Chapter II: Across the Atlantic (2)

“It would be unpardonable to forget the great Barnum,” says a New York writer, “one of our most remarkable men. He lives among the millionaires in a costly brown-stone house in Fifth Avenue, corner of Thirty-ninth Street, and is a millionaire himself. He has retired from the details of actual life, though he has the controlling interest of the Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum. He has made and lost several fortunes; but, in the evening of life, he is in possession of wealth, which he expends with great liberality and a genial hospitality. He was born at Bethel, Connecticut, and was trained in a village tavern kept by his father. He had a hopeful buoyant disposition, and was distinguished by his irrepressible love of fun. At the age of fifteen he began life for himself, and married when he was nineteen. As editor of the _Herald of Freedom_, he obtained an American notoriety. The paper was distinguished for its pith and vigour. Owing to sharp comments on officials, Mr. Barnum was shut up in gaol. On the day of his liberation his friends assembled in great force, with carriages, bands of music, and flags, and carried him home. His first appearance as an exhibitor was in connection with an old negress, Joyce Heth, the reputed nurse of Washington. His next attempt was to obtain possession of Scudder’s American Museum. Barnum had not five dollars in the world, nor did he pay any down. The concern was little better than a corpse ready for burial, yet he bound himself down by terms fearfully stringent, and met all the conditions as they matured. He secured the person of Charles S. Stretton, the celebrated dwarf, and exhibited him. He also secured the services of Jenny land, binding himself to pay her 1,000 dollars a-night for 150 nights, assuming all expenses of every kind. The contract proved an immense pecuniary success. From the days of Joyce Heth, to the present time, Mr. Barnum has always had some speciality connected with his show, which the world pronounces humbug; and Mr. Barnum does not deny that they are so. Among these are the Woolly Horse, the Buffalo Hunt, the Ploughing Elephant, the Segal Mermaid, the What-is-it, and the Gorilla. But Mr. Barnum claims that, while these special features may not be all that the public expect, every visitor to the exhibition gets the worth of his money ten times over; that his million curiosities and monstrosities, giants, and dwarfs, his menagerie and dramatic entertainments, present a diversified and immense amount of entertainment that cannot be secured anywhere else. A large or red baboon, upon a recent occasion, was exhibited at the Museum. It was advertised as a living gorilla, the only one ever exhibited in America. Mr. Barnum’s agents succeeded in hoodwinking the press to such a degree, that the respectable dailies described the ferocity of this formidable gorilla, whose rage was represented to be so intense, and his strength so fearful, that he was very near tearing to pieces the persons who had brought him from the ship to the Museum. Barnum had not seen the animal; and when he read the account in the _Post_, he was very much excited, and sent immediately to the men to be careful that no one was harmed. The baboon was about as furious as a small-sized kitten. The story did its work, and crowds came to see the wonderful beast. Among others a professor came from the Smithsonian Institute; he examined the animal, and then desired to see Mr. Barnum. He informed the proprietor that he had read the wonderful accounts of the gorilla, and had come to see him. ‘He is a very fine specimen of the baboon,’ said the professor; ‘but he is no gorilla.’ ‘What’s the reason that he is not a gorilla?’ said Barnum. The professor replied, that ‘ordinary gorillas had no tails.’ ‘I own,’ said the showman, ‘that ordinary gorillas have no tails; but mine has, and that makes the specimen the more remarkable.’ The audacity of the reply completely overwhelmed the professor, and he retired, leaving Mr. Barnum in possession of the field. Mr. Barnum’s rule has been to give all who patronise him the worth of their money, without being particular as to the means by which he attracts the crowds to his exhibitions. His aim has been notoriety. He offered the Atlantic Telegraph Company 5,000 dollars for the privilege of first sending twenty words over the wires. It has not been all sunshine with Mr. Barnum. His imposing villa at Bridgeport was burned to the ground. Anxious to build up East Bridgeport, he became responsible to a manufacturing company, and his fortune was swept away in an hour; but with wonderful sagacity he relieved himself. As a business man, he has singular executive force, and great capacity. Men who regard Mr. Barnum as a charlatan, who attribute his success to what he calls humbug, clap-trap, exaggerated pictures, and puffing advertisements, will find that the secret of his success did not lie in that direction. Under all his eccentricity, there was a business energy, tact, perseverance, shrewdness, and industry, without which, all his humbugging would have been exerted in vain. From distributing Sear’s Bible, he became lessee of the Vauxhall Saloon; thence a writer of advertisements for an amphitheatre at four dollars a-week; then negotiating, without a dollar, for the Museum, which was utterly worthless; outwitting a corporation who intended to outwit him on the purchase of the Museum over his head; exhibiting a manufactured mermaid which he had bought of a Boston showman; palming off Tom Thumb as eleven years of age when he was but five; showing his woolly horse, and exhibiting his wild buffaloes at Holcken—these, and other small things that Barnum did, are known to the public; but there are other things which the public did not know. Barnum was thoroughly honest, and he kept his business engagements to the letter. He adopted the most rigid economy. Finding a hearty coadjutor in his wife, he put his family on a short allowance, and shared himself in the economy of the household. Six hundred dollars a-year he allowed for the expenses of his family, and his wife resolutely resolved to reduce that sum to 400 dollars. Six months after the purchase of the Museum, the owner came into the ticket-office at noon; Barnum was eating his frugal dinner, which was spread before him. ‘Is this the way you eat your dinner?’ the proprietor inquired. Barnum said, ‘I have not eaten a warm dinner since I bought the Museum, except on the Sabbath, and I intend never to eat another on a week-day till I am out of debt.’ ‘Ah, you are safe, and will pay for the Museum before the year is out,’ replied the owner. In less than a year the Museum was paid for out of the profits of the establishment.”

