VOL. LIV.

No. 3.

(At the 99th annual meeting of the New Hampshire Historical Society, held at its beautiful home in Concord on January 26, 1922, a bronze bust of the late Parker Pillsbury, by J. F. Paramino, was presented to the society by his nephew, Hon. Albert E. Pillsbury of Boston, native of Milford and former attorney general of the state of Massachusetts, whose interesting remarks on the occasion are published herewith.-Editor.)

I feel that my first duty here is to acknowledge my obligations to the artist whose genius has created, out of the scant material supplied by a couple of photographs, a living likeness in bronze of Parker Pillsbury. Except for the peculiar gift of what may be called posthumous sculpture, which is one of Mr. Paramino's possessions, making the dead live again, probably my purpose could not have been realized, for I know no other follower of his art who has at once the eye to see so clearly the man he never saw and the hand so cunningly skilled to reproduce him.

In offering the Society this memorial of the abolition movement, and of New Hampshire's part in it, I did not expect to make it the subject of any public comment, but your invitation has suggested to me the question whether it may not be necessary to say something by way of explanation, or of reminder, if for no other reason. The present generation never stood face to face with slavery. It has no adequate conception of the barbarism so deeply rooted in the social system where slavery prevailed,

that Congress is struggling at this very hour, more than half a century after the legal extinction of slavery, with one of the direct survivals of it. The satanic orgies of Southern mobs in burning negroes at the stake have made us a name of reproach around the world. The people of today have forgotten the abolitionists and have no realizing sense of what they were or what they did or suffered. Parker Pillsbury's home was in this town and city of Concord for half a century or more, and he was for many years as well known a figure, almost, as any in this corner of the country, yet it would not surprise me to know that there are but few people living in Concord or in New Hampshire to-day who would recognize his name if they heard it, or know anything of the part he bore in the moral warfare that led up to the abolition of slavery. In his later years he published a book, under the characteristic title "Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles," in which he records his concurrence in Cato's caustic remark upon statues that have to be accounted for, in which I agree, and while I think he would have disclaimed any such distinction, if I felt that reasons need be given for remembering him in a permanent memorial I should not be here on this errand.

The relation of the abolitionists to the social order of their time was much like that of the early Christians, whose experiences they shared, even to a martyrdom hardly less cruel, if less bloody, than that of the Roman

PARKER PILLSBURY were the pioneers who cleared the ground for the march of our victorious armies. Every man who fell on the battlefields of the Rebellion died in the cause for which they wrought. The war, though called a war for the Union, was in truth a war about slavery, and about nothing else. Their appeal was only to conscience; they could not gather in ballots the harvest they had sown, but at the opportune moment appeared the great last prophet of the cause, who denounced the house divided against

itself and coupled the moral forces of abolition to the train of events that brought in Emancipation and a Union without slavery, the only thing that ever threatened the Union.

I cannot take the time of this meeting to enlarge upon the epic of abolition or to say more of Parker Pillsbury than to sketch in the briefest outline enough of him to give this audience a background for the imagination. He was brought from his birthplace in Hamilton, Massachusetts, as a child in arms, and grew up on his father's farm in Henniker, early developing qualities that led his pious parents to devote him to the Congregational ministry. For this he took the training of the shortlived Gilmanton seminary, and a season at Andover, was licensed to preach, and undertook the supply of a little church in Loudon. Even then he had heard and answered the call of William Lloyd Garrison, and from that time until the final overthrow of slavery he was at the forefront of battle in the abolition cause, abandoning the church for its guilty fellowship as he called it, truly enough, with the slaveholder. To the summons of the church and conference for expulsion he replied "I have already excommunicated you, for your complicity in the sins of slavery."

In leaving the pulpit to follow Garrison he, of course, exchanged at the outset all his worldly prospects for social ostracism, broken friendships, public and private contumely, mob violence, of which he was more than once the object if not the victim, threats of indictment, and offers in Southern newspapers of a price for his head, all of which were part of his reward. The very name of abolitionist not only closed every door of preferment but went far to outlaw the bearer from respectable society.

As a platform orator in the antislavery field, the press and other

chronicles of his time appear to regard him as second only to Garrison and Phillips. In the force of his blow I think some of those on whom it fell might not regard him as second to any. Honeyed words were no part of any abolitionist's equipment, but Parker Pillsbury's were likened to "red-hot iron searers."A contemporary said that while other abolition orators spoke, Pillsbury lightened, and thundered. He never hesitated to startle or even to shock his hearers, believing that by no other means could they be brought to a realizing sense of the all-embracing iniquities of slavery, and in this belief he poured out upon their frozen apathy the fiercest heat of the invective of which he was master, until he became, perhaps, the best-hated and reviled of all the reviled and hated tribe of abolition agitators. He seems to have had the spirit of prophecy upon him, and it was his constant prediction from the beginning that American slavery was destined to go down in blood.

It would not become me, and I have no purpose or desire, to_magnify his service or his merits. I prefer to leave him as the men of his own time saw him, the men who knew him best-a striking figure, evidently, upon which many writers were tempted to try their hand. Among the pen-portraits of Parker Pillsbury which have come down in the literature of that period are two, each drawn from life by the hand of a master, so vigorous and vivid that they ought to be left here with the sculptured image.

In James Russell Lowell's works will be found a series of sketches, struck off with mingled sympathy and humor, of the leading figures in anti-slavery convention at Boston in 1846, where Parker Pillsbury appears in action in these lines:

"Beyond, a crater in each eye, Sways brown, broad-shouldered bury,

Pills

Who tears up words, like trees, by the roots,

A Theseus in stout cowhide boots;
The wager of eternal war
Against that loathsome Minotaur
To which we sacrifice each year
The best blood of our Athens here.

A terrible denouncer he,

Old Sinai burns unquenchably
Upon his lips; he well might be a
Hot-blazing soul from fierce Judea,
Habakuk, Ezra, or Hosea."

So he appeared to Lowell, who was not alone in likening him to the fiery souls of Hebrew scripture.

One of Emerson's essays on Eloquence has a passage which I always believed to have been written with Parker Pillsbury in mind, but was never assured of this until his Journals were published by his son a few years ago, when the fact stood confessed. I give it as it appears in the Journal, fresh from the occasion, from which it was transcribed into the essay with little change.

"We go to the bar, the senate, the

shop, the study, as peaceful professions, but you cannot escape the demands for courage, no, not in the shrine of Peace itself. Pillsbury, whom I heard last night, is the very gift from New Hampshire which we have long expected, a tough oak-stick of a man, not to be silenced or insulted or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than they; he mobs the mob. John Knox is come at last on whom neither money, nor politeness, nor hard words, nor rotten eggs, nor blows, nor brickbats, make the slightest impression. He is fit to meet the bar-room wits and bullies; he is a wit and a bully himself, and something more; he is a graduate of the plough and the cedar swamp and the snow-bank, and has nothing to learn of labor or poverty or the rough farm. His hard head, too, has gone through in boyhood all the drill of Calvinism, with text and mortification, so that he stands in the New England assembly a purer bit of New England than any and flings his sarcasms right and left, sparing no name or person or party or presence. He has not only the documents in his pocket to answer all cavils, and to prove all his positions, but he has the eternal reason in his head."

With this I leave him to a place in your gallery of New Hampshire