Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous Part 8

The manufacture of silk had become a most important industry. Seventeen hundred years before Christ the Chinese had discovered the making of silk from silk-worms, and had cultivated mulberry-trees. They forbade anybody to export the eggs or to disclose the process of making the fabric, under penalty of death. The Roman Emperor Justinian determined to wrest this secret from China, and thus revive the resources of his empire. He sent two monks, who ostensibly preached Christianity, but in reality studied silk-worms, and, secreting some eggs in two hollow reeds, returned to Justinian, and breaking these canes, laid the eggs on the lap of the beautiful Empress Theodora. From this the art spread into Italy, and thence into France.

The more Jacquard thought how he could help the silk-weavers of France the more he became absorbed, and forgot that money was needed to support his family. Soon the looms had to be sold at auction, with his small home. The world ridiculed, and his relatives blamed him; but Claudine his wife encouraged him, and prophesied great fame for him in the future. She sold her little treasures, and even her bed, to pay his debts. Finally, when there was no food in the house, with tears in his eyes, Jacquard left his wife and child, to become a laborer for a lime-burner in a neighboring town. Claudine went to work in a straw-bonnet factory; and for sixteen years they battled with poverty.

Then the French Revolution burst upon Lyons in 1793. Her crime before such murderers as Robespierre and Marat was that she was the friend of Louis XVI. Sixty thousand men were sent against her by the so-called Republicans, who were commanded to utterly destroy her, and write over the ruins, "Lyons made war upon liberty; Lyons is no more." Six thousand persons were put to death, their houses burned, and twelve thousand exiled; among them Jacquard.

His only child, a brave boy of sixteen, had joined the Republican ranks, that he might fight against the foreign armies of England, Austria, and Naples, who had determined, under Pitt, to crush out the new government.

At the boy's earnest request his father enlisted with him, and together they marched toward the Rhine. In one of the first battles a cannon-ball struck the idolized son, who fell expiring in Jacquard's arms. Covered with the blood of his only child, he dug a grave for him on the battle-field; and exhausted and heart-broken went to the hospital till his discharge was obtained.

He returned to Lyons and sought his poor wife. At last he found her in the outskirts of the city, living in a hay-loft, and earning the barest pittance by spreading out linen for the laundresses to dry. She divided her crusts with her husband, while they wept together over their irreparable loss. She soon died of grief, but, with her last words, bade Jacquard go forward in developing his genius, and have trust in G.o.d, who would yet show him the way of success. Blessed Claudine! A sweet, beautiful soul, shining like a star in the darkness of the French Revolution.

Jacquard with all earthly ties severed went back to the seclusion of inventing. After his day's work was done as a laborer, he studied on his machine for silk-weaving. Finally, after seven years,--a long time to patiently develop an idea,--he had produced a loom which would decrease the number of workmen at each machine, by one person. The model was placed at the Paris Industrial Exposition in 1801; and the maker was awarded a bronze medal. In grat.i.tude for this discovery he went to the image of the Virgin which stood on a high hill, and for nine days ascended daily the steps of the sacred place. Then he returned to his work, and seating himself before a Vaucanson loom, which contained the germ of his own, he consecrated himself anew to the perfecting of his invention.

Jacques de Vaucanson, who died when Jacquard was thirty years old, was one of the most celebrated mechanicians of France. His automatons were the wonder of the age. He exhibited a duck which, when moved, ate and drank like a live one. The figure would stretch out its neck for food, and swallow it: walk, swim, dabble in the water, and quack most naturally. His musician, playing the flageolet with the left hand, and beating the tambourine with the right, executing many pieces of difficult music with great accuracy, was an astonishment to every body.

He had been appointed inspector of silk-factories at Lyons, and, because he made some improvements in machines, he was pelted with stones by the workmen, who feared that they would thereby lose their labor. He revenged himself by making a machine which wove, brocaded, and colored at the same time, and was worked by a donkey!

It remained for Jacquard to make the Vaucanson loom of the utmost practical use to Lyons and to the world. After a time he was not only able to dispense with one workman at each loom, but he made machinery do the work of three men and two women at each frame. The city authorities sent a model of this machine to Paris, that the Emperor Napoleon might examine it. So pleased was he that he at once sent for Jacquard to come to Paris. The latter had previously invented a machine for making fishing-nets, now used in producing Nottingham lace. When brought before Bonaparte, and Carnot the Minister of the Interior, the latter asked, "Is it you then, who pretend to do a thing which is impossible for man,--to make a knot upon a tight thread?"

