JOHN MURRAY FORBES.*

WHEN Mr. Graham Wallas's Life of Francis Place appeared, most readers must have been astonished to find how important a part had been played by a Strand tailor, who never sat in Parliament, in the history of English legislation in the nineteenth century. Mrs. Hughes's Life of her father, John Murray Forbes, will be an equal surprise to most of her readers—on this side of the Atlantic at all events—through showing what an important part in the history, not only of his country, but, it may be said, of the world, was played by a Boston merchant who never held office or sat in Congress, or even in the Legislature of his State. But the analogy between the two men goes no further than that of their energy and their disinterestedness. Place remained all his life a narrow Benthamite, esteemed by many, loved perhaps by none. Forbes appears to have been loved by all with whom he came into relations of any intimacy, respected by all good men, reverenced by those who knew him best.

A descendant, no doubt, of the Aberdeenshire Forbeses, J. M. Forbes cared nought for genealogy, and was content to reckon his ancestors as having been "probably a set of old cattle-thieves." Born in France in 1813, he was thereby dis- qualified for the Presidency (for which he was better fitted

Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes. Edited by hls Daughter, Sarah Forbes Hughes. 2 vols. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. than most of those who have held the office). His father died young, after a period of invalidship requiring the strictest economy in family management. His school- days were brief; he entered his uncle's Boston office at fifteen, "strong, healthy, and self-reliant" (chaise- teristics which applied to him throughout life) ; "a fair swimmer, a good shot, and best of all a good rider." The firm which he served had a house in China in which an elder brother was partner, and on the latter's death in 1830 he was sent out to train for the position, which he attained in 1834, having in the meanwhile returned home through ill-health and married at the early age of twenty. The weight of responsibility thus early laid upon him goes far to explain the ready self-reliance which characterises his whole subsequent life. Ten years of business in Boston followed his return to America in 1838. The conclusion of some advice given to a relative at this period shows certainly the canny Scot:— " The great art of making bargains is to find out other people's ultimatum without letting out yours, and this can be done with most people by letting them talk."

Meanwhile feelings had been awakened in him which would develop the nobler side of his nature, and largely shape his life. He had been "neutral or indifferent on the subject of slavery" till a speech by Wendell Phillips denouncing the murder (1837) of Lovejoy, a clergyman and newspaper editor, by a Missouri mob, for daring to condemn the burning alive of a negro, changed his "whole feeling" with regard to slavery, though "the bigotry and pigheadedness of the abolitionists" prevented his joining them. In 1856, though awake to the prospect of "a coming storm," he did not go further than restricting the extension of slavery. By 1857, not- withstanding the anxieties of a business panic, "politics were rapidly becoming his absorbing interest." He left the old Whig party, to which he had hitherto belonged, to join the more advanced "Free-soilers," afterwards called "Repub- licans." In 1859 he entertains at tea John Brown, "a grim, farmer-like looking man with a long grey beard and glittering grey-blue eyes which seemed to have a little touch of insanity about them." He had a hand, as "one of the electors at large," in the election of Lincoln, and was sent as a delegate to the Peace Congress at Washington in February, 1861, convened on the invitation of Virginia, but soon found that the South would only receive concessions, committing themselves to nothing. Already Forbes and another dele- gate were discussing plans for the relief of Fort Sumter with General Scott, the Commander-in-Chief. When the Conference was broken up, and Fort Sumter attacked, Forbes was in close relations with Governor Andrew (of Massa- chusetts), "going to the State-house daily and acting as adviser or clerk, or better still as physician, by carrying off the Governor to dine, a ceremony he was ready to post- pone till midnight, unless some friend captured him." Andrew put in his hands the first arrangements for moving the troops South. He becomes for a short time Deputy-Com- missary for Massachusetts, is authorised to purchase forth- with provisions for four thousand for thirty days, but on being superseded by a soldier finds "abundant occupation in buying ships and helping to give the proper direction to public opinion." Although "only acting as Secretary of the Navy for Massachusetts for a very short time," he corre- sponds with Mr. Seward, with the Chairman of the Naval Committee of the House of Representatives ; rough-drafts a "Bill for a Volunteer Navy," which was passed ; acts on a State Commission of three "to buy merchant ships for the Navy, and fit them for sea and nominate from the merchant service Captains, and perhaps other officers, to command them." (The Commission, dissolved in August, 1861, asked no charges except actual travelling expenses.) Still, he hesitates before emancipation, more "a weapon to hold in reserve to threaten with, than one to strike with." In November, 1861, he sends a draft for $1,000 to Baltimore for the relief of Northern soldiers in Southern prisons. He takes an active part in establishing the National Sanitary Commission ; Massachusetts does for it in a month nearly four times as much as New York in six months. He is in active correspondence with the Chairman of the Ways and

