Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860

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It has been shrewdly said, that, "when the Lord wants anything done
in this world, he makes a man a little wrong-headed in the right
direction." With this goes the disposition to overestimate the
importance of one's work and to push principles and theories towards
extremes. The saying is true of some individuals at or before certain
crises in affairs; it is not true of the great inevitable historical
movements, any more than the history of revolutions is the history of
nations. Halifax is called a trimmer. William Wilberforce was a
reformer. Each did a great work. But it would be simply absurd,
except in the estimation of the moral purist, to call Wilberforce as
great a man or as great an historical and influential person as
Halifax. Halifax saw and acted in the clear light and large relations
in which the great historian of our own times wrote the history of
the Stuarts. Wilberforce was a purer man, who acted more
conscientiously and persistently within his smaller range of life and
thought. It would have been inconsistent with Mr. Choate's nature for
him to have been "wrong-headed" in any direction. Such largeness of
view, such dramatic and interpretative imagination, such volatile
play of thought and fancy, and such perception of the pettiness and
hollowness of nearly all the aims and ambitions of daily life we
cannot expect to find coexisting with the coarser "blood-sympathies,"
the direct passion, and the dogged and tenacious hold of temporary
and smaller objects and issues, which distinguish the American
politician, or with the narrowness of view, the zeal, and the moral
persistency which characterize the practical reformer. There was,
therefore, in his nature a certain want of the sturdier, harder, and
more robust elements of character, which, though commonly manifesting
themselves in connection with self-assertion and partisan zeal, are
indispensable to the man who, in any large and political way, would
take hold of practical circumstances and work a purpose out of them.
We admire him for what he was. We do not condemn him for the absence
of qualities not allied to such delicacy and breadth of nature. It is
simply just to state the fact.

He had too little political ambition to seek his own advancement. He
never could have been a strictly party man. His interest in our
politics was a patriotic interest in the country. While he recognized
the necessity of two great parties, he despised the arts and
intrigues of the politician. His modesty, sensibility, large views,
and want of political ambition and partisan spirit prevented
interest, as they would have precluded success in party management.
Had he spent many years instead of a few in the national Senate, he
never could have been a leader in its great party struggles. He had
not the hardier personal and constitutional qualities of mind and
character which lead and control deliberative bodies in great crises.
He would not have had that statesmanlike prescience which in the case
of Lord Chatham and others seems separable from great general scope
of thought, and which one is tempted to call a faculty for
government. But he must have been influential; for, besides being the
most eloquent man in the Senate, his speeches would have been
distinguished for amplitude and judgment in design, and for tact and
persuasiveness in enforcement. They might not have had immediate and
commanding effect, but they would have had permanent value. His
speech upon the Ashburton Treaty indicates the powers he would have
shown, with a longer training in the Senate. More than ten years had
passed between that speech and his two speeches in the Massachusetts
Constitutional Convention, upon Representation and the Judiciary, and
in that time a great maturing and solidifying work had been going on
in his mind. Indeed, it was one sure test of his genius, that his
intellect plainly grew to the day of his death. We would point to
those two speeches as giving some adequate expression of his ability
to treat large subjects simply, profoundly, artistically, and
convincingly. Many of his earlier and some of his later speeches and
addresses, though large in conception and stamped with unmistakable
genius, want solid body of thought, and are, so to speak, too fluid
in style. This obviously springs from the qualities of mind and from
the circumstances we have indicated. In court, the necessities of his
case and the determination and shaping of all his argument and
persuasion to convincing twelve men, or a court only, on questions
requiring prompt decision, kept his style free from everything
foreign to his purpose. But, released from these restraints, and
called upon for a treatment more general and comprehensive than acute
and discriminating, his style often became inflamed and decorated
with sensibility and fancy. His mind, moreover, was overtasked in his
profession. His unremitting mental labor in the preparation and trial
of so many cases was immense and exhausting. It shortened his life.
That his genius might have that free and joyous exercise necessary to
its full use and exhibition in literary or political directions, an
abandonment of a great part of his professional duties was
indispensable. This was to him neither possible nor desirable. The
mental heat and pressure, therefore, under which he wrote his
speeches and addresses, and the necessity for the exercise of
different methods of thought and treatment from those called into
play at the bar, explain why (with a few noble exceptions) they do
not give a fair or full exhibition of his genius and accomplishments.
But in them his judgment never lost its anchorage. Unlike Burke, who
was the god of his political idolatry, his sensibility never
overmastered his reasoning. Through a style sometimes Eastern in
flush and fervor, and again tropical in heat and luxuriance, were
always seen the adjusting and attempering habit of thought and
argument and the even balance of his mind.

