of a degree of Doctor of Laws it was universally re- 
 garded as a just recognition of her work and character. 
 
 But to return to the law. In the early part of 1856 
 Mr. Evarts kindly invited me to come into his oflSce, 
 and made a seat for me in his own room, and there I 
 soon got to be very busy. As a prominent Bachelor 
 of Laws of Harvard University and a member of the 
 Massachusetts bar, I had looked forward, of course, 
 to entering immediately upon a career in the courts, 
 but nothing could be further from the actual fact. 
 The world does not need the counsel of boys, either 
 in court or out, but I was determined, if possible, to 
 make myself indispensable in that office, and an easy 
 way soon opened, for they found out that I could 
 write a good hand, and could keep it up at the rate 
 of twelve folios an hour for ten hours a day. There 
 were no stenographers, and only an ancient scrivener, 
 a regular retainer of the office, and another casual 
 friend of his who was called in occasionally, but they 
 could not keep up with the rush of work. Mr. But- 
 
[ii9] 
 ler and Mr. Southmayd used to draw tremendously 
 long papers, and many of them came into my hands 
 to copy, which I did with the greatest avidity, learn- 
 ing a great deal all the time as to the preparation of 
 papers; and many a long document will be found in 
 my handwriting in the county clerk's office and the 
 surrogate's court, and the register of deeds of that 
 day. And so I gradually became quite necessary. 
 
 I attended courts also at the call of the calendar, 
 and can recall the interesting habits of the bar at that 
 time. The leaders of the bar always appeared in 
 dress suits at ten o'clock in the morning, and the im- 
 perturbable George Wood, who was the most famous 
 of the chancery lawyers, as some, I think, were then 
 called, and who was all brain, made long arguments 
 with so little emotion or manifestation of feeling that 
 a story was told of him that always impressed me 
 very much, for it was said that in an important case 
 where he had to make a special effort, one of the 
 tails of his dress coat, when he rose to speak, rested 
 upon the table at which he had sat, and there it re- 
 mained undisturbed during the whole of his argu- 
 ment of two hours, to the great entertainment of 
 all the bystanders. 
 
 The judges of the courts were all highly respecta- 
 ble, but they were very few in number, and they re- 
 ceived very small salaries, as compared with those 
 now paid. I think that in the Supreme Court there 
 were but three judges, who held jury terms and equity 
 terms, and then sat together in the general term on 
 
[ I20] 
 
 appeal. The superior court held a very high place 
 and had a very large commercial business, and there 
 were, I think, three or four judges there, consisting 
 of some famous men like Chief Justice Oakley and 
 Judge Duer, who would have been a credit to any 
 tribunal anywhere. To show how the Federal Gov- 
 ernment has gained upon the States until almost the 
 entire power of the nation has been concentrated at 
 Washington, there was only one judge of the federal 
 court in New York at that time, the Honorable 
 Samuel R. Betts, and there was hardly business 
 enough for him. He was at quite an advanced age, 
 and often took naps upon the bench, so that the 
 lawyers before him had to raise their voices to a very 
 high pitch to wake him up. But Judge Samuel Nel- 
 son, who was one of the greatest lawyers and judges 
 I ever knew, was then assigned to the second circuit, 
 and on very important cases he would come and sit 
 with Judge Betts. 
 
 And now how changed it all is ! Some ten federal 
 judges holding court all the time can hardly keep up 
 with the pressure of business, and when the courts 
 open in October many branches are holding separate 
 terms, and there is now a bill pending in Washington 
 for adding two new judges to the district. In those 
 days the practice in the federal court was a terra 
 incognita to most lawyers, and a very few offices, 
 of which ours was one, had any business there. 
 
 The scriveners, with whom as a skilful writer I 
 was intimately associated in my early days in the 
 
■'■^ 
 
 GAMALIEL HODGES— 1766-1850. 
 
 This silhouette ol Mr. Choate's grandfather was made when he was about seventy 
 years of age. He was a very big man, over six feet and a half tall, and weighed 
 over three hundred pounds; although when he was born he is said to have been 
 so small that he was put in a silver tankard and the top shut down ! 
 
and had a very large commercial business, and there 
 were, I think, t\ ^ there, [r.g 
 
 of some famous mc 
 
 *';-^>,-> Hner, who vv 
 
 Miy where, 
 ernment has gained 
 
 entinr of the ^ncenti 
 
 Washing; lai 
 
 •ni 
 
 wich the - -j. ui^'-iw- 
 
 open in 0. ,. . many brai; 
 terms, and there is now u b 
 for adding two new jiid 
 the practi. 
 
 federal 
 ■ Hidiy keep up 
 
 days 
 
 a those 
 a tfrra 
 office;-. 
 
 court was 
 
 inro^nita to most idwycLS. ana d verv few 
 -' .oj8f-eaTi— aaoaoH j3uamao 
 
 ■y] ,, ^^dgiiiff bn«,lk| lied si)a6J!>3iz« -isvQ.nism aid ti9v sesijyaH. .^.^e )q aiesj ; 
 ' ^^'' ii^ ^^sri bi bt«' 81 3il mod »BW ad tistlw HgDorfjIs tsfcoLoq bsibfti/d ssirfr *9">o '• 
 jawob Jurfs qoj arij bn« bi6:loB3 lavlis 6 at Juq !bw sd Jsdl llanw ja 
 
[121] 
 
 office, were an interesting lot, most of them Irishmen 
 who had done nothing else since their immigration. 
 Samuel L. Montgomery, the scrivener of our office, 
 known there and to the whole profession as Sam, was 
 a truly interesting character. He had been there for 
 untold years, and had married, brought up one fam- 
 ily, and had lost his wife, and one day he came to 
 Mr. Evarts and said that he was going to be married 
 again. Well, they congratulated him, the heads of 
 the office were much pleased, and gave him a vaca- 
 tion of two weeks for his honeymoon, and made up 
 a nice little purse for him to take the journey with 
 his wife. After the appointed time he returned to 
 the office in finest of spirits, and this conversation 
 occurred between Mr. Evarts and him: "Well, Sam, 
 we are very glad to see you back. Did you have a 
 good time.?" "Had a perfect time. Never had 
 such a good time in my life." "Well, where did you 
 go.?" "Went to Saratoga, Trenton Falls, Niagara 
 and back." " Did you have time enough .?" " Plenty 
 of time." "Money enough.?" "Yes, I had some 
 left." "Well, how did your wife enjoy it.?" Sam 
 scratched his head. "Well," said he, "the fact is, 
 I left her in Brooklyn." 
 
