Tuscan Spring

“You know, I suppose, the Charles Perkinses – with whom I lately spent an evening. Mrs. P. is spicy, and Mr. P. – sugary shall I say? – no, full of sweetness and light – especially sweetness.”
- Henry James

Charles Callahan Perkins was a young man in a hurry. As a sophomore he left Harvard in the spring before exams were complete and wanted to skip right to his senior year. He had a lot of enthusiasms, but his academic career was mediocre; he couldn’t wait to get out of college and go to Europe.

Going abroad at that time was thought by most to be self-indulgence; Art was regarded as a mere will-o'-the-wisp. An artist was considered by many to be a man who had taken to Art because he was fit for nothing better. Such attitudes didn’t deter Charles; as soon as he finished his course of studies, and gained some notice in music and art and graduated in 1843, Charles sailed for Europe. He had nothing holding him in Boston; he was fabulously wealthy, his mother was in New Jersey, and there was no “culture” in America.

Charles headed first to Rome, where he became the constant companion of the young sculptor Thomas Crawford, one of the first Americans to try his hand at carving sculpture. Crawford was working on his statue of Hebe and Ganymede, and struggling against poverty. Charles was never challenged by the need to make money, but rather by how to spend his wealth and spread his affections. He acquired Hebe and Ganymede, and eventually gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts back in Boston, and his warm support lifted Crawford out of his depression.

Charles headed to Paris where he indulged his enthusiasm for music. The opera, the conservatory, and the chamber concerts of Paris quickened his love and knowledge of music. He began to compose, and wrote several melodies and a few more serious works, some of which were performed to the acceptance of the Parisian critics. The Gazette de la France Musicale recognized him as a composer of some "grand symphonic works", and praised a number of his works, particularly the charming L'Excelsior which set his friend Longfellow's poem to music, (with versions in both English and French), but the critics also suggested that the young artist needed to make a choice between music and painting.

For most of the next twenty-five years, Europe was Charles’s home. He was passionate about all the arts. He studied painting in Paris with Ary Scheffer, a “frigidly classical” painter, mainly of the type of religious themes which showed up on Sunday School publications of the 1950’s. CC bought several of Scheffer’s paintings, and exhibited Scheffer’s Christus Consolator at the Athenaeum in 1852 (it showed up in a rural Minnesota church in 2007).

He travelled to Leipzig, where he studied the history of Christian art, and then returned to Paris where he learned the art of etching. Felix Bracquemond was friends with Millet and Corot, Degas and Rodin, had learned the trade of lithography as a youth, and then learned etching and engraving and played a major role in the revival of those arts. He instructed Charles in these arts, which he would use with his characteristic enthusiasm.

Charles returned briefly to Boston in 1849, where he founded and sometimes conducted the Handel and Hayden Society, then returned to Europe in 1851, to Leipzig, continuing his music studies. He travelled through Spain and sketched the countryside, and wrote about the museums he visited, the Alhambra, architecture, and military movements during the insurrection in Madrid in 1854.

~

Back again in Boston, Charles married Frances Davenport Bruen on June 12, 1855.

Fanny was the daughter of the Reverend Matthias Bruen, who had served as a missionary to the "saloon sodden wilderness" of Greenwich Village, and had gathered a flock of 10 souls together as the Bleeker Street Presbyterian Church, which eventually grew into today’s Broadway Presbyterian Church. Reverend Bruen died in 1829 when Fanny was only four, so she was raised by her mother Mary Ann Davenport (1793-1892) and her grandfather Matthias Bruen, the Perth Amboy tea merchant who was an enthusiastic collector of books, particularly early bibles and books of hours, and one of the richest men in America.

Within a year, Charles and Fanny had produced a beautiful daughter Eleanor, and the following year they returned to settle in Florence with Fanny’s mother Mary Ann and sister in tow. Two sons were born in Florence, Edward Clifford (1858), and Charles Bruen (1860).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning stayed in close touch from Rome, writing Mary Ann with concerns over the narrow escape of Charles’s brother Ned and sister Sarah and their mother from Perugia, and looked forward to joining them in Florence.

My dear Mrs. Bruen,
I do want to have a good happy letter from you this time about Mrs. Perkins. Pray tell me that she makes you all happy, & that the baby continues in its former prosperity. Your letter quite shocked me—for I had not realized to myself there having been so much danger & anguish among you though I had heard of illness. Shall you decide on leaving Italy for the summer, I wonder? Or will you go to Lucca as usual? I suppose we may say of the winter it is past; & yet we had such a return of gloom and chill (even in Rome) when we said so weeks ago that it requires courage to affirm anything. I had begun to go out, & was forced to leave it off. Only, the warmth during the last three or four days has been re-assuring. We shall be slow in returning to Florence, having, like slow snails, a house on our backs till June. But I mean to try to return before May is out. Our plans afterward are very uncertain. The more repose for me, the better I believe—even from good words & …works, perhaps. . .
Give my love to dear Mrs. Perkins, Miss Bruen—all of you. Let me have a word of good news if possible.

