The source of this uncorrected OCR text may be viewed in the DjVu format at: http://fax.libs.uga.edu/CT275xM512xM5/ or http://purl.galileo.usg.edu/ugafax/CT275xM512xM5/ LIFE OF ci r. <,'..' -O / 1 JOSIAH MEIGS BY WM. M. MEIGS. PHILADELPHIA: 1887. LIBRAR Y\ OF THE Dniwitj of Georgia tfX îr •"*•• • •*t ' " l '•:k^&% •äiwiä / s*g§ ^5f- JJ£iOM1»2i * il ron^ ïSJSx- 3?? l '••'M •s-, 4 -v-i CHAPTEE IV. 1794-1800. Appointed Professor at Yale — Manner as a teacher — Residence and family — His interest in politics — Becomes soon a republican — State of parties, and extreme heat of party feeling at that time — Federal ist sentiment of Connecticut makes him a social outcast — Nearly dropped from his. chair at Yale from same cause — Why he finally left Yale . . . . ... CHAPTER V. 1800-1811. The University of Georgia — Meigs chosen a Professor, and its Presi dent — His activity there as a pioneer in education — Manner of instruction — Trouble between him and Trustees —— He resigns Presidency — Growing estrangement — Proceedings of Board, and his removal by them from professorship — Later opinions of this quarrel,- and of the high value of Meigs's work at Athens . CHAPTER VI. 1811-1814. His family at this time — Soon applies for office from U. S. Government — Appointed Surveyor-General — Mr. Jefferson's aid to him in this matter — Family influence — Goes to Cincinnati to live — Acquaint ances there — Cincinnati " School of Literature and the Arts " — Appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office, and etarts for Washington ....... CHAPTER VII. At length in Washington, his wanderings and struggles at an end — Details of his thoughts and character — Political views he held during life — Opinion of Adams's administration — Of the Hartford Conven- 59 tion and its supporters — Of the Connecticut Federalists — Manners at home and with his children — Friends — Joel Barlow and others — Urbanity, and general evenness of temper — Occasional outbursts — Not fond of general society — Interest in young men — Mrs. Meigs — His long struggle with poverty and debt — Indifference and care lessness about money — Personal narratives of him — His learning — Natural Sciences — Classics — Meteorology and his plan for the estab lishment of a Weather Bureau in 1817 — Congress failing to approve this plan, he collects and publishes results by voluntary work — In terest in mechanical matters, and forecast of steamboats — Religion — Portraits, and personal appearance . . . . 64 CHAPTER VIII. 1814-1822. Washington in 1814 — Land Office, dnties of — His occnpations in Wash ington — Extracts from his letters . . . .87 CHAPTER IX. Further details of his last years — President of the Columbian Institute — Professor in Columbian College — Application to Mr. Jefferson in regard to professorship in University of Virginia — His great health — Final and only illness, and death — Mrs. Meigs writes of the final scene — Funeral — Obituary notices — Membership of various societies — Mrs. Meigs survives him many years — Children they had lost — Sketches of lives of the children, who survived Josiah . . 109 Authorities . - 117 Appendices . 121 r CHAPTER I. 1757-1778. Birth—Parentage—Family History—Boyhood and Youth—Goes to Yale College—Life and Associates there—Graduation. JOSIAH MEIGS, the thirteenth child of Return Meigs and Elizabeth Hamlin, was born at Middletown, Connecticut, on_/_ the 21st day of August, 1757, in the forty-sixth year of his mother's age. His maternal grandmother was Elizabeth Pat- ridge, of Hatfield, who married John Hamlin, of Middletown, on May 3d, 1709 ; Elizabeth, the second child of this marriage and the mother of the subject of this sketch, was born at Mid dletown on February 12th, 1711-12. Josiah's father, Return, was the grandson of the grandson of Vincent Meigs, or Meggs, who, with his sons John and Mark, had settled at New Haven about 1644, after having (at least some of them) been at Wey- mouth, Mass., for a time. These immigrants seem to have come from the southeastern part of England, where more than one family of Meggs lived ; the earliest mention of any one of the name is an inscription in the church of St. Mary Bredman, Can terbury, to one "William Meggs, alderman of that city, who died January 1, 1519. The indications are that they came from Dorsetshire, but I at least have not yet found it possible to trace their connection with any English branch of the family. JOHN MEIGS, the son of Vincent, moved from New Haven to the East End of Guilford, and later to Killingworth, upon its settlement, and died there January 4th, 1671-2, leaving a com- 2 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. fortable estate. His trade was that of a tanner and currier, but he was originally also a dealer in shoes and doubtless a shoe maker. In his latter years, he was probably only engaged in farming, und it seems that he must have been a man of educa tion, for his will bequeaths manuscripts and several books, among others, a Greek and a Latin dictionary.* A record* of that ancient day tells us that he was on one occasion of eminent service to the unfortunate hunted regicides, Whalley and Goffe, and probably the means of saving their lives. Very early one Monday morning in March, 1661, he mounted his horse at Guilford and rode with speed to New Haven as a messenger to warn these fugitives that their pursuers were at Guilford, and were on the point of hurrying to New Haven to seize them and carry them off to certain death. Meigs arrived ahead of the pursuers, and the regicides, warned in time, hastened away to another of their mysterious hiding places. John Meigs had four daughters, but only one son, John, who returned about the time of the death of his father to the East End of Guilford, and died there in 1713. This second John had several children, the second of his sons being Janna. Janna lived and died in the East End of Guilford, was a captain in the Guilford train-band, and represented that town in the General Assembly of Connecti cut several times : both he and his father, John, were coopers and farmers. He died in 1739, leaving a large estate and a large family. One of his sons, Timothy, graduated at Yale in 1732. Return, the father of the subject of this sketch, was Janna's fifth child and fourth son. * This is so stated by Savage, but the existence of the Latin Dictionary is not clear to my mind. The bequest in question is of " Simpson's English Greek Lexicon and Sham's Dictionary," and all my efforts to learn what Sham's Dictionary was have been unavailing. The will is transcribed in an unusually clear hand in the Killingworth Land Eecords. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 3 It does not seem that the immigrant members of the family were so saturated with the puritanical spirit, as was possibly advisable in a settler in the colony of New Haven. Though this is not known of the eldest immigrant, Vincent, yet it may be safely said of his son John, for he was frequently in hot water with the authorities of that most blackly puritanical colony, and took an active part against her in the contest with Con necticut. On one occasion at Guilford, he was complained of to the authorities for noisily driving his cart along the road late in the night on the Lord's Day ; he appeared and explained (the Court Records tell us) " that he was mistaken in the time of the day, thinking that he had time enough for the journey, but being somewhat more laden than he expected the cattle came more slowly than usual and so cast him behind, it proving to be more late of the day than he had thought. But he professeth to be sorry for his mistake and the offence justly given thereby, promising to be more careful for time to come. The Court con sidering the premises did see cause (seeing that the matter seemed to be done upon a surprisal and not witting or willingly) to pass it over with a reproof for this first time, enjoining a public acknowledgment of his evil in so neglecting to remember the Sabbath, on the next lecture or fast day, with all the aggravating circumstances in it." Decidedly, this first John did not get along well with the authorities of his adopted home, but the case was different with the second John and with Janna. They appear to have been of some importance in the affairs of the colony, and held positions both of a religious and political nature. RETUEN MEIGS was born at Guilford, March 16th, 1707-8, and the Middletown records tell us that he and Elizabeth Hamlin " ware joyned for Marriage Covenant Féby 1st, 1732-3." k LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. He moved to Middletown and was a hatter there;2 in 1745 he was appointed lieutenant of the second company or train- . band in the 6th regiment of Connecticnt; and in 1747 he was deputy to the General Assembly from Middletown. The large families said to be nsual in those days, were strongly exemplified in the case of Eeturn and his wife, for they had no less than thirteen children ; but the vigor of constitution also claimed for the children of our ancestors was by no means evidenced in this family, for but four out of the thirteen children attained man hood, and the greater number died in early infancy. Mrs. Meigs died September 17th, 1762, and on March 25th, 1763, Eeturn married a second wife, a widow by name Jane Doane, by whom he had no children. This is nearly all I have been able to learn of Eeturn Meigs. He was a little over sixty-seven years old, when the first blood of the Eevolutionary war was shed at Lexington, and therefore past the age when he could well take any active part in that struggle ; and there is no evi dence to show what opinions he entertained upon the questions at issue. He died poor, if not bankrupt, on the 22d of June, 1782, and is buried by the side of his first wife in the old ceme tery at Middletown on the banks of the Connecticut river. His second wife survived him, as did also his four children who attained majority : they were Eeturn Jonathan, Giles, John and Josiah. KETUKN JoNATHAN3was born December 17th, 1740; had been ensign, lieutenant and captain in the Connecticut militia before the Eevolution ; and, at the outbreak of that contest, after Lexington, marched with a company of men to the neighborhood of Boston. He soon became the Colonel of the Sixth Connecti cut infantry, a body which seems to have attained some reputa- LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. 5 tion and was known as the Leather-cap Regiment.* He went with Arnold, as commander of one of the divisions of the army, through the forests of Maine on the ill-fated expedition against Canada, but was captured in the assault upon Quebec. He was exchanged before very long, and it is of interest to know that Samuel Adams* was instrumental in procuring his exchange. He was to some degree intimate with General Montgomery, and kept a journal of the Canada expedition, which closes with the following entry, made soon after his capture and imprisonment : " 1776, January 1st. This whole day in the Seminary. The first day I knew confinement. I hope I shall bear it with becoming fortitude. Major McKenzie brought Gen. Mont gomery's knee-buckles and Mr. McPherson's gold broach, and made a present of them to me, which I highly value for the sake of their late worthy owners." After his exchange he returned once more to his military duties, led later one of the columns in the assault and capture of Stony Point, and distinguished him self by the command of a very successful secret expedition against Sagg Harbor on Long Island. For his behavior on this occasion, Congress voted him a sword, which was presented after the war and is still preserved (as are also Gen. -Montgomery's knee-buckles) by one of his grandchildren, E. J. Meigs, of Washington. He took also an active part in the suppression of * This is said upon the authority of a letter, dated " Jefferson, Ashtabula Co., January 30, 1819," from one Josiah Atkyns to Col. Meigs, in which the writer says :—" Forty years have almost elapsed since I took my discharge from under your hand at Springfield, New Jersey. The acquaintance that I have had with you for three years as a Colonel of the famous Leather-cap Eegiment of the Eevolutionary Army hath bound me to you by no common tie." The writer then goes on to say that he is in distress and wants to obtain the benefit of the Act of Congress for Eevolutionary soldiers, and requests Col. Meiga to send him a certificate. S LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. the famine-caused mutiny among the troops of the Connecticut line in May, 1780; in his efforts to suppress this alarming trouble, Col. Meigs, who was temporarily in command of the brigade to which the regiments in mutiny belonged, was struck by one of the soldiers, but finally induced the great mass of the men to return to their duty ; some few had to be arrested and confined. The mutiny, thus successfully averted for the moment by Col. Meigs's energy, gave Gen. Washington " more concern than anything that had ever happened," and was only finally composed after thfi utmost difficulty. After the war, Meigs was doubtless penniless and without prospect, and he removed to Ohio, where he played a highly important part in the early government of that new settlement. Henry Meigs* gives a graphic account from boyish memory of his uncle's setting out on his long and wearisome journey through the forests to the Ohio country : he writes as follows :—" [one afternoon] in the year 1788 he [Col. Meigs] with his son R. J. arrived * * * from Middletown at Stratford, and after some re freshments and adieux they mounted their horses, which were hardy Canadian ponies. I went out of doors to them with a pewter mug of Flip (beer, rum and sugar heated by irons); they were in their saddles ; they drank it off and said good-bye—it was nearly dark when they left us." Later still, he removed to Hiawassee, Tennessee, where he was commissioner to the Cherokee Indians, among whom he had great influence and was known as the White Path. He had applied without success for office under President Washington and probably under Adams ; and received the above appointment within a month of Jeffer- * Henry Meigs will be so often quoted from in the following pages, that it is best to say at the start that the eldest son of Josiah Meigs is always the person referred to, unless otherwise expressly stated. LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. 7 son's inauguration in a very kind letter from Secretary Dearborn who signs himself "your old friend and humble servant." He lived at Hiawassee many years and attained the advanced age of eighty-three: to the end he was straight, tall and vigorous. While at the Indian agency he was in frequent communication by letter with his brother Josiah, who was seventeen years younger than he, and who had the highest admiration and warmest affection for his eldest brother. I have often heard it said that Col. Meigs is one of the figures introduced by Trumbull into his well-known painting of the death of Gen. Montgomery, but had always doubted the statement because he was in fact nowhere near Montgomery in the assault upon Quebec. What I have recent ly learned, however, seems to leave no doubt tliat Trumbull had allowed himself an artist's license, and that the statement was correct, for Henry Meigs writes that Trumbull personally knew Col. Meigs, and that the latter is in the engraving in his " Rifle dress as a Major—his left hand open and raised on the right [observer's left] of the picture." He also figures as one of the characters in a dramatization, of the Revolutionary period, of the assault upon Quebec : this drama was, I believe, produced in Philadelphia. Of Giles Meigs, the second son of Return who survived I know but little of interest. Field says of him that he " was a captain of militia in the Revolution and went with his company to New London." He was twice married in Middletown, and probably lived and died there. The third son to reach maturity was John. At the begin ning of the Revolution, he entered the army as a volunteer, was attached to the regiment of Col. Webb, and soon obtained a commission. He was adjutant and later Brigade Major, was wounded during the war, and was the recipient of a pension IF 8 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. 9 .0 from the United States. He is said to have been a very active officer and much beloved by his troops. After the Revolution he continued in the militia as Brigade Major,5 and in 1799, when war was thought imminent with France, he was nomi nated to a captaincy in the army by President Adams. He had moved from Middletown to New Hartford in 1796, and died there in 1826 at the age of seventy-three, leaving a large family. Of Josiah's early years, but very little is known. He was born in Middletown, and his infancy and boyhood and early youth were passed in the rather narrow atmosphere of that small New England town. He had doubtless been named after his father's brother, Josiah, who represented Guilford in the Gen eral Assembly in 1767, and who had been several times an officer in the train-band of that town. When the boy was at the early age of five years, his mother died, and his father very soon remarried, but no further actual knowledge of his boyhood has reached us ; we are therefore left altogether to conjecture as to his early tendencies and character. The house of his father, who was a hatter, was probably a plain one even for those sim ple days, and would certainly to-day be classed as severely plain : the inventory of the father's estate shows that he died poor, owning one picture, a few books, mainly of a religious tendency, and little else but plain household furniture, and the implements of his trade. The apparently boundless store of health possessed by Josiah up to the time of his last and only illness, renders it likely that he was a boy of a stirring disposition, and fond of open air sports and all amusements of an active nature ; and it would be no bold flight of the imagination to picture him to our selves as often taking long boyish tramps over the fields near Middletown, and fishing and swimming in the Connecticut river : thus at the same time laying unconsciously the founda tion of his health, and cultivating that love of nature and power of observation, which were destined to play an import ant part in his not uneventful life. At this time, too, were probably laid the foundation of his life-long political belief, during the days when the English authorities were striving to repress the rising spirit of resistance in the colonists and to re duce them to absolute submission to the will of Parliament. He was not eight years old at the time of the passage of the Stamp Act, and was not quite eighteen, when the first blood of the war was shed at Lexington ; so he grew up to youth at a time when political subjects were constantly under discussion, and when the rights of the people and the wrongs committed against them by those in authority were daily talked of with the utmost freedom and warmth. It is true that there is no positive evidence as to the opinions of his father, Return Meigs, upon these subjects, but it is hardly assuming much to say that the earnest espousal of the patriot cause from the very beginning by two of the sons is almost conclusive evidence that Return favored the American side ; and that Josiah, therefore, began to imbibe his love of popular government at his father's table, in his early school-boy days. Moreover, the boy must, in any event, have been much influenced by the strongly American . views of his brothers Return Jonathan and John, who were respectively seventeen and four years his seniors, and who so early volunteered their services in the field. It is often said that the boy is father to the man, and the boyhood of Josiah seems to have been peculiarly calculated in point of time to lay the founda tions of a character entirely American and free from any taint of colonial days. He hardly came into the world early enough even to remember the time, when, in American mouths, home meant England ; and from the days when he was first old 10 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 11 t.! enough to observe until he became a full-grown man, his native land was engaged in a desperate struggle for existence with her mother-country. Feelings instilled into the human mind so early and impressed upon it for so many years, are rarely rooted out, and it will be found that he always felt a bias against Eng land and retained to the last a kind spot in his heart for France. No record tells us of the education Josiah received as a boy, but it is unlikely that it was any better than was given to the average boy of that day, for it was plainly not the original in tention of his father that he should be