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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: February 3, 1860

Last night’s Elm Street fire was a sad business. Some eighteen or twenty people perished. There was another fire in Lexington Avenue (dwelling houses) due to these pestilent furnaces. Two factories have just been blown to bits in Brooklyn by defective or neglected steamboilers, with great destruction of life. We are still a semi-barbarous race. But the civilizing element also revealed itself this morning at the Tombs, when Mr. Stephens was hanged for poisoning his wife. If a few owners or builders of factories and tenement houses could be hanged tomorrow, life would become less insecure.

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: Monday, February 6, 1860

Just from opera, Puritani, with Ellie and Mrs. Georgey Peters and Dr. Carroll. Little Patti, the new prima donna, made a brilliant success.³ Her voice is fresh, but wants volume and expression as yet; vocalization perfect. . . .

Columbia College meeting at two p.m. Resolved to appropriate the President’s house and Professor Joy’s to College purposes, turn them into lecture rooms, and so forth. A good move. It is contemplated to build a new house for the President on Forty-ninth Street, which I think questionable.

I brought up some matters connected with the Law School, which went to the appropriate committee, and instigated King to introduce the question of suppressing-these secret societies, which do immense mischief in all our colleges. John Weeks has just taken a young brother of his from Columbia College and sent him into the country, because he found that the youth belonged to some mystic association designated by two Greek letters which maintained a sort of club room over a Broadway grocery store, with billiard tables and a bar. Whether it be possible to suppress them is another question. Result was that King is instructed to correspond with the authorities of other colleges and see whether any suggestions can be got from them and whether anything can be done by concerted action. . .⁴

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³ Adelina Patti, now about to enter her eighteenth year, had made her operatic debut in New York in 1859.

⁴ Fraternities were well planted at Columbia. Alpha Delta Phi had been chartered there in 1836, and three other fraternity chapters had been organized in the 1840’s. Francis Henry Weeks took his degree at Williams College in 1864.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 6-7

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: February 17, 1860

Old Stephen Whitney dead, leaving (some say) fifteen millions behind him.⁶ That may be exaggerated, but he was close-fisted enough to have saved up thirty without doing the least good to himself or anyone else. His last act was characteristic and fitting. He locked up his checkbook and died.

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⁶ Moses Y. Beach’s Wealthy Citizens of New Cork (1845) had listed Whitney, a merchant, cotton speculator, and real estate investor whom it described as "a very shrewd manager and close in his dealings,” as worth ten millions and standing next John Jacob Astor in wealth.

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: February 18, 1860

Spent this evening diligently cutting the leaves of Darwin’s much discussed book on The Origin of Species and making acquaintance with its general scope and aim. It’s a laborious, intelligent, and weighty book. First obvious criticism on it seems this, that Darwin has got hold of a truth which he wants to make out to be the one generative law of organic life. Because he shews that the fauna and flora of a group of islands lying near a certain continent are so like those of that continent, though differing specifically therefrom, and so unlike those of other regions more remote, as to make it probable that they are the offspring of the continental species modified by the altered conditions of their new habitat, he considers himself entitled to affirm that all beasts, birds, and creeping things, from mammal to medusa, are developments from one stock, and that man is the descendant of some ancestral archaic fish, with swimming bladder improved into lungs, that flying fish have by successive minute steps of progress through countless ages become albatrosses, and flying squirrels bats. But I suspect that He who created and upholds this great marvelous system of various harmonious life is not obliged to conformity with any one Law of Creation and preservation that Darwin’s or any other finite intellect can discover.

Darwin asks rather large concessions. You must begin by giving him thousands of millions of millions of years (that Johnny Strong would be puzzled to read were they expressed in Arabic numerals) for the operation of his Law of Progress, and admit that the silence of the stratified record of those ages as to its operation and existence may be explained away; and then, the want of affirmative evidence to sustain his theory being accounted for, he can make out a plausible case for it by suggesting that “it may have been’’; “why should not’’; “we may suppose that,” and the like.

