Read an Excerpt
CCB
The Life and Century of Charles C. Burlingham, New York's First Citizen, 1858â"1959
By George Martin Hill and Wang
Copyright © 2005 The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-9878-9
CHAPTER 1
A Boy's View of the Civil War
"I WAS BORN CHEAP," Burlingham would reply when asked how he, New York's First Citizen, came to be born in Plainfield, New Jersey. At the time, 31 August 1858, his father, the Reverend Aaron Hale Burlingham, was pastor at the South Baptist Church on New York's West Twenty-seventh Street, and his parents lived in a small brick house nearby. Yet "I was taken in my mother's womb to Plainfield to be born cheap in the house of my aunt, with the aid of my medical uncle, and I returned to New York City as speedily as practicable." He always regretted the circumstance. When, in 1933, Columbia University gave him an honorary degree and President Nicholas Murray Butler referred to him as a "Son of New Jersey," he squirmed and later told Butler he was "not entitled" to that honor: Plainfield had been a quirk of finance, without loyalty entailed on either side.
In his naming, however, he escaped a discomfort. His father proposed "Theophilus Culp," to honor a close friend of Dutch ancestry. But another friend warned, as CCB told the story, that "all the boys would call me 'teacup.'" So in place of "Theophilus" the name of CCB's paternal grandfather, Charles, was substituted, and he was christened "Charles Culp."
According to CCB, his grandfather Charles Burlingham (1776-1852) "was a weak man," and in old age, which on the frontier could come early, perhaps he was. Born in Smithfield, Rhode Island, as a young man he went west to Saratoga County, New York, and in 1818 farther west to the upper Genesee Valley, to what later became the town of Pike, in Wyoming County. The place was then a wilderness, and he, with his wife and family, followed blazed roads and Indian trails until, at what seemed a likely place, they stopped and began to hack a home from the woods and to farm. His eldest son, Benjamin, eighteen at the time, recalled, "[We]"had plenty of axe and handspike work." The family grew, and the children ultimately numbered seven boys and three girls — another girl dying in infancy.
After fifteen years of combating nature, the grandfather's energies began to fail, and at age fifty-seven he gave his farm to a son, Prentice, who soon turned it over to his brother John. Upon each transfer there was a condition: the holder of the father's farm must maintain the parents as well as the youngest child, the eleven-year-old Aaron (1822-1905).
The combined farms now had ninety acres and two small houses, and because John, with his wife and baby, lived in the larger, he took in with him his brother, Aaron, an arrangement that for Aaron was not wholly satisfactory. Except for the three and a half months of winter when he went to the local district or common school, he was expected to work full-time on the farm, and John was not an easy man. Years later Aaron wrote of him, "John was not flush with money, nor free from littleness in the administration of the double home and in his treatment of the boy. And his wife sympathized with him. Still, they were good people and on the whole meant well." But as a boy and young man, bound by his father's agreement with John, Aaron frequently felt like an indentured servant.
The school was both his refuge and means of escape. Common schools of the time in western New York were an early form of public school, organized locally but, if meeting certain standards, receiving some aid from the state. In the rural counties most children of both sexes, at least until the age of sixteen, attended the brief winter sessions except when needed at home or at work, which was often. Instruction was basic: reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography, and sometimes a little history. Because of the suspicions and prejudices among the many Protestant sects, religion as such was not taught, but the Bible was used as a reader, and pastors of most persuasions visited the schools to conduct prayer meetings and distribute tracts and magazines.
The people of western New York in the forty years before the Civil War were notably alive to religion. The area, then and later, was known as "the burned-over district" — the analogy being, as one writer put it, "between the fires of the forest and those of the spirit." In the intense revivalism of the 1820s and 1830s, everyone read the Bible and was eager to dispute its meaning. New sects formed and after a time were abandoned (Mormonism being the exception). Among those that failed, superstition and credulity often mixed with moral intensity. Thousands, persuaded the world would end on 22 October 1844, had to face the unexpected dawn. Yet by and large the "Yorker Yankees," as they were called, "were extraordinarily wide-awake, well-informed, and ambitious for greater knowledge. Beyond the routine of formal education they were more alert than most other Americans."
Aaron shared in the ferment of this Second Great Awakening and continued in his local common school past sixteen. When eighteen, apparently with John's approval, he went for six weeks to a private school in nearby Castile, a town larger than Pike, and for the remainder of the winter he taught in a village common school there, boarding with local people and giving John the balance of his earnings. For summer, he returned to John's farm, to work without pay. And he did this for two years.