brought up as a student or learned man. On the contrary he served6 for a time in' some capacity in his father's store, presumably, as an apprentice in the business and with the intention of following it during his life. Whether the business did not succeed or Josiah showed no fitness for it, or whether he was thought to show capabilities for some more intellectual occupation is not known, but he gave it up and went to Yale College, graduating there in 1778, at the age of twenty-one years. The class, of which he was a member, contained many names afterwards widely known. Noah Webster and Joel Barlow achieved a continental and even yet wider fame, while Oliver Wolcott, Uriah Tracy, Zephaniah Swift, Ashur Miller, and Noah Smith, were all prominent names at a later day in the federal councils and in various departments'of the administration of Connecticut. The years which this class passed at Yale were indeed troublous times: in the summer of 1777 the College was entirely broken up because of the dangers incident to the war, and Josiah's class was sent to GlastonburyT under the charge of Tutor Buckminster ; and at another time, Webster's diary tells us, the country was so impoverished that " the steward of the college could not supply the necessary provisions of the table, and the students were compelled to return to spend several months at home." Another matter of interest is told by Web ster ; in the spring of 1775, General Washington passed through New Haven on his way to assume command of the American army at Cambridge. He passed a night in New Haven, inspected the students, and was much pleased at the precision with which they performed their manual drill ; and on his de parture, the Yale company escorted him as far as Neck Bridge. Webster says, that on this momentous occasion it fell to his humble lot to lead the company with music, and it is to be pre sumed that Josiah Meigs and all the class—then freshmen— followed to the strains of the future lexicographer's inspiring notes. Some of the students of that day saw war more closely than on this occasion of boyish parade. Webster, whose father was captain of some volunteer company, shouldered his musket one summer ; and Joel Barlow did the same thing more than once, and took part8 in the battles of Long Island and White Plains. During his collegiate life, Meigs was a member9 of the Honor ary Fellowship Club, a Literary Society of the undergraduates, but no record of interest remains of the society's doings at this time. Until the last year at college, his class was probably chiefly instructed by the tutors, among whom were Timothy Dwight, Abraham Baldwin, and Joseph Buckminster, all men of marked ability and with all but the last of whom he had other relations later in life. Naphtali Daggett was the President of the College during the first part of Meigs's life there, but was succeeded by Ezra Stiles in 1777. The biographer of President Stiles10 tells us that it was the President's custom to take par ticular charge of the senior class, and that he instructed them in metaphysics, ethics, history, civil policy, and in theology ; using t? s o •- -.9--. •- - 'OU 12 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. as text-books Locke on the Human Understanding, Paley's Moral Philosophy, Priestly on History, Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, and Vincent's Exposition of the Assembly's Catechism. He also taught them Hebrew, exercised them in extemporaneous and forensic and occasionally in syllogistic disputation ; lectured to them on ecclesiastical history, and on Saturdays at evening prayers expounded to them the Savoy Confession of Faith, while " on Tuesdays and Fridays the undergraduates in rotation de claimed before him, after evening prayers in the chapel ; and he commended or criticised these performances, according to their 1 respective merits." President Stiles's diary11 will also tell the curious with what strange rigor all sorts of academic forms were adhered to at the graduation in 1778, and how, at last, when they had dragged out their weary length, the degrees were con ferred and the exercises followed in the chapel; among these12 were " a cliosophic oration in Latin by Sir Meigs," and various other performances by Sirs Barlow, Webster, and others. Clio- sophio13 was " a collegiate term, applied to an Oration on the Arts and Sciences, delivered annually at an examination in July ;" but I have not learned for what .special reason the members of the graduating class were given the title Sir. These facts are certainly important as showing the training Meigs received and the men he was thrown with at College, but it must be added that his later life does not show that the branches we are told President Stiles taught made any very deep hold on his mind. It is probable that his inborn tendencies looked in other directions, and that the teachings of some of the tutors had more influence upon him. College life and instruction in his day were so utterly different from what is found in modern places of learning that we can hardly realize just what it was ; and the years he passed in his alma mater were, moreover, a LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 13 period of change, when the restless spirit of innovation was just beginning to make violent assaults on the old cast-iron system of rigidly classical education. In writing of the life of Meigs's classmate, Barlow, at Yale, Mr Todd says1* that the then advan tages ofthat college, "judged by modern standards, were ridicu lously small. Two small buildings and a chapel were all that the pretty campus could then boast. The college butler was still an institution, and the students were still gathered in the Com mons Hall, under the eye of tutors. A few young members of the faculty, by strenuous efforts, had just succeeded in admitting English composition and oratory to a curriculum which had ' before embraced only the dead languages, mathematics, philoso phy, and polemic divinity. Poetry, belles lettres, and the modern languages were largely ignored." For a time, at least, Meigs was under the instructions of Tutor Buckminster; and the author just quoted shows 15 that this gentleman, who was a min ister of distinction, was more liberal than were most of his cloth: it was his habit to encourage freedom of inquiry among the members of his class, even upon religious subjects, and this he did although he says it led him at times into difficulty. It is not unlikely that these discussions had an influence upon Meigs's mind, but it does not seem easy to show that the general morale of the then college life affected his future greatly. It is true that he maintained his classical knowledge all through life and that mathematics was to the end a delight to him—as it seems to have been the branch in which his capacities had been ob served16 at college—but, apart from these subjects, his college studies seem rather to have been wanting in any marked influ ence on the direction of his studies, or, so far as I can see, upon his mental habits. «l. * -i LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 15 CHAPTER II. 1778-1788. Little known of three following years—Miss Clara Benjamin, of Stratford —Appointed Tutor at Yale—Marriage—Admitted to bar—Residence, and birth of eldest child—Resigns tutorship to establish printing-office and publish The New Haven Gazette—That paper's changes, tendencies and circulation—End , of its publication. BUT very little has been found relating to Meigs for the three years immediately following upon his graduation. He doubtless kept up his studies, and it is very likely that he supported himself by teaching, but nothing has been preserved to show positively what he was doing in this interim for his support and advancement. Indeed, only one bare mention of his name occurs in this period, so far as I know : this is contained in a letter from Joel Barlow to Miss Ruth Baldwin, then his inam orata and later his wife. Barlow writes, as follows,17 from Mid- dletown, on July 26, 1779 :—" The bearer, Miss Fowler, will tell you what a fine dance we had last night at Captain Starr's. I * * am now with Meigs, who sends love to you." As the writer of this letter and Josiah Meigs were classmates and life-long friends, it may safely be assumed that Josiah is the Meigs re ferred to, and it may probably also be concluded from it that he, like other young men, indulged in balls and dances, and that he had been present with Barlow at this particularly fine dance at the house of Captain Starr, who was doubtless a relative of the second wife of Josiah's brother, Col. Meigs. It is probable that it was during these three years after gradu ation that Meigs made the acquaintance of Clara Benjamin, who became later his wife. Her home was at Stratford, some fifteen or twenty miles from New Haven, and she was the daughter of Col. John Benjamin,18 who was descended from another John Benja- min,'a settler at Watertown, Mass., in 1632. Col. Benjamin appears to have had some education as an engineer and was at least once employed in that capacity in his later years.* He had served in the Revolution and received a bullet-wound in the shoulder at the battle of Ridgefield. During the war he became strongly attached to a Spanish gentleman, and named his young est son Delucena after him, and the same name was also given later to the third son (Chas. Delucena) of Josiah and Clara Meigs. Col. Benjamin died at Stratford, Sept. 14th, 1796, partly from the results of his wound : he was thrown from a sleigh, tore a blood-vessel near his old wound and bled to death. So far as is known, no portrait exists of Clara Benjamin, but her daughter had at one time a silhouette of her, and it is probable that she was a beautiful woman. A daughter of her daughter, who saw a great deal of her in her latter years, writes, "she must have beeu very pretty. * * * She had a beautiful profile, blue eyes, brown hair, fair skin, and a good figure, not quite middle height." She appears, too, to have been a woman of some mettle, and tells in a letter written more than * This is. stated upon the authority of a notice in The New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Magazine of July 5, 1787, which reads as follows :— " New Haven, July 5, DESCRIPTION of BENJAMIN'S bridge at NE WFIELD in Stratford. This bridge is 432 feet long between the abutments at each end and each abutment is 45 feet long—so that the whole length is 522 feet—[It] was begun on the llth day of April, 1786, and finished on the llth day of September, following, at an expense of S30 pounds. The work was conducted by Col. Johu Benjamin, of Stratford." LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. sixty years afterwards, how once during the Eevolution her father, having been informed that tories were coming from Long Island to burn his home and carry him off, called her to him at the head of the stair-case and asked whether she would, if he were attacked, hand him cartridges and enable him to defend himself and his house. She replied that she would, and they were prepared for the attack, but, though the tories came to carry out their purpose, they went off without making the attempt. In 1781, when only 24 years of age, Meigs was appointed Tutor of Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Astronomy in Yale College; and ou January 21st, 1782, he was married to Clara Benjamin. He held his position as tutor for three years, and there is reason to suppose that he filled it with marked suc cess. Holmes writes18 that he gave at this time ample proofs of his mathematical talents, and it will be seen later that he was chosen to fill a professorship of nearly the same subjects in the College some years afterwards, largely because of the favorable impression he had made during his tutorship. In the first class committed to his charge as a tutor, as he himself tells us many years later, were several older than he; and it contained some forty or fifty students, among whom were Jedidiah Morse, the Geographer, John Cotton Smith, Governor of Connecticut, and several other distinguished men. It is probable that he was at this same time studying law, for he was admitted19 a member of the bar in New Haven in April 1783. Further than this, no record of him at this time has been found, and nothing shows whether he then practised law or not ; but, as it is likely that, in those days of worthless paper-money and extreme and uni versal poverty, he suftered no little of the res angusta domi of which he writes some thirty years later in reference to his son LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 17 Charles, it will not be very venturesome to assume that he gladly eked out his Yale salary by private teaching, and by the acceptance of -whatever law-cases came to his hands. He lived at this time " in the old double frame house called the Sherman house opposite the southerly end of Yale College buildings ;" and here Henry Meigs—his eldest son—tells us he " first saw the light on the 28th of October, 1782, in a heavy gale of wind." In 1784 Meigs resigned his Yale tutorship and entered upon a new course of life, establishing a printing office and publish ing The New Haven Gazette, in conjunction with Daniel Bowen and Eleutheros Dana. I am at a loss to conjecture from what source came the money to purchase the plant for this occupation. Meigs's father had died two years before, but had left no estate, if he was not even bankrupt ; and, as Josiah appears from the firm's name to have been the senior partner of the publishing house, it can hardly be supposed that the other members fur nished all the financial means. During its continuance of four or five years, the paper went through several changes of name and ownership. It was at first The New Haven Gazette, and the first number dated May 13th, 1784, contains a notice that the three partners " have opened a Printing Office, a few Hods west of the College, in Chapel Street, where they are ready to perform Printing work of every kind," and asking for useful essays for their paper, which was to be issued weekly to subscri bers at the price of 8 shillings per annum. It continued to be published in this form until February, 1786, when Bowen retired from the firm, and the remaining members took entire charge of the printing office and continued the paper under the name of The New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Magazine, in a somewhat different form and at the price of 9 (soon reduced again to 8) shillings per annum. A year and a half later, Meiga 18 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. & Dana dissolved partnership by mutual consent, and from ] August 2d, 1787, Meigs was the sole publisher. The paper was of rather a literary character, but all papers of that day were very different from those of our time. There were no editorials or leading articles, nor was the reading matter principally made up of articles written by a staff of attachés or reporters. The paper we are concerned with—and I believe it was much the same with all others—contained a request for articles to be sent in by persons not directly attached to it at all; and its columns teem with writings from the pens of Lycurgus, Cato, Agricola, and others of the mighty dead, who, could they bnt hear their 18th century utterances, would be greatly sur prised and mystified at the subjects they discnss and the ideas they express. It contains also mathematical questions to be solved, poems, sonnets, elegies, news from all parts of the ! world (often or generally in the shape of extracts from private letters), œnigmas for the ladies, and extracts of some length from recently published books—from the Wealth of Nations, then about ten years old, from Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, and from the Marqnis of Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishments, among many others ;—and scientific observations, and notes of sci entific books and discoveries are of constant occurrence. Num bers of letters describe the "Western Country" and its wonders and trials, at least one of which bears the signature of the great pioneer DanielBooneat "Fayette County, Kentucke;" and the volumes fairly overflow with letters expressing all sorts of opinions on the currency and general politics of the day, and often carried on with much asperity and personal vituperation through several numbers by answer, reply, replication and rejoinder. Some indelicacy is indulged in in pnns, verses, and other writings, of a much higher flavor than is to be found in LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 19 the papers of a hundred years later ; and it is not without interest to find in the number of February 23d, 1786, an account of the operation of transplanting teeth from one mouth to another, with some reference to certain dangers attending it; and in that of November 23d of the same year an account of the far-famed, but still questionable, sea-serpent.* The events leading up to the adoption of our present constitu tion are followed with great apparent interest, arid there can be no doubt that the paper was conducted with a view to aid in the establishment of a more perfect Union, and that it exercised an important influence in that direction. This tendency is apparent * I am not conversant enough with the history of dress to feel sure of my ground, but think that the " protuberances," referred to in the following article are the lineal ancestors of the highly-developed bustle of our own day. Tht Gazttle and Magazine of July 27,1786, contains the following, dated Paris, May 8 :—" The present fashionable protuberances so much in vogue among the females, have by the adroitness of two dressy fair ones of this capital, been turned to a profitable, instead of expensive fashion, and gave rise to a laughable adventure. The females in question had contrived to fill bladders with brandy, which they substituted for cork, wool, wire, &c., and thus equipped in the most outre prominence of the mode, they passed several times in a day unsuspected through the gates of Paris, smuggling no inconsiderable quantity of brandy. The frequency of their excursions caused some suspicions among the officers at the gates, who attempted to touch their garments, but this was resisted by the fair ones with every appearance of affected modesty ; however one of the officers having sufficient information of what was going forward, determined to detect them, and providing himself with a sharp-pointed instrument he slily pierced what is nowadays usually made of cork, when lo! a fountain of brandy played from the orifice to the great diversion of the spectators and the no small confusion of the fair one. The result was rather serious, as they were both confined, and there are now actually females at the gates whose business it is as decently, as possible to examine into the protuberances of such ladies as appear to be in outre of the present fashion. What a pity, as there are so few means to gain a decent living, that they should not be permitted.to dress to advantage, when fashion will admit of it ! " 20 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. before the meeting of the Convention of 1787, for the paper under the new title in 1786 started off with the first of a series of articles by " Lycurgus " entitled " Observations on the present situation and future Prospects of this and the United States," and evidently intended to favor federal sentiment. Many other articles of the same tendency are printed over other signatures, before that Convention met ; while, during its sittings, occasional speculation is indulged in as to its deliberations, and confident opinions expressed of the harmony of its members—so well was the secret of their contests concealed. The Convention finished its labors on the 17th of September, and the newly proposed constitution was printed in full in the Gazette and Magazine of the 27th of the same month : and after that date, while the con stitution was under discussion by the people and in the State conventions, numerous articles are to be found discussing it, some in high praise and some in severe condemnation : fragments, too, are given of the debates of the Connecticut and Massachusetts Conventions.* Though, as already mentioned, the paper can hardly be said in our modern sense to have avowedly advocated any special course of action, and had indeed no regular editorial page on which to do so, yet the prevailing tendency of its columns was strongly in favor of the adoption of the constitu tion ; and it may be put down with perfect certainty that Josiah Meigs, who was its sole editor from a time some weeks preceding the making public of that instrument, was heartily in favor of its ratification. Another proof that the paper and its editor were in favor of the constitution is contained in a letter of Col. Humphreys to Alexander Hamilton, f dated New Haven, Sept. 16th, 1787. ' See Appendix A. t See Appendix B. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 21 It is probable that many of the articles signed by high-sound ing classical names were in reality the work of the editors and owners, and I had hoped to be able, by some chance internal evidence, to recognize that some of them were from Meigs's pen, and in this way to ascertain further ikcts in relation to his opinions and style of composition, but have not been able to do so with any certainty. At first I thought that the series of arti cles above referred to, by " Lycurgus," was from his pen, but came later to think it very unlikely that some of the opinions they contain could be his : while now a more careful reading has made me at least suspect that he wrote both them and another series called " The Friend, by James Littlejohn, Esquire." Both of these productions seem to me very well written ; Lycurgus writes in a vein of ironical laudation of the absolute perfection of the Articles of Confederation and of the state of the country under that instrument; while James Little- John furnishes essays upon many different subjects, evidently more or less modelled upon the Spectator and the Rambler. The first-named series contains in its first article, and the last-named in its second, some details of the early lives of the writers, which may very well be Meigs's account of his own childhood, so well do they in general fit in with the little known of him at that time and with the probabilities of the case. But it is necessary to this theory to assume that at least James Littlejohn allowed himself some little freedom and departed in certain particulars from the actual details of his youth. So it will be seen that it is really impossible to do much more than conjecture upon the subject. Chance has preserved the fact that Noah Webster20 wrote some articles for the paper, and it is known that a series of papers, called the "Auarchiad," was from21 the joint pens of Barlow, Trumbull, Humphreys, and Hopkins : this, also, was a 22 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. pro-Union production, and was much appreciated and widely copied into other papers. As already said, the paper was a weekly one. It contained about eight pages to the number, for a time after the change in 1786 without advertisements, which were then printed separately, but later were again printed in the body of the paper, as they had been in the earlier days of the Gazette. The printed page was about eight and a half by seven and a half inches with no very large margin, and the type used was fairly good, and some of it larger than papers of to-day bestow on us ; but the paper was most wretched, and for this reason and probably from want of proper means of cleaning the type, the printing is frequently so blurred as even to be difficult to read. The paper is at times of a sickly blue tint and varies very greatly in single numbers ; and they seem, too, to have have been short of type, as its style is not infrequently changed suddenly in the middle of an article. It is, moreover, not quite in keeping with our modern ideas to find a newspaper apologizing twice in one year for issuing but half a sheet, on the" 20th of July, 1786, " because of a disappoint ment with respect to paper," and on the 21st of December, because of " the severity of the weather the week past." The Gazette and Magazine took for its motto originally, " Non sibi sed toto genitos se credere mundo," * but later substituted this by the plain English, " Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased,", from the fourth verse of the twelfth chapter of Daniel. As to the circulation of the paper, some information is ob tained from editors' notices printed in it complaining of the neglect of subscribers to pay their dues. From these22 it appears * The motto was not, however, quoted precisely as it reads in the original (Lucan, Phars. II 383), where it runs:— "flee sibi seel toto getjituro se credere mundo." LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. 23 that the circulation, in 1787, was in the neighborhood of nine hundred copies ; about half of these were issued to subscribers directly from the office, and the other half were sold by the publishers to " posts," who then disposed of them at their own risk to persons outside of the City. Eight shillings a year for a paper with so small a circulation would have produced a small income, indeed ; but it has been seen that even this small sum was collected with difficulty. Nor was this all : such were the circumstances of the times that the publishers notified the public, on January 18th, 1787, that, in orderte " accommodate our custo mers as much as possible, in the present scarcity of cash, we are ready to accept in payment Wheat, Rye, Indian-Corn, Flour, \ Beef, Pork, Cheese, Hog's Lard, Wood and Flax ;—the last of which will be peculiarly agreeable." * I have been unable to learn just when the last number was issued, but the latest seen by me is that of December 18th, 1788, being No. 50 of Volume I 3 ; nor do I know accurately why the publication was stopped. There is no direct evidence as to whether it was financially suc cessful or not: it does not seem very likely'that it could have been, when all the country was so pinched as then ; but on the other hand, its publication for over four and a half years indi cates that it was at least no very great financial failure. The printing establishment was probably maintained as long as the paper and was at least occasionally employed for public printing ; there are preserved in the State Library at Hartford, receipts of Josiah Meigs for sums of money received in 1787 and 1788 for printing legislative resolutions. As already stated, the firm's office was originally in Chapel Street, " a few rods west of the College : " later, it was removed to " the south corner of the Green, fronting the Market." * See Appendix C, I • 24 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. No trace has been found as to how Meigs disposed of the printing establishment or the paper ; for The New Haven Gazette, which seems to have been started by Abel Morse in the begin ning of 1791, can hardly have had any connection with The New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Magazine. It is likely, however, that it was finally stopped with the end of the volume for 1788. CHAPTER III. 1784-1794. Elected City Clerk of New Haven—Course of philosophical lectures in Yale College Chapel—Delivers public oration on July 4,1789—Goes to Bermuda to practise law—Engages warmly in the defence there of American captured vessels—His zeal and success lead to his arrest on charge of treason—Narrowly escapes transportation—Return to America. DUEING the same time at which Meigs had been publishing his paper, and probably also during the last year of his tutorship at Yale, he held the office23 of City Clerk in New Haven; he was chosen to the office at the first election under the City Gov ernment, in February, 1784, and was re-elected for several years ; the latest election found of him being in June, 1789. It seems, also, that at some period between his tutorship and the middle or end of 1789, he ^delivered a series of philosophical lectures in the Chapel of Yale College. He was in New Haven at least till midsummer of 1789, and the Connecticut Journal of the day tells of the part he took in the celebration of the 4th of July ofthat year, an anniversary of that date, of more than usual importance, for the principle of government by the people, but recently re-born to the world, was advancing and spreading over the globe with such vast power and promise, that the ardent admirer thereof might well believe that a new sun was rising to mankind. In our own country, the States had recently adopted the new plan of government, and had thus redeemed themselves from the hopeless slough of bad and ever jarring iï 26 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 27 government, which had existed under the Articles of Confedera tion. The great Washington had been, with one voice, called to be the first President under the new government, and had but a few months before, taken the oath to support and defend the present Constitution of the United States of America, and the experiment of a true government by the people was promis ing such brilliant results, that the coldest of men might well be carried away. And in France, our late ally, to whom gratitude was not yet cold, the inspiring spectacles of the early era of the Revolution were enacting ; the States General had met but two months before, for the first time for one hundred and seventy- five years ; had entered upon their great work with fine promise, and had begun the task of abolishing the unspeakable wrongs against the people which had grown up under absolute govern ment ; while as yet no one could certainly foresee the evils and errors which the revolutionary governments later fell into. It may well be supposed, therefore, that the 4th of July of that year was celebrated with far more than usual ardor, and that not a little prophesying was indulged in, that has hardly been justified by the experience of ninety-eight years, great and marvelous though the results have been. The people of New Haven were notified by the papers on July 1st, that the occasion would be celebrated by an oration by Mr. Meigs, in the brick meeting-house, at 11 A. M.,and that a contribution would then be raised, which, after deduction of expenses, would be given to the poor ; there was also to be a procession and a prayer before the oration, and in " compliance with general opinion, the custom of dining in public on this occasion is suspended." After the prayer by Dr. Dana, we are told,25 "a beautiful oration, replete with benevolence and Federal ideas, was delivered by Josiah I Meigs, Esq., in a manner which did great honor to himself and the day. It was calculated not only to preserve and feed the sacred flame of liberty, but to recommend industry, manufact ures and the liberal arts, and conciliate all parties to a cheerful acquiescence in the new Federal Government,"—for there were many most earnest patriots, who saw nothing but monarchy and absolutism in the new form of government. In the latter part of 1789, Meigs left his country and went to live in Bermuda. I and some others had always supposed that he had some official business there in connection with the TJ. S. Government, but such was not the case. His eldest son Henry tells us, in a sketch of his own life, that his father went to Ber muda upon receiving the offer of some law business in those islands in the hands of the Johnsons of Stratford. He himself writes that he went there in the close of 1789 ; and a small water-color sketch, made many years afterwards by his son Henry for his grandson, teaches us that he lived there in a long house very close to the water, on the island of St. George's. This house is very possibly still standing, and in it was doubtless born his son Charles on February 19,1792. For the first two or three years of his life in Bermuda,- Meigs's life was probably quiet enough. His law practice is not likely to have been large, and it is probable that he often longed for his native land, as he read the accounts of the working of the new government's machinery and received confused stories of the gradual forma tion of the two great political parties, which soon divided America into two almost hostile camps. He maintained his interest in scientific matters, studied geometry, as is shown by a book on the subject in my possession which he bought in Bermuda ; and made observations on the meteorology of the islands : these latter he sent to the Eoyal Society, in London, as is learned from their letter of thanks to him, preserved among the papers of Henry Meigs, «. : 28 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. 29 But, if his first years in those " Summer Islands " were as quiet and uneventful as is the ordinary climate of that almost tropical region, the latter part of his stay there is only to be compared to the outburst of one of the violent hurricanes that occasionally visit them, leaving a trail of ruin and destruction in their path. It was his chance to be there at the time when the ambition and avarice of the English, combined with their dislike of their successfully rebellious offspring and with their almost un questioned control of the ocean, led to the passage of certain decrees in council and other measures, which simply legalized the plunder and piracy of American and other shipping. American ships were brought into the islands by British priva teers, libelled in the Admiralty Courts, and condemned under circumstances which constituted simple robbery. It is likely that Meigs was the only American lawyer in the islands, and thus it came about that most of the unfortunate masters applied to him for legal advice, and that, as Henry Meigs wrote, he I " stood alone at the Bar of the Vice-Admiralty Court as their defender." They arrived there captives, without friend or acquaintance, and with no means even of meeting the expenses of legal process, let alone of paying fees ; but none the less Josiah undertook their cases, " obligated himself," he had occasion to tell us later on a most important occasion, " in great sums of money for the payment of costs of process, * * and advanced money, even to my last dollar, on the credit of their owners, to defray their expenses home." He was proctor for some forty claimants and obtained favorable decrees for about half of them. It was to be expected that services of this character would not endear him to the men who were engaged in the business of privateering, and we are accordingly told that seventy-four priva- teersmen came to hate him with a bitter hatred for so inter fering with their rich harvest of profits. But this was not all the trouble. Josiah Meigs, though i ordinarily a man of an even disposition and very urbane in his manners, was, when his feelings were aroused, of a very warm temper and exceedingly outspoken in his disapproval of the actions of his opponents. This will be seen more than once in his lifetime, and it is likely that, in Bermuda at thirty-six years of age, he expressed himself with even greater warmth than in his later years. Doubtless, acts of wanton cruelty were often inflicted on the unfortunate American captains and crews by their roving captors, and we are told that he denounced this cruelty as well as the captures in very free and independent language, both in and out of court. So strong did the feeling at length grow against him that the privateersmen trumped up a charge against him on the ground of his outspoken language, and had him arrested for treason ; he was detained several days in custody, and narrowly escaped being sent as "one26 of the very first settlers to Botany Bay," but was finally acquitted and released owing to the exertions and influence of the Governor of the Islands, Henry Hamilton, who was his personal friend. Advantageous offers are said to have been then made to induce him to stay in the islands, but he considered war inevitable and would not trust himself in a country at war with his own ; so he indignantly refused all the offers and immediately proceeded to embark for America. He put all his family on a small sloop and arrived at New York after a short passage ; on the way, the step of their mast broke, and they were in some danger until the mast was re-stepped after a good deal of hard labor. It is probable that the sloop he sailed in was the " Mary," Captain Sands, which reached27 New York, May 13th, 1794. The papers of the day contain œ a note, probably from Meigs, as to the decisions in the Admiralty Court in Bermuda and the vj? '•'. , „> F 5Î-* so LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. hopeless outlook there for captured American property, and also a list of the libelled vessels in Bermuda, handed in, they say, by Mr. Meigs, who sailed from there on the 5th ; but there is some discrepancy in regard to the exact date of his sailing from Bermuda, for his family Bible records that Mrs. Meigs gave birth to a son at sea on the 3rd of May, 1794, in " Latitude 36° Longitude 67° W ;" this child they named "Sea," but he lived only eight weeks. CHAPTER IV. 1794-1800. Appointed Professor at Yale—Manner as a teacher—Residence and family—His interest in politics—Becomes soon a republican—State of parties and extreme heat of party feeling at that time—Federalist sentiment of Con necticut makes him a social outcast—Nearly dropped from his chair at Yale from same cause—Why he finally left Yale. THE six months following upon Meigs's return to America were passed partly in New York and partly in Stratford, Henry Meigs writes ; and then Josiah was appointed, as will soon be told, to a professorship in Yale College. This position, but for the reasons soon to be narrated, he would probably have held for life ; and it would have afforded a man of his tendencies a good field for distinction, and would have freed him from that wander ing over the country and that wearisome struggle with grinding poverty and debt, which were his lot for nearly fifteen of the better years of his life. Ezra Stiles was at this time the President of Yale, as he had been during the latter part of the time when Meigs was there as an undergraduate ; and was a very zealous worker in the interests of the College. The institution had had difficulties for some time with the legislature of Connecticut, and had failed to procure from it financial aid ; but President Stiles was at length successful in composing the troubles and securing an appropri ation. " A part of these funds was at once applied to the sup port of a Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. This chair had been vacant since the resignation of Prof. Strong 32 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 33 ^ and was now filled by the election of Mr. Josiah Meigs of the class of 1778. He read his first lecture in the College Chapel November 20th, 1794, and was formally inducted into office the 4th of December following. On this occasion the President publicly delivered to him the keys of the philosophical depart ment, and Mr. Meigs pronounced29 a Latin inaugural address." The period of Meigs's life, during which he held this profes sorship, was certainly of very great importance to him ; and probably the field was more congenial to his tastes than any other he occupied during his life. But, possibly for this very reason s but little is known of him for these six years. Holmes30 inti mates that he received^the appointment, because his mathematical abilities had been observed during his tutorship ; and Professor Silliman gives a slight view of his manner as a teacher : he writes:31 "he was a gentleman of great intelligence and had read Chaptal, Lavoisier, and other chemical writers of the French school. From these, and perhaps other sources, he occasionally introduced chemical facts and principles in connection with those of natural philosophy." Silliman then goes on to narrate: the interest and curiosity excited in his mind by Meigs's explanation of the laws of latent heat, but my investigations have unearthed nothiag further in regard to his connection with Yale College except what will soon be told of the reason for his leaving it, and the fact that he delivered the funeral oration32 upon President Stiles, after the tatter's death in 1795. Henry Meigs writes, that they lived at this time " in a frame house on York Street opposite Punderson's Gardens," where they had a large garden in which he and his father worked hard. From the correspon dence between Josiah Meigs and his brothers, one or two glimpses of him are obtained in this period, but they are but momentary. His brothers John and Giles still lived in Middletown, and visits were occasionally interchanged. In July, 1795, the first-named brother visited Josiah at New Haven and says he took part in the celebration of the anniversary of Independence and had the pleasure of meeting his brethren of the Cincinnati. And in the spring of 1796, Josiah and his eldest child Henry (then thirteen years old) spent ten days with John Meigs at Middletown. The latter records this fact in a letter to his brother Return Jonathan, and says that the visitors walked all the way both to Middletown and back to New Haven, refusing all persuasion to take a horse and carriage. As the distance between the two places is about twenty-five miles, it will be seen that it was a pretty good walk for a boy of thirteen years, if not for a learned professor of thirty-nine. The professor's family at this time consisted of Mrs. Meigs who, he writes, had grown " very fat and in good case," and of the following children :—Henry, already in the Freshman class at Yale (he graduated in 1799, at seventeen) Clarissa or Clara, eleven years old, Samuel, eight, Charles, four, and Juliana, eight months. He had lost33 a danghter Julia in 1787, and the son Sea who had been born on the passage from Bermuda. Josiah Meigs was always deeply interested in public affairs and became soon an ardent republican and follower of Mr. Jefferson. It is evident from his letters that he began early to incline towards that party, and there is proof that he had largely drawn away from the Administration's policy, at least as early as the middle of Washington's second term, about the time °f the discussions growing out of Jay's Treaty. On July 23d, 1795, he writes to his brother, the Colonel, expressing regret that the latter had not succeeded as he deserved in his application to government, says he hopes the treaty with Great Britian will fail, and then continues:—"I am displeased with many things »00 2n"i i 34 LIFE or JOSIAH MEIGS. in the administration of Government. They appear to me to have lost sight of thegreat leading traits of freedom. I may be told that, as I have nothing to lose, I ought not to feel uneasy. ![?] have children and I look with [tender regard] to their future situation and to that of [their] posterity from generation to [generation. I am] not pleased with the moderation] prevail ing in France.