The period required for the production of the whole animal world from a single parent stock (and he holds that both the animal and vegetable races have one common primeval parent, a diatom, I suppose) by the working of his imaginary law of natural selection is even beyond the all but inconceivable procession of ages which he concedes that his theory calls for. Let us see. We have records of the condition of animal life in certain of its departments that go back to the earliest picture writing of Egypt and become more and more abundant and minute as they approach our own days. Those of the last two hundred years are copious and elaborate. During the last fifty, a mass of evidence has been collected that could hardly be read through in one lifetime. The superficial area covered by investigations thus recorded in our own day is immensely great; that is, 25,000 miles of European coast line alone, studied almost inch by inch, every zoological province of all the earth’s surface investigated (though, of course, not exhaustively) by inquisitive travelers and men of science. Practical men, stimulated by hope of profit in money, have been working hard and intelligently to modify existing breeds or species by changing all their original or natural relations to climate, food, and habit, and perpetuating as far as they could every improvement in the breed artificially or accidentally produced. But no symptom of the change of one species to another has been produced or has occurred within the historic period. There is not even a legend of the ancient identity of lion and eagle, no tradition of a period before horse and ass; geese and ducks were distinct animals. No development of new organs or new functions by any animal is anywhere recorded or traceable. Scientific breeders after centuries of vigilant work have produced various types of horse, sheep, pigeon, and so forth; but these several types lose their respective peculiarities, unless their purity be carefully maintained. (Note Darwin’s statement about the tendency of peculiarities of the rock pigeon, the original progenitor, to recur in the fancy breeds, pouter and tumbler and so forth.) The area covered by scientific research and by experiments in breeding for the last century is equivalent (in considering Darwin’s theory) to scores of thousands of years of recorded observation in a single district. But however this may be, man’s experience for, we will say, only four thousand years furnishes no instance of the development of new functions or new organs by any animal or vegetable organism.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 10-11

Diary of George Templeton Strong: February 25, 1860

Efficient in Wall Street. Pio Nono, “the Pope, that pagan full of pride,” is on bad terms with the Eldest Son of the Church, that unprincipled Ghibelline, Louis Napoleon. Unless the Ravaillacs and Jacques elements are extinct, Louis Napoleon may be in danger.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 11

Diary of George Templeton Strong: February 29, 1860

Went alone to Philharmonic rehearsal at Academy of Music. Watched Hazeltine and pretty Helen Lane billing and cooing just in front of me to the very appropriate accompaniment of Beethoven’s lovely D Symphony. A sentimental gent would say that the handsome young couple and the glowing joyous music of that brightest of all Beethoven’s greater works were each a sort of commentary on the other. Then I went to 24 Union Square and saw Mr. Buggies, who left Lockport Monday, spent a day at Albany, and reached New York this morning. I paid him another visit this evening. He has convalesced rapidly and looks better than I expected to see him. I feared this perilous illness might have left him with energies impaired and faculties blunted, but he is quite himself, full of life and vigorous thought. He is not without his hobby, namely: there is, or seems to be, a political reaction against sectionalism, John Brownism, Higher Lawism, and the like. This is, therefore, a good opportunity to assert the claims of the church as a conservative law-loving institution against Calvinism and the ultra Protestant notions it has produced; to tell Union men throughout the country that they belong in the church; to define the limits of authority and private judgment in political ethics. A clear statement of all this might effect a great deal just at this time and would come with a certain authority from the committee appointed by the last general convention of which Mr. Ruggles is chairman.

Monday, Jem and George Anthon dined here, and we heard Martha, which is a very pretty opera. Last night I attended Noyes’s second lecture before the Law School; crowded, like the first. That people should go away from a law lecture in New York for want of seats is without precedent. This school is the only one of our seeds of post-graduate instruction that survives and grows, our only university nucleus. If Betts and Ogden were less hopelessly inert, it might be developed into usefulness on a large scale.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 11-12

Diary of George Templeton Strong: Sunday, January 1, 1860

New Year’s Day. God prosper the New Year to those I love. Church with Ellie and Johnny; an effective sermon by Higby. Thereafter we took a cold “constitutional” up the Fifth Avenue to Forty-second Street, a rather vigorous winter day, still and sharp. Tonight is overcast, with promise of snow tomorrow.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 2

Diary of George Templeton Strong: January 5, 1860

With Ellie to the Artists’ “Reception” in Dodworth’s Rooms; a vast crowd. Discovered Mrs. D. C. Murray and Mrs. John Weeks, General Dix, Wenzler, Stone, Rossiter, Mrs. Field (commonly distinguished as “the murderess,” being mixed up a little with the Due de Praslin affair),¹ the Rev. Mr. Frothingham, Lewis Rutherfurd, and others. Many bad pictures on the walls, and some few good ones. Eastman Johnson and Charles Dix are making progress. Wenzler has a lovely portrait of one of Dr. Potts’s daughters. Stone’s portrait of my two little men was there, and people praised it—to me.

