"My Dears it was Hell"

 

There is some evidence that Eliza’s marriage to Reverend Doane may not have been received all that enthusiastically by the rest of the family.  John Murray Forbes noted in a letter to his brother Tom in Canton that Eliza Perkins “is now Mrs. E. P. Doane, having been married last week.  - Aunt P. has never mentioned the subject.”

At the time of their marriage Charley Perkins was a happy six-year-old who made friends easily and seemed eager to learn to draw and to play music. His sister Saadi was eleven and loved to read and took riding lessons and drew pictures of her horse Romeo in her journal.  Teddy, who was nine, had an ethereal face and a clever sense of humor, and had a way of always finding “treasures new and old”. Four year old Hal seems to have been lost in the shuffle.

In the winter the Perkins/Doane family lived in a townhouse adjoining their grandmother’s house on Pearl Street.  Their grandfather had seven siblings, and they had a vast array of second cousins – Forbes, Russell, Abbot, Sturgis, Trumbull, Winslow, Cushing…  The Perkins children were particularly close to their Forbes cousins. The Forbes’ father had died young so the boys were put to work at an early age - Tom was already clerking in Canton, Johnny apprenticed in the Perkins counting house as soon as he left school, and Ben went to sea at the age of thirteen, while the girls, Margaret and Emma, joined the Perkins household. Margaret became “Queen Margaret” and presided over the sewing chamber. Her sister Emma had travelled to Europe with James and Eliza after the death of their first child and became one of the Perkins children’s main caretakers. She was very well read and loved for looking after “the old and the young, the sick and the well, the ignorant and the enlightened, the rich and the poor”. 

Daddy Mousse lived with the family as well.  Deyaha Moussa had been born in West Africa around 1760 and had been abducted and trafficked to Haiti, where, after the horrendous voyage, he languished for days in the slave market, wracked with fever and dysentery, too sick to be sold. The story passed down in the family is that James Perkins and his brothers happened to pass by the market when Deyaha looked at them, and, perhaps taken by their friendly expressions, he smiled.   To be clear, James was not a sentimentalist – he traded slaves on a regular basis – but he was taken by that smile and   paid for the man even though he was close to death and brought him to the hospital where he eventually recovered his strength. He soon proved his capability and was put to work in the Perkins counting house. 

In 1791, when Haiti’s slaves rose up in bloody rebellion and James and Sarah Perkins found themselves (with their infant son) trapped at an inland plantation Deyaha smuggled the family back to the coast hidden in the back of a hay wagon and guarded them as they made their way to the safety of their ship. 

Deyaha Moussa lived for thirty years in Boston as a member of the Perkins Family. By all accounts he shared the family’s joys and sorrows as his own, and was “much cherished for his honesty, his independence, and warmth of heart”.  When he passed away in August of 1831, he was buried in the family crypt under St. Paul’s Church (even though he was “a sincere Mohammedan”) alongside James. 

With their father and Mousse both dead, and their new stepfather absorbed in Church affairs, the Perkins children were left without a warm-hearted father-figure in their lives. 

Their Uncle Tom (Thomas Handasyd Perkins) lived nearby in a four-story townhouse on Temple Place. The house contained twenty-six fireplaces, marble statues in the vestibule, rare engravings in the dining room, a piano nobile in the hall, and an armchair in the parlor that Emperor Napoleon had sat on while exiled at St. Helena. Three of the Colonel’s daughters had houses on Temple Place as well, so grandchildren and cousins were common. The whole family would gather at the house for Thanksgiving and crowd around two long tables and applaud as youngest child walked the length of the tables.

When the time came, the Forbes boys shipped out to take their place in Canton. Their cousin John Perkins Cushing had shipped out as a sixteen-year-old in 1803 to clerk in the family’s counting house there, but when the head of the firm suddenly died, John found himself the sole agent for all the family’s accounts in the Far East. By the time he returned to Boston in 1830, he had completely mastered the Opium Trade and was as much a Chinaman as a Bostonian. Fabulously wealthy and popularly known as “Ku-Shing,” he wore ivory silk pajamas and was attended by a Chinese manservant who wore his hair in a long black queue. The young ladies of Boston naturally beset him “like bumblebees”.

Boston was then a small and pretty city. The streets around the Common were full of comfortable homes; the Back Bay was still a bay. There was an attempt to turn the Public Garden into a private park with a conservatory, an aviary, and a menagerie. In an exuberant display of wealth Cushing bought a house which occupied an entire city block on Summer Street and surrounded it with a wall of porcelain imported from Canton. The Perkins children all looked forward with joy to Cushing’s parties - with haystacks, pony rides, music, fire balloons, dancing on the lawn with the dancing teacher Papanti in charge, and a great procession of the children to the supper table.

In the summer the family moved to Pine Bank on Jamaica Pond. Pine Bank was originally a simple wood framed cottage which their grandparents had built in 1802. It stood on a peninsula which stood high over the northern bank of the pond. Pine Bank was about a mile distant from their Uncle Tom’s farm in Brookline, which had massive heated greenhouses full of strawberries and camellias and orange blossoms, and their Uncle Sam’s house with its orchards of seckel pears and vineyards of zenfandel grapes.  Off to the right stood the Shaw property – Past the Shaws lived the Wards and the Welds and the Parkmans. To the left lay the Curtis farm, known for the apples it shipped abroad in great quantity, and beyond lived the Adams, Winslow, Spaulding, Gorham and Munson families. Gazing out past Captain Prince’s orchards famous for their pears, plums, and apricots, a visitor could see the hazy Blue Hills in the distance bumping up like a whale from the flat horizon.