* Moderation [does not] do in the midst of gold, treason, and perfidy." Many other letters could well be quoted here to show the same drift in his political opinions, but it will be best on the whole to reserve them until later and then produce them all together, both * The brackets indicate parts of the letter which have become defaced and are more or less illegible. For fear that some reader may carelessly infer that the massacres of the French Revolution were the special cause of Meigs's admiration—as they still compose its principal feature in the minds of many— it will be well to recall to mind the events which were at this particular time occurring in France. It should be remembered, then, that, after the Revolution of the 9th thermidor (1794, 27 July) and the execution of Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just, the fury of the Revolution seemed for the time spent, and there followed a distinct period of reaction, which the French historians call the "Réaction thermidorienne." The condemned and fugitive Girondists were recalled, the Jacobin Club was closed, and steps were taken to abolish the Con stitution of 1793, while the expatriated Royalists began to return in some number, and to express more or less openly the hopes inspired in them by the course of public events. A very severe winter and the pressure of famine led to the insurrections of the 12th germinal (1795, April 1st) and of the 1st, prairial (20th May), which were violently suppressed by the troops of the Con vention. This was probably the latest French news of importance known in America at the date of the above letter. But it is very clear that Meigs took a deep interest in the course of events in France and on the whole fully sided with the revolutionary movement,, despite its errors. Henry Meigs gives the following additional evidence of this fact. When they were in Bermuda and he was studying French, he says " my father flattered me that I was being qualified to talk French with " les Enfans de la Patrie," and [to] put in my voice in the mad song of the Marseillais (sic)." LIFE or JOSIAH MEIGS. 35 because this will avoid repetition, and because the letters, which have been preserved, belong generally to a rather later period. But it will be necessary to say something more here upon the subject and upon the general politics of the day, in order to present clearly to the reader what is to follow. Meigs was indeed an ardent admirer of the purposes of the French Revolution ; and this, as well as his Bermuda experi ences and his general democratic proclivities led to his siding with the party in America, whose sympathies were with that country and against England. And it is very evident, too, that his democratic tendencies must have had a deep and firm hold on him ; for not only was he absent from his country during the time when the events were taking place which marked and de fined the boundary-line between parties in America, but, even upon his return, he was placed in a part of the couutry where all his surroundings and the vast majority of his old friends were rankly federalist, and where all his material interests called upon him, therefore, to follow with the tide and to cry aloud against change and in favor of the old rigid system, which the worshippers of the English were striving to maintain. He certainly showed no little force of character and true democracy \ in avoiding this and in adhering to the party, which later ' crushed federalism and imprinted so large a portion of its own principles on the American government that it has been well said34 of its great leader that, if he was wrong, then America is wrong. The French Revolution, and the furious wars, which followed it, formed then a sort of centre, aronnd which the politics of the whole civilized world turned; and nowhere was this more strongly the case than in the United States. As these stupen dous wars continued year after yeprapd as efforts were made by 36 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 37 '„Il rill..in the combatants to force our country to take a part in them, the republicans (and, no doubt, Meigs with them) bitterly opposed the at least alleged proneness of the federalists to plunge the country into a war with France, and preferred vastly to side with the republicans of that country in their struggle against the uuited monarchies of Europe, which had made the war against revolutionary France with the distinct, if not avowed, object of crushing the revolution, and of reinstating and maintaining the special privileges of classes. This was certainly the face the great wars bore at their outbreak and down to about the end of the century, whatever may have been the case later. So great an element in American politics did this feeling for the two great rivals make that " Anglomen " and " the French faction " became, as is well known, usual terms to describe our political parties. The heat of party feeling at that day, too, was more bitter and violent than we can nowadays conceive; it may be doubted whether it was as strong during the civil war. It was a period of veritable cataclysm, and the world's political and social structure were undergoing such an upheaval as natur ally shocked and terrified the large class which adhered to the past and to a great extent believed in the system of privileged classes in the political body—that system whose supporters for many years formed a political party in America, and which is not unfairly typified in the efforts made in the Convention of 1787 for a life-tenure Senate to be composed of members, who, as Gouverneur Morris said, " must have great personal property : must have the aristocratic spirit : must love to lord it through pride." The Federalists of that day saw the Republicans siding with and defending the French Revolution, in which they could see nothing but bloody crimes and a mad purpose to destroy all existing things and'. vedu ff.. 68 LIFE OF JÜSIAH MEIGS. neoticut federalists obtained about the time of the election in that year a warrant for $50,000 from the federal treasury which they heralded broadly as the first instalment of their much larger claim, hoping by this bait to attract many votes. The repub licans in the State, being alarmed for the possible effect of this, wrote to Meigs, and he obtained from the Department of War a 'statement that the $50,000 had been paid for services of certain Connecticut militia while acting under the federal authorities, and that nothing would be paid for the services of that militia (the quoted words are Josiah Meigs's and not the War Depart ment's) " while acting under the command of Gov. Smith in defiance of the Laws of the United States." This explanation of the payment was spread widely and had great political effect, Meigs says. After expressing his content with the State of the country and speaking of the success of the republicans in Con necticut, he goes on to say to his brother :—" The conduct of the Euling Party in that State during the War was absolutely rebel lion against the United States, and instead of being rewarded for it they ought to be hanged. You and I love our native State and we respect the character of the true-blooded yankies—they are a brave, an honest, and a virtuous people, and ought not to be imposed upon by designing hypocrites of any description either of Laity or Clergy." These extracts will serve to give a good idea of his opinions upon politics, and especially of New England Federalism • and, though his views are doubtless at times somewhat colored by party feeling, yet they may aid in calling attention to a chap ter in the history of our country which has not generally been written with that openness and candor, which are so desirable. It may be added that he was clearly very full of the idea of the national grandeur and glory of the United States, and evidently looked LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 69 more to the federal government than did most of the leaders of his party. He would probably have been in favor of the gen eral government's management of many departments of affairs, which they maintained were not and ought not to be, within its sphere; and I think there can be no doubt that he would, in his latter years, have hotly opposed almost any attempt by the States openly to defy the federal authority. This is, however, merely my individual judgment drawn from the general tenor of his letters, and it is in the highest degree probable that he had maintained his party in the resistance it offered through resolu tions of certain State Legislatures in 1798-9 to the policy then dominating the Federal councils. He was usually very well con tented with the course of affairs in America, if not even over- satisfied and more sanguine than circumstances justified, but he had his moments of depression, as well as others. Thus he writes in 1804, referring to some recent elections, "some of these things make me sick of representation, but nihil est ab omni parte beatum •" and in 1816 he writes from Washington, " I fear that the National Bank will fail at last." * * * "De republica nunquam est desperandum, but I think it a serious hardship to live on hope—and to be always on the border of despair." In April, 1822, he writes:—"This Congress are in my opinion seriously injuring the respectful feelings which people should have for the government." Of his inner life at home and of his manner with his children, some record remains, though not very much. In addition to his wife and children, Mrs. Meigs's youngest sister, Miss Emily Benjamin, formed a part of their family circle for a good .many years. She was with them at least in Athens, and in Washing ton where she died unmarried. With his three children, of whom most is known, he appears to have always been a most kind father and to have left a memory of great respect and affec- \- 70 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. tion. His daughter and he are said to have been most devoted to each other until the end of his life : his eldest son speaks of him constantly in terms of affection and respect, and they main tained for years a most frequent correspondence; and his son Charles always spoke of him to his children with the utmost respect, and has already been quoted as writing of him in the same terms. Of his household habits, Henry Meigs gives the following interesting account : " I had been always allowed by Father the privilege of sitting up late, provided I was out of bed by sunrise ! This soon made going to bed by nine p. m. an inevitable necessity. I have maintained that habit to this day. * * * * Father always rose first in his house, made the fires and all the little domestic work before he called up servants and family. He said the servants never learned to make fires—it was a philosophic work : first shavings : next splinters : next small wood : last large wood-r-all scientifically adjusted—lastly a Tinder Box and three inches of waste paper. Quotient a bril liant fire on a Zero-ic morning in three minutes." When this son Henry had recently recovered from some sickness and was about leaving Georgia to settle in the north, his father wrote him on December 4th, 1803, as follows :—" I have hoped that all my family would have continued to enjoy that high and almost unparalleled health with which we have been so greatly blessed. I see very clearly that you are not to be a fixed and permanent Citizen of Georgia. Wherever you may be, it is in your power to be as happy as any one can be whose education has been equal to yours. Perhaps this may be the last letter you will ever receive from me. On this supposition let me charge you to persevere with undeviating steadiness in that virtuous con duct, which I believe you have hitherto practised. All the ex perience of all ages Ijas proved that, on the whole, honesty is the LIFE .OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 71 best policy. We are too apt to think of others, and to neglect the examination of our own hearts. I think my own experience is a full proof of this :— it is, at least, such to me. Without a love either of wealth or glory, and perhaps even with a culpable disregard to the acquisition of property, I have a family which you know is in most respects one of the most excellent.—We have had an unparalleled degree of health.—We have had as few disquietudes as fall to the share of the most favored of the millions of the families of the human race. Permit me to say that at this midnight hour my heart expands with gratitude to the Great Father of the whole human Family for his kind and tender care—he has taken me in his arms and carried me in his bosom. This goodness I have not indeed deserved, but I will say to you before God—That I have never violated the Chastity of woman—that I have never willingly withheld a debt which I was able to pay ; nor have I ever been guilty of a malicious or revengeful act. In this view, perhaps a false and partial view, I consider myself as having been peculiarly protected by our [Great] father. I need not detail [to you] your particular duties. You [know] them well. I cannot wish [you] to be happier then I have [been]. I do not think it falls [to the] lot of man to be more so." * Again, on October 15th of the next year, when this son was studying law in New York, his father writes him another letter of advice. After counselling against marrying until his position was such that he could support a family, he adds : " Study your profession as if to be eminent in it were the only object of your life, and without any regard to the good derivable from the profits of it. In short you must study law as moralists say * The -worcls enclosed in brackets aie more or lees illegible in the origi- pal letter, 1/. III 72 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 73 sïu ÏT we must practise virtue, for virtue's sake, and not for its re wards." His letters show also that he not infrequently sent gifts of money to aid his son in that devoted pursuit of the study of the law, which he advised. An incident in the life of the younger son Charles furnishes a curious illustration of the rather adventurous tendency of our pioneer class. Probably many of the descendants of Josiah Meigs would hardly approve of sending off one of their children of but thirteen years of age into the forest for several weeks, in the custody of a half-breed Indian, yet such was the adventure on which Charles was allowed to go in 1805, and there can hardly be any question that the experience was of eminent use to him. One Jim Vann, a fair type of the half-civilized, semi- Indian of our borderland, having some virtues and not a few strongly developed vices, was at that day a trader and quasi chief among the Cherokee Indians not veiy far from Athens. Often leaving his home and journeying to a distance to make purchases, he had met and conceived a strong fancy for Charles and had offered to take him some day into the Indian country, show him much of interest, and above all to give him an Indian pony. The boy, eager to accept the chance for adventure, urged and begged his parents for permission to go, and at last pre vailed ; so, at Vann's next trip, Charles followed him far into the Indian country and saw and learned much which served a half centuiy later for tales, delightful, indeed, to the boyish ears of his descendants. His father writes on February 24th : — " Charles has just returned from the Cherokee nation where he has been about seven weeks with J. Vann at Vannstown, on the Eutowah Eiver, in the heart of the Cherokee country, about 150 miles from Athens. Mr. Vann has given him a fine little pony and Indian stockings, a belt of wampum, and other Indian knick-knacks. He has taught him Ihe Indian songs, etc., so that on the whole Charles has a tolerable Indian education." f:- It is curious also to note that this journey made through the forest in single file, and much of it probably along merely blazed trails, lay on the very route upon which modern times seem to have projected the building of a railroad. As to Meigs's friends, it will appear later that he had a good many, and that he kept up his relations with them for many years and was in the constant habit of corresponding with them. But in addition to those to be named hereafter, Joel Barlow should be mentioned. They had been classmates at Yale, and they remained friends until the death of Barlow, and after that time Meigs apparently lived near Mrs. Barlow in Washington, and his letters contain the kindest references to her and express deep feelings of sorrow at her death in 1818, in her home near Washington. Poor Barlow, stung to the quick by the bitter and cutting notices of his Columbiad, with which the federalist pens flooded the country, while no republican review worthy ot' mention was written, wrote Meigs in 1810 urging him to carry out—what Barlow seems to have thought had been Meigs's in tention, if not his agreement—his plan of reviewing the poem. He wrote upon this subject more than once, pressing Meigs upon the ground that there was no one so fit as he to write a fair and judicial review of the work, but Meigs does not seem to have complied with the request—possibly the state of affairs at Athens at that time was not such as to permit the occupation. As to Meigs's manners with his friends and in general society, everything shows that he was ordinarily most gentle and kindly, and very popular. It has already been seen, on the other hand, that he was at times, when greatly excited, altogether carried away by the warmth of his feelings, and that he would then break out into violent and denunciatory language of the 't l 74 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. 