My Friends at Brook Farm
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John Van Der Zee Sears >> My Friends at Brook Farm
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[Illustration: John Van Der Zee Sears]
MY FRIENDS AT BROOK FARM
BY
JOHN VAN DER ZEE SEARS
TO MY FRIEND
JOSEPH HORNOR COATES, Esq.
OF PHILADELPHIA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE OLD COLONIE
II. FRIEND GREELEY
III. A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
IV. A BAD BEGINNING
V. A GOOD ENDING
VI. ENTERTAINMENTS
VII. THE SCHOOL
VIII. ODDMENTS
IX. FOURIER AND THE FARMERS
X. UNTO THIS LAST
ILLUSTRATIONS
JOHN VAN DER ZEE SEARS _Frontispiece_
HORACE GREELEY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
THE BROOK FARM CALL
"THE HIVE"
CHARLES A. DANA
THE PAGEANT
A PIONEER KINDERGARTEN
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
CHAPTER I
THE OLD COLONIE
In May, 1624, the Dutch packet New Netherlands sailed up the Hudson
River to the head of navigation, bringing a company of eighteen families
under the leadership of Adrian Joris. The immigrants landed at a little
trading post called Beaverwick kept by one Tice Oesterhout, a pioneer
hunter, married to a Mohawk Squaw. In a few days a party of Indians,
probably Mohawks, waited on the newcomers and politely made inquiry as
to their object in entering upon Indian lands without notice or
permission; Tice Oesterhout and his wife acting as interpreters. Joris
replied that they came in peace and hoped to abide in peace on friendly
terms with the Indians. He was told that he and his people would be
welcome if they joined the universal peace union of the Iroquois, and
not otherwise. This proposition the settlers agreed to by acclamation.
In due course the General Council of the Five Nations accepted the
Colony as a member of the Iroquois Federation. Joris was recognized as
the Civil Chief of the little community, and, as he was a Walloon, his
people became the Walloon Nation of the Great Peace Alliance. The Great
Peace was the treaty forming the basis of the Iroquois Federation. The
Colonists, instead of making a treaty with the Indians, gave their
adhesion to one already made, thereby securing safety and a practical
monopoly of the fur trade on the upper Hudson. They sent annual presents
to the Iroquois General Council, which were doubtless received as
tribute in recognition of sovereignty, but the Walloon Nation did not
seem to care very much about the sovereignty business so long as the fur
business continued to prosper, as it did for the next half century.
Two score or so of Walloons did not constitute a very formidable nation
but the men were reinforced by the women who had an equal voice not only
in local affairs but in the General Council of the Federation.
The settlers built their houses on the Indian trail leading Westward to
which they gave the name of Beaver street--their grand boulevard which
must have been two or three squares long. Beaver Street was the main
highway of the Walloon Nation and was the center of the "Old Colonie" as
the Dutch neighborhood was subsequently called. Under English rule, the
"Old Colonie" or Beaverwick was merged with Fort Orange and
Rensselaerwick, these, collectively, being named Albany in honor of the
Duke of York, Albany being one of his titles.
The Dutch of the "Old Colonie" did not take kindly to the supremacy of
the English. They obeyed the laws and the constituted authorities but
they stubbornly maintained their autonomy as far as practicable, holding
aloof from their English neighbors, keeping to their own language, their
own manners and customs, and their own habits of life, generation after
generation. As the "Old Colonie" extended its borders and new elements
were added to its population, these Dutch characteristics were gradually
modified and finally disappeared altogether, but they resisted modern
influences many years and as late as the middle of the nineteenth
century, evidences of Dutch ancestry were still to be noticed among the
people of the "Old Colonie."
My father's house, where I was born, stood on the south side of Beaver
street next to that of the Ostranders where the last Walloon Civil Chief
was said to have lived. As a child I heard Dutch spoken in the street,
in the stores and the market. We spoke Dutch, more or less, at home, and
no other language at my grandfather's farm. The Sears family came from
Cape Cod, but my mother was a Van Der Zee, and although the first Van
Der Zee came from Holland in 1642, the family was as Dutch as ever in
1842, two centuries later. Mother learned English, at school but spoke
it very little until after her marriage, and then crooned nursery rhymes
in Dutch to her children; "Trip a trop a tronches," "Wat zegt Mynhur
Papa," etc.
