If
the scene on the floor of the House, when the old President fell,
struck the still simple-minded American public with a sensation
unusually dramatic, its effect on a ten-year-old boy, whose
boy-life was fading away with the life of his grandfather, could
not be slight. One had to pay for Revolutionary patriots;
grandfathers and grandmothers; Presidents; diplomats; Queen Anne
mahogany and Louis Seize chairs, as well as for Stuart portraits.
Such things warp young life. Americans commonly believed that they
ruined it, and perhaps the practical common-sense of the American
mind judged right. Many a boy might be ruined by much less than the
emotions of the funeral service in the Quincy church, with its
surroundings of national respect and family pride. By another
dramatic chance it happened that the clergyman of the parish, Dr.
Lunt, was an unusual pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat austere
intellectual type, such as the school of Buckminster and Channing
inherited from the old Congregational clergy. His extraordinarily
refined appearance, his dignity of manner, his deeply cadenced
voice, his remarkable English and his fine appreciation, gave to
the funeral service a character that left an overwhelming
impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many great functions -
funerals and festival - in after-life, till his only thought was to
see no more, but he never again witnessed anything nearly so
impressive to him as the last services at Quincy over the body of
one President and the ashes of another.
The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the
official ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when
the boy was taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a
Eulogy. Like all Mr. Everett's orations, it was an admirable piece
of oratory, such as only an admirable orator and scholar could
create; too good for a ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value;
but already the boy knew that the dead President could not be in
it, and had even learned why he would have been out of place there;
for knowledge was beginning to come fast. The shadow of the War of
1812 still hung over State Street; the shadow of the Civil War to
come had already begun to darken Faneuil Hall. No rhetoric could
have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his subject. How could he
say there, to an assemblage of Bostonians in the heart of
mercantile Boston, that the only distinctive mark of all the
Adamses, since old Sam Adams's father a hundred and fifty years
before, had been their inherited quarrel with State Street, which
had again and again broken out into riot, bloodshed, personal
feuds, foreign and civil war, wholesale banishments and
confiscations, until the history of Florence was hardly more
turbulent than that of Boston? How could he whisper the word
Hartford Convention before the men who had made it? What would have
been said had he suggested the chance of Secession and Civil
War?
Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found
himself standing face to face with a dilemma that might have
puzzled an early Christian. What was he? - where was he going? Even
then he felt that something was wrong, but he concluded that it
must be Boston. Quincy had always been right, for Quincy
represented a moral principle - the principle of resistance to
Boston. His Adams ancestors must have been right, since they were
always hostile to State Street. If State Street was wrong, Quincy
must be right! Turn the dilemma as he pleased, he still came back
on the eighteenth century and the law of Resistance; of Truth; of
Duty, and of Freedom. He was a ten-year-old priest and politician.
He could under no circumstances have guessed what the next fifty
years had in store, and no one could teach him; but sometimes, in
his old age, he wondered - and could never decide - whether the
most clear and certain knowledge would have helped him. Supposing
he had seen a New York stock-list of 1900, and had studied the
statistics of railways, telegraphs, coal, and steel - would he have
quitted his eighteenth-century, his ancestral prejudices, his
abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training, and the rest, in order
to perform an expiatory pilgrimage to State Street, and ask for the
fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks and a clerkship in the
Suffolk Bank?
Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make
up his mind. Each course had its advantages, but the material
advantages, looking back, seemed to lie wholly in State Street.
CHAPTER II
BOSTON
(1848-1854)
PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died
January 1, 1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest
estate in Boston, about two million dollars, to his seven surviving
children: four sons - Edward, Peter Chardon, Gorham, and Sydney;
three daughters - Charlotte, married to Edward Everett; Ann,
married to Nathaniel Frothingham, minister of the First Church; and
Abigail Brown, born April 25, 1808, married September 3, 1829, to
Charles Francis Adams, hardly a year older than herself. Their
first child, born in 1830, was a daughter, named Louisa Catherine,
after her Johnson grandmother; the second was a son, named John
Quincy, after his President grandfather; the third took his
father's name, Charles Francis; while the fourth, being of less
account, was in a way given to his mother, who named him Henry
Brooks, after a favorite brother just lost. More followed, but
these, being younger, had nothing to do with the arduous process of
educating.
The Adams connection was singularly small in Boston,
but the family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant,
and almost wholly of clerical New England stock. One might have
sought long in much larger and older societies for three
brothers-in-law more distinguished or more scholarly than Edward
Everett, Dr. Frothingham, and Mr. Adams. One might have sought
equally long for seven brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they
all bore more or less the stamp of Boston, or at least of
Massachusetts Bay, but the shades of difference amounted to
contrasts. Mr. Everett belonged to Boston hardly more than Mr.
Adams. One of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had broken
bounds early in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a seat
in Congress where he had given valuable support to J.
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