GERRIT SMITH.
For many years we were in the habit of hearing, now and then, of a certain Gerrit Smith, a strange gentleman who lived near Lake Ontario, where he possessed whole townships of land, gave away vast quantities of money, and was pretty sure to be found on the unpopular side of all questions, beloved alike by those who agreed with him and those who differed from him. Every one that knew him spoke of the majestic beauty of his form and face, of his joyous demeanor, of the profuse hospitality of his village abode, where he lived like a jovial old German baron, but without a baron's battle-axe and hunting spear.
He was indeed an interesting character. Without his enormous wealth he would have been, perhaps, a benevolent, enterprising farmer, who would have lived beloved and died lamented by all who knew him. But his wealth made him remarkable; for the possession of wealth usually renders a man steady-going and conservative. It is like ballast to a ship. The slow and difficult process by which honest wealth is usually acquired is pretty sure to "take the nonsense out of a man," and give to all his enterprises a practicable character. But here was a man whose wealth was more like the gas to a balloon than ballast to a ship; and he flung it around with an ignorance of human nature most astonishing in a person so able and intelligent. There was room in the world for one Gerrit Smith, but not for two. If we had many such, benevolence itself would be brought into odium, and we should reserve all our admiration for the close-fisted.
His ancestors were Dutchmen, long settled in Rockland County, New York. Gerrit's father owned the farm upon which Major André was executed, and might even have witnessed the tragedy, since he was twelve years old at the time. Peter Smith was his name, and he had a touch of genius in his composition, just enough to disturb and injure his life. At sixteen this Peter Smith was a merchant's clerk in New York, with such a love of the stage that he performed minor parts at the old Park theatre, and it is said could have made a good actor. He was a sensitive youth, easily moved to tears, and exceedingly susceptible to religious impressions. While he was still a young man he went into the fur business with John Jacob Astor, and tramped all over western and northern New York, buying furs from the Indians, and becoming intimately acquainted with that magnificent domain. The country bordering upon Lake Ontario abounded in fur-bearing animals at that period, and both the partners foretold Rochester, Oswego, and the other lake ports, before any white man had built a log hut on their site.
Astor invested his profits in city lots, but Peter Smith bought great tracts of land in northern and western New York. He sometimes bought townships at a single purchase, and when he died he owned in the State not far from a million acres. His prosperity, however, was of little advantage to him, for as he advanced in life a kind of religious gloom gained possession of him. He went about distributing tracts, and became at length so much impaired in his disposition that his wife could not live with him; finally, he withdrew from business and active life, made over the bulk of his property to his son, Gerrit, and, settling in Schenectady, passed a lonely and melancholy old age.
Gerrit Smith, the son of this strong and perturbed spirit, was educated at Hamilton College, near Utica, where he figured in the character, very uncommon at colleges in those days, of rich man's son; a strikingly handsome, winning youth, with flowing hair and broad Byron collar, fond of all innocent pleasures, member of a card club, and by no means inattentive to his dress. It seems, too, that at college he was an enthusiastic reader of passing literature, although in after days he scarcely shared in the intellectual life of his time. At the age of twenty-two he was a married man. He fell in love at college with the president's daughter, who died after a married life of only seven months. Married happily a second time a year or two after, he settled at his well-known house in Peterboro, a village near Oswego, where he lived ever after. The profession of the law, for which he had prepared himself, he never practiced, since the care of his immense estate absorbed his time and ability; as much so as the most exacting profession. In all those operations which led to the development of Oswego from an outlying military post into a large and thriving city, Gerrit Smith was of necessity a leader or participant,—for the best of his property lay in that region.
And here was his first misfortune. Rich as he was, his estate was all undeveloped, and nothing but the personal labor of the owner could make it of value. For twenty years or more he was the slave of his estate. He could not travel abroad; he could not recreate his mind by pleasure. Albany, the nearest large town, was more than a hundred miles distant, a troublesome journey then; and consequently he had few opportunities of mingling with men of the world. He was a man of the frontier, an admirable leader of men engaged in the mighty work of subduing the wilderness and laying the foundations of empires. He, too, bought land, like his father before him, although his main interest lay in improving his estate and making it accessible.
In the midst of his business life, when he was carrying a vast spread of sail (making canals, laying out towns, deep in all sorts of enterprises), the panic of 1837 struck him, laid him on his beam ends, and almost put him under water. He owed an immense sum of money—small, indeed, compared with his estate, but crushing at a time when no money could be raised upon the security of land. When he owned a million acres, as well as a great quantity of canal stock, plank-road stock, and wharf stock, and when fifteen hundred men owed him money, some in large amounts, he found it difficult to raise money enough to go to Philadelphia. In this extremity he had recourse to his father's friend and partner, John Jacob Astor, then the richest man in North America. Gerrit Smith described his situation in a letter, and asked for a large loan on land security.