Monday the second was kept for New Year’s Day. It was a fine specimen of crisp frosty weather, with a serene sky and a cutting wind from the northwest. I set forth at eleven o’clock in my own particular hack, en grand seigneur, and effected more than twenty calls, beginning with Mrs. Samuel Whitlock in 37th Street. My lowest south latitude was Dr. Berrian’s and the Lydigs’. There were no incidents. Bishop Potter’s drawing-room was perhaps the dullest place I visited. The Bishop is always kindly and cordial, but nature has given him no organ for the secretion of the small talk appropriate to a five minutes’ call. He feels the deficiency and is nervous and uncomfortable. Very nice at Mrs. George F. Jones’s, and at Mrs. William Schermerhorn’s. At Mrs. Peter A. Schermerhorn’s, in University Place, I discovered the mamma and Miss Ellen, both very gracious. At Mrs. William Astor’s, Miss Ward (the granddaughter of the house; Sam Ward’s daughter by his first wife) talked of her friend Miss Annie Leavenworth. . . . Mrs. Edgar was charming in her little bit of a house, the “Petit Trianon.” Poor Mrs. Douglas Cruger seems growing old, is less vivacious and less garrulous. At Mrs. Serena Fearing’s I was honored with a revelation of the baby that was produced last summer.

Pleasant visit to Mrs. Christine Griffin, nee Kean—where little Miss Mary was looking her loveliest. That little creature will make havoc in society a year or two hence, when she "comes out.” She is very beautiful and seems full of life and intelligence. Mrs. Isaac Wright in Waverley Place, with her brood of four noble children rampaging about her, was good to see. . . .

Home at six, tired after a pleasant day’s work. We had a comfortable session at dinner with Dr. Peters and Mrs. Georgey Peters, Miss Annie Leavenworth, Miss Josephine Strong, Walter Cutting, Richard Hunt, Murray Hoffman, George C. Anthon, Jem Ruggles, and Jack Ehninger. Dinner was successful.

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* Henry M. Field, brother of Cyrus W. and David Dudley Field, had married (May, I85i) Laure Desportes, who was innocently involved in the famous Choiseul-Praslin murder case in France. Rachel Field has told the story in All This and Heaven Too (1938).

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 2-3

Diary of George Templeton Strong: January 7, 1860

Walked uptown with George Anthon, who entertained me with the biography of his runaway cousin. Miss "Unadilla” Elmendorf, and incidents of the elopement, which is chronicled in newspaper paragraphs as a “marriage in high life.” The girl is illegitimate, and her Lochinvar a noted swindler of tailors and hotelkeepers and a parasite of opera troupes, but full of talent and impudence. He made his way into the barbarous State of Virginia to report John Brown's execution for Frank Leslie's or some other newspaper when almost—or quite—every other reporter was repulsed and excluded by the natives.

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: January 9, 1860

To Columbia College meeting, Lafayette Place, at two in the afternoon. . . . I moved that Lieber’s opening lecture of his present Law School course be printed, which was carried.

Thereafter to Tenth Street Studio Building to call on Leutze; I spent an hour with him pleasantly. I saw his "Battle of Princeton” picture, and another, a Venetian scene—masqueraders in a gondola, the Bridge of Sighs overhead, the corpse of a state criminal just brought out into another boat, upon which the riotous festive party comes suddenly and unawares. This latter picture is unfinished, but will be among the best things Leutze has done.

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: January 10, 1860

House of Representatives not yet organized, no Speaker elected and government at a deadlock. Members spend their time during the interval between the ballotings in speech-making about John Brown, fugitive slaves, Hinton Rowan Helper’s Impending Crisis, and the irrepressible nigger generally. That black but comely biped is becoming a bore to me. No doubt he is a man and a brother, but his monopoly of attention is detrimental to the rest of the family; and I don’t believe he cares much about having his wrongs redressed or his rights asserted. Our politicians are playing on Northern love of justice and a more or less morbid Northern philanthropy for their own selfish ends by putting themselves forward as Cuffee’s champion. But the South is so utterly barbaric and absurd that I’m constantly tempted to ally myself with Cheever and George Curtis.²

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² The Rev. George B. Cheever, author of God Against Slavery (1857); George William Curtis, now attacking slavery in his speeches and writings.

