N the year 1809 the paint was still fresh on the only steamboat in the world. Thus far and no farther had preceded the evolution of human passage by waterways and rivers. The means of destruction were scarcely greater than in the Middle Ages. In January of that year Sir John Moore, at Coruna, won his fatal victory over the French with flintlock muskets. The art of life was still in its rudimentary stages. In Great Britain it cost fourteen pence to send a letter three hundred miles, and in the United States seventeen cents for the same service. There was not an iron-barred tramway on the face of the globe. Men hoped to fly through the air, but had no expectation of being propelled by a steam engine. In that year, after his sixty-sixth ascension, died Francois Blanchard, first aeronaut to cross the English Channel. Perhaps in the farm sheds of the world there was not a single plow with iron or steel moldboard. The harvesters in the wheat fields of all countries, from Poland to the Alleghenies, cut their grain with sickles. The most rapid transit on earth or sea was the sailing vessel; and that might be surpassed in speed, for short distances, by race horses. On the physical side the old civilization perpetuated itself. The industrial genius of man was displayed only in local enterprises and curious handicrafts. The age of astounding invention and overwhelming material progress had not yet risen on mankind.Of general knowledge the conditions were in a correlative stage of development. In 1809 William Smith, the father of English geology, was preparing his earth-map of England and Wales—a work which became the foundation of all subsequent inquiry. On January 20 of that year William McClure read in Philadelphia his great paper on the “Geology of the United States," thus laying the basis of that science which was to destroy the old superstitious concept of the earth, and to make known to man the true character of the globe which he inhabits.
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Our knowledge of the solar system at that date was limited to the orbit of Uranus.
Neptune must lie far off for thirty-seven years, awaiting the genius of Adams and Leverrier to make him known. Four asteroids —Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta—had been discovered within the ten preceding years. These were supposed to constitute the whole group of fragmentary worlds between Mars and Jupiter. The scale on which the universe is built was as yet but vaguely conjectured. The constitution of the earth and of our atmospheric envelope was but little understood. Sir Humphry Davy, just recovering from the long nervous fever with which he was prostrated on his discovery of sodium and potassium, was reaching out rapidly for the bottom elements of the natural world. It was three years before that horrible explosion in the Felling colliery led him to the invention of the safety lamp and the preservation thereby of the manufacturing interests of Great Britain. The greatest telescope in the world was the twenty-foot reflector of the elder Herschel. Young Fraunhofer, at the age of twenty-two, still in the Institute of Munich, was experimenting with his lenses and prisms. Through them, ten years later, was to come to him the revelation of the significant lines of the spectrum, indicating the fundamental unity and common plan of universal nature.
The social and domestic condition of mankind was sufficiently significant Until within a year the slave trade had been openly practiced under the Constitution by the merchants of the United States. In Great Britain the system of servitude was still protected. In Demerara, Trinidad, and Jamaica the sugar plantations were worked by Negro slaves under the lash of the driver and the banner of St. George. In the home life of England the evolution had proceeded so far that there were those who doubted, and even disputed, the right of husbands to whip their wives as freely as they might whip slaves ; but such scoffers at the existing order were few and without great influence ! The divorced wife in England, whatever might have been her own blamelessness or the horrid crimes of the husband that led to the separation, was positively interdicted from visiting or seeing her own children ! The remaining shadows of the Middle Ages reached out far into the domestic condition of all the civilized peoples of Europe and America. The civil and political state of the world was sufficiently significant. History had appointed France, and France had appointed Napoleon, to lead a supreme revolutionary campaign against the ancient order in Europe. At this time it appeared that the campaign was to be successful, and that the old regime was about to be extinguished. The monarchies of Europe were crouching close to the ancient walls, hoping that the storm might pass and that they might again emerge to sit on thrones and hunt in parks and gather beauty of doubtful reputation into courts where fashion reigned and virtue was not even remembered !
