PHILANTHROPISTS AND REFORMERS
This has been a country celebrated for its great fortunes, and the
makers of some of those fortunes will be considered in the chapter
dealing with "men of affairs"; but many who have been grouped under that
heading might well have been included under this, since, for the most
part, the richest men have been the freest in their benefactions. It is
worth noting that the recorded public gifts in this country during 1909
amounted to $135,000,000. The giving of money is, of course, only one
kind of benefaction, and not the highest kind, which is the giving of
self; but the good which these gifts have rendered possible is beyond
calculation.
[Illustration: GIRARD]
This kind of philanthropy is no new thing in the United States. It is
almost as old as the country itself. Indeed, few of the older
institutions of learning but had their origin in some such gift. One of
the earliest of such philanthropists was Stephen Girard, whose
life-story is unusually interesting and inspiring. The son of a sailor,
and with little opportunity for gaining an education, he shipped as
cabin-boy, while still a mere child, and after some years of rough
knocking around, rose to the position of mate, and finally to a part
ownership in the vessel. In 1769, at the age of nineteen, he established
himself in the ship business in Philadelphia, but the opening of the
Revolution put an end to that business. Not until the close of the war
was he able to re-embark in it. The foundation of his fortune was soon
laid by his integrity and enterprise, but it was largely augmented in a
most peculiar manner.
Two of his vessels happened to be in one of the ports of Hayti, when a
slave insurrection broke out there, and a number of the planters hastily
removed their treasure to his vessels for safe-keeping. That night, the
insurrection reached its height, and the planters, together with their
families, were massacred. Heirs to a portion of the treasure were
discovered by Mr. Girard, but he found himself possessed of about
$50,000 to which no heirs could be traced.
With remarkable foresight, Mr. Girard invested largely in the shares of
the old Bank of the United States, and in 1812, purchased its building
and succeeded to much of its business. He was the financial mainstay of
the government during the second war with England--in fact, it was he
who made the financing of the war possible. And yet he was, to all
outward appearances, a singularly repulsive and hard-fisted old miser.
In early youth, an unfortunate accident had caused the loss of one eye,
and his other gradually failed him until he was quite blind; he was also
partially deaf, and was sour, crabbed and unapproachable. In small
matters he was a miser, ready to avoid paying a just claim if he
could in any way do so, living in a miserable fashion and refusing
charity to every one, no matter how deserving. He was forbidding in
appearance, and drove daily to and from his farm outside of Philadelphia
in a shabby old carriage drawn by a single horse. No visitor was ever
welcomed at that farm, where its owner dragged out a penurious
existence.
Yet in public matters no one could have been more open-handed, and when,
after his death in 1831, his will was opened, it created a shock of
surprise, for practically his whole fortune of $9,000,000 had been
bequeathed for charitable purposes. Large sums were given to provide
fuel for the poor in winter, for distressed ship-masters, for the blind,
the deaf and dumb, and for the public schools. Half a million was given
Philadelphia for the improvement of her streets and public buildings;
but his principal bequest was one of $2,000,000, besides real estate,
and the residue of his property, for the establishment at Philadelphia
of a college for orphans. In 1848, Girard College was opened, and has
since then continued its great work, educating as many orphans as the
endowment can support. So Girard atoned after his death, for the
mistakes of his life.
Almost equally singular was the life of the founder of that splendid
government enterprise, the Smithsonian Institution--perhaps the most
important scientific center in the world. James Smithson was in no sense
an American. Indeed, so far as known, he never even visited the United
States, and yet no account of American philanthropy would be complete
without him. He was born in France in 1765, and was the illegitimate son
of Hugh Smithson, afterwards Duke of Northumberland. He went by his
mother's name for the first forty years of his life, being known as
James Macie, until, in 1802, he assumed his father's name.
Born under this shadow, the boy soon developed unusual qualities,
graduated from Oxford, with high honors in chemistry and mineralogy, and
added greatly to his reputation by a series of scientific papers of
great importance. A large portion of his life was passed in Europe,
where he associated with the greatest scientists of the day, honored by
all of them. He died at Genoa at the age of sixty-four, and, when his
will was opened, it was seen how the circumstances of his birth had
weighed upon him. For, "in order that his name might live in the memory
of man when the titles of the Northumberlands are extinct and
forgotten," he bequeathed his whole fortune "to the United States of
America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian
Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of
knowledge among men." After a suit in chancery, the bequest was paid
over to the United States government, amounting to over half a million
dollars. In 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was formally established,
its first secretary being Joseph Henry, of whose great work there we
have already spoken. It has increased in scope and usefulness year by
year, and stands to-day without a counterpart in any country.
Peter Cooper also left a portion of his wealth for "the diffusion of
knowledge among men," but a different sort of knowledge--the knowledge
that would help a man or woman to earn a living. His own career had
shown him how necessary such knowledge is. His father was a hatter by
trade, and the boy's earliest recollection was of his being employed to
pull hair out of rabbit-skins, his head just reaching above the table.
But the hat business was unprofitable, and the elder Cooper tried a
number of businesses, brewing, brick-making, what not, the boy being
required to take part in each of them, so that he had no time for
schooling, and had to pick up such odds and ends of knowledge as he
could. Finally, in 1808, at the age of seventeen, he was apprenticed to
a carriage-maker, and remained with him until he was of age.
After that, the young man himself tried various occupations without
great success, until the establishment of a glue factory began to bring
him large returns. By the beginning of 1828, he was able to purchase
three thousand acres of land within the city of Baltimore and to
establish the Canton iron-works, which was the first of his great
enterprises tending toward the development of the iron industry in the
United States. Other plants were built or purchased, rolling mills and
blast furnaces established, and a great impetus given to this branch of
manufacture. He practically financed the Atlantic Cable Company, in the
face of ridicule, and made the cable possible, and he saved the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad from bankruptcy by designing and building a
locomotive--the first ever built in this country--especially adapted to
the uneven country over which the track was laid.
The fortune thus acquired he devoted to a well-considered and practical
plan of philanthropy. His career had shown him the great value of a
trade to any man or woman. The schools taught every kind of knowledge
except that which would enable a man to earn a living with his hands,
which seemed to him the most important of all. He determined to do what
he could remedy this defect, and in 1854, secured a block of land in New
York City, at the junction of Third and Fourth Avenues, where, shortly
afterwards, the cornerstone was laid of "The Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art." It was completed five years later, and
handed over to six trustees; a scheme of education was devised and
special emphasis was laid upon "instruction in branches of knowledge by
which men and women earn their daily bread; in laws of health and
improvement of the sanitary condition of families as well as
individuals; in social and political science, whereby communities and
nations advance in virtue, wealth and power; and finally in matters
which affect the eye, the ear, and the imagination, and furnish a basis
for recreation to the working classes." Free courses of lectures were
established, a free reading room, and free instruction was given in
various branches of the useful arts. From that day to this, Cooper Union
has been an ever-growing force for progress in the life of the great
city; it has been a pioneer in the work of industrial education, which
has, of recent years, reached such great proportions.
Peter Cooper lived to see the institution which he had founded realize
at least some of his hopes for it. He himself lived a most active life,
taking a prominent part in many movements looking to the reform of
national or civic abuses. In 1876, he was nominated by the national
independent party as their candidate for president and received nearly a
hundred thousand votes. Since his death, the institution which he
founded has grown steadily in importance; other bequests have been added
to his, and Cooper Union has come to stand, in a way, for civic
righteousness.
The year 1795 saw the birth of two children who were destined to do a
great work for their country--George Peabody and Johns Hopkins. Both
were the sons of poor parents, with little opportunity for achieving the
sort of learning which is taught in schools; but both, by hard
experience with the world, gained another sort of learning which is
often of more practical value. At the age of eleven, George Peabody was
forced to begin to earn his own living, and a place was found for him in
a grocery store. His habits were good, he did his work well, and
finally, at the age of nineteen, was offered a partnership by another
merchant, who had noticed and admired his energy and enthusiasm. The
business increased, branch houses were established, and at the age of
thirty-five, George Peabody found himself at the head of a great
business, his elder partner having retired. He decided to make London
his place of residence, and became a sort of guardian angel for
Americans visiting the great English capital. He had never married, and
it seemed almost as if the whole world were his family. His constant
thought was of how he could elevate humanity, and he was not long in
putting some of his plans into effect.
In 1852, his native town of Danvers, Massachusetts, celebrated her
centennial, and her most distinguished citizen was, of course, invited
to be present. He was too busy to attend, but sent a sealed envelope to
be opened on the day of the celebration. The seal was broken at the
dinner with which the celebration closed, and the envelope was found to
contain two slips of paper. On one was written this toast, "Education--a
debt due from present to future generations." The other was a check for
twenty thousand dollars, afterwards increased to two hundred and fifty
thousand, for the purpose of founding an Institute, with a free library
and free course of lectures. Four years later, the Peabody Institute was
dedicated, its founder being in attendance. Soon afterwards, he decided
to build a similar Institute at Baltimore, only on a more elaborate
scale, as befitting the greater city, and gave a million dollars for the
purpose. It was opened in 1869, twenty thousand school children
gathering to meet the donor and forming a guard of honor for him.
