“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK”
Students and classifiers of American “types” often say that the grandfathers of the present generation of New Englanders represent the “New England type” much more accurately than their descendants of to-day. Some times I wonder what they mean by “New England type.” Apparently they make the phrase stand for blue-nosed, thin-blooded frigidity of temperament, a pinched, mean, timorous attitude towards human life and human nature, and a cold, calculating capacity to skin other people alive in a bargain. At any rate, the presumption seems to be that whatever else they were, New Englanders were always very much of the same sort.
Here are my two New England grandfathers.
Both of them had identically the same sort of ancestry, plain English people who came to the New World about the middle of the seventeenth century. Certain genealogically-minded members of the two families have gathered reverently together the scant tradition concerning the generations that bridge the two centuries and a half of life in America; but though I have dutifully plodded through the thick volumes of “family histories” I have never been able to see that any of my forebears did anything more than earn their own livings and keep out of jail.
Younger branches of both families moved up into Vermont, after the end of the French-and-Indian wars and have lived here ever since. Both my grandfathers spent their boyhood on Vermont farms. And there the resemblance ceases.
One of them had, apparently, from early childhood, a passion for books and learning and sophistication and cultivation—and gregarious, articulate social existence—and dinner parties and black broadcloth and white linen and good wine—and all the other elements in the sort of life which is not to be found on Vermont farms. The Vermont farm, however, seems to have presented him with some tools for getting what he wanted: a powerful great body, an active mind and an unlimited amount of dynamic energy. He left home at sixteen (this was about 1833) spurred on by the sympathy of a strong-minded mother. I have still in the attic of his old house, the little hair-covered trunk which he took with him, and which contained all his worldly possessions.
From that time on, until his old age, he never came home except to rest in the occasional, very brief intervals of incessant and almost appalling activity, both intellectual and physical. With only a little help from his family he earned his way through college, and then put himself through a Theological Seminary in record time. With him, as with other manifestants of the mid-century explosion of energy in America, it was as if the long generations of vegetating country-dwellers had, like other vegetating matter of by-gone ages, turned to rich veins of highly combustible material, which this descendant of theirs mined out, at top speed, and cast by great shovelfuls into the furnace of his personality. He seems always to have been incandescent, the whole six-feet-three of him, with motive-power which he could not, try as he might, use up fast enough to cool off. All his life he burned hot with a vitality at which an ever-widening circle of other human beings, rich and poor, young and old, learned and ignorant, warmed their hands and their hearts. Even the people whom he furiously rubbed the wrong way (he had as many enemies as friends) were stimulated by the friction to a quicker life-pace, a livelier circulation. The temperature in a room rose when he entered it. Even people of sluggish, scholarly, dilettante temperaments, even coldly superior and skeptical people who prided themselves on being too disdainful of life to lift an eyebrow over its issues, soon kindled either to intense exasperation or lively personal affection. In either case, calm and ease and torpidity of life were scorched and shaken. I have often thought with sympathy of the vestrymen in Grandfather’s various parishes.
As a young clergyman he ran one parish after another, with increasing brio. When he settled down in the New York parish where he stayed for most of his life, he was already editing a church-paper and writing innumerable pamphlets, in addition to his regular duties as rector. He now speeded up the staid old parish into new work of all sorts, added one mission chapel after another to the church organization, pushed out the influence of the parish further and further, especially into the outlying regions of the slums, which because of their very discouraging aspect of poverty and foreignness had been till then safe from attempts to improve them.
Of course I knew my grandfather only when he was a very old man, long after he had retired from active life; but I never got from him the slightest impression that he was what is known as a “religious-minded person” or that all this remarkable expansion of church and mission work came entirely from evangelical fervor. In fact, as I remember Grandfather, you never would dream that he had been a minister at all. My guess is that he developed that church as his contemporaries developed their transcontinental systems of railways, because he was born with a clutch that never slipped, so that all the power he created by his many-cylindered motor was transmitted without loss to the wheels which sent him with extreme rapidity along the road he had chanced to follow.
He not only developed the parish, he developed his own life: he bought books, unendingly bought books, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, English. No junk-man who ever lived has been able to free us entirely of this vast accumulation of serious-minded books of research, now quite worthless, all of them, full of the pompous and inaccurate scholarship of his day. He traveled abroad and sprang, tiger-like, upon European culture, with his formidable New-World capacity for the assimilation of Gargantuan meals of solid food. He married “well,” as the saying goes, and gave his son university life and European travel. He lived as he had wanted to live, with friends and acquaintances in three countries, dressing his vast body in fine broadcloth and white linen; his house was lined with well-bound books; he was a famous talker—in the vein of Dr. Johnson—much sought after for his brilliantly amusing conversation, though at times, I take it, he followed his prototype into rather overpowering monologue; he was a powerful and very fluent public speaker—we have chests and chests full of his sermons still in the attic—and so far as I can gather he no more doubted the ultimately satisfying value of all these things as an integral part of life than Mr. Russel Sage seems to have questioned the ultimately satisfying value of squeezing the last penny of interest out of a loan, or Barnum to have doubted the worthwhileness of running the biggest show on earth.
