Historic Boys: Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times

The quiet life of an average American boy would not seem to furnish very much worth the telling. The boy patroon differed little, save in the way of birth and vast estate, from other boys and girls of the eventful age in which he lived; but many instances in his youthful career could safely be recorded. We might tell how he came home from college just as the great war was closing; how he made long trips, on horseback and afoot, over his great estate, acquainting himself with his tenantry and their needs; how, even before he was twenty years old, he followed the custom of his house and married fair Mistress Margery, the "brave girl" of the Schuyler mansion; and how, finally, on the first of November, 1785, all the tenantry of Rensselaerswyck thronged the grounds of the great manor-house, and, with speech and shout and generous barbecue, celebrated his coming of age – the twenty-first birthday of the boy patroon, – now no longer boy or patroon, but a free American citizen in the new Republic of the United States.

His after-life is part of the history of his State and of his country. At an early age he entered public life, and filled many offices of trust and responsibility. An assemblyman, a State Senator, a lieutenant-governor, a member of Congress, a major-general, and the conqueror of Queenstown in Canada in the War of 1812, one of the original projectors of the great Erie Canal, and, noblest of all, the founder and patron of a great school for boys, – the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, – he was, through all, the simple-hearted citizen and the noble-minded man. But no act in all his long life-time of seventy-five years became him better than the spirit in which he accepted the great change that made the great lord patroon of half a million acres the plain, untitled citizen of a free republic.

"Though born to hereditary honors and aristocratic rank," says his biographer, "with the history of the past before him, in possession of an estate which connected him nearly with feudal times and a feudal ancestry, and which constituted him in his boyhood a baronial proprietor, he found himself, at twenty-one, through a forcible and bloody revolution, the mere fee-simple owner of acres, with just such political rights and privileges as belonged to his own freehold tenantry, and no other." And though the Revolution, in giving his country independence, had stripped him of power and personal advantages, he accepted the change without regret, and preferred his position as one in a whole nation of freemen, to that feudal rank which he had inherited from generations of ancestors, as the Boy Patroon, the last Lord of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck.

From the patrician emperor of old Rome to the patrician citizen of modern America these sketches of Historic Boys have extended. They represent but a few from that long list of remarkable boys, who, through the ages, have left their mark upon their times, – lads who, even had they died "in their teens," would still have been worthy of record as "historic boys." The lessons of their lives are manifold. They tell of pride and selfishness, of tyranny and wasted power, of self-reliance and courage, of ambition and self-conquest, of patience and manliness. History is but the record of opportunities for action availed of or neglected. And opportunities are never wanting. They exist to-day in the cities of the New World, even as they did ages ago with young David in the valley of Elah, with the boy Marcus in the forum of Rome, or with the valiant young Harry of Monmouth striving for victory on the bloody field of Shrewsbury.

Whenever or wherever a manly boy says his word for justice and for right, or does his simple duty in a simple, straightforward way, regardless of consequences or of the world's far too-ready sneer or frown, the stamp of the hero may be seen; and however humble his condition or contracted his sphere there is in him the mettle and the possibilities that may make him, even though he know it not, a worthy claimant for an honored place on the world's record of Historic Boys.

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