Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 3
1830-06-28
Morning very warm. I tried this morning Mr. Brooks’ shower bath before breakfast and found myself exceedingly refreshed by it.1 The feeling of the morning air though chilly is very delicious. There is a freshness about it, and the Country looks so verdant and still that it cheers the spirits to the task of the day. Rode to town and went to the Office. Mr. Spear my doubtful Tenant sent me two thirds of his Rent as did also Mrs. Wells. I believe in order to ensure punctuality it is 270highly necessary to keep persons in mind of their obligations. I was thus enabled to make a further deposit this month, and found that it had been the largest since my assuming the Agency. But this will avail little. My father seems equally satisfied if an Agent is minus a thousand dollars or if he scrapes faithfully every source. He came to town today much exhausted, and apparently depressed. I do not relish this in the least. He is in many respects an altered man. Returned to Medford to dine, but was caught in a very violent thunder shower which wet me very considerably.
Mr. Brooks and Mr. Frothingham did not dine at home, having gone to Charlestown to hear Mr. Everett deliver an Oration upon the Anniversary of it’s being two hundred years since the first settlement.2 I should like to have gone if I had not so violent a crowd to deal with. As it was I felt content in being able to sit and read Winthrop, though rather a dry study. The weather was showery. Evening, Mr. Stetson and Mr. Frothingham came home, afterwards Mr. Brooks. We got into a warm and animated conversation, or rather argument upon the subject of the Colonization scheme.3 I confess I am rather inclined to think well of it as the only cool and apparently reasonable scheme which has been presented. But Mr. Brooks and Mr. Frothingham were against me.
Peter C. Brooks had several years before constructed a “small house under the bank of the Canal” in which a shower bath was rigged. He delighted in the baths, prolonging them as late into the autumn as he could. CFA found the baths among the pleasant aspects of successive stays at Mystic Grove. See Brooks, Farm Journal, 24 Sept. 1826; below, vol. 4, entry for 22 Aug. 1832.
The ceremonies had begun at Town Hall from where a procession moved up Main Street to Charlestown’s First Church. There at 4 p.m. to an audience that crowded the hall “to excess,” Edward Everett delivered an address “eminently able and eloquent” (Boston Patriot, 28 June, p. 2, col. 5; 30 June, p. 2, col. 2). The address is printed in Edward Everett, Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions, Boston, 1850, 1:215–245.
The American Colonization Society addressed an appeal to the “Clergy and Congregations of all denominations of Christians throughout the United States” that was designed to be read in pulpits in support of “the establishment of colonies of the free people of colour on the African coast.” The advancement of the colony of Liberia, it was held, would “relieve our country of a class injurious to the public welfare, .... elevate its character and confer upon it the most precious social and political blessings, ... suppress the slave trade, ... [and create] in Africa a Christian Republic” (Boston Patriot, 24 June, p. 2, col. 2).