Two other great gifts marked his life--the sum of three million dollars
for the erection of model tenements for the London poor, and a like sum
for the education of the American negro. When, in 1869 the end came in
London, a great funeral was held at Westminster Abbey, and the Queen of
England sent her noblest man-of-war to bear in state across the Atlantic
the body of "her friend," the poor boy of Danvers.
It is a strange coincidence that Baltimore, which had profited so
greatly from George Peabody's philanthropy, should also be the object of
that of Johns Hopkins. The latter was of Quaker stock, was raised on a
farm, and at the age of seventeen became a clerk in his uncle's grocery
store at Baltimore. He soon accumulated enough capital to go into
business for himself, first as a grocer, then as a banker, and finally
as one of the backers of the Baltimore & Ohio Railway. In 1873, he gave
property valued at four and a half millions to found in the city of
Baltimore a hospital, which, by its charter, is free to all, regardless
of race or color; and three and a half millions for the endowment of
Johns Hopkins University, which, opened in 1876, has grown to be one of
the most famous schools of law, medicine and science in the country.
Another Quaker, Ezra Cornell, is also associated with the name of a
great university. Reared among the hills of western New York, helping
his father on his farm and in his little pottery, the boy soon developed
considerable mechanical genius, and at the age of seventeen, with the
help of only a younger brother, he built a new home for the family, a
two-story frame dwelling, the largest and best in the neighborhood. He
soon struck out into the world, engaged in businesses of various kinds
with varying success, but it was not until he was thirty-six years old
that he found his vocation.
It was at that time he became associated with S. F. B. Morse, who
engaged him to superintend the erection of the first line of telegraph
between Washington and Baltimore. Thereafter he devoted himself entirely
to the development of the new invention; succeeded, after many rebuffs
and disappointments, in organizing a company to erect a line from New
York to Washington, and superintended its construction. It was the first
of many, afterwards consolidated into the Western Union Telegraph
Company, which, for many years, held a monopoly of the telegraph
business of the country, and which made Ezra Cornell a millionaire. He
himself was well advanced in years, and finally retired from active
life, buying a great estate near Ithaca, New York, where he lived
quietly, devising a method for the best disposition of his great
fortune.
He at last decided to found an institution "where _any_ person can find
instruction in _any_ study." Work was begun at once, and in 1868,
Cornell College was formally opened, over four hundred students entering
the first year. The founder's gifts to this institution aggregated over
three millions. Many other bequests followed, which have made Cornell
one of the most liberally-endowed colleges in the country. Froude, the
great English historian, visited it on one occasion, and afterwards
said:
"There is something I admire even more than the university, and that is
the quiet, unpretending man by whom it was founded. We have had such men
in old times, and there are men in England who make great fortunes and
who make claim to great munificence; but who manifest their greatness in
buying great estates and building castles for the founding of peerages
to be handed down from father to son. Mr. Cornell has sought for
immortality, and the perpetuity of his name among the people of a free
nation. There stands his great university, built upon a rock, to endure
while the American nation endures."
The next great benefaction we have to record is, in some respects,
unique. John Fox Slater was born in Slatersville, Rhode Island, in 1815.
He was the son of Samuel Slater, proprietor of the greatest cotton-mills
in New England, and he naturally succeeded to the business upon his
father's death. The business prospered, receiving a great impetus from
the invention of the cotton-gin, and Slater's wealth increased rapidly.
He had, on more than one occasion, visited the south and seen the
negroes at work in the cotton fields. As time went on, the idea grew in
his mind that he should do something for these poor laborers to whom,
indirectly, his own fortune was due, and in 1882, he set aside the sum
of one million dollars for the purpose of "uplifting the lately
emancipated population of the Southern States, and their posterity." For
this gift he received the thanks of Congress. No part of the gift is
spent for grounds or buildings, but the whole income is spent in
assisting negroes in industrial education and in preparing them to be
the teachers of their own race. By the extraordinary ability of the
fund's treasurer, it has been increased to a million and a half,
although half a million has been expended along the lines contemplated
by the donor. This, with the Peabody fund, comprises a powerful agency
in working out the difficult problem of negro education.
* * * * *
The fortunes of such men as Peabody and Cornell and Hopkins and Peter
Cooper seem small enough to-day when compared with the gigantic
aggregations of money which a few men have succeeded in piling up. Not
all of them, by any means, devote their wealth to philanthropy. Here, as
in England, there are men concerned only with the idea of building up a
family and a great estate; but there are a few who have labored as
faithfully to use their wealth wisely as they did to accumulate it.
First of them is Leland Stanford, born in the valley of the Mohawk,
studying law, and moving to Wisconsin to practise it, but losing his law
library and all his property by fire, and finally joining the rush to
the newly-discovered California gold-fields, where he arrived in 1852,
being at that time twenty-eight years old. After some experience in the
mines, he decided that there were surer ways of getting gold than
digging for it, and set up a mercantile business in San Francisco, which
grew rapidly in importance and proved the foundation of a vast fortune.
He was the first president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and was in
charge of its construction over the mountains, driving the last spike at
Promontory Point, Utah, on the tenth of May, 1869. He was prominent in
the politics of state and nation, being elected to the United States
Senate in 1885.
It is not by his public life, however, that he will be remembered, for
he did nothing there that was in any way memorable, but by his gift of
twenty million dollars to found a great university at Palo Alto,
California, in memory of his only son. On May 14, 1887, the cornerstone
of this great institution was laid, and the university was formally
opened in 1891. The idea of its founder was that it should teach not
only the studies usually taught in college, but also other practical
branches of education, such as telegraphy, type-setting, type-writing,
book-keeping, and farming. This it has done, and so rapid has been its
growth, that it now has over seventeen hundred students enrolled.
After Senator Stanford's death in 1893, the university was further
endowed by his widow, Jane Lathrop Stanford, so that the present
productive funds of the university, after all of the buildings have been
paid for, amount to nearly twenty-five million dollars.
The second of the great givers of recent years is John Davison
Rockefeller, whose name is synonymous with the greatest natural monopoly
of modern times, the Standard Oil Company. His rise from clerk in a
grocery store to one of the greatest capitalists in the history of the
world is an interesting one, as well as an important one in the
commercial history of America. Born at Richford, New York, in 1839, his
parents moved to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was a boy of fourteen, and
such education as he had was secured in the Cleveland public schools. He
soon left school for business, getting employment first as clerk in a
commission house, and at nineteen being junior partner in the firm of
Clark & Rockefeller, commission merchants.
At that time the petroleum fields of Pennsylvania were just beginning to
be developed, and young Rockefeller's attention was soon attracted to
them. He seems to have been one of the first to realize the vast
possibilities of the oil business, and in 1865, he and his brother
William built at Cleveland a refinery which they called the Standard Oil
Works. They had little money, but unlimited nerve, and very soon began
the work of consolidation, which culminated in the formation of the
Standard Oil Trust in 1882. They were able to kill competition largely
by securing from the railroads lower shipping rates than any competitor,
in some cases going so far as to get a rebate on all oil shipped by
competitors. That is, if a railroad charged the Standard Oil Company one
dollar to carry its oil between two points and charged a competitor a
dollar and a quarter for the same service, that extra quarter went, not
into the coffers of the railroad, but into the coffers of the Standard
Oil Company. Such methods of business have since been made illegal, and
the Standard is compelled to do business on the same basis as its
competitors, but its vast resources and occupancy of the field give it
an advantage which nothing can counteract.
The operations of the Standard Oil Company naturally piled up a great
fortune for John D. Rockefeller--how great cannot even be estimated. Not
until comparatively recent years, did he turn his attention from making
money to spending it, but when he did, it was in a royal fashion. Ten
million dollars were given to the University of Chicago, which opened
its doors in 1892, and now has an enrollment of over five thousand
students; ten million more were given to the General Education Board,
organized in 1903, for the purpose of promoting education in the United
States, without distinction of race, sex, or creed, and especially to
promote and systematize various forms of educational beneficence; a
million was given to Yale; the great Rockefeller Institute for Medical
Research was founded at New York and liberally endowed; and Mr.
Rockefeller's total benefactions probably exceed a total of thirty
millions. This will soon be greatly increased, for he has just asked
Congress to charter an institution to be known as the Rockefeller
Foundation, which he will endow on an enormous scale to carry out
various plans of charity, through centuries to come.
He seems recently to have experienced a change of heart, too, toward the
public. During his early years, he gained a reputation for coldness and
reserve, which made him probably the best-hated man in the United
States. Then, suddenly, he changed about. Instead of refusing himself to
reporters, he welcomed them; he seemed glad to talk, anxious to show the
public that he was by no means such a monster as he was painted; and he
has even, quite recently, written his life story and given it to a great
magazine for publication. Seldom before has any public man shown such a
sudden and complete change of heart. He still remains, in a sense, an
enigma, for it seems possible that the smiling face he has lately turned
to the world conceals the real man more effectively than the frowning
countenance he wore in former years.
