“The procession of the old clergymen who filled our pulpit”

Back in January I quoted Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on one of the impressive clergymen who came to preach in his father’s pulpit in Cambridge while he was a boy.

Young Oliver was born in 1809 in the house that had belonged to the Harvard College steward Jonathan Hastings. In 1775 the Massachusetts committee of safety and Gen. Artemas Ward took it over as the first rebel headquarters of the war.

In The Poet at the Breakfast Table, Holmes described some ministers whose names I know because they wrote recollections about the Revolutionary period when they themselves were boys.

Holmes recalled the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768–1842) of Dorchester this way: “already in decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors.”

The Rev. David Osgood (1747–1822) has made only one appearance in Boston 1775, guarding his privilege to perform all marriages in his town. Holmes recalled him as “the most venerable David Osgood, the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy over-shadowing eyebrows.”

Holmes’s longest profile limned the “attenuated but vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in wickedness or wit.”

Homer (1759–1843) was minister of the first congregation in Newton, where Homer Street preserves his name. Holmes went on:

The good-humored junior member of our family [Holmes himself?] always loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles Coverdale’s Version, and the Bishop’s Bible, and how he wrote to his friend Sir Isaac (Coffin) about something or other, and how Sir Isaac wrote back that he was very much pleased with the contents of his letter, and so on about Sir Isaac, ad libitum,—for the admiral was his old friend, and he was proud of him.

Homer and Coffin had been classmates at the South Latin School, one becoming an American clergyman and the other a British admiral. Coffin’s recollections of life in that school were invaluable to me in writing about its culture.

The kindly little old gentleman was a collector of Bibles, and made himself believe he thought he should publish a learned Commentary some day or other; but his friends looked for it only in the Greek Calends,—say on the 31st of April, when that should come round, if you would modernize the phrase.

In other words, that magnum opus’s day of publication would never arrive.

Source of “the volley fired by a young Virginian”?

In The Fight with France for North America (1902), Arthur Granville Bradley wrote:

The killing of Jumonville raised a great commotion not only in the colonies but in Europe. “It was the volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America,” says Horace Walpole, “that set the world on fire.”

That line referred to George Washington, then a young major in the Virginia militia, ordering his men to fire on the French officer Jumonville in 1754.

That’s the earliest example I’ve found of that quotation attributed to Walpole. In the following decades it was whittled down to: “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.” I see it appearing mainly in local histories of places important in the French and Indian War, but in the late twentieth century it started to appear in biographies of Washington. Lots of them.

So far as I can tell, those biographies cite previous biographies rather than any collection of Walpole’s writings. I’ve seen the line quoted by such authoritative authors as Peter Henriques, Ron Chernow, Russell Shorto, and various National Park Service resources.

In The Loyal Son (2017), Daniel Mark Epstein noted the similarity of that line to one attributed to Voltaire (shown above), and suggested “the belletrist Horace Walpole [was] translating the words of Voltaire.”

Indeed, in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), Voltaire wrote:

La complication des intérets politique est venuë au point qu’un coup de canon tiré en Amérique peut être le signal de l’embrasement de l’Europe.

That was translated a few years later by the Scottish editor and novelist Tobias Smollett as:

So complicated are the political interests of the present times, that a shot fired in America shall be the signal for setting all Europe together by the ears.

That idiom about ears not only means nothing today but it didn’t replicate Voltaire’s metaphor. “Embrasement” means setting on fire. In 1884, the historian Francis Parkman offered a better translation in Montcalm and Wolfe:

Such was the complication of political interests, that a cannon-shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe in a blaze.

There was, to be sure, no cannon involved in Washington’s action. But Voltaire was playing on readers’ knowledge of signal cannon.

How did Walpole come into the picture? I can’t tell. He and Voltaire did correspond about Maj. Washington’s attack on the Jumonville party in 1768, but Walpole’s letters of 21 June and 27 July don’t contain the phrase about “a young Virginian in the backwoods.”

Some authors cite Walpole’s Memoirs of the Reign of George II for the line about Washington. That long book does include one paragraph about young Washington, but not this line.

I’ve found some French versions of the line about “a young Virginian in the backwoods.” However, they all render “backwoods” differently, suggesting that they’re modern translations from the English rather than a phrase that Voltaire set down in French centuries ago.

At this point, therefore, I suspect that the oft-repeated line attributed to Walpole was actually created by A. G. Bradley, mixing up what Parkman said Voltaire wrote about the Jumonville incident with what Walpole wrote about Washington.

If anyone can find the quotation in question in Walpole’s voluminous writings, or anywhere else before Bradley’s book, I’d welcome the additional information.

TOMORROW: What Walpole definitely wrote about young Washington.