My father's store was "on the Pier," which is equivalent to saying he
was a flour merchant. The Pier was a sort of bulkhead between the canal
basin and the river, and it was occupied by a single row of buildings,
all of which were flour stores. The Genesee Valley was a famous wheat
growing country in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the
grain was ground in Rochester and shipped down the Erie Canal to Albany,
the receiving and distributing center for the trade. My father made
business trips to New York, and, sometimes, as far east as Boston, in
those days a long journey. He usually arranged to go "down the river" in
the Spring, having, beside his own affairs, commissions to fill as
delegate to one or more of the May Conventions.
The May Conventions were annual gatherings of religious bodies,
philanthropic organizations, reform associations, literary associations,
educational associations and all sorts of associations for the
improvement of the human race in general and the American people in
particular. The Friends yearly Meeting, the Conference of the American
Anti-Slavery societies, the Grahamites or Vegetarians, the Temperance
advocates and other upholders of beneficent, benevolent, and Utopian
ideals assembled on these occasions, and with much eloquence, made it
clear to the meanest understanding that the universal adoption of the
principles especially professed by each would do away with all evil in
the world and bring about a return of the Golden Age.
My mother did not always attend the May Conventions, but whenever she
went, she took one of us children with her. My first visit to New York
was made as an unqualified member of the Albany delegation to something
or other, I forget what. One thing I do not forget, however, and that is
hearing Horace Greeley make an address, and afterward being puffed up
with pride when the orator chatted familiarly with his small admirer at
dinner in our hotel on Barclay Street.
When my mother was absent from home, the family was left in charge of
our courtesy Aunt Catholina Van Olinda who kept the house with my elder
sister Althea, while I was dispatched for the time to my grandfather's
farm. I was very much at home on the farm and spent many happy days
there in early childhood, being regarded as a sort of heir apparent by
the principal personages there, namely, my grandfather, John Van Der Zee
the elder, and Tone and Cleo. The last named, Antony and Cleopatra, to
speak properly, were ancient negroes born and brought up on the farm and
rarely leaving it in all their long lives. They were slaves, inasmuch as
they disdained to be emancipated, and "free niggers" they looked down on
with contempt. They belonged to the Van Der Zee place and the place
belonged to them, and not to belong to anybody or to any place was, to
their apprehension, very like being a houseless and homeless pauper. As
I was John Van Zee the younger, according to their genealogy the natural
successor of Baas Hans, they extended to me assurances of their most
distinguished consideration. My father, Charles Sears, was not in the
line of succession, he being English or in other words a foreigner. They
tolerated him, partly because he spoke to them in Dutch, the only
language they knew or cared anything about, and partly because he was,
after all, a member of the family by marriage. As he always brought a
book in hand when visiting the farm, they made sure he was a
drukker--that is, a printer or bookseller or something of that vain and
frivolous description. Cleo attained great age, overrunning the century
mark. In her later years she came by inheritance to my mother, and so
rather curiously, it happened that while my father openly professed
anti-slavery sentiments, my mother was a slaveholder, presumably one of
the last of that class in the state of New York.
One of our neighbors in the Old Colonie was Thurlow Weed, the Boss of
the Whig party in the Empire State, and the founder, proprietor and
editor of the _Albany Evening Journal_, one of the most influential
papers in the country. Father was on terms of near-intimacy with Mr.
Weed, and this brought him in touch with Horace Greeley. Father, though
never a politician, was interested in party affairs and in constant
communication with the Old Line Whigs of the Henry Clay following, and I
am under the impression that the consultations of the political firm of
Seward, Weed and Greeley were sometimes held in father's library. When
he was editing the "Log Cabin" the party paper in the first Harrison
campaign, Mr. Greeley was often a guest at our house, and at that
period, he and father formed a warm friendship which continued during
the remainder of their lives.
Having referred to Mr. Weed as the Boss of the Whig party in New York
State, I think it due to the memory of an honorable man to state my
belief that he never made one dollar out of politics. He gave a great
deal of service and a great deal of money to the promotion of his
political ideas, but never received a penny in return. He was a Boss
indeed, directing party affairs with the strong hand of a Dictator, but
he sought no profit and gained none, not even the thanks of those he
served. So far from bettering his fortunes, his public activities
involved constant demands upon his private purse. Not only party friends
but party enemies called on Thurlow Weed for help when in distress,
knowing that his hands would be open and his lips closed. Closed they
were, but it was generally understood in the Old Colonie that the many
seedy and needy applicants coming to his door must have made serious
inroads on his income.
