Back Aa

Anglo-American Memories

<h3> CHAPTER V THE AMERICAN DEFOE, RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR. </h3> Richard Henry Dana, Jr., to whose intervention in the Burns case we owe it that Judge Loring was compelled to grant Burns something in the nature of a trial, was a man whom Massachusetts may well be content to remember as one of her representatives for all time. By descent, and in himself, he was a chosen son of that chosen people. His father, Richard Henry, his grandfather, Francis, his great-grandfather, Richard, were all jurists, all patriots, all men of letters. Take one step more, and you come to Daniel, then to Richard again, who, if not quite a voyager to New England in the Mayflower, is heard of as a resident in Cambridge in 1640. Six Danas—nay, five, since our Dana survived his father but three years—span two centuries and a half: from father to son as they took their march down these eventful years, an unbroken line, a race of gentlemen. It used to be made a reproach to the Dana of whom I write that he was a gentleman. Beyond doubt he deserved the reproach. When a candidate for Congress in 1868 in the Essex district against Ben Butler that eminent warrior called {42} him a kid-gloved aristocrat. "Not even gloved has my hand ever touched his," answered Dana in the heat of a redhot campaign. Butler's rancour lasted to the end, as we shall see. This, of course, is no biography of Dana. I am writing of what I saw and heard; or not much more. I dealt with the Burns case as a record of personal impressions. But let me quote as an example of Dana's method of statement his account of Burns's arrest. He said to Judge Loring: Burns was arrested suddenly, on a false pretence, coming home at nightfall from his day's work, and hurried into custody, among strange men, in a strange place, and suddenly, whether claimed rightfully or claimed wrongfully, he saw he was claimed as a slave, and his condition burst upon him in a flood of terror. This was at night. You saw him, sir, the next day, and you remember the state he was then in. You remember his stupefied and terrified condition. You remember his hesitation, his timid glance about the room, even when looking in the mild face of justice. How little your kind words reassured him. That is the same hand which wrote Two Years Before the Mast—the touch of Defoe, with Defoe's direct simplicity of method and power of getting the effect he wanted by the simplest means; the last word in art, in all arts. Dana was incapable of rhetorical extravagance or of insincerity of any kind. His Two Years Before the Mast is as much a classic in England as at home. One proof of it is the number of pirated editions, before there was an international copyright law. He wrote to me once: "I hear there is a cheap English edition of {43} the book which has had, because of its cheapness, a great circulation. Published, I think, in Hull. Could you send me a copy as a curiosity?" I sent it; a little fat volume with a red cloth cover, much gilt, very closely printed, and sold at a shilling, long before the days of cheap books. It had sold by scores of thousands. It is a book always in print, in one edition or another. Copyright profited Dana no more in America than in England, or not for a long time. Bryant, to whom Dana's father sent the manuscript, hawked it about from one publisher to another in vain, till finally he sold it outright to Harpers for two hundred and fifty dollars, copyright and all. In my copy, with the imprint of James R. Osgood & Co., Boston, is a Preface dated 1869, in which Dana says: "After twenty-eight years the copyright of this book has reverted to me"; and so he presents the first "author's edition" to the public. My copy was a gift from Dana; it is among the treasures I possess and care for most, with this inscription in Dana's clear, quiet handwriting: My dear Smalley,—Will you accept this volume from me and believe me ever truly yours, RICH'D H. DANA, JR. Boston, Feb. 17, 1876. My real acquaintance with Dana had begun ten years before, when, in June or July, 1866, we crossed the Atlantic together in what was then the crack ship of the Cunard line, the China, the first {44} screw that carried the Cunard flag, capable of fourteen knots. The Cunarders then sailed from Boston, touched at Halifax, and thence steamed to Queenstown direct, and so on to Liverpool. Halifax was an experience; it took us, with all the Cunard seamanship, and there was none better, four hours to get alongside the pier, the currents running I know not how many miles an hour. The China belonged to the old school; of all new schools the Cunard people, now foremost in everything, had at that time an abhorrence. The saloon aft and tapering to a point, racks over the table filled with table glass, long benches for seats, cabins crowded and dimly lighted with one smoking and smelling oil lamp in a triangular glass case between two cabins; sanitary arrangements unspeakable. I, on my first Atlantic voyage, thought it all the height of luxury; and so it was, for that time. The modern comforts and splendours of sea life date from 1889 with the White Star Teutonic, launched in that year, first of the "floating palaces." The China made her way from Halifax to Queenstown through a continuous fog at undiminished speed. The captain, for an exception among the Cunard captains of those days, regarded a passenger as a human being, and not merely as a parcel to be safely carried from port to port and dumped safely on the wharf, intermediate sufferings of no account. He would answer a question. I asked him, with the audacity of a novice, whether it was safe to steam day and night through a fog at full speed. {45} "Safe, good God, no." "Then why do you do it?" "Why? I will tell you why. First, we have got to get to Queenstown and Liverpool. Second, fogs don't last for ever, and the faster we go the sooner we shall get out of this one. And third, if there's a collision, the vessel going at the greatest speed has the best chance." So antedating by many years the famous saying of another Cunard captain, summoned to the bridge when a collision seemed imminent, finding the engines reversed, and instantly ordering "full speed ahead"; remarking to the first officer who had reversed the engines: "If there's any running down to be done on this voyage, I propose to do it." But there was none. When I told Dana of my talk with the China's captain, that experienced seaman and author of The Seaman's Manual observed: "I like a captain to have the courage of his opinions, but not to tell his passengers. Keep it to yourself." And I have kept it for forty years; the captain and ship are gone to Davy Jones's locker. Nothing happened, but something very nearly happened. There had been no chance of an observation since leaving Halifax, and we made the Irish coast rather suddenly, some