Qass. -£d_3ii__ Book-, ofel Book-^-Oiid t./y/4^ j^lr SKETCHES MEN OF PEOGEESS. JAMES PAKTON. BAYARD TAYLOR. HON. AMOS KENDALL, REV. E. D. MAYO. J. ALEXANDER PATTEN. AMD OTHER WRITERS. EMBELLISHED WITH HANDSOME STEEL PORTEATTS IJv ItlTCHIE, FERINE, and HALL, \o species iif willing nens more worthy of cnltlTsUon than blograpliy -Zo/i; /.(.■»» NEW YORK AND HARTFORD PUBLISHING COMPANY. GREER & COMPANY, CINOINNATL 1870-18^. CONTENTS. VOLIO Chapin, Edwin Hubbell 1 Bryant, William Cullen 7 Hoffman, John T 13 Field, David Dudley 23 McCormick, Cyrus Hall 31 Grow, Galusha A 61 Morgan, Edwiu D. 69 Childs, G. W." 75 Gerard, James W 91 ^ Webb, W. H ,i 103 Pierrepoiit, Edwards 113 Smith, K, Delafield 117 Drew, Daniel 143 Johnston, John Taylor 155 English, James E 163 Kelley, William D 171 Tildon, Samuel J. ., 181 Gough, John B 191 t/^ Garrison, C. K. . . . .^ 195 Willmarth, Arthur F 203 Vaiiderbilt, William H 209 Barnes, Alfred S 213 Weed, Thurlow 221 Leland, Stanford 227 Durant, Thos. C 245 Scott, Thomas A 253 Boker, George H 237 Clews, Henry. 267 Allison, W. C 275 Hepworth, Rev. G. H 279 Gould, Jay 287 Holland, Josiah G 301 Burchard, Rev. S. D 307 Newberry, J. S 313 Peak, William 1 321 Vanderpoel, Jacob 325 Pomeroy, S. C 327 Pratt, Zadock 337 Griswold, John A 343 Webb, James Watson . . V. 349 Roosevelt, James 1 405 Rement, William B 41 1 u Morgan, Charles x 419 IK>LIO Phillips, Philip 425 Hooker, Joseph 433 Taylor, James B 439 Baird, Matthew 441 Clay, Cassius Marcellus 447 Hatch, Rufus 453 Wilson, Henry 457 Saxe, John G 465 Cas.s, Gen. George W 469 Singerly, Joseph 475 Heintzelman, S. P 481 Spencer, James C 489 Stranahan, J. S. T 493 Parnum, Henry 501 Corning, Erasttis 509 De Peyster, John W 617 Hulburd, Calvin T 527 Hastings, S. Cliiiton 533 Seymour, S 541 Van Anderi, Isaac 555 Kimball, H. 1 565 Bullock, Rufus B 509 Quintard, George W. . .% 573 Talmage, Rev. T. De Witt 577 Beckwith, N. M 583 Dillon, Sidney 587 Lawrence, Wm. B., LL. D 595 Lawrence, Albert G 611 Selftver, A. A 617 Hulburd, Hiland R 623 Vanderpoel, Aaron J 631 Hazard, Augustus G 635 Blaine, James G 647 Palmer, Oliver H 657 Lefferts, Marshall 661 Barnes, Demas 669 Plimpton, James L 675 De Graaf, Henry P 683 Divine, William 687 Hoadley, David 697 Bradford, George P 691 Smith, John Gregory 701 Smith. M. C 70T ^. '^ c^A-f^/L^. EDWII^ HUBBELL OHAPIK BY DR. MAYO. DWIN HUBBELL CHAPIK was bom in Union Village, Washington County, K Y., December 29, 1814. The county of Washington might be selected as a model county to illustrate the working of republican institii.tions in the Uiiitcns to their ranks, at such a juncture, did not promise to promote harmony. But tlie convention at Albany was a very larg-e one, and it soon became apparent that, if a proper nomination were made for Governor, a vigorous campaign could be prosecuted with a reasonable hope of success. Under these circumstances, an unusual number of distinguished names were canvassed by the delegates. Sanford E. Church, Henry C. Murphy, William F. Allen, John T. Hoffman, Henry W. Slocum, John A. Dix, William Kelly, and others, were mentioned as avail- able candidates. After a fair interchange of opinion it was found that a majority of the convention favored the choice of Mayor Hoffman, and on the second day he was nominated by acclama- tion, amidst the wildest enthusiasm. The convention then ad- journed until afternoon, and on reassembling it was addressed by the candidate himself, who had been telegraphed for. His manly 8]3eech on that occasion made a lasting impression on the minds of the delegates, many of whom saw him then for the first time. After his nomination, Mayor Hoffman canvassed the State, speaking at Elmira, Syracuse, Pochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, Brooklyn, JSTew York, and other places. His earnest and con- vincing arguments were well received by the masses of the people everywhere. But frequent defeat had engendered amongst the Democrats a want of confidence in their ability to succeed, and the ill-timed tour of Johnson and Grant united the columns of the opposition, while it injured rather than benefited the party whoso interests the President sought to subserve. But, notwithstanding 2 IT G JOHN T. HOFFMAN. these disheartening circumstances, the election returns showed a decided gain in the Democratic vote over the preceding year. After the election, the Democrats awoke to the knowledge of the fact that, had thej made more eflbrt, they might have overcome the small majority by which Governor Fenton was re-elected. The lesson came late, but it was not altogether lost, as the next year's contest showed. In the fall of 186Y, Mayor Hoffman was chosen temporary Chairman of the Democratic State Convention, and delivered a speech on that occasion in which he enumerated with admirable succinctness the governing principles of the party, and defined its attitude in relation to current questions with remarkable clearness. The ticket nominated by this Convention, headed by the Hon, Homer A. Nelson for Secretary of State, was successful at the en- suing election, its candidates being chosen by an average majority of over 47,000. Mr. Hoffman's first term as Mayor was then drawing to a close. The popularity which he had gained in the discharge of his duties made his renomination a foregone conclusion. The Tammany Convention met on the Saturday evening succeeding the State election. A great concourse of people gathered around the hall and when it was announced that Hoffman had been nominated without a dissenting voice, the air rang with the cheers of the sat- isfied populace. In this canvass, Mayor Hoffman had two com- petitors, Fernando Wood, Mozart Democrat, and William A. Darling, Eepublican. The result of the election was significant. Hoffman carried every ward in the city. His vote w\as the largest ever given to any candidate in New York. His majority over both his competitors was nearly equal to the total vote of either. With this unmistakable indorsement he entered upon his second term as Mayor, on the first ot January, 1S68. His third annual message as Mayor contained a reiteration of his views on the question of city government ; which views were sim- ply the old theory of Jefferson, tha,t in local affairs the local 18 JOHN T. HOFFMAN. 7 authorities should rule. Simple and sensible as this doctrine ap- pears, its enunciation gained the Mayor some vigorous abuse from his political opponents. But in despite of this, his popularity had grown so great that, when the National Democratic Convention met at New York in July, Mayor Hoffman's name was suggested by many of the Western delegates in connection with the Vice-Presidency. But he neither sought nor desired this honor, and the nomination of Gov- ernor Seymour for President placed it out of the power of the Convention to urge it upon him. On the 13th of August, 1868, the State Committee, together with many prominent Democrats, met in Utica, for consultation. This meeting developed the fact that Mayor Hoffman would again be the Democratic candidate for Governor. The canvass of 1866 had brought him in contact with the people who, everywhere, felt that he had earned this honor, by the earnest and effective service he performed in that disastrous year. "When the convention met in September the name of Senator Murphy, who was Mayor Hoffman's chief competitor, was with- drawn and John T. Hoffman was, for a second time, nominated by acclamation, for Governor of the State of New York. The Republicans had previously placed in nomination John A. Griswold, of Rensselaer. He was heralded as the builder of the first "Monitor," and this service, togetlier with his record in Congress, was dwelt upon until considerable enthusiasm was aroused among the people in his behalf. Both the candidates were young men, and the personal qualifi- cations of each were admitted by all ; but the canvass was one of peculiar bitterness. Victory seemed within the grasp of either party, and the pendency of the Presidential campaign roused par- tisans to extraordinary efforts and lent additional interest to the gubernatorial contest. Mayor Hoffman canvassed the State in person and addressed the electors at many of the principal towns. His presence inspired 19 S JOHN T. HOFFMAN. confidence among bis supporters, and his speeches, although they evoked sharp criticism from Republican sources, cemented the elements of bis strength. At the election which occurred on the 2d of N'ovember, 1868, he was chosen Governor by a majority of 27,946. But opposition to Governor Hoffman did not cease with the closing of the polls. The cry of " fraud " was set up and persisted in by those whose candidates had met defeat. This cry is no new catch-word for politicians of either party ; but the vigor with which it was pressed in this particular instance made it somewhat effective in producing a feeling of popular prejudice against Governor Hoffman. How quickly this feeling was dissipated, after the Governor had taken his seat, is a matter of common knowledge. His bitterest enemies became his eulogists ; Republican newspapers commended his course, and an opposition Legislature indorsed, almost without a dissenting voice, every veto message which he submitted, to their consideration. These vetoes were numerous and were aimed chiefly at the evil system of special legislation which cumbers our statute- books with iimumerable unnecessary laws that seldom prove bene- ficial except to individuals whose personal schemes are accomplished at the cost of the tax-payers. In personal appearance Governor Hofi'man is above the medium height and has a strong well-knit frame. His weight is, perhaps, a hundred and seventy j)ounds. His hair is dark and abundant ; his forehead is broad and particularly developed in what phrenolo- gists call the perceptive faculties ; his eyes are of a deep brown color; his nose is large; his chin prominent, and his mouth shapely and indicative of firmness. He wears a full mustache but no beard. As a speaker he is plain, clear, and straightforward in manner as well as in matter. His voice is full, round and sonorous, l>ut he practices few of the tricks of the orator and seldom embel- lishes his speeches with rhetorical flourishes. As a writer he is argumentative rather than imaginative, and his style is too analyt- ical to be florid. He possesses, however, a certain happy power of 20 JOHN T. HOFFMAN 9 poetical description, which he displayed to good advaatage in the Agricultural Address delivered by him before the Ulster County Fair, last September. * In his intercourse with liis fellow-men Governor Hoffman is frank and genial ; he has nothing of the demagogue's overbearing pom- posity, and he is free from the sycophant's affectation of cordiality. He makes no promises which he does not keep ; he holds out no false hopes to applicants for his favor ; he is loyal to truth, and he cherishes his personal integrity as something more valuable than any political power. Note. — Since the sketch of Governor Hoffman was written, he lias been re-elected Governor of New York by 33,066 majority. His public career has been one of signal triumph ; commencing at the bottom round of the political ladder, he has ascended step by step to the gubernatorial chair of the Empire State, and is now the prominent leader, and, to all appearances, the coming man of the Democracy in the next Presidential contest 21 ^ !!^-^?^^£:^^^ -^^feg^r^^ic^ DAYID DUDLEY FIELD. AVID DUDLEY FIELD was born, February 13, 1805, at Haddam, Connecticnt, where his father, the Eev. David D. Field, was the Congregational minister. Instructed first in the common school of the district, he was at ten years of age transferred to his father's study, and there taught Latin, Greek, and Alo-ebra. When he was fourteen his father removed to Stock- bridge, Massachusetts, to become pastor of the church there. Here the son pursued his studies under the care of the Rev. Jared Curtis, then preceptor of the Stockbridge Academy, except that for one summer lie attended Mr. Gleason's Academy at Lenox. In the fall of 1821, he entered Williams College. On leaving college he began the study of law in the ofiice of Harmanus Bleecker, at Albany, and, after a few months witli him, went to the city of New York, where he continued his studies in the office of Henry and Robert Sedgwick. He was admitted first as attorney and solicitor, in February, 1828, and a year or two after as counselor at law. Henry Sedgwick, in the mean time, having died, Mr. Field, on his admission as attorney, became the partner of Robert Sedgwick, and continued so until 1835. In May, 1836, he went to Europe, and for upward of a year traveled in various countries, returning to New York in July, 1837. From that time to the present, he has been constantly at work as an advocate, writer, and citizen. His practice ascounsel in the different courts has been very large. Among the celebrated cases in which he has been engaged, are those which grew out of the controverciy respecting a railway on Broadway from 1852 to 1863; the Metropolitan Police controversy from 1857 to 1863; the Street 23 2 DAVID DUDLEY FIELD. Comviiissioner controversy from 1857 to 185S ; the Milligan case in 1867, respecting the constitutionality of military commissions for tlie trial of civilians; the Cummings case, respecting the constitu- tionality of test oatlis; the McArdle case in 1868,' respecting the constitutionality of the Reconstruction acts; the Erie Railway cases from 1868 to 1870; and the Albany and Susquehanna case from 1869 to 1870. His career as a law-reformer began in 1839, by the publication of " A Letter to Gulian C. Verplanck, on the Reform of the Judicial System of New York." The following imperfect list of his pub- lished writings and speeches will show the variety and extent of his labors. Beginning with the letter to Mr. Yerplanck, in 1839, we have, in 1839 and 1840, "Sketches over the Sea," Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, published in the DemocratiG Review. In 1851, he pub- lished an article in the New Yorlc Review on the writings of AVil- liara Leggett. In 1842., he wrote a letter to John L. O'Sullivan, member of Assembly, on Law Reform, accompanied by drafts of bills, which were printed by the Legislature. In 1852-3-4-5, he wrote articles for the Deonooratic Review^ on " The Rhode Island Question," "American Names," "Cost Johnson's Forlorn Hope," " Duer on Insurance," " Study and Practice of the Law," " Law of Progress of the Race," "Journey of a Day," "The Oregon Question," "British Re^news on Oregon," and two poems, " King of Men," and " Greylock," In 1846 he published a pamphlet on the " Reorganization of the Judiciary ; " in 1847, one upon the question " What shall be done with the Practice of the Courts," and " Some Suggestions respecting the Rules to be estab- lished by the Supreme Court." From 1847 to 1865 he was en- gaged in the work of codification for the State of New York, the result of which is contained in nine volumes, the 1st, being the " Code of Civil Procedure;" the 2d, the "Code of Criminal Pro- cedure ; " the 3d, the " Political Code ; " the 4th, the " Penal Code ; " the 5th, the " Civil Code ; " the 6th, the " Book of Forms ; " the 7th, 8th, and 9th, containing the successive drafts of these codes, and 24* DAVID DUDLEY FIELD, 3 ten different reports. These were accompanied by six auxiliary tracts: JN'o. 1, on " The Administration of the Code ; " No. 2, " Evi- dence on the Operation of the Code ; " No. 3, " Codification of the Common Law ; " No. 4, " Competency of Parties as Witnesses for Themselves ; " No. 5, A Short Manual of Pleading under the Code," and No. 6, "The Completion of the Code." His public addresses began with an address at Tammany Hall, in 1842, on the nomination of Robert H. Morris for mayor. Next came a speech at the Broadway Tabernacle, in 1844, on the An- nexation of Texas. This was followed by the famous " Secret Circular," and the ''Joint Letter," which it preceded. Li 1847, he attended the River and Harbor Convention at Chicago, and made a speech in favor of a strict construction of the Constitution in that respect. The same year he was chosen delegate to the Syracuse Convention, where the Democratic party was split into two over the question of slavery extension, and on that occasion he introduced the famous resolution, long afterward known as the " Corner-Stone," which was for years displayed at the head of the leading columns of the Albany Atlas, as the last and rallying cry of the Free Democracy. It was in these words : — " Resolved, That while the Democracy of Now York, represented in this convention, will faithfully adhere to all the compromises of the Constitution, and maintain all the reserved rights of the States, they declare, since tlie crisis has arrived wiien tliat ques- tion must be met, their uncompromising hostility to the extension of slavery into terri- tory now free, or which may be hereafter acquired' by any action of the government of the United States," About the same time he made a speech at the demonstration in New York for Italy and the reforms of Pius the Ninth. In 1848, he wrote the address for the mass meeting of New York Democrats to hear the report of the delegates to Baltimore, and afterward acted in support of Mr. Yan Buren's nomination to the Presidency. He spoke at the Park meeting, New York, and at meetings in Stockbridge and Springfield, Massachusetts, in Faneuil Hall, Boston, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Bangor, Maine, and 3 25 4 DAVID DUDLEY FIELD. he wrote the address of the Democratic-Republican Committee to the electors of the State. In 1852, he made an argument before a committee of the New York Common Council, on the proposed Broadway Railway, and in the winter of 1853, before a committee of the Legislature. Then followed in 1851, a speech at the Broad- way Tabernacle, in favor of religious liberty for Americans abroad ; in 1855, a speech as chairman of a dinner to J. Hosford Smith, United States Consul at Beyrout; in 1856, speeches in support of Fremont, at Philadelphia, at Poughkeepsie, at Troy, and at Stuy- vesant Institute, New York ; an address at the Albany Law School on Law Reform ; the address and resolutions of a mass meeting at Syracuse ; and the address of the State Committee. We can only give the subjects and times of the subsequent speeches and addresses : In 1857, at the meeting in Bleecker- Buildings, New York, to ratify the Republican State nominations ; in the New York Common Pleas, upon a trial against the CJiurch- man for libel ; in the New York Supreme Court, upon the constitu- tionality of the new Police Act ; and the address of the State convention. — In 1858, at the demonstration in New York, for the Atlantic Telegraph; and the address of the Democratic State con- vention. — In 1859, on the opening of the Law School at Chicago; before the joint committee of the two houses of the Legislature on the Parallel Railway; at the mass meeting in Wall Street in favor of Mr. Ilavermeyer's election to the mayoralty; and on the death of Theodore Sedgwick. — In 1860, at Philadelphia, on the danger of throwing the election of President into Congress ; at the Repub- lican festival in the Eighteenth Ward of New York, February 22d ; and at the New England dinner. — In 1861, at the Peace Conference in Washington ; at Union Square, New York, on the ujirising of the people; at the meeting of ladies in the Cooper Institute; at the Opdyke ratification meeting; and the address to the Twentieth Massachusetts Regiment passing through New York. — In 1862, address of the loyal citizens of New York, at the Union Square meeting; and speeches at the ratification meeting in the Eighteenth 26 DAVID DUDLEY FIELD. 5 Ward, and at Owego, Elmira, Geneva, Norwich, Oswego, and Greene, in support of General Wadsworth's nomination as gover- nor. — In 18G3, at the mass meeting in the Cooper Institute; at the complimentary dinner to Governor Morton, of Indiana ; at the meeting on the anniversary of the fall of Sumter ; at the mass meeting in Madison Square ; at Wilmington, Delaware ; and at the banquet to the officers of the Russian fleet. — In 1864, at the dinner to Mr. Romero, Mexican minister; at the meeting of the mer- chants and bankers held at the Exchange before the election ; at the celebration in Cooper Institute of Mr. Lincoln's re-election ; at the banquet in the Metropolitan Hotel for the same purpose ; and upon the occasion of the death of William Curtis Noyes. — In 1865, in the Weed libel suit ; on the conclusion of the war ; and on the death of Mr. Lincoln. — In 1866, at the meeting in support of President Jolmson's veto message; on the constitutionality of mili- tary commissions, in the Milligan case ; on the constitutionality of test oaths, in the Cummings case; and in the autumn of the same year an address before the British Social Science Association at Manchester, England, on an " International Code ; " and an address before the Law Amendment Society, London, on the " New York Code." In 1867, he published " Suggestions respecting the Revision of the Constitution of New York ; " and again attended the meetings of the Social Science Association, at Belfast, Ireland, and made an address on the " Community of Nations." — In January, 1868, he presided at the Free-trade banquet in honor of Mr. William Cullen Bryant upon his return from abroad, and made the address of welcome. The same month he made an argument in the Supreme Court of the United States, on the constitutionality of the Reconstruction acts, in the McArdle case. In May follow- ing, he spoke at the banquet given to the Chinese Embassy, at the head of which was Mr. Burlingame ; on the 28th of July, he de- livered the address at the unveiling of the monument erected at Williams College to the graduates and undergraduates who fell 27 4: DAVID DUDLEY FIELD. he wrote the address of the Democratic-Republican Committee to the electors of the State. In 1852, he made an argument before a committee of the New York Common Council, on the proposed Broadway Railway, and in the winter of 1853, before a committee of the Legislature. Then followed in 1854, a speech at the Broad- way Tabernacle, in favor of religious liberty for Americans abroad ; in 1855, a speech as chairman of a dinner to J. Hosford Smith, United States Consul at Beyrout; in 1856, speeches in support of Fremont, at Philadelphia, at Poughkeepsie, at Troy, and at Stuy- vesant Institute, New York ; an address at the Albany Law School on Law Reform ; the address and resolutions of a mass meeting at Syracuse ; and the address of the State Committee. "We can only give the subjects and times of the subsequent speeches and addresses : In 1857, at the meeting in Bleecker- Buildings, New York, to ratify the Republican State nominations ; in the New York Common Pleas, upon a trial against the Church- man for libel ; in the New York Supreme Court, upon the constitu- tionality of the new Police Act ; and the address of the State convention. — In 1858, at the demonstration in New York, for the Atlantic Telegraph; and the address of the Democratic State con- vention. — In 1859, on the opening of the Law School at Chicago; before the joint committee of the two houses of the Legislature on the Parallel Railway ; at the mass meeting in Wall Street in favor of Mr. Ilavermeyer's election to the mayoralty; and on the deatli of Theodore Sedgwick. — In 1860, at Philadelphia, on the danger of throwing the election of President into Congress ; at the Repub- lican festival in the Eighteenth Ward of New York, February 22d ; and at the New England dinner. — In 1861, at the Peace Conference in Washington ; at Union Square, New York, on the uprising of the people; at the meeting of ladies in the Cooper Institute; at the Opdyke ratification meeting; and the address to the Twentieth Massachusetts Regiment passing through New York.— In 1862, address of the loyal citizens of New York, at the Union Square meeting ; and speeches at the ratification meeting in the Eighteenth 26 DAVID DUDLEY FIELD. 5 Ward, and at Owego, Elmira, Geneva, Norwich, Oswego, and Greene, in support of General Wadsworth's nomination as gover- nor.— r-In 1863, at the mass meeting in the Cooper Institute ; at the complimentary dinner to Governor Morton, of Indiana; at the meeting on the anniversary of the fall of Sumter ; at the mass meeting in Madison Square ; at Wilmington, Delaware ; and at the banquet to the officers of the Russian fleet. — In ISQi, at the dinner to Mr. Koraero, Mexican minister; at the meeting of the mer- chants and bankers held at the Exchange before the election ; at the celebration in Cooper Institute of Mr. Lincoln's re-election ; at the banquet in the Metropolitan Hotel for the same purpose ; and upon the occasion of the death of William Curtis Noyes. — In 1865, in the Weed libel suit ; on the conclusion of the war ; and on the death of Mr. Lincoln. — In 1866, at the meeting in support of President Joljnson's veto message; on the constitutionality of mili- tary commissions, in the Milligan case ; on the constitutionality of test oaths, in the Cummings case; and in the autumn of the same year an address before the British Social Science Association at Manchester, England, on an " International Code ; " and an address before the Law Amendment Society, London, on the "New York Code." In 1867, he published " Suggestions respecting the Revision of the Constitution of New York ; " and again attended the meetings of the Social Science Association, at Belfast, Ireland, and made an address on the "Community of Nations." — In January, 1868, he presided at the Free-trade banquet in honor of Mr. William Cullen Bryant upon his return from abroad, and made the address of welcome. The same month he made an argument in the Supreme Court of the United States, on the constitutionality of the Reconstruction acts, in the McArdle case. In May follow- ing, he spoke at the banquet given to the Chinese Embassy, at the head of which was Mr. Burlingame ; on the 28tli of July, he de- livered the address at the unveiling of the monument erected at Williams College to the graduates and undergraduates who fell 27 6 DAVID DUDLEY FIELD. in the civil war; and in DeceniLer, spoke at the banquet given to Professor Morse. — January 14, 18G9, he made a speech at the ban- quet given to Mr. James W. Gerard, on his retirement from the bar; on tlie 25th, he presided at the festival in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of Burns' birth ; and later at the annual dinner of the alumni of Williams College ; and in October, he de- livered an address on an " International Code," before the Ameri- can Social Science Association, in j^ew York. — In 18Y0, he again presided at the annual dinner of the Williams alumni, and at the Burns' festival ; made an address on judicial abuses before the State Judiciary Committee , and read a lecture on '"'■ Proportional Representation," at the Lowell Institute, Boston. During all this time, he has not relaxed his efforts in pro- moting social and political progress. He helped to procure the nomination of Mr, Van Buren, in 1848, and of Mr. Lincoln in 1860, and was active iu the Presidential elections of those years, as well as in the canvass of 1856 for Fremont. In politics lie has always been a Democrat, in the sense in which he understands Democracy. His position is defined in a letter which he wrote to the Albany Atlas and Argus on the 22d of May, 1856 : — "Though I have not hitherto acted with the Eepublican party, my sympathies are of course witli the friends of freedom wherever they may be found. I despise equally the fraud which uses the name of Democracy to cheat men of their rights ; the cow- ardice which retracts this year what it professed and advocated the last ; and the falsehood which affects to teach the riglit of the people of the Territories to govern themselves, wliile it imposes on them Federal governors and judges and indicts them for treason against the Union because they make a constitution and laws which they prefer, and collects forces from the neighboring States and the Federal army to compel them to submission." He has written many articles on current topics for the newspapers ; had a public correspondence with Professor Morse and Reverdy Johnson on the Peace Conference andthe war ; was an active mem- ber of the National War Committee raised in New York ; and, during the riots of 1863, did such service as to receive the follow- ing commendation from the mayor of New York, Mr. Opdyke, in the history of his mayoralty : "To many eminent private citi- 28 DAVID DUDLEY FIELD. 7 zens also m J acknowledgments are due for most valuable services, and to none more than to David Dudley Field, Esq., whose cour- age, energy, and vigilance were unsurpassed and without abatement from the beginning to tlie end of the riots." He was last year president of the American Free-Trade League. He is now president of the Personal Representation Society of New York, and his latest address was the one on " Proportional Rep- resentation." He is at present engaged in the preparation of the draft of an international code, to which he has devoted much of the last four years, and in which he is aiming not only to set forth the existing rules of international law, but to suggest such modifi- cations as seem to be required by the present state of civilization. 29 O. /v^ /V^-v^--*..^^ OYEUS HALL MCOOEMICK pllKRE are few tasks more difficult than to write the life of an inventor. The world is quick to appreciate the exploits and herald the fame of the successful soldier. His laurels are won upon a field toward which every eye is turned with in- tense interest, and upon whose issue the destiny of a nation pal- pably hangs. A single masterly movement of his columns kindles a thousand bonfires, and makes his name live in the memorial- bronze or the stately shaft. Not so, however, with the inventor. " Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war ; " but the victories of peace are silent, and the victor must often be content with the reflection that cheered the immortal Kepler, "my work is done; it can well wait a century for its readers, since God waited full six thousand years before there came a man capable of comprehending and admiring his work." Happily, in the case of the man whose name is now before us as foremost in the history of agricultural invention and progress during the present age, tlie quiet achievement of his early life, and the arduous toils of his riper years, have, in his world-wide fame as well as his commercial success, already received in a measure their merited reward. It is related of Cromwell, by the historian Macaulay, that when he sat for his last portrait, it was with the stern but noble injunc- tion to Sir Peter Lely — " Paint all my scars and my wrinkles or I will not pay you a farthing ; " and, in undertaking the present memoir, it is with no desire to offer encomium, but simply to in- terpret living facts for the benefit of the living. It was Yirginia that, in 1780, in response to the appeal of Oon- 31 2 CTUUS HALL McCORMICK. gress, oj)ened her princely hand and gave away the Northwestern Territory to the Union, and it was the same old State that afterward gave to the Northwest the Reaper by which its unequaled develop- ment has been effected. Mr. McCormick was born February 15, 1809, at " Walnut Grove " (the family residence), in Rockbridge County, Virginia. His father, Robert McCormick, and his mother, whose maiden name was Mary Ann Plall, were both of Scotch-Irish descent, and natives, the former of Rockbridge, the latter of Augusta County The father was a farmer, owning several farms, with saw and grist mills, and having shops for blacksmithing, carpentering, machiner}^, etc., in which his own mechanical ingenuity and that of young Cyrus found scope for exercise and experiment. The son did not have the advantages of a collegiate education. Ilis studies were limited to the English branches, such as could be obtained in the common schools of the country — " the old field school,'''' sometimes called — an institution, however, which, if judged by its fruits, did a great work in training some of Virginia's most elegant writers and forcible orators, as Patrick Henry, Henry Clay, and others. The old Virginia school did its work upon the subject of this notice, not without co-operative agencies. The workshop is, to a boy that thinks, an arena in which he is to put into practice all that he has learned. The youth who ferrets out the mechanism of a locomotive and constructs one for his amusement, if you choose, though it be only a plaything to run across his yard, has done more for his education than if he had mastered a book in geome- try ; and in the end he has more mental muscle and sinew to show for it. When Cyrus was fifteen years old he employed his inventive gift in the construction of a " cmc?/e," which he used in cutting with the harvestmen in the field. During his son's youth, the elder McCormick busied himself with the invention of several valuable machines, upon some of which he obtained letters patent, embracing thrasliing, hydraulic, hemp-break- 32 CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. 3 irig, etc.; and in 1816 he contrived a maeliine for reaping wliich would cut the grain when standing up straiglit, but which proved wholly unavailable when the grain was in a matted or tangled state. His experiment was made on the plan of having a number of ver- tical cylinders, 8 or 10 inches in diameter, placed in line at right angles to the line of draft of the machine, which cylinders, in their revolutions, gathered the standing grain to stationary serrated cut- ting hoo/i's, and when the stalks were severed on these hooks the grain was carried by leather straps to the side of the machine and delivered in sicath. " At the commencement of the harvest of 1831 Mr. Robert McCormick made another trial of his machine, again without a practical succesp, and when, being satisfied that his principle of operation could not succeed, lie laid it aside and abandoned the further prosecution of his idea. His son, who had this time been witnessing his father's experi- ments with much interest, then perceiving- the difficulties in the way of his father's suc- cess — while never liimsolf having seen, or heard of, any other experiments or principles tried but his father's in connection with grain reaping by horse-power — devoted himself most laboriously to the discovery of a principle of operation upon which to carrj' out the great object for which his father had labored both mentally and physically for fifteen years. " Finding, as his father also had found, that the difficulty of separating the grain to be cut between each two of the cylindeis, when in a fallen or tangled state, was insur- mountable ; and that, therefore, to succeed, the grain must be cut in a body without such separation, except at the line of division between the swath to be cut and tlie grain to be left standing (at which point the ascertained difficulty of separating liad to be overcome), the question first to be solved was how that was possible. In his reflections and rea- soning on this point it occurred to him that to efiect the cutting of tlie grain by a cutting instrument, a certain amount of motion was only necessary, which was demonstrated by the action on the grain of the cradle then in common use. The next thought was that while the motion forward as drawn by horses was not sufficient, a lateral motion must at the same time be conmiunicated to the cutting instrument, which, combined with the forward motion, would be sufficient to efiect the cutting process as the machine advanced upon the grain. How then was this to be effected ? '.'Two different methods occurred to the mind of the inventor before he undertook to put eitlier to the test of a trial in the field. One was that of a revolving wheel placed horizontally (as the wheel of a cart) and drawn forward against the grain, while caused to revolve rapidly on its axis, having a cutting edge placed on its periphery. "Not satisfied however with tiiis idea — many objections and difficulties in the way of its success presenting themselves to tlie mind of Mr. McCormick — his next idea, which proved to be the foundation upon which his great invention was finally based, was that of communicating by a crank the requisite lateral reciprocating motion tc a straight cutting blade, placed at right angles to the line of drauglit of the machine. This first principle he immediately put to the test by (himself) constructing in a temporary manner the required gear-wheels and frame-work, and applying it to the cutting of grain, when the cutting, 3 ' 33 4 CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. tlien by a smooth edfre, was well done, but when he immediate]}- discovered the import- ance of supportiucT the grain at the edge of tlie blade by guard-fingers, with whicli ho united the serrated edge to the cutting blade ; and also the importance of having a device forgathering the grain to the cutting apparatus. Tliis done he at once applied himself to supplying what seemed now required to make a working machine, and soon origi- nated and placed over tlie cutting apparatus the revolving and gathering reel, for gath- ering and throwing back the grain, and a frame-work in rear of the cutting blade, whicli he called the platform, for receiving the grain as cut by the machine. "With these important original principles combined, and with a vigorous effort, he con- structed a machine, placing it on one driving-tuheel at the stubble side of the machine, which operated the gear-wheels and crank, upon which the main frame of the machine, containing the cog-wheels, was placed, and from which the platform was extended to the grain side, then supported by a slide, tlie ivheel at the side having been substituted the next year. " From the main frame of tliis machine, and outside of the standing grain, projected a pair o^shiifis within whicli it was drawn by one horse. And on theopi^osite side of the platform was constructed the divider for separating the grain to be cut from that to be passed by the machine. " From this machine the cut grain was drawn from the platform and deposited on tho ground ut the side by a man with a rake, walking on the ground." "The child is father to the man," and it may have been the im- perfections of his father's machine tltat first suggested to the younger MeCormick the necessity of a construction upon a principle wholly different. As early as 1831, Mr. MeCormick, then in the twenty-second year of his age, made the invention which has given liis name a world-wide reputation, and which is now accomplishing the work of considerably more than a million harvesters. In 1831, the Reaper triumphed in the harvesting of several acres of oats. The following year it cut fifty acres of wheat. For several years, wliile experimenting with, exhibiting its oper- ation in the field, and Avorking the Eeaper himself, though operat- ing well in his liands, he deemed it best — while still undergoing important improvements — to postpone its sale. In the mean time Mr. MeCormick, with a disposition to do business for himself, and thus try his fortune on liis own responsi- bility — while his Reaper could not yet be relied upon as a source of profit (and he was indeed advised by his father not so to depend upon it) — intimated to his father that, if approved by him, any 34 CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. 