Diary of George Templeton Strong, Saturday, June 16, 1860

From early morning (or at least from the earliest hour of which I am personally-cognizant) the town was all agog about the Japanese ambassadors. Streets were already swarming as I went downtown. Hardly an omnibus but was filled full. Every other person, at least, was manifestly a rustic or a stranger. Flags everywhere. Small detachments of our valiant militia marching, grim and sweaty, to their respective positions. Dragoons, hussars, and lancers, by twos and threes, trotting about with looks of intense uneasiness. The whole aspect of things indicated some great event at hand.

I left Wall Street at about two-thirty, intending merely to walk uptown and observe the humors of the dense crowd that lined both sides of Broadway, for I was so sick of talk about the Japanese that I vowed that I would not see them. But I met young Dudley Field, who kindly insisted on my taking advantage of certain eligible windows in his office on Broadway. There I found his sister, Miss Jenny, Miss Laura Belden, Judge Sutherland and Judge Leonard, Gerard, and one or two more, with strawberries and ice cream, and so forth, and saw all the show to great advantage.

Quite an imposing turnout of horse, foot, and artillery. Ditto of aldermen in barouches and yellow kids, trying to look like gentlemen. The first-chop Japanese sat in their carriage like bronze statues, aristocratically calm and indifferent. The subordinates grinned, and wagged their ugly heads, and waved their fans to the ladies in the windows. Every window in Broadway was full of them. The most striking object was the crowd that closed in and followed the procession. Broadway was densely filled, sidewalks and trottoir both, for many blocks, and mostly with roughs. Bat the police kept good order. I made my way uptown through side streets with difficulty, for they were thronged with currents of sightseers flowing off from the great central canal, and of loafers, slinging along with the characteristic loaferine trot to get ahead of the procession and have another look at the Japs. . . .

Two old fools, Samuel Neill and Tom Bryan, have been making themselves ridiculous by going to North Carolina in this weather and fighting a duel. The former, they say, has a bullet hole through the arm. They got into a squabble “late at e’en, drinking the wine” at the Union Club, over the weighty question of Garibaldi’s nationality. One said he was a Scotchman, and the other said he wasn’t, and they punched each other’s heads without being able to settle it that way. Garibaldi, by-the-by, holds his own. Success to him, filibuster as he is. There are limits even to conservatism.

Professor Dwight has been heard at length in our Law School appeal by the Court of Appeals, which held a special evening session for that purpose. Judge Denio and O’Conor and others say it was a very able argument. . . .

Was at the Savings Bank Thursday afternoon, taking Hamilton Fish’s place as attending trustee. His daughter. Miss Sarah, has just married one Sidney Webster, and the Governor had to do the honors of the wedding reception.

There is talk of the Democrats nominating Judge Nelson. I’d gladly vote for him, especially so against “Abe,” whose friends seem to rest his claims to high office chiefly on the fact that he split rails when he was a boy. I am tired of this shameless clap-trap. The log-cabin hard-cider craze of 1840 seemed spontaneous. This hurrah about rails and railsplitters seems a deliberate attempt to manufacture the same kind of furor by appealing to the shallowest prejudices of the lowest class. It ought to fail, and I hope it may; but unless the Democrats put up a strong man, it will succeed.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 32-3

Diary of George Templeton Strong, June 20, 1860

Attended the British Consul this morning, closing a commission to take testimony for the Court of Sessions.¹² Talked with him about the proposed visit of the Prince of Wales. Archibald seems to have been called on by his government to advise whether the Prince, if he come here, shall accept the invitation of the city government or decline it and travel through the country incognito. He wanted to know what I thought about it, and I decidedly recommended that this royal imp should visit us as an English gentleman or nobleman, and accept no public hospitalities, for the tender mercies of the Common Council are cruel. But Mr. Archibald thinks otherwise, and he may be right. A frank acceptance by the Prince of any civility paid him by our public functionaries, such as they are, would flatter the public vanity and bring us closer to England. . . . Crowd at the Metropolitan Hotel all day, except at intervals when dispersed by a shower. People stand and stare at the windows for a vision of some ugly Mongol mug protruded for a moment and then withdrawn.