As the dramatist saves his finest effect for the fall of the curtain, so
we have saved for the last the most remarkable giver in history--Andrew
Carnegie, whose total benefactions amount to at least one hundred
millions of dollars. A sum so stupendous would bankrupt many a nation,
yet Mr. Carnegie is so far from bankrupt that his gifts show no sign of
diminution. The story of how, starting out as a poor boy, on the lowest
round of the ladder, he acquired this immense fortune, is a striking
one.
Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835. His father was a weaver,
at one time fairly well-to-do, for he owned four hand looms; but the
introduction of steam ruined hand-loom weaving, and after a long
struggle, ending in hardship and poverty, the looms were sold at a
sacrifice and the family set sail for America. Mrs. Carnegie happened to
have two sisters living at Pittsburgh, and there the family settled--by
one of those curious chances of fate, the very place in all the world
best suited to the development of young Andrew Carnegie's peculiar
genius.
At the age of twelve years, he became a wage-earner, his first position
being that of bobbin-boy in a cotton mill at Alleghany City, where his
salary was $1.20 a week. Pretty soon he was set to firing a small engine
in the cellar of the mill, but he did not like this work, and finally
secured a position as messenger boy in the office of the Atlantic & Ohio
Telegraph Company, at Pittsburgh. One night, at the end of the month, he
did not receive his pay with the rest of the boys, but was told to wait
till the others had left the room. He thought that dismissal was coming,
and wondered how he could ever go home and tell his father and mother!
But he found that he was to be given an increase in salary, from $11.25
to $13.50 a month.
"I ran all the way home," said Mr. Carnegie, in telling of the incident,
long afterwards. "Talk about your millionaires! All the millions I've
made combined, never gave me the happiness of that rise of $2.25 a
month. Arrived at the cottage where we lived, I handed my mother the
usual $11.25, and that night in bed told brother Tom the great secret.
The next morning, Sunday, we were all sitting at the breakfast table,
and I said: 'Mother, I have something else for you,' and then I gave her
the $2.25, and told her how I got it. Father and she were delighted to
hear of my good fortune, but, motherlike, she said I deserved it, and
then came tears of joy."
It was at the dinner given, in 1907, in his honor as "Father of the
Corps," by the surviving members of the United States Military Telegraph
Corps of the Civil War, that Mr. Carnegie spoke these words, and he
continued as follows:
"Comrades, I was born in poverty, and would not exchange its sacred
memories with the richest millionaire's son who ever breathed. What does
he know about mother or father? They are mere names to him. Give me the
life of the boy whose mother is nurse, seamstress, washerwoman, cook,
teacher, angel and saint, all in one, and whose father is guide,
exemplar, and friend. These are the boys who are born to the best
fortune. Some men think that poverty is a dreadful burden, and that
wealth leads to happiness. They have lived only one side; they imagine
the other. I have lived both, and I know there is very little in wealth
that can add to human happiness, beyond the small comforts of life.
Millionaires who laugh are rare. My experience is that wealth is apt to
take the smiles away."
But we are getting ahead of our story. That small increase in salary
meant a good deal to the little family, whose father was working from
dawn to dark in the cotton-mill, and whose mother was contributing what
she could to the family earnings by binding shoes in the intervals of
housework. Meantime the superintendent of the company for which the boy
was working happened to meet him while visiting the Pittsburgh office,
and it was discovered that both of them had been born near the same
town in Scotland. The fact may have had something to do with the boy's
subsequent promotion, and it is worth noting that forty years later, he
was able to secure for his old employer the United States consulship to
the town of their birth. But for the time being, he was busy with his
work as messenger-boy. He soon learned the Morse alphabet and practised
making the signals early in the morning before the operators arrived. He
was soon able to send and receive messages by means of the Morse
register--a steel pen which embossed the dots and dashes of the message
on a narrow strip of paper. But young Carnegie soon progressed a step
beyond this, and was soon able to read the messages by sound, without
need of the register. It was, of course, only a short time after that
when he was regularly installed as operator.
He was not to remain long in the telegraph business, however, for Thomas
A. Scott, superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania
Railroad, offered him a position at a salary of $35 a month. Carnegie
promptly accepted, and on February 1, 1853, at the age of seventeen,
entered the employ of the road. His promotion was rapid, and he rose to
be superintendent of the Pittsburgh division before the success of his
other ventures caused him to resign from the service. These ventures
were, in the first place, investment in the newly-developed oil-fields
of Pennsylvania, which yielded a great profit, and afterwards the
establishment of a steel rolling-mill, in the development of which he
found his true vocation, building up the most complete system of iron
and steel industries ever controlled by an individual. Some idea of the
value of the business may be gained from the fact that, when the United
States Steel Corporation was organized in 1901 to take over Mr.
Carnegie's interests he received for them, first mortgage bonds to the
amount of three hundred million dollars.
It is this sum which he has been disposing of for years. Unlike most
other philanthropists, he has not used his wealth to endow a great
university, but has devoted it mainly to another branch of education,
the establishment of free public libraries. He conceived the unique plan
of offering a library building, completely equipped, to any community
which would agree to maintain it suitably, and, by the beginning of
1909, had, under this plan, given nearly fifty-two millions of dollars
for the erection of 1858 buildings, of which 1167 are in this country.
Among his other great gifts was one of $12,000,000, for the founding at
Washington of an institution "which shall, in the broadest and most
liberal manner, encourage investigation, research, and discovery, show
the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind, and provide
such buildings, laboratories, books, and apparatus as may be needed."
The sum of ten millions was given to the great Carnegie Institute, of
Pittsburgh; still another ten millions were given to Scottish
universities, and still another for the purpose of providing pensions
for college professors in the United States and Canada; and finally
five millions for the establishment of a fund to be used for the benefit
of the dependants of those losing their lives in heroic effort to save
their fellow-men, or for the heroes themselves, if injured only. What
great benefaction will next be announced cannot, of course, be foretold,
but that some other announcement will some day be forthcoming can
scarcely be doubted, since Mr. Carnegie has announced his ambition to
die poor.
Although born in Scotland and maintaining a great estate there, he is an
American out-and-out. He proved his patriotism during the Civil War by
serving as superintendent of military railways and government telegraph
lines in the east; and has proved it more than once since by enlisting
in the fight for civic betterment and good government. Thousands of
benefactions stand to his credit, besides the great ones which have been
mentioned above, and it is doubtful if in the history of the world there
has ever been another man armed with such power and using it in such a
way.
We will end here the story of American benefactions, although scarcely
the half of it has been told. During the last forty years, not less than
one hundred millions of dollars have been given to American colleges;
nearly as much again has been given for the endowment of hospitals,
sanitariums and infirmaries; vast sums have been given for other
educational or charitable purposes, so that, of the great fortunes which
have been accumulated in this country, at least three hundred millions
have been returned, in some form or other, to the people. And the end
is not yet. Scientific philanthropy is as yet in its infancy. Just the
other day, Mrs. Russell Sage set apart the sum of ten million dollars
for a fund whose chief and almost sole purpose it is to obtain accurate
information concerning social and economic conditions--in other words,
to furnish the data upon which the scientific philanthropy of the future
will be based. The disposition toward such employment of great fortunes,
and away from the selfish piling-up of wealth is one of the most
cheering and promising developments of the new century in this great
land of ours; the kings of finance are coming to realize that, after
all, wealth is useless unless it is used for good, and the next half
century will no doubt witness the establishment of philanthropic
enterprises on a scale hitherto unknown to history.
* * * * *
We have already said that the highest form of philanthropy is not the
giving of money, but the giving of self, and we shall close this chapter
with a brief consideration of the careers of a few of the many men and
women who, in the course of American history, have devoted their lives
to the betterment of humanity, either as ministers of the gospel or as
laborers for some great reform.
[Illustration: BEECHER]
Among ministers, no name has been more widely known than that of
Beecher--first, Lyman Beecher, and afterwards his brilliant son, Henry
Ward Beecher. Lyman Beecher was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in
1775, the son of a blacksmith, and his youth was spent between
blacksmithing and farming. His love of books soon manifested itself,
however, and means were found to prepare him for Yale, where he
graduated at the age of twenty-two. A further year of study enabled him
to enter the ministry. For sixteen years, he was pastor of the
Congregational church at Litchfield, Connecticut, and soon took rank as
the leading clergyman of his denomination. His eloquence, zeal and
courage won a wide reputation, and in 1832, he was offered the
presidency of the newly-organized Lane seminary, at Cincinnati. This
place he held for twenty years, and his name was continued as president
in the seminary catalogue, until his death.
Soon after he assumed this position, the slavery question began to
assume the acute phase which ended in the Civil War. Mr. Beecher was, of
course, an Abolitionist, and for a time lived in a turmoil, for many of
the seminary students were from the south, while Cincinnati itself was
so near the borderline that there was a great pro-slavery sentiment
there. But during Mr. Beecher's absence, his trustees tried to allay
excitement and, in a way, carry water on both shoulders, by forbidding
all further discussion of slavery in the seminary, and succeeded in
nearly wrecking the institution, for the students withdrew in a body,
and while a few were persuaded to return, the great majority refused to
do so and laid the foundation of Oberlin College. For seventeen years,
Mr. Beecher labored to restore the seminary's prosperity, but finally
abandoned the task in despair. He resigned the presidency in 1852,
intending to devote his remaining years to the revision and publication
of his works, but a paralytic stroke put an end to his active career.
