Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett

By Matthew Mason

Known today as "the other speaker at Gettysburg," Edward Everett had a distinguished and illustrative career at every level of American politics from the 1820s through the Civil War. In this new biography, Matthew Mason argues that Everett's extraordinarily well-documented career reveals a complex man whose shifting political opinions, especially on the topic of slavery, illuminate the nuances of Northern Unionism. In the case of Everett--who once pledged to march south to aid slaveholders in putting down slave insurrections--Mason explores just how complex the question of slavery was for most Northerners, who considered slavery within a larger context of competing priorities that alternately furthered or hindered antislavery actions.

By charting Everett's changing stance toward slavery over time, Mason sheds new light on antebellum conservative politics, the complexities of slavery and its related issues for reform-minded Americans, and the ways in which secession turned into civil war. As Mason demonstrates, Everett's political and cultural efforts to preserve the Union, and the response to his work from citizens and politicians, help us see the coming of the Civil War as a three-sided, not just two-sided, contest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469628615

Matthew Mason

Matthew Mason is professor of history at Brigham Young University.

Book preview

Introduction

In December 1859, with John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry having shaken his beloved Union once again to its core, Edward Everett rose to address a mass meeting in his hometown of Boston. This audience knew Everett not only for his long career as a scholar and politician but also for his most recent career as a traveling orator for the Union. Throughout the late 1850s, Everett had journeyed to every section of the nation delivering an oration titled The Character of Washington to packed houses, donating the proceeds to save the first president’s Mount Vernon estate as a shrine to the Union. Thus when he stepped to the podium of this meeting called to demonstrate Bostonians’ attachment to the Union, the throng paid him every demonstration of respect and enthusiasm. Everett’s predominant purpose that day, as with his Mount Vernon activities, was to inculcate the blessings of the Union, consecrated as they were by the memory of our Fathers who gave it to us: Precious legacy of our fathers, it shall go down, honored and cherished to our children. Generations unborn shall enjoy its privileges as we have done, and if we leave them poor in all besides, we will transmit to them the boundless wealth of its blessings! Such filial appeals had an electric effect. A newspaper reporter present remarked on the close attention, the earnest feeling, which this vast crowd manifested, including the frequent tears in the eyes and on the faces of multitudes touched by a common sympathy, as some patriotic emotion was awakened by the sentiments of the several speakers. Indeed, attendees’ hearts were swelling with pent-up emotions, longing to find adequate expression.¹

A year and a half previous, he had taken this Unionist gospel into the belly of the secessionist beast, Charleston, South Carolina, and had received a similarly rapturous response. Reports of his performance of the oration in Augusta, Georgia, beat Everett to Charleston, and they described how his auditors in that town had not yet recovered from the spell which was thrown around us by this mighty magician. Indeed, words failed when one attempted to convey "the impression which was made upon us by his magnificent oration upon the career and character of the Pater Patrae. Upon his arrival a committee of Charlestonians greeted Everett as the very High Priest of the Union, come to aid in perpetuating that Union in its whole constitutional integrity and sanctity, and in the spirit and wisdom of its immortal founder. A friendly newspaper editor who attended the speech the next night agreed with his Georgian counterpart that mere words could not capture the effect of the oration. But he did boldly declare that an epoch in many memories will be dated from the happy privilege and experience" of hearing Everett expound upon Washington and the Union.²

Such public demonstrations of emotion in such apparently opposite and antagonistic places as Boston and Charleston on the eve of the Civil War cry out for exploration. They indicate both the strength of the Union and that this strength lay primarily in the hearts of antebellum Americans. As the content of Everett’s speeches suggested, the Union packed such an emotive punch for most white antebellum Americans because of its connection to the revered Revolutionary Fathers and because it embodied the Revolution’s legacy of political rights that were rare in the nineteenth-century world. Indeed, for them the term Union connoted a voluntary confederation rather than a nation cemented by force. Others might calculate the value of that compact and make decisions about slavery based on profit and loss considerations. But these patriots stood by a Union of the heart, not of the pocketbook.³ Few if any Americans had done more to nurture this conviction than Edward Everett.⁴

Indeed, by then Everett had pursued an unusually long, complex, and high-profile career at the crossroads of slavery, a culture of reform, and nation-building in American politics. He had been much in the public eye as an orator, politician, scholar, and diplomat. His thinking, writing, and speaking about the nature and value of the American Union stretched from the death of George Washington to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. The successes, failures, and evolution of his vision of how vexing political questions, including—but far from limited to—slavery, should interact with the sacred Union provide an unusually valuable window on the ebbs and flows of Unionism as a political force across this long period. The themes Everett’s career illuminates dictate the parameters of this volume: it will have its hands full with presenting a political biography focused on the man’s public life. His literary efforts and his private life will come in only as they shed light on that public career.⁵

Yet even well-informed general readers have only a vague recollection of Everett as the stodgy orator who rambled on for hours at Gettysburg before Abraham Lincoln took the stage. Most scholars of the early American Republic do not think much about, or of, Everett. They tend to dismiss him as a doughface (the derogatory contemporary term for Northern politicians who sided with the South in the sectional debates over slavery that led to the Civil War) and therefore craven and unpopular. Those who attend more closely to Everett’s career caricature him as an academic out of his depth in the rough-and-tumble of Jacksonian-era American politics. As it stands, his fullest biography is almost ninety years old. The most extensive scholarly treatments of Everett are appreciative studies of his oratory by professors of communication studies, in which the political history of Everett’s times forms only a backdrop. Given these works’ publication in venues that do not reach historians, no wonder historians do not know Everett.⁶

It was not always so. At his death in 1865, Everett was a household name throughout the Union (and the Confederacy). Then for much of the late nineteenth century, scholars and the public ranked him high among antebellum orators, statesmen, and men of letters. Admirers most often mentioned him in connection with Lincoln, or with his close antebellum ally Daniel Webster, esteeming him as proverbial for patriotism.⁷

Everett’s declining reputation is in large part a function of historiographical trends in recent decades. On the one hand, this study of Everett adds to a growing willingness among historians to take sectional moderates seriously. But on the other, recent historical literature remains disproportionately focused on Americans who espoused extreme proslavery and (especially) antislavery views. Either directly or by omission, the standard narratives of the era dismiss sectional moderates as irrelevant to the story of polarization that led to secession and war. Passionate Unionists like Everett and his audience have no role to play in such interpretations other than to stand on the shore, helpless against the rising antislavery tide in the North and the secessionist tide in the South.⁸

Those who have studied Everett have outdone this portrait by painting him as so out of touch that he should never have been in politics in the first place. Many cast him in a one-dimensional, static role as a typical doughface, insufficiently supplied with a moral compass or a backbone to resist the march of Southern slavery.⁹ But beyond that, scholars universally treat Everett as a bookish fish out of water in the popular politics of his day. Constitutionally allergic to conflict, he lacked … both taste and talent for the contentiousness, vulgarity, and violence endemic to the rapid democratization of American politics.¹⁰ Such studies are not calculated to spark political historians’ interest in Everett.

