President Eliot in some speech, I think before the graduates of the Latin School, speaking of his life as a boy, said he had a great respect for his little self. I cannot say that of my young self at Harvard. My time was largely wasted in novel reading or reading books which had not much to do with the college studies, and lounging about in my own room or that of other students. I am not sure that the period of growth from sixteen to twenty is one when it is good for a youth to study hard. So far as my observation extends the poor scholars who have graduated at Harvard become as useful and eminent men in after life as the good scholars. I do not now think of any person, who has graduated first scholar since Edward Everett, who became in after life a very great man, although some of them have been very respectable. Judge Thomas Russell, who was first in the class before mine, was a very successful and brilliant man, performing admirably everything that he undertook. He was a good judge of the Superior Court, a good minister to Venezuela, a good advocate, and an excellent political speaker. But he never attained a place in the world equal to that of his classmate Gray, who, if I remember right, did not have a part at Commencement. Professor Child gained great distinction in his chosen field, but, I incline to think, would have gained the same distinction if he had devoted himself to the same pursuits and had never entered college at all. The first scholar in the class of 1843, the first class that graduated after I entered, was Horace Binney Sargent, a brave soldier, and the author of some beautiful and spirited war lyrics. But there were several of his classmates, including Thomas Hill, John Lowell and Octavius B. Frothingham, who attained much greater distinction. In the class of 1844 the first scholar was Shattuck Hartwell, a highly respectable and worthy gentleman, many years an officer in the Boston Custom House, who spent a large part of his life fitting pupils for college, while Francis Parkman, the historian, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, the mathematician, and Dr. John Call Dalton, the eminent physician, neither of whom had a very high record, became distinguished in after life. Among my own classmates, as I have already said, Judge Webb, Fitzedward Hall and Calvin Ellis attained very great distinction, although no one of them stood very high in rank. In the next class John Felton, Judge Endicott, Judge Charles Allen, and Tuckermann, the naturalist, were the persons who have been most famous in after life. I believe no one of them, except Felton who graduated the second scholar, ranked very high in college. I myself graduated with a fairly decent rank. I believe I was the nineteenth scholar in a class of sixty- six. When I graduated I looked back on my wasted four years with a good deal of chagrin and remorse. I set myself resolutely to make up for lost time. I think I can fairly say that I have had few idle moments since. I have probably put as much hard work into life as most men on this continent. Certainly I have put into it all the work that my physical powers, especially my eyes, would permit. I studied law in Concord the first year after graduation. I used to get up at six o'clock in the morning, go to the office, make a fire and read law until breakfast time, which was at seven in the summer and half- past in the winter. Then I went home to breakfast and got back in about three-quarters of an hour and spent the forenoon until one diligently reading law. After dinner, at two o'clock, I read history until four. I spent the next two hours in walking alone in the woods and roads of Concord and the neighboring towns, went back to the office at seven, read a little geometry and algebra, reviewing the slender mathematics which I had studied in college, and then spent two hours in reading Greek. I read through Thucydides, Homer and Xenophon's Hellenica and some other Greek books in that year. Sundays I went to church twice, but shut myself up in a room at home the rest of the day and read a great quantity of English literature, including Milton, Spencer, Chaucer, George Herbert, South's Sermons and other English classics, reading over again Butler's Analogy and Jouffroy. It has been said that if a man wish to acquire a pure English style he should give his days and nights to Addison. I say that if a law student wish to acquire a vigorous and manly English style, the fit vehicle for conveying weighty thoughts to courts or juries or popular assemblages, let him give his days and nights to Robert South.
