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