5' tiling he miglit be disposed to give liirn in that connection would be gratelully acc(-})ted. Whereupon his father gave him a farm, and stocked it in a moderate way ready for business, and the son farmed it for one year. About that time an opportunity was pre- sented to engage in an iron-smelting business, which seemed to promise larger profits than farming, and soon Mr. McCormiek entered into it. But during the financial revulsion of about 1S37, and in connection with some misfortunes iii the working of their smelting furnace, his business partner, foreseeing the coming storm, covered his private property with deeds of trust in favor of his friends ; and when, subsequently, failure overtook the firm, the ruin fell mainly upon the inventor. This failure, like similar fail- ures, proved, perhaps, a "blessing in disguise." Stripping himself of all his capital, Mr. McCormiek met and liquidated all the liabil- ities he had incurred. Applying himself then to his work with renewed vigor, in 1839 the sale and introduction of the Reaper into general use commenced, and its reputation extended rapidly into the great centers of agricultural interests and improvement. In 1845 he removed to Cincinnati, resolved to devote himself to the one tiling of establishing himself in the then emporium of the grain-growing West, and in widening the introduction of his machines. They were first patented in 183-1, but in 1845 he obtained a second patent for several valuable improvements in them. In 1846-7-8 he had also some of his machines manufactured in Brockpurt, New York, the makers paying him a "royalty" on all they sold, and taking, as security for advances, farmers' orders for machines, as procured by Mr. McCormiek. In 1847 a third patent was granted him for improvements still more valuable; and in 1858 another valuable patent was granted to him, and still another to himself and brothers. Foreseeing prior to 1847 that Chicago was to become the center of the agri- cultural empire of the West, from its commanding position at the bead of lake navigation, Mr. McCormiek then made this city his 35 6 CTEUS HALL McCORMICK. liome and prosecuted his eiiterpiise far and wide in radiating lines. In 1848, seven hundred of his machines were made and sold. The year 1849 saw the annual sale of the McCormick Reapers and Mowers reach the hiwh figure of fifteen hundred. Since tlien the ]mmber sold has regularly' increased, until now the annual sales exceed ten thousand, including what are termed plain reapers, com- bined reapers and mowers, and plain mowing machines — employing for several years past, in their manufacture, from five to six hundred men, with a lai-ge amount of machinery adapted particularly to this work. The demand for the invention is perpetually multiplied in proportion as its great labor and grain saving merits become the subject of inquiry and investigation. At the commencement of Mr. McCormiek's manufacturins: busi- ness in the JN^orthwest, to eiFect sales he found it necessary to sell his machines on time and with a guaranty of their performance, which system he has continued to the present time, thus enabling purchasers not only to prove the value of the article they purchase, but to realize in advance of payment a large proportion of the purchase-price of the machine. About the year 1850, the two brothers of Mr. McCormidk, "William S. and Leander J., both younger than himself, were in- troduced into his business at Chicago. In 1859 they were associ- ated with him as partners in the manufacturing, and have rendered important assistance in the business — the former at the head of the ofiice department, and the latter at the head of the manufacturing department. In the death of his brother William S., in 1865, Mr. McCormick, sustained a great loss. He was a man of rare excellence of charac- ter and superior business abilities. His loss was irreparable. In 1859, the Hon. Reverdy Johnson, in an argument before the Commissioner of Patents, from testimony taken mi the case, said, that the McCormick Reaper had already " contributed an annual income to the whole country of fifty-five millions of dollars at least, which must increase through all time." 36 CYRUS HALL MoCORMICK. 7 The quantity of land wliicli can be cultivated, by using these machines, is proved to be doubled, and most proof goes higher still. Each of these machines has paid its price to the owner; the saving of the cost of reaping is at least seventy-five cents an acre, in labor alone. It has been jigain and again proved that the saving of grain alone, as compared with " cradling," is from one to two bushels in an acre cut. These facts have been established in the courts by a large number of witnesses, and accepted as evidence. From the long time and perseverance necessary to improve and perfect this implement, in consequence of the great variety of situ- ations in which the crop to be cut is found — green, ripe; wet, dry; tall, short ; standing, fallen ; straight, tangled ; and on rough as well as smooth ground — and from the short period in each year during which experiments could be made (so different from other imjirovc- mcnts), it will be observed that the first patent of Mr. McCormick (in 1834) expired (in 1848) before he had accomplished much finan- cially with his invention (its extension having been refused at the Patent Otfice and by Congress), and that the important original })rinciples of the invention were thus early thrown open to public competition, leaving to him only the protection of liis subsequent patents. In this way, at that early day commenced a competition in the Reaper and Mower business, with the various modifications in construction (made on the same general principles) that the world of intellect employed in the business would be likely to work out, which lias been kept up to the present time. With the free use, also, of the important improvements covered by the expired patents of 1845 and 1847 other manufacturers have been and are making large numbers of these machines throughout all parts of this country and the world: so that, at present, there are annually added totlie supply in use more than 100,000 of these machines. On the ground of the great value to the jptihlic of McCormick's invention, the opposition to the extension of his patents thus de- prived him of those advantages of protection against competition which have been granted to every other prominent inventor in tlie 37 8 CTRUS HALL McCORMICK. countrj', and without regard to tlie greater delays in his case in perfecting the invention, consequent upon the limited time in the liarvest season of each, year for experimenting. The continued success of Mr. McCormick, under such circum- stances, in the manufacture and sale of his inventio7i during a period of thirty years, declining from the beginning to sell patent rights to others, improving and patenting in detail from time to time as required, and retaining throughout the first position in the business, is perhaps without a parallel, and only second in merit to the invention itself. Tillage was beautifully called by a gre it Roman writer, "the nursing breast of the State." If this were felt so true in the little narrow peninsula of Italy, liow much more forcibly does the figure apply to our vast and almost limitless country, on which the sun scarcely sets? One has only to glance over the physical geography of the United States, to see that the great interests of our people are agricultural and mining interests. And, in the development of material resources, the sphere of usefulness for Mr. McCormick' s invention is beyond measurement. An invention such as the Keaper is also of a general utility to science. A distinguished meteorologist, speaking of the ba- rometer and thermometer, remarked that " each of these inven- tions had laid open a new world." As much may be said of the Reaper. Ko such mechanism can be given to any branch of human industry, without stimulating the energies and quickening the ardor of scientific investigation everywhere. Experiment and theory are inseparable. Science has many votaries whose adoration is unrestrained, and whose ofierings at her shrine are of the costli- est nature. But it is by utilizing the simplest elements of science, as Mr. McCormick has done, that she is elevated to her true dig- nity. This is, in Mr. Ilallam's words, '"to turn that which has been a blind veneration into a rational worship." But to resume the history of the invention itself: a field 38 CTRU3 HALL McCORMICK. 9 trial of the machine, with that of Obed Hussey, was made near Kichraond, Virginia, in cutting wheat, in the harvest of 1843, in tlie presence of a hirge number of the most skillful farmers and agriculturists of that part of the State, most expert in the husband- man's art, A committee, selected by and from tliose assembled on this occasion, made a report in favor of the McCormick machine. Mr. Ilussey, whose invention was two years later than that of Mr. McCormick, was his only competitor in the business until about 1849 or 1850, when Manny in the West, and Seymour & Morgan in the East, commenced business — after the expiration of McCormick's first patent of 1834. In 1845 the Gold Medal of the American Institute was awarded to Mr. McCormick for his invention. At the World's Fair, in London, in 1851, the first international institution of the kind convened in history, after two trials in the field — -the first on Mechi's celebrated " model farm," and the second on that of the Hon. Philip Pusey, M. P. — Mr. McCormick was awarded the " Council Medal" of the Exhibition, " for the most valua1)le article contributed to it," and its " originality and value " — awarded by the Council of Juries, and one of only four such medals awarded by the Exhibition to the United States, The London Times, which, prior to the trial of the reaper in the field, had — in ridicule of it and of the meagreness of the American department of the Exhibition — characterized it as " a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine," writing after the trial, said it was " the most valuable article in the Exhibition, and of sufficient value alone to pay the whole expense of the Exhibition." Mr. Ilussey's machine competed at this Exhibition, himself being present. In 1855, after a field trial with all other machines, the Grand Gold Medal was given to Mr. McCormick, at the Paris Exposition, for his Reaper and Mower, as furnishing " the type after which all others were made, as well as for the best operating machine in the 39 10 CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. iield." Tliis was one of three such medals only that were awarded in the agricultural department of the Exposition. Ill 1862, the Prize Medal was awarded the American inventor by the London International Exhibition. The first prize, in the onlv field experiment made in England of all the rival machines at the Exhibition, was presented to Mr. McCormiek. The first prize was awarded to the McCormick Reaper at the International Exhibition held, at Lille, France, as late as 1863, after a field trial oi the sharpest competition with all other machines. During the harvest of the same year (1863), in a most spirited and hard-fought field-contest of Reapers at the great International Exhibition of Hamburg, the Gold Medal was unanimously awarded to Mr. McCormick, in the language of the judges, for the best machine exhibited, and for " the practical introduction and im- provement or perfecting of the Reaping Machine." From this Exhibition, Governor Joseph A, Wright, United States Commissioner, in a communication made to the press of this country, said : " McCormick thrashes all nations, and walks off with the Golden Medal." Many other European Exhibitions, to say nothing of immerous State Fairs in America, have, with unanimity, awarded the McCor- mick Reaper and Mower their highest premiums. The National United States Agricultural Society, after a great trial of Reaping Ma(;hines, extending through nine days, at Syracuse, New York, in 1857, awarded Mr. McCormick the highest prize, their Grand Gold Medal of Honor. Next, and more striking still, we mention the Great Exposition of all Nations, meeting in Congress at Paris, in 186Y. In the report of the International Jury of this Universal Expo- sition, published by the Imperial Commission, occurs this statement : "The man who has labored most in tho general distribntion, perfection, and discov- pry of the first practical Reaper, is assiiredly Mr. McCormick, of Chicago, Illinois. It was in 1831 that this ingenious and persevering inventor constructed the first ma- 40 CYRUS HALL Mccormick. h chines of this kind, rude and imperfect when first tried. In all the Universal Exposi- tions, the first prize has been awarded to this admirable implement, and at this time, at Yincennes, as at FouiUeuse, under the most difficult conditions, its triumph has been complete. Equally as a benefactor of humanity, and as a skillful mechanician, Mr. McCormick has been judged worthy of the highest distinction of the Exposition." Tills report was made by Engeue Tlsseraiid, Director-General of the Imperial Domains. M. Anrellano, of the Danublan Principalities, in an Independent report, published b}^ the Exposition, says: — "It is Mr. McCormick who invented the first Reaper. He occupied himself with this question from 1831, and in 1851 there was seen, for the first time, figuring at the Exposition in London, a model Reaper. We have thought it necessary to give some details on tlie origin of Reapers, and in particular on those of Mr. McCormick, which are, it may be said, the type after which all others have been constructed." After the triumph of McCornilck's machine in the two great public trials on the Emperor's farms at Fouilleuse and Yincennes, he was iuvited by the Emperor to a private exhibition of his Keaper on his farm at Chalons, for the inspection of himself and officers of his army, then stationed at that military camp. It was accordingly put in operation there, under the superintendence of Mr. McCormick, and witnessed with great Interest and satisfac- tion for some three-quarters of an hour by the Emperor, Marshal MclSlel], Director-General Tisserand, and others. At this field trial, his Majesty was so pleased with the Keaper, that, acting under the impulse of the moment, he proposed to decorate Mr. McCormick with the cross of the Legion of Honor on the spot, and was only deterred from so doing by one of the olticers, who suggested that such a course, not being en regie, would tend to give dissatisfaction to rival exhibitors. Among the entries of the most magnificent awards of the ExDOsltlon are : — "Grand Prize. C. H. McCormick — Reaper. Gold Medal. C. H. McCormick — Reaper axd Mowek. Diploma of Chevalier. Imperial Order of the Legion op Honob. Nomination of Character. 41 12 CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. His Majesty, the Emperor, by decree of the ith January, 1868, has named Chevalier of t?ie Imperial Order of the Legion of Honor, Mr. Mc Cormick, of Chicago, inventor OF A NBW REAPING MACHINE, Exhibitor, to take rank from this day. Paris, 9th January, 1868."* The originality, as well as value, of the invention was further emphasized in the official report : "The man," it says, "wlio has worked the most to the discovery of the first practi- cal Reaper, and to the perfection and generalization of the machines, is assuredly Mr. McCormick, of Chicago, Illinois. It was in ] 831 that this ingenious and assiduous in- ventor constructed the first machine of this kind." Mr. McCormick was the only exhibitor, in this greatest of all the great international exhibitions, who received the Decoration of tlie Legion of Honor for *•' the invention " of his machine ; and also the only person in the Exposition who received hoth the Deco- ration and its Grand Prize. In a great trial of Reapers at Altenberg, Hungary, held in July, Ht the recommendation of the Hungarian government, at which not less than thirty-eight competing machines were catalogued, the first prize, a Gold Medal, and sixty ducats were awarded to the McCormick Reaper. And, finally, in the last harvest, of 1869, in the special Inter- national Exhibition of Reapers held at Altona, Prussia, there was awarded to the McCormick Reaper a diploma called the '• Rappell of previous Gold Medals," which, in the language of the official correspondent, communicating the intelligence, " the Exhibition placed above the Gold Medal." Inventors are sometimes unfairly reckoned among those erratic specimens of the race, who, poet-like, are "born, not made." They are, in fact, not generall}' what are called business men. They are in many cases inclined to be visionary, and without sufficient stability of purpose to pursue any one thing long and perseveringly enough to make it a success, even when success is attainable; such are often the difficulties through which a great success is achieved by an inventor. * The distinction of the Legion of Honor ia, by a recent law in France, to be con- ferred only for gallantry on the field of batile. 43 CYRUS HALL McCORMIOS;. 13 The subject of this sketch is an illustration of the important truth that the genuine talents of the human mind are available and will pass current in anj market, whether it be mechanical, mercantile, scientifi(,', or literary, Mr. McCormick's originality has only been equaled by his tenacity and versatility. The steady assiduity and unswerving purpose with which, over a wide and ever-expanding field of usefulness, he has pushed forward his work, afford an example of a mind in easy equi- poise, capax rerum^ and one of which it may be said, as of Isaac Barrow's, " it is characterized by a certain air of powerful and of conscious facility in the execution of whatever it under- takes, seeming always to feel itself superior to the occasion, and which, in contending with the graatest ditficulties, pats forth but half its strength." As a writer, Mr. McCormick is easy, graceful, and strong. When interested in his theme his pen moves with great power and au- thority, as those who have provoked him to discussion will avouch. This was strikingly shown in the famous controversy in Scotland in 1863, concerning the merits and invention of the Reaper. There, on foreign soil, alone, browbeaten by Scotchmen for having beaten them in the Reaper, and combating the leading agri- cultural journal of Scotland, the Norili Britinh Agricnlturist^ representing the ungenerous pride and stubborn prejudice of its countrymen, Mr. McCormick, in the judgment of the more disinterested press, came off victor. The correspondence with this journal originated about the award of the Gold Medal to Mr. McCormick by the Implement Jury at the Hamburg International Exhibition. The editor of the Agriculturist desired to make it appear that this award was only an honorary thing. But a letter from one of the jury, published in the course of the correspondence, confirmed the fact that the award " means exactly what it says." The Mark Lane Express^ of London, the first agricultural paper of England, on the 26th of October, in an editorial on the " Battle 43 14: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. of tlie Reapers," said tliat " while the editor of the North British Agriculturist shows much zeal for liis countryman's (Rev. Pat- rick Bell) machine, we must say that we think the facts and ar- guments of Mr. McCormick are presented with a clearness and force which seem unanswerable in establishing that he was the first to invent the leading features of the successful Reaping Machine of the present day ; that he continued regularly the improvement and prosecution of the same to the perfection of the machine, and that this — in the slightly-varied language of the different scientific juries of the various Great International Exhibitions of the world — consti- tutes tlie invention of the Reaping Machine." '' In fact," says this London journal, " before the Great JS'ational Exhibition of 1851, if Reaping Machines were invented, they were unknown to the English farmers. We extract some paragraphs from Mr. McCorniick's letter, which appeared in the North British Agriculturist of October 15th, which seems to have closed the dis- cussion and appears to us to settle the question." {Mark Lane Express^ The following is the letter referred to by the Mark Lane Exjpress : — Palace Hotel, Buckikgham Gate, Loxdoji, Oduler 12, 18G3. Sir : — As stated in my letter of last week, I did hope there would be no occasion for my further use of the columns of the Agriculturist. I felt so for two reasons : one of which was, that while I could neither doubt my right fairly to defend myself, throu,t;h the same medium, against assaults made upon my rights or interests, through a public jour- nal, nor your " generous " disposition to accord to me that right, yet I did not hke, even under these circumstances, to stand debtor as the recipient of " commercial " benefit without a quidpro quo. The other reason was my desire to close a controversy with the editor not anticipated; and, though in self-del'ense at any rate, reluctantly entered into. Nevertheless, I must beg to say that I can not consent to be cut short just as the matter now stands-; nor would I acknowledge the Scotch blood that courses through my own veins, if the Scotch public oould justify such an excision. The public can now judge, even with your latest comments before them, of my posi- tion on the first question raised in the case through the " British Press;" and as to the question of the " invention of the Reaping Machine," so far- as the views and feelings of the editor are concerned, and had been expressed, I was not only quite satisfied, but felt, as I said, that my thanks were due to him. I can well understand and appreciate his national feeling upon the question; but when he afterward not only changes his own ground upon that question, but undertakes my disparagement — not only by the 44 CYRUS PALL McCORMIOK. 15 reproduction of a description of matter deemed unworlliy of notice by the Commissioner of Patents, who sat in judgment upon it, but with a corresponding spirit on his part — I must claim to bo lieard in reply. If, as the editor says, ''Mr. McCormick is a foreigner, and entitled to at least the claim which he makes." he places himself in a singularly inconsistent position in refusing me in the next breath that very '• opportunity," after further characterizing my connec- tion with the Reaping Machine as " rather that of a commercial and successful speculator than that of a real inventor!" And this, while I have carefully avoided the .shghtest disparagement of the Rev. Patrick Bell, although it now appears that the notice, by the editor, of the " American machines, chielly imitations of Bell's Reaper," disposed of iu my last, and " the words of the Remonstrance by Citizens of New York " against the e.xtension of my patent in 1834, now adopted by the editor as his reply to me, are but the reproductions of what Mr. Bell has himself in years past had published in the columns of the North British Agriculturist. But I am happy to have learned that, while the correspondence has been closed in its past form, the editor does yet recognize my right of reply tlirough his correspondence columns, as an "advertisement," which also removes my first objection to its continuance, and will, "I trust, make it more pleasant to the taste of my respected anonymous assailants, whose ear-marks are still visible. And how does " its commercial character betray its origin, and almost confirm — if confirmation were needed — what we contended for?" I surely need not say to the editor of the North British Agriailturifit, that in Reaping Machines, that which has no " commercial value, has really no value at all ; and if I have furnished the best evidence of the great commercial value of my Reaping Machine iu the demand which has been found fur it, is that to be taken as proof against me as a " real inventor ?" With a simple statement of "established facts," I shall leave others to characterize such a course by an intelligent and responsible editor of a public journal — not by interested and irrespon- sible signers of a remonstrance, proved also by the very face of tli£ir own paper lo liave been wholly unworthy of notice. But the editor says my '■communication does not give a single new fact as to the invention of the Reaper." While this as a " fact," as already stated, was not pretended, how does it apply to the readers of the North British Agriculturist, which is the proper test of the correctness of the statement made by the editor? What I want is a knowl- edge of existing facts. The position taken by the North British Agriculturist, whether by its editor, or others writing for its columns, and upon which the whole superstruc- ture of its reasoning has been founded, has been that mj invention origmated with my patent in 1834; while upon this assumption only could the "American inventors" referred to, even with their abortive experiments, be made available. And the report of I'^xaminer Page to Commissioner Burke has, on the same ground, been used to show priority of Obed Hussey to me. The explanation and proof on this point, furnished in my last and conceded by the editor, establishes my priority to Hussej' and all the other "American inventors," and places them, therefore, in the position to have "borrowed" from me, instead of me from tliem. And still the editor, in his last commentary, with ttie evidence also before him of Commissioner Burke to the originalit\' and value of my Reaping Machine, wholly ignores this fact in his statement that nothing '• new " has been presented, and also in his use of the references of the remonstrants. Now, one or two observations on the facts further elicited : First, although T did not patent my Reaper till 1834, and whilst I " preferred not to sell a Reaper until ] 8:59 " (for use in 1840), Bell never patented his, and never sold one until about the time when he adopted my cutting apparatus, when it was of course no longer a Bell's Reaper — and 45 IQ CYRUS HALL MoCORMICK after tlio character of my Reaper had been established throughout the world. If Bell was then a "divinity student," I was at the same time a " farmer's boy." Second. While Hu?sey may have sold a very few Reaping Machines between IS."?! and 1840, using in them prominent features of my prior invention, mine was operating regularly and successfully every year from 1831 onward, in numerous public exhibitions abroad, as well as in tlie home harvest, having cut with it fifty acres of corn in 1832, while at the same time undergoing improvements, so that, when I commenced the sale of it, that sale increased uniformly and rapidly. And tlius being the first to invent the loading features of the ultimately successful Reaping Machine, and having continued reg- ularly the improvement and prosecution of the same to the perfection of tlie machine, it is respectfully submitted that this, in the slightly varied language of the different scien- tific juries of the great international exhibitions of the world, constitutes the invention of the Reaping Machine. What then are these original features of the successful Reaping Machine of the present day? " They are, first, the application of the draught forward and at one side of the machine, called the side-draioght machine, which was successfully done in my first machine of 1831, as shown in my patent — the application of the power at tlie rear, as referred to by the New York remonstrants, only having been experimented with in a machine constructed immediately preceding my application for the patent, but wliich was not continued afterward. The side-draught had first been used with a single horse in shafts, when it was thought a ivider machine might be propelled to advantage from the rear: hence the experiment. Second, the cutting apparatus, with a serrated reciprocating blade operating in fingers or supports to the cutting, over the edge of the sickle. This was also done by me suc- cessfully in 1831, with the single bearing or support on one side of the sickle, and with the double hearing (on both sides) in 1832, as proved by the testimony taken in the case, when this machine cut fifty acres of grain. Third, the fixed j5Zai/o?'m of boards for receiving and retaining the corn as cut and de- posited thereon by the gathering reel, until collected in a sufficient quantity or size for a sheaf. Fourth, discharging it from the platfmin on the ground in sheaves at the side of the machine, out of the track of the horses in their next passage round. Fifth, a divider for .separating, in connection luith the reel, the corn to be cut from that to be left standing — a further improvement upon which (with still other improvements in detail), having become the subject of a patent in 1845 ; while the arrangement of a suitable seat on the machine so as to enable the attendant the more easily and com- pletely to deliver the corn from it, was also a subject of a third patent in 1847. And now, while in law he who fails to reach the point of practical and valuable suc- cess does nothing, and he who continuously and vigorously prosecutes his invention and improvements to that point is allowed to prove bank to his first experiments — with these foundation principles claimed in my machine, how does Mr. Bell stand on the editoi's idea of " the great similarity of the general principles adopted in Reaping Machines ? '' Propelling them /rom i/ie rear was the method adopted in nearl}' all the expeiimcnis made from the time of the Gauls to the time of Bell's connection with the Reaping Machine. The editor has shown that Salmon^s machine cut by sJ^ears (in 1S07, as Bell's), and Smithes laid the corn in swath in ISll — which was also done by my fa- ther's machine in 1816; while I must again be permitted to repeat that Bell's machine, while lost to the public at least in 1851, never would have been practically and com- mercially valuable with his cutting shears, and his impracticable gathering reel of ' two 46 CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. 17 and a half feet in diameter," instead of mine of six to eight feet, asfiist tised in its con- nection with my cutting apparatus, afterward adopted by liim. To leave nothing of the adopted " repl.y, in the words of the remonstrance," a word further on it. "The team attached to the rear" has been explained in this letter. The remonstrance says my " platform is described as about six feet broad. Bell's machine is described as just six feet broad." The editor knovs that "Bell's machine has wo Iplatfonn !'" "Ball's reel," like ot\\eT unsuccessful "gathering racks " and reels before it, has also been explained. The remonstrance then refers to one of two methods for cutting described in my patent, which also cut well but was not continued, the former being found the simpler. The claims of " tlie American inventors," Randal, Schnebly, and Husse}', have been disposed of as subsequent to my invention; and that of " Moore and Hascall " was simply the application of my original serrated edge to the "scal- loped (or saw) edged " blade (by Manning), while the drmv cut principle in mine was entirely different and superior — and, as perfected in the patented combination of the open (or very obtuse) angle of the ^ckle with the angular finger, is yet superior to all others. And the seat, with its importance and value, as patented by me in 1847, was in vain sought to be overthrown in the courts by the introduction of the " llussey and Randal seats." I am, etc., C. H. McCORMICK. Thus, after winning the battle of the Reapers in tlie harvest-fields of Europe, the inventor won them over again in the columns of an unfriendly British press. Without singleness of aim and indomitable perseverance in pur- suit of his object, an inventor can hardW hope for success. The Roman poet's description of the man, " Justum ao tenacem propositi," emphatically marked the career of our subject. On one occasion, in 1859, in the great suit of McCormick v. Seymour & Morgan, for an infringement of his patent, in the ab- sence of a witness fur his patent of 1845, the defendants, upon a pretense, desired to put off' the trial for the term ; but the plaintiff, against the advice of his lawyers, boldly pressed forward the trial upon his patent of 181:7 alone, and obtained a judgment for dam- ages to an amount exceeding $17,000. In the final trial by the Supreme Court of the United States of the great case of McCor- mick V. Manny & Co., when the verdict was in favor of the latter, in 1858, as not infringing McCormlck's patents of 1845 and 1817 — when they had the free use of all the original principles in the expired patent of 1831 — the decision was made by four out of seven 47 15 CYRUS HALL Mccormick, of the judges sitting, the other three being in favor of a verdict for plaintiff, but only one of whom wrote out his dissenting opinion. This, too, when it was argued that a verdict for plaintiff would not only rnin defendant, but prevent the manufacture of a single Keap- ing Machine without a license from plaintiff, while a verdict for defendant would leave plaintiff in possession of his patents and business unaffected. Nevertheless, it was believed by counsel for plaintiff that, had a full court of nine judges been sitting, the ma- jority would have rendered a verdict for plaintiff. Tiie result, however, did not discourage Mr. McCormick. He appears to have learned at an early period of his life the difficult art of turning dei'eat into victory, and securing the fruits of evei-y success by chas- tening it with moderation and prudence ; for without these success was unattainable, the path of the inventor lying amid chilling dis- appointments, not less forbidding than those which often beset the track of the Arctic explorer. With the invention of the Keaper, Mr. McCorraick's fertility of mfnd was by no means exhausted, but rather quickened and stim- ulated. Prior to his invention of the Reaper, he invented and patented two plows for horizontal plowing on hilly ground. The second of these ingenious contrivances, especially, called a " Sdf- Sliarjpening Horizontal Plow," while skillfully arranged, was simple and effective in its construction and a very valuable and superior implement to the agriculturist in hilly countries. But, suffering delay (as did the Reaper at first) in getting the merits of the invention prominently before the public, and not procuring the extension of the patent, it gradually fell into disuse for want of the requisite attention and perseverance in its introduction. Although his great invention must be regarded as tlie distin- guishing triumph of Mr. McCormick's life, there are other fields in which his character has been developed and his influence felt. Pie is known to the public not only by his former connection with the religious and secular press of Chicago, but by the contro- versies, like those we have already alluded to, into which he has 48' CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. 19 been drawn, in the prosecution of his leading aims of life and defense of his course as a public man. In his political course Mr. McCormiek has ever acted with de- cision and consistency, following without faltering or coniproniiso his convictions of right. With this fact in view, it will not seem surprising that in times of great national excitement, his opinions have been misrepresented bj some and misunderstood by others. Born and reared in the South, having his home in the West, and his business associations leading him into close intercourse with tho East, he has ever been in the hroadest sense of the term, a national man, free from those sectional prejudices which have resulted so unfortunately for the nation. The platform on which he firmly stood during the war was that of national union and the rights of the respective States under the Federal Constitution. Convinced that the election of Mr. Lincoln to tlie Presidency in 1860, by a pureh'' sectional vote, would afibrd an excuse or serve as a pretext for precipitating disorder and civil strife upon the country; and impressed with the belief, by his intimate knowledge of Southern character, that the war, if inaugurated, would be prolonged and disastrous, he labored earnestly for the success of the Democratic party, regarding it as the only party that could present a successful barrier against disunion on the one hand, or Federal encroachments on the other, and thus bring peace to a divided people. lie at- tended the Democratic IsTational Convention in Baltimore, and it is due to him to state that had his counsels been followed the disruption that ensued would not have taken place. In 1864, dur- ing the spirited Presidential contest between Lincoln and McClel- lan, he was presented by the Democratic and Conservative voters of Chicago as their candidate for Congress, and, although unsuc- cessful, conducted the most vigorous political contest ever known in that city. Mr. McCormiek was an advocate of peace, on a basis honor- able alike to the North and to the South. During the contest it was charged by the Pcpublicans that the Democratic party de- 4 " 49 20 CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. signed a dishononible peace with the South ; and subsequent to the triumph of Mr. Lincoln, when no such suspicion could be enter- tained, Mr. McCormick published a proposition that the Demo- cratic party, by convention, should select a commission from the Democracy, with the sanction of President Lincoln, to meet a similar delegation from the South, to effect a termination of the war, in a restoration of the Union — a proposition received with much favor by prominent Democrats and conservative Republicans, and by some leading newspapers on both sides ; but the measure failed from the difficulty of obtaining a call of the convention. In 1859, the subject of this notice founded and munificently en- dowed the Theological Seminary of the Northwest, at Chicago. After the institution, however, had fairly entered upon its career, it, unfortunately, fell into the hands of a small but irresponsible and unreliable party, determined to pervert the endowment from the purpose it was originally designed to accomplish. Unwilling that the fund he had bestowed for a specific object should be used in violation of the terms and conditions on which it had been given, the donor firmly refused to pay over the last installment on his bond as demanded of him, or so long as the seminary remained under the control of those who grossly misrepresented its founder, and the friends with whom he co-operated. The professor who had caused himself to be put in the "McCormick Chair of Theology," in " a long and severe tirade," printed in a church paper, went so far as to charge Mr. McCormick with simony. But, in a series of letters (published in 1868 and 1869, in the Northwestern Pteshyte- rian), which, for dignity, chasteness of style, and clear analysis liave seldom been excelled in controversial discussions, Mr. McCor- mick vindicated himself from the charges made against him, and proved that, like Shy lock of old, his adversary had harped only on " the bond ! the bond ! " In answer to this malicious attack Mr. McCormick replied by a dignified and unvarnished recital of facts, supported by a weight of evidence crushing to his opponent. Subsequently the cora- 50 CYRUS HALL Mccormick. 