But to neglect or dismiss Edward Everett is to misperceive both Everett’s political savvy and the popular appeal of the emotional brand of Unionism he represented. To be sure, Everett hated sectional conflicts so much that it sometimes harmed his physical health to be caught up in them. Contemporaries often found him grave and prosaic to a fault. Especially after he left his Senate seat in the mid-1850s, he was ambivalent about whether what he was doing was political. And when it benefited him politically, he pleaded that his early career did not prepare him for what he disdained as the low game of politics.¹¹ But he was not tone-deaf to the imperatives of popular politics. He vigorously resisted efforts to brand him an aristocrat, worked closely with newspaper editors to hone the printed versions of his speeches, and was so concerned about his public image that he asked correspondents to return copies of letters he had sent them!¹² He understood politics well enough to serve in both houses of Congress, as governor of Massachusetts, as ambassador to Great Britain, and as secretary of state and to receive a vice-presidential nomination in arguably the most important presidential election in American history.

One key thing Everett understood about politics that historians have only recently begun to fully recapture is how deeply it was intertwined with both high and popular American culture. Decades ago, in what is today an unjustly neglected work, scholar George Forgie treated Everett’s late antebellum popularity as evidence of Americans’ sentimental regression from politics to domesticity in the crisis decade of the 1850s.¹³ But Everett and his many fellow travelers would have scratched their heads at this attempt to separate the cultural and the political. They embraced this cause with unbounded sentimentalism, but theirs was no escapism. At all ranks they articulated a targeted political purpose: saving the Union. To be fair, Forgie wrote before the waves of recent scholarship elucidating the intersections between politics and culture in the early Republic and those between nationalism and the politics of historical memory.¹⁴ For this reason among others, the time seems right, as historian Irving Bartlett put it over fifteen years ago, for a reevaluation of one of our most visible, versatile, and productive Americans, whose life extended from Washington’s administration to the year of Lincoln’s assassination.¹⁵

There were numerous Americans toiling in varying ways to build national loyalty in the new and fractious Republic, and Everett’s long career brought many of them together. Builders of the early American nation faced long odds. They encountered potent regional identities as well as tricky questions, like how much of their British heritage to include in the national autobiography. They also lacked most of the standard building materials of nationhood, such as a strong centralized state or a common religion or language or ethnicity.¹⁶ But Americans’ nation-building project was never going to fail for lack of trying. Some worked with the tools of highbrow literature, while others worked at the grass roots to develop the voluntary associations that marked a distinctively American civil society. Many emphasized American identity in opposition to a variety of Others, ranging from foreigners to domestic racial minorities. Still others produced nationalist histories, memorials, and music meant to serve as the texts, shrines, and liturgy of a distinctively American civil religion. Their efforts clustered around commemorations of American military history, especially the American Revolution. That made the Fourth of July the premiere occasion on which to stoke the nationalist fire and venerate Washington as the preeminent national saint.¹⁷ This active culture of historical celebration made powerful use of one of the primary building blocks of national identity in the modern world. It gave American nationalists, like those curating national memory elsewhere, a sense both of deep roots in a common history and of the nation’s historical destiny.¹⁸ Everett brought many of these nationalist tools to his long hours on the national work site. He worked with his pen, and he contributed money and organizational skill to efforts to memorialize American history.

But first and foremost he deployed oratory. It was an implement of enormous force. Early Americans valued rhetorical skill as the king of literary accomplishments, indispensable to the workings of a political system based on securing the consent of citizens. Individual orators such as Webster and Everett inspired awe that flirted with worship, in part because their art by design worked on the sentiments as well as on the reason of their audiences.¹⁹ The particular topics Everett subjected to his oratorical treatment also drew on almost the full range of nationalist shibboleths. He repeatedly marshaled North America’s history, and its military history in particular, to create a national biography for the United States and elevate it to at least equal importance with those of European nations. He appealed to the Constitution and Washington’s Farewell Address as his civil religion’s sacred texts; to the Founding Fathers, preeminently Washington, as its patron saints; and to historically significant sites, preeminently Mount Vernon, as its places of pilgrimage.

Although unity was the goal, contemporaries’ reactions to Everett’s exertions highlight the passions on all sides of the contest between sectionalism and nationalism. Most historians associate intensity of feeling exclusively with sectional extremists. While Everett and his fellow laborers made no effort to disguise the nation-building end of their mythmaking, they opposed as illegitimate sectionalists’ equally instrumental usages of such symbols and language. Those on the other side likewise saw sectional moderates as traitors to the national heritage. The increasing intensity of these memory wars shows that neither side was especially moderate and helps explain the volume (in both senses of the term) of antebellum Americans’ appeals to tradition.²⁰

Indeed, more than any other problem in American life, slavery confounded both Everett and the nationalist project to which he dedicated himself. Everett’s confusion on how to deal with American slavery was profound, and his public stances on the issue were situational rather than consistent. At one extreme, in his initial speech in the U.S. House of Representatives, he denied that slavery was wrong and pledged to strap on his knapsack and help the white South put down any slave rebellion in its midst. At another point in his congressional career he even (privately) pondered purchasing a plantation in Louisiana. At the other extreme, Everett as governor of Massachusetts gave public responses to abolitionists’ election-year queries about candidates’ stances on the key issues surrounding slavery that satisfied those abolitionists and panicked Southern slaveholders. More than two decades later a secretary in Lincoln’s cabinet consulted Everett in advance of the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation.

