A biographical sketch by one of the most illustrious of United States' poets. The boyhood he speaks about would have taken place about 1804. One can hardly fathom such strict discipline and family relationships today as he describes.The conductor of St. Nicholas has asked me for a talk with the boys who read this magazine. If she had not at the same time suggested a subject, I am pretty sure that I should not have complied with the request; but when she mentioned "The Boys of My Boyhood," there was something in the words which carried my mind back to the early years of my life, and made me think that I might be able to hold the attention of the readers of the St. Nicholas for a little while in discoursing of those who began life with me.
The boys of the generation to which I belonged—that is to say, who were born in the last years of the last century or the earliest of this—were brought up under a system of discipline which put a far greater distance between parents and their children than now exists. The parents seemed to think this necessary in order to secure obedience. They were believers in the old maxim that familiarity breeds contempt. My own parents lived in the house with my grandfather and grandmother on the mother's side. My grandfather was a disciplinarian of the stricter sort, and I can hardly find words to express the awe in which I stood of him—an awe so great as almost to prevent anything like affection on my part, although he was in the main kind, and, certainly, never thought of being severe beyond what was necessary to maintain a proper degree of order in the family.
The other boys in that part of the country, my school-mates and play-fellows, were educated on the same system. Yet there were at that time some indications that this very severe discipline was beginning to relax. With my father and mother I was on much easier terms than with my grandfather. If a favor was to be asked of my grandfather, it was asked with fear and trembling; the request was postponed to the last moment, and then made with hesitation and blushes and a confused utterance.
One of the means of keeping the boys of that generation in order was a little bundle of birchen rods, bound together by a small cord, and generally suspended on a nail against the wall in the kitchen. This was esteemed as much a part of the necessary furniture as the crane that hung in the kitchen fireplace, or the shovel and tongs. It sometimes happened that the boy suffered a fate similar to that of the eagle in the fable, wounded by an arrow fledged with a feather from his own wing; in other words, the boy was made to gather the twigs intended for his own castigation.
It has never been quite clear to me why the birch was chosen above all other trees of the wood to yield its twigs for this purpose. The beech of our forests produces sprays as slender, as flexible, and as tough; and farmers, wherever the beech is common, cut its long and pliant branches for driving oxen. Yet the use of birchen rods for the correction of children is of very great antiquity. In his "Discourse on Forest Trees," written three hundred years ago, Evelyn speaks of birchen twigs as an implement of the school-master; and Loudon, in his "Arboretum," goes yet further back. He says: "The birch has been used as the instrument of correction in schools from the earliest ages." The English poets of the last century make frequent mention of this use of birchen twigs; but in Loudon's time, whose book was published thirty years since, he remarks that the use of these rods, both in schools and private families, was fast passing away,—a change on which the boys both of England and the United States may well be congratulated,—for the birchen rod was, in my time, even more freely used in the school than in the household.
The chastisement which was thought so wholesome in the case of boys, was at that time administered, for petty crimes, to grown-up persons. About a mile from where I lived stood a public whipping-post, and I remember seeing a young fellow, of about eighteen years of age, upon whose back, by direction of a justice of the peace, forty lashes had just been laid, as the punishment for a theft which he had committed. His eyes were red, like those of one who had been crying, and I well remember the feeling of curiosity, mingled with pity and fear, with which I gazed on him. That, I think, was the last example of corporal punishment inflicted by law in that neighborhood. The whipping-post stood in its place for several years afterward, the memorial of a practice which had passed away.
The awe in which the boys of that time held their parents extended to all elderly persons, toward whom our behavior was more than merely respectful, for we all observed a hushed and subdued demeanor in their presence. Toward the ministers of the gospel this behavior was particularly marked. At that time, every township in Massachusetts, the State in which I lived, had its minister, who was settled there for life, and when he once came among his people was understood to have entered into a connection with them scarcely less lasting than the marriage tie. The community in which he lived regarded him with great veneration, and the visits which from time to time he made to the district schools seemed to the boys important occasions, for which special preparation was made. When he came to visit the school which I attended, we all had on our Sunday clothes, and were ready for him with a few answers to the questions in the "Westminster Catechism." He heard us recite our lessons, examined us in the catechism, and then began a little address, which I remember was the same on every occasion. He told us how much greater were the advantages of education which we enjoyed than those which had fallen to the lot of our parents, and exhorted us to make the best possible use of them, both for our own sakes and that of our parents, who were ready to make any sacrifice for us, even so far as to take the bread out of their own mouths to give us. I remember being disgusted with this illustration of parental kindness which I was obliged to listen to twice at least in every year.
