Part 9

Chapter 93,745 wordsPublic domain

The portion of this honorable life upon which his personal fame will doubtless be founded is that from 1862 to 1865, when he was military governor of the Department of the South. In this capacity he first proved possible the distribution of the vast body of free or fugitive slaves over the Sea Islands, which had been almost deserted by their white predecessors. This feat was accompanied by what was probably in the end even more important,—the creation of black troops from that centre. The leadership in this work might have belonged under other circumstances to Major-General Hunter, of Washington, District of Columbia, who had undertaken such a task in the same region (May 3, 1862); but General Hunter, though he had many fine qualities, was a thoroughly impetuous man; whimsical, changeable, and easily influenced by his staff officers, few of whom had the slightest faith in the enterprise. He acted, moreover, without authority from Washington, and his whole enterprise had been soon disallowed by the United States government. This was the position of things when General Saxton, availing himself of the fact that one company of this Hunter regiment had not, like the rest, been practically disbanded, made that the basis of a reorganization of it under the same name (First South Carolina Infantry). This was done under express authority from the War Department, dated August 25, 1862, with the hope of making it a pioneer of a whole subsequent series of slave regiments, as it was. The fact that General Saxton was a Massachusetts man, as was the colonel whom he put in charge of the first regiment,—and as were, indeed, most of the men prominent from beginning to end in the enlistment of colored troops,—gave an unquestioned priority in the matter to that state.

It must be remembered that this was long before Governor Andrew had received permission to recruit a colored regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, whose first colonel was Robert Gould Shaw, a young hero of Boston birth. The fact that this was the first black regiment enlisted at the North has left a general impression in Massachusetts that it was the first colored regiment; but this is an error of five months, General Saxton’s authority having been dated August 25, 1862, and that of Governor Andrew January 26, 1863. The whole number of black soldiers enlisted during the war was 178,975 (Heitman’s “Historical Register,” page 890), whose whole organization may fairly be attributed, in a general way, to the success of General Saxton’s undertaking. In making this claim, it must be borne in mind that the enlistments made by General Butler at almost precisely the same time in New Orleans consisted mainly of a quite exceptional class, the comparatively educated free colored men of that region, the darkest of these being, as General Butler himself once said, “of about the same complexion as the late Daniel Webster.” Those New Orleans regiments would hardly have led to organizing similar troops elsewhere, for want of similar material. Be this as it may, the fact is that these South Carolina regiments, after their number was increased by other colored regiments from various sources, were unquestionably those who held the South Carolina coast, making it possible for Sherman to lead his final march to the sea and thus practically end the war. As an outcome of all this, General Saxton’s name is quite sure to be long remembered.

It is fair now to recognize the fact that this combination of civil and military authority was not always what Saxton himself would have selected. There were times when he chafed under what seemed to him a non-military work and longed for the open field. It is perhaps characteristic of his temperament, however, that at the outset he preferred to be where the greatest obstacles were to be encountered, and this he certainly achieved. It must be remembered that the early organizers and officers of the colored troops fought in a manner with ropes around their necks, both they and their black recruits having been expressly denied by the Confederate government the usual privileges of soldiers. They had also to encounter for a long time the disapproval of many officers of high rank in the Union army, both regular and volunteer, this often leading to a grudging bestowal of supplies (especially, strange to say, of medical ones), and to a disproportionate share of fatigue duty. This was hard indeed for Saxton to bear, and was increased in his case by the fact that he had been almost the only cadet in his time at West Point who was strong in anti-slavery feeling, and who thus began with antagonisms which lasted into actual service. To these things he was perhaps oversensitive, and he had to be defended against this tendency, as he was, by an admirable wife and by an invaluable staff officer and housemate, Brevet Major Edward W. Hooper, of Massachusetts, who was his volunteer aide-de-camp and housemate. The latter was, as many Bostonians will remember, of splendid executive ability, as shown by his long subsequent service as steward and treasurer of Harvard University; a man of rare organizing power, and of a cheerfulness which made him only laugh away dozens of grievances that vexed General Saxton.

