I J a Master Minds at the Commonwealth's Heart By Percy H. Epler Joint Author of Yale Addresses on "The Personality of Christ, Author of "The Beatitude of Progress," Magazine Articles, etc. F. S. Blanchard & Co., Publishen Worcester, Massachusetts 1909 KAft Copyright, 1909, by F. S. Blanchard & Co. IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER, AND TO MY MOTHER WHOM HE HAS LEFT, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY ONE WHOSE EYES ARE MORE AND MORE OPENED, AS DISTANCE INCREASES THE PERSPECTIVE, TO THE SACRED DEPTHS OF THEIR PARENTAL LOVE AND SACRIFICE. CONTENTS Fsge Foreword 5 Artemas Ward — First Commander-in-chief of the American Revolution, Victor of the Evacuation of Boston, and Hero of Shays' Rebelhon 9 Eli Whitney — Inventor of the Cotton-gin .... 57 Thomas Blanchard and other inventors ... 78 Elias Howe — Inventor of the Sewing-machine ... 78 William Morton — The Conqueror of Pain .... 89 Dorothy Lynde Dix — Redemptress of the World's Insane . 119 Clara Barton — Founder of the Red Cross in America . 149 George Bancroft — Historian of the United States . . . 189 John Bartholomew Gough— Greatest Apostle of Temperance 217 George Frisbie Hoar— An American Ideal Statesman . 247 Luther Burbank— Discoverer of a New Plant World . . 285 ILLUSTRATIONS Opp. Page Ancient Kitchen of the Ward Homestead with Door and Knocker 15 Watching the Battle of Bunker Hill 23 Portrait of General Artemas Ward 45 Revolutionary Homestead of General Artemas Ward . . 54 Birthplace of Eli Whitney 58 Portrait of Eli Whitney 70 Portrait of Thomas Blanchard 74 Birthplace of Elias Howe 78 Portrait of Elias Howe 86 The Discovery of Ether as an Anaesthetic 91 Portrait of Dr. William Morton 105 Portrait of Dorothy Lynde Dix 119 Clara Barton's Birthplace and Present Summer Home at Oxford 150 Portrait of Clara Barton 157 Portrait of George Bancroft 189 Bancroft's Birthplace 192 Portraits of John Bartholomew Gough . . . . 217 Reproduction of Painting of John B. Gough .... 245 Portrait of George Frisbie Hoar 247 A Presidential Party at Senator George Frisbie Hoar's Residence 273 Portrait of Luther Burbank 285 Birthplace of Luther Burbank and his Cottage at Santa Rosa, California 296 Cactus— Before and After 307 FOREWORD hi writing a collective biography of ten great lives in the zone of inventive genius presented in such a book as ''Master Minds at the Commonwealth's Heart," the danger of origi- nality is as great as the danger of merely reproducing recounted facts from others. Defects from each of these qualities of the biographer no doubt abound, yet not inten- tionally. So far a^ I have sought originality, it has been by a diligent study of each life and time to get a first-hand consciousness of the animating purpose of the life and re- immerse the life story anew in that. So far as I have clung to lines presented by other biographers, it has been to true the account to facts, in doing which escape from hitherto admirable biographies, long and short, is well nigh impossible. Not relinquishing the hope of some original presentation through the seizing of each life's purpose amid the detail and making it stand out in its essentials, I yet naturally have found it impossible to get clear away from the splen- did work of scores of magazine writers and monographers before and after the Civil War, and from the following authoritative and standard biographies : "The Life of Dor- othea Dix," Tiffany; "Trials of a Public Benefactor," N. P. Bice; "The Story of the Bed Cross," "The Story of My Childhood," etc., Clara Barton; John Bartholomew Gaugh's "Autobiography," "Platform Echoes," "Sun- light and Shadow," etc.; "Life and Letters of George Ban- FOBEWORD croft," 2 vols., M. A. DeWolf Howe; George Frisbie Hoar's " Autohiograpliy of Seventy Years," 2 vols.; "New Crea- tions in Plant Life," W. S. Harwood. Especially does the author acknowledge the courteous and unfailing help of these descendants of master minds or originals themselves, in granting him access to unprinted sources, photographs, daguerreotypes, etc.: the late Miss Harriet Ward and Miss Clara Denny Ward of Shrews- bury, and other members of the Ward family; Hon. Eli Whitney, grandson of the inventor; Miss Clara Barton and her secretary. Dr. J. B. Hubbell; Mrs. Charles Beed, niece of John B. Gough; the descendants and friends of Elias Howe at Spencer; Dr. William Morton of New York, the son of the discoverer ; Miss Mary Hoar, daughter of Senator Hoar; Luther Burbank and his sister, Mrs. Bee- son. These once, and frequently more than once, revised and corrected the copy, occasionally inserting a luminous touch. Finally well-informed men, themselves authors of note, like Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard University or Charles Allen Dinsmore, or eye-ivitnesses and friends of the great men of the Commonwealth, like Hon. A. S. Roe and ex-Librarian S. S. Green of Worcester, have read all or part of the monographs and grafted their kindly criti- cism. I present these ten lives in a group with a purpose. For zones of genius have always held their peculiar place in the history of huma/)iity. Master minds, isolated as they may be in their originality, do not exist alone. Others living near catch the breath of their inspiration, and though proceeding perhaps along altogether different paths, are animated to achieve equally great master-pieces. The contagiousness of genius might be proved, had we time, by a biographical map of the world's great genius groups. FOREWORD We have Jiere to view hut one} While individually its figures have been too frequently forgotten or obscured, it has never been in any case viewed as a group originating from one centre. But it is a mighty group nevertheless. It is more than a school of genius. We speak of the Concord School, and properly. They were writers, authors, dreamers. But these in the Worcester zone of genius are not only writers and dreamers, but founders, creators, in- ventors, discoverers, "doers of the word and not 'writers' only," and in this sense they are a greater zone of genius than that at Concord. General Artemas Ward, First Commander-in-chief of the American Revolution; Eli Whitney, Inventor of the Cotton-gin; Elias Howe, Inventor of the Sewing-machine ; Dr. William Morton, "Conqueror of Pain;" Dorothy Lynde Dix, Redemptress of the World's Insane; Clara Barton, Founder of the Red Cross in America; George Bancroft, Historian of the United States; John Bartholomew Gough, Greatest Apostle of Temperance; George Frishie Hoar, an American Ideal Statesman ; Luther Burbank, Discoverer of a New Plant World! — Geniuses are these, small, perhaps, if you bound them by their starting-point, the hill-crowned region of Worcester. But they are mighty when you see them radiate the globe. PERCY H EPLER Worcester, September 10th, 1909. iHad the author projected a history of Worcester, there have been other residents of Worcester and of the county of Worcester, of na- tional reputation whose sketches might well have been given, such as Isaiah Thomas, and the first Levi Lincoln, and Governor Davis, and others in the past; Andrew H. Green in the present; and still others equally great who did not start here, but who for a time were resi- dents of Worcester, such as Edward Everett Hale. But such is not the object of the book as it is to deal with ten international figures who have been distinctly creators, founders, discoverers or inventors. ARTEMAS WARD FIRST COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, VICTOR OF THE EVACUATION OF BOSTON, AND HERO OF SHAYS' REBELLION^ THE earliest chapter of the American Revolution we may realize afresh by reading the letters in an an- cient trunk over which, in the old colonial home- stead at Shrewsbury, General Artemas Ward's tall clock is still telling the moons and tick-tocking the generations away. For here are writings whose broken seals disclose the first secrets of the conflict in the handwriting of the fathers of the Revolution, in the handwriting of Washing- ton and his generals, in the handwriting of the creators of the Constitution, and sometimes, as in the following, in the handwriting of an intercepted message of the enemy. Just here breaks upon the scene the secret forming of the first minute-men. There vibrates throughout the qui vive that pulsated about the storm-centre at Concord. Con- sternation whispers its breath and betrays its shock at the rupture between royalist and American, brother and brother, comrade and comrade, neighbor and neighbor, friend and friend. Here is exposed the ominous separa- lApril 20th, 1908, as the Patriots' Day address in Boston at the celebration of Patriots' Day by the Sons of the Colonial Wars of Massachusetts, the author first presented this monograph on General Ward by invitation of Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard University and the Governor of the Sons of the Colonial Wars. 10 MASTER MINDS tion of powder-stores from the King's powder-houses to the powder-houses of the patriots. Here is thrust in the royalist counter-stroke of Governor Gage's proclamation and the threat that every rebel taken in arms would hang. In the captured missive from Cambridge, August 29th, 17741— Mr. Brattle presents his duty to His Excellency Governor Gage; he apprehends it is his duty to acquaint His Excellency from time to time with everything he hears and knows to be true and of importance in these troublous times. Captain Minot of Concord, a very worthy man, this minute informed Mr. Brattle that there had been repeatedly made pressing applications to him to warn his company to meet at one minute 's warning, equipped with arms and ammunition according to laws he had constantly denied them; adding, if he did not gratify them, he should be constrained to quit his farm and town. Mr. Brattle told him he had better do that than lose his life and be hanged for a rebel. This morning the Selectmen of Medford came and received their town stock of powder which was in the arsenal on Quarry Hill. So there is now there in the King's powder-house only which shall remain there as a sacred deposition till ordered out by the Captain General. The facts in this letter exposed not only the patriots' withdrawal of powder, but actuated the first attempt of General Gage to disarm the people by securing the powder- stores and cannon of the colony, WARD WITHSTANDS THE KING'S GOVERNOR Amongst the first patriots to voice their rights against British encroachment of liberties and against arbitrary power was Artemas Ward. Original copies of the royal Governor's official summons to council still lie in a packet in the ancient trunk, and iFrom a manuscript at the Ward homestead. ARTEMASWARD 11 repeatedly bear to Ward this commandatory but reluctant message : Sir: His Excellency tho Governor directs a general council to be held at the Council Chamber in Boston on Wednesday, the 11th instant, at ten o'clock in the forenoon, and expects your attendance accordingly. This summons was not issued with grace by the royal Governor, but at the dictation of a popular demand he dared not resist. To represent their stand against a high-handed infringe- ment of their rights and liberties, nine years before Mr. Brattle's letter and for nearly ten years previous to the Revolution, the Massachusetts men insisted upon the pres- ence of Artemas Ward in the royal council. The Governor objected and negatived their choice — an evidence of the greatness of Ward's weight as a patriot. In this full decade before the events of '76, among the pre-revolutionary collisions constantly occurring, one col- lision took place in June, 1766, at Shrewsbury Green, with King George's Governor, Francis Bernard. This June day Artemas Ward was engaged after the manner of his time in doing his part towards the rebuilding of the Shrewsbury Meeting-house. Like the rest of his line, who did the same from the time Deacon Ward landed in the sixteen hundreds, Ward took the lead in the Pilgrim Church and in all that it meant to America, particularly in fostering in the Colonies the idea of freedom and individual liberty which had been always tabernacled in its ark. Suddenly Ward's superintendence of the white church's reconstruction was interrupted by a dash of a mounted red-coat, who swirled out of the dust of tJie Boston turn- pike. It was the agent of His Majesty's Governor at Bos- ton, and he did not rein the wheeling nag till he brought it 12 MASTER MINDS up full before Artemas Ward himself, to thrust before him the order whose seal he at once broke thus to read aloud: Boston, June 30, 1766. To Artemas Ward, Esquire. Sir: I am ordered by the Governor to signify to you that it has been thought fit to supersede your commission of Colonel in the regiment of militia lying in part in the County of Worcester and partly in the County of Middlesex, and your said commission is superseded accordingly. I am, sir. Your most obt and humble servant, Jno. Cotton, Deputy Secretary. "Give my compliments to the Governor and say to him that I consider myself twice honored, but more in being superseded than in being commissioned, and (holding up the letter) that I thank him for this, since the motive that dictated it is evidence that I am what he is not, a friend to my country!" ^'Colonel Ward forever!" shouted the fast-grown crowd as the cloyed and chesty royalist dug his spurs into his horse 's flanks and shot out of view back to Boston. The Governor could revoke the commission, but he could not stifle the breath of liberty nor shut Ward out of the Governor's own royal council, to which, against the Gov- ernor's negative, the patriot Colonists, as we have seen, elected him in 1768, notwithstanding even then tlu'eats of subjection by the King's soldiers. WARD IN THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WARS There was another thing Ward carried with him besides the breath of liberty which the Governor could not revoke. It was, as with Washington, a knowledge of war, which he had learned under the King's generals in the French and Indian fights in the wilderness. In ARTEMAS WARD 13 1755-1758 such was his innate martial mettle that, like over one third of the able-bodied youth of Massa- chusetts, with Colonel Williams' rcf^ment of foot, he left the feathered nest of a country seat and the j^olden spoon of a proud family^ to risk life and limb in the battles in the wilds of the north. Like Washincrton under Braddoek, under General Abercrombie, Lord Howe and Williams, he was here first to follow the ^leam and show the mettle of the man in a school of war the teachincrs of which he was so soon to turn back against his English tutors in the fierce reflex of Revolution. The very diary in which on page after page he wrote down each day his campaigns still lies at the estate^ of his great-grandson, the late Samuel D. Ward of Shrewsbury. Taking it up and reading it to-day, it is easy for us to see in Ward from the first the brand of unsullied courage. The crux of the expedition in which he advanced from Major to Lieutenant-colonel lay in the retreat from the farthest point in tliis particular campaign against Tieonde- roga. The command that came to leave the breastwork, where at imminent danger to his life he stood amid his falling comrades for one whole day of bloody attack, Ward stigmatizes in his diary under that date as given at a point whence they so soon "shamefully retreated!" Had the faintest flaw of the fear of a coward lurked in the iron of Artemas Ward's blood, it would have manifested itself in these fierce and virgin battles where were hand-to-hand fights in trackless wilds against the cunning of superior foes. Nowhere is there a hint of anything but dare and iHis wife was a great grand-daughter of Increase Mather. 