I
-
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
1 r ¥tf?L ftU-*
From Photograph taken in iSSj-
*z
Truman Marcellus Post, d.d.
a Biograp^
PERSONAL AND LITERARY
T. A. POST
BOSTON AND CHICAGO
Congregational &unoag=Scf)ool ano ^Publishing Soctctg
Copyright, 1891, by Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society.
7£
My circle of exact knowledge seems shrinking as I descend the vale of years; but I feel more strongly than ever that my Father and God will be with me and bear me up through the mystery of the eternal future. — From letter of Dr. Post to Calvin Hurlburd, December 24, i8yg.
PREFACE.
It is believed that the life of Truman Marcellus Post will be of interest, not only to his circle of personal friends, but also to the general public. It had to do with events and crises of immense significance in the early history of the West, and later on with the great civil and military struggle for Missouri. And for such reasons it must possess a deep and growing interest to the student of history. This biography contains also autobiographic sketches and narratives, graphic and picturesque, sometimes intensely tragic, which, aside from any historic merit they may possess, cannot fail to attract and charm the reader.
But, in large measure, the life of Dr. Post was withdrawn from the outside world, and was passed in the seclusion of his study, among his books and in labors of the pen. This part of his life furnishes little, if anything, in the way of incident for the chronicler. Neverthe- less it was in some respects the most significant phase of his history. For nearly fifty years it was very prolific intellectually in sermons and
W lectures and addresses, and in contributions of various sorts to news-
§ papers and periodicals. These writings were the bloom and the fruit- age of his mental manhood. Not only so, but they were the record of his own inner and subjective life, of its habitudes, its moral and
^ intellectual traits, its achievements in learning, and its battles in the
<•> field of opinion.
And just here a very grave embarrassment has been encountered
J in this memoir. The limits of the present volume would make the
in
■ >
insertion of all, or indeed of any considerable portion, of the literary works of Dr. Post simply out of the question. Many of them, as indeed some of the best of them, were so compact in thought and so teeming with imagery, that any synopsis doing justice to the author would be difficult and perhaps impossible. On the other hand, to ignore these literary products or to pass them with a mere statistical mention, would be, as already intimated, to eliminate from the memoir that part of it which was the noblest and most significant.
There remained, therefore, no course but the middle one, of selecting from his various works sample or specimen utterances on the different
45
vi PREFACE.
subjects treated, and from those selected to cull out and present to the reader some of the leading thoughts and choice passages ; although in so doing it was painfully apparent that the benefit, oftentimes very great, of the context, and the symmetry and power of the article or address as a whole, would be lost to the reader. The task of choosing passages from the published works of Dr. Post for republication in this volume, while seemingly necessary to anything like completeness of the memoir, has therefore been a very delicate and necessarily a very unsatisfactory one.
Moreover, these extracts, interspersed through the narrative, as they have been, according to their chronological order, are frequently dis- connected with any chain of events, and on disconnected topics, and are therefore sometimes an interruption rather than an aid to the easy flow of the story. But on the other hand it is believed that all the more readily will the reader be led, at odd intervals and as the mood is on him, to take up the volume and ponder over the " life thoughts " and glowing pictures that are presented in them.
A fact to be emphasized in this connection is that the present volume leaves altogether unpublished many of the writings, and a number of the best writings, of Dr. Post. Some of them, such as the lecture upon the Age of Pericles and the lectures upon Ancient Commerce, could not be found. Others, such as several discourses on Congregationalism and on the Pilgrim Forefathers, and the Methods of Historical Study, etc., though equal in merit with addresses quoted from, have been omitted as kindred with them in theme, and to avoid any topical same- ness. And some of the most striking and impressive sermons of Dr. Post, such as " Think on these things1' ; " Be sure your sin will find you out," and " The power of an endless life," were never transcribed in full, and are therefore not in a state for publication.
It is doubtless also true that in another respect this sketch must prove an unsatisfying one. In the present day, and especially in the midst of a great city where events are following one upon another like ground swells of the ocean, the fame of men, however conspicuous they may be in public affairs, is soon swept away and almost forgotten ; to-day they are here; to-morrow a memory; shortly a mere tradition. And particularly is this true of a lifework whose results, as in the present instance, are accomplished so greatly along the line of silent causes and by the power of his own character in its impress upon the hearts and lives of others. Of such a history no record can be saved for the future in any earthly chronicle.
There was also something in the wondrous personalty of Dr. Post
PREFACE. VI 1
felt by all who knew him, and making him most beloved by those who knew him best, which the historian must despair of transmitting to the generations following. One may attempt to depict such a character, but in delineating its traits he finds that they fade into cold abstrac- tions, like sunlight into its prismatic rays in a spectrum ; the glow, the charm, the warm and living presence which transfused and kindled and quickened them all is no longer there, and the task seems well-nigh in vain.
It may not be out of place to add here that the work of preparing this volume is of a character entirely unwonted to the writer. It has been carried on by him in the midst of other and pressing labors, and he has been under no little embarrassment in attempting to do simple justice to the subject of the memoir, without laying himself open to the criticism of bias by reason of personal relationship, and perhaps, also, to criticism of attempting to deal with themes which might be more appropriately dwelt upon by a stranger.
Once more, and finally. The life of Dr. Post, as already said, carried him through stormy public crises. It is well known that in the battles for Congregationalism and the Fedeial Union, in Missouri, he took a conspicuous part. And among the readers of this volume, there will doubtless be many, as there were many among his warm and personal friends, whose sympathies and opinions were widely opposed to the course pursued by him during those controversies. Such read- ers will hardly need the assurance that there is no wish in these pages to stir the embers of party or sectarian feuds. But a memoir ignoring or glossing over such periods, and his own public utterances of the times, would present his life with its most conspicuous events left out or half told. Such a biography of Dr. Post would be not only glar- ingly incomplete, but would omit the very facts which, more than all others, bore witness to his moral manhood. Happily, the issues fought over in those days are no longer living issues, and as they are referred to in these pages it is trusted that the reader will find in the narrative neither root of bitterness nor challenge to controversy, but merely a faithful chronicle of events and a record of that bravery for conviction which all persons, of whatever school in politics or religion, will be glad to honor.
Put it is high time that the volume should go to press, if it is to be published at all, and it is given to the reader without further explana- tions, or apologies for its shortcomings. T. A. P.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
GENEALOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL.
Stephen Post. — Roswell Post. — Martin Post: his marriage with Sarah Hulburd, and birth of his sons Martin, Aurelian, and Truman. — His career and early death. — The Cornwall homestead and church and graveyard. Pages 1-6.
CHAPTER II.
EARLY HOME AND LIFE.
Marriage of Martin Post's widow with Captain Hand, and offspring of this union. — Larrabee's Point : its scenery and legends. — Early home and life in Shoreham, and youth in Orwell. Pages 7-15.
CHAPTER III.
PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS.
Preparation for college and matriculation. — Picturesque Middlebury. — Its noted men and college faculty in 1825. — College days and graduation. Pages 16-30.
CHAPTER IV.
PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR.
A year spent by Mr. Post at Castleton as principal of its Seminary, and tutorship of two years following in Middlebury. — Social life there. — The Henshaw household. — Visits to Norfolk, Conn., and to Homer, N. Y., at the time of his brother Martin's wedding. — Sickness well-nigh fatal in 183 1. Pages 31-40.
CHAPTER V.
ANDOVER. — WASHINGTI 'N. — JACKSONVILLE.
Andover Seminary and theology. — Winter of 1832-33 in Washington.— Recollections of Marshall, Story, Wirt, Taney, Clay, and Webster; also, of Governor Duncan, of Jacksonville, 111. —Journey West in spring of
X CONTENTS.
1S33, through the Alleghanies, down the Ohio, up to St. Louis and thence to Jacksonville. — That village in 1833. — Home of Governor Duncan. — Judge Lockwood and his family. — Stephen A. Douglas. — General Hardin and his wife, afterwards Mrs. Walworth. — Appointment to professorship in Illinois College. Pages 41-54.
CHAPTER VI.
EARLY DAYS IN JACKSONVILLE.
Early days in Jacksonville. — Illinois College in 1833. — "Cholera year." — Northern trip and Indian Treaty in Chicago. — Dangerous illness in Jacksonville and religious experiences. Pages 55-62.
CHAPTER VII. CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE.
Organization of the Congregational church at Jacksonville. — Public pro- fession of religion, and how it was brought about. — Letter picturing college life and surroundings. — Address at teachers' convention at Cincinnati. — Death of Aurelian Post. — Blind days and Poetry. Pages 63-72.
CHAPTER VIII.
MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME.
Trip to the east in 1835, and marriage. — Wedding journey to Jacksonville. — Winter of 1S35-36 at college. — Purchase of the Lockwood place. — Strange night's adventure. — The new home : its inmates and surround- ings,— Newton Bateman. — Augustus Hand. — H. B. McClure and wife come West. — Visit of Madam Henshaw. — Story of a boar hunt. Pages
73-S9-
CHAPTER IX.
THE SLAVE-POWER IN ILLINOIS.
Daniel Webster in Jacksonville. — The slave-power in Illinois in 1837. — Fourth of July oration. — Death of Lovejoy and "Address to the people of Alton." Pages 90-106.
CHAPTER X.
CALLED TO THE PASTORATE.
Illness at home. — Visit to Logansport. — Death of Mrs. Sarah Hand. — Trip through Northern Illinois in 1840. More as to the Jacksonville Congregational church. — The pastorate over it. — Views on systematic
CONTENTS. XI
theologies, ecclesiastical order, terms of communion, and extempore preaching. — Visit to Middlebury in 1843, ai,d preaching in the old Congregational church. — Ascent of Mount Lincoln. — Death of Gov- ernor Duncan. Pages 107-123.
CHAPTER XI.
AN ADDRESS AND AN ESSAY.
Address in 1844 on "The Heroism of the Democratic Ages," and trip to Lebanon, 111. — Contributions to The Biblical Repository on "The Immortality of the Soul." Pages 124-136.
CHAPTER XII.
LETTERS AND INCIDENTS.
Misadventures of a trip to Burlington. — Letters and Mss. in 1846 descriptive of Mackinac Island and strange incidents and serious illness there. — Scarlet fever at home. Pages 137-148.
CHAPTER XIII.
CALLED TO ST. LOUIS.
Call to the Third Presbyterian Church in St. Louis. — Call to Middlebury College. — Pressure from St. Louis, and obstacles in the way of removal thither. — Inducements that favored the call to St. Louis; its final acceptance. — The last years in Jacksonville. — The ideal home in retrospect. Pages 149-160.
CHAPTER XIV.
FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS.
First years in St. Louis. — Lecture on the Pilgrim Fathers. — La Clede Saloon disaster. — Address at dedication of Bellefontaine Cemetery. Pages 161-182.
CHAPTER XV.
ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS.
Address at Middlebury, Vt., on "Genius." — Early friends in St. Louis. — Article on " The ' Moral Obligations of the Legal Profession." — Literary reviews. — "The Voices of History." — A'^FareweU to 1850." Pages 183-200.
xii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XVI.
STRUGGLE OF CONGREGATIONALISM.
Struggle of Congregationalism, and founding of the First Congregational Church in St. Louis. — Address on "Congregationalism; and the Expediency of forming a Congregational Church." — The St. Louis home. — Incidents in 1852-54. — Sundry addresses in the East. Pages 201-216.
CHAPTER XVII. THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION.
Mr. Post and the cause of education. — Addresses at Illinois College. — Gasconade disaster. Pages 217-228.
CHAPTER XVIII.
RETENTION IN ST. LOUIS AND LITERARY LABORS.
Call to South Brooklyn. — The new chapel. — Articles on " Immortality." — " The Skeptical Era." — Address at Iowa College on " Religion and Education." — Letter to sons at Vale. — Address at Norwich, Conn., and various incidents. Pages 229-240.
CHAPTER XIX. CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES.
Christmas Discourses in 1859 on "The Greatness and Power of Faith as Illustrated by the Pilgrim Fathers," and on "The Vitality of Christianity." Pages 241-259.
CHAPTER XX.
A LOYAL PULPIT.
Dedication of the new church at Tenth and Locust streets. — Its standing and influence. — The civil war. — The loyal pulpit as a factor in molding public opinion in St. Louis in 1860-61. — Public services of Dr. Post in this crisis. — Patriotism of the First Congregational Church.
— Camp Jackson. — Sermon of Dr. Post on Fast Day in November, 1861. Pages 260-280.
CHAPTER XXI.
WAR PAPERS.
War papers: "Guerrilla war"; "Price's proclamation"; "What ails us?"
— Address on Palingenesy. Pages 281-301.
CONTENTS. Xlll
CHAPTER XXII.
MARTYRDOM AND FREEDOM.
Assassination of President Lincoln, and services at the First and Second Presbyterian churches in St. Louis. — Sermon at the First Congregational Church, on " The Duty of Intercessory Prayer." — Paper in The North American Review, on " Free Missouri." Pages 302-312.
CHAPTER XXIII.
RESTORED SIGHT. — ARTICLES ON OLD AGE.
Blind days again ; and removal of cataract in Boston. — Articles in The Chicago Advance on "Old Age." Pages 31*324.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A CHURCH COLONY. — NATIONAL POLITICS.
Pilgrim Chapel. — Services of recognition. — Sundry publications relating to national politics. Pages 325-339.
CHAPTER XXV.
HISTORY AS A TEACHER.
Address before the State Officers and Legislature at Springfield, 111., on " History as a Teacher of Social and Political Science." Pages 340-355.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE PILGRIM FATHERS.
Address in Chicago, at the 250th Anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, on " The Occasion and the Situation." Pages 356-370.
CHAPTER XXVII.
A DARKENED HOME.
Sermons on the Church Fathers, and Discourse before the American Board on " The Ministrant Church." — Tripsin 1873 to Colorado and Europe. — Death of Mrs. Post, and letter to Daniel Roberts. — Letter from Ferrisburg two years afterwards. Pages 371-379.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
EXTRACTS FROM ADDRESSES. Address in Broadway Tabernacle, New York — " Our Country as a Factor
XIV CONTENTS.
in the Kingdom of Christ.-' — Monograph on the Second Advent. — "Congregationalism: the Life Story." — Class Semi-Centennial Address in Middlebury, and letters to Calvin Hulburd. — Address in Chicago at the Annual Banquet of the Sons of Vermont. — Sermon in St. Louis before the American Board, on "The Outlook of the Times; the Trend of the World." Pages 3S0-394.
CHAPTER XXIX.
RESIGNATION OF PASTORATE.
Resignation by Dr. Tost^f his Pastorate. — Hammond Library bequest to the Chicago Theological Seminary, and response of Dr. Post for the Seminary. — Letters on Various Topics. — Summers at Biddeford Pool and elsewhere. Pages 395-405.
CHAPTER XXX.
LARGELY RETROSPECTIVE.
Semi-Centennial of the Congregational Church at Jacksonville, and Sermon by Dr. Post. — Article in The Andover Review on "Transition Periods in Religious Thought." — Death of Mrs. Clara H. Young, and Letters to Mrs. M. C. Mead and Calvin Hulbuid. Pages 406-419.
CHAPTER XXXI.
UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS.
Address at unveiling of the Blair Monument, and at the funeral of Samuel T. Glover. — Articles in The Andover Review on the "Life of William Lloyd Garrison " and on " The Things which Cannot be Shaken." Pages 420-432.
CHAPTER XXXII.
ILLNESS AND DEATH.
Signs of the coming end. — Visit to Des Moines at meeting of the American Board. — Fatal illness and death in December, 1886. Pages 433-437.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES.
Pages 438-451.
CONTENTS. XV
CHAPTER XXXIV.
TRIBUTES TO DR. POST.
Expression of the Press on the death of Dr. Post, and Tributes from the United States Court and Religious and Educational Societies in St. Louis and elsewhere throughout the country. Pages 452-461.
CHAPTER XXXV.
DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS.
Some marked traits in the character of Dr. Post. — His enthusiasm in mental pursuits. — His manifold learning and freedom from pedantry. — His idealism. — His poetic genius. — His favorite authors. — His love of nature. — His "Indian summer" cast of thought. — His sense of the unseen world and of the value of human opportunity. — His mental and moral manhood. — His characteristics as a public speaker. — His pathos. — His purity and freshness of soul. — His religious beliefs. — The result of his lifework. — Two pictures. Pages 462-479.
APPENDIX.
Thesaurus of treasured thoughts and pictures taken here and there from the writings of Dr. Post. Pages 481-500.
INDEX
Of Names and Subjects. Pages 501-507.
J? ^.a^?r
From Ambrotype Picture taken about the year 1850.
TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
CHAPTER I.
GENEALOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL.
Stephen Post. — Roswell Post- — Martin Post : his marriage with Sarah Hulburd, and birth of his sons Martin, Aurelian, and Truman. — His career and early death. — The Cornwall homestead and church and graveyard.
IT was hardly more than fifteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims, when Stephen Post came from England, and with a band of his countrymen settled Cambridge, Mass. He subsequently went to Saybrook, Conn., where his lineage took root, and from whence it has sent its offshoots through the country to the seventh and eighth generations. Stephen Post was a friend of Uncas in the Pequot war, he was one of the builders of the old fort at the mouth of the Connecticut, and was in his clay a man of considerable distinction. His dust, with that of many of his descendants, mingles with the soil of this region, while a goodly number of his name are among its living inhabitants. In 1753 his grandson, Roswell, moved to Rutland, Vt., where a house still standing is pointed out as the "old Post mansion," and where he died and was buried. Roswell's son and namesake was a soldier in the Revolution, with Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga and with Stark at Bennington, and probably among the " Con- tinentals " under Washington. He attained some civic distinction, having served three terms in the Vermont legislature. In 1773 he settled in Cornwall, and was one
2 TRUMAN MAKCELLUS POST.
of the founders of the Congregational church there, and one of its officers till his death in 1827.
Of his marriage with Martha Mead, of Killingworth, Conn., were born a number of children, and among them was Martin Post, father of the subject of this memoir. Of his life little remains but tradition — the brief story of one having great promise who died too early. His name is not on the records of the Cornwall Church, but he was said to be a man of earnest religious character, a regu- lar attendant on "public worship," and a daily student of the Bible and of books of high moral order. He studied law with Seth Storrs, Esq., a prominent Middlebury lawyer, and was admitted to the bar early in 1802 ; during the interval till 1804 he seems to have practiced law in Jericho, Vt. ; and while there he married Sarah Hulburd, of Orwell Village, a woman of noble type and devoted piety.
Shortly after his marriage he removed to Cornwall and built a small house not far away from his father's home- stead, and there he continued the practice of law until 1808, and is said to have been the only one of his pro- fession who ever attempted to ply his vocation in that harmonious township. From monetary or other consid- erations he did not confine himself to the profession of law, but was clerk of the Vermont House of Represent- atives from 1804 to 1808, and also clerk of the Addison County Court from 1808 to 18 10. With the commence- ment of his work in the latter office he moved from Corn- wall to Middlebury, where he is said to have formed a law partnership with Horatio Seymour. From Mr. Seymour he bought a little parcel of ground in the village, and built a modest cottage, overlooking the pretty wooded valley of Otter Creek. Of this house the eye searches in vain for any trace except a patchwork of old red
GEXEALOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL. 3
clapboards framed into the ell of a more pretending structure of much later date.
Cornwall was the birthplace of his sons, Martin Mer- cillian and Aurelian Hulburd, of whom frequent mention will be made later in these pages. It may be said here, although somewhat in anticipation, that Martin gradu- ated at Middlebury College, valedictorian in the class of 1826, and having passed through a theological course at Andover, came at the age of twenty-five to Logansport, Ind. (at that time an Indian trading post in an almost unbroken wilderness), where he remained till his death, October 11, 1876, and where he organized a church of which he continued pastor for many years and until his growing infirmities compelled him to resign. He was one of the founders of Wabash College and intimately associated with the various seminaries and churches which sprang up in the surrounding region. He was a modest, earnest, scholarly and saintly man, of rare purity of heart and life. Of his five sons, three are still living and engaged in the ministry. Two daughters also sur- vive, both of whom are married, one residing in Logans- port and one in New York.
