Lowell, Massachusetts

“ The grandfather of the poet, Judge John Lowell, was author of the clause in the Bill of Rights abolishing slavery in Massachusetts. One of his sons was founder of the great manufacturing city on the Merrimac which bears his name. A grandson established the Lowell Institute, a system of popular instruction by free courses of lectures,—a system unique, in that it aims to bring to its audiences representative454 scholars, chosen less for their skill in the graceful but often specious art of public speaking than for solid attainments. ”

“ The girls of Lowell—the Lucindas, the Alleghanias, the Tancredas, the Velledas—who, after a day's labor, pass into the street in silken dresses, with gold watches shining at their zone, and their beautiful faces shaded by parasols—those Massachusetts weavers, who have even instituted an academy among themselves—do not in their innocent verses, invoke the vengeful muses. ”

“ To know any one well it is needful to inquire into his ancestry, and two or three hints may be given of the currents that met in this poet. On his father's side he came from a succession of New England men who for the previous three generations had been in professional life. The Lowells traced their descent from Percival Lowell,—a name which survives in the family,—of Bristol, England, who settled in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1639. ”

“ We generally speak of a man's descent. In the case of James Russell Lowell's ancestry it was rather an ascent through eight generations. Percival Lowle's son, John Lowell, was a worthy cooper in old Newbury; his great-grandson was a shoemaker, his great-great-grandson was the Rev. John Lowell of Newburyport, the father of the Hon. John Lowell, who is regarded as the author of the clause in the Massachusetts Constitution abolishing slavery. ”

“ He was appointed in 1784 on the commission to decide boundary disputes between Massachusetts and New York. In 1789 he became U. S. judge for the district of Massachusetts, and in 1801 he was appointed chief justice of the 1st circuit, including Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Judge Lowell was president of the Massachusetts agricultural society for years, and contributed toward the establishment of the botanic garden at Cambridge. Harvard gave him the degree of LL. D. in 1792. ”

“ And yet the skill of the managers had something greater still behind, in Massachusetts linked arm in arm with South Carolina. To be sure, a thoughtful mind might find something like a false syllogism in pairing off a Commonwealth whose greatest sin it has been to lead the van in freedom of opinion, and in those public methods of enlightenment which make it a safeguard of popular government, with an Oligarchy whose leadership has been in precisely the opposite direction, as if both had equally sinned against American ideas. ”

“ Whose intellect is equalled but by few,
Should strive for what he'd weep to find were true!
Lowell had lived in Concord near Judge Hoar and Colonel Whiting, and had frequented Emerson's house, at the east end of the village, where the Turnpike left the main Lexington road (now Massachusetts Avenue) , up and down which the Redcoats had marched on that eventful 19th of April, which, opened the War of Independence. In years ensuing, Lowell followed Emerson in that path of literary independence which led New England away from servile imitation of English models ”

“ A faint smile plays about these last expressions of his kindly nature, as he seems to wave the world aside that he may take his friends by the hand. Death found him cheerful, and he passed away in the middle of the bright summer.{409}
APPENDIX A. THE LOWELL ANCESTRY I. Paternal. [110]
1. The first American ancestor of the Massachusetts Lowells was Perceval Lowell, written also Lowle, who came from Somersetshire, England, in 1639, when he was 68 years old, and was one of the early settlers of Newbury, Mass., which was organized in 1642. ”

“ There was even one man found in Massachusetts, who, measuring the moral standard of his party by his own, had the unhappy audacity to declare publicly that there were friends enough of the South in his native State to prevent the march of any troops thence to sustain that Constitution to which he had sworn fealty in Heaven knows how many offices, the rewards of almost as many turnings of his political coat. ”

“ Lowell’s early poems do not show much novelty of theme or manner. They are on about the same subjects that all men were writing verse upon in the forties, and written with the same vocabulary, images, and rhythms. Love, nature, liberty, idealism, classic story, personal moods are the themes, but there is some novelty in the ingenuity of the phrases and in the new fauna and flora. If he was following the English romanticists he was transferring their worship of beauty to a New England landscape and their religious musings to the turmoil of idealism that stirred the youth of Massachusetts. ”

“ They would have been likely to answer the claim, "I am as good as anybody," by a quiet "Yes, for some things, but not for others; as good, doubtless, in your place, where all things are good." What the early settlers of Massachusetts did intend, and what they accomplished, was the founding here of a new England, and a better one, where the political superstitions and abuses of the old should never have leave to take root. So much, we may say, they deliberately intended. No nobles, either lay or cleric, no great landed estates, and no universal ignorance as the seed-plot of vice and unreason ”

“ Lowell ranked fifth in value in 1905 and fourth in 1900 among the cities of Massachusetts; more than three-tenths of the total population are factory wage-earners, and nearly 19% of the population are in the cotton mills. ”

“ Charles Lowell. At this time the north shore of Massachusetts Bay had all the charm of rock and beach which it now has, with a pristine simplicity of life which it has lost. To-day the visitor drives through the woods near Beverly by well-kept roads, meeting at every turn other carriages and pleasure parties. Then, the woods were as beautiful, but had unbroken solitude. “At Newport,” Lowell wrote to Miss Norton, “you have no woods, and ours are so grand and deep and unconverted! ”

“ The Massachusetts Quarterly, which had been started in 1847 as an organ of more progressive thought than the North American Review, was under the management of Theodore Parker, and Lowell was evidently a welcome though not constant contributor, as this letter to the editor intimates:—
Elmwood, July 28, [1848] .
My dear Sir:—Do you know where parsons go to who don’t believe in original sin? I think that your experience as an editor will bring you nearer orthodoxy by convincing you of the total depravity of contributors. ”