 The other casual scrivener, who came off and on 
 when there was extra work, was named Collins, and 
 one day when he had grown quite old he came to 
 me and wanted help to get into an old man's home. 
 "Well," said I, "Mr. Collins, you don't look as 
 though you needed to go to an old man's home. 
 
[ 122 ] 
 
 You look in fine health and condition. How old 
 are you?" "Well, I am eighty-two. I think it is 
 time for me to stop work and go into an old man's 
 home." "I wish," said I, "that you would tell me 
 how it is that you have kept in such splendid condi- 
 tion till eighty-two, for I should like to get there 
 myself in as good shape as you are." "Well," said 
 he, "I will tell you. I have always kept married. 
 I am on my fifth wife now." So I gave him the help 
 he wanted for so worthy an object. 
 
 I had always had in mind that I would combine 
 with my professional life as much attention to public 
 services as was compatible with it, and I had hardly 
 been in the office six months before the great cam- 
 paign of 1856 came on, when the Republican party 
 was formed, and made Fremont and Dayton its can- 
 didates to run against Buchanan and Breckinridge. 
 The object of its formation was, if possible, to pre- 
 vent the further extension of slavery, which had been 
 made possible by the legislation in Pierce's adminis- 
 tration, during which the famous Kansas-Nebraska 
 Act was formed, and left the great northwest region 
 possibly open to the introduction of slavery, the Mis- 
 souri Compromise of 1820 and the great compromise 
 acts of 1850 having been thrown to the winds. Of 
 course I joined the Republican party, and remem- 
 ber being a member of the Rocky Mountain Cam- 
 paign Club, which took rooms in the Stuyvesant In- 
 stitute on Broadway near Eighth Street, not far from 
 my residence, and Charles A. Dana and John J. 
 
[ 123] 
 
 Townsend and other men of distinction in later years 
 were members. I remember well my first political 
 speech for Fremont and Dayton in the summer of 
 1856, just after they were nominated. It was made 
 at a meeting held on the roof of our boarding-house 
 in Bleecker Street, gotten up by Judge Brown and 
 E. C. Benedict, long since known as Commodore 
 Benedict, the friend of Grover Cleveland. We as- 
 sembled after dinner, and I made the principal speech, 
 which seemed to entertain and satisfy the large audi- 
 ence consisting of inmates of the house, and then 
 later before the election I made a still more impor- 
 tant speech at Constitution Hall, corner of Thirty- 
 fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. Huge placards 
 were set up in the vicinity, representing an express- 
 train, with General Fremont running the train as en- 
 gineer, and running over an old buck that lay upon 
 the track representing Buchanan, and under this in 
 great capitals was a notice that Joseph H. Choate 
 and others would address the meeting, and that vic- 
 tory was certain. It was a very good meeting in 
 which Mr. Carter and the Reverend O. B. Frothing- 
 ham took part, giving a religious aspect to the affair. 
 Some fifty years afterwards I found one of those pla- 
 cards in overhauling my papers, had it framed, and 
 sent it to the Union League Club where, I believe, 
 it is still preserved in the archives as showing an 
 important step in the history of the Republican party. 
 I had the pleasure of meeting John Fremont in 
 Charles Gould's office in Wall Street before the elec- 
 
[ 124] 
 
 tion, and was impressed with the idea that he was 
 a very Hght character and contained no great amount 
 of what is known as presidential timber, and it was 
 probably well for us that we were thoroughly beaten. 
 Nevertheless the campaign, which was well fought 
 (for after all Buchanan was a minority President, and 
 Fremont had a million and a half of votes to Buchan- 
 an's eighteen hundred thousand), paved the way for 
 the triumphant election of Lincoln and the saving 
 of the country four years afterwards. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Fish undoubtedly occu- 
 pied at that time the foremost place in the social 
 world of New York, although he had not attained to 
 the world-wide distinction that he afterwards ac- 
 quired in his eight years' service with President Grant 
 as his secretary of state. Mrs. Fish, like her sister 
 Mrs. Griffin, was a lady of great charm, and they 
 exercised a most dignified and generous hospitality 
 entirely free from the extravagance and dissipation 
 that has of late marked what is called society in New 
 York City. I regarded it as a very great honor to 
 be invited now and then to their dinners, where I 
 always found myself among the best people. 
 
 A very early admission to the Century Club in 
 1858 brought me into relations with the most charm- 
 ing circle of men. The Club then consisted of some- 
 thing less than two hundred members, of whom al- 
 most all the original members of the club, founded in 
 1846, still survived. Time was not so pressing then 
 as it has since become, and comparative leisure pre- 
 
['25] 
 
 vailed with them all, so that not only on Saturday 
 nights, but on almost every night in the week, ex- 
 cept Sunday, many of these delightful old members 
 were present, and we youngsters sat at their feet in 
 devout admiration. Such men as Gulian Crommelin 
 Verplanck, William Cullen Bryant, Doctor Bellows, 
 the two Kembles, Gouverneur and William, Charles 
 M. Leupp, Jonathan Sturges, John H. Gourlie, and 
 others of great distinction, including many artists 
 like Daniel Huntington, Charles C. Ingham, Fred- 
 erick E. Church, John F. Kensett, and others of their 
 profession, which always has constituted a very 
 prominent element in the club, formed such a group 
 of character and good fame as can hardly be found 
 at the present day in any club in New York, I think. 
 It was an immense privilege and, in fact, the com- 
 pletion of a liberal education to be thrown among 
 such men, intercourse with whom contrasted very 
 strongly with my simple and secluded life at Salem. 
 The Century occupied a very modest building in 
 Fifteenth Street. There was no cuisine, and the only 
 refreshments on ordinary nights consisted of oysters, 
 which we cooked ourselves in chafing-dishes, and a 
 favorite drink was what was called a Renwick, in- 
 vented and introduced by Professor Renwick of 
 Columbia College, containing a little sprinkling of 
 Jamaica rum. Small as the body was, it enjoyed al- 
 most an international reputation, and every stranger 
 of distinction that came to the city was sure to be 
 introduced there at the meetings on Saturday night, 
 
[126] 
 
 which were always largely frequented by the mem- 
 bers. Thackeray, Tom Hughes, and many other 
 famous Englishmen appeared there, and on my first 
 visit to London, in 1879, Tom Hughes was good 
 enough to take me to a meeting of a club that he had 
 organized in the same name, but which, I believe, 
 did not long survive. At any rate, it never attained 
 anything like the distinction of its namesake. 
 
