The incident shows how far education, prosperity, wealth, and forty
years of public life had transformed the father of Miss Sedgwick from
the country boy of a hill-farm in Connecticut. More to our present
purpose, the apologetic way in which Miss Sedgwick speaks of these
high-bred prejudices of her father, shows that she does not share
them. "The Federalists," she says, "stood upright, and their feet
firmly planted on the rock of aristocracy but that rock was bedded in
the sands, or rather was a boulder from the Old World, and the tide of
democracy was surely and swiftly undermining it."

When this was written, Miss Sedgwick had made the discovery that,
while the Federalists had the better "education, intellectual and
moral," the "democrats had among them much native sagacity" and an
earnest "determination to work out the theories of the government."
She is writing to her niece: "All this my dear Alice, as you may
suppose, is an after-thought. Then I entered fully, and with the faith
and ignorance of childhood, into the prejudices of the time." Those
prejudices must have been far behind her when her first story was
written, "A New England Tale," in which it happens, inadvertently we
may believe, all the worst knaves are blue-blooded and at least most
of the decent persons are poor and humble. Later we shall see her
slumming in New York like a Sister of Charity, 'saving those that are
lost,' a field of labor toward which her Federalist education scarcely
led.

She could have learned some condescension and humanity from her mother
who, in spite of her fine birth, seems to have been modest and
retiring to a degree. She was very reluctant to have her husband
embark upon a public career; had, her daughter says, "No sympathy with
what is called honor and distinction"; and wrote her husband a letter
of protest which is worth quoting if only to show how a well-trained
wife would write her doting husband something more than a century ago:
"Pardon me, my dearest Mr. Sedgwick, if I beg you once more to think
over the matter before you embark in public business. I grant that the
'call of our country,' the 'voice of fame,' and the 'Honorable' and
'Right-Honorable,' are high sounding words. 'They play around the
head, but they come not near the heart.'" However, if he decides for a
public career, she will submit: "Submission is my duty, and however
hard, I will try to practice what reason teaches me I am under
obligation to do." Th