University of the State of New York has existed, on which is laid the duty
of visiting and superintending in a general way our institutions of
education above the degree of Common Schools. It consists of twenty-three
members, including the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor, the Secretary of
State and the Superintendent of Public Instruction; the other nineteen
members are appointed by the Legislature. The Board assists at the
incorporation of all colleges and academies, looks into their condition,
interposes in certain specified cases, receives reports from them and
makes annual reports to the Legislature, and confers by diploma such
degrees as are granted by any college or university in Europe. Mr.
Verplanck was appointed a member of this Board in 1826, in place of
Matthew Clarkson, who had been a Regent ever since 1787. In 1855 he was
appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University, and to the time of his death
punctually attended the meetings of the Board, shared in its discussions
and bore his part in its various duties. In 1844 the State Library was
placed under the superintendence of the Regents. Mr. Verplanck was
immediately put on the Library Committee, where his knowledge of books and
editions of books made his services invaluable. There were then about ten
thousand volumes in the collection, and many of these consisted of broken
sets. Under the care of the Regents--Mr. Verplanck principally, who gave
it his particular attention--it has grown into a well selected, well
arranged library of more than eighty-two thousand volumes. About the same
time the State Cabinets of Natural History were put under the care of the
Board, and these have equally prospered, every year adding to their
extent, until now the Regents publish annually, catalogues of the
additions made to them from various sources, and, occasionally, papers
communicated by experts in natural history.
Every year in the month of August a University Convocation is held at
Albany, to which are invited all the leading teachers and professors of
our colleges and academies, and carefully prepared papers relating to
education are read. At the first of these conventions, in 1863, Mr. D.J.
Pratt, now the Assistant Secretary of the Board, had read a paper on
"Language as the Chief Educator and the noblest Liberal Art," in which he
dwelt upon the importance of studying the ancient classic authors in their
original tongues. Mr. Verplanck remarked that in what he had to say he
would content himself with relating an anecdote respecting the first
Napoleon, which he had from a private source, and which had never been in
print. The Emperor wishing to keep himself advised of what was passing in
the University of France, yet without attracting public attention, was
wont on certain occasions to send to the University a trustworthy and
intelligent person from his household, who was to bring back a report.
This man at one time reported that the question of paying more attention
to the mathematical sciences had been agitated. On this Napoleon exclaimed
with emphasis: "Go to the Polytechnic for mathematics, but classics,
classics, classics for the University." At another time Verplanck, still
occupied with his favorite studies, gave the convention an address on the
pronunciation of the Latin language, in which he came to the conclusion
that of all the branches of the Latin race, the Portuguese in their
pronunciation of Latin make the nearest approach to that of the ancient
Romans. He was desired by the members of the Board to write out the
address for publication, but this was never done. Verplanck, as I have
already remarked, was an unwilling scribe, and did not like to handle the
pen.
The Annual Reports of the Regents, which are voluminous documents, give
much the same view of the arrangements for public education in the State
as is obtained of a country by looking down upon it from an observatory.
Every college, every academy, every school, not merely a private
enterprise, and above the degree of common schools, makes its yearly
report to the Regents, and these are embodied in the general report which
they make to the Legislature, so that the whole great system, with all its
appendages, its libraries, its revenues, its expenditures, the number of
its teachers and its pupils, and the opportunities of instruction which it
gives, lies before the eye of the reader. It now comprehends twenty
Colleges of Literature and Science, three Law Departments, two Medical
Colleges, two hundred or more Academies, or Schools of that class, besides
the Normal School at Albany.
In his discourse delivered before this Society in 1818, Mr. Verplanck had
apostrophized his native country as the Land of Refuge. He could not then
have foreseen how well in after times it would deserve this name, nor
what labors and responsibilities the care of that mighty throng who resort
to our shores for work and bread would cast upon him. Shortly before the
year 1847 the number of emigrants from Europe arriving in our country had
rapidly and surprisingly increased. The famine in Ireland had caused the
people of that island to migrate to ours in swarms like those which the
populous North poured from her frozen loins to overwhelm the Roman Empire.
