THE LIFE AND TIMES OF

SAMUEL BOWLES.

SAM

CHAPTER I.

THE ANCESTRAL INHERITANCE.

AMUEL BOWLES was born on the ninth of February, 1826, in the quiet country town of Springfield, Massachusetts, and in the beautiful valley of the Connecticut. He came on both sides of old New England stock. His father, named Samuel also, had some antiquarian taste, and made research into the genealogy of his family; faithful, patient, and exact in that as in all he did. A little pamphlet which he printed tells that the English family of Bowles, sometimes spelt Bolles, figures in the records of the genealogist Burke; but that the American family which spells its name as here printed was descended from John Bowles, an elder in the church of Roxbury, Mass., in 1640. He was one of the founders of the Roxbury Free School and a member of the Artillery Company. John the second (1653-1691) was baptized by the "Apostle Eliot," and married his granddaughter; was graduated at Harvard in 1671; became a ruling elder in the church; was elected a representative to the "General Court"-the Massachusetts legislature and was speaker of the House. John the VOL. I.-1

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third (1685-1737) was also graduated at Harvard in 1703; was early and long engaged in managing the affairs of Roxbury town; and was major in the militia, and representative in the General Court for ten successive years. His son, Joshua Bowles (1722-1794) was a carver of furniture in Boston. Says the pamphleteer, the grandson of Joshua: "He never had much property. Indeed, I do not think our ancestors were ever distinguished for the acquisition of wealth. But he has been represented to me as a very benevolent, pious man. old lady who knew him well in her youth, told me that when walking behind him in the street, she had heard him praying audibly. Like some other good men of his day, he had a queer way of intermingling religious and secular thoughts and words. My father told me that in a letter to him he once wrote: 'Dear Samuel: Strive to live in the fear of God, and write me word how the boat comes on' (a pleasure or sail boat kept to be let)." Of Joshua's sons, two served in the Revolutionary war, as sergeant and captain, but Samuel, first of the name (17621813), was only thirteen years old when the war broke out. In those troubled times he got but scanty schooling, at the hands of Master Tileston, a well-known Boston school-teacher. He and his wife grew up under the religious influences of the "Old South Church.” He learned the pewterer's trade, found his business spoiled by the war, went to Hartford, Conn., and kept a grocery store, in which he seems to have thriven in a modest way. His son writes: "He was a man of good sense, quick wit, tender feelings, and strict honesty. Though not a member of any church, he was a faithful and liberal member of the Baptist Society, and governed by a sense of religious duty in bringing up his family."

"Good sense, tender feelings, strict honesty, sense of religious duty"-true marks these are all of his son

Samuel (1797-1851), who has part in our story as father of its hero. "Quick wit" could hardly be ascribed to him: he was slow in his mental action; cautious, canny, thrifty; a prim, sober man, respected and trusted by every one; laughed at sometimes for little stiffnesses and oddities; undemonstrative in his family, as was the wont of New Englanders, but with warm and faithful affections. He received as a boy a common-school education, went into his father's shop at the age of fifteen, and at his father's death a year later inherited nothing but an old gold watch and the family Bible. He was then apprenticed to a printer. "During my apprenticeship," he wrote in his maturity, "I was one of some ten or fifteen who formed an association for the improvement of the mind. I was one of the most zealous and steadfast of the club till it ran down. We met once a week, had discussions and listened to readings, original and selected. Here I acquired a taste for reading and mental cultivation. Before this my inclination was almost entirely for social pleasure and for evening carousals with young associates. And I was not very particular in the choice of my company. My connection with the debating club I consider an important era in my life - a sort of redeeming season, saving me from dangerous tendencies. It gave a good direction to my habits, strengthening my mind to resist temptation, and led me to prefer mental to sensual pleasure." When his apprenticeship was completed, he worked at the printing trade for six years, as journeyman and foreman, in Hartford and New Haven. These were years of struggle and dubious success; he was embarrassed by incompetent associates, got in debt, and underwent some hardships. While in Hartford he was prostrated for the greater part of a year by typhus fever of extraordinary severity; a most luckless illness for himself and his posterity, for it left him with a weak

ness of the bowels which became chronic, and his death resulted from an attack of dysentery; while a weak digestive system was inherited by his children, and to his son Samuel was a misfortune through life. But the young printer struggled pluckily on, and in the course of time took to himself a wife, Miss Huldah Deming, of Wethersfield, a woman of goodness, sense, and energy, a descendant of the Puritan captain, Miles Standish. In 1824 the young printer undertook the enterprise of a new weekly paper in Springfield. He came up the river in a flat-boat, with his young wife and their baby daughter, Julia, bringing a hand printingpress and some scanty furnishing for the new home. Friends in Springfield advanced a little money, and on the eighth of September appeared the Springfield Republican. Proprietor, publisher, editor, reporter, compositor, and pressman appear to have been united in Samuel Bowles; and it must be owned by one who reads the first numbers of the paper that one man might have produced it all without any dangerous strain on his powers. But it was the day of small things in journalism, and the Republican satisfied the moderate requirements of the newspaper readers of that day. It had at the start two hundred and fifty subscribers, at two dollars a year; it slowly and steadily prospered, outran or absorbed its local rivals, and seems to have soon yielded a modest but sufficient livelihood for its proprietor and his growing family. His first child, Albert, was born in 1823, and lived but seven months; the next was Julia; then, in the second year of his residence in Springfield, came the son who was named after his father and grandfather; and to these succeeded another daughter, Amelia, and another son, Benjamin Franklin. All of these except the first-born lived to maturity.

CHAPTER II.

THE EARLY ENVIRONMENT.

HE generation to which "Sam Bowles" belonged

THE

for by that name every one called the magnetic and mercurial man, whom the stiff Biblical trisyllable Samuel never fitted-was the generation in which New England broke through the sheath of Puritanism, and flowered into broader and more various life. Two centuries before, certain grave and resolute Englishmen had turned their backs on the refinements and corruptions of the Old World, to found a pure spiritual commonwealth in the wilderness. They and their descendants had been trained in a conflict for existence under rigorous physical conditions. They had been compelled to win a livelihood from soil which asks a hard price for all it yields. They had battled with a climate of extreme and swift fluctuations. They had been separated by the ocean's breadth from the resources with which the Old World ministered to comfort, taste, and imagination. Three advantages. attended them:-they came of picked English stock, they were free from all political inequalities among themselves, and their community was founded under a lofty religious impulse. Two hundred years had developed and confirmed them as a shrewd, serious, hard-headed people. They had grown strong in the robust qualities of manhood. Nature had said to each man, "Work or you