21 mittoe appointed bj tlie General Assembly to investigate these Seminary difficulties made a unanimous report, fully sustaining Mr. MeCormick in the course he had pursued and releasing him from the payment of the " simony " bond ! "Within a few years Mr, McCormick has endowed a Professorship in Washington College, Virginia, an institution founded by and named in honor of " the father of his country^'' — recently under the presidency of General Robert E. Lee. lie also has made large dona- tions to the Union Theological Seminary of Virginia, and to other societies in connection with the Presbyterian Church. During his eventful struggle, on many fields of ardent and painful rivalry, Mr. McCormick remained single until the year 1858. He then married a daughter of Melzar Fowler, an orphan niece of Judge E. G. Merick (at the time, of Clayton, Jefferson County, New York, but at present a citizen of Detroit), a highly gifted and accomplished lady, whose elegant and kindly attractions grace her hospitai:)le mansion. He has four interesting children, one son and three daughters. The eldest, eleven years of age, is a boy of more than ordinary intelligence. The valley of Virginia, especially that portion around Lexing- ton, was largely settled by families adhering in sentiments to the political cause of Cromwell, and by the Old School Presbyterians, in whose creed Mr. McCormick was instructed, and whicli he afterward embraced, in about the twenty-fifth year of his age. In 1865 he removed from Chicago to Kew York, where he became interested in some important enterprises, including the Union Pacific Railroad, in which for some years he has been a Director. And, now, in bringing this imperfect notice to a close, we may add a word upon the story it conveys. The individuality of the inventor is lost in the value of the invention. A late writer, after brilliantly portraying the events which led to the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Vasco Nunez, remarks: "Every great and 51 22 CYRUS HALL McCORMICK. origiDal action has a prospective greatness — ^not alone from tlic thought of the man wlio achieved it, but from the various aspects and high thouglits which the same action will continue to present and call up in the minds of others to the end, it may be, of all time." The result of human activity has an unlimited divergence like the rays of the sun. In the instance just quoted, Nunez, with folded arms and bent knees, ofi'ered thanks to God for having re- vealed to him the famed South Sea ; so little did he dream that he had discovered the great ocean whose mighty waters cover more than one half of our entire planet. Nor is this disproportion be- tween the value of the discovery, as at first estimated and as finally realized, a tiling of rare occurrence. An English mechanic once constructed an engine for pumping water out of a coal-pit, little thinking he was thus revolutionizing the world by machinery moved by steam. The early philosophers of Greece in treating the Conic Sections never suspected that they were furnishing means for the mensuration of the heavens, and were unconsciously laying the foundations of astronomy. " Human inventions," to use the words of Captain Maury, '* are important geographical agents, and the various mechanical improvements of the age have greatly changed the face of our country and the industrial pursuits of the people. Before Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin, the culti- vation of cotton in the South was confined to a small ' patch ' on each farm. About seventy years ago, an American ship from Charleston, arriving in England with ten bales of cotton as part of her cargo, was seized on the ground that so much cotton could not be produced in the United States. In 1860 the production had reached four luillions of bales and upward." Eaiment is to the human family second in imj^ortance to food. When the Reaper, by which the harvests of the world's breadstuffs are sickled, attains the age of Whitney's invention, how vast, how bright, the prospect of its use and its utility ! ^^lU^^^ GEOEGE LAW. '^ EORGE LAW was of Irish extraction, his father, John Law, having been honi in the north of Ireland. He came to this country in 1784, and settled in Jackson, Washington county. New York, where the subject of this sketch was born, in 1SC6. His father was a substantial farmer, raising a large number of cattle, and kec]iing the most extensive dairy in the county. His pon assisted in the labors of the farm until he attained the age ot eighteen, enjoying such means of education as were afibrded by the cchcols of the country. He contracted a strong taste for leading in his early days, which increased with advancing years, until his habit of studying the best works on history, science, and the higher branches of litQi-ature became inflexible, and by dint of patient and careful investigation he got to be one of the best informed men of the day. His memory was uncommonly tenacious, and. what he once perused he never forgot, so that his mind was well stored and his information always available. There never lived a man more exclusively self-made. He instructed himself thoroughly in everything necessary to a perfect comprehension of the important part he was to perform on the world's stage. From the time he left his father's house up to the year 1839, when he contracted to build the High Bridge which spans the Harlem River, conveying the Croton water at a giddy height across that stream, he was continuously employed on the public works of dif- ferent States, principally New York and Pennsylvania. He began in a subordinate capacity, but soon advanced to the position of superintending and sub-contracting, and then to be one of the most extensive contractors of his time, in which he laid the foundation 53 2 GEORGE LAW. of his fortune. His engagements were always in constructing rail- roads and canals. He was popular with his men, always treating them with humane consideration, and fulfilling his engagements with them to the letter. "While the High Bridge — which will stand for ages as a monument of his unerring judgment and consummate skill — was in process of construction, he sailed for Europe. He was in Paris in December, 1 840, when the body of Kapoleon was brought there from St. Helena. He remained abroad until the summer of 1841, visiting all the most interesting places on the continent, and spending some time in London. He described what he saw in a vivid and graphic manner, presenting a distinct image to the mind of the listener, and rendering intelligible and satisfac- tory what was before vague, misty, and incomprehensible. His language is simple, natural, and unambitious, and his narrative power is something extraordinary. He examined the battle- ground of Waterloo with patient care, understanding the disposi- tion and movements of the contending armies with perfect clear- ness ; and his accomit of that momentous struggle is as impressive a picture as that painted by the pen of Victor Hugo. He saw Yesuvius under the most auspicious conditions, and he so describes the spectacle that his hearers seem to witness the volume of smoke and flame issuing from the crater, and the burning lava pouring down the sides of the mountain. On his return to the United States, Mr. Law engaged successively in many different enterprises, for constant occupation was indispensable to him, all of which he conducted with that practical intelligence, wise discretion, and persistent energy that never fail to achieve great results. In 1842 he bought largely into the Harlem Railroad. The affairs of the company had been so grossly mismanaged that the property of the shareholders was nearly all dissipated. The stock had a nominal value of five per cent., but there was no market for it oven at that low figure. The company was overwhelmed with debt. It was not earning even the running expenses of the road, and hopeless bankruptcy seemed inevitable. At this juncture Mr. Law pur- 54 GEORGE LAW. 3 chased a majority of the stock, and took upon himself the sole management of the road. lie infused new life into its direction, provided for its outstanding debts, introduced a wise economy where all before had been foolish extravagance, and in an incred- ibly short period of time, the stock rose from five to seventy-five j)er cent. He was next persuaded to undertake the resuscitation of the Hudson and Mohawk Railroad, running between Albany and Schenectady, then swamped by a floating debt of a quarter of a million. The capital stock was a million and a quarter, and its market value was then twenty-seven per cent. There was an in- clined 23lane at Albany and another at Schenectady. The road was badl}^ managed, the stockholders discontented and ready to accept any terms which Mr. Law might be disposed to ofier, lie bought into it, and immediately assumed the control of its affairs. He dispensed with the inclined planes, changed the line of the road, carrying it around the hills, bringing it into the centre of Albany, and connecting its western terminus with the Utica road. He reduced the yearly expenses more than a hundred per cent, re-stocked the road, and wlien he left it, at the end of two yeai-s, its market value had increased two hundred per cent. The stock soon rose to par, and at the time of the consolidation it bore a handsome premium. In 1847, Mr. Law embarked in the crowning enterprise of his life. In that year he commenced the preparations which ended in his becoming the owner, by building and purchase, of sixteen ocean steamers. The vast treasures of California had become partially known to the world. Colonel Sloo, of Ohio, had contracted with the United States Government to transport the mails between the Atlantic coast and California by the way of New Orleans and Chagres- Sloo had not the means to fulfill his contract, and he opened negotiations with Mr. Law in order to obtain his aid in carrying out the project. With the eye of a statesman as well as a sagacious lousiness man, Mr. Law discerned the importance to the nation of securing this immense trade against the competition 55 4 GEORGE LAW. of Great Britain. The commerce of tLc Soutli Pacific was monop- olized by her far-seeing merchants, and nothing but the bold ente]-- prise and almost illimitable resources of George Law prevented them from gaining possession of the entire trade of the North Pacific and California. His great movement was inspired by the highest motives of patriotism, the vast returns from the investment being a secondary consideration. The steamer " Falcon," which he bought in 1845, took the first passengers to Chagres which reached California by steam. Soon after he built the " Ohio " and "Georgia," which commenced running in January, 1849. But we have not room for further details of his operations on the ocean. One transaction, however, was so characteristic of Mr. Law, and illustrates so fully his firmness, independence, and sense of fairness and rectitude, that in justice to him it should not be omitted. In 1852, the authorities of Cuba issued an order prohibiting the " Crescent City," or any other vessel having on board Mr. Smith, the purser of the " Crescent City," from entering the harbor of Havana ; he having in some way given offence to the Captain- General of the Island. Mr. Law refused to submit to this arbitrary demand, and appealed to the Govermnent at Waslimgton. The timid and temporizing policy of the Administration led them to evade the real question, and to recommend that the Cuban author- ities should be appeased by the removal of tlie obnoxious purser. This course was repugnant to Mr. Law's sense of v/hat was due to himself as well as Smith, and he peremptorily declined to accept the suggestion. The President — whose infirmity of purpose wan notorious — told Mr, Law Ihat if his steamer was lestroyed he would have no claim for damages. Mr. Law replied, with much spirit, that if the Government could not protect its own citizens in their rights, the fact ought to be known. That, for his part, he was confident that the American people would not look with com- posure upon any dereliction of the Government in that regard. The result was, that although the Captain-General threatened to sink the " Crescent City" if she attempted to pass the Moro Castle 56 GEORGE LAW. 5 witli Smitli on board, he was retained. The vessel continued her trips, and the order was finally withdrawn. In 1852, the great enterprise of crossing the Isthmus from Aspin- wall to Panama by rail was languishing from want of confidence in the undertaking, and the difficulty of providing the requisite means to surmount the almost invincible difficulties presented by tlie obstacles of high mountain ranges, deep ravines, and a climate so charged with miasma as to be dangerous to human life. The vast importance of an early completion of the road so impressed Mr. Law, that he visited Cha,o;res and Panama in order to inform himself by personal examination in respect to the feasibility of the undertaking. After purchasing into the road to the extent of half a million of dollars, ho went to Aspinwall and Panama, located a terminus, and set men at work on the road, and in constructing a dock and station for steamers, which was the first accommodation of the kind for commerce between the tvv'o oceans ever provided in that country. He came home in April, 1852, having visited Hglvana, Jamaica, Porto Bello, San Juan, and 'New Orleans, and made a careful scrutiny into the resources and capacity of those important places. On his return he made a report respecting the difiiculties of the undertaking, and the prospective advantages of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. > The judgment of Mr. Law was accepted as undoubted authority, and the money to com- plete the work was forthcoming. When he bought into the road, the market value of the stock was seventy-five per cent. The fol- lowing year it rose over one hundred per cent. < His connection with the Eighth Avenue Railroad, one of the most important thoroughfares in the city, was made under similar circumstances.^ Certain parties had procured a grant for the road, but they were unable to complete the work, and the charter was about to lapse by its own limitation — two and one-half months only remaining of the time in which it was required to be built. Mr. Law advanced $800,000, and completed the work within the specified period. He has been engaged in many other enterprises 57 6 GEORGE LAW. of more or less magnitude, all of tliem being of public utility and importance. But it is liardly necessary to rehearse them in detail ; suffice it to say that no man ever lived in Ainerica who has accom- plished one-half that which has been achieved by Mr. Law in pro- moting public internal improvements, enlarging the field of our ocean traffic, and augmenting the prosperity of the country. / In the early stage of the Rebellion, the Government at Wash- ington was wholly unequal to the exigencies of the situation. Tlie tremendous issues which the Administration had to confront, over- whelmed the President and his Cabinet. There was neither states- manship, firmness, nor confidence in Congress or the Executive Department. The news of the appalling and wholly unexpected defeat of the Federal forces iit Bull Run fell upon the country with crushing force, while it created such a panic in Washington that Mr. Lincoln and the timid and incompetent men around him cast about for the means of escaping the impending danger. An immediate attack from the victorious Confederate army was gener- ally apprehended. So abject and utter was the pervading terror, that Mr. Lincoln ordered an armed vessel lying at Greenleaf Point to be kept under a full head of steam, ready to transjDort himself and family to a place of safety; and it was currently reported, without contradiction, that he frequently visited the steamer to ascertain by personal examination that his directions were strictly obeyed. The Secretary of War, equally overcome by his fears, had a train in readiness on the JSTorthern Central Railroad, with steam constantly up, with which to flee with his family to the in- terior of Pennsylvania. And l)ut for the calm intrepidity and the wise and soldierly assurances of General Scott, by which the terrors of the President and Cabinet were allayed and partially removed, it may be doubted whether there would not have been an utter rout of the Administration, leaving the Capital of the nation to the mercy of the rebels. The wliole North was distressed, disgusted, almost paralyzed, by the magnitude of the perils by which we were menaced. So strong and all-pervading was the sense of inse- 68 GEORGE LAW. 7 curity and danger, tliat extraordinary measures wei'e clamorously demanded. At this juncture Mr. Eajmond. oftlie!N"ew York Times, proposed a revolutionary movement as the only means of saving the nation. His outcry seemed to embody the popular sentiment, and when he suggested that the authorities at Washington should be deposed as unequal to the emergency, and a Provisional Govern- ment created with George Lavv'^ for its head, with the power of a Dictator, the country stood aghast at the audacity of the man who could contemplate such a proceeding. Still there was a sensation of relief produced by the reflection that the services of one so com- petent, so self-contained, with such a profound knowledge of men, and means so ample, were at the disposition of the people. The proposition, altliough startling at the cutset, soon came to be calmly considered, and there seemed to be a general concurrence of opinion that something had to be done immediately, if the seat of government was to be successfully defended, and that if it biecame necessary to set aside the Washington Government, Mr. Law was the man to be invested with supreme authority. This brief description of the situation in 18G1 is given as an indication of the popular estimate of the practical wisdom, the sound judg- ment, and the vast resources of George Law. For many years of his life, and even after he had acquired much of his large wealth, the character and attributes of Mr. Law were utterly misunderstood and misconceived throughout the country. Up to a late period of his life, there was the strangest discre])ancy between the popular estimation of Mr. Law and the man himself. lie had been con- cerned in so many important enterprises in connection with the public works in different parts of the country, and his name was so identified with steam navigation on our inland waters, as well as on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, that he was as generally known as any other private American citizen. And notwithstand- ing the uniform skill, intelligence, and success with which his busi- ness operations were conducted, none but his intimate friends and those who became acq^uainted with him in the prosecution of these 59 8 GEORGE LAW. nndertakings had the remotest idea of the intellectual oi* moral nature of George Law. The general impression was that he had attained to opulence by lucky speculations and thrifty contracts, into which he had been led by an overmastering desire for gain, avarice being his master passion. Whcreajs, in fact, his large estate has been acquired by wise forecast, intelligent calculation, and the energetic prosecution of immense enterprises conceived for the twofold purpose of promoting the general good and receiving a fair return therefrom. If a hackneyed phrase could be excused in this connection, we might say that Mr. Law is one of the most remarkable man of the age. Considering his humble origin and the privations of his childhood and earlier youth, what he has accom- plished l)y his own unaided exertions, the extent to which he has educated himself, his solid acquirements in many branches of useful knowledge, his wonderful skill in managing men, and his general effective power, are a marvel to all who know him. lie is an origi- nal and profound thinker, with a brain as clear as a bell, working with the precision of the most perfectly ordered machine. We have never known a more Bclf-containcd man, or one who brings to the consideration of every subject of which he takes cogni- zance a healthier or stronger intellect, or who is more certain to arrive at a correct conclusion. His mental structure is as massiv*c and potent as his physical. lie is a giant in stature, and his mind is correspondingly large, operating slowly and with great delibera- tion, but with ponderous force. He is methodical and systematic in his habits and mode of doing business. He is equable in tem- per, self-poised, rarely excited, and never thrown from his balance. He is an eminently just man; he fulfils all his engagements with fidelity, and never prosecuted an enterprise by dishonorable and questionable means. In politics, he sympathizes with the Democratic party, but of late years has taken no active part in elections. But he has all the elements requisite in a great leader, and is capable of exerting a controlling influence in any sphere, however extended. 60 "'""m h, Emily Satlai'' ^^' . PKA^:F:R 37 ' r HOK GALUSHA A. GEOW. [We are indebted to the enterprivsing publishing house of Zeigler, McCurdy & Co., Phi- ladelphia, publishers of '■ Men of Our Day," for the greater part of this sketch] W^ALUSIiA A. GEOW is a native of AshforJ (now East- ^^^ ford), Windham County, Connecticut, where lie was born, ^^^^ August 31, 1821, At the tender age of three years, he lost his father, Joseph Grow, v.ho died, leaving six children, the eldest of whom was but fourteen years old and the youngest an infant, and a property, the proceeds of which were barely sufficient to pay his debts. Galusha was sent to live with his grandfatlier, Captain Samuel Robbins, of Voluntown, in tlie eastern part of the county, with whom he remained until he was ten years old, performing the work common to fai-mers' boys of his age, viz., driving oxen to plow, milking, '-riding horse"' to furrow out corn, "doing chores," otc— and attending district school in the winters. About that time his mother removed to Pennsjdvania, where she purchased a farm in Susquehanna County, on the Tunkhannock Creek, at a place called Glenwood, where slie resided until her death, in 1864; and which is still the home of her four sons, of whom all, except Galusha and his oldest brotljer, are married. The farm which this good matron purchased was paid for partly at that time, and partly in annual payments; and it required the exercise of much thrift on her part, as well as the united industry of all her children, to make, as the saying is, "both ends meet." She opened a small country-store, which one of her boys tended, while two others worked the farm and engaged in lumbering, Galusha, being the youngest boy, assisted his brother in the store, and accom})anied bim, in tlie spring seasons, in rafiing lumber 61 2 GALUSHA A. GROW. down the Susquelianna River. In 1838 he commenced a course of study at Hartford Academy, preparatory to a collegiate edu- cation ; and, in 1840, entered the Freshman class at Amherst C'Ollege, Massachusetts. From this excellent institution, al- though slenderly fitted by his scanty preparatory studies to cope M'ith his well drilled New England classmates, he graduated in 1841, with high honors, and with tlie reputation of being a ready debater, and a line extemporaneous speaker. As fre- quently happens, however, the assiduity with which he had ap- plied himself to his studies had seriously impaired his health ; yet, nothing daunted, he plunged earnestly into the study of law, was admitted to the bar of Susquehanna County, in the fall of 1847, and continued to practice successfully until the spring of 1850, when broken health compelled him to leave the office for outdoor and more invigorating pur&uits. The following year, therefore, was spent in surveying, farming, peeling hemlock bark for tanning use, etc., and his enfeebled, frame began soon to show encouraging results of such labors. In the fall of 1850, he received and declined a unanimous nomi- nation for a seat in the StsLte Legislature, tendered by the Dem- ocratic County Convention. But, a few months later, while engaged with a gang of men in rebuilding a bridge over the Tunkhannock, which had been swept away by a freshet, he was informed that he had been nominated for Congress, The campaign into which he now entered was a most spirited one — the Demo- cratic party in his district being divided on the Wilmot proviso, the breach had become more fully developed after the pas- sage of the compromise measures of 1850. One wing of the party renominated Mr. Wilmot, while the other selected James Lowrey, Esq., of Tioga County, each candidate canvassing the district in person, and their respective friends becoming warmly enlisted. The Whig candidate was John C. Adams, a lawyer of Bradford County. The district, which then comprised Susquehanna, Bradford, and Tioga counties, usually gave a Democratic majority 62 GALUSnA A. GROW. 3 of about two thousand five hundred. Eight da^'s before the elec- tion, Wihnot and Lowrej" agreed, after consultation with respective friends, to withdraw from the contest, if the Democratic confer- ence of tlie district would reassemble and nominate Grow, who was then unknown in Tioga County, but had taken a very active part in his own county, in tlic presidential elections of 184:4 and 1848, had been a warm supporter of Wilmot, and was his law part- ner for two years. The conference composed of both sets of conferees met at Wellsboro, Tioga County, the week before the election, and all agreed on Grow as a candidate. He was elected by twelve hundred and sixty-four majority, and took his seat in December, 1851, the youngest member of Congress. He continued to represent the district for twelve consecutive years, being elected by majorities ranging from eight thousand to fourteen thousand, and once by the unanimous vote of the district, so that he was often styled " Great Majority Grow." With the exception of Wilmot, who was elected six years, no representative had ever been elected in the district to exceed four years. A new Congressional apportionment of the State, in 1861, unite. Susquehanna County with Luzerne County, and made tiie district Democratic, by which he was defeated in the election of 1862 ; since which time he has been engaged in lumbering and his old pur- suit of surveying, trying to regain health, which had become very feeble when he left Washingfton in the sorino; of ISGo. In 1855 he spent six months in Europe, and most of the summer of 1857 in the Western Territories. He was one of the victims of the National Hotel poisoning, in the winter and spring of 1857, from which he has never fully recovered. In Congress, the most important committees on which he served were the committees on Indian Affairs, Agriculture, and Terri- tories. For six years he was on the Committee on Territories, and four years its chairman ; embracing all the time of the Kansas 63 4 GALUSHAA.GROW. troubles ; and so devoted was lie to the interests and aiiairs of Kan- sas, that his tellovv-merabers often designated him (good-naturedly) as the member from Kansas. His twelve years of service extended through a most important period of the llepublic : the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, election of Banks, Speaker, the Kansas troubles, Lecom.pton Bill, the Homestead Bill, the Pacific Railroad, etc., as well as the Fre- mont and Lincoln campaigns, etc. Mr. Grow's maiden speech in Congress was made on the " Home- stead Bill," a measure which he continued to press at every Con- gress until its final passage as a law in 1861. Indeed, the persistency of his eftbrts for its success, gained for him the appropriate sohri- quet of "The Father of the Homestead bill." In the speecli to which we allude, delivered March 30, 1852, Mr. Grow remarked : " The struggle between capital and labor is an unequal one at best. It is a struggle between the bones and sinews of men and dollars and cents; and in that struggle it needs no prophet's ken to foretell the issue. And in that struggle, is it for this government to stretch forth its arm to aid the strong against the weak? Shall it continue, by its legislation, to elevate and enrich idleness on the weal and the woe of industry ? * * * While the public lands are exposed to indiscriminate sale, as they have been since the organization of the government, it opens the door to the wildest system of land monopoly, one of the direst, deadliest curses that ever paralyzed the energies of a nation or palsied the arm of industry. It needs no lengthy dissertation to portray its evils. Its history in the Old World is written in sighs and tears." * * * "If j-ou would raise fallen man from his degradation, and elevate the servile from his groveling pursuits to the rights of man, you must first place witliin his reach the means for suppljdng his pressing ]>hys!- cal wants, so that i-eligion may exert its influence on the sonl, and soothe the weary pilgrim in his pathway to tlie tomb. * * * If you would make men wiser and better, relieve your almshouses, close the doors of your penitentiaries, and break in pieces your 64 GALUSHA A. GROW. 5 gallows, j3iirify the influences of the domestic fireside. For tliut is the school in which human character is formed, and there its destiny is shaped; there the soul receives its first impres-sions, and man his first lesson, and they go with him for weal or for woe through life. For puiiiying the sentiments, elevating the thoughts, and developing the noblest impulses of man's nature, the influences of a moral fireside and agricultural life are the noblest and the best. In the obscurity of the cottage, far removed from the seductive influences of rank and affluence, are nourished the vir- tues that counteract the decay of human institutions, the courage that defends the national independence, and the industry that sup- ports all classes of the state." In all the exciting discussions of public affairs, since 1850, Mr. Grow has taken an active and influential part, especially in those relating to the extension or perpetuity of slavery. Mr. Grow, although educated a Democrat, and his family con nections all belonging to that party (but now being Republican), has been thoroughly anti-slavery in his convictions and his utter- ances, asserting boldly that " slavery, wherever it goes, bea.ra a sirocco in front and leaves a desert behind." He resisted with all his energies the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and, from the date of its consummation, he wholly severed his connection with the Democratic party. When, upon the floors of Congress, Southern bullies adopted the bludgeon and revolver as their logic, he met their insolence with a muscular argument, which proved the sincer- ity of his declaration to Keitt, the South Carolinian, that " no nig- ger-driver could crack his whip over him." And soon after the infamous assault upon Sumner by this same Keitt and his friends, Mr. Grow took occasion, in a speech on the admission of Kansas, to assert that " tyranny and wrong rule with brute force one of tlio Territories of the Union, and violence reigns in the capital of the Republic. In the one, mob-law silences with the revolver the voice of men pleading for the inalienable rights of man ; in the other, the sacred guaranties of the Constitution are violated, and reason 6 65 6 GALUSHAA. GROW. and free speech are supplanted hy tlie bludgeon ; and, in tlie coun- cil chamber of the nation, men stand up to vindicate and justify both. Well may the patriot tremble for the future of his country when he looks upon this picture and then upon that !" In 1859, he was mainly instrumental in defeating the attempt in the Senate to increase the rates of postage from three to five and ten cents on letters and double the old rates on printed matter. On the 4th of July, 1861, Mr. Grow was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, an office which he held during the first two years of the war, receiving, at the close of his term, the first imanimo us yoie of thanks wliich had been given by that body to any Speaker in many years. The eloquent and patriotic words which he uttered upon taking the chair of the House, at a time when the rebel flag of the new Confederacy was flaunting in the very sight of Washington, were made good by the alacrity with which— when the mob held possession of Baltimore, severing the connection with the North — he seized a musket, and, as a member of Clay's brigade, stood " on watch and ward," until the arrival of New York Seventh and other troops, via Annapolis, brought safety to the capital. He was drafted under the first draft ; and, although exempted by the board of examination, as unfit for military duty, by reason of his health, he still furnished two substitutes who served through the war. During the Presidential election of 1868 he was chairman of the Republican Central Committee of Pennsylvania. At the session of the Legislature of 1869, most of the Republican papers of the State zealously urged his election to the Senate of the United States, but other influences prevailed. For the past year he has been engaged in Philadelphia in the mani^facture of a vitreous porcelain, out of a mineral imported from Greenland, called kryolith. Though absorbed in business, he has lost none of his interest in the public questions of the day which afi'ect the rights of men or the interests of the laboring classes. 66 GALUSHA A. GROW. 7 At the celebration of the adoption of the Fifteenth Constitutional Amendment, at Philadelpiiia, by the colored people of the State, he said : — "The second great epoch in our history is passed, and we meet on this occasion to commemorate the third. The ideas that made the fathers the fanatics of their day have been incorporated into organic law, and are stamped in indelible characters upon the pillars of the Republic. Tiie Goddess of Liberty can now rear her altars without shuddering at the clauk of the chaiu riveted by her professed votaries. Henceforth the land of Washington is tlie home of the emigrant and the asylum of the exile of every*clime, and of all races of men. We stand on the line that divides the old from tlie new; the dispensation of hate, oppression, and wrong from that of liberty and right. . . . Grievously the nation sinned, generously it has atoned. God so ordained in the retributions of His providences, that for the sighs and tears wrung from the bondmen through ages of sorrow, He exacted the sighs and tears of a nation mourning its unreturning brave. The wealth coined in the sweat of the laborer's unrequited toil He scattered to the winds in the havoc and devastation of war. Will the Republic learn from this terrible visitation of anguish and woe that the only sure foundation for social peace and national perpetuity is in equal and just laws administered alike for the protection of every citizen? Nations live by the practice of justice, and they die by injustice and wrong." His prediction in the following extract from his closing address, 4th March, 1863, as Speaker of the Thirty-seventh Congress, has been fully verified. " Whether the night of our adversity is to be long or short, there can be no doubt of the final dawn of a glorious day. For such is the physical geogi'apiiy of the continent that there can be, between the Gulf and the Lakes, but one nationality. No matter what changes maj' be wrought in its social organization, its territorial limits will continue the same. The traditions of tlie past, and the hopes of the future, have crystallized in the American heart the fixed resolve of one union, one coimiry, and one de.stiny. And no human power can change that destiny any more than it can stay tlie tide of the 'father of waters,' as it rolls from the mountains to the sea. "If the people between the Gulf and the Lakes can not live together in peace as one nation, they certainly can not as two. This war then, though it cost countless lives and untold treasure, must, in the nature of things, be prosecuted till the last armed rebel is subdued, and the flag of our fathers is respected on every foot of Ameri- can soil." Mr. G row's public career, as will be seen, has been prominently marked by his persistent advocacy of free homesteads, free ten itory, human freedom, cheap postage, and, indeed, every measure by which the people were to be made wiser, purer, or happier. It is a record of which every public man may well be proud ; a record peculiarly 67 8 GALUSIIAA. GKOW. befitting one who, bronglit up a farmer's boy, has never forgotten or hesitated to acknowledge the interests which the working-men of the Republic have upon his services. Though young in years, and far from robust in health, and with no adventitious aid from wealth or family influence, he has already achieved a national reputation. His long public career as a politician has been marked by a straightforwardness and fidelity which excite the admiration of the people. It has been marred by no wavering, no eccentricities, no lapses from the path of principle, but he has carried the flag of the party and the country, undismayed, through battle, through defeat, and victory, relying upon the immutability and truth of the cause, ■with " Not a star tarnished, not a stripe polluted." Vigorous outdoor exercise during the past six years has tended greatly to re-establish his health, and may, we sincerely hope, fit him for a still more extended career of public influence and usefulness 68 HOK EDWIN D. MOEGA:^. BY J. ALEXANDER PATTEN. f HE name of Edwin D. Morgan lias a national renown. Throughout our vast country his eminent services in mu- nicipal, State, and National offices have obtained for Lim universal public praise. Honest and patriotic, intelligent and elE- cient, he has displayed those qualities which are at once the highest in manhood and in official station. Edwin D. Morgan, eighteenth governor of New York, and late senator of the United States, was born in the town of Washington Massachusetts, February 8, 1811. He attended the public schools of that section until he was twelve years of age, when his father removed to Windsor, Connecticut, where he was a pupil of the high school, and subsequently a student in the Bacon Academy at Col- chester. He was a boy of remarkable enerfrv and intellicrence When the family removed to Windsor, a distance of some fifty miles, young Edwin drove an ox-team, loaded with the household effects, performing a large share of the journey on foot. Having reached the nge of seventeen he went to Hartford, where he became a clerk in the wholesale grocery and commission house of his uncle. This was a great step for him. Filled with bright anticipations of a success- ful future, to be gained by integrity and industry, he devoted him- self to his duties with great zeal. He mastered the details of the bus- iness with surprising ease, and showed a tact and penetration in bargaining that proved him to have rare capacity for business. At the end of three years his uncle admitted him to a partnership, and he remained in Hartford some five years longer, carefully accumulating a capital. In 1836 he came to the city of New York to reside, and cstablislied himself in the same kind of trade. His capital was not 69 2 EDWIN D. MORGAN. more than a few thousand dollars, and in the infancy of his busineps he was obliged to pass through the terrible financial crisis of 1837, which he did successfully. The house then established is still in prosperous business, after a period