Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D.
O >> Orville Dewey >> Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D.AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS OF ORVILLE DEWEY, D.D.
Edited by his Daughter Mary Dewey
INTRODUCTORY.
IT is about twenty-five years since, at my earnest desire, my father
began to write some of the memories of his own life, of the friends whom
he loved, and of the noteworthy people he had known; and it is by
the help of these autobiographical papers, and of selections from his
letters, that I am enabled to attempt a memoir of him. I should like to
remind the elder generation and inform the younger of some things in the
life of a man who was once a foremost figure in the world from which
he had been so long withdrawn that his death was hardly felt beyond the
circle of his personal friends. It was like the fall of an aged tree in
the vast forests of his native hills, when the deep thunder of the crash
is heard afar, and a new opening is made towards heaven for those who
stand near, but when to the general eye there is no change in the rich
woodland that clothes the mountain side.
But forty years ago, when his church in New York was crowded morning and
evening, and [8] eager multitudes hung upon his lips for the very bread
of life, and when he entered also with spirit and power into the social,
philanthropic, and artistic life of that great city; or nearly sixty
years ago, when he carried to the beautiful town and exquisite society
of New Bedford an influx of spiritual life and a depth of religious
thought which worked like new yeast in the well-prepared Quaker
mind,--then, had he been taken away, men would have felt that a tower of
strength had fallen, and those especially, who in his parish visits had
felt the sustaining comfort of his singular tenderness and sympathy in
affliction, and of his counsel in distress, would have mourned for him
not only as for a brother, but also a chief. Now, almost all of his own
generation have passed away. Here and there one remains, to listen with
interest to a fresh account of persons and things once familiar; while
the story will find its chief audience among those who remember Mr.
Dewey [FN My father always preferred this simple title to the more
formal "Dr." and in his own family and among his most intimate friends
he was Mr. Dewey to the last. He was, of course, gratified by the
complimentary intention of Harvard University in bestowing the degree
of D.D. upon him in 1839, but he never felt that his acquisitions in
learning entitled him to it.] as among the lights of their own youth.
Those also who love the study of [9] human nature may follow with
pleasure the development of a New England boy, with a character of great
strength, simplicity, reverence, and honesty, with scanty opportunities
for culture, and heavily handicapped in his earlier running by both
poverty and Calvinism, but possessed from the first by the love of truth
and knowledge, and by a generous sympathy which made him long to impart
whatever treasures he obtained. To trace the growth of such a life to
a high point of usefulness and power, to see it unspoiled by honor and
admiration, and to watch its retirement, under the pressure of nervous
disease, from active service, while never losing its concern for the
public good, its quickness of personal sympathy, nor its interest in the
solution of the mightiest problems of humanity, cannot be an altogether
unprofitable use of time to the reader, while to the writer it is a work
of consecration. He who was at once like a son and brother to my father,
he who should have crowned a forty-years' friendship by the fulfilment
of this pious task, and who would have done it with a stronger and
a steadier hand than mine, BELLOWS, was called first from that "fair
companionship," while still in the unbroken exercise of the varied
and remarkable powers which made his life one of such [10] large use,
blessing, and pleasure to the world. None could make his place good to
his elder friend, whose approaching death was visibly hastened by grief
for the loss of the constant sympathy and devotion which had faithfully
cheered his declining years. Many and beautiful tributes were laid upon
my father's tomb by those whom he left here. Why should we not hope that
that of Bellows was in the form of greeting?
ST. DAVID'S, July, 1883.
[11]I WAS born in Sheffield, Mass., on the 28th of March, 1794. My
grandparents, Stephen Dewey and Aaron Root, were among the early
settlers of the town, and the houses they built the one of brick, and
the other of wood--still stand. They came from Westfield, about forty
miles distant from Sheffield, on horseback, through the woods; there
were no roads then. We have always had a tradition in our family that
the male branch is of Welsh origin. When I visited Wales in 1832, I
remember being struck with the resemblance I saw in the girls and young
women about me to my sisters, and I mentioned it when writing home. On
going up to London, I became acquainted with a gentleman, who, writing a
note one day to a friend of mine and speaking of me, said: "I spell the
name after the Welsh fashion, Devi; I don't know how he spells it." On
inquiring of this gentleman, and he referred me also to biographical
dictionaries,--I found that our name had an origin of unsuspected
dignity, not to say sanctity, being no other than that of Saint David,
the patron saint [12] of Wales, which is shortened and changed in the
speech of the common people into Dewi.'