2 Adjacent to the General Ward homestead. On the ancient farm Artemas Ward was bom, Nov. 7, 1727. 14 MASTER MINDS risk. The peril ahead was in a black, untrodden wilderness which masked redskins, who were backed in turn by the army of the French. Privation and death lay there, before which indeed two thousand of his comrades were to fall, including* his particular leader, Lord Howe. But with all the spirit of his being. Ward was for action and against retreat. In broken battle-lines in deadly engagements beyond Lake Champlain, hand to hand with Indians and French, it was no longer a baptism of water of which he first ■^ATote, ''My horse flung me into the river," but a baptism of blood. From eight in the morning till nine at night under steady fire at the farthest breastwork, with the born soldier's freedom from adjectives or emotion, he simply records, "Many slain," though from the forests on the way he passes details of bleeding men emerging '^ scalped alive" to tell of ambush and of butchery ! WARD THE FIRST AMERICAN GENERAL IN COMMAND OF THE REVOLUTION Such a knowledge of war began by the patriots to be first systematically turned against the British October 27th, 1774, when the Provincial Congress appointed Artemas Ward general officer, together with Jedediah Preble and Seth Pomeroy. The first of the latter two not serving, General Ward was left first in rank, senior officer of the Revolution and the first American appointed General in actual command. March 9th, 1775, the Committee of Safety was organized "to alarm, accoutre and assemble militia," and to establish at Concord and at Worcester stores for powder-magazines, cannon and guns. Ancient Kitchen of the Ward Homestead— With Doo:; and Knocker ARTEMA8 WARD 15 April 18th, 1775, it was this accumulation of stores that called out Oafjo's orders "to reconnoitre and destroy." Tho troops that obeyed the order brought on the clash at Lexington and Concord. Just before this oiitburst of the Revolution, General Artemas Ward, when all realized that they must "hang together or hang separately," left the Provincial Congress at its adjournment April 15th, expecting May 10th to con- vene with it for a day of prayer and fasting. In this spirit of deep and breathless solemnity, he retired to the stillness of his home, the other patriots doing the same. Samuel Adams and John Hancock (marked to be sent to the King for trial) awaited events in the prayerful quiet of the house of Rev. Jonas Clark at Lexington. Hard upon the outbreak of April 19th, when the relay of horsemen alarmed every highway and turnpike with the simple and oft-repeated alarm, "To arms! to arms! the war's begun!" there came at Shrewsbury as everywhere else the breaking of a passion whose pressure had for years been clamped down nowhere deeper than in the Ward household. In the glow of the great fireplace of the ancient kitchen we can stand in now, when the ponderous blinds had been tightly drawn and the burnished guns still overhead hung waiting to speak their message, the letters of the Commit- tee of Correspondence had here been read time and time again. Here faces gleamed with light other than the back- log's and drank inspiration other than that from the crane. For years only brains were fired. The guns hung ready but mute. But at last these flintlocks,^ as a last resort, en- forced the dictates of men's minds. iThese guns were used in secret drilling, and the old kitchen is yet marked with dents from the clumsy barrels. 16 MASTER MINDS April 20th President Warren^ of the Committee of Safety accompanied the general alarm by this call to towns : "Our all is at stake. Death and desolation are the consequence of delay. every moment is infinite- LY PRECIOUS. One hour's delay may deluge your coun- try IN BLOOD AND ENTAIL PERPETUAL SLAVERY UPON THE FEW OF OUR PATRIOTS THAT MAY SURVIVE THE CARNAGE.'' It was the drive of this compelling passion of April 19th that enlisted before the town of Boston, by Saturday night, over sixteen thousand patriots and. in their lead, accom- panied by his sons, Ithamar and Nahum. Artemas "Ward as General at the head of the army.^ Immediately General Ward took command of the troops inpouring from every side, not only from the Province of Massachusetts, but from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and Connecticut. It was no frolic or foray, for beyond these colonies on to New York went " f/ie shot heard round the world," and following right upon the dispatch of the news at Lexington and Concord, the patriots in New York arose as one man, as is shown by this "intelligence,"' at once posted to General Ward and still found in his effects : iWarren, as if anticipating his fate at Bunker Hill, transported his wife and children to a house on Main Street, Worcester, still standing where it has been moved, 1 Fountain Street. 2First to bring the patriots kiUed (forty-nine killed, fifty-seven wounded) at the bridge and at Lexington, General Ward ordered out one lieutenant, two sergeants and fifty rank and file. For bread and other provisions for the assembling thousands, Colonel Gardner he dispatched to Eoxbury; for cannon and ordnance, Col- onel Bond to Cambridge. 3From a manuscript at homestead. ABTEMASWARD 17 Newport, April 26, 1775. Sir: It is with pleasure that I communicate to you by express the following important intelligence: By a vessell just arrived here from New York, we are informed that the news of the engagement between the regulars and the provincials got to New York on Sunday last between forenoon and afternoon service; that the people of the city immediately rose, disarmed the soldiers, possessed themselves of the fort and mag- azines, in which they found about 1500 arms; that they unloaded two transports bound to Boston, Captain Montague not dareing to give them any assistance; that a third transport has sailed while they were seizing the two others, and the people had fitted out a vessell in order to take and bring them back; that they had forbid all the pilots from bringing up any King's ships; that Captain Mon- tague was not able to procure a pilot in the whole city, and that the inhabitants were preparing and putting themselves into the best position of defense. The gentleman who brings this intelligence left Elizabethtown yesterday morning, and tells us that on Monday the committee of that town and county met and agreed to raise one thousand men immediately to assist in the defense of New York against any attacks that may be made against them. I have the honor to assure you that the intelligence may be depended on, and that I am Sir, Yr hum Ser John Collins, Chairman of the Committee of Inspection. The Commanding officer at Eoxbury. Thus, to SO great an extent conceived and born in New England, the Revolution, in whose creation Artemas Ward was an initial master mind, spread from New England over a continent. The generals commanding the troops from the other col- onies yielded deference to General Ward as head, defer- ence being thus yielded by General Spencer of Connecticut, General Greene of Rhode Island and General Folsom of 18 MASTER MINDS New Hampshire, "Ward's orders to be in the form of requests. The titamc task of the organization of an unformed and unarticulated patriot army fell to General Ward. His it was first to face the stupendous hurden of setting in order nearly twenty thousand troops, arising, as it were, in a night, to stand before him in the morning, a tatterdemalion multitude of high-strung and independent spirits. Already senior officer in command of this first army of the American Revolution, Artemas Ward, May 19, 1775, by the following commission was elevated by the Provincial Congress to the post of Commander-in-chief : The Congress of the Colony of Mass. To the Hon. Artemas Ward, Esq. Greeting: We, reposing especial trust and confidence in your courage and good conduct,i do by these presents constitute and appoint you, the said Artemas Ward, to be General and Commander- in-chief of all the forces raised by this Congress aforesaid for the defense of this and other American Colonies. You are therefore confidently and intelligently to discharge the duty of a general in leading, ordering and exercising the forces in arms, both inferior officers and soldiers, and to keep them in good order and discipline; and they are hereby ordered to obey you as their General; and you are yourself to observe and follow such orders and instructions as you shall from time to time receive from this or any future Congress or House of Representatives of this colony or the Com- mittee of Safety, so far as said committee is empowered by this commission to order and instruct you for the defense of this and the other colonies; and to demean yourself according to military i"The army reposed great confidence in its officers. They were the free choice of the men. Many had that influence over their fellow men that accompanies character. Ward was a true patriot, had many private virtues and was prudent and highly esteemed." — Frothingham, "Siege of Boston," p. 103. ARTEM AS WARD 19 rules and discipline established by said Congress in pursuance of the trust reposed in you. By order of the Congress, 19 May, A. D. 1775. T TtT Pres. Pro Tern. Jos. Warren. General Ward's ori^nal placing,'' of this vast unformed force of citizen minute-men about the besiegino^ line of some twenty miles was so stratefj^ic that Washincrton upon his arrival found, in the large, its position from a military point of view unchangeable. Lord Howe's estimate of his enemy's lines and their position bespoke an even higher appraisal of General Ward's strong line of impregnable blockade into which he divided this multitudinous array of men. "The Objective at Bunker Tlill" is a late booklet introducing us to the English letters as found in England by the author. Colonel Fisher. Through these letters of Lord Ho^ve, General Clinton and others, new light is thrown on the American Revolution, and nowhere more than on the underestimated work of General Ward, whose original laying of the siege-lines of Boston, as well as his final work on Dorchester Heights, the English deemed im- pregnable, and spoke of with well-weighed esteem. A week after occurred a "frolick" at Noddle's and Hog Islands — a frolic which, while the engagement was a minor one and, compared to Bunker Hill, but a foot-hill to a mountain, betrayed a deep-laid and permanent plan of General Ward's army, which was not only to hem in the five thousand King's regulars within the besieged town of Boston, hid to starve them out by corralling all near-by stock and pro-visions. From headquarters, Cambridge, May 27th and 28th, 1775, original letters of General Ward picturesquely paint the 20 MASTER MINDS local colors of the raid which any moment may swing into the decisive engagement. He wrote as to Hog Island that was attacked by the regulars : Our party, consisting of about six hundred men and two field- pieces, have just been forwarded to them. They have sent for reinforcements. But it is prudent not to weaken our company more. Our men have all been ordered to be in the greatest readiness this night. I doubt not your camp will be in the same readiness. There have been great movements in Boston this day. They have viewed arms, etc., etc. We have intelligence by General Putnam, who has just come from Chelsea, that Hog Island and Noddle's Island are swept clean; all the live-stock, as much as the total amount thereafter seized by the English, is taken off by our party. An armed schooner upon Winnisimmet ways was burned, although there was a heavy fire kept up continually. She had about sixteen pieces of cannon. I have the pleasure to inform you that we have not lost one man. I am obliged to you for