Hosea Biglow may be taken as the type
of the ordinary Yankee country boy of that day. Adin had
the advantage, better, if you can have but one, than any
university, of being brought up in the country. He was a
member of that absolute democracy, the old-fashioned New
England country town, where character and worth were the
only titles to respect in the community, where the son of
a President or the son of a Senator or of a Governor stood
on an absolute and entire social equality with the son of the
washerwoman. If the son of a President or Governor gave
himself any airs on that account, he had applied to him a
very vigorous and effective remedy well known to our Saxon
ancestors.
Adin Thayer came to manhood when the hosts of slavery and
freedom were marshalling for the great contest for the territory
between the Mississippi and the Pacific.
He was soaked in Scripture, especially in the Old Testament,
a soaking which has somewhat the same effect on the moral
and mental fibre that seven years in a tanner's vat used to
have upon sole leather. How often I have known Adin, on some
great political occasion or crisis, to crush some sophistry
or compromise, or attempt to get things on a lower plane,
by indignantly flashing out with some old text, such as, "Righteousness
exalteth a nation," or "Sin is a reproach to any people,"
or answer, as he did once, to a gentleman who wanted him to
sacrifice some moral principle for the sake of harmony in
the Republican Party, "My friend, we will be first pure, and
then peaceable.
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