As an organizer of troops General Saxton’s standard was very high, and he assumed, as was proper, that a regiment made out of former slaves should not merely follow good moral examples, but set them. As all men in that day knew, there was a formidable variation in this respect in different regiments, some of the volunteer officers whose military standard was the highest being the lowest in their personal habits. General Saxton would issue special orders from time to time to maintain a high tone morally in the camp, as he did, indeed, in the whole region under his command. He was never in entire harmony with General Gillmore, the military commander of the department, whose interest was thought to lie chiefly in the artillery service; and while very zealous and efficient in organizing special expeditions for his own particular regiments, Saxton kept up, as we thought at the time, a caution beyond what was necessary in protecting the few colored regiments which he had personally organized. When the Florida expedition was planned, which resulted in the sanguinary defeat at Olustee, he heartily disapproved of the whole affair. This he carried so far that when my own regiment was ordered on the expedition, as we all greatly desired, when we had actually broken camp and marched down to the wharf for embarkment in high exultation, we were stopped and turned back by an order, just obtained by General Saxton from headquarters, countermanding our march and sending us back to pitch our tents again. It was not until some days later had brought the news of the disastrous battle, and how defective was the judgment of those who planned it, that General Saxton found himself vindicated in our eyes. The plain reason for that defeat was that the Confederates, being on the mainland and having railway communications, such as they were, could easily double from the interior any force sent round by water outside. This was just what had been pointed out beforehand by General Saxton, but his judgment had been overruled.

General Saxton was a man of fine military bearing and a most kindly and agreeable face. Social in his habits, he was able to go about freely for the rest of his life in the pleasant circle of retired military men and their families in Washington. He and his wife had always the dream of retiring from the greater gayety of the national metropolis to his birthplace at Deerfield, Massachusetts. Going there one beautiful day in early summer, with that thought in mind, they sat, so he told me, on the peaceful piazza all the morning and looked out down the avenue of magnificent elms which shade that most picturesque of village streets. During the whole morning no wheels passed their place, except those belonging to a single country farmer’s wagon. Finding the solitude to be somewhat of a change after the vivacity of Washington, they decided to go down to Greenfield and pass the afternoon. There they sat on a hotel piazza under somewhat similar circumstances and saw only farmers’ wagons, two or three. Disappointed in the reconnoissance, they went back to Washington, and spent the rest of their days amid a happy and congenial circle of friends. He died there February 23, 1908. To the present writer, at least, the world seems unquestionably more vacant that Saxton is gone.

XIV

ONE OF THACKERAY’S WOMEN

Some years since, there passed away, at Newport, Rhode Island, one who could justly be classed with Thackeray’s women; one in whom Lady Kew would have taken delight; one in whom she would have found wit and memory and audacity rivaling her own; one who was at once old and young, poor and luxurious, one of the loneliest of human beings, and yet one of the most sociable. Miss Jane Stuart, the only surviving daughter of Gilbert Stuart, the painter, had dwelt all her life on the edge of art without being an artist, and at the brink of fashion without being fashionable. Living at times in something that approached poverty, she was usually surrounded by friends who were rich and generous; so that she often fulfilled Motley’s famous early saying, that one could do without the necessaries of life, but could not spare the luxuries. She was an essential part of the atmosphere of Newport; living near the “Old Stone Mill,” she divided its celebrity and, as all agreed, its doubtful antiquity; for her most intimate friends could not really guess within fifteen years how old she was, and strangers placed her anywhere from sixty to eighty. Her modest cottage, full of old furniture and pictures, was the resort of much that was fashionable on the days of her weekly receptions; costly equipages might be seen before the door; and if, during any particular season, she suspected a falling off in visitors, she would try some new device,—a beautiful girl sitting in a certain carved armchair beneath an emblazoned window, like Keats’s Madeline,—or, when things grew desperate, a bench with a milk-pan and a pumpkin on the piazza, to give an innocently rural air. “My dear,” she said on that occasion, “I must try something: rusticity is the dodge for me”; and so the piazza looked that summer like a transformation scene in “Cinderella,” with the fairy godmother not far off.

