Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 | Page 8

now be rejected by the commonest laborer.
As early as 1830 by father bought a cast-iron plough; it was the wonder
of the neighborhood and the occasion of many prophecies that were to
be falsified by events.
My father was a practical man and a gentleman by nature. With him
civility was innate. He was a close observer and something of a
philosopher. I recall his statement made in my childhood that matter
was indestructible. He was of even temper, and of an imperturbable
spirit. His paternal ancestor on this side of the Atlantic was made a
freeman at Lynn in 1638. Of his arrival in the country there is no record.
From that date there had been no marriage except into English families.
My father was purely English. My mother, whose family name was
Marshall, and who was a descendant of John Marshall who came in the
Hopewell, Captain Babb, in 1635, was English also through all her
ancestors from John Marshall.

My father enjoyed the respect and confidence of his fellow citizens and
he held many of the offices of the town and for many years. In 1843
and 1844 he was a member of the Massachusetts House of
Representatives and in 1853 he was a member of the Constitutional
Convention. I was also a member of the same bodies, and the
association with my father under such peculiar circumstances is one of
the pleasant recollections of my life.* My mother belonged to a family
of unusual intellectual endowment, and of great rigidity of opinion. Her
father, Jacob Marshall, was a student by tendency and habit, a stone
mason and farmer by occupation, and the inventor of the press used for
pressing hops and cotton in square bales. He lived to be more than
eighty years of age, was twice married, and had a large family of
children whom he educated and trained as well as children could be
trained and educated at the close of the last century in a country town in
northern Massachusetts.
For the last fifty years of his life he devoted himself to the study of the
bible and such works of history as he could command. His knowledge
of the bible was so great that he was an oracle in the town, although he
departed from the popular faith and became a Universalist. He lived
comfortably and without hard work, and in the later years of his life he
became the owner of two farms in the northerly part of Lunenburg. As I
recollect him and his farms he could not have been a good farmer. His
crop was hops, and that crop always commanded money, at a time
when it was unusual to realize money for farm produce.
As my father's house was a mile from the District School, and as there
was a school within twenty or thirty rods of my grandfather's house, I
was sent to my grandfather's for my first winter's schooling. I think it
must have been the winter of 1823-4. The teacher was Ithamar Butters,
called Dr. Butters from the circumstance that he had studied medicine
for a time with Dr. Aaron Bard, a physician in the village. Of Dr.
Butters as a teacher I remember little. He became a disbeliever in the
Bible--an agnostic of those days. I recollect a remark of his made many
years after: That he would prefer the worst hell to annihilation, which
he believed would be his fate.

I learned to read by standing in front of my mother as she read the
Bible. Of course all the letters were inverted, and the faculty of reading
an inverted page, has remained.
I went to the District School summer and winter, until I was ten years
of age, and to the winter school until I passed my seventeenth birthday,
when my school life ended. My father and mother were scrupulous
about my attendance, and I cannot recall that I was ever allowed to be
absent during the school term either for work or pleasure.
When I reached the age of ten years I was kept on the farm during the
summer months, until I left home in December, 1830. In those days
farmers' boys did not enjoy the luxury of shoes in the summer, nor
indeed in the autumn season. More than once I picked chestnuts bare-
footed and often I have tended the oxen in the mowing field frosty
mornings and warmed my feet by standing on a stone.
Once only during my home life did I go to Boston with my father. He
carried poultry in a one-horse wagon. I accompanied him. The year
may have been 1828, or '9 or '30. On our way he stopped at one of the
Waltham cotton factories to see a niece of my father