Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,298

This is the grave of Edward Everett Hale.

Born in 1822 in Boston, Hale was the elite of the Boston elite. The famed orator who notoriously went on forever and then was totally shown up by Lincoln at the Gettysburg Address, Edward Everett, was his uncle. His grand-uncle was the Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale. Hale proved to be an extraordinarily talented kid with special talents in the literary world. He started Harvard at age 13 after graduating from Boston Latin. He was elected Class Poet at Harvard and graduated second in his class in 1839. He became interested in the new liberal theology that was such a massive turn from the Puritanism of his ancestors. He continued at Harvard Divinity, became a Unitarian minister in 1841, and was a leading light of the liberal theology of the time.

If Hale was super elite, when he married Emily Perkins in 1852, he went even more elite. She was was the niece of both Roger Sherman Baldwin and Lyman Beecher. They had a bunch of kids, a couple of which became well-known American artists of the Gilded Age. As for Hale himself, he rose in the Boston minister world and was the pastor at South Congregational Church there from 1856 until 1899.

Hale was a pretty political guy for the time. He provided a lot of public support for Kansas abolitionists for example. Most of the liberal Boston elite hated slavery by this time, even if their real commitment to Black rights often proved extremely limited outside of ending slavery in its technical form (which is very different than actually providing people real and meaningful economic emancipation). Later, he became very supportive of the Chautauqua movement and popular education of various forms.

But to give a clue of the extremely limited vision of these elites, Hale did support the end of slavery and he supported Irish immigration too. So that makes him pretty good, right? I mean, he wasn’t a Know-Nothing or anything like that. But this is why we need deep dives into the context of the time rather than taking a political position of someone in the deep past without much context and praising him. See, he supported Irish immigration because, since the Irish were a bunch of dumb drunkard Catholics good for nothing but brute labor, their immigration would free up good Anglo-Saxon Americans for higher activities such as education. So in short, they could serve as the labor force for northern society, like Black laborers would in the South, both without any real “freedom” or belief that they could do anything but toil like dumb animals, and then the “whites” of the nation could create a liberal paradise of culture and education. Or as he himself wrote, “[it] compels them to go the bottom; and the consequence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted.”

So there’s your abolitionist pro-immigrant man of the mid-19th century, what a hero. Moreover, these things were connected. For example, he founded the New England Emigrant Aid Society to pay for charity to get the Irish out to the western frontier to prevent them from becoming slave states. So a lot of his support for a free Kansas was paying impoverished Irish to go out there. He later stated, “I am more proud of my part in the settlement of Kansas…than I am of any public service I have rendered.”

As a literary guy, he got involved with the American Antiquarian Society and was one of its leaders for the rest of his life. But the reason he is remembered today is his Civil War writings. In 1863, he wrote “A Man Without a Country” for The Atlantic (remember when that magazine wasn’t the horrifying rag it is today….) that was intended to gin up support for the war in the North. In it, he told the story of a soldier who refused to fight for his nation. He is tried for treason and forced to live the rest of his days on a ship without any news from his home. This was a highly didactic story and so the trial allows the prosecutor to give a history of the United States since the end of the international slave trade to show the superiority of the Union. He actually published it anonymously, so its enormous popularity doesn’t have too much to do with his relative fame. Later, he said it was an attack on the odious Clement Vallandigham, the treasonous Ohio Democrat running for governor that year from exile in Canada. Hale then wrote a sequel called “Philip Nolan’s Friends,” another didactic story that allowed him to explore the history of the Louisiana Purchase and its aftermath. Incidentally, part of the reason he chose The Atlantic as his favorite home is that early in his career, he briefly was a pastor at a parish in Worcester and one of his parishioners was Moses Phillips, who would go on to found the journal in 1857.

But Hale wasn’t just a didactic political writer. He also wrote some pioneering science fiction, such as his book The Brick Moon, which is considered to the first story using an artificial satellite above Earth as a plot point. The Atlantic Monthly serialized this starting in 1869 and it has been referenced by science fiction writers ever since.

Hale played a major role in the institutionalization of American letters after the Civil War. He edited journals, kept writing, knew everyone, did his work at the AAS, and either wrote or edited more than 60 books. I don’t think any of them are really read today, but they included some fiction, some travel writing, a lot of his sermons, etc.

In 1903, Hale became chaplain of the Senate and a member of the Literary Society of Washington. So he lived down there as an old man, one of the nation’s most respected literary figures. In 1904, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mostly though he lived at his big home in Roxbury, Massachusetts (really a neighborhood of Boston) and his summer lake home in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, not far from where I labor away at these posts. Turns out that Rhode Island home still exists. I should go check it out. Nice location, little lake behind him, a mile or so from the Atlantic Ocean.

Hale died in 1909 in Boston. He was 87 years old.

Edward Everett Hale is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other less known members of the mid and late 19th century literary world, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Banister Tabb is in Richmond, Virginia and Ella Wilcox is in Short Beach, Connecticut. Incidentally, I have trips to Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas coming up this spring for other reasons and I hope to expand them to pick up some graves. We all know what grave trips in the South means–more assholes. So if that’s what you want, you can help make that happen too. Previous posts in this series are archived here.