Then there were the Worcester relatives. Their grandmother, Sarah Paine Perkins had been born in Worcester and always made sure that her sisters were properly provided for. She had acquired the old Worcester Court House and, after refitting it as a private residence, deeded it to her sister, Elizabeth Trumbull, with the stipulation that the deed could only be conveyed through the female side of the family (specifically excluding her sister’s husband and son, who had demonstrated a notable lack of business acumen).   “Aunt Jem” Perkins made sure that Trumbull girls received gifts of books and outgrown clothing from older relatives and that, when the time came, Trumbull boys found employment in the counting room of a merchant house or shipped out on a China Trade ship.

Jenny Trumbull, who was just five months older than her cousin Charley Perkins, started keeping a diary in 1829 when she was seven years old. In September 1830, she noted the birth of a new cousin:

September 8th 1830. Caroline and I played in the woodhouse-chamber and made tea and had beans for bread, and we called beans without being shelled cake. Mrs. Doane has got a child; it is a boy. 

The Reverend George Washington Doane recorded the same event in his own journal:

Sunday, September 5, 1830 - My beloved boy born this morning - Gratias Domino maximas

A week later Doane received a counterweight of sad news – John Henry Hobart, the Bishop of New York was dead at the age of 55.  Bishop Hobart, who had ordained Doane and had founded the college in Geneva that now bears his name as well as the General Theological Seminary in New York City, and had served as Bishop of the state of New York as well as Rector of Trinity Church in Manhattan, had been an important mentor to Doane; he thought nothing of travelling all across western New York on a winter visitation and took 26 clergy at the beginning of his episcopate and quintupled them to 133 and watched the number of parishes increase from about 50 to almost 170 and confirmed roughly 15,000 souls.

A month later, Doane asked his friend William Croswell to baptize his newborn child.

Sunday, October 17, 1830 - My little boy baptized by the name of George Hobart. May the rest of his life be according to this beginning. And may he be emulous in his faithful service of the Lord of him whose honoured name he bears - Deus faxit.

On April 19, 1831, George Washington Doane was officially instituted as the sixth Rector of Trinity Church, Boston by the Rt. Rev. Alexander V. Griswold, Bishop of Massachusetts. With a wealthy congregation and a brand-new building, Doane was ready to transform Trinity Church. He threw himself into his work and recruited the Reverend John Henry Hopkins to become his assistant.

Rev John Henry Hopkins

Hopkins, who was in his seventh successful year at a parish in Pittsburgh, had tried to establish a theological seminary there, but the Trustees in Pennsylvania decided that the idea was “inexpedient, at present.” After this rejection Hopkins was receptive to Doane’s suggestion that he might create a seminary in Boston. Bishop Griswold voiced support for this idea, but the Bishop had no talent for organizing anything; it had fallen upon Doane to lead the charge. He invited Hopkins to a dinner with the bishop and several prominent clergymen; after the dinner meeting, Doane promised Hopkins that he could deliver favorable action from the Convention and a position at the proposed seminary.

At the end of July, 1831, Hopkins moved to Boston. He and his family were welcomed with enthusiasm and he bought a house in Cambridge and settled in with his family. He had three sons whom he schooled at home, and he expressed interest in taking on a few private pupils as well. The three Perkins boys were the same ages as the Hopkins boys, so while many of their cousins were sent to the academies in Exeter or Andover, or the new Round Hill School in Northampton, Charley Perkins and his brothers studied with John Henry Hopkins that year.

We know from Sam Eliots’ memoir that Charley “was taught at various schools, and by some very poor as well as by one or two good teachers in Boston and at boarding schools in Cambridge.” Sam Eliot did not make clear into which category of schoolmaster Hopkins fell. We know a bit more about his next schoolmaster, William Wells.

Wells had been an usher at Boston Latin, had taught at various private schools, and had sold books in Boston.  In 1830 he opened a “classical” school for boys in the old Fayerweather House in Cambridge, and for a time the school achieved a reputation on a par with Boston Latin as the best place to fit a boy for Harvard.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled: “In some ways Mr. Wells was in advance of his time, in his English love of athletic exercise, for instance, baseball, football, skating, coasting, were all actively encouraged by him, and I still recall with blissful delight the winter days when the ice on the neighboring pond was so fine, or the snow on the hills behind the house so well crusted for sledding, that we had, without asking, a special holiday to enjoy it.”

“The boys were well housed, well fed, and well taught, in the old classical way. Unfortunately, there the merit ended; the discipline of the school was of the old Spartan kind. If a boy was ill, he was tenderly cared for by the ladies of the family; but a boy in health was regarded as a sort of hardy little animal, who was to be turned out among his mates, to hold his own as he could.”

George Ticknor Curtis recalled “Mr. Wells always heard a recitation with the book in his left hand and a rattan in his right, and if the boy made a false quantity or did not know the meaning of a word, down came the rattan on his head.” 

In later years, when Charles Perkins was questioned by his sons about his school days with Mr. Wells, he would simply say, “My dears, it was hell.”