Charles Carleton Coffin | Page 6

my schoolmate. We were twenty or more boys and girls, and I was regarded by my mates with jealousy. I was an aristocrat, all because I wore broadcloth.
"It was the period of open fireplaces. Stoves were just being introduced. We could play blind man's buff in the old kitchen with great zest without running over stoves.
"It was the period of brown bread, apple and milk, boiled dinners, pumpkin pies. We had very little cake. Pork and beans and Indian pudding were standard dishes, only the pudding was eaten first. My father had always been accustomed to that order. His second marriage was in 1835, and my stepmother, or rather my sister Mary, who was teaching school in Concord and had learned the new way, brought about the change in the order of serving the food.
"Prior to 1830 there was no stove in the meeting-house, and the introduction of the first stove brought about a deal of trouble. One man objected, the air stifled him. It was therefore voted that on one Sunday in each month there should be no fire.
"It was a bitter experience,--riding two and one-half miles to meeting, sitting through the long service with the mercury at zero. Only we did not know how cold it was, not having a thermometer. My father purchased one about 1838. I think there was one earlier in the town.
"The Sunday noons were spent around the fireplaces. The old men smoked their pipes.
"In 1835, religious meetings were held in all the school districts, usually in the kitchens of the farmhouses. There was a deep religious interest. Protracted meetings, held three days in succession, were frequently attended by all the ministers of surrounding towns. I became impressed with a sense of my condition as a sinner, and resolved to become a Christian. I united with the church the first Sunday in May, 1835, in my twelfth year. I knew very little about the spiritual life, but I have no doubt that I have been saved from many temptations by the course then pursued. The thought that I was a member of the church was ever a restraint in temptation."
The anti-slavery agitation reached Boscawen in 1835, and Carleton's father became an ardent friend of the slaves. In the Webster meeting-house the boy attended a gathering at which a theological student gave an address, using an illustration in the peroration which made a lasting impression upon the youthful mind. At a country barn-raising, the frame was partly up, but the strength of the raisers was gone. "It won't go, it won't go," was the cry. An old man who was making pins threw down his axe, and shouted, "It will go," and put his shoulder to a post, and it did go. So would it be with anti-slavery.
The boy Carleton became an ardent abolitionist from this time forth. He read the Liberator, Herald of Freedom, Emancipator, and all the anti-slavery tracts and pamphlets which he could get hold of. In his bedroom, he had hanging on the wall the picture of a negro in chains. The last thing he saw at night, and the first that met his eyes in the morning, was this picture, with the words, "Am I not a man and a brother?"
With their usual conservatism, the churches generally were hostile to the movement and methods of the anti-slavery agitation. There was an intense prejudice against the blacks. The only negro in town was a servant girl, who used to sit solitary and alone in the colored people's pew in the gallery. When three families of black folks moved into a deserted house in Boscawen, near Beaver Dam Brook, and their children made their appearance in Corser Hill school, a great commotion at once ensued in the town. After the Sunday evening prayer-meeting, which was for "the conversion of the world," it was agreed by the legal voters that "if the niggers persisted in attending school," it should be discontinued. Accordingly the children left the Corser Hill school, and went into what was, "religiously speaking," a heathen district, where, however, the prejudice against black people was not so strong, and there were received into the school.
Thereupon, out of pure devotion to principle, Carleton's father protested against the action of the Corser Hill people, and, to show his sympathy, gave employment to the negroes even when he did not need their services. Society was against the Africans, and they needed help. They were not particularly nice in their ways, nor were they likely to improve while all the world was against them. Mr. Coffin's idea was to improve them.
About this time Whittier's poems, especially those depicting slave life, had a great influence upon young Carleton. Learning the poems, he declaimed them in schools and lyceums. The first week in June, which was not