Means Committee of the Senate as to currency matters, and has during the winter of 1861-62 "more irons in the fire than one would have thought it possible for any one man to keep there." He finds time to write to newspapers, but prays the editors (in italics) not to "embalm his name in print." The Secretary to the Navy (1862) requests him to charter a vessel for pursuing a Southern privateer, with authority to suggest a proper person for the command and three others for acting masters (January, 1862). At last he knocks up, and is ordered South. He selects Beaufort, in South Carolina, where one of his sons is with his regiment, becomes intimate with the General in command, sympathises with him as to enlisting coloured men as soldiers. By June, 1862, he is convinced "that emancipation may at any time be declared without disorder," and that "we are not to wait until the last deadly necessity comes." He gets up, and is chairman of, a committee for "promoting the use of the blacks as soldiers " ; works out the plan of a New England Loyal Publication Society ; sends to Governor Andrew a memorandum on "minor reforms needed," which include the quiet shelving of every drunkard among Army officers, dropping, "if not from a tree by a rope, at least from the army list, every skulking officer," hanging spies, and—to check the frauds of "robbers in the shape of contractors "—suggests the insertion of a clause in every contract that the contractor becomes by sign- ing it subject to martial law, both as to his person and property, with appropriate legislation. Then, in connection with a friend, he grapples with the evil arising out of the bounty system for recruiting, in giving birth to a class of middlemen, "who often took the largest part of the bounties themselves." With the Governor's assent the two got an order from the Governor that any engagement of theirs should be accepted "as equivalent to men." They then contracted with the large towns to furnish them with troops, the men being engaged directly, and thus entered over two thousand men, this recruiting business entailing on Forbes's part "a very inordinate amount of writing." Yet his general correspon- dence was not intermitted. With the Navy Department his relations were very close. He was one of the Presidential electors who re-elected Lincoln, and when the latter's Emancipation Proclamation was issued, had a million of copies printed in small slips, to be scattered out among the blacks by soldiers on the march. In February, 1863, he raises a second Massachusetts cavalry regiment, a negro regiment, and establishes a 'Union club. On March 14th he is summoned to New York by Mr. Chase, the Secretary to the Treasury. He is asked to go at once to England, to be followed by an old friend, Mr. Aspinwall, with ten millions of $5.20 Government bonds (value one million pounds), in order to stop the outfit of Confederate cruisers, especially ironclad rams, with full discretion as to the time of his stay, and with specific instructions " finally " to "use his own judgment upon the merits of each case." The telegram was received on the Saturday, and he saw the Secretaries of the Treasury and of the Navy on Sunday; on Wednesday, March 18th, he left Boston for Liverpool. He addressed himself first to the Society of Friends, but found them discouragingly "cautious and hard of hearing." Bright, Cobden, W. E. Forster, the Duke of Argyll were heartily with him. His old friend Nassau Senior he used successfully as a two-legged telephone to convey a "brilliant picture of Federal prospects" after the defeat at Chancellorsville to Lord Palmerston and his circle. The two envoys were not, however, able to purchase the iron- clads, but obtained a loan of 2500,000 for six months from Borings on deposit of $5.20 bonds. They returned in July, 1863, just before the Irish riots in New York. But instead of resting on his oars, within a month Forbes is in correspondence with Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, as to the organisation of black troops, the Minister saying : "I shall be glad at any time to receive any instruction or sug- gestion that may occur to you as beneficial to this branch of the service" (August 11th, 1863). Meanwhile, in conjunction with a Mr. Philbrick, he is spending or procuring a large sum of money for the education of the negroes ; procuring sub- scriptions enough to build a sloop of war ; urging the President to place by proclamation the war on an expressly democratic footing as one not of "the North against the South," but of "the people against the aristocrats " ; writing a paper against the exchange of prisoners (his own son being a prisoner at the time) ; standing up for equal pay to black and to white soldiers ; pressing a recruiting Bill.