Mr. Astor replied by inviting him to dinner. During the repast the old man was full of anecdote and reminiscence of the years when himself and Peter Smith camped out on the Oswego River, and went about with packs on their backs buying furs. When the cloth was removed the terrible topic was introduced, and the guest explained his situation once more.
"How much do you need?" inquired Astor.
"In all, I must have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars."
"Do you want the whole of it at once?" asked the millionaire.
"I do," was the reply.
Astor looked serious for a moment, and then said:—
"You shall have it."
The guest engaged to forward a mortgage on some lands along the Oswego River, and a few days after, before the mortgage was ready, the old man sent his check for the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Through the neglect of a clerk the mortgage papers were not sent for some weeks after, so that Mr. Astor had parted with this great sum upon no other security than a young man's word. But John Jacob Astor was a good judge of men, as well as of land.
Thus relieved, Gerrit Smith pursued his career without embarrassment, and in about twenty years paid off all his debts, and had then a revenue ranging from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year. He gave away money continuously, from thirty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars a year, in large sums and in small sums, to the deserving and the undeserving. Of course, he was inundated with begging letters. Every mail brought requests for help to redeem farms, to send children to school, to buy a piano, to buy an alpaca dress with the trimmings, to relieve sufferers by fire, and to pay election expenses.
"The small checks," Mr. Frothingham tells us, "flew about in all directions, carrying, in the aggregate, thousands of dollars, hundreds of which fell on sandy or gravelly soil, and produced nothing."
He gave, in fact, to every project which promised to relieve human distress, or promote human happiness. He used to have checks ready drawn to various amounts, only requiring to be signed and supplied with the name of the applicant. On one occasion he gave fifty dollars each to all the old maids and widows he could get knowledge of in the State of New York—six hundred of them in all. He gave away nearly three thousand small farms, from fifteen to seventy-five acres each, most of them to landless colored men.
"For years," said he, "I have indulged the thought that when I had sold enough land to pay my debts, I would give away the remainder to the poor. I am an Agrarian. I would that every man who desires a farm might have one, and no man covet the possession of more farms than one."
I need not say that these farms were of little benefit to those who received them, for our colored friends are by no means the men to go upon a patch of northern soil and wring an independent livelihood out of it. Gerrit Smith was a sort of blind, benevolent Samson, amazingly ignorant of human nature, of human life, and of the conditions upon which alone the welfare of our race is promoted. He died in 1874, aged seventy-seven, having lived one of the strangest lives ever recorded, and having exhibited a cast of character which excites equal admiration and regret.
PETER FORCE.
One of the interesting sights of the city of Washington used to be the library of "Old Peter Force," as he was familiarly called,—Colonel Peter Force, as he was more properly styled. He was one of the few colonels of that day who had actually held a colonel's command, having been regularly commissioned by the President of the United States as a colonel of artillery in the District of Columbia. He might, indeed, have been called major-general, for in his old age he held that rank in the militia of the district. And a very fine-looking soldier he must have been in his prime, judging from the portrait which used to hang in the library, representing a full-formed man, tall and erect, his handsome and benevolent countenance set off by an abundance of curly hair.
His library had about the roughest furniture ever seen in an apartment containing so much that was valuable. As I remember it, it was a long, low room, with streets and cross-streets of pine book-shelves, unpainted, all filled with books to their utmost capacity—a wilderness of books, in print and in manuscript, mostly old and dingy, and almost all of them relating in some way to American history. The place had a very musty smell; and as most of its treasures were in the original bindings, or without bindings, few persons would have suspected the priceless value of the collection. I am acquainted with a certain library in New York of several thousand volumes, most of which are bound resplendently in calf and gold, and the room in which they are kept is "as splendid as a steamboat," but old Peter Force could show you single alcoves of his library which, at a fair valuation, would buy out all that mass of sumptuosity.
It was not always easy to find the old gentleman in his dusty, dingy wilderness; but when you had discovered him in some remote recess he would take pleasure in exhibiting his treasures. He would take down his excellent copy of Eliot's Indian Bible, a book so faithfully made in every respect that I question if, as a mere piece of book-making, it could now be matched in the United States. He lived to see this rarity command in New York the price of fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. He would show you forty-one works, in the original editions, of Increase and Cotton Mather, the most recent of which was published in 1735. He possessed a large number of books printed and bound by Benjamin Franklin. He had two hundred volumes of the records of Colonial legislatures. He could show you a newspaper of almost every month—nay, almost every week, since newspapers were first published in America. He had in all nine hundred and fifty bound volumes of newspapers, of which two hundred and forty-five volumes were published before the year 1800. He would show you a collection of more than thirty-nine thousand pamphlets, of which eight thousand were printed before the year 1800. His collection of maps relating to America was truly wonderful. Besides all the early atlases of any note, he had over a thousand detached maps illustrative both of the geography and history of America; for many of them were maps and plans drawn for military purposes. He would show you, perhaps, a pen-drawing of date 1779, by a British officer, upon which was written: "Plan of the rebel works at West Point." He had also several plans by British officers of "the rebel works" around Boston during the revolution.