Aurelian graduated at Middlebury in 1832, and com- menced a course of theological studies at Andover, but was compelled to abandon it by failure of health. He then undertook to teach a private school at Medford, Mass., but found himself inadequate to the rigor of a northern climate and went to Mississippi, where he con- tinued his labors until, having been completely broken in health, he came north to die at the house of his brother Martin, in Logansport, in 1834.
The subject of this memoir, Truman Marcellus Post, was born at his father's house in Middlebury, June 3, 18 10. The first name was driven for an uncle who after-
4 TR UMAN MA R CELL US POS T.
wards migrated to Illinois and made for himself a farm home not far from Jacksonville and adjoining the village of Waverly, where he lived — and in the later days received stray visits from his namesake — down to the time of his death in 1847. Martin Post the elder seems to have had a penchant for Roman patronymics, as the name of Marcellus, like that of Aurelian, was borrowed directly from antiquity.
In the year 181 1, when in his thirty-third year, Martin Post died at Middlebury. Truman was at that time only eight months old and there was something pathetic in the manner in which in after years his mind went groping through the traditions of his father's life, as if striving to lift the veil that hid it from his eyes. Toward the close of his own life, and by the merest accident, he came across a journal which had been kept by Martin Post in his twenty-first year while engaged in teaching, and, as he spent the night over its record of humble begin- nings and lofty aspirations, it seemed, as he afterward said, "like a revelation from another world."
After his death the body of Martin Post was taken back to the scene of his youth and early manhood, and buried almost in sight of the ancestral home, in the churchyard of Cornwall, beside his mother and close to the spot where his father Roswell was buried fourteen years afterward.
A slab, now somewhat dimmed with time and flecked with lichen, bears the date of his birth and death, with these lines, taken perhaps from some old hymn : —
Beneath this stone Death's prisoner lies. The stone shall move, the prisoner rise, When Jesus, with almighty word, Calls sleeping saints to meet their Lord.
Cornwall was a region greatly beloved and hallowed by
GENEALOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL. 5
Dr. Post. The house of his grandfather Roswell was a place of frequent and familiar resort, and indeed was almost a home, for his boyhood. He remembered the grandsire "as a tall, white-haired, venerable man, who seemed, with his stories of the Revolution, to have come from a former age." And there in Cornwall was the "meetinghouse" where his grandfather's family were wont to worship, where his father had worshiped in former years, and where he himself received some of his earliest and strongest religious impressions, and doubtless in large measure that love for the Congrega- tional type which became so manifest in after years. In the walls of that church Congregationalism was handed down as a household faith, and so came to have not merely the power of a conviction, but that of a family tie and a heritage of the blood.
But the spot of all others that drew his thoughts and footsteps to Cornwall was the simple graveyard near to the church. The place was one which seemed to have been meant, by nature as well as man's device, for holy uses and meditation. Afar from the stir of life and on the brow of a hill, it looks across the peaceful landscape of farms away to the westward where hazy mountains are watching the scene like a spirit of repose. Here the sun comes earliest in the morning, and here he lingers when all the valley is wrapt in twilight. Down below in the meadow one may see the farmers busy in the August days harvesting the grain, just as their fathers harvested for a hundred years before ; and one thinks how in like manner on this upland the fathers of the hamlet have been har- vested in, generation after generation.
In 1885, replying to an invitation to preach the centen- nial discourse commemorative of the Cornwall Church, Dr. Post writes as follows : —
6 TRUMAN MAKCELLUS POST.
"The occasion would be to me one of deep and precious interest. My heart has ever been loyal to old Vermont. The graves of my ancestors are in your churchyard, and many memories of my childhood and early youth go back to the old church and call up the living scenery wont to be presented there more than half a hundred years ago — faces and forms loved and revered and voices of music and wisdom which long since have been silent in this world. Many of the pleasant associa- tions of my boyhood wander back amid the kind, pure, cultivated, and pious homes and the beautiful scenery of your town."
CHAPTER II.
EARLY HOME AND LIFE.
Marriage of Martin Post's widow with Captain Hand, and offspring of this union. — Larrabee's Point: its scenery and legends. — Early home and life in Shoreham, and youth in Orwell.
IN 1 813 the widow of Martin Post, with her three boys, left Middlebury for the home of her father, Ebenezer Hulburd, on the old road from Orwell to Ben- son; and there, in 18 14, she married a retired shipmaster, Captain Augustus Hand, then living near Larrabee's Point in Shoreham. In this home were born Augustus F.1 and Oliver, and Sarah Jane, Hand (afterwards Mrs. Fuller), of whom more hereafter.
There is doubtless a mystery in personal character which is not to be accounted for by any circumstances of time or place ; and it is equally true that the environment of early life, its habitudes and the scenes and moods of nature in which it is cast, are most potent factors in developing and molding the original germ.
The scenery of Larrabee's Point is specially noteworthy in this narrative, not merely because of its rare beauty, but because it showed the same face as now to the boy that gazed on it seventy years ago ; and the impressions made on childhood then may be gathered by one who stands there to-day.
Two miles or more to the south, on the east side of Lake Champlain, were the low timbered ridge and pro- jecting rocky ledge of Mount Independence. On the
1 Died Jun« 15, 1890.
8 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
west and across the narrow channel of the lake stood the gray gables and dismantled walls of Ticonderoga, and frowning down on the fort was the rugged and pine- clad promontory of Mount Defiance ; while to the north- ward, fronting the lake and guarding the then mysterious wilderness behind, was the lesser range of the Adiron- dacks, with here and there a lordlier summit far off and solitary, looking down over its satellites or through some long mountain canon. The scene was one to fill the eye of the painter and poet and stir the blood of the sons of the Revolution. And, with its passing beauty even to a stranger, how the charm of that picture of lake and hill and forest must have deepened with added time and asso- ciation ! Its mountains would grow more familiar and beloved from year to year from their picturesque and changeless contours, and yet they wooed the eye with perpetual change of light and shadow and varying hues ; flushing with dawn and gray with nightfall, always somber with their pines, but with each returning autumn flecked with the scarlet and gold of their deciduous foliage; in the Indian summer melting into purple haze, and glittering at last with the snowy mantle of the keen New England winter. Like the warp and woof in the garment of Faust's Earth Spirit were the colors woven by the hours and the seasons on that landscape at Shore- ham. And it was here in the farm home that faced the lake at Larrabee's Point that ten of the first conscious years of the subject of this narrative were spent.
In an address delivered to his classmates at Middlebury fifty years after his graduation, he says : -
" Among the many things for which I am grateful to the land of my birth, it wakes my special gratitude that she early taught me the love of nature in her wild moods and places, as well as in her sweet and gentle aspects ; in
EARL Y HOME AND LIFE. 9
the lake, the forest, the storm, and the mountain, as well as the quiet brook and dreamy dell. This love, which has lured me ever, on opportunity, to seek her, away from the city, in her own solitudes, I regard as one of the richest gifts of my early nurture, one of the most precious endowments of education. It has been to me a lifelong: ministry, both of pleasure and of health — a physical and spiritual life-fountain. Those grand and awful mountains, they were the joy of my childhood and youth, as they wore the charm of the unsealed and unscalable. They have been the joy of my return from distant climes, as their secret has been penetrated by the feet of the climber. They have been the joy of my dreams on far- off, illimitable plains, where clouds alone could type their grandeur to the fancy. They have breathed on the child of New England their mighty spell, as on their awful top I have slept on their cloud-rests, and felt the heartbeat of the great mother pulsating up all night through the granite."
In the boyhood of Truman Post the landscape of Lake Champlain was already historic with the story of Aber- crombie and Ethan Allen, and the fall of Ticonderoga, and the cannon-crowned summits of Independence and Mount Defiance. The taking of the old fort was some- thing more than general history. It was a legend told at the Cornwall fireside and afterward repeated by the grandson to his children, with many an added story of his own childhood ; and thus the scenery of Shoreham, with the younger generation, came to be a sort of family classic, and invested with something of his own wistful and loving memories. At Larrabee's Point, when hardly five years old, he had heard the awful detonations from the black hulks of the British men-of-war, trophies of Plattsburg, as they floated along the lake in grim proces-
I O TR UMAN MA R CELL US POS T.
sion, terrible even in captivity. Rare sport in swimming was there in Lake Champlain ; and over its frozen sur- face for many a long mile the boys sped away with the wind in the winter's moonlight. On the Vermont shore, when coming home with the cows, they could hear the fitful howl of the wolf from across the water, and their pulses would cool at the sound. On this lake a ship's captain fell through the ice, and was saved by Master Truman from drowning; and the rescuer, then hardly ten years old, was taken on board by the captain and made into quite a hero.
The Shoreham farmhouse was a plain clapboarded and gabled structure, a story and a half in height, substantial but unpretending, with old-fashioned small window-panes, and fireplaces deep and ample after the fashion of those days. It stood hardly a stone's throw from the water's edge, and, with its row of poplars rising like plumes above the roof, made quite a brave show to passing vessels. The household at Shoreham consisted of Captain Hand and his wife, and the five brothers and their " sister Jane." The manner of life there was very simple and largely out- of-doors. While not at school or engaged in study, the older boys were occupied most of the time in tasks about the farm, and during the seasons of planting and reaping in hard labor with the field hands ; and the spare after- noons and holidays afforded many an opportunity to switch the streams for trout, or explore the woods for nuts or game. And in this rugged out-of-door life, with its labor in the harvest, its buffet with the long winter snow, and its hardy pastimes, may be traced a physical education which put the toughness of the New England pine into the fibre of subsequent manhood.
The nervous strength and activity of Truman in his early boyhood are handed down in family chronicles as
EARL Y HOME AND LIFE. I i
something phenomenal. His brother, Dr. Augustus Hand, writes: "He was fond of all kinds of out-of-door sports. Into them he entered with all the vigor and spirit of his character, which fact made him not only a favorite and leader, but the boast of all the boys in the neighborhood on both sides of the lake." While yet a mere lad he had already gained quite a local fame as champion wrestler in the neighborhood ; and his title to such reputation may be judged from an incident here given as an illustration : —
Once while the hired men were washing sheep in East Creek near the Shoreham farmhouse, Truman was sitting: on the bank and poring over a book very much after his wont. One of the men, seeing, as he thought, an easy subject in the rosy-faced and curly-headed boy, concluded to run up behind him unawares and tumble him headfore- most into the stream ; but his anticipated victim somehow got wind of the project, and as the farmhand came charg- ing at him under full headway from the rear, Truman leaned forward, and with a sudden and dexterous whirl had the fellow in an instant over his shoulders and down headforemost into the water and there ducked him till he begged for mercy.
The achievements deserving mention during the boy- hood at Shoreham were by no means confined to those in the line of physical athletics. His prowess in scholarship was equally precocious and noteworthy.
Martin, Aurelian, and Truman, during the very early years, attended a country school held in a little building, the shell of which is still to be seen on the hill half a mile east of Larrabee's Point ; and at that time, as Dr. Hand writes, "he manifested a great fondness for all kinds of reading, and surprised every one by the eager- ness with which he devoured volume after volume of books upon subjects which were supposed far beyond one
12 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
of his years to understand. Yet he seemed to master everything he read. Whether it was history, poetry, or science, he had the same insatiable greed for them all. Milton's Paradise Lost was among the books of my father's small library, and I well remember the neighbor- hood talk about his reading and rereading it and other books which few of the old folks could understand. Nothing seemed ' hard study ' for him. It was relish alone — something like fascination — that led him on in everything he did. It was at the age of nine years that he first ' touched figures,' and then this work was incidental. The country schoolhouse was about half a mile from his home and it was the custom of the times for the boys to take turns in starting the schoolhouse fire in the morn- ing. Truman, being a little boy, was considered too young for such a task in the cold mornings of a Ver- mont winter. But one day when it came the turn of his brother Martin, who had some ' chores ' to do before he could go, Truman was commissioned to make the fire at the schoolhouse. Accordingly, hot coals were fixed in the oldtime foot-stove, then in common use, and the boy of nine years, holding the stove by one hand and a hot ' nut-cake ' in the other, started off facing the wintry storm to make the fire. I suppose everything went right, for every morning after that the boy wanted, and was permitted, to make the early fire, his mother always put- ting the hot nut-cake in his hand. No one knew what the object was until near the end of the term, when it was discovered that during these morning hours, without assistance and unknown, he had gone through and thoroughly mastered the arithmetic used in those days. I was too young to know anything of this at that time, but I learned of it afterwards, and I well remember, and it was one of the first things I do remember of school,
EARL Y HOME AND LIFE.
13
that all the big boys and girls, and sometimes the teachers, would go to the little boy, my brother Truman, with their hard sums in arithmetic."
Any narrative made up by a stranger, and at a time so far removed as the present, must necessarily be meager; but the above sketch may give some outline of the life at Shoreham, and of it little more remains to be said. That chapter in the life of Dr. Post was one to which, in the college days and through after life, on to the very latest, his thoughts turned back with a yearning fondness which seemed to grow stronger with the years and with his removal to other lands. His attachment for the kin- dred in his Shoreham home was characteristically strong and loyal and unchanging. With Aurelian he was spe- cially intimate, and with him he skated and hunted and ranged the woods, and fished through East Creek and Lemon Fair ; and his fondness for Aurelian was intensi- fied in after years by reason of this brother's untimely death. In 1S22 Martin went away to college, and the love of Truman for Augustus and Oliver and Jane took a peculiarly thoughtful and careful type, as though in the absence of brother Martin they were committed to his personal keeping. His affection for his mother was that of the tenderest devotion and the sorrow of his early sep- aration from her was one of the deepest griefs, as it was the first great grief, of his life.
That event occurred in 1824 during his fifteenth year; and the step was taken by him after a long mental strug- gle and with a bitter heart pang. This event was his departure — never to return as an inmate — from the home at Larrabee's Point.
Of the cause which induced him to leave, it is unneces- sary to speak in detail. For the purpose of this narrative it is sufficient to say that Captain Hand had been a sea-
H
TRUMAN MAR CELL US POST.
faring man, the master of a ship's crew, and accustomed always to unquestioning and absolute obedience ; that his temper was imperious and subject to frequent and violent outbreaks, and his disposition and treatment were such as at last to necessitate the departure. And so, with the sad consent of his mother, and after a solemn and mournful farewell, Truman started off with a bundle containing all his worldly effects, and, having walked six miles across the country to the house of his uncle and guardian, Deacon Dorus Bascom, then living near the village of Orwell, he was kindly received by his uncle, although entirely unannounced, and became at once a member of his family.
At that time the Bascom household consisted, besides the father and mother, of Semantha (afterward wife of Rev. H. H. Bates, of Glens Falls, N. Y.) and three sons, Oliver, Samuel, and Franklin. Two older daughters, Clarinda (Mrs. Samuel Howard) and Emily (Mrs. Riley Sanford), were already married and away. Of the sons of Deacon Bascom, Oliver subsequently made his home on a farm overlooking a stretch of valley lands and glimpses of Lake Champlain a mile away; and there he lived till his death, a few years since. He was a deacon, as his father had been before him, in the Orwell Church. He was a man of deeply religious character, of simple manners and life, and of most sterling integrity. Franklin Bascom secured a liberal schooling, and has since done most effi- cient work in different places, in the higher branches of education. Samuel Bascom remained in the old home- stead, a mile to the west of Orwell village, and still carries on the ancestral farm. Oliver was about the age of Truman, and more like a brother than a cousin. Till his departure for Middlebury, Truman remained with his Orwell relatives, and shared with them in their farm-
EARL Y HOME AND LIFE. I 5
work and in their pastimes, and with them he spent most of his spare days during the college vacations. Among them he found a welcome in the summer visits of later life, and the old associations were thus kept fresh, and the old memories continued green unto the end.
CHAPTER III.
PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS.
Preparation for college and matriculation. — Picturesque Middlebury. — Its noted men and college faculty in 1825. — College days and graduation.
EARLY in 1825 Master Post was in Middlebury, pre- paring for college and studying Latin with Lucius Tilden, then preceptor of the Addison County Grammar School, directly adjoining Martin Post's home of fifteen years before.
Of Mr. Tilden and his teachings Dr. Post writes, a month before his own death : —
" He had touched my life long ago, had touched it pleasantly ; had touched it when life was all aglow with the freshness, the mystery, the ideals of morning. He was with me, my teacher, when first were opened to me the portals of Latin speech, with its, to me, new world- aspect and structure of thought, its personnel, passion, and drama of humanity. . . . He was a distinct figure and factor, if not a creator and molder, in quite a living and formative germinal period of my life, and I recollect him then, as in after years, as pleasant, kindly, genial. It seems strange to think of him as belonging to a gone world."
Of the matriculation for Middlebury College, and of the first meeting with his classmate Post on that occa- sion, Daniel Roberts, the intimate friend of college days and of after life, makes mention in a memorial address at the commencement anniversary of 1887: —
PREPARA TOR Y AND COLLEGE DA YS. \ 7
" The evening of that day we met upon the college green and, in our suddenly formed friendship, felicitated each other upon our happy escape from plucking, our hearts beating high with hope and great expectations. It is very fresh in my memory to-day, though this was nearly sixty-two years ago. How lovely was the night and balmy the air ! and how we walked up and down declaiming such choice specimens of oratory as we knew, and 'spouting' poetry to the moon and the stars : 'Ye stars that are the poetry of heaven,' ' Sun of the sleepless, melancholy star,' 'Now came still evening on,' etc., in all which Post was much readier and more prolific than myself ; and our happy meeting closed with an impromptu wrestling bout, in which, by the kind aid of Hercules, or by accident, I won of him my first and only victory in any department of deserving endeavor."
The class of 1829 was an unusually gifted one. It had eighteen members, among whom were Sheridan Guiteau, afterward a Presbyterian clergyman, and in his later years agent for the American Bible Society in Baltimore ; E. F. Hatfield, also a Presbyterian clergyman, whom Mr. Post met in St. Louis in 1833; Calvin Hulburd, of Brasher Falls, N. Y., a first cousin of Mr. Post, afterward a prom- inent member of the Republican party and a member of Congress from that state ; and Daniel Roberts, already mentioned, long a leading member of the bar of Burling- ton, Vt. "Painter's Hall," the blue-gray granite build- ing of four stories on the hill to the west of the village, then pretty much out of town, was used as study and sleeping quarters by the undergraduates and tutors. And across the naked campus, below it, and toward the village was a three-story, white clapboarded building, standing on the site of the present public schoolhouse, known as the "Old College," in which were the chapel
1 8 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
and library and recitation rooms. The chapel was plain in its appointments as Puritan simplicity could desire. Its seats were uncushioned and without backs, save a single horizontal slat. On the platform was simply a wooden desk, at which President Bates would conduct morning prayers garnished with singing, in which the students remember his fine tenor in "Scotland" and other sweet psalmody. The somewhat monkish custom then prevailed of conducting prayers by candlelight ; and the fireless chapel on those winter mornings gave to the exercises a savor of penance as well as devotion.
On each Sunday the students assembled in the galleries of the Congregational church and heard discourses from Rev. Thomas A. Merrill, the pastor, who had been vale- dictorian at Dartmouth in the same class with Daniel Webster, and was a man of great piety and learning.
On Commencement days the whole body of students proceeded solenni more from the college to the church, headed by Dr. Bates in official gown, and by the pro- fessors, all marching to the tap of the drum and to such inspiring strains as " The Hunters' Chorus," in Der Freischiitz, from Kendall's band.
The college faculty was thrown into close daily contact with the students, and some of its members left a deep and lasting impress upon the young men.
President Bates is said to have been a man of portly and imposing presence, quite an admirable figure on the platform, a fine speaker, and a delightful singer. His scholarship is attested by the fact that in 1800 he bore off the first honors at Harvard over classmates of the standing of Judge Shaw. John Hough was professor of Latin and Greek, an excellent linguist, and a man of sharp and trenchant intellect. And both of these men, not to mention others, were thrown into intimate personal
PREPARA TORY AND COLLEGE DA VS. 1 9
relations then and afterward with the subject of this memoir.