We have said that his interest in politics was a patriotic interest
in the nation. He knew her history and her triumphs and reverses on
land and sea by heart. Though limited by no narrow love of country,
he felt from sentiment and imagination that attachment to every
symbol of patriotism and national power which makes the sailor suffer
death with joy when he sees his country's flag floating in the smoke
of victory. "The radiant ensign of the Republic" was to him the
living embodiment of her honor and her power. He had for it the pride
and passion of the boy, with the prophetic hopes of the patriot. Men
of genius are ever revivifying the commonplace expressions and
visible signs of popular enthusiasm with the poetic and historic
realities which gave them birth. He felt the glow and impulse of the
great sentiments of race and nationality in all their natural
simplicity and poetic force. It is not now the time to discuss Mr.
Choate's political preferences and opinions. No one who knew him well
can hesitate to pronounce his motives pure and patriotic. We could
not come to his conclusions on the policy and duty of our people at
the last Presidential election. Our duties to the Union forced us to
regard as paramount what he regarded as subsidiary. Our fear for the
Union sprang from other sources than his. But we believe he acted
from the highest convictions of duty, and he certainly exposed
himself with unflinching courage to obloquy and misinterpretation
when silence would have been easy and safe.

In what we have said of him as a lawyer we are sure that in every
essential respect we have not overstated or misstated his powers and
characteristics as they were known and conceded by lawyers and judges
in Massachusetts. We have confined ourselves mainly to his
jury-trials, because into them he threw the whole force and vitality of
his nature, and because we could thus more completely indicate the
variety of his accomplishments and the essential characteristics of
his genius and individuality. A knowledge of them is indispensable to
a just estimate of the man, and it must die with him and his hearers,
excepting only as it may be preserved by contemporaneous written
criticism and judgment, and by indeterminate and shadowy tradition.

The labors of so great a lawyer are as much more useful as they are
less conspicuous than those of any prominent politician or
legislator, unless he be one of the very few who have high
constructive or creative ability. There is little risk of
overestimating the value of a life devoted to mastering that complex
system of jurisprudence, the old, ever-expanding, and ever-improving
common law which is interwoven with our whole fabric of government,
property, and personal rights, and to applying it profoundly through
trial by jury and before courts of law, not merely that justice may
be obtained for clients, but that decisions shall be made determining
the rights and duties of men for generations to come. And when such a
life is not only full of immense work and achievement, but
is penetrated and informed with genius, sensibility, and
loving-kindness, it passes sweetly and untraceably, but influentially
and immortally, into the life of the nation.

THE REGICIDE COLONELS IN NEW ENGLAND.

Before the restoration of Charles the Second, in 1660, to the throne
of his ancestors, he had issued a "Declaration," promising to all
persons but such as should be excepted by Parliament a pardon of
offences committed during the late disorderly times. In the
Parliamentary Act of Indemnity which followed, such as had been
directly concerned in the death of the late King were excepted from
mercy. Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe were members of the High
Court of Justice which convicted and sentenced him. It was known that
they had fled from England; and one Captain Breedon, lately returned
from Boston, reported that he had seen them there. The Ministry sent
an order to Endicott, the Governor of Massachusetts, for their
apprehension and transportation to England.