offering me a reinforcement, but at present we apprehend we have no special need of them. We only request you to hold your men in readiness if we should. BUNKER HILL Such minor fights serve but as an index to the forces about to break upon one another on the two great penin- sular hills commanding the city — the keys to the situation, Bunker Hill and Dorchester Heights. Between these two heights of Boston on the north and south, with the blue strip of the Charles between them, lie the American Army on the Cambridge side and the King's regulars cooped up in Boston. The American belt-line of troops General Ward stretched in a semi-circle over twelve miles from Winter Hill on the left wing to Roxbury church on the right ABTEMA8 WARD 21 wing. It comprised by this time over sixteen thousand colonists. The English army, which consisted of at first some five thousand troops, was now to become, soon after Lexington and Concord, ten thousand, through reinforce- ments from England by Generals Howe, Clinton and Bur- goyne. The situation is in the prepossession of the two hills. With a judgment confirmed by the result, General Ward was opposed, for strategic reasons, to their occupying with a fortification Breed's Hill and Bunker Hill. So was General Warren. They called it at once "rash and imprudent." But others in the council of war alleging that the army was growing restless and the countiy dissat- isfied, voted to proceed. Upon the decision of the Committee of Safety to fortify it, Bunker and Breed's Hills at once became the storm- centre. On a bright moonlight night, June 16th, 1775, Colonel William Prescott with over one thousand men set out to throw up and occupy a redoubt and breastw^ork. In the rear two hundred yards back behind a low stone waU, Cap- tain Gridley, the engineer of the works, held the left flank. Reed and Stark the next morning increased the number to between twelve and fifteen hundred men. Against this force was flung the entire attack of the British army and navy. Over three thousand of the ten thousand King's troops had begun to cross by one o 'clock on the 17th. Since day- break the frigate Lively had been firing at the exposed works, which soon, together with burning Charlestown, became the target for not only the Lively, but the frigates Somerset, Symmetry, Cerberus, Falcon, Glasgow and four floating batteries. 22 MASTER MINDS 'June 20th, 1775, seven men of the Provincial Congress, acting for the Committee of Safety, three days after the battle forwarded this record of the engagement to the Con- tinental Congress: "We think it an indisputable duty to inform you that reinforcements from Ireland, both of horse and foot, being arrived (the number unknown), and having intelligence that General Gage was about to take possession of the advantageous posts in Charlestown and in Dorchester Point, the Committee of Safety advised that our troops should prepossess them if possible. "Accordingly on Friday evening, the 16th instant, this was effected by about twelve hundred men. About day- light on Saturday morning their line of circumvallation on a small hill south of Bunker's Hill in Charlestown was closed. ' ' At this time the ' Lively ' man-of-war began to fire upon them. A number of our enemy's ships, tenders, scows and floating batteries soon came up, from all of which the fire was general by twelve o'clock. About two the enemy began to land at a point which leads out towards Noddle 's Island, and immediately marched up to our intrenchments, from which they were twice repulsed, but in the third attack forced them. Our forces which were in the lines, as well as those sent out for their support, were greatly annoyed by balls and bombs from Cops Hill, the ships, scows, etc. At this time the buildings in Charlestown appeared in flames in almost every quarter, kindled by hot balls, and are laid since in ashes. Though the scene was most horri- ble and altogether new to most of the men, yet many stood and received wounds by swords and bayonets before they quitted their lines. At five o'clock the enemy were in full possession of all the posts within the isthmus. In the even- WaTcHIM. IHK liATILK llF IUNK KK IIlIJ. ARTEMASWARD 23 ing and night following, General Ward extended his intrenchments before made at the stone house over Winter Hill. About six o'clock of the same day the enemy began to cannonade Roxbury from Boston Neck and elsewhere, which they continued twenty-four hours with little spirit and less effect," "If any error has been made on our side, it was in taking a post so much exposed. ' ' When the bombs were bursting over Charlestown and the buildings "kindled by hot balls" were in flames, two shadows crossed the path of the Commander-in-chief, Artemas Ward. They were cast by the General 's third son, Tommy, who had been left at home, but who, rebelling at staying there, took hold tightly by the hand a lad with whom he had beaten his way from Shrewsbury forty miles away and appeared breathlessly headed for the battle. "How's this, Tommy?" vociferated the thunderstruck Commander to the young patriot, who insisted on joining his brothers on the fire-zone. "You must go right back!" The impression has too often been left that General Ward remained inactive, contenting himself with simply scrib- bling in his diary, "The battle is going on at Charles- town." But it is not so. General orders from head- quarters^ showed incessant activity. It was 9 o 'clock before Colonel Prescott applied to Ward for reinforcements, as Prescott himself did not believe the British would attack. At eleven o'clock General Ward ordered to Bunker Hill, to reinforce Prescott, the whole of Colonel Stark's and Reed's regiments of New Hampshire. This was three iGeneral Ward's headquarters were in the building later occupied by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and now known as his house. 24 MASTER MINDS hours before the three thousand English began to land. The remainder of the Massachusetts forces at about one o'clock he ordered to go. The battle began at three. Late in the day, notwithstanding the large possibility of the English yet striking at the centre at Cambridge, General Ward sent his own regiment and Patterson's and Gardner's to reinforce the patriots in the battle. Companies even of these last sent arrived in time to take posts as directed by Putnam. Certain other companies, though sent with these and long before these, failed to report for action over the fire-zone of the cannonaded Neck. In reality they never got there, but stampeded. June 17th, 1775, a general order from headquarters was sent to the effect that "the several companies in regiments parade precisely at five o'clock this afternoon at our alarm-post with two days' provisions, well dressed, their arms and ammunition in good order, ready to march to regiment orders." June 30th, in a record written by John Martin to Presi- dent Stiles, it is also stated that application to Ward for aid brought Colonel Putnam a large reinforcement about noon. Though Ward's aide hastened under cross-fire more than once through the enfiladed Neck in carrying his chief's commands, to maintain a central direc- torate or an intelligent line of communication, or to have exact and speedy intelligence of the enemy's surprising frontal attack, was indeed beyond human power. When Ward knew of the attack, which at first not even Colonel Prescott^ believed would come (as appears from the above 1' ' The troops, who had worked all night and half of a hot June day in throwing up intrenchments on Breed's Hill, were not relieved ARTEMASWARD 25 ordere long before the battle ended), he acted. But it took him, considering the shortness of the battle, a long time to know. Captain Aaron Smith's (the Shrewsbury soldier) statement that General Ward dispatched messen- gers across who were interfered with and sent back by Tory sympathizers witliin the American lines was no doubt but an undershot of the full truth. Other reasons for delay also abounded — reasons beyond General Ward's control. For instance, when the Conmiittee of Safety asked for the four best horses for General Ward's messengers, the Com- mittee of Supply refused, saying there were none except those unfit or wanted. The heat of the battle (over at five) occupied but ninety minutes. Waterloo lasted one day with thirty-four per cent, of the number engaged killed ; Gettysburg lasted three days with twenty-five per cent, of the Union Army lost; Bunker Hill lasted only ninety minutes with over thirty per cent, of the number engaged Idlled. Therefore, the bloody issue of Bunker Hill was decided with dreadful impetus. It was not only, proportionately speaking, one of the bloodiest battles in history, but the carnage was con- densed into an abnormally short period. Considering this, the suddenness of the onslaught and the slowness of the intelligence, it is seen that it was absolutely impossible, after the first intelligence of the enemy's frontal charge, for General Ward to have wisely acted sooner than he did. Yet before and during this ninety minutes' conflict, by others Colonel Preseott at first did not believe the British would attack his redoubt, and when he saw the movement he felt assured he could easily repulse any assailants, and it was nine o'clock before he applied to General Ward for reinforcements." — Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History, Vol I, p. 445. 26 MASTER MINDS General Ward constantly ordered troops to march and con- tinually gave his orders to reinforce. Lord Howe's and General Clinton's approval of the battle 's value to the Americans reveals in their letters a far higher appraisal of Ward's generalship than we have hitherto awarded to General Ward. The military probabilities were all against the English doing what they did. Their first master-stroke of strategy would have been to strike at the centre of the Army at Cambridge. Sixty-three half barrels of powder, only one-half pound for each soldier, in case of a general engag-ement, were all "the necessary article" the patriots possessed! General Ward knew this. But even to explain his course he dared not then expose the fact that this, together with his fear of an attack on the centre, was the reason of his caution. Had the English acted up to the best military strategy and struck at the centre at the American Army with its one-half pound of powder to a man, divided by a river and thinly stretching twenty miles all the way from Winter Hill to Eoxbury, they could have had a chance to destroy it piecemeal. Ward did not know that they would not live up to their opportunity. He had knowledge in fact, as it afterwards proved, that it was General Clinton's plan ! General Clinton 's plan was to cut off the patriots at the Neck and also then to strike at Cambridge. Gage and Howe shrank at the last moment from it, for which they were later roundly criticised in England.^ Till h^ found out for certainty their plan of frontal attack upon Bunker Hill, Ward had to guard against this master-stroke of strategy by the British, which was iSee Fisher, "The Objective at Bunker Hill." Also letters of Howe and Clinton. ARTEMA8 WARD 27 to bottle up the patriot troops by simply landing at the neck of the peninsula and thas corking the isthmian flask, with the Americans inside unable to get out. Indeed this, we see, was the strategy of the over- ruled English General, who was not overruled till the last minute. With the gunboats Lively, Glasgow, Somerset, Symmetry, Falcon, Cerberus and four floating batteries pouring in hot shot from the water-ways all about, had they done this, and had Ward ordered all of his army into the trap, they could indeed have annihilated the cut-off American columns at Bunker Hill. After the battle. Ward was cleared and confirmed by the report to the Provincial Congress June 20th, but three days later. This stated that in the opinion of the seven men constituting the committee, than whom no men on earth were fitter to judge, that "if any error has been made on our side, it was in taking a post so much exposed" — the very last thing Ward had said before the battle. But, after all. Ward's troops won a moral victory. One thing was left of Bunker Hill to the patriots, and that the greatest — a demonstration both to themselves and the enemy of the deatlilessness of their inspired cause. It gleamed out of the American gaze from the time when they met the whites of the enemy's eyes and made a martial tar- get of their waistbands. It sank in tliroughout the rake-off of the embattled farmer's fatal aim till the Americans' last dram of powder was wasted away, and cannon from land and floating batteries swept them from their feet at the third charge. It survived the triple fire and repeated itself at tlie engagement farther back. Then it appeared that England in Ward 's army was not to face a rabble of rebels, but a belligerent and equal foe. Then it broke once for all the flippant morale of English arms in America. 