Diary of George Templeton Strong: February 10, 1860

Opera tonight with Ellie and Mrs. Georgey Peters and her papa; Der Freischutz in an Italian version. The Germanism of that opera is so intense that any translation of its text is an injustice to Weber’s memory, but its noble music can afford to be heard under disadvantages. Max was Stigelli, and very good. Agatha (Colson) was respectable. She knew how her music ought to be sung and tried hard, but had not the vigor it demands. Caspar (Junca) was pretty bad.

Query: if there ever existed a Caspar who could sing “Hier in diesem Jammerthal” as it ought to be sung, or an Agatha who could do justice to the glorious allegro that follows her “leise, leise, fromme Weise”? I enjoyed the evening, also Wednesday evening, when we had Charley Strong and wife in “our box’’ and heard The Barber, delightfully rendered. Little Patti made a most brilliant Rosina and sang a couple of English songs in the “Music Lesson’’ scene, one of them (“Coming through the Rye’’) simply and with much archness and expression. This little debutante is like to have a great career and to create a furor in Paris and St. Petersburg within five years. . . .

Last night I attended W. Curtis Noyes’s first lecture before the Law School of Columbia College.⁵ It was carefully prepared, and (to my great relief) honored by an amply sufficient audience. The lecture room was densely filled, and Oscanyan told me sixty or seventy were turned away. We may have to resort to the Historical Society lecture room (in Second Avenue).

There is much less talking of politics now that a Speaker is elected.

I think a cohesive feeling of nationality and Unionism gains strength silently both North and South, and that the Republican party has lost and is daily losing many of the moderate men who were forced into it four years ago by the Kansas outrages and the assault on Sumner. If the South would spare us its brag and its bad rhetoric, it would paralyze any Northern free-soil party in three weeks. But while Toombs speechifies and Governor Wise writes letters, it’s hard for any Northern man to keep himself from Abolitionism and refrain from buying a photograph of John Brown.

Southern chivalry is a most curious and instructive instance of the perversion of a word from its original meaning; lucus a non lucendo seems a plausible derivation when one hears that word applied to usages and habits of thought and action so precisely contrary to all it expressed some five hundred years ago. Chivalry in Virginia and Georgia means violence to one man by a mob of fifty calling itself a Vigilance Committee, ordering a Yankee school mistress out of the state because she is heterodox about slavery, shooting a wounded prisoner, assailing a non-combatant like Sumner with a big bludgeon and beating him nearly to death. Froissart would have recognized the Flemish boor or the mechanic of Ghent in such doings. Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot in the Morte d’Arthur would have called them base, felon, dishonorable, shameful, and foul.

Burke announced sixty years ago that "the age of chivalry” was gone, and "that of calculators and economists had succeeded it.” Their period has likewise passed away now, south of the Potomac, and has been followed by a truculent mob despotism that sustains itself by a system of the meanest eavesdropping and espionage and of utter disregard of the rights of those who have not the physical power to defend themselves against overwhelming odds, that shoots or hangs its enemy or rides him on a rail when it is one hundred men against one and lets him alone when evenly matched, and is utterly without mercy for the weak or generosity for the vanquished. This course of practice must be expected of any mere mob when rampant and frightened, but the absurdity is that they call it “chivalry.” There was something truly chivalric in old John Brown’s march with his handful of followers into the enemy’s country to redeem and save those he held to be unjustly enslaved at peril of his own life. For that enterprise he was hanged, justly and lawfully, but there was in it an element of chivalry, genuine though mistaken, and criminal because mistaken, that is nat to be found in the performances of these valiant vigilance committeemen.

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⁵ William Curtis Noyes (1805—1864), one of the foremost New York lawyers, and owner of a magnificent law library, had distinguished himself in numerous cases; notably in the prosecution of the Wall Street forger Huntington, and in protecting the New Haven Railroad stockholders from the consequences of Schuyler’s embezzlement.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 7-9