The friendly welcome which had in fact been extended to the
distinguished fugitives cannot be confidently interpreted as an
indication of favorable judgment of the act by which their lives were
now endangered. No one of the New-England Colonies had formally
expressed approval of the execution of King Charles the First, nor is
there any other evidence of its having been generally regarded by
them with favor. It is likely that in New England, as in the parent
country, the opinions of patriotic men were divided in respect to the
character of that measure. In New England, remote as it was from the
scene of those crimes which had provoked so extreme a proceeding, it
may be presumed that there was greater difficulty in admitting the
force of the reasons, by which it was vindicated. And the sympathy of
New England would be more likely to be with Vane, who condemned it,
than with Cromwell. But the strangers, however one act of theirs
might be regarded, had been eminent among those who had fought for
the rights of Englishmen, and they brought introductions from men
venerated and beloved by the people among whom a refuge was sought.

Edward Whalley, a younger son of a good family, first cousin of the
Protector Oliver, and of John Hampden, distinguished himself at the
Battle of Naseby as an officer of cavalry, and was presently promoted
by Parliament to the command of a regiment. He commanded at the storm
of Banbury, and at the first capture of Worcester. He was intrusted
with the custody of the King's person at Hampton Court; he sat in the
High Court of Justice at the trial of Charles, and was one of the
signers of the death-warrant. After the Battle of Dunbar, at which he
again won renown, Cromwell left him in Scotland in command of four
regiments of horse. He was one of the Major-Generals among whom the
kingdom was parcelled out by one of the Protector's last
arrangements, and as such governed the Counties of Lincoln,
Nottingham, Derby, Warwick, and Leicester. He sat as a member for
Nottinghamshire in Cromwell's Second and Third Parliaments, and was
called up to "the other House" when that body was constituted.

William Goffe, son of a Puritan clergyman in Sussex, was a member of
Parliament, and a colonel of infantry soon after the breaking out of
the Civil War. He married a daughter of Whalley. Like his
father-in-law, he was a member of the High Court of Justice for the
King's trial, a signer of the warrant for his execution, a member of the
Protector's Third and Fourth Parliaments, and then a member of "the
other House." He commanded Cromwell's regiment at the Battle of
Dunbar, and rendered service particularly acceptable to him in the
second expurgation of Parliament. As one of the ten Major-Generals,
he held the government of Hampshire, Berkshire, and Sussex.

When Whalley and Goffe, upon the King's return, left England to
escape what they apprehended might prove the fate of regicides, the
policy of the Court in respect to persons circumstanced as they were
had not been promulgated. Arriving in Boston, in July, and having
been courteously welcomed by the Governor, they proceeded the same
day to Cambridge, which place for the present they made their home.
For several months they appeared there freely in public. They
attended the public religious meetings, and others held at private
houses, at which latter they prayed, and _prophesied_, or preached.
They visited some of the principal towns in the neighborhood, were
often in Boston, and were received, wherever they went, with
distinguished attention.

At the end of four months, intelligence came to Massachusetts of the
Act of Indemnity, and that Whalley and Goffe were among those
excepted from it, and marked for vengeance. Three months longer they
lived at Cambridge unmolested; but in the mean while affairs had been
growing critical between Massachusetts and the mother country, and,
though some members of the General Court assured them of protection,
others thought it more prudent that they should have a hint to
provide for their safety in some way which would not imply an affront
to the royal government on the part of the Colony. The Governor
called a Court of Assistants, in February, and without secrecy asked
their advice respecting his obligation to secure the refugees. The
Court refused to recommend that measure, and four days more passed,
at the end of which time--whether induced by the persuasion of
others, or by their own conviction of the impropriety of involving
their generous hosts in further embarrassment, or simply because they
had been awaiting till then the completion of arrangements for their
reception at New Haven--they set off for that place.

A journey of nine days brought them to the hospitable house of the
Reverend Mr. Davenport, where again they moved freely in the society
of the ministers and the magistrates. But they had scarcely been at
New Haven three weeks, when tidings came thither of the reception at
Boston of a proclamation issued by the King for their arrest. To
release their host from responsibility, they went to Milford, (as if
on their way to New Netherland,) and there showed themselves in
public; but returned secretly the same night to New Haven, and were
concealed in Davenport's house. This was towards the last of March.

