JAMES PARTON.
WRITER OF BIOGRAPHY.
HERE can be no higher public service than that of the man who gives to his fellows, and particularly to the rising generation, good biographies of noble men. If this be true, then James Parton must be ranked among those who have done most for Americans, for the series of books which began many years ago with a life of Horace Greeley and which ended, only two months before the author’s death with the biography of Andrew Jackson, has made the heroes of American history real live men for thousands of readers, has stirred the patriotism and aroused the ambition of many a boyish student, and has won for himself the respect and esteem which belong to literary achievements.
The ancestry of James Parton was French; his family having emigrated to England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
He was born in Canterbury, England, in 1822, and could just remember walking across the fields, in black clothes, at his father’s funeral. The solemn memory which thus took a strong hold upon his mind, was, perhaps, partly responsible for his dislike for ecclesiastical forms and particularly for the practice of formal “mourning.” His mother brought her little family to New York a year after her husband’s death, and James was educated in the schools of that city and at White Plains, New York. At the latter place he was in a boarding school where so much attention was paid to religion that nearly every boy who passed through it was a member of the church. He seems to have found something repellent in the manner of presenting Christianity, and although he became a teacher in the school and later held for some years a similar position in Philadelphia, he sympathized less and less with it until he came avowedly to give up all belief in supernatural religion. He was a very successful teacher and took great delight in his work and would probably have devoted his life to the schoolroom, had he not found himself unable to continue the custom of opening the sessions of school with prayer and on this account been compelled to give up his position. Returning to New York he became associated with N. P. Willis in conducting the “Home Journal” and thus began his career as a literary man. While so employed he remarked one day to a New York publisher, that a most interesting book could be made of the career of Horace Greeley, then at the summit of his power and fame as an editor.
The suggestion resulted in his being commissioned to prepare such a biography, the publisher advancing the funds which enabled Mr. Parton to spend several months in collecting materials among the people in New Hampshire and Vermont, who had known Mr. Greeley in his early life. The book made a great sensation and at once gave its author high standing in the literary world. He began to contribute to a number of leading periodicals on political and literary topics, and soon appeared as a public lecturer and found himself one of the most notable men of the day.
Mr. Parton was married in 1856 to Mrs. Sara Payson Willis Eldredge, whose brother, the poet, N. P. Willis, was his former associate. Mrs. Willis was a popular contributor to “The New York Ledger” and other papers, under the pen-name of “Fanny Fern,” and Mr. Parton was soon engaged in similar work, and later became a member of the editorial staff of the “Ledger” and closely associated with Mr. Robert Bonner. This was of the greatest advantage to him, as it furnished a steady income, while allowing him leisure in which to devote himself to the more serious works which were his real contribution to literature and upon which his fame rests. His next book was “The Life and Times of Aaron Burr,” which was prepared from original sources, and which made Burr a somewhat less offensive character than he was at that time generally thought to be. He next prepared a “Life of Andrew Jackson,” which finally met with great success, but which, being published at the beginning of the War of the Rebellion and being subscribed for largely in the South, involved both author and publisher in considerable immediate loss. For twenty years he labored upon a “Life of Voltaire,” giving to the study of the great European Liberal of the last century all the time and energy he could spare from the contributions which he must regularly supply to the “Ledger” and “The Youth’s Companion.” The “Life of Voltaire” was his only biography of a European character, and while he thought it his best work, and while it is a wonderful picture, not only of the life and character of the great Frenchman, but of manners and morals in Europe in the eighteenth century, the public interest in its subject was not so great, and its success by no means so complete as that which greeted his American biographies. He was greatly interested in the robust character of Gen. Benjamin Butler, and his next book was the story of the administration of the city of New Orleans, by him. He then offered to the public the first comprehensive study of the “Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin” that had appeared. This is, by many, thought to be his best book. It was followed by a “Life of Jefferson,” and later by three books drawn from his contributions to periodicals, “Famous Americans of Recent Times,” “Noted Women of Europe and America,” and “Captains of Industry.” His last work was a volume upon “Andrew Jackson” for the “Great Commanders” series.
After the death of “Fanny Fern” Mr. Parton took up his residence in Newburyport, Massachusetts, with Miss Eldredge, his wife’s daughter, who was charged with the care of an orphaned niece. This child had for several years been a member of his family, and had closely engaged his affection. The relations thus established resulted presently in the marriage of Mr. Parton to Miss Eldredge, a union, which, until his death in 1892, filled his life with joy and happiness. Mr. Parton took an active interest in the social life about him, joining frankly in every village enterprise and gradually acquiring very great influence in the community.
OLD VIRGINIA.
HEN John Rolfe, not yet husband of Pocahontas, planted the first tobacco seed in Jamestown, in 1612, good tobacco sold in London docks at five shillings a pound, or two hundred and fifty pounds sterling for a hogshead of a thousand pounds’ weight. Fatal facility of money-making! It was this that diverted all labor, capital and enterprise into one channel, and caused that first ship-load of Negroes in the James to be so welcome. The planter could have but one object,—to get more slaves in order to raise more tobacco. Hence the price was ever on the decline, dropping first from shillings to pence, and then going down the scale of pence, until it remained for some years at an average of about two pence a pound in Virginia and three pence in London. In Virginia it often fell below two pence; as, during brief periods of scarcity, it would rise to six and seven pence.