Affectionately yours, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Charles bought the Villa Capponi. The house, with its famous gardens and stunning view of Florence from the hills of Arcetri, (much admired in later years by Edith Wharton), was an old fortified farmhouse dating from the 14th century on a southern hillside overlooking the Arno valley. Surrounded by steep slopes of vineyards and olive groves, it has that Tuscan combination of architectural refinement within an ordered agricultural setting which exudes an air of dignity and domestic repose.

Charles sketched, painted watercolors, and etched. Mostly, he collected. He collected old masters, etchings, Tuscan sculpture; the 14th century head of a pope, an etching by Donatello, a head of Christ by della Robbia, a cast bronze coin by Pisanello; he bought a sword that had apparently been made for his ancestor Edmund Perkins in 1630; he bought a grey horse named Beppo in Venice to ride over the alps to Geneva.

Charles and Fanny entertained widely. At their home many recitals and concerts were given. They corresponded with Matthew Arnold, Longfellow, Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe. With Charles’s enthusiasm for art and music, and his wealth, he could go as far as his talent could take him. He drank the culture in as deeply as he possibly could; he was living a long way from gray old Boston.

Big Sister

Sarah Paine Perkins, the second child of James Perkins Jr and Eliza Green Perkins was named after her grandmother Perkins, and was always very close to her. Sarah was born in 1818 and was brought up at Pine Bank where the family moved after the Pearl Street mansion was given to the Athenaeum, and her grandfather died. Her older brother James died in 1824 when she was six, and her father passed away in 1828 when she was ten, and then her mother married Bishop Doane and moved to New Jersey, so Sarah stayed on where she was most comfortable, at Pine Bank with her grandmother and her younger brothers Ned and Charlie and Hal.

When she turned twenty she married a young man ten years her senior with literary inclinations. Henry Russell Cleveland had graduated from Harvard in 1827, was known to have clear judgment, a lively fancy, and an almost instinctive elegance of taste, and particularly enjoyed the English poets and the great Latin writers.

Henry had always been of delicate health, and after college he had headed west on the new canal to Geneseo where he had helped start an academy for boys. In Geneseo he contracted a fever, perhaps malaria, and almost died. His father was Vice-Consul in Havana so he visited Cuba in 1830, hoping the travel would help his health. He then travelled on to Europe; to England in 1831, and then on to Paris where he became private secretary to the American minister Rives and also secretary to the American Polish Committee where he became acquainted with Lafayette. He continued on to Geneva, and then to Florence, Rome, and Naples. When he finally returned to America in 1833 he became a proctor at Harvard. He certainly had literary inclinations, but, thinking practically, he started an academy in Boston and resumed his teaching career, documenting his methods in his book “Remarks on the Classical Education of Boys” (1834).

Henry formed an informal social group (a "mutual admiration society" in the words of one critic) called the Five of Clubs, which included the law partners Charles Sumner and George Hillard, the classicist Cornelius Felton, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The five young men met together at Pine Bank on Saturday afternoons, and talked of society and experiences and books and travels. They reviewed each others works and helped launch each others careers.

When he married Sarah in 1838, Henry's life changed. The marriage settlement stipulated that of her inheritance from her father, $30,000 would be paid to Henry as his own property. Beyond that sum, the inheritance would be given over to a trust, with the income to benefit Sarah free from the control of any husband. Soon after the marriage, he suffered an attack by a kind of nervous fever, which hung about him for some weeks, and he stopped teaching. He soon realized that his retiring habits and the delicacy of his organization gave him a strong preference for that "Domestic life, in rural leisure passed," which the poet Cowper pronounced to be so favorable to virtue and happiness.

From this period on the course of his life became placid and uneventful as, with the exception of a winter spent in Boston, a few months in Cambridge, and occasional visits to his wife's mother in New Jersey, he resided at the beautiful estate of Pine Bank.

His occupations were almost exclusively literary, though no inconsiderable portion of his time was devoted to the duties of a wide and generous hospitality. His friends long associated his smile of welcome and the cordial pressure of his hand with the breezy lawns of Pine Bank, the beautiful belt of trees which skirts its borders, its winding walks, and gentle waves that die away on its pebbled shore.

