The Learned Blacksmith - The Letters and Journals of Elihu Burritt

Merle Curti

Description

This antique book contains a collection of letters and journal entries, from Elihu Burritt. Elihu Burritt was a poor boy. Like other boys a hundred years ago, he gloried in the idea of self-improvement, and like many of his contemporaries he became a self-made man. But it was not worldly riches that he made. His lifelong ideal was to serve man kind, to promote human brotherhood, and he was never tempted to take another path. Unlike most Americans, he had no ambition to rise above the working class from which he came. This fascinating text will appeal to those with an interest in the early twentieth century, and will be of considerable value to collectors of such literature. The chapters of this book include: 'A Self-Made Man', 'The Crusade for World Peace', 'The Campaign for Ocean Penny Postage', 'Slavery and Civil War', and 'Assisted Emigration and Arbitration'. This volume was first published in 1937, and is proudly republished now for the enjoyment and edification of discerning readers.

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528763233
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE LEARNED BLACKSMITH
The Letters and Journals of Elihu Burritt
By
MERLE CURTI
DWIGHT W. MORROW PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, SMITH COLLEGE
1937

T O A RTHUR L. W EATHERLY ,
ONE OF THE FEW LEADERS IN THE PEACE MOVEMENT WHO AT THE COST OF GREAT PERSONAL SACRIFICE REMAINED TRUE TO THEIR PEACE PRINCIPLES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD WAR .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR several years I have been collecting Burritt material. With the exception of three letters and a few extracts from Burritt s Journals which appeared in peace periodicals that are now very rare, the material in this volume has never before been printed. Not all the unpublished letters that I have seen are included in this volume; but those that I have selected, and the passages from the Journals , are representative of Burritt s thought, activities and character. Burritt s letters, and selections from his Journals , are here printed exactly as he wrote them, except that the very few instances of misspelling or wrong word order which are quite obviously slips of the pen have been corrected. For example, where a proper name is usually spelled correctly in the manuscripts, but in one place is misspelled, that misspelling has been corrected. Except for such cases the policy has been to reproduce all the abbreviations and errors, including faults of punctuation, as in the original manuscript. Since this volume was completed, I have learned of a collection of eighty unpublished letters written by Burritt to one of his Quaker helpers in England during the years 1848 to 1855. This collection, which is at present in the hands of Mr. S. Graveson, will be deposited in the Library of Friends House in London.
I am especially grateful to Miss Greta Brown and the Trustees of the Library of the Institute of New Britain for permission to include the Burritt letters and selections from the Journals of Burritt in the possession of the Institute. Dr. Arthur Deerin Call, Secretary of the American Peace Society in Washington, D. C., kindly gave permission to use the letters of Burritt deposited in the archives of the Society. Dr. Harry Dana put at my disposal the Burritt letters in the Longfellow papers in Craigie House, Cambridge. I am also very grateful to the Harvard College Library for permission to use the letters of Burritt in the Charles Sumner papers; to the Library of Syracuse University for permission to include letters in the Gerrit Smith Miller Collection; to the Library of Oberlin College, Friends House, London, the Library of the Hague Peace Palace, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the Library of Congress and the Department of State for permission to include Burritt letters in their possession. The portion of the letter from Burritt to Longfellow which was printed in Samuel Longfellow s Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is included by permission of the Houghton Mifflin Company.
I wish to express my appreciation for courtesies extended by Mrs. Lyra Trueblood Wolkins, Dr. Thomas P. Martin, Mr. Manning Hawthorne, Dr. Paul Buck, Mr. John L. Nickalls, Mr. Julian Fowler, and Dr. W. F. Galpin. I am very grateful to Miss Ruth Yates, Mrs. Louis Hunter, and, especially, to Mr. Lawrence Crooks for help in checking the text with photostats or the original documents; to Miss Pauline Moor and Miss Lillian Levin for typing the manuscript; to Miss Mary Pardee Allison for proofreading; and to my wife for many helpful suggestions.
M ERLE C URTI
CONTENTS
I A Self-Made Man
II The Crusade for World Peace
III The Campaign for Ocean Penny Postage
IV Slavery and Civil War
V Assisted Emigration and Arbitration
THE LEARNED BLACKSMITH
CHAPTER I
A SELF-MADE MAN
ELIHU BURRITT was a poor boy. Like other boys a hundred years ago, he gloried in the idea of self-improvement, and like many of his contemporaries he became a self-made man. But it was not worldly riches that he made. His lifelong ideal was to serve mankind, to promote human brotherhood, and he was never tempted to take another path. Unlike most Americans, he had no ambition to rise above the working class from which he came.