Jacquard answered the brusque inquiry by setting up a machine, and letting the incredulous minister see for himself.

The Emperor made Jacquard welcome to the _Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers_, where he could study books and machines to his heart's content, and gave him a pension of about twelve hundred dollars for his discovery. When he had, with his own hands, woven a magnificent brocaded silk dress for the Empress Josephine, he returned to Lyons to set up the Jacquard looms. His name began to be lauded everywhere. Claudine's prophecies had at last come true. She had given her life to help him; but she could not live to share his honors.

Soon, however, the tide of praise turned. Whole families found themselves forced into the street for lack of work, as the looms were doing what their hands had done. Bands of unemployed men were shouting, "Behold the traitor! Let him provide for our wives and children now driven as mendicants from door to door; or let him, the destroyer of the peoples' labor, share in the death which he has prepared for us!"

The authorities seemed unable to quell the storm, and by their orders the new loom was broken in pieces on the public square. "The iron," says Jacquard, "was sold as old iron; the wood, for fuel." One day he was seized by a crowd of starving workmen, who knocked him down, and dragged him to the banks of the Rhone, where he would have been drowned at once, had not the police rescued him, bleeding and nearly dead. He left the city overwhelmed with astonishment and sorrow. Soon Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and America were using the Jacquard looms, largely increasing the manufacture and sale of silk, and therefore the number of laborers. The poor men of Lyons awoke to the sad fact, that by breaking up Jacquard's machines, they had put the work of silk-weaving into other hands all over the world; and idleness was proving their ruin. They might have doubled and trebled the number of their factories, and benefited labor a thousand-fold.

The inventor refused to take out a patent for himself, nor would he accept any offers made him by foreigners, because he thought all his services belonged to France. He loved the working people, who, for twenty years, were too blind to see it.

He removed to a little home and garden at Oullins, near Lyons, the use of which had been given him for life, where he could hear the sound of his precious looms on which he had worked for sixty years, and which his city had at last adopted. Here he attended his garden, and went every morning to early church, distributing each day some small pieces of money to poor children. As old age came on, Lyons realized the grat.i.tude due her great inventor. A silver medal was awarded him, and then the grand distinction of the cross of the Legion of Honor.

People from the neighboring towns visited Oullins, and pointed out with pride the n.o.ble old man at eighty-four, sitting by his garden-wall, dressed like a workman in his long black tunic, but wearing his broad red ribbon with his cross of honor. Ill.u.s.trious travellers and statesmen visited him whose fame was now spread through Europe and America.

Toinette, a faithful servant who had known and loved Claudine, watched over the pure-hearted Jacquard till death came, Aug. 7, 1834. Six years after, Lyons, which once broke his machine and nearly killed him, raised a beautiful statue of him in the public square. The more than seventy thousand looms in the city, employing two hundred thousand workmen, are grander monuments even than the statue. The silk-weavers are better housed and fed than formerly. The struggling, self-sacrificing man, who might have been immensely rich as well as famous, was an untold blessing to labor and to the world.

HORACE GREELEY.

Among the hills of New Hampshire, in a lonely, unpainted house, Horace Greeley was born, Feb. 3, 1811, the third of seven children. His father was a plain farmer, hard-working, yet not very successful, but aided by a wife of uncommon energy and good spirits, notwithstanding her many cares. Besides her housework, and spinning, and making the children's clothes, she hoed in the garden, raked and loaded hay to help her husband, laughing and singing all day long, and telling her feeble little son, Horace, stories and legends all the evening. Her first two children having died, this boy was especially dear. Mrs. Greeley was a great reader of such books as she could obtain, and remembered all she read. It requires no great discernment to see from whence Horace Greeley derived his intense love for reading, and his boundless energy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HORACE GREELEY.]

He learned to read, one can scarcely tell how. When two years old, he would pore over the Bible, as he lay on the floor, and ask questions about the letters; at three, he went to the "district school," often carried through the deep snow on the shoulders of one of his aunts, or on the back of an older boy. He soon stood at the head of his little cla.s.s in spelling and reading, "and took it so much to heart when he did happen to lose his place, that he would cry bitterly; so that some boys, when they had gained the right to get above him, declined the honor, because it hurt Horace's feelings so."