Henry's brother Horace had just returned from the "dream-land" of the west, and moved into Pine Bank as well. Horace joined into the literary activities of the Five of Clubs, and eventually went on to become one of America's first landscape architects and an associate of Frederick Law Olmsted (who would eventually turn Pine Bank into part of Boston's "Emerald Necklace"). Ralph Waldo Emerson hired Horace Cleveland to design Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, and then Horace returned west, to his "dream-land", where with a nod to his friendship to Longfellow and the Song of Hiawatha, he developed the Minneapolis park system including Minnehaha Park.

When her grandmother died in 1841, and with her mother in New Jersey with her second family, Sarah had to take care of her brothers. Charles had been suspended from Harvard in 1841 for leaving at the end of the term without permission and without passing his exams, and Sarah had to write to Longfellow to intercede with President Josiah Quincy to have Charlie reinstated. Her youngest brother Hal was expelled from Harvard for good in October 1842. She tried to help him become a farmer, but Hal, like his father, couldn't escaped his alcohol addiction and died young at the age of 25. She even took care of her mother when Bishop Doane got into severe financial distress because of the mortgages he had signed (along with funds from Charlie and Ned) made to found schools in New Jersey.

Her husband Henry Cleveland was never well. In 1841 he traveled on horseback with Charlie west through Greenfield, Charlemont, North Adams, and Williamstown, to Troy, and then back to Boston, but he developed a cough which stayed with him and made the trip uncomfortable for all. The following year he tried going back to Cuba and the Caribbean, and sailed to Bonaire, using the trip for his literary pursuits:

"I have studied Sales's Spanish Grammar entirely through, with care and attention, performing all the exercises twice; I have translated four books of Telemaque from the French into Spanish, carefully correcting my work by a Spanish translation; I have studied critically, and reviewed with care, two plays of Calderon, occupying two hundred pages; and in the same careful manner have studied through, three or four times, a volume of poetry, by Espronceda, a modern Spanish poet, the volume containing about three hundred pages. I have read Alison's History of the French Revolution, four volumes of Addison's works, all Byron's dramatic works, Dana's " Two Years Before the Mast," McKenzie's " Paul Jones," and Commodore Perry; besides a whole rabble rout of novels, tales, poems, romances, reviews, magazines, and newspapers, too numerous to be catalogued."

In May he took a steamboat for St. Louis, but his cough got progressively worse, and when he arrived he was carried to a hotel. He was feverish and bleeding from his lungs. Sarah and Charles had been summoned, and arrived in early June just in time to be with him as the last rites were administered. He died June 12th, 1843. The last words he spoke, addressed to his wife, were, "Whatever happens, we must trust in God."

Sarah returned to Pine Bank. Charlie took off to join Ned in Europe. Pine Bank seemed awfully big. Five years later, when Ned got engaged to Mary Spring, Sarah decided to give him the house.

She lived with Charlie at Oakwood on the north shore of the pond until she built her own house, Nutwood, in 1867, next door on the corner of Chestnut and Perkins Streets.

Sarah stayed in touch with Longfellow, and gave a complete set of Shakespeare to her favorite nephew Teddy when he married Edith Wharton in 1885. Sarah Paine Perkins Cleveland died, fifty years after her huband, in 1893.

Both sides of Chestnut Street on the Boston side were Perkins land until the area on the Ward's Pond side was sold to the Jamaica Plain Aqueduct Company to become parkland in the 1890's. Oakwood and Nutwood stood until the early 1970's when they became part of the Cabot Estate Condominiums and were demolished.

Pine Bank

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow fondly remembered Ned Perkins' wedding to Mary Spring. In the evening of June 10th, 1846, all the society of Boston drove out to the Perkins family country house Pine Bank on Jamaica Pond, where the Perkins gave a superb Fête Champêtre:

The evening, the blue lake, the boat with its white sail; the music, the dance on the greensward; the broad spreading tent, like a morning glory inverted, the well dressed crowd, the gleam of lamps through the gathering twilight, the young bride led by the white haired Mr. Otis, and then the fireworks, and as they drove away, the broad moon rose over the trees. . .

Ned inherited his mother’s loveliness and amiable manner. He was both attractive and gracious, and won friends among all sorts of men. Enthusiastic, even ardent, but perfectly simple, eager to enjoy, and as eager that others should enjoy what he did, he was a delightful companion.

He was the grandson of one of the richest men in America and had no reason or need to take up an “occupation”. Ned, a lover of books like his grandfather James, was a benefactor of the Athenaeum, for which he helped purchase part of George Washington's personal library. Longfellow shared his bibliophilia and invited Ned to join the Saturday Club. Without children of his own, he became a faithful, active trustee of St. Paul's School in 1862, where he was remembered for his constant punning and devising the school’s emblem of a pelican piercing its breast to feed its young with its own blood. He was a trustee of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and built an exquisite chapel in Northeast Harbor on his half-brother Bishop Doane’s property.

