Charles Carleton Coffin Part 2

"There was one ent.i.tled 'Up Salt River,'--descriptive of the approaching fate of the Democratic party. Another ran:

"'Oh, what has caused this great commotion the country through?

It is the ball, a rolling on For Tippecanoe and Tyler too.'

"Then came the chorus:

"'Van, Van, is a used-up man.'

"In 1839, I had a fancy that I should like to be a merchant, and was taken to Newburyport and placed with a firm of wholesale and retail grocers. I was obliged to be up at 4.30, open the store, care for the horse, curry him, swallow my breakfast in a hurry, also my dinner and supper, and close the store at nine. It was only an experiment on my part, and after five weeks of such life, finding that I was compelled to do dishonest work, I concluded that I never would attempt to be a princely merchant, and took the stage for home. It was a delightful ride home on the top of the rocking coach, with the driver las.h.i.+ng his whip and his horses doing their best.

"I think it was in 1841 that Daniel Webster attended the Merrimac County Agricultural Fair at Fisherville, now Penacook. I was there with a fine yoke of oxen which won his admiration. He asked me as to their age and weight, and to whom they belonged. He recognized nearly all of his old acquaintances. I saw him many times during the following year. He was in the prime of life,--in personal appearance a remarkable man."

Thus far it will be seen that there was little in Mr. Coffin's life and surroundings that could not be easily told of the average New England youth. Besides summer work on the farm, and "ch.o.r.es" about the house, he had taken several terms at the academy in Boscawen. During the winter of 1841-42, while unable to do any outdoor work, on account of sickness, he bought a text-book on land-surveying and learned something of the science and art, yet more for pastime than from any expectation of making it useful.

Nevertheless, that book had a powerful influence upon his life. It gave him an idea, through the application of measurement to the earth's surface, of that order and beauty of those mathematical principles after which the Creator built the universe. It opened his eyes to the vast modification of the landscape, and the earth itself, by man's work upon its crust. It gave him the engineer's eye.

Henceforth he became interested in the capacity of every portion of the country, which came under his notice, for the roads, fields, gardens, and parks of peace, and for the making of forts, military roads, and the strategy of battle. In a word, the book and its study gave him an enrichment of life which fitted him to enjoy the world by travel, and to understand the arena of war,--theatres of usefulness to which Providence was to call him in after-life.

In August, 1843, in his twenty-first year, he became a student at Pembroke Academy. The term of ten weeks seemed ever afterwards in his memory one of the golden periods of his life. The teacher, Charles G.

M. Burnham, was enthusiastic and magnetic, having few rules, and placing his pupils upon their honor. It was not so much what Carleton learned from books, as a.s.sociation with the one hundred and sixty young men and women of his own age, which here so stimulated him.

From the academy he advanced to be teacher of the district school on Corser Hill, in West Boscawen, but after three weeks of pedagogy was obliged to leave on account of sickness. He pa.s.sed the remainder of the winter in lumbering, rising at 4 A. M. to feed his team of horses.

While breakfast was preparing he studied books, ate the meal by candle-light, and then was off with his lunch of cold meat, bread, and apple pie. From the woods to the bank of the Merrimac the distance was three miles, and three or four trips were made daily in drawing the long and heavy logs to the water. Returning home after dark, he ate supper by candle-light, fed his horses, and gave an hour to study before bedtime.

The summer of 1844 was one of hard toil on the farm. In July he became of age, and during the autumn worked on his brother-in-law's farm, rising at five and frequently finis.h.i.+ng about 9 P. M. It is no wonder that all through his life Mr. Coffin showed a deep sympathy, born of personal experience, with men who are bound down to physical toil.

Nevertheless, the fine arts were not neglected. He had already learned to play the "seraphine," the instrument which has been developed into the reed organ. He started the project, in 1842, of getting one for the church. By great efforts sixty dollars were raised and an instrument purchased in Concord. Mr. Coffin became the "organist," and also taught singing in the schoolhouse. Three of his nieces, excellent singers, a.s.sisted him.

The time had now come for the young man to strike out in the world for himself. Like most New England youth, his eyes were on Boston. With a recommendation from his friend, the minister, he took the stage to Concord. The next day he was in Boston, then a city of 75,000 people, with the water das.h.i.+ng against the embankment of Charles Street, opposite the Common, and with only one road leading out to Roxbury.