It would be very unfair to give the impression that his agreeable social life and the possession of objects and books then in fashion made up the whole or even the largest part of his life. It took such a formidable number of elements to satisfy his huge appetite for life and activity, that it would be difficult to catalog them all. Controversy, for instance; he adored pamphleteering, and was known as one of the leading controversialists of his time. He was a heart-felt Low-Churchman and perhaps the real passion of his passionate life was his hot-blooded detestation of formalism in religious beliefs. Infinitely various, and all headlong, were his attacks on High-Churchism, with its rigid orthodoxy, and its fol-de-rols (as he called them) of salvation by incense and candles and twiddling distinctions between green and blue and yellow stoles.
Indeed this shouldering impatience of formal theological points led him late in life, to disagree vigorously with the majority of his parishioners on several questions of doctrine. Refusing to conform to the strict pattern they wished to impose upon him, he blew up with an explosion, shook the dust of his religious vocation off his feet, and retired to the comfortable old house in Vermont, where he spent his old age, living comfortably on his small savings. He took with him all the possessions he had enjoyed so heartily, his many, many books, his substantial furniture, the excellent oil-portrait which had been painted of his vivid, handsome face in middle-life, his gold-headed cane, his great black-silk clerical robes, and fine ecclesiastical linen. When he died, he had never, so far as I know, slept out of an excellent bed a single night in all his life.
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The other grandfather fared forth at about the same date or a little earlier, and at about the same age; but not in search of well-set dinner-tables nor well-filled libraries, nor the inheritance of culture from past ages. On the contrary, he seems all his life to have been engaged in running away from even the light and sketchy approximation to imprisoning regularity which was shown by the America of that day and the State of his birth. Like an unbroken colt who snorts and wheels and dashes away at the mere sight of some one emerging from the barn with a rope halter, this other farm-boy gave one look at what seemed to him the penitentiary-like pressure of conventional life and ran away with all the speed of what turned out to be a remarkably fleet pair of heels. First, as a lad, he ran away from his perfectly comfortable home, where he had been well cared for, and soundly if plainly educated. Disdaining ... no, more than that, courting hardship, as he always did, he roamed out into the absolute, untrammeled freedom of early frontier life. There he starved and hunted and went in ragged buckskin, and trapped, and moved on, and grew up to a great height and great strength, and was no man’s man to his heart’s content. At some time during this period he acquired, with characteristic casual ease, the profession of surveyor, the only one of the trades or professions at which he was willing even to give a glance. There was plenty of unsurveyed land in the States at that time, and all of it in the new, untracked wilderness which he loved.
He seems always to have despised physical comfort as a clumsy trap laid by life to catch you and hold you fast. None of it for him. He hated the very indoor smell of it, as he did the burdening weight of material possessions. A gun (which like other frontiersmen of that day he passionately and personally loved), an ax (with which he could perform almost any feat), the clothes he stood in, the tools of his wildwoods profession, and the world before him, full, intoxicatingly full of untrodden paths leading into bright enticing danger. Prosperity? A home of his own? Above all, regular work? Never, as long as there were squirrels and deer to shoot and logs to make temporary shelters withal!
His roamings took him into Ohio, the early river and lake settlements of which were at that time horribly marshy and fever-ridden. There he encountered the lure which brings most young adventurers in under a roof and beside a hearth-fire. He fell in love. A pretty Vermont girl was visiting some cousins there and had set up a little millinery shop, where she made and sold the scoop-bonnets of the period. Do you see them, the tall, big-boned surveyor, with his magnetic personality, pungent with the odor of freedom, and the pink-cheeked, white-fingered little amateur milliner?
She went back to Vermont to her family, and he followed her. I have often amused myself by walking around over the roads and paths and fields he must have trod during his wooing, and trying to imagine his impatience of the cribbed and cabined superfluity and conventionality of the Vermont life, which looked so primitive and bare to my other grandfather.