of more than thirty years. Mr. Morgan was a most intelligent and high-toned representative of the mercantile character. He gave dignity to all the transac- tions of the mart and the counting-room. No man of his day had more judgment, foresight, or nerve. He devoted thought and energy to his pursuit, and embarked in ventures before unattempted. Something of his disposition in business mutters is shown in an anecdote which is related of him. He was engaged in a great sugar speculation, and went to Louisiana to buy the article. A rival was there doing the same thing. One evening Mr. Morgan approached the house of a planter, and found dancing and merriment going on. When the planter appeared, he invited Mr. Morgan to enter, and partake of his hospitality in company with another guest, already present, whose name was mentioned. This guest was Mr. Morgan's rival, and he knew that his errand was to buy the crop of the planter. Under these circumstances, Mr. Morgan declined the invitation, but at once entered into a negotiation for the crop of sugar, which he bought, and rode on. Next morning when the rival opened business he learned, to his astonishment, that the entire crop had been pur- chased the evening before by Mr. Morgan. His whole business career was characterized by an enterprise which was both bold and successful. His transactions at home and in foreign markets were on the most extensive scale, and the integ- rity and soundness of his house were beyond all question. He gave his influence and pecuniary aid to the railroads of the country. He was an early friend of the Hudson Kiver Railroad, and at one time the president of the company. As early as 1840 he began to give attention to public affaii*8. While there was a Whig party he labored with untiring assiduity for its success, and on the organization of the Republican party became one of its leaders. At the Republican National Convention held Hi 70 EDWIN D. MORGAN. g Pittsburgh, in 1856, he acted as vice-president and was there made Chairman of the National Committee. In that capacity he opened the convention at Philadelphia, in 1856, that nominated Fremont; tliat at Chicago in 1860, which nominated Lincoln ; and also that at Baltimore, which re-nominated Mr. Lincoln. In 1866 he was made chairman of the Union Congressional Committee. It is needless to say that in all of these positions and duties he exhibited a dignity and efficiency that gave great satisfaction to his party. Going back to 1849, we find Mr. Morgan a member of the Board of Assistant Aldermen in New York, of which he was chosen presi- dent. During the prevalence of the Asiatic cholera at that period he served on the Sanitarj' Committee, and won the everlasting grat- itude of the people by his courageous and persevering services in behalf of the public health. Subsequently he was twice elected from the Sixth Senatorial District to a seat in the Senate, where he was placed at the head of the Standing Committee on Finance. At the regular session of 1851, and at the extra meeting of that summer he was made president jyro tempore of the Senate. In 1852 the Democratic party had gained cotitrol of the Senate, but Mr. Mor- gan was unanimously chosen again as its temporary president, and also, for the fourth time, in the following year. He held the office of a commissioner of emigration from 1855 to 1858, when he was elected governor. He served two terms as governor, and at his election in 1860 received the largest majority ever given for this office in the State of New York. The administration of puljlic affairs by Governor Morgan was enlightened and comprehensive in the highest degree. State credit, canal enlargement, defenses of the harbor of New York, and finally the duty of filling the quota of the State in a prolonged and bloody war, were all matters which fell to his executive care. All were managed with signal ability and success. His messages showed a clear and searching insight into the affairs of the State, and his recomendations were always judicious and practical. At the end of his terra of office he had sent no less than 320,000 men into the n 4' EDWIN D. MORGAN. iield, being more than a fifth part of all that had vet entered the service. In addition to these the State militia were on tliree sev- eral occasions, dispatched to Washington to answer emergencies. "When he left his office, New York stood credited with an excess over all quotas. The aggregate sum expended in bounties under the direction of Governor Morgan was $8,500,000, which the Leg- islature at its next session, acting on the recorainandation of Gov- ernor Seymour, lost no time in legalizing. Tlie tlianks of the Pres- ident and the Secretary of "War were frequently tendered to Gov- ernor Morgan, for his promptness and efficiency in responding to the wants of the government. As an expression of the President's sense of these important services, and to secure other jjractical ad- vantages, in September, 1861, Governor Morgan was appointed a major-general of volunteers, and the State has erected a military department under his command. He made contracts in behalf of the general government for rations, clotliing, arms, and ordnance to the extent of many millions of dollars, whicli were all a])proved. In all his public duties and obligations Governor Morgan had the public good solely in view. Charged with the manifold and momentous interests of a great State, he devoted to them his whole intelligence and energy. As the time for tlie election of a United States senator drew near, Governor Morgan became a prominent candidate. In Feb- ruary, 1S61, he was elected for the term of six years, to succeed Preston King. He took his seat at the called session of March of that year, and has served on the Committees on Commerce, Finance, the Pacific Eailroad ; as chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library, on Manufactures, Military Affairs, Mines and Mining, and on Printing. In February, 1865, on the retirement of Mr. Fessen- den, he was asked by Mr. Lincoln to accept the position of Secre- tary of the Treasury, which he declined. His career in the Senate was marked by the same dignity and purity of action that had characterized him in all other public stations. Leaving to others the oratorical displays, he confined himself to the severe duties of 72 EDWIN D. MORGAN. 5 the committees, and to a rule of being in his seat to vote on all im.p<^^rtant measures. No senator exercised a wider influence among his associates of both parties, or commanded more public respect. In July, 1867, Williams College, which is located in Mr. Morgan's native county of Berkshire, Massachusetts, conferred upon him the degree of LL. D. As an earnest friend of the learned institutions of the country, and a statesman of tried ability and virtues, this was an act that gave not less honor to the institution than to Mr. Morgan. He is a man of massive frame and tall stature. Erect, self-pos- sessed, and courtly, he has a most dignified and impressive pres- ence. His head is of a size in proportion to his large body, and the fine intellectual face has every feature prominent and noble. The brow is full and high, the nose and mouth are prominent and expressive. The eyes, though not by any means small, are deep set beneath the overhanging forehead. His face shows the amiable, virtuous character, and at the same time a fixedness of purpose and courage. Neither his manners nor conversation partake of an}' thing like conceit of opinion or position. But there is an elevation in the one and a decision in the tone of the other, that never fail to produce an impression. A man of splendid fortune and of the highest social station, he is not an aristocrat in his feelings or actions, but he always maintains the dignity properly belonging to the refined and exalted life. Our country has produced no man superior to Edwin D. Morgan in varied and useful talents for the walks of commerce and public duty. With the most insignificant advantages in youth, he has achieved business success and T>ational fame. Never untrue to principle, never faithless to friends or obligations, he stands in his private and public career an example to his own and all coming times. 73 GEOEGE W. CHILDS. BY JAMES PARTOX. 5^/!^ YOUNG man entering now upon a career of business may nSc^ well be discouraged at times when lie considers the little '^'=-*» chance he has of ever attaining a place among the masters and possessors of the world. A business establishment must now be immense or nothing. It must absorb or be absorbed. It must either be a great, resistless maelstrom of business, drawing countless wrecks into its vortex, or it must be itself a wreck, and contribute its quota to the all-engulfing prosperity of a rival. This is the law of modern business, against which it were idle to declaim. It is one of the results of man's reducing to subjection the mighty power of steam, by which he must first be enabled, and then compelled, to transact all his affairs on the great scale. I^or ought we to regret the change ; for, although the period of transition is one of loss and disaster to many, yet the result, I firmly believe, will be a universal advance in all that constitutes civilization. No man likes to see his business absorbed into the giant establishment of his neighbor. No cobbler relishes being swallowed up into a great manufactory of shoes ; and no wayside blacksmith welcomes the invention which now turns out, in a single factory, a million horseshoes a week, better made and cheaper than the most dexter- ous of human hands could produce them. But, suppose the rev^olu- tion complete; imagine the time when all the world's M'ork shall be done in establishments which vmst be well-ordered and ably- conducted, merely heoause they are immense ; when every man, instead of aiming to be the chief of a petty shop, subject to all the narrowing influences of its smallness and uncertainty, shall be a member of a concern which by its very vastness shall dignify all that belong to it, and which will, by its stability, afford that safe f<;ot- 75 2 GEORGE W. CHILDS. liold in the world wliich a small business rarely can ! I see glorious promise for tlie future of our race in that irresistible tendency, which so many deplore, that is creating everywliere businesses of enormous proportions. The proprietors of them will be expanded and elevated by the largeness of their transactions, and they will be compelled to employ, encourage, and justly compensate every grade of talent. They must do this. It will be no affair of senti- ment and generosit3\ That concern will everywhere be strongest which will know best how to attract and retain men of ability. Nevertheless, we can blame no young man if he looks back with regret to the time when Franklin could suppose that a capital of two hundred dollars was sufficient to set a mechanic up in business. Modern establishments certainly do look discouragingly vast to young ambition. A youth who begins life in a store like Stewart's, of New York, which is exactly two hundred times as extensive as the ordinary dry-goods store of former days, and which expends more money in a day than Ids salary would amount to in a centui-y, may well stand confounded when he considers the obstacles in the wa}' of his attaining mastership. But if steam is mighty, man is mortal. These great concerns are controlled by men who grow old, who withdraw, who must one day resign the reins to younger men ; and in them all there is going on a process of sifting out from the mass of persons employed the few who will at length govern departments, and the onk who will finally bear sway over the whole. Under the regime of the steam-engine, as in the times pre- ceding it, the rule still holds good that a man usually gets into as high a place as he is really tit for, and rises about as fast as it is safe he should. Providence being a good economist, first-rate men do not long continue in second-rate phices. Tliese familiar truths are strikingly illustrated in the career of Mi. Childs, the proprietor of the most important and lucrative news- paper of Philadelphia, one of those rooted newspapers which grow with the gi'owth of their city, and which seem capable of declining onlv with its decline. 76 GEORGE W. CHILDS. 3 Twenty-five years ago, when I was a resident of Pliihidelphia, tliere was one spot of that sedate and tranqnil eity which seemed like home; for it exhibited the vitality which New Yorkers ai'o accustomed to witness on every hand. This was the corner of Third and Chestnut streets, where was published \\\^ Piiblic Ledger^ and where there was also the most flourishing depot of newspapers and cheap publications then existing in the city. It was always exhilarating to ]>nss that corner; sueli was the bustle and bright display of the fugitive wares of literature. The Ledger then seemed as firmly established in the habits and confidence of the people as a newspaper could be, and it was still owned by the three able men who had founded it many years before. The Ledger building was solid, tall, and imposing, and the ofiice wore that air of immutable prosperity which old banks and old newspaper establishments alone possess. It had begun in the quiet way in which things of lasting import- ance usually do; and it had had that tough struggle for life which the strong never escape. On half a sheet of paper three journeymen printers from New York had drawn up, in 1836, their articles of partnership, had hired a small office, bought a hand-press, engaged an editor, and launched their enterprise — a penny paper — a novelty then in Philadelphia. They would have failed if they had been cowards, for they had not the capital to wait long for success. Luckily for them, questions arc»se which gave them the chance of risking destruction by doing right. They did right; they took the side of law against influential mobs. When the medical students — a numerous brotherhood in Philadelphia — were disorderly, the little Ledger defied and rebuked them. When the Irish were hunted down by Native Americans, and Catholic churches were burned by rioters, the L^edger courted odium by denouncing lawless vio- lence, and nearly incurred ruin. When the abolitionists were mobbed, the Ledger^ though its corps of proprietors and editors disapproved their proceedings, defended their right to assemble and discuss public questions. 77 4 GEORGE W. CHILDS. Such conduct as this makes a newspaper strike down its roots deep in the gratitude and esteem of tlie stable and the subscribing portion of the public. A newspaper gains by daring to lose. It never does so well for itself as when it gives wide-spread offense by being right a month before its readers. In 1848, when the Ledger had been in existence twelve years, it had grown past the perils of its youth, and yielded to its proprietors incomes ample and secure. They were still in the prime of life, and with powers strengthened by use and success ; nor were there wanting in the establishment men of mature and tried abilitj', who might be supposed capable of taking their places when age should have disposed them to withdraw. At that very time the future master of tlie Ledger worked in a portion of the Ledger building. He was not its chief editor. He was not foreman, book-keeper, or confidential factotum. He was not in the line of promotion at all. If any one had been asked to go over the edifice and name the person employed in it who was most likely to succeed to the pro- prietorship, he would not have so much as taken into consideration the chances of a youth, named Childs, who occupied a small office in the building. I should have passed him by as a person totally out of the question. And yet he, the almost unknown lad of eighteen, without capitaled friends or connections, with nothing to aid him but his own brain, hands, and habits — he, George W. Childs, was the predestined person ! The editor, who was a forci- ble and fluent writer, attempted mastership and fjiiled. Other leading men in the building tried for the same prize, but with no memorable success. That boy was the man ! He was the born master. He was the heir, though not the heir-apparent. And, what was still more remarkable, he had already distinctly set before himself, as an object to be accomplished, the proprietorship of the Ledger establishment. He had said to himself: " Lwill own all tJiis some day f'' It was not the random utterance of a light-hearted boy. He meant it. It was his deliberate purpose ; and he had grounds, even 78 GEORGEW.CHILDS. 5 in his boyish successes, for believing in its fufinineut. In they:ars that followed, he made no secret of his intention ; but often said to his intimate friends, '' If I live, I will become the owner of the Puh- I'iG Ledger^'' He said so to Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, nine years before he accomplished his pni-pose, and at a time when there seemed no likelihood of its ever being for sale, or of his possessing tlie means of buying it. The audacity of such a thought in a boy of eighteen can hardly be appreciated by any one wlio was not familiar with Philadelphia at the time, and Avith the solid basis of prosperity upon which the Ledger stood. It was as though a poor boy who had struggled to London from a distant town, and obtained some obscure employment about Printing House Square, should quietly say to himself: ''I will one day own the London T ivies ! " The lad was a stranger in Philadelphia, recently arrived from Baltimore, his native city. His early friends in Baltimore do not depict him as in the least resembling the ideal boy of modern novels — the Tom Browns, who put forth their whole soul in foot- ball and cricket, and bestow the reluctant residue upon the serious business of school. With sincere deference to our honored guest, Mr. Thomas Hughes, I must beg leave to state, that superior men, who learn to govern themselves and direct affairs do not spend their boyhood so. Not in the Rugby style do the Jeffersons, Franklins, Pitts, Peels, Watts, nor the great men of business, nor the immortals of literature and art, pass the priceless hours of boyhood and youth. Such boys do not despise the oar and the bat, but they do not exalt the sports of the playground to the chief place in their regard. This boy certainly did not. He exhibited, even as a child, two traits seldom found in the same individual: a remarkable aptitude for business, and a remarkable liberality in giving away the results of his boyish trading. At school he was often bartering boyish treasures— knives for pigeons, marbles for pop-guns, a bird-cage for a book ; and he displayed an intuitive knack in getting a good bargain by buying and selling at 79 $ GEOUGE W. CniLDS. tliG right moment. At .v very early age, he had a sense of the value of time, and a strong inclination to become a self-supporting indi- vidual. He has told his friends that, in his tenth year, when s{'h(,K)l was dismissed for the summer, he took the place of errand-boy in a bookstore, and spent the vacation in hard work. This was not romantio, but it was highly honoi'able to a little fellow to be willing thus to work for the treasures that boys desire. At tliii"- teen, he entered the United States Navy, and spent fifteen montlis in the service; an experience and discipline not without good results upon his health and character. He was a favorite among his boyish friends. One of them, Hon. J. J. Stewart, of Maryland, has recently said : "He was then what you find him now. His heart was always larger than his raenn^*. There is but one thing he ahvays despised, and that is meanness- ; there is but one character he hates, and that is a liar. "Wlicn he left Baltimore, a little boy, the affectionate regrets of all hit? companions followed him to Philadelphia ; and the attachment they felt for him was more like romance than reality in this every- day world. ... I remember that he wrote to me years ago, when we were both boys, that he meant to prove that a man oovid he libei'al and successful at the same timeP Let us see if the career of the man has fulfilled the dream of the boy. Upon reaching Philadelphia, a vigorous lad of fourteen, he knew but one family in the city, and they, soon removing, left him friend- less there. He found employment in his old vocation of sho|)-boy in a bookstore. But he was no longer a boy. Experience had given him an early maturity of mind and character, and he was soon discharging the duties of a man. Paying strict attention to busi- ness, working early and late for his employer, disdaining no honest service, he soon had an opportunity, young a.s he was, of showing that he possessed the rarest faculty of a business man — -judfjuiDif. After shutting up the store in tlie evening, he was intrusted by hii' emph)yer with the dnty of frequenting the book auctions anosed of a prodigious number of highly respectable families, whose means are limited, and to whom severe economy is a thing of conscience, necessity, and life-long habit. Not because they earn less than the inhabit- ants of other cities, but because they are ambitious for their chil- dren, and because it is the custom of the place for all but the very poorest people to live with a certain decent and orderly respect- ability, incompatible with waste. Poverty is not regarded there as an excuse for squalor and dirt. Hence, the change in the cost of 86 GEORGE W. CHILDS. 13 Jhe Ledger — the sole luxury to many virtuous faniilies — was really au important stroke of policy, which restored the paper to more than its former ascendency. Behold, then, Mr. Childs at length in the enjoyment of the position upon which he had lixed his hopes sixteen years before ! He assumed, at once, personal control of the paper, both as a busi- ness and as a vehicle of communication with the public mind. For four years he rarely left the editorial rooms before midnight. Him- self a man of the people, in full sympathy with the peoi>lc, he lias conducted the paper in the interests of the people ; and yet there is no paper in the world, the tone of which is more uniformly unsen- satloiial than that of the PahliG Ledger of Philadelphia. There is a certain sincerity in the editorials which contrasts most pleasingly with the mockery, the chaff, the hypocrisy, and the cowardly in- directness, which are such hideous characteristics of some of the newspapers of New York. Mr. Childs evidently feels that a lie is a lie, that an insult is an insult, and that a calumny is a calumny, whether it be spoken or printed ; and he does not consider that it is less atrocious to inflict a stab at midnight from the safe seclusion of an editorial room, than to take an assassin into pay for a similar purpose. It is an honest, clean, industriously edited paper — an honor to journalism, to Philadelphia, and to its proprietor. Noth- ing is admitted to its columns, not even an advertisement, which ought not to be read in a well-ordered household. The adoption of this rule by Mr. Childs excluded from the paper a class of adver- tisements which yielded a revenue of three hundred dollars a week. The people of Philadelphia have responded to his efforts with a liberality which has enabled him to serve them better and better. A new Ledger building, ample in proportions, and furnished with elegant completeness, now adorns the cit}', and invites the approval of visitors. Tiie public seems sometimes to bestow its favors ca- priciously — as if indifferent to the worth or worthlessness of those competing for its suffrages. In this instance, the people of Phila- delphia have rallied warmly to the support of a man whose ambition 87 X4 GEORGE W. CHILDS. and constant endeavor Iiave been to render tliein solid and lastino; service. No one can patiently examine a few numbers of the Public Ledger without perceiving that, in every department of the paper, there is an honest effort to give the reader the most and the best that can be put into the space assigned. It is gratifying to know that a newspaper conducted in this spirit is one of the most profitable in the country. Mr. Childs, now in the enjoyment of a princely income, honors himself by his constant consideration of the comfort, pleasure, wel- fare, and dignity of the persons who assist him. He has provided for them apartments to work in as handsome and commodious as the nature of their employment admits, and the building abounds in Buch conveniences as bath-rooms and ice-fountains. He takes pleasure in compensating faithful service liberally, and loves to see liappiness and prosperity around him. lie has presented his assist- ants recently with insurances upon their lives, and has given to the Typographical Society an elegant improved lot in Woodlands Ceni- etery, besides contributing liberally to the Society's endowment. Care was taken, in furnishing the compositors' room, to give the walls and ceiling the subdued tone most agreeable to the over- tasked eyes of tlie compositors. On days of festivity, such as the Fourth of July and Christmas, Mr. Cliilds is accustomed to ])rovide for those in his employment and their families an entertainment of some kind, in which all can participate — llie happy effects of wliich t^hine in their countenances and animate their minds for many a day after. In a word, his is a generous heart, and finds lia])piness in difi'using ha])piness, and loves to make all around and about him sharers in his prosperity. How much nobler is this than to scrimp and screw for fifty 3'ears, blasting all the life within range by a cold, grudging spirit, and then leave behind, as a heavy burden upon })osterity, a huge mass of property, which the owner parts with only because he can not carry it with him ! Posterity will have care and perplexity enough without being saddled with crude, injudicious bequests. But nearly GEOEGEW.CniLDS. ' 15 tlie whole eflicient population of tlio globe sustains the relation of employer and employed ; and as far as we can discern, this is an unchangeable necessity of human life. Hence we may say, that the welfare and dignity of man depend upon the degree to which the duties involved in this relation are understood and performed. A man in the position of Mr. Childs can, if he will, render the lives of many of those who serve him bitter and shameful ; he can discour- age them by a hard, pitiless demeanor ; he can corrupt them by a bad example; he can wound them by unjust- reproaches ; he can weaken them by excessive indulgence ; he can keep them anxious by his caprice ; he can foster ill-will, and relax honest effort by favoritism ; or, he can simply hold aloof, and regard his assistants merely as part of the ajiparatus of his business. Mr. Childs, on the contrar}^, chooses to be the friend and benefactor of those who labor with him ; and as he has himself labored faithfully in every post, from errand boy to chief, he knows where and how to apply the balm that solaces the hearts of the toiling sons of men. It is for this that I honor him. 89 ^"///I HE7.I0Cil^I-JjlC EWGKS- i.PnjNT? CO.ISS W./ii'ST. JAMES W. GEEAED. BY L. A. HENDRICK. |P HERE is not a man in New York City wlio holds a nearer and a dearer place in the heart of the public than J. W. Gerard. His field of usefulness has been varied. One thing which makes him desire the city's welfare is that he is not a foreigner or an outsider even but one born in our midst and whose entire interests center here. The following sketch we extract from the New York Herald. Mr. Gerard is of Scotch and French extraction, both his parents being born in Scotland but their parents were among the Huguenots who fled from their lovely land, on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, However, we may claim Mr. Gerard as truli/ American for his grandparents came to our glorious land before the Revolution. During the war they went to Nova Scotia but returned at its close. The greatest pains were taken with his education, going first through the finest private schools of the city, and then through Columbia College, which was at that time at the height of its glory. His college duties were a delightful and easy task to him. He graduated with honor, being the tliird in his class. Severe appli- cation to study was not to him a necessity in the attainment of liigh scholarship. Though a finished classical scholar and a fine mathematician, his natural tastes and glowing ambition took a higher range than the dull and dry formulas of the text-books. The indispensable value of these studies to thorough mental disci- pline he early felt and appreciated ; but in his philosophical studies, in belles letires, and in broader and pleasanter fields of general lit- erature he found tlie most hallowed delight. Studying the miglitj 91 2 JAMES W. GERARD masters of oratory aiul the intellectual light of tlie Old "World was his pleasure : the works of men who swajed Athens and Sparta in their glorj ; men wlio moved nations ; men who sang sweet songs for youth and for old age, in their day, and for the same classes for all time ; men whose glorious deeds still remain to im- mortalize their names. Mr. Gerard's sympathy was nevertheless with the living present. He studied men and things as tbey were presented to him in daily life. His hopes and his ambitions linked themselves with the great unbosomed future with whose revolving cycles and evolutions of the unknown were interwoven his duties, his destiny, bis future being, his coming life-battles, and their vie tories and defeats. Having taken his degree of Bachelor of Arts — and the records of the college show that he took in order also the degree of Master of Arts ; and a few years since, as will be remembered, the college conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of LaAvs, a title which he never assumed — he entered upon the study of law. Mr. Gerard began his legal studies in the law office of George Griffin, at that time the Gamaliel of the bar, and then in. the zenith of his fame. He read law with avidity, and soon had at his fingers' ends, so to speak, the contents of the legal text-books. Its tech- nical principles, its subtle distinctions, and its nice logic speedily became familiar to him. Few law students in their preliminarv reading attain a more exact, thorough, and methodized knowledge of the general principles of law. His studies were not confined to the text-books alone ; he thoroughly explored the abstruse doctrines of modern tenures and titles, and extended his research, in fact, into every department of equity and jurisprudence. But all this did not satisfy him. An essential part of preliminary legal training he early saw was to be able to acquire the art of speaking wuth flicility and perspicuity. Accordingly he and a few of the associates of his early legal days, Hiram Ketchum, Thomas Fessenden, Ogden Hoffman, and other young lawyers, formed a debating society called the Forum. Their place of meeting was in one of the 92 JAMES W. GERARD. 3 largest and best rooms of the old City Hotel on Broadway, near Cedar Street. At first six cents was cliarged for admission, but tlie growing ];opularity of the young and brilliant del)aters filled the large room, and, as the receipts were given away in cbarity. the price of admission was raised to twenty-five cents. Many who afterward became distingnished at the bar made here tlieir first appearance before the public as debaters, and by their practice here in the forensic art acquired that excellence in oratory character- izing their subsequent efibrts at the bar. Large numbers still living well remember the effoi'ts of Mr. Gerard, Mr. Ilofiinan, Hugh Maxwell, lliram Ketchum, and others, at these weekly dis- cussions. It was a constellation of brilliant talent. The first people in the city went to hear the debates. Often wlien some specially exciting topic was to be discussed the old Park Theatre, crowded on other nights, would on these nights present a beggarly array of empty benches. " — The rapid argument Soared in gorgeous flight, huking earth With heaven by golden chains of eloquence." The City Hotel has passed out of existence, and of all the active participants in those early scenes of forensic strife only Mr. Gerard, Mr. Maxwell, and Mr. Ketchum ai-e now living. The Forum was still in the full tide of its splendid success and growing popularity when Mr. Gerard was admitted to the bar. At this time a bright and dazzling array of great advocates adorn(Hl the New York bar. Emmet and Wells, Griffin and Ogdcn, -iones and Slosson were its shining ornaments — men not only of great acquirements as lawyers, but men of genius and surpassing elo- quence, and who cultivated oratory as an important adjunct to their profession. Hiring a humble office in William Street, at a rent ot one hundred dollars a year, he placed in it a desk, gave the utmost compass of display to his limited law library, put up his sign, and waited for clients. For some time none came. As he said in his speech at the banquet given him, he waited with patience, and 93 4 JAMESW. GERARD. wondered at the stupidity of people in not employing him. Every lawyer has, however, his first case, and he had his. Talent, industry, and obstinate perseverance formed the basis of Mr. Gerard's eminent success as a lawyer. The advice he gave to young lawyers in his banquet speech tells the whole story. Tlie pathway he indicated as the one they should choose is the one he chose himself. He showed them how genius avails but little in getting into practice — how men of great genius rarely make great lawyers — how energy, untiring perseverance, and patience are the elements that enter into a lawyer's success. He also advised them to become masters of the facts, not minding much the law, but leaving the latter to the judges. His theory is not to cross-examine too much, and not to save all the energies for the summing up, but make the opening equally effective. As a general rule, he thinks the colloquial the most effective style of addressing juries. Such is the programme he long since mapped out for himself. His style of speaking, both in the courts and out of them, is his own, borrowed from no one — an imitation of no one. Simplicity of diction is its most striking feature, and an affluence of language that never tires. To him may be applied the line of the old Latin poet : — " Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit." Although never writing out his speeches, legal, political, or otherwise, he has always shown the happiest faculty of saying the happiest things on all occasions. The letters of Governor Hoffman, Judge Latrobe, Chief Justice Hunt, ex-Attorney-General Evarts, and Judge Nelson read at the banquet testimonial, and the speeches of Mr. Cutting, Judge Blatchford, David Paul Brown, David Dud- ley Field, Luther R. Marsh, the late James T. Brady, and other;;, set forth in words of glowing eulogium tlie salient points of his character, and the causes that contributed to give him his proud eminence at the bar. It is unnecessary to repeat these kindly- expressed and well-merited eulogiums, as showing the basis of Ins 94 JAMES W. GERARD. >J Buccessful career. There is a characteristic, however, largely coti- tributing to this result, to which allusion should be made, and that is, that no person, however poor or humble, ever required his services tliat he did not commnnd them with the same zeal he would have given them to the richest and the most powerful xigain, he did not belong to that class oflawj^ers who — "So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause, Knowing they mxist be settled h^' the laws;" })ut, on the contrary, he always sought to aVoid litigation and only advised to resort to it when every other means tailed to accomplish the ends of justice. Altogether the cause of his success is clear — a disposition glowing with sunshine, a perpetual geniality, lively humor, integrity, talents, zeal, energ}', and great capacity for labor. A voluminous book might be written revealing the wit ima humor of Mr. Gerard. No matter what the case or its surround- ings, he always managed to bring into pleasant prominence its humorous points. While the mock gravity of the owl was foreign to his nature, he never strove to be witty. Ilis wit was spontane- ous, quick, lightning flashes — the fire struck from the flinty rock. His humor was perpetual — the long summer day of golden sun- shine. It was as much in his manner as in any thing he said. From the multitude of cases showing his humorous traits as a lawyer which we might give v/o will cite but one. On one occa- sion he was cross-examining a party who had previously been on very intimate terms with his client, but were then estranged and hostile. The witness had evinced inimical feelings to such an ex- tent in giving his testimony that he thought it best to make an explanation. "My relations with the plaintiff," said the Mitness, "were once of the closest character ; we were, in fact, like brothers ; but now — " " But now you are brothers in law," interrupted Mr. Gerard, finishing the sentence before the witness could go further. 95 Q JAMES W. GERARD. The circumstances connected with Mr. Gerard's first criminal case, which was tlie defense of a boj fourteen years of age, indicted ft)r stealing- a canary bird, led hiin to think that something miglit be done for the reformation of juvenile criminals. He was asked to deliver a public address. He visited all the city prisons, saw liow old and young offenders were mixed up together, consulted the police justices, and from the mass of the material thus collected took as the subject of his address the necessity of a house of refuge for juvenile delinquents. The proposition met at once with public approval, and the Plouse of Kefuge was built. What the House of Refuge is to-day need not be told. Its reformatory influence is most salutary. Thousands of young offendei's, who, if brought iu contact with persons hardened in crime, would themselves become hardened criminals, are here educated for future usefulness in life by being taught trades, and thence go forth into the woi'ld thor- oughly reformed and prepared to become good citizens. It is now one of the most useful institutions in the country, and has been adopted in nearly every State in the Uipon. The spirit of public enterprise forming such a large element in Mr. Gerard's career has in nothing shown itself more effectively than in his efforts to increase the efficiency of our police force. In the course of a European tour he stopped in London some time, and while there was particularl)' struck witii the elficiency of the London police as contrasted with the inetSciency of the police of this city. It became his settled conviction that the wearing of uni- forms would give additional respect to the men, and in every way be attended with good results. On coming back, he wrote a series of able articles in the Jountal of C'Oinmerct\ si)oke repeatedly in public on the topic, and in every way sought to impi-ess upon the city government the importance of adopting his suggestions, and particularly the uniforming of the police and making it a military organization. Everybody remembers how our police used to look in their shabby coats of many colors and every variety of hat and cap, and wilh no badge of office but a star at the breast, that was 90 JAMES W. GERARD. 