Meanwhile, in 1840, when another religious revival swept western New York, both Aaron and his eldest brother, Benjamin, declared their allegiance to Christ and were baptized by the Reverend James Reid, "uniting" with Reid in the Castile Baptist Church. "I was never a dishonest or immoral young man," Aaron wrote later, "but I came to feel that I was a great sinner, inasmuch as my life was away from God; and I decided to turn over a new leaf and live for the Lord Jesus and for the good of my fellow men." He would be a Baptist preacher.
After a third winter of teaching at a local school, and soon after his twenty-first birthday, on 18 February 1843, Aaron left farm and family at Pike for the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution at Hamilton, New York, a town of 1,300 people twenty-eight miles south of Utica and 180 east of Castile. He started by horse and wagon, driven by John to the Genesse River Canal, where he boarded a canal boat for Rochester; from there, he went on to Utica by horse-drawn barge on the Erie Canal, built less than two decades earlier. The horses, he noted, "only walked," and the fee was one cent a mile, bunk and board included. Finally, from Utica he rode the stage to Hamilton, where, to save a quarter, he carried his trunk on his back up the long hill to the "university."
The Hamilton Institution then had four buildings, housing a preparatory school for the college (called the Academic Department), the college itself, and the theological school. This collection of schools (which in the spring of 1846 changed its name to Madison, now Colgate, University) had been founded by Baptists in 1819 to train ministers, and by 1843, when Aaron entered, the three schools altogether had a faculty of ten and a student body of 213, most of the latter four or five years younger than Aaron. Nevertheless, he enrolled for the full course — a year of preparatory work, four of college, and two of divinity school. He had seventy-two dollars, earnings from the winter's teaching, which John had allowed him to keep. Years later he recalled:
I ought to have bolted three or four years earlier, yes, five years. I was without money, only the $72, nor had I the promise of any from any source for the undertaking. My brothers, Ben and John, had no conception of the need of an education for the ministry. They discouraged my going to Hamilton as a Utopian scheme — to take an eight [sic] years' course of study with $72! They did not give one cent for my education. My church did not offer to help me. My pastor, one of the best of men, a royal preacher and kindly disposed, appreciated my mission and need, but was too timid to press the case upon the church ... But something impelled me; I was impressed that God in some way would see me through. So gathering together what few little things I could with the ready aid of my dear mother who loved her boy and helped him in whatever his judgement and sense of duty approved, I started out.
Aaron was the first in his family to break away from what he later called "the narrow and unpromising limitations of that backwoods neighborhood." And he did not look back. Somehow, in seven years, taking odd jobs here and there, he put himself through Hamilton's three schools, though "I was prepared for nothing in the course of study ... I had never seen a Greek or Latin book before. I was too old to commence these studies, but I tugged along as best I could."
On graduating from the divinity school in 1850, his first post as pastor was at the Grant Street Baptist Church, Pittsburgh, from which he soon moved to a church in Oswego, New York, where he stayed two years, during which he married a woman as religious in spirit as he, Emma Lanphear Starr, the daughter of a tanner in Hamilton. She became his companion for life and the mother of his sons, Albert and Charles. And though her family loved and honored her, the better-educated father set its tone and pattern.
He seems never to have returned to Pike or to have introduced his boys to their Burlingham relatives. Some of what he had escaped there is suggested in an obituary of his eldest brother Benjamin, the only family member whose memory Aaron preserved in a family album:
He held fast to what he believed to be right with a grip of iron. Justice and right were words often upon his tongue and he believed that he thoroughly understood their meaning. A different education in youth might have softened some of the asperities of his character which was admired rather for its rugged boldness than for its quiet beauty. He was a man of strongly marked characteristics, having opinions of his own and not loath to defend in any presence and to any extremity that which he believed to be the right.
Aaron had much of Benjamin's contentious steel, but tempered by education and a wider experience of the world. Yet even in late middle age he could preach with a fiery moral certainty that recalled the frontier Protestantism of his youth.