Before he was six years old he had read the Bible through, and "Pilgrim's Progress." Their home contained only about twenty books, and these he read and re-read. As he grew older, every book within seven miles was borrowed, and perused after the hard day's work of farming was over. He gathered a stock of pine knots, and, lighting one each night, lay down by the hearth, and read, oblivious to all around him. The neighbors came and made their friendly visits, and ate apples and drank cider, as was the fashion, but the lad never noticed their coming or their going. When really forced to leave his precious books for bed, he would repeat the information he had learned, or the lessons for the next day, to his brother, who usually, most ungraciously, fell asleep before the conversation was half completed.

When Horace was nearly ten years old, his father, who had speculated in a small way in lumber, became a bankrupt; his house and furniture were sold by the sheriff, and he was obliged to flee from the State to avoid arrest. Some of these debts were paid, thirty years afterward, by his n.o.ble son. Going to Westhaven, Vt., Mr. Greeley obtained work on a farm, and moved his family thither. They were very poor, the children sitting on the floor and eating their porridge together out of a tin pan; but they were happy in the midst of their hard work and plain food. The father and the boys chopped logs, and the little sisters, with the mother, gathered them in heaps, the voice of the latter, says Mr. James Parton, in his biography, "ringing out in laughter from the tangled brushwood in which she was often buried." Would there were thousands more of such women, who can laugh at disaster, and keep their children and themselves from getting soured with life. Everybody has troubles; and very wise are they who do not tell them, either in their faces or by their words.

Horace earned a few pennies all his own; sometimes by selling nuts, or bundles of the roots of pitch-pine for kindling, which he carried on his back to the store. This money he spent in books, buying Mrs. Hemans's poetry and "Shakspeare." No wonder that the minister of the town said, "Mark my words; that boy was not made for nothing."

He could go to school no longer, and must now support himself. From earliest childhood he had determined to be a printer; so, when eleven years of age, he walked nine miles to see the publisher of a newspaper, and obtain a situation. The editor looked at the small, tow-haired boy, shook his head, and said, "You are too young." With a heavy heart the child walked the long nine miles back again. But he must do something; and, a little later, with seventy-five cents in his pocket, and some food tied in a bundle, which he hung on the end of a stick, slung over his shoulder, he walked one hundred and twenty miles back to New Hampshire, to see his relatives. After some weeks he returned, with a few more cents in his purse than when he started!

The father Greeley ought to have foreseen that such energy and will would produce results; but because Horace, in a fit of abstraction, tried to yoke the "off" ox on the "near" side, he said, "Ah! that boy will never get along in the world. He'll never know more than enough to come in when it rains." Alas! for the blindness of Zaccheus Greeley, whose name even would not be remembered but for his ill.u.s.trious son.

When Horace was fourteen, he read in a newspaper that an apprentice was wanted in a printing-office eleven miles distant. He hastened thither, and, though unprepossessing, from his thin voice, short pantaloons, lack of stockings, and worn hat, he was hired on trial. The first day he worked at the types in silence. Finally the boys began to tease him with saucy remarks, and threw type at him; but he paid no attention. On the third day, one of the apprentices took a large black ball, used to put ink on the type, and remarking that Horace's hair was too light, daubed his head four times. The pressman and editor both stopped their labors to witness a fight; but they were disappointed, for the boy never turned from his work. He soon left his desk, spent an hour in washing the ink from his hair, and returned to his duties. Seeing that he could not be irritated, and that he was determined to work, he became a great favorite.

When at his type, he would often compose paragraphs for the paper, setting up the words without writing them out. He soon joined a debating society, composed of the best-informed persons of the little town of East Poultney,--the minister, the doctor, the lawyer, the schoolteachers, and the like. What was their surprise to find that the young printer knew almost every thing, and was always ready to speak, or read an essay.

He was often laughed at because of his poor clothes, and pitied because, slender and pale as he was, he never wore an overcoat; but he used to say, "I guess I'd better wear my old clothes than run in debt for new ones." Ah! they did not know that every penny was saved and sent to the father, struggling to clear a farm in the wilderness in Pennsylvania.

During his four years' apprenticeship he visited his parents twice, though six hundred miles distant, and walked most of the way.