 I ought not to forget one other and very different 
 form of social intercourse, which I enjoyed from the 
 very day of my landing in New York, and that was 
 at Doctor Bellows's church, which still stands on 
 the corner of Twentieth Street and Fourth Avenue, 
 and which was then often spoken of derisively by 
 our orthodox friends as the "beefsteak" or "zebra" 
 church, from its peculiar architecture. It was fre- 
 quented by a large number of educated and highly 
 intelligent people, largely from New England, and 
 Doctor Bellows was a noble element in the life of 
 New York, and a very eloquent and powerful 
 preacher. I cherish his memory most devoutly as 
 my first, last, and only pastor, and keep his portrait 
 close by me by night and by day in memory of the 
 wonderfully wholesome influence that he exercised 
 upon my personal life. He was a man of most un- 
 tiring energy, not only in his profession, but in all 
 other good works, and his wonderful achievements 
 a few years afterwards in organizing and main- 
 taining throughout the Civil War the United 
 States Sanitary Commission, of which he was presi- 
 
[127] 
 
 dent, has given him, I beUeve, a lasting place in 
 history. 
 
 Thus it may be conceded that from the outset I 
 enjoyed very choice and unique social privileges, 
 and although in my subsequent busy life I had to 
 curtail indulgence in them somewhat, they have ever 
 been in the retrospect a most satisfactory pleasure. 
 
VIII 
 AT THE NEW YORK BAR 
 
 The conduct of law business in those primitive 
 days was very different in every particular from the 
 strikingly commercial methods into which the pro- 
 fession has fallen, or risen, in recent years. For 
 instance, the office of Butler, Evarts & Southmayd 
 consisted of four very moderate-sized rooms on the 
 second floor of 2 Hanover Street, a little building 
 which has long ago been demolished, and the place in- 
 cluded in the great banking-house of Brown Brothers 
 & Company. There were only two clerks besides 
 myself in the office and one scrivener. There was 
 no railing, which now marks every office that I 
 know about and which we forebade as long as it 
 was possible, and there were no retiring rooms for 
 the partners and leading associates in the office. 
 Cashier's and accountant's rooms would have been 
 thought absolutely unprofessional, as the lawyers of 
 the establishment did their own work. 
 
 It was not long after I had established my prowess 
 as a scrivener, as I have already described, that I 
 gradually began to come into the kind of work to 
 which I had looked forward when I chose the law as 
 my profession, and I had the singular good luck, 
 
 [128] 
 
[ 129] 
 quite unprecedented, I think, then and now, to serve 
 for some ten years as junior to Mr. Evarts in the con- 
 duct of the Htigation which then constituted a very 
 considerable portion of the business of the office, and 
 occasionally the litigation into which Mr. Evarts was 
 called as counsel. I learned to prepare the cases for 
 trial and for argument, and then to assist in prepar- 
 ing my senior for his vastly more important part of 
 the work. At first I was amazed at his wonderful 
 power of assimilating everything that I did, and the 
 extraordinary speed with which he would make him- 
 self master of all the questions involved in a case to 
 be tried. For he would come into court, when he 
 found that he could rely upon my preparation, ab- 
 solutely knowing nothing about the case, and would 
 assume the conduct of it, and in a half-day would 
 appear to have possessed himself of every question 
 to be tried in it, and of every leading bit of evidence 
 to be presented, so that from that time on to the end 
 of the case, he was fully imbued with all that was 
 necessary for its proper presentation. I had never 
 seen anything like this mental action before, and 
 never realized, until I came to stand in the same re- 
 lation to my junior in long subsequent years, that it 
 was simply an acquired faculty to which a man of 
 quick brain and energetic nervous action could qualify 
 himself. 
 
 Mr. Evarts, although then only thirty-eight years 
 old, was rapidly rising to the foremost place in the 
 profession, and here I think I ought to say something 
 
[ i3o] 
 a little more at large about his wonderful faculties 
 and his extraordinary career. 
 
 He was already only a few steps behind the very 
 leaders of the bar at that time. With such men as 
 Francis B. Cutting, George Wood, Charles O'Conor, 
 James T. Brady, Daniel Lord, William Curtis Noyes, 
 and Marshall S. Bidwell he was found to be in daily 
 conflict, and his opinion on important questions was 
 already much in demand. Of these men it is, I think, 
 fair to say that their superiors have never been pro- 
 duced at the New York bar from that day to this. 
 
 Francis B. Cutting was, perhaps, the most formida- 
 ble advocate in court that ever was at work in New 
 York. He was of tremendous physical force, and 
 seemed to throw all his energy of body and mind 
 into the case that he was for the time conducting. 
 He was a handsome creature, and in this respect I 
 think was without an equal. In all the work of the 
 courts, in the examination of witnesses, in the dis- 
 cussion of the questions of evidence, and in the pres- 
 entation of the case to the court or the jury, as might 
 be, he had no superior, and to be brought in conflict 
 with him led to a rapid education of his juniors. He 
 was in all the leading cases, but his professional career 
 was brought to a sudden end in the trial of the Par- 
 rish will case in 1858, a case which was one of the 
 very leading cases up to that time in the history of 
 New York on the subject of testamentary capacity. 
 Right in the midst of it he broke down suddenly and 
 finally, so that I think he never appeared in court 
 
I '31] 
 
 again. And it shows what a point in advancement 
 Mr. Evarts had already reached that he was called 
 into the case as Mr. Cutting's successor, and proved 
 himself fully equal to the conduct of it; and from 
 that time I think he ranked as one of the foremost 
 leaders of the bar in New York, and, of course, in 
 the country at large. 
 
 Mr. O'Conor was by common consent the fore- 
 most of the great lawyers of the day. In power of 
 logic, in keen and incisive criticism, in fierceness of 
 attack and defense, and in the complete mastery of 
 the law he was certainly without a superior. 
 
 Mr. Daniel Lord was of a wholly different type, but 
 was called upon every day to cope with O'Conor. 
 Immense weight of character, absolute fidelity to 
 the client and the cause, untiring industry, excellent 
 manners, and never-failing courtesy, especially to- 
 wards his juniors, were qualities the combination of 
 which made him irresistible whenever he had a fair 
 case to present, and as Mr. Evarts had been brought 
 up in his office and graduated from there some fifteen 
 years before, we looked upon him naturally with the 
 greatest reverence, to which he was fully entitled. 
 
 Mr. William Curtis Noyes was another model of 
 professional excellence and success. He was more 
 like the commercial lawyer of to-day than any of his 
 compeers, and was, I believe, perhaps the first exam- 
 ple that we had of a counsellor fully qualified to ini- 
 tiate and carry on great corporate organizations, 
 and I think that, up to the time that death struck 
 
[ 132 ] 
 him from the roll, he might be regarded as the most 
 successful lawyer of his time. 
 