It is difficult to discern a pattern in such swings, but to discount Everett as a rudderless opportunist would be to lose key insights into the twists and turns of American slavery politics from the 1820s through the 1860s at the state, national, and international levels. Indeed, a biographical treatment of such a long career allows us to watch how the key historical elements of place and time impact an individual’s shifting priorities. The fact that Everett, one of the brightest minds of his generation, was so confused over how to address slavery helps us see the complexity of the issue for the antebellum generations as it interacted with all other contemporary issues. Everett sought the middle of the road on the slavery issue, but that road was a winding one.

To dismiss compromisers on the slavery issue is easy to do but impoverishes our understanding of a vast swath of antebellum American political culture. Philosophers and other theorists who have contemplated compromise as a concept have illuminated its complexity. Throughout their history most Americans have agreed that compromise is necessary to the workings of a democratic politics and society, as well as a historic basis for union. But most people also believe that a compromise between good and evil lies outside the just limits of compromise, so they can accept a compromise only when it involves two morally legitimate sides.²¹ It is hard for modern observers when encountering historical compromises over slavery to imagine them as anything but a compromise between ultimate good (freedom) and evil (slavery) and Northern conciliators as anything but morally flawed. But excellent recent scholarship has recognized that as starkly immoral as slavery was, opposition to it encompassed a range of antislavery beliefs and actions rather than stark dichotomies between heroes and goats. As Caleb McDaniel has aptly noted, this literature focuses "attention less on stable boundaries between groups and more on unstable bonds that drew antislavery individuals together at particular moments in time."²² Instability certainly characterized Everett’s relationship with abolitionists and antislavery politicians across his long career, and attention to that changing relationship illuminates the dynamics of his orbit within the antislavery solar system.

An insight from David Potter also helps us comprehend the popularity and persistence of compromises and compromisers by seeing them from the inside. Historians’ recognition that slavery, in one aspect or another, pervaded all of the aspects of sectionalism, Potter noted, has left them content to ask "a simple question: Did the people of the North really oppose slavery? rather than a complex one: What was the rank of antislavery in the hierarchy of northern values? The complex version should help us perceive how the antislavery sentiment of the vast majority of Northerners conflicted with their love of a Union and Constitution that manifestly protected slavery. Thus the question became for them not a choice of alternatives—antislavery or proslavery—but a ranking of values. … The difference between ‘antislavery men’ and ‘conciliationists’ in the North was not a question of what they thought about slavery alone, but of how they ranked these priorities. Such complexities should give us pause even in the terms we apply to people and positions, for those who were ‘moderate’ about slavery were ‘extreme’ about the Union, quite as much as those who were ‘moderate’ about the Union were ‘extreme’ about slavery. When there are two reference points—the Union and slavery—it is purely arbitrary to make one, rather than the other, the measure of extremism."²³ From his emotional embrace of the Union to his shifts on the emphasis and tone with which he addressed slavery, Everett’s career gives flesh-and-blood illustration to Potter’s incisive points.

Revealingly, biography has proven the best route to illustrating the range of what was possible along a spectrum of antislavery belief and action. Biography done right can trace change and continuity across time and show an issue like slavery interacting with other issues that demanded the subject’s attention and loyalty. Everett usually occupied places on this spectrum at several removes from radical abolitionists, but he was closer to antislavery icons like John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln than one would at first suspect. Judicious biographical treatments of these and other antislavery heroes have shown that every one of them took changing positions on the issue because they dealt with slavery in the context of other commitments. Imperatives such as party loyalty or nationalism at times encouraged emancipationist sentiment and action, while at other times they could impede them. The same is true for this biography of Everett. It will show Everett in motion on slavery, as Eric Foner phrased his treatment of Lincoln, but it will not show Everett moving in one direction or in a predictable way.²⁴ Still, Everett’s movement along the antislavery spectrum took place within limits. His antislavery principles dictated that there were bounds beyond which his conservatism could not go; his nationalism and respect for law and order also set boundaries around his antislavery for much of his career.²⁵

Everett’s dedication to moral reform was also part of what kept him from traveling to anti-abolitionist extremes. His devotion to the Whiggish ethic of improvement meant he would always be far less bitter toward abolitionists and antislavery politicians than doughfaced Democrats tended to be. All anti-abolitionists decried zealotry, but most Democratic doughfaces feared and loathed everyone who injected moral questions into the political arena. Everett recoiled from fanaticism but could better understand the antislavery reform impulse, for he was an ardent supporter of the range of humanitarian reform movements in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world that scholars have dubbed the Benevolent Empire. Histories of this culture of benevolent reform have emphasized the evangelical roots thereof, and recent studies have situated within this culture radical abolitionists like one of John Brown’s Secret Six of supporters, the Bostonian Samuel G. Howe. Everett was neither evangelical nor abolitionist, but his commitment to the Benevolent Empire was indisputable. Heaven knows I am no enemy to progress, Everett pled in a classic statement of the Whig brand of reformism. In my humble measure I have longed for it, and toiled for it; in reference to some deep questions, I have wept and prayed for it; but let it really be progress. That Everett and Howe could have both emerged from this same culture underscores how broad and powerful this reform impulse was, and is worth explaining through the medium of biography.²⁶

Everett’s career with slavery was so complex in large part because he had pledged allegiance at once to nationalism, law and order, and reform. The oscillating vortex of slavery as it interacted with other issues encouraged him to emphasize one or the other of these commitments, depending on time and place. His career thus nicely illuminates the complexities of slavery and related issues for reform-minded antebellum Americans. The fact that Everett failed abolitionists’ purity tests made his life more rather than less representative of his times.