Sloops and schooners, loaded with coal and timber, sailed over the spot where afterwards stood his house, at No. 81 Dartmouth Street. In a word, the "Back Bay" and "South End" were then unknown. Boston city, shaped like a pond lily laid flat, had its long stem reaching to the solid land southward on the Dorchester and Roxbury hills.

Young Carleton went to Mount Vernon Church on Ashburton Place, the pastor, Dr. E. N. Kirk, being in the prime of his power, and the church crowded. The country boy from New Hamps.h.i.+re became a member of the choir and enjoyed the Friday night rehearsals. He found employment at one dollar a day in a commission store, 84 Utica Street, with the firm of Lowell & Hinckley. The former, a brother of James Russell Lowell, had a son, a bright little boy, who afterwards became the superb cavalry commander at the battle of Cedar Creek in 1864.

Carleton boarded on Beacon Street, next door to the present Athenaeum Building. The firm dissolved by Mr. Lowell's entering the Athenaeum.

Carleton returned to his native town to vote. He became a farm laborer with his brother-in-law, pa.s.sing a summer of laborious toil, frequently fourteen and sixteen hours, with but little rest.

It was time now for the old Granite State to be opened by the railway.

The Northern Railroad had been chartered, and preliminary surveys were to be made. Young Carleton, seizing the opportunity, went to Franklin, saw the president, and told him who he was. He was at once offered a position as chainman, and told to report two weeks later.

The other chainman gave Carleton the leading end, intending that the Boscawen boy, and not himself, should drag it and drive the stake.

Carleton did not object, for he was looking beyond the chain.

The compa.s.s-man was an old gentleman dim of eyesight and slow of action. Young Carleton drove his first stake, at a point one hundred feet north of the Concord railway depot, which was opened in the month of August, 1845. The old compa.s.s-man then set his compa.s.s for a second sight, but before he could get out his spectacles and put them on, young Carleton read the point to him. When, through his gla.s.ses, the old gentleman had verified the reading, he was delighted. Promotion for Carleton was now sure. Before night he was not only dragging the chain, but was sighting the instrument. The result, two days later, was promotion to the charge of the party. What he had learned of land surveying was producing its fruit. In the autumn he was employed as the head of a party to make the preliminary survey of the Concord and Portsmouth road.

Unfortunately, during this surveying campaign, he received a wound which caused slight permanent lameness and disqualified him for military service. It came about in this way. He was engaged in some work while an axe-man behind him was chopping away some bushes and undergrowth. The latter gave a swing of the axe which came out too far and cut through the boot and large tendon of Carleton's left ankle.

With skilled medical attention, rest, and care, the wound would have soon healed up, but owing to lack of skill, and to carelessness and exposure, the wound gave him considerable trouble, and once reopened.

In after-life, when overwearied, this part of the limb was very troublesome.

It was not all toil for Carleton. The time of love had already come, and the days of marriage were not far off. The object of his devotion was Miss Sally Russell Farmer, the daughter of Colonel John Farmer, of Boscawen. On February 18, 1846, amid the winter winds, the fire of a holy union for life was kindled, and its glow was unflickering during more than fifty years. In ancestry and relations.h.i.+p, the Farmers of Boscawen were allied with the Russells of England,--Sir William, of bygone centuries, and Lord John, of our own memory. Carleton found a true "help-meet" in Sally Coffin. Though no children ever came to bless their union, it was as perfect, though even more hallowed and beautified, on the day it was severed, as when first begun.

The following summer was one full of days of toil in the engineering department of the Northern railway, Carleton being engaged upon the first section to be opened from Concord to Franklin. The engineering was difficult, and the work heavy. Breakfast was eaten at six in the morning, and dinner wherever it could be found along the road. Seldom could the young engineer rise from his arithmetical calculations until midnight.

Weary with such exacting mental and physical labor, he resigned his position, and became a contractor. First he supplied the Concord railroad with 200,000 feet of lumber, which he purchased at the various mills. This venture being profitable, he engaged in the lumber trade, furnis.h.i.+ng beams for a large factory, timber for a new railway station at Concord, and for a s.h.i.+p at Medford. It was while transacting some business in Lowell, that he saw President Polk, James Buchanan, Levi Woodbury, and other political magnates of the period, who, however, were rather coldly received on account of the annexation of Texas, and war with Mexico.