Mr. Beecher's vigor of mind and body were imparted in a remarkable
degree to his children, of whom he had thirteen. Of Harriet Beecher
Stowe we have already spoken, but by far the most famous of them was
Henry Ward Beecher. Born in 1813, and renouncing an early desire for a
sea-faring life in favor of the ministry, he secured his first charge in
1837, and ten years later entered upon the pastorate of Plymouth church,
in Brooklyn, where his chief fame was won. The church, one of the
largest in the country, soon became inadequate to hold the crowds which
flocked to hear his brilliant preaching. As a lecturer and platform
orator he soon came to be in such demand that he was at last compelled
to decline all such engagements. He took an active part in politics,
holding that Christianity was not a series of dogmas, but a rule of
everyday life, and did not hesitate to attack the abuses of the day from
the pulpit. He was as facile with the pen as with the tongue, and his
publications were many and important. All in all, he was one of the most
influential and picturesque figures that has ever occupied an American
pulpit.
Lyman Beecher was at all times a doughty antagonist, and in 1826 he had
been called to Boston to take up the cudgels against the so-called
Unitarian movement which had developed there, under the leadership of
William Ellery Channing. For six years and a half, he wielded the
cudgels of controversy, but with no great effect, for Channing was a
foeman in every sense his equal. Channing had graduated at Harvard in
1798, a small man of an almost feminine sensibility, with a singular
capacity for winning devoted attachment from all with whom he came in
contact. For two years, he served as tutor in a family at Richmond,
Virginia, where he acquired an abhorrence of slavery that lasted through
life. Upon his return north, he began the study of theology at
Cambridge, and in 1803, became pastor of a church in Boston, where he
soon attracted attention by sermons of a rare "fervor, solemnity, and
beauty." He was from the first identified with the movement of thought,
which came to be known as Unitarian, and gave to the body so-called a
consciousness of its position and a clear statement of its convictions
with his sermon delivered at Baltimore, in 1819, on the occasion of the
ordination of Jared Sparks. For the fifteen years succeeding, Channing
was best known to the public as the leader of the Unitarian movement,
and his sermons delivered during that period constitute the best body of
practical divinity which that movement has produced. In later years, he
was identified with many philanthropical and reform movements, and was
one of the pillars of the anti-slavery cause, though never adopting the
extreme opinions of the abolitionists. Of his rare quality and power as
a pulpit orator many traditions remain, and his death at the age of
sixty-two removed a great power for righteousness.
Even to give a list of the men and women who have sacrificed their lives
in the attempt to carry the gospel of Christianity to heathen nations is
beyond the limits of a book like this, but at least mention can be made
of two of the earliest, Adoniram Judson and his wife, whose experiences
form one of the most thrilling chapters in missionary history.
Adoniram Judson was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1788, and after
graduating at Brown University, and taking a special course at Andover
Theological seminary, became deeply interested in foreign missions, and
in 1810, determined to go to Burmah. Securing the support of the London
Missionary Society, he sailed for Asia on the nineteenth of February,
1812. Two weeks before, he had married Ann Haseltine, who consented to
share his work, and who sailed with him. On that long voyage, they had
ample time to discuss and consider the various dogmas of their faith,
and they became convinced that the baptism of the New Testament was
immersion, and in accordance with this view, both of them were baptized
by immersion upon reaching Calcutta. But this change of faith cut them
off from the body which had sent them to India, and it was not until
1814 that the Baptists of America took the two missionaries under their
care.
Meanwhile, Dr. Judson mastered the Burmese language and began his public
preaching. Before long, he baptized his first convert, and pushed
forward the work with renewed zeal, translating the gospels into
Burmese, publishing tracts in that language, and undertaking the most
perilous journeys. The Burmese government had never been friendly, and
in 1824, seized the missionaries and threw them into prison. They were
confined in the "death hole," reeking with foul air, without light, and
were loaded with fetters. Just enough food was given them to keep them
alive, and at last, stripped almost naked, they were driven like cattle
under the burning sun, to another prison, where it was intended to burn
them alive. They were saved by the intercession of Sir Archibald
Campbell, but Mrs. Judson's health had been wrecked by the terrible
experience. She never recovered, dying two years later. Undaunted by
difficulties, Dr. Judson continued his work, completing his translation
of the Bible, travelling over India, compiling a Burmese grammar and
dictionary, but his labors at last undermined even his constitution and
he died at sea in 1850, while on his way to the Isle of France.
Turn we now to Lucretia Mott, one of the most extraordinary women who
ever lived in America. Born in Nantucket in 1793, the daughter of a
sea-captain named Thomas Coffin, she was raised in the strict Quaker
faith, to which her parents belonged. She began teaching while still a
girl, and at the age of eighteen, married a fellow teacher, James Mott.
It was not long after that, that she developed the "gift" of speaking at
the Quaker meetings, simply, earnestly and eloquently. The Quakers had
always opposed slavery and Lucretia Mott was soon working heart and
soul against it. When the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in
1833, she was one of four women who joined it, and she proceeded
immediately to organize the Female Anti-Slavery Society, the first
organization of women in America working for a political purpose. Years
of abuse followed, for in those days anti-slavery lecturers were tarred
and feathered, their homes burned, and many other indignities heaped
upon them. Throughout all this, Mrs. Mott never lost her serenity, and
never suffered bodily injury. On one occasion, the annual meeting of the
Anti-Slavery Society, in New York, was broken up by a mob, and some of
the speakers were roughly handled. Perceiving that some of the women
were badly frightened, Mrs. Mott asked her escort to look after them.
"But who will take care of you?" he asked.
"This man will," she said, and smilingly laid her hand upon the arm of
one of the leaders of the mob. "He will see me safe through."
The rioter stared down at her for a moment, his conflicting thoughts
betraying themselves upon his countenance, then his better nature
triumphed and he led her respectfully to a place of safety.
She seems to have possessed the power of charming any audience, and
carried her anti-slavery campaign even into Kentucky, where she
commanded respectful attention. She was one of the first to take up the
question of woman suffrage, and in 1848, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
a few others, called the first Woman's Suffrage Convention ever held in
this country. For fifty years she continued her public work, until she
grew to be one of the best known and best loved women in the country.
She lived to see the slave freed, and when she died, a great concourse
followed her body silently to the grave. As they stood there with bowed
heads, a low voice asked, "Will no one say anything?"
"Who can speak?" another voice responded, "The preacher is dead."
* * * * *
In this day of pitying and enlightened treatment of the insane, it is
difficult to realize the barbarities which they were called upon to
endure a century ago. They were regarded almost as wild beasts, were
kept chained in foul and loathsome places, fed with mouldy bread, filthy
water, and allowed to die the most miserable death. For everyone used to
believe that insanity was a mark of God's displeasure, and the outcast
from His heart became equally an outcast from the hearts of men. The
insane were regarded with fear and loathing, and it was not until the
beginning of the nineteenth century that such men as Dr. Channing began
to insist on the presence in human nature, even in its most degraded
condition, of grains of good.
It was from Dr. Channing that Dorothea Lynde Dix drank in this theory
with passionate faith, and proceeded at once to convert it into action.
She was governess of Dr. Channing's children, and had long been
interested in bettering the condition of convicts; but now her
attention was turned to the insane and she proceeded at once to master
the whole question of insanity, its origin, its development, and its
treatment, so far as it was then known. Enlisting the aid of a number of
broad-minded men, among them Charles Sumner, she went to work. In one
prison, she found two insane women, each confined in a small cage of
planks; others were locked in closets, cellars, and stalls; some of them
were naked, some were chained, some were regularly beaten and scourged.
With all her data at hand, she addressed a memorial to the Massachusetts
legislature, setting forth, in page after page, the details of these
almost incredible horrors, which she herself had witnessed.
It exploded like a bombshell, for it was a terrific arraignment of the
whole state. Her statements were denounced as untrue and slanderous, but
a little investigation proved their truth, and with such men behind her
as Channing, Horace Mann, and Samuel G. Howe, it was soon apparent that
something would be done. The obstructions and delays of politicians were
swept away before a steadily rising tide of public indignation, and a
large appropriation was made by the legislature to provide proper
quarters and proper treatment for insane persons. So Miss Dix won her
first great victory, the forerunner of similar ones in almost every
state in the union; for she travelled from state to state making the
same investigations she had in Massachusetts, arousing public opinion,
and compelling legislature after legislature to make adequate provision
for the insane. The vastness of this campaign which Miss Dix planned
deliberately and which she carried through until she had visited every
state east of the Rocky Mountains, gives evidence to her extraordinary
character. During the Civil War, she was superintendent of hospital
nurses, having the entire control of their appointment and assignment.