 James T. Brady was one of the most delightful 
 men I have ever met. He was a real orator and was 
 largely engaged in defense of criminal cases, although 
 he was quite equal to any civil procedure that might 
 arise; his striking personality as a witty and jovial 
 Irishman fully made up for any lack of legal learning 
 and entitled him to a place in the front rank. He 
 was one of the dearest and most fascinating of men; 
 always frank and open, having, so far as I could see, 
 nothing to conceal and no desire to conceal anything, 
 and he commanded a popularity far exceeding that 
 which at that time, I think, any of his associates in 
 the profession enjoyed. He was always in demand 
 for great public meetings and never failed to make 
 a first-rate speech. 
 
 Marshall S. Bidwell was a lawyer of great learning. 
 Descended from a famous lawyer of the same name, 
 he had practised in Canada for many years, and had 
 become the leader of the Liberal party there previous 
 to and during the Rebellion of 1837, and became so 
 formidable to the government that he was ordered 
 to leave the country, and he moved to New York 
 City where he subsequently practised law and took 
 a prominent position. He left his name upon the 
 profession by establishing the office which, under the 
 name of Bidwell & Strong, Strong & Cadwalader, and 
 now Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, has main- 
 tained such an enviable position in the city. 
 
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 name of Bi ong & Cat 
 
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[ 133] 
 
 Among this group my senior found a fitting place 
 in the legal world and was constantly engaged in the 
 most vigorous kind of work. I regret very much that 
 although fifteen years have passed since his death no 
 adequate memoir of Mr. Evarts has as yet been pro- 
 duced, and the number of those who knew him well 
 is rapidly diminishing. Taking him for all in all, he 
 was the quickest-witted man that I have ever known 
 on either side of the water, and in the course of a 
 long life I have met many of the foremost men of 
 intellect and action, both here and in Great Britain. 
 Nothing could possibly escape him, and his mind 
 seemed to flash instantaneously, no matter what was 
 the subject that engaged his attention. He was ex- 
 ceedingly fortunate, too, in being at the height of 
 his powers during the most interesting period of our 
 history, and it so happened that four or five of the 
 greatest and most interesting causes that have ever 
 engaged the attention of our courts came when he 
 was at the head of the profession, and as such 
 was naturally called upon to take a leading part in 
 them. 
 
 The Lemmon slave case, in the court of appeals 
 at Albany, involved most interesting questions in 
 regard to the application of the Fugitive Slave Law, 
 and he was retained by the State of New York as 
 counsel to maintain the right of the alleged slave to 
 his liberty. It happens to few lawyers in a single 
 life to be called on to lead in four such cases as the 
 Geneva Arbitration, the Electoral Commission, the 
 
[ 134 ] 
 
 impeachment of President Johnson, and the trial of 
 the case of Tilton against Beecher. 
 
 The Geneva Arbitration was the one great histori- 
 cal case which would form a fitting ornament and 
 achievement of any great professional career. He 
 had very powerful associates in Caleb Gushing, of 
 Massachusetts, and Morrison R. Waite, of Ohio, 
 who afterwards became chief justice of the Supreme 
 Gourt, and was opposed by Sir Roundell Palmer, who 
 for his great services in the case was afterwards raised 
 to the peerage and became Lord Ghancellor of Eng- 
 land, as Lord Selborne. It was a case of truly in- 
 ternational importance, and may safely be said to 
 have attracted the attention of the whole world. It 
 was a natural sequel to those alarming differences 
 which had arisen between the two countries out of 
 the conduct of Great Britain in letting out the 
 Alabama and the other sea raiders to prey upon the 
 commerce of America during our Givil War, and 
 which, in effect, did really destroy it for the time 
 being. I do not suppose that any legal controversy 
 ever enlisted and excited the feelings of the people 
 of two great nations so much. He led with great 
 distinction and had the good fortune to be the winner 
 of the case, which resulted in what I believe to have 
 been the largest pecuniary award ever recovered in 
 such an arbitration, and when he returned to America, 
 bringing his sheaves with him in the shape of fifteen 
 millions of dollars as the result of his efforts, the en- 
 thusiasm with which he was met knew no bounds. 
 
[135] 
 
 This was the finest laurel Mr. Evarts ever won, 
 and from the novelty and world-wide interest in 
 the case, it is, perhaps, the most notable professional 
 achievement that ever fell to the lot of any Ameri- 
 can advocate. Making full allowance for all the 
 aid rendered by his distinguished associates, there 
 is no doubt that he is entitled to the chief credit 
 for the grand result, and the pecuniary success of 
 it was nothing compared to its immense value as 
 establishing the supremacy of arbitration as the 
 only sure means of settling international quarrels 
 between great nations, for this question had been 
 threatening war from the time of the escape of the 
 Alabama. 
 
 The trial of the impeachment of President John- 
 son was one of the grandest and most thrilling legal 
 conflicts that has ever taken place anyvvhere. The 
 President had undoubtedly been guilty of very im- 
 prudent conduct, but the narrow technical issue on 
 which the case chiefly turned, his alleged violation of 
 the Tenure of Ofiice Act, raised a constitutional ques- 
 tion which should easily have protected him before 
 any tribunal. It seemed to me at the time that the 
 impeachment of the President was one of those high- 
 handed and desperate attempts which are sometimes 
 made in seasons of great party excitement, not only 
 to oust the President from office, but for the time 
 being to paralyze the executive office itself, and to 
 usurp on the part of the House of Representatives 
 the whole executive power of the government. The 
 
[136] 
 
 purpose of the impeachment, if they could succeed 
 in removing the President, to put the office in the 
 hands of an extremely zealous leader of the party, 
 was never disavowed, and so it required, as it seemed 
 to me, great courage on the part of Mr. Evarts, who 
 had been a lifelong Republican, to accept a retainer 
 from the President, and to maintain his cause and 
 the integrity of his great office to the best of his abil- 
 ity. His conduct of the case as a forensic perform- 
 ance will never, I think, be forgotten. He was asso- 
 ciated with two great lawyers, both of whom were 
 considerably older than himself, William S. Gros- 
 beck, of Cincinnati, and Judge Benjamin R. Curtis, 
 of Boston, but Mr. Evarts had to bear the brunt of 
 the case and was found to be not only physically but 
 mentally fully adequate to the occasion. His ex- 
 treme readiness on the floor, his startling wit, his 
 broad ability to grapple with all the legal and con- 
 stitutional questions that arose, made him a very 
 conspicuous figure in the case. It may be, and I 
 think it is the case, that as the Senate, which formed 
 with the Supreme Court the tribunal to hear and 
 determine the case, was then constituted, it would 
 have been impossible to obtain the two-thirds vote 
 necessary for a verdict of removal, for there were a 
 number of senators in whose minds patriotism was 
 before party, and I have always regarded it as one 
 of the most brave and public-spirited triumphs of 
 good conscience that seven senators were found un- 
 der the lead of Mr. Fessenden and Mr. Trumbull, to 
 
[ 137 ] 
 
 defy the imperious dictates of their party and vote 
 for acquittal of the President. 
 
