The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume VI, 1872–1878

In January 1872, Bryant traveled to Mexico City, where he was greeted warmly by President Benito Juarez; on this and other occasions he was feted for the Evening Post's sturdy condemnation in 1863 of the abortive invasion of Mexico, which was freshly remembered there. AT the close of his visit a local newspaper remarked that the "honors and hospitality which were so lavishly and generously conferred upon him were the spontaneous outpouring of a grateful people, who had not forgotten that when Mexico was friendless Mr. Bryant became her friend." Returning in April through New Orleans and up the Mississippi by steamboat to Cincinnati, he was greeted at a public reception by Governor Rutherford Hayes, who was pleased by his "winning and lovable" manners and "pithy" anecdotes.

That spring Bryant built a library for his birthplace, Cummington, stocking it with several thousand books procured for him by the publisher George Palmer Putnam in New York and London. The following year, after the last of his many travels - this time a revisit to South Carolina and Florida - he made a similar gift to Roslyn. These benefactions won him honorary membership in the newly formed American Library Association, and an invitation to open a library at Princeton University, which made him an honorary doctor of letters. Ultimately, in the final year of his life, his plans for the Bryant Library at Cummington, solicited from the White House by President Hayes, provided the basic design for the first presidential library in the country - that established by Hayes in Fremont, Ohio.

An improbable by-product of the presidential race in 1872 was a proposal by leading journalists that Bryant become -in his seventy-eighth year - a candidate to oppose President Grant and his challenger for the Republican nomination, the mercurial editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley. Bryant's immediate refusal to take the suggestion seriously was succinct, and tinged with humor. It was impossible, he declared in his newspaper, that he should receive the nomination, and "equally impossible," if it were offered, that he should "commit the folly of accepting it." Four years later he was distressed at being unable to switch his journal's support of the Republican candidate Hayes to the Democratic candidate, his old companion in political reform, Samuel Jones Tilden.

As Bryant approached and entered his eighties, his writing and public speaking continued without slackening. Between 1872 and 1878 he published his collected Orations and Addresses, edited a revision of his anthology of poetry and two volumes of landscape sketches, Picturesque America, co-authored a four-volume Popular History of the United States, and undertook to co-edit a three-volume set of Shakespeare's plays, while also producing long monographs on several seventeenth-century English poets. He dedicated statues of Shakespeare, Walter Scott, and Fitz-Green Halleck in Central Park, and spoke elsewhere on Robert Burns, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, and Shakespeare, gave speeches on Mexico and "National Honesty," and presided over the founding of the State Charities Aid Association. He was honored in Albany at receptions by each house of the legislature. For his eightieth birthday, his life's work was celebrated in silver on a Tiffany vase given him by admirers throughout the country.

Bryant's last public act was to unveil, in Central Park, his brainchild of nearly a half century earlier: a bust of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Here, after exhaustion under the June sun, he fell and suffered a massive concussion followed by a stroke, which led to his death a fortnight later in his eighty-fourth year. A period of virtual national mourning preceded his funeral and his burial beside his wife at Roslyn. At one of many memorial services, a eulogist exclaimed, "The broad outline of his character had become universally familiar, like a m

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780823287321

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XXXII

Mexico, and an Election

1872

(LETTERS 2034 TO 2107)

EARLY IN JANUARY BRYANT COMPLAINED TO DANA that he was so pestered by the inconveniences of notoriety that he was about to escape by visiting the Bahamas, and perhaps Cuba and Mexico. He wrote that requests to criticize a poem, sign an autograph, compose an ode, make a speech, attend a dinner, or explain his verses were like mosquitoes in your room at night; they break your quiet whether they bite you or not. So, taking Julia, and her cousin Anna Fairchild, and accompanied by his brother John and John Durand, he left New York on January 25 on the Morro Castle for Nassau.

Many of their fellow passengers, among them General George McClellan, Senator John Stockton of New Jersey, and Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, were guests of president A. W. Dimmick of the Atlantic Steamship Line, and were going on to Cuba. But Bryant with his party disembarked at Nassau, where for two weeks they visited schools, sponge markets, and pineapple, sugar, and coconut plantations. They were struck by the lushness of the verdure on an island formed wholly of coral, and by the indolence of its people. Perhaps quitting their shipboard companions had been induced by the rough passage from New York, during which seas swept over the ship’s forecastle and carried off one of a number of horses tethered there.

Leaving Nassau on the steamer Missouri, they sailed to Havana, which Bryant found greatly changed from the city he had seen in 1849. Whereas there had then been no decent hotel by American standards, now there were several, and the city was busier than any Spanish town he knew—even Barcelona. On his earlier visit Bryant had been diverted by the tearful, wailing processions of Holy Week; now he was impressed by a carnival on the first Sunday in Lent, with its grotesque masks—ladies powdered, patched, and whitened with cascarilla. With some concern, he heard at the office of the Associated Press of dangers from robbers on the route he would take from Vera Cruz to Mexico City. But he was reassured by American and British consular officers, who denied the truth in such reports. So, after being fêted by journalists and government officials, and meeting the iron-fisted Count of Valmaseda, just then suppressing a rebellion against Spanish rule, and seeing officers of the American fleet, which was at anchor in the harbor, Bryant and his male companions sailed on the Corsica for Vera Cruz, leaving Julia and Anna at the comfortable San Carlos Hotel, which they preferred to the prospect of a rough and perhaps dangerous journey to the Mexican capital.

After a four-day voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Vera Cruz, the travelers went ashore in a boat sent by the port captain at the request of Bryant’s friend Matías Romero, former Mexican minister to Washington, and now minister of finance in the government, who had asked that a lookout be kept for Bryant’s arrival.