In the ten years from 1845 to 1854 inclusive, more than a million and a
half of Irish emigrants left the United Kingdom. The emigration from
Germany had also prodigiously increased and promised to become still
larger. All these were exposed, and the Germans in a particular manner, on
account of their ignorance of our language, to the extortions of a knavish
class, called runners, and of the keepers of boarding-houses, who often
defrauded them of all that they possessed, and left them to charity. Most
of those who, after these extortions, had the means, made their way into
the interior and settled upon farms, but a large number remained to become
inmates of the almshouse, or to starve and sicken in crowded and
unwholesome rooms. Mr. Kapp, for some time a Commissioner of Emigration,
relates, in his interesting work on Emigration, an example of the manner
in which these poor creatures were cheated. An emigrant came to a
boarding-house keeper to pay his bill: "It is eighteen dollars," said the
landlord. "Why," said the emigrant, "did you not agree to board me for
sixpence a meal and threepence for a bed?" "Yes," was the answer, "and
that is just seventy-five cents a day; you have been here eight days, and
that makes just eighteen dollars."
These things had become a grievous scandal, and it was clear that
something must be done to protect the emigrant from pillage, and the
country from the burden of his support. The Act of May, 1847, was
therefore passed by the New York Legislature. It named six gentlemen of
the very highest character, Gulian C. Verplanck, James Boorman, Jacob
Harvey, Robert B. Minturn, William F. Havemeyer, and David C. Colden, who
were to form a Board of Commissioners of Emigration, charged with the
oversight and care of this vast influx of strangers from the Old World. To
these were added the Mayors of New York and Brooklyn, and the Presidents
of the German Society and the Irish Emigrant Society. Every master of a
vessel was, within twenty-four hours of his arrival, to give this Board a
list of his passengers, with a report of their origin, age, occupation,
condition, health and other particulars, and either give bonds to save the
community from the cost of maintaining them in case they became paupers,
or pay for each of them the sum of two dollars and a half. The payment of
money has been preferred, and this has put into the hands of the
Commissioners a liberal revenue, faithfully applied to the advantage of
the emigrants.
Mr. Havemeyer was chosen President of the Board, but resigned the office
after a few months, and was succeeded in it by Mr. Verplanck, who held it
till the day of his death. Under the management of the Commissioners, the
Bureau of Emigration, becoming with almost every year more perfectly
adapted to its purpose, has grown to vast dimensions, till it is now like
one of the departments of government in a great empire. Whoever passes by
Ward's Island, where the tides of the East River and the Sound meet and
rush swiftly to and fro through their narrow channels, will have some idea
of what the Board has done as he sees the domes and spires of that great
cluster of buildings, forming a vast caravanserai in which the poorer
class of emigrants are temporarily lodged, before they can be sent into
the interior or find employment here. Here are barracks for the men, a
spacious building for the women and children, a nursery for children of a
tender age, Catholic and Protestant chapels, a dispensary, workshops, a
lunatic asylum, fever wards, surgical wards, storehouses, residences of
the physicians and other persons employed in the care of the place, and
out-houses and offices of various kinds. Here, too, rise the stately
turrets of the spacious new hospital styled the Verplanck Emigrant
Hospital, in honor of the great philanthropist, for such his constant and
noiseless labors in this department of charity entitle him to be called.
The Commissioners found that they could not protect the emigrants from
imposition without a special landing place from which they could wholly
exclude the rascal crew who cheated them. It took eight years to obtain
this from the New York Legislature, but at last, in 1855, it was granted,
and the old fort at the foot of Manhattan Island, called Castle Garden,
was leased for this purpose. This is now the Emigrants' Landing, the gate
of the New World for those who, pressing westward, throng into it from the
Old. Night and day it is open, and through this passage the vast tide of
stranger population, which is to mingle with and swell our own, rushes
like the current of the Bosphorus from the Black Sea towards the Propontis
and the Hellespont, to help fill the great basin of the Mediterranean.
What will be the condition of mankind when the populations of the two
hemispheres, the East and the West, shall have found, as they must, a
common level, and when the human race, now struggling for room in its
ancient abodes, shall look in vain for some unoccupied region where a
virgin soil is waiting to reward the laborer with bread?
As he enters Castle Garden the emigrant undergoes inspection by a
competent physician, and if he be aged, sick, or in any way disabled, the
master of the vessel must give a special bond for his maintenance. He is
introduced into the building--here he finds one department in which he is
duly registered, another from which he receives such information as a
stranger requires, another from which his luggage is dispatched to its
destination, another at which attend clerks, skilled in the languages of
continental Europe, to write his letters, another at which railway tickets
are procured without danger of extortion, another at which fair
arrangements are made with boarding houses, another from which, if sick or
destitute, he is sent to Ward's Island, and half a dozen others, important
as helps to one who has no knowledge of the usages of the country to which
he has come. I refer to these arrangements, among a multitude of others,
in order to show what administrative talent and what constant attention
were necessary to ensure the regular and punctual working of so vast a
system. To this duty Mr. Verplanck, aided by able and disinterested
associates like himself, gave the labors of a third of a century,
uncompensated save by the consciousness of doing good. The composition of
this Board has just been changed by the Legislature of the State, in such
a manner as unfortunately to introduce party influences, from which,
during all the time of Mr. Verplanck's connection with it, it had been
kept wholly free.