 The Electoral Commission was a very rare and an 
 absolutely unique form of litigation as a means of 
 settling a contested election for the presidency, and 
 although it had no international bearings, it put to 
 a severe test the possibility of adjusting such a con- 
 test without resort to force. If Mr. Tilden had been 
 more pugnacious and had really claimed what his 
 followers all believed — that he was entitled to a 
 plurality of votes of some two hundred and fifty 
 thousand — a contest of force for the position might 
 well have taken place, as General Grant, then Presi- 
 dent and commander-in-chief of the army and navy 
 of the United States, would certainly have resisted 
 the claim. It was a very happy outcome from a 
 most dangerous issue, and the counsel who conducted 
 the controversy before the commission, of whom Mr. 
 Evarts was the chief on the Republican side, are en- 
 titled to the very greatest credit for their devotion 
 to the case. 
 
 By virtue of the extreme prominence of the part 
 taken by Mr. Evarts in the Geneva Award and in the 
 Electoral Commission, he was practically compelled 
 to devote the rest of his life to the public service, and 
 in the great offices of attorney-general of the United 
 States, secretary of state, and senator from New 
 York he certainly rendered admirable service to the 
 whole nation. There is no doubt that notwithstand- 
 ing the result of the Electoral Commission a cloud 
 
[•38] 
 
 of doubt and suspicion rested upon the title of Presi- 
 dent Hayes, and it was by the happy selection of a 
 very powerful and public-spirited cabinet, of which 
 Mr. Evarts was, as secretary of state, at the head, 
 that this embarrassment was completely overcome, 
 so that the administration of Mr. Hayes will be found 
 to rank very high in the history of good government 
 with any that preceded or followed it. 
 
 The case of Tilton against Beecher was not only 
 infinitely curious and interesting, but its conduct on 
 the part of the defense, in which Mr. Evarts led, was 
 one that called forth the highest powers of advocacy. 
 The most distinguished clergyman in the United 
 States was put on trial for alleged acts of gross im- 
 morality, of which he doubtless was entirely innocent. 
 The trial occupied many weeks, and of course every 
 word that was uttered in the court-room was bruited 
 abroad throughout the country as far as the press 
 could carry it. The arguments in summing up were 
 of inordinate length, Mr. Evarts's, I think, occupying 
 nine days, or seven days, and Mr. Beech's for the 
 plaintiff nearly as long; but the whole history of the 
 case, every consideration and circumstance that could 
 possibly have any material bearing upon the issue, 
 were all contained in the first day of his seven days' 
 argument. Mr. Evarts must have been in complete 
 sympathy from the start with his distinguished client; 
 they were both of that stern old Puritan descent, 
 origin, and discipline which had continued in Massa- 
 chusetts and Connecticut undiluted down to their 
 
[ 139] 
 time, and I have often said to Mr. Evarts that I 
 thought his own mental and moral qualities were as 
 fully displayed in his first day's argument as those of 
 his great client. 
 
 Thus it appears that Mr. Evarts easily held to the 
 end of his days the well-earned post of the greatest 
 and most famous advocate at the American bar. 
 
 Such was the man with whom, from a point mid- 
 way in his great professional career, I was closely as- 
 sociated until his death forty years afterwards, and 
 the digression which I have made to sketch his char- 
 acter was necessary to show the very unusual and, 
 indeed, unique advantage that I enjoyed from the 
 very outset of my young professional life. I cannot 
 recall any other instance of a lawyer in America hav- 
 ing such an advantage at the start. In England, 
 where the distinction of the profession between bar- 
 risters and attorneys is strictly maintained, there is 
 a somewhat similar relation at times established be- 
 tween the leaders of the bar and their juniors. For 
 instance, I have heard that Lord Haldane, who came 
 afterwards to be Lord Chancellor, after a most dis- 
 tinguished professional career at the bar, especially 
 in the chancery side of the practice, " devilled " as 
 they call it, for twelve years at the beginning with 
 Lord Davey. 
 
 Lord Davey, himself, had been very eminent at 
 the chancery bar, and is believed to have had the 
 largest professional income of any lawyer there from 
 private practice, not including those who had held 
 
[ i4o] 
 
 the office of attorney-general, or solicitor-general, and 
 had in those days been permitted to continue their 
 private practice at the same time, and who, of course, 
 enjoyed in the matter of fees a very great advantage. 
 For instance, it was the common talk of the profes- 
 sion, when I was in England, that Sir Roundell 
 Palmer, already referred to as the leading counsel for 
 Great Britain in the Geneva Arbitration, had in one 
 year, while attorney-general, realized the net sum of 
 fifty thousand pounds, but it was also said that he 
 worked for it day and night the year round, from 
 Monday morning until Saturday night, and that one 
 day, when Mr. Goldwin Smith needed very much to 
 see him and called at his chambers for the purpose, 
 his clerk said: "Is it absolutely necessary for you to 
 see him?" To which Mr. Smith replied that he 
 thought that it was. "Well," said the clerk, "if you 
 say it is necessary, you can see him, but I would 
 advise you not to, for he hasn't been in bed since 
 Sunday night," and this was Thursday. 
 
 The devilling process consisted very much in what 
 I did so long for Mr. Evarts, working up the cases, 
 studying the questions, preparing a brief or memo- 
 randum for the senior, and being kept for the time 
 somewhat in the shade, but when Lord Davey was 
 raised to the bench. Lord Haldane, then, of course, 
 Mr. Haldane, came into full possession of his re- 
 ward, for he immediately succeeded to about half of 
 the business that Lord Davey had enjoyed; and, 
 throwing off the devil's mask at once, came into a 
 
place of great prominence in the profession. So I 
 enjoyed during my term of ten or twelve years of 
 subordinate service all the advantages which are 
 open to the young English barrister and which are 
 almost wholly unknown here, and I never can suffi- 
 ciently express my obligations and gratitude to Mr. 
 Evarts for giving me this great opportunity. 
 