On December 8, 1810 Elihu Burritt was born in the little village of New Britain, Connecticut. His father, for whom he was named, had been a common soldier in the Revolution. With great difficulty he eked out a narrow living for his wife, Elizabeth Hinsdale Burritt, and his ten children, by cultivating a few rocky, barren acres of soil and by plying his trade of shoemaking. Neighbors respected this man for his scrupulous honesty and uprightness and for his willingness to share what little he had with those worse off than himself. But in their estimation his active and speculative mind was impractical and led him into many ill-timed adventures, so that much of the brunt of looking out for the family fell on his wife, a pious woman and a model of self-sacrifice and devotion. Elihu resembled his parents in many respects.
Burritt s boyhood was one of hardship and deprivation. True, there were a few simple pleasures. He saw with a boy s eyes the speckled trout sporting in the meadow brook, and sometimes found an opportunity to go fishing or to take part in nutting expeditions. With the other boys of the village he took delight in listening to the stories of veterans of the Revolutionary War, and in watching the militia parade on the village green on training days. But this solemn youngster found the greatest satisfaction in reading warlike stories in the Bible and in rereading the handful of religious books and historical works in the library of the parish church.
His child s heart revolted at every kind of injustice. One day-he was fourteen-the schoolmaster, exhausted by the unruliness of his students, declared that any pupil detected in whispering was to take the ferrule and stand in the corner until he observed some like offender, to whom he could surrender its keeping. The pupil who should have the ferrule in his possession at the moment of dismissal would be punished for all the offenders that afternoon. A few minutes before school closed a boy was mean enough to tempt a girl who was a great favorite to whisper, and consequently she stood to be penalized for all the rest. This was more than Elihu Burritt could endure: he whispered on purpose to save her from becoming the recipient of forty blows save one.
The death of his father and the poverty of the family made it impossible for Elihu to obtain more than the most meager schooling. He became an apprentice to Samuel Booth, the village blacksmith. This one-legged man was exemplary for his piety and his benevolence and doubtless confirmed the warmhearted impulses of his apprentice. While at work in the smithy Elihu placed Thomson s Seasons , a book of romantic poetry, against the forge chimney and, as the iron was heating and the sparks flying, took short sips of its beauty. But for the most part he occupied his mind with all sorts of mental feats, such as measuring the distance around the earth in barleycorns. He took great delight in learning Latin and Greek verbs which he could conjugate in his mind as his arms and hands were busy at the forge. So insatiable was his thirst for knowledge that he acquired a remarkable faculty for cultivating his mind as he worked and after he went home at night. When he was twenty-two he had become so fascinated by the family resemblances between Latin, Greek, French and his mother tongue that he managed to take three months from his work at the smithy in order to pursue, at New Haven, the study of these languages and Spanish, Italian, German and Hebrew as well. Although he lived in the shadow of Yale, he modestly thought it would be unbecoming for a young man of twenty-two to seek the aid of scholars in acquiring a rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, so he made no effort to find a tutor.
Too close application to his studies contributed to a breakdown in health. The young blacksmith tried his hand at school-teaching and at storekeeping. When the panic of 1837 paralyzed business and swept away his meager savings he decided to start life over again in new surroundings. Perhaps, even, he could find work as a sailor on some ship bound for Europe, and there obtain such works in the modern and Oriental languages as he had been unable to acquire at New Haven. Almost penniless, he started out on foot. At Worcester, some hundred miles from New Britain, he heard of the Antiquarian Society, and found that he could borrow grammars and lexicons. So he secured work at a foundry, and dug deep into the more difficult languages. Before long he had composed a letter in the Celto-Breton tongue which he sent to the Royal Antiquarian Society in France. A few months later, as he stood in his leather work-apron at the forge, his gray-blue eyes lighted up as he was handed a large volume, bearing the seal of the learned French society, and a letter testifying to the correctness of his composition.
As the months and years passed the young blacksmith made himself more or less acquainted with all the languages of Europe and with several of Asia, including Hebrew, Chaldaic, Samaritan and Ethiopic. Anxious to turn his knowledge to some practical account and to supplement his meager earnings of twenty-five cents a day, he solicited an opportunity to make translations. He had no idea that it would involve any publicity, and was horrified and astounded when he read that Governor Edward Everett had, in an address at a Teachers Institute at Taunton, referred to his remarkable attainments. To his surprise and chagrin this excessively modest youth, who was so shy that at twenty-one he still scarcely dared look a schoolgirl in the face, found himself suddenly acclaimed the learned blacksmith. The public was the more ready to accept this title by reason