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Perhaps nowhere else in the U.S. are the makings of this latest war shaped so fully within sight of a past American battleground. No tourist may now climb to the top of Bunker Hill's grey shaft: he might see too much going on in the Charlestown Navy Yard below. Once it required a poet's fancy to make the shots at Concord's rude bridge heard round the world. Now, ten miles away, ammunition is being fashioned that will literally be heard the world around.
This grafting of the present on the past is most aptly symbolized by the life & times of one of New England's first citizens, Leverett Saltonstall. By face, family and fortune, he is a symbol of New England's yesterday. As three-time governor of New England's largest state, he is a prime symbol of New England's today.
Laden Family Tree. To those who sneer at First Families—a group that includes most of Lev's well-trounced political opponents—a Saltonstall is open game. The family tree is conspicuously laden with riches and dignity. Saltonstalls have been as prominent as their long noses and lantern jaws, as far back as their carefully kept genealogies go—21 generations back, to Thomas de Saltonstall in 1343 in Yorkshire, England.
The first Saltonstall to reach the New World came here with an economic head start, and the family has never lost that advantage. The first American Saltonstall, Sir Richard, arrived with John Winthrop in 1630, and founded the Boston suburb of Watertown. He stayed in the New World only a year, just long enough to remember the infant Harvard College in his will. But his son got elected to the Massachusetts legislature and fathered the family's first Harvard graduate, class of 1659. (This Harvard man, Nathaniel Saltonstall, was later a judge, and with enough of the family astuteness to dodge the job of presiding over the Salem witchcraft trials.)
The Governor's one direct Saltonstall ancestor in the Revolutionary War did no fighting, but at least he favored the American side. Most of his contemporary kin were Tories.
The Revolutionary record is more aggressive in the other half of the Saltonstall line. Four Brookses (his mother's kin) fought at Lexington Green. Old Abigail Brooks served hot chocolate to the minutemen coming home from the Revolution's first engagement. A Brooks was a general at Valley Forge, and later governor of Massachusetts.* Other Brookses spilled their blue blood against the British at Lake Erie, and against the Seminoles in Florida. But the Saltonstalls fought in 1812 and 1861; one was cited for gallantry in the Civil War, as commander of an unseaworthy ferryboat converted into a gunboat.