Samuel Stater months afterward they "started three cards, drawing and roving, and seventytwo spindles, which were worked by an old fulling-mill water-wheel in a clothier's establishment." There they remained about twenty months, when they had several thousand pounds of yarn on hand, after making great efforts to weave it up and sell it. Such was the beginning of the successful manufacture of cotton in the United States. Tench Coxe and others had urged the establishment of that branch of industry; and several capitalists had attempted it, but with poor success with imperfect machinery. In 1793, Mr. Slater was a business partner with Almy & Brown, and they built a factory yet [1855] standing, at Pawtucket. At about the same time he married Hannah Wilkinson, of a good Rhode Island family; and, in 1795, imitated Mr. Strutt by opening a Sabbath-school for children and youths, in his own house. The manufacturing business was gradually extended, and Mr. Slater took pride in sending to Mr. Strutt, specimens of cotton yarn, equal to any manufactured in Derbyshire. When war with Great Britain commenced, in 1812, and domestic manufactures felt a powerful impulse, there were seven thousand spindles in operation in Pawtucket alone; and within the little State of Rhode Island, there were over forty factories and about forty thousand spindles. A writer, in 1813, estimated the number of cotton factories built and in course of erection, eastward of the Delaware river, at five hundred.' 1. According to the census of 1850, the number of cotton establishments then in the United States, was 1,094, in which more than seventy-four millions of dollars were invested. These gave employment to LUCRETIA MARIA DAVIDSON. 315 When President Jackson made his eastern tour, he visited Pawtucket, and, with the Vice-President, called on Mr. Slater and thanked him in the name of the nation, for what he had done. "You taught us how to spin," said the President, "so as to rival Great Britain in her manufactures; you set all these thousands of spindles at work, which I have been delighted in viewing, and which have made so many happy by lucrative employment." "Yes, sir," Mr. Slater replied; "I suppose that I gave out the psalm, and they have been singing to the tune ever since." Mr. Slater died at Webster, Massachusetts, (where he had built a factory, and resided during the latter years of his life), on the 20th of April, 1834, at the age of about sixty-seven years. 66 LUCRETIA MARIA DAVIDSON. "In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf, And we wept that one so lovely should have a lot so brief; Yet not unmeet it was, that one, like that young friend of ours, So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers."-BRYANT. native HERE is no record," says Dr. Sparks, "of a greater prematurity of intellect, purity," than was exhibited by Miss Lucretia Maria Davidson, the wonderful child-poet. She was the daughter of Dr. Oliver Davidson, and a mother of the highest susceptibility of feeling and purity of taste. She was born at Plattsburg, New York, on the 27th of September, 1808. Her body was extremely fragile from earliest infancy until her death. The splendor and strength of her intellect appeared when language first gave expression to her ideas, and at the age of four years she was a thoughtful student at the Plattsburg Academy. She shrunk from playmates, found no pleasure in their sports, and began to commit her thoughts (which came in numbers) to paper, before she had learned to write. Before she was six years of age her mother found a large quantity of paper covered with rude characters and ruder drawings of objects, which Lucretia had made, and carefully hidden. She had secretly managed to make a record of her thoughts, in letters of printed form, as she could not write, and on deciphering them, her mother discovered that they were regular rhymes, and the rude drawings were intended as illustrative pictures. Here was an author illustrating her own writings before she was six years of age! The discovery gave the mother much joy, but the child was inconsolable. The key to the arcanum of her greatest happiness was in the possession of another. Lucretia's thirst for knowledge increased with her years, and she would sometimes exclaim, "Oh that I could grasp all at once!" She wrote incessantly, when leisure from domestic employment would allow, but she destroyed all she wrote, for a long time. Her earliest preserved poem was an epitaph on a pet Robin, written in her ninth year. At the age of eleven her father took her to see a room which was decorated for the purpose of celebrating the birth-day of Washington in. The ornaments had no charms for her; the character of Washington occupied all her thoughts; and, on returning home, she wrote five