Those who knew him best thought the most of him. They appreciated his sweetness of disposition, his sense of honor, his purity, his desire to live uprightly and generously. Not blind to his defects, or dreaming that his nature had reached or closely approached maturity, his kindred and intimate friends thought him, and had every reason to think him, one of the most promising of young men.

After his marriage to Mary in 1848, Ned tore the original country house at Pine Bank down and built a year-round house. Pine Bank II was a substantial three-storied affair with mansard roof by a French architect, Jean Lemoulnier, which faced the Pond with a small terrace and balconied front entrance with fancy grillwork along the roofline.

Twenty years later, on the 10th of February, 1868 a housemaid kindled the fire in Mary's bedroom to be ready for her return from Boston. A chimney caught fire and burned furiously in the afternoon, but burned itself out.

When Mary and Edward returned early in the evening, they heard from the servants what had occurred, and carefully examined the rooms where the chimney passed and all seemed perfectly right, no smell or smoke or undue heat to be anywhere. The poor darlings being tired after a town day, took a little repose on the sofa, and Edward fell asleep. He was woken by a muffled explosion, and rushing to the window as he rushed upstairs, the glare of a large glow shone out from the burning roof and was reflected on the white lawn of snow.

The brick-work of the chimney must have cracked and opened during its burning, and burning embers must have dropped into the woodwork. Within 10 minutes all hope of saving the house had vanished. It was 7: 30 P. M. and the neighbors were all at their various homes and came so promptly, rich and poor, that all the furniture of second and lower stories, and all the books, pictures, the portraits of James and Sarah, bas-reliefs, even the chandeliers and several marble fire places were saved by their energy and kindness.

The night was very cold and very slippery. Later some rowdy men came and stole some things and many clothes, and as Pine Bank smoldered firemen emptied the superb wine cellar and consumed some excellent claret while tending the smoking ruins.

Ned started all over again on the still useable foundation. He had his cousin John Hubbard Sturgis design Pine Bank III, instructing him, "I want a house of moderate costs and dimensions". What he built was Gothic in red brick and imported English tan terracotta - a theme he had Sturgis repeat for the new Museum of Fine Arts built the following year at Copley Square (where the Copley Plaza Hotel now stands).

Frederick Law Olmstead had started work on Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system in 1878. Mary died at Pine Bank in 1882 at age 58. By then, commercial ice houses were taking over the pond, and a movement arose to protect the open space. In 1892, the City of Boston created Jamaica Park and tore down the houses on the pond. The only house left was Pine Bank, when it was decided to use it as a refectory for those visiting the park.

Ned removed the fireplace mantels and stained-glass windows, and went to live out his last years down the street with his niece Mrs. Cleveland in her house Nutwood, where, after three years of mental depression, he died in 1899.

“His wealth gave him the liberty to do as he pleased, but his nature drew him irresistibly to beauty and to service.”

Civil War

When news of the attack on Fort Sumter arrived in New York, nobody really knew what the public reaction would be, or what course the state should take. William M. Evarts met with five other prominent men in a private office on Pine Street on Tuesday after the firing on Sumter to feel the pulse of the people, and to call a public meeting. “We did not know whether we dared to do it, lest the fewness of the number should be counted and the game be lost; and then we did not dare take the Academy of Music, for fear our shrunken columns would display the poorness of the patriotism of New York.”
The arrival of the Civil War seemed to hit everyone as a surprise. Certainly the states had their differences, but what would separation actually mean? Nobody foresaw the bloodiness of the conflict that would come. As Henry Adams noted, “Not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wanted secession. The vast majority wanted to go on with their occupation in peace. Not one, however clever or learned, guessed what happened.”

Evarts was nervous that federal troops might be harassed in New York as they had just been in Baltimore. When the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, with Evarts, the Colonel, and the Mayor at the head, marched down Broadway the cheers of the crowds came as a great relief. The public meeting was a great success and a Union Defense Committee was formed with Evarts as secretary, and it soon organized sixty-six regiments and expedited the movement of troops and supplies to the front lines.

~

Evarts had campaigned for Zachary Taylor in 1848; when Taylor won, William Seward managed to have Prescott Hall appointed district attorney for the southern district of New York, and Evarts became Hall’s assistant DA. The United States had a history of citizens launching freelance military schemes, from Aaron Burr’s journey down the Ohio River, to the adventures against the Indian territories which Evarts's father had opposed. As Assistant DA, Evarts had instructions to enforce the neutrality act and to stop various filibustering expeditions to Cuba and Latin America. Evarts placed marines aboard the ships in New York Harbor chartered by Narciso Lopez, who was plotting to liberate Cuba and he seized the ship Kate Boyd, which was loaded with munitions bound for Haiti.

