To James Madison from Benjamin Waterhouse, 30 June 1825
From Benjamin Waterhouse
Cambridge 30th. June 1825.
Dear Sir
Having reached home but a few days since, I seize the first day of leisure to express to you, and your good Lady my grateful acknowledgements for your polite attention, while sojourning in your hospitable mansion,1 where I experienced what I had often heard from the voice of fame.
After passing about a week at Washington, principally with my greatly esteemed, & highly venerated friend,2 I left him with feelings of an elder for a younger brother, rejoicing at his high honours, and commiserating, in anticipation, his anxious moments, & contingent perplexities, inseperable from such a station, in such a government as ours. But I believe, with Mr Jefferson, that he will not have a very turbulent voyage of it, notwithstanding he presides in a country where public favour, and public censure are some times nearly balanced.
You may have seen in the papers that the miserable General H. has been treated with a public dinner,3 at which presided a son of the late worthy Govr. Sullivan, and nephew to the General4—a degenerate plant of a strange (foreign) vine—the bitterest, & most inveterate of the whole high-federal gang—a man notorious for having dishonored his Father and his Mother, and who had doubtless congenial feelings with the military convict.
I mentioned that Hull had a stroke of apoplexy, a year, perhaps, before his appointment of General on the Canada expedition. I have refreshed my memory since I came home, and therefore repeat, that a few miles from my house, at a review of the Middlesex militia, whereof the late Speaker General Varnum was commanding officer, General Hull fell senseless, and, if I recollect rightly, was carried home in that condition; from which time, he never appeared to be the man he was before, insomuch that I remember people spoke of it, when his appointment was announced. The gallant General Miller5 called on me yesterday when we refreshed each other memories on the events of Hull.
Since the disaster at the review, which was at Concord, Hull appeared heavy, dull & bloated, and, at times very talkative on the subject of the facility and certainty of conquering Canada. His limbs did not appear to suffer, nor his tongue to falter; but, to the eye of a Physician, his brain appeared to have lost its intellectual energy. I never heard his temperance called in question. Altho’ the General has lived, for a series of years, within three miles of me, I have never, during all that time, seen him, until lately. While he worked hard on his farm, he seemed forgotten, and he has only reappeared at a time when the Ship of state was about tacking, when he, and some others were hoping that she would “miss stays”;6 in which case he might, possibly, appear on the top of some of the waves. I very much doubt if Hull writes those productions which have recently appeared under his name.7
General Dearborn has not entirely recovered from his fracture. He was at my door last week, but would not venture to get out of his carriage. It has shook his whole frame. A man of 75 cannot afford to break a bone, or even to fall down.
How a Washington paper came to mention my name in connection with a professorship in your Virginia University,8 I cannot conceive. I never heard, or dreamt of such a thing. No—if I have any ambition, it is to serve my country abroad. Am I too old—or too ignorant of political matters to make my bow to the King of the Netherlands? In a country where I have resided four academical years, one of which was past in the family of the venerable Adams.
Please to present my great respects to Mrs. Madison. My wife is almost jealous. She stood before the glass, and stretching herself up, and putting on one of her best looks, turned to me and said, “am I not as tall as Mrs. Madison?” To which I could only reply—that I did not beleave there was much difference, seeing both husbands were obliged to look up to them! Having been so long from home, I thought my wife was entitled to a compliment.
I have sent a discourse, preached by my son in law in the Unitarian church New York for Mr. Macon with my compliments.9 With an high degree of respect, I remain, Dear Sir, Your obt. servt
Benjn. Waterhouse
RC (DLC). Docketed by JM.
1. Waterhouse described his visit to Montpelier in a letter to John Quincy Adams: “My visit to the Ex-Presidents has been not only very pleasant but very profitable. How apt is the imagination to beguile us! I had never seen Mr Madison. Although I owed him a debt of gratitude, I had a wrong impression of the man. I suspect I was misled by Stewart’s picture of him. I never imagined that such a puckered up, astringent countenance, could have belonged to such an open, expansive, and benevolent heart. I have very rarely met with a gentleman, in the course of my life with whom I have been more pleased, or from whom I parted with better feelings. As to his Lady she is the art of pleasing personified. I entered their house with the formal ceremony of a stranger, & left it with the feelings of a brother. What a great blessing a good wife is to an old man! Without it, he is like an old and lonely tree on a bleak mountain, with not even under brush to shelter the trunk, or warm its root, unless indeed the young suckers shoot up, and rally round it for that purpose” (Waterhouse to Adams, 4 July 1825, MHi: Adams Papers [microfilm ed.], reel 471).
2. John Quincy Adams had just begun his term as U.S. president.
3. The public dinner for William Hull at the Exchange Coffee House took place on 30 May 1825, with nearly two hundred and fifty in attendance. The speeches and toasts were reported in full in the Portland, Maine, Eastern Argus, 6 June 1825. A notice in the Salem Essex Register, 2 June 1825, read: “the usual number of regular and volunteer toasts were given, most of which are unexceptionable—but we think the whole affair indiscreet, and improper, calculated to answer no good purpose, and tending to render such honours in future very cheap.”
4. William Sullivan (1774–1839) was a Harvard-educated lawyer and Boston Federalist who was prominent in state politics. He was also a writer and lecturer on historical subjects.
5. James Miller (1776–1851), a New Hampshire lawyer, was commissioned a major in the Fourth Regiment of Infantry in the U.S. Army in 1808, and he served in that regiment in the Indian wars under William Henry Harrison and under William Hull at Detroit. Captured at Detroit in 1812 and paroled the following year, Miller, now a colonel of the Twenty-First Regiment, fought with distinction in the battles of Chippawa, Lundy’s Lane, and Fort Erie: he was made brevet brigadier general in July 1814. After the war Miller served as territorial governor of Arkansas, 1819–24, and as collector of the port of Salem, Massachusetts, 1825–49, where he was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s superior and the subject of the Custom House sketch that introduces The Scarlet Letter (Heidler and Heidler, Encyclopedia of the War of 1812, 352–53; , 3:184, 318, 402, 625, 634; Cal Ledbetter Jr., “General James Miller: Hawthorne’s Hero in Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 47 [1988]: 99).
6. A nautical expression that means a failure to tack, or come about (W. H. Smyth, The Sailor’s Word-Book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms … [London, 1867], 653).
7. Waterhouse was referring here to William Hull’s Memoirs of the Campaign of the North Western Army of the United States, A.D. 1812 (Boston, 1824; 16616), originally published in thirty-eight letters in the Boston Statesman in the spring and summer of 1824. For some of the letters, see the Salem Gazette, 6, 13, 20, 23, and 30 July, and 3, 6, and 13 Aug. 1824.
8. “The National Journal mentions that the University of Virginia has offered one of her professorships to Dr. Waterhouse, of Cambridge” (Boston Commercial Gazette, 27 June 1825).
9. William Ware, A Sermon on the Communion: Preached, March 6, 1825, in the First Congregational Church in the City of New York (New York, 1825; 23218).