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¹² E. M. Archibald had been the able British consul since 1857.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 34

Diary of George Templeton Strong, June 21, 1860

This evening with Mr. Ruggles to Dr. Gilman’s, Thirteenth Street, to meet sundry of the professors of our Medical College and consider whether any kind of scientific post-graduate course can be evolved out of nothing by concerted action between Columbia College and this, its new ally. President King and Torrey were there, and the Medical College was represented by Gilman, Parker, Delafield, Clark, Dalton, and other medicine men, generally of high caste. We talked the matter over and agreed to meet again a fortnight hence. Something may come of it, but my expectations are moderate. The Medical College building, at the comer of Twenty-third and Fourth Avenue, is convenient and accessible, but we want men of larger calibre than Joy, McCulloh, Dr. Delafield, and Dr. Parker. . .¹³

The Democratic Baltimore Convention is still sitting, and none the easier for sitting. The great old Democratic Party is in articulo mortis; its convention is abolishing of itself, and just on the eve of suicide by dismemberment and disintegration, after the manner of certain star-fishes (vide Gosse). If Douglas be nominated, a Southern limb drops off. If any other man is nominated, a Northwestern ray or arm secedes. Southern swashbucklers demand an ultra-nigger platform that would cost the party every Northern state; unless it be adopted, they will depart to put on their war paint and—whet their scalping knives. The worst temper prevails; delegates punch each other and produce revolvers. In short, a wasps’ nest divided against itself is a pastoral symphony compared to this Witenagemot. Its session has abounded thus far in scandalous, shameful brutalities and indecencies that disgrace the whole country and illustrate the terrible pace at which we seem traveling down hill toward sheer barbarism and savagery.

The Convention has made little progress yet—has not even succeeded in defining its own identity. Its throes and gripings have thus far been on the question whether certain chivalric delegations that seceded at Charleston shall be received back digested and assimilated, or rejected as foreign matter. The New York delegation seems to hold the balance of power. After Douglas, Dickinson and Horatio Seymour are talked of; I could vote for the latter. There is a Nelson movement, too, silent as yet, but growing.¹⁴ But the elements of the Convention are in unstable combination, and it is likely to decompose with an explosion like chloride of nitrogen, or disintegrate like a Prince Rupert’s drop, on the slightest provocation before it nominates anybody. And, if one half of its bullies and blackguards and Southern gentlemen will make free use of their revolvers on the other half, during the general reaction and melee that is like to accompany the act of decomposition, and will then get themselves decently hanged for homicide, the country will be safe; and millions yet unborn will bless the day when the Baltimore Convention of 1860 exploded and the Democratic Party ceased to exist.

If there were a real ruler now to march into this congregation of politic knaves and hang a dozen of the worst cases, with their bowie knives round their necks, and set the rest to hard labor on public works for a term of years!!! What a subject he would be for a biography by Carlyle! But there is no such luck. Whatever may be the result of this Convention, the Democracy has disgraced itself and damaged itself beyond cure. I half expect that Republicanism and Abe Lincoln will sweep every vestige of that party out of existence.

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¹³ Willard Parker (1800-1884), for whom the Willard Parker Hospital for Infectious Diseases in New York is named, had studied in Europe and held chairs of anatomy and surgery in several medical schools in this country before he joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons as professor of principles and practice of surgery (1839-1870). Edward Delafield (1794—1875), ophthalmologist and surgeon, founded the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1818. He occupied the chair of obstetrics and diseases of women in the College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1825 to 1838, and was president of the College from 1858 to 1875. Alonzo Clark (1807-1887) held the chair of physiology and pathology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1848 to 1855, when he became professor of pathology and practical medicine in the same school. John Call Dalton (1825—1889) was the first physician in America to devote himself exclusively to experimental physiology and related sciences. His studies with Claude Bernard in Paris turned his ambition from practice to teaching, and he introduced the experimental method in teaching of physiology, thus opening a new era in medical education. He occupied the chair of physiology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons 1855-1883, and served as president 1884-1889.

