Progress

Windsor, Vermont, where the Republic of Vermont was declared in 1777, is sandwiched between Mt. Ascutney, which rises three thousand feet just east of the town, and the Connecticut River. By 1820, it grew to become a thriving center for trade and agriculture and the state's largest town. In 1835, a dam was built across Mill Brook to provide water power, and as factories began to make guns and machinery, as well as tinware, furniture and harness, the region became known as the Precision Valley.

On August 30, 1843, in Windsor, William M. Evarts married Helen Wardner, whom he had met the year he taught school in Vermont. Helen was an attractive woman and the intellectual match of her husband (and fertile). Bill brought his bride to the house in New York City on East Nineteenth Street, next door to Horace Greely in fashionable Union Square. While not outwardly socially ambitious, Helen soon became a dominant player in the circles in which the Evarts moved. While she joined the New York social scene, she obviously also pulled Bill back towards her home of Windsor.

The Evarts bought the Edward Curtis house, next door to the Constitution House, in 1846, for a country retreat. Windsor, at that time, was a quintessential New England town, marred only by the state prison near the center of town.


“It is a beautifully conducted institution. None but the most worthy are admitted, and disorderly and intoxicated persons, it seems, are not allowed. Owing to the great demand, we are unable to supply quarters to all, and so we take the worst; but as the worst of a Vermont population corresponds to the cream of a New York legislature, some idea can be formed of our high standard as jailers.”


In 1847, Windsor broke ground for a rail depot, and the station soon connected the town to Burlington on Lake Champaign, and down the Connecticut River to New London and Long Island Sound. When the connections were complete, you could travel to New York in eight hours. Evarts next bought the house next door, which he used for his many guests, and in 1857 he bought the big house, Runnemede.

Bill’s family, as well as his legal and social career in New York progressed rapidly. By 1848, three children had been born; Saturday nights was always reserved for the family or for entertaining from home. Evart’s mother, Mehetebal lived with the family until she died in 1851, and then nine more children were born between 1851 and 1862.

He undertook admiralty cases, property cases, and settled estates. He tried cases in Federal District court, the Chancery Court, and the Court of Appeals. He represented the heirs of Matthias Bruen in a complicated suit involving the estate of a famous tea merchant. In the collision case of the Narragansett, he took on admiralty law. In Walworth v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company he parsed the validity of a second mortgage.

James and John Harper started printing and publishing books in Manhattan in 1817; brothers Fletcher and Wesley joined them in the 1820s. The Harpers learned early to keep books in print and in stock, produce better yet less expensive editions than the competition, and be the first one on the dock when a ship came into harbor. Since there were no international copyright laws at the time, they frequented the docks waiting for the latest proofs from Great Britain. When a ship came in carrying a new title, the Harpers often had a new American edition on the streets within 24 hours.

By the 1830s Harpers was the largest printer in the country. In 1833, a steam printing press was installed and the company became "Harper & Brothers". Harper bestsellers included Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, Webster's Dictionary, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Harper's New Monthly Magazine started publishing in 1850. By 1853 41 presses ran ten hours a day, six days a week, averaging 25 volumes per minute.

The plant included the most advanced printing and publishing equipment of its time, but in December 1853, the Harper plant caught fire. Damages were in excess of $1 million, and the insurance company was reluctant to honor the policy. The fire had evidently been started by a match accidently thrown into a pan of camphene, used as a cleaning solvent. The insurance policy exempted liability for fire caused by the use of camphene.

The Harper brothers retained William M. Evarts. Evarts argued the provision only referred to use of camphene for lighting (it was often used for lamps in the nineteenth century but was also known to be explosive). The court of appeals agreed with Evarts, and Harpers was able to rebuild.

William M. Evarts pocketed a handsome fee.

~

New York

"Old Kinderhook" Martin Van Buren was elected president in 1836, succeeding his fellow democrat Andrew Jackson. When economic panic resulting from the Jacksonian monetary policies hit in 1837, New York really became a hotbed of radicals. The price of flour quickly doubled, and in the "Great Flour Riot" the labor activist Loco-Focos attacked flour dealer Eli Hart’s store house on Dey Street and looted hundreds of barrels of flour.

During the 1840 campaign, the Loco-Focos rioted again, this time attacking the Whig headquarters. William M. Evarts, having inherited a profound distrust of Jackson and his followers from his father, started writing in support of the Whigs. Daniel Webster, to whom he had been introduced at Yale, was his hero. Following Webster’s lead, Evarts supported William Henry Harrison for President; Harrison copied Jackson's own successful strategy and campaigned as a war hero, Old Tippecanoe, with a log cabin heritage, while presenting Van Buren (he called him "Van Ruin") as a wealthy snob.

Harrison won an electoral landslide, and Evarts celebrated the Whig victory. Unfortunately, Harrison’s inaugural address lasted over two hours on a wet, cold March day. The new President, wearing neither a top-coat nor a hat, then rode through the streets of Washington in the parade; he caught a bad cold and died thirty-one days later. John Tyler became the first Vice-President to succeed to the Presidency, and immediately discarded the Whig agenda.

Evarts was unsparing in his criticism of Tyler. Evarts’ essay, “Mr. Tyler and the Whig Party”, in The New World, called him an “accidental president” with a “wrong-headed conscious” who was unfit for power. The article, with praise from Daniel Webster, started Evarts political career, just as his legal career was also starting to blossom.






Evarts was first noted by the public when he helped defend the Bernie Madoff of his day. Colonel Monroe Edwards had a real talent for forgery. He made enough from his illicit activities and the illegal slave trade in Texas to buy a plantation and become a leading citizen of his county, but one forgery too many landed him in jail.