She inherited from her father in full the Bohemian temperament, and cultivated it so habitually through life that it was in full flower at a time when almost any other woman would have been repressed by age, poverty, and loneliness. At seventy or more she was still a born mistress of the revels, and could not be for five minutes in a house where a charade or a mask was going on without tapping at the most private door and plaintively imploring to be taken in as one of the conspirators. Once in, there was nothing too daring, too grotesque, or too juvenile for her to accept as her part, and successfully. In the modest winter sports of the narrowed Newport circle, when wit and ingenuity had to be invoked to replace the summer resources of wealth and display, she was an indispensable factor. She had been known to enact a Proud Sister in “Cinderella,” to be the performer on the penny whistle in the “Children’s Symphony,” to march as the drum major of the Ku-Klux Klan with a muff for a shako, and to be the gorilla of a menagerie, with an artificial head. Nothing could make too great a demand upon her wit and vivacity, and her very face had a droll plainness more effective for histrionic purposes than a Grecian profile. She never lost dignity in these performances, for she never had anything that could exactly be described by that name; that was not her style. She had in its stead a supply of common sense and ready adaptation that took the place, when needed, of all starched decorum, and quite enabled her on serious occasions to hold her own.

But her social resources were not confined to occasions where she was one of an extemporized troupe: she was a host in herself; she had known everybody; her memory held the adventures and scandals of a generation, and these lost nothing on her lips. Then when other resources were exhausted, and the candles had burned down, and the fire was low, and a few guests lingered, somebody would be sure to say, “Now, Miss Jane, tell us a ghost story.” With a little, a very little, of coy reluctance, she would begin, in a voice at first commonplace, but presently dropping to a sort of mystic tone; she seemed to undergo a change like the gypsy queen in Browning’s “Flight of the Duchess”; she was no longer a plain, elderly woman in an economical gown, but she became a medium, a solemn weaver of spells so deep that they appeared to enchant herself. Whence came her stories, I wonder? not ghost stories alone, but blood-curdling murders and midnight terrors, of which she abated you not an item,—for she was never squeamish,—tales that all the police records could hardly match. Then, when she and her auditors were wrought up to the highest pitch, she began to tell fortunes; and here also she seemed not so much a performer as one performed upon,—a Delphic priestess, a Cassandra. I never shall forget how she once made our blood run cold with the visions of coming danger that she conjured around a young married woman on whom there soon afterwards broke a wholly unexpected scandal that left her an exile in a foreign land. No one ever knew, I believe, whether Miss Stuart spoke at that time with knowledge; perhaps she hardly knew herself; she always was, or affected to be, carried away beyond herself by these weird incantations.

She was not so much to be called affectionate or lovable as good-natured and kindly; and with an undisguised relish for the comfortable things of this world, and a very frank liking for the society of the rich and great, she was yet constant, after a fashion, to humbler friends, and liked to do them good turns. Much of her amiability took the form of flattery,—a flattery so habitual that it lost all its grossness, and became almost a form of good deeds. She was sometimes justly accused of applying this to the wealthy and influential, but it was almost as freely exercised where she had nothing to gain by it; and it gave to the humblest the feeling that he was at least worth flattering. Even if he had a secret fear that what she said of him behind his back might be less encouraging, no matter: it was something to have been praised to his face. It must be owned that her resources in the other direction were considerable, and Lord Steyne himself might have applauded when she was gradually led into mimicking some rich amateur who had pooh-poohed her pictures, or some intrusive dame who had patronizingly inspected her humble cot. It could not quite be said of her that her wit lived to play, not wound; and yet, after all, what she got out of life was so moderate, and so many women would have found her way of existence dreary enough, that it was impossible to grudge her these trifling indulgences.

Inheriting her father’s love of the brush, she had little of his talent; her portraits of friends were generally transferred by degrees to dark corners; but there existed an impression that she was a good copyist of Stuart’s pictures, and she was at one time a familiar figure in Boston, perched on a high stool, and copying those of his works which were transferred for safe-keeping from Faneuil Hall to the Art Museum. On one occasion, it was said, she grew tired of the long process of copying and took home a canvas or two with the eyes unpainted, putting them in, colored to please her own fancy, at Newport. Perhaps she invented this legend for her own amusement, for she never spared herself, and, were she to read this poor sketch of her, would object to nothing but the tameness of its outlines.

JOHN BARTLETT

In every university town such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is an outside circle, beyond the institution itself, of cultivated men who may or may not hold its degrees, but who contribute to the intellectual atmosphere. One of the most widely known and generally useful of these at Cambridge—whether in his active youth or in the patient and lonely seclusion of his later years—was John Bartlett, best known as the author of the dictionary entitled “Familiar Quotations.”