Yet Mr. Verplanck had his party attachments, though he never suffered them
to lead him out of the way he had marked for himself. He would accompany a
party, but never follow it. His party record is singular enough. He was
educated a federalist, but early in life found himself acting against the
federal party. He was with the whigs in supporting General Harrison for
the Presidency, and claimed the credit of suggesting his nomination. Mr.
Clay he would never support on account of his protectionist principles,
and when that gentleman was nominated by the whigs he left them and voted
for Mr. Polk, though he was disgusted by the trick which obtained the vote
of Pennsylvania for Mr. Polk under the pretence of his being a
protectionist. Subsequently he supported General Taylor, the whig
candidate for the Presidency, but the nomination of Mr. Buchanan, in 1857,
saw him once more with the democrats, from whom he did not again separate.
When the proposal to make government paper a legal tender for debts was
before Congress, he opposed it with great zeal, writing against it in the
democratic journals. I agreed with him that the measure was an act of
folly, for which I could find no excuse, but he almost regarded it as a
public crime. He vehemently disapproved, also, of the arbitrary arrests
made by our government during the war, some of which, without question,
were exceedingly ill advised. His zeal on these points, I think, made him
blind to the great issues involved in our late civil war, and led his
usually clear and liberal judgment astray.
I have not yet mentioned various capacities in which he served the public
without any motive but to minister to the public welfare. He was from a
very early period a Trustee of the Society Library, in which he took great
interest, delighting to make additions to its stock of books, and passing
much time in its alcoves and its reading rooms. He was one of the wardens
of Trinity Church, that mistress of mighty revenues. He was for some years
one of the governors of the New York Hospital, and I remember when he made
periodical visits to the Insane Asylum at Bloomingdale, as one invested
with authority there. During the existence of the Public School Society he
was one of its Trustees from 1834 to 1841, and rendered essential service
to the cause of public education.
His useful life closed on the 18th of March last. For some months before
this date his strength had declined, and when I met him from time to time
it seemed to me that his features had become sharper and his frame more
attenuated, yet I perceived no diminution of mental vigor. He took the
same interest in the events and questions of the day as he had done years
before, his apprehension seemed as quick, and all the powers of his mind
as active.
On the Wednesday before his death he attended one of those weekly meetings
which he took care never to miss, that of the Commissioners of Emigration,
But in one of his walks on a rainy day he had taken a cold which resulted
in a congestion of the lungs. On Thursday evening he lay upon a sofa,
conversing from time to time, after his usual manner, until near midnight.
On Friday morning, when his body servant entered the room and looked at
him he perceived a change and called his grandson, who, with a
grand-daughter, had constantly attended him during the past winter. The
grandson immediately went for his physician, Dr. Carnochan, who, however,
was not to be found, and whose assistant, a young man, came in his stead.
Mr. Verplanck, in a way which was characteristic of him, studied the young
man's face for a moment and then asked: "From what college were you
graduated?" The reply was--"Paris;" on which Mr. Verplanck turned away as
if it did not much please him, and in a moment afterward expired. He was
spared the previous suffering which so many are called to endure. His son
had visited him from time to time, and was with him the day before his
death, yet this event was unexpected to all the family. His father, in his
old age, had as suddenly passed away, having fallen dead by the wayside.
The private life of our friend was as beautiful as his public life was
useful and beneficent. He took great interest in the education of his
grandchildren; inquired into their studies, talked with them of the books
they read, and sought with great success to make them fond of all good
learning, directing their attention to all that was noble in literature
and in art. His mind was a storehouse of facts in history and biography on
which he drew for their entertainment, and upon occasion diversified the
graver narratives with fairy tales and stories of wonder from the Arabian
Nights. He made learning pleasant to them by taking them on Saturdays to
places of amusement from which he contrived that they should return not
only amused but instructed. In short, it seemed as if, in his solicitude
for the education of his descendants, he sought to repay the cares
bestowed upon his early youth by his grandfather of Stratford, of whom he
said in his discourse delivered at Amherst College, that his best
education was bestowed by the more than paternal care of one of the wisest
and most excellent sons of New England. Long after he was an old man he
would make pleasant summer journeys with these young people and look to
their comfort and safety with the tenderest solicitude.