28 MASTER MINDS "I would sell them another hill at the same price," said General Greene. Washington upon hearing of the battle declared that "the liberties of America are now secure." To General Ward at headquarters Colonel Prescott reported the result of Bunker Hill. General Ward thanked him, but wisely refused to let him go back to recapture the hill. A short time later General Ward thanked the troops under him as a whole, saying to them on June 24th: ' ' The General orders his thanks to be given these officers and soldiers who behaved so gallantly at the late action in Charlestown. Such bravery gives the General sensible pleasure, as he is thereby fully satisfied that we shall fully come off victorious, and triumph over the enemies of free- dom and America." The day before this order, June 20th, three days after the battle, realizing how the confusion, slowness and insubordi- nation of officers had hindered General Ward in reinforc- ing Bunker Hill, Connecticut voted to place the whole of its troops under General Ward, and advised the other Colo- nies plainly to do the same thing openly, as it had so far been but a matter of deference. That evening as General Artemas Ward extended his lines and entrenchments over Winter Hill, it was not to abandon himself to despair. Even then inspired by this test of the American Army 's courage, there no doubt arose before him the other key-point to the sifuation — the un-lost hill on the southern peninsula, Dorchester Heights. Whether or not Ward then thought of Dorchester Heights, the fact is, the time soon came when he did, and it re- mained to be his vindication and by his victory there to prove to the world his courage and his generalship. ARTEMAS WARD 29 THE ARRIVAL OF WASHINGTON Two days before the Battle of Bunker Hill and not at all because of it, at Philndolphia the Continental Concrress appointed Washington Commander-in-chief of the Conti- nental Army. The difference between Ward and Washinprton is the difference between two great epochs — the Continental and the Provincial or Colonial. Washington incarnated the Continental, Ward the Provincial. Artemas Ward by the Congress of Massachusetts, at that time heading as he did New England and the Provincial cause, had been appointed Commander-in-chief of the Provincial Army by the Pro\'incial Congress. But the Eevolution had groMTi out of the Provincial period into the Continental. It was, therefore, time to pass its leadership over to a Continental cause instead of a Provincial cause ; a Continental Congress instead of a Pro- vincial Congress; a Continental capitol instead of a Pro- vincial capitol; a Continental army instead of a Provincial army; a Continental commander-in-chief instead of a Pro- vincial commander-in-chief. The two positions Washington and Ward held were not identical. They were not the same. The Provincial lead- ership was not destroyed, but fulfilled and passed out of the Provincial into the Continental, the new embodiment of which was Washington. There were great New Englanders who were later sign- ers of the Declaration of Independence like Paine, who favored Ward.^ But for one great reason he was not to be i"Mr. Paine expressed a great opinion of General Ward." — Let- ter of John Adams in Colonel Joseph Ward's Revolutionary cor- respondence. 30 31 ASTER MINDS the man. He had filled his place as Provincial leader and was to carry to success the driving of the British from New England. He had not only filled his place, but fulfilled his place. But he could not fill Washinsrton's place. For Washington, chovsen as head of the Continental cause, brought all the dismembered colonies together into one new body — the United Provinces of North America — by knotting the muscles of their various powers into one arm — the Continental Army. Washington arrived July 2d, 1775. From Nathan Stowe's old order-book in manuscript at Concord, Washington's general orders for July 4, 1775, read to this effect : "All troops of the several colonies which have been raised or are hereafter to he raised for the support and defense of the liberties of America are received into the pay and service of the Continental Congress, and are now the troops of the United Provinces of North America, and it is hoped that all distinctions of Colonies will he laid aside." If Washington was astounded at the task of reorganiza- tion, it reveals what a herculean burden had been Ward's of organization. For Washington found nearly twenty thousand men whom Ward had initially organized and held together deployed in so well-planned a siege-line that he himself would not change it and the English could not. If "it was a naked army, and the quartermaster had not a single dollar in hand;" if "the troops were in a state not far from mutiny," it only shows all the more the hardness of Ward's initial task in leading, organizing and holding such a mass of raw material. ARTEMASWARD 31 BETWEEN THE LINES Washino-ton's arrival July 2d, 1775, had found the remarkable army Ward had collected and held together. July 9th, at a council of war, it was decided to maintain posts as Ward had placed them and to increase the army to twenty- two thousand. The British ai-my across the Charles in Boston was then estimated at eleven thousand five hundred. To General Ward July 22d, 1775, came the commission of Major-general and the rani? next to Washinrrton, of second in command of the Continental Army, with his station the right wing at Dorchester Heights. The left wing at Winter and Prospect Hlills, to whose command General Lee^ was to succeed, consisted of two brigades under Generals Sullivan and Greene. At the centre, where were Washington's headquarters at Cambridge, were two brigades under Putnam. During the next eight months the siege of Boston is to go on till March 17, 1776, the day of the British evacuation. iWard's rival and detractor, as we shall see, and a general not only discounted at the time, but rated even lower in the later his- tory of the Eevolution. "Gates and Lee were placed in service next to Washington, and of both these Englishmen the record was as bad as it could be." — Edward Everett Hale in "Reminiscences of a Hundred Years." General Lee's pompous and un-American opinions shone through- out his meteoric career. Washington deciphered and sent to a friend a sample of this questionable General's language as a "specimen of his abilities in that way." Lee's role, in which he later in his own language describes himself as "a dog in a dancing school," was one in which he jealously came to denounce Washington himself as "damnably deficient." The detraction of General Ward which he and other rivals dared, however, lasted long enough to shatter Washington's friendship for Ward. 32 MASTER MINDS For nearly a year the two armies lie, the one over against the other. We open certain unprinted letters to feel again the ferment of this long wait ; the excitement of the chafing camps; the friction without collision; the nervous tension of the tightening lines; the momentary convulsions of the one at the slightest alarm in the other. Saturday night, July 29, it is a trembling woman in the camp. In the peak of a baby's cap or tucked into its slip is a letter from "Washington to Ward. We hold it again as "Elizabeth Royal" held it, and we re-read it even as at first it was read as a sentry's lantern trembled across its page: KOXBURY. To the Honorable General Ward.i The bearer, Elizabeth Eoyal, wife to a soldier in the Sixty-third Regiment, has obtained leave from the General to go into Boston, leaving her child here. If she applies you will give the necessary orders to the guards. This morning a detachment of riflemen surprised the enemy's guard q 'rt 'd. in Charlestown Neck and brought off two prisoners, but they gave no particular information but what we had before. It is supposed that two of their men were killed ; not one on our side was either killed or wounded. I am sir with much esteem, Your most ob'd't and very H'ble servant, Jos. Eeed (Washington's secretary). Headquarters, Sunday, 9 o 'clock. The British army, alarmed by the riflemen's surprise, fear the main engagement may be precipitated any moment. Washington fears the same, and therefore watches every move and detects the slightest action, as is shown by this iFrom original manuscript at homestead. Many of Washington's dictated letters and dispatches, while still his dictations, were signed by his aides or secretary. ARTEMASWARD 33 request Washington dictated in this hitherto unprinted letter : Headquarters, Cambridge, 30 July, 1775. His Excellency here desires me to inform you that it is his opinion the movemonts of the regulars on your side may have been occasioned by the alarm we gave them last night. He requests you to be prepared for them in case they attempt anything against your posts, and if any new movements are made to give him immediate notice of them. "We have had before ns General Ward's unpublished or- derly book^ in which he wrote each day's events and orders at Dorchester. It details the Ions: stand of the ri^ht wing up to March. In its pages we follow the patriots as they are bracing themselves for the impending struggle, and strengthen outposts on even to Squantum. As the winter drew on, as some soldier on the Neck or on the other side from over the Charles kicked the blazing log of a fire in the American camp, the British army confined there heard him sing camp-songs like this: "And what have you got by all your designing But a town without dinner to sit down and dine in?" Ward's plan of starving and freezing out the garrison was working. For to provide fuel for the shivering troops of the British, numbers of whom were up to December still in tents, through his glasses from Dorchester, General Ward watched meeting-houses being torn down in Boston. lln the Antiquarian Society, Worcester, where the writing stands out as boldly as on the day he wrote it in his year as Commander of the right wing. 34 MASTER MINDS Washington, too, was on the watch. English ships com- ing to succor the royalists he had smartly seized, and their coasting vessels prevented from bringing in provisions and provender. Chief among the prizes taken by the patriots was the brigantine Nancy, loaded with beef and with two thousand stands of arms and seven thousand of round shot for cannon, two thousand muskets, one hundred five thou- sand flints, sixty reams of cartridge paper, three thousand round shot for twlve -pounders and four thousand shot for six-pounders. Grave matters of internal administration still arose, how- ever, to engage the new Commander-in-chief. From the contents of many letters, nowhere do we see "Washington demonstrate more wise and delicate capacity to command than in thus holding the restless army together by conciliat- ing New England generals to the reorganization. Manu- script letters far back in 1775 expose how often he yielded minor differences wherever he could to secure the major harmony. So close even since September have grown the sentries of the opposing armies, and so short the space between, that deserters walk undetected from one to the other. Counter- signs are betrayed and the enemy is given the password by which they may enter the American lines. At such times from wing to wing the besieging army quivers with excite- ment as post-riders dash in to Washington with dispatches like this one to Washington from Greene, which we have reopened in the original manuscript from General Ward's house: o ART EM AS WARD 35 Prospect Hill, Sept. 10, 1775.1 8 o'clock. Til is TiKunout reported me from the White-house Guard ^ that a deserter had made his escape into Bunker Hill. Two ^ sentries fired at him but he made his escape I believe unhurt. H ... If this deserter has carried in the countersign, they may easily carry it over to Roxbury. It would be a pretty ^ y, advantage for a partisan frolic. 9 ^ The Rifflers seem very sulky and . . threaten to rescue H w their mates tonight, but little is feared from them, as the o g regiment are already at a moment's notice to turn out — and 1^ ^ the guards very strong. On again Avith the dispatch, under cover of darkness, spurred the post-rider whom Washington, by his staff officer, after the reception of the eight o'clock message, hastened over to Ward at Roxbury with General Greene's dispatch and the new parole and countersign, adding: Headquarters 9 at night,i 10 September, 1775. The parole and countersign has been changed on this side as you see them inscribed in General Greene's letter. You will no doubt order it to be complied with. Your most obedient humble servant, Horatio Gates (Adj. Gen.). How long the British can stand the pressure of the siege becomes to both sides an a.nxious question. It is evident that it cannot be long, and this means — action ! Beset everywhere by petty sjnuptoms of disorganiza- tion and disorder, Washington not only finds no chance to strike the enemy, but grows desperate in his determination to prevent his own army's leaking away between his fingers while apparently yet in his hand. iFrom the original manuscript at homestead. 