One noticeable case was that of a saloon-keeper, a Whig politician in a
small way, who was supposed to control the "canal vote," that is the
vote of the floating population in the canal basin, among whom were
boatmen ready to cast their ballots either way for a price. Mr. Weed did
not approve of this man or of his methods, and the fellow went over to
the Locofocos, bag and baggage. He took with him an ugly grudge against
the Whig Boss and vented his spite in lies, slanders and defamations of
the foulest kind. For years he made all the trouble he possibly could,
but being a drinking man, he meanwhile drifted down hill, deviously but
without a stop. When he had reached the bottom, in utter destitution, he
came to Mr. Weed begging for aid--and he got it. More than that, after
his death his children were supported until they could take care of
themselves, and the costs, as we could not help knowing, were paid by
our Beaver Street neighbor.
A final memory of Mr. Weed lingers in my mind, to the discredit of those
who should have been his grateful friends. The last time I called on him
was when he was living in New York with his daughter, I think in Broome
Street. On greeting him I noted that he was much disturbed by some
annoyance which he could neither conceal nor throw off with his old-time
buoyancy of spirit.
His agitation was so evident and so unusual that I ventured to inquire
as to the trouble which so vexed his serene temper. In reply he took up
a copy of a prominent New York morning paper and pointed to a
sub-editorial in which he was referred to by name as "a veteran lagging
superfluous on the stage."
That was the most unkindest cut of all. Mr. Weed was at that time living
in retirement, but he still contributed vigorous and timely articles to
the editorial columns of this same journal. He was grievously hurt by
the gratuitous affront to which he had been so rudely subjected, but all
he said was, "I may be superfluous, but no one can truthfully say I ever
was a laggard."
I believe the management of the paper apologized privately for the
stupid insult, ascribing the sub-editorial to one of the juniors, and
expressing regret that it should have been inadvertently printed. All
the same, Thurlow Weed never wrote another editorial, the untoward
incident putting an end to the labor of a long and arduous journalistic
career.
Across the way from Mr. Weed's residence in the Old Colonie was the Van
Antwerp house, bearing the date 1640 in iron figures at the peak of the
gable which fronted the street. It was built of yellow brick--or at
least the gable front was so built--and the Van Antwerp legend was that
these bricks were imported from Antwerp, the native town of their
family. The last descendant was Juferouw Cornelia Van Antwerp who kept a
little school in the basement of her dwelling, the family fortune having
dwindled until this home was about the only property left to the
Juferouw. In this school my sister Althea and I were taught the three
R's and not much else. The ancient Dutch spinster was a lady, well-bred,
dignified and courteous, who held a high place in the elect circle or
Old Colonie society, and was not the less esteemed because of her
straitened circumstances. Her walk and conversation were no doubt
edifying, but the curriculum of her scholastic institute possibly left
something to be desired in the departments of higher education. She had
one available qualification for her position, however,--being an expert
in making and mending quill pens. She spent much of her time during
school hours in shaping these writing instruments, and I imagine she
eked out her slender income by supplying pens to the neighbors.
The public schools were, in those days, looked upon as public charities,
and these were not attended by children whose parents or guardians could
afford to pay for private instruction which, whether better or worse,
did not at all events, suggest poverty. So it came about, that father,
on returning from one of his journeys eastward, brought home the idea of
sending Althea and myself to school at Brook Farm.
CHAPTER II
FRIEND GREELEY
When Mr. Greeley first came to our house, I was not very favorably
impressed by his appearance. He was tall and strongly built with broad
shoulders somewhat bent forward, a smooth face, fair complexion and very
light hair worn rather long. He was near-sighted and, like other
near-sighted folk had a way of peering forward as he walked, and this
with his heavy lurching gait, gave him a very awkward, countrified
carriage. He remarked in my presence at a later time, "I learned to walk
in the furrows of a New Hampshire farm and the clogging clay has stuck
to my feet ever since."