He was born in Plymouth, June 14, 1820, was educated in the public schools of that town, and in 1836 entered the bookbinding establishment connected with the University bookstore in Cambridge, under John Owen, who was Longfellow’s first publisher. In the next year Bartlett became a clerk in the bookstore, and soon showed remarkable talent for the business. In 1846 Mr. Owen failed, and Bartlett remained with his successor, George Nichols, but became himself the proprietor in 1849. He had shown himself in this position an uncommonly good publisher and adviser of authors. He had there published three editions of his “Familiar Quotations,” gradually enlarging the book from the beginning. In 1859 he sold out to Sever & Francis. In 1862 he served as volunteer naval paymaster for nine months with Captain Boutelle, his brother-in-law, on board Admiral DuPont’s dispatch-boat. In August, 1863, he entered the publishing house of Little, Brown & Co., nominally as clerk, but with the promise that in eighteen months, when the existing partnership would end, he should be taken into the firm, which accordingly took place in 1865. The fourth edition of his “Familiar Quotations,” always growing larger, had meanwhile been published by them, as well as an _édition de luxe_ of Walton’s “Complete Angler,” in the preparation of which he made an especial and exceptionally fine collection of works on angling, which he afterwards presented to the Harvard College Library. His activity in the Waltonian sport is also commemorated in Lowell’s poem, “To Mr. John Bartlett, who had sent me a seven-pound trout.” He gave to the Library at the same time another collection of books containing “Proverbs,” and still another on “Emblems.”

After his becoming partner in the firm, the literary, manufacturing, and advertising departments were assigned to him, and were retained until he withdrew altogether. The fifth and sixth editions of his “Quotations” were published by Little, Brown & Co., the seventh and eighth by Routledge of London, the ninth by Little, Brown & Co. and Macmillan & Co. of London, jointly; and of all these editions between two and three hundred thousand copies must have been sold. Of the seventh and eighth editions, as the author himself tells us, forty thousand copies were printed apart from the English reprint. The ninth edition, published in 1891, had three hundred and fifty pages more than its predecessor, and the index was increased by more than ten thousand lines. In 1881 Mr. Bartlett published his Shakespeare “Phrase-Book,” and in February, 1889, he retired from his firm to complete his indispensable Shakespeare “Concordance,” which Macmillan & Co. published at their own risk in London in 1894.

All this immense literary work had the direct support and coöperation of Mr. Bartlett’s wife, who was the daughter of Sidney Willard, professor of Hebrew in Harvard University, and granddaughter of Joseph Willard, President of Harvard from 1781 to 1804. She inherited from such an ancestry the love of studious labor; and as they had no children, she and her husband could pursue it with the greatest regularity. Both of them had also been great readers for many years, and there is still extant a manuscript book of John Bartlett’s which surpasses most books to be found in these days, for it contains the life-long record of his reading. What man or woman now living, for instance, can claim to have read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” faithfully through, four times, from beginning to end? We must, however, remember that this was accomplished by one who began by reading a verse of the Bible aloud to his mother when he was but three years old, and had gone through the whole of it at nine.

There came an event in Bartlett’s life, however, which put an end to all direct labors, when his wife and co-worker began to lose her mental clearness, and all this joint task had presently to be laid aside. For a time he tried to continue his work unaided; and she, with unwearied patience and gentleness, would sit quietly beside him without interference. But the malady increased, until she passed into that melancholy condition described so powerfully by his neighbor and intimate friend, James Russell Lowell,—though drawing from a different example,—in his poem of “The Darkened Mind,” one of the most impressive, I think, of his poems. While Bartlett still continued his habit of reading, the writing had to be surrendered. His eyesight being erelong affected, the reading also was abandoned, and after his wife’s death he lived for a year or two one of the loneliest of lives. He grew physically lame, and could scarcely cross the room unaided. A nervous trouble in the head left him able to employ a reader less and less frequently, and finally not at all. In a large and homelike parlor, containing one of the most charming private libraries in Cambridge,—the books being beautifully bound and lighting up the walls instead of darkening them,—he spent most of the day reclining on the sofa, externally unemployed, simply because employment was impossible. He had occasional visitors, and four of his old friends formed what they called a “Bartlett Club,” meeting at his house one evening in every week. Sometimes days passed, however, without his receiving a visitor, he living alone in a room once gay with the whist-parties which he and Lowell had formerly organized and carried on.