It has been said that no dispute could ever stand before Brother Jonathan; it would melt away like snow on an April day when he lifted his benignant eyes and put the finger of one hand on the other, and said, “Let me make it clear to you.”
Queer old Samuel Peters, the Episcopal agent, or missionary in the colony, made so much fun of the good people in his History of Connecticut, and so led England and America to laugh by his marvelous anecdotes and description of the blue-laws, that the really thrifty and heroic character of these people has been misjudged.
A wonderful family had Brother Jonathan. His children who lived to become of age became famous, and they were all remarkable as children. Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., could read Virgil at five, and had read Homer at twelve, and could talk with his father in Latin and Greek, and discuss Horace and Juvenal when a boy. He, as we have said, became a great painter, and commenced by drawing pictures in the sand which was sprinkled on his father’s floor. They used “herring-bone” to tidy rooms in those days, spare rooms, by dusting clean sand on the floor, in a wavy way, leaving the floor in the angles of a herring-bone. We do not know that it was in such herring-boning sand that young Trumbull began to draw pictures, but it may have been so.
We have visited the rooms in the old perpendicular house where he began to draw. His good father did not approve of his purpose to become a painter, but he thought that genius should be allowed to follow its own course. A man is never contented or satisfied outside of his natural gifts and haunting inclinations. So the battles into which his father’s spirit entered, John made immortal by painting, and his work may be seen not only in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington, but in the “Trumbull Collection” at Yale College.
Young Trumbull was led to continue to paint by his sisters Faith and Mary, who went to Boston to school. This was the Copley age of art in Boston. You may see Copley’s pictures at the Art Museum, Boston, and among them the almost living portrait of Samuel Adams. When these girls returned from visits to Boston, Mary began to paint inspiring pictures and to adorn the rooms with them.
She and her brother studied the lives and works of the old masters. How? We do not know, but genius makes a way.
A thrifty farmer and merchant was Col. Jonathan Trumbull in his young days. You laugh at these old-fashioned men, but look at what this man, who could discuss Homer and Horace with his boys, and the arts of Greece with his girls, accomplished through the good judgment and private thrift in his early life. Says his principal biographer, G. W. Stuart, of the fine young farmer, who had ships on the sea, and was beginning to turn from a farmer to a notable merchant:
“So the first years of Trumbull’s life as a merchant passed in successful commerce abroad, in profitable trade at home, and with high reputation in all his contacts, negotiations, and adventures. And ‘his corn and riches did increase.’ A house and home-estate worth over four thousand pounds; furniture, and a library, worth six hundred pounds; a valuable store adjacent to the dwelling; a store, wharf, and land at East Haddam; a lot and warehouse at Chelsea in Norwich; a valuable grist-mill near his family seat at Lebanon; ‘a large, convenient malt-house;’ several productive farms in his neighborhood, carefully tilled, and beautifully spotted with rich acres of woodland; extensive ownership, too, in the ‘Five-mile Propriety,’ as it was called, in Lebanon, in whose management as committeeman, and representative at courts, and moderator at meetings of owners, Trumbull had much to do; a stock of domestic animals worth a hundred and thirty pounds—these possessions, together with a well-secured indebtedness to himself, in bonds, and notes, and mortgages, resulting from his mercantile transactions, of about eight thousand pounds, rewarded, at the close of the year 1763, the toil of Trumbull in the field of trade and commerce. In all it was a property of not less than eighteen thousand pounds—truly a large one for the day—but one destined, by reverses in trade which the times subsequently rendered inevitable, and by the patriotic generosity of its owner during the great Revolutionary struggle, to slip, in large part, from his grasp.”
Here is a picture of thrifty life in a country village estate in old New England days.