Antislavery activists and politicians themselves obscured their closeness to people like Everett by pouring out some of their worst scorn on the doughfaces and Cotton Whigs as weak-kneed, craven traitors to the cause of freedom, and most recent historians have adopted that viewpoint as their own. But taking sectional moderates like Everett seriously involves understanding their self-image rather than accepting their enemies’ view at face value. Sectional conservatives probably prolonged the torturous life of slavery in the United States by helping Southern slaveholders achieve the dominant power in the federal government that was so necessary to preserving slavery. But the moderates insisted that whatever their votes’ and speeches’ effects on slavery, that was collateral to their central and noble goal of preserving the Union. And they insisted that their willingness to compromise and conciliate while taking heat from their constituents meant they embodied the antebellum ideals of restrained manhood and political moderation.²⁷

Studies of sectional moderates need not substitute that self-image for the abolitionists’ view. Instead, in this book I purpose to build on the rich scholarship on abolitionists and antislavery politicians by putting Everett and his antagonists into dialogue. Furthermore, given that proslavery Southerners also repeatedly numbered among his opponents, attending closely to all participants in the debates swirling around Everett yields an important insight about the antebellum sectional controversy. While most studies of that conflict portray it as a two-way struggle between North and South, it was in fact even in its barest outlines a three-way contest between Northern sectionalists, Southern sectionalists, and committed Unionists. It was in truth more than three-sided because that latter team was riven by its own sectional and partisan differences, and African American stances on these issues rarely comported with many among any of the white teams. But consistently seeing this battle as three-sided would be a step forward for our understanding of the era. Contemplating it in this way across several decades also allows us to see the ebbs and flows in who had the upper hand in this combat at any given time.

As suggested earlier in this introduction, Unionism and Unionists were a force to be reckoned with, even when the sectionalists had the momentum and initiative. Elizabeth Varon has shown that even as disunion rhetoric and programs became more commonplace in the 1850s, attacking one’s enemies as disunionists remained a winning political tactic. Again there is the case of John Brown. The national resonance of his deeds in both Kansas and western Virginia showed how a small band of antislavery zealots could drive the political agenda and put moderates of various stripes on the defensive. But when Brown’s disciples met in 1858 to adopt the Provisional Constitution and Ordinances of the People of the United States, they hotly debated an article that insisted that this constitution’s articles look to no dissolution of the Union, but simply to Amendment and Repeal. Our flag, they added, shall be the same that our Fathers fought under in the Revolution.²⁸ Their violent attempt to implement this constitution put Unionists once again into a reactive posture. But the throngs attending the Union meetings and the ideological power of the Unionism they represented made them a key audience for even the most radical of sectionalists.

And in a landmark recent study of the Civil War, Gary Gallagher has built a convincing case based on overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources that throughout that costly conflict, preserving the Union was the primary motivation for the vast majority of Union soldiers and civilians. Even after 1863, for most Unionists emancipation constituted a means toward the original end of saving the Union. President Lincoln repeatedly argued for this way of seeing emancipation, whereas his most determined Democratic opponents charged that the war aims had changed with the Emancipation Proclamation. Thus, without an appreciation of why the loyal citizenry went to great lengths to restore the Union, Gallagher boldly but rightly proclaims no accurate understanding of the era is possible.²⁹

It takes some doing to explain to a modern audience, Gallagher muses, why the cause of Union once resonated so powerfully. A war to end slavery seems more compelling to twenty-first-century Americans and far less abstract than a war for union. He explains this by noting that recent popular culture has rejected the idea of nationalism as a motivating force. Moreover, while Civil War–era scholarship’s focus in recent decades on race and emancipation has obviously paid enormous dividends, it sometimes suggests the war had scant meaning apart from these issues—and especially that the Union victory had little or no value without emancipation. As if to prove Gallagher’s point, James Oakes’s own outstanding recent study of the war decries the idea that an ethically dubious nationalism motivated the Union war effort. It would indeed be difficult to excuse so much bloodshed, Oakes posits, if it served no purpose other than the restoration of the Union. So by making it clear that for Republicans it was also an antislavery war from the beginning, Oakes believes he is rescuing some purity for the war. The work of scholars who have shown how postbellum Americans marshaled the idea that the Civil War was about union to achieve North-South reconciliation for whites only has likely contributed to the souring of professional historians on what Gallagher calls the Union Cause. But as Gallagher demonstrates, wartime Unionism was far from abstract or meaningless to loyal Americans.³⁰

The passionate connection to Union that prompted loyal citizens’ enormous and sustained wartime sacrifices did not spring up ex nihilo in 1861. It was in large part the result of the cultural work done by Everett and his fellow laborers in the antebellum nationalist vineyard. The willingness to fight rather than allow secession, the at once high-minded and visceral attachment to union that sustained the war effort, and the wartime wielding (often by women) of historical symbols of American nationalism in organized prowar efforts all had antecedents illustrated by the prewar career of Edward Everett.³¹ The searing politics of slavery that confounded Everett for decades and led to the election of 1860 and secession put him and his fellow Unionists almost entirely on the defensive. But the Civil War itself illustrated how they had helped order the priorities of most Northerners and many Southerners, such that they were willing to fight and die for the sacred American Union.³²

Chapter 1: Scholar, Preacher, and Paper Warrior

On 11 April 1794, Oliver and Lucy Everett welcomed their fourth child, Edward, into their home in the Boston suburb of Dorchester. Oliver, who came from a long-standing but rather undistinguished Massachusetts family, had raised his economic and social position by earning an education from Harvard and the post as minister of Boston’s New South Church. In 1792 he lost this pastorate due to chronic health problems, and the family moved to Dorchester to regain Oliver’s strength. His source of livelihood is murky until 1799, when he became a judge in the county Court of Common Pleas. While the family was headed by a man respected in Dorchester for his mental powers, then, Edward and his siblings were raised in lower-middling material circumstances at best.¹

Both his father’s example and the family’s economic situation pointed young Edward’s feet to education as the path of upward mobility. Dorchester was a propitious place to enter such a path, for the school took second place only to the church in its residents’ hearts. Proud to lay claim to the first taxpayer-supported public school in America (dating from 1639), Dorchesterites hired an unusually long run of excellent Harvard-trained teachers. It was in the town’s new brick schoolhouse that Edward attracted the earnest tutelage of not only his instructors but also the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris, the respected pastor of the First Church. Four decades later, Everett, by then the governor of Massachusetts, looked back on the Boston schools as the friends of my friendless youth and poverty, gratefully gushing that they gave me a better education than I had the means of getting any other way.² While poverty may have been a bit strong, this reminiscence is a key to understanding Edward’s self-image as a success story made possible by education.

