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Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, Lowell (search)
uded to return home. The next ten years of Lowell's life might be called the making of the man. He worked hard and lived economically; earning what he could by the law, and what he could not by magazine writing, which paid poorly enough. Publishers had not then discovered that what the general public desires is not literature, but information on current topics, and this is the last thing which the true man of letters is able to provide. A magazine article, or a campaign biography of General Grant, could be written in a few weeks, but a solid historical biography of him, with a critical examination of his campaigns, has not yet been written, and perhaps never will be. A literary venture of Lowell and his friends in 1843, to found a first-rate literary magazine, proved a failure; and it is to be feared that he lost money by it. See Scudder's Life of Lowell, III.109. However the world might use him he was sure of comfort and happiness at his own fireside, where he read Shell
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, Frank W. Bird, and the Bird Club. (search)
is to levy a blackmail on his subordinates, compelling them to pay him a commission in order to retain their places. Frank Bird was furious with honest indignation. He said: I will go to Washington and have that man turned out if I have to see Grant himself for it ; and so he did. One evening at Walpole a poor woman came to him in distress, because her only son had been induced to enlist in the Navy, and was already on board a man-of-war at the Boston Navy-yard. Mr. Bird knew the youth, aer a period of fifteen years, come next in value to the authentic documents of that important period. They possessed the rare merit of a keen impartiality, and though sometimes rather sharp, were never far from the mark. He not only criticised Grant and the political bosses of that time, but his personal friends, Sumner, Wilson, and Frank Bird himself. In 1872 Emerson said to a member of the club: I do not like William Robinson. His hand is against every man ; but it is doubtful if Robin
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, Sumner. (search)
d a failure because the administration did not afterwards support him; and it is true that no government would submit to a demand for adventitious damages so long as it could prevent this; but it was a far-reaching exposure of an unprincipled foreign policy, and this speech formed the groundwork for the Treaty of Washington and the Geneva arbitration. It was a more important case than the settlement of the Northeastern boundary. Sumner died the death of a hero. The administration of General Grant might well be called the recoil of the cannon: it was the reactionary effect of a great military movement on civil affairs. Sumner alone withstood the shock of it, and he fought against it for four years like a veteran on his last line of defence, feeling victory was no longer possible. Many of his friends found the current too strong for them; his own party deserted him; even the Legislature of his own State turned against him in a senseless and irrational manner. Still his spirit w
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, The War Governor. (search)
rtunity of extending his influence. If Andrew were chosen Senator in the way that was anticipated Wilson knew well enough that this patronage would have to be divided between them. Andrew could not have replaced Sumner in the Senate. He lacked the physical strength as well as the experience, and that extensive range of legal and historical knowledge which so often disconcerted Sumner's opponents. He had a genius for the executive, and the right position for him would have been in President Grant's cabinet. That he would have been offered such a place can hardly be doubted. But Governor Andrew's span of life was over. He might have lived longer if he had taken more physical exercise; but the great Civil War proved more fatal to the statesmen who were engaged in it than to the generals in the field. None of the great leaders of the Republican party lasted very long after this. Andrew's friends always felt that the man was greater than his position, and that he really mis
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, The colored regiments. (search)
or I cannot promise again. After this ten or twelve more enrolled themselves, and having provided for their maintenance until they could be transported to the camp at Readville, he went over to Niagara, on the Canada side, to see what might be effected in that vicinity. In less than a week he was again in Buffalo arranging a recruiting bureau, with agencies in Canada and the Western States as far as St. Louis — where there were a large number of refugees who had lately been liberated by Grant's campaign at Vicksburg. Mr. Lucian B. Eaton, an old lawyer and prominent politician of the city, accepted the agency there as a work of patriotic devotion. Among Mr. Stearns's most successful agents were the Langston brothers, colored scions of a noble Virginia family,--both excellent men and influential among their people. All his agents were required to write a letter to him every evening, giving an account of their day's work, and every week to send him an account of their expenses.
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, Elizur Wright (search)
Elizur Wright The influence of Ohio in the United States of America during the past half century may be compared to that of Virginia during the first forty years of the Republic. All of our Presidents, elected as such since 1860, have come from Ohio, or adjacent territory. Cleveland came from beyond the Alleghenies, and Lincoln was born on the southern side of the Ohio River. General Grant and General Sherman came from Ohio; and so did Salmon P. Chase, and John Brown, of Harper's Ferry celebrity. Chase gave the country the inestimable blessing of a national currency; and even the Virginians admitted that John Brown was a very remarkable person. The fathers of these men conquered the wilderness and brought up their sons to a sturdy, vigorous manliness, which resembles the colonial culture of Franklin, Adams, and Washington. Sitting in the same school-house with John Brown, in 1816, was a boy named Elizur Wright who, like Brown, came from Connecticut, and to whom the peop