In the autumn of 1864 Professor Goldwin Smith came to America and Mr. Forbes invited him to dinner. Emerson was of the party, and part of his note on it must be quoted :—

"Mr. Forbes at Naushon is the only 'squire' in Massachusetts. and no nobleman ever understood or performed his duties better-

He is an American to be proud of. Never was such free, good meaning, good sense, good action, combined with such domestic, lovely behaviour, and such modesty and persistent preference of others. Wherever he moves he is a benefactor. It is of course that he should shoot well, ride well, sail well, administer railroads well, keep house well, but he was the best talker also in the company, with the perpetual practical wisdom seeing always the working of the thing, with the multitude and distinction of his facts (and one detects continually that he has had a hand in everything that has been done), and in the tem- perance with which he parries all offence and opens the eyes of his interlocutor without contradicting him. I came away saying to myself of J. N. F., 'How little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific people, that he is not likely ever to meet a man who is superior to himself.'"

After the war, indeed, his active interest in political life becomes gradually less. "While we were fighting, he wrote to Wendell Phillips, "I felt more like the Irishman at the Donnybrook Fair, that hard hitting was the right thing ; but

now I feel like lying by, and waiting for something that I

can support in earnest" (February 6th, 1866). He struggled in vain against the abuses which had grown up in the Republican party, against Protection, in favour of Civil Service reform, and when Mr. Blaine was nominated for the Presidency in 1884 by the Republicans, broke away from party altogether, and chiefly devoted himself to the business of his firm and to railway management. In this he showed his usual resolute integrity. Finding that his colleagues on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railway Board were at once directors and constructors, after pointing out to them the impropriety of their position, he appealed to the share- holders, and the Board was overturned. (He himself never advised any one to buy or sell stock in his own railway). And-

" The older he grew the more his old interest in ships and ship- ping returned to him He had had a very deep feeling about loss of life at sea, and had always instructed his Captains to send a man aloft just after sunset and before sunrise to scan the horizon, and be sure no vessel was within sight needing help.

In case one of his ships encountered any craft in distress, every chest of tea or bale of cotton was if needful to go over- board to lighten the ship, rather than that a life should be lost."

Not till he was over eighty did his power of work diminish. He gave up active railway management, though attending

meetings of directors till August 18th, 1898. The two succes-

sive failures of his old house of Russell and Co. in China, and of his friends Baring Brothers in London, "seemed to give him an actual physical shock, and almost made him ill."

He amused himself for a time with tree-planting and yacht- building. But physical ailments came on apace, and "towards the end his being no longer able to take a hand in

influencing public affairs, and the increasing infirmities of age, prevented his wishing even to hear of passing events."

To the war with Spain he was vehemently opposed. He died of pneumonia, October 12th, 1898.

Not a great man, as the world reckons greatness. But surely one who had more greatness in him than many who have earned the name of great.

There remains only to be said that his daughter's bio- graphy of him deserves to be numbered among the beet which this century has produced.