Edward’s first political memory—in fact, many key personal firsts for him—came in connection with George Washington’s death in December 1799, which touched off a months-long spell of national mourning in which citizens elaborately staged their grief. Though it came in the midst of bitter partisan divisions, this process of grieving eschewed party politics in favor of national unity. As one historian has put it, these public memorials for Washington were significant events in advancing the development of an American civil religion, as clergymen eulogists fused the symbol of Washington with Christianity and a providential vision of American destiny. Women’s heavy participation in the public mourning ceremonies helped cement the notion that it was all above the sordidness of partisanship.³ Children also participated in these rituals. Edward’s contemporary and future fast friend George Ticknor remembered seeing his father come home speechless with emotion; my mother was alarmed to see him in such a state, until he recovered enough to tell her the sad news. He recalled that children joined in wearing black crepe on their arm during the period of mourning. Such vivid memories were part and parcel of an early national political culture in Massachusetts that centered on reverence for the Revolution and its heroes. Ruled by surviving patriots, surrounded by places full of associations with the Revolution, and indoctrinated by ceremonies commemorating its glories and heritage, young Bay Staters grew up very much in the shadow of the American Revolution.⁴

Though not yet six years old, Edward experienced Washington’s death in an indelible way. Six decades later, he recounted vivid memories from that period. A song whose refrain was Huzza for Washington had stuck with him all that time. He remembered his father placing around his neck a black ribbon whose medal bore the inscription He is in glory, the world is in tears. In school, his first little declamation was the familiar elegy, beginning—‘From Vernon’s Mount behold the hero rise; / Resplendent forms attend him to the skies.’ Perhaps most memorably, Dorchester’s leading citizens chose Oliver Everett for the distinct honor of delivering the town’s official eulogy of Washington on the departed demigod’s birthday, 22 February 1800. In the 1850s, Edward recalled in vivid detail his father’s preparations to deliver the oration, the only writing of Oliver’s ever published. I seem even now, he added, to hear Dorchester’s town bell calling the town’s citizens to attend his father’s speech. In another first, this was the first public secular discourse that Edward ever heard.⁵

In that eulogy, Oliver attributed Washington’s undeviating course of right actions to his possession of a combination of shining virtues. His general course was to illustrate the character of General WASHINGTON and to place him within a providential history of the march of that civil freedom, order and justice, which flourished in America and which WASHINGTON (always in caps) defended in war and peace. Americans must now emulate his selfless patriotic devotion by defending the nation he had founded. Although this Federalist saw that country menaced by treacherous citizens and designing foreigners, he submitted that by far the greatest portion of our citizens, it is believed, are friends to order and our excellent constitution and if called forth by a crisis will take their beloved offspring by the hand, and march towards the tomb of WASHINGTON. Rallying at this shrine, these patriots would swear to preserve from ruin their beloved country; and to perpetuate those national blessings which it enjoyed, under the patronage of its departed SAVIOUR. Oliver made no attempt to hide the political benefits of such an imagined gathering, whose effect shall be wonderful. Patriotism shall revive; … faction shall vanish. Order shall return. Righteousness shall reign.⁶ In all of these unforgettable aspects of this moment were themes that would shape key parts of Edward’s own future career of public Washington worship: unrestrained praise for the civic saint; the focus on his character and on how emulating it would save the imperiled Union from internal threat; the stakes involved in saving such a Union; and a vivid vision of Washington’s tomb as a physical embodiment of and rallying point for Americans’ devotion to a constitutional union of law and order. It is notable that this speech and all the other emotional connections to Washington and union far predated Edward Everett’s exposure to slavery and other questions that would engross his attention in later years.

Such memories as these would become all the more poignant when Oliver died in 1802, whereupon Lucy moved her young family to Boston. Edward thrived there as well and in the process formed his friendship with Daniel Webster when the latter served as a substitute schoolmaster over Edward’s school. In 1807, at the tender age of thirteen, the bright young scholar entered Harvard University, where he succeeded in every subject and graduated as valedictorian. In later years he remembered his experience at Harvard in great detail. In his reminiscences he admitted that ambition had driven most of his efforts, which went far beyond what was required to succeed in his studies. He also formed another relationship that would powerfully shape his career when he took classes from the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, John Quincy Adams, which left an indelible impression on him.⁷

During his senior year, Everett joined with some classmates to found a literary journal for which he served as editor and contributor-in-chief, the Harvard Lyceum. The content as well as the endeavor itself was a preview of coming attractions from Everett. In the inaugural edition, the Address of the Editors pledged a journal that would attend to the widest range of Harvard students’ intellectual interests in typical fashion for a literary review, but the subject of American literature will receive our particular attention. This ought to be the theme of the reflection and inquiry of all, whose reputation as Americans is involved in the result. There followed a long, defensive lead editorial granting but explaining away American literature’s inferiority to European. One article did lament Americans’ current mode of celebrating the Fourth of July, however, where the feeble triteness of the orations sent revelers away without improving their minds, their patriotism, or their virtue. Another regretted some Americans’ unnecessarily angry tone and unfair reverse criticisms in responding to their British critics.⁸ At sixteen years of age, then, Everett enunciated a nationalist viewpoint on literature, balanced by a budding Anglophilia. He also perceived the largely untapped potential of public occasions such as Fourth of July celebrations to elevate citizens’ hearts and minds to achieve political ends, including vindicating America in the Atlantic republic of letters.

Other articles Everett either contributed to or included in this sheet offered further glimpses into his forming ideologies relative to slavery and other leading political themes. One enthused that every native of this happy land, taught to dread slavery as the severest curse, can well appreciate his privileges and would never hesitate to fight in their defense. Another piece arguing against the tendency to disparage modern civilization and worship the ancient pointed out that in the most refined periods of antiquity, the state of society was such that more than nine tenths of the lower orders of the population were doomed to miserable servitude despite all the leading citizens’ paeans to Athenian liberty and denunciations of usurpation and tyranny abroad.⁹ Such reflections were imprecise predictors of how the young man would approach American slavery; they might have underwritten either a complacent attitude toward slavery based on its antiquity or on America’s alleged freedom from its curse, or a vigorous opposition to Americans’ appalling emulation of Athenian hypocrisy. Reflections on other political and social issues included one titled Essay on Government observing that it seems to be necessary to the preservation of the human race on earth, that subordination of various kinds should exist in society. This conservatism was balanced by an article called Enthusiasm, which took a charitable attitude toward this much-abused trait. It should be channeled and prudently managed but not extinguished because it had beneficial effects on the sensibilities of a man, even with all its excesses.¹⁰ Judging by these articles, he was a budding conservative but no reactionary, committed to rational reform and hesitant on the painful issue of slavery.