Middlebury at that time had among its people, oufside of the college professors, not a few men of prominent standing in that region and throughout the state ; and their power was felt, not only by the community, but in a large degree by the college itself. Some of them were the warm family and personal friends of Master Post during the college life, and men for whom he cherished grateful recollections in all the years that followed. There was Horatio Seymour — counted by many to have been an abler man than his more famous namesake in New York — who was closely connected in friendship and business relations with Martin Post the elder ; and there was Daniel Chipman, quite noted in his time, and imperishably asso- ciated with the history of Middlebury through the hill which bears his family name ; then there was S. S. Phelps, a famous jurist and United States senator and father of the late Minister to England ; and there were Judge Swift — the friend of Truman as of his father before him — and Hon. William Slade, and Seth Storrs who was one of the earliest and foremost benefactors of the college.
Relative to these social influences of his college days is the following from the Semi-Centennial Address of Dr. Post, in 1879, already referred to : —
" The college becomes the capital interest of the vil- lage, its foster child, the object of local pride, affection, and kindly offices, nucleus and center of many of its enterprises. The consciousness of identity of interest extends itself in kindly feeling toward the students, and results in a reciprocal interest, stimulating, refining, and beneficent to both parties.
" Much do we, the old alumni, certainly owe to the people
20 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
of this town, old and young, to those in literary, profes- sional, and business pursuits as well as to those embel- lishing its general social life. There are names of such, familiar, dear, which crowd upon me now, which I may not stop to recite. Still they seem to live, waiting to greet us on our return, coming a phantom army from under the skies of morning. As in boyhood they wrought us blessings, so do they ever. They touch the life pulse, they quicken the heart throb through all the years."
During the freshman year Master Post roomed with his cousin, Calvin Hulburd, in Painter's Hall, and for a time, probably, in the same dormitory with his brother Martin. For a while he lodged near the colleges in a students' boarding house, kept by Mrs. Foote, whose son Solomon (afterwards well known as presiding officer of the United States Senate) was his roommate ; and for a portion of of the college course he boarded with Professor Hough in his home on Waybridge Road.
While an undergraduate Master Post was not much given to social visiting. When not in the recitation room or dormitory, he was often out on a solitary walk, or a stroll with some classmate. The love of nature bred on the shore of Lake Champlain seemed to grow with what it fed on, and in the life at Middlebury College it found charm and inspiration at every hand. The grace- ful and rounded slope of Chipman's Hill invited young men and maidens to a tryst at the summit, and one never grew too old to feel his pulse quicken at the sight of its marvelous panorama. To the north, half shut from view and in the haze, was the " Chin " of Mansfield, and not far from it, jutting up among its foot- hills, like a crouching lion among his whelps, was the top- most peak of Camel's Hump. To the east was Dunmore Mountain, long, shaggy, and somber, stretching south
Congregational Meeting House Middlebury, Vermont.
PREPARA TOR Y AND COLLEGE DA YS. 2 1
from Bristol Gap, and behind it rose the bald crest of Lincoln. On the south was the Rutland chain, and to the southwest was Black Mountain with the lesser hills of Lake George. In the western foreground was Snake Mountain, famous for its prospect, and away against the western sky, sometimes in the frosty air very close at hand, sometimes through the smoky atmosphere looking "far, vague, and dim," were the Adirondacks, skirting the life at Middlebury as that at Shoreham and Orwell, but as yet mysterious and unexplored, and standing across the track of sunset, very much, as one might fancy, like " the undiscovered country " beyond our earthly horizon.
Near by and nestling at the base of Chipman was the little village of Middlebury, with its houses half hidden by the foliage, and the solitary clock spire whose bell sent up its vibrations through the drowsy air.
The old Congregational church stood there then as now, with its white and graceful front, looking across the green and over the bridge and up the narrow street to the southward ; St. Stephen's, with its gray stone walls and square belfry, was not then built, but in the later college days stood facing it at the lower end of the park.
Not to be forgotten in any description of the village was Otter Creek, with the bridge across it, where the passer — however familiar with the scene — would be drawn as by a fascination to loiter, and watch the waters as they sped along and plunged down among the rocks, and to gaze at the dim rainbow above the waterfall, and listen to its ceaseless roar.
In the Semi-Centennial Address of Dr. Post, already spoken of, special emphasis is laid on the attractions of the country about Middlebury in the college days, " chal- lenging the student to gymnastics under the open sky,
2 2 TR I'M A A - . 1/. / R CEL L US POS T.
to the resolute and manly climb, and bending his noble strength against the steep, or inviting to a morning ramble amid visions as of the Delectable Mountains, or sending him forth to saunter under more than the glories of the Italian sunsets, or summoning to distant excursions up awful heights that battle with the storm clouds for their homes. All these brace and tone the physical man and put the student on his mettle, while they quicken, ennoble, and refine the spiritual being, flooding it with the ideal and blending the aesthetics and imagery of nature with the structure and furniture of academic lore."
A frequent makeshift among students who were com- pelled to earn their way through college was school teach- ing in the neighboring country districts. To favor the student in this undertaking, a seven weeks' vacation was given during the winter. And the fact that Master Post gave two or three months of each year of the college course to this calling, without the ordinary student's respite from work, among strangers, at a pittance of thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen dollars a month, and still maintained himself, finished his full course, and carried off the first prizes in a class of unusual talent, bears testimony, not only to the capacity, but to the self-denial and manly pluck and tireless industry that carried him through.
During the first winter vacation he was teaching, as he writes his mother (January 28, 1826), in the north part of Williston, seven miles or thereabouts from Burlington.
In the winter of 1826-27 he taught in the township of Shoreham, two miles or so west of the village and two or three miles from the lake. Captain Hand and the family had then removed to Ferrisburgh ; but the thoughts and footsteps of the young student still lingered about the old home.
PRE PARA TOR Y AND COLLEGE DA VS. 2 1
December 27, 1826, he writes to his mother : —
..." My schoolhouse is situated near the graveyard in which my infant sister was buried. I frequently go there. I cannot distinguish the grave, but the circumstance that I am near it fills me with musings, which, although melan- choly, I love to indulge.
" I can see the graves of many of the relatives that have been buried there whom I have never known. I lean on the tombstone and glance my eye over the places where I sported in my boyhood. Our old farm is plainly distin- guishable from the place. I can see the point of rocks where I fished, and the pastures where I, with Augustus, drove the cows.
" Every day brings with it thoughts of home. I feel much anxiety respecting the welfare of my little brothers and Jane, not but that I know that they have parents to care for their well-being, but from the consideration that the whole course of their future life will be influenced, and their characters will be formed, by the principles which they now imbibe and the habits which they now acquire. I am extremely desirous of visiting home, and I think of the children at night upon my bed. But I do not think I shall be able to leave my school, and it is not probable that you will see me before next spring. Grand- father's health, when I left Cornwall, was very poor. I do not think that he will live long-."
In December, 1827, Mr. Post was at Shoreham, proba- bly engaged with his country school. And a letter to Mr. Roberts, read by the latter during his memorial address, already mentioned, in its poetical coloring and its musing,* half-melancholy vein, shows the mental characteristics of that period and unmistakably the same stamp of thought that marked the writer in his later days : —
" I am in an extreme quandary with what to begin my
24 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
letter. If it were destined for thine own private indulgent eye alone, it would not be a matter of so much difficulty. But as undoubtedly after my decease every scrap of my writings will be collected and compiled, and given to the world as the remains of departed genius, it behooves me to avoid writing anything that may cast a shade upon my memory. ... I congratulate you on your bright visions and lofty aspirations. But oh, 't is hard to devote the warm spring of existence to the arduous and probably futile pursuit of this ignis fatuus ; to sacrifice our youth- ful pleasures and young affections to this mighty shadow, fame ; to forever chase a bauble that too often, like the fabled apples of the sea of death, molders to dry ashes in the grasp. Yet who for his life would give over the chase ? Hard as the struggle is, is it not still harder to think to lie down in the darksome house, ' by the cold world forgot,' to have our memories forever quenched in the silence of the grave ; a grave unvisited by aught save the cold beams of yon pale moon that streams its fitful light through the lattice ? Man shrinks from such a prospect, and vainly mocks himself with idle hopes and fantasies. . .
"Hark! the clock strikes; 'tis the knell of 1827. Another year is numbered with the past eternity. It had its virtues and its vices, its follies and its crimes, its toils and its troubles, its love and its hatred, its joys and its sorrows. Many a languid eye has been kindled into rapture ; many a bright one has been shut for aye. Many hearts have been corrupted, many have been broken, many have forever forgotten to beat. Many have sinned, few are forgiven. Many have died, few are remembered, and fewer still are regretted. Where are all these ? They are to us as things beyond the flood. They have been, and is the world the better for them ? What influence has
PREPARA TOR Y AND COLLEGE DA YS. 2 5
the past year had on the destinies of the human race ? What influence on our destinies ? What are we ? Where are we ? reeds driven along the tide of human time,
' Which as it glides with ceaseless flow Retains each grief, retains each crime, Its earlier years are doomed to know.'
" How seldom does man start into a consciousness of the eternity of his existence ! How few, while they view the dull pageantry of time, awake from its dreams and see themselves a part of immensity, a part of an endless chain of existence ! How few reflect that, like the clouds and sunbeams which have thrown their shades and glories over the eyes of former ages, but have
' Left in yonder silent sky No vestige where they flew,'
so they themselves may soon pass, and all that can be known, all that can be told, of them may be, ' Once there lived a man.' "
The life of the schoolmaster in those days was not always a bed of roses. Sometimes in the rough country districts the pupils were too much for the teacher; and in one instance, possibly at the Williston School, two of them successively had been forced to succumb to open rebellion and resign. Perhaps in view of this fact and of the peculiar adaptation of young Post as an athlete, in addition to his other qualifications, he was selected to fill the vacancy. And, having been apprised of the state of affairs, as related by Dr. Hand, "he procured a number of ' oxgoads,' and oh his first entrance into the schoolroom placed them conspicuously before the scholars. But," writes the doctor, " it was not long before the rebellion presented itself in the form of an Amazonian girl who purposely made herself the subject of discipline.
26 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
I forget the entire details, save that the girl and her equally big brother suddenly found themselves piled together upon the floor, and the boy in receipt of all the vengeance which the whips could impart. When the scene closed the two insurgents had escaped through the door and with them the last vestige of the school insub- ordination."
In the spring of 1828, after consultation with the presi- dent and officers of the college, he taught in the Addison County Grammar School. And in the winter of 1828-29 he had charge of the country district schoolhouse, which may still be seen on the hilltop, half a mile or so west of the Foote homestead and near the bridge which crosses the " Lemon Fair."
In January, 1829, he writes his mother from this place :
" Although I am in want of money badly enough, I can hardly help regretting, at times, having engaged myself in a school. I had anticipated much pleasure in vacation and hoped I might have been of service to the children."
He is passing his time on the whole very pleasantly, utilizing most of the hours out of school in study, and "trying to learn to sing."
His mind is already turning toward the uncertain future beyond Commencement day. "Where I shall go when I leave college, I know not. It hardly seems possible that college life is so nearly over. It has vanished like a shadow. And so I suppose you will tell me all my days will vanish."
Of the college days little more than as above outlined remains to be said. The life was one of intense applica- tion, early in the morning and late in the night, and not merely with the studies of the curriculum, but with gen- eral reading in the best standard literature. His faculty
PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS. 2 "J
in mastering the classics and mathematics was not more remarkable than his faculty of rapid reading and his power of absorbing and assimilating what he read.
In the address of Mr. Roberts, above referred to, is a character sketch of his classmate, which, even down to the mention of bad penmanship and the orator's disregard for his own text, may be recognized by the friends of modern date : —
" From the first to the last of his college life, Post was easily the leader of his class in all studies, and was the valedictorian at our graduation. His superiority was readily acknowledged by all his classmates, and that with- out jealousy or envy, for he bore his honors modestly, without ostentation or seeming consciousness of his superior claims ; and his class was a close-knit brother- hood of bright and generous youth, taking pride in each other. . . .
" He found time in college for much reading outside the curriculum. He was attracted by the best in English literature, favoring the romantic and imaginative, espe- cially when it exhibited the art and graces of composition and style. He remembered well and was apt and ready in quotations of the choice and dainty things said or written in English speech. The later style of the preacher and essayist, in its gorgeousness, its Miltonic stateliness, its draping and rich phrasing, was native to him and was plainly marked in his college compositions. I was always his prompter at our college exhibitions, for I was almost the only one who would venture to decipher his then unreadable manuscript, nor could I always follow his tracks, for he was not himself accustomed to follow closely his own manuscript, but in the glow and ardor of the occasion words and phrases, ornamental and cumula- tive, would rush in and make themselves places to the
2 8 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T.
confusion of his prompter, though often to the improve- ment of the original.
" He loved from a boy to visit the old historic scenes where sentiment would be fed by association, as Ticon- deroga, Mount Vernon, etc. My first visit to the ruins of 'Old Ti ' was made under his pilotage late in the winter of 1827-28, crossing Lake Cham plain from Larrabee's Point on the ice. He loved nature in all her moods.
" His boyhood and youth strikingly indicate the man he was. The Rev. Dr. Post was plainly the boy Truman in his development — a change in degree, but not in essential elements. He was then, as in after life, pure and tender- hearted, sympathetic, averse to strife and wrangling, but steadfast in his moral convictions ; honest and honorable; a lover of the good, the heroic, the true, and the beautiful ; of a tropical fancy and rich poetic nature, which gushed forth spontaneously in an eloquence as graceful as it was daring in its flight."
At last came round the coronal day, the Commencement day of August, 1829.
An old file of The Vermont American of August 28, 1829, spreads at full length the order of exercises, as of those before the " Philomathean " and "Beneficent" societies on the day previous. The paper chronicles, before the latter association, " An oration : The Moral Sublime. By T. M. Post ; " also, an award of prizes for declamation to H. B. McClure and R. F. Lawrence of the freshman class.
On Wednesday were held the exercises of the gradu- ating class, at which fifteen orations were delivered on various subjects announced in the program. At the end was " An oration : The Claims of the Age on Lit- erary Men, with Valedictory Address. By T. M. Post, of Shoreham."
PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS. 29
The American remarks briefly that "the graduating class did much credit to themselves."
Neither of the orations referred to in The American has been found.
Mrs. H. B. Smith, then Hannah Bates, daughter of the president, writes of Mr. Post and the valedictory address : " I was present at his graduation (it was a great while ago), but I well remember his youthful, modest appear- ance, and the impression he made, not only on his class, but on the whole audience, when he repeated these lines : —
There are tones that will haunt us, though lonely
Our path be o'er mountain or sea ; There are looks that will pass from us only When memory ceases to be.
There are hopes that our burden can lighten
Though toilsome and steep be the way, And dreams that like moonlight can brighten
With a light that is dearer than day.
There are names that are cherished, though nameless
For aye on the lip they may be ; There are hearts that though fettered are tameless
And thoughts unexpressed but still free.'"
The above verses may have been quoted, or, as Mrs. Smith conjectures, may have been original with the speaker.
At the class reunion of 1879 tne scene of that Com- mencement day came up again through "the haze of half a century's memories": —
"To some of us gathered here to-day from distant regions, or far-off years, and probably for the last time, come utterances, to which we cannot shut our ears, from the far-fled, ever-receding, beautiful land of youth ; from the day, then so grand, grandest we had ever seen, or
30 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
perhaps were to see, when, our course finished, our diplomas proudly won, we came forth on the Commence- ment stage with the eyes of youth, beauty, and love — 'the starlight of our boyhood' — shining on us, together with the approving smile of the wise and strong, the revered and the honored, auspicating our debut before the great world. How brave our representation ! How col- ored with the ideal the world into which we were in thought perhaps bringing the new epoch ! With fare- wells, full of love and hope, and some tears and fond promises of reunions, we parted and went out into the mystery of life.
" Forgive us, friends, if we seem somewhat strange among you to-day ; if on this anniversary festival we appear almost as with sphinx faces, turned, with sad, steadfast look, to the land of the Nevermore. We see there what your eyes may not see, we hear voices you have never heard. Our diplomas are perhaps half dust, discolored with the fade and mold of time. The hands that gave them are long since dust, the eyes that shone on us so kindly, quenched long ago, the faces that beamed so benignly on us their approving smile, long since were reflected in the jasper sea."
CHAPTER IV.
PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR.
A year spent by Mr. Post at Castleton as principal of its Seminary, and tutorship of two years following in Middlebury. — Social life there. — The Henshaw household. — Visits to Norfolk, Conn., and to Homer, N. Y., at the time of his brother Martin's wedding. — Sickness well- nigh fatal in 1831.
CASTLETON Seminary, in the picturesque village of that name and not many miles from Middlebury, recently celebrated its hundredth anniversary, and on its walls bore in evergreen characters the names of its former instructors; among them that of " T. M. Post," and, opposite, the figures "1830."
During that year he was principal of the seminary, lodging for the most of the time at the house of Zimri Howe, with whom were also at the same time a number of teachers of an academy for young ladies in Castleton village.
The letters of this period refer to these new-found acquaintances and the pleasure derived from their society : but they likewise show that the mind of the writer is much of the time back at Shoreham and among his kindred ; that he is often thinking of the old farm now tenanted by strangers ; of the family circle now broken, and of its loved members who have gone to other parts.
He is thinking and caring about Augustus and Oliver and Jane, much after his former wont, as though still burdened with a special responsibility on their account. The same earnest, anxious forecast into the long future for those whom he loved, which marked his later manhood, is discernible far back in these years.
32
TRUMAN MAKCELLUS POST.
In December, 1829, he is just back from Middlebury with rather homesick remembrances of his Alma Mater. In a letter of this date he writes, to classmate Roberts : " There were but few students at the college. It made me melancholy to traverse the deserted halls, and think that not one of the glorious class of 1829 was there. All were gone, each his own way over the earth. I at- tended church on the Sabbath: couldn't help looking in our old seat for the well-known faces of our class- mates, but they were scattered. Barber and myself alone were there to represent them.
" College life with all its delightful scenes of fellowship and endearment, our frequent assemblings in that place, particularly the scenes of our last Sabbath there, and the hurry, the excitement, and the iclat of our Commence- ment, all passed over my mind like a melancholy dream. But I need not detail my musings. You know what your own would have been. But I assure you, among the scenes which fancy conjured up, not the least prominent or the least cherished were those associated with the name of 'Roberts.' Very many and pleasant hours have we passed together, and it is sad to think that they are over. But, Daniel, they shall not be forgot ; shall they ? Even in the wane of age they shall rise before the mind's eye, the greenest spots on memory's waste. Our friendship has never been interrupted from our first inter- view on the college green to the present hour, and I trust it never may be. True, the past in its fresh loveliness comes no more. But shall it not occasionally claim from us the tribute of a regret and a sigh ? "
In the early spring following he is at Cornwall, enjoying a short release from the drudgery of school, among the friends in Addison County.
In April he is back at Castleton. And in a letter to his
PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR.
33
mother he mentions the receipt of one from President Bates, offering him a tutorship in Micldlebury College. He writes : " I shall raise this year funds sufficient to carry me through the study of a profession. Moreover it will be pleasant to spend another year at home and espe- cially at Middlebury."
In the fall of 1830 he took his first extended trip out into the world, passing through Shoreham and Albany, exploring New York, attending Commencement in New Haven, and visiting Norfolk on his return.
In the same year came an urgent appeal from the faculty of Middlebury College, calling him to accept a position as tutor. And in response to this invitation the position in Castleton was resigned and that in Middlebury accepted, and as tutor he remained in Middlebury for the two years next following.
Mr. Post, though greatly absorbed in his studies and college duties, had a relish for social life, and on his return to Middlebury was welcomed into a most delightful society. As tutor, he was brought into daily association with President Bates, and the engagement of his brother Aurelian to one of the daughters (who died years after- wards unmarried), and the pleasant circle of sisters in the household, made him a frequent visitor there. The tie which bound him to this family proved to be more than a passing college friendship. In 1833, at Marietta, Ohio, he found Hannah Bates, already spoken of, and then wife of Rev. Henry Smith, President of Lane Seminary; and he was the guest of Dr. Bates in Middlebury years afterwards.
Among the Middlebury friends of Mr. Post of that day, and long remembered, were Dr. William Bass and his daughters, whose sweet voices used to be heard in the church choir, and the family of Jonathan Hagar, more
34 TR I'M A X M. I R t ■/■:/. L I 'S POS T.
than one of whom were then quire famous for their beauty and social accomplishments.
