Daniel Webster and the Big Noses
Famed Statesman Always Remembered Rollins Family Noses
Jul 26, 2008
“A family by the name of Rollins lived in the vicinity, not otherwise remarkable...than for the large and somewhat peculiar shape of their noses,” Webster is quoted as saying in Social Hours of Daniel Webster, by Charles Lanman (Harper's Monthly, September, 1856).
Noses with Altitude
“It was not merely that they were long, or rose high from the face, but they described from where they joined the forehead to their termination over the mouth, a parabola. Other men have had eminent noses, but this family had them peculiar to themselves. There were some five or six brothers, with noses describing almost the same curve, and rejoicing in the same altitude,” said the man who became a famous orator.
The Rollins men entered the courtroom as observers one by one until their noses formed a line.
Attorney General Atkinson was addressing the jury thus when the second Rollins appeared: “I know the danger of confounding physical and moral deformity, and I will not ask you to condemn this man because of his countenance; still you cannot look at him, gentlemen, without an impression of his guilt. "
When the fourth Rollins joined his brothers, Mr. Mann, sitting beside Webster, exclaimed: "What! Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?"
Couldn't Repress Laughter
“This was past human endurance,” Webster said. “In vain Mann and myself stuffed our handkerchiefs in our mouths; in vain bit our lips until the blood flowed freely; the very efforts we made to repress our desire to laugh excited it and, carried away in spite of ourselves, we fairly gave way to an unseasonable mirth,” Webster said in an account reprinted in John Rodman Rollins’ 1874 book, Records of Families of the Name Rawlins or Rollins in the United States.
Webster continued: “I laugh to this day when I recall that scene: those four noses overlapping each other like horses on a stretch, one just advanced ahead of the other, and so different from the noses we meet in our usual experience; the perplexed countenance of Atkinson, the grave surprise of the court, and the wondering stare of the crowd.
Noses by Battalions
“One such nose might have been tolerated, but when they come in battalions, they carry everything before them. My client was fortunately acquitted—partly, perhaps, owing to the sympathetic inclination of the juries (sic) toward the predominant feeling of the crowd, who, on this occasion, suspected something ludicrous had occurred, and though ignorant as to what it was, laughed on trust,” Webster concluded.
Miriam Belanger, a genealogist descended from Daniel and Sarah (Rollins) Mann, heard passed-down family tales about Webster and the Rollins noses. When interviewed in 1976, Miriam still had the chair Websteroften sat in when stopping with the Manns enroute from Boston to his home in Franklin, NH. (There’s Humor on Family, by Dana Davis, Clearwater (FL) Sun Oct. 24, 1976.)
Grandmother Didn't Like Webster
Webster was liked by all her Mann ancestors but one. “My grandmother thought he was awful…Mr. Webster was quite a ladies’ man, and my grandmother was beautiful and a young bride ...He would wink at her or carry on some flirtation across the room and she decided he wasn’t a very nice man at all,” Miriam said of the man who became a U. S. Senator and Secretary of State.
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