JAMES SHEPHERD PIKE.

Read before the Maine Historical Society, December 22, 1885.

BY GEORGE FOSTER TALBOT.

In exploring the ancient beginnings of the history of our state, we must not overlook the grand events, nearer our own times, that have already become historic. In these events-in the great political changes, which have renewed and confirmed the popular liberties, and given strength and stability to our republican constitution-James Shepherd Pike, a citizen of Maine, whose demise has lately happened, was a prominent actor. The tribute we pay his life of disinterested public service is all the more necessary and grateful, in that his public service was so inconspicuous. Applause follows loud and fast upon the footsteps of the military hero. The reputation that rewards brilliant oratory in the courts, or in the state or national legislature, and the distinction and emoluments that accompany the holding of high office, are promptly, spontaneously and universally accorded. But the private citizen, who becomes the advocate of the people, too disorganized to concert for the maintenance of their rights, too poor to compensate, sometimes too short-sighted to appreciate their voluntary defender, whose only incentive is zeal for a just cause, whose only reward is the approval of a good conscience, and who discusses public questions in leading journals, where his personality is merely shadowed in the initials of his name, or quite obscured in an association of unnamed editors, does not make a conspicuous exhibition of himself to the world. If the general public overlook such men, we must rescue them from their privacy and honor their achievements; for it is the historian's business to discover and proclaim the men who really guide the thought of their times, and who initiate the movements which in their issues overthrew or established social and political institutions.

James Shepherd Pike was born in Calais, in the state of Maine, on the eighth of September, 1811. His father was William Pike,

who was born in Portland, August 18, 1775, and his mother was Hannah Shepherd, born in Jefferson, Maine, in 1785. William Pike was twice married, and by his first marriage had a son, the late William Pike of Calais, and a daughter, who became the wife of Judge Anson G., son of General John Chandler, one of Maine's first senators in congress. James Shepherd was the eldest but one of the children of Hannah Shepherd, of whom Edgar, a brilliant scholar, graduate of Bowdoin College, died at the very opening of a promising career as a lawyer in the state of Louisiana, where he established himself immediately after leaving college; Charles E. became a lawyer, practicing successfully in Machias, Maine, in Boston, and in Wisconsin, where he now lives, and having been a member of the legislatures of both Maine and Massachusetts, and solicitor of the internal revenue bureau at Washington; and Frederic A., late of Calais, deceased, is well known in the political history of the country as an influential member of congress, during the important period of the civil war, as a leading lawyer and a sagacious, enterprising and successful business man.

The Pikes are of the New England Puritan stock, the first immigrant and progenitor having been John Pike, born in Langford, England, who removed to America in 1635, bringing his son Robert, then nineteen years of age, and four other children. He seems to have been mentioned in some old record as "John Pike, laborer, from Langford," but it is explained in Mr. Savage's Genealogical Register," that it was sometimes necessary for the more prominent and zealous dissenters to conceal their places of residence and real description of their persons, to avoid detention and arrest; and the fact that his young sons, John, jr., and Robert, were educated persons, accomplished in the arts of speaking and writing, indicates that their father must have been of an estate above the condition of most laborers at that time. The old records of the Essex county court show that John Pike, sr., appeared in the courts more than once as the attorney of persons who prosecuted suits and obtained judgments in civil causes; and his own will, evidently written by himself, probated at Hampton in 1654, shows by its phraseology, and by the amount and kinds of estate devised, of which an inventory is recorded, that the testator was prominent among an emigration made up, as no other

emigration ever was before or since, of educated and well-to-do people of the middle and upper classes.

This Robert Pike became famous in the history of New England settlement, and was the "New Puritan," whose character and history his descendant, the subject of this sketch, has made illustrious in a biographical work of great merit and interest, published by the Messrs. Harper in 1879. He seems to have been a man in whom the modern and liberal spirit appeared and asserted itself a full century before its time. The poet Whittier writes of Robert Pike:

I have been accustomed to regard him as one of the wisest and worthiest of the early settlers of the region of the valley of the Merrimac-the most remarkable personage of the place and time. I have always had an admiration for him, and in my story, "Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal," I endeavored to do justice to him.