But the care of the insane was her life work. She resumed it at the
close of the war, and carried it forward until her death.
* * * * *
We have already referred more than once, in the course of these
chapters, to the anti-slavery agitation which ended in the Civil War.
During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, it was the one
great political question in America, upon which men were compelled to
take one side or the other. From the first, there existed in the north a
band of abolitionists--of men, in other words, who believed that the
only solution of the slavery question was to put an end to that
institution at once and forever. Of the persecutions which were visited
on the abolitionists we have spoken when telling the story of Lucretia
Mott. Social ostracism was the least of them.
Perhaps no one person in America did more to crystalize public sentiment
against slavery than Lydia Maria Child. An author at the age of
seventeen, and writing continuously until her death, coming early under
the influence of William Lloyd Garrison, that great leader of the
abolitionists, it was inevitable that she should employ her pen to
assist the cause. In 1833 appeared her "Appeal for that class of
Americans called Africans," the first anti-slavery work printed in
America in book form, antedating Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by
nineteen years. It attracted wide attention, enlisting the interest of
such men as Dr. Channing, who walked from Boston to Roxbury to thank the
author. But it was not without its penalties, for society closed its
doors to Mrs. Child, many of her friends deserted her, and she was made
the subject of much cruel comment. However, she became more and more
interested in the anti-slavery crusade, edited the "National
Anti-Slavery Standard," and wrote pamphlet after pamphlet. When John
Brown was taken prisoner, she wrote him a letter of sympathy, which drew
forth a courteous rebuke from Governor Wise, of Virginia, and a letter
from the wife of Senator Mason, the author of the fugitive slave law,
threatening her with future damnation. These letters were published and
had a circulation of three hundred thousand copies. Wendell Phillips
paid an eloquent tribute to her character and influence, at her funeral:
"She was the kind of woman," he said, "one would choose to represent
woman's entrance into broader life. Modest, womanly, sincere, solid,
real, loyal, to be trusted, equal to affairs, and yet above them; a
companion with the password of every science and all literature."
But however valuable the services of women like Lucretia Mott and Lydia
Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe were in the fight against slavery,
the leader and high priest of the movement was William Lloyd Garrison.
Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1805, his was an unhappy boyhood,
for his father, a sea-captain of intemperate and adventurous habits,
left his family, soon after the boy was born, and was never seen again.
The mother, a woman of unusual strength of character, went to work to
earn a living for herself and her son, and it was to her careful
training that his development was due. At fourteen years of age, he was
apprenticed to a printery and served until he was of age. From the first
he was remarkable for his firmness of moral principle and for an
inflexible adherence to his convictions, no matter at what cost to
himself.
He soon showed, too, that he was destined for something more than a
printer--a man who puts in print the ideas of others--that he had ideas
of his own. His apprenticeship over, he started a paper of his own, but
it was too reformatory for the taste of the day, and proved a failure.
The most noteworthy thing in connection with it was the publication of
some poems which had been sent in anonymously, and which Garrison,
recognizing their merit, discovered to be the work of John G. Whittier,
then entirely unknown. He visited the poet, encouraged him to keep on
writing, and laid the foundation of a friendship which was broken only
by death.
Going to Boston after the failure of his paper, Garrison for a time
edited the "National Philanthropist," devoted to prohibition. This
paper, too, was a failure, but at Boston Garrison met a man whose
influence changed the whole course of his life. His name was Benjamin
Bundy. He was a Quaker, and at that time thirty-nine years of age. He
was a saddler by trade, but for thirteen years had devoted his life to
the anti-slavery cause, forming anti-slavery societies and editing a
little monthly paper with a portentous name--"The Genius of Universal
Emancipation." Bundy, whose home was in Baltimore, had journeyed to New
England in the hope of interesting the clergy in the cause. In this he
was bitterly disappointed, but he mightily stirred the heart of young
Garrison, who soon became his ally and afterwards his partner in the
conduct of the paper. His vigorous editing of it was soon a national
sensation. He had seen with dismay the indifference with which the north
regarded the great issue--an indifference grounded on the belief that
slavery was intrenched by the constitution and that all discussion of it
was a menace to the Union. He realized that this indifference could be
broken only by heroic measures, and he took the ground that since
slavery was wrong, every slave had a right to instant freedom, and that
immediate emancipation was the duty of the master and of the state.
Baltimore was at that time one of the centres of the slave trade. There
were slave-pens on the principal streets, and Garrison soon witnessed
scenes which would have touched a less tender heart. In the first issue
of his paper, he denounced this traffic as "domestic piracy," and named
some men engaged in it, among them a vessel-owner of his own town of
Newburyport. This man immediately had Garrison arrested for "gross and
malicious libel," he was found guilty, fined fifty dollars and costs,
and as there was no one to pay this, was thrown into prison.
Garrison took his imprisonment calmly enough, but his old friend, John
G. Whittier, was deeply distressed and appealed to Henry Clay to secure
the release of the "guiltless prisoner." This Clay would probably have
done, but he was anticipated by another friend of Garrison's, Arthur
Tappan, of New York, who sent the money to pay the fine, and the young
agitator was free again, after an imprisonment of forty-nine days. He
had not been idle while in prison, but had prepared a series of lectures
on slavery, which he proceeded at once to deliver. Then, on the first
day of January, 1831, he began in Boston the publication of a weekly
paper called the "Liberator," which he continued for thirty-five years,
until its fight was won and slavery was abolished.
How well that fight was waged history has shown. In his first number he
announced: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as
justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, to speak, or write with
moderation. No! No! Tell the man whose home is on fire to give a
moderate alarm; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the
fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a
cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will
not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--and I will be heard."
And heard he was. The whole land was soon filled with excitement; the
apathy of years was broken. From the south came hundreds of letters
threatening him with death if he did not desist, and the state of
Georgia offered a reward of $5,000 for his apprehension. In the north,
anti-slavery societies were formed everywhere, and the movement grew
with great rapidity, in spite of powerful efforts to crush it. There
were riots everywhere. Garrison was dragged through the streets of
Boston with a rope around his body and his life was saved only by
lodging him in jail; Elijah Lovejoy was slain at Alton, Illinois, while
defending his press; Marius Robinson, an anti-slavery lecturer, was
tarred and feathered in Mahoning County, Ohio; in the cities of the
south, mobs broke into the postoffice and made bonfires of anti-slavery
papers and pamphlets found there. Quarrels and dissension in the
anti-slavery ranks developed in time, but when the Civil War was over,
the leaders of the Republican party united with Garrison's friends in
raising for him the sum of $30,000, and after his death the city of
Boston raised a statue to his memory. Perhaps no better estimate of him
has ever been made than that of John A. Andrew, war governor of
Massachusetts:
"The generation which preceded ours regarded him only as a wild
enthusiast, a fanatic, or a public enemy. The present generation sees in
him the bold and honest reformer, the man of original, self-poised,
heroic will, inspired by a vision of universal justice, made actual in
the practice of nations; who, daring to attack without reserve the
worst and most powerful oppression of his country and his time, has
outlived the giant wrong he assailed, and has triumphed over the
sophistries by which it was maintained."
Closely second to Garrison in the awakening of the public conscience to
the enormities of slavery was Theodore Parker, one of the purest, most
self-sacrificing and interesting of personalities. He came of good
stock. His grandfather, John Parker, commanded the little company of
minute-men who held the bridge at Lexington on that fateful nineteenth
of April, 1775; his father a farmer, and Theodore himself the youngest
of eleven children. The family was poor and the boy was brought up to
hard labor, with short intervals of schooling now and then. But his
thirst for knowledge seems to have been insatiable, and he read
everything he could lay his hands on, even to translations of Homer and
Plutarch and Rollin's "Ancient History." A century ago, a book was a far
greater treasure than it is to-day, when their very number has made us
in a way contemptuous of them; and the few which young Parker could
secure were read and re-read and learned through and through. His memory
was amazing, and at the age of twenty he walked from his home in
Lexington to Cambridge, took the entrance examination for Harvard
College, passed with honors, and, walking home again, told his
unsuspecting father, then in bed, of his success. He could not be spared
from the farm, however, nor was there any money to pay for his
maintenance at Cambridge, so he continued working on the farm, keeping
up with his class by studying in the evenings and going to Cambridge
only to take the examinations.
He undertook teaching after that, and gradually worked his way toward
the ministry, to which he was admitted in 1837. He was soon called to
Boston, to a congregation independent of sectarian bonds, and here he
reached the culmination of his fame, attracting the most cultured people
of the city by his breadth of knowledge, warmth of feeling and intensity
of conviction. His interest in slavery began early, and by 1845, his
share in the anti-slavery struggle had become engrossing. He threw
himself into it heart and soul, and no one did more to awaken the
conscience of the north. His speeches, letters, sermons, tracts and
lectures had an immense influence; he took an active part in aiding
runaway slaves to get to Canada, and his labors were incessant and
prodigious. His health at last gave way, and the end came in 1860, at
Florence, Italy, where he lies buried.