During the tutorship, Mr. Post taught a large Bible class ,of young ladies in the Congregational Sabbath- school ; and a very dear friend of subsequent years, then a pupil and inmate of Mrs. Cook's noted boarding school, in a recent letter gives her recollection of the young teacher.
"To have a call from ' tutor ' Post, as we called him, or to meet him on a walk, was a pleasant theme for conver- sation for days afterwards. There was a fascination about him which was felt and acknowledged in the highest religious and literary circles, or in any walks, by those who were so happy as to know the magnetic, transforming power of his goodness, his refined nature, his constant aim and effort to make men happier by making them holier."
Among the acquaintances of tutor days was Philip Battell, Esq., the classmate of Martin Post, whose friend- ship ripened with subsequent years. In the fall of 1832 Mr. Post is visiting his home in Norfolk, Conn., and writes : —
" I am weatherbound for the present, in this mountain town, by the dismal equinoctial ; and from the bustle and hurry of travel and visiting, my mind takes the chance to steal back to old Vermont a while and to inquire after the welfare of old friends. Not but that I am in a most pleasant haven — for never was found one more delightful, or better adapted to soothe the impatience of the delayed traveler. ... I had most sad, sad to me at least, leave-taking of some of my friends in Middlebury, but left — heart and hand free — and went with my brother Martin to Homer, N. Y., to attend his wedding."
A household then well known in Middlebury was that of Madam Sarah Henshaw, widow of Daniel Henshaw who had come to that village in 1800 and who died in
PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR. 35
1825. The old family mansion, now burned and razed to the ground, then and for well on to a half century after- wards, stood on the rise of the hill, just back from the street whose bridge crosses Otter Creek, and within the rushing sound of its mill wheel and waterfall. The white frame cottage, with its low eaves and long sweep of pitched roof, and its front porch, peeping through vines and evergreens at the passer-by, was known as the " Hen- shaw homestead." And long after it had passed from its original ownership into the possession of strangers, to the older inhabitants it remained a familiar and picturesque reminder of the former days, and was full of departed footsteps and voices.
Madam Henshaw was a lady of rare beauty. Her* presence was courtly and dignified, and her character of the noblest stamp of Christian womanhood. She was noted for her kindness and hospitality to the young men of the college, and her house was a favorite place of resort to all of them who had the good fortune to know her. During his senior year Mr. Post had been a frequent and welcome visitor. But at that time and during the year of 1829-31 most of the family of Madam Henshaw were scattered. Sarah (Mrs. Charles Richards) was living in Brooklyn. Julia, the wife of Rev. Jacob J. Robertson, was then with her husband in the mission field in Greece. Catharine, who had married Rev. Alfred Baury, was in Boston. John P. K. Henshaw, for many years rector of St. Peter's Church in Baltimore and subsequently bishop of Rhode Island, was away in his ministerial labors. Charles Henshaw was no longer at home. Eliza (Mrs. Piatt), and Margaret — afterwards wife of Rev. Chauncey Fitch, and Harriet — subsequently Mrs. H. B. McClure, were still in Middlebury. Frances was for a while at Mrs. Willard's school in Troy, N. Y. ; and most of the
36 TH UMAN MA R CELL US POST.
time from 1829 to 1831 was visiting her sister Emeline (Mrs. Daniel Whitney) in Green Bay, Wis., at that time a remote Indian outpost, whose principal society consisted of the garrison of Fort Howard and the friendly savages. During part of the college course Frances had been in Middlebury, but her acquaintance with the young student had been slight, and so remained till near the end of his tutorship.
The above names furnish a partial list of those whose lives were thrown into association with that here narrated during the tutor clays of 1830-32. Each of these names had its own story — some of them pleasant and romantic memories ; others were closely interwoven, not only with Middlebury life, but indelibly with the long future.
The intellectual tone and stimulus of the college and the culture and charms of its society must have made the Middlebury of those days a rare world indeed. And it deserves a far more extended mention than can be given it in these pages.
Mr. Post, in subsequent life, if practicable, made an annual visit to his relatives in Vermont, and never did so without pressing into the service some one of his cousins and with them making the social round of his kindred. That this habit was an old one appears from a letter written in the February vacation of 1832, in which he writes from Cornwall that he has been on a "cousining foray through this region." He says : " I have ridden and visited, and visited and ridden ; looked into law a little and into novels more, and, to crown all, have delighted, reformed, and illuminated the people of Orwell and Shoreham by a recitation of old speeches."
Among the events of the tutor's life, one calling for special chronicle was a sickness — indeed his first serious illness and one which proved almost fatal — in the spring of 1831.
PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR.
37
He was then rooming, perhaps boarding, at the two- story frame house, just across the street from the Con- gregational church, now occupied by Smith Beckwith, Esq. The house then belonged to Mrs. Rebecca Miller, a widow lady widely known in the community for her benevolence and more especially for her kindness to the college students, one or two of whom were almost always inmates of her household.
The disorder here referred to was a violent attack of lung fever ; and Mr. Post attributed his life to the un- wearied watching and nursing of Mrs. Miller and that of a niece of her husband, a maiden lady living in the same house.
For two or three days he was thought to be dying ; the bells that tolled off the night hours in the clock spire opposite were stopped from ringing ; and during the crisis of this illness daily bulletins announcing his condition were posted at the door.
While he was thus lingering on the coast line of mortality the verses of Shelley, written on the bay of Naples, kept chanting and weaving their spell through his half-conscious and worn-out spirit : — But now despair itself is mild ;
Even as the winds and waters are. I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away this life of care, Which I have borne and still must bear, Till Death, like sleep, might steal on me;
And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.
Before this sickness Mr. Post had planned a trip to the Mediterranean ; and perhaps dreams of that far-away sea may have been a half-waking vision of the " solemn main " which borders the end of life's journey.
45
38 TR UMAN MARC ELL US POS T.
Of this abandoned voyage and of the " terrible impres- sion " — then fresh upon him — of his sickness, he wrote to Mr. Roberts in a letter dated November 5, 1831 : —
" After having written and rewritten upon the subject of going to the Mediteranean for a year or two, and having made arrangements in some measure for that purpose, I am yet here and have the prospect of remaining here for the present ; and what is more, am in good spirits, and what is more still, in comparatively very good health. The streams of life have, I hope, resumed in a measure their wonted course. The dream of death, that terrible dream which pressed for a while like an incubus upon my mem- ory, has receded until I begin to feel again reviving inter- ests and sympathies in the passing pageants of mortality and demean myself with something like assurance of life. But that dream still glooms horribly in the distance, still comes up in shuddering retrospect. I know it must come again; that the hour of its terrible reality must come — that my reprieve at the longest is short — that what I or you or all have to do must be done quickly. It must be terrible for any one in the flush of youth and health and hope to be cut off from the bright throng of the living, but doubly terrible for one who suffers that hour to come upon him like a ' thief in the night.'
" Would not men be wiser, be better, be happier, had they courage to look in the face the terrors of that hour, to familiarize themselves with them, and to prepare to meet them not as trembling cowards? True, one feels cold about the heart to think that its deep beatings, its hopes and desires shall soon be hushed in ' cold obstruc- tion,' and that all it loves and admires shall be but fester- ing corruption. But is it the part of a brave man to quail from any terror, however grisly, which he cannot shun or avert ? Is it not folly, yea, worse than folly, to
PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR. 39
cling, to the disregard of its immortality, to a world whose glories are a lie, whose promise is a mockery, whose sweets are the aspic, but whose disappointments are the stings of scorpions? What 'beggarly elements' these to a glorious hope of a blessed immortality ! Yea, should we not rather than blench from death, exult to die, to live forever, to fling off the cerements of corruption and arise to newness of life, forever exempt from the thraldom of sense, the fever of passion, and the thirst of unslaked desire ? "
This sickness seemed almost like Byron's " fatal remem- brance," that threw " its bleak shade alike o'er the joys and the woes" of after life.
"From that hour," he says, in the "Life Story" (an address delivered in 1877 before the Congregational State Association of Missouri, and from which frequent extracts will be made in these pages), " the shadowiness of time and the sense of eternity were wrought into the soul forever. In those terrible hours, when — Faith and Hope not yet grown to strength and confidence — the awful cur- tain was lifted, and, through days and nights which seemed ages, I looked with the vividness of Dante's vision into the open secret of the hereafter, — a hereafter through which I had not yet learned to walk with the Son of God, — that revelation was to the new life with me like Dante's initia- tion to the walks of Paradise through infernal and pur- gatorial gloom and flame. Then was the shadow of the everlasting cast over the field of the present world, and the heart -beat of time set forever to the pulses of eternity. Of those who stood around me to see me die — most of them long since passed away — not a face now wears the light of the sun. But the revelations of those hours are fresh as yesterday. They are burned into my being forever : part of my ever-present consciousness till that
40 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
hour shall come again and that curtain is lifted never more to fall. I now recognize it as then lifted as a necessity in order to break the inordinate power of the present world over my youth."
CHAPTER V.
ANDOVER. — WASHINGTON. JACKSONVILLE.
Andover Seminary and theology. — Winter of 1832-33 in Washington. — Recollections of Marshall, Story, Wirt, Taney, Clay, and Webster; also, of Governor Duncan, of Jacksonville, Illinois. — Journey west in spring of 1833, through the Alleghanies down the Ohio, up to St. Louis and thence to Jacksonville. — That village in 1833. — Home of Governor Duncan. — Judge Lockwood and his family. — Stephen A. Douglas. — General Hardin and his wife, afterwards Mrs. Walworth. — Appoint- ment to professorship in Illinois College.
THE fall of 1832 opens a new epoch in this narrative. Previous to his illness, in 183 1, Mr. Post had been studying law, but this event turned his mind into another channel, and he became deeply occupied with themes of religion.
He considered the question of making a public profes- sion and uniting with the church. "But," he says, in the "Life Story" already referred to, "I found myself fenced out of communions, which I thought its genuine repre- sentatives, by creeds, requiring, as conditions of mem- bership, categorical statements of belief on doctrines which seemed to me speculative, and on which I had not positive belief nor grounds for any ; and I felt it became me to be honest, if in any matter in the universe, in that of publicly and formally confessing Christ. Whether right or wrong in the ground I took, my embarrassment in this matter I feel was not without divine permission and intent. It certainly became an important element in my subsequent history, and wrought itself into all its texture, a leading and guiding thread. It was the key to most of my subsequent career. It deflected the course of
42
TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
ray life and shaped its directions for years; and existed, I think, as the primal cause of my coming west."
In the hope of removing these difficulties, and also, as
it would seem, with some idea of studying for the minis- try, he went to Andover in the autumn of 1832 ; and he writes: " I spent some months in that delightful seclusion in the study of sacred literature — months which, brief as they were, and without accomplishing their immediate object, are remembered as among the most pleasant and profitable of life, and those most powerful in influence on future thought and culture."
But he found that he could get no relief such as he had sought from his theological perplexities, and so left over; and, "seemingly shut up to the profession of the law," and in order to aid his education in this direc- tion by listening to the arguments in the Supreme Court, as also to hear the debates in Congress among the famous statesmen of that day, he went at the close of 1832 to Washington and there spent the winter.
His uncle, Reuben Post, afterward for many years pastor of the "Circular" (Congregational) Church of Charleston, S. C, was then living in Washington in charge of a Presbyterian church of that city, and was also chap- lain of the United States Senate.
In the absence of their natural guardian he had rendered great kindness to the children of his brother Martin ; kindness not merely in the way of counsel but of material assistance rendered to the two older nephews. And at his home Truman doubtless passed much of his time — if, indeed, he were not an inmate there — while in Washington.
During the winter, he says : " I was permitted to behold the close of the old regime of men and ideas of the age following the Revolution, and to be present amid the
AND O VER. — IV A SHTNG TON. — J A CKSONVILLE. 43
contests of the elder and younger Titans of political debate, in their struggle over constitutional questions which were to convulse the country through an era of agitation that was to close only with the arbitrament of civil arms. The simple majesty of Marshall was still upon the bench, and beside him the rich legal and classic lore of Story. The eloquence of Wirt, exuberant and prodigal of beauty; the pure diction and lucid logic of Jones, and the cold, impassive legal argument of Taney were still heard at the bar of the Supreme Court ; where also figured the second Adams, the dashing and brilliant Clay, the massive and majestic Webster, and others whose chief field of arms was in the congressional chambers above, where the subtle dialectics of Calhoun, the stal- wart force of Benton, and the eloquence of Rives, Bur- gess, McDuffie, and many others were contesting with them the prizes of oratory and partisan leadership. An- drew Jackson was in the chair of state. The times were critical and lowering with war storm, the issues vast, the passion and strife colossal and profound. It was the battle of giants over the life principles of our govern- ment and civilization. The months at Washington that placed me in immediate view of this spectacle I regard as among the most important and productive of my life. Their imprint, their lessons and prophecy ever remained with me. It has seemed to me I was led to Washington in that crisis of our national history that I might feel the pulse and pressure of the times, as I could not otherwise, and be placed en rapport with its central movement and forces."
The stay of Mr. Post in Washington during this winter of 1832-33 possesses interest, aside from the experiences here related, from the fact that through an accidental meeting the question of his future home and career in life was then determined.
44 TRUM. IN M. IRCELLUS POST.
During this winter in Washington he met General (afterwards Governor) Joseph Duncan, of Illinois, at that time a member of Congress, and honored as the youthful hero of Fort Crogan, and was urged by him to come to the " magnificent virgin fields of the west, and especially to that grand and mysterious land of promise, Illinois ; *' and it was largely in consequence of this invitation that Mr. Post made his journey west in the following spring.
Of this trip the reader is furnished with an account made up somewhat indiscriminately from the " Life Story," already mentioned, and from unpublished mss. endorsed "Reminiscences Autobiographic" — of which latter it should be said here, that they were prepared in compli- ance with often expressed wishes of the writer's children, and simply for their gratification, and without any view of publication.
Turning away from Richmond, Va., where inducements had been held out bv Senator Rives to enter his law office, Mr. Post traveled by railroad cars drawn by mules to Hagerstown ; and then by stage over the Alleghanies to Wheeling.
" When descending the western slope of the mountain," he says in the mss., " I felt as in another world. The old life, the former world, with all its hope and love and ambition and passion, had passed away. I seemed divided from it, as if by a gulf separating time from eternity.
■• All I had loved, hoped, pursued, and achieved seemed vanishing amid the forever past. The distance was such, and the conditions and exposures of travel were such, that I could expect to return but few times in my life, and then to find that the places which had known me knew me no more. What loves and hopes and faces, noble, sweet, beautiful, and loving were fading away forever !
ANDO VER. — WASHING TON. — J A CKSONVILLE. 45
Never, except in that dread hour which severs time from eternity, can any farewell affect me more."
In the "Life Story" he says : "I descended the Ohio by steamboat from Pittsburgh, stopping briefly at Marietta, where were already laid the foundations of its promising college, under the presidency of Dr. Henry Smith, now of Lane Seminary, widely known and honored for erudition and eloquence in the lecture room and in the pulpit. Pausing a few days at Cincinnati, I formed the acquaint- ance of Salmon P. Chase, then a young lawyer, in the beginning of his career, afterwards Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court ; also, that of Dr. Lyman Beecher, whose wise treatment of my religious difficulties was of great service to me afterwards. His daughter (Mrs. Stowe), then in early girlhood, was engaged there with her sister Catherine in an educational enterprise, little dreaming then of Uncle Tom's Cabin and subse- quent literary celebrity. Others of the same family were there also, giving little sign of the eventful histories of the future. . . .
" From Cincinnati, taking boat with General Harrison — then in his prime — and his son, with the wild refrain of the colored boatmen ringing along shores frowning with primeval forests or escarped with cliffs pierced with caves still haunted with fresh legends of brigands, I passed, with a week's voyage, down the Ohio and up the Missis- sippi, to my first vision of St. Louis, then a French village of some 6,000 or 7,000 inhabitants, hanging on the edge of a green bluff. It seemed to me the end of the world — the 'jum ping-off place.' I so characterized it in letters written from it on my arrival. Third Street was then a bold push westward. Fourth Street was quite out of town."
"Along its course, then a footpath," he writes in the
^6 TRUMAN MARCBLLUS POST.
mss., "through the thick grass, I scared up the wild prairie-hen — when indeed they were not too little famil- iar to fly at man's presence — or startled the waterfowl, amid the numerous ponds that occupied what is now the densest part of the city, in the region of Fifth and Sixth Streets. Along this path for about a mile through the green waste I walked to the mound that has given the name of ' Mound City ' to St. Louis. From its top my visimi was of a new, virgin, and for the most part wild and solitary world; no sound of steamer on the waters, save here and there a solitary puff, like the initial pulse of a new world waking to life. The skies were pure, smokeless, to the distant horizon, save where the little village below the river bluffs sent up here and there its curl of blue smoke. Between me and the Pacific lay a dark continent, where, amid the lone and mighty stretches of meadow and forest and mountain, roamed hordes of wandering savages and the wild creatures of nature."
In St. Louis he found good people already at work "laying in difficulties the foundations of future insti- tutions. . . . Salmon Giddings had already taught and preached here from 1817, through some half a score of years, and, himself a Congregational minister, out of materials largely Congregational, had, according to the usage and supposed requirements of the times, founded a Presbyterian church. Dr. Potts had been here, but was nt for the time in the enterprise of the Marion College. . . .
" Here I found, also, to my great joy, my college class- mate, Rev. Edwin F. Hatfield, years since made the stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, who was then starting what since has become .the Second Presbyterian Church of St. Louis ; and here I spent a few days, chiefly among the members of the legal profession, a number of whom — some already emi-
AND O VER. — IV A SHING TON. — J A CKS ON I 'ILLE. 4 7
nent, and, through several decades following, leaders of the bar in St. Louis and Missouri, such as Bates, Geyer, and Gamble — I have had reason pleasantly to reckon among my lifelong friends."
Having come so far, Mr. Post felt that before finally settling in St. Louis he must visit his friend, General Duncan, " and look upon the new empire arising with imperial promise and natural resources in Illinois ; " and so, arranging to return and enter the office of Hamilton Gamble, and leaving his trunk behind, he was carried by his classmate, Hatfield, to St. Charles, at that time nearly a peer of St. Louis ; and spending the night there he set out the next morning for Jacksonville, some hundred miles distant, walking across the tongue of land between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers to the ferry opposite Graf- ton, III, walking from Grafton to Carrollton, thirty or forty miles further, by a bridle path through the wilds.
" Never shall I forget," he says, in the " Life Story," " my first vision and impression of the prairie that morn- ing ; the vast, silent green waste, houseless, manless, the red man gone, the white man not yet entered ; the ocean- like expanse, now a level plain, now rippling into verdant wavelets, now with a vast sea roll of gradual rise and fall, occasionally billowing into bluffs that bordered the rivers and the water courses with long stretches and curvature of forest flecked and embroidered with the redbud and the haw ; the grassy desert, studded here and there with oases of the oak, maple, walnut, and pecan, fringed with the sassafras, the persimmon, and the sumach ; and occa- sional islets of the wild plum, cherry, and apple scattered through the sea of verdure and with their fragrance hitting the sense from afar ; amid which the plumage of the paroquet glistened and the thrush and the mocking bird burst into song — it seemed to me a fairy landscape.
|S TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
I seemed as wandering in a Magian realm, under a mighty Solitude that bent entranced over a vision of new, strange, infinite beauty. The Genius of Morning seemed on all things; it was the morning of the day, of the land, and of my own life. It was Youth's walk amid the fields of
morning.
•• But the day waxed on, and as I followed the bridle trail or the points of the compass, through grassy and forested wilds and up and down the acclivities and descents of the water courses, the sun grew fierce in his rays, and I grew weary and foot-sore. I remember, as I sat down beside a grassy brook and thrust my bruised and fevered feet into its waters, I suddenly seemed to come to myself; I started to consciousness of myself and my situation, and seemed to hear a voice. ' What doest thou here ? ' Far away from home and friends and all I had known or loved on earth, in the morning of my youth, I seemed drifting, a lone waif on the great tidal stream of nations, a single lost drop in it, into the vast mysterious West — and then onward — whither ? But a hand above was beckoning onward. Suddenly, as I sat thus self-musing, two large water snakes came swimming along by me, so carelessly and quietly that it seemed they were yet too unfamiliar with man to recognize him for a foe. I was out in the wilds of nature, almost beyond the shadow of the domin- ion and fear of my race over the animal world.