 But I am getting a little ahead of my story and 
 must go back to the beginning, when I entered the 
 law office in Hanover Street as a student in January, 
 
 1856. After I had been there about six months the 
 firm proposed that I should remain with them for a 
 year as a clerk, there being only two others occupying 
 that relation. I was to receive five hundred dollars. 
 I gladly accepted the offer and thought myself very 
 rich, and I think that I enjoyed that five hundred 
 dollars more than I ever enjoyed the greater indi- 
 vidual fees which came to me in after years, for I 
 was immediately able to write to my father that 
 he would not have to send me any more money, 
 as I could take care of myself, and so relieve the 
 poorly furnished family purse of that much of the 
 drain upon it. After a year, at the beginning of 
 
 1857, the firm proposed that I should continue for 
 another year, and as an inducement offered me a 
 salary of eight hundred dollars, and that I might 
 do any business of my own that should happen to 
 come to me, and in that year I received, besides 
 my salary, about five hundred dollars in fees, so 
 that at the beginning of 1857 I really thought my- 
 
[ 142] 
 
 self a CrcEsus. My financial ambition was not very 
 lofty, for I remember very well feeling and saying 
 at that time that, if I could ever find myself the 
 owner of accumulations to the amount of ten thou- 
 sand dollars, I should be perfectly satisfied and 
 never want more. 
 
 At this time, too, my large earnings of one thou- 
 sand three hundred dollars a year enabled me to begin 
 to accumulate, for I have always thought that it 
 was the duty of every lawyer to begin to provide for 
 his future in that way as soon as possible. I never 
 went quite to the extreme of Mr. Southmayd, who 
 used to preach the doctrine of self-denial very ur- 
 gently, and declare it to be the duty of every lawyer 
 to accumulate his entire professional income from 
 the start. **But," said I, "it isn't everybody that 
 can do that, for we must live." "No," said he, 
 "that doesn't follow; that is not at all necessary." 
 It had not been necessary in his case, because he, 
 fortunately, lived at home and had no expenses ex- 
 cept for his clothes, and those were simple and mod- 
 est, for he always patronized the same tailor, and 
 hating to go to be measured or to try on, he fell into 
 the habit of sending a semiannual message to his 
 tailor: "Two suits like the last." So, for his sixty 
 years, there was never any change in the fashion of 
 his garments. But there is no such wonderful rule 
 for a young lawyer, no such aid in his personal ad- 
 vancement, as to begin to accumulate as early as 
 possible, no matter how little, for he begins in that 
 
[H3] 
 
 way to have income that earns itself, wholly inde- 
 pendent of his own exertions. 
 
 Thus I continued in the office of my superiors for 
 about three years, until in 1858, seeing no prospect 
 of any further advance in that office and feeling my- 
 self already fledged, I struck out for myself and 
 opened a law office in Wall Street in partnership with 
 William Henry Leon Barnes, a year or two my junior. 
 Both of us were in the same line, ambitious to become 
 court lawyers, he having been for a year or two with 
 Mr. Charles O'Conor, as I had been with Mr. 
 Evarts. Possibly we might have done very well in 
 long-continued partnership, although I have my 
 doubts about that, because we were too much in 
 the same line; but he got married and went off for a 
 very long wedding-tour, which took him to Europe 
 for several months. 
 
 In the meantime, Mr. Evarts began to approach 
 me with new overtures, asking at first if I did not 
 know of any young man whom they could get to 
 come in with them to help in the business of the firm. 
 Of course I said I did not. But he from time to 
 time continued his approaches, and finally said: 
 '*You don't seem to understand what I am after. 
 We want you back in the office, and to come in as 
 a member of the firm." Of course I could not re- 
 sist this splendid opportunity, because the firm was 
 certainly at that time the leading firm in the city. 
 So the firm Choate & Barnes was dissolved, and 
 Barnes, who was certainly one of the most brilliant 
 
[ 144] 
 young men of his time, went to try his fortunes in 
 CaHfornia, where he became connected with one of 
 the foremost lawyers there, and had a very successful 
 career. 
 
 I wish that I could find the letter that Mr. Evarts 
 wrote to me stating the terms on which I could come 
 in with them, for in a few words it furnished a very 
 good illustration of the situation of the bar at that 
 time, so far as money was concerned. The idea of 
 lawyers making great fortunes appears never to have 
 occurred to anybody. The law was a strict profes- 
 sion, and was satisfied with ordinary and reasonable 
 rewards. He wrote that they would like to have me 
 join the firm as a partner, and that I should receive 
 fifteen per cent of the income, not including, however, 
 his own counsel cases, those in which he was employed 
 by other lawyers and with which his firm had noth- 
 ing to do. He added that while he could not state 
 exactly what this would amount to, he thought that 
 I might safely count upon at least three thousand a 
 year. This would make the entire office income 
 twenty thousand dollars, instead of the half million 
 which I understand in these later days some law 
 offices enjoy. Well, I thought that my fortune was 
 certainly made, for it had never occurred to me that 
 in five years after leaving the law school I could 
 come into such an income as it would give me, and 
 which, I suppose, measured by modern standards, was 
 equal to four or five times the amount to-day. From 
 this time forward I not only had the great privilege 
 
ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE FORMATION OF THE FIRM OF CHOATE 
 AND BARNES. IN 1858. 
 
 This notice was found among Mr. Choate's papers, and must have been issued just 
 a few months before he joined the firm of Evarts and Southmayd. 
 
tile loremost 
 car. 
 
 good ilius": 
 time, so far a 
 lawyer 
 
 le situ 
 
 mecte; 
 
 esstui 
 
 "I. iLVtiris 
 
 aid come 
 
 "d a very 
 
 r that 
 
 I IT 
 
 Vtc: 
 
 tweiUv 
 
 ousand a 
 
 ne entire ottice income 
 
 id Uoiiars, ir. " the half million 
 
 • ■■" ^'--^ ''"• ^■'- ''■^■" '•^■^e Jaw 
 
 cei 1 . for it h?.d r»evf r 
 
 in five years aft- 
 
 hooi 1 could 
 
 come Ui;;AT^ld\;iU Uli,-^'?!':- '.\h it u-ouM eive nic, rLrid 
 
 Which^ .^?8ar # !.«aHSfAa bwA: ^ > : i • : da? CIS, WaS 
 
 :n'rii 
 
 
 
 
No. 62 WALL STREET, 
 
 /■r'' fill////// /i ry//f»// /i rnit/ /'ff^'ntl-i //// ///r p/nt///.t 
 ff f?//rf/-i/ &■ f/.i . 
 
 .Ioso])h J I. Ohonto, 
 William H. 1^. IJrtinos. 
 