36 MASTER MINDS By November 28th, of the required twenty-two thousand men but three thousand five hundred had re-enlisted for the new establishment. Even on into December, not only was the recruiting of men for the new year delayed, but officers were unfixed, with less than thirty days before the expira- tion of all. The whole future of the Revolution was indeed at stake. GENERAL WARD, VICTOR OF THE EVACUATION OF BOSTON During the past months, lest the enemy make the first move, Washington had been all along for weeks most alert, and constant warnings fiy between him and Ward. A warning to Ward December 4th, 1775, by his Adjutant- general, Washington punctuates ■with these words: This moment a report is come from the commanding oflScer at Chelsea that the enemy have passed from Boston to Charlestown this afternoon, near one hundred boats full of men; perhaps this may be only intended as a feint on this side, when the serious attacks may be on yours; it behooves to be alert in all quarters. I therefore by His Excellency's command acquaint yen of this manoeuvre of your enemy, not doubting but you will take your measures accordingly. By the hard-pressed enemy in Boston, where conditions were growing intolerable, is there to be a movement against the stores? Washington will send troops here and there to guard them, as we see by his dictated word, and straightway in view of the climax, which sooner or later circum- stances will force upon them, he looks towards meet- ing the crisis. To meet this crisis General Washington altogether planned three separate attacks upon Boston, all of which failed to eventuate. They were the one shown ARTEMAS WARD 37 in the following letter on Castle William, the one across the Charles on ice, and the counter attack to Lord Percy's in March. As to the first he most interestingly proceeds to unfold to Ward the following design : Cambridge, Nov. 17th, 1775.1 As the season is fast upproachiug when the Bay between us and Boston will, in all probability, be close shut up, thereby rendering any movement upon the Ice as easy as if no water was there, and as it is more than possible that General Howe, when he gets the expected reinforcement will endeavor to relieve himself from the disgraceful confinement in which the Ministerial troops have been all this Summer, common prudence dictates the necessity of guard- ing our camps wherever they are most available for this purpose, I wish you, Sergt. Thomas, Genl. Spencer & Col. Putnam to meet me at your Quarters tomorrow at Ten o'clock, that we may ex- amine your work at the neck and Sewells point, and direct such batteries as shall appear necessary for the security of your camp, on that side to be thrown up without loss of time. I have long had it upon my mind that a successful attempt might be made, by way of surprise, upon Castle William — from every acct. there are no more than 300 men in the place. The whale boats therefore which you have, such as could be sent to you would easily transport 800 or 1000 which with a very mod- erate share of conduct and spirit might I should think bring off the Garrison, if not some part of the Stores. — I wish you to discuss this matter (under the Kose) with officers of whose judgment and conduct you can rely — something of this sort may show how far the men are to be depended upon — I am with respect Yr most obed H Ser G Washington This stands out as the first one of the three ways Wash- ington planned to take Boston, all of which failed to suc- ceed. lOriginal manuscript at Antiquarian Society, Worcester. 38 MASTER MINDS About two weeks later the Continental Congress voted Washington "could attack Boston in any manner he may think expedient." Dropping the Castle William plan, he elected another one — to attack by crossing the frozen waters of the Charles. But the ice did not freeze until the middle of February. Calling a council, Washington, to his great disheartenment, found himself out-voted on the grounds of the too great risk involved. February the 13th the enemy themselves anticipated him and carried out his strategy by crossing over the ice to Dor- chester Neck (now South Boston). Here they leveled all cover in the shape of buildings, also capturing six patriot guards. The British objective was Dorchester Heights. But they were not the only ones having designs on this objective. It was also tlie objective for General Artemas Ward's right wing. While Washington was three times to be compelled to give up his plans of attack upon Boston, the chance from Ward's side is all the time opening. The plan went before the council of war. It was voted by the council, Washington then concurring. From the very first Ward's move towards a victorious prepossession of Dorchester Heights, towards the Dorchester Heights victory and towards the British evacuation, moves swiftly to a climax. Everything favored the Dorchester Heights plan. The brigantine Nancy's contribution of ammunition came just in time to supply Knox's heavy cannon so brilliantly trans- ported from Ticonderoga over the Green Mountains by forty-two ox-team sleds. General Ward had also under him most able subordinates. General Thomas, Colonel Put- nam and Engineer Gridley, who had thrown up the Bun- ker Hill redoubts. ART EM AS WARD 39 But details are over, and at len^h the crisis is at hand. It may come at any moment. The American fjenerals are all alert. Any juncture may precipitate the conflict. Though himself outvoted as to his plan of attack and now giving the new undertaking over into the direct command of his first Major-general, General Ward, Washington right nobly decided that as to prepossessing Dorchester Heights : "It is better to prevent than to remedy an evil," and backs Ward with every force at his command. In an interest- ing letter he keeps Ward in touch with the enemy's designs, and Ward in turn warns General Brewer that in view of an immediate attempt upon the American lines, the troops "lye upon their arms" and the picket be "so dis- posed as to give them a warm reception." Washington betrays great caution. It is evident that it is hard for him to share Ward's convictions that the affair is to go through without a hitch and be a clean sweep for the American forces. It is yet but February 27th, and March 17th, the day of the British evacuation of Boston, is three weeks distant. Washington fears an attack while Ward is unprepared. But his fear again and again turns out unfounded, as, for instance, he here himself declares to General Ward from Cambridge, February 27th, 1776^: We were falsely alarmed a while ago with an account of the regulars coming over from the Castle William to Dorchester. Mr. Bayler whom I immediately sent is just returned with a contra- diction of it. But as a rascally Eifleman went it last night & will no doubt give all the intelligence he can, wd it not be prudent to keep Six or Eight trusty men by way of Lookouts or Patrols iThis letter, originally found at the residence, is also in Miss Ward's "Old Times in Shrewsbury," p. 168. 40 MASTER MINDS tonight on the point next to the Castle as well as in Nuke Hill; at the same time ordering particular Eegiments to be ready to march at a moment's notice to the Heights of Dorchester. For should the enemy get Possession of those hills before us, they would render it a difficult task to dispossess them. Better it is therefore to prevent than to remedy an evil. To draw attention from the right wing's operations of Major-general Ward, Saturday night, March 2d, the left wing north of Boston began cannonading, and continued cannonading the nights of Sunday and Monday, March 3d and 4th. So great was the din and so skillful were the manoeuvres that Knox's forty-two ox teams hauled the Ticonderoga cannon on "screwed" straw over the frozen earth of Dorchester Neck within a mile of the English sen- tries without discovery. March 3d, preceding the day (March 4th) on which General Thomas' ox-teams were to cany up the cannon, came this letter from Washington to Ward;! To Major General Ward, Commanding at Eoxbury, Cambridge 3 March 1776 Sir: My letter of last Night would inform you that the Gen'l officers at this place thought it dangerous to delay taking post on Dorchester Hills, least they should be possessed before us by the Enemy, and therefore Involve us in difficulties which we should not know how to extricate ourselves from — This opinion they were inclined to adopt from a belief, indeed almost a certain knowledge, of the Enemy's being apprised of our designs that way. You should make choice of some good Eegiments to go on the morning after the Post is taken, under the command of General Thomas — the number of men you shall judge necessary for this Eelief may be ordered. I should think from two to three thousand, as circumstances may require, would be enough. I shall send you lit is the most highly graphic of several Dorchester Heights letters, and is now in the Ward homestead. ARTEMA8 WARD 41 from thenco two Regiments to be at Roxbury early on Tuesday morning to strengthen your lines and I shall send you from hence tomorrow evening two Companies of Riflemen, which with the three now there may bo part of the Relief to go on with Gen'l Thomas — these Five companies may be placed under the care of Captain Hugh Stephenson subject to the Conunaud of the officer Commanding at the Post (Dorchester), — They will I think be able to gald the Enemy sorely in the march from the boats in landing. A Blind along the Causey should be thrown up, if possible while the other work is about; especially on the Dorchester side, as that is nearest the Enemy's Guns and most exposed. We calculate 1 think that 800 men would do the whole Causey with great ease in a night if the marsh is not got bad to work again and the tide gives no great Interruption. — 250 able men I should think would soon fell the Trees for the Abettes but what number it may take to get them, the Fascines, Chandeliers etc. in place I know not — 750 men (the working party carrying their arms) will I should think be sufficient for a Cov- ering party, these to be posted on Nuke Hill — or the little hill in front of the 2nd hill looking into Boston Bay — and near the point opposite the Castle — sentries to be kept between the Parties and some on the back side looking towards Squantum. As I have a very high opinion of the defense which may be made with barrels from either of the hills, I could wish you to have a number over. Perhaps single barrels would be better than linking of them together, being less liable to accidents. The Hoops should be well nailed on else they will soon fly and the casks fall to pieces. You must take care that the necessary notice is given to the Militia agreeable to the plan settled with General Thomas. I shall desire Col'n Gridley and Col'n Knox to be over tomorrow to lay out the work. I recollect nothing more at present to mention to you — you will settle matters with the officers with you, as what I have here said is intended rather to convey my ideas generally than wishing them to be adhered to strictly. I am with esteem etc. Sir Yr most Obed. Servt Go Washington. Monday, March 4th, soon after General Thomas had started from General Ward's camp with twelve hundred 42 MASTER MINDS men, he took position on the higher elevations of Dorches- ter Heights, where he was reinforced. Under General Ward, the immediate head in command of the undertaldng entrusted to him, all worked in perfect harmony. Gridley, who entrenched the Heights and laid out the works, was assisted by Colonel Putnam. Inspired by their townsmen's generalship, it was said that none of the sappers and miners worked with more unflagging toil to entrench the Heights than General Ward's own Shrewsbury neighbors. One of these, Nathan Howe, died of the chill he conti'acted this night. So remarkable was the extent of their night's work that General Howe of the enemy's force wrote to his cabinet minister in England that it must have been the work of twelve thousand men. It was the first sight of the works frowning down upon the shipping that evoked from the British officer in com- mand the exclamation: "The rebels have done more in a night than my whole army could have done in a month ! ' ' To destroy these suddenly thrown-up works which could themselves destroy the harbor ships, their only means of escape, Lord Percy with three thousand British proceeded to Castle William, the little island just off the main land (now Castle Island, South Boston). Here he planned attack on the east and south, but a driving storm prevented this action. While Lord Percy was thus for attacking Ward's army at Dorchester Heights on the east and south, Washington planned his third unsuccessful stroke upon Tuesday, the 5th of March. It was by a counter-attack to strike Boston by the west on the river side.^ iWhere now lies the Massacliusetts General Hospital Parkway. ARTE MAS WARD 43 But Percy's failure to make the English attack on the other side blocked Washington's move, for which he had in readiness the troops of Putnam, Greene and Sullivan. Thus the field was left clear to Artemas Ward, and we cannot but admire tho magnificent way in which Washing- ton, liis other plans miscarrying, now leaves the master- piece of the Dorchester Heights undertaking to Major- general Ward, and yet backs him with every resource of his matchless generalship. He is in constant solicitude for the undertaking, of whose success he is not wholly con- vinced. He therefore writes from headquarters to General Ward: By the deserter from the 63 Eegiment who came last night from the Enemy the General is informed that they have it in con- templation to erect a battery of Cannon somewhere between Brown's House and the George Tavern, having cut down Liberty Tree for the purpose of making fascines, etc. Though the tales of deserters are not always true, yet some attention may not be thrown away upon the present occasion. The General thinks a strong Picquet at all hours of the night should be in readiness to defeat the design of the Enemy. A proper patrol may also, during the night, keep con- stantly watching the motions of the enemy and instantly alarming the picquet upon any advance upon that side who will thereupon march and drive the enemy from the intended works. The deserter says, he informed the gentlemen who examined him this morning at Roxbury of the intentions of the Enemy .1 March 8th Howe sent within the American lines by flag an offer of truce, stating the English desire to evacuate Boston with the army. The Selectmen of Boston sent by the same flag a petition begging that ' ' so dreadful a calam- ity as the destruction of Boston ' ' might not be brought on from without. iFrom a manuscript at Ward homestead. 