During his stay in the United States from 1859 to 1867, Romero had courted American aid for Mexico, first to repel French troops who had installed the Emperor Maximilian on a Mexican throne in 1863, and, after that puppet of Napoleon III had been defeated and executed by Benito Juárez, for financial aid and investment. Throughout that period Bryant had been Romero’s steady supporter both in his journal and in person. In 1863 and 1864 he helped arrange banquets in New York at which Romero met merchants and government officials; upon Romero’s departure in 1867 Bryant hailed this gentleman who possessed an ability worthy of a great cause, and a fortitude and constancy of purpose equal to his ability. Accounts of each of these occasions were reported in both New York and Mexico City.

Though Bryant’s unofficial visit to Mexico in 1872 was simply the reflection of a long fascination with the Spanish language and culture, through unforeseen circumstances it became the subject of speculation by both the Juárez government and its opponents. On the day of his arrival at Vera Cruz he wrote Julia that a Mexican paper had printed a report from the United States that he came in a diplomatic capacity—with instructions to negotiate the dismemberment of the republic. Under the dateline January 2 from Washington a leading newspaper, Siglio XIX, had carried a report that there was to be a sellout in the United States Mixed Claims Commission of Mexican territory, and that President Grant was seeking a personal emissary to close the deal, probably Bryant. This was taken up by another journal, with the implication that Bryant sympathized with the New York Herald’s touted policy of Manifest Destiny. A third paper defended Bryant’s integrity and stressed his long support of Mexico since the war of 1846–1848. Adherents of the rebel Porfirio Diaz linked Juárez and Romero to the rumors of betrayal. It seems not to have been widely known in Mexico that two years earlier Bryant had declined nomination as umpire under a convention of 1868 to adjudicate claims arising from the Mexican-American War; nor would his critics have been aware of his longstanding aversion to public office.

Against this background of misunderstanding, it is noteworthy that, after a tedious trip from Vera Cruz, Bryant’s ten-day stay in the capital city should have turned quickly into a modest triumph. Newspapers ran sketches of his life and career. Several of his poems and prose tales—although not among his best—were hastily translated and published (unfortunately, excellent Spanish versions of Thanatopsis and To a Waterfowl, rendered in 1867 by the poet Ignacio Marical, were not among these). The poet and political writer Guillermo Prieto published a laudatory account of Bryant’s defense of Mexico against the French invaders of 1863. At a concert of the Philharmonic Society he was made an honorary member, and after addressing a prestigious group of writers and artists, the Geographical and Statistical Society, partly in Spanish, he was elected to that organization as well. These were the least strenuous of his activities, for, often with the guidance of the American Secretary of Legation Porter Cornelius Bliss, a veteran of Spanish-American residence and learning, he visited schools, museums, hospitals, cemeteries, a state funeral, country estates, and banquets given by officials and private citizens. The climax came two days before his departure when Matías Romero presented the Bryant party to President Benito Juárez. Bryant described his host as a strikingly fine example of the Aztec race, and was impressed by the courtesy with which, taking both my hands in his he said: ‘Remember, Señor, that in me you have a servant and a friend.’ Juárez’ comments on the current rebellion against his government, and the country’s need for capital development and skilled labor, led Bryant to discuss these matters at length in letters to the Evening Post.

It is a measure of Bryant’s vigor and stamina in his seventy-eighth year that, in addition to days and evenings of strenuous activity throughout his visit, he found the time and energy to send six long letters in as many days to his journal, as well as others to his hosts. A note to Major George W. Clarke, editor of the English language paper The Two Republics, enclosed at Clarke’s request the text of Bryant’s remarks at the Geographical Society. After Bryant left, Clarke noted the significance of his visit in words not much different from those printed in several of the city’s Spanish language journals. We believe, he said, that no foreigner ever was the subject, in this capital, of a warmer, a more sincere and elegant reception. … He came … with none of the prestige of a great politician. … The honors and hospitality which were so lavishly and generously conferred upon him … were the spontaneous outpouring of a grateful people, who … had not forgotten that when Mexico was friendless Mr. Bryant became her friend. Following this encomium Clarke printed Bryant’s note of gratitude to his hosts in this interesting city … with a sense of regret that I have not been able to study more at leisure, its political and social condition, and its other peculiarities.

Returning to the coast by way of Orizaba and Cordova, Bryant wrote Romero from Vera Cruz thanking him for his hospitality, and for an armed escort which had ensured a pleasant journey without molestation. At Havana Bryant’s party rejoined Julia and Anna, and on April 2 sailed for New Orleans on the Hamburg liner Germania—all save John Bryant, who had left earlier on another ship. During the voyage Bryant talked with Episcopal bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple of Minnesota, an advocate of better conditions for the Sioux and Chippewa tribes, who thought the Indians of the United States were in general badly treated beyond belief.

At New Orleans on April 5 Bryant put up at the Saint Charles Hotel. He walked around the old French quarter with an acquaintance who entertained him later at the Jockey Club. In the evening he was the guest of Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth, an Illinois man then under criticism for trying to harmonize the interests of blacks and whites. On the eighth the Bryant party boarded a Mississippi River steamboat for the return home. Though Bryant’s diary entries cease at this point, an admiring Governor Rutherford B. Hayes recorded his impressions of the traveler in a reception given Bryant in Cincinnati.

Bryant’s first important public act after reaching New York was a speech on May 22 at the dedication of J. Q. A. Ward’s statue of Shakespeare on the Mall in Central Park. In this he confessed his absorption with such a great mind as the Maker of all sometimes sends upon the earth and among mankind, as if to show us of what vast enlargement the faculties of the human intellect are capable. It was Bryant’s penultimate tribute to the genius whose works he would thereafter reread in entirety before editing, with Evert Duyckinck, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, lavishly illustrated and published in three volumes after his death. Later that year he spoke at the unveiling of a statue of Walter Scott, also in the park.