There are no better rules for business success than those laid down by Mr. Barnum, and which have guided his course. Among them are these—“Select the kind of business suited to your temperament and inclination; let your pledged word ever be sacred; whatever you do, do with all your might; use no description of intoxicating drinks; let hope predominate, but do not be visionary; pursue one thing at a time; do not scatter your powers; engage proper assistance; live within your income, if you almost starve; depend upon yourself, and not upon others.”

Perhaps one of the men who made most money by advertising, was Mr. Barnes, the proprietor of the _New York Ledger_. The manner was entirely his own. When he startled the public by taking columns of a daily journal, or one entire side, he secured the end he had in view. His method of repeating three or four lines—such as, “JENNY JONES writes only for the _Ledger_!” or “Read Mrs. SOUTHWORT’S new story in the _Ledger_!”—and this repeated over and over again, till men turned from it in disgust, and did not conceal their ill-temper—was a system of itself. “What is the use,” said a man to Mr. Barnes, “of your taking the whole side of the _Herald_, and repeating that statement a thousand times?” “Would you have asked me that question,” replied Mr. Barnes, “if I had inserted it but once? I put it in to attract your attention, and to make you ask that question.” This mode of advertising was new, and it excited both astonishment and ridicule. His ruin was predicted over and over again; and when he had thus amassed a fine fortune, it was felt that the position he had secured was the one he aimed at when he was a mere printer’s lad. He sought for no short paths to success; he mastered his trade as a printer patiently and perfectly; he earned his money before he spent it; in New York he was preferred because he did his work better than others; he was truthful, sober, honest, and industrious; if he took a job, he finished it at the time and in the manner agreed upon. He borrowed no money, incurred no debts, and suffered no embarrassments. He was born in the north of Ireland, not far from Londonderry, and was true to the Scotch Presbyterian blood in his veins.