He endured it for some months, till his wooing was successful, and, just after her twenty-first birthday, the gentle, home-loving girl put her hand upon his sinewy arm and followed him out into the wilds. This was in 1838 when the wilds were very wild indeed. My great-uncle, who was her little brother at that time conceived a lifelong admiration and affection for the great, strapping, warm-hearted hero who came to take away his big sister. He used to tell me stories of that impetuous wooing, and of the strange impression left on the deeply-rooted mountain-people by the meteor-like appearance and disappearance of this startling, unreliable, dangerously alive personality, living so immorally free from all the rules and possessions and standards which bore them down to the earth, and to which they so tenaciously clung. My great-uncle always ended these stories of his brother-in-law (whom he never saw but on that occasion) by saying, “He was a talented man, with a powerful personality, who could have done anything he chose.” He also told me, “Our minister said of Albert that he was a wild, free son of Nature.” I take it the minister had had some contact with the romantic-school phraseology so much in fashion at that date.
It was a bitterly hard life which the Vermont girl had chosen, full of extravagant hardships and privations of which she could never have dreamed. They lived here and there, always from hand to mouth, always as far beyond the edge of the settlements as it was possible to take a family of young children, for they had five little girls by the time they had been married a decade. Once or twice her husband made an attempt to enter regular life, to run a store in a frontier settlement, to take an everyday job; but these trials never lasted long, and their old life was taken up, log-cabin after log-cabin, rough clearings in the primeval forest, days when there was nothing but corn-meal in the pantry, long treks in covered wagons to escape from the fever-and-ague which burned and ravaged them; never more possessions than could be drawn by a team of lean horses, ... and always unbroken love and devotion between the two wayfarers. Wherever their caravan halted for a few months was home to the woodsman’s wife, because he was there; his vitality, his free-hearted zest in whatever came to them, bore her along like a tidal wave. And to the end of her days she worshipped the memory of his deep, never-wavering passion for her.
You can imagine that her comfortably well-to-do family thought he took a very queer way to show it, and with Yankee out-spokenness told them both so, as cuttingly as Yankee tongues can speak. Without a hesitation she flung her family ties away along with her love of home, her woman’s love for stability, her mother’s anxiety about her little girls. Not till long after his death did she again resume relations with her family.
Her little girls, never having known any other life, saw nothing unusual in the one they led, especially as their mother, her personality doubled and trebled by the exigencies of her life, stood, somehow, miraculously between them and the most impossible of the hardships to which their father so light-heartedly condemned them. They were always dressed in well-mended garments, they had shoes and stockings, they were clean and cherished, there was always cheer and loving-kindness between their father and mother, and when there was only corn-meal mush for supper, they scarcely noticed it, because of the old songs and stories of which their mother had such a store. My mother sang them to me, and I now sing them to my children, those old folk-songs with which my grandmother charmed away hunger from her little children. They adored their great, rollicking father, always in high spirits, and they preferred the deer-steaks and squirrel stews which were the results of his wonderful marksmanship, to the tough, stringy beef and salt pork which was the diet of the other frontier children. One of my mother’s vivid recollections is of looking out of the window on a snowy day and seeing her stalwart father emerge from the woods into the clearing, carrying ... a very Robin Hood ... a whole deer’s carcass on his broad shoulders. He cast it down before the door and called, like a great boy, for his women-folk to come and admire him! She says she can close her eyes now, see the blood ruddy on the snow, and her father’s thrown-back head and bright, laughing face.
Of course, when the news of gold in California came, burning-hot like wild-fire from the west, he was one of the first to go. He would be. A distant, uncertain, and dangerous expedition, into unknown country; could he resist such an alluring combination? Of course, he could have resisted it if he had tried; but he did not try. He never tried.
Also, of course, it was really out of the question to transport a wife and five little girls across an untracked continent, full of Indians. He was to go alone, make a brief stay, get the lay of the land, and come back, his pockets full of gold, to take the family out in a ship around the Horn. It was all settled in his mind as if the gold were heavy in his pockets. The separation would be short ... he was sure of it, as he was always sure of whatever would ensure his being free of the slightest constraint.... He moved his family into the nearest settlement, cashed in on everything saleable, added a small sum that had just come to him as his share of his father’s small property, and got together enough to support his family for a year. It took little enough, as they had always lived. And he would be back before the year was out, rolling in gold.
With empty pockets and a high heart he took his gun and his ax, kissed his family good-by and went away planning to live off the country as he traveled, as he always had.
One letter came back from California, the only one he ever wrote, since he had never before been separated from the one human being he had loved. He had had a gloriously adventurous time in getting out there, Indians, drought, snow, heat, grizzly bears—all the regulation accompaniments of the transcontinental trip in 1849. He struck it rich at once, and as one of the first on the ground had a wonderful claim of his own. They would all be rich in no time.
In no time he was dead.
For an interminable period his wife heard nothing, and then, very vaguely, that he had died of “mountain fever.” He had been dead and buried for months before she learned that she was a widow at thirty-two with five helpless little girls and not a penny in the world.