Parker's immense influence was due to the brain rather than to the
heart. He possessed no grace of person, music of voice, or charm of
manner, none of that fascination which is a part of the great orator. He
was a white-hot flame which scorched and seared, an intellect pure and
piercing, a self-made instrument to expose the shams of society.
Closely associated with Garrison and Parker in the fight against
slavery, and in some ways more famous than either, was Wendell Phillips.
The very opposite of Parker, handsome in person, cultivated in manner,
with a charm of personality seldom equalled,--the two yet worked hand in
hand for a common cause, the one, as it were, supplementing the other.
Wendell Phillips was the son of John Phillips, the first mayor of
Boston, and was a year younger than Theodore Parker. He went the way of
all well-to-do Boston youth through Harvard, graduating there in 1831,
without distinguishing himself particularly, except by his skill in
debate and his finished elocution. During one of the revivals of
religion which followed the settlement of Dr. Lyman Beecher at Boston,
he became a convert, and this marked the beginning of his interest in
the great moral question of the day, slavery. It soon became
overwhelming, and was given point and passion by a spectacle which he
witnessed on October 21, 1835.
He had studied for the law, been admitted to the bar, and opened an
office, and looking from his office window on that October day, he saw a
mob break up an anti-slavery meeting on the street below, pull William
Lloyd Garrison off the platform, tear his clothes from his back, throw a
rope around him and drag him through the streets, ready to hang him, and
prevented from doing so only by a ruse of the mayor, who got Garrison
into the jail and locked him up for safety. That spectacle moved the
young lawyer through and through, and from that moment he was an avowed
Abolitionist.
"If clients do not come," he had said to a friend a short time before,
"I will throw myself heart and soul into some good cause and devote my
life to it."
Clients would have come, no doubt, but the good cause came first. His
opportunity came in 1837, when Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a mob at
Alton, Illinois, for publishing an anti-slavery paper. Phillips, stirred
with indignation, arranged for a public meeting at Faneuil Hall, and was
of course present, but with no expectation of speaking. Dr. Channing
made an impressive address, and one or two others followed, when James
T. Austin, attorney-general of the state, and bitterly opposed to the
anti-slavery agitation, arose. He eulogized the Alton murderers,
comparing them with the patriots of the Revolution, and declared that
Lovejoy had "died as the fool dieth." Some instinct led the chair to
call upon Wendell Phillips to reply. He consented, and as he stepped
upon the platform won instant admiration by his dignity, his
self-possession, and his manly beauty.
"Mr. Chairman," he began, "when I heard the gentleman who has just
spoken lay down principles which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and
murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and
Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the
hall] would have broken into voice, to rebuke the recreant American, the
slanderer of the dead. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil
consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the
earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."
The effect of the whole speech was tremendous. At last the
abolitionists had found a champion equal to the best, and from that hour
to the end of the anti-slavery conflict, he was foremost in the fight.
He accepted without reservation the doctrines which Garrison had
formulated: that slavery was under all circumstances a sin and that
immediate emancipation was a fundamental right and duty. Up and down the
land, obeying every call so far as his strength would permit, he
travelled, lecturing against slavery, asking no pecuniary reward. He was
soon a great popular favorite--the greatest, perhaps, who ever mounted a
lecture platform in America,--and gained a hearing in quarters where,
before, abolitionists had been hated and derided. His tact in winning
over a turbulent audience was extraordinary; the strongest opponents of
the anti-slavery cause felt the spell of his power, and often confessed
the justice of his arguments.
When that fight was won and the negro had gained his freedom, Wendell
Phillips remained the foremost critic of public men and measures in
America, and year after year, he devoted his great gifts to guiding
popular opinion. A champion of temperance, of the rights of labor, of
the Indians, of equal suffrage, he stood forth until his death an
inspiring and august figure--a man who devoted his life wholly to the
welfare of his country.
One of the reforms which Wendell Phillips advocated was that of woman
suffrage, but this movement has come to be particularly associated with
the name of Susan B. Anthony. Like her great predecessor in that cause,
Lucretia Mott, Miss Anthony was a Quaker, and the Quakers, it should be
remembered, made no distinction of sex when it came to speaking in their
meeting-houses. Her father was well-to-do, and she received a careful
education, and in 1847, first spoke in public. The temperance movement
absorbed her energies at first; then the Abolitionist cause; and finally
the work of securing equal civil rights for women. During the winter of
1854, she held woman suffrage meetings in every county in New York
State, and the remainder of her life was devoted to this cause.
Her most prominent co-worker was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose
inspiration came directly from Lucretia Mott, whom she met in 1840, and
with whom she joined, eight years later, in issuing a call for the first
woman's suffrage convention. The convention was held at Mrs. Stanton's
home at Seneca Falls, New York, and from that time forward, she devoted
herself entirely to lecturing and writing upon the subject. That the
cause of woman suffrage has made so little headway is certainly not
because of a lack of devoted and accomplished advocates; it seems rather
to be due to the fact that it has not yet succeeded in winning over the
great body of women, who have held aloof and viewed the movement with
indifference, if not with suspicion.
* * * * *
We cannot close this consideration of the anti-slavery movement without
some reference to that strange fanatic, John Brown, who headed a
forlorn hope and gave up his life for an idea. It was the custom at one
time to consider John Brown a saint, at the north, and a very emissary
of Satan, at the south. One estimate was as untrue as the other. He was
merely a misguided old man, grown a little mad, perhaps, from long
brooding over one subject.
He was born at Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800, his father being a
shoemaker and tanner, who, five years later, moved to Hudson, Ohio, then
a mere outpost in the wilderness. He was soon expert in woodcraft, and
he relates how, when he was six years old, an Indian boy gave him a
yellow marble, the first he had ever seen, and which he treasured for a
long time. He had little or no schooling, and a project to educate him
for the ministry was cut short by an inflammation of the eyes. He grew
up into a tall, handsome man, headstrong, but humane and kind, and
easily moved to tears. He married young and had many children, for some
of whom a tragic fate was waiting.
He soon became interested in the anti-slavery movement, and, by 1837,
was so absorbed by it that he made his family take a solemn oath of
active opposition to slavery. Ten years later, he unfolded to Frederick
Douglass a plan for a negro insurrection in the Virginia mountains, but
nothing came of it. From that time forward, the project seems to have
slumbered at the back of his mind, and he grew more and more certain
that the only way to end slavery was to arm the blacks and encourage
them to fight for freedom. In 1854, his sons emigrated to Kansas, then
in the throes of civil war over the slavery question, and their father
busied himself raising money to send arms and ammunition into the
troubled state. Finally, in September, 1855, he himself removed to
Kansas, became the captain of a band of Free State Rangers, took part in
the fight at Lawrence, and in some other affairs, and then, proceeding
to the shores of Pottawatomie creek, where several pro-slavery men
lived, seized five of them and put them to death.
For this deed he never experienced any compunction; he believed that he
was directed by Providence in these "executions," as he called them, and
after they were over, he held divine services. His fearful deed sent a
thrill of horror through the country, and Brown and his sons became
marked men. Their houses were burned, and one of the sons went insane
from brooding over the father's deed. Brown himself was charged with
murder, treason and conspiracy, and a price put on his head, but no one
attempted to arrest him. Another of his sons was soon afterwards shot
and killed by pro-slavery men and Brown, hastily collecting a small
force, attacked the marauders, and killed or wounded many of them,
himself being injured by a spent rifle ball. The fight was known as "the
battle of Osawatomie," and Brown was thereafterwards known as
"Osawatomie" Brown.
But the fight in Kansas was about won, and Brown again took up the idea
of a slave insurrection. He went to Boston to raise the necessary money,
and succeeded in getting it without much trouble, though most of the
people who gave it to him had only the haziest kind of an idea of what
it was he proposed to do. He bought rifles and ammunition, and also had
a thousand pikes made with which to arm the negroes, who, of course,
would not know how to use the rifle. Then he got together a band of
young men, secured a military instructor; and on July 3, 1859, he
appeared at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, hired a small farm near there, and
quietly assembled his men and munitions.
Harper's Ferry had been selected because there was a well-equipped
arsenal there which would furnish the arms and munitions which he had
been unable to buy, and would also serve as a base of operations. Brown
intended to proceed to the mountains, gathering up the slaves as he
went, and establish headquarters in some strong position, where he could
drill his forces and prepare for a raid on the rest of the state. He
believed the slaves would flock to him, and that he would soon be at the
head of a great army. He tried to get Frederick Douglass to join him,
but Douglass refused, and, at last, on the night of Sunday, October 16,
1859, at the head of a little band of twenty-two men, whites and
negroes, he moved on the arsenal. They reached the covered bridge over
the Potomac without adventure, crossed until they were near the Virginia
side, seized the solitary sentinel who challenged them, broke down the
armory gate with a sledge hammer, seized the remainder of the guard, and
a few citizens, who attempted to interfere, and were soon firmly in
possession of not only the arsenal, but also the little town.