excellent verses on that theme. An aunt ventured to express doubts of their originality. The truthful child was shocked at the hint of deception, and she immediately wrote a poetic epistle to her aunt, on the subject, which convinced her that Lucretia was the author. over ninety-two thousand persons, male and female, and produced annually manufactured goods valued at more than sixty millions of dollars. The value of the raw material used was almost thirty-five millions of dollars. Before she was twelve years of age Lucretia had read most of the works of the standard English poets; the whole of the writings of Shakspeare, Kotzebue, and Goldsmith; much history, and several romances of the better sort. She was passionately fond of Nature, and she would sit for hours watching the clouds, the stars, the storm, and the rainbow, and when opportunity offered, mused abstractedly in the fields and forests, as if in silent admiration. On such occasions her dark eye would light up with ethereal splendor, and she seemed really to commune with beings of angelic natures. At length her mother became an invalid, and the cares of the household devolved on Lucretia. The little maiden toiled on and hoped on; ever obedient, self-sacrificing, and thoughtful of her mother's happiness, while the wings of her spirit fluttered vehemently against the prison bars of circumstances, which kept it from soaring. "Oh," she said one day to her mother, "if I only possessed half the means of improvement which I see others slighting, I should be the happiest of the happy. I am now sixteen years old, and what do I know? Nothing!" Light soon beamed upon her darkened path. A generous stranger offered to give her every advantage of education. The boon was joyfully accepted, and Lucretia was placed in Mrs. Willard's school, in Troy. There she drank too deep and ardently at the fountain of knowledge—her application to study was too intense, and her fragile frame was too powerfully swayed by the energies of her spirit. During her first vacation she suffered severe illness. After her recovery she was placed in Miss Gilbert's school, in Albany, but soon another illness prostrated her. She rallied, and then went home to die. Like a flower when early frost hath touched it, that sweet creature faded and drooped; and on the 27th of August, 1825, the perfume of her mortal life was exhaled in the sunbeams of immortality, before she had completed her seventeenth year. The last production of Miss Davidson's pen was written during her final illness, and was left unfinished.1 She had a dread of insanity, and that poem was on the subject. She wrote, "That thought comes o'er me in the hour God mercifully spared her that affliction, and her intellect was clear as a sunbeam when death closed her eyelids. JOHN ARMSTRONG. WHILE the remnant of the Continental army was encamped near Newburgh, a few months before they were finally disbanded, and much dissatisfaction existed among the officers and soldiers because of the seeming injustice of Congress, anonymous addresses appeared, couched in strong language, and calculated to increase the discontents and to excite the sufferers to mutinous and rebellious measures. Those addresses, which exhibited great genius and power of expression, were written by John Armstrong, one of the aids to General Gates, and a young man then about twenty-five years of age. He was a son of General John Armstrong, of Pennsylvania, who was distinguished in the French and 1. In 1829, a collection of her writings was published, with the title of Amir Khan and other Poems, prefaced with a biographical sketch, by Professor S. F. B. Morse. That volume forms her appropriate monument. Indian war, and participated in the military events of the Revolution. John was born at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the 25th of November, 1758, and was educated in the college at Princeton. While a student there, in 1775, he joined the army as a volunteer in Potter's Pennsylvania regiment, and was soon afterward appointed aid-de-camp to General Mercer. He continued with that brave officer until his death, at Princeton, early in 1777, when he took the same position in the military family of General Gates, with the rank of major. He was with that officer until the capture of Burgoyne. In 1780, he was promoted to adjutant-general of the Southern army, when Gates took the command, but becoming ill on the banks of the Pedee, Colonel Otho H. Williams took his place, until just before the battle near Camden. Then he resumed it, and continued with General Gates until the close of the war. It seems to have been at the suggestion of General Gates and other distinguished officers, that Major Armstrong prepared the celebrated Newburgh Addresses.1 Under the administration