[H5] 
 
 of working with Mr. Evarts, to which I have already 
 referred, but gradually began to be employed inde- 
 pendently of that. The mere fact of my having been 
 taken into so distinguished a firm gave me a sort of 
 personal standing of my own, and clients began to 
 come to me, and sometimes in Mr. Evarts's absence, 
 and especially in the absence of the other members 
 of the firm, I was called upon in emergencies to act 
 for myself. By dint of untiring industry and reason- 
 able ingenuity and, I must admit, some audacity, I 
 began to make headway quite rapidly. 
 
 I remember very well my first great constitutional 
 case, which was as amusing as it was audacious. 
 General James Watson Webb, who had been an in- 
 timate friend of Mr. Evarts and Mr. Prescott Hall, 
 and a lot of other prominent men and good livers in 
 New York, and who had been editor of The Courier 
 and The Enquirer, and a loyal supporter of William 
 H. Seward, came into the office one Saturday after- 
 noon and inquired for Mr. Evarts. Of course Mr. 
 Evarts was never there on Saturday afternoon, and 
 he said, "Well, then, you must help me," and he 
 stated his case. He had just been appointed minis- 
 ter to Brazil by President Lincoln, and had made all 
 his arrangements to sail on the following Wednesday, 
 when, to his infinite surprise, he had been served with 
 short summonses, as they were called, in the Marine 
 Court, which were returnable on the following Tues- 
 day, one day before he was to sail. As several parties 
 to whom he was indebted for these small sums were 
 
[.46] 
 
 acting together, he had found out that there was a 
 conspiracy among them to get judgment on Tuesday 
 and to seize his trunks as he was going on board the 
 steamer, and so prevent his saiHng altogether. 
 They were probably the parties from whom he had 
 got more or less of his outfit. 
 
 "Well," said I, "General Webb, what is your de- 
 fense .? " " I am sure I don't know," said he. " Have 
 you had these goods.?" "Yes." "Have you paid 
 for them.?" "No, I had no money." "Well, how 
 came they to sue you in the Marine Court, of all 
 places in the world.?" "Well," said he, "it is just 
 as I say, a conspiracy to prevent my sailing. You 
 must put in a defense." I reflected and said: "Well, 
 I will try, but I am not at all sure that it will succeed." 
 " Do the best you can," said he. " Have you got your 
 commission .?" I asked. He took it out of his pocket, 
 signed Abraham Lincoln, President; William H. 
 Seward, Secretary of State, and with a big seal of the 
 United States upon it which looked as big as a large 
 platter, and which I thought would make a great 
 impression in court, especially in the Marine Court, 
 which was a small municipal tribunal of very limited 
 jurisdiction. So I interposed the plea that by the 
 Constitution of the United States the Federal Courts 
 had exclusive jurisdiction of all suits affecting am- 
 bassadors, public ministers, and consuls, and on 
 Tuesday, the return day, I appeared in court and 
 interposed that plea. A very eminent lawyer of that 
 day, many years my senior, appeared on the other 
 
[HI] 
 
 side, and proposed to pooh ! pooh ! me out of court. 
 "Why," said he, "your Honor, Mr. Choate is en- 
 deavoring to impose upon you. The clause in the 
 Constitution of the United States, to which he refers, 
 giving the Federal Courts exclusive jurisdiction of all 
 suits affecting ambassadors, public ministers, and 
 consuls, refers only to foreign ambassadors, public 
 ministers, and consuls." I insisted, on the other 
 hand, that there was no such word as "foreign" in 
 the Constitution, and that the clause in question 
 included all ambassadors, public ministers, and con- 
 suls. "Will your Honor please send for the Consti- 
 tution, and then, perhaps, we shall see who is trying 
 to impose upon the court." So the Constitution was 
 brought and read, and it turned out that I was right. 
 The word "foreign" was not in it, and we argued it 
 to and fro on the reason of the thing, and Judge 
 Henry Alker, who held the court and was half Irish- 
 man and half Frenchman, and a brother-in-law of 
 James T. Brady, to whom I have already referred, 
 took the papers for consideration, and in the after- 
 noon he rendered a decision in my favor, dismissing 
 all the cases, and the general went on his watery way 
 to Brazil unimpeded by judgments or executions. 
 It was quite a professional triumph, and the best of 
 it was that in due time I sent to the general a bill 
 for my services, of which he never took any notice. 
 But I have heard cases argued in the Supreme Court 
 at Washington, constitutional cases, too, which had 
 very much less merit in them than the one which I 
 
[148] 
 
 then presented to the Marine Court with so much 
 success. The Supreme Court of the State, however, 
 to whom one of the creditors had resorted when the 
 case came on there in the fall, laughed the defense 
 out of court, and the creditors found ample means 
 to recover judgments, which, probably, were not 
 worth much more than the paper on which they 
 were written. 
 
 I worked like a Trojan at the law. For nearly 
 forty years (to be exact, for thirty-seven years), until 
 I had the honor to be appointed ambassador to Eng- 
 land in 1899, I labored steadily at the preparation, 
 trial, and arguments of cases in the courts, with 
 hardly a break from the first Monday of October 
 round to the last Friday of June. In the course of 
 that time I disposed of an enormous number of 
 cases, steadily growing in importance and difficulty, 
 and without any failure of health. This was a rare 
 blessing, for almost every lawyer that I have known 
 who has worked under the same pressure, and there 
 were very few of them, suffered at least one break- 
 down, which disabled him for a time. 
 
 When I came to see how the English lawyers work 
 and how they are relieved by frequent holidays, I 
 wondered that we had ever maintained our arduous 
 struggle through the year without breakdowns. 
 There the courts come in in October and continue 
 their sessions for eight or nine weeks until Christmas, 
 when they have a two weeks' holiday, and every busy 
 barrister drops his briefs and makes for the Conti- 
 
[ H9] 
 
 nent or for the mountains, and has a real period for 
 rest and recruiting; then they come in again and 
 work for eight or nine weeks more, which brings them 
 to the Easter recess, another real hoHday of ten or 
 twelve days with the same advantage; another eight 
 or ten weeks of work and Whitsuntide arrives (a 
 third intermediate holiday of which we know nothing 
 and which we ought to borrow at once); and then 
 a fourth term of eight or ten weeks of work, which 
 brings them up to the 12th of August, when the law is 
 off on grouse, and courts and barristers, kings, lords, 
 and commons disappear for the long vacation of 
 twelve weeks. No wonder that they hold out better 
 than ourselves, and that nervous breakdowns are 
 rarely heard of over there ! But with us it is, in the 
 case of busy barristers, a continuous and almost un- 
 interrupted nervous strain for nine months of the 
 year. 
 