The matters in which the radical and prophetic clear-sightedness of Robert Pike was conspicuous amidst the dogmatic and persecuting superstition of his time were, first, his hostile criticism of the action of the Massachusetts legislature, of which he was a member, toward the Quakers, for which he was by that body tried, convicted, fined, and disfranchised; second, his resistance to the dictation of his pastor, the Rev. John Wheelwright, and his excommunication therefor; and third, his opposition to the Salem witchcraft persecutions of 1692, and his triumphant argument against them. Our Mr. Pike, his biographer, says of him:

It does not appear that he entertained sentiments that could be deemed heretical by the Puritan clergy of the time, even in his defence of Quaker preaching, or his more general doctrines of toleration and personal independence. He simply held "advanced views" of civil and ecclesiastical liberty, which finally became dominant.

The earliest Pike settler established himself in Newbury, Massachusetts, where there is still a large farm which has been in the Pike family more than two hundred years.

This family is numerous, and, like most New England families, has been widely scattered over the country, embracing among its members the author of Pike's arithmetic, with which many an old man has struggled in his youth; Albert Pike, the poet, remembered for his Saul-like stature and long hair by the people

of Arkansas and of Washington city, and Austin F. Pike, congressman and senator from New Hampshire.

The line of descent from John, brother of Robert, the "New Puritan," is through Moses Pike, Timothy Pike, and Timothy Pike, 2d, to William, James Shepherd's father, who removed to Calais and was drowned in St. Andrew's Bay, July 1, 1818, in sight, perhaps, of the Mansion House in Robbinston, where his distinguished son established his beautiful home in the later years of his life.

A good inheritance of character and intellectual vigor came from the mother's ancestry. Hannah Shepherd was a descendant of Rev. James Shepherd, the first settled minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Early in the settlement of Maine, some of his descendants came to Jefferson, in Lincoln county, where another James Shepherd became locally famous in the social and civic affairs of the community, and where the name is still in good repute by the excellence and intelligence of the many people who bear it.

Mr. Pike enjoyed the ordinary school advantages of the time of his childhood, but the sudden death of his father, when he was only seven years old, left his mother's young family in poverty, and his school life terminated when he was only fourteen years old. He went into the store of Neal D. Shaw of Calais, largely engaged in lumbering and trade. He developed, from a boy, a rare aptitude for business, habits of industry, and unusual power of reticence and reserve, which made him a most circumspect and confidential person to be entrusted with the responsibilities of commercial enterprises. His clerkship continued till he himself went into business, which was before he attained his legal majority. He tried both trading and banking without any considerable success; and ultimately entered into a partnership with James C. Swan, and engaged in the flour and grain and shipping business, until by its successful results he had acquired the moderate competence which became the nucleus of the considerable property he left at his decease.

He had a sagacious mercantile judgment, a capacity for devising large commercial enterprises, and a self-control and patient hopefulness which would carry him confidently through the discouraging periods of a great venture; and yet, when quite

early in life he found himself in possession of a modest competence, he abandoned the pursuit of gain and never recurred to it. His strength and originality of character were shown by the ease and completeness with which he was able to throw off the mastering passion of the country and the age-the love of money— and turn to pursuits that favored the bent of his genius. He was associated with men embarked in speculations, and listened intelligently to the development of their schemes; he passed through a crisis of our history, when the intimate association betwixt business opportunities and public legislation brought temptations to many of our leading public men, which their integrity and patriotism could not quite resist, and none of these brilliant glimpses of private fortune, opening among the daily walks of public duty, dazzled for a moment his clear sense.

The pursuit to which he devoted himself was that of a public writer and teacher- a teacher, not in the department of science, for which he was not learned, nor of religion, for which he had no calling, but in the larger and more useful, if lower, field of politics, for which he was admirably endowed. His accomplished daughter, Mrs. Mary Caroline Robbins, wife of Dr. J. H. Robbins of Hingham, Massachusetts, writes of him :

Though without school education, my father derived from books, of which he was through his early manhood an eager reader, an amount of general information as well as literary knowledge, that made him always among the best informed of men. He read slowly, and when he had finished a book he had made its contents absolutely his. His memory was unfailingly accurate, his judgment sound; and to hear him sum up his impressions derived from his reading was to get the marrow of the work itself, expressed in language of unusual vigor and originality. In his later years he read but few books, but was an exhaustive reader of newspapers. His literary taste was good, though often influenced by his prejudices, and his quotations from authors were always correct and apposite.

Mr. Pike's first literary ventures were as early as 1833, and were published in the Boundary Gazette, a weekly, home paper of limited circulation and brief existence. Thence he advanced to be successively a correspondent of the "Portland Advertiser," "Boston Courier" and "New York Tribune," always a favorite with the readers of those journals, and always securing attention by the freedom' of his comments, the sagacity and independence of his counsels, and the vigor and directness of his style.