Elihu Burritt: A Memorial Volume Containing a Sketch of His Life and Labors, With Selections From His Writings and Lectures, and Extracts From His Private Journals in Europe and America
A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen and Its Neighbourhood
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This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
A Glance at Revolutionized Italy: A Visit to Messina, and a Tour Through the Kingdom of Naples, the Abruzzi, the Marches of Ancona, Rome, the States ... of 1848: A Glance At Revolutionized Italy
Elihu Burritt was an American The Learned Blacksmith, reformer and linguist. He became famous as an advocate, who set forward measures that helped internationalize the 19th-century pacifist movement.
Background
Elihu Burritt was born on December 8, 1810 in New Britain, Connecticut Named after his father, an eccentric shoemaker and farmer, he also derived from him an enthusiasm for impracticable ventures. From his mother, Elizabeth Hinsdale, who bore nine other children, he learned self-denial and whole-hearted devotion to the ideal of service. If, as a child, he tried to persuade her to borrow fewer sermons and more histories from the meager church library, he nevertheless made her deep religious feelings his own.
Education
Neither the district school nor a term at his brother's boarding-school satisfied his appetite for knowledge, and hence Elihu Burritt imagined and solved quaint problems of mental arithmetic and learned Greek verbs while blowing the bellows at the smithy where he was an apprentice.
Career
With scarce a dollar in his pocket Burritt set out from his native village in the year 1837 seeking work and a chance to further his self-education. Worcester, Massachussets, offered both. His attainments in all the European and several Asiatic languages reached the ear of Governor Edward Everett, who referred to them in an address and offered him the advantages of Harvard, which Burritt refused. Although chagrined at such undesired publicity, he did, however, bring himself to accept lecture invitations.
While preparing a lecture on "the anatomy of the earth, " Elihu Burritt was so struck by the unity and interdependency of its parts that he ended by writing a plea for international peace. Into that cause, which had just lost its chief apostle by the death of William Ladd in 1841, Burritt now threw himself heart and soul.
With the help of a business partner he founded at Worcester, in 1844, a weekly newspaper, the Christian Citizen. This truly international pacifist publication dragged Burritt deeply into debt before, in 1851, he was forced to abandon it.
During the Oregon crisis, when Burritt was also editing the Advocate of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, he besieged Congress with peace propaganda and cooperated with Friends in Manchester, England, in a picturesque exchange of "Friendly Addresses" between British and American cities, merchants, ministers, and laborers. According to Burritt eight hundred newspapers printed these "Friendly Addresses".
He himself carried the "Friendly Address" from Edinburgh, with its impressive list of signatures, to Washington, where Calhoun and other senators expressed much interest in this "popular handshaking" across the Atlantic. This cooperation with British friends of peace led Burritt to cross the Atlantic in June 1846, and during that autumn he formed there the League of Universal Brotherhood.
By 1850 this "world peace society" had, through his efforts, twenty thousand British and as many American signatures to its pledge of complete abstinence from all war. It sponsored a "Friendly Address" movement between British and French cities when war seemed imminent in 1852, Burritt personally delivering the friendly interchange of opinion to appropriate municipal officials in France.
He also induced the League to sponsor "The Olive Leaf Mission, " through which peace propaganda was inserted in forty influential Continental newspapers. This work was financed by woman Leaguers whom Burritt organized into sewing circles.
Between 1850 and 1856 he estimated that the Olive Leaves reached monthly one million European readers. Almost single-handed this enthusiast organized in 1848 the Brussels Peace Congress, which inaugurated the series held in the following years at Paris, Frankfort, London, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Burritt's Journals exhibit incredible activity which included traveling widely in Germany to enlist delegates and soliciting and gaining the cooperation of Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and distinguished French economists and philanthropists.
To bring the American peace movement into this truly international peace organization, Burritt in 1850 organized eighteen state peace conventions, with the result that forty Americans attended the Frankfort Congress that year. These peace congresses won increasing attention from the European and British press, and Burritt's name was celebrated in popular periodicals like those of Douglas Jerrold, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Chambers, and ridiculed in Blackwood's and the influential London Times. At each Congress Burritt ably pled for such a Congress and Court of Nations as William Ladd had advocated.
The Crimean War interrupted this European peace work, and Burritt devoted more time to the related scheme of cheap international postage, and to plans for preventing civil war in his own country. Urging by pen and lecture the utilization of the public domain for compensated emancipation, he also organized a convention to stimulate interest in this plan, and during one winter traveled 10, 000 miles from Maine to Iowa in its behalf.
Burritt, who had identified himself with the thoroughgoing anti-war group, opposed the Civil War on pacifist grounds, but he was appointed by Lincoln in 1863 as consular agent at Birmingham. In several volumes he described industrial and rural England with insight, vigor, and charm.
From 1870 until his death in 1879, Elihu Burritt lived in New Britain, devoting himself to the improvement of a few stony acres of land, to writing, and to teaching languages.
Almost uniquely in the America of his generation, Burritt was capable of thinking in international terms. Deprecating sectarianism, he found solace in Quaker meetings and the Anglican ritual as well as in his own Congregationalism.
Views
Burritt was and always had been a staunch abolitionist, who hated slavery as much as he hated war.
Also, his sympathies with free trade and labor were intelligent and realistic. Only two years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto (1848) he was advocating, in Olive Leaves printed in the German press, a strike of the workers of the world against war as the only alternative to a Congress and Court of Nations.
Personality
Overwork undermined the health of this narrow-chested, stout-handed youth, and for his entire life he paid the price in acute suffering. Awkward as he was, and in spite of excessive shyness, his clear blue eyes, his broad, sloping forehead, and his fine mouth compelled sympathy.
Connections
Elihu Burritt never married, but his entire life was rich in friendships.