Samuel Phillips Newman is my third great uncle and the eldest of the Rev. Mark Newmanâs seven children. The latter Newman was my paternal grandmotherâs second great grandfather, and I was given his name.
This story begins with the Newman familyâs connection to Phillips-Andover Academy of which the Rev. Mark Newman was the third principal. As a student at the recently established Phillips-Exeter Academy (Andoverâs fraternal rival), he had found favor with the founder Dr. John Phillips, whose family was of the Boston Brahmin class. The Rev. Mark married Sarah Phillips in 1795. After fourteen years as the Andover academy principal, he became the Board of Trustees president for the establishment of the Abbot Female Academy in Andover, and he donated the land for its first building. The Rev. Mark was a deacon licensed to preach at the South Congregational Church in Andover, a church that his own ancestors had helped found. There would be several Newman Congregational ministers in his descendent lineage of which two were women. The Rev. Markâs niece Emma E. Newman (d. 1922) was a pioneer for having women in the pulpit and began her preaching career on the horseback circuit in Big Woods, Illinois, and my great aunt Harriet Maude Newman pastored several churches over her lifetime (d. 1997). In 1809, the Rev. Mark founded a publishing company in the Andover Theological Seminary building, which became a well-known and successful publishing concern that printed theological commentaries, sermons, and the textbooks for the Phillipsâ, Punchard Free School, and Abbot Academy students. His presses were also among the vanguard to publish theological works in Greek, Hebrew, and in several Asian languages. The Andover Bookstore, as it is known today, remains the oldest commercial concern in Andover.
Samuel, the subject of this scholarly edition, shared his fatherâs academic acumen. Phillips Academy Andover had well prepared him for Harvard College from which he graduated with honors. He also studied theology at Andover and became a licensed preacher. The majority of his unfortunately short careerâhe died at age 44âwas spent at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine wherein the main story of this book took place. There, he taught the Latin and Greek languages and literature, served as the president for two years, and became the first professor of rhetoric and oratory. His brother Mark H. Newman (Emily Dickinsonâs uncle by way of his marriage to her fatherâs sister), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were classmates (1825) and Samuelâs students. Samuel spent the last few years of his life as principal to an innovative state normal school for girls in Barre, Massachusetts, founded by Horace Mann. He was a well-respected man of known integrity who served as executor of the estate of William E. Weld, another family of the Boston Brahmin class.
Here is where the story becomes personal to me. My great uncle Winthrop Randall Newman (b. 1905) was the family historian and passed on the Newman family lore; he also did genealogical research for others in town. His comfort space was poring over thick humic volumes in small Massachusettsâ town archives. Winthrop was nicknamed âWinkyâ by his mother because as a child he was âquick as a wink.â Winky was our beloved bachelor uncle, and he lived alone in the familyâs 121 Elm Street, coal-heated house where the only modernization since the 1880s had been running cold water and a single bathroom. Beginning in his 20s, Winky was stricken with degenerative arthritis, of which he never complained but that slowed him considerably. Somehow, he always managed to dress in his same suit, tie, and sweater vest. In the winter, he used two canes to scale the outside narrow icy steps to shovel the heating coal, making a little pocket of warmth within those torturously interminable New England winters.
Winkyâs maternal grandfather had built the family home, and it was here that he and his siblings were born and raised. In this Elm Street house in January 1932, his younger sister Dorothyâmy paternal grandmotherâgave birth to her stillborn son George. She ignored her doctorâs warnings and became pregnant again in March. On December 4, 1932, Dorothy gave birth to my father George Newman Peters and died seven hours later from postpartum hemorrhaging. Time never eroded the poignancy of her death. When she was mentioned, it was in half sentences with moist eyes. Iâve only seen a couple photographs of her from when she was a child, but thankfully I was told once that when she was around children or even if she talked about children, she was âlike an angel,â and so I have a sense of her spirit. As customary at the time, the family placed her coffin under the big window in the front parlor for visitation, and my fatherâs bassinet remained in a back room closer to the floorâs heating grate over the dirt cellarâs wood-coal fire. As a child, when I would play on the parlor floor with my fatherâs toys, I would think of him at my age playing alone in this same place.
Winky lived at 121 Elm Street until his death at 82 years. Among my memories of that house, the one most immediate is the parlor piano, then unplayed for decades; and once after striking a yellowed ivory key, I listened as its doleful fading tone brought to mind my ancestors present and alive. That memory affords me the opportunity to acknowledge my gratitude for Winky having bequeathed his love of the history of our ancestral family to me.
On Thanksgiving of 1976, I was 17 when I signed as a witness to Winkyâs holographic will. His instructions were to donate all items in the house that had historic value to the Andover Historical Society. Unfortunately, upon his passing, the will was determined to be invalid, and in probate my great aunt Harriet wanted everything to be sold and so be done with the house. Antique dealers and family members descended, and more than a centuryâs worth of accumulated family artifacts found different homes. Among these were several thousand photographic negatives on glass plates that my great-grandfather Charles Henry Newmanâa prolific and well-known photographerâhad developed over his fifty-five-year career. Charles was Samuelâs great-grandnephew. These plates, along with all of the historically significant items such as prototype cameras sent to him by George Eastman Kodak, were bought by one dealer. Eleven years after Winkyâs passing, this entire collection was serendipitously found and then purchased by a board member of the Andover Historical Society. This purchase created a bizarre six-degrees-of-separation story whereby, in the end, everything was rescued from an antique auction in Maine and disposed of exactly according to Winkyâs will. It is easy to attach intentionality to that outcome!
Upon our fatherâs death in 2005, my brother gave me a fragile 1839, 7th edition of A Practical System of Rhetoric. Before that day, I was somehow ignorant of Samuel, our common uncle. In first holding that book, I experienced a weighty sense of frailty. I reflected on the delicate contingency of life, and yet here was the organized thought of a direct-lineage family uncle. As it has happened, I am learning that this good uncle has much to teach me. As a student of philosophy, I recognized that Samuel approached the teaching of rhetoric by looking for the most fundamental irreducible principles and then for ways to communicate these principles to his students and to their teachers. This work makes him more of a meta-rhetoric thinker. The dialogue in which he engaged is, indeed, consequential dialogue.
Happy providence has once again come to the Newman family. An internet search conducted at a random moment connected me with Dr. Beth Hewett, a rhetorical historian who has studied my uncle Samuelâs work deeply. Hewettâs insights into rhetoric show clarity and passion as she presents analysis and arguments for Samuelâs proper place among the nineteenth-century rhetoric figures and their schools of thought. Hewett claims that Newmanâs focus on devising a practical method for educating college students should appropriately elevate his status as a significant nineteenth-century rhetoric figure. He must, Hewett argues, be placed within the proper frame of this conversation, and she clearly prescribes a way to engage his critics. To borrow Samuelâs words from his address to the Benevolent Society of Bowdoin College in 1826, âAnd had the injustice of contemporaries denied this praise, the record of what they said and did is with us their posterity.â That night during this address, Samuel was talking about American colonial revolutionary ancestors and heroes, but I offer these words back to him in peace. With this scholarly edition of A Practical System of Rhetoric, Samuel P. Newmanâs work is returned to a sense of the approbation he justly received during his lifetime.
Mark R. Peters