7 half the time in an eclipse. Having convinced the Police Com- missioners of the utility of the proposed uniform they ordered it to be worn, but the men rebelled and refused to wear it, calling it Mr. Gerard's "d d aristocratic livery." About this time, Mrs. Coventry Waddell gave a fancy ball at her residence in Fifth Avenue. " The police object to wearing the new uniform," said Mr, Gerard to Mr. Matsell, who was then Chief of Police. " Will you lend me a suit ? I am not ashamed to wear it." "Certainly," replied the chief; but where are you going to wear itr " At a ball on Fifth Avenue." " That is a fashionable place to introduce the uniform," said the robust and smiling chief. Mr. Matsell gave him a complete uniform, hat, club, and all. The police heard of it, and said if Mr. Gerard was not ashamed to wear it they certainly ought not to be. And so it was adopted without further objection. In almost every city of the United States police uniforms are now worn. A somewhat memorable event in the history of Mr. Gerard is his crusade some years ago against newsboys. He does not object to newsboys; thinks them a great institution — an indispensable insti- tution in our nineteenth century of civilization. His only objection was to their vociferous style of crying out Sunday papers on Sunday morning, waking everybody from sleep and disturbing ministers and congregations at the Sabbath worship. The Sunday officers were powerless against the noisy urchins, and Mr. Gerard, deter- mined to abate the nuisance, directed an officer, although he had no warrant, to arrest an editor, who, as an exponent of the rights of newsboys, had taken on himself to cry out and sell papers. On Mr. Gerard promising to indemnify the officer, the latter arrested the editor and marched him off to the Tombs, where he was thrown into a cell, to answer a charge of disorderly conduct. An action for false imprisonment was brought by the editor. We will not 7 97 8 JAMBS W. GERARD. pursue the case tlirough all its lengthy details. There were several trials and appeals. Mr. Gerard carried his point, and was success- ful in abating the nuisance. It was in contemplation to give Mr. Gerard a piece of plate for his success in the matter, but he never accepted the honor. No man in tlie city has taken a livelier interest in the cause of pub- lic education than Mr. Gerard. It has been no ephemeral, spas- modic interest. It has been the interest of a lifetime. His warm and generous and sunny nature has a special affinity for children. His soul overflows with tenderness and love for them. He is never 60 happy as when surrounded with their smiling faces. With his o-rowing years this love has grown in its intensity, and in the sweet- ness and purity of his devotion to their interests. For over twenty years he has been an officer of our public schools. No one has con- tributed more than he to perfecting our present splendid system of popular education. There is not a public school in this city every child of which does not know his face, and look more smiling and happy when he comes. As is well known, he has been in the habit of delivering frequent lectures to the older children, and he always has a pleasant word to say to all, from the youngest to the oldest. Our public schools was the closing theme of his great banquet speech. His soul dilated with joy, and a beautiful and almost sacred inspir- ation clothed his utterances. No more beautiful thought and more beautifully expressed was ever uttered than that embodied in his his closing words, which we can not refrain from quoting: ''There "is one hour in the day, which is sacred in tliis great city, and "which is enough to redeem it from much of its sin and wicked- "ness. As the city bells toll out the hour of nine in the morning " a liundred thousand children are engaged in prayer in more tlian "a hundred lofty buildings; a hundred thousand tongues, with "eyes cast upward to the skies, are repeating in solemn, subdued "accents that beautiful prayer to their God which our Saviour " taught on earth ; a hundred thousand voices pour forth a solemn "ciiant in praise of the great Creator who has given them the light 98 • JAMES W. GERARD. 9 "of another dav, and the sweet music of children's voices pouring "forth strains of solemn music is more acceptable to Heaven than " any holy incense ever thrown from silver censer. There is sub- "limityin the thought.'' His interest in our public schools and his labors for their benefit will only terminate with his life, Never having been an active politician, it requires but few lines to give a summary of Mr. Gerard's political life. He was a Federal- ist of the old school and became a member of the Whig party, but when that became an abolition party, under the leadership of Seward and others, he left it, and although he has since acted with the De- mocracy, but not with its ring by any means, he has alwaj^s been independent and voted for tlie best men, without regard to party. Having almost uniformly acted with the minority, he has never been put up for any office, nor held any except that of Inspector of Pub- lic Schools. It is well known, however, that he has never had any political nor judicial aspirations, although once oftered the nomina- tion for Congress, and once that of Judge of the Superior Court. Being devoted to his profession he would not give it up for office of any kind. In early life Mr. Gerard was married to a danghter of Governor Sumner, of Massachusetts, and sister of General Sumner. They had four cliildren, of whom only two — a son and danghter —are now liv- ing. His wife died some five years ago, leaving him a large landed estate in Boston. Since 1844 he has lived at his present residence on Gramercy Park, then the most northerly ■iiouse in New York, and the second stone house in this city. He is an Episcopalian, and attends Dr. Washburne's church. He is as tree from bigotry in re- ligion as he is from partisanship in politics. In private life he is the most companionable of men. In society his address is the most charming that can be imagined, and its honhominie irresistible. He keeps up with the times, its literature, its socialities, its amuse- ments, its busy, animated life. No one is more often to be seen at the opera, concert, or lecture room if there is promise of a good evening's entertainment. Advancing j-ears do not dampen his 99 10. JAMES W. GERARD. spirits nor his vivacity. He has always known how to enjoy hitn- self, and in this regard shows no departure from the habits of a life- time. Next to his taste for tlie opera and music is his passion for fine paintings. He has several times made the tour of all the picture galleries in Europe, and the walls of liis parlors are adorned with 8ome of the finest works of the old masters. There is, in fact, no more valuable collection of private paintings in this city. Every- body knows i\\Q 2^<^'*"'^onnel of Mr. Gerard. Probably no one is more widely known. As we have already stated, he is in the enjoyment of excellent healtli, and it is to be hoped he may be long spared to scatter about him the blessings of geniality and public usefulness and charities, which are abundant, though unostentatious. On Mr. Gerard's withdrawal in 186S from the practice of his pro- fci^sion, there was a magnificent banquet given him at Delmonico's, It was a tribute nnprecedented in its character — a tribute to his eminent abilities as a lawyer, to his zeal and nnbendiug integrity in his profession, and to the general kindliness of disposition he has shown at all times during his long and honorable service at the bar — a tribute of wdiich any man may be justly proud. This tribute — magnificent as it was, and while all the great legal lumi- naries of our city and the leading notabilities of other profe^sion3 gi'aced the banquet with their presence ; and, while learning, taste, wit. imagination, and eloquence gave force and brilliancy to the apeeches — is only feebly expressive of the more extended and broader universality of regard entertained for Mr. Gerard as a citizen. His fame has gone beyond the boundaries of court rooms, preparing briefs and oi)ening cases, examining witnesses and sunmiing up, that climax of legal eftort in which the lawyer summons up all the tact and brilliancy and eloquence and power there is in him to accomplish a verdict for his client. His name has long been a household word. His activity of enterprise as a citizen has been sleepless. No one need to be told that to him we owe the establish- ment of the House of Refuge, that it was through his efforts our police were uniformed, and that to his devotion to our educational 100 JAMES W. GKRAED Jl interests we are mainly indebted for the present perfected system of our public schools. lie has not stopped liere. In all matters of public interest his voice and influence have been heard and felt. Ennobling charities, reforms in government and politics, literature, science and art, each have always had in him a strong and faithful ally. A pure and broad philanthropy welling up from a nature warm and generous and bubbling over with kindly sympathies, and a humor, giving perpetnally pleasing beauty and brightness to his life, pervades his whole soul and being. His life has been an active one in his profession and out of it. To him labor est ooliiptaa. He can not live without labor. His labors in his profession were always on the side of justice and right. His labors out of the profession have been unceasing labors of love for all that elevates manhood and makes life and goodness and joy synonyms of each other and sweetly kin to all that is pure and true and beautiful. A life made up of his varied professioiud experiences, and electric with the vital- izing influences of his genial temperament, sprightly humor, and expansive benevolence, is replete with incidents giving to narrative a livelier glow than the most vivacious records of fiction. In con- clusion we give a part of his speech at the bancpiet : — " I have no apprehension that I shall slide down into listless apathy. My time will be fully occupied. I shall have enough to do. I go from the bustle of the law, not into listlessness, l)ut into a large and active scene of usefulness. I shall give the principal ])art of my time and energies to the public schools — the largest and most splendid system of popular education, whicli is known in any })art of the world ; and that is one great motive of my giving up the practice of the law. I have been for twenty years a peripatetic educational missionary ; and although my especial ground is con- fined to the Fifteenth and Eighteenth wards, yet my walks have extended over the whole city from the Battery to Harlem ; from the East to the North rivers ; and I intend to devote my energies to the welfare and interest of the rising generation of the working classes of the city. The school system as organized in this city ia 101 12 JAMES W. GERARD. perfect; it requires no change, no aiTiendraent : and only let the politicians keep clear of it, and its success will be certain. " The doors of its attractive school-houses are opened to receive, without money and without price, the children not only of the native, but of all immigrants, no matter from what part of the world they come or what language they speak ; no matter what is their nationality, what their social condition, or their religion. The doors are open to Jew and Gentile, and Christians of all denomi- nations — the Protestant, the Catholic, the Episcopalian, the Pres- byterian, Methodist, or Baptist — all meet on neutral ground, and they acquire as good a practical education (both sexes) as any boarding or day-school in the country or in any country can afford. To a gentleman of any taste or refinement, nothing is more agree- able, and I may say instructive, than to pass an hour or two in the morning in the class-room, and see the development of mind and the ambitious strife between the different nationalities, of the masses of children, who, with happy faces, ^o through their exer- cises under a mild, but beautiful and gentle discipline, with no harsh or loud orders given, but the discipline of the whole school led by the music of a piano or the sound of a little bell. In any discussions relative to the merits of the public schools, remember that xmiversal intelligenoe is the hulwarJc of a repul)lic, and if you will have universal suffrage^ you must have its antidote, universal ethicatton. '' I shall now conclude my remarks. Tiiis beautiful banquet will ever be a green spot in my memory, which I never, never can forget. It is the greatest compliment could possibly be paid me. It is unprecedented to a mere lawyer who never wore the ermine or held judicial office, and was simply in the rank and file of the bar. As we now part, I wish you all, individually, health, happi- ness, and prosperity for many years to come. May your lines be cast in pleasant places. May you be plagued with few of the ills of life which flesh is heir to. May your paths be strewed with roses, and may there be but few thorns among them." 102 W. H. WEBB. .R. WEBB was horn in the citj of New York, June 19, 1816, of parents wliose ancestors were English and Huguenot on the paternal side, and Huguenot and Scotcli on the Qiaternal. The former had settled in Connecticut and the latter in New York long before our War of the Revolution. His father, Isaac Webb, was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He removed to the city of New York with his parents, when quite young, and early engaged in the business of ship-building. He afterward became the leading member of the well-known ship- building firms of Isaac Webb & Co. and Webb & Allen of New York. For several years, he was also associated with the renowned ship-builder Henry Eckford, prominent during and after the War of 1812. The subject of our sketch received his education at the private schools of New York and New Jersey. For awhile he attended, the grammar school of Columbia College, wliere he won the regard of the professors and attained the highest rank in mathematics. In liis early years he evinced little fondness for youthful sports, but rather a taste for rare and beautiful natural curiosities, collec- tions of which were made during his school boy days. At the age of thirteen, our future ship-builder constructed his first boat (a small skiff), during his summer vacation. Others followed (among them a paddle-boat), being built during the following two years. The fondness displayed by tlie sop for such pursuits was not pleasing to the father. When the summer vacation came round, the latter intimated that he wished his son, who was then fifteen 103 2 W. H. WEBB. years of age, to resort during tlie vacation only to the molding-loft of his father's ship-yard for occupation and amusement. A molding- loft is a building expressly arranged for laying off plans of vessels in full size, which are built from patterns made after these plans. Here, much to the surprise and regret of the parents and his school-teachers, with whom he was a favorite and who had formed other plans of life for the boy, he determined to learn the art of constructing ships. He therefore sought permission, which was never given, to stay in the ship-yard. The lad, however, was suf- fered to remain at the molding-loft, his parents hoping that a brief experience w^ould suffice and a return to school follow. But their hopes were doomed to disappointment. Exposure at the yard during the next winter, caused (as he was not robust) severe illness. On recovery, parents and friends en- deavored to dissuade the boy from his purpose, but without avail, and work in the ship-yard was resumed. Two years had rolled round and the age of seventeen was reached, by which time the boy discovered he had eml)raced a profession most difficult to learn, requiring constant and extraordinary appli- cation. He was now ready to relinquish his object, fearing that his dreams of becoming a master of the business would never be realized. But remembrance of the determination shown in the beginning, contrary to his parents' desire, knowledge of the humili- ation attending an abandonment after such action, together with the fact that others had succeeded, and therefore he ought to succeed, induced the boy to persevere. Nearly six years were spent in constant work by day, and hard study at night, in order to obtain the scientific and practical knowl- edge necessary to become a complete master of the art of ship- building. He took only one week of vacation during this time, wliich was principally spent in a visit of examination to the dry-dock at the Boston Navy Yard, then new and the first of the kind built in this country. At the early age of twenty, having been previously intrusted 104 W. H. WEBB. 3 ■with the direction of principal portions of the work in the construc- tion of ships and the management of men, lie undertook, under a subcontract made with his father, tlie building of the New York and Liverpool packet-ship Oxford of the old Black Ball Line. He continued the business of constructing vessels as sub-con- tractor until the age of twenty-three, having in the mean time built the Havre packet-ship Dnchesse (rOi-Uans {iii\\\ doing good service), the Liverpool packet-ship New York, and two smaller vessels. About this time the young man's health began to fail, and he took a trip to Liverpool in the last-named ship on her first voyage — partly with a view of becoming more fully acquainted with the performance of a ship at sea. After a short tour of Great Britain and a visit to the Continent, he was unexpectedly recalled by the death of his father, whose business affairs were found to be involved. Soon after his return home, he formed a partnership, April 1, ISIO, with his father's former associate, under the new firm of Webb & Allen. This lasted three years, when Mr. Allen retired, and the then prosperous business has since been conducted by Mr. Webb alone with increasing aTid remarkable success. He has built, up to the present time, one hundred and thirty -four vessels. Many of these are London, Liverpool, and Havre packets, as well as steam-ships of the largest tonnage and in the aggi'egate greater than that of any other constructor in this country. Mr. Webb never built ships on speculation, but always under contract. Having early given evidence of his ability in the model- ing of steam-vessels, he was engaged to construct the first steam- ships to run between New York and Savannah. He also built the first large steamer for the New Orleans trade, as well as the first steamer for the Pacific Mail Steam-ship Company, carrying the United States Mail between Panama and San Francisco. He con- structed all the steamers subsequently built for that company. The first steamer that entered the Golden Gate (harbor of San Fran- cisco), also the first three steamers prelected to carry the first United 105 4 W, H. WKBB. States Mail from New York to China, via Aspinwall, Panama, and San Francisco, were built by Mr. Webb. About the year 1S50 he conceived the idea of constructing a model vessel of war for the United States navy, and application was made at Washington with this view. This application brought an offer from Mr. Dobbin, Secretary of the Navy, for the construction of a model steam-frigate, but on the condition that the vessel should be built in the United States' government dock-yards. This condi- tion was so inconvenient, on account of other engagements, and the jealous hostility manifested by the Bureau of Construction at Washington was so great, that Mr. Webb had to abandon his cherished idea. Application was next made to the Emperor of the French, who listened favorably to Mr. Webb's proposal, but returned answer, that the objections made by the Marine Department were such that he declined ordering a vessel to be built out of their own duck-yards. Determined to pursue his object, Mr. Webb sent in the spring of 1851 an agent to St. Petersburg, with proposals to the Kussian gov- ernment, who returned the same year unsuccessful. He reported sufficient encouragement, however, to induce his being sent again the following year. Du)-ing the agent's second visit, the Russian government consid- ered Mr. Webb's proposals to construct for them one or more large model war-steamers, but were disinclined to treat with other than the principal himself. Something of the hesitancy on the part of the government arose from the fact that the then Russian minister at Washington, Mr. Bodisco, would not tavor the project, having (as he said) had too nmch trouble with parties in this country who had previously obtained contracts from his government. The favorable report forwarded by his agent, induced Mr. Webb to repair to St. Petersburg in person, during the summer of 1S52, at great inconvenience to his business at home. On arriving there, Lu found his agent had misled him. and that the Emperor Nicholas, 106 W. H. WEBB. 5 for tlie same reasons tliat influenced his minister, Mr. Bodisco, had decided not to order a vessel to be built in America. This was a dilemma: the apparent defeat of the long-cherished object of liis visit, which was known to his countrymen and entailed much loss of time and sacrifice of business, was crushing to the pride and hopes of Mr. Webb. Howev^er, he decided to make further efforts to gain his end. Here the determination of character sliown in the boy Avas evinced in the man. Other proposals were made and additional inducements offered to the naval committee, who expressed a willingness to consider them, but saying it would be more than their heads were worth to receive new proposals without orders from higher authority. The influence of the Grand Duke Constantine, General Admiral of the Russian navy, was now sought. But as he was leaving for the annual re- view of the fleet at sea, Mr. Webb was obliged to suffer a vexatious delay. On his return, the grand duke accorded a personal interview, when he was so favorably impressed, that he promised (provided Mr. Webb would agree to deliver the vessel, when built, at Cronstadt) to bring the subject once more to the notice of the emperor. This condition, which entailed enormous risk and responsibility, having been agreed to, the matter was again referred to the naval commit- tee. The latter soon made a favorable report to the general admi- ral, and the result was that the emperor was induced to rescind the order previously given. Mr. Webb then left St. Petersburg, in six weeks after his arrival, with an order for the construction of a large steam line-of-battle ship after his proposed model and plans, as well as other orders of magnitude. Immediately on his return home, Mr. Webb commenced the necessary preparations for the construction of the first ship ; but before sufi&cient materials could be collected for the building of so large a vessel, the war between Russia and the Allies (England, France, and Turkey) broke out and put a stop to tlie work. The neutrality laws of the United States rendered questionable the pro- 107 Q W. H. WEBB. priety of proceeding under the contract. On the restoration of peace, the work under the contract was resumed, but upon a differ- ent plan and a new model, designed and submitted by Mr. Webb, with a less number of guns, though of larger caliber and mounted on fewer decks. This idea, originating with him and presenting great advantages over the plans formerly a(;cepted, has since been adopted in the navies of all maritime countries. Tlie vessel was built strictly in accordance with these plans and this model, notwithstanding the Russian officers, who had been sent to America to superintend her construction and who had remained in this country during the Crimean War, withheld their approval. But when the vessel was tried at sea, they were not sparing of their expressions of satisfaction. Her performances exceeded, especially in the matter of speed, all expectations and the promises made to the general admiral when the contract was entered into. On the 21st day of September, 1858, just one year after the lay- ing of the keel, this screw frigate of 72 guns, 7,000 tons displace- ment, and named the General Admiral— in honor of the Grand Duke Constantino — was launched from Mr. Webb's yard in the city of New York. It has proved to be the fastest vessel of war yet built (except the Steam Kam Dunderhercj^ since constructed by liini), having made the passage from New York to Cherbourg in the unprecedented time of eleven days and eight hours, mostly under steam alone. Mr. Webb delivered this magnificent and most powerful steamer at the port of Cronstadt, in person, in the summer of 1859. lie received from the imperial Russian government very valuable testimonials, both written and substantial, of the satisfaction with Avhich they received the vessel, as well as the high opinion enter- tained of the manner in which all promises and the details of the contract were carried out. The unexampled success of the frigate General Admiral soon became known to the naval authorities in Europe, and especially attracted the attention of the Italian govern- 108 W H WEBB. 7 nicnt, which had just about that time been created through the aj^ency of Couut Cavour. This eminent and far-sighted statesman invited Mr. Webb to visit Turin, then the seat of government. Tlie latter here entered into contract with the royal Italian govern- ment to construct two iron-clad screw fi'igates, each of thirty-six large guns and six thousand tons displacement, afterward named the Re d' Italia and the lie di Portogallo. The contract for these two frigates having been made just previous to the breaking out of the Rebellion in the United States, great obstacles interposed, consequently, to its fuliillment, especially as these were the first iron-clads ever built in this country. Never- theless, both vessels were delivered within the time agreed upon. Mr. Webb was engaged at the same time in rebuilding and re- fitting for war purposes many steam-vessels for his own govern- ment, as well as constructing several large steamers for the mer- chant service. The Re d'' Italia was the first iron-clad steamer that crossed the Aflantic, and gave proofs of extraordinary sea-going qualities and speed. The same may be said of her sister ship, the Re db Portogallo. The former made the passage in the winter season from New York to Naples, a distance of over five thousand miles, in eighteen days and twenty hours, mostly under steam alone. The literal fulfillment of the contract for these two frigates and their performances were so satisfactory to the Italian government, that King Yictor Emmanuel conferred on Mr. Webb the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus (one of the oldest in Europe) as a token of his esteem. While the frigates were in course of construction, Mr. Webb accepted an order from our own government to build a screw ram of large tonnage, expressly adapted for the heaviest armament, to possess the highest speed and tlie best sea-going qualities — the model and plans to be designed by himself. The task thus imposed was a very difiicult one, never having been accomplished before; but Mr. Webb in a short time presented 109 8 W. H. WEBB. "' a model and plans entirely original, designed by himself, for the consideration and approval of the naval authorities at Washington. The plans were submitted to a board of naval experts, consisting of the cliiefs of the bureaus of both construction and engineering, and others, by whom the}'' were condemned. Here again arose a difficulty, Mr. Webb oflferinghis opinions and experience in opposition to those of the Navy Department, and in- sisting that the experts were wrong and could not appreciate the advantages of his plan. He persevered till the then Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Welles, relying entirely on Mr. Webb, entered into contract with him for the construction of that remarkable vessel known as the Dunderherg. Its dimensions are three hundred and seventy-eight feet on deck, sixty-eight feet breadth of beam, and thirty-two feet depth of hold. It has a displacement of seventy-two hundred tons, being the largest iron-clad yet built. It also affords more room for fuel, stores, provisions, as well as accommodation for officers and crew, with a less draft of water, than any other large armored vessel of war. • The performances of this ship surprised the Nav}^ Department and the country, surpassing all the promises made by Mr. Webb, as well as the requirements of the contract. Her speed has not yet been equaled in any vessel of war, being fifteen knots at sea fully armed and in commission. The model of this iron-clad is new and distinct from the turret or Monitor system. It embodies many novelties, as well as a ram of peculiar construction. The engines have also several new and important features. With her extraordinary speed, enormous weight of broadside battery (four thousand and twenty-four pounds of solid shot), and the prow, her destructive power is immense — far greater than that of any other ship ever yet constructed. The Rebellion having ended before the completion of this vessel, the Secretary of the Navy favored Mr. Webb's proposition to be allowed to sell her to some foreign government. With this view, 110 W. H. WEBB. 9 Mr. "Webb procured the passage of an act of Congress, directing the Secretary of the Navy to release the foi'mer from his contract. This encouTitered decided opposition on the part of General Grant, Secretary Stanton, and others, who said so powerful a vessel of war ought never to be allowed to become the property of another power. Mr. Webb, now en{ij)led to treat with other governments for the sale of his steamer, soon found applicants, and without much delay sold her to the Emperor of the French for a larger sum than had been agreed to be paid by the United States. As the purchase of the Dunderherg provided oidy for deliver}' at the port of New York, the French Admiralty engaged Mr. Webb to deliver her at Cher- bourg. He sailed contrary to tlie advice of his friends, who seemed to think it a perilous undertaking in a vessel of such novel con- struction. The Dunderherg arrived safely at the port of Cherbourg after a rough passage of fourteen days. Mr. Webb has received from high naval authorities of France, also from tlie Em])eror Napoleon, assurances of their great satisfac- tion with the perforniances of the Dunderherg (now liochamheaic)^ his majesty having promised to confer the Order of the Legion of Honor on its constructor. Among the vessels since built by Mr. Webb are the steamers Bristol and Prcmdenee running from New York on the route to Boston, being the largest of their class and magnificently fitted up. They are the first of this class ever built by Mr. Webb, and their models difl'er from those heretofore constructed for the trade by others. They were consequently objected to by experts, and their performances awaited with much interest. Suffice it to say, that at their first trials they surpassed in speed any steamers previously built, accomplishing twenty miles per hour continuously. Our constructor was employed by the Pacific Mail Steam-ship Company to build the model steamer (afterward called the Chma) fur their new line to run between San Francisco and China. This vessel, one of the largest merchant-steamers ever constructed in this country, accommodates twelve hundred passengers, and carries at lU 10 W. H. WEBB. the same time about two thousand tons of freight. It also combines tlie greatest strength whh the liighest speed. New elements of streno-th, originated bj Mr. Webb, were introdneed in the construe tion of this ship. She has encountered several hurricanes in the Chinese and Japanese seas, and performed wonders in the opinion of nautical men. To enumerate all the important vessels that have been constructed by our subject during the past thirty years, would be a tedious task. However, we ma^' mention the Guy 3I(mnering (Liverpool packet), the first full three-deck merchant vessel built in this country ; and thesliip Ocean Monarchy possessing the greatest freight capacity of any ever constructed up to the present time. She has received on board over seven thousand bales of cotton at one loading, drawing no more than eighteen and a half feet of water. Among the few clippers built by this gentleman are tlie Clial- lenge^ Comet, Invincible, and Young America. These ai"e all cele- brated, one of them (the Comet), under the command of Captain Gardner, having made live successive voyages, averaging one hun- dred days, between Xew York and San Francisco; and one voyage from San Francisco to New York in seventy-six days. This is the shortest passage ever made between the two ports. In addition to the building of vessels, Mr. Webb has been en- gaged in the steamship business, having run an o])position line of steamers for several years between New Yoik and San Francisco. However, he finally amalgamated his interests with those of the Pacific Mail Steam-ship Company, and his line was withdrawn. ' At present, he is running the only American steamers in tlie European trade, and recently sent the first American steamer into the Baltic. He now purposes establishing a line of steam-ships to run between San Francicco and Australia, via Honolulu and other islands in the Pacific Ocean. Such a record of successful entei'prise, in an im- portant and a diftieult department of business, requiring mental qualities of a high order, as also indomitable perseverance, is its own eulogy, and stamps Mr. Webb as a man of progress. 112 HOK EDWARDS PIERREPOISrT. BY P. n. GREER. ;UDGE riERREPOlS'T* is of an old Connecticut family, being a descendant of James Pierrepont, one of tlie founders of Yale College. He is a native of IS'orth Haven, and was graduated at Yale College, in the class of 1837, with very high honors. His legal education was received at the New Haven Law School, of which Judge Daggett was then the head. In 18-tO he went to Columbus, Ohio, and became the partner of P. B. Wilcox, a distinguislied lawyer of tliat city. After five years he returned to practice in Kew York, and in 1840 he married the daughter of Samuel A, Willoughby, her mother being of the old Dutch family of De Bevoise, in Brooklyn. In 1857 he was elected Judge of the Superior Court of New York, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Chief Justice Oak- ley. In 186.0 he resigned his seat upon the bench and resumed the practice of the law, and has, for many years, been one of tlie most eminent men at the Kew York bar. Until the breaking out of the war he had always been a Demo- crat, but from the first he took an active part against the Rebel- lion. He was a member of the Union Defense Committee, and a zealous supporter of the administration of Mr. Lincoln. In 1S63 he was appointed, with General Dix, to try the prisoners of state, then confined in the various prisons and forts of the Federal government. * Pierrepont is the old English mode of spelling the name ; in this country many shortened it to Pkrvont : the original and correct spelling is now pretty generally restored. 8 113 2 EDWARDS PIERREPONT. In 1S64 he was one of the most active in organizing tlie War Democrats in favor of the re-election of Abraham Lincoln. In 1867 he was a member of the Constitutional Convention of the State of JS^ew York, and one of the Judiciary Committee. In the spring of 1867 he was employed by the Attorney-General and the Secretary of Slate, to conduct the prosecution on the part of the government against John H. Surratt, indicted for aiding in the murder of President Lincoln. This celebrated trial com- menced before the United States District Court in the city of Washington on the 10th day of June, and lasted until the 10th day of August, 1867. In the Presidential contest of 1868, Judge Pierrepont was an ar- dent supporter of General Grant, making very large contributions in money, and effective speeches upon the Republican side. General Grant upon his accession to the Presidency in 1869 ap- pointed Judge Pierrepont, Attorney of the United States for the Southern District of New York, which office he resigned in July, 1870. The Pierrepont family are of Norman origin. At the time of the Conquest, Robert de Pierrepont came over to England with the Conqueror. The family name was Robert ; Pierrepont was the designation or title ; the head of the family taking the name of the castle and estates, which derived their name from a stone-hridge built in Normandy in the time of Charlemagne, to take the place of a ferry, which was then considered a great work. In the time of Edward I., Sir Henry de Pierrepont, possessed of large landed estates, married Annora de Man vers by whom he acquired the Lordship of Holme \\\ the County of Nottingham, now called Ilolme-Pierrepont. Sir George Pierrepont, of Holme-Pierrepont, had three sons : from the elder was descended the Earls of Kingston ; and from the Earls, the Dukes of Kingston. From the younger, was descended John Pierrepont, who came to Roxbury, now a part of Boston, and his eldest son was the Rev. James Pierrepont, of New Haven, 114 EDWARDS PIERREPONT. g whose descendant, eldest in the male line, was the I'ightful heir to the dio;nities and estates of the second Duke of Kingston, who was grandson to the tirst duke, and who died without issue just before the American Revolution ; which event prevented the recovery of the titles and estates by the American branch of the Pierrepont family, and cast the estate upon the female line of the English branch. Lady Frances Pierrepont, grand-daughter of the first Duke of Kingston, married Sir Philip Meadows, and her son, Charles Meadows, on the death of the last duke, assumed the name of Pierrepont and took the estates in right of his wife, though he could not inherit the titles of the Pierrepont family. The present Earl Man vers is the son of Charles Meadows and grandson to Lady Frances Pierrepont. Lady Mary Pierrepont, afterward the celebrated Lady Mary Montagu, was the eldest daughter of the first Duke of Kingston, and her daughter married the Marquis of Bute, from which mar- riage came in direct line the present Marquis of Bute. The Rev. James Pierrepont, of New Haven, had six sons and two daughters. Through this common ancestor the families of Pierrepont, Edwards, and Dwight are connected. Sarah, daughter of the Rev. James Pierrepont, was married to the eminent divine, President Jonathan Edwards. The celebrated Pierrepont Ed- wards was her son. Judge Ogden Edwards, of New York, and Governor Henry W. Edwards, of Connecticut, were her grandsons. The late Henry Pierrepont Edwards, judge of the Supreme Court of Kew York, was her great-grandson. Timothy Dwight, D. D., so long the distinguished President of Y'^ale College, was her grandson, and from him is descended Hon. Theodore W. Dwight, Professor of Law, in the city of ISTew York. The Hon. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, now the learned and eminent President of Yale College, is directly descended from the same stock. Judge Pierrepont, of New York, the subject of this sketch, is a 115 4: EDWARDS PIER RE PONT. direct" descendant of Joseph, tlie third son of the Rev. James Pierrepont. William C. Pierrepont, of Pierrepont Manor, and Henry E. Pierrepont, of Brooklyn, are direct descendants of lleze- kiah, the sixth son of the Rev. James Pierrepont. The original portraits of the Rev. James Pierrepont and Mary his wife, are in the possession of Judge E. K. Foster, of New Haven, who is a direct descendant, through the female line, of the sixth son of the Rev. J ames Pierrepont. Judge Pierrepont ranks high as an impressive and eloquent speaker. He is a cogent logical reasoner, and an able debater. His clear utterances, his earnest manner, his dignified, polished diction, render him at all times an agreeable and pleasing speaker. He is quiet, fond of literature, and a close student. In addressing ])ublic audiences, he commands the closest attention. His private life is without a blemish. His independent nature, and his devotion to a principle, command the respect of his political opponents. He has always dared to pursue the coui-se his sense suggested. He is exclusive in his social taste, but with a high standard of inteo-rit}' ; more proud than vain, and more cordial than familiar. Intimately known but to few, he is respected by all as a gentleman of culture and of elevated character. He has, for some years, been prominent in public affairs, and distinguished among the foremost in the legal profession : noted for his clear perceptions, energy, and strong common-sense, he is much employed in important business. He started with the best advantages of education, and has con- tinued to be exceedingly industrious. Nature gave him a remark- ably cool and even temper, which nothing disturbs ; this, united with firm courage and great determination, has contributed to his success. Few men are more self-poised or self-reliantj and none more completely follow^ their own judgment, or more readily take the responsibility and accept the consequences of their own acts. 116 'ij jam CW'S"^ "Z^-^A HOI^. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. BY GEORGE P. ANDKEWS, Assistant Attorney of the United States durinr) tlue official terms of District Attorneys Theodore Sedyicick, James I. lioosecelt, E. Delajield Smith, and Daniel S. Dickinson. "■^■"^ ^ '^ ^^^^ ^^^^ g^^^^T ^^^ ^^^^ United States, that as early as (A the year 1820, their national Cono^ress declared the Slave >^ Trade piracy, and threatened its infamous participants with the penalty of death. It was the shame of the Re- public that from that time till 18GI, a period of forty-one years, a law which the publicists of the world had eulogized, remained a dead letter. Ships had been seized and mariners arrested ; naval officers had been active and marshals demonstrative ; but no prosecuting officer had followed the one to condemnation and sale, nor the other to conviction and execution. It v/as reserved to E. Delatield Smith, District Attorney of the United States at New York during the administration of Abraham Lincoln, a young and untitled lawyer, to bring to the scaffold, after the iniquity of a third voyage, the captain of a slave ship. Humanity had long demanded a terrible example to deter cupidity from this cruel crime. The difficulties of proof and the perversities of juries had become proverbial, and public sentiment did not then coin- cide with the severity of the declared penalty. The law had been pro- nounced by men of legal eminence too defective in detail to admit of enforcement. This very culprit had, in 18G0, been offered immu- nity from the punishment of death if he would plead guilty and accept a commutation of sentence to mere imprisonment. To bring him to justice, required ability, energy, persistency, a power of persuasion, rare courage, and perfect integrity. The result, in the execution of Nathaniel Gordon, master of the slave ship 117 2 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. " Erie," is at once a moniiineiit to the public services, and a key to the character, of the subject of tliis sketch. Its consequences to the country, at a time when foreign nations were seeking to intervene against us in our late struggle for national existence upon the ground that in our lust for dominion we were indifferent to the question of slavery, were at the time acknowledged by the press of Europe. In an oration delivered in the city of New York, February 22d, 1862, the historian George Bancroft referred to this celebrated case in the following language : — " The centuries clasp hands and repeat it one to another ! Yesterday the sentiment of Jefferson, that the slave trade is a piratical warfare upon man- kind, was reaffirmed by carrying into effect the sentence of a high tribunal of justice; and to save the lives and protect the happiness of thousands, a slave trader was executed as a pirate and an enemy of the human race." From a genealogical pamphlet prepared by a relative of Mr. Smith, we learn that his father was Doctor Archelaus G. Smith, long an eminent physician and surgeon in Western New York, who with meagre advantages rose from a farmer's boy to a man of scientific acquirements, — assiduous, upright, and benevolent. In perfecting himself in his profession, he attended in the city of New York the medical lectures of Doctor Edward Delafield, and named his son after that distinguished man. E. Delafield Smith was born at liochester, New York, May 8th, 1826. The family removed to the city of New York when he was ten years of age. " He is a New York boy," used to say old Alderman James Kelly, formerly of the Fourth AVard, and more recently Postmaster of the city, " for I have seen him roll hoop on the Battery and play marbles in the City Hall Park." lu the earliest years of the settlement of this country, the grand- father of Dr. Smith emigrated from England to Connecticut, being one of two brothers, the other of whom settled in Virginia. Both were planters. The names of his maternal ancestore were Preston and Bundy. The latter name was derived from the forest of lis HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. 3 Boiidy, near Paris, the Buiidys being among the adventurers who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, subsequently turning farmers and settling in Kent. The American progenitor came over with Governor Winthrop in 1G30. The immediate ancestors of Doctor Smith fought in the American revolution, and he was himself a surgeon in the war of 1812. On the ma- ternal side, Mr. Smith is a descendant of the Boughtons, an English family, originially from Wales. His mother's maternal ancestor was a Penoyer, a family which left France for England in the time of Louis fourteenth, at the revocation of the edict of Nantes. To Robert Penoyer, Harvard University owed one of its early endowments ; and a scholarship in that college still belongs to the descendants. Jared Bough ton, Mr. Smith's maternal grand- father, a man of integrity, intelligence, and enterprise, emigrated from Old Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to the country of the Genesee, in Western New York. He was one of the pioneers of civilization in tliat region. His wife was the first white woman, and his eldest daughter — the mother of Delafield Smith, a woman of superior intelligence — the first white child ever in Victor, in the county of Ontario, where " Boughton Hill " was one of the oldest settlements. This was in 1790. Deer were then plenty, and bears and wolves were then often seen, in a wilderness which now wears no trace of savage life. A journey from Massachu- setts to Western New York was at that period accomplished in winter by sleighs, and in summer on horseback, men and women being borne over the streams upon the ice in January, and upon the saddle in July, During his childhood, Delafield was half the year upon the farm of his maternal grandfather, where he imbibed a love of rural scenes, of horses, and of stock which lias never deserted him ; and for the remainder of the year a student in one of the severest of seminaries, located at Pochester, where he acquired a hatred of the exactions of a school which ever afterward confirmed his char- acteristic impatience of arbitrary restraints. But he was a good 119 4 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. reader, and his infant declamation, in a clmroh of that place, ut the age of eight, at a school exhibition, was long remembered. In New York, the old Quaker school of Solyman Brown, in Broadway, below Broome Street, the grammar school of the University, Coudert's French Academy at Wheatsheaf, New Jersey, and a New England seminary at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, were his haunts up to the commencement of his college course. Entering the New York University, under Theodore Freling- huysen, Tayler Lewis, Draper, Loomis, Johnson, Henry, and other eminent professors, he was the poet of his class, and by the common testimonials of both teachers and students, its best writer and speaker. He has since returned to this institution as a pro- fessor in its faculty of law. Graduating at the age of twenty, he pursued his legal studies, first with an elder brother, and subsequently in the offices of R. M, & E. H. Blatchford, Judge William Kent, and Judge Henry E. Davies. In 1848, he was admitted to the bar, and in January 1849, commenced alone the practice of his profession. In 1851 lie formed a partnership with Mr. Smith Clift ; and subsequently with Mr. Isaac P. Martin and Mr. Augustus F. Smith — the latter being his brother and a man of professional distinction. Perhaps no legal business in the city of New York has been more lucrative than that in which he participated for many years in the partnership last mentioned. Four large volumes of selected judicial decisions were published by him from 1854 to 1859. These are widely known to the legal profession of the country, and are often cited, under the name of E. D. Smith's Reports. With a solid reputation as a mercantile lawyer, pecuniarily in- dependent, and deeply interested in public aflfsiirs, he accepted, in April, 1861, the position of law officer of the United States in New York, and at the close of a term of four years resumed the ordinary practice of his profession. With the exception of the United States District Attorneyship, 120 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. 5 and also excepting the use of Mr. Smith's name, in 1859, in connection witli the position of counsel to the corporation at New York, he has never accepted office nor permitted his friends to seek it for him. On one occasion, in 1869, the Republican Party of the metropolis, in a canvass confessedly hopeless, bestowed their full suffrages upon him for District Attorney of the State, and many not of his political affinities added their votes. But it has been his practice to decline both executive appointments and party nominations, frequently given or tendered, for county, legis- lative, judicial, and congressional positions. An account of the public services of Mr. Delafield Smith during the four years of his official term as District Attorney and Counsel of the United States at New York, would involve the writing of a judicial history of the nation during the most momentous period of its existence. It is simply true and just to say, that his successes before Courts and juries in vindicating the laws of the land were unprecedented. In a four years' term, for example, he procured six capital convictions — six verdicts involving the death penalty — against a number no greater obtained for thirty years immediately preceding his term, and none since. At the same time, no prosecuting officer was ever more glad to drop a prosecution the instant the iC'ist gleam of innocence appeared, or the moment any exercise of mercy seemed reconcilable with the demands of public justice. The young, the poor, and the first offender were often released, while the more powerful culprit was relentlcrisly pursued. . Notwithstanding the extraordinary demands of legal business growing out of the war, the civil litigations of the government and especially its revenue suits were constantly pressed, and the sums annually realized were matter of remark, at the time, for their number and magnitude. The office is one of multifarious duties, which cannot be performed by any one individual, without well-drilled assist- ants. Its greatest need is an organizing, administrative, execu- tive ability in its chief And this, among his other qualifications, 121 Q HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. was recognized in Mr. Smitli by all wLo had business witli the office. The condemnations procured in the cases of the British steamers Peterhoff, Springbok, Stephen Hart, and others, dealt a blow at trade with the Southern insurgents carried on through Nassau, Matamoras, and other intermediate points, while like forfeitures were inflicted upon the owners of domestic ships and cargoes at- temjJting to sail with similar destinations and purposes. "We pass with less particular mention the earlier prize cases of the Hiawatha and others, in which Mr. Smith, contrary to his custom, employed associate counsel. Among the celebrated cases successfully conducted, may be mentioned that of the rich capitalist Kohnstamm, where, witli valuable aid, frauds upon the Government amounting in their ramiiications to half a million dollars v/ere exposed, and an example made which saved to the national treasury millions more. We may also refer to the convictions procured by Mr. Smith, of John U. Andrews, the leader of the New York rioters in July, 1SG3 ; the Parkhill murderers ; the negro Hawkins, hanged for the butchery of a ship's master ; the Italian man-slayer, Dimarchi ; the Port Jervis and East New York counterfeiters ; to cases of cruelty to seamen, and of mutinies against officers ; convictions and forfeitures for frauds upon the customs and the internal revenue. The prosecutions under the lav/s for the suppression of the slave trade did not stop with the execution of the Captain of the Erie. The imprisonment of the merchant Albert Horn, for fitting out slave ships; the conviction — after juries under Mr, Smith's pre- decessors had twice disagreed — of Rudolph Blumenburg for perjury, as a surety for the discharged slave ship Orion ; the sentence of a number of mates ; the condemnations of the Kate, the AYeather- guage, the Nightingale, the Sarah, and the Augusta ; the narrow escape from the gallows of Haines and Westervelt, by a disagree- ment of juries standing nine and ten to three and two for convic- tions — ail taught the new lesson that seizures and arrests meant 123 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. 7 uir^paring prosecutions. Without enumerating; other cases, it is sufficient to say that in a few months the foreign slave trade "was forever extirpated from the port of New York. To the wives of Union prisoners and the v/idows of deceased sol- diers, Mr. Smith, throughout his term, rendered systematic and gratuitous services in procuring the payment of dues and pensions, and saving the deductions and delays of the systems of claim agency. From the age of eighteen, Delafield Smith has been widely known as a terse, strong, and stirring public speaker. The following extract from the commencement and the close of his published address, July lOtli, 1863, in the case of the Peterhoff, is a specimen of the clear and direct style in w^hich he addresses a legal argument to a court without a jury : EXTIIACT FEOM AeGUMENT TO THE CoUKT IX THE CaSE OF THE Peterhoff. " May it please the Court : — This case is clothed with profound interest in the public mind, both of Europe and America. It is brought to the bar of a court, commissioned by the government of a great country, and charged with the determination and applica- tion of international law. Not solely individuals, but nations, are parties to this controversy. Not alone an august judicial tri- bunal at Washington, but the imperial courts of a distant conti- nent will sit in review of the judgment which shall be pronounced here. Yet the testimony spread upon this record is within a nar- row scope. The facts marshaled before us are few. A decision may be reached without straining the eye in search of precedents, beyond such familiar adjudications as have long ago sunk to the level margin of an elementary treatise. It is true, indeed, that consequences of magnitude have become entangled in the issue. Put for them, the world might well wonder that so simple a case should have so aroused the populace of one country, and so in- terested the publicists of many. 123 •g HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. " Was the recent entcq^rise of tlie Petcrhofi' honest or fraudulent ? Was her voyage lawful or illegal ? Was her destination real or simulated ? "In deciding the issue involved in this capture, two classes of facts demand attention. First, such as are of a public character, too general to require specific proof, and sufficiently notorious to come, of their own force, within the range of unaided judicial cog- nizance. And, secondly, those established by the testimony taken m preparatorio, consisting of the responses of witnesses to the stand- ing interrogatories administered by the prize commissioners, together with such light as an inspection of t!ie ship's papers and of her cargo may tlirow upon the iutent of those by whom her course has been directed. " In the summer of 18GI the foundations of this land trembled with an earthquake of territorial war. The country was aroused as from a sleep. Guards, of her own appointment, still lingering in her high places, were prepared to trample out her life if she lay still, and to as.>a:3sinate her if she arose. Perjured treachery and audacious force viod with each other to destroy a government, which discovered its worst enemies amongst the most pam])ered and caressed of tlie children of her protection. The war was not for a boundary, a province, or a form of government. Its purpose, sorrowfully seen at homo, was to annihilate the unity and life of the nation. Its consequences, greedily predicted abroad, w^ere to open the best portion of the western hemisphere to insolent foreign footsteps, which periodically humiliate the States of Mexico and South America. It was a rising, not to overthrow tyranny, but to establish it. Guilty leaders and deluded communities afl'ected to reproduce the drama of the American revolution, making oppres- sion perform now the part that liberty enacted rhen. " Words and acts of attempted conciliation were wasted. Awak- ened to its own defence, the government is forced at length to the arbitrament of war. The Executive establishes a blockade of the insurrectionary ports. The Emperor of the French, dreaming of 124 HON. B. DELAFIELD SMITH. 9 Iiis personal aggrandizement, and hating the principles of republi- can government, weaves wily aits for our embarrassment ; and Britain, without his excuses, green with jealousies which our ova- tions to her prince should have cleansed away, whets with the stone of national animosity the cupidity of her tradesmen. Gov- ernment and people, emulating each the bad faith of the other, hasten to confer rights npon one belligerent and to heap Avrongs upon the other. Ships, clad in iron, start from her docks to prey upon the merchant marine of a friendly power, while vessels crowd the harbor of New York flying the red signals of England, to the exclusion of the flag which was once the protection oi American commerce. lu doflance of the public law of the world, English bottoms infest our southern seas, violate the belligerent right of blockade, and bear food, medicines and arms to the enemies of hu- man freedom and of stable government. " Such was the situation of public affairs, when the naval forces and the federal courts of the United States, the one with untiring energy, the other with intelligent firmness, surrounded with in- creasing hazards the bold breaches of blockade and the wholesale indulgences in contraband trade, with which this unnatural conflict was fostered and prolonged. " Then cunning greed invoked frauds and subterfuges, to do by indirection what had proved at length too dangerous and impracti- cable for the open arts cf enterprise. The little harbor of ISTassau, in the island of New Providence; the port of Cardenas, on the northerly coast of Cuba, and, at last, the unfrequented region of Matamoras, in Mexico, are magnified into vast marts of trade, and become the rivals of Liverpool, Ilavre and New York. Ships of ponderous toimage traverse the seas and swarm in the vicinity of these inconsiderable places. Owners, shippers and masters, with remarkable eiFrontery, claim that they are centres of substantial, legitimate and independent trade. At the same time, the common sense and common knowledge of the world acknowledge that they are mere stopping places and ports of transhipment, by or 125 10 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. through which munitions of war and articles of necessity, of com- fort and of luxury, may be carried from the British Isles to the in- surgent section of the American Union. So the British bark " Springbok " sets her chaste sails for Nassau. So the British schooner " Stephen Hart " turns an honest face toward Cardenas. And thus, we say, the steamer " Peterhoff" pursues her virtuous pathway to Matamoras. But the rough sailor follows in the track of each. He sees through the thin disguises. He thrusts aside the flimsy veil. He arrests the pretender and sends her where she must submit to the scrutiny of a court of justice. " In the light, then, of the notorious fraud, the simulation, the circuity, the indirection, with which this contraband trade to the Southern ports has been projected and persisted in, we approach the proofs in the case now under consideration. No intelligent examination of the testimony now before us can be attempted without a recognition of the public facts to which I have ad- verted. " Sailing imder such circumstances, it must be conceded that the Peterhoff, if guilty, would shroud her purpose in the depths of dissimulation ; and, if innocent, would fail in no mark of frankness. We shall observe, in the course of our inquiry, how much she has displayed of the one, and how little of the other." Want of space compels us to omit the body of the argument. The following are the closing sentences : " A vigorous administration of the public law both of blockade and of contraband of war, has been maintained by Great Britain in aid of her own wars, as well those that were mijust as those that were just. It is the right of nations. The American government will not surrender it — never, certainly, in a conflict for its exis- tence. It is vital to an early and thorough suppression of the war of insurrection which has desolated so large a portion of its territory. " Rebellion, indeed, exhibits ' waning proportions,' but it can- 126 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. H not be Speedily subdued and extirpated nnless want and privation exhaust, while armies overthrow. We march upon an extended country, sparsely populated, without an}- one geographical or com- mercial key to its military or political pov/er. It has no Gibraltar, no Sebastopcl, no Paris, no London, and no New York. The end, indeed, is certain. The national authority will be established, vindicated, enlarged. But that consummation will be near or far, as the law of nations, violated without home rebuke by British tradesmen, shall be sustained and executed by judicial tribunals. '* The speedy establishment of freedom and order upon this con- tinent, and the consequent termination of a bloody war, is the as- piration of pariotism here, and of liumanity the world over. The achievement of a good so substantial and so general, may be pro- moted or retarded by the lessons which cases like this sball teach as well to the merchants and statesmen of Europe, as to the power which maintains, and the people who suffer from the Great Eebellion." Before a jury, Mr. Smith is earnest and impressive. On the trial of one of the mates of the slave ship Nightingale, before Jus- tices Nelson and Shipman^ the defence was represented by Charles O'Conor, James T. Brady, and John McKeon, who had brought out in the testimony the fact that the defendant was the son of a wealthy gentleman of Staten Island and a grandson of a former Vice-Presi- dent of the United States. Mr. Smith said : " Against crime clearly proved, respectability is not a valid plea. As regards the prisonei', his surroundings certainly furnish no ex- cuse for this felonious enterprise. As respects his example, they add tenfold to the public mischief of his acts. It is not easy to keep a common sailor from a slave bark, when such as he lead the v/ay. You can hardl}^ blame poor Jack for thrusting slaves into the loathsome hold, while gentlemen mates, as proved in the evi- dence here, keep tally on the deck ! Dissatisfied with the paternal 127 12 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITU. home on the slopes of Staten Island, he aspires, perhaps, to huikl for his own pleasure, in the metropolis itself, a mansion with the gains of adventures which involve the transportation of human beings from their homes in Africa to the strange coast of Cuba, in stifling pens, beneath tropic suns, with the actual calculation, founded upon terrible experience, that if two thirds die and one third land, the venture is a fair success ! Might it not have occurred to him, that a fortune so constructed would trouble his future dreams with insufferable remorse ? Ought it not to have been plain to his intelligence, that the carved columns, the expanded arches, the dizzy domes of a palace so erected, would, in a future guilty imagination, rest, for tlreir caryatides, upon the shoulders of slave men, the breasts of slave women, and the bodies of slave children ? Oh God ! How many costly stone structures raise their ornamented fronts impudently to heaven, while their foun- dations are laid — literally laid — in hell.'' U})on returning to general practice, Mr. Smith achieved profes- sional successes against the government almost as im])ortant as those which he had officially gained in its favor. For instance, in the mercantile case of B^nkard and Ilutton against Schell, late collector of the customs, to recover duties paid under protest, he obtained from judge and jury, in the United States courts, tiie reversal of a class of statute-constructions immediately involving several millions of dollars. The treasury department, erroneously believing that Mr. Smith's experience in revenue law had taken the then district attorney at a disadvantage, demanded a new trial, and sent an officer from Washington to aid in the de- fence. The result of the second adjudication was the establish- ment of principles which required a still larger refund of illegally exacted duties. The ease is now an established precedent, and its just determination is matter of felicitation among the importing merchants of the country. The following is extracted from a stenographic report of the first trial; 128 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. 13 EXOEDIUM OF CLOSING ADDRESS TO THE JURY, BEFOEE JUDGE SMALLET, IN THE CASE OF BENKAED AND IIUTTON AGAINST SCHEIX, COLLECTOR OF THE CUSTOMS. ^^May it please the Court, and you, Gentlemen of the Jury : — The dark day of battle and rebellion is ended. The lav/s, long silent, again lift up their voices. The national tribunals of justice, wearied with long contests between neutral and belligerent, once more give access to the citizen as well as to the government. Neither may now assume to be above the law. " With the serene reign of order and tranquillity at length re- etored, may we net pause for a moment to pay a passing tribute to those in the council and the field, to whom that restoration is due. And in this, shall we not remember that in the darkest days of all, when the national credit was almost exhausted and the national treasury well nigh collapsed, the one was restored and the other replenished by the generous action of the merchants of New York. " Shall it be said that the gratitude of the government to them finds its sole expression in a rude denial of legal rights on the one hand, and in vexatious prosecutions for penalties and forfeitures, sustained by unfounded imputations of fraud, on the other? " Shall it not rather be said, that having in vain petitioned for justice at governmental departments, they at last have sought and found it in the courts of their country ? And when that justice shall have been administered, may they not proudly remember that it was awarded by a judge who found in the circle of his judicial action ways efiectually to aid his country in her life and death struggle, and at the same time inexorably to guard against infraction every provision of the law and every line of the Consti- tution, even in the midst of the din of arms." » From the published speeches of Mr. Smith, we insert in full the following brief specimen of a popular appeal : ^ 129 14 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. ADDRESS AT UNION SQUARE, AT THE WAR MEETING, CALLED BT HIE COMMITTEES OF THE NEW YORK CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, THE COMMON COUNCIL, THE UNION DEFENCE COMMITTEE, AND OTHER BODIES, IN RESPONSE TO AN APPEAL OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES FOR ADDITIONAL MILITARY FORCES. [Extracted from a printed report of the proceedings, prepared under the supervision of the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce.] " Mr. Smith, being introduced by General Fremont^ who pre- sided at the stand near the Spingler Institute, was received with great enthusiasm, and spoke as follows : " Men of New York : — This is, in truth, a colossal demonstra- tion. The eye can hardly reach the boundaries of these compact thousands. It would be vain for the voice to attempt it. The people have come in their might. They have come in their maj- esty. They have ' come as the winds come when forests are rended.' They have ' come as the waves come when navies are stranded.' We are here to-day, not to speak and acclaim, but to act and incite to action. [Applause.] "We know that this mon- ster rebellion cannot be spoken down ; it must be fought down. [Cheers.] " We are assembled to animate each other to renewed eiForts and nobler sacrifices, in behalf of our imperilled country. There is hardly one of us who has not, at this hour, some endeared relative on the bloody fields of Viiginia. The voices of our armed and suf-i fering brethren literally cry to us from the ground. To-day we hear them. To-day let us heed them. [Applause.] The call for fresh troops comes to us from a loved and trusted President — from faithful and heroic generals. [Loud cheers.] This day determines that it shall be answered. [Renewed cheers.] Let each act as though specially commissioned to obtain recruits for a sacred service. [Applause.] " Fremont is here. You have heard his voice. He has told ii8 130 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. 15' to uphold our government and sustain our generals in the field. Whatever officer may go io battle with the President's commission, will be made strong by a loyal people's prayers and confidence. [Loud cheering.] " The Army and Navy, the President, the Cabinet and the Con- gress, have done all that can now be effected by them. The issue to-day is with the people. Do you ask activity on the part of the President? Recall his personal labor and supervision in the coun- cil and the field. Do you seek a policy ? Look to his solemn con- ference with the loyalists of the border States. [Cheers.] Do you demand legislation ? Witness the matured laws that Congress has spread upon the statute-book. A jurist, from the bench of our highest tribunal, once declared a maxim which shocked the coun- try and the world. It is ours, with our representatives, to respond : A rebel has no rights which a white man is hound to respect. [Loud and long continued cheering, with waving of hats and handker- chiefs.] " A traitor cannot own a loyalist of any raee. Nor can ' ser- vice be due ' to national conspirators, except at the call of public justice. [Laughter and applause.] "The limits of civilized warfare must and will be observed ; but those limits are broad as the boundaries of the ocean, and they lie far beyond the lives and the treasure of traitors in arms. [Cheers.] In this mortal combat between the enemies and the friends of republican liberty, wherein treason scruples at nothing, patriots must neglect no means that God and nature have placed in their hands. [Loud cheers.] " These institutions were reared on the ruins of British pride. Their foundations must be reconstructed on the crumble! preten- sions of Bouthern oligarchs. [Renewed cheers.] We must, and Vv'e will, repel force by force. They who press an iron heel upon the heart of our noble nation, must perish by the sword of her avenging sons. God grant the time may be near, when every rebel leader may say his prayers, and bite the dust, or hang as high as Hainan. 131 15 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. If we are wise, and true, and brave, the American Union, like the sun in the heavens, shall be clouded but for a night. Still shall it move onward, and every obstacle in its pathway be withered and crushed. [Renewed and continued cheering.] "Victory, indeed, cannot be won, except by arms. Our institu- tions were the gift of the wounded and dead of the armies of Wash- ington. Shakespeare said, and we re-utter in a higher sense, • Things bought with blood must be by blood maintained.' " Look to our amiies, and rally the people to swell their wasted ranks. Go, you who can. And spare neither labor nor money to enable others to march to battle. [Cheei's.] " Let loyal men permit no question to distract or divide them. Care not what a man's theories may be, so that his heart feels and his hand works for the Union. Every citizen, North or South, who prays for the success of our arms, and who labors for the vin- dication of our Constitution, whatever may be his politics or opin- ions, is a patriot. [Cheers.] They who condemn any class of our fellow-citizens, because of difierences on collateral issues — those who declare that a loyal abolitionist is on a level with an armed secessionist — are wrong in head, or at heart unsound. [Applause.] " Let assertions like this be at an end. Let all loyal men, and all loyal journals, abandoij arguments which bear the dull and counterfeit ring of traitor philosophy. [Loud applause.] " For the rest — for those who not alone seem^ but are, disloyal — let the people arise in their might, and silence them all, whether they speak in the street to the few, or seek, through the public y>ress, to poison the many. Law, in many things, cannot go so far, nor accomplish so much, as determined public opinion. [Cheers.] While men in Korth Carolina and Tennessee, with manly courage, strike in their districts, at the hydra of rebellion, shall not we, in New York, war upon the spirit of secession in every form ? [Ap- plause, and cries of ' We will.'] The old flag must be the para- 13ii HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH 17 mount object of all. It will be loved bj the faithful. By the false, it must be feared. [Vociferous cheering.] " They talk of a distinction between fidelity to the government and devotion to the administration. In the day of national danger or disaster, the two sentiments are inseparable. Distrust him who professes the one only to disclaim the other. [Applause.] "When the tempest howls, no prayer breathed for the ship, forgets the pilot at her helm. [Applause and cheers.] " Loyalty knows no conditions. Stand by the government ! Scrutinize its action ; but do it like earnest patriots — not like covert traitors. Stand l)y the administration! In times like these, party spirit should be lulled. That spirit was hushed in the era of the Kevolution — in the days of Madison and Monroe — and when the hero of New Orleans crushed the rising lorm of Nullifica- tion. Our fathers stood by Jackson as their sires sustained "Wash- ington. It is our privilege to uphold the arm of a President, great and pure, who will share their glory on the page of history. [Loud cheering.] " I must trespa^s no longer. [Cries of * go on, go on.'] No, fel- low-citizens ; I will bid you farewell. Our illustrious Secretary of State has this day given to the aimy the only son not already in the public Service. Let us emulate his spirit of sacrifice, and think nothing too dear to ofier on the altar of cur country. " Mr. Smith spoke with a clear, loud voice, and retired in the midst of most enthusiastic cheering." The following tribute to the memory of the gifted and lamented James T. Brady, was delivered at a meeting of the bar in New York, in February, 18G9, and we find it published with the pro- ceedings : SPEECH OF E. DELAFIELD SMllH ON THE DEATH OF JAMES T. BEADY. "Mr. E. Delafield Smith said: — Mr. President: — I know well that occasions like this are best adorned by those who bring to 133 18 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. them the dignity of years, tlie lustre of learning, the glory of re- nown. And I rejoice that while the scythe of death has been busy in our midst, peers of our illustrious friend still remain to honor his obsequies. Tet it must be acknowledged that James T. Brady possessed characteristics, extraordinary in degree .if not in kind, calculated to inspire and to justify, in younger and humbler mem- .bers of his profession, a desire to press forward and stand among the foremost at his bier. " Juniors and even juvenals at the Bar ; aspirants upon the very threshold of manhood ; youths still lingering in academies and schools ; and little children, tender as those our Saviour caressed, were as dear to his presence as the most accomplished of the crowned intellectual princes with whom it was his pride to cope in .the forum, and his delight to mingle in social festivities. " To all who approached him in his life, rang out the welcome of his cheerful voice. By its dying echoes, all alike are summoned to his tomb. The greatest who kneel there must make room for the least. If, at the home so lately his, where we looked upon his face for the last time ; if, from the coffin, whicli was buried in flowers before the cold earth had leave to press it, his eyes could have opened and calmly viewed the scene — no floral harp, no cross nor crown, however beautiful or elaborate, w^ould have won a sweeter smile than the simplest wreath that struggled for its place in the general profusion. " Ilis khidness and courtesy were universally bestowed ; and in view of this, it is remarkable that they were so singularly accepta- ble and flattering to every individual who came within their reach. But they were a matter of heart, not of manner — too respectful to offend, too genuine to be resisted. As the generous light of the sun may illumine half the world, yet the rays that fall on us seem peculiarly our own ; so the genial glow of his kindness cheered us all, and yet eacb felt himself the special recipient of his favor. "There were times, however, when his generosity became marked and demonstrative. It was iuterestiuir to observe with 134 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. 