44 MASTER MINDS Accompanied by an expression of the Commander-in- chief's prevailing fear of a trap and the overturning of Ward's plan, came as a result Washington's peremptory orders to General Ward March 10, which we reopen from the original as they came from Cambridge March 10th, 1776 : By his Excellency's command I am to inform you that it is his desire that you give peremptory orders to the Artillery officer commanding at Lams Dam that he must not fire on the town of Bos- ton tonight unless they first begin a cannonade, and that you inform the officer at Dorchester Heights that he is not to fire from thence on the town. If they begin and we have any cannon on Nuke Hill his Excellency would have the fire to be returned from thence among the shipping and every damage done them that possibly can — Notwithstanding the accounts received of the enemy's being about to evacuate Boston with all seeming hurry and expedition, his Ex- cellency is apprehensive that Gen. Howe has some design of hav- ing a brush before his departure and is only waiting in hopes of finding us off our guard. He therefore desires that you will be very vigilant and have every necessary precaution taken to prevent a sur- prise and to give them a proper reception in case they attempt any- thing. It, however, was farthest from Howe's purpose to do anj^hing but get aivay, and General Ward's victory was completely beyond even Washington's expectations. At General Ward's headquarters on March 13 a council of war was summoned, at which were Washington, Put- nam, Sullivan, Heath, Greene and Gates. Nook's Hill as a nearer point from which to harass the ships and towns was here determined upon as a point to be fortified. Saturday, the 16th of March, Howe blew up his own army effects which the over-crowded transport bound for Hali- fax compelled him to leave behind. Sunday morning, the 17th, he then embarked in seventy-eight transports the besieged army of eight thousand nine hundred and six officers and men and eleven hundred tory residents. General Aiitemas Ward First Commander-in-chief of the American Revolution (From a portrait of 1777) ARTEMA8 WARD 45 The 17th of March is therefore the feast-day in the rubrics of the Eevolution in New England. It marks the driving of the British from New England. On this red- letter day the same deathless purpose that unnerved King George's troops at Bvnher TJill expdled the iron heel of the King from Neiv England soil once and forever. It is to the glory of New England, and it is the everlast- ing retriever of Bunker Hill, that the Dorchester Heights victory that cleared New England of the aggressor fell not only to Washington, grand as he was, hut more immediate- ly to the New England General, the first Commander-in- chief of the Eevolution as it came to a head in Massachu- setts — General Artemas Ward. From the time of its first conception to the time of its final victory, the British evacuation was Ward's master- piece. As the commanding officer at the head of the specific undertaking, it was Ward, not Washington, who literally sent the enemy to Halifax. General Ward, as soon as the enemy evacuated on March 17th, had the gates unlocked and entered with five hundred troops, with Ensign Rich- ards hearing the standard.^ lOn the 20th the main body of the army entered. The siege ended Monday. Ward marched in notwithstanding the fact that the Boston Selectmen had warned him of the pest of small-pox, to which scourge he was to sacrifice his eon Nahum. Washington as the Commander-in-chief came over after- wards from Cambridge and entered with ceremony. A medal was struck for Washington, without whose reorgan- ization of the army in one sense the victory could not have been achieved. But in another sense neither his immediate plan nor faith nor action was directly, in the main, responsible for the brilliant vic- tory. For Thomas the heights of Dorchester were named, but for Ward the appreciation of America is yet to be shown. 46 MASTER MINDS GENERAL WARD AT BOSTON Partly from a belief in Ward's incapacitation through an intestinal malady, partly from a personal misunder- standing of him as his Major-general, and partly from the feeling that Ward could best of all serve the cause in New England's capital, Boston, Washington left General Ward over the evacuated town, and took with him as his staff all the other generals to the New York campaign. There is no doubt that amongst these reasons, belief in Ward's incurable sickness was in some ways a major one and cannot be charged to Washington or laid at any other door. In April (1776) General Ward himself represented to Congress his enfeebled state of health and unwillingness to continue in office while prevented by ill health from ren- dering "an equivalent in service." He therefore requested Congress to accept his resignation as First Major-general of the Continental Army. But there is not much doubt, however, that General Ward, who served the State in twenty more intensely active years, would have risked his state of health, whose disorder he had all along, were it not for the lamentable misunderstanding which undeniably existed between him and Washington. Washington 's estimate of Ward was no doubt discolored by mischief-maJiers, chief among whom was General Lee^ lA confidential letter of Washington to Lee shows Lee's per- nicious influence, which existed in the early part of the Eevolution until Washington found Lee out. In this letter, existing among Colonel Joseph Ward's literary remains, Washington is sharing Lee's misconception of Ward as "a chimney-side hero." "It is well known that Washington spoke of the resignation of General Ward, after the evacuation of Boston, in a manner approach- ing contempt. His observations, then confidentially made, about ABTFjMA.S WART) 47 of the left win£7, ever a malcontent and troiihle-hreeder, and a man so un- Americanly ambitious, that to throw down whatsoever character stood between him and his own superiority was a common failinnf. They discolored the glasses through which Washinprton looked at Ward. It was no doubt with a keen sense of this misunderstand- ing and its results that "Ward later wrote, June 14th, 1790 : "This world is full of disappointments, and sometimes I am ready to say that no one hath more of them than I." Yet no matter what the single or combined reasons, no matter how he felt, no matter how great the misunder- standing, it was Ward's fate to be shelved and pocketed to police a pest-ridden and deserted city, while the other gen- erals superseded him and carried on the Revolution. The fortifying of the harbor against the possible return of the enemy he had driven out was the only reward, the only soldierly task left him. ARTEMAS WARD, THE HERO OP SHAYS ' REBELLION Yet Ward did not sulk in his tent or retire as invalided. The period of reconstruction following the Revolution's loss of blood and wealth, the modem mind ill conceives. some of the other generals, were not calculated to flatter their amour propre or that of their descendants. It is said that General Ward, learning long afterwards the remark that had been applied to him, accompanied by a friend, waited on his old chief at New York, and asked him if it was true that he had used such language. The Presi- dent replied that he did not know, but that he kept copies of all his letters, and would take an early opportunity of examining them. Ac- cordingly, at the next session of Congress (of which General Ward was a member) he again called with his friend, and was informed by the President that he had really written as alleged. Ward then said, 'Sir, you are no gentleman,' and turning on his heel quitted the room." — Dralce: "Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex, page 48 MASTER MINDS In the swept-clean nation, devils of fratricidal conflict worse than the first seemed about to tear young America to pieces. Were the arms that had but lately given the Republic birth now to turn upon it and rend it ? This was a crisis immediate and fearful. The trouble was crucial, severe and threatening. Bankrupt even to the melting of their pewter which was gone ; destitute to the clothes off their backs which they had given; in debt and everything mortgaged; lands foraged and overrun ; farms neglected ; church habits broken ; hus- bands and sons killed or incapacitated; standards and morals frequently demoralized, — ^in fine, parts of the coun- try upon which the Revolutionary centres drew ready to lose themselves in a reaction of debt, disorder and discour- agement, strong hands were needed to save the State. Letters and messages lie in "Ward's trunk rehearsing "crimes which reached the very existence of social order which were perpetrated wdthout content." Washington's messages are filled with the situation. In Pennsylvania he has to recall the army. In August, 1786, Washington most seriously took notice of this state of rebel- lion and declared: ''A letter received from General Knox — just returned from Massachusetts — is replete with mel- ancholy accounts of the important designs of a consider- able part of that people. Among other things he says: 'Their creed is that the property of the United States had been protected by the exertion of all, and therefore ought to he the common property of all; and he that attempts oppo- sition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice and ought to be swept from off the face of the earth. ' ' ' Again "they are determined to annihilate all debts, and have agrarian laws by means of unbonded paper money. The ARTEMA8 WARD 49 number of these people in Massachusetts amounts to one- fifth part of several populous counties, and to them may be collected people of similar sentiments from the states of Rhode Island, Connecticut and New PTampshire, so as to constitute a body of about twelve or fifteen thousand des- perate and unprincipled men. They are chiefly of the young and active part of the community. "How melancholy is the reflection," concludes Washing- ton, "that in so short space we should have made such long strides towards fulfilling the prediction of our trans- atlantic foes : ' Leave them to themselves and their govern- ment will soon dissolve. ' Will not the wise and good strive hard to avert this evil ? ' ' Febmarv' 3d, 1787, Washington added: "If three years since, any person had told me that there would have been a formidable rebellion as exists to-day against the laws and constitution of our making, I should have thought him a bedlamite or a fit subject for a mad-house." In Massachusetts, which had breasted the Revolutionary conflicts and had become a field of battle, the dead were many and the sick legion. "The pitiable condition of the injured and unfortunate inhabitants of Massachusetts," was a phrase used in letters to Ward to describe the people's suffering. To cap the climax, it was a population who had given their all in blood and money to supply the sinews of war which had not been wrenched from them but offered gladly upon their country's altar, that was to meet the debtor's fate and the mortgagee's hammer. Executions for debt were being everywhere served.^ Inability to meet the demands of creditors cruelly stung the New England iln 1784 more than 2000 actions were entered in the county of Worcester. 50 MASTER MINDS ' pride. All this was intensified by prophets of evil, agitators and alarmists. Repudiation of debt and stay of execution — this became the natural and popular outcry in Massachusetts as well as at other centres of disturbance. The people started to take the law into their own hands and initiate a reign of lawlessness. In New England it took the form of Shays' Rebellion. The centre of Shays' Rebellion was Worcester, the Heart of the Conmionwealth, and. strange to say by the very home of Ward — the first hero of its defeat. The best of Ward's old captains in the Revolution headed the militia, whose ranks were hot-beds of the trouble. Captain Aaron Smith, for instance, lived opposite Ward's house,^ not a stone's- throw away. Captain Wheeler, another townsman, rebelled, to say nothing of the rank and file who enlisted everywhere under Ward's old comrades. Captain Daniel Shays, the ring- leader himself, was also one of Ward's captains. To let the rebellion swell from such a start till it over- flowed and became one with the other ferment in other col- onies would be civil war and the nation's death. Now came a beautiful proof of Ward's unflinching love of country after his being superseded in Washington's staff by such as Lee and Gates. He might, through sympathy with his own New England, his soldiers and their homes and through jealousy of Washington, have let the evil go on. But no! To do-v^Ti Shays' hand and break the rebellion became the work of his mind and tongue. Artemas Ward was at this time Chief-justice of the Court of Common Pleas. The first Tuesday in September, i"The house built by Ward's father, whence Ward's family moved across the street to the present old homestead." ARTE MAS WART) 51 1786, as Chief-justice with his associates, he was ordered by the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth to convene the court at Worcester. Should it meet and its execution and judcrments be decreed law, execution against debtors could be enforced. Hence it was the psychological moment for Shays to strike. Successful, it would appeal to other centres of people, and set the country aflame and complete the prediction that the gfovernment would soon dissolve, towards which dissolution Washington confessed the country was g'oing by lonjs^ strides. Under Captain Wheeler, Ward saw one of Shays' wheels of rebellion pass out of Shrewsbury. There were many others under as many captains. They came into Worcester County IMonday afternoon, September 4th, the day previous to the court's session, and barracked in the Court House halls. Aaron Smith, Ward's next-door neigfhbor and friend, marched his Shrewsbury company up Monday morning and posted them on Court Hill and around the Court House. Had there been tlie least show of disloyalty or had pri- vate jealousy swallowed his patriot's devotion, it would now be easy for Ward to sit back and see the troubles pile up against the Government and Washington and say nothing. But he was not that type of man. He preferred to bring against himself unpopularity at home by standing against the people. The populace, in sympathy with the disaffection, crowded the open and slopes. A challenge rang out, and a clank of a bayoneted musket. It was a sentinel halting Judge Ward's cortege of jurists at the foot of the hill. 52 MASTER MINDS But hardly had the challenge resounded when the old Commander's tones rang out stern and clear upon the Sep- tember air: "Present arms!" Almost on the exact spot, not far from the place where now is the motto, ' ' Obedience to Law is Liberty, ' ' the sol- dier obeyed, and the judge's party proceeded up the Court House Hill, eyed by the hostile populace and troops. On the broad steps at the southern entrance, with side- arms drawn. Ward's old friends, neighbors and officers, Captain Wheeler and Captain Smith, blocked the way, backed by five soldiers, whose fixed bayonets were leveled gleaming in the sun. At this point the crier of the Court House opened the doors, exposing a body of soldiery within ready to fire. Ignoring the blockade, and attempting to pass the five soldiers, the jurists were met with bayonet points which even pierced their coat-fronts. Saying he would answer their complaints, Chief Justice Ward was told to reduce his remarks to writing. Deter- minantly refusing, General Ward heard the drum beat and the guard commanded to charge. The crisis was faced by their old Commander as with gleaming eye and righteous wrath he looked his soldiers full in the face and spoke to this effect : "I do not value your bayonets; you might plunge them into my heart; but while that heart beats I will do my duty; when opposed to it, my life is of little consequence; if you will take away your bayonets and give me some posi- tion where I can be heard by my fellow-citizens and not by the leaders alone, who have deceived and deluded you, I will speak, but not otherwise."