When Edwards got out, he jumped bail and, to avenge his co-conspirators, lit out for London to inform the British about illegal activities in the Southwest. With forged letters of introduction he met statesmen such as Lord Palmerston and even borrowed money from the Earl of Spenser. However, his reputation soon caught up with him; he was forced to flee to Paris, and then back to Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia he assumed a new identity as a Louisiana planter and managed to borrow $25,000 from Brown Brothers, secured by bogus notes documenting cotton held by New Orleans brokers. When Brown Brothers discovered the forgery, Edwards tried fingering an old associate, but was found out and thrown in the Tombs.

Robert Emmett, son of the famous Irish lawyer, Senator John Crittenden and Representative Thomas Marshall, both of Kentucky, and young Evarts were retained as defense counsel. Colonel Edwards managed to retain this impressive team because he sent Emmett a letter from his prison cell documenting the substantial sums he still held in a New Orleans bank.

When Edwards was brought from the Tombs to the courtroom, he was smiling and dignified, fresh from the barber and the tailor. The prosecution proceeded to produce an unbroken chain of evidence, as well as an expert witness, Richard Vaux, who demonstrated that a stamp found in Edwards’ trunk exactly matched the forged documents, but not the genuine stamp of the New Orleans post office. On cross-examination, Emmett produced the New Orleans bank letter from Edwards which guaranteed his legal fees, and was extremely dismayed when Vaux demonstrated that it too was a forgery.

Evarts did his best. He pointed out the disadvantages a Westerner faced being tried in a Northern court, the big money behind the prosecution, the public prejudice against the defendant, “Give a dog a bad name, and anybody may kill him”, but despite his best efforts, Edwards got ten years in Sing-Sing, where he died violently insane several years later.

Evarts received no compensation as counsel, as Edwards, in truth, had no assets, but what Bill did gain, when fifty thousand pamphlets of the proceedings were published by the Herald, was a reputation as a young lawyer on the make .

“What is a retainer?
“A retainer is that which is retained”
- Wm M Evarts

~

The Law

I think Benares is one of the most wonderful places I have ever seen. It struck me that a westerner feels in Benares very much as an Oriental must feel when he is planted down in the middle of London. Everything is so strange, so utterly unlike the whole of one’s previous experience. We went to see a recluse, a man who is worshipped for his holiness from one end of India to the other. On the way we saw various images of this saint, and when I saw him coming out of his hut, I at once recognized him . . . He is a divinity. He hasn’t a rag on his back, but he has perfect manners, a ready wit, and a turn for conversation through an interpreter. We traded autographs, I said I had heard of him, and he said he had heard of me. Gods lie sometimes, I expect. . . This face is a strongly legal one, is it not? You have heard of William M. Evarts, formerly Secretary of State, and one of the greatest minds America has ever produced. Well, this face at first reminded me strongly of Evarts.

-Mark Twain

Jeremiah Evarts died in 1831, leaving little money behind, so Billy had to withdraw from the Latin School. Fortunately he was able to finish his schooling elsewhere in Boston, and then with help from his uncles was able to travel “two hundred and forty miles by stage coach from Boston to New Haven to avoid going to Harvard University, which was across the bridge", continuing the Evarts family aversion to “Hell and Harvard”.



At Yale, Billy became Bill Evarts, and he made friends easily and quickly. He frequented the off-limits tavern “The Barons”, was elected a class “Bully”, joined the debating society, and kept a journal where he recorded reading over twenty thousand pages of history, poetry, novels and essays, over and above the prescribed course materials in his sophomore and junior years. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans delighted him, and like his father, he became indignant over the treatment of Native Americans. In his junior year he got into a fracas in the dining hall which earned him a “second warning” and a letter from the college president to his uncle. He helped organize and edit the Yale Literary Review, the longest ongoing literary review in America. In his senior year (1837) he was elected to Skull and Bones and Phi Beta Kappa, and made a commencement oration which, echoing his father, deplored public acceptance of the corrupt conditions in Washington, calling for a new generation of national leadership.

After Evarts graduated from Yale, he spent a year in Vermont just as his father had thirty-five years previously. He taught school for a year, as his father had, and courted an attractive young woman, Helen Wardner, daughter of a prominent banker and one-time state treasurer of Vermont. He read law, as one still can in Vermont, with Horace Everett.

After Jeremiah Evart’s death in 1831, Bill’s mother Mehetabel moved to Concord, so after his year in Vermont Evarts returned to near-by Cambridge to study law at Harvard. There were fewer than one hundred students at the Law School in those days, but many of its students, including Charles Sumner, John L. Motley, and James Russell Lowell went on to remarkable careers . Evarts formed a particularly close and lasting friendship with Richard Henry Dana, who had just returned from two years as a sailor in the Pacific, and who would chronicle those experiences in his best selling memoir Two Years Before the Mast, before going on to a distinguished legal career. Dana was much impressed by Evarts: “If he does not become distinguished, he will disappoint more persons than any other young man whom I have ever met.”

So in 1840, with a law degree in hand, Bill made his way to New York City to find his fortune. He came with letters of introduction to some of the best families, including one from his law school master Joseph Story describing him as a young man of “very uncommon talents and professional attainments . . . destined to take a very elevated rank in his profession”

Evarts had met the respected lawyer Daniel Lord in New Haven, and had some family and college connections, so he sought him out in hopes of finding employment. “Well, Mr. Evarts,” Lord said, “You have come to commence your studies and be a lawyer in New York.”

“I have come to try” Bill replied.

“Well sir,” Lord shot back “if you have only come to try, you had better go back; if you have come to stay, we shall be glad to receive you.”

Evarts quickly made clear that he had come to be a lawyer.


At a New England Society dinner, Mark Twain had just finished a piquant address, when Evarts arose, shoved both of his hands down into his trousers pockets, as was his habit, and laughingly remarked: "Doesn't it strike this company as a little unusual that a professional humorist should be funny?"

Mark Twain waited until the laughter excited by this sally had subsided, and then drawled out: "Doesn't it strike this company as a little unusual that a lawyer should have his hands in his own pockets?"