Meanwhile, the country round about was arming, and by noon, of Monday,
Brown was so surrounded that he could not escape. Why he had not got
away to the mountains in the morning, as he had intended doing, no one
knows. The Virginia militia gathered, and in the early evening, a
company of United States marines arrived from Washington, under command
of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. They soon found
out how small Brown's force was, carried the arsenal by assault, and
took Brown and the survivors of his little band prisoners. Brown's two
sons were dead, as were seven others of his followers, and seven more
had succeeded in escaping, though two were afterwards captured.
The rest is soon told. Brown was swiftly tried and convicted of "treason
and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel, and of
murder in the first degree," was sentenced to death, and was hanged on
December 2, 1859. The affair made the South wild with rage and
apprehension, for a slave insurrection was a thing to be trembled at,
and Brown's execution similarly affected his friends at the North. He
had once remarked, "I am worth a good deal more to hang than for any
other purpose," and this was, in a sense, true, for in the words of the
great marching song of the Northern armies during the war which
followed, "his soul was marching on."
Another branch of philanthropy with which the name of a woman is closely
identified is that of caring for the wounded and destitute in time of
war or disaster, and the woman is Clara Barton. Born in Massachusetts
about 1830, she started in life as a school-teacher, but in 1854 secured
a position in the patent office at Washington, where she remained until
the opening of the Civil War. The sight of the suffering in the
Washington hospitals revealed to her her real vocation, and she
determined to devote herself to the care of wounded soldiers on the
battlefield. This work of mercy was one that carried with it a wide
appeal, and she soon secured influential backing and support.
Her work was so effective that in 1864, she was appointed "lady in
charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James, and in
the following year was sent to Andersonville, Georgia, to identify and
mark the graves of the Union soldiers buried there. Soon afterwards she
was placed by President Lincoln in charge of the search for missing men
of the Union armies--a work of the first importance, to which she
devoted all her energies, and which she carried on for some years after
the war closed, raising the necessary money by lectures and appeals for
donations. Thousands of families at the North have reason to thank her
for definite knowledge as to the fate of their loved ones.
Her health broke down under the strain, at last, and she went for a rest
to Switzerland, but the outbreak of the Franco-German war, in 1870,
called her again to duty, assisting the grand duchess of Baden in the
preparation of military hospitals, and giving the Red Cross Society the
benefit of her experience. In 1871, at the request of the German
authorities, she superintended the supplying of work to the poor of
Strasburg, after that city had been reduced by siege; and after the fall
of Paris, she was placed in charge of the distribution of supplies to
the destitute of that great city. At the close of the war, she was
decorated with the golden cross of Baden and the iron cross of Germany.
Although the Red Cross societies in Europe had been established as early
as 1863, and an international organization completed six years later,
the society was not officially recognized by the United States until
1882. The American Association of the Red Cross was at once organized,
and Miss Barton chosen its president, a position which she held without
opposition for many years. Its object as stated by its constitution is
"to organize a system of national relief and apply the same in
mitigating suffering caused by war, pestilence, famine and other
calamities." Since then, every such occasion has found the society in
the forefront of relief work, and it has distributed many millions in
assuaging human suffering.
* * * * *
Still another great reform, ridiculed at first, but now recognized as
one of the most beneficent movements of the age is associated with a
single name. The reform is the protection of dumb animals, and the name
is that of Henry Bergh.
Born in New York City in 1823, the son of a wealthy ship-builder and
inheriting his father's fortune at the age of twenty, Henry Bergh, after
spending some years in Europe, a portion of them in the diplomatic
service of the United States, returned to this country, determined to
devote the remainder of his life to the interests of animals.
It was a new idea which he presented to the public, met at first with
indifference, then with ridicule and opposition. But as a bold worker in
the streets of New York, by a relentless activity in carrying cases of
ill-treatment of animals to the courts, and an eloquent advocacy of his
cause on the floor of the legislature, he soon won friends and support,
as every great cause is bound to do, and finally succeeded in so winning
over public sentiment that, in 1866, the legislature passed the laws
which he had prepared, creating the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals, with himself as president. He gave not only his
time, but his property to the work, and soon had the society in a
prosperous condition, with branches forming in other cities. Indeed, the
idea which he fostered has spread to the whole country, and nowhere may
animals be mistreated with impunity. The idea that man is responsible
not only for the happiness of his fellows, but for the well-being of his
beasts marks a long stride forward in ethics.
Bergh's influence, indeed, extended beyond this country. Not only did
practically every state in the Union enact the laws for the protection
of animals which he had procured from the state of New York, but Brazil,
the Argentine Republic, and many other foreign countries did likewise.
In 1874, Bergh rescued a little girl from inhuman treatment, and this
led to the formation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children, which has also done a great work.
No doubt before Bergh's time, there were many people who were pained to
see either children or animals mistreated and who passed by with averted
eyes. Bergh did not pass by. He made it his business, in the first
place, to secure adequate laws for the punishment of cruelty, and in the
second place, to provide means for the enforcement of those laws.
There are many of us to-day who are shocked at the injustice and
suffering in the world, and who would welcome its regeneration. But
wishing for a thing never got it. Nor does philanthropy consist merely
in wishing men well. It means labor and self-sacrifice, and frequently
obloquy and misunderstanding. The reward of the reformer is usually a
stone and a sneer, if nothing worse. But when a man's heart is in the
work, stones and sneers seem only to spur him on. They are like wind to
a flame, fanning it white-hot. And it is a wonderful commentary on the
essential goodness of human nature that never yet, in the history of
mankind, has a real and needed reform failed, in the end, of success.
Among latter-day clergymen in America, none has achieved a wider
reputation or a greater personal popularity than Phillips Brooks. Born
in Boston in 1835, a graduate of Harvard, ordained to the Episcopal
ministry at the age of twenty-four, and ten years later called to the
rectorship of Trinity church, Boston, it was in this latter field, which
he would never leave, that he showed himself to be one of the strongest
personalities and noblest preachers of his age. No more striking figure
ever appeared in a pulpit. Of magnificent physique, with a striking and
massive head and handsome countenance, breathing the very spirit of
youth, in spite of his grey hair, he had the interest and attention of
any audience before he opened his lips.
Phillips Brooks has been compared to Henry Ward Beecher, and in many
things they were alike. But the former's culture, while perhaps less
varied than Beecher's, was deeper and richer, his sermons were less
brilliant but cast in better form, his appeal was narrower but to a far
more influential class. He was, in a word, the preacher of the
intellectual. No one who heard him preach ever failed to be startled at
first by his tremendous rapidity of delivery--averaging two hundred
words a minute--or failed to find himself, at first, lagging behind the
equal rapidity of thought. But once accustomed to these--once realizing
that, in listening to him there could be no inattention or wandering of
wits--his sermon became a source of keenest intellectual delight and
noblest spiritual inspiration.
Phillips Brooks often said that he had to preach rapidly, or not at all.
In youth he had suffered from something resembling an impediment in his
speech, and more measured utterance gave it a chance to recur.
Certainly, no one who ever listened to his fluent and limpid utterance
would have suspected it. But he was far more than a great preacher. By
his broad tolerance, his lofty character and immense personal influence,
he became, in a way, a national figure, the common property of the
nation which felt itself the richer for possessing him. A gracious and
courtly figure, with a heart as wide as the human race, he lives,
somehow, as the true type of clergyman, whose concern is humanity and
whose field the world.
Which brings us to the life of the last man we shall consider in this
chapter, a man the opposite in many ways of the great clergyman whose
career we have just noted, and yet, like him, of broadest sympathies and
most sincere convictions; a man whose life was more picturesque, whose
battle against fate was harder, and whose achievement was even more
remarkable--the greatest evangelist the modern world has ever produced,
Dwight L. Moody. If ever a man labored for his fellow-men, he did, and
the story of his life reads almost like a romance.
He was born at Northfield, Massachusetts, in 1837, the son of a
stone-mason, who, disheartened and worn out by business reverses, died
when the boy was only four years old. There were nine children, the
oldest only fifteen, and when the father's creditors came and took every
possession they had in the world, the future looked dark indeed. The
mother was urged to place the children in various homes, but she managed
to keep them together by doing housework for the neighbors and tilling a
little garden.
As soon as he was old enough, Dwight was put to work on a farm, but his
earnings were small, and finally, when he was seventeen, he started for
Boston to look for something better. He managed to get a position in a
shoe-store, and there came under the influence of Edward Kimball, who
persuaded him to become a Christian and to join a church. But he was not
admitted to membership for nearly a year; so poor was his command of
language and so awkward his sentences that it was doubted if he
understood Christianity at all, and even when he was admitted, the
committee stated that they thought him "very unlikely ever to become a
Christian of clear and decided views of gospel truth; still less to fill
any extended sphere of public usefulness." How blind, indeed, we often
are to the possibilities in human nature!
At the age of nineteen, Dwight removed to Chicago, secured another
position as shoe-salesman, and offered his services to a mission school
as a teacher. His appearance made anything but a favorable impression,
but finally he was told that he might teach provided he brought his own
scholars. The next Sunday he walked in at the head of a score of
ragamuffins he had gathered up along the wharves. The divine fire seems
to have been working in him; he was finding words with which to express
himself, and burning for a wider field. So he rented a room in the slum
districts which had been used as a saloon and opened a Sunday school
there. It was an immense success, soon outgrew the little room, and was
removed to a large hall, where, every Sunday, a thousand boys and girls
attended. For six years, Moody conducted that school, sweeping it out
and doing the janitor work himself, attending to his business as
salesman throughout the week. But in 1860, at the age of twenty-three,
he decided to devote all his time to Christian work.