I now come to the most illustrious name, as regards money-getters, either in England or America. Mr. George Peabody was something more than a money-hunter, and, in the history of money-making men, deserves the post of honour for his philanthropy. He was born in Massachusetts, and was, essentially, a self-taught and self-made man. After he had learnt, in the district school, how to read and write, having been four years in a grocer’s score, and having spent another year with his grandfather in rustic life in Vermont, he went to join his brother David, who had set up a drapery or dry-goods store at Newburyport. This was stopped, a few months after, by a fire, which destroyed Peabody’s shop and most of the other houses in the town. Fortunately, at this juncture, an uncle, who had settled in George Town, in the district of Columbia, invited young George to become his commercial assistant; and he stayed with him a couple of years, managing the most part of the business. In May, 1812, during the unhappy war between Great Britain and America, when a British fleet came up the Potomac, this young merchant’s clerk, with others of his time, volunteered into the patriot army, and served a few months in the defence of Port Warburton, as a true citizen soldier. The short war being over, his proved skill and diligence brought him the offer of a partnership in a new concern—it was that of Elisha Riggs, who was about to commence the sale of dry goods throughout the middle States of the Union. Riggs found the capital, while Peabody did the work, and the firm at once achieved immense success. Peabody acted as bagsman, and often travelled alone, on horseback, through the western wilds of New York and Pennsylvania, or the plantations of Maryland and Virginia, if not farther, lodging with farmers or gentlemen slave-owners, and so becoming acquainted with every class of people, and every way of living: indeed, so fast did the Southern connection increase, that the house was removed to Baltimore, though its branches were established, seven years later, at Philadelphia and New York. About the year 1830, Mr. Riggs having retired from business, Mr. Peabody found himself at the head of one of the largest mercantile firms in the home-trade of America. But Mr. Peabody had also, by this time, distinguished himself as a man of superior integrity, discretion, and public spirit. “He coveted no political office; he courted the votes of no party; he waited upon no caucus; put his foot down,” says the writer of the account of his life in the “Annual Register,” “upon no platform; but held aloof from the strife of American factions.” His first visit to London was in 1827, whole he was still chief partner in the Baltimore firm. In 1843, he fixed himself here, as merchant and money-broker, with others, by the style of “George Peabody and Co., of Warnford Court, City.” As one of the three commissioners appointed by the State of Maryland to obtain means for restoring its credit, he refused to be paid for his services; but the State could not do less than vote him their special thanks. To the last he retained his fondness for his native land, and used to celebrate the anniversary of American Independence, on the 4th of July, with a kind of public dinner at the Crystal Palace.

It is as a magnificent giver as well as getter of money that Mr. Peabody has become famous. He knew perfectly well what he was about. He had seen as much of the world as most elderly men of business accustomed to society and travel, and he had come to the conclusion that a man was not made happy by fine houses, and grand equipages, and stately parks, and galleries filled with the choicest productions of art in ancient or modern times, or by the social status which assuredly the possession of money gives. None of these things, he found, made a man happy; though if he had them, and were deprived of them, the loss would make him truly unhappy indeed. Mr. Peabody thought he knew a surer way to the possession of happiness; and that was, by dedicating the wealth he had honourably acquired, to the promotion of the well-being of his less fortunate fellow-men.

Some of his first acts of pecuniary munificence, as was to be expected, had an American bearing. At the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, he promptly supplied the sum needed to pay for the arrangements of the United States contributions. In the following year he joined Mr. Henry Grinnell, of New York, shipowner, in fitting out the expedition to the Arctic Sea in search of Sir John Franklin. In the same year he bestowed a large donation, since augmented to £100,000, to found a free library and educational institute at Danvers, his native place. In 1857, he revisited his native land, after an absence of twenty years. On this occasion he gave £100,000 to form, at Baltimore, a noble institute devoted to science and art, in conjunction with a free public library. The corner-stone of this building was laid in 1858, and the structure was then completed; but its opening was delayed by the civil war which at that time prevailed. It was not till after the conclusion of the war that it was finally dedicated to the purposes for which it was founded. Mr. Peabody afterwards gave a second £100,000 to the institute.