Soon after he had learned his trade, the newspaper suspended, and he was thrown out of work. The people with whom he boarded gave him a brown overcoat, not new, and with moistened eyes said good-by to the poor youth whom they had learned to love as their own. He remained a few weeks with his family, then walked fifty miles east to a town in New York State, where he found plenty of work, but no money, and in six weeks returned to the log-cabin. After trying various towns, he found a situation in Erie, taking the place of a workman who was ill, and for seven months he did not lose a day. Out of his wages--eighty-four dollars--he had used only six, less than one dollar a mouth! Putting fifteen dollars in his pocket, he took the balance of sixty-three in a note, and gave it to his father. A n.o.ble son indeed, who would not buy a single garment for himself, but carried the money home, so as to make the poor ones a trifle more comfortable!

He had become tired of working in the small towns; he determined to go to the great city of New York, and "be somebody." He walked a part of the way by the tow-path along the ca.n.a.l, and sometimes rode in a scow.

Finally, at sunrise, Friday, Aug. 18, 1831, he landed close to the Battery, with ten dollars in his pocket, knowing, he says, "no human being within two hundred miles." His first need was a boarding-place.

Over a saloon, kept by an Irishman, he found room and board for two dollars and a half a week. Fortunately, though it was the almost universal custom to use liquors, Horace was a teetotaler, and despised chewing or smoking tobacco, which he regarded "as the vilest, most detestable abuse of his corrupted sensual appet.i.tes whereof depraved man is capable;" therefore he had no fear of temptation from these sources.

All day Friday and Sat.u.r.day he walked the streets of New York, looking for work. The editor of the "Journal of Commerce" told him plainly that he was a runaway apprentice from the country, and he did not want him.

"I returned to my lodging on Sat.u.r.day evening, thoroughly weary, disheartened, disgusted with New York, and resolved to shake its dust from my feet next Monday morning, while I could still leave with money in my pocket, and before its almshouse could foreclose upon me." On Sunday he went to church, both morning and afternoon. Late in the day, a friend who called upon the owner of the house, learning that the printer wanted work, said he had heard of a vacancy at Mr. West's, 85 Chatham Street.

The next morning Horace was at the shop at half-past five! New York was scarcely awake; even the newsboys were asleep in front of the paper offices. He waited for an hour and a half,--a day, it seemed to him,--when one of the journey-men arrived, and, finding the door locked, sat down beside the stranger. He, too, was a Vermonter, and he determined to help young Greeley, if possible. He took him to the foreman, who decided to try him on a Polyglot Testament, with marginal references, such close work that most of the men refused to do it. Mr.

West came an hour or two later, and said, in anger, "Did you hire that fool?"

"Yes; we need help, and he was the best I could get," said the foreman.

"Well, pay him off to-night, and let him go about his business."

When night came, however, the country youth had done more and better work, than anybody who had tried the Testament. By beginning his labors before six in the morning, and not leaving his desk till nine in the evening, working by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, he could earn six dollars a week. At first his fellow-workmen called him "the ghost," from his white hair and complexion; but they soon found him friendly, and willing to lend money, which, as a rule, was never returned to him; they therefore voted him to be a great addition to the shop. As usual, though always scrupulously clean, he wore his poor clothes, no stockings, and his wristbands tied together with twine. Once he bought a second-hand black suit of a Jew, for five dollars, but it proved a bad bargain. His earnings were sent, as before, to his parents.

After a year, business grew dull, and he was without a place. For some months he worked on various papers, when a printer friend, Mr. Story, suggested that they start in business, their combined capital being one hundred and fifty dollars. They did so, and their first work was the printing of a penny "Morning Post," which suspended in three weeks, they losing sixty dollars. The partner was drowned shortly after, and his brother-in-law took his place.

Young Greeley, now twenty-three, and deeply interested in politics, determined to start a weekly paper. Fifteen of his friends promised to subscribe for it. The "New Yorker" was begun, and so well conducted was it that three hundred papers throughout the country gave it complimentary notices. It grew to a subscription list of nine thousand persons; but much of the business was done on trust, times were hard, and, after seven years, the enterprise had to be abandoned. This was a severe trial to the hard-working printer, who had known nothing but struggles all his life. Years after this he wrote, "Through most of this time I was very poor, and for four years really bankrupt, though always paying my notes, and keeping my word, but living as poorly as possible.