The man, woman or child who violates the sanctity of the household and brings scandal and shame to the domestic hearth, making the cheek of virtue to blush and filling the air with a moral nausea that sickens and disgusts, is a foul fungus growth on the body of society. Let it be cut off. Aye, not alone does religion and does the church of God say that he who, professing Godliness, so far forgets himself as to be guilty of wanton infidelity to his family, should fall under the censure of his brethren, but also social authority which has its primal seat in the family says that such a sinner should suffer and wither under the scourge of social ostracism as well. The Lord is served by the maintenance of domestic integrity, because the family is of His own founding, and because in the conservation of its purity is involved the weal of humanity in general.
On the other hand, in a lecture he titled "Atmospheres," he revealed a different side of his personality. After stating that he did not intend to talk of oxygen or nitrogen but of men and women, he began to describe how "Individuals and communities create atmospheres of their own, and live in them ... One snarling man may change the whole air of the shop or field, and make it intolerable. In the presence of some rich men you feel a fullness of blessing coming to you; in the presence of other rich men you feel yourself in a blighting atmosphere."
True riches, for Aaron, lay not in material wealth. He lamented that boys were taken out of school at fourteen or fifteen and put to work, because "in nine cases out of ten" it was the end of any "intellectual growth." And the "esthetic" was equally important to a full Christian life; everything "pertaining to a love of the beautiful ... is a real thing in our nature." As an example he mentioned the lift in spirit he felt one day when visiting London's grimy tenements and seeing window boxes filled with flowers. Moreover, people needed a good social atmosphere: "When not social we lose enjoyment, virtue, tone and power to do good. Home without the social element is a prison." He extolled families who conversed together, where "the very atmosphere is charged with the sweet breath of congenial spirits." Work, the aim of life, was better done when approached in this spirit, the spirit of "Him in whose glory we hope to find complete and eternal blessedness."
Toward the end of his life, The Gospel Age (a Baptist journal) judged Aaron Burlingham to have been a good preacher with "a sharp, incisive style of speech," "originality of thought," and a willingness to deal "with the present truth rather than effete speculations and doctrines." He was not a philosopher; but his thoughts suggest that his home was one in which traditional standards of morality were believed with fervor, yet where people were unafraid of beauty, change, or adventure, a home in which the classical learning of the past was revered even as the new ideas of science were examined and sometimes accepted. Aaron continually admonished his sons to preserve inward integrity but also to look outward, with optimism, to gaze on the world in all its variety, and to find it, for the most part, good.
CCB's earliest recorded memories are of the draft riots that shook New York City for four days during the Civil War. Because volunteers no longer met the needs of the Union army, President Lincoln in the winter of 1863 requested, and Congress passed, a conscription act under which men, beginning in July of that year, would be drafted. The act declared all "able-bodied male citizens" between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five liable for military duty, the order of call-up to be decided by a lottery. Those called, however, could escape service by presenting an "acceptable substitute" who would enlist for three years, or by paying three hundred dollars. Because these provisions favored the rich, they angered the poor, who also saw in the act's application to "citizens" — construed as only white men — a discrimination against white labor to the advantage of black, left free to take the white workers' jobs. More than any other Civil War legislation, the Conscription Act brought the federal government into the common citizen's home and workplace.
In New York, on Monday, 13 July 1863, two days after a blindfolded official had drawn from a revolving drum the names of the first 1,200 men to be called, mobs sacked the draft offices. They destroyed the lists of names, smashed the furniture, poured turpentine on the floor, and burned the buildings. One office on Third Avenue near Forty-sixth Street, a block not yet fully built, was attacked at noon, and by evening the building and five or six houses nearby had been destroyed. Another draft office, at Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street and closer to the Burlinghams, by 5 p.m. was in flames along with neighboring buildings. And many houses north of Fourteenth Street were looted.
Initially, the mobs may have been organized and instructed by "Copperheads," members of the Democratic Party who opposed the war, despised Lincoln, and saw in the Conscription Act a chance to embarrass him and aid the Confederacy. Outside the first draft office to burn, for instance, a well-known Confederate sympathizer, John U. Andrews, addressed the mob. And the timing of the insurrection was well chosen, for much of the state's militia was then in Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, where the bloody battle had been fought only the week before. Also, the prompt destruction of the tools of war — telegraph lines, shipyards, and railroads — suggested planning. More tenuously, the state's Democratic governor, Horatio Seymour, was characteristically slow to respond, as was also the city's moderate Republican mayor, George Opdyke. But no conspirators have ever been named.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CCB by George Martin. Copyright © 2005 The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. Excerpted by permission of Hill and Wang.
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