These predilections reflected in large measure the influence of Everett’s mentors. One influence that Everett himself cited was Benjamin Franklin. In 1855, he vividly recalled reading Franklin’s famous autobiography while at Harvard. Few books that I have ever read, he declared, have had a greater influence over me than this little volume. From it he gleaned a respect for the kind of industry, perseverance, and method that earned him the nickname Ever-at-it among his Harvard peers. This volume also helped lay the foundation for his trademark conciliatory interpersonal and public-speaking style: I learned from it the superiority of a modest intimation of opinion over dogmatic assertion, and the propriety of speaking with diffidence on controverted points. As scholar Alan Houston has shown, Franklin committed himself to a host of social and political reforms, moved by an ethic of improvement. Everett showed across several decades how deeply he had imbibed that ethic.¹¹

Among the living, he emulated foremost the Unitarian minister of Boston’s Brattle Street Church, Joseph Stevens Buckminster. Everett’s family had attended the hugely respected cleric’s congregation for some years, and Everett regarded Buckminster as the very model of a clergyman and a scholar. While at Harvard Everett visited Buckminster weekly to discuss matters theological and literary. Buckminster taught that the spheres of church, state, and letters should interrelate and that men of letters should seek to influence the other realms. As such, Everett’s career would epitomize Buckminster’s legacy.¹² Among Buckminster’s sermons that enunciated political and social themes was a Thanksgiving sermon celebrating the circumstances in the United States which are favorable to great moral and religious eminence. All of these conditions were in contrast with, and at a providential distance from, the decayed, stratified, unfree, and warlike Old World. While Buckminster encouraged his protégés Everett and Ticknor to travel to Europe to continue their studies, such counsels were tempered by this nationalist vision of the United States.¹³ Another running theme in his sermons was a reverence for the apostle Paul, whom he painted as zealous but not fanatical or delusional. Indeed, Buckminster offered a paean to self-mastery, which he contrasted with the spirit of the times with all its state of passions in constant turmoil.¹⁴

This call for Christian zeal tempered by moderation shone through a discourse touching on slavery in Paul’s—and by extension in Buckminster’s—time. In an undated discourse on the New Testament book of Philemon, Buckminster argued that the main lesson of this short book was what we can learn about the character of the writer Paul, and hence about the nature and spirit of Christianity. In Paul’s letter to Philemon urging him to take back his runaway Christian slave Onesimus as a brother in Christ, the careful reader would see the distinctions of master and slave, of the chief apostle and his meanest convert, vanishing in their common relation to Jesus and his gospel. But the honest reader would also find, that Christianity made no alterations in the civil or political relations of the converts, for Paul demands not the emancipation of the slave, but, on the contrary, returns him to the service of his master. How generous, Buckminster concluded, how disinterested, and yet how practicable is all this! How conformable to the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and how unlike the customs and the spirit of modern society! He who failed to understand this example of true, practicable benevolence understands not the nature of Christianity. He has not imbibed that spirit of charity, without which the most confident faith and the most burning zeal are but a hypocritical show, or a ruinous delusion.¹⁵ In this sermon Buckminster embodied the Massachusetts Unitarianism that historian Daniel Walker Howe has helpfully depicted as torn between optimism about humans’ ability to solve worldly problems by the application of rational moral sense, and commitment to hierarchy and order. Religious liberals and social conservatives, at once optimistic and apprehensive, Unitarians like Buckminster were reformers who feared change, especially as achieved by aggressive debate.¹⁶ In this sermon as elsewhere, Everett’s mentor advocated truly reaching out to the less fortunate, but not by means of a divisive radical spirit.

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After graduating, Everett conformed his public expressions to this spirit of reconciliation. Yielding to Buckminster’s and others’ advice, Everett stayed at Harvard to prepare for a career as a minister. In 1812 Buckminster died suddenly, and in 1813 the Brattle Street parishioners invited his pupil Everett to take his place. Leading one of the preeminent churches in Boston confirmed Everett’s meteoric rise into the city’s intellectual and social elite. He may have been foolhardy to take up such a task at the tender age of nineteen. Be that as it may, he hewed closely to Buckminster’s legacy, devoting himself more to literary matters than to theology. Invited to deliver the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1812, Everett’s offering pondered the literary potential for American poets in patriot topicks, starting with the Pilgrims in 1620 and moving through events like Bunker Hill.¹⁷

Amid the deeply divisive War of 1812, Everett continued to preach broad patriotism and partisan moderation. Indeed, in June 1814, at the height of New England Federalists’ opposition to the war and after two years of radical Federalist preachers branding the war a visitation upon America’s national sins, Everett declared from the Brattle Street pulpit that I do not enquire into the right or wrong of the war. And the next month, with Philippians 4:5—Let your moderation be known unto all men—as his text, Everett enthused that Christianity could not be founded in fanaticism and enthusiasm, but was indeed divine. As such it not only was a rational and practical religion but was also calculated for man in his present condition. For unlike the enthusiast, the man of moderate views … builds his hopes upon foundations least likely to fail, and strives for objects most certain to be secured. Moderation, he disclaimed, gives no excuse to those, who are ever shrinking from the effort of improvement of self or society. But it did teach that difference of opinion or diversity of interest was never a sufficient reason for cutting off the ties of common charity. It was not for Everett to emulate the Massachusetts Federalist preachers who upbraided Republican warmongers in the harshest language, for he had set out to be such a man as he described in this sermon.¹⁸ His youth and brilliance did at times draw him into controversy, notably a five-hundred-page, often personal as well as theological rebuttal of a doubter of Christianity’s authenticity. He earned great praise for himself and helped establish Unitarians’ Christian credentials by means of this book.¹⁹ But this demonstrates that he saved the brashness natural to a young academic for academic disputation, eschewing political strife.