My embarra.s.sments were sometimes dreadful; not that I feared dest.i.tution, but the fear of involving my friends in my misfortunes was very bitter.... I would rather be a convict in a State prison, a slave in a rice-swamp, than to pa.s.s through life under the harrow of debt.

Hunger, cold, rags, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach, are disagreeable, but debt is infinitely worse than them all. Avoid pecuniary obligation as you would pestilence or famine. If you have but fifty cents, and can get no more for a week, buy a peck of corn, parch it, and live on it, rather than owe any man a dollar."

Meantime the young editor had married Miss Mary Y. Cheney, a schoolteacher of unusual mind and strength of character. It was, of course, a comfort to have some one to share his sorrows; but it pained his tender heart to make another help bear his burdens. Beside editing the "New Yorker," he had also taken charge of the "Jeffersonian," a weekly campaign paper published at Albany, and the "Log-Cabin,"

established to aid in the election of General Harrison to the Presidency. The latter paper was a great success, the circulation running up to ninety thousand, though very little money was made; but it gave Mr. Greeley a reputation in all parts of the country for journalistic ability.

President Harrison died after having been a month in office; and seven days after his death, Mr. Greeley started, April 10, 1841, a new paper, the "New York Tribune," with the dying words of Harrison as its motto: "I desire you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more." The paper had scarcely any money for its foundation,--only a thousand dollars loaned by a friend,--but it had a _true man_ at its head, strong in his hatred of slavery, and the oppression of the laboring man, and fearless in the advocacy of what he believed to be right.

Success did not come at first. Of the five thousand copies published and to be sold at a cent each, Mr. Greeley says, "We found some difficulty in giving them away." The expenses for the first week were five hundred and twenty-five dollars; receipts, ninety-two. But the boy who could walk nearly six hundred miles to see his parents, and be laughed at for poor clothes, while he saved his money for their use, was not to be overcome at thirty years of age, by the failure of one or of a dozen papers. Some of the New York journals fought the new sheet; but it lived and grew till, on the seventh week, it had eleven thousand subscribers.

A good business-manager was obtained as partner. Mr. Greeley worked sixteen hours a day. He wrote four columns of editorial matter (his copy, wittily says Junius Henri Browne, "strangers mistook for diagrams of Boston"), dozens of letters, often forgot whether he had been to his meals, and was ready to see and advise with everybody. When told that he was losing time by thus seeing people, he said, "I know it; but I'd rather be beset by loafers, and stopped in my work, than be cooped up where I couldn't be got at by men who really wanted to and had a right to see me." So warm as this were his sympathies with all humanity!

In 1842, when he was thirty-one, he visited Washington, Niagara, and his parents in Pennsylvania, and wrote delightful letters back to his paper. How proud the mother must have felt of the growing fame of her son! What did Zaccheus think now of his boy of whom he prophesied "would never know more than enough to come in when it rains"?

The years pa.s.sed on. Margaret Fuller came upon the editorial staff; for Mr. Greeley was ever the advocate of the fullest liberty for woman in any profession, and as much pay for her work as for that of men. And now came a great sorrow, harder to bear than poverty. His little son Pickie, called "the glorious boy with radiant beauty never equalled," died suddenly. "When at length," he said, "the struggle ended with his last breath, and even his mother was convinced that his eyes would never again open upon the scenes of this world, I knew that the summer of my life was over; that the chill breath of its autumn was at hand; and that my future course must be along the down-hill of life." He wrote to Margaret Fuller in Italy, "Ah, Margaret, the world grows dark with us!

You grieve, for Rome is fallen; I mourn, for Pickie is dead." His hopes were centered in this child; and his great heart never regained its full cheerfulness.

In 1848 he was elected to Congress for three months to fill out the unexpired term of a deceased member, and did most effective work with regard to the mileage system and the use of the public lands. To a high position had come the printer-boy. At this time he was also prominently in the lecture-field, speaking twice a week to large audiences all over the country. In 1850 his first book was published by the Harpers, "Hints toward Reform," composed of ten lectures and twenty essays. The following year he visited England as one of the "jury" in the awarding of prizes; and while there made a close study of philanthropic and social questions. He always said, "He, who by voice or pen strikes his best blow at the impostures or vices whereby our race is debased and paralyzed, may close his eyes in death, consoled and cheered by the reflection that he has done what he could for the emanc.i.p.ation and elevation of his kind."