" As the day waned, a thunderstorm sprang out of the torrid sky, and caught me ' far out at sea ' on the treeless waste of prairie. Its coming seemed like the march of God from Mount Paran — so fearful was the roll of his chariot-wheel over that floor of the world, and ' burning coals went forth at his feet.' But it passed, and his glory was on the bow of peace that hung on the retreating cloud ; and as the spring thrilled with fresh and grateful pulse all things, 'the whole earth was full of his praise.'
AND O VER. — WA SHING TON. — J A CKSONVILLE. 49
" Refreshed, though drenched and weary, I found shel- ter in a cabin, in which, by fragmentary memorials of previous surroundings of luxury, it appeared that a Broad- way merchant had found in these lone wilds refuge from the wreck of his fortunes on the shores of the distant Atlantic.
" Striking the stage road next morning at Carrollton, where a stage passed once a week from St. Louis, I rode to Jacksonville."
When Mr. Post first saw that town it was hardly a decade since the axe of Isaac Roe, the first settler, had begun to ring in the woods of Diamond Grove.
Of Jacksonville at that time say the mss. : " I found it a huddle of log cabins clustered around a public square, where was a rude courthouse in a rectangle of mud and dirt. The village contained about 3,000 inhabitants crowded into these cabins, where each apartment, often quite narrow, had frequently to suffice for the accom- modation of an entire separate household. This crowded condition of the settlement was due to the fact that it was an extreme outpost towards the wilderness of the northwest ; and many came here with no idea of permanent stay, but as a place for outlook for a future home still further on in the wilds. They were here as in a sort of caravansery for a temporary sojourn.
" From the college, then just built, the landscape, which- ever way you looked, was for the most part a green wild, full of unique natural richness and beauty — verdant lawns sloping away to the distant forests or with grassy perspective meeting the sky on the far-off horizon, flecked here and there with oases of flowery shrubs or trees, voiced and hued with birds of strange richness of note or plumage, from the humming bird to the mocking bird. It was a scene of strange enchantment to eyes that had been
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accustomed hitherto to the stern and somber scenery of New England.
•A little way from the small cluster of log cabins was a waste and silent world. It seemed like a land strangely divested of its inhabitants and momently expecting their return. . . .
" I entered Jacksonville on Saturday. That day was a sort of Roman Nundinal, or general weekly holiday, to the people — a day of general rendezvous at the county seat or around some central place for various miscellaneous public purposes, political, social, commercial ; for trading, horse racing, carousing, gambling, and fighting of all kinds ; and especially for public discussion and election- eering addresses. . . .
" On my arrival I soon found my way to the house of General Duncan, about a mile west of town on College Hill. I recollect my kind reception there, my finding General Duncan and his wife outside under the trees in front with a long dining table spread, and a large number of hard-looking rough men and politicians gathered from the district to dine with the general, and seeing his little, delicate wife, recently imported from a refined and luxu- rious home in New York, rising and invoking the divine blessing on the repast ; an act which in such surroundings seemed to me, for its devotion to principle and conscience, to approach the moral heroic. It won my respect and admiration for her as a Christian lady forever afterwards. I recollect my first night at this house, where I occupied a bed in the vestibule of what was little more than a hastily erected shanty, and, by the position of my couch on the floor at the door, prevented all ingress or egress during night. I domesticated the next day temporarily with Mr. James G. Edwards (then publisher of a Jack- sonville newspaper), and in the house and with the family
ANDO VER. — WASHING TON — J A CKSONVILLE. 5 I
of Judge Samuel D. Lockwood and his noble, lovely, queenly, Christian wife. The house had been temporarily leased to Mr. Edwards, and Judge Lockwood and his family were boarding with them ; and with the inmates I formed new and delightful acquaintances which were a joy and help to me in my after years, and are among the pleasantest memories of my life. This was my first introduction to that home which afterwards was to be- come my own for fourteen years, the birthplace of all my children save one, and to me one of the sweetest and most sacred spots on earth.
" I remember my pleasant introduction to the society of the town and especially the legal fraternity ; the first party I attended directly after my arrival, where I met eight ladies and forty-seven gentlemen, among whom were those destined afterwards to wide public celebrity, social or political, and some whose names have become of national historic interest. One of the guests, a little, dapper young man, brought to me a picture of the Acropolis as something rare amid our surroundings in that far land. The man afterwards known to the country as Stephen Douglas was then engaged in teaching a common school. Another, a rather crude and roughly dressed young Ken- tucky lawyer, was afterwards known as the chivalric General Hardin, who fell in victory on the field of Buena Vista. One of the ladies present was his brilliant young wife, a dashing Kentucky belle, afterwards known to the country as Mrs. Chancellor Walworth, and mother of the beautiful Nellie Hardin — afterwards Mrs. Mansfield Walworth, whose husband and son are the figures in the awful Walworth tragedy of 1873, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
" Jacksonville was then a new world, socially embryonic, genetic, in a period demiurgic, constantly engaged with
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primordial problems which required dealing with and handling, reexamining and testing first principles, philo- sophic and organic, social, political, institutional, educa- tional, and religious. The stimulus imparted to those thus engaged was intense and profound. Most of us, also, were in life's morning, with an indefinite kaleidoscopic future through the vague glittering scenery of a world yet in genesis and magnificent mystery and therefore highly idealized. The excitement and activity of enterprise and .speculation were universal ; I felt most intently and deeply the impress of this genetic genius of a new world. It was an educational tonic and impulse worth many years at the university."
During the winter at Washington and the tour through St. Louis the career contemplated, if not mapped out, by Mr. Post was, as already indicated in these pages, not that of preaching; not, save as a temporary resource, that of teaching, but the calling of his father, that of the bar. Richmond had been looked to as a possible field, St. Louis as a probable one. And accordingly we find in the olo- graph of Judge Lockwood, who was at that time one of the judges of the supreme court of Illinois, a certificate dated June, 1833, admitting "Truman M. Post to practice law as an attorney and counselor in all the courts of law and equity in the state of Illinois."
To this fact and also to the fact that he was then board- ing with Judge Lockwood, Mr. Post refers in a letter to his mother dated June I, 1833, recounting his trip west and settlement at Jacksonville.
The anticipation of a lawyer's career was, however, and by what seemed then the merest chance, never realized.
On March 20, 1833, as appears from the college records, " T. M. Post was, after conference with President Edward Beecher and Rev. Theron Baldwin, appointed professor of
ANDO VER. — WASHING TON — J A CKSONVILLE. 5 3
ancient languages in Illinois College." And not far from this time he was made also professor of ancient history, and in both professorships he continued till 1847.
As to these appointments, and how they came to be offered and accepted, we quote from the mss. : —
" I remember one day soon after my arrival in Jackson- ville a call from Rev. Edward Beecher (to whom my uncle at Washington had, I think, given me letters) and Rev. J. M. Sturtevant, who were teachers in the college just opened, and whose names the west and the whole country have since learned to honor. They inquired if I would for a little while aid them in the classical department in the new college, as they were at that time in need of a teacher, and had learned that I had been engaged in teaching at Middlebury College. The proposition struck me favorably, attractively. My sphere of life was, I felt, yet unfixed ; my determination of thought and action between educational, political, clerical, literary, and legal pursuits was as yet unsettled. 'The world was all before me where to choose,' and so I consented to the proposition made me, as a temporary arrangement, one furnishing meantime a point of lookout and a ' coigne of vantage ' for a wider survey and more deliberate selection.
" Some two weeks or so afterwards, Rev. Asa Turner, one of the founders and trustees of the college, who had been east in quest of a classical teacher, and in that pursuit had visited Middlebury College, had been advised by President Bates to look me up and confer with me. He had accordingly gone on to Andover, and, not finding me there, but learning that I had gone to Washington and thence had disappeared from the knowledge of my friends somewhere in the south or southwest, had aban- doned the pursuit ; and on returning to Jacksonville he found me on the ground.
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"Soon afterwards I was offered the chair of ancient languages in the college, and after some hesitation was induced to accept it with the understanding that it was the established plan of the college to build houses for the professors and pay a salary of $1,000 per annum, though both features of the plan might wait a little for a maturer state of things before they could be fully realized.
"The pulse of life beat high at this point of my history. I was all the while in a sort of wonderland in both the inner and outer world. A strange glamour of wondrous glory and beauty seemed to rest upon both. The future of myself, like that of the land around me, was glittering with ideal possibility and promise. Under such augury and ideal my new career opened, and I started on it. . . .
•• Life has but one such start and such vision, as it has but one youth."
CHAPTER VI.
EARLY DAYS IN JACKSONVILLE.
Early days in Jacksonville. — Illinois College in 1833. — " Cholera year." — Northern trip and Indian Treaty in Chicago. — Dangerous illness in Jacksonville and religious experiences.
IN the year 1829, under a philanthropic scheme entered into on behalf of Yale College, a number of her graduates, known afterward as the " Yale Band," came to Jacksonville and incorporated Illinois College ; and when Mr. Post became professor the history of the institution dated back but four years to its academic cradle.
In this year, 1833, its faculty were Edward Beecher, Theron Baldwin, Julian M. Sturtevant, Jonathan B. Turner, Truman M. Post, and Nathaniel Coffin. Mr. Beecher was president, Mr. Coffin was treasurer, and the remainder of those named were professors. Dr. Samuel Adams, a graduate of Bowdoin and for many years an intimate and beloved associate of Mr. Post, dated his connection with the college somewhat later.
The dormitory, then just completed, and burned twenty years afterwards, — a very plain brick building of four stories, and flanked by wings designed as homes for its officers, — stood on the brow of the hill at the edge of a grove and looked eastward with unobstructed prospect over its own ample grounds and across a stretch of prairie to the little settlement a mile distant.
Another brick structure of lesser dimensions, hardly a stone's cast to the west, was the chapel, which still remains very much the same, to outward seeming, as it looked in
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[833. Here the old bell from its perch on the roof called the students to prayer and recitation, and here, just under the roof and within its dormer windows, was the college library.
In the northern wing of the dormitory lived President her with his family, and the southern wing was the home of Professor (afterward President) Sturtevant.
The middle building furnished quarters for the students and some of the faculty and tutors, and in the basement was a long room used after ancient custom for college "commons." There Mr. Crocker and his wife provided a table, not only for the students, but for some of the professors and their families.
In the southern room of the second story of the college Mr. Post and Professor Turner — the latter then fresh from Vale and from his home in Massachusetts — kept their bachelors' apartment from 1833 to 1835.
The students, numbering a hundred or more, were gathered largely from the region around, and, like the country of that day, were a good deal " in the rough," but in many instances developed afterwards into men of prominence and wide influence for good. "The first lad I taught," say the mss., "then sixteen or seventeen years of age, who, with one other student, constituted the first class that graduated, was Richard Yates, afterwards known as the grand war governor of Illinois, a modest, bright, amiable, great-souled youth, with a lofty ideal and ambitious aspirations, which grew afterwards to a noble manhood and large, heroic statesmanship. Others also were there who have since climbed to heights of respon- sibility, power and peril in public service and the history of the country."
To this day, among those old enough to remember
EARL Y DA YS IN J A CKSON VILLE. 5 7
Jacksonville so far back, the year 1833 has a ghastly preeminence as " cholera year."
'•' Reports came up from the village to our college commons each morning of new cases and startling deaths. Sometimes whole families, as in the case of Rev. Mr. Ellis, were swept off in twenty-four hours. The distress of the town was extreme. Society was not then knit together by acquaintance and mutual kindness. The people, gathered from all quarters, had not coalescence enough for mutual helpfulness. The wild, vague terror of a disease, regarded as contagious and killing with fear- ful rapidity, kept men aloof from each other. Families were isolated in mutual quarantine, and doors and win- dows were seen by one passing along the streets, thronged with pale and fearful faces, sometimes with the sick, who had no one to minister a cup of cold water. But even there were to be found some benevolent and heroic spirits ready to brave personal danger at the call of humanity and to whom the present distress was occasion and opportunity to assert their nobility of nature. Frightful rumors, mean- time, came in from the lonely cabins in regions round about of desolate suffering and dying, of the dead un- buried, or of little children sometimes left to dig the graves and bury as they could their dead parents. Human society seemed almost disintegrated by mutual fear, and at length the college was broken up for the time and the students dispersed."
Among those who devoted themselves to these missions of mercy through the country about Jacksonville were the two young professors. Having become pretty well worn out with Samaritan labors, and by reason of the hegira mentioned having an enforced vacation, they took this occasion for recreation, and on horseback and in company with tutor Erastus Colton made a tour through
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Northern Illinois, with Chicago and its convention of Indians as objective points.
The journey lay (say the MSS.) "for three, or four hun- dred miles for the most part through a manless wilder- ness, a vast sweep of grassy plains intersected at intervals h\ river or water courses lined with belts of forest and interspersed with isolated oases or islands of woodland. It was the year after the Black Hawk war, occasional traces of which we passed in our journey. But with the ption of a lone cabin here and there, nestling in these belts beside the water courses or oases crowning some upland, it was one mighty solitude.
" Our route took us first across the Illinois River at Naples, and I shall never forget the beauty and magnifi- cence of the river valley that burst upon our view as we stood upon the heights of the overlooking bluffs. It was one vast swale of meadow, waving with long grasses or carpeted with the gorgeous yellow of the flora of mid- summer or early autumn.
" Naples was then chiefly a ferry and a steam mill, whose proprietor, Michael Collins, received us very courteously and hospitably. From Naples we went some fifty or sixty miles across what was called from allotments made to soldiers the ' Military Tract,' and after many wanderings, and after repeatedly losing our way, we at length dis- covered the small beginnings of what is now the beautiful city of Ouincy, then consisting of some scattered humble tenements on the banks of the river. Here we found intelligent, estimable, and hospitable Christian people, some of whose names, such as Tilson and Turner, were already known to us, and who became friends much valued and loved in the years after.
" From Ouincy we rode northeast some fifteen miles or so, to what was then called the Bear Creek settlement, near
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the present Mendon, and spent a pleasant Sabbath with Deacon Chittenden, an agreeable and intelligent Christian gentleman, who had brought his New England principles and practice with him into the wilds. His name and works abide with many estimable descendants at this time. Thence we rode to Princeton, as early as that period the home of the Lovejoys, a new settlement near the deflec- tion of the Illinois from its western to its southern course.
" From Princeton we went eastward to Ottawa, at that time, as far as I recall, consisting of a single house, a hotel (Walker's) on the south side of the Illinois, nearly opposite the mouth of the Fox.
" From thence we proceeded to Chicago, passing one house in 'Holderman's Grove,' and not coming across any other as far as I can recollect, and following the latter part of the way in the trail of the Indians ; sleeping some of the nights under skies lighted by the bivouac fires ; some mornings awaking with puddles of water, formed by thunder showers during the night close by on the ground, thus laying the foundations for the fever that followed in the autumn.
"We entered Chicago by the trail of the Indians through the long grass of the prairie, for the most part of the year a marsh, but then dry.
" Fort Dearborn had a small garrison, and was the depot of government stores of various kinds for the Indians, of whom some 7,000, embracing extensively the tribes of the northwest, had rendezvoused here for a treaty. The place presented, besides the fort and its garrison, a small number of newly erected houses, principally cabins or shanties hurriedly put together, and wigwams or lodges of the Indians of the different tribes scattered about in the neighborhood.
" The germ of the town had already been laid off and
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platted on the south side of the river, and I felt so assured of its future growth to considerable importance that I based a large part of one side of the public square, where now the courthouse stands, for S200, with which sum, indeed, I could have bought ioo acres of land on what is now the central part of the present city of Chi- • ; but we concluded on deliberation that the land was too marshy to pay taxes, which might be levied on it.
•• I entered Chicago through a lodge of Indians, and saw more of the Indian life and dress and manners while at Chicago on this visit than ever elsewhere, and more than perhaps I could have seen in the years since, aggre- gated at one spot. Many of the squaws — the wives or daughters of chiefs — were there richly dressed and orna- mented, their persons or garments loaded with brooches of silver; but on going for rations to the fort, the 'big Indian ' was manifested, riding proudly on his pony and followed by his squaw trudging along on foot, loaded with the meats and provisions doled out to them.
" At the treaty, which was held on the side of the river, where afterwards the Lake House was built, a struct- ure of rough boards had been hastily erected, resembling such as are seen at circuses. There were present on the part of the Indians about 500 chiefs and braves from the tribes of the northwest, with their varieties of costume and dialect, and on the part of the government the lieu- tenant-governor of the territory of Michigan, his suite, interpreters, etc. The session continued for nearly the entire day, and was to me a most memorable scene, and one never to be repeated, and one of lasting consequence in the history and destinies of the northwest.
" I had entered Chicago with what I now know to have been seeds and premonitions of malarial disease con- tracted on the Illinois prairies. The tonic breezes and
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atmosphere of Lake Michigan alleviated or temporarily suspended these, but on returning with the same sort of exposure to sun and rain and night air, now growing autumnal, and with life entirely irregular in all its appoint- ments, the diseased tendency set in again, and before we reached Jacksonville I became so ill that I was compelled to ride with my horse at the top of his speed across the hot stretches of prairie, and then to throw myself, sick and exhausted, on the ground and await the late arrival of my companions. My sickness was what is now termed typhoid malaria. It was protracted through some six weeks — a low, insidious, obstinate type of fever. It made a pivotal epoch in my life and a lasting impress on its subsequent course. Never shall I forget the first days of it when I lay in a college room during the anniversary of its Commencement, a stranger, young, alone sometimes for hours, with none amid the tumult and excitement to think of me or minister a cup of cold water. Never shall I forget the kindness of Mrs. Edwards, wife of the editor, who came to me, saw my desolate case, and took me, a comparative stranger, to her house and like a sister nursed me for weeks. I think I came near to, death, and the sickness, I believe, did much to heighten, intensify, and purify my religious experience.
"The nights of ecstasy, the delight in prayer, the abstraction from this world and communion with Christ and the eternal world ; the sweet devotion and consecra- tion to a religious life ; the unworldliness of the mood I was then in, — have been unique in my mental history. I thought I never should descend from it, or be in love with this world again. But I have to record sadly that I did descend from it. I went down from this 'mount of transfiguration ' to the renewed contest with evil spirits. The decline was gradual and insidious, yet never, I think,
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to the level of my old existence. The tone, purpose, and ideal of my life were in a degree permanently altered. I think it was a merciful touch of divine Providence, that which the soul received as a new inbreath of the Holy Spirit, and for which all praise to the heavenly Father. " I recollect that during one of the nights of my sick- ness there occurred a wonderful meteoric storm which strangely excited my watchers. I remember the exclama- tions on their outlook upon the night, as though the end of the world had come. It was, I think, in October. The star shower was one of the most memorable recorded in meteorological history."
CHAPTER VII.
CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE.
Organization of the Congregational church at Jacksonville. — Public pro- fession of religion, and how it was brought about. — Letter picturing college life and surroundings. — Address at teachers' convention at Cincinnati. — Death of Aurelian Post. — Blind days and poetry.
ON the fifteenth day of December, 1833, not far from nine months after the arrival of Mr. Post in Jack- sonville, the Congregational church of that place was organized in the Methodist house of worship, on East Morgan Street.
On the roll of its first membership were the names of Timothy Chamberlain, Dr. M. L. Reed, Elihu Walcott, Jeremiah Graves, Edwin Mears, Asa Talcott, Salem Town, Benjamin Allyn, Jesse B. Clark, and a number of others, with members of their households, in all thirty-two persons, — some of which families, well-known at the time, have disappeared, and faded from the memory of the community.
This church was the first of its order further from New England than Western Reserve, unless we except that in Mendon, and one in Rock Island, which were founded about this period, but which for some time were without any mutual relations, and indeed were scarcely heard of beyond their immediate vicinities.
Of the Jacksonville church, then under the pastoral care of Rev. William Carter, Mr. Post became a member on the seventh of June, 1834.
On this topic he writes (mss.) : " The currents of my religious life having changed, I agitated anew the question,
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never at rest, of uniting with the church by a public profession of my faith ; but I found the theological diffi- culties which barred my entrance into an orthodox church in the east, and which had sent me from Andover to Washington, and from Washington to the west, were not removed by my new religious experience. But the wish to overcome them and put them out of the way of my making a public profession of Christianity had grown stronger They were chiefly speculative and created by creeds requiring the affirmation of beliefs on points where.m I had not formed, and seemed unable to form, — had not the data or the faculty to form, — positive opinions ; and they were subjects my opinion in regard to which did not affect my Christian life in the inner or outer world.