Everyone tries, I suppose, to penetrate as far back as he can into his
childhood, back towards his infancy, towards that mysterious and shadowy
line behind which lies his unremembered existence. Besides the usual
life of a child in the country,--running foot-races with my brother
Chandler, building brick ovens to bake apples in the side-hill opposite
the house, and the steeds of willow sticks cut there, and beyond the
unvarying gentleness of my mother and the peremptory decision and
playfulness at the same time of my father,--his slightest word was
enough to hush the wildest tumult among us children, and yet he was
usually gay and humorous in his family,--besides and beyond this, I
remember nothing till the first event in my early childhood, and that
was acting in a play. It was performed in the church, as part of a
school exhibition. The stage was laid upon the pews, and the audience
seated in the gallery. I must have been about five years old then, and I
acted the part of a little son. I remember feeling, then and afterwards,
very queer and shamefaced about my histrionic papa and mamma. It is
striking to observe, not only how early, but how powerfully, imagination
[13] is developed in our childhood. For some time after, I regarded
those imaginary parents as sustaining a peculiar relation, not only
to me, but to one another; I thought they were in love, if not to be
married. But they never were married, nor ever thought of it, I suppose.
All that drama was wrought out in the bosom of a child. It is
worth noticing, too, the freedom with sacred things, of those days,
approaching to the old fetes and mysteries in the church. We are apt to
think of the Puritan times as all rigor and strictness. And yet here,
nearly sixty years ago, was a play acted in the meeting-house: the
church turned into a theatre. And I remember my mother's telling me that
when she was a girl her father carried her on a pillion to the raising
of a church in Pittsfield; and the occasion was celebrated by a ball
in the evening. Now, all dancing is proscribed by the church there as a
sinful amusement.
[FN This was the reason why Mr. Dewey gave to the country home which
he inherited from his father the name of "St. David's," by which it is
known to his family and friends.--M. E. D.]
The next thing that I remember, as an event in my childhood, was the
funeral of General Ashley, one of our townsmen, who had served as
colonel, I think, in the War of the Revolution. I was then in my
sixth year. It was a military funeral; and the procession, for a long
distance, filled the wide street. The music, the solemn march, the bier
borne in the midst, the crowd! It seemed to me as if the whole world was
at a funeral. The remains of Bonaparte borne to the Invalides amidst the
crowds of Paris could not, [14] I suppose, at a later day, have affected
me like that spectacle. I do not certainly know whether I heard the
sermon on the occasion by the pastor, the Rev. Ephraim Judson; but at
any rate it was so represented to me that it always seems as if I had
heard it, especially the apostrophe to the remains that rested beneath
that dark pall in the aisle. "General Ashley!" he said, and repeated,
"General Ashley!--he hears not."
To the recollections of my childhood this old pastor presents a very
distinct, and I may say somewhat portentous, figure, tall, large-limbed,
pale, ghostly almost, with slow movement and hollow tone, with eyes
dreamy, and kindly, I believe, but spectral to me, coming into the house
with a heavy, deliberate, and solemn step, making me feel as if the very
chairs and tables were conscious of his presence and did him reverence;
and when he stretched out his long, bony arm and said, "Come here,
child!" I felt something as if a spiritualized ogre had invited me.
Nevertheless, he was a man, I believe, of a very affectionate and tender
nature; indeed, I afterwards came to think so; but at that time, and
up to the age of twelve, it is a strict truth that I did not regard Mr.