He had no income, and to keep his expenses as low as possible, he slept
at night on a bench in his school, and cooked his own food. Then the
Civil War began, and he erected a tent at the camp near Chicago where
the recruits were gathered, and labored there all day, sometimes holding
eight or ten meetings. He went with the men to the front, and was at the
desperate battles of Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chattanooga. The war
over, he took up again his work in Chicago. The great fire of 1871 swept
away his church, but he soon had a temporary structure erected, and
labored on.
By this time, his fame had got abroad, and finally in 1873, his great
opportunity came. Accompanied by Ira D. Sankey, the famous singer of
hymns, he started on an evangelist tour of Great Britain. At his first
meeting only four people were present; at his last, thirty thousand
crowded to hear him. In Ireland, the crowds sometimes covered six acres,
and during the four months he spent in London, over two million people
heard him preach. Great Britain had never before experienced such a
religious awakening; but it was as nothing to the reception given him
when he returned to America two years later. There are many people still
living who remember those wonderful revivals in Philadelphia, New York,
and Boston, with their great choirs, and Ira Sankey's singing, and
Moody's soul-stirring talks. From that time forward he was easily the
first evangelist in the world--perhaps the greatest the world had ever
seen.
It is doubtful if any man ever faced and preached to so many people. He
spoke to thousands night after night, week in and week out. In his
themes he kept close to life, and few men were his equal in making
scriptural biography vivid and realistic; in reconstructing scriptural
scenes and setting them, as it were, bodily before his audience. He was
not a cultured man, as we understand the word--not a man of broad
learning; perhaps such learning would only have weakened him--nor did he
have the presence and voice which go so far toward the equipment of the
orator. But he burned with an intense conviction, and his sermons were
so free from art, so direct, so persuasive, that they were perfectly
adapted to the end he sought--the conversion of human beings.
SUMMARY
GIRARD, STEPHEN. Born near Bordeaux, France, May 24, 1750; sailed as
cabin-boy to West Indies, and then to America; established in
Philadelphia, 1769; financial mainstay of government in war of 1812;
died at Philadelphia, December 26, 1831.
SMITHSON, JAMES LEWIS MACIE. Born in France in 1765; matriculated from
Pembroke College, Oxford, England, 1782; Fellow Royal Society, 1786;
distinguished as student of mineralogy and chemistry; died at Genoa,
Italy, June 27, 1829.
COOPER, PETER. Born at New York City, February 12, 1791; apprenticed to
carriage-maker, 1808; engaged in various enterprises and established
Canton Iron Works, Canton, Maryland, 1830; Greenback candidate for
President, 1876; died at New York, April 4, 1883.
PEABODY, GEORGE. Born at Danvers, Massachusetts, February 18, 1795;
settled in London as a banker, 1837; died there, November 4, 1869.
HOPKINS, JOHNS. Born at Waterbury, Connecticut, May 19, 1795; founded
house of Hopkins & Brothers, 1822; chairman of finance committee
Baltimore & Ohio railroad, 1855; died at Baltimore, December 24, 1873.
CORNELL, EZRA. Born at Westchester Landing, New York, January 11, 1807;
mechanic and miller at Ithaca, New York, 1828-41; member of State
Assembly, 1862-63; State Senator, 1864-67; died at Ithaca, New York,
December 9, 1874.
SLATER, JOHN FOX. Born at Slatersville, Rhode Island, March 4, 1815;
established Slater Fund, 1882; died at Norwich, Connecticut, May 7,
1884.
STANFORD, LELAND. Born at Watervliet, New York, March 9, 1824;
Republican governor of California, 1861-63; United States Senator,
1885-93; died at Palo Alto, California, June 20, 1893.
ROCKEFELLER, JOHN DAVISON. Born at Richford, New York, July 8, 1839;
partner of Clark & Rockefeller, 1858; built Standard Oil Works,
Cleveland, Ohio, 1865; organized Standard Oil Company, 1870; Standard
Oil Trust, 1882.
CARNEGIE, ANDREW. Born at Dunfermline, Fifeshire, Scotland, November 25,
1837; came to United States, 1848; telegraph messenger boy, 1851;
introduced Bessemer steel process to America, 1868; formed Carnegie
Steel Company, 1899; merged into United States Steel Corporation, 1901,
when he retired from business.
BEECHER, LYMAN. Born at New Haven, Connecticut, October 12, 1775; pastor
of various Congregational churches, 1799-1832; president Lane
Theological Seminary, 1832-51; died at Brooklyn, New York, January 10,
1863.
BEECHER, HENRY WARD. Born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24, 1813;
graduated at Amherst, 1834; pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church,
Brooklyn, 1847-87; founder of the _Independent_ and the _Christian
Union_; died at Brooklyn, March 8, 1887.
CHANNING, WILLIAM ELLERY. Born at Newport, Rhode Island, April 7, 1780;
graduated at Harvard, 1798; pastor of Federal Street Church, Boston,
1803-42; died at Bennington, Vermont, October 2, 1842.
JUDSON, ADONIRAM. Born at Malden, Massachusetts, August 9, 1788;
graduated at Brown, 1807; started as missionary to Burmah, 1812, and
remained in far East until his death, April 12, 1850.
MOTT, LUCRETIA. Born at Nantucket, Massachusetts, January 3, 1793;
entered ministry of Friends, 1818; assisted at formation of American
anti-slavery society, 1833; called first woman suffrage convention,
1848; died near Philadelphia, November 11, 1880.
DIX, DOROTHEA LYNDE. Born at Worcester, Massachusetts, 1805; devoted her
whole life to work for paupers, convicts, and insane persons;
superintendent of hospital nurses during Civil War; died at Trenton, New
Jersey, July 19, 1887.
CHILD, LYDIA MARIA. Born at Medford, Massachusetts, February 11, 1802;
editor _National Anti-Slavery Standard_, 1840-43; published a number of
novels; died at Wayland, Massachusetts, October 20, 1880.
GARRISON, WILLIAM LLOYD. Born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, December
10, 1805; began publication of the _Liberator_, 1831; president American
Anti-Slavery Society, 1843-65; died at New York City, May 24, 1879.
PARKER, THEODORE. Born at Lexington, Massachusetts, August 24, 1810;
studied at Cambridge Divinity School, 1834-36; Unitarian clergyman at
Roxbury, 1837; head of an independent society at Music Hall, Boston,
1846; died at Florence, Italy, May 10, 1860.
PHILLIPS, WENDELL. Born at Boston, November 29, 1811; educated at
Harvard; admitted to the bar, 1834; leading orator of the Abolitionists,
1837-61; president of the Anti-Slavery Society, 1865-70; Prohibitionist
candidate for governor of Massachusetts, 1870; died at Boston, February
2, 1884.
ANTHONY, SUSAN BROWNELL. Born at South Adams, Massachusetts, February
15, 1820; became agitator in cause of woman suffrage, organized National
American Woman Suffrage Association and was its president for many
years; died March 13, 1906.
STANTON, ELIZABETH CADY. Born at Johnstown, New York, November 12, 1815;
graduated at Willard Seminary, 1832; met Lucretia Mott, 1840; held first
woman's suffrage convention, 1848; associated with Susan B. Anthony;
died at New York City, October 26, 1902.
BROWN, JOHN. Born at Torrington, Connecticut, May 9, 1800; removed with
parents to Ohio, 1805; emigrated to Kansas, 1855; won battle of
Osawatomie, August, 1856; seized arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia,
October 16, 1859; captured, October 18; tried by Commonwealth of
Virginia, October 27-31; hanged at Charlestown, Virginia, December 2,
1859.
BARTON, CLARA. Born at Oxford, Massachusetts, 1821; superintended relief
work on battle-fields during Civil War; laid out grounds of national
cemetery at Andersonville, 1865; worked through Franco-Prussian war,
1870; distributed relief in Strasburg, Belfort, Montpelier, Paris,
1871; secured adoption of Treaty of Geneva, 1882; president American Red
Cross Society, 1881-1904.
BERGH, HENRY. Born at New York City, 1823; secretary of legation at St.
Petersburg, 1862-64; organized American Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals, 1866; founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children, 1874; died at New York City, March 12, 1888.
BROOKS, PHILLIPS. Born at Boston, December 13, 1835; graduated at
Harvard, 1855; graduated from Episcopal Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia,
1859; rector of Trinity Church, Boston, 1870-93; elected Bishop of
Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, 1891; died at Boston, January 23,
1893.
MOODY, DWIGHT LYMAN. Born at Northfield, Massachusetts, February 5,
1837; started missionary work at Chicago, 1856; conducted revival
meetings in Great Britain, 1873-75; and devoted the remainder of his
life to this work; died at Northfield, December 22, 1899.