In 1862, Mr. Peabody made the magnificent donation of £150,000 for the amelioration of the condition of the poor of London, and the trustees, who were men of mark and position, immediately employed the money in accordance with the noble donor’s wishes, in the erection of model dwellings for working-men. In 1866, he added another £100,000 to the fund; and in 1868, he made a further donation of about fifteen acres of land at Brixton, 5,642 shares in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and £5,405 in cash (altogether another £100,000); thus making the value of his gifts to the poor of London as much as £350,000. By the last will and testament of Mr. Peabody, opened on the day of his funeral, his executors, Sir Curtis Sampson and Sir Charles Reed, were directed to apply a further sum of £150,000 to the Peabody Fund, thus making a sum of half a million sterling so employed.

This extraordinary beneficence, on the part of a private citizen, was acknowledged in Great Britain. The freedom of the City of London was conferred on Mr. Peabody by the corporation. The Queen, not content with offering him either a baronetcy or the Grand Cross of the Bath, which he respectfully declined, wrote him a grateful letter, and invited him to visit her at Windsor. In 1866, just before his second visit to his native country, he received from her the gift of a beautiful miniature portrait of herself, framed in the most costly style, which he deposited in the Peabody Institute at Danvers. The last token of public honour which was rendered to Mr. Peabody before his death, was the uncovering, by the Prince of Wales, of Storey’s fine bronze statue of himself behind the Royal Exchange.

Mr. Peabody remained in his native land three years, during which time he largely increased the amount of his donations, and founded more than one or two important institutions. He gave 2,000,000 dollars for the education of the blacks and whites in the South; 300,000 dollars for museums of American relics at Yale and Harvard Colleges; 50,000 dollars for a free museum at Salem; 25,000 dollars to Bishop McIlxame for Kenyon College; and presented a sum of 230,000 dollars to the State of Maryland. He also expended 100,000 dollars on a memorial church to his mother, and distributed among the members of his family 2,000,000 dollars. In recognition of his many large gifts to public institutions in America, Mr. Peabody received, in March 1867, a special vote of thanks from the United States. He died in London, at the house of his friend, Six Curtis Sampson, at Eaton Square, in the seventy-filth year of his age. The funeral took place in Westminster Abbey though, in accordance with the wishes of the deceased, the body was afterwards conveyed to America. The coffin-lid bore the following inscription:—

GEORGE PEABODY,
Born at Danvers, Massachusetts, February 18th, 1795;
Died in London, England, November 4th, 1869.
The remains were taken over to America in her Majesty’s turret-ship,
the _Monarch_.

The late Mr. A. T. Stewart, dry-goods merchant of New York, has left a curious monument of his administrative skill in the great Working Women’s Hotel, recently completed in that city. As a large employer of labour, male as well as female, Mr. Stewart became impressed with the difficulty that working-folk have in finding lodgings even in comparatively new cities. In swiftly-growing New York, the constantly increasing demand for business premises has pushed the population higher and higher up the island, until one fashionable street after another has been converted into stores and offices, and people fairly well off have built themselves handsome dwellings further afield. This has been by no means an unprofitable change for house-owners; for the compensation received for a house “down town,” more than suffices to build and furnish a handsome dwelling in that part of the city still devoted to private residences; but to the poorer classes of inhabitants, rapid change and development of this kind have been not a little oppressive. Far more swiftly and suddenly than in London, the working-people have found themselves thrust from the space previously occupied by them, but grown too valuable to be covered by their humble homes. Like their brethren in London, they have either retired to the suburbs and find a tiresome morning and evening journey added to the miseries of life, or have taken refuge in large houses let out in tenements and built expressly for the accommodation of artisan families. Both English and American experiments in this latter direction have been very successful. Practice has taught the proper principle of constructing large tenement houses as well as artisans’ and labourers’ cottages, and the working family is probably not less commodiously, and is certainly more healthily, lodged than it has been at any preceding period. The single man, too, is cared for; but the single woman has hitherto been under certain disadvantages. It is obvious that a house almost always contains more space than she wants, and costs more money than she can afford; and it is equally clear that in cooking her own meals separately she is wasting time, food, and fuel. Some of these objections might, perhaps, be got over by four or five women clubbing together; but their general feeling has never been strongly manifested in favour of divided rule or responsibility. It is subjecting human nature to a severe test to ask people to “room together,” as it is called in America, the ordinary result being that the temporary “chums” never speak again to each other for the rest of their lives. It was to obviate this strain on human sympathy that Mr. Stewart projected the Working Women’s Hotel, the completion of which he did not live to see.

