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.



CHAPTER IX

MEN OF AFFAIRS

Almost from the first years of her existence America has been known chiefly as a commercial nation, as a nation noted for her men of affairs, rather than for her artists and men of letters. Which is to say that the life of the Republic has been practical rather than artistic, and it is only of late years, except for a sporadic instance here and there, that any genuine artistic impulse has made itself felt.

This is not a cause of reproach. Given the circumstances, it was inevitable that America should develop first on her commercial side. Here was a great continent, stretching thousands of miles to the westward, waiting for man's occupancy. Millions of acres of plain and woodland awaited development. There were cities to found and rivers to bridge and roads to make and soil to till and gold to dig before America could think of writing poetry or painting pictures. Think—it is only three centuries since Jamestown was founded; only a century and a quarter since we became a nation—a mere handbreadth of time when compared with the long centuries of English or French or Italian history. We have already said that for art historic background is necessary; a background of achievement and tradition. Such a background we are just achieving. Besides, during our first century, there were such great deeds of conquest and development to be done that they challenged our strongest men. Great fortunes were made, as a matter of course, and Europe witnessed the unique spectacle of men, born in poverty and obscurity, rising to be captains of the world. It is this which has never ceased to shock the European sense of the fitness of things—that the poor boy of yesterday may be the millionaire of to-morrow and take his place with the greatest of the nation. It is the story of a few such boys which will be told in this chapter.

First is the man who financed the Revolution and who to a large extent made possible its successful termination—Robert Morris. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1734, he came to this country with his father at the age of thirteen, and a place was soon found for him in the counting-house of Charles Willing, a wealthy merchant of Philadelphia. By his diligence and activity, as well as unusual intelligence, he grew in favor and confidence, until, upon the death of the elder Willing, he was taken into partnership by the latter's son, and by the opening of the Revolution, the firm of Willing & Morris was one of the largest and most prosperous in Philadelphia.

Of English birth, and bound to England by the ties of business, Morris was nevertheless opposed to the stamp-act and was one of those who, in 1765, signed an agreement to import nothing further from England until the act was repealed. He was, however, opposed to independence, and, as a member of the Continental Congress, voted on July 1, 1776, against the Declaration. Three days later he declined to vote, but when the Declaration was adopted, he signed it, and threw in his fortunes unreservedly with his new country. His services were more than valuable—they were indispensable. As a member of the Committee of Ways and Means, he backed the government's credit with his own. Without his aid, the last campaigns of the war would have been impossible. It was he who supplied General Green with munitions of war for the great campaign of the south, and shortly afterwards raised a million and a half on his own notes to assist Washington in the movement which resulted in the capture of Cornwallis at Yorktown. A year later, when the financial situation of the government had become desperate, he organized the Bank of North America to assist in financing it. For three years, he acted as superintendent of finance, with complete control of the monetary affairs of the country. He was a member of the Constitutional Convention, and when the new government was organized, Washington asked him to accept the treasury portfolio, but he declined, suggesting instead Alexander Hamilton. That was not the least of his services to America, for Hamilton was preeminently the man for the place.

It was the striking irony of fate that the man who had controlled the finances of a nation and by his personal exertions saved it from bankruptcy should himself die in a debtor's prison; yet such was the case. A series of unfortunate land speculations swept away his wealth and ruined his credit; he found himself unable to meet his obligations and was seized by his creditors and thrown into prison, where he remained for some years, and where death found him in 1806.

So Robert Morris was not one of the founders of great fortunes. Turn we to the earliest and perhaps most successful of these, John Jacob Astor, the very type of the astute, large-minded, and far-sighted financier. Born at Waldorf, Germany, in 1763, the son of a poor butcher in whose shop he worked until sixteen years of age, there was nothing in his life or circumstances to indicate the future which lay before him. One of his brothers, however, had come to America and settled at New York, and young John Astor resolved to join him in the land of opportunity. At the age of twenty, he was able to do so, bringing with him some musical instruments to sell on commission, but a chance acquaintance which he made on shipboard changed the whole course of his life.

This acquaintance was that of a furrier, who told young Astor of the great profits to be made by buying furs from the Indians and selling them to the large dealers. Perhaps he exaggerated the profits of the business; at any rate, he fired the ambition of his hearer, and the latter decided to enter the fur business without delay. Upon landing in New York, therefore, he at once secured a position in the shop of a Quaker furrier, and after learning all the details of the business, opened a shop of his own.