75 cause of his wrath or indignation. He was not, it seems, at all fond of general society ; this will appear again from his letters, but the following to his son Henry, written from Washington on March 12th, 1816, had better be introduced here; he writes on this occasion :—" I was at Mrs. Monroe's Drawing Room last evening. It was crowded with the Great and the Gay and the Idle—and was as splendid as I wish to see—I go to such places on principles of duty not of choice. I prefer my own fireside with a book to all the parade." A most amiable trait in his character was his interest in younger men, and his pleasure in associating and studying with those of them who were anxious to increase their knowledge. More than one page of this sketch shows this, and none more strongly than those where we find him in 1813 a man of 56 years, meeting in the evening with the very much younger men,* who composed the Cincinnati School of Literature and the Arts, acting as their president, and deliver ing to them lectures on Astronomy and Natural Philosophy, inspired merely by the love of the subjects or by an active and kindly interest in young men. Mrs. Meigs was clearly fer more than a helpmate to him, and must indeed have been so essential a part of the household that it would have hardly been able to go on without her. She ap pears to have been a woman of admirable health, and I find but one record of her having a serious illness, and that a violent one that nearly ended her life at Athens in 1807. She was evidently the financial manager in the household—and it will be seen later that, though there were no large sums to be accounted for in the professor's home, yet a financial manager was very necessary, and one especially of the sort endowed in a high degree with the * Dr. Drake, who succeeded Meigs as the President of the School in 1814, was then only 29 years of age, virtue of economy. In 1805, Josiah wrote to his son Henry as follows :—" Your mother has about forty pigs in esse and ex pects in about three months to have as many more. She is hearty and strong and healthy and cheerful as you can imagine a person to be, and if I had half a dozen slaves and five hundred or one thousand acres of good land, I would put her to work as Overseeress, and I dare say she would maintain in all the substan tial articles of living, the whole of her children with their families." From at least a few years after his return from Bermuda down to within six or eight years of his death, Meigs was battling with poverty, and it is plain enough that the battle was often one wherein it was all he could do to keep his head above water. These troubles, strangely enough, seem to have begun during the time of his professorship at Yale, for his letter to the College in 1798 has told us that, in the first four years he was there, he had spent a prior accumulation of " several hundred dollars," and that he had hardly a dollar above his debts. It is likely that his salary was very small, but I do not think it at all improbable, from what is known of his character and his money habits, that he had spent part of his salary in purchases to enable him to give a better course of instruction. Whether or not this guess has any foundation in fact, his later letters show that he left Connecticut with a good many debts hanging over him, and that they were still unsettled as much as five years afterwards. He had, moreover, been unable to recover sums due to him by others, and I find that in 1805 he had the great good fortune to recover a debt of nearly $200, which had been due him in Con necticut for eighteen or nineteen years. This must have been a very Godsend to him, but he at once sent an order for nearly the whole of it to hjs son Henry, and urged him to get it into '"il , fag* F ïsïg. l 76 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. his hands " as soon as possible ; otherwise it may be taken as my property—and y ou know I owe some money in Connecticut." While at Athens, he appears not only to have been pressed by old debts, but to have been unable at times even to get his salary and to have been forced by sheer necessity to borrow more in order, as he says, " to keep the pot boiling." In sending his son the sum just mentioned, he writes on February 10, 1805 :—"as to myself I find I am more and more embarrassed every day. I dispose of more than my income, and make scarcely any percep tible impression on my debts—nor do I see that I shall ever be able to send to the Red Sea or to any other receptacle of Ghosts, that Spectre of debt which has so many years haunted me and destroyed all the happiness of my life." On another occasion he writes to the same correspondent that he can send no money : " there is no money in the Treasury—our great building has absorbed all, and I can scarcely get enough to buy butter and other necessaries of life. I have considerable faith in the doctrine of destiny—and that mine was from the beginning to be never able to have a Guinea of my own at command. * * * I wish you would hit on some way of getting money, for I would rather you had never been, than that you should suffer one-half of that vexation and pain which the want of it has always made me suffer." One other proof of his poverty there, is derived from a story,47 with which his son Charles D. Meigs often delighted an admiring circle of his children or grandchildren. During the times when his father was still a professor at Athens, " Charley,'' then a young and active boy, having become possessed with a wild boyish desire to purchase from its owner a fish of stupendous size recently caught in the waters of the Oconee river, rushed off to his mother to beg of her the dollar, which the owner demanded for the treasure. She demurred at first on the ground that LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 77 there was but twice that sum in the house, but finally gave him the dollar; and the story then went on that Charley lost the money on his way down to the Oconee river, but finally secured the prize by getting from his mother the second and last dollar in the house. When he moved from Cincinnati to Washington, he borrowed of Dr. Drake some $200 or $300, which does not seem to have been finally repaid until early in 1816. It will be seen later, too, that he found his salary* in Washington no more than enough to maintain him ; and it had better be added here that he left 110 property behind him. The settlement of his estate shows that he left personalty appraised only at the sum of $1,007.17, and it is not likely that he left any real estate which was not included in the inventory ; the articles appraised were almost entirely of household use, but there was " one lot of books" which sold for the small sum of $24.65, and some valuable work by Humboldt, which Mrs. Meigs disposed of later for about $200 ; it had apparently cost $300. Meigs himself speaks on one occasion of his having possibly a culpable disregard to the acquisition of property, and it seems to me that it must be admitted that such appears to have been the case, though the evidence upon the point is by no means clear and precise. Henry Meiga, writes of him as follows upon this subject :—" His liberality prevented his accumulating any property. Pie left none behind him. fie was only anxious to * The Act of April 25th, 1812, which first established a Commissioner of the General Land Office, provided that his salary should be the same as that of the Auditor of the Treasury. At this time, the latter officer's salary was f 2250 ; and I think that no increase was made, while Josiah was Com missioner. He had, also, the franking privilege. The Act of May 18th, 1796, providing for the appointment of a Surveyor General, fixed his salary at $2000, and this was, I think, the salary of the Office as lata as 1815. '•<$ "l v ' 78 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. be and to be thought generous and honest." And a letter of his son Charles to Henry Meigs gives an amusing instance of this indifference to monetary affairs. The letter is dated shortly after the date of Josiah's appointment to the Surveyor General ship, and narrates that the father, upon telling the son of his appointment, instead of rejoicing at his escape from what must have been extreme poverty, had clasped his hands and ex claimed " My God ! Charley ! what fine instruments we shall have." Charles goes on to say that he believes that the pleas ure his father derived in anticipation from his mathematical speculations was far greater than that furnished by the prospect of independence. The following personal narrative of him was told his grand son Gen. Meigs, by a gentleman who had lived in Washington at the time and seen the occurrence. It was repeated to me as having taken place upon the occasion of one of our naval vic tories in the war of 1812, but no brilliant naval victory occurred so near the close of the war as Meigs's arrival hi Washington, so it may be conjectured that the battle of New Orleans * was the * Since writing the above it has occurred to me that the battle of New Orleans was almost altogether wanting on onr side in the death for one's country, which was evidently uppermost in Meigs's mind. On the other hand the capture of the "President" by the English—the only naval engage ment the narrative can well concern—was very bloody to the Americans but was a defeat. In this uncertainty it seems best to me to let the story stand as it is. Of the capture of the " President," Ingersoll (Second War, Second Series I p. 22) writes :—" On the tempestuous night of Jany 14th, 1815, in a BUOW storm, Decatur escaped to sea from New York in the frigate President but * * * * ran aground * * * * when, as alleged by many, treacherous lights from the shore apprised the enemy of her emergency. Next day four ships of war * * * were under all press of sail in pursuit. At midnight * * * three * * * * overtook the President, mobbed her, as our consolotary phrase was at the time, and Decatur proudly surrendered his sword, not to any single conqueror, but to the commander of the squadron ; after attesting LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 79 event in question. At some evening entertainment in Washing ton, the news was rather suddenly and unexpectedly brought of this superb triumph of American arms. Of course, all Americans present were in a high state of excitement and delight, and full of congratulations to each other. Meigs was certainly no less pleased than the rest, but seems to have been rather over whelmed by the triumphant news, and not to have joined at once in the exultant feelings of those around him. He was before long observed by some friend to be sitting all alone, with his eyes looking far away and his whole expression so rapt, that his friend seems to have feared he was not well, and went up to speak to him. Upon being addressed, he looked up in a few moments, and showed what had been the course his thoughts were pursuing, as he replied solemnly " dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." It is amply evident that Meigs was a student upon many sub jects, and a deep and thorough one on more than a few. His favorite pursuits were Mathematics, Astronomy and Meteor ology. It seems his aptitude for mathematics had been observed while he was still a student at Yale ; and he did not by any means give up the study with graduation. A copy of Euclide's Elements, * with his name written in it by himself in Bermuda, on September llth, 1792, has survived to the present day, and like Porter [in the Essex] a noble spirit of resistance, which would not yield till more wonld have been worse than useless. The destruction endured in the Essex and the President exceeded that on board any English vessel of war before she struck her flag." * " Euclide's Elements with Archimedes's Theorems of the Sphere and Cylinder investigated by the method of Indivisibles by Isaac Barrow, etc., to which is annexed Euclide's Data with Marinus's preface, and a brief Treatise of Regular Solids." •V „"•v," V- c> " 80 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. exhibits his careful reading of it in some geometrical figures, and in calculations in his own handwriting upon e. g, the re lation between the diameter of a sphere and the side of the cube inscribed; and a copy of Paradise Lost shows his fondness for figures by his marginal calculation * of the distance through / which the falling angels passed in their nine days' descent. • Henry Meigs writes of his father that " his greatest pleasure ' was in the application of the latter [mathematical science] to astronomy, the sublimity of which he felt with unusual force ;" and his letters show that he often observed astronomical phe nomena and corresponded with his son upon what he saw. Meteorology was also a very favorite pursuit with him, but this will be gone into more at length shortly. I believe also that to him is largely due the system ffi of the survey and division of our pub lic lands, which is much the same to-day as in his time—but of this point I speak with hesitation from want of the necessary knowledge. But he by no means confined himself to these subjects. In the natural sciences he cultivated several other branches besides those mentioned ; and everything proves him to have been an excellent classical scholar. Not many men, whose occupation does not call upon them to do so, would be competent to make an address in Latin sixteen years after leaving college, as Meigs did upon beginning his professorial career at Yale ; and his letters show that he had a fondness for and familiarity with the dead languages, and at least with French of the living ones, * This note reads :—" Spaces passed over by falling bodies are as Squares of the times—the space in the first second is sixteen feet: therefore the angels in nine days fell through a space of 1,832,308,363 + miles." LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 81 to the end of his life. His son Charles, who was himself a vor acious and thorough student upon many subjects, wrote49 of him as follows : — " He was an excellent Greek and Latin and French scholar, and made high attainments in mathematics. He cultivated with some success a love for the sciences of botany and geology, and as a general littérateur and scholar had few superiors, so that take him all in all, it will be rare to meet with a person of more extensive and diversified knowledge than was possessed by that gentle and good man." Meteorology was one of his favorite studies, and one which he pursued for very many years of his life. In Bermuda, it has been shown that he kept some regular sort of observations of weather, and he seems to have continued for the rest of his life to do so, and to collect observations taken by others at different points. But one of his efforts in this direction should be gone into at some length, as it shows that he was far ahead of the average of his day and generation upon the subject of the obser vation and organized study of the phenomena of nature; and as it has a striking interest to us, who live some seventy years later and have before us daily the results of a system similar to that which he wished to establish. His plan was to establish a regular series of daily meteorological observations to be taken at different points in the country, under the direction of the Com missioner of the General Land Office, similar to those now taken by the Weather Bureau. He appears first to have thought of this in 1817, and he writes to Dr. Drake at different times as follows :— "February 1, 1817. "****!, yesterday, suggested in a note to an influential member of Congress, whether a Resolution might not pass, authorizing the President of U. S. to cause Meteorological Reg- Sfi 82 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. isters fco be kept at each of the Land Offices of the U. S., under the direction of the Commr. of the G. L. Office, and that the Meteorological Observations should be returned monthly to the G. L. Office with their Official Returns. Detroit, St. Louis, Opelousas, New Orleans, Saint Stephen, &c., &c., are in an area of about ten or thirteen degrees of Latitude and Longitude, com prising Hill, Mountain aud River, &c. " You will see with a glance of your bright mind that some thing very clever might be made of this. If my plan be adoptai, and the Registers be furnished with the requisite Instruments for Temperature, Pressure, Hain, Wind, &c., the expense of which would be a mere trifle compared to what YOU and I, at least, think the value of the object, we may in a course of years know more than we shall be able to know on any other plan. I shall prefer the Centigrade Thermr." "June 13th, 1817, " * * * * I am glad that you and Dr. Mitchell and other intelligent men are pleased with my effort to obtain Meteorological information. It is certainly a good plan, and I shall persevere in it, until it shall have become a matter of course. I mentioned the matter to some influential members of the National Legisla ture, but they were so deeply occupied with more important subjects that nothing was done. I shall however pursue it next winter ; without some system of this kind, our Country may be occupied for ages, and We the people of the U. S. be as ignorant on this subject as the Kiclcapoos now are, who have occupied a part of it for ages past. " The expense of the instruments for the Regrs. ought not to be regarded. The stationary character of the Office of Regr., with the constant opportunity he has of conversing with appli cants for Lands from all parts of the Land District, promise not only exactness but multifarious information ****** LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. "83 " My son the Doctor [Charles D. Meigs, later of Philadelphia] * * * sailed from Charleston, S. Ca., on the 5th of this month, and in three days arrived iu New York ; at least seven hundred miles in seventy-two hours. We knew he was to sail at that time and as we had a North-East Storm on land at that period, we predicted for him a boisterous and tedious passage—but he writes me that, from Charleston the ship was immediately placed Eastward of the Gulf Stream, and took a South-East Current of Atmosphere, which drove her like an arrow from the bow thro' the whole transit without variation of force or direction ; this is a curious Meteorological Fact." The effort to have the observations taken under the sanction of public authority failed, but Meigs did not by any means give up his efforts to advance the interests of science. On the 29th of April, 1817, he addressed a circular60 to the Registers of the Land Offices, requesting them to take regularly, certain mete orological observations and forwarding blanks to them for the purpose ; thus, the plan had to be placed entirely on a voluntary basis, and of course it was not possible to obtain barometric observations ; Meigs himself does not seem to have had one of these so important, but at that time expensive and still rather rare, instruments ; and it is very unlikely that any of the Reg isters had them. The blanks sent out were prepared for three daily observations of temperature, wind and weather j and con tained a column for general observations, wherein the Registers were asked to note unusual weather phenomena, facts relating to the time of the migrations of birds, the earliest appearance of flowers in the spring, the hibernation of animals, seismic disturb ances, unusual states of public health, and anything relating to the antiquities of the country. His request appears to have met with a favorable reception, and the public papers for some few kivT» ÏOCÈÇ-. ï i' 84 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. years contain notices furnished by him upon " the distribution of caloric" and kindred matters. The observations51 he obtained. covered often a wide area, and he more than once notices that almost universal prevalence of cold over the country at a partic ular date, which we have become so familiar with under the name of a "cold wave;" thus, we learn from him, for example, that one of these outpourings of polar air occurred shortly before Christmas, 1818, for he records that the 21st of December had been the coldest day through the whole of the space " between Detroit and Augusta * * about six hundred and fifty miles, or about nine degrees twenty-one minutes of latitude." The obser vations at the Land Offices were continued for a few years, and Meigs says, in 1819,52 that the politeness of the Registers of the Land Offices and of others had enabled him to collect observations for nearly twenty years. He writes twice to Dr. Drake that he was thinking of using this material to prepare an article upon the subject for the American Philosophical Society, but he died before doing so. The mass of observations he had collected upon the subject came into the hands of Henry Meigs, and was by him presented, in 1858, to the American Institute of New York, where, I believe, they are still preserved. In matters of mechanical improvement, also, Meigs was always interested, and his letters refer occasionally to great engineering operations as of no serious difficulty and likely to be accomplished in a very short time. It is curious, too—and seems almost prophetic, with the world standing, as it did then, on the very threshold of the stupendous improvement he refers to—to find him writing to his brother, on Aug. 19th, 1803,—" I am so enthusiastic in matters of mechanical improvement as to believe that the means of ascending the Mississippi and Ohio will in a very short time be pointed out. This beiug once done, LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 85 it follows that on the banks of the Mississippi will be founded a City—the seat of die Government of a community bounded by the North Pole, the Atlantic and Pacific and the Isthmus of Darien, viz ;—the whole of North America." As will be shown later, he lived not only to see the introduction of steamboats, but to travel on them nearly the whole way from Baltimore to New Haven ; he did not, however, see the vast empire he predicted, and, though our country has since his day acquired no incon siderable portion of the territory he foresaw as forming a part of it, yet we Americans of eighty-four years later may still be permitted to doubt the desirability or present probability of the complete fulfilment of that which he predicted. It is apparent that Meigs was a man of deep religious feeling, though it may be doubted whether he was in full accord with the tenets of any particular sect. Mrs. Meigs had presumably been brought up as an Episcopalian, as her father belonged to that body53; and their son Charles was baptized in the English Church in Bermuda, but it is not clear of what sect they were members. Mrs. Meigs wrote many years later that they had gone to the Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, and a letter of Charles D. Meigs shows that Josiah had endorsed notes for some church in Washington shortly before his death ; but I do not know to what dénomination this belonged. At least two paintings of him remain, one owned by the grand son of his son Henry, showing a half-full face and a half-length view of him seated, and another showing a small profile vieVv of the head only. The original of the latter, I believe, is in the pos session of Henry Meigs Aubrey, grandson of Josiah's daughter Clara, for whom it was probably painted about 1819, when she was going with her husband, John Forsyth, to Spain. Three other copies or originals of it exist, one owned by Gen. Meigs of I. (!