Christmas was merry Christmas at the old family mansion in Fishkill. He
caused the day to be kept with many of the ancient usages, to the great
satisfaction of the younger members of the household. He was fond of
observing particular days and seasons, and marking them by some pleasant
custom of historical significance--for with all the ancient customs and
rites and pastimes pertaining to them he was as familiar as if they were
matters of to-day. It distressed him even to tears when, last Christmas,
he found that his health did not allow him to make the journey to Fishkill
as usual. He made much of the birthdays of his grandchildren, and taught
them to observe that of Shakespeare by adorning the dwelling with the
flowers mentioned in those aerial verses of the Winters Tale--
"daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried," &c., &c.
For many years past he had divided his time pretty equally between
Fishkill and New York, visiting the homestead in the latter part of the
week and returning in time to attend the weekly meetings of the
Commissioners of Emigration. While in the country he was a great deal in
the open air, superintending the patrimonial estate, which he managed with
ability as a man of business, giving a careful attention, even to the
minutest details. But he was most agreeably employed in his large and well
stored library. Here were different editions of the Greek and Latin
classics, some of them rare and enriched with sumptuous
illustrations--thirty different ones of Horace and nearly as many of
Virgil. With the Greek tragedians he was as familiar as with our own
Shakespeare. In this library he wrote for the Crayon his entertaining
paper on Garrick and his portrait, and his charming little volume
entitled "Twelfth Night at the Century Club." Here also he wrote several
papers respecting the true interpretation of certain passages in Virgil,
which were published in the 'Evening Post.' It is to be regretted that he
did not collect and publish his literary papers, which would form a very
agreeable miscellany. He seemed, however, almost indifferent to literary
fame, and when he had once sent forth into the world an essay or a
treatise, left it to its fate as an affair which was now off his hands. On
Sunday morning he was alway at the old church in the village of Fishkill,
one of the most attentive and devout worshippers there. It is an ancient
building of homely architecture, looking now just as it did a century ago,
with a big old pulpit and sounding board in the midst of the church, which
the people would have been glad to remove, but refrained, because Mr.
Verplanck, whom they so venerated, preferred that it should remain.
The patrimonial mansion at Fishkill had historical associations which must
have added to the interest with which our friend regarded it. Mr.
Tuckerman relates, in the "North American Review," though without naming
the place or the persons, a story in which they were brought out in a
singular manner. He was there fifteen or twenty years since, a guest at
Verplanck's table. He describes the June sunshine which played through the
shifting branches of tall elms on the smooth oaken floor of the old
dining room, the plate of antique pattern on the sideboard and the
portraits of revolutionary heroes on the walls. As they sat down to
dinner, an old lady, bowed with years and with a restless, yet serene
look, entered and took a seat beside Mr. Verplanck. A servant adjusted a
napkin under her chin and the dinner proceeded. A steamer was passing up
the river and a band on board struck up a martial air. The old lady
trembled, clasped her hands, and, raising her eyes, exclaimed, "Ah! all
intercession is vain. Andre must die." Mr. Verplanck made a sign to the
company to listen, and calling the lady Aunt, addressed her with some kind
inquiry, on which she went on to speak of the events and personages of the
Revolution as matters of the present day. She repeated rapidly the names
of the English officers whom she had known, "described her lofty
head-dress of ostrich feathers, which caught fire at the theatre, and
repeated the verses of her admirer who was so fortunate as to extinguish
it." She dwelt upon the majestic bearing of Washington, the elegance of
the French, the dogmatism of the British officers; the by-words, the names
of gallants, belles and heroes; the incidents, the questions, the
etiquette of those times seemed to live again in her tremulous accents,
which gradually became feeble, until she fell asleep! "It was," continued
the narrator, "like a voice from the grave." This old lady was a Miss
Walton, a sister of Judge Verplanck's second wife.
When he found time for the studies by which his mind was kept so full of
useful and curious knowledge, I cannot well conceive. He loved to protract
an interesting conversation into the small hours of the night, and he was
by no means, as it is said most long-lived men are, an early riser. An
anecdote related by a gentleman of the New York bar will serve to
illustrate, in some degree, his desultory habits during that part of his
time which was passed in New York. This gentleman gave a dinner at
Delmonico's, then in William Street, to a professional brother from
another city, who was in town only for the day. Mr. Verplanck, Judge
William Kent, and one or two other clever lawyers, were of the party. I
will allow him to tell the story in his own words.