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.

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?

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.