^ iSee pp. 118-120, History of Worcester, Mass., by William Lincoln. ART EM AS WAR J) 53 The five soldiei's in the hill-top, like the sentries at its foot, themselves nuistered by the master mind of their old Commander, dropp(>d their iiuiskets. The way up the steps, now nn])locked, the jndf^e ascended in the dignity of triumphant hiw and for two hours ad- dressed the people, where most appropriately enshrining the spirit of that day is now earven in stone the above- mentioned motto given by Senator Iloar:^ ''Obedience to Law is Liberty." Repeated demands were as loyally met by Ward and other patriots, who remained unmoved by threats or show of force, and declared firmly for the Con- stitution. The rebels were stubborn, however, and con- tinued assembling till the moral opposition, in which Ward led, began to turn the tide of public opinion, until at last, January 21st, 1787, the State sent an army of forty-four hundred men against them under General Lincoln, That Ward acted with etfect can be judged by the going to pieces of the rebellion and later the resumption of court. Resentfully, the cowed leaders, scattered throughout the towns of central Massachusetts, were pursued by the troops under General Lincoln in a pursuit which is traced in a iSenator Hoar himself, the Ward family advocate, was a cham- pion of General Ward, and had often expressed to the family the conviction that General Ward's statue should occupy the space in front of the Court House. The ignorant assumption as to Ward of popular history writers, he frequently took pains to scorn. Compare Howe in * ' Life and Letters of George Bancroft, ' ' where Howe points out even Bancroft's fault as one that obscured all lights but Washington 's. ' ' In more than one instance Bancroft 's with- holding of credit where credit was due sprang rather transparently from a desire to fix upon Washington 's brow every laurel it could accommodate." This is preeminently true of Bancroft's passing over of Ward in order to emblazon Washington. 54 MASTER MINDS diary written by General Ward's son. Some of the rebels even gathered around Aaron Smith's homestead just across the King's highway from Ward's own home. Their camp-fires spat their sparks and snapped their harmless revenge in front of Ward's very door-stoop till, stamped out by the Commonwealth's troops, that put to flight the last of Shays' rebels, who flew to the four winds, they had nothing left but to imitate the dis- graceful flight of Shays himself. "Convinced of the errors and evil consequence of being in rebellion and opposition to the good laws and authority of the Commonwealth, I do feel truly and heartily sorry for my misconduct. Therefore, permit me, kind sir, to beg humbly your pardon and forgiveness in this as well as in other matters. ' ' One by one, in the spirit of this represent- ative confession, returned Ward's old comrades from the rebellion, some going so far as to have their epistles of con- trition read before the Shrewsbury Church, in the presence of the old Commander whose master hand had dealt the rebellion its first death-blow. Thus Ward never laid down public service to his coun- try. And in other ways he covered at every step his mili- tary retreat with honor. In 1777 he was elected to the Ex- ecutive Council of the Commonwealth, of which he became President, and for sixteen years he was active in the Legis- lature, and he was Speaker of the Assembly in 1785. In 1777 he had been the choice of the people for the Con- tinental Congress at Philadelphia. In 1791 he was elected to the national House of Representatives, to remain until 1795. The reconstruction period and the diplomacy of the American Revolution could be interestingly sketched, had we time, from letters in Ward's effects, disclosing the hand ^1 K ABTEMA8 WARD 55 of Franklin, Adams, Hancock, and of forei^ lungs and courts. As a gentleman and a scholar, his personal standing was so great at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1748, that he acted as overseer, and, being again and again called to the college, served at President Langdon's right hand. No matter what his disappointments and military eclipse, in every quarter to the end, Ward, the patriot leader, never once failed to lay down his service to the new nation. For while New England was always dear to him, she was chiefly dear to him as the mother of the nation ; and she was to him, above all others, even above Washing- ton, the mother of the nation because the mother of the Revolution of which he was a first-bom son. In 1799 he was smitten with a paralytic stroke, to be repeated in March, 1800. ' ' I hope to see you in that world where the weary are at rest and where envy and malice cannot approach," were previously spoken words which conveyed the spirit of his going, which occurred a little before seven in the evening of the 28th of October, 1800, as the family circle watched the end when they parted, but when Ward and Washington met where "to know all is to forgive all." " It is one of the most pathetic bits of satire in American history," declared William Cullen Bryant,^ "that the name of the first commander in the Continental Army should be remembered by nine people in ten only as that of an imagined humorist — half philosopher and half showman.^ iWith Ms coadjutors in "Scribner's History of the United States." 2Eef erring to ' ' Artemus Ward, ' ' the nom de plume of the humorist of that name, Charles F. Browne. 56 MASTER MINDS In few other cases has the camera ohscura of history more sadly concealed by its negative a heroic national figure. But it is a figure that, more and more, exposure to new light will clearly bring out and prove that, as author and finisher of the American Revolution in New England, Artemas Ward took second place to none. The curtain may well be raised on the stage of "Master Minds at the Commonwealth 's Heart, ' ' not by a dry history lecture, but by this Revolutionary hero's intensely thrilling life in whom the Revolution first came to a head and whose figure best focalizes the light of its opening chapter in New England. It is also a life, very blood of very blood, of the hill-folk of central Massachusetts, from whom later sprang the other master minds, and therefore fittingly introduces the group of geniuses here produced. In living action it shows how came to be that liberty without which would have been impossible such a marvelous outburst of discov- ery and inventive genius as they represent, and it well points out the birth of the freedom which was the mother of their ingenuity and which magnetized their souls with its currents. ELI WHITNEY INVENTOR OP THE COTTON-GIN WITH the name of Eli Whitney, Westboro adds a great link to the chain of central Massachusetts towns which are coupled with the careers of master minds. On the hard-scrabble of a comparatively thrifty New England farm, December 8, 1765, a baby boy came to add to a New England mother 's burdens, which were in general, and in this case so severe that it sometimes took two or three mothers,^ as one passed away after another, to rear one man's family. Yet had she but lived to rear this mite she called Eli, she would have seen her life triumphantly vin- dicated, and she would have seen of the travail of her soul and have been satisfied. In the independence of that day, when necessity was the mother of invention, Eli Whitney's father did his own repairing. To do this generated an atmosphere about the place in which ingenuity was taxed to the limit. THE LAD IN THE LITTLE LEAN-TO WORKSHOP "Our father," his sister has recalled, ''had a workshop, and sometimes made wheels of different kinds, and chairs. iSee President G. Stanley Hall's illuminating address, "More Manly Men and Womanly Women." 58 MASTER MINDS He had a variety of tools, and a lathe for turning chair- posts. This gave my brother an opportunity of learning the use of tools when very young. He lost no time, but as soon as he could handle tools he was always making some- thing in the shop, and seemed not to like working on the farm. One time after the death of our mother, when our father had been absent from home two or three days, on his return he inquired of the housekeeper what the boys had Birthplace of Eli Whitney. In the Tool-shed at the Left Began his Boyhood Labors at Invention. been doing. She told him what B. and J. had been about. 'But what has Eli been doing?' asked he. She replied he had been making a fiddle. 'Ah,' he added, despondingly, 'I fear Eli will have to take his portion with fiddles.' " Nevertheless, so well made was the instrument that the boy understood now the structure of all violins, and was sought throughout the countryside by every one who had one to repair. ELI WHITNEY 59 On another occasion, during: church-time, a watch of his father's Eli secretly took to pieces, and put together again before his father's return. Thus it was that no one discovered young Whitney's genius for him. As generally happens, in the unexpected and quite accidental in such instances as these, he found it out for himself. If around the house, for instance, a table-lmife was broken, he made one in its place. Shortly after he was ten years old, the Revolutionary War broke out. Among other conunodities denied the Americans through the English blockade, nails, he noted, were everywhere lacking. Young as he was, he contrived the idea of making them himself. By this time his father had been won over to believe in the boy's mechanical abil- ity, and went out of his way not only to allow him free use of his tools, but to get for him new ones. Whitney was only sixteen years old when the war ended in 1781, but up to this time, for three years, since thirteen, the lad had made first the machinery for manufacturing nails, then the nails tliemselves. The demand was large, and the nails were used everywhere. TOO OLD FOR A COLLEGE EDUCATION? As early as the age of twelve, the boy, enamored of an active life, had point-blank refused his father's proposition that he go to preparatory school and make ready for college. But in the play of his ingenuity, ever seeking knowledge and advancement out of the rut in which he found himself, six years after the thirteen-year-old boy had invented a way to make nails, he made a way, not finding one, to go to Yale. 60 MASTER MINDS Thus six years after he refused his father's offer of a college education, he changed his mind. He was eighteen, and the hard knocks of the world proved to him the helpfulness of a higher education to enable him to rise above the common level. "Too old," declared his father. Added to this was his stepmother's violent opposition to spending money on Eli at this age. If he went at all he must begin all over again, start with elementary preparatory studies, and at the same time earn enough to pay his ' ' keep ' ' and defray his future college course with the amount he could save. Yet he decided to do it alone. At seven dollars a month and his board he found a place to teach in three towns that belt Worcester on three sides: Westboro, Northboro and Paxton. Studying alongside all the while, in the summer he attended the neighboring academies. To teaching school he added such humble work as making and selling bonnet-pins and walking-sticks. By these means he succeeded at last in his dream of a liberal educa- tion, and arrived at New Haven, twenty-three years old, in 1789. Mathematics naturally being the choice of a mind as scientific as his, with his native originality he turned from the dead languages to pursue his peculiar bent, and was graduated in a class of thirty-four in 1792. His address to his classmates recalls that he took life earnestly in college, and showed an educated conscience. "We have nearly completed our collegiate life," he con- cluded, ' ' our whole life to look back ; how short it has been ! We soon must quit these favorite walks of science and retirement and go forth each to perform his destined task on the busy stage of life. Let us ever be actuated by prin- ciples of integrity, and always maintain a consciousness of ELI WHITNEY 61 doing right. This will beam happiness upon our minds, make the journey of life agreeable, avert the deadly shaft of calumny, and be a firm support in death. In a few days more we shall be dispersed in various parts of the world." In this Whitney proved a class prophet, with tho object of the prophecy — himself. That Whitney's whole life was to be spent in stemming iho dull, resistant tide of human meanness, and the shafts of f'alumny, he then little knew, but seemed for it even then prepared. Prepared was he also, not only in grace of soul, but in a trained mathematical mind. In college he betrayed his scientific genius — a stroke quite out of the ordinary in that day of the classics' sole tyranny over an education. ^ Men even then noted how his talent was confined, not to the course, but overflowed as usual into invention. In an astronomical experiment, for instance, when the apparatus broke down, Whitney dared ask to repair it in place of its being sent abroad. In addition to this mechanical practicability, however, his stopping to get an education in the higher branches was itself a mark of his inventive originality. For all along the advice of unlettered machinists had been against it, and one had said: "There was one good mechanic spoiled when you went to college. ' ' First having avoided the extreme of the academic, now avoiding this extreme advice of the mechanic, it seemed as if he were now to fall back at last into the academic, miss his talent — and study law. lA tyranny over liberal education which has swung the other way to technical science. 