(,, • tt?. 8fr LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS; Washington, one by the University at Athens, and one by Henry Meigs, grandson of Josiah's eldest son Henry. The silhouette, a reproduction of which forms the frontispiece of this sketch, was given by Dr. Drake to the youngest daughter of Charles Dl Meigs in 1851 : in the letter sent with the gift, he writes that, at the time it was cut (probably 1813 or 1814), it was thought a very good likeness. From these portraits, there can be obtained a fairly accurate idea of his personal appearance ; he was tall and spare, and is remembered by a grandson as wrapped in a long frock-coat ; he had a large and capacious head with a high forehead, a long and prominent chin, a square mouth and a rather long and pointed nose; and his eyes were mild, but bright, and of a blue tint. In general effect, his face has certainly marked power and is very alive and of a peculiarly benevolent appearance. CHAPTER VIII. 1814-1822. Washington in 1814—Land Office, duties of—His occupations in Wash ington—Extracts from his letters. IT must be remembered that, when Meigs came to Washington in the end of 1814, that city was in reality but a small and scattering village, to which the government had been removed only fourteen years before. The fortunes of war, too, liaving placed it in the hands of a conquering army a few months earlier, Ross and Cockburn had barbarously burned some portions of it, and the blackened ruins still remained. The era in our history marked by the war of 1812, too, was not yet closed ; active hos tilities were still going on, and the bitter opposition and unpatri otic conduct of New England were threatening our country with all the dangers of a division of the confederacy ; but affairs were destined soon to take a turn that made the English authorities glad to be freed from the burden of the war, while all America hailed the honorable Treaty with one voice as a priceless boon. It did not only relieve us from the weight of awar, which had, with many a glorious success, brought many a disaster to Ameri can arms, but it nipped in the bud the plans and plots of the Hartford Convention and its supporters, and covered them with an odium and ridicule from which they never recovered. The date of his arrival there was indeed an epoch in our his tory, and many references to the interesting historical events enacting around him are to be found in his letters; but he looked / •V-t\f 88 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. at these now merely as an outsider, but rarely, it seems, mingling in any political strife ; he was at last out of the battle and at rest, and he devoted himself almost entirely to the duties of his office and to the studies he took pleasure in, only watching pub lic events from a distance. Though the routine of his office made large demands upon his time, he does not seem to have found it burdensome except during the sessions of Congress, when all sorts of demands for information were made upon him by that - body : during one of these periods, when it is likely that much unnecessary labor had been put upon him by hasty and ill-con sidered Congressional requests, he groans to his friend Dr. Drake over the confinement to his office caused by the very inquisitorial tendencies of Congress and sighs, in the language of Horace :— " O rus, quando te aspiciam ? " When he took charge of the Land Office in the end of 1814, ten clerks were constantly employed in it: in January, 1818, he writes that he is " extremely occupied—the business of Military Land Bounties, superadded to the ordinary business is almost too much for me. For more than three months, I have been confined six hours a day in the office, yet I am in perfect health and I am astonished at myself, and I hope grateful to the Giver and Sustainer of life when I reflect that no pain or sickness assails me, while so many around me droop and die." At this time there were eighteen clerks employed in his office. In May of the same year, he writes that he has written his name officially at least fifty thousand times within six months, and in 1821, he writes to Dr. Drake, excusing himself for neglect to write to him and other friends, on the score of age and increase of public business, his office then involving (he says) a correspondence with thirty-two Land Offices, about twenty of which had been estab lished since be became Commissioner in 1814. The Land Office LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 89 had a good deal of patronage at its disposal, if we may rely upon the opinion of John Quincy Adams, who writes64 in his diary as follows, in referring to the appointment of John Forsyth as Minister to Spain ;—" His wife is daughter to Josiah Meigs, who is at the head of the Land Office, and niece to E. J. Meigs, Postmaster General. These are both offices having extensive patronage scattered all over the Union, and their influence was perhaps not without its weight, in forming Mr. Crawford's estimate of Forsyth's fitness for the mission to Madrid. I have not formed a very exalted opinion of Forsyth's principles or of the loftiness or delicacy of his character." * We should be very much in the dark as to these last years of his life, and should have much less knowledge of his pursuits and his character in general than we have, were it not that a good many of his letters at this time have been preserved. To our knowledge, he corresponded with Dr. Drake of Cincinnati, with Dr. Abbot at Washington, Georgia, with Col. Mansfield, with David Daggett, who was at different times U. S. Senator and Chief Justice of Connecticut, and with several members of his family. Most of this correspondence is probably long since lost, but the letters to David Daggett are preserved in Yale College Library, and those to Dr. Drake are in my possession and have been carefully read by me, as have also those to Mr. Daggett and to many of his family. They are written in an easy style, and «touch upon all subjects ; scientific matters are constantly noted, new publications and other matters of literary * AdamB goeB on then to criticise Mr. Forsyth for an alleged uncivil tone of independence of the Executive the preceding winter, when seeking the appointment; and sayB that, since accepting the office, his conduct in the Senate has been such as to embarrass the Executive. Mr. Forsyth'B Spanish mission was conducted with such eminent success that his reputation will not be ma terially injured by the diarist's disapproval. w -^ 'A. 90 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS.- interest referred to, and politics and the public rnen of the day and customs of Washington society occasionally discussed ; they in dulge in pleasantry occasionally, and at times use with great apparent facility, in quotation or otherwise, the Latin and Greek, as well as the French tongues. These letters are not in such shape that they can be moulded into a continuous narra tive, bnt they will be used almost exclusively to tell the story of his life in Washington ; and it is believed that they will serve admirably to depict his character, and will have an even broader use in showing the mode of life and the customs of the few citizens who then lived in that small embryo of our modern federal capital. The letters to be quoted are all addressed to Dr. Daniel Drake, and extend from a few days after his arrival down to within five months of his death ; they read as follows :— " Washington City, "Dec. 3rd, 1814. " We arrived here on the 26th of November and terminated without accident a Journey of about 600 miles over stony mountains, muddy roads, and rapid rivers. * * * * We did not find the mountains so formidable as our apprehensions had painted them.—It indeed requires patience and moderation to get over them without the fracture of Bones. From the top of Laurel Hill the prospect to the West is very extensive, sublime, and if the day had been clear, would have been very beautiful. " This City answers my expectations as to its Extent, and the Ruins of the Public Buildings prove that it was once a beautiful City. The people are mostly of that class who are born to live on the labours of others—Fruges consumere nati, like the suitors of Penelope. " I believe there is a greater product of industry in Cincin nati in one month than in this Metropolis in as many years. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 91 They are idle, luxurious, and fond of show, especially in fur niture ; for example, at. the sale two days ago of the Kussian Minister's (Dashkoff) Furniture, a pair of looking Glasses went at the trifling price of $600 ! ! ; the Glasses were of Paris plate, to be sure, but what is of more value, they had been the prop erty of a Foreign Minister. The Market of Cincinnati in Quantity, Quality, Price and in all other attributes of a Market is incomparably superior to the Market of W. City. It is un fortunate for the present Congress that the Yankees cannot transport their eatable Notions by water. I have been intro duced to the great Men, and after attending Mrs. Madison's drawing room next week shall judge myself acquitted of most of the burden of Etiquette. We have taken private Boarding in the same apartments with my Nephew, the P. M. General. When Congress rise, viz. :—about the 1st of March, I shall take possession _of the house * on the hill next to Barlow's, and go to planting cabbages, etc. " 1 have not yet visited the Fathers of the Country in Grand Council. It is lamentable that so many of them are Step- Fathers. The dispatches last received have raised the hopes of * I have not ascertained in what part of Washington Meigs's permanent residence was. The Barlow referred to, so far as I know, can only be Mrs. Joel Barlow, but it seems very unlikely that Meigs lived far ont near George town, where Barlow's country seat (Kalorama) was and where Mr. Todd seems to think Mrs. Barlow lived after her husband's death. One of Meigs's meteor ological notices (Niles's Eegister, 1819, Vol. XVII p 80) says the observations of t emperatnre at Washington were taken in a house " on the north side of F St." and it is likely that these were taken by him in his own house. Mr. E. J. Meigs, Jr., of Washington, informs me that the Postmaster-General (my in formant's great uncle) lived upon the lot of ground now constituting No. 509 N. Seventh St. N W., and occupied by the Second National Bank of Wash ington. .-rf ~:Jü' . v° « t 92 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. many who wish for Peace; others can see no hope ; time will, like Death, teach us more than we now know." * * * * "Dec. 10,1814, 10 A.M. " * * * * It is high time for you Patriots in Cincinnati to form a Plan for a Bridge over the Ohio—an easy Job. « * * * * We have a Eeport this morning to which consider able Credit is given that Preliminary Articles of Peace have been signed. Certain it is that an Express arrived last Even ing, and that those who ought to be good judges are very cheerful this morning. * * * * When the Muses return with Peace, I hope to be able to amuse you more agreeably." " Feby. 18, 1815. "The Treaty * with G. B. was ratified by the Senate (unan imously) on the 16th. Last Evening at 8 o'clock the British * Josiah's nephew, Eetnrn Jonathan Meigs, Jr., then Postmaster- General of the United States, seems to have been the second person in Wash ington to hear of the peace. The following curious account of an unsuccessful effort made at that time to draw him into a most improper and corrnpt use of his pnblic position is given by Mr. C. J. Ingersoll in his pamphlet on Gen. Jackson's Fine (p 22) :—l: Intelligence of the Treaty of Ghent reached Washington on tbe 14th February. It was taken there clandestinely by a merchant, brother of an Eastern Member of Congress, who imparted it in strict confidence to Jonathan MeigB, the Postmaster-General, having first exacted a promise from him not to divulge certain highly important information, which, on that condition alone, wonld be made known to him. The scheme was to precede the mail, by delay ing it one day, in order to speculate in cotton, tobacco, sugar, and other southern produce, then at low prices, to be immediately and greatly enhanced by peace. Perplexed between a promise to a Member of Congress and a sense of public duty, the Postmaster-General thought proper confidentially to advise with James Monroe the Secretary of State and War, as to what was right to be done in snch dilemma. Mr. Monroe had no hesitation in determining that such a promise to secrecy was not binding; forthwith, on his own responsibility, carried the news to the President, who, with as little hesitation, made it public. It was soon followed by authentic conformation." See also Parton's Life of Gen. Jackson Vol. II p 251. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 93 messenger (Mr. Buckner) arrived ; the Ratifications have been exchanged and this morning (by daybreak) the Treaty was pub lished. We have an Illumination this Night by order of the •Civil Authority. I hope you will not, at Cincinnati set the River Ohio on fire." " March 7, 1815. "****! had yesterday the pleasure of hearing the elo quence of William Pinkney at the bar of the Supreme Court of U. S. in a very interesting Prize Cause,* and hope, this day, to hear Mr. Emmott the celebrated Irish Counsellor for the Claimant. Mr. P. was Counsel for the Captors ; the Cause is of great pecuniary consequence—say $100,000—but what is of more importance, the decision of the Court will be of great importance to this and all other maritime Powers. * * * * The Court is really respectable and venerable ; their decision, I am confident,, will be in favor of the Captors. But my confidence in many cases has been heretofore so frequently proved to be un founded that I shall not break my heart if it should prove to be in this case also unfounded, altho' a considerable practice in the Admiralty Court of Bermuda led my attention to the gen eral subject of the Rights of Neutrals and Belligerents. * * * * * This was doubtless the case of the Nereide (9 Cranch 449), which in volved the highly important question of maritime law, whether the goods of a neutral, captured in the vessel of an enemy, are lawful prize or not? The decision of the court was that they are not lawful prize, i. e. the decision was in favor of the claimant and against the captor, BO that Meigß's confidence turned out to be unfounded. It is probable that his belief that the decision would be in favor of the captor, is to be explained by the fact that his knowledge.of the subject had been derived from practice in English Courts, where (I think) the capture would, at that time at least, have been sustained. Judge Story dissented from the decision of the court, and one other member of the court agreed with him. e /, & •'• ^ 94 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. I have here found La Lande's Astronomy in French—in 4 Vols. Quarto—it was sent to me by Mr. Monroe, Sy. of War." "May 6, 1815. " * * * * What are we to think of Napoleon ? Mister John Bull seems to me like unto an ignorant Clodhopper at the exhi bition of a Juggler, expecting his Cake or Gingerbread to be immediately secure iu his Pocket, when—lo ! Master Presto, the Chief of the Magi, has apparently swallowed it." " Dec. 28, 1815. "I present you the Compliments of the Season, viz: I con gratulate you and all my fellow-beings from Man to Insect, on the return of the Sun to re-animate our hemisphere, which I take to be the true and philosophic cause of Christmas rejoicings, and to be of an antiquity far beyond 1815 years." "January 29, 1816. " * * * * But not every man has the Qualities of Mr. Randolph—I have heard him for about one hour.—He does not equal the ideas I had formed of him—He is not dignified, either in manner or matter. His figures are frequently low, or trifling, or disgusting, and I firmly believe that the little influence he had obtained before the interregnum, is much diminished. Those who love to hear the administration abused, I presume are wil ling to listen to him, but he attracts the attention of the Gallery more than of the House. It is said that when he finished his Three days speech (last Saturday) there was not a quorum of the House present. " If I were perfectly independent, and at my own disposal, I would immediately place myself iu your Scientific Atmosphere at Philadelphia. You, I know, will breathe it to valuable pur pose. I am here surrounded with Books, but they are, in great measure, Forbidden Fruit. My official duties and company, LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 95 especially during a session of Congress, render it almost impos sible to avail myself of the pleasures of reading. I think I know less of the current of Public Business and passing events than if I were in Cincinnati. " We have sixty-three Mails arrive here every week, and iu fact it is a sort of Chaotic State of things. I endeavor to man age my own little bark, and keep her steadily in the stream. The business of the L. Office is well organized, and seldom does any case of difficulty present itself. The sale of Public Lands in creases in every Land Office District. * * * * If ever I visit Philadelphia, I shall of course seek the acquaintance of Dr. Wistar and the other Genii of that lovely City. Have you not observed that a great proportion of Persons of eminent Science have reached great age ? Look into the Biographic articles in the Encyclopaedia or in Bayle. This is an inducement to me to read and to know every thing. * * * * Your Patient, my little John [his youngest son, John Benjamin Meigs] has been vae- cmafed, *and I flatter myself it will prove beneficial to him. * * My Stiles [his next to youngest child, Ezra Stiles Meigs] has grown astonishingly. He bids fair to approximate the height of Giants. " This is a healthful place : "the water is of the best quality. * Meigs seems to have taken a great deal of interest in the subject of vaccination. His name heads a memorial to Congress dated January 1, 1820, and asking for the appointment of a national vaccine institution for the United States. It seems that a public meeting upon the subject had been held in Washington, and a committee appointed (of which Meigs was one), which was to act in conjunction with Dr. Jas. Smith, who had been appointed to some position relating to the subject, under an Act of Congress entitled " An Act to encourage vaccination." The memorial in question was read in the Senate and referred to a special committee, but I have not found any report upon it. Ex. J?apers.No. 29,16th Congress, 1st session Vol. II January 5, 1820. •-, • V* 96 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 97 " I am told that the knowing ones here laugh at the Spanish Chevalier de Onis." "Feb. 7, 1816. " * * * * We are all well, viz :—as well, as can be expected in a State of Society like this during a session of Congress, and I, at least, shall rejoice, when they rise." "Feb'y20, 1816. "Yours of the 17th is received. We had seen a Notice two or three days ago of the sore affliction which it has pleased God to give as a trial of your virtue. On this occasion our tears are mingled with yours. Consolation is vain; time only can, and time only will give it, but condolence is useful ; my heart assures me while I write this that our Condolence will, in a small de gree at least, soften the pangs you suffer. * * * * Much evil is the order of Nature, but surely there is much more good than evil." "March 1, 1816. " I received this morning the Book [Dr. Drake's View of Cincinnati], for which I thank you. I have already sent the Copy to the