The Medicis

Morning at the Office reading Kent’s Commentaries. Found them dull and myself sleepy. Heard of the death of James Perkins, the richest man of his age in Boston. No loss however. - Charles Francis Adams diary entry June 23, 1828

Josiah Quincy compared the Perkins family to the Medicis. The Medicis had their ups and downs too.

James Jr. was the son of a very rich man. He graduated from Harvard in 1809, and after marrying his first-cousin-once-removed Eliza Callahan, built his house on Jamaica Pond next to Pine Bank, his father’s estate. He joined his father in contributing a substantial sum ($8,000) to the Boston Athenaeum when it moved into the family's Pearl Street mansion, and put in a few hours at the counting house, but the fact of the matter is, with the Perkins fortune, he didn’t have to work a day in his life.

James Jr. and Eliza had five children. The firstborn, James, born in 1814, died at the age of ten. Sarah came along in 1818, Edward (Ned) Newton Perkins in 1820, and Charles Callahan Perkins in 1823. Baby James, James Henry Perkins, known as Hal, was born in 1826.

James Jr. did his best to follow in his father’s footsteps, but unfortunately, he was an alcoholic and never really found his proper role in life. Along with his cousin, “Short-Arm Tom," whose right arm was a trifle shorter than his left he brawled his way across two continents.

In London, Tom boxed an old African named Richmond, who had such long arms that he could button his breeches at the knee without stooping. Tom knocked the African almost through a window. After he had extricated a few pieces of glass from his arms, he said with great respect: "Golly, Massa Major, how you do hit wid dat right of yours! Why, I radder be kicked by old Massa's black mule dan hab you hit me again like dat. No, by golly, I don't want any mo' of dat hitten here."

After losing her first-born son James in 1824, and her husband James’s untimely death at age thirty-eight in 1828, Eliza got religion, lots of religion. She quickly remarried George Washington Doane who had just become the assistant rector at Trinity Church in Boston. When Dr. Gardiner died in 1830, Doane was made rector. In 1832 he was elected Bishop of New Jersey.

Bishop Doane and Eliza produced two sons of their own, George Hobart Doane (1830) and William Crosswell Doane (1832), and when Doane became bishop, the couple moved to New Jersey with their two sons and left the Perkins children behind in the care of their grandmother.

Sarah was always very close to her namesake grandmother. She married Henry Russell Cleveland in 1838 and moved right into Pine Bank, the Perkins family house, where she loved reading to her grandmother, boating on Jamaica Pond, the long rides on horseback, the visits of the family, and the boys coming back from school and college.

Once a year Sarah drove with her grandmother in the chariot with yellow wheels, the pair of roan horses, and Calvin, the coachman, to Worcester to visit the Paine relations. Grandmother Sarah sat erect and never leaned back once, all the 50 miles. She was a grand lady; a witty friend once said that if Madam Perkins was approaching the Gates of Heaven, she would say to her coachman, "Drive right in, Calvin."

Charley and Ned were sent off to boarding school in Cambridge, and were looked after by Charles Follen and his wife Eliza. Follen was a radical German poet who had come to the United States in 1824. Introduced by the Marquis de Lafayette, he quickly established himself in Massachusetts society. He became the first professor of German at Harvard, and managed to marry a Brahmin, Eliza Lee Cabot, in 1828. Follen believed in the importance of training the body as well as the mind, helped establish the first college gymnasium in the United States at Harvard, and is said to have had one of the first Christmas trees in America.

Hal was expelled from Harvard in October 1842. The family tried to help him become a farmer, but Hal, like his father, had a "severe drinking problem" and died young at the age of 25.

After her husband died, Sarah Cleveland gave her share in Pine Bank to her brother Ned when he got married. He tore down the old house and in 1848 built a grander one from plans by a French architect. Sarah was not pleased, the new house was"not, to my taste, becoming to the place; French, square and heavy."

To her brother Charley in Europe she described the destruction of the old house:
Charley dear, our own dear Pine Bank house is no more-the old house nearly level. I have not looked upon its murder, though when I was the other day on your land I heard the dear old boards and planks sighing and screaming as they were rent asunder it seemed to me that they told, one by one, the years in succession that had been numbered since it stood 1804 with a shriek, 1805 with a scream, 1806, a shudder, it ripped apart.

The two Doane boys, unlike their Perkins half-brothers, were obviously born with ecclesiastical blood. George Hobart Doane became a deacon at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark. There he preached on the "One Holy and Catholic and Apostolic Church," and had more positive things to say about Pope Pius IX than he did Dr. Tyng, the leader of the Episcopalians.

At age 25, George appeared at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Newark, intent on conversion, and asked to see the Roman bishop. Unsurprisingly, he was soon thereafter deposed as deacon of Grace Episcopal Church; his father personally removed him from office. After studying in Rome, George Hobart Doane was ordained a Catholic priest in 1857. He eventually made peace with his father, and as Monsignor Doane "worked early and late for fifty years to make Newark a pleasanter and cleaner city to live in.”

His brother William Croswell Doane, more predictably, became the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Albany. He served about 60 years in ordained ministry. We Episcopalians still sing his hymn, Ancient of Days.

Ned and his wife took Sarah and her daughter, and their mother Eliza to spend the winter in Rome in 1858. While they were enjoying the Roman spring in April 1859, they were distraught to receive news of the death of Bishop Doane back in Boston. The family decided to travel, perhaps to bring some sunshine into their mother's saddened life. They arrived in June in the old mountain city of Perugia.

The timing was poor. When they arrived, the city’s nobles, smelling liberty in the air, decided to declare Perugia independent from the Papal state. The Monsignor's Pope, Pius IX, would not tolerate this challenge to his authority, and sent his army to re-conquer Perugia. Two thousand papal troops advanced on the city. The gates of the city were closed, but with the assistance of priests and monks from within the walls, the mercenaries broke through. Furious fighting broke out in the narrow streets and the Perkins family sought refuge in a hotel. Ned kept watch with his sword while the ladies hid in a small closet. The troops rushed through the hotel's apartments, looting and bayoneting many innocents, including one of the proprietors and a mother with a child in her arms.