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: January 11, 1860

News today of a fearful tragedy at Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the wholesale murders commonly known in newspaper literature as accident or catastrophe. A huge factory, long notoriously insecure and ill-built, requiring to be patched and bandaged up with iron plates and braces to stand the introduction of its machinery, suddenly collapsed into a heap of ruins yesterday afternoon without the smallest provocation. Some five or six hundred operatives went down with it— young girls and women mostly. An hour or two later, while people were working frantically to dig out some two hundred still under the ruins, many of them alive and calling for help, some quite unhurt, fire caught in the great pile of debris, and these prisoners were roasted. It is too atrocious and horrible to think of.

Of course, nobody will be hanged. Somebody has murdered about two hundred people, many of them with hideous torture, in order to save money, but society has no avenging gibbet for the respectable millionaire and homicide. Of course not. He did not want to or mean to do this massacre; on the whole, he would have preferred to let these people live. His intent was not homicidal. He merely thought a great deal about making a large profit and very little about the security of human life. He did not compel these poor girls and children to enter his accursed mantrap. They could judge and decide for themselves whether they would be employed there. It was a matter of contract between capital and labor; they were to receive cash payment for their services. No doubt the legal representatives of those who have perished will be duly paid the fractional part of their week’s wages up to the date when they became incapacitated by crushing or combustion, as the case may be, from rendering further service. Very probably the wealthy and liberal proprietor will add (in deserving cases) a gratuity to defray funeral charges. It becomes us to prate about the horrors of slavery! What Southern capitalist trifles with the lives of his operatives as do our philanthropes of the North?

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: Tuesday, January 17, 1860

Mr. Ruggles is quite ill at Lockport (Governor Hunt’s), so ill that Mrs. Ruggles and Miss Bostwick go thither tomorrow. He went to Buffalo, last Thursday was a week, to attend to some railroad receivership and caught severe cold on the journey. Our cars in wintertime, with their sloppy floors, red-hot stoves, and currents of chill air from opened doors and windows, are perilous traps for colds and inflammations. He took refuge at Governor Hunt’s after two or three days of indisposition, which he was obliged to neglect, and was threatened with congestion of the lungs. He is reported by telegraph “mending slowly’* but has been heavily dosed with anodynes and other vigorous medicaments that have weakened and depressed him. We have but just learned how seriously ill he has been, and Elbe feels quite uneasy, but I hope without sufficient cause.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 4-5

Diary of George Templeton Strong: January 19, 1860

Mr. Ruggles reported by telegraph “improving,” but not strong enough to travel.

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: January 20, 1860

Anxious about Mr. Ruggles at Lockport. A telegram from Jem, received just before dinnertime, announced that “the physicians thought” him improving slowly, which was satisfactory enough, but for the inference, strained perhaps, that Jem did not think so.

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

Diary of George Templeton Strong: January 25, 1860

Wolcott Gibbs called by appointment tonight. We microscopized energetically, and the performances terminated with a very modest supper of chicken and hock. Gavitt was to have joined us but made default. We studied the Ross 1/12 objective and examined the circulation in the tail of a tadpole and a kitty fish, which I brought uptown with me from the little aquarium shop in Fulton street this afternoon. Results were satisfactory. My binocular is unquestionably an acquisition. It shews certain structures better than the Ross instrument.

The Rev. Mr. Bellows, who called at breakfast time this morning to ask after Mr. Ruggles, is my authority for the following diplomatic

Scene at the Tuileries. A State dinner. The Honorable Mr. Mason, F.F.V., (our Minister to France), and Don Somebody, the Spanish Ambassador, glowering at each other across the table, during intervals of deglutition, each timidly desiring to establish himself in rapport with the other.

Spain. Breaking the ice: “Parlez-vous français, M’sieu Masón?”

America. With effort: "Ung Poo.” (A pause) "Permit me, Sir, to ask whether you speak the English language?

Spain: "Small.” (Conversation closes.)

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 5-6