President, to the National Library, and to Mr. Jefferson. I have told Mr. Jefferson that I am sure he will be gratified with the work. I have given him a history of your Mind, in less than three lines, and have observed to him that it is pleasant to know that the best disciplined minds are friendly to our free Institutions." "Marché, 1816. «****! know less, I think, of the Politics of the day, than if I were in Philadelphia or New York or Cincinnati. Of Caucus business I know nothing. I think that the feeling of the Great Family of the United States is for Monroe as next Chief Magistrate, and, since feeling and thinking are much the same thing, I suppose that the thinking will produce acting, and that the result will be as above, viz :—for Monroe." "April 30, 1816. "****! find that nothing [i. e. no portion of his income] will be saved here. All Life is a contest, but here, Living, in its trite acceptance is peculiarly a contest. " Have you remarked a large Spot on the Sun ? I viewed it this morning thro' our telescope. It is a very irregular Figure, and I think unusually large. What is it other than a Solar Volcano?" "July 7, 1816. "It seems indeed strange that when you was in Baltimore, you could not direct your course thro' our City. I hope we shall yet see each other. The facilities of travelling are every day in creasing, and, when the great Cumberland Koad is finished, visits of the Tram, & Cis Alleyanians will be but parties of pleasure. * * * * " I have lately made an Excursion to the North East. I left this City on the 6th of June, and returned on the 24th. During that period of eighteen days I visited most of the interesting objects in Philadelphia, New York and New Haven. Dr. Dwight and the Professors (at Yale College) received me with distinguished politeness and humanity. I visited the Chapel, the Laboratory, the Library, &c., &c., and was much pleased to find that all was as it should be. If Dr. Dwight * could but be willing cordially to approve our Civil Institutions nothing would be left to be desired. In my tour I travelled from Baltimore to New Haven in Steam Boats, excepting only the passage of the * Dr. Dwight, it has already been said, was then and had been since 1795 President of Yale College : in politics, he was an ultra-federalist. _ « tf 1 \* ~-*~ ' 1 ." fwjl > ^ I I r*j"wA*^ 98 LIFE OF JOSIAH METGS. Isthmus from Frenchtown to Wilmington and from Trenton to New Brunswick." "Sep. 30, 1816. « * * * * My S011) Charles, of Augusta, Ga., is determined to attend the Lectures in Philadelphia next winter. His practice has, no doubt, qualified him to receive a greater benefit from the Lectures, than he would receive if he had not practised. * * * * I do not think we have a single really accomplished Physician in the City, but I am not personally acquainted with half of them. * * * * I have lately wrote [sic] to Dr. Mitchell and to some other of the literati wishing a satisfactory solution of the Halo of Sept. 8—an account of which I wrote for the National Intelligencer, which was published on the 12th. I enclose with this a representation of its Phenomena. We understand the Ordinary Rainbow (I think) perfectly ; it is one of the most beautiful Solutions of perhaps the most beautiful object in Na ture, but the Halo or Corona is yet unexplained. I do not know how to enter even the threshold of its Solution." "Jan'y 30, 1817. «****! suppose, that by this time you have received the Fac Simile of Asiatic Brick. My son Henry has amused him self on the subject, and Dr. Mitchell has complimented him in a Note, which you will see in the Journal accompanying this. My son Henry is an ingenious young man, but, as he has a number of children, I am more gratified with his appointment as Notary of the U. S. Branch Bank of New York, than with the most excellent Doctor's compliments on his acumen as an Antiquarian. * * * * Henry has addressed to me a Benedic- tionary Letter in Chinese—the first Chinese Epistle perhaps written in North America ;—the Graphic part is beautiful, and T am much obliged to him fur giving me the substance of it in LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 99 English, with the manner of pronouncing the Words by the China Man. * * * * We have nothing very interesting. The Corps Diplomatique are exceedingly polite to everybody. They give (especially the Ministers of France and Great Britain) superb drawing Eooms and Suppers and Card tables, &c.,&c., &c. They plaister their fronts and tails with Gold Lace, and at Mr. Madison's who wears plain black cloth, they look, in my opinion, very silly Quoad their Costumes. I have as completely satisfied^ the sentiment as to Courts and Courtiers, here, in two years as • Yorick's [?] French servant, La Fleur, did the sentiment of Drumming, after having beaten one for ten years in a marching Regiment." "Feb. 7th, 1817. " I enclose with this three English News Papers * * * * If we can preserve Peace about 10 or 15 years, and our attachment to our Country continues, we may have another War, which will ':- open a safe road to Quebec." "June 13th, 1817. " I have always had apprehensions that your Intellectual man would claim too much from your Corporeal man. Juvenal said 2000 years ago, very properly, that it is folly ' propter vitam vivendi perdere causas :'— a sentiment well illustrated by an old Sailor—he was sitting 1 astride of the main top-gallant yard ; his Captain on the quarter- \ deck ordered him to go to the extremity of the yard to reeve a halyard. Jack saw that if he attempted it he should fall, and after hearing the Curses of his Captain for some time, he said, : I'll tell you what, Captain, I have beeu a Sailor, mau and boy, these 40 years; I always made it a rule never to kill myself for the sake of living, and by —— I won't go ! ! !' I recommend the story to your attentive consideration, and I dare say that Mrs. Drake will join me * * * * / 100 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. 101 i» il " I am acquainted with M. Correa the Portuguese minister. He is a veteran in science of all descriptions ; he knows more of the U. States as a subject of scientific contemplation and observa tion than both houses of Congress ; he is the only learned man of our Corps Diplomatique, and I have much satisfaction in his conversation. * * * * We have no news. The President, you know, is on a tour to the East and North and West. It is considered by some republicans as of doubtful policy : if he could escape the folly of parades and addresses, &c., &c., his journey would be much more easy and pleasant—and perhaps more use ful in a political view." "Jan. 8th, 1818. « * * * * Your Western World will be a highly interesting object, at all events, and it remains to be proved whether that interest will be joyous or grievous. M. Correa says that the Atlantic States are to be merely the Portico of the Great Political Temple of the West. I feel more anxiety now than I ever before experienced relative to our vast country. " The Public Papers inform you of all that is going on here. I bought last Evening 2 Vols, of a new Work by my merry Friend, Mr. Paulding, author of John Bull & Brother Jonathan, and now Secretary of the Navy Board. It is written well so far as I read ; it kept me up an hour or two later than my usual hour of rest, and I had all the benefit of laughter. * * * * " The death of the Princess Charlotte of Great Britain is of course a very interesting topic of conversation. Had that poor child been educated to take care of the Dairy, she might have been the Mother of a dozen Children. I think I am not super stitious, but there seems to be an awful fatality in the present State and future prospects of the Eoyal Family of Great Britain." "Jan. 27th, 1818. " * * * * death of Dr. Wistar. I regret that I had not the pleasure of an acquaintance with him in this state of being. I hope to be acquainted with him hereafter. " We are well, except Miss Emily. Poor child, she has ap proximated to the last day of life. She has a Cancer. * * * * She is serene and calm, and even cheerful in so alarming a condi tion. She has founded her faith and hope on the Eock of Ages. " * * * * M. Correa is greatly afflicted on account of the death of Dr. Wistar ; he was confined to his room yesterday. I intend to call on him to-day." "July 24th, 1818. " * * * * You have done right in leaving Lexington, and in declining an Invitation to return. I have little hope of any thing really clever in States which permit Slavery.* * * * * " You see by the length of this that I am an old man. I am am now almost 61 JEtatis. I have never had one sick day. I was the 13th child of my mother and was born in the 49th t year of her Age. * This and one or two other sentences in his letters show that, at least in his latter years, Josiah Meigs thought the system of slavery highly detrimental to the best interests of a community . I do not know, however, whether he had always been of this opinion : during his residence at Athens, he owned slaves, as is learned from his writing to Col. Meigs on Aug. 19th, 1803, " we have had no death except of my favorite Negro female slave and her child, an infant." t It will have been observed that I have said he was born in the forty- sixth year of his mother's age. It seems audacious to contradict a man upon such a point at this distance of time, but, as the official record of his mother's birth only makes her forty-five at the time Jof his birth, I cannot but think that he fell into error, writing from hearsay and so long after the death of all who would have been likely to have accurate knowledge of the subject. f * ö. 102 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 1,08- u "Nov. 10th, 1818. " On my arrival here after an absence of more than three weeks on a visit to Philadelphia, New York and Connecticut, in com pany with Mrs. Meigs, I found yours. * * * * I had a very interesting visit to my friends and Children in Philadelphia, New York, and Connecticut. I had not been at Middletown, the place of my nativity and the land of my forefathers' sepul chres, for nearly 20 years. I spent several days there, and many a pleasing reminiscence I had—true reminiscences, for many a pleasing idea was recalled by objects, which to mere memory would have been forever lost. " I was happy to find my son the Doctor rising rapidly in the estimation of the good people of Philadelphia. * * * * " I have placed my son Ezra Stiles with his Brother at Phil adelphia to attend the Lectures of the Medical School. Stiles is an extraordinary young man—I call him my Giant—on the 1st of last August he completed the 17th year, and then measured 6 feet and half an inch ; he is straight as a Keed, and as strong as Hercules, and, what is better, he has a fine mind. How we do love to talk about our Children !" "Feb. 5,1819. " * * * I too can give you pleasure by the information that the Columbian Institute, of which I have the honor to be Presi dent this year, has good prospects. " I have little doubt that this Congress will, before they rise, give the Institute a few acres of ground for our building and for a Botanic Garden. "Mr. Barlow made great efforts to obtain this object eight or ten years ago—he could do nothing—but prejudices which then were of the density of a thunder cloud are now as tenuous as the train of the Comet, The gentlemen here all know aud feel that I have not, nor can have, any selfish view, in advocating the interest of the C. Institute ; they believe that I love Science and Litera ture for their own sake—as the moralists very properly say, we ought to love Virtue for its own sake. I tell those gentlemen who hold in their hands the destinies of our beloved country that Knowledge is Power—if not even Virtue. * * * * " I hope yet to pass from Cincinnati to Kentucky with you, over a good bridge, and revisit Big Bone Lick. " Our Congress are yet engaged in the Seminole War, and if they were not limited by the Constitution and Laws, would spend, perhaps, more time in talking about the war than Jackson did in finishing it. * * * * "These diplomatic gentlemen I am pretty well acquainted with, they are very civil and well behaved Gentlemen, but really (except M. Correa) they are no great things; it requires dozens of them to balance a Franklin, or a Jefferson, or an Adams, &c. " I send you De La Plaine's book. He has persuaded a large number of folks here (and me among the rest) to sit before his Portrait Painter. Correa says De La Plaine's Repository is only a History of Beasts. I hope he (De La Plaine) will be satisfied with my Portrait in Oil, and say nothing about me in Printer's Ink." " Feb. 25, 1819. " * * * * This morning is announced the ratification of a Treaty with Spain, with the unanimous consent of the Senate. " The Gulf Stream is ours. My Western friends are secure. The Bulwarks of our Holy Religion * must now pray double tides, as Seamen say. * This expression might be supposed to refer to Spain, only that Meigs twice uses it where it can only mean England. On one of these occasions, he writes that " The Land Laws of the United States were all burned in the con flagration kindled by the " Bulwarks of our Holy. Religion " i. e. at the time Washington was captured by the English. • f $ * This ie, of coursé, an abbreviation for the well-known newspaper, the National Intelligencer of which Gales and Seaton were the publishers. LIFE OF JOSIAII MEIGS. 107 accompanied with a suggestion of a better plea. The opposers of the Missouri constitution * will, I trust, be able to suggest such a Plea as will quiet all the alarming agitation of this day." * * * * "Feby. 26, 1821. " * * * * My line of knowledge of Literary characters has bec n growing indistinct since 1801, when I left Yale College. I advised the Govr. and the Judges to apply to the Principals of the Northern Colleges for recommendation. It is wholly vain to look to Southern Colleges. Where Slavery is admitted,. Literature and Science will never flourish. The muses hate the Lash and Whip; they are of gentle mind. Convestit omnia perfundens sua luce Sol ; The overflowing Sun clothes all things with his Light. The idea is more elegantly expressed by Homer, Milton, Thompson, but I cannot now turn to the passages or exactly recollect them. " In the 8th book of Iliad, Line 1st, we have ' 'Half /lev zpozoiteithof èzî&vato jtâgfw ait àlav,' which Pope has wretchedly translated 'Aurora, now, fair daughter of the dawn ' Sprinkled with rosy light the dewy morn.' " Our Florida business is settled and the Missouri (MiSEKY) business is unsettled ; the Civil death of this Congress takes place at Midnight between next Saturday and Sunday. I fear this corporate body is badly prepared to die, either civilly or physically. "I have had some hints that I might amuse myself and possibly do some good to Society by acting with the Commissioners of Spain in defining the Boundary, by the Red River, etc. ; As tronomical Skill will be necessary to ascertain Latitudes and Longitudes. If I were 15 or 20 years younger than I am I * See Appendix F. Xjf. / J 108 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. should gladly undertake the work, but 64 years admonish me to seek repose. " We have had a severe winter—the Quadrigesimal. Can you or your Scientific friends assign a probable cause? If it were a period of 20 years, it would seem to have some connection with the Lunar Cycle—the Saros of the Greeks—I know nothing about it." " April 8, 1822. " * * * * The avidity for office is of the highest grade of Mania here. I have at least 100 applicants for a single clerk ship in the G. L. Office of the lowest grade of compensation— viz. : $800—and I am confident I could raise in ten days a Eegiment of 800 clerks at $400." * * * * CHAPTER IX. Further details of his last years—President of the Columbian Institute —Professor in Columbian College—Application to Mr. Jefferson in regard to professorship in University of Virginia—His great health—Final and only ill ness, and death—Mrs. Meigs writes of the final scene—Funeral—Obituary notices—Membership of various societies—Mrs. Meigs survives him many years—Children they had lost—Sketches of lives of the children, who sur vived Josiah. Not much more remains to be said of my subject. His own words have given an idea of his Washington life and furnished many details of his thoughts and aspirations down to within five months of his death, and it is only necessary now to sum up a few points and give a short account of some matters which do not appear from his letters. In the last few years of his life, he took some interest in the Columbian Institute, and was its president from 1819 until his death apparently, when John Quincy Adams 55 was elected in his place. Upon the foundation ot the Columbian College in the beginning of 1821, he was one of the original corporators and a trustee, jointly with his nephew, E. J. Meigs, Jr. ; and he was elected Professor of Experimental Philosophy in the in stitution in 1821. It is probable, therefore, that he delivered a course of lectures in it the last winter of his life. Both of these Institutions, it need hardly be said, were in Washington, and the latter one has now become a University and a place of learning of much importance. He wrote also in 1820 to Mr. Jefferson asking as to the mode of application for a professor ship in the University of Virginia ; but Mr. Jeffersou replied that the institution was not yet advanced to that stage, all its < iüw rï°«£s '/< / K .i ^ l 110 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. funds having been applied to building purposes. These facts appear to indicate that Meigs longed at times for a place where he could devote himself more entirely to purely scientific pur suits. It has already appeared that Josiah Meigs was a man of great health, arid it is likely that he might have lived many years more but for some violent attack of illness, which terminated his life in the short space of eight days. This seems to have been the only illness he ever had, but I have been unable to learn its nature. In August of 1822, he had visited Philadel phia and does not seem to have been very contented there ; on his return to Washington, he writes on August 15th to his son Henry that he is glad to return from Philadelphia to his home, where, he says, " I can breathe a pure air—and am not com pelled to suffer Noise and Noisomeness. I lament that the Dai- mon of Yellow Fever has appeared at all. * * It is very hot. * * We suffer severely by drought—and it is less healthy than it has been. * * We are well." This is the last letter of his that has been in my hands, but from other sources it appears that he was taken sick in the last few days of August, rapidly grew dangerously ill, and died in the night * between Wednesday and Thursday the 4th and 5th of September, 1822, at the age of 65 years and two weeks ; he had been ill but eight days. Mrs. Meigs wrote her son Henry not long after that his father had said from the first of his illness that he should not recover, and that he had died without bodily pain. She added that her only alleviation iu her great sorrow flowed " from the confidence ex- * His tombstoue records that he died Sept. 5, 1822, but it seems from other sources that his death occurred on the eveuing of the 4th. Ezra Stiles Meige wrote his brother Henry on Sept. 5,1822, that their father " expired last night at a quarter before eight o'clock ; " and the National Intelligencer of Saturday the 7th says that he had died " on Wednesday night last." . LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. Ill pressed [by Mr. Meigs] three days before his death of a blessed hope through the merits of a Redeemer, when with overflowing tears he repeated the 51st psalm * which is in Watts, which she quotes. Charles had gone down to Washington from Phila delphia, upon hearing of his father's illness, but did not get there until after his death; he writes Henry Meigs as follows :—"I found the house in deep mourning, for the body of our parent had not yet been removed to its last abode. The external marks of re spect were decent and proper. There was no pomp, except that which sprang from the voluntary and respectful attendance of a large number of people of rank and though they are in general not so good and honest as people who have no rank, yet they show the state of the public mind as to his character." On the Saturday (7Ui) following his death the National Intel ligencer had the following short obituary notice of him:—" * * Few persons have lived more esteemed, or died more regretted, by those to whom they were known, than this venerable and excel lent man. The purity, philanthrophy, and simplicity of his character, were proverbial, and rendered him an object of general respect. * * * It is a remarkable fact, that although the deceased reached the age of sixty-five, he had never suffered a day's sick ness before the attack which terminated his life." Niles's Regis ter, of Sept. 14th, noticing his death, spoke of him as " one of the best of men and most faithful of officers ;" and the National Gazette, of the 9th, said of him :—" He was passionately fond of scientific pursuits to which he has devoted a large portion of his life. He was universally respected for his mild and unas suming manners." The members of the Columbian Institute resolved55 to wear crape for one month as a mark of respect to bis memory, and the clerks in the Land Office resolved56 to do * See Appendix G. I ^ ' -f \- 112 LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. the same and to attend his funeral in a body. He was buried in Holmead's Cemetery in Washington, but, that having been given up as a burying-ground, his grave was removed in July, 1878, to the lot of his grandson, Gen. M. C. Meigs, in Arlington Cemetery. Josiah Meigs was a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Languages and Belles- Lettres, and apparently a Doctor of Laws : his name is at least often written with LL. D. after it, though there is nothing to show by what institution the degree was conferred. I know nothing about his connection with the second-named society, except the fact of his membership, which appears from his letters, but on October 19th, 1821, he sent to the American Philosophi cal Society a paper called " Geometric exemplification of temper ature, wind, and weather, for 1820, at Washington :" this was referred to a committee and its report thereon adopted, but no other trace of the paper has been found : it was not printed by the Society, but its title makes it likely that it was not of a nature capable of being printed. The following is also worthy of mention here to show how late his scientific interests kept up and to what a distance he sent his results, though I do not know just what is referred to. Henry Meigs writes him ou July 13th, 1822, " I see that your honors flow uot only from the Columbian Institute of which you are President, but also from the Northern Czar, whose Imperial Academy is pleased to learn from so remote and unknown a region as this." Mrs. Meigs survived him many years, living the greater part of the time with her daughter, Clara Forsyth. Her latter years must have been saddened by poverty and separation from most of her children, but she is said to have been bright and cheerful and fond of company to the end. She died iu 1850 (?) at the LIFE OP JOSIAH MEIGS. 