“Judging from the prices charged,” says a writer in the _Daily News_, “and the regulations enforced, the working women for whom the great hotel at New York has been constructed, are of a class somewhat above that of the factory or work-girl proper. Seven dollars a-week for board and a separate room, or six dollars a-head if two persons occupy the same room, is a price that would absorb an ordinary workwoman’s entire earnings. When it is recollected that the value of a paper dollar is now within a fraction of that of a gold one, and that wages and other things have fallen in price with the contraction of the currency since the civil war, it is not easy to see from what class of actual workwomen the hotel is to draw its customers. Women working at trades clearly cannot aspire to the comforts provided for seven dollars a-week, and it is doubtful whether those in a position to pay that sum will submit to the restrictions imposed upon boarders. For the sum asked they can, at the present moment, obtain board easily elsewhere, and enjoy perfect liberty. It is very likely that the food and accommodation provided at the hotel are much superior to those offered at the smaller boarding-houses with which the outer edges of New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City are thickly studded; but mere eating and sleeping seem to be regarded by women, in America at least, in a far less serious light than by men. The code of regulations at the Working Women’s Hotel affords an amusing instance of the severity which comes over the American when called to the lofty and important position of keeping an hotel. In other walks of life he is easy and good-natured, but when impelled by destiny to ‘run’ an hotel, he undergoes a sudden transformation into a despot. The guests at the new hotel are informed that eight large parlours have been provided for the reception of visitors, who will not be allowed in other rooms or parlours except by express permission of the manager. The eight parlours specified correspond, in fact, to the strangers’ rooms at a club. It is furthermore provided that no visiting to a room will be allowed except by consent of all the occupants; that no washing of clothes will be permitted in the rooms, and that no sewing-machines or working apparatus shall be brought into them. This last regulation may appear severe, but it is probably intended to protect those who do not sew from annoyance. A sewing-machine is an unpleasant neighbour, it is true; but so is a rocking-chair; yet it may be doubted whether even the despot who reigns over this last new ‘institution’ will prove equal to the task of tabooing that pestilent article of furniture. Animals will be rigidly excluded. No dogs, cats, birds, or other pet creatures will be suffered; meals will be served at fixed hours; the gas will be turned off and the hotel closed at half-past eleven. Whether this code will be submitted to by American working-women capable of paying from 24_s._ to 28_s._ weekly for board and lodging remains to be seen. The upper lady-clerk in a store is, as a rule, gifted with great strength of character, and as a fairly educated, self-reliant, and hardworking member of society, is perfectly entitled to display her sense of independence. She will be quick to perceive the advantages offered by the new hotel, but it is at least probable that she will be equally quick to resent the restrictions which it is sought to impose upon her sovereign will and pleasure.”

A poor rich man, not long since, died at Cincinnati, leaving property worth considerably more than half a million sterling. He lived up an alley in one small room, dressed in rags, and looked like a penniless tramp, and yet he owned more than 100,000 acres of land. Another citizen of Cincinnati also offered to present to the city his valuable art-collection, worth £40,000, on condition that a fire-proof building should be erected in which to store it.

It is said that Peter Cooper, of New York, who has now (1878) entered his eighty-eighth year, is worth £2,000,000. He began life as a coachmaker’s apprentice; but having invented a superior kind of glue, which came into general use, he rapidly made an immense fortune.

The last illustration of getting on in America may be found in the case of Carl Schurz, now (1878) one of the Secretaries of State in America.