His labors in his parish, however, proved far from moderate, and within a year of taking up the pastorate, Everett was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He projected a trip to the Washington, D.C., area to realize a respite. Armed with letters of introduction from Massachusetts luminaries such as Harrison Gray Otis and John Adams—the latter of whom introduced him to Thomas Jefferson as probably the first literary character of his age and State—Everett set off in the fall of 1814.²⁰ Heretofore reluctant to comment on slavery in the partisan wartime context and uncertain in his abstract ponderings on the institution, Everett on this journey observed slavery up close for the first time. Interacting largely with respectable Upper South slaveholders, he reached conclusions that fell considerably short of abolitionism. And a sojourn at Mount Vernon reinforced his already strong Unionism.

Everett responded philosophically to the plight of slaves. From what I could observe on various occasions interacting with the slaves of the area surrounding Washington, he recorded, these poor wretches do not feel the debasement of their condition, and are as much resigned to their slavery, as servants here to their servitude. While praying with a family in Alexandria, he spied a slave secretly kneeling on the stairs. This reverential act struck him as proof that even the most debased and unenlightened in all countries have yet that common spark of spirituality, in them, which under happier auspices would have kindled into Sensibility, Improvement, and Bliss. It was enough to make him yearn for the future Judgment Day, when the ills and privations they suffer here will be repaid. Moreover, while this poor creature was kneeling and listening to my prayer, I could not help reflecting how differently God sees from man. Tho’ sunk in our eyes, out of the circle of humanity, and not entitled to a word except of command or censure, ’tis likely that not one joined the petitions, with greater acceptance, to God, than this poor slave.²¹ Of a piece with the philosophy of Buckminster’s Philemon sermon, this response was consistent with both a benevolent Christian view of individual slaves and a resignation to their temporal lot within God’s time frame.

In the here and now, Everett agonized over what course true humanity should take concerning American slavery. On the one hand, he was impressed that his elite hosts treated the several generations of slaves they owned with the greatest kindness. They struck him as eminently reasonable, cautious opponents to slavery in principle; this impression laid the foundation for decades of cooperation with just such Upper South moderates.²² But on the other hand, he fretted that the moral influence of slavery upon the virtue of slaveholders is deplorable, arising from an intimate familiarity with their body servants that made me shudder. He quoted Jefferson on how the commerce between master and slave turned the former into petty despots. But what can be done? he despaired in a lengthy diary entry. To emancipate the slaves, is to exchange a great evil, for a greater, given that freed blacks have almost universally proved vicious mischievous and miserable. Even the slaves famously freed by George Washington’s will had found that the gift was a gilded curse: humanity itself can hardly wish the example to be followed. Therefore, it would be most desperate madness, or rather an impossibility, to emancipate them all at once. Given all these countervailing aspects of the question, the problem of slavery in the South is the greatest political problem I have met, and one which I fear will never be solved, till it is done at a future day, in terrible convulsions; and the subversion of the countries where this deplorable system prevails. Mass slave rebellion would lead to a horrible conflict whose outcome would be either that the few surviving slave rebels would be reenslaved, or, what I fear is more likely, that a desolating success would be the consequence of their attempt, which would drench the State in its best blood [and] strew it with the ruins of its noblest fortunes. The black conquerors would probably soon be invaded from other American states, hemmed in, and reduced to a guerrilla force driven to the ridge to harass the country, for a few generations, till they gradually disappear like the Indian tribes. The soil would thus be restored to the whites, who would as likely as not, cover it in ten years, with another population of Slaves.²³

This priceless passage foreshadowed and helps explain Everett’s decades-long perplexity over Southern slavery. As a truly humane man encountering what seemed an intractable political and social problem, he feared that immediate emancipation would prove calamitous for everyone of both races. Haunted as he was and would remain with the specter of the Haitian Revolution, because of the geography and demographics of the United States he seems to have expected a massive slave revolt there to be even worse than in Haiti, as well as ultimately fruitless. Although not ultimately proslavery, these ruminations contained impressions of American slavery’s mildness that would surface later. And so strong was Everett’s rejection of rapid emancipation in America that in this, as with nothing else, he was willing to broach the heretical notion that Washington had made a mistake.

Everett’s good standing in the Unionist church was never in doubt, however, and he bolstered his faith by a pilgrimage to Mount Vernon in a critical hour for the Union. In 1814, New England town meetings and legislatures had called for a convention to discuss revising or disbanding the Union in order to prevent future calamities akin to the War of 1812. Aggrieved Federalist leaders would meet in the Hartford Convention beginning in December 1814, and as this movement went forward in that season, lovers of constitutional union everywhere were deeply alarmed. In late November 1814, Everett visited Washington’s estate and enjoyed illustrious company, including the family of Washington’s heir Bushrod Washington. At dinner one evening, the table talk dwelled principally upon the supposed determination of Eastern federalists to sever the Union. When they called on Everett for a toast, he pointedly offered the ‘Union of the U.S.’ The next day he more extensively surveyed the mansion and grounds and brought a few geranium leaves and orange leaves, as relicks from Mt. Vernon, but they all withered and decayed, like the good impressions we carry from a church. He remarked that the evergreen of a grove of cedar trees, waving over the General’s tomb, amidst the surrounding desolation of the vegetable world, seemed like the tradition of the hero’s own virtues, still cherished amidst the corruption of the political community. I broke a branch of cedar from one of the trees. He wished he could have visited Mount Vernon alone, in which case I should have seen and felt a thousand things, becoming the veneration one should cherish for a spot like this, and would have taken away feelings that would have lasted me all my life. But his companions’ familiarity with Mount Vernon led them to take it for granted, and most of their conversation during the visit was disappointingly commonplace.²⁴ Although hoping for a more moving religious experience, Everett the pilgrim did the best he could. And there is something poignant about this Bostonian of Federalist leanings toasting the Union at its emotional epicenter at one of its times of crisis.