When the soldiers entered their apartment, Ned managed to persuade them, with the help of his sword and some gold, that they were Americans and should be left alone. The ruffians eventually left, but then two hour later, more drunk hooligans broke in, and robbed the family of all they had.

The Perkins were fortunate to make their way back to Rome alive, where news of their harrowing tale quickly made it back to America in the pages of the New York Times. Sarah Cleveland and her daughter bore the ordeal with remarkable fortitude, but the trial for Eliza Greene Callahan Perkins Doane was too much, coming so soon after her husband’s death. Mrs. Doane, at the age of 70, died in Florence in November 1860 at the residence of her son Mr. Edward N. Perkins. “It appears her mind never recovered from the shock it received during the memorable sack at Perugia, Italy, in which she and her party escaped a cruel death."

The Trail of Tears

First they fell upon their knees
and then upon the aborigines.

-William M. Evarts

Andrew Jackson was certainly a different kind of President.

His predecessor John Quincy Adams, the son of a president, had spent a good part of his youth in Europe, accompanying his father to France and the Netherlands, studying in Leiden, travelling to Russia, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, even marrying his London born wife Louisa while abroad. He was by breeding and training a diplomat.

Jackson was born in a cabin. His father died from a logging accident just before his birth. Sporadically schooled, Jackson fought in the Revolution, was captured by the British and slashed by a British officer when he refused to clean his boots. After the war he became a rough and tumble country lawyer, disputing land claims, defending assault and battery charges, and speculating on Indian lands. In 1812 he became a military hero when he defeated the British in New Orleans, and continued his military career seizing Florida in the First Seminole War. Jackson was from the frontier, and he had no use for Indian rights.

There was no love lost between Adams and Jackson. Jackson had won the popular vote in 1824, but with no clear electoral majority, Adams won the election in the House of Representatives. In 1828 Jackson won both the popular and electoral majorities. When the time finally came for Jackson to assume the presidential office, he refused to pay the traditional courtesy call on the outgoing President; Adams, in turn, skipped the inauguration of Jackson.

Georgia had just passed a law prohibiting whites from living on Indian territory without a license from the state. The law’s intent was to get rid of white missionaries who were helping the Indians resist removal. When "Sharp Knife" Jackson took office, the struggle over Indian removal entered its final phase. Jeremiah Evarts urged the Cherokee to challenge the law in the Supreme Court. The Marshall court ruled that Indian tribes were indeed sovereign nations and state laws had no force on tribal lands, to which Jackson is said to have defiantly replied, "John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!"

A federal Indian Removal Act was making its way through Congress with strong support from the South and West. Jeremiah Evarts started a petition campaign opposing the legislation and supporting the Cherokee's rights. Starting with a few carefully written memorials, he drew up petitions to be sent to Washington. Copies of the petitions were printed and sent to the ABCFM network of congregations to gather names, along with specific instructions for printing additional petitions:

Print a short memorial, on one leaf of a sheet of letter paper, and a circular on the other leaving the circular for the outside of the letter. To save press-work, you might have both printed pages face inwards; for the memorial part should have no writing on either side, and should go clean…

Petitions were sent from Bath, Brunswick, Bucksport, Bluehill, and Bridgton Maine; from Chester, Campton, and Cornish New Hampshire; from Andover, Brighton, Cambridge, and Dunstable Massachusetts; from Pittsford, Thetford, Weatherfield, and St. Johnsbury in Vermont.

Hundreds of petitions with tens of thousands of signatures were sent to Congress, but politicians ridiculed their efforts. Richard Wilde was disgusted by "these everlasting political homilies - this mawkish mixture of sentiment and selfishness -this rage for instructing all the world in their appropriate duties." Wiley Thompson charged the petitioners with drawing on "the vast accumulation of trash which appeared in the columns of the National Intelligencer over the signature of William Penn." President Jackson ridiculed the Indian land claims and remarked that they could not assert title to lands "merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase."

After vigorous lobbying and debate, the Jackson forces narrowly won the vote on the Removal Bill and President Jackson signed the measure on May 28th, 1830. Evarts was deeply disappointed that so many people failed to stand up for morality and justice. "My comfort is that God governs the world; and my hope is, that when the people of the United States come to understand the subject, there will a redeeming spirit arise; for I will not believe that the nation is yet lost to truth and honor."

Despite his disappointment, Evarts couldn’t stop working. He continued his travels and exhortations for the cause, but he was obviously exhausted. Returning from a trip to Cuba, he sensed that death was near:

"Whether I make my grave on the land, or in the ocean, I submit cheerfully to Him. It will be as He pleases; and so it should be."

Arriving in Charleston, he was dying, but he showed a happy tranquility in his final days. Given the last rites, "You will soon see Jesus as he is..," he exclaimed — "Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful glory! We cannot comprehend — wonderful glory! I will praise, I will praise him! .... Wonderful — glory—Jesus reigns."

Jeremiah Evarts died on May 10, 1831 in Charleston, South Carolina. His body was returned to New Haven and buried in the Grove Street Cemetery.

In 1831 the Choctaw were removed to the west, the Seminole were removed in 1832, the Creek in 1834, then the Chickasaw in 1837, and finally the Cherokee in 1838. One in four Cherokee died from exposure, disease, and starvation en route to their new lands in Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.

~

“There are many humorous things in this world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages". - Mark Twain

Education for All

Jeremiah Evarts was never healthy; portraits show him as frail and skeletal, with prominent nose and ears, his hair combed forward to conceal a receding hairline. His doctors recommended travelling south for his health, and his evangelical interests drew him towards the Cherokee and Choctaw, so he was in South Carolina on a mission when his wife Mehetabal bore his fifth child Billy in Boston in 1818. Jeremiah didn’t sound too hopeful when he wrote in his journal, “I commend the babe to protection of Heaven, and pray that its soul may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, however it may please God to dispose of its temporal estate.”