¹⁴ Strong’s unwillingness to vote for the politician Daniel S. Dickinson (1800-1866) is understandable. The movement for Justice Samuel Nelson of the Supreme Court (1792-1873) developed no strength.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 34-6

Diary of George Templeton Strong, June 23, 1860

Mr. Ruggles came in this evening and reports that the rump of the Convention has nominated Douglas. Afterwards came Walter Cutting, very kindly offering me tickets for the grand ball Monday night in honor of the Japanese embassy. Tickets are in great demand and hardly to be got by any one who has not an uncle or a confederate in the City Councils. It will be a showy and lavish entertainment, but neither Ellie nor I care to assist. Have encountered attaches of the embassy twice, looking over books and buying largely at Appleton's new store. They seem intelligent and observant, talk in soft oriental whispers, and contrive to make themselves understood by Kernot and Allen and the other salesmen. Books on the industrial arts, geographies, atlases, and high-colored lithograph illustrations interest them especially. They buy largely, also, of children’s books, and say "new language—child’s book— very good.’’

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 36

Diary of George Templeton Strong, July 4, 1860

“The day was ushered in," as the newspapers say, with the usual racket, which has not yet abated. I lounged downtown after breakfast, and made an expedition to Jersey City; partly for want of something to do, and partly to give Miss Rosalie Ruggles the latest news from Barrington. A sweltering hot day it has been, as I found out on my walk home after lunching at Delmonico’s.

After dinner, I strolled out again and found my way to the North River, in the region of Bank Street, where the Great Eastern lies.¹⁵ She loomed up colossal in the twilight. It was too late to ask for admission (price, one dollar). So I walked home again. Looked in at the “Palace Garden” in Fourteenth Street and “looked” out again very speedily. It was hotter than the hot street and presented no attractions but colored lamps, a dismal orchestra, and an occasional skyrocket.

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¹⁵ The Great Eastern, a British liner designed by Russell Scott weighing almost 19,000 deadweight tons, the leviathan of her day, had reached New York, June 28, to find the shores black with throngs excited over her arrival. In the first five days 143,764 people paid to visit her.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 37

Diary of George Templeton Strong, May 11, 1860

. . . Stopped at Law School on my way down, with Mr. Ruggles, and conferred a little with the graduating class. The young men have expressed the wish to have a sermon preached to them before their Commencement (the 23d instant) on the duties of their profession; very becoming and graceful, especially as it is quite spontaneous. Hawks was applied to, but after nibbling a little at the invitation, declined it. He is lazy, and it may be, too, that he himself was aware that the subject demanded heavier metal than his smooth, wordy rhetoric. So the class instructed us to apply to Vinton, and we called at Trinity Church after service. Vinton sees plainly enough that it is an opening not to be despised, and accepts readily. . . . Afterwards with Lewis Rutherfurd and William Betts, about degrees to be conferred at this Law Commencement. We propose to LL.D. Judges Ingraham, Woodruff, and Daly, who have consented to act as a committee to examine the essays and examination papers and award the prizes. Vivat the Law School! I hope to make a great deal out of it.

The Baltimore Convention of conservative fogies and fossils nominates Bell for President and Edward Everett for Vice-President. Not of much practical importance probably, but I for one am tired of talk about niggers and feel much inclined to vote for anybody who promises to ignore that subject.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 25-6

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Tuesday, May 15, 1860

. . . Universal sympathy for poor Fowler, except from a very few Buchananizing Democrats. Isaiah Rynders has not yet succeeded in arresting him, and probably won’t succeed if he can help it.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 26

Diary of George Templeton Strong, May 16, 1860

Chicago Convention is in full boil and bubble. Strong opposition to Seward, but he will be nominated at last. That wily old Thurlow Weed, the most adroit of wire-pullers, seldom fails when he takes hold of a case in earnest. General Dix is to be Fowler’s successor in the post office. Butterworth of the assay office will decline the appointment.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 27

Diary of George Templeton Strong, May 19, 1860

Thy Nose, O W. H. Seward, is out of joint! The Chicago Convention nominates Lincoln and Hamlin. They will be beat, unless the South perpetrate some special act of idiocy, arrogance, or brutality before next fall.