A project central to Bryant’s interest in the town of his birth and in public education took much of his time this year—the gift of a library to Cummington. In June, still seeking a site for the building, he had collected and forwarded to his Homestead for storage 1,600 volumes, later augmented by 2,000 more which his friend the publisher George Palmer Putnam acquired for him in London. After his Homestead superintendent Francis Dawes had found him a centrally located eleven-acre lot, work began on a library of brick and stone, a barn, and a librarian’s home of poured concrete—one of the first such structures in New England.

Engaging a local woman to catalogue his collection, Bryant undertook a careful concern with each step in the process. On the Evening Post’s job press he printed cataloging slips, regulations to be pasted in each book, and certificates defining rules for borrowers. He even advised Mrs. Nahmer, the cataloguer, on the safest manner of cutting the leaves of new volumes. When the list of 3,618 volumes was completed in January 1873, he printed it between hard covers on the Evening Post Steam Presses. His selection of titles ensured that the collection would be entertaining as well as educative. Some of his comments to Mrs. Nahmer were amusing as well as revealing. Directing her to omit one book and send another to his Homestead library, he remarked of a third, Do what you please with the book of Lola Montez [notorious mistress of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria], but do not include it in the catalogue nor in the collection—Burn it or keep it—I do not want it. He stipulated that his gift to the town should be called simply the Cummington Library, but after his death the townspeople renamed his benefaction the Bryant Library.

1872 was a presidential election year. Though Bryant, with other progressive Republicans, opposed the renomination of President Grant because of growing evidence of corruption in his administration, he deplored the rival candidacy of editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, for whom he had little respect. The day after Greeley’s nomination on May 3 by a Liberal Republican Convention, Bryant cut short a staff discussion of who would comment by saying, I will write that editorial myself. His remarks were scathing. Greeley, he charged, lacked courage, firmness, and consistency; his course during the Civil War had been one long wobble. His associates were so bad that he couldn’t avoid corruption; he had no settled principles except that he was a thorough-going, bigoted protectionist. Abhorrent to Bryant, finally, was the grossness of his manners, by which Allan Nevins has supposed Bryant meant a certain Johnsonian grossness which he thought Greeley permitted himself in the drawing room. After writing this denunciation, Bryant remarked to his associates with a quiet twinkle, ‘Well, there are some good points in Grant’s administration, after all.’

During the following months Bryant’s letters reiterated his disgust with Greeley’s candidacy. He termed it as among the strange vagaries of the times, an act of gross folly, a grave discredit to American politics. And, although his preferred candidates to head the Republican ticket in November were the wartime ambassador to Great Britain Charles Francis Adams, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, or Governor John Palmer of that state, in this order, his newspaper reluctantly supported Grant.

A surprising corollary to widespread distrust of the Greeley candidacy were reports in the press that Bryant himself would be put forward as a candidate by Republican leaders dissatisfied with both Grant and Greeley. This led Bryant to print in the Evening Post a card rejecting these stories with a finality equaling such later denials as those by General William T. Sherman and Calvin Coolidge, and surpassing these in grace and wit. The idea is absurd enough, he declared, not only on account of my advanced age, but of my unfitness in various respects for the labor of so eminent a post. I do not, however, object to the discussion of my deficiencies on any other ground than that it is altogether superfluous, since it is impossible that I should receive any formal nomination, and equally impossible, if it were offered, that I should commit the folly of accepting it.

Bryant’s poetic output in 1872 was limited to two Indian legends, printed in the New York Ledger. His only other literary exercise, and a notable one, was his agreement with the Appletons to write a preface and oversee the letterpress for a two-volume series of descriptive essays on American scenes illustrated by landscape artists with many drawings and steel engravings—notable as perhaps the final effort of its magnitude to pit the graphic artist against the photographer.

Two compliments may be noted here to suggest Bryant’s eminence just then in letters and journalism. One correspondent urged him, as the most prominent literary man of our country, the editor of one of the most influential journals in America, to undertake a reformation of the orthography and pronunciation of our language—a task Bryant declined as almost sure to fail. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., wrote of Bryant, I doubt if there is a man living whose opinions and actions on the slave question have had more influence on the educated thoughtful man than Mr. Bryant’s.

2034. To Theodore Weston¹

New York Jany. 4th 1872.

Dear Sir,

I would come to the meeting of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum this evening if I could, but the Century meets tonight, and I am its President, and the same subject which occasions the meeting of the Trustees of the Museum will come up, and my absence will hardly be consistent with a proper decorum.

Yours very truly,

W. C. BRYANT.

MANUSCRIPT: MMA ADDRESS: Theodore Weston Esq.  /  Secry protem.

1. Recording Secretary of the Metropolitan Museum. See 1938.1.

2035. To Robert Bonner¹

New York Jany 11th 1872.

My dear sir.

I have received the accompanying manuscript from Mr. George Harvey the artist² with a request that I should put it into your hands as a contribution to the Ledger. If it should be accepted he would expect some compensation. If it should be declined, may I ask of you the favor of returning it to me at the office of the Evening Post.³

I am sir,

very truly yours

W. C. BRYANT.

MANUSCRIPT: QPL ADDRESS: Robt. Bonner Esq. DOCKETED: Jany 11, 1872  /  Wm Cullen Bryant.

1. Editor/publisher of the popular New York Ledger, which had published a number of Bryant’s poems and prose writings. See 1137.1.

2. A British friend of Bryant’s. See 553.2.

3. Harvey’s manuscript is unidentified.

2036. To Mary L. Bolles Branch¹

The Evening Post

41 Nassau Street, cor. Liberty,

New York, Jany. 18 1872.

Dear Madam.