Jeremiah was corresponding secretary for the ABCFM, and travelled a great deal on behalf of the society. The pressure from white settlers on the Indian tribes which occupied lands in the southeast was intense, and Evarts worked to help the Indians integrate into white society through conversion and education. His 1818 trip took him to Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 1822 he visited Georgia, eastern Tennessee and Virginia. In 1823, after he visited western Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire, then New York, Philadelphia, Princeton, and Washington, he continued southward through Virginia, Tennessee and Mississippi, spending several weeks visiting missionary stations among the Cherokees and Choctaw and continuing to New Orleans from where he sailed back to New York.


When Jeremiah was at home in Boston, John Jay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Ellery Channing regularly came to call. Lafayette visited Boston in 1824 and when he reviewed schoolboys lined up on the Boston Common, the Marquis made sure to personally shake the hand of six year old Billy, the grandson of his old compatriot Roger Sherman.

Billy entered Boston Latin School, which at that time stood opposite King’s chapel on School Street, and where his school mates included Henry Ward Beecher and John Lathrop Motley. He particularly excelled at reciting Latin and won the school prize for elocution.

“I certainly was taught to say in the most perfect manner the longest list of Latin nouns and prepositions that I did not want to learn at all, became intimately acquainted with their whole pedigree and relations with large sums and words that I never expected to meet in my subsequent life at all; but having learned that, I could learn other things very easily."




The ABCFM missionaries helped bring printing presses to the Cherokee, who developed their own alphabet and had fonts of type cast in their alphabet. In 1827 the Cherokee adopted a written constitution, modeled on the Constitution of the United States, which declared the Cherokee to be a sovereign nation with complete jurisdiction over their territory, and they had a national newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, published in both English and Cherokee using the syllabary developed by Sequoyah. The Cherokee had no intentions of moving.

In 1827 Jeremiah travelled to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, where he lobbied Congress to retain funding for civilizing efforts. In 1828 Jeremiah took Billy along with him to Washington and introduced him to John C. Calhoun, who was a great admirer of Evarts’ grandfather Roger Sherman. Calhoun took a liking to Billy and introduced him to the president, John Quincy Adams.

Samuel T. Armstrong printed the Panoplist at 50 Cornhill Street in Boston. Cornhill Street, near Faneuil Hall and Scollay Square, was the center of Boston’s book trade and home to printers, engravers, bookbinders and booksellers. Paul Revere had had his engraving shop at Cornhill after the revolution. Armstrong printed a stereotyped Bible and sold books by Martin Luther, Calvin, Cotton Mather and the like.

At this time in Boston steam and horse powered presses were just starting to be put into use, rollers were replacing ink balls, type was being founded and stereotyping was being employed. There were numerous daily newspapers, and book publishing was on the rise. With so many presses in operation and so many skilled craftsmen, there were more authors publishing their work in Boston than anywhere else in the country.

Armstrong was a member of the first Boston society of printers (43 members) which set prices for composition and presswork and rules for apprentices and journeymen. It worked to secure improvements in the manufacture of paper, ink and type. Armstrong left his printing establishment in 1825 (its successors would eventually merge into Houghton Mifflin) to enter politics, and later became mayor, lieutenant governor and acting governor of the state.

In 1829 Armstrong and Mayor Harrison Gray Otis visited the colored students’ school in the Belknap Street church. In grammar school Billy Evarts received one of the medals which Benjamin Franklin had endowed to be awarded annually to the most deserving student in each school. At the Belknap Street School, three colored students, Charles Battiste, Nancy Woodson and William Nell were pronounced the most deserving scholars. In lieu of the Franklin Medals given to white scholars such as Billy Evarts, Mr. Armstrong gave each colored scholar a gift certificate to Loring’s Bookstore for the Life of Benjamin Franklin.

Billy and the rest of the white medalists were invited to an awards banquet at Faneuil Hall, but the colored scholars were not. William Nell, however, decided to go anyway, and got in with one of the waiters and pretended to wait on tables. While he watched the honors awarded to the white scholars Mr. Armstrong caught sight of him and whispered to him, “You ought to be here with the other boys.” Of course, Nell thought the same idea. Twenty-five years later, the remark still rankled as he recalled his thought at the time: “If you think so, why have you not taken steps to bring it about?”

~

In the fall of 1829, Jeremiah, writing as "William Penn", wrote twenty-four essays in the National Intelligencer, which blasted the new Jackson administration and its proposed Indian removal policy.

"Most certainly an indelible stigma will be fixed upon us, if, in the plenitude of our power, and in the pride of our superiority, we shall be guilty of manifest injustice to our weak and defenseless neighbors." If the Indians were driven from their homes to destruction, "then the sentence of an indignant world will be uttered in thunders, which will roll and reverberate for ages after the present actors in human affairs shall have passed away."

Was this to be a nation of law or of men?

Books

"You have his countenance very correctly given in the family portrait, which Stuart painted. It was not his way to volunteer advice. Once, and I am sorry to say once only, as we sat together after dinner, he turned to me with great seriousness, and spoke to me earnestly and at considerable length on the importance of my becoming well grounded in English literature, — and I very well remember that he especially directed my attention to the ‘ Lives of the Poets,' by Dr. Johnson;
"Thus I answer your inquiries, and remain ever very faithfully yours,
Geo. Bancroft.

James’s copy of “Lives of the Poets” sits on my bookshelf, with his enthusiastic comments in the frontispiece; “Notwithstanding the Errors and Instances of Partiality and Misrepresentation . . . the Lives of the Poets cannot be perused by any reader of taste without a great Degree of Pleasure.” The book was printed in Dublin in 1779, by a consortium of thirteen gentlemen (Messrs. Whitestone, Williams, Colles, et al.). Holding the book, I am drawn to the consistency of the typography and the presswork; the impression “bites” into the old style laid rag bond. The book is bound in calfskin, although curiously, pages 531 through 534 are bound in error between the title page and the table of contents. Books of this period were substantial objects of considerable value, the labor of many hours of painstaking labor, each individual letter set by hand, each sheet hand fed into the press, the impression the result of the pressman's skill and brawn, each signature hand folded with an ivory bone, then individually sewn and bound by the bookbinder.