 It would be hardly worth while to recall even the 
 names of the cases in which I was constantly engaged 
 in the earlier half of my professional life. The 
 foundations were being laid for the subsequent super- 
 structure of professional success. I had a great liking 
 for jury trials, and it always seemed to me that the 
 lawyer who is constantly engaged in that branch of 
 legal practice leads a more intensely intellectual life 
 than almost any other professional man. 
 
IX 
 
 MARRIAGE 
 
 Having reached the point where I could not only 
 support myself, but a family, I naturally thought of 
 getting married, but had never met my fate in this 
 respect, or encountered a woman who answered all 
 my ideas. But one day my friend John H. Sher- 
 wood said to me: "I want to introduce you to a 
 young lady who I am sure will exactly suit you, 
 and, if I am not mistaken, you will suit her equally 
 well." He must have been a wonderful judge of 
 character to make so bold a prophecy, but he proved 
 to be a real prophet. Not long afterwards, I think 
 by his arrangement, I was invited to dine at the 
 house of Mr. Thomas P. Rossiter, then a noted artist 
 and very prominent in a social way among the artists 
 of New York at that day, and there I met Miss Caro- 
 line Dutcher Sterling, the daughter of Frederick A. 
 Sterling, of Cleveland, Ohio, and I very soon found 
 that it was as Mr. Sherwood had said. But there 
 was a serious difficulty in the way. She was living 
 at the house of her cousin, Mrs. Rossiter, and had 
 come to New York for the purpose of studying art, 
 intending to devote herself to it as a profession for 
 life, with great prospect of success. She was some 
 five years my junior, and was as earnestly devoted 
 
 [150] 
 
[151] 
 
 to art as I was to the law, so that we were both most 
 unfortunately busy, and the worst of it was that she 
 had made a vow of some sort never to think of any- 
 thing but art. In fact, she wore a wedding-ring on 
 which was inscribed the words "Wedded to art," 
 and the date, some time before I knew her. How- 
 ever, I followed up our first acquaintance with great 
 persistence, and found that the more I saw of her the 
 better I liked her, and came to know that she had all 
 the traits that I wanted, and that I must stake all 
 my fortunes on that die. Still that plaguey wedding- 
 ring stood in my way, but there is no rock so hard 
 but that a little wave will beat admission in a thou- 
 sand years, and after a while I found that she began 
 to relent, and that my prospects were brightening 
 every day, so I pressed on, and on the Fourth of 
 July, 1 86 1, the beleaguered fortress yielded,* and I 
 
 * The following self-explanatory verses, which were found among Mr. 
 Choate's papers, are interesting, as they were written on the Fourth of July, 
 1861, to Mrs. John Jay, at Katonah, in Westchester County. The manuscript 
 of the verses (a portion of which is reproduced in facsimile on a neighboring 
 page) was discovered by Mrs. Jay among her papers and returned to the 
 writer. 
 
 "My dear Mrs. Jay — 
 
 Words are weak to convey 
 The chagrin and dismay 
 Which it costs me to say, 
 I must still disobey 
 You: nor come, on the Fourth, to Katonah. 
 
 But that day of parade 
 I have vowed to a maid 
 Of whose wrath I'm afraid 
 Lest my word, once betrayed, 
 She may leave me for life to bemoan her. 
 
 She is youthful and fair, 
 With the saintliest air, 
 
[152] 
 
 celebrated that anniversary of our national inde- 
 pendence by sacrificing my own independence for 
 life. The old wedding-ring was put aside, and on 
 the i6th of October, in that year, I put another ring 
 upon her finger, which continues there to this day. 
 
 Upon the whole, it was the most fortunate day of 
 my life, for although fifty-five years and more have 
 fled, I think that neither of us have ever had occasion 
 to regret it. In all that time we have had some very 
 
 And her sunny brown hair 
 Decked with Hlies so rare 
 Descends on the rarest of shoulders. 
 
 And hard were the case, 
 But the wonderful grace 
 That's enthroned in her face 
 Would win her a place 
 In the hearts of the coldest beholders. 
 
 And then, such a mind ! 
 Why, I may be stone blind 
 But if you can find 
 One as pure and refined 
 And as rightly inclined 
 You must let it appear in the sequel. 
 
 And then, as for her soul, 
 While our planet shall roll 
 You may ransack the whole, 
 From Equator to Pole 
 But will never discover her equal. 
 
 She's so free from all taint 
 That men call her a saint, 
 And she may or she mayn't 
 Lend an ear to my plaint, 
 But my heart is not faint 
 And my lips with all praises have blest her. 
 
 Now I trust you'll excuse 
 This poor plea of my muse, 
 Since I cannot but choose 
 For this cause, to refuse 
 What it grieves me to lose — 
 A kind welcome once more to Westchester." 
 
FACSIMILE OF MANUSCRIPT OF VERSES. 
 
 Written to Mrs. John Jay by Mr. Choate on the day of his engagement — ^July 4, 
 1861. The verses — printed, in toto, on pages 151 and 152 — are interesting as 
 showing his characteristic handwriting, which never faltered until the day of 
 his death. 
 
celebratfd /ersaty of otir national 
 
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 Kf- tag wa iidc, 2: 
 
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 to regiT me we have had some very 
 
 Bii: ver her equal. 
 
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[153] 
 
 severe trials and afflictions, but for all that have had 
 abundant and ever-increasing cause to be thankful. 
 She is fully entitled to the better half of all our pros- 
 perity and success, and now, as the end of life ap- 
 proaches, we do, indeed, find ourselves blessed with 
 all that should accompany old age, as honor, love, 
 obedience, troops of friends. 
 
 For the first year of our married life we went to 
 board with her aunt, Mrs. Carr, in a pleasant little 
 house on Twenty-third Street, just east of Fourth 
 Avenue. It was destroyed a few years ago, but the 
 marks of it still remain on the side of the adjoining 
 mansion of much greater pretensions against which 
 it rested. In the spring of 1863 we ventured to go to 
 housekeeping, and hired for six hundred dollars a 
 year a modest house in West Twenty-first Street, No. 
 93, afterwards changed to No. 137, which we occu- 
 pied for six or seven years until it would hold no 
 more children than four, with whom we had already 
 been blessed. 
 
 When we look around us in these days and see how 
 children of our acquaintance are in the habit of com- 
 mencing married life on the scale which their parents 
 have already attained, we sometimes wonder how 
 we ever had the courage to embark in it, but those 
 were very simple days, and we were able by dint of 
 a reasonable frugality to lay aside from year to year 
 about half our income, which, being steadily contin- 
 ued, soon removed all danger of the wolf coming to 
 our door. 
 
VEB 
 
 bl9ifc