I did not make the compilation called the Library of Poetry & Song nor give it its name nor verify the authorship of the poems which compose it. I was only employed to write the introduction, in doing which I advised some one of some of the poems collected and a few additions. I have no power over the book, but I have sent your letter² to Mr. J R. Howard of the firm of J. B. Ford & Co publishers in this city, who has had as much [to] do with the compilation as any body, and have recommended that in the next edition the poem be ascribed to you. I have not the volume at hand and am so busy, being, about to sail for the West Indies that I have no time to look up the poem for the purpose you mention.³

Yours respectfully

W. C. BRYANT.

MANUSCRIPT: Smith College Library.

1. Mrs. John L. Branch, the mother of Anna Hempstead Branch (1875–1937, Smith 1897), who was later the first Century prize-winning college poet.

2. Unrecovered.

3. A poem, The Petrified Fern, published as Anonymous in early editions of Bryant’s Library of Poetry and Song, was later credited in the 1880 edition, p. 863, to Mary L. Bolles Branch.

2037. To Richard H. Dana

New York January 18th 1872.

Dear Dana.

Your last letter¹ I have not yet answered. As I am about to leave the country for a few weeks I make it a matter of duty first to pay up my debts. I have taken passage for Nassau in the Bahamas. Julia goes with me and a young lady her cousin,² and my brother John. We may go—or probably my brother and myself will probably go farther, and after a short stay at Nassau proceed to Havana and thence to Vera Cruz and from Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico, partly by rail and partly by diligence. I am assured that the road is now perfectly safe and not especially fatiguing even for an old man like me.

Of late the inconveniences of notoriety have multiplied upon me, and I shall be glad to get away from them a little while. They keep me writing letters at too much expense of time. Now it is an autograph that they want, then my opinion of a poem which they have written and sent me in manuscript; at one time I am asked to write an ode for an anniversary, at another time a letter in favor of somebody who wants an office. Then I must answer somebody who wants to be a correspondent of the Evening Post or a place on its editorial staff, and again I must write to decline an invitation to attend a public meeting and make a speech, or a public dinner, and next I am asked what is the true meaning of some verse which I have been so unfortunate as to write. I dare say others are pestered like me with these little annoyances. They are like mosquitoes in your room at night; they break your quiet whether they bite you or not.

I was very sorry to have such an account as you have given me of your daughter’s health, and earnestly hope that she is now free from the suffering of which you spoke. The injuries which we receive from violent shocks and bruises of the body often leave a tendency to pains in the nerves which make one miserable for a long time. Julia’s young cousin, who goes with us to the Bahamas has been a great sufferer from that cause. She was thrown out of a carriage and much hurt more than two years since and has not quite recovered from the effects of it yet. …³

MANUSCRIPTS: NYPL–GR (partial final and draft copies).

1. Apparently that dated December 27, 1871 (NYPL–BG), in which Dana had introduced his manly grandson, a Harvard sophomore.

2. Anna R. Fairchild, a daughter of Frances Bryant’s late brother Egbert N. Fairchild. See 134.2.

3. The balance of this letter has apparently been clipped.

2038. To Christiana Gibson¹

New York January 20th

1872

My dear Miss Gibson,

All your friends on this side of the sea will deeply sympathize with you and the other members of your family in the loss which you have met with.² These are sorrows which no previous preparation can steel us against. The blow although expected, is severe when it comes. Yet if we did not see our friends leaving us, one by one, how unwilling we should be to die.

You speak of the death of Mr. Tuckerman.³ Few persons could be so much missed from our circle of friends in New York as he. He was always doing kind things; I have heard of many such since he left us. Then his conversation was always interesting; he kept up with every thing that was going on in society, in the world of letters, of arts and of politics, and had some judgment of his own to give on every subject, which we were glad to hear. His disorder was pneumonia. A short time before his death, only four or five days, he sent me a little article for the Evening Post concerning the productions of Mrs. Carson’s pencil.⁴ Mrs. Carson, you may know, is the daughter of the late Mr. Pettigrew of Charleston,⁵ and has lately come before the public as an artist. Soon afterwards, I heard that he was quite ill, at the house of his cousin, Mr. Lucius Tuckerman, and I think it was little more than twenty-four hours after this, that we had the news of his death. His relatives found him at the hotel where he had his rooms, and desiring to look to his comfort, had him conveyed to his cousin’s, where he had every attention that a sick man could have. His disorder, though not at first very alarming, ran its course rapidly. I was at his funeral, where Dr. Bellows⁶ spoke with great feeling of the many excellent and amiable qualities of his character.

I have taken passage for myself and four others for Nassau in the Bahamas. From Nassau my brother, John Durand and myself, and Julia and her cousin Miss Fairchild, if I can persuade them, will proceed to Havana, there to take one of the steam vessels which make the voyage to Vera Cruz on the mainland. From Vera Cruz we expect to go on to the city of Mexico, partly by rail and the rest of the way by diligence. Our return will be by way of New Orleans, which I have not yet seen. If Julia should not care to go further, I shall leave the two young ladies at Nassau, to join us on our return at Havana. I am assured that the journey from Vera Cruz to Mexico may be made at this time with perfect safety.

You must have had reason to be ashamed of us when you read the astonishing accounts of the enormous fraud committed by the swindlers, who had got the government of the city into their hands. But we have reformed all that, and now it is the fashion to smite corruption almost every where and to pry into it and expose it. I hope that good will come of it all.

I wish you were of our party in the expedition to Mexico. I should then be sure of as agreeable a journey through that country, as we made together through Wales.⁷

Julia sends love and the expression of her sympathy to you all. Remember me most kindly to your mother and to all those of your household.

I am, dear Miss Gibson,

very truly yours,

W. C. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL–BPMP ADDRESS: Miss Christiana Gibson ENDORSED: Mr. Bryant  /  Jan. 20–1872  /  Death  /  of Tuckerman.

1. A Scottish schoolteacher, formerly of New York but now living in Crieff, Scotland, where Bryant had visited her and her family in 1867. See 502.3.