62 MASTER MINDS THE TURNING POINT IN HIS LIFE With this in view, like most young men of early days, in order to lay by the means he set out to teach school. Offered a position as tutor to a South Carolina gentleman, at eighty guineas a year, he arranged to travel south. Smallpox delayed the New York voyage, but the delay threw him into the friendship of another party waiting to sail, chief among whom was the widow of Gen. Nathaniel Greene. In this delay he learned that the father of his prospec- tive pupils had grown tired of waiting his arrival, in the long journey of those days, and had engaged another tutor. "While on the vessel to Savannah he met a Yale graduate, Phineas Miller, who was with the widow of General Greene. To meet these two friends proved the turning-point in his life. As he confided his ambitions to this lady, she mani- fested a motherly interest, and invited him, at the news of his lost position, to Mulberry Grove, her own plantation near Savannah. THE INVENTION OF THE GIN At that time it took a negro a day to clean a single pound of raw cotton and separate it from the seed. Cotton was to the eyes of an inquisitive New England young man itself a curiosity. Whitney had never seen a cotton boll, or seed, or plant. The West Indies had grown all that had been used in any quantity in America. In 1770 its cultivation was tried, and it was found to grow prolifically in Georgia, surpassing even rice, tobacco and indigo. IUjI WHITNEY 63 But there was no way to separate the fibre from the entangled seeds save by the slow hand-labor, a pound a day a hand. By 1792, but one hundred thirty-eight thousand three hundred and twenty-four pounds, on this account, were raised for export in an entire year. Jay considered it of so little importance that he considered its being placed on the prohibited list of exports as an item of no loss. But this year happened the crisis that made cotton king. This crisis was the invention of the cotton-gin. It was this way. A group of Southern gentlemen were being entertained at the great house at Mulberry Grove by Mrs. Nathaniel Greene, amid the emerald live oaks and magnolias, under the white-pillared portico. Languidly as they lighted their cigars and smoked, they bemoaned the slow manner of extracting cotton-seed from the cotton-boll. ' ' Why don 't you go to work and get something that will do it, gentlemen ? ' ' exclaimed Madam Greene. **Your good husband, the General, though he cleaned the redcoats out of Georgia, couldn't clean the seeds from cot- ton." was shot back as the cavalierish answer. "Apply to my young friend here; he can make any- thing," replied Mrs. Greene. ''My tambour frame was all out of kilter ; I couldn 't embroider at all with it because it pulled and tore the threads so badly. Mr. Whitney noticed this, took it out on the porch, tinkered with it a little, and there see what he has done — just made the frame as good as new ! ' ' ''As for cleaning cotton-seed," exclaimed Mr. Whitney, blushing, " why, gentlemen, I shouldn't know it if I saw it. I don't think I ever saw cotton or cotton-seed in my life." 64 MASTER MINDS But next day he caught his first sight of raw cotton, took it back to the Greene plantation, and made cotton his study in place of law. Green-seed or short-stapled cotton, in contrast to black- seed, which grew only by the sea-shore, could be grown evers^where in Georgia and the Southern uplands, where no other crops could grow, if only there was some way to sepa- rate the seeds, which were hopelessly entangled. That he might invent a machine to do this, in secret con- fidence Mrs. Greene gave Eli Whitney a private room in which to experiment. Here first he had to draw his own wire and make his own tools. By May 27th, 1793, Phineas Miller became interested, and entered into partnership. It has been said there were no records of his first labor. But there is a record, and that his own. The 21st of November, 1793, he wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Sec- retary of State. In this he said : "Within about ten days after my first conception of the plan, I made a small though imperfect model. Experi- ments with this encouraged me to make one on a larger scale ; but the extreme difficulty of procuring workmen and proper materials in Georgia prevented my completing the large one until some time in April last." To get their pound or so a day, Whitney had observed old negro mammies claw off the seed with their finger-nails. Could not a cylinder wheel, covered with the teeth of a wire comb, do the same thing? Whitney's idea was to place the enteethed rollers so near the cotton sticking out of an upper hopper of iron wire mesh that it would catch hold of the mass and claw away the torn fibre from the seed- boll. The openings in the gratings of the hopper that held the mass of raw cotton, though permitting the torn fibre ELT WHITNEY 65 caught in the saw-like teeth to drop, were too narrow for the seeds to fall thi-oiigh — hence the separation. The brushes were arranged on the second roller, or cylinder, traveling the opposite way, but touching the cot- ton in the claw-teeth of the first cylinder and removing it. Thus designed was the machine that was to enable one negro to clean five thousand pounds of cotton a day ! It so revolutionized cotton-planting that by 1800, to say nothing of home consumption in America, one hundred and fifty times the cotton was exported (eighteen million pounds instead of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred and twenty-four pounds in 1792). By 1860 over two billion and fifty million pounds a year were exported (four million eight hundred and twenty-four thousand bales at four hundred and twenty-five pounds a bale) . Such an invention was hailed with tremendous enthu- siasm. Whitney's battle witpi the Px\tent thieves Crowds in flocks came from every quarter to see the wondrous design. Unable to see it until patented, they broke open the house and carried it away. The thieves then reproduced the model. Hence arose the swarm of competitors who were to con- test Mr. Whitney's design Avith the stolen one, which was really not their ovm, but his. "My invention," wrote Whitney to his fellow inventor, Fulton, "was new and distinct from every other. It stood alone. It was not interwoven with anything known before ; and it can seldom happen that an invention or an improve- ment is so strongly marked and can be so clearly and specially identified." "The use of the machine being immensely profitable to almost every planter in the cotton districts, all were inter- 5 66 MASTER MINDS ested in trespassing on the patent right, and each kept each other in countenance. Demagogues made themselves pop- ular by misrepresentation and unfounded clamors, both against the right and against the law made for its protec- tion. Hence there arose associations to oppose both. At one time but few men in Georgia dared to come into the court and testify to the most simple facts within their Imowledge relative to the use of the machine. In one instance I had great difficulty in proving that the machine had been used in Georgia, although there Avere three sepa- rate sets of this machinery in motion within fifty yards of the building in which the court sat, and all so near that the rattling of the wheels was distinctly heard!" Backed as he was by Phineas Miller, Eli Whitney imme- diately went north to New Haven, completed a new model and commenced the manufacture of cotton-gins. The planters planted a greatly increased acreage, and an arrangement was made with them to give one-third of the profits to the gin-o^^Tiers, cotton selling at that time at twenty-five cents a pound. October 26. 1794, Miller wrote to Whitney : "Do not let anything hinder the speedy construction of the gins. The people are almost running mad for them!" Gins in New Haven could not be made in sufficient num- ber to meet the demand of the enlarged crop. This gave the venders of the stolen model their chance to produce and sell imitations. THE FIGHT AGAINST THE CURRENTS OF DEBT, FIRE, THEFT AND DEATH The money from one-third of the crop was much of it to be lost, and Whitney and his partner soon found them- selves financially embarrassed. ELI WniTNEY 67 In March, 1795, aftor beinp: taken with an illno55s, Eli Whitney returned, still half sick, from New York to New Haven, to find fire had bnrned his entire factory ! To opposition and lack of funds was added now this con- flap:ration in New ITaven ! The fire bnrned, besides all the factory, the new machines, with all desip^ns, books and papers, and the firm was left banlo'npt! Yet came another blow. Enjifland, which was so soon to become the world's factoiy centre for the mannfactnre of America's cotton, now raised a formidable outcry, being falsely led to a belief by Whitney's enemies that his machine ruined the cotton fibre, making it too brittle. In Georgia alone twenty-eight gins lay idle. "This misfortune is much heavier than the fire," wrote Miller. "Every one is afraid of the cotton. Not a pur- chaser in Savannah will pay a full price for it." "I con- fess myself to have been entirely deceived in supposing that an egregious error, and a general deception with regard to the quality of our cotton, could not long continue to influence the whole of the mannfactory, the mercantile and the planting interests against us. But the reverse is the fact, and I have long apprehended that our ruin would be the inevitable consequence. ' ' In 1796, humiliated by being compelled to seek loans, Whitney had already written a friend : "I applied to one of those vultures called brokers, who are preying on the purse-strings of the industrious." He paid twenty per cent., which was increased right along by this shark to five, six and seven per cent, a month! But from the first the calibre of the yonng men was fixed, as is shown in 1795 in an early letter of Miller to Whitney. "I think indeed it will be very extraordinary if two young men in the prime of life, with some share of 08 MASTER 31 IND8 ingenuity, witli n littlo knowledge of the world, a prr^at deal of industry, and a eonsidorable command of property, should not be able to siistain such a stroke of misfortune as this, heavy as it is." Yet Ynle p-rit was on hand for the uphill pfame, for in March, 1797, Miller wrote: "Am determined that all the dark clouds of adversity shall not abate my ardor in laborinji: to burst through them, in order to reach the dawn of prosperity." Already a.s an earnest of tbis prrit, Miller had p^iven up all bis means and bis hopes of a home, even refusinfj: to marry. Yet M'ilb il. all. by Oct. 17, 1797, he was forced to say: "The extreme embarrassments which have been for a long time accumulating' upon me are now become so great that it will be impossible for me to struggle against them many days longer. 11 lia.s rc(|uired my utmost exertions to exist." "The current of disappointment carrying down the cat- aract" his "shattered oar" and "a struggle in vain,"— to all these ho pointed in the words of an oarsman who has been beaten. In 1799 he followed up the situation with this letter: "The prospect of making anything by ginning in this State is at an end. Surreptitious gins are erected in every part of the country, and the jurymen at Augusta have come to an understanding among themselves that they will never give a verdict in our favor, let the merits of the case be a.s they may. ' ' In 1803, unable to bear the erusb of human meanness and oppression, Miller broke dowTi and died. Rut the race Avas not lost. It was to be won by Whitney alone. Yet without Miller's great soul and sacrifice, Whitney could never have succeeded. ELI WHITNEY 69 Having gotten so far, refusing to lie down, he fought it out. "In all my experience in the profefssion of law," wrote his consultin