Winslow Family Memorial, Volume IV FAMILY MEMORIAL The Winslows of Boston Isaac Winslow Margaret Catherine Winslow IN FIVE VOLUMES VOLUME IV Boston, Massachusetts 1837?-1873? TRANSCRIBED AND EDITED BY ROBERT NEWSOM UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE 2009-10 Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume IV Editorial material Copyright © 2010 Robert Walker Newsom ___________________________________ All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this work, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission from the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts. Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume IV A NOTE ON MARGARET’S PORTION OF THE MANUSCRIPT AND ITS TRANSCRIPTION AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED (ABOVE, III, 72 n.) MARGARET began her own journal prior to her father’s death and her decision to continue his Memorial. So there is some overlap between their portions. And her first entries in her journal are sparse, interrupted by a period of four years’ invalidism, and somewhat uncertain in their purpose or direction. There is also in these opening pages a great deal of material already treated by her father. But after her father’s death, and presumably after she had not only completed the twenty-four blank leaves that were left in it at his death, she also wrote an additional twenty pages before moving over to the present bound volumes, which I shall refer to as volumes four and five.* She does not paginate her own pages. I have supplied page numbers on the manuscript itself and entered these in outlined text boxes at the tops of the transcribed pages. Margaret expands the practice begun by Isaac and elaborated towards the end of his portion of supplying informative headlines and marginal notes on most pages. I shall transcribe them at the beginning of each page, at the beginnings of lines, or in marginal text boxes in a smaller and bolded font as seems most appropriate and efficient, and I supply editorial notes as necessary in instances where their physical position or other circumstances on the page might be significant. Margaret also abandons her father’s practice of dividing her text into numbered chapters; although she makes sporadic references to her “chapters” and divides these at decades—though not always (see below, V, 65). These practices somewhat obviate and certainly complicate the task of supplying periodic abstracts of events in her narrative. Therefore I have supplemented her headlines and notations where it seems to me helpful and placed these in the page-number boxes at the tops of pages, also in a smaller and bolded font. * In fact at III, 107, Margaret herself has referred to the forthcoming volume as the “fourth volume.” Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume IV Volume Four [the following printed page is pasted on an endpaper] OMNIA OMNIBUS* THE CONSUMMATIONS OF FORTY YEARS.— Those memories that can reach back forty years may review and enjoy a history of such a series of consummations as no preceding century ever witnessed. First in the list stands the Abolition of Slavery in the British West Indies; Second, the Reform Bill in England of 1832; Third Rowland Hill’s Penny Postage; Fourth, Abolition of the Corn Laws; Fifth, Repeal of Taxes on Knowledge and cheapening of literature; Sixth, the Great Reform Bill of 1867, and the enfranchising of the masses. These are the consummations of the last forty years that an English memory may review with rich satisfaction. The American memory will revert to one great fact that towers up above all other events in the same period of time; that is, the total and everlasting extinction of Slavery on the continent of North America. More than half a century’s gladdening consummations are embraced in that great act. “Only one, but a lion,” said the lioness in the fable to the fox, on being taunted by it with her lack of children. America has only one great consummation during the present century to glory in, but that includes all the long reaches of progress that England has accomplished in the same period. So the two great kindred nations have marched shoulder to shoulder, and kept step on the grand march of civilization; first one foot then the other, as if both belonged to the same body and were moved by the same will. The American foot has had to carry a heavy clog which made its stepping hard and slow; but now that clog is cast away, and the nation is stripped like a young giant for the race, ready and eager to run neck and neck with England on the high roads of progress, and clear the way and lead the van of all the other peoples of the earth. Looking in other directions, what nations have been born or created in these forty years! What was Australia in 1830, or California, or half-a-dozen of the American territories now populous States! What was Germany or Italy at that time in the cohesion and one- heartedness of compact and patriotic nations! What a new and mighty people is growing up to manhood in Russia out of extinguished serfdom! Truly “John Brown’s soul is marching on.” Truly we may hear the feet of the nations shaking the world with their onward tread. Some are running, some are walking, some are just trying to step out like lately-weaned infants; but all are facing a hopeful future, and are reaching on towards the things that are before. Everywhere there is forward motion, or the tension of muscles for moving. And the lightning, horsed on submarine telegraphs, records every step in advance, and sends the news of it to the sundered and distant peoples as quick as the wings of thought. Thus a great and startling event falls upon the ear of twenty nations as a preacher’s word falls from the pulpit upon the ear and heart of his small audience. * I have not been able to identify the publication in which this editorial appeared. The date I suppose to be 1870. “Omnia Omnibus” means “all things to all men,” which appears in 1 Corinthians 9: 22: “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume IV [The first eight pages of the fourth volume of the Memorial, paginated by me i-viii, consist of genealogical tables and notes; they are not here transcribed.] 1 Life in the Hawkins St. house shortly after Isaac and Margaret’s marriage; births; Aunt Patty’s Providential monetary help; living on an insufficient income. 1850. January. Journal by M C Winslow. 27th Birth day. within one year of half the allotted fourscore & ten.* Begin this journal, or monthly with review of past . life. Father has been recalling the times of our birth (all his children) and the various places of his residence in Boston. Brs I W Jr and E W† were born in Hawkins St, out of Sudbury. The house was an old one, to which Gmother Winslow moved in Sept of 1800. She died in Oct of the same year, and Mother became mistress of it in Feb 1801. Father’s brothers and sisters were then all with him, and thus Mother adopted a full grown family, and began housekeeping with all the old and shabby furniture of the Hawkins St establishment. Happily, being of an unambitious temper, the latter circumstance gave her little uneasiness; from the former she had much greater trouble and discomfort. In a short time, however, two of my Uncles went to a boarding house – while Aunt Pickering‡ passed much of the year with Mrs Malbourn§ at Newport R I . Aunt Hudgens, then young and very handsome, attracted many beaux to the Hawkins St house, and Father had many strangers and business correspondents to notice; so that in the shabby old house not a few dinner parties were given, although these were little agreeable to Mother’s natural inclination, which preferred retirement and the society of her own family circle. Her Grandmother Pollard, her father and Mother & her sister Henrietta then resided in Brattle Square; her sisters Catherine (Mrs Houston) and Susan, – and her brother Joshua Pollard Blanchard all being in Tobago, W I. where Mr Houston had business. Uncles Tom and John also went abroad about this time, to France and elsewhere as supercargoes &c – on voyages mostly procured for them by Father. A sister of Grandfather Winslow called Aunt Patty an underwitted person lived at this time and for many years in Father’s family, and her board making an income of about 800$ pr annum which she had inherited and could not use, – was, under Providence, the means, in part, of enabling Father to support his numerous family. Thus when he was left, fatherless himself, but to act the part of a father towards his brothers & sisters, obliged, not only to struggle simply in the establishment of a new business for himself, but to procure a living for the former by making up voyages and contriving agencies through which frequent losses fell upon his own slender means, he was Providentially assisted in his household income by this poor unconscious instrument, whose board the other heirs of her property liberally consented to allow him. With such addition, however, the Hawkins St establishment with its half dozen steady inmates, its floating tide of sojourners, and its numerous visitors, was maintained upon the average sum of 6 or 700$ a year;– about one third of the required limit within which an unencumbered modern pair think it prudent and reasonable to commence housekeeping on what they term an * The 27th January is her thirty-fourth birthday.