miles further north than we expected, came near enough to hear the breakers, and swung to the south in safety. His mind full of sea lore and of sea romance as well, Dana was the most delightful of companions on shipboard. Beneath an exterior which people {46} thought cold, he had a great kindliness of nature. He made no professions; his acts spoke for him. He gave freely of the riches of his mind. He knew England and the ways of the English, and was full of illustrative stories; among them was one of his first visit to the House of Commons. I heard that night one of the best speeches to which I ever listened: fluent, rich in facts, sound in argument; well phrased and well delivered. I said to myself, "That man must carry the House with him." When he sat down a member rose on the opposite side and spoke for perhaps ten minutes. He stumbled along, hesitated, grew confused, his sentences without beginning or end; nothing but a knowledge of the subject and a great sincerity to recommend him. But it was perfectly evident that the first speech had no weight with the House, and that the second convinced everybody. The first speaker was Whiteside, a brilliant Irishman and Solicitor-General; the second a county member whose name I never knew. The House thought Whiteside merely an advocate and his speech forensic. His opponent was a man whom everybody trusted. It was character that carried the day. And you will find it generally does with the English. Dana brought to the study of the law a philosophic mind, and to the trial of causes in court a power of lucid exposition invaluable alike with the Bench and with a jury. The law was to him a body of symmetrical doctrine. He referred everything to principles, the only real foundation for anything. He stood very high at the Bar, for he had learning and would take immense pains, and when he brought a case into court it {47} was a work of art. Moreover, he brought a conscience with it. And he was one of the lawyers, none too numerous, to whom even Chief Justice Shaw listened. Out of many anecdotes I have heard from him I will choose one. He had defended in the United States Circuit Court a man indicted for aiding in the escape of a fugitive slave. "The case against him," said Dana, "was perfectly clear; there was really no defence; he had beyond a doubt committed the crime of helping rescue a man from slavery. I looked for a conviction as a matter of course. But after the judge had charged the jury, hour after hour went by and still they stayed out. The judge sent for them and asked if they required any further guidance in law or in fact. The foreman said 'No'; but they could not agree, and finally were discharged. "Some years later," said Dana, "as I stood on the steps of the Parker House, a man came up to me and said, 'You don't remember me, Mr. Dana?' I did not, and he went on: "'Well, Mr. Dana, I expect you remember trying that case where a man named Tucker was indicted for aiding and abetting in the escape of a fugitive slave. I was on the jury in that case.' "At this I instantly recalled the facts, and said: 'Since you were on that jury, I wish you would tell me what I have always wanted to know—why they disagreed.' "'Well, Mr. Dana, I don't mind telling you we {48} stood eleven to one for conviction, and that one obstinate man wouldn't budge. Perhaps you remember it was proved on the trial that the negro was got away from Boston, taken to Concord, New Hampshire, and there was handed over to a man who drove him in a sleigh across the border into Canada.' "'Oh, yes, I remember that.' "'Well, Mr. Dana, I was the man who drove him in the sleigh across the border into Canada.'" I knew something of the preposterous charge against Dana, that in editing Wheaton's International Law he had appropriated the labours of a dull predecessor, Mr. William Beach Lawrence. When President Grant nominated Dana Minister to England in succession to that General Schenck who is still quoted as an authority on poker, the Lawrence charge was pressed before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It was an ex parte hearing, and Dana had no opportunity to defend himself. Whether that or the unsleeping malignity of General Butler did him the more harm I know not, but President Grant, as his honourable habit was, stood by his nominee; and the Senate rejected Dana by thirty-one votes to seventeen. The matter naturally attracted attention in England, and there were comments, none too just. I wrote a letter to The Times, of which Mr. Delane was then editor. A long letter, something over a column, but Delane published it next morning in his best type, first striking out a number of censorious sentences about Butler {49} and Zach Chandler and other eminent persons who had engineered Dana's defeat. In my wish to do justice to Dana and upon his enemies I had not remembered that I was writing in an English newspaper, and had no business to be rebuking Americans to an English audience. When I read my letter and noted Delane's excisions I saw how wrong I had been, and I wrote to Delane to thank him for suppressing all those ferocities. There came in reply such a note as only Delane would have written. "It is the first time anybody ever thanked me for using a blue pencil on a correspondent's letter. Thank you." This was in 1876. Dana's letter to me on my letter about him was characteristic. I think I might print it, but it is with other papers in New York. He was grateful and kindly, but also critical. He was always capable of looking at his own case as if it were a third person's; his mind detached from everything that was personal to himself. He thought the legal points might have been pressed. But the public, especially the English public, will not have too much law. I suppose the Beach-Lawrence suit and the Minister-to-England business troubled Dana more than anything else in his career. He ought, of course, to have been Minister. He would have been such a Minister as Charles Francis Adams was, or as Phelps was, two of the American Ministers whom the English liked best; out of the half-dozen who have held in this country a {50} pre-eminent position among Ministers and Ambassadors, including the present Ambassador and his two immediate predecessors, Hay and Choate. That brilliant list ought to have been enriched with Dana's name; but it was not to be. Dana came abroad again in 1878, and I saw him once more. He spent his time chiefly in Paris and Rome, and died in Rome, January 7th, 1882. He lies near Keats and Shelley in the Protestant cemetery at Porte Pià; and there is a monument. In Boston he is remembered; whether he is remembered elsewhere I have no means of knowing. But we cannot, in whatever part of America, we cannot afford to forget a man who had all the American virtues in one of the heroic ages of America. {51} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.