His voice was thin and high-pitched, a small voice for such a big man,
as we thought, and he had an abrupt manner of withdrawing attention that
was to us rather disconcerting until we got used to it. His pockets were
bulging with newspapers and memoranda, scrawled in the curiously obscure
handwriting which I subsequently found much difficulty in learning to
read, though it was plain enough when the meaning of the strange
hieroglyphics intended for letters was once fully understood. He was
pressed with business during his brief visits but found time to make
friends with the juveniles of the family and we learned to welcome him
with real pleasure. My mother noted that we made him smile, and that
went far in establishing intimacy. Horace Greeley's rare smile revealed
beauty of character and that charity commended by St. Paul as greater
than faith or hope; a smile more nearly angelic than we often see in
this mundane environment.
His peculiarities of dress have been, I think, much exaggerated by
common gossip. He wanted his clothes made big and easy, and he wore them
a long time and somewhat negligently, but that was because he had other
things to mind and not in the least because he affected singularity. I
was with him a good deal as a boy and as a young man and I am sure he
spoke truly when in response to some friendly advice concerning these
matters, he said "I buy good cloth, go to a good tailor and pay a good
price, and that is all I can do about it."
The popular phrase about Greeley's old white coat had some foundation in
fact, but not much. He did wear a light drab overcoat when I first saw
him, with the full pockets spreading out on each side. As it suited him
he wore it many years afterward, and when it was quite worn out he had
another one made just like it which he wore many years more. I doubt if
he ever had more than two of these famous garments, but it is true that
these two, always supposed to be the same old white coat, were known all
over the Northern part of the country. As late as the first Grant
presidential campaign, Elder Evans, inviting him to make an address
before the Shaker community at Harvard, Mass., asked him to please bring
"the old white coat, that our folk may know it is you, for sure."
It is possible there may have been some little feeling of resentment
against this sort of patronage expressed in the dragging on of the old
white coat with the sleeves awry and the collar turned under, but I am
sure that as a rule Mr. Greeley gave very little thought as to
wherewithal he would be clothed.
Horace Greeley never had half a chance to develop the finer qualities of
his nature--and he knew it. He was a tremendous worker and as an
aggressive editor, an ambitious politician and an ardent reformer,
driven like a steam engine, he could give little heed to the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune, but he was sensitive as a girl to rebuffs
bringing to mind what might have been. Among friends with whom he felt
at home and in really congenial company, he was a different being from
the hard hitting fighter and eccentric philosopher known to the public.
At our home he was with the children like a child, genial and
companionable as an elder brother. In the house of the Carey sisters,
where I saw him years later, he was happy and care-free. Phoebe and
Alice Carey, poets and essayists, had Sunday evening gatherings at their
home in New York, where the choice spirits of the literary world held
converse after the manner of their kind, as at the assemblies in the
Paris salons of the 18th century. In this company Mr. Greeley was at his
best, animated, witty and charmingly affable. He realized, only too
well, that his best was wasted in the strife which was his daily portion
and which ended in the disastrous defeat that cost him his life. The
flashes of aroused egotism that sometimes blazed out in red-hot words,
were only signs of impatience and regret that he had been deprived of
opportunity to cultivate the amenities and graces of life and to gain
control of the higher powers he consciously possessed. Any one who will
take the trouble to-day to read his later writings, his tribute to old
friends and his essays like that on "Growing Old Gracefully," will be
led to know that Horace Greeley had the soul of a poet.
Through acquaintance with Thurlow Weed my father came to know Mr.
Greeley and through Mr. Greeley he came to know Dr. George Ripley and
the circle of literary folk in Boston of which he was the center. Boston
was not at that time a literary city. If there was a seat of literature
in America, then, it was to be found in Philadelphia, there being very
little visible evidence of literary activity, in the three-hilled town;
no Old Corner Book Store, no publishing house like Ticknor and Fields,
no _Scarlet Letter_, no _Atlantic Monthly_ and no _Evening Transcript_,
subsequently one of the best newspapers from a literary point of view
this country ever had. There was, however, at the period referred to,
about 1840, a coterie of brilliant intellectual people in Boston and
Cambridge many of whom attained, later, some degree of eminence in the
literary world.
These were young men and women of fine culture, liberal in opinion and
animated by a new spirit of the times which was in this country first
manifested in their midst. At that period a wave of interest in what was
then known as social reform swept over France and Germany and reached
our shores in Massachusetts Bay, eventually extending all through the
north and northwest, conveying new social and political ideas to
thousands of intelligent Americans. These new ideas were discussed at
the meetings of the thinking young folk above referred to, at which
meetings they also held other high debates on matters philosophic,
poetic, educational, etc. They eventually established a periodical as
their organ called _The Dial_, a publication which immediately
attracted wide attention by the admirable literary style of its articles
as well as by their originality and commanding interest. _The Dial_
had the effect of imparting greater cohesion to the company of editors,
contributors and others interested in its publication, and these
presently became known to the world as the Transcendentalists; a word
borrowed from Germany and rather too formidable for general use in our
busy country.