113 advanced age of 88 years, and was buried in Columbus, Georgia, which was then her daughter's home. She was evidently most loyal to her husband in all his troubles, and her letters exhibit far more feeling in speaking of them than do his own. As late as 1840, she writes with no little asperity of the Dwights who had been largely instrumental in Mr. Meigs's troubles in New Haven, and then goes on to tell of the already-mentioned move- ment of the tories against her father's house, and closes by saying, " and now the families of these very tories are called Whigs." It may safely be concluded, therefore, that not only was she a devoted and faithful wife and mother, but that she was very full of that intense devotion to her husband's interests and that cer tainty of his being in the right, which many women exhibit and which has, probably, much to do with the complete happiness of a family. In addition to the children already mentioned as lost by Josiah and Clara Meigs, they lost a daughter Juliana at Athens in 1809; she died after some long illness, which her father says she endured like a heroine. In 1818, their son Samuel William died, who appears to have been a young man of good promise but only attained the age of thirty. He had apparently some unfortunate love affair, as I find a cousin of his writing in the end of 1816, that Samuel had gone to Georgia and that his marriage differ ence was not yet made up. His father writes shortly after his death, that " his reason had been wholly destroyed by an accu mulation of various misfortunes and ills both physical and men tal * * * * he was always distinguished for his good will and benevolence and obedience." He died in an asylum at Baltimore and was buried in Holmead's Cemetery in Washington, but was removed with his father to Arlington in 1878. -. --Il a ' APPENDIX C. The following may not be without interest as 'a sample of the style of pleasantry of the day, and as one of the many dunning notices which the non-payment of dues called for : it is in all probability irom the pen of Josiah Meigs, as it is contained in the issue of August 9, 1787, after he had become the sole pub- 124' LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS, II usher :—" NEW HAVEN, AUGUST 9. TO the READERS of this PAPER. The Printer wishes to suggest to you, that when Meigs and Dana adopted the motto of the First Volume, "NON SIBI SED TOTO GENITOS SE CREDERE MUN- DO"—they only meant to express their wishes to advance the interest of the PUBLIC, so far as they could in connection with their OWN PRIVATE INTEREST—which they conceived to be the true modern meaning of the word PATRIOTISM. " But it seems the line lias been taken in its literal sense to- wit : That the printers were under no obligations to themselves nor their connections, but that they meant to devote their indus try and the best part of their lives to the public, without any compensation. " This is a capital ERRATUM in construction, which, with numerous ERRATA in their printing, you are intreated to correct. " I know of but one servant of the public, who has been so great as to refuse all reward for his services,—and he is utterly beyond the reach of imitation : Nature has not been vigorous enough to produce his like since the creation. " The present motto was as unluckily chosen as the other. The prophecy of DANIEL is fast fulfilling. The Printers have let 'MANY RUN TO AND FRO' all over the country, 'AND' their 'KNOWLEDGE' of the worthlessness of newspaper debts has been indeed vastly ' INCREASED.' " It appears to be a matter of no small consequence to adopt proper mottoes—and there is in an old author, a line of plain English, which cannot be perverted or misunderstood,—a line which has excited more vivid and powerful emotions than any one in Homer, Virgil, Milton, Trumbull, Dwight, or Barlow, which perhaps may be adopted for the motto of the Third Vol ume of this paper—it is the following: "PROMISE AFORE SAID NOT REGARDING, HATH NEVER PERFORM ED THE SAME." "All persons indebted to the late Partnership of Meigs, Bow- en and Dana, or Meigs and Dana, are requested to make imme- LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 125 diate Payment to the Subscriber, that he may be enabled to dis charge the demands against the said Partnerships. Any kind of country Produce or manufacture will be received. They are particularly intreated to make use of the opportunities they may have of forwarding their respective balances at the approaching commencement." "The PRINTER. " New-Haven, August 8th, 1787." •/ : APPENDIX D. The two following letters from Jefferson to Meigs had better be printed here, to show more accurately what is stated in the " Washington, May 20, 1803. " Your friendly letter of April 12th was not received till the llth of this month. The approbation, which you are pleased to express of my efforts in the public cause are highly acceptable, the concurrence of our fellow-citizens of understanding and good principles being more than a countervail with me for all the dirty ribaldry and falsehoods with which the tory papers are constantly filled. We are giving a fair course to the experiment whether an honest government can stand against the licentious ness of the press—a fair one, I call it, because we do not deter them by prosecutions even under those laws against libels estab lished by the states, whose authority to establish such we always affirmed to be exclusive of that of the general government. I believe we shall succeed in the experiment and that it will appear that the people will consider the acts of the government which they see and feel, as better evidence than the falsehoods which they read. It is with great pleasure I learn that the college of Georgia is under your care. Science is indispensably necessary for the support of a Republican government, and it is to the middle aud southern States we must look for support until the clerical chains in which the New England states are bound can / I 126 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. be broken or lightened. This will be done in time. Two of those states are already with us. In Massachusetts we continue to gain, and even in Connecticut where we have lost in the house of representatives, we have gained in the mass of the people. In 1802 Trumbull and Kirby had 12,000 and 4523 votes, to-wit : out of every 100 Trumbull had 71 Kirby 29. In 1803 the votes are 14,300 and 7848, to-wit: of every 100 Trumbull has 65 and Kirby 35. People of that country move slowly but steadily. I pray you to accept, &c." "Monticello, Mar. 16, 1815. " Your favor of Feb. 15 has been received, and I cordially reciprocate your congratulations on the great events which have taken place in the South, and the peace which has followed them. The latter, altho' desired, is rendered infinitely more acceptable by the former, which indeed was necessary to impress on both parties a just idea of the bravery of both : but most especially to let England see she can gain nothing of us by war. I hope her government will now have the wisdom as well as justice, by a satisfactory provision against the impressment of our citizens to convert into a permanent peace what is really but a truce without that provision. Still her loss by the war will be incal culable, as it has planted all the important manufactures so firmly in our soil as never again to be eradicated. I am con fident that two-thirds of the articles we formerly took from England, will now be furnished among ourselves. We shall hardly again send our cotton to England to be spun, woven, and returned for our own wearing. " I am particularly to thank you for the kind expressions of your letter towards myself, and for the opportunity it gives me of assuring you of the friendly interest I take in your happiness and success. This pleasure will be greatly increased, if an oppor tunity should be afforded me of doing it in person, should your passage thro' this part of our country permit me to see you here, in the course of the"ensuing summer, as your letter flatters me. With this assurance be pleased to accept that of my friendly esteem and respect." V-; j N '• JK LIFE OP JoäiAH MEIGS. 127 APPENDIX E. There is quite an extensive sketch of the life of E. J. Meigs, Jr., who was the eldest son of Col. R. J. Meigs, to be found in Campbell's biographical sketches (Columbus, O., 1838). He is often spoken of as the " Postmaster-General," on account of his having held that federal office for many years, and also as the "Governor," because he had held the gubernatorial office in Ohio ; he had also been a Judge of the Supreme Court of that State and one of her earliest U. S. Senators. Some of his letters appear to me to show so well the state of political and social feeling of the day as to make it advisable to print them. The few following extracts are reproduced here, and will serve to show (what I have already had occasion to mention) that party spirit was at that time at white heat. The letters quoted are all written to his father, Col. Meigs : " Marietta [Ohio] "Sept. 19th, 1796. " The Executive Directory exhibit firmness with prudence and the nation of republicans will triumph and the nation of pirates (I hope) be humbled." " Marietta, Jan'y 31, 1802. " Herewith you will receive the Ohio Gazette containing the statement of votes. The Feds here by every art and Falsehood kept me out of the Convention, although I attended at Chili- cothe for my own satisfaction. But we have fairly beat them at last by large majorities, and they are raving worse than ever and fulminating their anathemas against the administration with the malice and Fury of Bigots in despair. It is impossible to detail the political occurrences here; every railing accusation has been brought against me, even the Ladies of the Town were prohibited from visiting us, and attempts were made to exile us from society. But with a hand steadily reaching to its object, I have nearly prostrated their Temples of Federalism. The Put- natn influence is nearly done. By returns from the other coun- $ies I find that in both houses of the Legislature consisting of u 128 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 54, there will be but 4 Federals. Mr. Tiffin will be Governor ; it is generally intended by Republicans to appoint me Chief Justice of the State for 7 years with a salary equal to the Gov ernor's, which will be better for me settled as I am in Marietta than to go to Chilicothe." " Cincinnati, March 5, 1802. " I wrote you by Mr. Frye, since which time I went to Wash ington City, stayed there about ten days, and attended the debates of both Houses of Congress. Col. Worthington and Judge Symmes were there. Mr. Jefferson sent for me and made many inquiries concerning the Territory ; a few days after I dined with him at his house in company with several leading republican Characters of both Houses. Mr. Jefferson is plain in dress and manners, affable and inquisitive, where he wants information." "Richmond, Va., Sept. 26, 1807. " I have been here 6 weeks as a witness in the Trial of Col. Burr. * * * * The intention of dividing the U. S. lias within a few days been satisfactorily proved. Burr is as subtle as ether and seems to avoid all touch ; you may as well grasp a Shadow. * * * * It is astonishing what support Col. Burr receives here from Federal Influence, Exertion, and Intrigue; almost every Fed. seems to identify himself and his fate with Col. Burr." APPENDIX F. It will be remembered that the opponents of the further ex tension of slavery made their first violent contest at the time Missouri desired admission into the Union. They proposed to require an amendment to her Constitution, prohibiting forever slavery within her limits; and the whole country was divided at once into two hostile camps, North and South. The letter in the text shows that Josiah Meigs, though strongly disapproving of slavery, was opposed to the proposed restriction; and his oldest son Henry lost his seat in Congress from entertaining the LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. 129 same opinions and acting upon them in opposition to the will of his constituents. He was a -member from New York, the Leg islature of which State had requested her representatives to vote in favor of the restriction ; but he voted in favor of the State's admission without the restriction, thus distinctly violating the Legislature's request. This excited a great deal of severe criti cism of him in his State, and possibly John Quincy Adams was not altogether in the wrong when he wrote in his Diary (IV 518) that he supposed certain resolutions in favor of emancipation introduced by Mr. Meigs were intended as " an apology to his . constituents for voting against the restriction." The resolutions in question were as follows, and were presented by Mr. Meigs, on February 5, 1820 : " Whereas slavery in the United States is an evil of great and increasing magnitude, one which merits the greatest efforts of this nation to remedy : Therefore, " Resolved, that a committee be appointed to inquire into the expediency of devoting the public lands as a fund for the pur pose of " 1st, Employing a naval force competent to the annihilation of the slave trade. " 2ndly, The emancipation of slaves in the United States ; and 3dly, colonizing them in such a way as shall be conducive to their comfort and happiness, in Africa, their mother country." " The said preamble and resolutions were read : and, on mo tion of Mr. Walker, of North Carolina, laid ou the table." (Benton's Abridg. Debs. Congr. VI 502). At the next session, on February 16, 1821, Mr. Meigs rose to call the House's attention to his above resolutions. In the course of his remarks he said :— " He was aware that on the first mention of this subject, un pleasant feelings might be excited in one part of the House, but he trusted on examination of the proposed plan, it would appear less objectionable than was believed; and he ardently hoped indeed, that ultimately it might be found the means of closing forever, by one of the most glorious acts of legislation that ever proceeded from any legislative body, the growing controversy 130 LIFE OF JOSIAH MEIGS. LIFE or JOSIAH MEIGS. 131 between the North and South, acknowledged on all hands to be of a most serious and alarming nature. When, he said, it was considered that in the certain increase of our population, doubling in 25 years, we should see in half a century not less than forty millions of people in the United States, of which perhaps twenty would be inhabitants of the vast country be yond the Mississippi, we cannot fail to admit that the five hundred millions of acres, contemplated to be devoted as a fund for the emancipation of slaves, will have had a value more than competent to the redemption and colonization of all such of our slave population as it shall be found expedient or desirable to part with. * * * * Mr. Meigs said he had witnessed with constant anxiety, the progress of the great controversy which now agitates us, and had from the beginning of his career, as a mem ber of this House, determined, if it should become necessary, to devote himself a sacrifice for the great object if possible, of keeping the two great parties in peace. I do not know, said he, whether I have made such a sacrifice. It is probable I have by the well-known course which I have pursued upon this subject. But sir, if indeed I have lost the confidence of those whom I represent, I will, before I leave my present station, at least make one effort for the purpose of uniting the parties by the only measure which appears to me to be calculated to unite them ; one, too, in which both may participate, and in which they will, as I repeat, perform one of the most noble acts of legislation ; one which I would not exchange for all the laws on our statute-books from 1789 to this day." The resolutions he then offered did not differ very materially from those presented at the prior session ; they proposed the appointment of a committee to consider the expediency of devoting 500 millions of acres next west the Mississippi (1) to the employment of the same naval force before proposed ; (2) to gradual emancipation " by a voluntary exchange of the lands for them (the negroes);" and lastly, to colonization, but no exchange was to be allowed except upon the perfectly ascertained consent of the slave proposed to be colonized, and no separation of husband and wife or parent and child was to be allowed " contrary to their well-ascertained consent." By 63 votes to 50, it was at once decided to consider the resolutions, and they were then on motion of Mr. Clarke, of New York, laid on the table by a vote of 66 to 55. (Benton's Abridg. Debs. Cong. VII122-3). Mr. Meigs's vote against the restriction excited the utmost opposition to him in New York ; he writes : " I suffered pur gatory for thirty years after my votes on the Missouri question ; I lived armed night and day with my heavy pistols each loaded with balls and slugs—threatened with assassination many times a day by anonymous writers." As already said, his votes upon this subject cost him his seat ; but, whatever any one may think of the question, which was at the bottom of the matter, his bold independence must excite admiration. Mr. C. C. Cambreleng was, I think, his successor. APPENDIX G. This psalm reads as follows :— 1. Shew pity, Lord ; O Lord, forgive ; Let a repenting rebel live : Are not thy mercies large and free ? May not a sinner trust in thee ? 2. My crimes are great, but can't surpass The power and glory of thy grace : Great God, tliy nature hath no bound, So let thy pard'ning love be found. 3. O wash my soul from ev'ry sin, And make my guilty conscience clean ; Here on my heart the burden lies, And past offences pain mine eyes. 111 • ' 1 132 LIFE IF JOSIAH MEIGS. 4. My lips with shame my sins confess Against thy law, against thy grace ; Lord, should thy judgment grow severe, I am condemned, but thou art clear. 5. Should sudden vengeance seize my breath, I must pronounce thee just in death : And if my soul were sent to hell, Thy righteous law approves it well. 6. Yet save a trembling sinner, Lord, Whose hope, still hov'ring round thy word, Would light on some sweet promise there, Some sure support against despair.