"At length in conversation with the Rev. William Carter, a man of earnest piety and Christian good sense, and who was then urging the duty and fitness of a public confession of Christ, he asked if I could not answer, to the inquiry as to my assent to the creed in a public pro- fession, that I believed I substantially accepted it. I felt I could surely give that form of assent, as I subsequently did give it, and so made my confession and was admitted to the church in a little chamber in the second story of a printer's office, then used as a place of meeting for a small and feeble band that had united themselves together as a Congregational church.
"During these days I became acquainted with the Rev. Gideon Blackburn, and was much moved, and I think in some directions helped, by his sometimes crude but majes- tic pulpit eloquence. I was helped still more by the Chris- tian sweetness and simplicity of Mrs. Judge Lockwood."
In June, 1834, Mr. Post had just returned from a trip to Ouincy and to Marion College in Missouri, and found him- self well pleased on the whole with his surroundings and
CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. 65
manner of life. He evidently had no idea of changing the latter.
He writes — (letter to his mother, June 8) : —
" I have seen another of my birthdays pass by, and am now twenty-four years old. ... I was appointed, some time last winter or early in the spring, professor of languages in the college, and have accepted.
" My situation is pleasant, very pleasant, as much so as I ought to wish. I am associated with some of the best men, intellectually and morally, that I have ever seen, in a spot that in beauty and fertility is the garden of the whole west, and in the midst of a community that will soon be immensely rich and strong.
" The station I am in is one of high and numerous responsibilities, and it requires strong energy and effort and high endowments to meet them as they should be met. I sometimes almost shrink back as I contemplate them.
"... The college is situated on a height that over- looks the vast meadow before us, in one point of which you can discover nothing but prairie and sky. Imme- diately back of the college is a grove that forms our playground and walks and retreats in the hot weather. It is a beautiful grove, the richest in fruit and flowers that I have ever seen. . . .
"About the college hill are several pleasant dwellings: one belonging to the chief justice of the court (a very pleasant man) and family ; another to a member of Con- gress (who will probably be our next governor).
"You must remember that this place is in its very infancy. The college is hardly four years old. But we now have two buildings of brick, one of them larger than New College in Middlebury.
" I live in a room by myself, a very pleasant one, from
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which I can look down upon the green prairies and farm- houses and -roves for many miles in extent.
" I am a bachelor yet and probably shall remain so for the present. I board with the college faculty and their families in the college commons."
In the fall of 1834 Mr. Post attended a teachers' con- vention in Cincinnati, returning by way of Logansport.
Of this trip and a melancholy incident connected with it, an account is given in the mss. : —
" I went from Jacksonville to Cincinnati through a country for the most part a wilderness. My journey was induced by a call of the teachers of the Mississippi Valley to meet there in an educational convention, and also by the hope of meeting my brother Aurelian at Logansport, Ind., in a visit I wished to make him after the session of the convention. I had left him at Andover, but he had been driven from there, by what proved the incipient stages of consumption, to seek restorative in- fluences at the west. He had taught a part of the year in the southern states, and was now on a visit for refuge from sickness and in hope of recovery at my brother Martin's home in Logansport. I had anticipated much pleasure from this visit. T set out with a horse and buggy for the teachers' convention at Cincinnati, having an address prepared on 'The Study of the Greek and Latin Classics as a Part of a Liberal Education ' ; anticipating there to meet Grimke, of South Carolina, who was known through the country as an able and eloquent antagonist of them. I went by way of Springfield, Paris, Terre Haute, and the National Road, except where its terrible condition compelled me to take byways through the Indiana forests to Indianapolis, and thence by way of Lawrence to Cincinnati. Though a stranger and young, I was somehow — I cannot now recall the circumstances
CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. 67
— put forward to deliver my address, my first appearance before any extensive public gathering assembled from a large section of the country. I had every reason to sup- pose my address was very favorably received. It was commented on and criticized quite extensively in public prints, and afterwards published in a volume with other addresses before the convention. After it was delivered, an elderly gentleman, Dr. Daniel Drake, came up from the audience to the pulpit, and grasping my hand very warmly, with high compliments on my address, asked me to his house — an invitation I was obliged to decline on account of news from my brother Aurelian at Logansport which seemed to render it needful that I should hasten there if I wanted to find him alive. At that convention I remember meeting, besides Dr. Drake above referred to (quite a grand man and widely known), Professor McGuffey, a man also of much ability and extensive repu- tation (afterwards the author of a series of schoolbooks). Both of these men were subsequently my lifelong friends. I also met, and was most favorably impressed with, Edwin Mansfield, then a young man, well-known afterwards in politics and literature.
" I left the evening after my address, hastening on to Logansport by way of Indianapolis, and the Indiana forests and my adventures with the wind and storm and nights amid the wilderness were — or would be now — quite memorable.
" I reached Logansport only to find my brother Aurelian had been already a week in his grave. Of my grief and disappointment at not seeing once again the brother and companion of my childhood and youth, I cannot speak. He had talked of another trip to the south, till a day or two before his death. He and his elder brother, compan- ions of my boyhood, all that was mortal of them, now
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sleep side by side on the crown of a high bluff overhang- in-' the Wabash — to the resurrection morning.
•• I found also at Logansport my half brother Augustus (now Dr. A. F. Hand, of Morris, 111.), who had left his father and home in Ferrisburg, Vt., and had come on through almost incredible hardships, traveling on foot, carrying his trunk on his back or working his way by canoe through the marsh and forest from Lake Erie along the Maumee River and down the Wabash to Logansport.
" After a visit of a few days I returned by the way of Lafayette, Danville, and Springfield (a journey then through an almost unbroken wilderness) to Jacksonville, bringing Augustus with me."
Of his brother Aurelian and his death Mr. Post wrote some lines of poetry, which were enclosed to his mother in a letter written November, 1834. They were not intended for any other eye and the fact that they were written was unknown to his own family till after his death.
On his return to Jacksonville Mr. Post contracted a malady of the eyes, of which he writes (mss.) : "It was to me a fearful, persistent, and for two years a seemingly incurable plague. It blinded me to such an extent that I could not read anything or pursue my classic studies, except by the help of other eyes. It shut me up to memorizing and analyzing my previously acquired knowl- edge ; to committing to memory poetry : for example, whole books of Milton and other authors. It was of great use to me in teaching me to interpret, analyze, classify, and develop to their cause, origin, or consequence all acquired knowledge, and to brood facts or principles or scenery to their full significance and contents. In this affliction I began writing poetry, meditating at one time a large work. Those years were among the most profitable of my life."
CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. 69
Probably the poetry referred to was an epic, or part of one, in pentameter .blank verse, entitled, "The Macro- cosm," begun during the first two years in Jacksonville, and containing not far from twenty-five hundred lines. It was never given to the public and indeed never brought to a close. Why it was unfinished is a matter of conjecture. It was probably crowded out, from year to year, by more pressing demands, and the " convenient season " never came. Work upon it was intermitted and resumed, for a time after Mr. Post's marriage ; and Newton Batemen, then an inmate of the household, remembers hearing him, from an adjoining chamber, in the late hours of the night, as, unable to read or write, he paced the floor and thought aloud and dictated to his wife, whose facile pen was then, as through subsequent years, of invaluable service.
The poem, rewritten in parts and half copied, was at last laid away in his secretary and served simply as the reminder of an unrealized dream.
Paradise Lost, the first two or three books of which he had known by heart from boyhood in Shoreham, and other parts of which, as appears from the mss. just quoted, were committed to memory in these blind days seems to have shot its color through his imagination when this poem was written. And some such influence may have been felt, unconsciously to the writer, in a less degree, from a favorite poem, Byron's " Dream."
As the author never saw fit to give the manuscript to the public, and no correct estimate of the merit of the poem can be gleaned from disconnected extracts, the two or three fragments here quoted must not be read in the light of criticism, but merely as samples showing the beginnings and possibilities in poetic numbers of a young man of twenty-four, whose mind, though rich and abounding in poetic thoughts of the noblest order, was
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afterward too earnestly engaged in pressing needs of the hour for the stately measures of blank verse. In this poem, seen as in
. . . "a mirror vast, Deep, pure, and spanless as the azure sky,"
appears, first of all and far back of created things, eter- nity, inhabited by
The Invisible alone. No star,
Nor cloud, nor angel's wing, gleamed through the lone
And radiant infinite. Time was unborn.
Space was the investiture of God. There was
No height, no depth, no past, no future. All
Was Deity. He was the Universe. . . .
Then appears the serene primeval world of angel and seraph,
Creation's elder born, the winged sons
Of strength and splendor. Hues undying bathed
Their glorious plumes ; their vision ne'er grew dim ;
Their pinions never drooped. Decay ne'er touched
The immortal youth that sat upon their brow
Serene and golden wing. Nor grief, nor care,
Nor weariness, nor evil thought, did cloud
Their beings' sinless flow. 'Neath blander heavens,
And more refulgent light, mid sweeter bowers
Of bloom, and hills of softer green, and streams
Of lovelier azure — scenes more brilliant far
Than ancient poesy e'er dreamed or sung
Of blest Hesperides in soft repose
On the bright bosom of the western wave —
Amid such worlds, and skies imparadised,
They lived, they loved, they wandered, they adored.
In quest of knowledge new, or of new themes
For admiration, wonder, and delight,
They skirted now around the farthest orb
That glittered in the crystal depths, and now
Returned, with plume unruffled by fatigue.
CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. J I
In choir seraphic, and with lyre inbreathed With music's soul, they formed a starry crown Around the Lord of Light. Thus circled on The golden ages numberless, and swift, On silken pinions borne, the happy years Passed unrecorded by. . . .
Then the vision changes and shows the drama of war- ring angels and falling demons and chaos following. Next appears the birth of creation and of Eden and of the first parents : —
As dream of youth, or as that sweeter dream That breaks upon the faded eye of age, When on the dark extreme of mortal years Quick Fancy spreads his iris wings in flight And rainbowing o'er the waste of months and years Wakes childhood from its flowery grave, or Faith, With sun-eyed glance undazzled, wanders far Mid worlds of souls beyond the touch of sin ; And fadeless beauty, visions of the blest Eternity, with angel faces, shine Beyond the stream of death. . . .
Then follows a description of the world before the flood, and a picture of the flood, closing the poem as transcribed and revised, — after which the mss. are in the rough original, interlined, uncorrected, and somewhat frag- mentary.
The vision changed ; and lo ! before me pass'd In hurrying eddies, wasting earth and sky, One universal storm of flood and fire ; And piled clouds, and drifts of solid gloom, And march of mighty winds, and tempest pomp, And whirlwinds with the hot blue lightnings wreath'd Swept darkly' on; and o'er them all there blaz'd Vengeance, pale angel, and the sword of God. . . .
72 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
. . . The vision changed. The broad, bright sun was flaming up a sky Of spotless blue, save one far cloud, whereon God's bow did hang. Below spread out a lone Illimitable deep, without or isle Or shore. All but the winds and waves were dead ; All save one motelike home of life, the ark, That floated moving on, a living thing Reposing on the mighty breast of death.
CHAPTER VIII.
MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME.
Trip to the east in 1835, and marriage. — Wedding journey to Jacksonville. — Winter of 1835-36 at college. — Purchase of the Lockvvood place. — Strange night's adventure. — The new home: its inmates and surround- ings.— Newton Bateman. — Augustus Hand. — H. B. McClure and wife come west. — Visit of Madam Henshaw. — Story of a boar hunt.
IN the spring of 1835 the trouble with his eyes, which seems to have baffled the skill of the Jacksonville doctors, impelled Mr. Post to seek a remedy elsewhere.
He writes in the mss. : " I set out for the east ; visited St. Louis ; called to see Judge Peck, of the United States court, conspicuous in the judicial history of the time, who had become nearly blind from disease of the eyes, and consulted him in regard to the treatment he had adopted and the result. I learned nothing satisfactory. I only wondered he had any eyes left.
" I proceeded by boat to Cincinnati and thence to Marietta, where I stopped ; had a brief battle with sick- ness ; visited the traces of an ancient Indian city or camp in the vicinity ; met Mr. Edward Beecher and family at Pittsburgh ; parted company with them there on board a canal boat, and took a stage for Philadelphia over the mountains ; went from Philadelphia to New York, was there taken to the home of Mr. Marcus Wilbur, and for some time was cared for and nursed by his wife, a most lovely Christian lady and friend, whom I shall ever remem- ber with gratitude and pleasure.
"While in New York I was under the treatment of Dr. John Kearney Rogers for several weeks, but received
74 TR I rMAN MAR CELL US PCS T.
little decided advantage, and thought it best to visit Dr. Reynolds, of Boston, whose reputation at the time was highest among American oculists.
" I visited Berlin, Conn., and Northampton, Mass. ; made the acquaintance of Dr. Todd, my experience with whom was singular, but which resulted at last in a perma- nent friendship. I visited Amherst College, took tea with Dr. Humphreys and the faculty, proceeded to Boston by way of Worcester, stayed briefly in Boston, having received for treatment of my eyes directions which, with other influences, I think resulted in their cure during the year afterwards.
" I then traveled from Boston to Boscawen, where I became acquainted with the family of Mr. Ezekiel Web- ster, and attended the Commencement of Dartmouth College. From that place I journeyed to Ferrisburgh, Vt., and there visited my mother, who treated and nursed my sore eyes for a number of weeks, and thence I con- tinued on to Middlebury."
October 5th of this year was an eventful day in these annals ; inasmuch as it witnessed the double wedding of Madam Henshaw's two youngest daughters, namely, that of Harriet with Henry B. McClure, and that of Frances with the subject of this memoir. The event was at the time a notable one in Middlebury society, though no one of those who took part in the pageant and scarcely one of those who witnessed it now survive.
Mrs. Seymour, — then Miss Hagar, — a schoolmate and companion of Frances Henshaw, still recalls a number of incidents and details which will aid in supplying a picture of the wedding scene. Two couples as handsome she had rarely, if ever, seen in Middlebury. She remembers what a striking contrast in types of loveliness was presented by the sisters — Harriet being a pronounced blonde, while
wSBBfa
St. Stephen's Church, Middlebury, Vt.
MARRIA GE AXD NE IV HOME.
75
Frances was a brunette. Nor did Mrs. Seymour forget the fact that both wore white satin gowns and a single white flower. Her statement may now seem strange that the face of Mr. Post at that period had a good deal of color and that his hair was nearly black and curling closely about his head.
The little church of St. Stephen, where the ceremony took place and where the Henshaw household had wor- shiped since its erection, seven years before, was crowded with friends from Middlebury and elsewhere, and was decked with flowers and evergreens. The Rev. Mr. Crane, rector of the church, officiated, and Madam Hen- shaw, with her son, the Rev. Mr. — afterwards Bishop — Henshaw, stood at the chancel and received the bridal party. The wedding began in a rain storm which broke into sunshine at the close of the service. In the evening there was a reception at the house of Madam Henshaw.
"A day or two after the wedding" (mss.) " I took my wife and drove in a buggy to Ferrisburgh and made a few- days' visit with my mother (the last mortal touch of that sweet noble life). Then we returned to Middlebury, and I remember the farewell to my dear, queenly mother-in-law at the Henshaw home; then our stage ride through Cas- tleton to Troy and Albany and our sail down the Hudson by steamboat, and a visit in Brooklyn, at the hospitable home of Mrs. Richards, the noble, gifted elder sister of my wife. Her daughter Sarah (afterward Mrs. Kirkwood) and another young lady, who were bridesmaids, had been our companions of travel from Middlebury.
" From Brooklyn, after a brief and pleasant visit, we took steamer up the Hudson to Troy, spent a clay or so with Madam Willard and her children, then traveled by Erie Canal (at that time equal to a royal progress) to Geneva, N. Y. ; thence by stage to Lewistown, then by
j6 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
buggy, myself being driver, up the Niagara River to the falls and to Buffalo ; a memorable and never-to-be-forgotten ride, both because of the scenery and the time in our lives, — the climacteric of youth and marriage, — which we took by ourselves in a road then solitary ; an all-day ride in a bright autumn sunshine, through natural scenery in some regards the most wondrous in the world. And we were alone with nature and with each other, moving on toward the great mystery of life, the mystery of a new life in a new world in the mysterious West.
" From Buffalo we took steamer for Ashtabula, and from that point crossed by stage with slow progress — traveling by day and lying by at night — to Wellsville, on the Ohio, and to Cincinnati ; thence, after a brief visit, by steamer down the Ohio, which was a trip so slow that we were on it nearly a week, — a travel intolerably tedious except that we were together, deepening our acquaintance with each other, relating stories of our past lives ; my wife reading to me often, as my eyes were not restored to strength. Then turning up the Mississippi we reached St. Louis in about a week from Cincinnati. There, as I remember, we made a visit with Mrs. Samuel Perry and also one with Dr. Beaumont's family. After this stay in St. Louis we took stage through mud and dreary weather to Carlinville, — then a most forbidding place, — and thence, again by stage, on to Jacksonville, which, with the rain and mud and dark, dreary days of November, wore its worst aspect."
To Mr. Roberts he wrote from Illinois College, Feb- ruary 23, 1836 : —
" We had a pleasant return journey, though a long one, of five weeks. ... It was not till I got amid the mighty solitudes of our rivers and forests and our magnificent prairies that I could make it seem real that I had been
MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. -J
once more to gaze on the mountains of my childhood and the faces of other years, or realize that all the tides of emotion, intense interests, and changeful incident that had crossed my stream of being and marked it to eternity, were anything more than the rapidly shifting scenes and forms and personnel of a fairy and tragic dream of a night in midsummer. But a loving presence by my side, and tones known 'neath far other skies told me that it 'was not all a dream.' "
Mr. and Mrs. Post reached the college November 12, 1835, and there they found among the faculty society President Beecher and his wife and her mother and unmarried sister, and Professor — afterwards President — Sturtevant and wife and her sister, Miss Fairweather.
After boarding a short time in the "commons" the newly-married pair spent the remainder of the winter (1835-36) in the north wing with the family of Mr. Beecher.
" My wife " (mss.) " first assisted me in preparing for my recitations by reading to me in English and Latin, and subsequently, having learned the Greek alphabet, in Greek, although she could not translate either. Then she took my malady of the eyes from me, and for months neither of us was able to read. We were shut up and could only talk or listen to the reading of others. Yet the cheerfulness of my dear wife never forsook her. She was ever to me a spirit of sweetness and a spirit of light, and the blind days were neither profitless nor unhappy, but in many ways touched beneficently our lives."
"This winter," writes Mrs. Post from St. Louis, in the spring following, "was one of blind happiness."
Among the friends made during this period and referred to in the mss. were Dr. John Blatchford and his wife, Dr. Blackburn, already mentioned, Theron Baldwin (who soon
jS TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
afterward, with Captain Godfrey, established Monticello Seminary), and Winthrop Gil man.
The year 1836 possesses intense interest for the de- scendants of Mr. Post from the fact that his home life was begun here ; life in a home of surpassing loveliness, where all but one of his children were born, and where the family life continued uninterrupted through all the daws in Jacksonville. The selection by Mr. Post of his homestead came about in this way: —
It will be remembered that the program of the college corporation when he became one of its professors was to furnish them with residences. And the project ulti- mately failed, simply for want of means. There may be some connection between such a scheme and a resolution appearing in the college records, adopted March 11, 1836, appointing a committee " to provide temporary accommo- dations for Professors Post and Turner, with power to purchase the house now offered for sale by Hon. S. D. Lockwood."
The house had been recently built by Judge Lockwood, and about it was a tract of seven acres. It was only a quarter of a mile from the chapel, and a sweet, solitary footpath through the intervening belt of woodland led from one to the other. Mr. Post's sojourn had charmed him with the spot, and Judge Lockwood was his personal friend. So he concluded to make the purchase, and, with his young wife, went into possession in the spring of 1836, although the title to the property does not seem to have passed till 1839. In that year the place was bought by him for $3,600, and two mortgages were given for the purchase money, one for a part of it to Judge Lockwood and another for the remainder to the college. Both of these mortgages were paid off in 1846.