Old Virginia is a pathetic chapter in political economy. Old Virginia, indeed! She reached decrepitude while contemporary communities were enjoying the first vigor of youth; while New York was executing the task which Virginia’s George Washington had suggested and foretold, that of connecting the waters of the great West with the sea; while New England was careering gayly over the ocean, following the whale to his most distant retreat, and feeding belligerent nations with her superabundance. One little century of seeming prosperity; three generations of spendthrifts; then the lawyer and sheriff! Nothing was invested, nothing saved for the future. There were no manufactures, no commerce, no towns, no internal trade, no great middle class. As fast as that virgin richness of soil could be converted into tobacco, and sold in the London docks, the proceeds were spent in vast, ugly mansions, heavy furniture, costly apparel, Madeira wine, fine horses, huge coaches, and more slaves. The planters lived as though virgin soil were revenue, not capital. They tried to maintain in Virginia the lordly style of English grandees, WITHOUT any Birmingham, [♦]Staffordshire, Sheffield or London docks to pay for it. Their short-lived prosperity consisted of three elements,—virgin soil, low-priced slaves, high-priced tobacco. The virgin soil was rapidly exhausted; the price of negroes was always on the increase; and the price of tobacco was always tending downward. Their sole chance of founding a staple commonwealth was to invest the proceeds of their tobacco in something that would absorb their labor and yield them profit when the soil would no longer produce tobacco.
[♦] ‘Stafordshire’ replaced with ‘Staffordshire’
But their laborers were ignorant slaves, the possession of whom destroyed their energy, swelled their pride, and dulled their understandings. Virginia’s case was hopeless from the day on which that Dutch ship landed the first twenty slaves; and, when the time of reckoning came, the people had nothing to show for their long occupation of one of the finest estates in the world, except great hordes of negroes, breeding with the rapidity of rabbits; upon whose annual increase Virginia subsisted, until the most glorious and beneficial of all wars set the white race free and gave Virginia her second opportunity.
All this was nobody’s fault. It was a combination of circumstances against which the unenlightened human nature of that period could not possibly have made head.
Few men saw anything wrong in slavery. No man knew much about the laws that control the prosperity of States. No man understood the science of agriculture. Every one with whom those proud and thoughtless planters dealt plundered them, and the mother country discouraged every attempt of the colonists to manufacture their own supplies. There were so many charges upon tobacco, in its course from the planter’s packing-house to the consumer’s pipe, that it was no very uncommon thing, in dull years, for the planter to receive from his agent in London, in return for his hogsheads of tobacco, not a pleasant sum of money, nor even a box of clothes, but a bill of charges which the price of the tobacco had not covered. One of the hardships of which the clergy complained was, that they did not “dare” to send their tobacco to London, for fear of being brought into debt by it, but had to sell it on the spot to speculators much below the London price. The old Virginia laws and records so abound in tobacco information that we can follow a hogshead of tobacco from its native plantation on the James to the shop of the tobacconist in London.
In the absence of farm vehicles—many planters who kept a coach had no wagon—each hogshead was attached to a pair of shafts with a horse between them, and “rolled” to a shed on the bank of the stream. When a ship arrived in the river from London, it anchored opposite each plantation which it served, and set ashore the portion of the cargo belonging to it, continuing its upward course until the hold was empty. Then, descending the river, it stopped at the different plantations, taking from each its hogsheads of tobacco, and the captain receiving long lists of articles to be bought in London with the proceeds of the tobacco. The rivers of Virginia, particularly the James and the Potomac, are wide and shallow, with a deep channel far from either shore, so that the transfer of the tobacco from the shore to the ship, in the general absence of landings, was troublesome and costly. To this day, as readers remember, the piers on the James present to the wondering passenger from the North a stretch of pine planks from an eighth to half a mile long. The ship is full at length, drops down past Newport News, salutes the fort upon Old Point Comfort, and glides out between the capes into the ocean.
How little the planters foresaw the desolation of their Province is affectingly attested by many of the relics of their brief affluence. They built their parish churches to last centuries, like the churches to which they were accustomed “at home.” In neighborhoods where now a congregation of fifty persons could not be collected, there are ruins of churches that were evidently built for the accommodation of numerous and wealthy communities; a forest, in some instances, has grown up all around them, making it difficult to get near the imperishable walls. Sometimes the wooden roof has fallen in, and one huge tree, rooted among the monumental slabs of the middle aisle, has filled all the interior. Other old churches long stood solitary in old fields, the roof sound, but the door standing open, in which the beasts found nightly shelter, and into which the passing horseman rode and sat on his horse before the altar till the storm passed. Others have been used by farmers as wagon-houses, by fishermen to hang their seines in, by gatherers of turpentine as storehouses. One was a distillery, and another was a barn. A poor drunken wretch reeled for shelter into an abandoned church of Chesterfield County—the county of the first Jeffersons—and he died in a drunken sleep at the foot of the reading-desk, where he lay undiscovered until his face was devoured by rats. An ancient font was found doing duty as a tavern punch-bowl; and a tombstone, which served as the floor of an oven, used to print memorial words upon loaves of bread. Fragments of richly-colored altar-pieces, fine pulpit-cloths, and pieces of old carving used to be preserved in farm-houses and shown to visitors. When the late Bishop Meade began his rounds, forty years ago, elderly people would bring to him sets of communion-plate and single vessels which had once belonged to the parish church, long deserted, and beg him to take charge of them.