Wis.h.i.+ng for a home of his own, Carleton now bought a farm in West Boscawen, and began housekeeping in the following November. He carried on extensive lumber operations, hiring a large number of men and teams. He rose between four and five in the morning, and was in the woods, four miles away, at sunrise, working through the day, and reaching home after dark to care for the cattle and horses and milk the cows. None of his men worked harder than he.

Although railroad building stimulated prices and gave activity to business men, the flush times were followed by depression. To secure the construction of a railway to the mast yard, Carleton subscribed to the stock, and, under the individual liability law of that period, was compelled to take as much more to relieve the company from debt.

Soon he found, however, in spite of hard work for both himself and his wife, that farming and lumbering together rendered no adequate returns. Relief to mind and body was found in the weekly arrival of _Littell's Living Age_ and two or three weekly papers, in agricultural meetings at Concord and Manchester, and in the formation of the State Agricultural Society, of which Carleton was one of the founders.

CHAPTER V.

ELECTRICITY AND JOURNALISM.

The modern age of electricity was ushered in during Mr. Coffin's early manhood. The telegraph, which has given the world a new nervous system, being less an invention than an evolution, had from the labors of Prof. Joseph Henry, in Albany, and of Wheatstone, of England, become, by Morse's invention of the dot-and-line alphabet, a far-off writer by which men could annihilate time and distance. One of the first to experiment with the new power--old as eternity, but only slowly revealed to man--was Carleton's brother-in-law, Prof. Moses G.

Farmer, whose services to science have never yet been adequately set forth.

This inventor in 1851 invited Mr. Coffin to leave the farm temporarily, to construct a line of wire connecting the telegraphs of Boston with the Cambridge observatory, for the purpose of giving uniform time to the railroads. In this Carleton was so successful that, in the winter and spring of 1852, he was employed by Mr. Moses Farmer to construct the telegraph fire alarm, which had been invented by his brother-in-law. The work was completed in the month of May, and Charles Carleton Coffin gave the first alarm of fire ever transmitted by the electric apparatus. The system was a great curiosity, and many distinguished men of this country, and from Europe, especially from Russia and France, came to inspect its working.

Commodore Charles Wilkes, of the United States Navy, who had returned from his brilliant expedition in Antarctic regions, but who had not yet made himself notorious by a capture of the Confederate commissioners, proposed to use this electric system in ascertaining the velocity of sound. Cannon were stationed at various points, the Navy Yard, Fort Const.i.tution, South Boston, and at the Observatory, in front of which was an apparatus and telegraph connecting with the central office. Each cannon, when fired, heated the circuit. Each listener at the various points was to snap a circuit key the moment the sound reached him. In the central office was a chronograph which registered each discharge in succession. The distances from each cannon muzzle had been obtained by triangulation. In the calm, still night, Commodore Wilkes and Professor Farmer stood in the cupola of the State House with the chronograph, holding their watches, and noting the successive flashes.

The experiments were not very satisfactory. Mr. Coffin, perhaps, possibly, because he was not a skilled artillerist, had the mortifying experience of seeing the apparatus in front of his cannon blown into fragments, but he made notes of the other reports. After a series of trials, the approximate result was obtained, that in a moderately humid atmosphere the velocity of sound was a little under nine hundred feet per second.

The exactions of the fire alarm service, owing to its crude construction, which compelled the attendants to be ever on the alert, told severely on Carleton's' nervous system. He therefore resigned in October, and went to Cincinnati to get the system introduced there.

Herds of hogs then roamed the streets, picking up their living around the grain houses, and in the gutters. After three weeks of exhibition and canva.s.sing, he found that Cincinnati was not yet ready for such a novelty, and so he returned to Boston.

The following winter was pa.s.sed in Boscawen without financially remunerative employment, but in earnest study, though in the spring a supply of money came pleasantly and unexpectedly. He undertook to negotiate a patent for an invention of Professor Farmer's, and after considerable time disposed of it to a New York gentleman. Carleton's net profits were $1,850.

This was an immense sum to him, and he once more resolved to try Boston, and did so. He made his home, however, in Malden, renting half of a small house on Was.h.i.+ngton Street. Having inked his pen on agricultural subjects, descriptive pieces, and even on a few poems, he took up newspaper work. Entering the office of the Boston _Journal_ he worked without pay, giving the _Journal_ three months' service in writing editorials, and reporting meetings. This was simply to educate himself as a journalist. At that time very few reporters were employed on the daily papers. What he says of this work had better be told in his own words:

"It was three months of hard study and work. I saw that what the public wanted was news in condensed form; that the day for stately editorials was pa.s.sing away; that short statements and arguments, which went like an arrow straight to the mark, were what the public would be likely to read. I formed my style of writing with that in view. I avoided long sentences. I thought that I went too far in the other direction and clipped my sentences too short, and did not give sufficient ornamentation, but I determined to use words of Saxon rather than of Latin or Norman origin, to use 'begin,' instead of 'commence,' as stronger and more forcible.

