On October 20, 1845, Colonel Lee was married to Elizabeth Perkins Cabot, a daughter of Samuel Cabot, and through her mother a granddaughter of that Col. Thomas Handasyd Perkins who, in his day, was one of the most prominent citizens of Boston. The match proved eminently happy in spite of certain misgivings expressed by a lady who had married one of his relatives,1 and who now ventured the opinion that the men of the family were not well adapted for matrimony. This lady was highly esteemed for her intelligence by a large circle of judicious friends; and she should have had abundant opportunity to know concerning that whereof she deponed; but, if her generalization was true, at least Mr. Lee furnished the necessary exception. He was never "rough' "to any woman, least of all towards his wife. Ordinarily his manners to ladies were marked by a fine gallantry, which never failed to charm them, for it was altogether sincere, the natural expression of a very chivalrous sentiment towards the sex; he did not keep it for full-dress occasions, holding another set of manners in reserve for domestic use.

Of this marriage there were born four sons and four daughters. George Lee, Eliot C. Lee, Joseph Lee, and Mrs. Frederick C. (Elizabeth P.) Shattuck, are living.

Of the year of affliction which robbed Colonel Lee of three other children, his niece, Miss Frances R. Morse writes :

"Unusual and heavy sorrows fell upon Colonel Lee in the year 1872. 1872. In the autumn of 1871 he and Mrs. Lee, with their daughter Clara, then twenty-one years old,

1 See post, p. 77.

and two younger daughters, went abroad. Colonel Lee's eldest son was then in Paris, a student in Bonnat's atelier, where they saw him for a time on their way to Italy. They passed the winter in Rome, and there, in February, the little youngest daughter, eight years old, was taken ill with diphtheria, and died. Clara, who had nursed her devotedly, took the disease from her and died a week later. Both are buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

Colonel Lee's son came from Paris and joined his father and mother in Florence, and was with them through the summer in Switzerland, a companionship which brought healing and comfort. "In October he contracted typhoid fever in the Low Countries, and after some weeks of illness in London he died there on November 10th.

"Bereaved of three children, Colonel and Mrs. Lee came home to Brookline in the late autumn of 1872. What they lost in the two elder children, already come to manhood and womanhood, it is better not to try to tell. That in his little youngest daughter Colonel Lee lost a source of soothing, comfort and delight, no one can forget who had seen him come home tired from the day's work in town, take her in his arms, and put his head by hers. Fifteen years after her death the 14th of February is noted in his diary as 'Susie's birthday.' His heart was very tender for others who bore like sorrows.

"Colonel Lee seldom directly referred to the hopes and promise which ended in that sad year. He made no pause in his work, but went steadily on with all that he had undertaken, but when he sometimes spoke of the

way in which a house, built to be a happy home, might become a tomb, one felt how deep was the scar."

During the latter part of this period, Ralph Waldo Emerson with whom Mr. Lee was on terms of warm friendship, together with his son Edward W. Emerson, then a student of medicine, were in Europe, and Dr. Emerson writes:

"When we reached London, we learned that the younger Harry Lee was very sick with typhoid fever. The alarm and distress which this brought to his parents can be imagined, yet day by day I saw Colonel Lee taking his solitary walk with a brave face and that redoubtable military air which he always had. More than that, he called almost daily upon my father, and putting his own suffering out of sight, was friendly, helpful and always entertaining, treating my father with that respectful banter of the man of affairs towards the philosopher which he liked to indulge in, and calling Mr. Emerson to account for his attitude of an admiring listener to the wisdom of others at the meetings of the Overseers of Harvard College, instead of taking an active part in the debate.

"Yet all this time his son was growing sicker and died a few days later."

Many years later a third daughter died.

CHAPTER III

DURING THE CIVIL WAR

THE Cabots had not been a race very strenuous in activities; the Jacksons, more laborious, were a serene and placid family; the Lees, impulsive and energetic, had shown more interest in public affairs, but had the conservatism natural to members of an upper and prosperous class. All had usually been what are called influential citizens, but devoid of political ambition. Only by going back to belligerent, contumacious, independent Mistress Anne Hutchinson can we account for those cells in Colonel Lee's brain which made him a "radical," the word is his own, and perhaps a trifle extravagant, though he justifies its use by saying that he had been promoting the formation of the Free Soil party during four years before it took actual shape, and that he was one of the Vice-Presidents at the first meeting of the party in 1848, at which Governor Andrew served as President." With this political group he stayed until its absorption into the new organization of the Republican party. To his action at this time Colonel Lee repeatedly referred in subsequent years with much satisfaction. Thus, in a speech before a Civil Service Reform Association, he said:

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"You, who have known the Republican party of the last twenty years, can hardly be made to know, much less to feel, how insignificant in numbers and standing seemed the Free Soilers when they seceded from the great Whig party, then panoplied with the respectability, the wealth and talent of New England. Words failed to express, looks or acts to convey, their (the Whigs') contempt, and the Democrats' hatred, of these few, young, obscure appealers to a higher law.

a long contest, beginning openly in 1848, and ended only by the breaking out of the Civil War. . . . The triumph of the Free Soilers, or Republicans, as they were subsequently called, was the slow triumph of progression over retrogression, of resolution over irresolution, of principle over policy, of the higher law over the lower law."

By a natural sequence, when John A. Andrew entered upon the Governorship of Massachusetts, he nominated Henry Lee as one of his staff; the commission bears date January 15, 1861. Hence came the title of Colonel which seemed so appropriate that it ever after remained the familiar prefix to his name. When these aides, usually civilians, are suddenly honored by military titles, it is considered desirable that the choice should fall upon tall, handsome gentlemen, well set up physically, so that they may at least wear the ornate panoply of war with good effect. In these particulars Mr. Lee was well up to the standard. But Governor Andrew sought also other qualities in these decorative personages who were, in his shrewd opinion, likely to be called upon to sustain him in more