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

Diary of George Templeton Strong, April 27, 1860

Little or nothing to record. Fine Day. Rumor this afternoon of schism in the Charleston Convention, certain Southern delegations of pyrophagi seceding. Not impossible, nor unlikely if the Convention refused to put the ultra proslavery plank of a slave Code for the territories into its platform, and so throw away all chances of carrying any one Northern state. But I hope it’s untrue, and that this congregation of profligate wire-pullers will mature its plans for the next campaign without any open rupture. For if disunion tendencies within the Democratic party are stronger than the cohesive power of public plunder and can disintegrate the party itself, it’s a bad sign for our national unity.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 24

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Monday, April 30, 1860

Everybody talks of the great Heenan and Sayers prize fight in England—the “international” fight—and of the American champion’s unfair treatment. It occupies a much larger share of attention than the doings of the Charleston Convention, the results of which may be so momentous.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 24

Diary of George Templeton Strong, Tuesday, May 1, 1860

Some eight Southern delegations have seceded from the Charleston Convention. It refused to make a slave code for the territories an article of faith, and hence this schism. So the great National Democratic party is disintegrated and dead; broken up, like so many other organizations, by these pernicious niggers. It is a bad sign.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 24-5

Diary of George Templeton Strong, May 3, 1860

. . . The Democratic Convention has dissolved and dispersed without nominating anybody. It is to assemble again at Baltimore in June.

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: February 2, 1860

After dinner with Ellie to No. 24, where I left her, and then seeing a glow in the southern sky over the roof of the Union Place Hotel, I started in pursuit of the fire. I dog-trotted to Grand Street before I found it. A great tenement house in Elm Street near Grand burning fiercely. Scores of families had been turned out of it into the icy streets and bitter weather. Celtic and Teutonic fathers and mothers were rushing about through the dense crowd in quest of missing children. A quiet, respectable German was looking for his two (the elder "was eight years old and could take care of himself, but the younger had only nine months and couldn’t well do so”). I thought of poor little Johnny frightened and unprotected in a strange scene of uproar and dark night and the glare of conflagration and piercing cold, and of Babbins, and tried to help the man but without success. There were stories current in the crowd of lives lost in the burning house; some said thirty, others two. The latter statement probably nearer the truth. Steam fire engines are a new element in our conflagrations and an effective one, contributing to the tout ensemble a column of smoke and sparks, and a low shuddering, throbbing bass note, more impressive than the clank of the old-fashioned machines. . . .

There is a Speaker at last. Sherman withdrew, and the Republicans elected Pennington of New Jersey (Bill Pennington’s father), who seems a very fit man for the place. Reading Agassiz’s Essay on Classification. Rather hard reading for anyone not thoroughly learned in a score of -ologies. But I can see and appreciate its general scope and hold it to be a very profound and valuable book.

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