Everett’s opportunities to travel and glean new light on American nationhood and American slavery would continue after his return from this Southern itinerary. In yet another incredible opening for the brilliant young scholar, Harvard invited him to accept a new chair in Greek literature endowed by wealthy Bostonian Samuel Eliot. The offer included two years of sabbatical up front, during which he could pursue advanced studies in Europe, making it an offer he could not refuse. One day after turning twenty-one, Everett officially left his congregation and took up his professorship. Four days later, in a group that included Ticknor, he sailed for Europe for what ended up being four years rather than two. During that span he earned his Ph.D.—the first American to earn this degree—from Gottingen University and traveled extensively across Britain and the Continent.²⁵

The young American felt all the ambivalence that other provincial republicans felt when they traveled in cultured, aristocratic Europe.²⁶ He understood keenly that Europeans set a standard of scholarship and literature that Americans could only hope to approximate after their most arduous efforts. He was proud, therefore, to mingle with the European intelligentsia and gratified that in these circles he had met with kindness and cordiality. The budding Anglophile found to his pleasure that the idolatrous veneration with which I once regarded the English, has been succeeded, not as is too often the case by jealousy and hatred, but by a grateful and sincere respect. Upon returning to the United States, he confided to his older brother Alexander that I fear I shall have to prepare myself for the day of small things.²⁷ Yet amid the splendor of European civilization, Everett hardly lost interest in America. Conservative that he was, he professed no love of hereditary aristocracy while inspecting it. Keen to understand American history within the context of world and European history, he thought a good deal about a projected statue of Washington while visiting the ruins of Rome. Also while in Rome, he composed a hundred-page sermon examining the advantages America enjoyed over Europe in some of the commonly supposed constituents of National happiness.²⁸

In this context of exploring Europe and comparing it to America, Everett’s years abroad also further informed his evolving thoughts on slavery. Like friend and traveling companion Ticknor, Everett had long revered the British abolitionist statesman William Wilberforce, and they both relished the opportunity to meet him in England. He rhapsodized in his journals about the great good that such moral reformers did in the world.²⁹ Wilberforce’s model of incremental legislative progress against slavery stood for Everett as a wise, humane alternative to the Haitian Revolution’s model of abolition. Despite this reformist streak, he was rather matter-of-fact in his response to relics of ancient slavery he encountered in Rome, and the tens of thousands of sturdy beggars he witnessed in Naples only confirmed his fatalistic resignation to the existence of poverty in human societies. By contrast, however, he was shocked by the squalor he often witnessed in his travels on the Continent—especially in the German states, where he took dire poverty to be the default situation of the peasantry. This made him all the more grateful for the relative prosperity Americans of every class and color enjoyed.³⁰ As his European tour neared its end he could say that he had theorized a good deal about American slavery, presumably in light of such a range of European contacts and observations. Indeed, he invited Alexander to contribute to a clever duodecimo treatise he contemplated preparing on the subject.³¹ As no such treatise seems to be extant, it would appear that Everett applied his European reflections on the subject principally to future public declarations on American slavery and its abolition.

His return to America with the novel doctoral degree in hand ensured numerous and eager audiences for his reflections on social and political questions. In the early 1820s, he helped produce English translations of Greek grammar and literature that became staples of college curricula around the country for the next three decades. This was just the beginning of his influence on Hellenism in American art, oratory, and public life more generally.³² He also returned to a Harvard student body eager to hang on and mimic his every word. Witness after witness testified that he seemed to express and embody our dreams of an accomplished scholar and a finished man, so much so that Everett helped inordinately to create the classic New England diction emerging in this era. One student from Virginia kept his notes from Everett’s classes to the day he died. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured Everett’s impact in a much later lecture titled Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England. The novelty of his German learning, Emerson remembered, together with the natural grace and the splendor of his rhetoric, meant that there was an influence on the young people from the genius of Everett which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens. And more than young people fell under this spell, for the restless genius could not be confined to the Harvard classroom. He delivered several sermons as an itinerant preacher throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic. He also gave a series of lectures that Emerson recalled being largely and fashionably attended for two winters in Boston. As a net result, the word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, became current and classical in New England. All his speech, Emerson continued in what would become a theme in describing Everett’s oratory, was music, and with such variety and invention that the ear was never tired.³³

The words that became so classical in New England included refinements of his thoughts on social inequality and on the American Union. An 1819 sermon thanked God for his goodness to America, which was best appreciated when compared with the plight of Europe. From that vantage point Everett saw a thousand civil & political details, which would illustrate the happy state of our land. All those details testified that it was the design of God, to build up a most free & happy People here. He warned against a spirit of indifference to such unexampled blessings and against wasting our tho’ts & cares on the little imperfections, which our human nature mingles up even in this almost perfect system. His audience’s momentous charge was to preserve these blessings. Should they fail they would dash the hopes, I will not say of our Country or of our Age, but of the World & of Mankind.³⁴ This would be the tack Everett the nationalist and Unionist would pursue throughout his life: there was nothing wrong with this providentially designed nation (or at least the flaws were comparatively minor), so nineteenth-century Americans’ only task was of conservation. And the stakes involved with this task were enormous.

In a sermon delivered in various places in Massachusetts and New York in 1820 and 1821, Everett continued his spoken meditations on the biblical teaching that God is no respecter of persons. Everett recognized as real and natural the distinctions in society resulting from men’s differing opportunities and stations. A society without differentiated roles would be nothing but a barbarous horde of individuals, each vainly endeavouring to dispense with the help of his fellows. But social distinctions, he pursued, have no moral merit, being socially constructed and temporary. To balance a proper sense of true, moral, eternal Equality with all these outside distinctions, one needed to understand the doctrine that there is no respect of persons with God—there is no connection between these natural distinctions, & the moral condition of men. This, Everett exhorted, is the great solution of the hard problem of human fortune, at which we are so apt to repine, and which will reconcile us, if any thing will to whatever inferiority we may labor under. Unfortunately for the peace and happiness of the world, too few had understood these principles and had even fought cruel wars to vindicate an imaginary & fantastic equality. Other lessons he derived from these doctrines included the need for society’s superiors to learn humility and for everyone to strive for spiritual improvement in anticipation of that true superiority being rewarded in heaven.³⁵ Consistent with Buckminster’s Philemon doctrines, this sermon called for moral reform rather than anxious revolution in the name of equality. While some individual passages could have been read as reactionary resignation to worldly injustice, read