Perhaps no one ever worked harder in establishing a business than John Jacob Astor did. Early and late he was at his shop, except when absent on long and arduous purchasing expeditions into the wilderness. More than that, he possessed admirable business judgment, so that, after fifteen years of work, he had succeeded in accumulating a fortune of a quarter of a million dollars. With careful and sagacious management, the business prospered so that Astor was soon able to send his furs to Europe in his own vessels, and bring back European goods. And about this time, he began working on a grandiose and picturesque enterprise.

The English Hudson Bay Company, established many years before, with hundreds of trappers and traders and scores of trading-posts, controlled the rich fur business of Canada and the northwest. We have seen how, years after the events which we are now narrating, the agents of the company tried to save Oregon for England and how Marcus Whitman foiled them. Astor's plan, in outline, was to render American trade independent of the Hudson Bay Company by establishing a chain of trading-posts from the great lakes to the Pacific, to plant a central depot at the mouth of the Columbia river, and to acquire one of the Sandwich Islands and establish a line of vessels between the western coast of America and the ports of Japan, China and India. Surely a man who could conceive a plan like that was something more than a mere trader, and Astor proceeded at once to carry it into effect.

Two expeditions were sent out, one by land and one by sea, to open up intercourse with the Indians of the Pacific coast, and the settlement of Astoria was planted at the mouth of the Columbia river. Whether Astor would have been able to carry out the remainder of his plan is purely problematical, for before he had it fairly under way, the war of 1812 began, and he was forced to abandon the enterprise. The story of this far-reaching project has been told by Washington Irving in his "Astoria." Until his death, he continued to enlarge and increase his business, and left a fortune estimated at twenty millions of dollars.

The Astor plan of investment is one of the safest, most sagacious in the world. Practically all of his profits were invested by John Jacob Astor in real estate outside the compact portion of the city of New York. As the city grew out to his holdings, he would improve them, rent or sell them, and reinvest further out. In this way the growth of the city marked also the growth of his fortune, and this plan of investment has been followed by his descendants to the present day, until they have become by far the most important owners of real estate in New York City. His son, William B. Astor, gave his life to the preservation and growth of the vast property he inherited, and at his death had more than doubled it, dividing an estate of $45,000,000 between his two sons.

Not that the whole thought of these two men was money-getting, for their public gifts were numerous and important. The most noteworthy was the Astor library, founded by John Jacob Astor at the suggestion of Washington Irving, and largely added to by his son, the total amount of the Astor donations to it exceeding a million dollars. But they stand as two types of sagacious and hard-headed business men, to whom money-making and the still more difficult art of money-keeping was an instinctive accomplishment.

The second great American fortune was that founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt, as remarkable and picturesque a character as this country ever produced. Born on Staten Island in 1794, the son of a farmer in moderate circumstances, the boy soon developed a remarkable talent for trade. His father owned a sail-boat, in which he conveyed his produce across the bay to the New York markets, and the boy soon learned to manage this and was intrusted with these daily trips. When he was sixteen years old, he bought a boat of his own, in which he ferried passengers across the bay, and two years later he was owner of two boats and captain of a third. This was the beginning of the great fleet of steamers, sloops and schooners which he built up for the navigation of the shores of New York bay and the Hudson river, which won him the title of "Commodore," which clung to him all his life. Before he was forty years old, he had accumulated a fortune of half a million dollars, and was ready for those great financial operations which marked his later life.

The discovery of gold in California led him to establish a passenger line by way of Lake Nicaragua which netted him ten millions in ten years; he established a fast line of passenger steamships between New York and Havre; and finally was attracted to railway development as a field of enterprise destined to win large returns. In the course of a few years he had secured control of both the Hudson River and New York Central roads, and brought both of them to the highest state of efficiency, and after consolidating them, extended the system to Chicago by the purchase of the Lake Shore, the Canada Southern and Michigan Central. He built a great terminal in New York City, and made the system so profitable that, from it, and a series of fortunate speculations, he accumulated a fortune of $100,000,000, practically all of which he bequeathed to his eldest son, William Henry. One million was also given for the establishment of Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, for many years, had a very poor opinion of his son's financial ability, and giving him a small farm on Staten Island, left him to shift for himself. Everyone has read of the incident which changed this opinion. William needed some fertilizer for his farm, and asked his father to give him a load of manure from his stables. His father told him to go ahead and take a load, and William thereupon brought a great scow up to the pier near the stables, proceeded to load it, and when his father protested, pointed out that he had not specified the kind of load, but that he had meant a scow-load. This bit of sharp practice pleased his father, and, shortly afterwards, the great success with which he managed the Staten Island Railroad, as receiver, established him in his father's confidence. He continued and extended his father's policy of railway investment, and added to the great fortune which had been left him, and which still remains one of the greatest in America, though it has been split up among the different branches of the Vanderbilt family. William himself distributed about two millions in various benevolent and public enterprises, one of the queerest of which was the removal of one of "Cleopatra's Needles" from Egypt to Central Park, New York City, at a cost of over a hundred thousand dollars.

