Author: Sargent, Lucius Manlius
Biography:
SARGENT, Lucius Manlius (1786-1867: WBIS)
The youngest of seven children of a prosperous Boston merchant, Daniel Sargent, and his wife Mary Turner, he attended Phillips Exeter and Harvard--which he left without a degree after a campaign against the administration over the college food. (As author and publisher "Van Tromp" he published two numbers of a projected monthly pamphlet Of the New-Milk Cheese. Harvard conferred an honorary AB in 1842.) He then studied law and was called to the bar in 1811, but having no financial motive to practice, he turned instead to literature and to further campaigns. Besides the verse included here, he contributed occasional odes and discourses for special occasions, wrote regularly for the newspapers, and in the 1830s published a successful series of Temperance Tales in prose. As "Sigma," he published weekly essays in the Boston Evening Transcript from 1847 to 1856, afterwards collected as Dealings with the Dead (1856). He seems to have been tenacious in a cause: DAB describes his typical approach as aiming "towards blasting something offensive to him out of the water," though he was in real life generally a kindly and gentle man. He married Mary Binney in 1816 and had three children with her, one of whom died in infancy. After she died in 1824, he married Sarah Cutler Dunn in 1825 and had one more child. Only one of the grown children, however, survived him. He died after a short illness in Boston and is buried in Mount Auburn cemetery. (ancestry.com 29 Aug. 2020; DAB; Appleton; John H. Sheppard, Reminiscences of Lucius Manlius Sargent [1871])
Other Names:
- Lucius M. Sargent