I spent two years at the Law School after graduating from the College. I cannot state too strongly my great debt to it, and to Franklin Dexter, Simon Greenleaf, Joel Parker, and Theophilus Parsons. I have no remorse for wasted hours during those two years. The time in a Law School is never likely to be wasted if the youth have in him any spark of generous ambition. He sees the practical relation of what he is learning with what he has to do in life. The Dane Law School was then, and I suppose it is even more true of it now, a most admirable place for learning the science of law and preparing for its practice. The youth breathed a legal atmosphere from morning till night all the year round. He had the advantage of most admirable instruction, and the resources of a complete library. He listened to the lectures, he studied the text-books, he was drilled in the recitations, he had practice in the moot courts and in the law clubs. He discussed points of law in the boarding-house and on his walks with his companions. He came to know thoroughly the great men who were his instructors, and to understand their mental processes, and the methods by which they had gained their success. The title of old Nathan Dane to a high place on the roll of his country's benefactors, and to the gratitude of the profession of the law, and of all lovers of jurisprudence throughout the country cannot be disputed.
CHAPTER VIII 1846 TO 1850. FOUNDATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. DANIEL WEBSTER.
The foundation of the Republican party, and my personal memories of Daniel Webster, belong to the same period. I will not try to separate them.
The story I am to tell may seem trivial enough to my readers. But it is to me a very tender and sacred memory. The time was ripe for the great movement that abolished slavery. If no one of the eminent men of that day had ever lived other men would have been found in abundance for the work. If Massachusetts had failed in her duty some other State would have taken her place. But in the Providence of God it was given to Massachusetts to lead in this great battle and it was given to these men whom I have to name to be leaders in Massachusetts. I thank God that it was given to my eyes to behold it. The American people have had many great affairs to deal with since that day. They have had great trials and great triumphs. They have won renown among the nations. They have grown in wealth and in power. They have subdued a mighty rebellion. They have carried their flag in triumph to the ends of the earth. They have wrested the last vestige of power in this hemisphere from an old and proud nation who once occupied the place that England has since occupied and which it seems likely we are to occupy hereafter. They have resisted many strong temptations and acquired much glory. I am afraid they have of late yielded for a time to one strong temptation and missed an opportunity for still greater glory, that never will come back. But there was something in that struggle with slavery which exalted the hearts of those who had a part in it, however humble, as no other political battle in history.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.
And, surely, to be young was far nearer Heaven than Wordsworth found France in the opening of the French Revolution.
I became of age at just about the time when the Free Soil Party, which was the Republican party in another form, was born. In a very humble capacity I stood by its cradle. It awakened in my heart in early youth all the enthusiasm of which my nature was capable, an enthusiasm which from that day to this has never grown cold. No political party in history was ever formed for objects so great and noble. And no political party in history was ever so great in the accomplishment for liberty, progress and law.
I breathed a pure and bracing atmosphere in those days. It was a time of plain living and high thinking. It was a pretty good education, better than that of any university, to be a young Free Soiler in Massachusetts. I had pretty good company, not in the least due to any merit or standing of my own, but only because the men who were enlisted for the war in the great political battle against slavery were bound to each other by a tie to which no freemasonry could be compared. Samuel G. Howe used, when his duties brought him to Worcester on his monthly visit, to spend an hour or two of an afternoon in my office. I was always welcome to an hour's converse with Charles Allen, the man who gave the signal at Philadelphia for breaking away from the Whig Party. Erastus Hopkins occasionally spent a Sunday with me at my boarding house. When I went to Boston I often spent an hour in Richard Dana's office, and was sure of a kindly greeting if I chanced to encounter Sumner. The restless and ubiquitous Henry Wilson, who, as he gathered and inspired the sentiment of the people, seemed often to be in ten places at once, used to think it worth his while to visit me to find out what the boys were thinking of. In 1851 I was made Chairman of the Free Soil County Committee of Worcester County. I do not think there was ever so good a political organization in the country before, or that there ever has been a better one since. The Free Soilers carried all but six, I think, of the fifty-two towns in that county. I was in correspondence with the leading men in every one of them, and could at any time summon them to Worcester, if there were need.
We acquired by the Mexican War nearly six hundred thousand square miles of territory. When the treaty was signed, the struggle began between freedom and slavery for the control of this imperial domain. No reader of the history of Massachusetts will doubt her interest in such a struggle. Three things stood in the way of lovers of liberty in the Commonwealth.