The site where this house was built is said to have
MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 79
been chosen by Judge Lockwood as the highest point in Morgan County. Certainly it commanded a brave out- look to the north and to the west, while to the south and east it was screened by a venerable grove of forest trees. The hill on which it stood swept gracefully down to the road a few hundred yards in front, and the house, while in view to passers-by, was partially hidden by the foliage of oak and elm trees and by elder and snowball bushes, and was far away from any dust and noise of the turnpike. The woods between the house and the college, though small in extent, were thickly grown and ancient enough for the dryads ; and their lofty branches still afforded occasional shelter to those denizens of wild nature that linger about the dwelling of the pioneer. The house itself was of brick, painted a " cream color," of two stories in height and with gable ends. It had a central hall and stairway and parlor and sitting-room on the lower floor, and chambers overhead, and to the south was a wooden ell, containing pantry, storeroom, kitchen, and bedroom. Among the delights of the place, and by no means the least of them, it possessed a well of immense depth, with water cold and clear and never failing in the driest days. At the southern end of the grounds was an elm of colossal size whose branches, spreading like a parachute, could be seen for miles away above the sur- rounding timber. The place was a strangely sequestered one. Near neighbors there were none. The visitors were chiefly the robin and the thrush, and the wrens which annually came and built their nests in the closed window blinds ; and no ruder sounds were heard there than the chatter of the jay and the cooing of the stockdove, and now and then the screech of the owl in the dead of the night, and the daily call of the chapel bell or the faint sound from that of the church a mile and a half away.
So TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
July, 1836, brought the first cradle into this household. In that month was chronicled the arrival of a daughter, the firstborn among six children. And in this connection an incident may be given as illustrating the loneliness of the house in its then surroundings and the dangers to which the inmates were sometimes exposed.
In those days, what with the absence of Mr. Post at faculty meetings, and the difficulty in securing servants, and the solitary situation of the place, the evenings were often passed by Mrs. Post without a soul in the house except the little baby. It was on such an evening that an occurrence took place, which is described by Mr. Post as follows : —
" The evening was wild, the wind blowing violently, the sky moonless, and the air thick with down-rushing snow. Amounting almost to sleet it pattered against the window, which occasionally shook and rattled as in anger or suffer- ing under the fierce paroxysmal blows of the tempest. My house was about one fourth of a mile distant from the college, separated from it by a bit of thicket and forest through which ran a footpath. On the south no house for miles. On the west an old, sort of tumble-down house, formerly occupied by 'Judge Simras,' but rented for the season to a man named Goram, a violent and bad man, but with a wife who was a pleasant Christian woman, a member of my church. My wife and myself and little Frances in the cradle were alone in the house, when sud- denly there was a hurried knocking on the door and then the presentation at the window of a woman's face pale with terror, head bonnetless, with hair disheveled in wild disorder. I sprang to the door and opened it, and the next instant Mrs. Goram was in the room with the ex- clamation : 'O Mr. Post! two men are murdering my husband ; they are holding him over the fire and threat- ening: to throw him into it and roast him alive.'
MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 8 I
" I immediately put on my boots, took out my gun, and hastened through the thick darkness and blinding snow down to the highway on the north in order to go to the Gorams', the course across lots, over fences, and through forest, being almost impassable in the darkness. As I reached the road I heard the footsteps of a horse ap- proaching. I called aloud to the rider. He answered to my halloo. I told him there was an alarm of murder in the house near by ; that there were two of the murderers and I was alone. He was a cattle driver, a rough order' of men at that day, but he immediately turned his horse and went with me to the scene of the alarm. As we approached the house the noise of violent moving and loud objurgation came on our ears. The lower part of the house was strongly lighted up ; we stood for no knock- ing but immediately burst into the room. There stood three men before a large blazing fire, their backs turned toward us. The room was in great disorder as was the dress of the men, and stains of blood were about on the floor. The aspect of the men themselves, with torn and disorderly garments and faces aflame with passion, was wild and, with the shade and the blazing fire, quite of the Rembrandt order. As we entered they turned, each attempting to vociferate his story, so drowning each other that I could understand nothing.
" It afterward appeared that the two men with Mr. Goram were Englishmen, father and son, on their way further west. They had with them a team of four horses and a wagon. Overtaken by the cold weather on their route they had taken board for their horses and them- selves at Goram's for the winter, expecting with the first grass of spring to proceed on their journey. Troubles and jealousies and quarrels about various things had arisen, and that night Goram had drawn a knife and axe against
8 2 TRUMAN MAR CELL US POS T.
them. They had disarmed him, but on a second attempt had become exasperated and torn his hand in taking away his weapons and then held him up before the fire declar- ing they would roast him. At that juncture Mrs. Goram had fled through the storm to my house for help. As I came in and all began to tell their story at once, I checked them and told them I could hear but one at a time. As they paused and one of the Englishmen began to talk, suddenly, quick and lithe as a wildcat, Goram sprang for his ride, suspended from the low ceiling just above their heads. In a moment one of them would have been dead,, but we all sprang at and on him and again disarmed him, I presume with no great care for tenderness in the act. Then the younger Englishman began to tell his story, when suddenly I heard the tramp of a multitude, as though a hundred men were beating the earth with clubs. The next minute my strong, Ajax-like, half-brother Augustus, burst into the room, carrying the door with him as he came, and the room was full of men. They were students of the college that, led by Augustus, had rushed through the dark and storm and mud and splash, and through thicket, brier, and brake to the scene of alarm and to my supposed rescue.
" The manner of their coming was this : After I had suddenly left the house for the scene of the reported murder, leaving my wife alone with little Frances in the cradle, it flashed upon her that I had gone, a single man, to a scene of murder by two men in a solitary place who might avenge my interference and complete and cover one crime by perpetration of another. She must run to the college through storm and night and, leaving the baby alone, rally somebody to my assistance. Accord- ingly she started and got through thicket and forest and darkness, I know not how, and, approaching the college,
MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 83
discovered a light in the chapel. It was evidently full of people, but she could not hesitate ; she dashed into the room where the students were in general assembly for a public debate. She could not speak, but her pale face and her disordered array spoke for her. Augustus rushed to her in alarm. She could only say, ' Your brother — murder — Judge SimmsV Nor did he wait to hear more, but, he leading, the students scampered pellmell through the storm and mud, and thicket and forest, and over fences till, reaching the house, they made their appearance as I have described.
" After they came in, something of order was estab- lished. The men were called to tell their story, which they did in succession. But I soon saw there was no way of reconcilement or peace or safety if they were left together ; and to save bloodshed and possible homicide, I directed the Englishmen to harness their team and come to my house. I would give shelter to them and their animals. They did so, and I housed and sheltered them for several days.
" After my wife had delivered her message on the night of the alarm, exhausted, breathless, and spent, she would have rested but that the vision of the little babe in the house all alone, urged her haste almost as much as the vision of her husband set upon and murdered. It was not a great while before they got through the woods, and found the little child sleeping quietly and sweetly as though there was neither harm nor crime in the world. But it took a long time for my wife's nervous system to recover from the shock."
It must not be supposed that life in the new home was passed in the wilderness, or entirely away from society.
There was a personal magnetism and sympathy on the part of Mr. Post, and a mental stimulus in his teaching,
84 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
that drew the students strongly towards him, and a number of them were much about his place, rendering service in different ways, and in turn receiving aid in their studies. Anion- them were Newton Bateman, mentioned in a pre- vious chapter, afterward state superintendent of public instruction in Illinois, and now president of Knox College at Galesburg in that slate, and always the devoted friend of his old professor.
Augustus Hand for a time lodged in the college, but early became an inmate of the family, and was of great assistance in various matters, besides adding quite mate- rially to the life of the household by his presence and kindly and eccentric ways.
After the double wedding, Mr. McClure and wife had spent some time among the relatives of the former, in Brockport, N. Y., and in August, 1836, Mrs. Post, who is longing to have her sister in Jacksonville, writes a most earnest invitation to them to come west ; " Come," she says, "to our home and our hearts." But no definite tidings could be got till Thanksgiving day, when, just as Mr. and Mrs. Post were sitting down to the table to discuss a dinner of wild turkey, the missing ones drove up in a buggy, wholly unannounced, having come across the country in this mode of conveyance.
The McClures stayed with them for some time, after- ward removing to a house of their own half a mile or so nearer town on the southern edge of the "prairie," and within easy walking distance of the home on the hill ; and the intercourse between the sisters and their house- holds remained one of almost daily intimacy through their joint stay in Jacksonville. Shortly after his arrival in that village, Mr. McClure opened a law office and com- menced a practice which, in spite of the fearless stand taken by him for free-soil principles, finally carried him into the front ranks of the Illinois bar.
MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 85
There was no little visiting done among the families of the faculty, all of whom were from New England, and congenial by reason of birth and education, and all living on College Hill and readily accessible to each other. And there was, as may be imagined, great rejoicing when Madam Henshaw, drawn by the double attraction, about this time took her journey all the way from Middlebury and made the daughters a long visit.
But although there was no dearth of pleasant society at the home and among the families of College Hill, — as indeed also by reason of frequent social interchanges with people of the village, — there still remained about the region traces of primitive wild nature that were not with- out their attractions and excitements. The prairie fowl and hen hawk were to be found through the open country, and the raccoon and hoot owl were not infrequent visitors in the College grove.
An adventure related in the mss., and here copied, shows that more formidable game had not yet become obsolete :
"It was some time about midsummer of 1837, when, on going into my garden one day, I saw there a strange look- ing animal engaged in eating and destroying the vege- tables. It looked in some respects like a common hog, yet struck me as different from anything I had ever seen. The creature was of a reddish brown, with a shag about the head and neck like a mane, with peaked nose, and long, terrible tusks. He was not heavier than large specimens of the common, domestic hog, but longer, lanker ; with flesh not adipose, but muscle and brawn, and well and compactly limbed.
" He seemed to belong to a race of swine imported into the country, a long time ago lost in the wilds and grown savage, called 'prairie sharks,' the dread of swine-raisers and swine-dealers ; which could run with horse or hound ;
86 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
which despised dogs and fences and shotguns ; whose greed nothing could gorge ; whose lankness no feeding could fatten ; scrawny, swift, strong, invulnerable.
" The animal saw me as I entered and, as I was between him and the gate, he rushed directly at me. Not in the least stopped or turned aside by the missile with which I struck him full in the face, he swept past me, who nar- rowly avoided his stroke, and loping off through the front lot, jumped over a five-rail fence and disappeared in the neighboring wilds. But the creature, having got a taste of farm products, evidently liked them, and would return, though not in the daytime. Ke would prowl about my premises in the night, solitary and wary in his habits, like a wild beast. I set all sorts of snares, scythes, and bear traps, but he knew how to elude them or break away from them. I fed him arsenic enough to have killed a score of men. Nothing could hurt him, nothing could hold him, nothing could poison him ; and he kept on his nightly prowling and foraging. The college boys came over to my help and kept watch around my premises, but so keen was his smell, or so vigilant and wary his outlook, that he was never seen or heard by them.
" So matters went on, much to my discomfiture and disgust, for some time. At length one quiet, moonlight night, past the middle of it, my wife waked me. The creature was in the front lot ; she could see him plainly. He was deliberately, as one perfectly master of the situa- tion and with no fear of interruption, breaking down the long corn and, like an oriental sultan, was dining leisurely alone. I immediately dressed and, going out in another direction, stole off noiselessly to the college by a path through the intervening forests. On my way I turned over the stile that led from the path into my premises, as I knew if alarmed he would take that mode of exit ;
MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 87
for though his swineship could on emergency defy and despise fences, he evidently preferred going over the stiles like a gentleman. I hurried over to the college and, going to the students' quarters, I roused up Thomas Laurie, a young, bright, and resolute Scotch boy from the neighbor- hood, since that time for years a missionary in Syria, sub- sequently a pastor in Roxbury, and now with a church in Providence. I also called up Ireland, since then a mis- sionary in Africa, where he now is. They hurried on their clothes and came, Laurie with a shotgun and Ireland with his spear, ready for action.
" Returning silently through the grove, I posted them by the fence which divided it from the field in front of my house where the marauder was at work, stationing Laurie in ambush behind the fence at the place of the stile, where I knew the boar would first rush, and Ireland lower down in supporting distance, also in ambush behind the fence. I then took my gun and went into the field making a loud noise, whereupon, as I had expected, the animal, alarmed, rushed to the stile and in a moment I heard the report of Laurie's gun ringing on the night air. The beast had come close to him and he had fired full in his face. Intimidated by the report and the smoke and the shock, the boar had run back and was looking for an escape on the other side of the lot, and beyond my house toward the south and west. I knew he could not well escape in that direction as there was a tall, close board fence which he could neither leap nor climb, and I ran thither with my gun.
" But he had discovered his mistake and, finding no escape in that direction, had turned at bay, and seeing me approach, charged upon me. I heard the grinding of his teeth and saw, under the shadow of the trees in the moonlight, the line of a dark object approaching. I
SS TJiUMAN MARCELLUS POST.
waited until I could almost touch him with my gun, and then fired and sprang to one side. It was well I did so, for afterward it became apparent that otherwise he would have struck me with his terrible tusks and strength, and must have killed me or torn me fearfully. As it was the shock and flash and smoke, together with my springing aloof, saved me, and he swept past me not in the least deterred or diverted, leaving the strong wild boar smell on the air, and running toward the stile. Then another ring of Laurie's gun on the night air, and with the same result as at the first. But the animal, unharmed, had now retreated into the concealment of the depth of the tall corn, and refused to come out.
" It evidently was dangerous to stir him up, or to go in and drive him out, and none of us liked to enter into the cornfield. But evidently it must be done or the enemy, long hunted and at last brought to bay, would escape us. So addressing myself to the exigencies of the case, I armed myself with gun and axe, and also with weapons still more effective, namely, tin pans and pails which I could beat to the direst tantara-ra-ra, and marched, with all drums beating, down upon the enemy. It evidently was too much for him — this new, strange terror — for directly I heard again the ringing of the gun on the night air, and then the jubilant shout, that set all the echoes of the forest a-going, ' I 've killed him ! I 've killed him ! ' I ran up to Laurie's station, and lo ! there he lay, the monster, — for such he was, — stretched out in death. The discharge at close quarters from behind the fence had thrown the entire consolidated charge through the eye into the brain. Otherwise he was shotproof. We might as well have fired our shotguns at an iron-plated enemy. The previous charges had left no wound in him ; had not penetrated at all the shield of tough brawn an inch and
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a half thick with which nature covered his neck and shoulders.
" He was something dreadful to behold. His mass of hard muscle with tendons like those of an ox, his tusks, long and sharp, and his red wild shag of mane, made him a fearful object, and suggested the peril beyond our thought to which we had been exposed in hunting him. Few wild beasts could have been more terrible to en- counter. His appearance justified all that the ancients have told us of the peril and the heroic courage involved in the boar hunt.
" Next day there was a gathering of students around the slain. They fastened ropes around him and drew him out into the depth of the forest, where people came from miles around to see. He must have been the last of his race in that region. I never saw his like there or else- where. With the Indians of Illinois and the mound builders, he lives only in tradition and the mists of the well-nigh forgotten past."
CHAPTER IX.
THE SLAVE-POWER IN ILLINOIS.
Daniel Webster in Jacksonville. — The slave-power in Illinois in 1837. — Fourth of July oration. — Death of Lovejoy and "Address to the people of Alton."
IT may surprise the general reader that a man then so prominent throughout the country as Daniel Webster should have taken a tour in the year 1837 through the "far west," and especially that he should have made any stay in a village so small as the Jacksonville of that period. But it is a fact that he passed through there during that year, and stayed long enough to make a number of speeches and to listen to others ; also to attend a " barbecue " and one or more receptions given in his honor. An address of welcome was given by President Beecher, and in the estimation of the college students the speech, as a specimen of oratory, far excelled the response thereto of the distinguished guest.
It may be worthy of narration simply because Mr. Webster figures in the story, that on one of these speech- making occasions, at which, of course, all Jacksonville and vicinity were present, it was found necessary by the com- mittee in charge, for want of a better rostrum, to mount the illustrious orator upon a chair occupied by Mrs. Post ; but Mr. Webster gallantly refused to ascend until another seat had been procured for its occupant and he had in person escorted her to it.
One evening Mr. Webster was entertained at the house of Governor Duncan, who probably had known him in
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Washington. Among the guests were Judge Lockwoocl and wife and Mr. and Mrs. Post.
In a letter to a member of Governor Duncan's family Mr. Post refers to this evening and his recollection of Webster and a conversation with him on the book of Job.
Chronologically in this connection reference should be made to the slavery agitation in Illinois in the " thirties " and the attitude taken by the faculty of Illinois College on that question.
In Jacksonville, while there was a considerable admixture of people from New England, a very large and influential part of the population was made up of Kentuckians, having a strong proslavery bias.
In that place as elsewhere through all that region there was (mss.) "a collision between two antagonistic civiliza- tions, one born directly or indirectly of slavery and the other of freedom ; between different views of humanity as well as Christianity — views as to the rights and relations of men in states, societies, churches, and in the kingdom of God. . . . The shock had been long deferred. Antag- onistic principles had slept side by side in unconscious or timid procrastination of the inevitable. But that era was passed. Those principles were now in direct encounter in the same field, confronting one another in struggle for the same domain, the possession and organization of the same nascent empire, each conscious of the other as its mortal foe and of this as the fatal hour. Amid this con- flict of Ormuzd and Ahriman I had to do my thinking, talking, writing, and preaching, in all the demands of an initial ministerial and pastoral life. The pressure of these questions was ubiquitous as an atmosphere."
The writer recalls the relentless and sleepless inquisi- tion of the slave-power; its "espionage and censorship
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over speech, press, school, society, and the pulpit;" how it "hounded, with threat of social ostracism, or mob mur- der, or the mad dog cry of 'abolitionist,' all that dared an utterance of opposition to its despotism," and how "it sent forth our young men to vindicate their chivalry by hunting down on horseback a poor negro woman fleeing from the hounds and the lash through the winter storm and snow, shivering in barns or sleeping under the open heavens in the fearful cold."
Illinois College in those days was looked upon by the southern people with suspicion, and by many was regarded as an "engine of abolitionism." And although not on the extreme lines, its position as an antislavery institution was pronounced and fearless.
On the Fourth of July, 1837, Mr. Post delivered in Jack- sonville an oration which (with one spoken on the same occasion by Rev. Edward Beecher) was, " at the earnest solicitation of the students," furnished for the press ; and which, among various topics appropriate for the occa- sion, dwelt upon the portents of the times. Although proslavery proscription and mob violence had not then reached the culminating point, — the tragic denouement of November following, — that crisis was plainly coming and not far distant, and the air was thick with it. Two or three passages from this oration are inserted here, as its words of counsel and warning have a peculiar significance in the light of events shortly following : —
" . . . I come forward, my fellow citizens, to mingle my hopes and gratulations and sympathies with yours. Born amid a wild and mountain land, where the foot of the invader never penetrated but to bear him to defeat and death, nurtured amid plains where the share of the plow- man ever and anon turned up the rusty memorials and moldering bones of Revolutionary times, though the course
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of my life leads me aloof Jrom political controversy, I have learned ever to greet this day with joy and with gratitude. It is a day that calls up hallowed associations and treas- ured hopes ; a day toward which, clown the far shades of the future, the eyes of mankind will be turned as to one of the proudest in the record of human action. . . .
" It is the birthday of a peculiar people, of a new form of human society, predicated upon the assertion of the mutual equality and equal rights of man. ... A new principle has been thrown into human affairs whose influ- ence is to be limited not to our own empire, however vast, but to reach the millions upon whom our midnight sun is the orb of the morning. . . .
"It is possible that great and immutable principles, especially when they require effort or sacrifice, may be held up simply as splendid theory, while in practice they become obsolete, powerless, dead. There is such a thing as living down constitutions and Declarations of Right by practically denying or violating the principles on which they are founded, till at last they are located amid the figures of rhetoric or the speculations of fancy, but have no lodgment in the belief of the intellect or the affections of the heart. When the fundamental principles of any government come to be thus regarded by the people, the original vital spirit of that government is lost, the green- ness of youth, the freshness of the heart is gone ; decay and dissolution are the natural results.
