Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1

by George S. Boutwell

In the years 1849 and 1850 the town of Concord was represented by the Hon. Samuel Hoar, and he led in the defence of the College. He was no ordinary antagonist. First and last I have been brought into competition with many men of ability, and I have not often met a more able reasoner. He spoke without notes, his only aid being his pocket knife which he held in his right hand and dropped by regular processes into his left hand, where he changed the ends of the knife and then resumed the automatic process.

My own argument I have not read for many years, but it is not unlikely that it contains as much ingenuity as can be found in any argument that I have ever made. The movement attracted a good deal of interest in the State. The College was in control of the Unitarians exclusively, and it was far from prosperous. The final change of the Board of Overseers gave a popular character to the institution, and it was one of the elements of its recent prosperity. For the moment the managers of the College were very hostile to me, but in the course of ten years all feeling had disappeared, and I enjoyed the friendship of Presidents Sparks, Felton, and Walker.

The College conferred upon me the degree of LL.D. in 1851. That honor had no significance as it was given to every person who was elected Governor and that without regard to his learning, attainments, or services.* Subsequently, however, I was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences by the votes of those who were controlling the College. In 1861 I was invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration, and I was then made a member of the society. Since the opening of the war I have been at Cambridge on two or three occasions only, and my present acquaintance with the persons in power is very limited.

From 1844 to 1850 I received from Governor Briggs several appointments. In 1845 or '46 the Legislature passed an Act authorizing the appointment of railway commissioners. Governor Briggs sent me a commission, which I declined. The Board was never organized, and the act was soon repealed. I was also appointed a member of a commission on Boston Harbor. At the time the public were anxious about the fate of the harbor in consequence of the drainage into it by Charles River, and numerous minor channels. It was not then understood that all deposits by drainage could be removed by dredging. The members of the Commission were Judges Williams, Hopkinson, Cummins, the Hon. Chas. Hudson and myself. The three judges had then recently lost their offices by the abolition of the court of common pleas. Mr. Hudson had then recently left the United States House of Representatives, but whether voluntarily or upon compulsion I cannot say. He was a clergyman, a Universalist, but at an early age he had abandoned his profession for politics. After serving in the Massachusetts House, Senate and Council, he was elected to Congress from the Worcester district, for which he sat during four Congresses. He was a man of solid qualities without genius of any sort. He was distinguished in Congress as a Protectionist, and his speeches on the tariff question were widely circulated by the Whig Party. They were filled with statistics, and like all arguments based on statistics, they were subject to a good deal of criticism by the advocates of free trade.

The three judges were respectable, clear-headed gentlemen. Of Cummins the story is told that, when for the first time a plan of land was introduced in a real-estate case, he refused to consider the document, saying: "I will not allow a case to be won in my court by diagrams." Williams had been chief justice of the common pleas court and he was estimated as the superior among his associates upon the bench. Judge Hopkinson was from Lowell, where he had been a favorite of the ruling class in that city. He was a man of moderate ability. The work of the commission continued through several months, and some of its recommendations were adopted by the Legislature.

As the charters of all the banks in the State were to expire in 1850 or 1851, in the latter year, I think, the Legislature authorized the appointment of a board of commissioners for the examination of the banks. The Governor and Council appointed Solomon Lincoln, of Hingham, Joseph S. Cabot of Salem, and myself.

Mr. Lincoln was a kind, capable man of considerable learning, especially in Old Colony history and genealogy. His first question to bank officers often related to them personally, and when he found a man who traced his line to the Old Colony, he pressed him with questions until his whole history was disclosed. Mr. Cabot sometimes anticipated Mr. Lincoln, by saying at once, when we entered a bank, "Is there anybody here from the Old Colony?"

Mr. Cabot was a bachelor of fifty, and his ways were often odd, and occasionally they were disagreeable. He had a custom of never locking his sleeping-room door. Of this he often boasted. When we were at the American House, Worcester, Mr. Cabot said upon his appearance in the morning: "A very queer thing happened to me last night. When I got up my clothes were missing. At last I opened the door, and there they were in the hall. I supposed that I had been robbed. But I am all right," taking his wallet from his pocket. I said: "Have you looked in your wallet?" He opened it to find that the money had disappeared. We ventured to suggest that for a bank commissioner, he had not shown a great amount of shrewdness.

In the years 1849 and 1850 the commission examined all the banks in the State. Only one was found insolvent, a bank at Pawtucket on the Rhode Island line. The cashier, named Tillinghast, had been persuaded by a man named Marchant, of Rhode Island, to loan money without the knowledge of the officers of the bank. The loan, at the time of the discovery, amounted to sixty thousand dollars.

Upon the examination it appeared that there was a slight surplus of funds over the amount required by the statement. We insisted upon another examination. The cashier then reduced the balance by the statement that certain notes sent forward for collection had been discounted. It was impossible, however, to make the two sides of the account equal each other. At the end of the second day the cashier confessed the crime, and transferred his private property to the bank. Marchant did nothing. He came to the Rhode Island edge of the bridge, where we had some consultations with him, but without any result advantageous to the bank.