James appreciated the niceties of style and he loved books. While he never had the public personality of his younger brother Tom, his friends and family appreciated the generous warmth of his personality. He was a constant reader and a bibliophile. He collected books even while living in Haiti, and was one of the original subscribers to the Boston Athenaeum, and a trustee for many years. In 1822, when the Athenaeum’s collection of books and artwork had grown to the point where it needed a permanent home, he donated his Mansion on Pearl Street to the growing society. Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated the house “royally fitted up for elegance & comfort” where he enjoyed its amenities with his literary friends and colleagues.

That same year James sat to have his portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart. The two were good friends and James had a cellar full of excellent Madeira wine which they both enjoyed. Presumably, the portrait was coming along quite well as they spent considerable time together. The sitting was unfortunately cut short however, when James died rather suddenly from pneumonia on the first day of August.

Shortly after the death, James’s brother Tom called at the studio, expecting to see the portrait almost complete. There was only an initial sketch on the easel, and Colonel Perkins was outraged. Stuart did his best to explain the situation, but Tom stormed out, “Very well, Mr. Stuart, you have inflicted an irreplaceable loss by your dilatoriness, and I shall never enter your studio again!” The words had particular effect as Thomas Handasyd Perkins was the richest man in Boston, and the acknowledged leader of the Brahmin caste.

Stuart worked feverishly from memory for the next several weeks. Meeting Colonel Perkins by chance in the street, he begged him to reconsider and visit his studio. Tom relented; “I entered the studio, and there on the easel I saw the perfect portrait of my dear brother, which (pointing to the picture on the wall) now hangs before you.”

The Athenaeum Trustees attended their late benefactor’s funeral en masse, and commissioned their first purchase, a copy of the portrait of their benefactor.

The Athenaeum portrait varies in several ways from the family portrait. In the family portrait, James sits at a desk with a sheaf of papers, a few books, and a quill pen. His gaze is direct and completely self-assured. The Athenaeum portrait embellishes his surrounding considerably. He sits, a public personality, slightly bemused, holding an open letter, before a Roman column and tapestry, with shelves of books in the background.

An editorial in the Commercial Advertiser noted that James gave $20,000 to the Boston Athenaeum in 1821, and left $25,000 to Harvard University in his estate, and lamented that "We are astonished that capitalists, in their liberal moments, never think of Yale College. Cambridge, before, had so much money that they hardly knew what to do with it - while modest and unassuming Yale..."

In 1826 the Athenaeum commissioned Stuart to paint a portrait of Thomas Handasyd Perkins to hang alongside his brother James. Two years later, it was the Trustees who were outraged by Stuart’s dilatory nature, when Stuart died, deeply in debt as usual, and the unfinished portrait found in the studio was not the commissioned painting, but the portrait being painted for Mrs. Perkins.

The Panoplist

The printing press was the empowering symbol of enlightenment and enrichment in early America. By the beginning of the nineteenth century presses had become plentiful enough in America so that news could be quickly printed anywhere in the country. Jeremiah Evarts wrote in amazement “We of the present age, who have lived thirty years, have seen greater changes within our time, than could have been seen, at other periods of the world, in several centuries.”

He was right. Free from the old colonial relationship with England, entrepreneurship and invention took hold in America. There was a sudden increase of mass produced goods, including books, newspapers, and magazines. The Stanhope press, made of cast iron rather than wood, and using levers rather than the old “wine-press” screw was introduced in England in 1800, and George Clymer improved on the design in Philadelphia in 1812 with his own lever action "Columbian" press.

The new presses were much easier and more efficient to run, cutting the required number of impressions in half, and the print quality was markedly improved. Paper was being manufactured in this country. Anthony Haswell started the first mill in Vermont, in Bennington, in 1784, making just enough paper for his own newspaper; by 1820 there were fifteen mills supplying the needs of the state. With reduced costs, popular novels were suddenly finding their way into the culture. Evarts noted with dismay the proliferation of “that light and frothy stuff, which under a hundred names, our booksellers’ shops were pouring upon the public.”

In 1810 Evarts moved from New Haven to Charlestown to become editor of the Panoplist, which had been founded as a counterweight to Unitarianism at Harvard. This move opened the door for Evarts; the Awakening became Evarts personal mission as he addressed the issues which challenged society: education, the promotion of religion, inroads on the Sabbath, the call to evangelize through foreign missions, and temperance.

It’s a little hard to believe that before the generations of hard drinkers, one of my forebears would be a founding member of the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance. The new western lands in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Kentucky were producing grain which was more easily transported when converted to whiskey. In the early 1800’s the estimated per capita consumption of hard liquor was around six gallons per person, which is a little south of where it stood in Tyringham in the mid 1960’s when I was growing up.

My two grandfathers would sit on the side terrace in Tyringham before dinner on summer evenings with Ritz crackers, cheddar cheese, Edward with his J. W. Dant straight on the rocks, and Arthur with his Early Times, with a little “branch” water.

- Edward: “Can’t you wait for the ice to melt?”
- Arthur (my maternal GP, just returned from a cruise on the Kungsholm): “The liner had seven bars.”
- Edward: “You probably needed all of them.”

John Jay, the first Chief Justice had been elected to the board of ABCFM, ordered two complete sets of the Panoplist, and subscribed both for himself and for his town library, when Evarts’ first son was born and baptized in April 1813 as “John Jay Evarts”. Jay had written Evarts in January, complimenting his writing, which “abounds in just sentiments, handsomely expressed.” Jay wished to contribute to the printing press in Serampore, India, but worried about transmitting funds as the War of 1812 made sending money through England problematical.