After the end of the war with Mexico, the issue of slavery dominated political debate. Evarts helped form the Republican Party in New York in 1856. When Governor William Seward campaigned for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1860, Evarts was chairman of the New York delegation and nominated Seward at the convention. Seward, as leader of the "irrepressibles" was the strongest voice against slavery, and came into the convention the establishment favorite. He led for the first two ballots, but Horace Greeley led the opposition and eventually the more conservative westerner Lincoln took the lead and finally won the nomination. It was a crushing blow to the Seward camp; Thurlow Weed burst into tears, but Evarts quickly made his way to the stage of the “Wigwam”, mounted the secretary’s table, and with great emotion moved the unanimous approval of Lincoln’s nomination. As Evarts left the Wigwam, he turned to his fellow delegate and remarked, with his characteristic dry humor: "Well, Curtis, at least we have saved the Declaration of Independence!"

Lincoln carried New York, Seward became Secretary of State, and Evarts name was soon floated to succeed Seward as senator. His name was placed in nomination and he led Horace Greeley through two ballots, until the Thurlow Weed / Horace Greeley feud boiled over and the dark horse Harris eventually won.

~

During the war Evarts was retained by the the government to prosecute Confederate privateers. The Confederate ship Savannah had left Charleston and captured a northern merchant ship, before being captured herself by a northern warship. The crew was paraded through New York and taunting crowds demanded they be hanged. The United States had always permitted privateering in wartime, and while President Lincoln had declared Confederate privateers to be pirates, a convic tion would probably have led to Confederate reprisals. The issue, which Evarts wiggled around, came down to the question of whether in a civil war a crew had any rights as belligerents, or (anticipating the questions still being asked in Guantanamo) were deemed unlawful combatants.

The British were allowing ships, such as the Florida, to be built and go to sea and then capture American merchantmen. Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in England, feared the rapid destruction of the merchant marine. Seward telegraphed Evarts in April of 1863 requesting him to sail to London to assist Adams on the legal matters of enforcing neutrality. The Alexandra, another Confederate cruiser was said to be almost ready in Liverpool, and more ships were being built.

Great Britain proclaimed neutrality, but it was an uneasy neutrality which kept Lincoln and Seward nervous. England had abolished slavery in 1833, but the real politick was that the English were concerned about the growing power of the United States, and perceived the British interests might best be protected if secession split the growing country in two.

~

On the wall of the front room of our house in Bennington, I have a framed fragment of the flag of the USS Kearsarge, given to me when my mother moved out of the High Street house in Bethlehem. The note on the back, obviously typed by my father, reads:

“The Kearsarge was an important ship of the Union’s navy in the time of the Civil War. 1861-1864. The Alabama was a smaller, but faster, sailing ship, built for the Confederancy in England, which was a very successful blockade runner and thorn in the side of the Union Blockading ships.

After a lengthy series of cruises, during which she did a good deal of harm to the Union cause, the Alabama was caught, outside of the French seaport of Cherbourg, in 1864, trying to evade the Union’s ship, the Kearsarge. She was heavily outgunned and, as a sailing vessel only, was less manoeverable than her enemy which had auxiliary steam propulsion. The Alabama was sunk.

This little piece of flag – actually a bit of the “pennant” was given to my Grandfather, whose name was the same as mine, by Mary Winslow, whose father was the Captain of the Kearsarge, in 1869."

~

Evarts went to London with letters of introduction from George Bancroft and Charles Sumner to Anthony Trollope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Baring, and William Gladstone. Arriving in London, Evarts drove a two-horse brougham about the city, making the acquaintance of the rich and powerful. He presented himself well; the Chief Justice Lord Coleridge found him “a very able man, full of good sense and moderation . . . He is a little hard, perhaps, but very clever, reasonable, and a gentleman.”

Henry Adams, working as his father’s secretary, was twenty years younger than Evarts but the two hit it off right away, talking incessantly of the law and the war and the need for reform at home. Adams noted how Evarts still smarted from the race for senator and was soured on his political luck.

“If you could have seen Evarts and me after dinner at one of those little colleges, conducting a noisy and jovial game of whist, with cigars and brandy and soda-water . . . You recollect, no doubt, that he wears his hat so that a plumb line dropped from its center would fall about twelve inches behind his heels. His speech is Yankee and his aspect shouts American with stentorian lungs. Fortunately his conversation and his mind make up for the peculiarities of dress and appearance, so that I was always relieved when he took off his hat and opened his mouth.”