In the business world of New York City, half a century ago, no name was more prominent than that of A. T. Stewart, whose success as a merchant was one of the most astonishing features of the time. Born near Belfast, Ireland, in 1803, Stewart was a descendant from one of those hardy and thrifty Scotch-Irish, whom we have had occasion to mention before. His father was a farmer, but died while the son was still at school, and at the age of twenty the latter came to New York, and after looking over the field, opened a small store on lower Broadway, with a sleeping apartment for himself in the rear. Such was the beginning of the greatest dry-goods business this country ever saw. It increased by leaps and bounds, for Stewart seems to have had a sort of instinctive genius for the business. He was continually moving to larger and larger quarters, and in 1862, built on Broadway a store which was at that time the largest in the world, and which, even in this day of mammoth structures, commands attention. Its cost was nearly three millions, a colossal sum for those days; two thousand people were employed in it and it cost a million a year to run. But it brought a tremendous return, and its owner soon became one of the wealthiest men in New York.

He wanted more than wealth—he hungered for political and social honors which were never fully his. He had made a large contribution to the fund of $100,000 presented by the merchants of New York to General Grant, and in 1869, Grant appointed him secretary of the treasury. The senate refused to confirm the appointment, on the ground that the law excluded from that office anyone interested in the importation of merchandise. Grant sent to the senate a message recommending that this law be repealed, but the senate refused; and Stewart thereupon offered to place his business in the hands of trustees and devote its entire profits to charity during his term of office; but still the senate refused, and the nomination was withdrawn. It was a bitter blow to Stewart, nor was his fight for social prominence much more fortunate. As his last stake, as it were, he began the erection of a great marble palace on Fifth Avenue, designed to cost a million and to be the finest private residence in the world, but he died before it was completed.

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One of the great industries of the country is that of sugar refining, and it is inseparably connected with the name of Havemeyer, for to the Havemeyers is due its development and its formation into a so-called trust, which practically controls the market, and which has won great wealth for its organizers. The ancestor of the Havemeyers was a thrifty German who came to this country in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and, after engaging in various pursuits, opened a little sugar refinery in New York City, which soon brought him a comfortable income. There, in 1804, William Frederick Havemeyer was born, and after a careful education, entered the refinery, gained a thorough knowledge of the business and, in 1828 succeeded to it, having as a partner his cousin, Frederick Christian Havemeyer. These two men developed the business in a wonderful manner, installing new machinery, inventing new processes, which reduced the manufacturing cost, acquiring possession of other plants and securing government support in the shape of a protective tariff, which made a naturally profitable business doubly so, and netted its owners many millions.

William Frederick Havemeyer found time, in the intervals of running his business, to take a prominent part in New York politics. He was mayor of the city from 1845 to 1851, and again in 1873, dying before the last term was finished.

As far as possible removed from Havemeyer's humdrum existence was that of Phineas Taylor Barnum, the greatest showman the world has ever seen, the originator of the great travelling circus, the exploiter of Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind, the owner of Jumbo, the most famous elephant that ever lived, whose name has passed into the English language as a synonym for bigness.

Barnum was born at Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810. His father was an inn-keeper and died when the boy was fifteen years old, leaving no property. He tried his hand at store-keeping, and failed; ran a newspaper, and was imprisoned for libel, and finally reached New York at about the end of his resources and looking around for something to do. That was in 1834, and by accident he hit upon his real vocation.

A man by the name of R. W. Lindsay was exhibiting through the country an old negro woman named Joice Heth, advertising her as being 161 years old, and as having been the nurse of George Washington. Barnum went to see her and found her an extraordinary-looking object. He has himself told how he was impressed by her.