1& ■what judgment and taste it even then was guarded and directed In the celebrated trial of the 'Savannah Privateers' — to which a preceding speaker referred with great kindness to both the living and the dead — where we felt the blows which he delighted to deal upon a prosecution, he was associated with some eminent advocates and also with some unknown to professional fame or experience. In his matchless address to the jury, he repeated, with careful credit, some of the arguments which these humbler allies had used, and paid them a tribute of praise not less just in conception than delicate in expression. Of four leading counsel there arrayed — Lord, Evarts, Brady, Larocque — three have gone to their long home. " In the prominent cases of Home and of Ilaynes, arising under the laws for the suppression of the slave trade, and in the great fraud case of Kohnstamm, it will not be easy to forget either the ability of his defenses, or his subsequent assurance of sympathy in the anxious labors which those prosecutions involved. " He never entered a court-room but smiles from Bench and Bar responded to his presence. He never appeared upon a platform but to be greeted by thronging auditors. ]^o banquet saw dimin- ished guests while he remained to speak. ' From tlie charmed council to the festive board. Of human feelings the unbounded lord.' " A lawyer, an orator, a scholar, a gentleman — all that these made him was given to his country in her day of danger, and to the land of his ancestors in every hopeful struggle. " Great in intellect, great in heart — ' See, what a grace was seated on this brow ; Hyperion's curls ; the front of Jove himself.* " Our hearts may well be touched as they rarely have been. Words, unless of fire — tears, unless of blood — should only mock their grief. 135 20 HON. E. DELATIELD SMITH. ' Ye orators, whom yet our councils yield, Mourn for the veteran hero of your field 1 Te men of wit and social eloquence, He Avas your brother — bear his ashes hence 1 While powers of mind almost of boundless range. Complete in kind, as various in their change, While eloquence, wit, poesy, and mirth. That humbler harmonist of care on earth, Survive within our souls — while lives our sense Of pride in merit's proud preeminence, Long shall wc seek his likeness — long in vain.' "When 'a miglity spirit is eclipsed ' — when death comes to the nohle and brave, we cannot but be glad it is the common lot. We would not shrink forever from the dark path which they are forced to tread. We would not fail to seek them at last in the better world beyond. " Gentle, genial, generous spirit ! Our hearts shall long resound with the sweet music of the solemn Cathedral, which breathed a prayer for thy peace and rest. ' Stay not thy career ; I know we follow to eternity I' " The following after- dinner speech we copy from the "Ameri- can Scotsman" of February, 18T0, containing a report of a celebration in New York of the birth of Robert Burns : — SPEECH ON SCOTLAND DELIVERED AT BUKNs' ANNIVEESAET DINNER. " The Hon. E. Delafield Smith, on being called on, responded to the next toast, Scotland, as follows : "As Daniel Webster said of Massachusetts, Scotland 'speaks for herself.' History and philosophy, science and learning, poetry and romance are steeds to the chariot of her fame as onward it moves from generation to generation. Like the morning it advances, growing brighter as it dav^^ns on each succeeding age. 136 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. 21 " It is a luxury to know that we may indulge in limitless praise of Scotland without arousing the jealousy of either of the countries in her immediate neighbourhood. For Englishmen and Irishmen will impute all her glory to the blood of their own ancestors, sown across the border centuries ago ! Do we not read that Saxons conquered the Lowlands and made them their own in the year of our Lord 449 ? And do we not learn that a Celtic tribe from Erin settled on the west coast in A. D. 503, became the dominant race, and even gave the very name of Scots to the Picts who preceded them ? (Applause.) " If we extol her for her Presbyterianism — that sturdy church which she planted on American soil — may it not afford a malicious delight to her rivals, as well as some special satisfaction to her friends — for she is always hospitable — to know that whiskey and ale are among her principal productions? (Langhter.) If we praise her salmon, her opponents may gnaw at her herrings. If we admire her tartan, her enemies may hang on her hemp. (Re- newed laughter.) If we exalt her schools, it may console her competitors to confess that the salaries of her schoolmasters depend upim the fluctuating price of oatmeal. [Continued laughter,] If she is the land of books, we must acknovdedge her alike the ' land o' cakes.' If she produces a brilliant literature, it is kind to her neighbors to drench it with cold ' reviews,' so that its fame shall not glow too brightly in the admiration of the world. If she launches great steamers you may still taunt her on her canal-boats. If she glories in her steam-engines, she yet furnishes the navies of the world with sails, but leaves them, it must be confessed, the ' airs ' that swell them. " And here, to be serious, I cannot refrain from alluding to the personal manners of Scotchmen, by which they are sometimes prejudiced in the minds of those who fail to realize the value of sincerity in human intercourse. They have not the formal polite- ness of the English, the cordiality of the Irish, nor the suavity of the Frencli. But a Scotch smile is a reality. It intensely means 137 22 HON. E. DELAFIELD SMITH. all it Indicates, l^sse qitam videri. You remember the story of tlio Frenchman who discovered a neighbor in his carriage, and told him to get out. ' Sir,' said the intruder, ' you asked me to get in.' ' Ah,' was the mild response, ' you were welcome to the compliment, but I want the carriage myself.' A true Scotchman would grudge the politeness, but give you the drive. [Laughter and applause,] " No man can do justice to this steadfast, heroic, beautiful, wild and classic land, without recalling the valor of her historic battle- fields — without recounting her array of names inscribed at every goal of human achievement — nor without rising to a sublime description of her lakes and rivers, her heaths and highlands, her cataracts and torrents. [Chee: s.] " But here we approach the domain, not of eloquence, but of poetry ; and upon him that may not without presumption invoke either muse, silence is doubly imposed.' [Go on.] " Yes, I would not sit down without pointing to one immortal name on Scotland's roll of honor, to illustrate that grandest feature of Scottish character, intrepid integrity. I allude not now to the glorious humanity of Burns. I refer to his great successor, Walter Scott. [Applause.] My theme is not to-night the charm of his song, nor the witchery of his romance. I would recall your memory to that chapter in his biography which relates that when his fame was at its height aud his fortune supposed to have been made, the failures of certain publication -houses carried with them his pecuniary destruction. As endorser upon their paper, he was overwhelmed with debts amounting to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Brave as Alexander, he faced his calamities without com])laint, and at the age of fifty-five went to work to retrieve them. At his death five hundred thousand dollars had been paid, and the remainder was in the way of speedy discharge. Refusing all composition or settlement, he laid down life on the altar of his Scotch honesty. Born in the year and on the day that gave the first l^apoleon birth, his courage was of a type that warriors might envy. [Cheers.] 138 HON. E. DELA FIELD SMITH. 23 " The magnauimity of Walter Scott toward bis literary rivals illustrates another manly trait of Scottish character. The greatest of his poetical competitors was the illustrious Byron. Acknowledging that Byron ' bate ' him, be yet forgot an early thrust received in the satire, and became as kind to his brother poet through his life as he proved tender and just to his mangled memory. [Loud cheering.] And the genius of that brilliant bard must itself be largely credited to Scotland. For he himself says : ' 1 am lialf a Scot by birth, and bred A whole one, and my heart flies to my head, — As ' Auld. Lang Syne ' brings Scotland, one and all, Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills and clear streams, The. Dee, the Don, BalBnsive business with his accustomed intelligence and energy, and his exertions were rewarded with ample returns. For the last fifteen years he has been interested in large manufac- turing establishments in different parts of the State, to the number of fifteen, to which he has given much time and attention. He has been the principal manager of the business of the New Haven Clock Company, the largest concern of the kind in the world; and in that capacity has visited Europe three several times to promote the sale of its wares. On the last occasion he remained abroad nearly a year, making a complete tour of Europe. He is also president of the Goodyear Metallic Rubber Shoe Company, one ] Go 4 JAMES E. ENGLISH. of tlic largest establishments of the kind in the United States, and an active director in several other large and well-managed companies, all successfully prosecuting their several branches of industry. As a business man he is distinguished for practical sagacity, fore- cast, and sound judgment. In the numerous enterprises with which he has been connected, his penetration and discernment have rarely been at fault, and his associates have always accepted liis suggestions and advice with unhesitating confidence. The re- sult is seen in the large fortune he has acquired, and which he un- ostentatiously and quietly enjoys, dispensing a liberal hospitality, and bestowing large sums upon charitable and philanthropic objects, as well as aiding industrious and deserving young men to successfully establish themselves in business. And it is worthy of mention, in this connection, that his entire wealth has been the result of legitimate business transactions, Mr. English never having been a '* speculator " in any sense of the word. The connection of Governor English with political life dates back more than twenty years, and during that period he has been constantly in some public employment. Being a man of innate modesty, and never seeking distinction or notoriety of any kind, offices of every description have been thrust upon him, frequently against his wishes, and occasionally in spite of his earnest remon- strances. He was for many years in the municipal councils of his native city and town, and also a member of both branches of the Le- gislature, having been elected to the Senate for several successive years. He was chosen a member of Congress in 18G1, and again in 1 863, serving through the first four years of the Rebellion. He was on the Committee on Naval Affairs in the 37th Congress, and so effi- cient and valuable were his services in that capacity, and so highly were they appreciated by the Navy Department, that upon the coming in of the next Congress, a new organization of the Naval Committee involving some changes as a matter of course, and Mr. Colfax, in advance of being chosen speaker, having promised to sub- 166 JAMES E. ENGLISH. 5 (^titate Mr. Brandagee, a Ilepu])Hcan from the New London Dis- trict, in place of Mr. English, Mr. Welles personally and earnestly solicited the retention of Mr. English, stating that it was highly important that his services should be retained as a member of that committee. He served on the Committee on Public Lands in the 38th Congress. Though an earnest Democrat in principle and from conviction, he zealously supported the war measures of the administration, voting for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and for the I^ational Emancipation Act. He, how- ever, opposed the Legal Tender Bill and the National Bank system. He foresaw the pernicious tendency of those measures, and the arguments by which he resisted their passage have never been answered, while the disastrous effect upon the industrial and commercial interests of the country attests tJie soundness of his reasoning. Although possessing large manufacturing interests to be benefited by class legislation, he has ever been a strenuous opponent of protection for the sake of protection, and a warm advocate of all measures of revenue reform! He was chosen governor in 1867, carrying the election by his personal popularity, at a time when nearly every State in the Union was under the domination of the Republicans, thus giving the first check to the usurpations of that powerful organization, and turning back the tide of fanaticism. He was re-elected in 1868, and again in 1870. And it is no more than justice to him to say, that the present prosperous condition of the great Democratic party throughout the country and its steadily increasing strength, are in a large measure to be ascribed to the revolution in Connec- ticut which Governor English inaugurated and conducted to a triumphant consummation. He is a firm believer in the right of the States to manage their own domestic concerns in their own way, and the points made by him, in his several messages and other State papers, in defense of this right, have been most felicitously put, and never successfully answered. He was nominated as one of the Presidential electors of the 167 Q JAMES E. ENGLISH. State at large in the campaign of 18G8, and was a conspicuous candidate for the Presidency before the Democratic National Convention. Governor English has taken an absorbing interest in the cause of education, having repeatedly urged upon the Legislature, in his official capacity, the establishment, of a system of education which should open the schools to every child in the State without distinc- tion, and free of all charge for tuition. And nothing but his perse- vering exertions and great personal influence could have overcome the strong opposition with which the proposition was received on its inception. And the indigent people of Connecticut, whose oH'spring have free access to the excellent schools of the State on the same footing as the children of the opulent, owe that inestimable privilege to the wise benevolence and enlightened statesmanship of Governor English. He may justly claim the distinction, accorded him by the friends of education throughout the State, of being " the father of the free-school system," while his valuable services in the higher walks df instruction have been recognized in his appointment as one of the councilors of the Sheffield Scientific School connected with Yale College. Having summed up the most conspicuous events of his life, and referred, although superficially, to his public career, it only remains for us to present a hasty and imperfect view of the attributes of his character and the estimation in which he is held by those among whom his days have been spent, and whoare qualified to appreciate his excellence and the beneficent influence which he has constantly exerted upon society. As a man of sound sense and practical wisdom in all that re- lates to the every-day concerns of life, Mr. English is pre-eminent among his fellows. He is a man of quick perception, fine faculties, with a power of generalization quite extraordinary in one of his habits of life. His reasoning powers are uncommon, and he has a ready, thorough appreciation of the force of an argu- ment presented in a controversial discussion. He makes no pre- 168 JAMES E. ENGLISH. 7 tensions as a scholar, bat lie writes fluently and with precision, conveying his meaning in terse and well-chosen language. He has great executive ability, and the functions of his high office are performed with that degree of skill, intelligence, and integrity which insures a successful administration. He is liberal, philan- thropic, and gives freely of his large wealth in aid of every charity and every well-directed public enterprise. He enjoys the unmixed respect and esteem of his neighbors, and has troops of warm friends to whom he has endeared himself by countless acts of humanity and kindness. He has a sound constitution, is full of activity and vigor, of regular, abstemious habits, and leads a blameless life, illus- trated by intelligent benevolence and warm-hearted friendship. 169 /^J^. HON. "WILLIAM Ij KE LLE^ ■.PRESENTATIVE TB-OM FEin-t SYLVAMIA HOR WILLIAM D. KELLEY. 'HE Republican party is the legitimate heir of the old Fed- eral and Whig parties — the parties of Washington and Webster — which, in the ancient and medieeval periods of tlie Republic, as they may be termed, illustrated the sentiment and the idea of nationality as opposed to tlie heresy of State sovereignty. There is, nevertheless, flowing in tlie veins of this great Repub- lican organization much of the best blood of the old Democratic party. The men who adopted the political teachings of Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the inspirer of tlie ordinance of 1789, who heartily believed the great American doctrines of the freedom and equality of all men, and the power and duty of the nation to protect the national domain from the pollution of human slavery, passed, by a natural transition, into the Republican ranks when the Democratic party abandoned the faith of its fathers, and became the embodiment of a " creed out- worn." Among the men of the Democratic party who earliest separated from " its decaying forms," and contributed to organize a new party, in the light of truth and reason, on the basis of inherent, inalienable right, was the subject of this sketch — William Darrah Kelley. He was born in the Northern Liberties of Philadelphia, on the 12th of April, 1814. His grandfather, Major John Kelley, was a native of Salem county, New Jersey, and served throughout the Revolution as an officer of the Continental line. The son of this Revolutionary officer, and the father of the subject of this memoir — David Kelley — removed from New Jersey to Philadelphia, 2 WILLIAM D. KELLEY. where lie married a lady of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Miss Hannah Darrah. The cloud of linaneial emban-assment which, at the close of the war of 1812, darkened the horizon, cast its deep shadow over the fortunes of Mr. Kelley ; and by his death, in 1816, his widow was left, without an estate, to support and educate a dependent family of four children, the youngest of whom — William — was but two years of age. Mrs. Kelley struggled nobly and well to fuliill this great trust, and lived to witness the consum- mation of her most ambitious hopes in the prosperity and advance- ment of her distinguished son. At eleven years of age, it became necessary that William should earn his own living. He accordingly left school, and became an errand-boy in a bookstore, then a copy-reader in the office of the Philadel2yhia Inquirer newspaper, and finally an apprentice to Messrs. Rickards & Dubosq, manufacturing jewelers, of Phila- delphia. He attained his freedom in the spring of 1834. This was the era of the removal of the deposits from the United States Bank ; and Mr. Kelley's first experience in political leadership was gained in encouraging and organizing the resistance of the Demo- cratic workingmen to the tyrannous demands of the Whig capi- talists of Pliiladelphia. The stand he took on this question rendered it difficult for him to obtain employment in liis native city. He accordingly removed to Boston, and at once secured a situation in tlie establishment of Messrs. Clark & Curry. In Boston, tlie spirit of New England culture took deep hold upon his natuie. While laboring with characteristic industry in the most difficult branch of his trade, the art of enameling — and achieving a high reputation as a skilful and tasteful workman, he improved his scholarshij) by solitary study ; and his contributions to the news- papers of the day, and written and extemporaneous lectures and addresses before public audiences, established his reputation as a writer and speaker of ability and power, in association even with such men as Bancroft, Brownson, Alexander H. Everett, Channing, and Emerson. 172 WILLIAM D. KELLET. 3 In 1839, he returned to Pliiladelpliia, and entered, as a student of law, the office of Colonel James Page, a local leader of the Democratic party, and the postmaster of Philadelphia. On April 17, 1S4I, he was admitted to the bar of the several courts of his native city. His advancement in the profession was immediate and rapid; while, in every political canvass, local and national, his stirring addresses attracted large audiences, and rendered hira one of the most conspicuous figures in the Democratic party. In January, 1S15, lie was appointed by the attorney -general of the State, Hon. John K. Kane— to conduct, in connection with Francis Wharton, Esq., who has since become celebrated as a writer on criminal law, the pleas of the Commonwealth in the ■courts of Philadeli)hia. In March, lSi6, Governor Shunk appointed Mr. Kelley a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, a tribunal whose jurisdiction was co-extensive with the common law, chancerj-, and ecclesiastical courts of England. In 1851, he was elected to the same' bench, under the new constitution of the State, upon an independent ticket, in defiance of the attempted proscription of the Democratic party organization, which was embittered against him for his course in the contested election case of Reed and Kneass. This was a triumphant vindication by the people of the justice and integrity of his action in that cause. But Judge Kelley did not confine himself to the topics of his profession or to the discussion of political questions. The protection of the weak and down-trodden, the reformation of the ignorant and vicious, and the promotion of education, have ever found in him an eloquent and powerful advocate. His remarkable powers of oratory gave additional effect to his chaste and polisiied style, and tew public speakers have proved so effective. We offer the following passages from an address of his before the Linnsean Society of Peimsjdvania college, Gettysburg, on the " Characteristics of the Age," delivered over twenty years ago, as giving an idea of the felicity and beauty of his style as a writer. The earnestness and tlie clear ringing tones of the orator are wanting to give it full eflect. 173 4 WILLIAM D. KELLET. *'I would not disparage the value of the 'little learning' which enables a man to read and write his mother-tongue with facility. When 'commerce is king,' the ability to do this is little less than essential to the physical well-being of the citizen. Under such government the receipt-book peaceal>ly enough performs a large share of the functions of the embattled wall and armed retainers of the days when force was law. But to rise above the commercial value of these slender attainments, he who can read the language of Shakespeare and Milton, Johnson and Addison, Shelley and Wordsworth, has the key to the collected wisdom of his race. The farms around his workshop, the property of others, present to his view a landscape which is his, and to him belongs every airy nothing to which poet ever gave habitation or name: The sages of the most remote past obey his call as counselors and friends; and in the company of prophet and apostle he may approach the presence of the Most High. The value of such a gift is inestimable. Wis dom and justice would make it the certain heritage of every child born in the commonwealth. * * * -X- * * * " The spirit of commerce is essentially selfish. Voyages are projected for profit. The merchant, whose liberal gifts surprise the world, chaffers in his bargains. Not for man as a family of brethren, therefore, are the blessings of this age. They are the gifts of a common Father, but they come not, like light and dew, insensibly to all. They mark the achievements of our race, and manifest the master-spirit of the age, but hitherto they have been felt but slightly by the masses of mankind. Wealth increases; but its aggregation into few hands takes place with ever-growing rapidity. The comforts of life abound ; but when the n)arkets of the world are glutted, hunger is in the home of the artisan. Over- production causes the legitimate effects of famine. The i!)gennity of political economists is vainly taxed for the means of preventing the accumulation of surplus material and fabrics. And wl)ile warehouse and granary groan with repletion, heartless theory 174 ■WILLIAM D. KELLET. $ points to the laboring population reduced to want and pauperism, and, with dogmatic emphasis, inquires if the increase of population cannot be legally restrained ? The state of the market shows that there are more men than commerce requires, and a just system of economy would adapt the supply to the demand ! ******* " Ancient philosophy did not recognize utility as an aim. It contemned, as mechanical and degrading, the discovery or inven- tion that improved man's physical condition. Socrates invented no steam-engine or spinning-jenny. The soul was his constant study. Regardless of his own estate, he cared not for the material comfort of others. Indifferent to the world himself, he sought to raise his disciples above it. A disputatious idler and a scoffer at utility, he fashioned Plato and swayed the world for centuries. Our philosophy comes from Bacon. It only deals with the wants of man and uses of nature. The body is the object of its solici- tude. Earth is the field of its hopes. Time bounds its horizon. Fruit, material fruit — the multiplication of the means of temporal enjoyment — was the end Lord Bacon had in view, when, de- nouncing the scliools, he gave his theory to the world. Time and experience have vindicated his methods. But have they not also shown, that a system which offers no sanction to virtue and no restraints to vice, whose only instruments are the senses, and whose only subject is material law, may impart to a world the vices which made the wisest also the meanest of mankind?" In August, 1856, Judge Ivelley was nominated, while absent from home, as the Republican candidate for Congress from the fourth Congressional district of Pennsylvania. He was not elected ; for the Republican idea had made at that day but feeble impression in Philadelphia, and the party was without means or organization. During that canvass he made his first great Republican address on " Slavery in the Territories," in Spring Garden Hall, Philadelphia. Motives of delicacy prompted him to resign his judicial office itumediately after the election, and he returned, after a term of- 175 6 WILLIAM D. KELLEl. nine years and nine months on the bench, to the private practice o Iiis profession. In October, 1860, he was elected on tlie Republican ticket to the seat in Congress to which he has been five times since returned by his constituents. On his return from the special session of Congress which convened on July 4th, 1861, he partici- pated as counsel for the Government, in the prosecution of the pirates of the rebel privateer Jeff Davis, and made a brilliant closing argument in that great State trial. In Congress he has spoken at length upon every national topic; and, in most instances, he has borne the standard of his party, and planted it far in ad- vance, holding it with firm and steady hand, until his friends occu- pied the position. As early as January Y, 1862, he detected the fatal errors of the military policy of McClellan, and warned the country of the incompetency of that officer, in an impromptu reply to the speech of Vallandigham, on the Trent case. On the 16th of January, 1865, he vindicated, in an elaborate speech, the justice and necessity of impartial suffrage as a fundamental condition of the restoration of republican governments in the rebel States. On the 22d of June, 1865, in an address on " Tlie Safeguards of Personal Liberty," at Concert Hall, Philadelphia, he criticised the policy of recon- struction foreshadowed by President Johnson in his North Carolina proclamation, and indicated a plan of action, in respect to the rebel States, which has been since substantially embodied in the Reconstruction Acts of Congress. In his speech on " Protection to American Labor," delivered in the House of Representatives, on the 31st of January, 1866, he indicated a financial policy, in reference to the payment of the public debt, which Congress has fully adopted in the repeal of the cotton-tax, and the modification of the duties on manufactured products. In connection with these remarkable speeches, may be mentioned his speech on the 27tli of February, 1866, on "the Constitutional Regulation of Suffrage." Two of Judge Kelley's speeches in Congress — that of January 16, 1865, on Suffrage, and that of January 31, 1866, on Labor — have had 176 WILLIAM D. KELLEY. 7 more extensive circulation than the speeches of any other American Btatesman. More than lialf a million copies ot" each have been jninted and distributed. At the first session of the XXXIX. Congress, Judge Kelley introduced the bill, which viras afterwards passed with certain modi- fications, to secure the right of suffrage to the colored population of the District of Columbia. On the evening of the 22d of Februarj^, 1868, he spoke in favor of the impeachment of the President, and more recently partici- pated in the debate in the House of Representatives on the reso- lution of Mr. Brooniall, of Pennsylvania, to prohibit hereditary exclusion from the right of sulFrage, and defended the position taken by him in his more extended speech, two years before, on the Constitutional Regulation of Suffrage. We have not space even to mention the numerous speeches and addxa=ses of Judge Kelley in and out of Congress. He lias addressed his fellow-citizens from the lakes to the gulf In the spring of 1867, he visited the Southern States, and in a series of addresses at New Orleans, Montgomery, and other cities, spoke earnest and eloquent words of hope and encouragement to the people of the South. The noble wisdom and tender humanity which pervade these speeches, stamp them as the production of a statesman and a philanthropist. They were words of friendly coun- sel, which the people of the South would do well to heed. A comprehensive, national character, and a generous, intense, all- embracing humanity, have always characteriz:ed Judge Kelley 's political opinions. He saw in the repeal of the Missouri Compro- mise, conclusive evidence that the Democratic party had become sectional ; and he left it. He found that Democracy, which once had meant civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, advancement, the greatest good of the greatest number, had come to mean pro- scription of opinion, aristocracy, tyranny, disorder, slavery ; and he abandoned it. He is therefore one of the fathers of the National Republican 12 177 8 WILLIAM D. KKLLEY. party. The sincerity and earnestness of his convictions would always gain for him the attention of the ITouse of Representatives, if it were not commanded by the striking and engaging peculiari- ties of liis eloquence. He appears with equal advantage in im- promptu reply, and in elaborately prepared address. His vehe- ment declaiViation, delivered in tones of voice marvelously rich and powerful, thrills, on occasions, the members upon the floor and the listeners in the galleries; as when, on the memorable night of the 22d of February, he exclaimed : — " Sir, the bloody and unfilled fields of the fen reconstructed States, the unsheeted ghosts of the two thousand murdered negroes in Texas, crj', if the dead ever invoke vengeance, for the punish- ment of Andrew Johnson." Judge Kelley is altogether the most considerable public character whom Philadelphia ever sent to the national councils. She has too few of such men — men of progressive ideas, commanding talents, and national fame ; and when one has served her, as Judge Kelley has, through eight years of eventful history, it becomes her duty, as a just community, to cherish and honor him. Judge Kelley served in the XLI. Congress, and has just been re- elected. In the organization of the House, he was placed on the Comnn'ttee of Ways and Means, and that of Coinage, Weights, and Measures. As a member of the previous House he has devoted himself assiduously to the promotion of the repeal of all duties im])osed on articles of food and raw materials for manufacture, for which we depend upon foreign countries. In these he would have absolute free trade. But as to the articles into the production of which our native material and labor enters, he is an extreme pro- tectionist. In this respect he may be regarded as the representative man of his native State, to the interests of whose people he is proudly devoted, as is shown by the following extract from hia speech in the House of Representatives on March 25, 1870 : — " Sir, I am proud of dear old Pennsylvania, my native State. She was the first to adopt the Federal Constitution, and \va3 in fact the key-stone of the Federal arch, 178 WILLIAM D. KELXEY. Q holding together the young Union when it consisted of but tliirteen States, and she ia to-dny pre-eminently the representative State of the Union. You cannot strike her 80 that her industries shall bleed without those of other States feeling it, and feeling it vitally. She has no cotton, or sugar, or rice fields ; but apart from those she is iden- tified with every interest represented upon this floor. " Gentlemen from the rocky coast of New England and the gentlemen who are here from the more fertile and hospitable shores of the Pacific, especially the gentlemen from the beautifully wooded shores of Puget Sound, complain that their ship-yards are idle. Hers, alas I are also idle, although they are the yards in which were built the largest wooden ship the Government ever put afloat, and the largest saihug iron-clad it ever owned. She has her commerce, and sympathizes with young San Francisco and our great commercial metropolis. New York. She was for long years the leading port of entry in the country. She still maintains a respectable direct commerce and imports, very largely through New York, for the same reasons that London does thiough Liver- pool and Paris through Havre. " Are you interested in the production of fabrics, whether of silk, wool, fla.x, or cotton ? If so, her interests are identical with yours, for she employs as many spindles and looms as any New England State, and their productions are as various and valuable. Are your interests in the commerce upon the lakes? Then go with me to her beau- tiful city of Erie, and behold how Pennsylvania sympathizes with all your interests there. Are your interests identified with the navigation of the Mississippi and seeking markets for your products at the mouth of that river and on the Gulf? I pray you to remember that two of the navigable sources of the American 'Father of Waters' take their rise in the bosom of her mountains, and that for long decades her enterprising and industrious people have been plucking from her hills bituminous coal and floating it down tliat stream past the coal-fields of Oliio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and other coal-bearing States, to meet that of England in the market of New Orlearrs and try to drive it thence. Gentlemen from the gold regions, where were the miners trained who first brought to light, with any measure of science and experience, the vast resources in gold and silver-bearing quartz of the Pacific slope ? They went to you from the coal, iron, and zinc mines of Pennsylvania. There they had learned to sink the shaft, run the drift, handle the ore, and crush or smelt it. It was experience acquired in her mines that brought out the wealth of California almost as magically as we were taught in childhood to believe that Aladdin's lamp cmrld convert-base articles into precious metal. "Nor, sir, are the interests of Pennsylvania at variance with tho-e of tlie great agri- cultural States. Before her Representatives in the two Houses of. Congress liad united their voices with those of gentlemen from the West to make magnificent land-grants for the purpoee of constructing railroads in different directions across the treeless but luxuriously fertile prairies, Pennsylvania was first among the great agricultural States. And to-day her products of the field, the garden, the orchard, and the dairy equal in value those of any other State. Gentlemen from Ohio, notwith.standing the statement of the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Allison), that you alone manufacture Scotch pig-iron and suffer from its importation, as j-ou alone have the black band ore from which it is made, is it not true that when Pennsylvania demands a tariff that will protect the wages of her laborers in the mine, quarry, and furnace, she does but defend the interest and rights of your laborers, and those of ever}^ other iron-bearing State in the Union? Gentlemen Irom Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, Pennsylvania is denounced, because she pleads fdr a duty on coal that will enable you to develop your magnificent 179 10 WILLIAM D, KELLEY. tide-water coal-fields in competition with Nova Scotia. The coal of your tide-water fields is far more available than that of the inland fields of Pennsylvania, which de- pend on railroads for transportation. On the banks of the James, the Dan, and a score of other navigable rivers, lie coal-beds to within a few hundred feet of which the vessels which are to carry the precious fuel away may come, and they lie nearer to the markets of New England than those of your colonial rivals at Nova Scotia ; and when you were not here and Virginia and North Carolina were voiceless on this floor, I pleaded with the Thirty-Ninth Congress for the duty of $1.25 per ton in order that Virginia and North Carolina, soon to be reconstructed, should be able to produce fuel for New England better and cheaper tlian Nova Scotia does, and that it should be Carried in New England built vessels, so that the thousands of people employed in producing and transporting it should constitute a market for the grain of the Western farmer and the productions of American worksliops. I miglit, Mr. Chairman, extend the illustration of the identity of the interests of Pennsylvania with those of the peo- ple of every other State, but will not detain the committee longer on that subject. In leaving it I, however, reiterate my assertion that you cannot strike a blow at her indus- tries without the people of at least half a score of other States feeling it as keenly as she will. She asks no boon from Congress. Her people, whether they depend for subsistence upon their daily toil, or have been so fortunate as to have inherited or acquired capital, seek no special privileges from the Government. They demand that we shall legislate for the promotion of the equal welfare of all. They know that they must share the common fate, and that their prosperity depends upon that of their countrymen at large." 