The history of Carl Schurz reads like a romance, for the wandering Ulysses himself, restricted to narrower limits by the imperfect geographical knowledge of his day, never had a tenth part of his modern imitator’s advantages in “observant straying” over different lands, and amidst diverse languages, nor “noting the manners and their climes” of widely separated races. Born near Cologne in 1829, and educated first at its gymnasium, and subsequently at the University of Bonn, Carl Schurz enjoyed superior educational advantages, by which, naturally studious, he greatly profited. When but nineteen years of age, under the influence of his professor, Kinkel, he became a Revolutionist in his sentiments; and in the year 1848, memorable for the revolutionary tide that swept over Europe, established, in conjunction with his professor, a journal to advocate those principles. Of this journal he was for a time sole editor. When, in, the spring of 1849, the abortive insurrectionary effort was made at Bonn, in which both he and the professor took a part, they fled together to the Palatinate. Here our young student joined the revolutionary army as adjutant, and aided in the defence of Rastadt against the government troops. On the surrender of that place he escaped to Switzerland, but soon returned to deliver his friend Professor Kinkel from the fortress of Spandau. In this effort he was successful. In 1851, we find the young revolutionist at Paris, as correspondent of German journals, and a little later at London, for a year giving lessons in German. But the exile wearied of Europe, and his fancy drove him to America, where he arrived ignorant of the language, and, it is to be presumed, short of cash. But he proceeded to grapple resolutely with both difficulties. Three years he spent in the quiet Quaker city of Philadelphia, teaching, and learning, and writing—for there is a large German population In Pennsylvania. Then he drifted westwards; first to Wisconsin, where he commenced his career as a political partisan making speeches in German, during the presidential canvass of 1856, on the Republican side. He was also an unsuccessful candidate for the lieutenant-governorship of Wisconsin that year—fast work for one but four years in the country. The first public speech he delivered in the English language was in 1858, about which time he commenced the practice of law. In 1859, he made a lecture tour through the New England States, speaking English, as I have been informed by an auditor, very imperfectly. Now he speaks the language with perfect purity, and a scarcely perceptible accent. In 1860, he was an influential member of the National Republican Convention, and one of the chief speakers during the canvass that resulted in the election of Lincoln to the presidency. Appointed by Mr. Lincoln minister to Spain, he soon resigned that office to return home and take part in the civil war—the Germans forming a large portion of the military contingent in the Federal army, the great bulk of the German immigration having settled in the North and North-western States; very few indeed at the South. It was a curious sequel to a revolutionary career at home that Mr. Schurz should have been so soon engaged in suppressing a rebellion in his adopted country. He rose to the rank of major-general in the Federal service, and took part in the battle of the second Bull Run, and where Stonewall Jackson defeated the Federals at Chancellorsville. He was also at Chattanooga and Gettysburg fights. At the close of the war he returned to the practice of the law, and connected himself with the newspaper press in different parts of the country as a Washington correspondent.

When, in 1866, after the assassination of President Lincoln, Andrew Johnson was acting President of the United States, he appointed Carl Schurz as special commissioner to visit and report on the actual condition of the southern country, then under process of reconstruction. On his return from this mission our German Ulysses migrated to Detroit in Michigan, where he founded a newspaper. The ensuing year he moved again to the city of St. Louis, in Missouri, where he founded a German newspaper, took an active part for General Grant in both languages in 1868, and in 1869 was elected United States senator for six years’ term from Missouri. Disagreeing with General Grant’s policy and mode of conducting public affairs, Mr. Schurz passed over to the Opposition to his administration, and, in conjunction with Horace Greeley—like himself an Abolitionist and Republican—sought to establish a reform party of Liberal Republicans, as opposed to the Spoils party of Grant. Mr. Schurz was the presiding officer in the Cincinnati Republican Convention, which nominated Horace Greeley for the presidency, and since then his career has been one of unmitigated success.

In the new States, as well as in the old, these American money-makers flourish. As I write, I hear that Mark Hopkins, the great Californian railway millionaire, has died with upwards of £3,000,000, and his will cannot be found. In the absence of a will his widow takes two-thirds of the fortune, and his two brothers the remainder. Money-making, it may be said, is the chief characteristic of Brother Jonathan and his numerous and pushing tribe.