They had been so situated a month, when their friends had information
from Boston that the search for them was to be undertaken in earnest.
Further accounts of their having been seen in that place had reached
England, and the King had sent a peremptory order to the Colonial
governments for their apprehension. Endicott, to whom it was
transmitted, could do no less than appear to interest himself to
execute it; and this he might do with the less reluctance, because,
under the circumstances, there was small likelihood that his
exertions would be effectual. Two young English merchants, Thomas
Kellond and Thomas Kirk, received from him a commission to prosecute
the search in Massachusetts, and were also furnished with letters of
recommendation to the Governors of the other Colonies. That they were
zealous Royalists, direct from England, would be some evidence to the
home government that the quest would be pursued in good faith. That
they were foreigners, unacquainted with the roads and with the habits
of the country, and betraying themselves by their deportment wherever
they should go in New England, would afford comfortable assurance to
the Governor that they would pursue their quest in vain.

From Boston, the pursuivants, early in May, went to Hartford, where
they were informed by Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut, that "the
Colonels," as they were called, had passed thence immediately before,
on their way to New Haven. Thither the messengers proceeded, stopping
on the way at Guilford, the residence of Deputy-Governor Leete. Since
the recent death of Governor Newman, Leete had been Chief Magistrate
of the Colony of New Haven, which was now, and for a few years later,
distinct from Connecticut.

The Deputy-Governor received them in the presence of several other
persons. He looked over their papers, and then "began to read them
audibly; whereupon we told him," say the messengers, "it was
convenient to be more private in such concernments as that was." They
desired to be furnished "with horses, &c.," for their further
journey, "which was prepared with some delays." They were accosted,
on coming out, by a person who told them that the Colonels were
secreted at Mr. Davenport's, "and that, without all question, Deputy
Leete knew as much"; and that "in the head of a company in the field
a-training," it had lately been "openly spoken by them, that, if they
had but two hundred friends that would stand by them, they would not
care for Old or New England."

The messengers returned to Leete, and made an application for "aid
and a power to search and apprehend" the fugitives. "He refused to
give any power to apprehend them, nor order any other, and said he
could do nothing until he had spoken with one Mr. Gilbert and the
rest of his magistrates." New Haven, the seat of government of the
Colony, was twenty miles distant from Guilford. It was now Saturday
afternoon, and for a New-England Governor to break the Sabbath by
setting off on a journey, or by procuring horses for any other
traveller, was impossible. An Indian was observed to have left
Guilford while the parley was going on, and was supposed to have gone
on an errand to New Haven.

Monday morning the messengers proceeded thither. "To our certain
knowledge," they write, "one John Meigs was sent a-horseback before
us, and by his speedy and unexpected going so early before day was to
give them an information, and the rather because by the delays was
used, it was break of day before we got to horse; so he got there
before us. Upon our suspicion, we required the Deputy that the said
John Meigs might be examined what his business was, that might
occasion so early going; to which the Deputy answered, that he did
not know any such thing, and refused to examine him." Leete was in no
haste to make his own journey to the capital. It was for the
messengers to judge whether they would use such despatch as to give
an alarm there some time before any magistrate was present, to be
invoked for aid. He arrived, they write, "within two hours, or
thereabouts, after us and came to us to the Court chamber, where we
again acquainted him with the information we had received, and that
we had cause to believe they [the fugitives] were concealed in New
Haven, and thereupon we required his assistance and aid for their
apprehension; to which he answered, that he did not believe they
were; whereupon we desired him to empower us, or order others for it;
to which he gave us this answer, the he could not, or would not, make
us magistrates... We set before him the danger of that delay and
their inevitable escape, and how much the honor and service of his
Majesty was despised and trampled on by him, and that we supposed by
his unwillingness to assist in the apprehension he was willing they
should escape. After which he left us, and went to several of the
magistrates, and were together five or six hours in consultation, and
upon breaking up of their council they told us they would not nor
could not to anything until they had called a General Court of the
freemen."