180 SAMUEL J. TILDEN^. I/PIIERE is no otlier country where the position of a lawyer ^^^^^ reaches the dignity and power that it possesses here. He lias not here, in front of him, an aristocracy of hereditary title or of wealth. If a leader in his profession, he is in the front himself. If his professional pursuits carry him, in his career, beyond the investigation of subjects of mere personal interest, he becomes versed in constitutional questions, in the principles that guide the grandest civil interests and the state itself. If his ora- tory has the true fire, his leadership is supported by the tide of popularity. If he is a profound thinker, his counsel becomes con- trolling among his a'sociatcs. If ,he has physical energy, his in- fluence becomes active and real. If he acquires honest wealth, the independence it brings takes off all the weight from him in the race; and if his character secures for him a reputation for integ- rity and the honor of his countrymen, he has the whole field open to him, and he becomes the representative of a power beyond his own. The foundation of true virtue, as of true genius, is force. Force accomplishes results. The vindication of success demonstrates that a man does not march counter to his time and to human prog- ress, but that he represents an idea at the precise time when that idea is worth representing ; that if the times that try men's souls come, he has a soul worth trying. Whoever does not succeed is of no use to the world, and he passes away as if he never existed. These are reflections proper to an estimate of the character of Samuel J. Tilden. At the point, in his course, when the world 181 2 SAMUEL J. TILDE N. opened before him he chose the profession of a lawyer, and has, in singleness of purpose, pursued tlie path of his profession with a diligence that has placed him, midway in a whole life's course, in a position of which all the advantages are in his power. His first entry upon public life was in tlie political campaign in 1832, which resulted in the election of General Jackson to hia second term of the Presidency. At that time William L. Marcy was governor of the State of New York, beginning an adminis- tration known as the Albany Regency. The opposition to the Jackson or Democratic ticket depended upon the coalition between the national Republican party and the Anti-masons, a political fragment, of brief existence on a local issue, which was made up of men drawn from each of the main parties. Success in the election, as shown by the event which terminated the political history of the An ti -masons, depended upon discrediting the coali- tion and withdrawing from it old Democrats into the ranks of their own party. Although he was but eighteen years of age, Mr. Til- den had already explored the facts and principles of this political situation, which had been for some years a leading question in State politics ; and, of his own motion, had written a paper leveled directly at the result, and this accidentally came to light. At his father's house in New Lebanon, Cohimbia County, New York, he had formed an acquaintance with the great statesmen of the Jacks- >nian era — William L. Marcy, Martin Van Buren, A. C. Flagg, Silas Wright, Michael Hofi'man, and the Livingstons. His father was a farmer, from English ancestors who settled in Massa- chusetts, at Scituate, in 1C26, removed to Connecticut in 1715, and thence to Columbia County, in 1790. He was a neighbor of Mr. Yan Buren and the Livingstons, and was himself not without in- fluence among the statesmen who were his friends. Mr. Tilden's paper becoming known in this circle, it was taken to Albany, and appeared in the Albany Argus on the 9th of October, 1832, as an address to the electors of Columbia County. It soon happened that a standard was applied to the ability of the paper, and to its effect 182 SAMUEL J. TILDEN. 3 in a canvass that was engaging the vigor of the ablest men, for the editor was obliged to defend Mr. Yan Buren from an imputation of self-seeking, bj stating that it was not from his pen. This po- litical association, the most powerful in the liistory of the State, continued, witli Mr. Tilden in its counsels, until, after thirty years, he himself came into the leadership of his party. In 1832 he came to the city of New York to pursue his studies. These were interrupted by ill health ; and although there is now no trace left of it, his appearance was such that he was sometimes conscious, in tiie greeting of his friends, of their surprise at seeing him again. Still, a while at Yale College, and with private in- struction in New York, he kept at work in the acquisition of knowledge and the training of his powers. It is one of the quali- ties of genius that it can work all night. This sort of unremitting labor, pursued under a supreme necessity of ph^'sieal exercise for his health's sake, and the close direction of his studies in the single line of the law and its cognate branches, rapidly advanced him in his profession. lie confined himself to the great questions that arose before him, and never became engaged in a general practice. His studies in history, political economy, and meta- physics, all the more fiuitful because they were driven for a pur- pose in the intervals of professional occupations, expanded in him the broad views, and fixed in him the general principles of science, which impelled, him along the special professional path he had chosen. The line he was engaged in as counsel in the cases of great corporations, gave a practical application to his early incli- nation for financial discussions, and brought his profound study of the financial aspects of political economy up to tlie solution of actual questions. When he was twelve years old, his grandmother read to him altematel}^ in the Bible and in Jcft'erson's Corre- Bpondence, and upon that foundation he has built. In his political career he has never sought office, nor held any since they were open to his ambition. The principle that it is the first of social duties for a citizen of a republic to take his fair 183 4 SAMUEL J. TILDEN. allotment of care and trouble in all public affairs, wlien it lodges in a true and generous heart, excludes the use of political power as a means of self-aggrandizement. He served one year in the State Assembly, as a delegate from the city of New York, in 1846 ; and was an active member of the Constitutional Convention of 1846, and of that of 1867. In the former he was next to Michael Hoffman on the Committee on Canals and the Financial Obligations of the State, and in the latter was on the Committee on Finance. In 1866 he was chosen one of the Democratic State Committee, and at the same time took the position of its chairman. He suc- ceeded Dean Richmond who had been chairman since 1850, and to whom Mr. Tilden had been a trusted confidential adviser. It has thus fallen to him to preside at, or to open, many of the most im- portant coTU'entions of that party. His speeches, on these occa- sions of breaking ground, have been remarkable for the precision and fervor with which he would express the dominant idea of the time, and the grasp he would take at the heart of the questions rising to be political issues. In the constitutional conventions, finances and tlie canals, the principal financial topic, engaged his attention, and he was successful, in 1846, in shaping the canal policy which has since proved so beneficial. In his professional career he has engaged not only in cases which required argument in the Courts of Review, upon the principles of law wliich fitted a case of developed facts ; but more eminently in the development of the facts themselves, from complicated sources, in the order of their legal value, so as to comprise the law, com- plete the case, convince the court and carry the jury. As Judge llogeboom said of his summing up, on such an occasion, he spoke as if in a trance. In the year 1855 Azariah C. Flagg received the certificate of election as Comptroller of the City of New York, and his title to the office was contested by his opponent by quo warranto. The vote had been so close, that a change in the return in a single election district would alter the result. Upon a fi*aud inserted here his 184 SAMUEL J. TILDEN. 5 opponent proceeded, and proved that the three hundred and sixteen votes counted for Mr. Flagg beh)no;ed to him, and that his one hun- dred and eightj-six votes were all that Mr. Flagg received. He re- lied on the tally lists, which were on two sheets of paper; the one containing the canvass of tlie regular tickets was lost, but false results were pretended to have been transferred from it to the sheet containing the canvass of the split tickets, by certain figures, which, added to the votes there shown for him, gave him the three hundred and sixteen. That this was the truth, and that by an error made in the return, the votes had been transposed, was confirmed by the oral evidence of the iniipcctors, and appeared to be overwhelming. Mr. Tilden, by a logical and mathematical analysis, — shown by tables deriv^ed from the tally list that remained, the number of tickets and of candidates, and the aggregate votes, — reconstructed the lost list, and proved conclusively that the return for Mr. Flagg was cor- rect, and that the results pretended to have been transferred from it were arbitrary, false, and necessarily impossible. He won the case for Mr. Flagg on his opening. In the Burdell case, in 1857, which was tried, on the issue of his marriage, before Surrogate Bradford, the circumstantial and positive evidence of respectable witnesses in favor of the marriage was com- plete. On the theory that a fabricated tissue, however artful, if torn by cross-examination would reveal the truth, he put the one hundred and forty-two witnesses to the test, and developed a series of circumstances which struck the mind of the judge "with irresis- tible force,'' and led to his " entire satisfaction and conviction " that the marriage had never taken place. In the Cumberland coal case in 1858, in Maryland, there is an illustration of his ability to establish a purely legal principle. He sustained the doctrine that a trustee can not become a purchaser of property confided to him for sale, and applied that doctrine to the directors of corporations ; fully exhibiting the equitable principles on M'hich such sales are set aside, and the conditions necessary to give them validity. 185 Q SAMUEL J. TILDEN. Ill the case of the Delaware and Ilndson Canal Company against the Pennsylvania Coal Company, in 1863, the rights of the canal company to a large increase of toll, on a perpetual contract for coal transportation, depended upon the question of fact, whether a.-^ they claimed, by larger boats on an enlarged canal, the transpor- tation had been rendered cheaper. By a calculation that took yeai'S of labor, brought in M-ith its just weight every statistic and circum- stance of canal navigation, and by the application of the law of average, Mr. Tilden established the fiict against the canal company, and against the popular opinion ; and settled the fundamental eco- nomic principles of canal navigation for the country. In addition to many such cases, he has, since 1855, been exten- sively connected with the railroad enterprises of the country, par- ticularly of tlie AVcst. Perhaps more than half of tliose enter- prises, north of the Ohio, between the Hudson and the Missouri, have stood to him in the relation of clientage. The general mis- fortunes, between 1855 and 1860, which brought insolvency upon so many of these railroads, and placed in ])eril and confusion the interests of j^eople of all conditions, who were their creditors and contractors, bondholders and stockholders, called for some plan of relief. It was here that his legal knowledge, iinancial skill, labori- ous industry, weight of character and personal influence were called into action, and resulted in a plan of reorganization which })ro- tected equitably the rights of all parties, in many cases saved tire- some and wasting litigation, was generally adopted, and has resulted in a condition of railroad prosperity as eminent as the depression was severe. His relations with these companies and the individuals controlling them, have continued, and his thorough com- prehension of their history and requirements, his practical energy and decision, have elevated him to the mastery of the questions that arise in the organization, administration, and finances of canals as well as railroads, so that their prosperity can not be sepa- rated from his influence upon them. If there were space to expand tliese outlines into full illustra 186 SAMUEL J. TILDEN. 7 tions, it would jiistiij the estimate placed upon Lis character, and the indication of the elements of his success. He has that rare equipoise between courage and judgment, which saves him from being rash in the hour of roflec^tion, and from indecision at the mo- ment of action. There is a mean between the theoretical, whicli l)enetrates ultimate causes and comprehends remote influences, and tiie practical, which looks ahead at the immediate result and the im- pediments. From that stand-point, tlie man who can get there, tests and rectifies theories, weighs on fundamental princi})les means and ends, and finishes by concentrating the power of all causes toward the .(ccomplishment of a single object. The theorist lacks result, and the practical man lacks power; but the man who is alive to the duly of to-day, and who has spent his time in settling pi'inciples, and correcting them by daily application to those ends which are the object of an active and eminent life, illustrates the elements ot success. These elements exist in Mr. Tilden in two forms. He has the ]>uwer of analysis, and the power of combination. The power of analysis is rare ; in most men it arises when they find them- selves in emergencies, where they are compelled to think and to decide. It is the power to investigate, with intricate research, the mass of facts of a case which meets one like a chaos, and out ot it to pluck up the hinging facts, and swing them in their logical order: it is the persistence in holding a complex mass of ideas, facts, principles, and illustrations under the mental lens, until dis- tinct and accurate views appear, and at the focus rises the inuige to be realized. Then comes into ]>lay the power of combination and organization, which is the rarer power, and without which the power of analysis is like an ungathered harvest. It is the power to comprehend the situation, to devise the expedient, to seize the oi)portunity, to combine men and to carry their convictions. Mr. Van Buren was an example of this power; and even in his day, and in the councils of the Regency", Mr. Tilden stood among them, not without purpose and not without honor; so that Michael Iloff- 187 8 . SAMUEL J. TILDEN. man said of liim, " that young man will have liis way, for he lias a plan." It need hardly be added of such a man that, within his range, he reads every thing. He does not rest upon his acquisitions as a sufficient capital, but keeps in advance on the fresh fields of thought ; and the library with which he surrounds himself, rich in all branches, is full on his favorite topics of political economy and finance. If you were to meet him, you Avould find a man full of convic- tions and of great gentleness, fond of abstruse questions, quick in his appreciation of literature and art, jealous of the dignity of his profession, and with a candor and fairness which leaves him no opponents. His penetration into the merits of a case, and liis grasp of the justice of it, are such, that it is the characteristic of his business that he settles controversies, or rather, prevents them, by leading the parties away from their differences to the point where they can agree, and which they all see to be right. It is because lie gains their confidence at the outset. You could not leave him without your thoughts, perhaps your feelings lingering upon him. In a social discussion, he is full of enthusiasm and of grace. You watch for the source of the spell whil;h holds you, and would find it in the fullness of his human nature, were it not in the intel- lectual fascination of a man who thoroughly undei'stands his sub- ject, and is in earnest about making you believe it. He will in an argument gather up the points of the controversy, or analyze and balance an array of facts, from clear statement rise into eloquence, and with a rigorous accuracy that leaves not a point to be contested, reach his conclusion and clinch it, with his hearers in the silent consciousness which follows an argument which was not made to be answered. In public life, his part would be that of a statesman. He vi^ould determine the principles and plan, rather than execute the details of an administrative office. He would direct the counsels of a 188 SAMUEL J. TILDEN. 9 political party, rather than encounter the turbulence of its contests*. But with his native larf^eness of mind ; with an experience that measures the nnitcrial interests of all classes of men in all their modes of advancement ; with a power to delve among and array facts, and upon them to erect a philosophic basis from which to press on to action ; with a logical method, an utter familiarity and a fearless consciousness of power in handling great questions, his place would be found at great crises, and under the burden of the insoluble problems of a parliamentary debate. At such a moment, as amid the financial difficulties and crude remedies which have followed the rebellion, he would be the man to contrive the scheme which comprehended every determining fact, and overcame ever}' possible objection ; wliich was sound in principle and efficient in practice, and by his reasoning and advocacy to bring order upon what was formless and void, and, because he was right, to gain the convictions of men and achieve great results for his country. During the most active period of his life, the party to which he belongs has held too loosely the reins of its power, so that he has deserved well of his country, rather than Iiad a career. It will be a brilliant epoch in the history of our nation, wlien the ideas which are to shape its policy and advance its destiny emerge into domi- nance, and, with its representative men foremost, the party shall resume its power. 189 JOHi^ B. GOUGH. V^gf Oim B. GOITGII was born on the 22d of August, 1817, ^^W* at Sandgate, in the county of Kent, England — a romantic >s3Cy jittle watering-place frequently resorted to by many of the English gentry. His father was a soldier for twenty-five years, and served in the Fortieth and famous Fifty-second Hegiinents of Light Infantry, receiving at last a pension of £20 per year. His mother was an intelligent, pure-minded, and affectionate lady, whose ver}' being was interwoven with her son, who as ardently retiirn(?d her love. From her he received a rudimentary education, which was further promoted by attendance at the village-school. Soon after the age of ten, however, he left school, and was never afterwards permitted the advantages of scholastic instruction. In the year 1829, at the age of twelve years, young Gougli came to America, and on the 3d of August for the first time beheld New York City, which was to him a New World, teeming with strange sights, and the commencement of a new era in his eventful life. After residing about two months in the city, he went to a farm in Oneida county, and there remained two years biisied in agricultural pursuits; then again returned to New York, with but fifty cents in his pocket, and a small trunk containing all the worldly goods he possessed. Mr. Gough, in speaking of this period of his youthful career, in his autobiograph}', says : — " As I stood at the foot of Cortliindt Street nfter T left the boat, hundreds of people passed by resjardless of me. and I felt desolate indeed. But the impressions and in- structious received from mj' beloved mother, alTorded me some rays of consolation which glimmered through the gloom. Whilst musing on my sad fortune, the text of Scrip- ture, ' Trust in the Lord,' etc., .lame into my mind and gave me encouragement. So, 191 2 JOHN B. GOUGH. shou'.doiing my trunk, I oiitered tlie "jreat ciiy, a boy bi.t fonrtoen years of ago, a strang-er among a strange people, with no one to guide me, none to advise me, and not a single soul to love or be loved by. Meeting with tiie venerable Mr. Dando, I was engaged by him as errand-boy, and also to learn the book-binding business, at $2.25 per week, boarding myself, etc." The early life and struggles of the subject of this notice cannot he better told, perhaps, than by himself, in the work before quoted from, so we shall continue a i'aw brief extracts : — *' After the death of ray mother, I scraped together all I could and went to visit the family with whom I left England; but after remaining with them two months, I found my absence would not be regretted, and again left for New York. While boarding on Grand Street, I laid the foundation of future sorrows, for there I became acquainted with dissipated young men, to whom my talents made me weleouie ; and thrown upon the world with a tarnished reputation, my situation was far worse than it had hitherto been, and as my habit for strong drink was becoming confirmed, my circumstances began to be desperate indeed. All my efforts to obtain work were in vain, and when one meal was ended, I did not know where to olitain another." At length, however, he determined to reform, and not continue a blighted outcast from society. At this time, he says : — " Scarcely a hope remained for me of ever becoming that which I once was, but having promised to sign the pledge, I determined not to break my word. With palsied hand I grasped the pen and signed the total-abstinence pledge." His condition became speedily much improved, his appearance more respectable, and soon after this it was whispered that he had some talents for public speaking. His first address from a pulpit occupied fifteen or twenty minutes, and was listened to very atten- tively. Unfortunately, again a glass of brandy was offered to him., and again he fell. One rash, inconsiderate act undid the work of months, and well-nigh blasted every future hope. Still, with a resolve creditable alike to his head and heart, he determined to loose himself from the fetters of strong drink, and continued to give lectures on temperance, though with little or sometimes no remuneration. On one occasion, when he had been speaking for more than two hours, a vote of thanks was pro})osed for the lecture, though he had not money enough to pay his car-fare home. 192 JOHN B. GOUGH. g Mr. Gough's first lecture in Boston was in a hall under tlie nmseuni on Tremont Street. The room was about half filled. Says Mr. Gougli: "After I had engaged to speak in Boston, I felt half inclined to run away, when I thought it was the modern Athens of America. But I made out to get through the ordeal." Since that time he has deliv^ered three hundred and twenty one lectures in Boston, besides addresses to children, and always to crowded houses. And who now in the city does not remember the lecturer Gough, the inimitable Gough, who with mimicry that none can equal, convulsed the audience one moment with weeping, the next with laughter. Who among the teas of thousands to-day who have heard his pleadings with the inebriated in Tremont Tem- ple and elsewhere, can forget his magical presence and impassioned eloquence ? Who can forget his charmingly pathetic stories ? Who does not remember a " London Fog," "• Peculiar People," " Cir- cumstances," etc. ? In 1853 Mr. Gough was invited to Great Britain to commence a new and interesting field of labor. As in Boston, so now in the greatest metropolis of the Old World, he hesitated and feared the criticisms of a Loudon audience. "I cannot argue," he says; "I am no logician, have no education." But the venerable Dr. Beecher said, " Go, Mr. Gough, and talk to the people, and I will pray for you." On the 30th of July, 1853, he arrived in England, and the first words that greeted his ears were those of friends and admirers who bade him " welcome to England." At SuiTey Gardens he lectured to an audience of seventeen thousand persons, the largest he ever addressed. It was a proud day for the village of Sandgate, when they beheld again their own village-boy, grown to the stature of a man, and one of the most attractive speakers in his field of labor, in the New or Old World. In the year 1854 Mr. Gough was employed constantly in address- ing the people in the principal towns and, cities of England and Scotland. Exeter TIall was often crowded with an audience of 13 193 4 JOHN B. GOUGH. cultivated and Christian people, who came, attracted by the fame of the speaker, to listen and learn, rather than to condemn ; for logic and criticism were unthonghtof in the interest which ever attended his earnest, thrilling, heart-felt talk. His style was peculiarly his own, and its efficacy has been avouched over and over again. In England the success of the speaker was complete, his triumph in behalf of temperance wonderful. After two years of hard labor, Mr. Gough returned home to the " Old Bay State," but before leav- ing, promised to revisit England at some future day. In 1857 this promise was fulfilled, and dm-ing a protracted stay in England and on the continent, he delivered six hundred and five lectures. and traveled 40,217 miles. In 1860 Mr. Gough again embarked for his home in the United States, carrying with him the assurance of a noble work performed, and many loving testimonials and heart-felt " God bless you's," from appreciative friends who regretted his adieu to the Old World. It were impossible to determine the measure of good accomplished by this devoted champion of temperance. His work has been earn- est and unremitting; his triumph has been glorious, and his re- ward will be enduring. With his compassion for the inebriate, he has inherited a love for the widow and the orphan, and has ever extended a helping hand to the afflicted. Many will call him blessed, for many have received bounteous blessings from his hands. He possesses a beautiful home near Worcester, Massachusetts, where, with all the surroundings of comfort and elegance, he lives in the enjoyment of the pleasing consciousness of having done much good, and the certainty of being appreciated by his fellow- men. 194 C. K. GAEEISOK HE subject of tins biographical notice, Cornelius K. Garrison, was born in the neighborhood of West Point 'f^ on the Hudson, on March 1st, 1809. His forefathers were among the earliest settlers of 'New Amsterdam, and were of that colony of worthy Hollanders, whose brain and muscle inaugurated the jdoneer eiforts which have resulted in the un- equaled development of this country. His ancestors — the Garri- sons and Coverts on his father's side, and the Kingslands and Schuylers on his mother's — were old Knickerbocker families of whose blood any descendant might be proud. During the childhood of Cornelius, his father, Oliver Garrison, by some misadventure, lost all his fortune, he having been pre- viously a large capitalist, consequently the son was thrown on his own resources at an early age. Undaunted by the misfortune of his father, he speedily resolved to take care of himself; and it is here in this readiness to appreciate a necessity, and determination to surmount difficulty, that we discover in the youth the germs of a will and an energy that have served the man so well in after life. During the business season, he was employed in the carrying trade on the river, and thus passed three years of his life from his thirteenth to his sixteenth year. In the meantime, fully r.ware of the great value of education, he diligently applied himself to study whenever occasion presented, and particularly during the winter months when the navigation of the river was closed. At the age of sixteen, in compliance with his mother's earnest wish, he went to New York fur the purpose of studying architec- ture, and here during three years' of application to that particular 195 2 C. K. GARRISON. branch, he acqnh'ed valuable information, which served him well in the time immediately following. At the expiration of the tliree years in Kew York, he removed to Canada, where he remained five years or more, actively engaged in planning and erecting buildings, constructing steamboats on the Lakes, and otherwise turning his architectural knowledge to good account. "While in Canada, he made the acquaintance of and subsequently married, a lady from Buffalo, 'New York. "While there, also, he acquired an enviable reputation for reliable, clear- headed business sagacity, evidenced by the Upper Canada Com- pany giving to him the general supervision of its affairs in Canada, This position, valuable as it was, considering the vast wealth and power of the company, was soon renounced by Mr. Garrison, on account of the then threatening aspect of affairs between England and the United States, arising from border difficulties. On leaving Canada, Mr. Garrison returned to the States, and located in the Southwest, where he entered largely in his Inisiness, and was also interested in other enterprises connected with the navigation of the Mississippi. On the discovery of gold in Cali- fornia, he went to Panama and established a banking house, which proved his most successful undertaking thus far. In 1852, he vis- ited New York, with the view of establishing a branch bank, but receiving at this time a favorable offer from the Nicaragua Steam- ship Line, to take the San Francisco agency of their business, he accepted the position -and set out immediately for California. The great work which he accomplished during a seven years' stay in California, is one which to relate would necessitate a his- tory almost in detail of the city of San Francisco itself during that period. He reached the city on the steamer Sierra JVevada, in the latter part of March, 1853. As agent of this steamship line, he received a salary at the rate of $60,000 per annum, and had about $25,000 additional as representative of sundry Insurance companies. His first efforts were directed to the reformation of the Nicaragua Steamship Line, whose business was rapidly declining under in- 196 C. K. GARRISON. 3 competent management and the odium attending the terrible dis- asters of the Independence and S. S. Lewis. With characteristic energy, and admirable comprehension, difficulties that tlireatened to engulf his company in financial ruin, were speedily mastered, and his wonderful administrativ^e ability, inr.piring life and effici- ency in every department of the service, restored almost magical prosperity to the enterprise, and placed it in powerful competition with the strongest lines on the Pacific coast. Fame of course attended this work. Its master spirit found himself suddenly a public f^ivorite, and this appreciation found ex- pression in his being elected Mayor of San Francisco in six months after his arrival. This honor came wholly unsolicited by Mr. Gar- rison, who rather preferred the pursuit of his great business enter- prises, to any political preferment. Such a graceful compliment, however, by the citizens of San Francisco to one almost a stranger among them could not be declined, although Mr. Garrison entered upon his new duties with many misgivings respecting his capability, heightened no doubt by the knowledge of the ability and suc- cess of his immediate predecessors in office. A work styled " Kep- resentative Men of the Pacific," from which we have gathered the foregoing data, thus speaks of Mr. Garrison's advent and efficiency in the mayoralty: "It was soon evident that the same sound judgment and executive talent that could grasp and prosperously control steamship lines and banking institutions, could with equal facility administer the affairs of a community. His inaugural ad- dress, delivered in October, 1853, to the two branches of the Com- mon Council, was a model of plain, unpretending, common sense, abounding in practical suggestions, going straight to the point, and quite devoid ol flourish or attempt at oratorical display. He ac- knowledged the weight of the responsibility, and pledged himself to devote his best energies to the interests of the city. A month later he submitted a message, which may challenge any paper of the kind, in sound business ideas and financial propositions. It contained the germs of what became, years afterwards, the rally- 197 4 C. K. GARRISON. ing cries of reform in the administration of the city government. The first outspoken denunciation in any official document, of the disgraceful public gambling then prevalent in the many saloons of San Francisco, and the first rebuke of Sunday theatricals, with a recommendation for ordinances for their suppression, are found in this message. And it was not merely a verbal protest against tlie evils described. Mr. Garrison never ceased to wage war against them until the desired reforms were completely efiected. The crime of a public gaming hell has never blackened the fame of San Fran- cisco since Mayor Garrison's term. For this act alone he is enti- tled to the gratitude of all who respect morality, decency, and good order. The first proposal of an Industrial School for juvenile de- linquents, wlio should thus be separated from contact with the hard- ened criminals in the cells of the city prison ; the earliest suggest- ions of a tariff of hack fares for the protection of strangers from extortion ; the taxation of non-resident capital ; the building of sub- stantial, well-ventilated school houses in place of the shanties then used in various districts — these, among other proposals equally sensible and at that time novel, were embodied in the message." That Mr. Garrison's efforts vv^ere potent in enliancing the pros- perity and good government of San Francisco no one can gainsay. In the way of education he accomplished much. When the money required for the construction of school houses was called for, and could not be obtained at proper quarters, he advanced it from his private means, lie organized the first African school in San Fran- cisco, believing that as the negroes were destined, at some future day, to enjoy the rights of citizenship, it was proper to prepare them therefor by education. At this time, apart from, his other and engrossing duties, he never lost sight of two favorite schemes in his mind. The one a steamship line to China and Australia, and the other the exploration of a route for the Pacific Railroad. He urged immediate action on these subjects whenever occasion oflered. He was the first subscriber to a Telegraph line across the Sierras to demonstrate the practicability 198 C. K. GARRISON, g of overland telegraphic communication between San Francisco and New York. During his stay in California there were few charitable enter- prises to which he was not a reatly and liberal contributor. One notable instance of this characteristic generosity is recorded in his serving the public gratuitously during his whole tcnn as Mayor ; a check drawn for the entire amount of his salary having been dona- ted and divided equally by him among the Eoman Catholic and Pi'otestant Orphan Asylums. Nor were these benevolent dispensa" tions confined to San Francisco or California. Hundreds of desti- tute people at Panama were relieved at his personal expense, and it was he who, in September, 1853, was foremost in a movement for aid- ing the sufferers from yellow fever in New Orleans, and contributed of his private means unsparingly to that end. His services in this matter were warmly appreciated by the public, and the Germans of San Francisco, in a special meeting, passed him a vote of thanks for his effective aid in the transmission of funds and otherwise. After an eventful career in California, during which the City of San Francisco experienced, under his able administration and by his enlightened cooperation in great works of public improvement., of moral, social, and educational advancement, a stimulus and im- pulsion in the way of prosperity never before realized. Mr. Garri- son returned to New York City in the year 1859. Here he became at once a bold and successful financier, interested in great commer- tial enterprises, and taking a principal part in some of the heaviest transactions of the times. He is now cne of the leading Steamship proprietors in the Unit'^d States. He assisted the Government in multitudes of ways, during the late war, rendering incalculable ser- vice by the aid of his steamship service. When the Union cause was in sorest need, and capital was hesitating, Mr. Garrison fitted out, principally by his own exertions and respohsibility, what was known as Butler's Ship-Island Expedition. This patriotic endeavor was formally acknowledged by President Lincoln, Secretary Seward, Mr. Sumner and other leading members of Congress. 199 6 C. K. GARRISON. His visit to the metropolis of the Pacific, one of the earliest over the railroad across the continent, after an absence of ten years, was the occasion of an enthusiastic ovation, tendered in the way of heartfelt congratulations and kind wishes by his many friends who welcomed his return. A short time prior to his departure from San Francisco, he received the following communication, signed by the most prominent professional and business men of the city : San Francisco, August 10th, 18G9. Hon. C. K. Gaeeison: Deae Sie. — In token of the very great regard we entertain for you, both on account of your public services and private benefices to the citizens of San Francisco, we, your old friends and associates, beg to ask your acceptance of a farewell dinner, to be given at the Maison Doree, on Monday evening, August 16th, at seven o'clock. (Here follow some thirty or more signatures.) At tlie elegant and sumptuous banquet which followed the accept- ance of this invitation, Hon. Ogden Hoffman, United States District Judge, Governor Haight, and Hon. Frank McCoppin, Mayor of the city, were present as invited guests. Dr. A. J. Bowie presided, and made the following address : Gentlemen : This banquet to-niglit, to the Hon. C. K. Garrison, was prompted by a desire on the part of Mr. Garrison's friends to convey to him first, their full recognition of the great services he had rendered to this community, in behalf of immigration to our city and State, but more especially because of liis personal endear- ment to the early surviving settlers and residents of the City of San Francisco. We can scarcely hope, however much we may desire it, tliat Mr. Garrison will again venture to enconter the toil of another visit to our city, which wo know he loves so well, and to whose development and growth he has contributed so largely ; and therefore, at one and the same moment, we proclaim our pleasure at securing him, and our regret at parting, by bidding him farewell. 200 C.K.QAIIRISON. 7 To which Mr. Garrison replied as follows : Gentlemen : I am filled with the greatest emotion at this most unexpected and flattering entertainment on the part of my old friends. If I had required any incentive beyond what had been supplied by my past relations with California, this spectacle of so nnieh worth and intelligence would urge me still further in hope and effort to develop tlie interests of this mighty country. Gen- tlemen, my heart is too full of gratitude for this splendid ovation to permit me to do aught else but beg you will accept the poverty of my language to express my full feelings of gratitude. Messrs. Judge Dclos Lake, Judge Lyons, Gen. E. D. Keys, "W. E. Ealston, Charles E. McLane, Hall McAllister, Joseph P. Hoye, J. G. Eastland, ar.d others followed in addresses equally appropri- ate lor the occasion, Mr. Garrison, as before remarked, is now a resident of Kew York City, and largely identiiied with its commercial prosperity. He is recogiiised by his co-workers in great business ^enterprises, as well as by all who know him, as a man of extraordinary energy, keen foresight, and a perseverance that appreciates the word difficulty as a mere notice of the necessity of exertion. Warm in friendship, tolerant and conservative in opinion, of fine social qualities and conversational powers, and a remarkable force of character — with ample means and a willingness to do good in future as in the past, joined to an enlightened and progressive estimation of duty, 0. K. Garrison is a citizen who would honor any community. 201 AETHUR F. WILLMAETH. r^J#RTHUR F. WILLMAETH, Vice-President of the Home >a