2. Apparently the death of one of Christiana’s three sisters.

3. The American art critic and essayist Henry T. Tuckerman (944.1) had died in 1871.

4. Charlotte Petigru (Mrs. William A.) Carson (1819–post 1880), a portrait and miniature painter of Charleston, South Carolina, had worked in New York City since 1860.

5. James Louis Petigru (1789–1863, South Carolina College 1809), a distinguished Charleston lawyer and strong Unionist throughout his life.

6. Rev. Henry W. Bellows (734.3).

7. In July and August 1867. See Letters 1717–1719.

2039. To George P. Marsh¹

New York January 20th

1872

To the Hon. George P. Marsh.

My dear Sir.

This note will be handed to you by Miss Laura T. Leupp, who visits Europe with her two younger sisters, Miss Isabella and Miss Margaret Leupp.² They intend to make Italy their residence for a considerable time. They are much esteemed friends of myself and my family, and I write to ask for them those acts of kindness which your station as the representative of our republic in Italy enables you to perform for the people of our country.

I am sir

very truly yours

W. C. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL–Crane Family Papers ADDRESS: To the Hon. George P. Marsh.

1. American minister to Italy since 1861. See 828.7, 1269.2.

2. Daughters of Bryant’s late friend and traveling companion Charles M. Leupp. See 421.1, 1111.1, Vol. V, p. 67.

2040. To Enoch C. Wines¹

The Evening Post

41 Nassau Street, cor. Liberty,

New York, January 22 1872

My dear Sir

I should have no objection to be one of the Vice Presidents of the meeting on Friday Evening² only I am expecting to sail for the Bahamas on the day before, so that it will be impossible for me to be present. I will see that attention is properly called to the meeting which is an important one.³

I am, Sir,

truly yours

W. C. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: Pennsylvania Historical Society ADDRESS: Dr. E. C. Wines.

1. Enoch Cobb Wines (1806–1879), a Congregational clergyman and prison reformer, was secretary of the National Prison Association, c. 1870–1877.

2. This meeting of the National Prison Association at Steinway Hall, presided over by Horatio Seymour (1299.2), was reported in the EP for January 27.

3. Bryant’s evident interest in prison reform dated from 1844, when he had been elected president of the New York Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death. See Vol. II [1], 190.

2041. To Mrs. M. G. DeHaro¹

New York January 24, 1872

My dear Mrs. De Haro.

I return with this note, the copy of Señor Vicuña’s translation of the Evangeline of Longfellow,² which you were so kind as to lend me and which seems to me beautiful. I am much obliged to you for the opportunity of reading the work in your noble idiom. I also thank you for the two charming poems which you were so obliging as to copy for me with your own hand.

I am about to sail for the Bahamas to be absent about two months.

I am, dear Madam,

very truly yours.

W. C. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: ACL ADDRESS: Mrs. M. G. DeHaro.

1. Unidentified.

2. Evangeline: romance de la Acadia. Traducido del ingeles … por Carlos Morla Vicuña (Bogotá, 1888) is the earliest edition listed in the National Union Catalogue.

2042. To the EVENING POST

Nassau, New Providence,

February 5, 1872.

We arrived at this place on Tuesday, the 30th of January, after a signally rough passage, during one day of which our steamer, the Morro Castle, made scarcely any progress. Yet she is a good sea-boat and, though with a good deal of motion, rode the waves well, rough as they were. Once she shipped a sea, the effect of which was described to me by a passenger who happened to be on deck at the time. The water swept over that part of the bows where twenty horses were standing. There appeared a man in that quarter, shouting at the top of his voice, and gesticulating violently. Another man ran forward from the after part of the steamer, exclaiming, All overboard! which startled the passenger, who supposed that some of the crew were lost. It appeared that the wave had swept one of the horses from his place, and that the affrighted animal had leaped into the sea. A horse in a high sea in mid-ocean is a helpless creature; nothing could be done, and the steamer passed on.

The land was a welcome sight to our somewhat woful-looking company of passengers early on Tuesday morning. We cast anchor among the semicircular curves of coral rock, green with a scanty vegetation, mostly of shrubs. The sea in this region is full of such rocks; they count them by thousands, and there are more than two thousand islands of different sizes composing the cluster of the Bahamas. The approach to the town presented a pleasant view, with its white stuccoed and sometimes whitewashed buildings among the fruit trees—the mamey, the sapodilla, the mango and the avo[c]ado pear, with the cocoa palm towering above them all. We landed amidst a crowd of several hundred persons thronging the wharf, mostly colored. A barouche took us up a declivity over a well-macadamized road, between rows of colored people on each side, smiling and nodding, to the Victoria Hotel, kept by Mr. Cleaveland, where our party was soon settled comfortably in a little cottage, a dependency of the hotel.

I had scarce time to look about me when an American acquaintance who was staying at the hotel, and whose carriage stood at the door, invited me and another of our party to take a drive. Will you drive about the town, or into the country? he asked. Into the country, was the answer, and into the country we went. I never saw finer roads, smooth and as hard as rock; in fact, the rock in many places comes to the surface, and all that needs to be done is to fill up the holes with which it is penetrated, and make a gutter on each side. A company of convicts, called the chain-gang, keep them in order. We passed here and there enclosures of fruit trees surrounded by high walls, topped with a row of broken bottles, which seemed to imply that but for such a safeguard the passer-by might help himself to what was within. On each side of the road were habitations of the colored people, who literally swarmed in the highway, sauntering about, or sitting at their doors, or windows, or standing in groups, as many women as men; the women tall and spare, as tall as the other sex and wonderfully erect, the shoulders thrown back and the chest brought forward, an attitude acquired by balancing on their heads the burdens which they carry to market or elsewhere. Some of them trailed as long skirts as were ever seen in a New York drawing-room. I think I have never seen in any part of the world what appeared to be so lazy a population, and what I have since learned convinces me that the appearance is by no means deceptive. Of all whom I saw in this drive only one was at work, and he was mending a breach in a stone fence next to the road.

