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fill'd with blacks, some with wounds, some ill, two or three with limbs
frozen. The boys made quite a picture sitting round the stove. Hardly
any can read or write. I write for three or four, direct envelopes, give
some tobacco, &c.
Joseph Winder, a likely boy, aged twenty-three, belongs to 10th Color'd
Infantry (now in Texas;) is from Eastville, Virginia. Was a slave;
belong'd to Lafayette Homeston. The master was quite willing he should
leave. Join'd the army two years ago; has been in one or two battles.
Was sent to hospital with rheumatism. Has since been employ'd as cook.
His parents at Eastville; he gets letters from them, and has letters
written to them by a friend. Many black boys left that part of Virginia
and join'd the army; the 10th, in fact, was made up of Virginia blacks
from thereabouts. As soon as discharged is going back to Eastville to
his parents and home, and intends to stay there.
Thomas King, formerly 2d District Color'd Regiment, discharged soldier,
Company E, lay in a dying condition; his disease was consumption. A
Catholic priest was administering extreme unction to him. (I have
seen this kind of sight several times in the hospitals; it is very
impressive.)
_Harewood, April 29, 1866. Sunday afternoon_.--Poor Joseph Swiers,
Company H, 155th Pennsylvania, a mere lad (only eighteen years of age;)
his folks living in Reedsburgh, Pennsylvania. I have known him for
nearly a year, transferr'd from hospital to hospital. He was badly
wounded in the thigh at Hatcher's Run, February 6, '65.
James E. Ragan, Atlanta, Georgia; 2d United States Infantry. Union
folks. Brother impress'd, deserted, died; now no folks, left alone
in the world, is in a singularly nervous state; came in hospital with
intermittent fever.
Walk slowly around the ward, observing, and to see if I can do anything.
Two or three are lying very low with consumption, cannot recover; some
with old wounds; one with both feet frozen off, so that on one only the
heel remains. The supper is being given out: the liquid call'd tea, a
thick slice of bread, and some stew'd apples.
That was about the last I saw of the regular army hospitals.
[ILLUSTRATION Here is a portrait of E.H. from life, by Henry Inman, in
New York, about 1827 or '28. The painting was finely copper-plated
in 1830, and the present is a fac simile. Looks as I saw him in the
following narrative.]
The time was signalized by the _separation_ of the society of Friends,
so greatly talked of--and continuing yet--but so little really
explain'd. (All I give of this separation is in a Note following.)
Notes (_such as they are) founded on_
ELIAS HICKS
_Prefatory Note_--As myself a little boy hearing so much of E.H., at
that time, long ago, in Suffolk and Queens and Kings counties--and more
than once personally seeing the old man--and my dear, dear father and
mother faithful listeners to him at the meetings--I remember how I
dream'd to write perhaps a piece about E.H. and his look and discourses,
however long afterward--for my parents' sake--and the dear Friends
too! And the following is what has at last but all come out of it--the
feeling and intention never forgotten yet!
There is a sort of nature of persons I have compared to little rills of
water, fresh, from perennial springs--(and the comparison is indeed an
appropriate one)--persons not so very plenty, yet some few certainly
of them running over the surface and area of humanity, all times, all
lands. It is a specimen of this class I would now present. I would sum
up in E.H., and make his case stand for the class, the sort, in all
ages, all lands, sparse, not numerous, yet enough to irrigate the
soil--enough to prove the inherent moral stock and irrepressible
devotional aspirations growing indigenously of themselves, always
advancing, and never utterly gone under or lost.
Always E.H. gives the service of pointing to the fountain of all naked
theology, all religion, all worship, all the truth to which you are
possibly eligible--namely in _yourself_ and your inherent relations.
Others talk of Bibles, saints, churches, exhortations, vicarious
atonements--the canons outside of yourself and apart from man--E.H. to
the religion inside of man's very own nature. This he incessantly labors
to kindle, nourish, educate, bring forward and strengthen. He is the
most _democratic_ of the religionists--the prophets.
I have no doubt that both the curious fate and death of his four sons,
and the facts (and dwelling on them) of George Fox's strange early life,
and permanent "conversion," had much to do with the peculiar and
sombre ministry and style of E.H. from the first, and confirmed him all
through. One must not be dominated by the man's almost absurd saturation
in cut and dried biblical phraseology, and in ways, talk, and standard,
regardful mainly of the one need he dwelt on, above all the rest. This
main need he drove home to the soul; the canting and sermonizing soon
exhale away to any auditor that realizes what E.H. is for and after. The
present paper, (a broken memorandum of his formation, his earlier life,)
is the cross-notch that rude wanderers make in the woods, to remind
them afterward of some matter of first-rate importance and full
investigation. (Remember too, that E.H. was _a thorough believer in the
Hebrew Scriptures_, in his way.)
The following are really but disjointed fragments recall'd to serve and
eke out here the lank printed pages of what I commenc'd unwittingly two
months ago. Now, as I am well in for it, comes an old attack, the sixth
or seventh recurrence, of my war-paralysis, dulling me from putting the
notes in shape, and threatening any further action, head or body. _W.W.,
Camden, N.J., July, 1888_.