Evarts lobbied the British to detain the Alexandra, which they finally did. When the case came to trial, the judge charged the jury that British neutrality laws aimed to prevent hostilities in British waters only, and forbade armament in port; but once outside British waters, a vessel could be armed. In other words, British shipbuilders could supply the Confederates with all the warcraft they could buy, if they were not armed within British ports (in my copy of Barrow’s biography of Evarts, my father noted in the margin: “Roosevelt’s Airplanes and Wilson’s Submarines”).

Returning to the US, Evarts urged Lincoln to visit Europe, but the gawky Lincoln replied that he would feel embarrassed to meet men of such great classical learning. Evarts, on the other hand, loved the give-and-take of puns and intellect, and invited George Bancroft to bring Sir Henry Holland, the travel writer, to visit his farm at Windsor: "I will show you the ignoble pen from which, in the shape of pork, your elegant pen has received some of its sense and strength."

~

Chief Justice Taney died in October 1864, and Evarts name was bandied about as a successor. The Court of Appeals unanimously petitioned Lincoln to appoint Evarts: “He is preeminent for his refinement, courtesy, and dignity of his manner, and these qualities are not undeserving of consideration in a man who is to occupy the place heretofore filled by a Jay, Ellsworth, Marshall, and Taney.”

Evarts, who never lacked self-confidence, concurred in a letter to Richard Henry Dana: “Aside from Gov. Chase I am justified in thinking that many things concur to make me a very prominent, if not the most prominent candidate.”

Chase of course felt differently: “Evarts is a man of sterling abilities and excellent learning and a much greater lawyer than I ever pretended to be. The truth is, I always thought myself much over-estimated. And yet I think I have more judgment than Evarts, and that tried by the Marshall standard, I should make a better judge.”

Chase got the job, and again Evarts was disappointed.

~

The end of the war came in sight shortly after the election. Lincoln was sworn in to his second term on March 4th, 1865.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

The war officially ended on April 9;

Lincoln was shot to death at Ford’s Theater April 14th.

Printer's Devil

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down until the average is three letters and a half. I can put 1,200 words on your page, and there's not another man alive that can come within two hundred of it. My page is worth $84 to me. It takes exactly as long to fill your magazine pages with long words as it does with short ones - four hours. Now then, look at the criminal injustice of this requirement of yours. I am careful, I am economical of my time and labor. For the family's sake I've got to be so. So I never write 'metropolis' for 7 cents, because I can get the same money for 'city.' I never write 'policeman,' because I can get the same price for 'cop'. And so on and so on. I never write 'valetudinarian' at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for 7 cents; I wouldn't do it for 15.

-Mark Twain

When he was twelve years old Samuel Clemens became apprenticed to his older brother Orion as a printer’s devil on the Hannibal Journal, handsetting type, and contributing an occasional story. In 1853 when he turned eighteen he headed east, working in Philadelphia and New York City. In this era of handset type his skill was in constant demand so he joined the printer’s union, jobbed around, and educated himself in the evenings in the public libraries. He returned to the Midwest after a few years, setting type and writing a few articles in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Keokuk, Iowa, until he met riverboat captain Horace Bixby in 1857.

Bixby agreed to train him as a riverboat pilot. Between 1858 and 1861, Clemens left behind the drudgery of printing to learn the romance and the ways of the Mississippi River, and he piloted steamboats between St. Louis and New Orleans until the Civil War stopped river traffic in 1861. Signing up as a soldier, he spent two weeks with the Marion Rangers, a ragtag Union militia, and then “lit out for the territories”, following his brother Orion who had become secretary to James W. Nye, the Governor of Nevada Territory.

It was in Nevada in 1863, while writing for the Virginia City Enterprise, that Clemens first became the writer Mark Twain. Within two years he moved to San Francisco to continue his newspaper career writing for the Morning Call and the Californian, and here he first met other writers, including Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard. Like many celebrities, Clemens took on a new identity as he reinvented his life, and when he became Mark Twain he embarked on a life-long quest to get rich, be famous, and be accepted and honored as a writer of serious literature.

In 1866 he sailed to the Sandwich Islands as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. On his return to California he started to lecture on his travels and soon travelled east to New York to lecture and to publish his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. Following his success he continued east on a pilgrimage cruise to Europe and the Holy Land and as a result of friendships he made on the cruise was introduced to his future wife Olivia Langdon when he returned to New York City in 1867.

In 1868 he finished his account of his trip, The Innocents Abroad and heavily courted Livy, the daughter of a wealthy timber and coal merchant, Jervis Langdon, from Elmira, NY. Livy was thoughtful and deep and an original in her own way and balanced Sam's often impetuous nature. “I take as much pride in her brains as I do in her beauty‚ & as much pride in her happy & equable disposition as I do in her brains.”

