Roger Brett had four sons, of whom two died young and unmarried, and two, Francis and Robert, married, and left many children. Whether the Catharine Brett who married Bernard Hart was descended from Francis or from Robert is not certainly known. Francis Brett’s wife was a descendant of Cornelius Van Wyck, one of the earliest settlers on Long Island. Robert Brett’s wife was a Miss Dubois.
Such was the ancestry of Bret Harte’s paternal grandmother. Her son, Henry Hart,[2] lived with her until, on May 5, 1817, he entered Union College, Schenectady, as a member of the class of 1820. He remained in college until the end of his Senior year, and passed all his examinations for graduation, but failed to receive his degree because a college bill amounting to ninety dollars had not been paid. The previous bills were paid by his mother, “Catharine Hart.” Alas! the non-payment of this bill was an omen of the future. Henry Hart and his illustrious son were both the reverse of thrifty or economical. Money seemed to fly away from them; they had no capacity for keeping it, and no discretion in spending it. Unpaid bills were the bane of their existence. Henry Hart’s improvidence is ascribed, in part, by those who knew him, to the irregular manner in which his father supplied him with money, Bernard Hart being sometimes very lavish and sometimes very parsimonious with his son.
Henry Hart was a well-built, athletic-looking man, with rather large features, and dark hair and complexion. His height was five feet ten inches, and his weight one hundred and seventy pounds. He was an accomplished scholar, speaking French, Spanish and Italian, and being well versed in Greek and Latin. He passed his short life as school-teacher, tutor, lecturer and translator.
On May 16, 1830, he married Elizabeth Rebecca, daughter of Henry Philip Ostrander, an “upstate” surveyor and farmer, who belonged to a prominent Dutch family which settled at Kingston on the Hudson in 1659. It will be remembered that the hero of Bret Harte’s story, Two Americans, is Major Philip Ostrander. The mother of Elizabeth Ostrander, Henry Hart’s wife, was Abigail Truesdale, of English descent. Henry Hart was brought up by his mother in the Dutch Reformed faith, but soon after leaving college, owing to what influence is unknown, he became a Catholic, and remained such until his death. His wife was an Episcopalian, and his children were of that, if of any persuasion.
In 1833 we find Henry Hart at Albany, and there he remained until 1836, the year of Bret Harte’s birth. In 1833 and 1834, he was instructor in the Albany Female Academy, a girls’ school, famous in its day, where he taught reading and writing, rhetoric and mathematics. Early in 1835 he left the Academy, and for two years he conducted a private school of his own at 15 Columbia Street, but this appears not to have been successful, for he ceased to be a resident of the city in the latter part of 1836, or early in 1837. One event in Henry Hart’s life at Albany is significant. In December, 1833, a meeting was held in the Mayor’s Court Room to organize a Young Men’s Association, which proved to be a great success, and which has played an important part in the life of the city down to the present day. Henry Hart, though a comparative stranger in Albany, was chosen to explain the objects of the Association at this meeting, and at the next meeting he was elected one of the Managers. When Bret Harte came East from California, he went to Albany and addressed the Association, upon the invitation of its members.
After leaving Albany the family led an unsettled, uncomfortable life, going from place to place, with occasional returns to the home of an Ostrander relative in Hudson Street in the city of New York. The late Mr. A. V. S. Anthony, the well-known engraver, was a neighbor of Bret Harte in Hudson Street, and played and fought with him there, when they were both about seven or eight years old. Afterward they met in California, and again in London. From Albany the Henry Hart family went to Hudson, where Mr. Hart acted as principal of an academy; and subsequently they lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey; in Philadelphia; in Providence, Rhode Island; in Lowell, Massachusetts; in Boston and elsewhere.
A few years before her death Mrs. Hart read the life of Bronson Alcott, and when she laid down the book she remarked that the troubles and privations endured by the Alcott family bore a striking resemblance to those which she and her children had undergone. Some want of balance in Henry Hart’s character prevented him, notwithstanding his undoubted talents, his enthusiasm, and his accomplishments, from ever obtaining any material success in life, or even a home for his family and himself. But he was a man of warm impulses and deep feeling. When Henry Clay was nominated for the Presidency in 1844, Henry Hart espoused his cause almost with fury. He gave up all other employment to electioneer in behalf of the Whig candidate, and the defeat of his idol was a crushing blow from which he never recovered. It was the first time that a really great man, as Clay certainly was, had been outvoted in a contest for the Presidency by a commonplace man, like Polk; and Clay’s defeat was regarded by his adherents not only as a hideous injustice, but as a national calamity. It is not given to every one to take any impersonal matter so seriously as Henry Hart took the defeat of his political chieftain; and his death a year later, in 1845, may justly be regarded as a really noble ending to a troubled and unsuccessful life.