Month: March 2021

September, 1819

September, 1819 brings some travel from Boston to visit family on the North Shore.  For the first visit, Gallison arrived in Salem by horse or coach, at sunset on the Saturday of what we now think of as Labor Day weekend.  Walking into the darkness, he reached his father’s house in Marblehead in about an hour and a half.

The following Sunday, while meeting with family members, he attended two churches.  This was not unusual for him, although in this case he hesitated before going to one, because of some controversy surrounding the guest minister’s invitation.  Gallison does not specific whether that stemmed from his being Irish, or his missionary activity in Hayti, or some other cause, but he eventually put aside his doubts and found that Mr Morton possessed ‘genius & eloquence.’

Other quick items include several updates on his discussions of privateering with the Peace Society, a charming piece of gossip concerning Daniel Webster in his days at the Phillips Exeter Academy, and his devotion of a stormy Sunday evening to reading the ‘Report of the Am[erican] Colonization Society.’

August, 1819

As noted earlier, Gallison had always devoted much of his journal to intellectual or spiritual life. In keeping with that, detailed descriptions of William Ellery Channing’s sermons fill nearly half of the entries for August, 1819.

Not content to be busy only on Sundays, he also describes a month filled with his other passions, including his intellectual life (writing for the North American Review), family, and Harvard.

At the end of the month, he visited the former President John Adams, in Quincy. Filled with gossip and talk of world affairs, this gathering of notables punctuated a most happy few weeks.

July, 1819

Gallison’s entries for July, 1819 cover three of his main interests: Federalism, Unitarianism, and the law. On the Federalist side, he was invited to be the speaker at the annual meeting of the Peace Society, a notoriously Federalist organization founded after the disastrous War of 1812. He eventually chose to address Christian ethics and political life, building on a foundation from Channing’s sermon during President Monroe’s famous visit to Boston in 1817. His first thought, however, was to talk about privateering, a subject that was on the mind of the Society, and would absorb a great deal of his attention in the following year.

Otherwise, along with some notes on his legal work and study, he left richly detailed impressions of the Sunday sermons and other religious meetings he had attended.