of the government of Pennsylvania, by Dickenson and Franklin, Major Armstrong was Secretary of State and adjutant-general. These posts he occupied in 1787, when he was elected to a seat in Congress. In the Autumn of that year he was appointed one of three judges for the Western Territory, but he declined the honor. In 1789, he married a sister of Chancellor Livingston, of New York, and purchased a beautiful estate on the banks of the Hudson, in the upper part of Dutchess county, where he resided until his death, fifty-four years afterward. He continually refused public office until the year 1800, when, by an almost unanimous vote of the legislature of New York, he was chosen to represent the State in the Federal Senate. He resigned that office in 1802, but was reelected, in 1803. A few months afterward, President Jefferson appointed him minister plenipotentiary to France, where he remained more than six years, a portion of the time performing the duties of a separate mission to Spain, with which he was charged. In 1812, Major Armstrong was commissioned a brigadier-general in the army of the United States, and took command in the city of New York, until called to the cabinet of President Madison, the next year, as Secretary of War. He accepted the office with much reluctance, for he had many misgivings concerning the success of the Americans. He at once made some radical changes by substituting young for old officers, and thereby made many bitter enemies. The capture and conflagration of Washington, in 1814, led to his retirement from office. Public opinion then held him chiefly responsible for that catastrophe, but documentary evidence proves the injustice of that opinion. No man ever took office with purer motives, or left it with a better claim to the praise of a faithful servant. He retired to private life, resumed agricultural pursuits, and lived almost thirty years after leaving public employment. He died at his seat at Red Hook, Dutchess county, on the 1st of April, 1843, in the eighty-fifth year of his age. General Armstrong was a pleasing writer. He is known to the public, as such, chiefly by his Life of Montgomery, Life of Wayne, and Notices of the War of 1812. 1. The first Address set forth the grievances of the army, evoked the use of power in their hands to redress them, and proposed a meeting of officers to take matters into their own hands, and compel Congress to be just. Washington defeated the movement by timely counter-measures. The attempt, however, aroused Congress and the whole country to a sense of duty toward the army, and a satisfactory result was accomplished. No doubt the Address and its bold propositions were put forth with patriotic intentions. Such was the opinion expressed to the author, by Washington, fourteen years afterward. 2. In August, 1814, a strong British force, under General Ross, penetrated Maryland by way of the Patuxent, and after a severe skirmish with the Americans at Bladensburg, pushed on to Washington city, burned the capitol, the President-house, and other public and private buildings, and then hastily retreated. Armstrong was censured for not making necessary preparations for the invasion, as was alleged. THAT gifted and remarkable promulgator of the religious doctrine known as as and for that reason, as well as for the patriarchal age to which he attained, as a minister, he was appropriately called by the affectionate and reverential name of Father Ballou. He was a native of Richmond, New Hampshire, where he was born on the 30th of April, 1771. His early years were passed among the beautiful and romantic scenery of Ballou's Dale, and in the groves, "God's first temples," his devotional feelings were early stirred and long nourished. His early education was utterly neglected; and it was when he was upon the verge of manhood that he first studied English grammar, and applied himself earnestly to the acquirement of knowledge from books. At the age of sixteen years he first managed to read and write fluently, after a great deal of unaided industry and perseverance. In those efforts, the family Bible became his chief instructor, and it was the instrument, under God, that made him what he was in after life. Farm labor was the daily occupation of his youth, and it gave him physical vigor for the severe labors of a long life. At the age of eighteen years young Ballou became a member of the Baptist Church. His religious views soon changed. He became possessed of the idea that all would be finally happy, because "God is love, and his grace is impar tial." The idea took the form of a creed, and an earnest longing to have others enjoy what he felt to be a great blessing, caused him to commence preaching, feebly yet effectively, at the age of twenty years. At a common school and an |