Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 6
1835-09-01
I went into town this morning in order to attend to some engagements made by me, although I knew that it would be necessary for me to return early for the sake of being in time to go with my father to 207Squantum. The morning looked threatening and the wind was easterly and cool. But it did not rain. My brief time in town vanished with great rapidity. I gave to the Printer my first number of the Papers on the State of the Nation1 and gave to Mr. Russell the remaining portion of the Appeal. House to see about some of Mrs. Adams’ Commissions. Altogether excessively busy.
Returned to Quincy by one o’clock and went down in the Carriage with my father. The annual dinner of the Neponset bridge Proprietors. There were present upon this occasion Mr. Quincy and son, Mr. T. Greenleaf and Price, Mr. Wales and son, Mr. Beale, Mr. Miller, Mr. Whitney and Mr. Lunt, Capt. Bass, my father and self. The dinner was on the whole quite pleasant. We got along well although the east wind was rather piercing. This Anniversary has got a bad name from the state of the weather very regularly for some years since. We returned home to tea and quiet evening.
Much talk of a paper which has lately appeared in New York purporting to be an Account of Lunar discoveries made by Dr. Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope and published first in the Edinburgh Journal of science. But it appears that the publication under that name has ceased for some years. So it is a hoax.2
See note to succeeding entry.
In early 1834, Sir John Frederick William Herschel had set up an observatory in South Africa at Feldhausen near Cape Town where for the next four years he would carry on his pioneering work in southern sidereal astronomy. Interest in him and in his work was widespread. Several months before the present entry CFA had borrowed a work of Herschel’s from the Athenaeum. Reports from Feldhausen excited sufficient attention to induce Richard Adams Locke to publish in August in the New York Sun a purported account of the discovery by Herschel there “that the moon had a vast population of human beings” and hitherto unobserved animals. The pieces from the New York Sun were reprinted in the Columbian Centinel, 1–3 September. Locke later told the whole story of his highly successful satiric effort in The Moon Hoax, N.Y., 1859. (
DNB
under Herschel;
DAB
under Locke.)
1835-09-02
At home all day. The Neponset Company were fortunate on the whole, for this day was one of the most rainy I remember. It was my intention to have gone to town, but I fortunately saved a drenching by giving up the idea.
My first number on the State of the Nation was published today, so that I sat down and composed another which strikes me as bittersweet.1 I also read a part of the seventh satire of Juvenal which I liked. Also assorted more Papers. The alternations of my feelings with re-208gard to these are curious. Hope and fear. My father seemed much pleased with my new essay. He gives me much encouragement for the first time in his life.
Afternoon. I read La Fontaine’s Theodor, a pleasant story. I have rarely read books of more interest, and wonder a little that they so soon appear to have lost their currency. Evening quietly at home.
The series called “On the State of the Nation” and signed “A Calm Observer” consisted ultimately of five numbers in the Daily Advocate. The first four appeared on 2, 5, 8, and 12 Sept. (p. 2, cols. 3, 3–4, 1, and 1 respectively); the final number on 30 Oct., p. 2, cols. 1–2. The focus of the series was again upon the presidential election, but less concerned with Webster’s part in it than earlier. No. 2 was a consideration and rejection of William Henry Harrison as a candidate. In Nos. 3 and 4, CFA gave a first statement to his views on the unfortunate consequences upon the election stemming from the excessive Southern demands being made upon candidates living in the Free States and from related antiabolitionist excesses in Boston and elsewhere. These views he would develop more fully and positively in his “The Slavery Question Truly Stated”; see note to entry for 9 June 1836, below.