"I selected the speeches of Webster, Lord Erskine, Burke, and other English writers, for careful a.n.a.lysis, but soon discarded Brougham and Burke. I derived great benefit from Erskine and Webster, for incisive and strong statement,--also Shakespeare and Milton. At that time I read again and again the rhapsodies of Christopher North, Professor Wilson, and the 'Noctes Ambrosianae,' and found great delight, also, in reading Bryant's poems.

"It was the period of white heat in the anti-slavery struggle, when the public heard the keenest debates, the sharpest invective. At an anti-slavery meeting the red-hot lava was always on the flow. The anti-slavery men were like anthracite in the furnace,--red hot,--white hot,--clear through. I have little doubt that the sharpness and ruggedness of my writing is due, in some degree, to the curt, sharp statements of that period. When men were feeling so intensely, and speaking with a force and earnestness unknown in these later years, a reporter would insensibly take on something of the spirit of the hour, otherwise his reports would be limp and lifeless. I was induced to study stenography, but the system then in use was complex and inadequate,--hard to learn. I was informed by several stenographers that if I wanted a condensed report it would be far better to give the spirit, rather than attempt the letter."

During the summer of 1854, Mrs. Coffin being in poor health, they visited Saratoga together, pa.s.sed several weeks at the Springs, and visited the battle-field where his grandfather, Eliphalet Kilborn, had fought. Carleton picked up a bullet just uncovered by the plow, and in that bright and beautiful summer's day the whole scene of 1777 came back before him. From the author's map in "Burgoyne's Defence,"

giving a meagre sketch of the battle, he was able to retrace the general lines of the American breastworks. This was the first of scores of careful study on the spot and reproduction in imagination of famous battles, which Carleton made and enjoyed during his life.

He was also present at the International Exhibition in New York, seeing, on the opening day, President Franklin Pierce and his Cabinet.

The popular idol of the hour was General Winfield Scott, of an imposing personal appearance which was set off by a showy uniform. He was the hero of the two wars, and expected to be President. In personal vanity, in bravery, and in military science, Scott was without a superior, one of the ablest officers whose names adorn the long and brilliant roll of the United States regular army.

Carleton wrote of General Scott: "A man of great egotism, an able general, but who never had any chance of an election. He was the last candidate of a dying political party which never was aggressive and which was going down under the slave power, to which it had allied itself."

Mr. Coffin writes further: "The pa.s.sage of the Compromise Measures of 1850 gave great offence to the radical wing of the anti-slavery party.

The members of that wing were very bitter towards Daniel Webster for his part in its pa.s.sage. I was heart and soul in sympathy with the grand idea of anti-slavery, but did not believe in fierce denunciation as the best argument. I did not like the compromise, and hated the odious fugitive slave law, but I nevertheless believed that Mr.

Webster was sincere in his desire to avert impending trouble. I learned from Hon. G. W. Nesmith, of Franklin, president of the Northern railroad, that Mr. Webster felt very keenly the a.s.saults upon him, and the manifest alienation of his old friends. Mr. Nesmith suggested that his old-time neighbors in Boscawen and Salisbury should send him a letter expressive of their appreciation of his efforts to harmonize the country, and that the proper person to write the letter was the Rev. Mr. Price, ex-pastor of the Congregational church in West Boscawen, in whom the county had great confidence. A few days later, at the invitation of Mr. Price, I went over the rough draft with him in his study. The letter was circulated for signatures by Worcester Webster, of Boscawen, distantly related to Daniel. It is in the published works of the great statesman, edited by Mr. Everett, together with his reply."

In May, 1854, Carleton saw the Potomac and the Capitol at Was.h.i.+ngton for the first time. The enlargement of the house of the National Legislature had not yet begun. He studied the paintings in the rotunda, which were to him a revelation of artistic power. He spent a long time before Prof. Robert W. Weir's picture of the departure of the Pilgrims for Delfshaven.