It is a rather remarkable fact that my mother had such close relations to so many eminent lawyers. Her father, though his public duties prevented him from practising law very long, was a very great lawyer and judge. Her brother-in-law, Judge Baldwin, was an eminent Judge of the Connecticut Supreme Court. Her cousin, Roger Minott Sherman, as has just been said, was an inmate of her father's household in her childhood, and was to her as a brother. She had, after his mother's death, the care of Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, her nephew, who was for many years at the head of the Connecticut Bar. To her nephew, William M. Evarts, my father's house was as another home in his boyhood. He was the leading advocate of his time. Her son, E. R. Hoar, was Attorney General of the United States. And her husband was in his day one of the foremost advocates of Massachusetts. So, with a little alteration, the Greek epitaph of the woman who was the daughter, wife, sister and mother of princes, might apply to her, if, as I like to think, a first-rate American lawyer is entitled to as much respect as a petty Greek prince.
CHAPTER III SAMUEL HOAR
I was born in Concord August 29, 1826. My grandfather, two great-grandfathers, and three of my father's uncles were at Concord Bridge in the Lincoln Company, of which my grandfather, Samuel Hoar, whom I well remember, was lieutenant, on the 19th of April, 1775. The deposition of my great-grandfather, John Hoar, with a few others, relating to the events of that day, was taken by the patriots and sent to England by a fast- sailing ship, which reached London before the official news of the battle at Concord came from the British commander. John had previously been a soldier in the old French War and was a prisoner among the Indians for three months. His life was not a very conspicuous one. He had been a Selectman of Lexington, dwelling in the part of the town afterward incorporated with Lincoln. There is in existence a document manumitting his slave, which, I am happy to say, is the only existing evidence that any ancestor of mine ever owned one.
My father's grandfather, on the mother's side, was Colonel Abijah Peirce, of Lincoln. He was prominent in Middlesex County from a time preceding the Revolutionary War down to his death. He was one of the Committee of the Town who had charge of corresponding with other towns and with the Committee of Safety in Boston. The day before the battle at Concord Bridge, he had been chosen Colonel of a regiment of Minute Men. But he had not got his commission, taken the oath, or got his equipments. So he went into the battle as a private in the company in which his son-in-law was lieutenant, armed with nothing but a cane. After the first volley was exchanged he crossed the bridge and took the cartridge-box and musket of one of the two British soldiers who were killed, which he used during the day. The gun was preserved for a long time in his family, and came to my grandfather, after his death. It was the first trophy of the Revolutionary War taken in battle. Such things, however, were not prized in those days as they are now. One of my uncles lent the musket to one of his neighbors for the celebration of the taking of Cornwallis, and it never was brought back. We would give its weight in gold to get it back.
I will put on record two stories about Colonel Peirce, which have something of a superstitious quality in them. I have no doubt of their truth, as they come from persons absolutely truthful and not superstitious or credulous themselves.
When Colonel Peirce was seventy years old, he told his wife and my aunt, her granddaughter, from whom I heard the story, who was then a grown-up young woman, that he was going out to the barn and going up to the high beams. In those days the farmers' barns had the hay in bays on each side, and over the floor in the middle rails were laid across from one side to the other, on which corn-stalks, for bedding the cattle, and other light things were put. They urged him not to go, and said an old man like him should not take such risks; to which he replied by dancing a hornpipe in the room in their presence, showing something of that exhilaration of spirit which the Scotch called being "fey" and which they regard as a presage of approaching misfortune. He went out, and within a few minutes fell from the high beams down to the floor and was instantly killed.
The other story is that a little while before this happened he said that he thought he saw the dim and misty figure of a ship pass slowly from one side of the barn to the other, under the roof.
A like story is told of Abraham Lincoln; that he used to see a vision of a ship before any great event, and that it came to him the night before he died.
I asked Mr. Secretary Hay about the Lincoln anecdote and give his reply.
DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON, April 18, 1903.