Judson as properly a human being,--as a man at all. If he had descended
from the planet Jupiter, he could not have been a bit more preternatural
and strange to me. Indeed, I well remember the occasion when the idea of
his proper humanity first flashed upon [15] my mind. It was when I saw
him, one day, beat the old black horse he always rode, apparently in
a passion like any other man. The old black horse--large, fat, heavy,
lazy--figures in my mind almost as distinctly as its master; and if,
as it came down the street, its head were turned aside towards the
school-house, as indicating the rider's intent to visit us, I remember
that the school was thrown into as much commotion as if an armed spectre
were coming down the road. Our awe of him was extreme; yet he loved to
be pleasant with us. He would say,--examining the school was always a
part of his object, "How much is five times seven?" "Thirty-five," was
the ready answer. "Well," replied the old man, "saying so don't make it
so"; a very significant challenge, which we were ill able to meet. At
the close of his visit he always gave an exact and minute account of
the Crucifixion,--I think always, and in the same terms. It was a mere
appeal to physical sympathy, awful, but not winning. When he stood
before us, and, lifting his hands almost to the ceiling, said, "And so
they reared him up!" it seemed as if he described the catastrophe of
the world, not its redemption. Indeed, Mr. Judson appeared to think
that anything drawn from the Bible was good, whether he made any moral
application of it or not. I have heard him preach a whole sermon,
giving the most precise and detailed description of the building of the
Tabernacle, without one word of comment, [16] inference, or instruction.
But he was a good and kindly man; and when, as I was going to college
at the age of eighteen, he laid his hand upon my head, and gave me, with
solemn form and tender accent, his blessing, I felt awed and impressed,
as I imagine the Hebrew youth may have felt under a patriarch's
benediction.
With such an example and teacher of religion before me, whose goodness
I did not know, and whose strangeness and preternatural character only
I felt; and indeed with all the ideas I got of religion, whether from
Sunday-keeping or catechising, my early impressions on that subject
could not be happy or winning. I remember the time when I really feared
that if I went out into the fields to walk on Sunday, bears would come
down from the mountain and catch me. At a later day, but still in my
childhood, I recollect a book-pedler's coming to our house, and when he
opened his pack, that I selected from a pile of story-books, Bunyan's
"Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners." Religion had a sort of
horrible attraction for me, but nothing could exceed its gloominess. I
remember looking down from the gallery at church upon the celebration of
the Lord's Supper, and pitying the persons engaged in it more than any
people in the world,--I thought they were so unhappy. I had heard of
"the unpardonable sin," and well do I recollect lying in my bed a mere
child--and having thoughts and words injected into my mind, which I
[17]imagined were that sin, and shuddering, and trembling, and saying
aloud, "No, no, no; I do not,--I will not." It is the grand mystery of
Providence that what is divinest and most beautiful should be suffered
to be so painfully, and, as it must seem at first view, so injuriously
misconstrued. But what is universal, must be a law; and what is law,
must be right,--must have good reasons for it. And certainly so it is.
Varying as the ages vary, yet the experience of the individual is but a
picture of the universal mind,--of the world's mind. The steps are
the same, ignorance, fear, superstition, implicit faith; then doubt,
questioning, struggling, long and anxious reasoning; then, at the
end, light, more or less, as the case may be. Can it, in the nature
of things, be otherwise? The fear of death, for instance, which I had,
which all children have, can childhood escape it? Far onward and upward
must be the victory over that fear. And the fear of God, and, indeed,
the whole idea of religion,--must it not, in like manner, necessarily
be imperfect? And are imperfection and error peculiar to our religious
conceptions? What mistaken ideas has the child of a man, of his parent
when correcting him, or of some distinguished stranger! They are
scarcely less erroneous than his ideas of God. What mistaken notions
of life, of the world, the great, gay, garish world, all full of
cloud-castles, ships laden with gold, pleasures endless and entrancing!
What mistaken impressions [18]about nature; about the material world
upon which childhood has alighted, and of which it must necessarily
be ignorant; about clouds and storms and tempests; and of the heavens
above, sun and moon and stars! I remember well when the fable of the
Happy Valley in Rasselas was a reality to me; when I thought the sun
rose and set for us alone, and how I pitied the glorious orb, as it sunk
behind the western mountain, to think that it must pass through a sort
of Hades, through a dark underworld, to come up in the east again. It is
a curious fact, that the Egyptians in the morning of the world had the
same ideas. Shall I blame Providence for this? Could it be otherwise? If
earthly things are so mistaken, is it strange that heavenly things are?