The next year they became engaged and he purchased one third ownership in the Buffalo Express with help from his future father-in-law. By the time he was 35 years old, through his own creativity and a good marriage, Sam Clemens had risen from rural printer’s devil to metropolitan publisher.

When The Innocents Abroad was published Mark Twain became a bestselling author, and after meeting William Dean Howells in Boston he became an esteemed member of the literary establishment as well. Like many celebrities of our day Mark Twain developed an outsized life style which demanded that he continued to generate wealth through his writings, constant lectures, and business ventures. He cultivated relationships not only with the literati, but also with the industrial magnates, such as Henry Rogers of Standard Oil, and Andrew Carnegie. In 1871, seeking literary companionship, he sold his interest in the Buffalo Express and moved his family to Nook Farm in Hartford to become part of the community started by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In 1873, in the book he coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner, he coined the term The Gilded Age and in his own life style also came to represent the excesses of that era. He led a grand life, which required a grand income. He consistently invested in business ventures to support his travels; when those businesses failed he was forced to continue his writing and lecturing to bail out his debts. Fortunately in 1876 he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and in 1877 marketed the Mark Twain Self-Pasting Scrapbook which actually worked and was somewhat successful. He started traveling abroad more, visiting Bermuda, and then living in Germany, Italy, France, and England until 1879.

The stereotype image of Mark Twain is of the frontier humorist. Before the civil war, the word "stereotype" referred to the process of creating a duplicate printing plate by molding a form of print-ready type with paper mache and then filling the mold with soft metal such as lead. "Cliche" was the noise made when the hot metal filled the cool mold. Mark Twain never fit into a stereotype, and abominated cliches. He did however invest (and lose) over $50,000 in the Kaolotype stereotype process, which used a clay to form the mold. As a writer, Twain wrote as much about his adventures abroad (Innocents Abroad, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the Prince and the Pauper) as he did about the west, and he spent (wasted) as much time managing his investments in technology as he did in writing.

One of Samuel Clemens most substantial investments was in the Paige Typositor. James W. Paige obviously never heard of the principle of Occam’s Razor, which posits that the simplest solution to a problem is usually the best. Paige first worked on mechanically setting type around 1873, and within two years had developed a composing machine. However, it couldn’t justify (spread type across a column), and it couldn’t distribute used type back into its storage cases.

It was difficult to raise capital, as no one believed it possible to automatically justify a line of type, but Clemens, who had spent his youth handcasting type, and his adult career trying to capitalize on his literary creations, understood the incredible potential of a typesetting machine.

Gutenberg had revolutionized printing in the late 1400’s when he developed a system for casting molded moveable metal type. By the nineteenth century, mechanization had started to transform many industries with improvements in looms, the sewing machine, metal fabrication, paper, guns and machine tools. Printing presses had gained speed with improvements such as the Hoe rotary press, but the actual setting of type was still a laborious hand process, where the typesetter would select an individual letter, set it in place, and then, when the piece had been printed, would distribute the letters back to their individual storage places. It was a process that begged for automation.

Clemens, the old printer’s devil, invested his first royalties from Huckleberry Finn in Paige's new machine. Paige set out to create more than a mere machine; he aimed to create a compositor "in the truest sense of the word, as it performs simultaneously all the work of a human compositor." By 1881, Paige had completed a machine which both composed and distributed type, but still without justification. Working with the Pratt & Whitney Company, he was able to automatically justify type by 1887. Clemens loved to watch the machine click and clack and set line upon line, and was heard to exclaim, 'We only need one more thing, a phonograph on the distributor to yell, "Where in Hell is the printer's devil, I want more type!" ‘

The Paige patent has been called the most voluminous ever taken out in the history of invention. One patent examiner died while the case was pending, another died insane, and the patent attorney who originally prepared the case also died in an asylum. The noted printer Theodore De Vinne said, when someone compared the Paige compositor to the Jacquard loom: 'True, but the Paige compositor unravels any old fabric, and from it reweaves any new design which the imagination of man can conceive.'

Paige continued to tinker with the machine, and Clemens continued to invest. In all, Clemens invested over $300,000 in the invention. Paige brought it to Chicago in 1892, and it was put in service at the Chicago Herald in 1894, where it worked well. But by then Otto Merganthaler’s Linotype, a simpler machine which cast type from molten lead, had established itself in the field.

I am a compositor-expert, of old and seasoned experience; nineteen years ago I delivered the final-and-for-good verdict that the linotype would never be able to earn its own living nor anyone else’s: it takes fourteen acres of ground now, to accommodate its factories in England.

Publish or ?

My classmate Charlie Scribner once wrote, “If you want to start a publishing company, the first thing you need to do is marry the daughter of the richest man in America”.