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America, becoming automatic, still fluctuated with the disturbances and storms of the mother continent. Our agitations, however, were like those of the sea on a shore far distant from the center of the storm. The Napoleonic era was at its height. In that year was made the treaty of Bayonne, in which Napoleon declared the end of the Bourbon rule in the Spanish peninsula. The French ascendancy was extended from Gibraltar to the Niemen, and from the Strait of Messina to the Baltic. The Corsican established his brothers and other subordinates, gathered out of law offices and livery stables, in power over a dozen states. They were the novi homines of new Europe, and stood in willing league with the French empire, then five years old. For the time it appeared that the new order reached by revolution in America was confirming itself coincidentally with the extinction of the old order destroyed by a revolution in Europe.
On our side of the sea the third Virginian president, following the second of the same dynasty, acceded to the chief magistracy of the republic in the spring of 1809. The counter currents of the British reaction in America and the Gallic sympathies of our people ran together throughout the old Thirteen States, and broke in long lines of foam and political agitation. The brief Federal ascendancy in our politics was ended, and the moderate Democracy, impersonated in Madison and his Secretary of State, was the prevailing type of American politics. Jefferson had retired to Monticello. Hamilton was five years dead. John Quincy Adams was Minister of the United States at St. Petersburg. Henry Clay had descended from the Senate to become the leader of the House of Representatives. The elder Adams was contributing to the Boston Patriot his letters in vindication of the policy of his unpopular administration. Children born at the time of the funeral of Washington were completing their tenth year. In England Pitt and Fox were three years dead, and the British ministry was striving, by means fair and foul, to revive the continental coalition against the Emperor Napoleon. That conqueror, on the 6th of July in this year, fought his great battle of Wagram, and on the 16th of the following December divorced Josephine, in order to secure for himself an heir whose mother should be a Hapsburg.
This volume is intended to show the life line of a great man drawn through the intricacies of the nineteenth century, beginning with the year 1809. The story is at once personal and historical. It is a life and a history. As it is personal, it suggests at the start the consideration of other personalities in relation to the great personality whose career is here delineated. The year of the birth of Gladstone was remarkable as the date of the beginning of a great number of personal forces in both Europe and America—forces which have interwoven themselves in a magical manner with the intellectual, moral, and political woof of our era. Perhaps no other
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year of this century has given birth to such a prodigious array of human forces. It is well that the attention of English and American readers be directed to the brilliant galaxy of names whose possessors appeared on this earthly scene of action in the year 1809.
Early in that year, namely, on the 12th of February, and coincidently on the same day, were born Charles Robert Darwin in England and Abraham Lincoln in America. The one was destined to emancipate the human mind from its traditional concepts of the natural history of life on our earth and to discover and expound the bottom principles of that magnificent biology which may almost be called the beginning of human knowledge. The other was destined in another sphere of great and beneficent activity to become, under historical causation, the emancipator of a race of slaves. While the one was to lift the mind of man to an orderly and sublime concept of the natural world, the other was to lift the political life of one of the greatest of peoples from the horrid quagmire of slavery and to establish the nation which he was called to rule in the days of trial on a new foundation of justice and equal rights for all.
In this year came Alfred Tennyson, the chief singer of the Victorian era, and Edgar Allan Poe, destined to leave a tremendous impress on American song. The one was to gather up the expiring light of the age of romantic poetry and to blend it with the refined and careless and sorrow-fringed poetry of the nineteenth century. The other was to look profoundly into the gloom of song, to see and describe weird faces in the dusk of hope, and to chant melodies all too few, born of the universal spirit, and nursed by his own somber and erratic genius.
In this year came also Mendelssohn the Great, Hebrew by birth, and teaching his father to say: “Formerly I was the son of my father, and now I am the father of my son!" Over the confusion of the century his Oratorios still rise. Though dying at the age of thirty-eight, his music reaches out to immortality.
We may not here enumerate all or even a majority of the great names whose possessors came into the world with the year 1809. They were all the products of the revolutionary storms that preceded them. They were the progeny of violence and heroic action. Already, however, there had come to the fathers and mothers of these children of 1809 the beginning of peace and hope. The light of a new era was rising, when the travails of motherhood announced the awakening to life of this remarkable group of personages.
One of the most distinguished of these great characters is the subject of this “Life and Times." We shall endeavor to follow with fidelity the lines of his career across the disturbed but hopeful drama of the tremendous century to which he has belonged.