The messengers labored with great earnestness to shake this
determination, but all in vain. For precedents they appealed to the
promptness of the Governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut, "who,
upon the recite of his Majesty's pleasure and order concerning the
said persons, stood not upon such niceties and formalities." They
represented "how much the honor and justice of his Majesty was
concerned, and how ill his Sacred Majesty would resent such horrid
and detestable concealments and abettings of such traitors and
regicides as they were, and asked him whether he would honor and obey
the King or no in this affair, and set before him the danger which by
law is incurred by any one that conceals or abets traitors; to which
the Deputy Leete answered, 'We honor his Majesty, but we have tender
consciences'; to which we replied, that we believed that he knew
where they were, and only pretended tenderness of conscience for a
refusal.... We told them that for their respect to two traitors they
would do themselves injury, and possibly ruin themselves and the
whole Colony of New Haven."

"Finding them obstinate and pertinacious in their contempt of his
Majesty," the messengers, probably misled by some false information,
took the road to New Netherland, the next day, in further prosecution
of their business. The Dutch Governor at that place promised them,
that, if the Colonels appeared within his jurisdiction, he would give
notice to Endicott, and take measures to prevent their escape by sea.
Thereupon Kellond and Kirk returned by water to Boston, where they
made oath before the magistrates to a report of their proceedings.

The fugitives had received timely notice of the chase. A week before
Kellond and Kirk left Boston, they removed from Mr. Davenport's house
to that of William Jones, son-in-law of Governor Eaton, and
afterwards Deputy-Governor of Connecticut. On the day when the
messengers were debating with Governor Leete at Guilford, Whalley and
Goffe were conducted to a mill, at a short distance from New Haven,
where they were hidden two days and nights. Thence they were led to a
spot called Hatchet Harbor, about as much farther in a northwesterly
direction, where they lay two nights more. Meantime, for fear of the
effect of the large rewards which the messengers had offered for
their capture, a more secure hiding-place had been provided for them
in a hollow on the east side of West Rock, five miles from the town.
In this retreat they remained four weeks, being supplied with food
from a lonely farm-house in the neighborhood, to which they also
sometimes withdrew in stormy weather. They caused the Deputy-Governor
to be informed of their hiding-place; and on hearing that Mr.
Davenport was in danger from a suspicion of harboring them, they left
it, and for a week or two showed themselves at different times at New
Haven and elsewhere. After two months more of concealment in their
retreat on the side of West Bock, they betook themselves, just after
the middle of August, to the house of one Tomkins, in or near
Milford. There they remained in complete secrecy for two years, after
which time they indulged themselves in more freedom, and even
conducted the devotions of a few neighbors assembled in their
chamber.

But the arrival at Boston of Commissioners from the King with
extraordinary powers was now expected, and it was likely that they
would be charged to institute a new search, which might endanger the
fugitives, and would certainly be embarrassing to their protectors.
Just at this time a feud in the churches of Hartford and Wethersfield
had led to an emigration to a spot of fertile meadow forty miles
farther up the river. Mr. Russell, hitherto minister of Wethersfield,
accompanied the new settlers as their pastor. The General Court gave
their town the name of Hadley. In this remotest northwestern frontier
of New England a refuge was prepared for the fugitives. On hearing of
the arrival of the Commissioners at Boston, they withdrew to their
cave; but some Indians in hunting observed that it had been occupied,
and its secrecy could no longer be counted on. They consequently
directed their steps towards Hadley, travelling only by night, and
there, in the month of October, 1664, were received into the house of
Mr. Russell.

There--except for a remarkable momentary appearance of one of them,
and except for the visits of a few confidential friends--they
remained lost forever to the view of men. Presents were made to them
by leading persons among the colonists, and they received remittances
from friends in England. Governor Hutchinson, when he wrote his
History, had in his hands the Diary of Goffe, begun at the time of
their leaving London, and continued for six or seven years. They were
for a time encouraged by a belief, founded on their interpretation of
the Apocalypse, that the execution of their comrades was "the slaying
of the witnesses," and that their own triumph was speedily to follow.
Letters passed between Goffe and his wife, purporting to be between a
son and mother, and signed respectively with the names of Walter and
Frances Goldsmith. Four of these letters survive; tender,
magnanimous, and devout, they are scarcely to be read without tears.

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