As we went on we saw what the island is made of. It is a coral rock, upheaved in gentle undulations above the level of the sea, and covered in most parts by a thin coating of soil. At the surface these rocks are for the most part perforated with innumerable holes, from the diameter of a man’s finger to that of his wrist or ankle, which often contain all the soil on which the plants and trees depend for their nourishment. Into these holes the orange and other trees insert their roots and flourish and bear fruit. When a man dies at Nassau, a grave is cut for him in the coral rock, the chips of which are returned to cover his coffin, and he sleeps with the millions of coral insects by whom these vast masses were built up, thousands of years ago, from the bottom of the sea, to be first their habitation and then their tomb.

One of the most remarkable sights seen by the newly-arrived visitor is the brilliant blue tint of the sea as beheld from the shore in a clear day. It is of a brighter blue than I have seen anywhere in the waters of the Mediterranean, seeming as if lighted by an indwelling beam. I could only compare its color to that of the globular vessels of glass in an apothecary’s window, filled with a blue liquid and placed in front of a gaslight. Our way was for a little distance beside waters thus beautifully tinged. One of the curiosities seen on this drive was the banyan tree, which all travellers must see, and which, though not large, is a good example of its kind. The long, horizontal branches send down slender twigs in search of the earth, which reach it and root themselves there, and increasing in size become auxiliary trunks, supporting the branches. There are at least a dozen of these on the tree which we saw. Not far from this I saw a solitary house, pleasantly situated, and made some inquiry concerning it. That, said my friend, is a house to which, in conformity to a singular custom prevailing in Nassau, newly-married couples go to pass the honeymoon. They take a servant or two and steal away from the town to this place, from which, after a becoming period is passed, they come forth again. There is nobody there now, but it will be occupied soon, for the rector of one of the churches in Nassau is to be married in a few days.

We took the market of Nassau on our way home. It is a meagre show that our fruit market makes, said my friend. A hurricane which swept over the island last August uprooted many of the fruit trees, and stripped the fruit from more of them; and truly the display of fruit was rather disappointing. Yet this was not altogether the fault of the hurricane. There are between forty and fifty different species of edible fruits raised on the island, of which twenty-three are indigenous, yet few of them are ripe at this season.

Near to the market are the low warehouses in which lie heaps of sponge ready to be sent from the island. Men go out in boats to the coral reefs, detach the sponges from the rocks to which they cling, squeeze out the salt water, string them on ropes and bring them in boats to the town, from which they are almost immediately sent to the old continent or the new. The sponge trade and the pineapple trade, said the intelligent person who showed us the separate heaps of sponge and explained their different qualities, are all that we have to depend on in our intercourse with foreign countries, and these two are nearly equal in importance. Our rocks under water abound with sponge, and our soil produces excellent pineapples. We send a few oranges abroad; but that trade is of little consequence.

One might, perhaps, expect that the colored population would apply themselves to the culture of the pineapple, which yields sure returns, but in those parts of the island which they inhabit I have seen no indication of this. The pineapple requires careful garden culture, and this does not agree with their indolent dispositions. They have patches of ground close to their dwellings, where they might cultivate them; but they prefer to live from hand to mouth, on a chance cocoanut, on a stick or two of sugar-cane, on wild fruit found in the thickets, and now and then a fish caught on the shore. I saw a sturdy-looking lad the other morning in the market tearing in pieces, with his fine teeth, a stick of sugar-cane a foot and a half in length. How many of these can you eat in a day? I asked. Four. And each one costs a cent? Yes, but I don’t get nothin’ else to eat, boss. I have been assured that at this season, when fruit is not plenty, many of these people subsist entirely on sugar-cane. When they were emancipated, thirty-four years since, they simply thought that to be free was not to be obliged to work, and they seem to cling to that fancy yet. Life is so easily supported in this climate, with such slight clothing and so little shelter, and food so cheaply obtained, that there seems but little probability of this race ever betaking themselves to regular industry.

With two of our party I strolled on the day of our arrival through Granttown, a district inhabited altogether by the negro population. Every dwelling has its plot of ground planted with fruit trees, including the banana and plantain, but these are often intermingled with idle shrubs, that here in Nassau take the place of weeds in our gardens, and keep green all the year, and the inhabitants often decline the trouble of extirpating them. Seen from an eminence Granttown looks like a ragged forest dotted with the roofs of houses. We found here one man at work, an old man, eighty years old he believed he was. He had cleared away the shrubs from a small piece of ground to be planted with bananas, and was busily gathering loose fragments of the perforated rock which formed the basis of the soil and peeped out on the surface. These he used to mend the stone fence which kept out the pigs that ranged the surrounding forest. We entered into conversation with him. His name, he said, was Antonio Edinbro; he was born in Florida, born free, migrated to Cuba when the United States took possession of Florida, and afterwards came to this place. I live alone here, master, alone wid God. My wife died standin’ at her washtub; my son died wid a cough; my daughter she died, and I am alone wid God. I do dis because I must do someting for a livin’. And now, please give an old man a few cents. They reckon money here in dollars and cents as in the United States.

We wanted a green cocoanut, to try the milk. The old man shouted for Adam, and Adam came, a boy ten years old, in a brown shirt, his only clothing. Here, Adam, take dis gentleman’s knife and climb dis tree and cut off two cocoanuts, de biggest. Adam obeyed, embracing the tree with his dusky arms and legs; but before he could reach the pendent nuts it became a pretty serious question whether he should proceed further or slip down the smooth bole of the tree to the ground. The old man encouraged him with words much as a ploughman encourages his cattle, and at last the nuts were reached and cut off and came to the ground, and we bore them home in triumph.

