BY MRS. E. F. ELLET.
MRS. LINCOLN.
The following letter (never before published) from Mrs. Mercy Warren to Mrs. Lincoln will be found interesting. Mrs. Lincoln was the eldest sister of Josiah Quincy, Jr., to whom allusion is made in the letter. Her husband, a brother of General Lincoln, died before the Revolution, and she resided, during the war, with her father, Josiah Quincy, at Braintree, now Quincy, in the mansion, now the summer residence, of President Quincy. One of her letters to her brother, Samuel Quincy, who left Boston with other loyalists, published in "Curwen's Memoirs" (page 562), is full of eloquence. She afterwards married Ebenezer Storer, of Boston, and died, at the age of ninety, in 1826, a few weeks after the decease of her early friend, John Adams. She was for many years a correspondent of Mrs. Adams, and a life-long friendship subsisted between them. They were often together at the family mansion at Quincy, where, in 1824, she welcomed Lafayette to her father's residence. The present Mrs. Quincy's mother, Mrs. Maria S. Morton, was there on that occasion. This lady had resided at Baskenridge, New Jersey, during a seven years exile from New York, where her husband, an eminent merchant, left part of his property, devoting the profits of the sale of the rest to the cause of American independence. He died during the war, leaving Mrs. Morton with six children. Washington and all his officers were frequent guests at her house, and some of the stirring incidents of the campaign in New Jersey occurred in her immediate neighborhood. She was born at Raub, on the banks of the Rhine, and lived to the age of ninety-three, passing the last twelve years with her daughter. She retained her powers to the last, and often beguiled the attention of President Quincy's children with the narrative of the times when, as he used to say, "the women were all heroines." She died at his residence at Cambridge.
Plymouth, June 3, 1775.
Dear Mrs. Lincoln: If the tenderest sympathy would be any alleviation to your sorrow, when mourning the death of a beloved brother, the ready hand of friendship should soon wipe the starting tear from your eye. Yet, while I wish to console the disappointed father, the weeping sister, and the still more afflicted wife, I cannot restrain the rising sigh within my swollen bosom, nor forbear to mix my tears with theirs, when I consider that, in your valuable brother, America has lost a warm, unshaken friend.[B] Deprived of his assistance when, to all human appearance, had his life been spared, he might have rendered his country very eminent service.
By these dark dispensations of Providence, one is almost led to inquire why the useful, the generous, the spirited patriot is cut off in the morning of his days, while the base betrayer of his country, the incendiary, who blows up the flames of civil discord to gratify his own mad ambition, and sports with the miseries of millions, is suffered to grow gray in iniquity.
But who shall say to the Great Arbiter of life and death, to the righteous Sovereign of the Universe, why hast thou done thus?
Not surely man, whose ideas are so circumscribed, and whose understanding can grasp so little of the Divine government, that we are lost at the threshold, and stand astonished at the displays of Almighty power and wisdom. But shall we not rely on Infinite goodness, however severe may be our chastisement, while in this militant state, not doubting that, when the ball of Time is wound up, and the final adjustment of the wise economy of the universe takes place, virtue, whether public or private, will be crowned with the plaudits of the best of beings; while the vicious man, immured in his cot, or the public plunderer of nations, who riots on the spoils of the oppressed and tramples on the rights of man, will reap the reward of his guilty deeds?
The painful anxiety expressed in your last letter for the complicated distresses of the inhabitants of Boston, is experienced, in a greater or less degree, by every heart which knows anything of the feelings of humanity. But He who is higher than the highest, and "seeth when there is oppression in the city," I trust will deliver us. He has already made a way for the escape of many, and if speedy vengeance does not soon overtake the wretched authors of their calamities, we must consider them as the scourge of God, designed for the correction of a favored people, who have been too unmindful of his goodness; and when they shall be aroused by affliction to a sense of virtue, which stimulated their worthy progenitors to brave the dangers of the sea, and the still greater horrors of traversing a barbarian coast, in quest of Freedom denied them on their native shore, the modern cankerworms will, with the locusts and other devourers which infested the nations of old, be swept, with the besom of destruction, from the face of the American World.
I hope my friend will not again be obliged to leave her habitation for fear of the ravages of an unnatural foe; yet I think we must expect continual alarms through the summer, and happy will it be for the British Empire, of which America is a part, if this contest terminate then. But, whether it be a season of war or the sunshine of peace, whether in prosperity or affliction, be assured Mrs. Lincoln has ever the best wishes of her real friend,