Evarts helped form the New England Religious Tract Society in 1814. The society consolidated publication and distribution in order to circulate inexpensive tracts through a network of village based church societies. By the end of the 1820’s it had more than 2600 branches and distributed nearly six million tracts annually. Just as today we hear appeals for “a laptop for every child”, the evangelical movement sought “A Bible for every family, a school for every district, and a pastor for every 1000 souls.” Local branches held meetings, raised money, circulated publications, and communicated directly with headquarters in Boston. This efficient network was unrivalled on a national scale in its day.

In issue after issue, the Panoplist sent out pleas for funds for printing presses and for paper on which to print. Presses were being set up in India, Ceylon, Greece, and the Sandwich Islands.

I am anxious to have a printing-press also established in Benares, by which school-books might be speedily multiplied, and treatises on different subjects might be printed, and generally dispersed throughout the country. Without this, the progress of knowledge must be very slow, and the Hindoos long remain in their present very fallen state, which is very painful to a benevolent mind.

In the early nineteenth century it was common for periodicals to reprint articles first published elsewhere. While printing technology had been widely spread, it was still a labor intensive operation with hand set type. Prior to steamships, canals and railroads, it was easier to reprint information in Kentucky or California or Ceylon or the Sandwich Islands than to transport bulk printed materials from the point of manufacture, and the technology had not yet been sufficiently mechanized to make publication in large quantities economically feasible.

As mechanization of print took hold, the model began to shift from “distribute and print”, to “print and distribute”. Prior to the telegraph, there were no wire services, and no central clearing houses for giving attribute to authors and copyright holders. While a copyright law had been passed in England in 1710, the colonies were not covered by the act and there was a long history of pirating in America. The first copyright law in the United States was passed in 1790, protecting books, maps and charts, but it was poorly enforced. Evarts felt the pain:

"We have not so much occasion to complain, that the strictly original parts of our work have been republished without our consent. In former years, however, such republications were not uncommon. A friend of ours, in a neighboring state, said to the publisher of a magazine, "There are four religious magazines in this state, all of which live by stealing from the Panoplist." The printer of one of these four determined to republish our whole work without our consent, or even our knowledge. He used it as an argument with his patrons, that he should present them with matter, which cost the editor of the Panoplist much labor and expense, but as it cost himself nothing, and he printed his work cheap in the country, and on inferior paper, he could afford it at an inferior price."

China

" Hi ya, my welly glad sabe that son my olo flen, Mr. Perkins, my very much chin chin you, maskee come ashore, come ashore ; as for dollar, can hab, yes, can hab lcckly."

- Houqua

By 1803, James and Thomas Handasyd Perkins had been involved in trading furs from the Northwest coast for Chinese tea in Canton for several years. James, one of the first Americans to master double entry bookkeeping, was the inside man, watching the money. Tom ran the operations, hiring crews, loading ships, making trades. It became apparent to them both that setting up a permanent office in Canton would help them trade their goods when market pricing was most advantageous.

The Chinese considered Americans "uncouth beings with fiery hair", part of "a ghostly tribe of barbarians." They were "wild, untamed men whose words are rough, and whose language is confused," "a strange people who came to the Flowery Kingdom from regions of mist and storm where the sun never shines." Clearly, if the Perkins firm was to find success in China, they would need an experienced hand.

They recruited twenty-six year old Ephraim Bumstead, who had apprenticed with their firm and had travelled to Canton as supercargo aboard the Thomas Russell in 1798, to set up an office. As an assistant, they sent along their nephew, sixteen year old John Perkins Cushing, with the hope he’d learn something along the way.

The Patterson arrived in Whampoa on New Years Day 1804, with Bumstead and Cushing and a substantial amount of gold and silver ($750,000 in today’s currency) on board. The Perkins brothers were highly enthusiastic back in Boston when the Patterson returned with a cargo of fine tea. They were already making arrangements to send additional ships and additional capital.
The Mandarin soon sailed with $300,000 in specie, the Montezuma was picking up $80,000 in Lisbon, the Hazard and Caroline were on the Oregon coast trading for furs, The Globe was on the Malay coast and the General Washington was at the Ile de France en route to China. Six large ships were due into Canton in the next few months.

It took four months to send a letter from China to Boston via a fast ship. Little additional news made its way back to Boston. In March 1805, the news did arrive (written in November) that Bumstead was desperately ill and intended to return to Boston. On April 5th word came that he had left China in November with his brother Samuel, captain of the Guatamozin, but that Samuel had been washed overboard and drowned between Java and Sumatra. On April 27th the Guatamozin arrived in Boston. Bumstead was not aboard; he had survived his brother by only a few days. Millions of dollars worth of business were now in the hands of seventeen year old John Cushing, eight thousand miles away.

The Perkins did all they could; they wrote fatherly letters of advice: “Your future well-being depends upon y’r conduct in this crisis. We shall calculate upon your throwing off all juvenile pursuits and acting up to the situation in wh. Circumstances have placed you.” They even invoked the spirit of the original “Captain” Perkins, “Let the sage counsels of y’r good grandmother still vibrate on your ear, and let them sink deep into your heart.”

Young Cushing (Ku-Shing to the Chinese) proved up to the challenge. He established himself at the American house at the “Thirteen Factories”, the small trading district on the banks of the Pearl River in Canton to which foreigners were confined. Teas and other merchandise were stored in these hongs until they are taken down the river to Whampoa and loaded on board the clipper ships. Here “Ku-Shing” dealt exclusively with Houqua, the head of the “Hong” in Canton which handled the Perkins brothers affairs. He bought excellent tea, imported rice during famine, loaned money at 18%, and diversified the firm’s operations. During the War of 1812 the Perkins' ship Jacob Jones captured 2 British merchant ships. The prizes both carried opium, and, when the profits involved were realized, changed the Perkins business model dramatically. The first cargo of Turkish opium, on board the brig Monkey, arrived in 1816; when that transaction proved profitable, the firm set up an opium buying operation in Leghorn, Italy.