The next day we climbed an eminence overlooking the town, to an old fort which commanded some beautiful views of the island in different directions. Seen from this spot the greater part of the island appears to lie in forest, with here and there an opening of pastureland or a small field cleared of wood and planted with the pineapple. In fact, large tracts, as we afterwards found, are not cultivated at all, but are overgrown with a dense thicket of low trees. We descended on the northern side of the eminence till we found ourselves in a broad field planted with fruit trees, where a man was at work, whom we asked to show us to the highway. He took us through a little gate, when we suddenly found ourselves in the presence of a venerable man of majestic stature, who courteously bowed and asked if we would like to see the grounds. This, of course, was exactly what we wanted. So he took us from place to place, showing us the various trees and plants of the tropics which he had collected in the course of a long life, for he was born on the island, and all of which were to us novelties and curiosities. He dismissed us at the gate close to a large banyan-tree. This, said he, is of the sort that we call the embrant. It never springs from the ground; the seed vegetates on the top of a wall or on the branch of a tree, and sends down shoots to the ground, which root themselves there. Here, you see, it has clasped and strangled the tree on which it was born. This tree, which has died in its embrace, was that which we call the Pride of India. We then took our leave, our aged entertainer bidding us come again whenever we pleased, bringing our friends with us.

The same day our party followed one of the lanes leading from the principal highway that passes by our hotel, until they reached the house of a man named McKennon, who cultivates the sweet orange, and the fruit resembling the orange called grape-fruit. Close to the house are the ruins of an old church built by his grandfather, a black man, of the coral rock, in which he gathered a Baptist congregation and preached to them. A terrible whirlwind, which in 1866 devastated the island, lifted off its roof and threw down its walls. It never was rebuilt again, and its dusky worshippers sought another place for their meetings. Descending a steep rock from this place we came upon an abandoned plantation, where stood the remains of a mansion of considerable extent, ruined and roofless, in which the founder of the old church once lived. The stretching boughs of the useless banyan tree overshadowed the place, and ants built their habitations, as large almost as haystacks, on the highest part of the ruins. Indeed, the whole island bears marks of a much higher and more general cultivation than it now receives. Remains of dwellings are seen among the thickets, and stone fences, mossy with time and full of breaches, uselessly divide the waste places. Some years since a great deal of cotton was raised on these islands, but they produce cotton no longer. The thin soil soon became exhausted, the country fell back upon the fruit trees.

I have left myself but little space to speak of the climate, which at this season is delightful. We have here the temperature of early June throughout the winter, and the variations of heat and cold are but slight. The Bahamas lie in the same latitude as the southern extremity of the peninsula of Florida. They have a tropical vegetation, but they are not within the tropics, nor do they feel the fierce sunshine which scorches the fields of Cuba. The three coldest months are January, February and March, and those have a temperature like that which with us marks the transition from spring to summer. This place becomes more and more, with every year, the resort of invalids from the United States, who seek to escape the rigors of a northern winter. At some time not far distant this will become one of the most thronged watering-places in the world.

I send this by the steamer Morro Castle, in which we came to Nassau. The passage was stormy, but we all had confidence in the staunchness of our vessel; and for my part, I never had for a moment the least sense of danger. The president of the company by which the Morro Castle is owned was with us, and his cheerful presence helped to keep us in spirits—as much, at least, as could be the case in such weather as we had. The greater number of the passengers were invited by him to take a pleasure excursion to the tropics, and but for him many of them would never probably, have thought of seeing what they will now for the rest of their lives remember with pleasure.

May favorable gales and a smooth sea attend the Morro Castle and its precious freight of kindly and well-graced men and women back to the country in which her keel was laid.

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: EP, February 14, 1872.

2043. To Isaac Henderson¹

Havana February 17th. 1872

My dear Sir

We arrived here on the morning of the day before yesterday, after a favorable passage from Nassau. Yet the wind was northwest, blowing over the great Mexican Gulf and rolling up such seas that our good steamer, the Missouri, had a most uneasy motion which communicated itself to the stomachs of the passengers. Our baggage and that of all the visitors to Cuba passed a very lenient examination at the Customs, though we had to wait for some time at the bar for the appearance of the customhouse officer who had not finished his breakfast.

The weather thus far is delightful, a soft June-like temperature, though on the day of our arrival the natives and others long resident here thought it cold. Havana is a [place?] noisy with commerce, and in this aspect contrasts singularly with every Spanish town in the old world that I have seen, even Barcelona, the most bustling of all of them. It is large, too, a population of more than two hundred thousand. Clean it cannot be called, and I am persuaded that the sewerage is defective so that the yellow fever finds some encouragement to make its visits.

When I was here twenty years since² there was no hotel to which Americans would go—now there are several—among which is the San Carlos, where we are staying. The rooms are airy and the table excellent, but just now it is crowded. Of the insurrection I hear nothing, but its seat is at the east end of the island where it smoulders yet, and where its partisans hope yet to see it break into a flame.³ The Spanish race is remarkable for its [persistency?] and the leaders and followers of the revolt hide themselves in the thickets of the upland wastes.

We have heard since we came reports of the insecurity of travel on the road between Vera Cruz and the city of Mexico. They seem however to be merely verbal rumors. If literally taken, it would be little short of madness to attempt the journey to Mexico. But we find that most sensible people do not give them much credit, and they seem to have no basis but verbal rumor. We shall therefore go to Vera Cruz and there expect to learn the truth. If they prove true we shall content ourselves with what can be seen of Mexico in that neighborhood. If they have no foundation we shall go on to the capital. The womankind we shall leave behind here—both of them think they have had enough of the sea for the present.

It is not necessary to give any direction concerning our letters and papers beyond what has been given, except that I do not want Harpers Bazaar. The letters &c for Julia and Miss Fairchild should still come to Havana.

Discharges of artillery are announcing the arrival of the Grand Duke Alexis.⁴

Yours very truly

W C BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: UTex ADDRESS: I Henderson Esq.