"Joice Heth," he says, "was certainly a remarkable curiosity, and she looked as though she might have been far older than her age as advertised. She was apparently in good health and spirits, but from age or disease, or both, was unable to change her position; she could move one arm at will, but her lower limbs could not be straightened; her left arm lay across her breast and she could not remove it; the fingers of her left hand were drawn down so as nearly to close it, and were fixed; the nails on that hand were almost four inches long and extended above her wrist; her head was covered with a thick bush of gray hair; but she was toothless and totally blind, and her eyes had sunk so deeply in the sockets as to have disappeared altogether. Nevertheless she was pert and sociable and would talk as long as people would converse with her. She was quite garrulous about 'dear little George,' at whose birth she declared she was present, having been at the time a slave of Elizabeth Atwood, a half-sister of Augustine Washington, the father of George Washington. As nurse, she put the first clothes on the infant, and she claimed to have raised him."

Barnum was so impressed by this extraordinary object, that he bought her for a thousand dollars, putting his last cent into the venture and borrowing what he lacked. He proceeded to advertise her with characteristic energy, and great crowds thronged to see her, so that his receipts sometimes ran as high as $1,500 a week. However, the old woman died within a year, and a post-mortem examination showed that she was really only about eighty years old.

But Barnum had found his vocation, that of showman, and after a few unsuccessful ventures, bought Scudder's American Museum, in New York City, and started out on a brilliant career. It is interesting to note that the museum which Barnum purchased consisted in part of the curios collected years before by Charles and Rembrandt Peale. Barnum added to it, was indefatigable in securing curiosities, really created the art of modern advertising, and it was his proudest boast that no one ever left the museum without having got his money's worth. He was one of the first to realize that the best possible advertisement is a pleased customer, and he tried honestly to keep his museum supplied with every novelty. The public soon came to appreciate this, and perhaps his greatest asset was public confidence in his promises. People came to believe that when Barnum advertised a thing, he really had it. But the most fortunate day in all his life was that November day of 1842, when he discovered at Bridgeport, Connecticut, the midget whose real name was Charles S. Stratton, but who was to become world-famous as General Tom Thumb.

The story of Tom Thumb's success reads like a romance. He was quite young when Barnum got him, and the showman took great pains with his education and training, for he wanted the midget to appear a finished man of the world. He became a great public favorite, toured America and Europe, was introduced to kings and princes and made a great fortune for himself and his exhibitor. Barnum struck the apogee of his fortunes when he discovered another midget, Lavinia Warren, who achieved a success scarcely less than Tom Thumb's. Indeed, she and the General fell in love with each other and were married at Grace Church, and as General and Mrs. Tom Thumb were perhaps the greatest drawing cards in the world. Another triumph of his career was his engagement of Jenny Lind for a series of one hundred concerts, at a salary of a thousand dollars a night, the receipts of the tour being over seven hundred thousand dollars.

Barnum had many ups and downs, which he met with an invincible optimism. His museum burned down and he rebuilt it, but it soon burned down again. It was then that the idea occurred to him to establish a travelling museum, exhibiting under a tent, and it was this idea which developed into "The Greatest Show on Earth." It really was the greatest and its owner never spared money in his endeavor to keep it so. Large-hearted, benevolent, a true entertainer, he will always occupy a bright place in the memory of the American public.

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Perhaps no name in the history of America was ever more closely connected in the public mind with money-making for its own sake than that of Russell Sage. It will be surprising news to many, who knew him only as a money-lender on a large scale, that he started out on a public career, as alderman, county treasurer, and finally as member of congress for two terms, from 1853 to 1857. He was the first person to advocate, on the floor of congress, the purchase of Mount Vernon by the government. His career on Wall street began shortly after that, at first in a small way; but before his death, he had developed into the greatest individual money-lender in the world.

That was his whole life. He took no part in any political or charitable movement; he had no interest in art, and he lived in the simplest manner. He used his wealth, not to procure enjoyment for himself or other people, but to procure more wealth. He was saving to the point of miserliness; he got the utmost he could out of his money; he never took a vacation—and dying, at the age of ninety, left a fortune of many millions. He had no children and the whole fortune went to his wife. She at once proceeded to bestow it in carefully-considered benevolences, so that the Sage millions are to benefit humanity, after all. In fact, it is doubtful if any other fortune, amassed by a single man, will, in the end, do so much good in the world as will this of Russell Sage, for Mrs. Sage is devoting it to what may be called scientific charity, which has for its object the universal betterment of mankind.

