PEOPLE ALMOST MENTIONED IN THE MAINE WOODS: REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Maine Woods: Rev. Edward Everett Hale HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF MAINE WOODS REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE THE MAINE WOODS: Ktaadn, whose name is an Indian word signifying highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804. It was visited by Professor J.W. Bailey of West Point in 1836; by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the State Geologist, in 1837; and by two young men from Boston in 1845. All these have given accounts of their expeditions. Since I was there, two or three other parties have made the excursion, and told their stories. Besides these, very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way. The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward. CHARLES TURNER, JR. JACOB WHITMAN BAILEY DR. CHARLES T. JACKSON EDWARD EVERETT HALE WILLIAM FRANCIS CHANNING HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF MAINE WOODS REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE 1822 Edward Everett Hale was born in Boston, the son of the editor and railroad manager Nathan Hale, and a descendant of the Captain Nathan Hale who had been hung by the Army during the Revolutionary War. (He was an older brother of Charles Hale.) (The father, Nathan Hale, was the editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser from 1814 to 1854 and the head of the Boston and Worcester Railroad.) NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Maine Woods: Rev. Edward Everett Hale HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF MAINE WOODS REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE 1831 The following is a snippet from Charles Haskell’s REMINISCENCES OF NEW YORK BY AN OCTOGENARIAN: In this year the first street railway in the world, the New York and Harlem, was incorporated with a capital of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Upon the notice of the commissioners to receive bids for shares of the stock, there was a furor among our citizens to obtain them, to be likened only to that of the “South Sea Bubble.”... The University of New York was incorporated in this year, the following officers being elected: James M. Matthews, D.D., Chancellor; Albert Gallatin, President of the Council; Morgan Lewis, Vice-President; John Delafield, Secretary; Samuel Ward, Treasurer.... The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad began operations in this year, exciting astonishment and fear by attaining a speed of twenty miles an hour. The river route hence to Peekskill, having for many years been run by Captain Vanderbilt, and the price of passage being such as the citizens of Putnam and Westchester counties, headed by Daniel Drew and James Smith, held to be exorbitant, a number of them associated in a company and built a steamer which forced Vanderbilt to reduce his fare to twelve and one-half cents. In 1832, however, Drew and Smith sold out to Vanderbilt without the knowledge or consent of their associates.... The population of the city in this year was ascertained to be 202,589. The T-rails of rolled iron designed by Robert Stevens and manufactured in England were delivered to America and experimented with on a right-of-way belonging to the Camden & Amboy Railroad. They would prove to be successful despite their high cost and despite the brittleness of the iron in use at that time. Although an inverted-U design was tried by the B&O, the T-rail was better and would soon come into general use.1 A steam-propelled passenger train was designed by placing the bodies of existing “Concord”2 stagecoaches over iron wheels: Charles Hale was born, younger brother of Edward Everett Hale and son of the editor and railroad manager Nathan Hale and a descendant of the Captain Nathan Hale who had been hung by the Army during the Revolutionary War. 1. In the early years of railroading, the majority of maimings and deaths of crewmembers came from the fact that they were required to stand between two cars being rolled toward each other, and steer a link into a socket, and then drop a pin precisely into the hole, to join the cars into a train. An improved coupler would not be patented until 1873, and would not be in general use until about 1890. In the meanwhile there were coming to be more and more railroad types walking around minus fingers or minus hands. 2. That’s Concord as in Concord, New Hampshire, a large manufacturing town. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF MAINE WOODS REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE 1833 August: Dr. James Cowles Prichard pioneered “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.” (Herman Melville’s father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, would utilize this concept “monomania” in a legal opinion in 1844, and Melville would deploy it in MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER in 1849, and then in MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE in 1851 as the defining characteristic of the psychology of the maimed Captain Ahab.) As what in this year would have been considered to be a prime instance of such monomania, in this year there appeared Lydia Maria Child’s infamous APPEAL IN FAVOR OF THAT CLASS OF AMERICANS CALLED AFRICANS. (The author’s “madness affecting one train of thought” was immediately recognized, and in an attempt at a cure her library privileges at the Boston Athenæum were summarily revoked.) The Reverend William Ellery Channing walked down to Child’s cottage from his home on Beacon Hill, a mile and a half, to discuss the book with her for all of three hours, but not because he agreed with her — the Reverend Channing considered Child misguided and a zealot. Child later commented that she had “suffered many a shivering ague-fit in attempting to melt, or batter away the glaciers of his prejudices.” The window of HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF MAINE WOODS REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE William Davis Ticknor’s Old Corner Bookstore was smashed because this APPEAL was on display. Having overheard his parents discussing APPEAL (and perhaps having heard of that smashed window at the Old Corner Bookstore, which had been smashed by someone leaning against or being shoved against it), the 11-year-old Edward Everett Hale considered heaving a stone at it through the shop window. This is the book that a manager of the American Bible Society refused to read for fear it would make him an abolitionist, and in fact it would be what the 22-year-old Wendell Phillips would be reading just as he was abandoning the practice of law in order to devote his life to abolitionism. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF MAINE WOODS REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE Here is the cover of a modern edition of that offending treatise: Outspoken in her condemnation of slavery, Mrs. Child pointed out its contradiction with Christian teachings, and described the moral and physical degradation it brought upon slaves and owners alike — not omitting to mention the issue of miscegenation, and not excepting the North from its share of responsibility for the system. “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken,” she wrote in the Introduction, “but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.” As a direct result of this, she would lose her editorial post with The Juvenile Miscellany (if you are so impolite and inconsiderate that you mention that we routinely molest our black servants, we certainly cannot allow you to have contact with our children). HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF MAINE WOODS REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE 1839 Edward Sherman Hoar matriculated at Harvard College. Francis Lemuel Capen, Edward Everett Hale, and William Francis Channing graduated from Harvard. Channing would go on to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (although his practice as a physician would never extend beyond the administration of quack applications of electricity to the heads and feet of sufferers). NEW “HARVARD MEN” After leaving Harvard, Ellery Channing had spent almost five years living in the home of his father Dr. Walter Channing, withdrawing books from the Boston Athenæum and presumably educating himself in this manner — but otherwise not doing much of anything. In this year he determined that he was going to make something of himself, as a farmer on the frontier! (Meanwhile, in this year, Abraham Lincoln was beginning to travel through nine counties in central and eastern Illinois, as a lawyer on the 8th Judicial Circuit.) LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Maine Woods: Rev. Edward Everett Hale HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF MAINE WOODS REVEREND EDWARD EVERETT HALE 1845 May 30, Friday: An article Dr. William Francis Channing placed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, his Harvard chum Edward Everett Hale’s dad’s gazette, described in general terms how he was intending to reduce fire losses by providing building occupants with an instant way to contact its fire stations — a fire alarm system, one based upon the new telegraph wire.