And especially shall I call in question this order of things,--this
order, whether of men's or of the world's progress, when I see that it
is not only inevitable, the necessary allotment for an experimenting and
improving nature, which is human nature, but when I see too that each
stage of progress has its own special advantages; that "everything
is beautiful in its time;" that fears, superstitions, errors, quicken
imagination and restrain passion as truly as doubts, reasonings,
strugglings, strengthen the judgment, mature the moral nature, and lead
to light?
I am dilating upon all this too much, perhaps. I let my pen run.
Sitting down here in the blessed [19]country home, with nothing else in
particular just now to do, at the age of sixty-three, I have time and
am disposed to look back into my early life and to reason upon it; and
although I have nothing uncommon to relate, yet what pertains to me has
its own interest and significance, just as if no other being had ever
existed, and therefore I set down my experience and my reflections
simply as they present themselves to me.
In casting back my eyes upon this earliest period of my life, there are
some things which I recall, which may amuse my grandchildren, if they
should ever be inclined to look over these pages, and some of which they
may find curious, as things of a bygone time.
Children now know nothing of what "'Lection" was in those days, the
annual period, that is, when the newly elected State government came in.
It was in the last week in May. How eager were we boys to have the corn
planted before that time! The playing could not be had till the work was
done. The sports and the entertainments were very simple. Running about
the village street, hither and thither, without much aim; stands erected
for the sale of gingerbread and beer,--home-made beer, concocted
of sassafras roots and wintergreen leaves, etc.; games of ball, not
base-ball, as now is the fashion, yet with wickets,--this was about all,
except that at the end there was always horse-racing.
Having witnessed this exciting sport in my [20] boyhood, without any
suspicion of its being wrong, and seen it abroad in later days, in
respectable company, I was led, very innocently, when I was a clergyman
in New York, into what was thought a great misdemeanor. I was invited by
some gentlemen, and went with them, to the races on Long Island. I met
on the boat, as we were returning, a parishioner of mine, who expressed
great surprise, and even a kind of horror, when I told him what I had
been to see. He could not conceal that he thought it very bad that I
should have been there; and I suppose it was. But that was not the worst
of it. Some person had then recently heard me preach a sermon in which I
said, that, in thesis, I had rather undertake to defend Infidelity
than Calvinism. In extreme anger thereat, he wrote a letter to some
newspaper, in which, after stating what I had said, he added, "And this
clergyman was lately seen at the races!" It went far and wide, you may
be sure. I saw it in newspapers from all parts of the country; yet some
of my friends, while laughing at me, held it to be only a proof of my
simplicity.
There were worse things than sports in our public gatherings; even
street fights,--pugilistic fights, hand to hand. I have seen men thus
engage, and that in bloody encounter, knocking one another down, and the
fallen man stamped upon by his adversary. The people gathered round, not
to interfere, but to see them fight it out. [21] Such a spectacle has
not been witnessed in Sheffield, I think, for half a century. But as to
sports and entertainments in general, there were more of them in those
days than now. We had more holidays, more games in the street, of
ball-playing, of quoits, of running, leaping, and wrestling. The militia
musters, now done away with, gave many occasions for them. Every year we
had one or two great squirrel-hunts, ended by a supper, paid for by
the losing side, that is, by the side shooting the fewest. Almost every
season we had a dancing-school. Singing-schools, too, there were
every winter. There was also a small band of music in the village, and
serenades were not uncommon. We, boys used to give them on the flute
to our favorites. But when the band came to serenade us, I shall never
forget the commotion it made in the house, and the delight we had in
it. We children were immediately up in a wild hurry of pleasure, and my
father always went out to welcome the performers, and to bring them into
the house and give them such entertainment as he could provide.
The school-days of my childhood I remember with nothing but pleasure. I
must have been a dull boy, I suppose, in some respects, for I never got
into scrapes, never played truant, and was never, that I can remember,
punished for anything. The instruction was simple enough. Special stress
was laid upon spelling, and I am inclined to think that every one of my
fellow-pupils [22] learned to spell more correctly than some gentlemen
and ladies do in our days.
