... My oldest brother was named Wilham Henry, after my grandfather and my uncle who was killed in India. Harry had unusual natural abilities, but no staying qualities, and took up too many different pursuits in life. He began by going to too many different schools. After our tutors at home he went to Mr. Phinney's in Newburgh. Schoolmasters used heroic methods in those days. Mr. Phinney had a colored coachman named Sam, part of whose duty it was to hold the boys on his back by their hands, their bodies being well exposed, while Mr. Phinney flogged them. I think Harry went next to the school at Nazareth in Pennsylvania, built originally by Whitefield and kept by the Moravian Brothers. Judging by the little picture on their writing-paper it was a simple place, and the terms were a contrast to the ideas of St. Mark's or Groton to-day. They charged thirty-five dollars a quarter, I find in an old bill, and four dollars for such extras as "washing and the Greek language."
After this Harry tried Doctor Muhlenberg's famous school at Flushing, called "College Point." Although Harry gave him a great deal of trouble, Doctor Muhlenberg was attached to him. When Doctor Muhlenberg was talking to a boy of whom he was fond, he had a funny habit of taking off his pupil's cap in an absent-minded way and rubbing his head. Harry told me of meeting the Doctor in the street, after he was grown up, and as soon as Harry took his hat off the Doctor started rubbing his head just from habit. While at College Point Harry once skated across the Sound; it was unusual to have it frozen, and he took advantage of the opportunity, but couldn't skate back because the ice broke up. After going to a military school at West Point he entered Trinity College, Hartford, in 1844, but only stayed a year. He was mixed up in some frolic in a room on the second floor of Jarvis Hall — I know the room well and I should say the windows were about twenty feet above the ground. When the professor came and knocked at the door Harry jumped out of the window and was pretty badly hurt; he broke something, his leg, I think, so he left college the end of his freshman year.
He had always wanted to enter the navy since his visits on board the North Carolina with Uncle Charles, and my mother had tried her best to get him a warrant, through Mr. Legare and other friends. Indeed, it was supposed to be all settled and Harry went to New York with Uncle, only to learn that the secretary of the navy had just died and had not signed the warrant after all. It was a great blow. But he was determined to go to sea anyway. So he got a position as cabin-boy on the clipper ship Water Witch, commanded by the notorious Bob Waterman, a fine sailor but very cruel and arbitrary — I think he was ultimately tried for the murder of a sailor. Harry was one of several cabin-boys, all, I believe, gentlemen's sons. It was the custom in those days for nice boys to go in this way to learn the sea. They went to Hong Kong. It was the ship's first voyage and she made the return trip from there to New York in seventy-six days, the fastest trip of the day.
One stormy, dark night Captain Waterman sent Harry up to reef a royal, which is, I believe, the highest and smallest sail on the main, or mizzen, mast of a full-rigged ship. Harry tried his best each time, but the bitter wind tore it away from him, so he slithered down to the deck and told the captain it couldn't be done. "Go up again and reef it and be d d to you, and don't come back till it's done," was the captain's answer. So up the mast Harry went and, finding the sail loose, flapping in the storm, he took out his sheath-knife and cut the whole sail clear and away it went. "Can't do it, sir!" he reported to the terrible captain. "What! Why the can't you do it?" "Top royal mizzen gone to leeward, sir!" And, strange to say, that was the end of it.
A brief flirtation with the law came next in Harry's career. He studied for about a year in the law office of Wells and Van Wagenen, in New York — Mr. Thomas L. Wells was one of my father's most intimate friends — but most of his friends were studying medicine, among them Tom Pinckney, of South Carolina, so he shifted to the New York Hospital and got a smattering of medicine. Surgery had a fascination for him, and he probably would have made a success at it with his skilful hands, but just at that time, 1849, gold was discovered in California and he determined to go there and dig. So with his intimate friend Sam Craig he joined French's Expedition. They prepared themselves with saddles, rifles, etc., and went to Galveston, from which place they were to ride across the plains on horseback to California. French's Expedition, a large company of men, assembled at Galveston and actually started, but dissensions arose and dissatisfaction with French's arrangements; in a short time the whole thing was a failure, the train disbanded, and every man had to shift for himself.
So Harry bought a horse and started to ride alone to California. It took him nine months. He crossed the American Desert, and he has told me how his only companions were the little horned toads that used to nestle in his blankets at night, when the desert was so breathlessly still that he could hear the grains of sand moving. He passed through the site of El Paso — then, I think, only two rocks or perhaps a single house — swam his horse across the Colorado River, and finally reached the coast, where he took passage in a brig. The captain of the brig died on the way, there was no one to navigate her, so Harry, who, of course, knew about sailing, took command and brought her into San Francisco.
At the mines, as he was so handy with tools, he built himself a nice little house and was getting along finely, when news came that his mother was ill — or perhaps he was Just restless. Anyway, he left his house in the gold-diggings and returned to New York. While in the mining-camp he also practised medicine and surgery, and actually amputated a man's leg. I believe the patient survived!
Harry happened to be in the South, staying with some of our relations, just before the Civil War broke out. Though he was a Northern man, he was so closely connected with the South that when the neighbors began training a troop he helped them to drill, as he had been to a military school. They had lots of fun. One day — I tell you this just as Harry told it — when the drill was over, they were having a feast in the woods, a splendid affair, with all sorts of good things sent by the Charleston ladies, wild turkey and plum-cake and wine, and every man with his body-servant standing behind him. After the feast one of his friends — I am not sure if it was Powder" Whaley or "Corkie" Huger — took him aside. "Harry," he said, "your interests are all in the North, and where the purse is there the heart should be. A boat goes from Charleston to-night and it may be the last to leave the port; you'd better take it. I was in love with your mother, so look out for yourself, and don't get a knife in your back!"
Strange to say, Harry took this advice — a thing he was never known to do before or since — and got the last boat from Charleston. As he was going up the gang-plank he happened to see Miss Sarah Matilda Grayson, a young cousin of my mother's, and "she looked so pretty and rosy" that he proposed then and there, with a "Tilly, will you marry me?" which she found agreeable. ... [more]