The good man had, perhaps, less reason than he supposed to magnify the advantages of education enjoyed in the common schools at that time. Reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic, with a little grammar and a little geography, were all that was taught, and these by persons much less qualified, for the most part, than those who now give instruction. Those, however, who wished to proceed further took lessons from graduates of the colleges, who were then much more numerous in proportion to the population than they now are.
The profound respect shown to the clergy in those days had this good effect—that wherever there was a concourse of people, their presence prevented the occurrence of anything disorderly or unseemly. The minister, therefore, made it one of his duties to be present on those occasions which brought people together in any considerable numbers. His appearance had somewhat the effect which that of a policeman now has at a public assembly in one of our large towns. At that time there was, in each township, at least one company of militia, which was required to hold several meetings in the course of the year, and at these, I remember, the minister was always present. The military parade, with the drums and fifes and other musical instruments, was a powerful attraction for the boys, who came from all parts of the neighborhood to the place at which the militia mustered. But on these occasions there was one respect in which the minister's presence proved but a slight restraint upon excess. There were then no temperance societies, no temperance lecturers held forth, no temperance tracts were ever distributed, nor temperance pledges given. It was, to be sure, esteemed a shame to get drunk; but as long as they stopped short of this, people, almost without exception, drank grog and punch freely without much fear of a reproach from any quarter. Drunkenness, however, in that demure population, was not obstreperous, and the man who was overtaken by it was generally glad to slink out of sight.
I remember an instance of this kind. There had been a muster of a militia company on the church green for the election of one of its officers, and the person elected had treated the members of the company and all who were present to sweetened rum and water, carried to the green in pailfuls, with a tin cup to each pail for the convenience of drinking. The afternoon was far spent, and I was going home with other boys, when we overtook a young man who had taken too much of the election toddy, and in endeavoring to go quietly home, had got but a little way from the green, when he fell in a miry place, and was surrounded by three or four persons, who assisted in getting him on his legs again. The poor fellow seemed in great distress, and his new nankeen pantaloons, daubed with the mire of the road, and his dangling limbs, gave him a most wretched appearance. It was, I think, the first time that I had ever seen a drunken man. As I approached to pass him by, some of the older boys said to me, "Do not go too near him, for if you smell a drunken man it will make you drunk." Of course I kept at a good distance, but not out of hearing, for I remember hearing him lament his condition in these words : "Oh dear, I shall die!" "Oh dear, I wish I had n't drinked any!" "Oh dear, what will my poor Betsy say?" What his poor Betsy said I never heard, but I saw him led off in the direction of his home, and I continued on my way with the other boys, impressed with a salutary horror of drunkenness and a fear of drunken men.
One of the entertainments of the boys of my time was what were called the "raisings," meaning the erection of the timber frames of houses or barns, to which the boards were to be afterward nailed. Here the minister made a point of being present, and hither the able-bodied men of the neighborhood, the young men especially, were summoned, and took part in the work with great alacrity. It was a spectacle for us next to that of a performer on the tight-rope, to see the young men walk steadily on the narrow footing of the beams at a great height from the ground, or as they stood to catch in their hands the wooden pins and the braces flung to them from below. They vied with each other in the dexterity and daring with which they went through with the work, and when the skeleton of the building was put together, some one among them generally capped the climax of fearless activity by standing on the ridge-pole with his head downward and his heels in the air. At that time, even the presence of the "minister was no restraint upon the flow of milk punch and grog, which in some cases was taken to excess. The practice of calling the neighbors to these "raisings" is now discontinued in the rural neighborhoods; the carpenters provide their own workmen for the business of adjusting the timbers of the new building to each other, and there is no consumption of grog.
Another of the entertainments of rustic life in the region of which I am speaking was the making of maple sugar. This was a favorite frolic of the boys. The apparatus for the sugar camp was of a much ruder kind than is now used. The sap was brought in buckets from the wounded trees and poured into a great cauldron which hung over a hot fire from a stout horizontal pole supported at each end by an upright stake planted in the ground. Since that time they have built in every maple grove a sugarhouse—a little building in which the process of making sugar is carried on with several ingenious contrivances unknown at that time, when everything was done in the open air.
