Category: 1819

December, 1819

As promised, a follow-up on the composition of the Missouri Compromise memorial. Here, Gallison presents the fruits of his all-nighter to the committee. Scholars interested in the legal history of abolition (or restriction) of slavery may be interested in the insertion of language composed by Nathan Dane specifically citing the Northwest Ordinance. Dane was one of that document’s architects in 1787.

Toward the end of the month, we get a few notices of his address to the Peace Society for their annual meeting on Christmas Day. It seems that he sought some advice from William Ellery Channing on its style and clarity. Of more interest to us is the content, which shows kinship to the sermon Channing delivered to President Monroe in July, 1817.

November, 1819

Here, we have the record of a most busy month. A fire ripped through Boston as the northern lights flashed overhead, leading a host of volunteer firemen to give service above and beyond anything they might have expected.

The Rev Mr William Ellery Channing explicated some points of Unitarian theology, in a long sermon noted with great detail and vigor by our diarist. Channing had only recently delivered his canonical Baltimore sermon, so his mind was fresh and his imagination quite engaged.

Perhaps of greatest interest today, a committee of Boston’s top lawyers met to plan a response to the proposed entry of Missouri to the Union as a slave state. They met in Gallison’s office, and Gallison was part of the committee formed to organize the public meeting and draft the necessary letters to Congress. He ended up doing most of the writing in a frenzied all-nighter, to be discussed in a later entry.

October, 1819

Moderation seized the agenda for much of Sunday, October 17th.  William Ellery Channing preached in the morning about Christianity’s efforts to keep ‘lusts & passions’ under control.  While he didn’t make any specific note about the Republicans who pushed toward the War of 1812, he did remind the congregation that Biblical embodiments of those unfortunate flaws were often represented by military figures.  This was a theme he had dwelt on when preaching to President Monroe in 1817, at the onset of the latter’s ‘Era of Good Feelings’ tour. His protégé would expand upon it further at year-end, in his address to the Peace Society.

Gallison’s classmate from Harvard, the Rev Mr Francis Parkman came at the subject from a different angle, drawing from an analysis of Elijah ‘that it is by a calm, dispassionate manner, the gospel may be best diffused, [and] that it is in the calm & quiet of the soul it is best heard.’   

Looking at other topics in Gallison’s entries from October, 1819 , we find that Aunt Scott’s finances, and the concurrent relationship with her first husband’s agents were less secure than before.

On the evening of the 20th, a high-powered legal cohort discussed some of their hopes and fears for the state Constitutional convention that loomed ahead.  Speaker Biglow was not too perturbed by the people’s ability to call a convention, although consensus among Daniel Webster and Judges Story and Prescott seemed to fear placing too much authority in the hands of the people in such an event. One remedy for any democratic excesses would be, they felt, was to give discretion to the legislature and not involve the public in debate. This was not a completely controversial position; they invoked even the Jeffersonian physician Dr Charles Jarvis and the fiery Samuel Adams as authorities favoring it.

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.

June, 1819

Several points of interest this month.  Gallison starts with the annual election ceremony for the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts—then as now a social occasion as much as a military one.  Posts of his on this occasion in other years indicate that some Gilbert & Sullivan pageantry was already making its way into the occasion.

More relevant to Gallison’s own life, he expanded his work for the church into teaching Sunday school.  In addition, he resumed an interest in privateering that eventually found its way into an essay for the July, 1820 issue of The North American Review, and a petition to Congress he drafted, submitted after his death in 1821.  William Ellery Channing and Daniel Webster were among the signers of the latter piece.

There are more notes on his churchgoing, an increasingly significant portion of his journal in later life– if we may say that about anyone who dies at 32!

A lighter note can be found in his description of a Handel & Haydn Society concert, interrupted by a fire in a nearby bakery.  The aria in question was from Handel’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato.

H&H was founded in 1815, dedicated (as may be deduced by its name) to supporting ancient and modern music.  The preeminence of those two composers in Boston’s musical life can be seen in the ceremonies commemorating peace with Britain in that year.  A multi-hour outdoor pageant featured, along with the speeches and brass bands, some of the most famous numbers from Handel’s Messiah and Haydn’s Creation.  Greatest hits from the greatest hits, as it were.

[1] Nicholas Parrillo, “The De-Privatization of American Warfare: How the U.S. Government Used, Regulated, and Ultimately Abandoned Privateering in the Nineteenth Century,”  Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol 19, Issue 1, 52.

May, 1819 (Plus or Minus)

This month, we see some relief from financial pressures.  At age thirty, after years of living quietly and passing a $50 loans between himself, Uncle Sewall, and his father when necessary, Gallison finally had money enough to invest on his own account.  He was able to put $469 into government bonds, and another $100 into a savings account—a year’s salary not too long before.

Channing returned from delivering his famous Baltimore Sermon.  For another, less formal look at Unitarian theology, we can read an extended account of Gallison’s Wednesday discussion group, which engaged in analysis of the Crucifixion.    

April, 1819

More reports on churchgoing and his Tuesday night discussion group this month, as was already beginning to be more common. Less significant to the journal, but touching on a nationally important event, he notes that Channing was headed to Baltimore to assist in the ordination of Jared Sparks. The resulting “Baltimore Sermon” would become one of the touchstones of Unitarian theology.

March, 1819

Beginning and end of this month have some curt dismissals of the trivia of everyday socializing. The middle features an index, or list of topics as he makes the transition from Volume K to the new Volume L.

More substantially, we have accounts of two sermons by Channing, who discusses religion and morality in some detail. His view was that one cannot be useful without the other.

Finally, a bit more social contact with Josiah Quincy, who was to write [spoiler alert] one of Gallison’s obituaries at the end of 1820.