Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/74

 58 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

��WILLIAM H. V. HACKETT.

��BY REV. JAMES DENORMANDIE.

THE patronymic of the subject of this paper belongs to some early English emigrants to Massachusetts and New Hampshire. About the middle of the 1 8th century, one Ephraim Hackett is prominent among the early and enter- prising settlers of Canterbury, and here Allen Hackett, an influential man in his neighborhood, was born in July, 1777. His wife was of the family of Youngs (who, in company with the Folsoms and Gilmans of Exeter, became the early settlers of Gilmanton), and they first met at the opening session of the Gil- manton Academy, in 1797. Coming from the neighboring town of Canterbury, Allen Hackett established himself as a tanner at Gilmanton, and here William Henry Young Hackett was born, September 24, 1800. His early and limited education was at the Gilmanton Academy, which, if it was not remarkable for its curriculum or discipline, was extremely successful in training young men and women together in friendship, deepening into life-companionship.

Mr. Hackett had no inclination for the work of the farm, to which his father had removed, but soon showed an interest in books and study, and a love for good literature, especially in the department of history, which never left him. Books were rare and expensive, and instead of a habit of extravagance, there was a necessity for self-exertion, so that Mr. Hackett would go into the forest, cut a cord of wood and take it to some purchaser, to procure the means for buying his text-books at school, and the studies, if fewer, were pursued with a thoroughness and discipline often wanting in the number and superfici- ality of our modern courses ; so that having occasion to go to West Point re- cently to look after a rejected cadet, Gen. Schofield said to me, that the pro- portion of boys now being rejected from our high schools,, was larger than twenty-five years ago it has from our common district schools.

Mr. Hackett began the study of law, to which he early turned his thoughts, when he was twenty, and two years later found him in the office of Ichabod Bartlett, at Portsmouth. This city was at that time remarkable for eminent men in its business, its professional, and its social life. The interests had not then greatly declined, which made it large enough and prosperous enough to invite the most distinguished ability in business, or in the professions, to make there a home, and the old social habits of a somewhat exclusive and aristocratic ten- dency, which at an earlier date separated the settlement at the Piscataqua from the Massachusetts, were not yet lost. The Piscataqua was in church and state very different from the other colonies, and it was only after a lingering oppo- sition, and as a consideration of safety, that the Episcopal gave way to the Puri- tan element. The South Parish, strictly Congregational, preserved its historical formation, in the name of wardens for its officers, which the other Congrega- tional organizations have followed, but which, we believe, no church in New England, except the Episcopal, would endure ; and it is supposed to be the South Parish to which Mather, in the Magnalia, refers the story of the Puritan clergymen, who, preaching there, and disgusted with the liveries and wigs, and fashionable appearance of the congregation, gave them a tirade upon their luxuriousness, told them they ought to^ be ashamed of it in a country to which their fathers had come, that all might be free and equal. Whereupon an old gendeman in the broad aisle arose and said " that their fathers came over to this country to make money," which was just as strictly true of the Massa-

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