1. Bryant’s partner and business manager of the EP. See 806.1.

2. Bryant had first visited Cuba with Charles Leupp in 1849.

3. Since 1868 there had been sporadic revolt on the island against its parent country, Spain.

4. Alexis Aleksandrovich (1850–1908), Grand Duke of Russia and brother of Czar Alexander III.

2044. To Julia S. Bryant

Vera Cruz, February 27 1872

Dear Julia

I reached this place this morning after a very agreeable passage of three days and a half. The sea was never more calm and smooth, and we sat all day under awnings on deck, not incommoded by the heat, for it was tempered for the most part by a breeze. I was expected, and the Captain of the Port, instructed by Mr. Romero,¹ the Minister of Finance came with a government boat to take us and our luggage to the town. In this way we escaped the customhouse inspection. I have presented my letters here and have been overwhelmed with attentions. Mr. Newbold² of Mexico had written to an English house here of which he is a partner to offer us rooms in a house overlooking the bay and refreshed by the sea breeze. We declined them for today, for we start for Orizaba tomorrow morning at six o’clock, but accepted them for our return from Mexico.

We find the stories about robberies greatly exaggerated and some of them are but repetitions of old ones.

One of the Mexican newspapers contains a paragraph dated somewhere in the United States—a letter—affirming that I visit the Mexican republic in a diplomatic capacity—with instructions to negotiate for the dismemberment of the republic. &c &c. Other Mexican papers notice this assertion and deny it.

We are all of us very well glad to have made the passage so successfully and glad to be on land again.

If you and Anna had taken passage with us you would have reached this place without fatigue, but what will be the journey to Mexico the capital, we are yet to know.

Yours affectionately

W C BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL–GR ADDRESS: To Julia S. Bryant.

1. Matías Romero, with whom Bryant had become acquainted when Romero was Mexican minister to the United States in 1862–1867, was largely responsible for Bryant’s invitation to Mexico. See 1442.3.

2. Not further identified.

2045. To Julia S. Bryant

City of Mexico

March 2d 1872

Dear Julia

We got to this place last night—safe sound and strong. We had beautiful weather and for twenty miles a bad road, and a tiresome journey in the diligence, through a cloud of dust. I was very glad as we were jolting over the road smothered with the fine white dust that you and Annie were not with us. The sights which we saw, however, were curious—the queer population, the unaccustomed scenery etc. Yet the greater part of the country is far from beautiful though some spots are so—vast arid plains without trees, hemmed in by mountains, are what is most generally seen. We shall stay here ten days and then return to Vera Cruz stopping at Puebla a fine town at Orizaba and at Cordova. We expect to take the steamer at Vera Cruz on the 20th of this month.

Yours affectionately

W C BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL–GR.

2046. To the EVENING POST

City of Mexico, March 5, 1872.

After I wrote last from Nassau I visited the schools of the place and saw what led me to form a more favorable opinion of the people. At the Central School, kept by a teacher from England, Mr. Begrie, whose whole heart is in his work, I saw evidences of a proficiency that surprised me. In mental arithmetic the pupils apprehended the complicated questions put them with astonishing readiness, and the answer was on their tongues almost before the question was concluded. Their familiarity with geography was almost as remarkable, and I certainly have never seen in any school such examples of elegant penmanship—the letters formed with such perfect precision and proportion. This was a school for boys. I was afterward taken to one for girls, the principal of which was a quadroon lady with an assistant of the pure African type, who put the pupils through several exercises in grammar, and I never heard questions of the kind answered more readily and satisfactorily. I next saw the Wood School, a private endowment for boys and girls, in which a system of rewards for good conduct and scholarship makes part of the discipline, and this, also, seemed to be exceedingly well conducted. In these schools there was but a mere sprinkling of the white race—scarcely one white child in twenty. I heard some complaint that the parents of the colored scholars were not sensible of the value of education, and therefore took but little pains to make their children punctual in their attendance. The public schools are now secular only, recognising no religious denomination. The Episcopalians, who till lately had the control of them, are not pleased with this change, but strive to obviate what they esteem its disadvantages by a zealous attention to their Sunday schools. Their own church, also, in the Bahamas, has been disendowed of late, almost contemporaneously, I believe, with the disestablishment of the Irish church, and the support, which had previously been a public charge, made voluntary. The large majority of the inhabitants of these islands are, in fact, dissenters. The Bishop of the Bahamas, Dr. Venables, a most excellent and laborious prelate, passes from island to island, visiting the churches of his charge, and it is not impossible that they will flourish all the more for their dissociation from the state.

In one respect the spread of education among the colored population will be certain to elevate their character. It will introduce among them what they are now deficient in—a taste for the refinements of life—and will multiply their wants, which are now but the wants of a rude people and an imperfect civilization. The new tastes and wants can be only gratified by industry, and occupation is one of the greatest securities against the temptations of vice. I was told by a gentleman occupying a distinguished post in Nassau, that in some of the outlying islands of the Bahamas the prejudice of the whites against the blacks is so strong that they decline to let their children attend the same schools, and that in consequence their families are growing up in ignorance. The blacks in those places are becoming the most intelligent part of the population, and begin to rank as the aristocratic class.

This much by way of postscript to my letter concerning Nassau, in whose balmy climate I passed a pleasant fortnight, and from whose courteous and hospitable dwellers I could not but part with regret. We crossed an unquiet sea on our passage to Havana, which I found a third larger and twice as bustling as it was when I saw it twenty years since; but of that city and the island of Cuba I may, perhaps, speak on my return from Mexico. Our voyage from it to Vera Cruz was in all respects a holiday. The temperature was most agreeable, the airs the softest that ever blew, the sea like a looking-glass, and the steamer—the British steamer Corsica—comfortable and roomy. In a little more than three days we were at Vera Cruz, in the middle of the