" There is a relation subsisting in this country that dia- metrically contradicts the instrument to which we have just been listening, and which declares that all men are not created equal or with certain inalienable rights ; a relation at war with the spirit and the letter of our Con- stitution, neutralizing our example, aye, holding it up to derision and contempt with foreign nations, rendering a
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nullity that enthusiastic assertion of universal equality of right which in 1776 awoke the American heart and roused the nations of the earth as with the sound of a trumpet. It was on this principle that the battle of the Revolution was fought. Slavery in our system is a discordant ele- ment. American slavery and American liberty cannot coexist on the same soil. . .
"There is another evil to which I will allude, of recent but of portentous birth : insubordination to law. Liberty has come to signify, in the mouths of some, an utter dis- solution of all restraints of law, and with many, license to transcend the law in extreme cases, that is, as facts show, wherever private passion or popular frenzy rage. It is high time that our darling words 'liberty ' and ' republi- canism ' were understood. It should be graven with a pen of iron on the heart of the whole American people that the supremacy of the law is the living soul of repub- licanism ; that the highest liberty of which man is capable is to be governed and protected by the laws which he himself has made ; that an insurrection against law in a republic is an insurrection of the people against the people ; is suicide that no extreme which would not justify plunging the dagger into their own bosom will justify ; that he who is guilty of it, in whatever form, — mob law, lynch law, club law, or dirk law, — is a traitor to his country and does all that he, a single individual, can do to lay her honor in the dust. . . . Xo nation has ever been able to endure mob law. None ever can."
About this time was published in The Jacksonville Statesman an article signed " Hitherto a Whig," from the pen of Mr. Post, condemning in strong terms the mobbing, at Andersonville, Ind., of an "abolition emis- sary," and an editorial defence of the outrage by the editor of a Whig paper called The Illinoisian.
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It is a matter of familiar history that on the night of the seventh of November, 1837, a proslavery mob surrounded the stone warehouse of Godfrey & Gilman in the city of Alton, where, at the time, was stored the press of The Observer, a newspaper edited by Elijah Parish Lovejoy.
This press had been received from a steamer on the Mississippi two days before. It will be remembered that twenty or thirty men, including Winthrop S. Gilman, were in the building, armed with muskets and shotguns, and defending the property, and that during the fight Lovejoy was killed.
This was the last scene and final catastrophe in a long and tragic drama enacted in St. Louis, St. Charles, and Alton, in which Lovejoy was the central figure. His death was not the mere "taking off" of a single private citizen. He stood for antislavery public opinion in the west. The continued assaults on his press in those cities, and his fearless pertinacity through all the "hunt of obloquy," made his name familiar everywhere in Illinois and Missouri, and the shot that took his life was felt to be that of an organized political power, and aimed at the life of free speech and free press in the Mississippi Valley.
While the Alton tragedy was brewing, the situation of Lovejoy at the time was canvassed by the faculty of Illinois College, and "we resolved" (mss.) "it was expedient that Dr. Edward Beecher should go to Alton in his support and render what aid he could by countenance, address, or counsel."
Dr. Beecher accordingly went to Alton, and there took an active and prominent part in the antislavery con- vention of October, 1837, being one of the committee on resolutions.
At a mass meeting there, November 2, he offered reso-
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lutions championing free speech and protection against mob violence; but the resolutions were sent to a commit- tee, and at the next meeting substitute resolutions were adopted, in which it was " deemed a matter indispensable to the peace and harmony of this community that the labors and the influence of the late editor of The Observer be no longer identified with any newspaper establishment of this city."
Lovejoy addressed the meeting, announcing his inten- tion to continue his work, and closed a strong and impas- sioned appeal by saying : " If the civil authorities refuse to protect me, I must look to God ; and if I die, I am determined to make my grave in Alton."
It was only three days afterward when Lovejoy was killed and his press thrown into the Mississippi. And it was very shortly after his death, while public sentiment was at its white heat, that a communication entitled " An Address to the People of Alton," was published in The New York Emancipator.
"I had" (mss.) "to keep the whole matter as secret as the grave from my very associates and companions, as though conscious of some dreadful crime. It was thought my life would be worth nothing if my authorship were known, in the state of the popular mind at the time, so desperate then was the wrath and terror of the slave- power in its tyranny over the free state of Illinois. My secret, I think, was not even known to The Emancipator, which published the article. It was kept even from Love- joy's family, who inserted the address, without knowing the authorship, in the Life of Lovejoy which they subse- quently published."
No adequate idea of this address can be obtained except by reading it as a whole ; but simply to illustrate its power of thought and diction, its marvelous word-painting, ant!
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its fiery arraignment of the Alton rnob, a few passages are here inserted : —
" Years have elapsed since I enjoyed the hospitality of your then infant settlement. Since then I have never ceased to feel a lively interest in your prosperity. Most gratifying have been the reports of your growing wealth and commerce, and especially of your liberality, correct morals, and enlightened public sentiment. Should the domestic institutions of bordering states ever enfeeble in them the spirit of freedom, among you, it was hoped, she would still be found vigorous and hardy as your own giant youth. Against the invasion of servile sentiment, here, it was presumed, would be an impregnable barrier — here, the rights of man were to find a sanctuary ; the perse- cuted of any name, or of however delusive a creed, were to obtain constitutional protection. Should the lights of American liberty elsewhere grow dim, amid your wild cliffs her torch was still to burn, as brightly as on Bun- ker's heights or the Plymouth Rock. These anticipa- tions, in sorrow, not in anger I say it, are no more. They have been most cruelly swept away. The associations connected with you, in the public mind, I need not tell you, are sadly, fearfully changed ; the bright colors have faded, and dark and dismal and bloody hues are on them. A tumultuary, lawless fanatic power, overmastering or overawing the civil authority, enslaving public sentiment, paralyzing the public conscience, freezing with fear the sympathies of even the generous, the intelligent and the good, and, with a few noble exceptions, making the mind of your whole city hold its breath, and crouch in silence before it — ferocity victorious over right, brute force over free opinion — a gang of ruffians, claiming to be regulators of speech and the press, usurp- ing the name of the people, and grasping in the same
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polluted clutch the functions of accuser, judge, and exe- cutioner — ' making night hideous' with their loathsome triumph, in the presence of unresisting multitudes de- molishing buildings, firing your city, publicly murdering an American citizen for the crime of exercising rights, most sacredly guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States and the state of Illinois; and finally, with fiendish malignity and a meanness more than fiend- ish, in violation of their express stipulations, firing upon the unarmed and unresisting; such are the images that now start at the name of ALTON. Are they mere horrid phantoms ? Would to God they were so ! Oh, no ! They have left enduring memorials in broken hearts, bereaved infancy, and untimely graves. They have left a community disgraced, freedom of speech awed into silence, and the majesty of law trampled under foot. In the dis- honor of the American name, in the wound given to the cause of universal liberty, and the outraged feelings of mankind, they have left abiding monuments. The muse of history turns aside her head and weeps, as she chroni- cles in crimson the record. . . .
"Other towns can often look back with pride to their early history, and relumine in the associations of the past the waning love of liberty and truth. Boston has her Faneuil Hall, Charleston her Fort Moultrie; but Alton must wear it upon her escutcheon, in characters as imper- ishable as the rocky bluffs around her, that in her early youth she crouched before not one but a hundred mas- ters ; that, in her, freedom of speech found its first Amer- ican martyr ; that she did all that, in her immaturity and feebleness, she could do to bury freedom of press, and with it the American Constitution, in a bloody grave. The sacrifice of life may have been small ; that of prin- ciple was mighty. The infamy of it not all the tide of
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coming years, nor the flow of your ever-rolling Mississippi, can wash away. . . .
" The outrage perpetrated among you was one of aggra- vated enormity, both as it regards the individual and the principles sacrificed. It was no gambler, no ruffian, no malefactor defying or evading justice, whose blood is upon your hands. It was not a case where an indignant popu- lace, in the impulse of an evil hour, inflicted a vengeance, due to its object, though rendering its avengers more guilty than the victim. It had not even 'the miserable justification of those instances where, in a zeal for jus- tice, all justice is trampled under foot, and in punishing one crime are committed a thousand. It was a man, in the eye of human law, without reproach ; a man of un- doubted piety, and giving evidence of a devotion, sincere, however misguided you may have deemed it, to the great cause of human rights ; a man wrong, if wrong at all, only in his views of a great moral question, and in the fearless expression of those views ; a man who, however imprudent or misjudging you may have thought him, you must at least acknowledge could not be deterred by self- sacrifice, or intimidated by the fury of the multitude, or seduced by popular opinion from supposed duty, but who dared in the assertion of the right even to die, — it is for shedding the blood of such a man that mankind holds you responsible. There were, too, at stake, not individual rights only, but vast principles. Whether our general and state constitutions, with their solemn guaranties, should be of sovereign authority, or a mere splendid delusion and a snare, was in controversy. Moreover he who strikes at freedom of speech is guilty of treason, not only to his country, but to his kind ; he strikes at the great means to the ultimate triumph of truth, and the anticipated improvement of the human race. It is these
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considerations — that the atrocity committed among you was provoked by no crime; that you made, as far as you could, a solemn oblation of the principles of universal liberty and of the future hopes of the race upon the same ensanguined altar — which sink your hitherto fair fame far below the infamous murders of Vicksburg and St. Louis. . . .
" It is vain to attempt to shift the blame by impugning the motives and previous conduct of the sufferer. To degrade him, were it in your power, would not exalt you ; it would only add to the ' deep damnation of his taking off' the coward malice that seeks shelter behind the carcass of his victim. To term him 'rash,' 'headstrong,' and 'imprudent,' is the strongest sentence of self-condem- nation you can utter. Why was it ' rash ' or ' imprudent ' to exercise the most sacred of American or human rights — freedom of speech — in Alton ? Was it because he ought to have known that there was not law, nor con- science, nor patriotism, nor intelligence, among you to protect him ? And if these elements were not found among you, you, and not he, were responsible for their absence. Nor do the results, melancholy as they are, though they argue your delinquency, necessarily convict him of rashness. There are moral as well as political conflicts, Thermopylaes where we must make a stand or perish — where yielding would be treason to our princi- ples, our country, and our race — where it becomes a solemn duty to die ! Perhaps nothing less than the shed- ding of blood could awaken the conscience and salutary fears of this nation, and open its eyes to that dreadful Tarpeian on whose verge it is tottering. . . .
" If we feel inclined to regret that a minister of the gospel attempted to defend the rights of the citizen and the laws of his country by force, this act should be viewed
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at least with indulgence by those who are wont to regard with admiration examples in their own Revolutionary his- tory, where the pulpit was exchanged for the battlefield. Never was there a cause more sacred than that in which he fell. . . .
" Infatuated men ! how could you see an individual mur- dered for the expression of unpopular sentiments, and not feel that you were hopelessly binding yourselves and your posterity to popular opinions, popular measures, popular prejudices, and popular crimes ; in short, never to act or speak but with the permission of the popu- lace, however degraded or guilt-stained it might be ? Did you suppose that Abolitionism was to be the last object of popular hatred ? How could you see liberty of speech smothered in blood in one instance, and not perceive you were creating a censorship over yourselves more jealous, fanatical, and intolerable than that of the Chinese or Austrian or the Romish despotism — that your own souls, the aspirations of your hopes, your own reason and love of truth must henceforth whisper, wizard-like, from the dust ? How could you fail to perceive that you were called upon to witness the obsequies of your own honor and the consummation of your own shame — to set your seal to the act of your own enslavement and of your deep and enduring disgrace ? How could you in retiring to your homes look your wives and children in the face ? Did you not feel that you had betrayed them ? that the same red-handed power that had broken the heart of the wife and made the child fatherless might visit your own hearths with widowhood and orphanage ; or, at least, that they might be secured against such visitation only by your becoming passive and pliant slaves, and that to the most despicable and brutal of masters ? Should the vio- lent and bloody spirit of the times, which you have at
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least tacitly countenanced, permit you to see old age, will this be a tale you will be proud to rehearse to your chil- dren ? When the frenzy and infatuation of the day have had their ensanguined hour, and passion and party are silent in the grave, and impartial history shall take up the transaction, will your descendants, think you, be proud to read your names in connection with the disgraceful story ? . . .
" With reference to the actual perpetrators of the out- rage, most of them, we are bound for the honor of the American name to presume, were of that refuse of society which is wont to cluster around a commercial emporium, kenneling unregarded in the grogshop and the gambling hell till some demagogue or agitator calls them forth to impersonate the people, supersede the laws, and take care of the public conscience and public morals. Many of them, in charity to the national character, we may assume are beneath the reach of an enlightened public sentiment, either from an ignorance that can not, or a prejudice that will not, read ; or belong to those des- peradoes in society to whom the whip, the axe, and the halter are the only arguments. Others there probably were of slender intelligence and weak moral purpose, but of inflammable passions, who, under the influence of evil men and mistaken opinion, knew not what they did. Such are indeed objects of pity, and upon evidence of repentance are not to be excluded from forgiveness, con- fidence, and kindness. But such, alas ! were not all. We have reason to believe that amid the immediate instiga- tors or actual perpetrators of the felony were some whose titled names, education enjoyed, profession in life, and pride of standing in society, we should have hoped would have kept them from such self-degradation — that there were those of enlightened conscience and cultivated intel-
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lect, who not only polluted themselves with the foul iniquity, but deliberately seduced others into it. With reference to such, whether with utter recklessness of character appearing openly in the transaction, or skulk- ing in concealment and instigating the wretches they had not courage to lead — it matters not — language is inadequate to the flagitiousness and wickedness of their character. That your malignity was too strong for your regard to the right, or your love of your country, is per- haps no matter of surprise ; but I am surprised that it took no counsel of ultimate consequences. The act you were committing, by the interpretation of all courts and all codes, was murder. Why, in that guilty hour did not your good or your evil angel whisper you that, by the act you were perpetrating, you were putting yourselves and the laws of your country at an eternal issue ? Yes ; between them and yourselves there is, and ever must be, war to the knife, a war of extermination, in which one or the other must perish. Public anarchy and ruin are your only safety. Can you expect, can you be so impious as to hope, to conquer in such a warfare ? But should you prevail, have you yet to learn from the admonitions of history that the instigators and leaders of popular frenzy, however they may triumph for a while, sooner or later feed the Brazen Bull their own hands have reared ? Sooner or later themselves are gorged by the anaconda which they are wont to caress, and whose hissing they pro- nounce excellent music. Did Robespierre and his com- peers dream that they were erecting the guillotine for themselves ? But did he, or Danton, or Marat, sleep in bloodless graves ? . . .
" Have you yet to learn that there is an avenging Provi- dence which often forbids that bloody and violent men should make their last bed in peace ! But should you be
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left to the course of nature, are there no furies of the guilty mind which the fugitive from human law can never escape and which often make the guilty envy his victim the repose of the sepulcher ? An American citizen mur- dered, a home desolated, a wife widowed, a child made fatherless — these are recollections which will not fade with the fading excitements of the hour. From these you can never flee ; no bars can protect, no concealments hide you from them. No flight can leave them behind — they are become part of your own souls.
" The dreadful truth that you are murderers will follow you through all your future existence. In whatever scenes you may mingle, beneath whatever sky you may repose, the grisly accuser will dog you. Though you essay to drown its voice in the madness of intoxication or in the excitements of deeper and still deeper crime, vain will be the attempt. It will await you in the grave. Yea ! in the last great congregation the gory phantom will start forth and arraign you at the bar of Eternal Justice. . . .
" And what have you gained by all this dreadful and guilty self-sacrifice ? Whatever may have been the faults of your victim, you have embalmed and canonized them. Whatever may have been the defects of his cause, or of his advocacy of it, you have done much by your mad act to identify that cause with that of freedom of speech and American liberty, and you have given its advocate rank among the apostles of humanity and martyrs to the rights of man ; among the Vanes and Sidneys of other times you have insured his name a record, while the traducer and the murderer are forgotten in the grave. Instead of checking the cause for which he labored, you have made the sympathies of this whole nation react upon you like an earthquake. You have virtually sur-
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rendered the field of argument by a resort to force. You have made the object of your hate a talisman and a power worth more to him and his cause than a hundred years of life. You cannot bury his shed blood in the earth. It will have voice. It will plead louder than a thousand presses. From its every drop will spring an army of living antagonists. Did you dream that in this age you could muzzle free discussion ? You might as well attempt to muzzle ^Etna. Did you hope to chain liberty of speech ? You might as well lay grasp upon Niagara. Did you think to oppose yourselves across the path of the lightning and the whirlwind ? . . .
" Citizens of Alton : If, in any respect, I may seem to have put myself in the unamiable and most undesirable attitude of a public accuser, it is that I may stimulate to sober inquiry into the causes of the past outrage and the means of future prevention. This means, melancholy experience demonstrates, is to be found only in the firm, fearless, impartial, and universal maintenance of law. Abolition is not the last of unpopular doctrines, nor do we know who or what may next become obnoxious to popular odium. Nothing less than the stern enforcement of law, irrespective of persons or opinions or circum- stances, will prevent persecution, proscription, and mur- der without end. This enforcement implies infliction of penalties as well as promulgation of commands, and involves in your case a melancholy duty with reference to the past. The laws have been repeatedly, openly, and flagrantly violated among you — a public, premeditated, atrocious murder has been perpetrated. The course you may take with the offenders will settle the question in the eye of mankind, whether you have moral energy and political virtue enough remaining to retrieve your dis- grace and recover your lost position. God forbid that I
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should cherish towards the unhappy wretches implicated any other than feelings of Christian kindness and a desire for their repentance ! God forbid that revenge should claim a bloody oblation for the shade of the murdered Lovejoy ! Vengeance belongs to another hour and a mightier hand. But the spirit of slain Justice does walk your street and clamor for expiation. Until that be given no charm can lay her unquiet shade. She will wander up and down your city. She will whisper you in the dark- ness of the night. Her sorrowing tones will steal upon the solitude of your repose and her gory apparition will affright your slumbers. Ages to come her moan will resound among your cliffs and rise upon the roar of the Mississippi. Unless atonement be made to violated law, order and security can never be restored among you — not, at least, until a generation unstained by this transac- tion has taken your places, and the offenders are beyond the reach of human justice."
CHAPTER X.
CALLED TO THE PASTORATE.
Illness at home. — Visit to Logansport. — Death of Mrs. Sarah Hand. — Trip through Northern Illinois in 1840. — More as to the Jacksonville Congregational church. — The pastorate over it. — Views on systematic theologies, ecclesiastical order, terms of communion, and extempore preaching. — Visit to Middlebury in 1843, and preaching in the old Congregational church. — Ascent of Mount Lincoln. — Death of Governor Duncan.
DURING the summer of 1839 there was for the first time illness, and, as appears from the mss., danger- ous illness, in the Jacksonville home.
" My dear wife and my eldest boy were both very sick at once under the almost suffocating heats of a terrible summer, seemingly nigh unto death, and I was, with no nurse, no servant, passing from the sick wife upstairs to the sick little boy below, attending to and watching both, and obliged to keep from the mother the knowledge of the sickness of her darling boy, accounting as I could for not bringing him into the room. Yet God gives strength for the days of trouble, so that they are never perhaps quite so dark or desperate as they seem at a distance. Youth, health, and hope are strong to bear as well as to do."
In the fall of this year Mr. Post was in Logansport, having driven across the country from Jacksonville. He writes Mrs. Post (October 14) : —
" Five years have fled, and I am here again. The rain clouds that heralded and pursued me all the way hither seem at last to have parted company with me and left me with the sunshine. The pure, cloudless morning breathes its spell over water and woodland ; the Wabash and Eel
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rivers sparkle in the distance, and far around glitter the stirless forest crests, through which the quiet light streams into the silent and solitary wilds beneath. 'T is a morn- ing for reflection and imaginative thought; an hour which, with me, no less than twilight, ever belongs to the distant, the absent, the past, the future, and the dead. From the scene before me my eye seems to gaze upon the distant west, until its intense vision transcends the horizon and descries my sweet wife and sweet babes. Would that I could waft over these. vast forests and prairies to you the blessings of serene and heavenward thought, of a pure and happy heart, that these, my dear Frank, might ever be your lot and that of your sweet ones. When