From my father's door, in the latter part of March and the early part of April, we could see perhaps a dozen columns of smoke rising over the woods indifferent places where the work was going on. After the sap had been collected and boiled for three or four days, the time came when the thickening liquid was made to pass into the form of sugar. This was when the sirup had become of such a consistency that it would "feather"— that is to say, when a beechen twig, formed at the small end into a little loop, dipped into the hot sirup and blown upon by the breath, sent into the air a light, feathery film. The huge cauldron was then lifted from the fire, and its contents were either dipped out and poured into molds, or stirred briskly till the sirup cooled and took the form of ordinary brown sugar in loose grains. This process was exceedingly interesting to the boys who came to watch its different stages and to try from time to time the sirup as it thickened.
In autumn, the task of stripping the husks from the ears of Indian corn was made the occasion of social meetings, in which the boys took a special part. A farmer would appoint what was called "a husking," to which he invited his neighbors. The ears of maize in the husk, sometimes along with part of the stalk, were heaped on the barn floor. In the evening, lanterns were brought, and, seated on piles of dry husks, the men and boys stripped the ears of their covering, and breaking them from the stem with a sudden jerk, threw them into baskets placed for the purpose. It was often a merry time; the gossip of the neighborhood was talked over, stories were told, jests went round, and at the proper hour the assembly adjourned to the dwelling-house and were treated to pumpkin pie and cider, which in that season had not been so long from the press as to have parted with its sweetness.
Quite as cheerful were the "apple-parings," which on autumn evenings brought together the young people of both sexes in little circles. The fruit of the orchards was pared and quartered and the core extracted, and a supply of apples in this state provided for making what was called "applesauce," a kind of preserve of which every family laid in a large quantity every year.
The cider-making season in autumn was, at the time of which I am speaking, somewhat correspondent to the vintage in the wine countries of Europe. Large tracts of land in New England were overshadowed by rows of apple-trees, and in the month of May a journey through that region was a journey through a wilderness of bloom. In the month of October the whole population was busy gathering apples under the trees, from which they fell in heavy showers as the branches were shaken by the strong arms of the farmers. The creak of the cider-mill, turned by a horse moving in a circle, was heard in every neighborhood as one of the most common of rural sounds. The freshly pressed juice of the apples was most agreeable to boyish tastes, and the whole process of gathering the fruit and making the cider came in among the more laborious rural occupations in a way which diversified them pleasantly, and which made it seem a pastime. The time that was given to making cider, and the number of barrels made and stored in the cellars of the farm-houses, would now seem incredible. A hundred barrels to a single farm was no uncommon proportion, and the quantity swallowed by the men of that day led to the habits of intemperance which at length alarmed the more thoughtful part of the community, and gave occasion to the formation of temperance societies and the introduction of better habits.
From time to time, the winter evenings, and occasionally a winter afternoon, brought the young people of the parish together in attendance upon a singing-school. Some person who possessed more than common power of voice and skill in modulating it, was employed to teach psalmody, and the boys were naturally attracted to his school as a recreation. It often happened that the teacher was an enthusiast in his vocation, and thundered forth the airs set down in the music-books with a fervor that was contagious. A few of those who attempted to learn psalmody were told that they had no aptitude for the art, and were set aside, but that did not prevent their attendance as hearers of the others. In those days a set of tunes were in fashion mostly of New England origin, which have since been laid aside in obedience to a more fastidious taste. They were in quick time, sharply accented, the words clearly articulated, and often running into fugues in which the bass, the tenor, and the treble chased each other from the middle to the end of the stanza. I recollect that some impatience was manifested when slower and graver airs of church music were introduced by the choir, and I wondered why the words should not be sung in the same time that they were pronounced in reading.