Lincoln will be strong in the Western states. He is unknown here. The Tribune and other papers commend him to popular favor as having had but six months’ schooling in his whole life; and because he cut a great many rails, and worked on a flatboat in early youth; all which is somehow presumptive evidence of his statesmanship. The watchword of the campaign is already indicated. It is to be "Honest Abe’’ (our candidate being a namesake of the Father of the Faithful). Mass-meetings and conventions and committees are to become enthusiastic and vociferous whenever an orator says Abe. But that monosyllable does not seem to me likely to prove a word of power. "Honest Abe’’ sounds less efficient than "Fremont and Jessie,’’ and that failed four years ago.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 28

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Monday, May 28, 1860

The park below the reservoir begins to look intelligible. Unfinished still, and in process of manufacture, but shewing the outline now of what it is to be. Many points are already beautiful. What will they be when their trees are grown and I’m dead and forgotten?

One thinks sometimes that one would like re-juvenescence, or a new birth. One would prefer, if he could, to annihilate his past and commence life, say in this a.d. 1860, and so enjoy longer acquaintance with this era of special development and material progress, watch the splendid march of science on earth, share the benefits of the steam engine and the electric telegraph, and grow up with this park—which is to be so great a fact for the young men and maidens of New York in 1880, if all goes well and we do not decompose into anarchy meanwhile. The boy of that year is likely to have larger privileges and a better time than were conceded to the boy of 1830. Central Park and Astor Library and a developed Columbia University promise to make the city twenty years hence a real center of culture and civilization, furnishing privileges to youth far beyond what it gave me in my boyhood.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 30

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Wednesday, May 30, 1860

Invited to be a vice-president of a great Republican ratification meeting tomorrow night. Declined on the plea of “engagements,” but the truth is I do not know whether I am a Republican at all.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 30

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Thursday, May 31, 1860

Seward’s special friends grumble at Lincoln’s nomination, but seem disposed to support it in good faith. It looks to me as if Honest Abe were going to run well. The Democrats must patch up their domestic difficulties, and select a strong and available candidate, or they will be beat.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 30

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Friday, March 2, 1860

Stopped at Barnum’s on my way downtown to see the much advertised nondescript, the "What-is-it.”¹ Some say it’s an advanced chimpanzee, others that it’s a cross between nigger and baboon. But it seems to me clearly an idiotic negro dwarf, raised, perhaps, in Alabama or Virginia. The showman’s story of its capture (with three other specimens that died) by a party in pursuit of the gorilla on the western coast of Africa is probably bosh. The creature’s look and action when playing with his keeper are those of a nigger boy. But his anatomical details are fearfully simian, and he’s a great fact for Darwin.

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¹ This “What-is-it.”—shortly to be viewed by the Prince of Wales—became the most famous circus freak in America. Often called "the missing link," he was really a Negro of distorted frame and cone-shaped head named William H. Johnson, who survived until 1926.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 12

Diary of George Templeton Strong, March 3, 1860

George Anthon called in Wall Street, and before going uptown, we stopped at Barnum’s. The "What-is-it?” is palpably a little nigger and not a good-looking one. There are other animals in the establishment much more interesting; for example, a grand grizzly bear from California, a big sea lion, a very intelligent and attractive marbled or mottled seal (phoca vitulina?), a pair of sociable kangaroos, and (in the happy family cage) an armadillo, a curious spotted rodent said to be Australian, two fine owls, and so forth.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 12-13