Our teachers were always men in winter and women in summer. I remember
some of the men very well, but one of them especially. What pupil of his
could ever forget Asa Day,--the most extraordinary figure that ever I
saw, a perfect chunk of a man? He could not have been five feet high,
but with thews and sinews to make up for the defect in height, and
a head big enough for a giant. He might have sat for Scott's "Black
Dwarf;" yet he was not ill-looking, rather handsome in the face. And I
think I never saw a face that could express such energy, passion, and
wrath, as his. Indeed, his whole frame was instinct with energy. I see
him now, as he marched by our house in the early morning, with quick,
short step, to make the school-room fire; and a roaring one it was, in
a large open fireplace; for he did everything about the school. In fact,
he took possession of school, schoolhouse, and district too, for that
matter, as if it were a military post; with the difference, that he
was to fight, not enemies without, but within,--to beat down
insubordination and enforce obedience. And his anger, when roused, was
the most remarkable thing. It stands before me now, through all my life,
as the one picture of a man in a fury. But if he frightened us children,
he taught us too, and that thoroughly.
In general our teachers were held in great [23] reverence and affection.
I remember especially the pride with which I once went in a chaise,
when I was about ten, to New Marlborough, to fetch the schoolma'am.
No courtier, waiting upon a princess, could have been prouder or more
respectful than I was.
To turn, for a moment, to a different scene, and to much humbler
persons, that pass and repass in the camera obscura of my early
recollections. The only Irishman that was in Sheffield, I think, in
those days, lived in my father's family for several years as a hired
man,--Richard; I knew him by no other name then, and recall him by no
other now,--the tallest and best-formed "exile of Erin" that I have ever
seen; prodigiously strong, yet always gentle in manner and speech to us
children; with the full brogue, and every way marked in my view, and set
apart from every one around him,--"a stranger in a strange land." The
only thing besides, that I distinctly remember of him, was the point he
made every Christmas of getting in the "Yule-log," a huge log which he
had doubtless been saving out in chopping the wood-pile, big enough for
a yoke of oxen to draw, and which he placed with a kind of ceremony
and respect in the great kitchen fireplace. With our absurd New England
Puritan ways, yet naturally derived from the times of the English
Commonwealth, when any observance of Christmas was made penal and
punished with [24] imprisonment, I am not sure that we should have known
anything of Christmas, but for Richard's Yule-log.
There was another class of persons who were frequently engaged to do
day's work on the farm,--that of the colored people. Some of them had
been slaves here in Sheffield. They were virtually emancipated by our
State Bill of Rights, passed in 1783. The first of them that sought
freedom under it, and the first, it is said, that obtained it in New
England, was a female slave of General Ashley, and her advocate in the
case was Mr. Sedgwick, afterwards Judge Sedgwick, who was then a lawyer
in Sheffield.
There were several of the men that stand out as pretty marked
individualities in my memory, Peter and Caesar and Will and Darby; merry
old fellows they seemed to be,--I see no laborers so cheerful and gay
now,--and very faithful and efficient workers. Peter and his wife, Toah
(so was she called), had belonged to my maternal grandfather, and were
much about us, helping, or being helped, as the case might be. They both
lived and died in their own cottage, pleasantly situated on the bank of
Skenob Brook. They tilled their own garden, raised their own "sarse,"
kept their own cow; and I have heard one say that "Toah's garden had the
finest damask roses in the world, and her house, and all around it, was
the pink of neatness."
In taking leave of my childhood, I must say [25] that, so far as my
experience goes, the ordinary poetic representations of the happiness of
that period, as compared with after life, are not true, and I must
doubt whether they ought to be true. I was as happy, I suppose, as most
children. I had good health; I had companions and sports; the school
was not a hardship to me,--I was always eager for it; I was never hardly
dealt with by anybody; I was never once whipped in my life, that I
can remember; but instead of looking back to childhood as the blissful
period of my life, I find that I have been growing happier every year,
up to this very time. I recollect in my youth times of moodiness and
melancholy; but since I entered on the threshold of manly life, of
married and parental life, all these have disappeared. I have had
inward struggles enough, certainly,--struggles with doubt, with
temptation,--sorrows and fears and strifes enough; but I think I have
been gradually, though too slowly, gaining the victory over them. Truth,
art, religion,--the true, the beautiful, the divine,--have constantly
risen clearer and brighter before me; my family bonds have grown
stronger, friends dearer, the world and nature fuller of goodness and
beauty, and I have every day grown a happier man.