“ RETURN TO PRIVATE LIFE
1885-1888 Elmwood was let, and if it had been vacant Lowell could hardly have gone back there at once to live. There were too many ghosts in the house, he said. He made no attempt to take up again his college work, though he held his title of Smith Professor with emeritus added, and as his daughter had abandoned her plan of taking her children abroad, he made his home with her at Deerfoot Farm, Southborough, Massachusetts, about two hours by rail from Boston, in a pretty country where there was little intrusion of manufactures. ”

“ This man’s son, James Lowell’s grandfather, the second John Lowell, is the Lowell who as early as 1772 satisfied himself that, at the common law, slavery could not stand in Massachusetts. It is believed that he offered to a negro, while Massachusetts was still a province of the Crown, to try if the courts could not be made to liberate him as entitled to the rights of Englishmen. This motion of his may have been suggested by Lord Mansfield’s decision in 1772, in the Somerset case, which determined, from that day to this day, that—
“Slaves cannot breathe in England ”

“ Her son, William Lowell, soldier, b. in Boston, 9 July, 1840; d. near Ball's Bluff, Va., 21 Oct., 1861, was educated in France and at Harvard, where he studied mental science and law. He entered the 20th Massachusetts regiment in 1861, was ordered to the field in September, and was killed while leading his battalion to the rescue of a wounded officer. When he was borne to the hospital-tent he declined the surgeon's assistance, bidding him go to those whom his services could benefit, since his own life could not be saved. ”

“ He showed the interest in public affairs which such a young man ought to show, and such as was suggested to him by his ancestry on his father’s side and his mother’s alike. He was at the Dane Law School,—the school connected with the University at Cambridge,—when the war broke out. James Lowell and his cousin, William Putnam, also at the Law School, undertook to raise recruits for a Massachusetts regiment. After some delay they and their recruits were assigned to the Twentieth Regiment, Lowell taking a commission as First Lieutenant, and Putnam that of Second. ”

“ The population of Boston has increased 600 per cent. during the present century. Lowell, which is the great Manchester of Massachusetts, has increased its population from 6500 in 1830 to nearly 40,000 at the present date; and the capital invested, which in 1823 was only 500,000l., is now nearly 2,700,000l. I do not wish to weary my readers with statistics, and therefore trust I have said enough to convey a tolerable impression of the go-aheadism of these hardy and energetic descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers ”

“ Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1838, an Early Industrial Town
It was estimated in 1860, on the basis of the census figures, that mechanical production gave employment to 1,100,000 men and 285,000 women, making, if the average number of dependents upon them be reckoned, nearly six million people or about one-sixth of the population of the country sustained from manufactures. ”

“ His constant encouragement and example were powerful formative influences in his sister's development. Another brother is the President of Harvard, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, through whose dignified, penetrating, sensible, authoritative speeches and writings breathes the old Massachusetts love of liberty.
Courage is a salient characteristic in Amy Lowell. She is afraid of nothing, not even of her birthday. ”

“ Christopher Gore soon commenced the study of law in the office and under the direction of Judge John Lowell, in whose family he resided while a student. He commenced the practice of law in Boston with every prospect of success. He had to depend on himself alone, for not only had he his own fortune to make, but after he left college, he had to contribute to the support of his mother and three unmarried sisters, who were left in Boston without means when his father went to Halifax. ”

“ He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors chosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in for the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell's friends that he should use the original right of the electors under the constitution, and vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes. After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest trace of indignation in his tone. ”

“ I have always found that the “machine” is eager to join hands with any man of literary, inventive, or business ability who is willing, as the phrase is, to “go into politics.” Certainly this was so in Lowell’s case, and in the autumn of 1876 he was asked to take a seat in Congress which we call in Massachusetts the South Middlesex seat. It was the seat which Edward Everett had captured years before, in the face of the machine of his time. It was the seat which William Everett afterwards captured, by fine audacity, although he was not even a resident in the district. ”

“ It is not surprising that a man with his active and inquiring mind brought up in New England should, when he found himself in Arizona, want to know something of the strange plants which grew everywhere about him and which were so entirely unlike the plants which he had known as a boy in Massachusetts, and later in Japan and Korea. ”

“ Since that time the Lowell Institute has given to the people of Boston, free of charge, from fifty to one hundred lectures each winter. The topics treated have taken a wide range, and the lecturers have included many of the ablest men in this and other countries. The work of the Lowell Institute has also included free lectures for advanced students given in connection with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, science lectures to the teachers of Boston, and a free drawing school. ”

“ He was graduated at Harvard, and in the law department there, was licensed to practise, and was judge-advocate and governor's aid in Massachusetts. He was president of the common council of Lowell in 1853-'4, of the Wameset bank, and of the Mechanics' association. ”

“ So, wen one's chose to Congriss, ez soon ez he's in it,
A collar grows right round his neck in a minnit,
An' sartin it is thet a man cannot be strict
In bein' himself, wen he gits to the Deestrict,
Fer a coat thet sets wal here in ole Massachusetts,
Wen it gits on to Washinton, somehow askew sets.
Resolves, do you say, o' the Springfield Convention?
Thet's percisely the pint I was goin' to mention;
Resolves air a thing we most gen'ally keep ill,
They're a cheap kind o' dust fer the eyes o' the people ”

“ One of the provinces of the state legislature of Massachusetts is to alter ugly names into pretty ones, as the children improve upon the tastes of their parents."
If the separate articles in "The Lowell Offering" bear signatures which represent distinct writers, we have, in our selection of thirty-seven articles, given the productions of twenty-nine individual contributors. It is this circumstance which leads us to believe that many of the papers are faithful representations of individual feelings. ”