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Sunday, March 4, 1860

. . . Church this morning. Higby preached. Not up to his average. Mr. Derby and Hoffman sat with us. Talked to Professor Lieber who came home with us. In correspondence with him for a day or two past. He’s a troublesome subject. His sensibilities are lacerated because he fears he "is to be a mere adjunct of Dwight’s” in the Law School, and he intends to decline all further share in its duties. Sorry to lose him. But he ought to see that the school cannot be established and will not win students unless training in practically useful and profitable knowledge (such knowledge of the Revised Statutes and Wendell and Cowen and Hill as it is Dwight’s office to impart) be its prominent feature. Lieber’s political philosophy and spirit of laws and Nairne’s legal ethics must be gradually worked into the system. If we make them essential and obligatory portions of the course at once, we shall simply frighten students away and dwarf or destroy the school, as a yearling baby would be stunted or killed by a diet of beef and madeira. . . .

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 13

Diary of George Templeton Strong, March 6, 1860

. . . Looking further into Darwin’s Origin of Species this evening. Though people who don’t like its conclusions generally speak of it as profound and as a formidable attack on received notions, I timidly incline to think it a shallow book, though laboriously and honestly written.

Darwin cannot understand why Omnipotent Power and Wisdom should have created so many thousand various types of organic life, allied to each other by various complex relations and differing in points of detail for which we can assign no reason. He wants to shew that the original creative act was on the smallest scale and produced only some one organism of the humblest rank but capable of development into the fauna and flora of the earth, from moss to oak and from monad to man, under his law of progress and natural selection. To him, as to the physicists of the last one hundred years, the notion of a supernatural creative power is repugnant and offen¬ sive. He wants to account for the wonderful, magnificent harmonies and relations of the varied species of life that exist on earth by reducing the original agency of supernatural power in their creation to a minimum. This feeling sticks out at page 483, where he asks triumphantly. Do people “really believe that . . . certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues?” (That passage is the keynote of the whole book.)

I must say I find it just as easy to answer that question in the affirmative as to admit that certain elemental atoms of lime, silex, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so forth are daily and hourly “commanded to flash into” organic wood fibre, cellulose, parenchyma, and so on. The latter miracle is being performed on the largest scale this minute wherever vegetation is in progress; the former seems to occur only at long intervals. I can see no other distinction between them. One is familiar to our senses, the other is proved by deduction. They are a priori equally credible, or incredible, whichever Mr. Darwin pleases. The inorganic world has its own internal harmonies and relations quite as distinct and unmistakeable as the organic. But no law of progressive development can be inferred from them. Mr. Darwin would not venture to maintain that iodine and bromine are developments of chlorine or vice versa, that some one little dirty, obscure or obsolete element was parent and progenitor of osmium, iridium, ruthenium, and all the rest of the platinum group. Very possible that these so-called elements may be hereafter decomposed and proved to be composite, but we have no right to assume that they will be, and until analysis reduces the inorganic world to a series of compounds of only two primal entities, it will testify against Darwin’s theory.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 13-4

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Monday, April 2, 1860

To Trinity Church vestry meeting tonight. As I railroaded homeward at ten, there was much people in and around the Tribune office, waiting, no doubt, for returns of today’s Connecticut election; the first gun fired in the presidential campaign. . . .

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 19

Diary of George Templeton Strong, April 17, 1860

After an apology for a dinner, I went to [Arnold] Guyot’s lecture at the Law School. Well attended and very hot; lecture original and interesting. Thereafter discoursed with Guyot, whom I like, and General Scott, the most urbane of conquerors. Curious it is to observe the keen, sensitive interest with which he listens to every whisper about nominations for the coming presidential campaign.

The Charleston Convention will nominate Douglas, I think. Then comes the sanhedrim of the undeveloped Third Party. It is not at all unlikely Scott may be its nominee. In that case, it is possible the Republican Convention may adopt him. I wish things might take that course, but hardly hope it. Neither Douglas nor Hunter nor Banks suits me.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 22

Diary of George Templeton Strong, April 23, 1860

No news of any action by the Democratic Charleston Convention. Douglas, the little giant, said to be losing ground.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 23

Diary of George Templeton Strong, April 26, 1860

No Democratic nominee from Charleston, yet. Two to one on Douglas, I say.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 23