Charlie's great-grandfather, the first Charles Scribner married the daughter of John Insley Blair who started the country store in Butt’s Bridge, New Jersey. Blair began his career as postmaster of Butts Bridge in 1825, and decided the town needed to upgrade its image. The town changed its name to Gravel Hill, and then fifteen years later, with Blair evidently clearly in control of his community, it changed its name again to Blairstown.

John Blair, invested in the Lackawanna Coal and Iron Company (which eventually became part of Bethlehem Steel in 1922) in 1846 when it started rolling the first iron railroad rails in the USA. Blair then got into the railroad business, investing in the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western in 1852, and the Union Pacific in 1860, just as rail lines grew explosively across the country. He eventually managed 16 railroad companies from his own private railcar, which travelled throughout his empire and routinely logged over 40,000 miles a year on the rails. Blair was the largest owner of rail mileage in the world and, like THP, became one of the richest men in America.

Charles Scribner married Blair's daughter Emma in 1846 and started the publishing firm that same year that would become Charles Scribners Sons. Starting an independent publishing company was something of an innovation at that time. Most established houses were either printers, like the Harper Brothers who ventured into publishing to provide work for their presses; or a bookseller like William T. Armstrong who might publish a title to supply extra books to sell in his store.

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Blair had followed the Perkins lead in becoming an early adopter of industrial technology. The Perkins brothers invested heavily in the Monckton Iron Company near Lake Champlaign in Vermont during the War of 1812, started the Perkinsville Manufacturing Company in a mill just outside of Windsor in 1829, and founded the first commercial railroad in America in 1826. The Granite Railroad in Quincy, Mass, moved giant blocks of granite from the quarry in Quincy two and three quarter miles to the Neponset River to be transported by barge to Charlestown for the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument.

William Ticknor, the publisher, had first suggested a monument commemorating the Revolutionary War battle, and Thomas Handasyd Perkins assembled a committee at his house to get the project moving. The design committee included Daniel Webster, George Ticknor, Gilbert Stuart, and Washington Allston. An obelisk design was selected and the corner-stone was laid on June 17, 1825 by Lafayette on his anniversary tour, with Daniel Webster delivering the oration. The celebration was unequalled by anything previously seen in New England.

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In 1980 I married Cathy Clark, from Cooperstown, New York. By then, the family fortune had been substantially reduced.

When I told my father that I was interested in this attractive redhead, Cathy Clark, from Cooperstown, he seemed unusually interested, and much later I found out that he called up Sheldon and Caroline Keck, the art restorers who had cleaned the Stuart portrait and lived in Cooperstown, to enquire as to the suitability of the match.

Caroline Keck, was well known for her strong opinions and had served as personal conservator for Georgia O’Keeffe and Nelson A. Rockefeller. “Oh, no”, she told my father, “Those are the nice Clarks”, with whom they regularly played bridge, and not the Clarks of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune.

I borrowed money from my father, and, with Phil Zuckerman, my classmate from DU, started an independent publishing company, Applewood Books. We joked that Phil was related to Mort Zuckerman, who had just bought the Atlantic Monthly, but actually Phil came from Levittown on Long Island. We were pretty much on our own.

The times were calling for a fresh approach to publishing. Unpublished and “mid-list” writers were finding it increasingly difficult to be published. The rise of mass media, especially television, and the rise of chain stores such as B. Dalton and Walden Books and the decline of the “carriage trade” were giving rise to the “blockbuster syndrome”. Returns were endemic with some houses seeing returns of thirty to fifty percent.

“A Bushel of New Writers for a New Generation of Readers” was our slogan. We developed some promising writers (Eric Kraft, Alan Cheuse, Richard Elman), and published some entertaining books (Peter Leroy, The Bohemians, Cocktails at Somozas). We were soon being featured in the Boston Globe Magazine and our books were being reviewed in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times.

Phil and I bought two Radio Shack TRS-80 computers, and running Scripsit we set copy for our books (except for Eric Kraft who used his own Wang word processor). We went to Altertext on Brattle Street in Cambridge with their black boxes to convert from one language to another, and then to Compuworks on Mass Ave. where we rented time on its Compugraphic typesetters.

One day, two visiting Chinese publishers came to town and visited our offices. This was in the early eighties, before contact with China became common, but Phil's wife Disty had studied acupuncture in Taiwan and spoke Chinese. I explained with delight to the visiting dignitaries how just two people could run a publishing company using this new technology. I received a blank stare, and envisioned the millions of people in China willing to set copy by hand.

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By 1985, the market forces waved the invisible hand. Lacking the subsidization of great family wealth, my career as an independent publisher came to an end.