Mrs. Sage, who thus becomes one of the world's great philanthropists, was Margaret Olivia Slocum, of Syracuse, New York, and was married to Mr. Sage in 1869. She was of a family in only moderate circumstances, and was a school teacher previous to her marriage. The turn of the wheel made her the wealthiest woman in the world, and she proceeded without delay to the carrying out of the immense benevolent enterprises which she had doubtless long meditated.

The name of Cyrus West Field is so closely associated with his supreme achievement, the laying of the first Atlantic cable, that we are apt to forget that he was in the beginning a manufacturer and had amassed a considerable fortune before his attention was called to the possibility of linking Europe to America by a telegraph line laid on the bottom of the Atlantic. It was under A. T. Stewart that Field received his mercantile training, having gone to New York in 1834, at the age of fifteen, from his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and entering Stewart's employ as a clerk.

He was an apt pupil, and before he was of age, owned an establishment of his own for the manufacture and sale of paper. In this business, in the course of a dozen years, he had amassed a fortune so considerable that he was able to retire from active charge of it, and to spend his time in travel. It was in 1853 that the project of carrying a telegraph line across the Atlantic ocean suggested itself to him during a conversation with his brother, who was interested in building a line across Newfoundland. The more he considered and investigated the project, the more feasible it seemed, and he proceeded to organize the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company, himself taking one fourth of the capital stock, and interesting such other capitalists as Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, Chandler White and Marshall Roberts.

But the project which had appeared simple enough in theory and on paper, proved extremely difficult of execution. If Field could have foreseen the thirteen years of constant anxiety which awaited him, he would no doubt have hesitated to undertake it. It looked, at first, as though success would crown his efforts almost at the outset, for in 1858, the laying of a cable was completed, and for some days, messages were sent from one continent to the other. Then the signals began to grow fainter and fainter, until they became imperceptible, supposedly from the water of the ocean penetrating the cable covering.

At any rate, the work had to be done all over again, with little money on hand, and the coming of the Civil War helped to make further progress impossible. Field visited Europe more than twenty times in the effort to raise money for the enterprise and to keep it before the public, but it was not until 1865 that another effort to lay the cable could be made. The "Great Eastern," the largest ship in the world, was secured, and began paying out the cable; but twelve hundred miles from shore the cable parted and could not be regained, although every effort was made to grapple it. So the vessel had to put back to England, and Field was confronted with the heart-breaking task of raising even more money. He succeeded in doing so, and in 1866, another expedition started out with a new cable. This time, it met with no serious misadventure, and on July 27, telegraphic communication was re-established between England and America, and has never since been interrupted.

That cable was the first of the hundreds which now encircle the globe. Congress presented the bold adventurer with a gold medal and the thanks of the nation; John Bright pronounced him "the Columbus of modern times, who, by his cable, has moored the New World alongside of the Old"; the Paris exposition of 1867 gave him the grand medal, the highest prize it had to bestow; and he received votes of thanks and medals and presents from all parts of the world.

In 1884, two other cables were laid across the Atlantic by John W. Mackay and James Gordon Bennett, whose private property they remained. Mackay had had an adventurous career, and was destined to be the founder of another of those great American fortunes which are the wonder and admiration of Europe. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1831, his father being another of those sturdy Scotch-Irish of whom we have already had occasion to speak. He was brought to New York at the age of nine; but his father died a short time thereafter and the boy was thrown practically upon his own resources.

When gold was discovered in California in 1849, Mackay joined the crowd that rushed to the new El Dorado, and for several years, he lived a typical miner's life, roughing it in the camps, but gaining little except a thorough knowledge of mining. In 1860, some guiding spirit led him eastward to Nevada; his fortunes there steadily improved, until he became one of the leading men in the settlement, and in 1872, he made one of the most famous and romantic discoveries in mining history, that of the famous Comstock lode, on a ledge of rock high in the Sierras, under which Virginia City now nestles. So rich in silver was this great ledge of rock and its enormous production added so greatly to the world's supply of silver that the market price fell to a point where such countries as India and China, whose currency was on a silver basis, were seriously embarrassed to maintain values. From one mine alone over $150,000,000 was taken out. Mackay devoted himself personally to the superintendence of the mines, working in the lower levels with his men, who idolized him.