“Short-arm Tom”, THP’s son came to Canton on one of the voyages. His cousin, John Cushing instructed him at breakfast soon after his arrival, " Tom, take an armed boat and go up to Mr. Houqua's, and say I wish him to send me, by you, a hundred thousand dollars."

Tom got ready to make the trip, and then waited for the paperwork. After some time Cushing said, "Tom, it is time for you to start, or you may lose the tide."

Tom protested, "You have given me no letter of introduction to Mr. Houqua, nor any written order for the money."

"Oh," said Cushing, "that is quite unnecessary; we do all our business with Houqua by word of mouth, and he does his with us in the same way."

Messrs. Perkins & Co., Canton -

We shall send a couple of fast schooners to Manilla, in all probability. We presume there is no difficulty in landing a cargo of teas there, to be exported, and without duty. This you must ascertain through some of the Spanish residents at Canton or Macao. What would a cargo of Congo tea cost, — say three thousand chests, which would load the " Levant," worth now, short price, $250,000, and cost say $36,000? Coming round Cape Horn, and arriving on the coast in winter, she would stand a good chance of getting in. We should be willing to try it, and hazard one-half, if Houqua would take the other . . . .

You say a cargo laid in at Canton would bring three for one in South America, and your copper would give two prices back. Thus, $30,000 laid out in China would give you $90,000 in South America; one-half of which, laid out in copper, would give one hundred per cent, or $90,000; making $135,000 for $30,000

60,000 pounds indigo, even at 80 cents ...................................$48,000
120 tons sugar, at ........................................................................7,200
Fill up with cotton, or some other light freight, say skin tea ....... 20,000
______

$75,000

would be worth here $400,000, and not employ the profits of the voyage to South America. Manilla sugar is worth $400 to $500 per ton clear of duty. The ship should be flying light, her bottom in good order, the greatest vigilance used on the passage, and make any port north of New York. Perhaps those on the eastern shore are easiest of access. There would be no very great chance but in the winter. We should not be surprised if the British send some frigates to the South-American coast, as one of our ships has been there ; but yet the danger cannot be very great of going to a single port In times like these, the resources of the head must make up for the limited state of trade. We have been fortunate in getting home our property from abroad, except what is in Canton; and that we think in good hands, under your care. We shall perhaps add to this. If the Chinese act with spirit, the supercargoes will prevent capture above Macao. This must be all-important. If not stopped at Macao, we think we shall see some other vessels along.

France

By 1793, the end was clearly in sight for the French colony in Haiti. The Perkins brothers needed to find a new way to make money. The dire situation in the colony was in many ways an extension of the upheaval in the mother country France. Sensing an opportunity, James shipped out on the Charlotte, to Martinique, and then on to France. The revolution had disrupted French agriculture to the extent that there was a significant danger of widespread famine. When James returned from his voyage, the firm shipped the Charlotte right back to France with a cargo of beef and pork, with his younger brother Tom in charge this time. After arriving in Bordeaux during a vicious winter ice storm, Tom made his way to Paris, where he hoped to transact trade and also recover some of the firm’s losses from the discord at Cap Francois.

In Paris, Tom dined every Saturday with the American minister, James Monroe and his wife Elizabeth ("one of the finest women I ever knew"). the Monroes introduced Tom to Adrienne Lafayette, the wife of the Marquis who was then being held in prison in Austria. With the political situation in France terribly unstable, Madame Lafayette wanted desperately to get her thirteen-year-old son George Washington Lafayette out of the country and to the United States where she hoped that the boy’s godfather, President Washington, would take care of the boy.

In April of 1794, Tom secured the necessary travel documents and conveyed the boy, who was travelling under the family name of Motier, to Le Havre, where he took passage on board one of the firm’s boats bound for Boston. James and his family warmly took young Lafayette under their wing as part of their family in Boston when he arrived. Washington hesitated to send for the boy, nervous that it might affect diplomacy with France, but finally “his heart overcame his doubts” and he sent for the boy in the spring of 1796 to live with him at Mount Vernon.

Tom still had time to kill while he was in Paris. After the fall of Robespierre, the prosecuting attorney Fouquier Tinville, along with the judges and jurymen which had condemned so many of the innocent and helpless, was to be executed in the Place de Greve. With his friends Russell and Higginson, Tom hired a window in a house on the square to witness the executions. The prisoners arrived in two carts; they were taken out, and placed in the room directly under the scaffold. From there they were taken, one by one, and, by a ladder of eight or ten feet, were brought to the guillotine, and decapitated. They all met their fate without a struggle except for one of the judges who vociferously cursed his executioner until silenced by the fall of the blade.

"From the time the prisoners descended from the carts, until their heads were all in long baskets, placed in the same carts with the lifeless trunks, was fourteen minutes. Two minutes were lost by changing the carts; so that, if all the remains could have been placed in one basket, but twelve minutes would have been required for beheading the sixteen persons! The square was filled with people. Great numbers of the lowest classes — and the low class of women were the most vociferous — were there, clapping and huzzaing with every head that fell. These were the same people who sang hallelujahs on the deaths of those who had been condemned to the guillotine by the very tribunal who had now paid the debt they owed to the city; for their convictions were principally of the city. Other wretches of the same stamp were acting their infernal parts in different departments of France. Notwithstanding the deserts of this most execrable court, the exhibition was horrid to my feelings, however deserved the fate of the culprits."

Tom returned to the states. In 1796 he met up with Washington in Philadelphia. The president thanked him profusely for all his help arranging for young Lafayette's passage, and invited him to visit him in Virginia.

Tom spent a night with the president in Mount Vernon. Sitting outside and talking, a toad hopped by. Washington asked Tom if he had ever seen a toad swallow a firefly. Well, he had, said the president, and through the thin skin of the toad had been able to see the light continue blinking after it had been swallowed.