CHAPTER VI

WAR-TIME AND PUBLIC SERVICE

(1861-1868)

WHEN disunion threatened the United States in 1861, the call to patriotic service took forms so manifold and met with responses so distinctive that the records of the time, as they contribute to American biography, are highly individualized and, in many instances, significant. Norton's letters show him a lover of his country, and a student of its problems; — but he was a man whose physical health necessarily restricted his service to that of mind and spirit. This service he rendered in full measure; especially through editorial labours for the New England Loyal Publication Society and for the "North American Review," of which, with Lowell as fellow-editor, he took charge before the end of 1863. His own pen he devoted early to the Union, in a pamphlet published in 1861 by the American Unitarian Association, "The Soldier of the Good Cause." The fervour of his feeling for this cause animates the pamphlet, from which a single sentence may be quoted: "Our war is in its real nature a religious war, and our soldiers must acknowledge themselves to be not only the soldiers of the United States, but the soldiers of the Lord."

But it was most of all through the work of the New England Loyal Publication Society that Norton

played an important part in the formation of public opinion. The origin and object of the Society are set forth in the biographies of John Murray Forbes, who planned the work and set it in motion, with an efficient executive committee, and Norton as editor. The actual nature of the work may best be described in Norton's own words, taken from a letter to Dr. John Simon,' written in 1871: "During our Civil War in America there was often need of enlightening and concentrating public opinion, and of giving it unity throughout our vast territory. To this end a few of us in Boston agreed to form a society called the 'Loyal Publication Society,' and having collected a comparatively small sum of money we set to work in the following way. We had printed at irregular intervals, generally once or twice a week, a Broadside containing selected or original newspaper articles, treating of such topics as for the moment had the most importance. These Broadsides printed in good type, on good paper, and on only one side of the sheet, so as to

1 (Sir) John Simon, C.B., 1816-1904 (knighted in 1887), sanitary reformer and pathologist; of the Royal College of Surgeons. Sir Richard Douglas Powell said of him: "He was a man gifted with true genius and inspired with a love of his kind. He will remain a noble figure in the medicine of the nineteenth century and will live in history as the apostle of Sanitation." (See Dic. Nat. Biography, 2d Supplement.) Through Ruskin, whose friend and physician Simon was, he became a close and lifelong friend of the Nortons. Writing in 1869 to Child, Norton said of Simon: "Every day that I see him I am struck with the solidity of his thought and the extent of his accomplishments. Greek tragedies, Dante's prose works, old ballads, Shakespeare, are all alike familiar to him. He is past fifty years old, has a fine head, (but not a handsome face) on a short thick-set body, and his expression is full of rare sensibility.”

2 At the most active period of the Society's work in 1864, two or three broadsides, in a regular edition of fifteen hundred copies, were issued every week.

be convenient to copy from, we sent regularly — without expense to the receivers to the editors of loyal papers throughout the country. Our circulation was between one and two thousand copies. We remained strictly impersonal, we made no request for attention, but very soon our articles began to be copied very widely. Many local journals in the different states are published weekly, and their first pages are filled with selected articles. Many of them have but a small exchange list, and consequently find it difficult to fill their first page with good material. We offered it to them taken from a great variety of sources, and by occasional original articles we supplied country editors with 'editorials.' They knew that their readers mostly saw but one paper, and would not discover their cribbing. In this way for three years we did a good deal of the editing of several hundred journals,

and some of the articles to which we gave circulation must have been read by not less than a million of people. Of the influence and effect of this quiet and inconspicuous work there could be no doubt. I was editor of the Broadsides, and had the general management entirely in my hands, and had the means of ascertaining the extent to which our work was successful."

Of the "North American Review," Lowell, soon after he and Norton undertook its editorship, wrote to Motley (July 28, 1864): "It wanted three chief elements to be successful. It was n't thoroughly, that is, thickand-thinly loyal, it was n't lively, and it had no particular opinions on any particular subject." With