The streams which bickered through the narrow glens of the region in which I lived were much better stocked with trout in those days than now, for the country had been newly opened to settlement. The boys all were anglers. I confess to having felt a strong interest in that "sport," as I no longer call it. I have long since been weaned from the propensity of which I speak; but I have no doubt that the instinct which inclines so many to it, and some of them our grave divines, is a remnant of the original wild nature of man. Another "sport," to which the young men of the neighborhood sometimes admitted the elder boys, was the autumnal squirrel-hunt. The young men formed themselves into two parties equal in number, and fixed a day for the shooting. The party which on that day brought down the greatest number of squirrels was declared the victor, and the contest ended with some sort of festivity in the evening.
I have not mentioned other sports and games of the boys of that day,—that is to say, of seventy or eighty years since,—such as wrestling, running, leaping, base-ball, and the like, for in these there was nothing to distinguish them from the same pastimes at the present day. There were no public lectures at that time on subjects of general interest; the profession of public lecturer was then unknown, and eminent men were not solicited, as they now are, to appear before audiences in distant parts of the country, and gratify the curiosity of strangers by letting them hear the sound of their voices. Hut the men of those days were far more given to attendance on public worship than those who now occupy their place, and of course they took their boys with them. They were not satisfied with the morning and afternoon services, but each neighborhood held a third service of its own in the evening. Here some lay brother made a prayer, hymns were sung by those who were trained at the singing-schools, a sermon was read from the works of some orthodox divine, and now and then a word of exhortation was addressed to the little assembly by some one who was more fluent in speech than the rest.
Every parish had its tything-men, two in number generally, whose business it was to maintain order in the church during divine service, and who sat with a stern countenance through the sermon, keeping a vigilant eye on the boys in the distant pews and in the galleries. Sometimes, when he detected two of them communicating with each other, he went to one of them, took him by the button, and leading him away, seated him beside himself. His power extended to other delinquencies. He was directed by law to see that the Sabbath was not profaned by people wandering in the fields and angling in the brooks. At that time a law, no longer in force, directed that any person who absented himself unnecessarily from public worship for a certain length of time, should pay a fine into the treasury of the county. I remember several persons of whom it was said that they had been compelled to pay this fine, but I do not remember any of them who went to church afterward.
For the boys of the present day an immense number of books have been provided, some of them excellent, some mere trash or worse, but scarce any are now read which arc not of recent date. The question is often asked, What books had they to read seventy or eighty years since? They had books, and some of great merit. There was Sanford and Merton, and Little Jack; there was Robinson Crusoe, with its variations The Swiss Family Robinson and The New Robinson Crusoe; there was Mrs. Trimmer's Knowledge of Nature, and Berquin's lively narratives and sketches translated from the French; there was Philip Quaril, and Watts's Poems for Children, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Mrs. Barbauld's writings, and the Miscellaneous Poems of Cowper. Later, we had Mrs. Edgworth's Parent's Assistant and Evenings at Home. All these, if not numerous, were at least often read, and the frequent reading of a few good books is thought to be at least as improving—as useful in storing the mind and teaching one to think—as the more cursory reading of many. Of elementary books there was no lack, nor, as I have already intimated, any scarcity of private instructors, principally clergymen, educated at the colleges.
I have here set down such particulars as now occur to me of the employments, the amusements, and the studies amidst which the boys of my time grew up and were trained for the duties of manhood. Of those who set out with me in life there are few now remaining; they are like old trees in a young wood, waiting for a high wind to snap their aged trunks and level them with the ground. They became dispersed to different parts of the country, particularly the new States of the West, whose institutions they have helped to form. They had grown up, in the main, a conscientious generation—laborious, enterprising, strict in the performance of duty, and obedient to the laws; and on this account they were the very men to whom the task of forming new communities might be most advantageously committed. A few of them became distinguished above their fellows. One became an eminent Orientalist, and settled at Athens, in Greece. Another, with whom I used to contend in the foot-race, became one of the millionaires of New York, and died not long since full of days, leaving an honored memory. A third, my schoolfellow in preparing for college, retired from a prosperous mercantile career to become a lecturer on political economy and the author of valuable works on that science. One with whom I had a series of written disputations, migrated to Indiana and became one of its legislators. One was afterward the founder of the American Tract Society, and now, in the calm evening of a long life, employs himself in writing its history. Two went to the East as missionaries, and in the midst of their labors laid down their lives before the approach of old age.
Whatever may have been the merits or the shortcomings of the generation to which these men belonged, they are now with the past, and it is yet to be seen whether the different system now adopted in training the youth of our country will give it a better class of citizens.
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