To begin with, my theme is comparatively featureless. The great
historian has pass'd by the life of Elias Hicks quite without glance or
touch. Yet a man might commence and overhaul it as furnishing one of the
amplest historic and biography's backgrounds. While the foremost actors
and events from 1750 to 1830 both in Europe and America were crowding
each other on the world's stage--While so many kings, queens, soldiers,
philosophs, musicians, voyagers, littérateurs, enter one side, cross the
boards, and disappear--amid loudest reverberating names--Frederick
the Great, Swedenborg, Junius, Voltaire, Rousseau, Linnaeus,
Herschel--curiously contemporary with the long life of Goethe--through
the occupancy of the British throne by George the Third--amid stupendous
visible political and social revolutions, and far more stupendous
invisible moral ones--while the many quarto volumes of the Encyclopaedia
Française are being published at fits and intervals, by Diderot, in
Paris--while Haydn and Beethoven and Mozart and Weber are working out
their harmonic compositions--while Mrs. Siddons and Talma and Kean are
acting--while Mungo Park explores Africa, and Capt. Cook circumnavigates
the globe--through all the fortunes of the American Revolution, the
beginning, continuation and end, the battle of Brooklyn, the surrender
at Saratoga, the final peace of '83--through the lurid tempest of the
French Revolution, the execution of the king and queen, and the Reign of
Terror--through the whole of the meteor-career of Napoleon--through
all Washington's, Adams's, Jefferson's, Madison's, and Monroe's
Presidentiads--amid so many flashing lists of names, (indeed there seems
hardly, in any department, any end to them, Old World or New,) Franklin,
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mirabeau, Fox, Nelson, Paul Jones, Kant, Fichte,
and Hegel, Fulton, Walter Scott, Byron, Mesmer, Champollion--Amid
pictures that dart upon me even as I speak, and glow and mix and
coruscate and fade like aurora boreales--Louis the 16th threaten'd by
the mob, the trial of Warren Hastings, the death-bed of Robert Burns,
Wellington at Waterloo, Decatur capturing the Macedonian, or the
sea-fight between the Chesapeake and the Shannon--During all these
whiles,
I say, and though on a far different grade, running parallel and
contemporary with all--a curious, quiet yet busy life centred in a
little country village on Long Island, and within sound on still
nights of the mystic surf-beat of the sea. About this life, this
Personality--neither soldier, nor scientist, nor littérateur--I propose
to occupy a few minutes in fragmentary talk, to give some few melanges,
disconnected impressions, statistics, resultant groups, pictures,
thoughts' of him, or radiating from him.
Elias Hicks was born March 19, 1748, in Hempstead township, Queens
county, Long Island, New York State, near a village bearing the old
Scripture name of Jericho, (a mile or so north and east of the present
Hicksville, on the L.I. Railroad.) His father and mother were Friends,
of that class working with their own hands, and mark'd by neither riches
nor actual poverty. Elias as a child and youth had small education from
letters, but largely learn'd from Nature's schooling. He grew up even in
his ladhood a thorough gunner and fisherman. The farm of his parents lay
on the south or sea-shore side of Long Island, (they had early removed
from Jericho,) one of the best regions in the world for wild fowl and
for fishing. Elias became a good horseman, too, and knew the animal
well, riding races; also a singer fond of "vain songs," as he afterwards
calls them; a dancer, too, at the country balls. When a boy of 13 he had
gone to live with an elder brother; and when about 17 he changed again
and went as apprentice to the carpenter's trade. The time of all this
was before the Revolutionary War, and the locality 30 to 40 miles from
New York city. My great-grandfather, Whitman, was often with Elias at
these periods, and at merry-makings and sleigh-rides in winter over "the
plains."
How well I remember the region--the flat plains of the middle of Long
Island, as then, with their prairie-like vistas and grassy patches in
every direction, and the 'kill-calf' and herds of cattle and sheep. Then
the South Bay and shores and the salt meadows, and the sedgy smell, and
numberless little bayous and hummock-islands in the waters, the habitat
of every sort of fish and aquatic fowl of North America. And the bay
men--a strong, wild, peculiar race--now extinct, or rather entirely
changed. And the beach outside the sandy bars, sometimes many miles at
a stretch, with their old history of wrecks and storms--the weird,
white-gray beach--not without its tales of pathos--tales, too,
of grandest heroes and heroisms. In such scenes and elements and
influences--in the midst of Nature and along the shores of the
sea--Elias Hicks was fashion'd through boyhood and early manhood, to
maturity. But a moral and mental and emotional change was imminent.
Along at this time he says:
My apprenticeship being now expir'd, I gradually withdrew from
the company of my former associates, became more acquainted with
Friends, and was more frequent in my attendance of meetings; and
although this was in some degree profitable to me, yet I made but
slow progress in my religious improvement. The occupation of part of
my time in fishing and fowling had frequently tended to preser
me from falling into hurtful associations; but through the rising
intimations and reproofs of divine grace in my heart, I now began to
feel that the manner in which I sometimes amus'd myself with my gun
was not without sin; for although I mostly preferr'd going alone,
and while waiting in stillness for the coming of the fowl,
mind was at times so taken up in divine meditations, that the
opportunities were seasons of instruction and comfort to me; yet, on
other occasions, when accompanied by some of my acquaintances, and
when no fowls appear'd which would be useful to us after being