Whether they were overweighted by their ponderous title or whether they
created an artificial atmosphere too etherial for common mortals, the
first generation of Transcendentalists was also the last. They had no
successors and _The Dial_, as their organ, was short lived. It
undoubtedly exercised a considerable influence in its day; and
individual members of the long-named fraternity did much to mould the
thought of the American people in after years. Among these were Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, George William Curtis, Francis George
Shaw, translator of Eugene Sue and of George Sand, and father of Colonel
Robert Shaw, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Dr. Howe and his fiancee
Julia Ward, Charles A. Dana, John S. Dwight and perhaps a score of other
bright spirits. Occasional attendants at their gatherings and
contributors to _The Dial_ were Horace Greeley, William Page,
afterward President of The National Academy of Design, Thomas Wentworth
Higginson and my father, Charles Sears. Their acknowledged leader was
the Rev. George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm.
I do not know anything more about this old time Transcendentalism than I
do about the Pragmatism of our day, and that is not much. I believe the
two schools of thought were alike in this, they both held that modern
civilization has gone sadly and badly astray in the pursuit of wealth.
Not money but the love of money is, now as ever, the root of all evil.
The first work of the makers of America was necessarily the creation of
property, the accumulation of the means of life, but we have pushed this
pursuit too far, have gone money mad not knowing when we should stop
trying to get rich and give our time and attention to higher things.
There is another matter to be noted as of some significance namely that
leading Transcendentalists were, and leading Pragmatists now are,
scholars and university men. It is true America was not turning out
university men in the '40's and it might perhaps better be said that the
Transcendentalists were college men, but as several of them were
educated in Germany the connotation may be allowed to stand. It was said
of these learned students that at their meetings they read Dante in the
original Italian, Hegel in the original German, Swedenborg in the
original Latin, which language the Swedish seer always used, Charles
Fourier in the original French, and perhaps the hardest task of all,
Margaret Fuller in the original English. Margaret was an honored member
of the illustrious company and was held in high esteem; but her writings
are mighty hard reading. I can quite understand James Russell Lowell's
judgment in his "Fable For Critics" where he condemns a certain literary
offender to severe punishment, sentencing him to 30 days at hard labor,
reading the works of Margaret Fuller.
It was, as above said, after one of his visits to Boston that my father
came home with the suggestion of sending Althea and myself to school at
Brook Farm. The idea met with a good deal of opposition from the Dutch
side of the house, which was my side for all I was worth, but I suppose
father opined that it was time some of the provincialism of the Old
Colonie should be rubbed off. Through his acquaintance with Thurlow Weed
he came to know Mr. Greeley and through Mr. Greeley was introduced to
Dr. Ripley and the Transcendentalists, gaining, by the way, broader
views and a wider range of ideas than those which had prevailed in
Beaver Street for two hundred years. Such, I take it was the sequence of
events, not as noted by a little boy but as partly imagined and partly
reasoned out at a later time. Partly imagined, too, is the presumption
that my father was attracted by the philosophic ideals presented by his
Boston friends. A tired business man might well be impressed by the
Transcendental teaching that our civilization has gone wrong in forcing
all human energy into the one pursuit, that of getting riches. They held
that while hard work rarely harms any one, the monotonous grind in the
money making mills results in arrested development. Work as hard as you
please, spend all the energy, all the talent, all the skill you have but
not in seeking wealth. That is not worth while, and it prevents the
doing of what is worth while. Do your best in the world; give all you
can, but be sure to get a fair return, not in money but in better
things. Seek culture, seek knowledge, seek character, seek friendship,
good will, good health, good conscience, and the peace that passeth
understanding shall be added unto you. Be content with a small measure
of this world's wealth and do not crave costly luxuries to make a show
withal. To this end, go out into the country; raise what you need as far
as possible with your own hands, and enough more to exchange for such
things as you cannot produce. Abandon the world, the flesh and the Devil
and go back to the soil and find the Garden of Eden.
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