Besides such things (and he had over three hundred plans and maps of which there was no other copy in existence), he possessed a surprising number of books printed in the infancy of the printer's art; among them specimens representing every year from 1467 onward. He had more than two hundred and fifty books printed before the year 1600, so arranged that a student could trace the progress of the art of printing from the days of Caxton. He had also a vast collection of manuscripts, numbering four hundred and twenty-nine volumes, many of which were of particular interest. The whole number of volumes in the library was 22,529, and the number of pamphlets nearly 40,000.
The reader, perhaps, imagines that the collector of such a library must have been a very rich man, and that he traveled far and wide in search of these precious objects. Not at all. He never was a rich man, and I believe he rarely traveled beyond the sight of the dome of the Capitol. Indeed, the most wonderful thing about his collection was that he, who began life a journeyman printer, and was never in the receipt of a large income, should have been able to get together so vast an amount of valuable material. Part of the secret was that when he began to make his collection these things were not valued, and he obtained many of his most precious relics by merely taking the trouble to carry them away from the garrets in which they were mouldering into dust, unprized and unknown.
A wise old New York merchant, long ago himself mouldered into dust, used to say:—
"Men generally get in this world exactly what they want."
"How can that be?" asked a youngster one day. "Almost everybody in New York wants to be rich, but very few of them ever will be. I want a million or so myself."
"Ah, boy," the old man replied, "you want a million; but you don't want it enough. What you want at present is pleasure, and you want it so much that you are willing to spend all your surplus force, time, and revenue to get it. If you wanted your million as much as you want pleasure, by and by, when you have a bald head like mine, you would have your million."
Peter Force was a very good illustration of the old merchant's doctrine. He got all these precious things because he wanted them with a sustained passion of desire for half a century. There never was a time when he would not have gladly got up in the middle of the night and walked ten miles, in the face of a northeasterly storm, to get a rare pamphlet of four pages. He was a miser of such things. But, no; that word does not describe him; for one of the greatest pleasures of his life was to communicate his treasures to others; and he communicated to the whole American people the best of his collections in massive volumes of American Archives. He was a miser only in the strength of his desire.
"More than once," he said to Mr. George W. Greene, "did I hesitate between a barrel of flour and a rare book; but the book always got the upper hand."
To the same friend he made a remark which shows that his desire to communicate was quite as strong as his desire to obtain.
"Whenever," said he, "I found a little more money in my purse than I absolutely needed, I published a volume of historical tracts."
It was interesting to hear the old man relate how this taste for the treasures of history was formed in his mind. His father, who served, during the revolution, in a New Jersey regiment, retired after the war to the city of New York, and at his house the Jersey veterans liked to meet and talk over the incidents of the campaigns they had made together. Peter, as a boy, loved to hear them tell their stories, and, as he listened, the thought occurred to him one evening, Why should all this be forgotten? Boy as he was, he began to write them down, under the title of "The Unwritten History of the War in New Jersey." He made considerable progress in it, but unfortunately the manuscript was lost. The taste then formed grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength. At ten he left school forever, and went into a printing office, which has proved an excellent school to more than one valuable American mind. He became an accomplished printer, and at twenty-two was elected president of the New York Typographical Society, an organization which still exists.
Then the war of 1812 began. Like his father before him, he served in the army, first as private, then as sergeant, then as sergeant-major, then as ensign, finally as lieutenant. The war ended. He went to Washington as foreman of a printing office, and at Washington, as printer, editor, publisher and collector, he lived the rest of his long and honorable life; never rich, as I have before remarked, though never without a share of reasonable prosperity. The most important work of his life was the publication of the American Archives, in which he was aided by Congress; he furnishing the documents and the labor, and Congress paying the cost of publication. Through the nine volumes of this work a great number of the most curious and interesting records and memorials of American history are not only preserved, but made accessible to all students who can get near a library. He had all the state-houses of the country ransacked for documents, and a room was assigned him in the Department of State in which his clerks could conveniently copy them.
All went well with the work until William Marcy became Secretary of State, whose duty it was to examine and approve each volume before it went to the printer. When Peter Force presented the manuscript of the tenth volume to Secretary Marcy he received a rebuff which threw a cloud over several years of his life.
"I don't believe in your work, sir," said the secretary. "It is of no use to anybody. I never read a page of it, and never expect to."
"But," said Mr. Force, "the work is published in virtue of a contract with the government. Here is the manuscript of the tenth volume. If there is anything there which you think ought not to be there, have the goodness to point it out to me."
"You may leave the papers, sir," said the secretary.
He left the papers; but neither Marcy nor his successors ever found time to examine that tenth volume, though on the first day of every official year the compiler called their attention to it. For seven years he was a suitor on behalf of his beloved tenth volume, and then the war occurred and all such matters were necessarily put aside. He was now seventy-one years of age, and his great desire was to dispose of his library in such a way that its treasures would not be scattered abroad, and perhaps lost forever to the country. At length, Congress having sanctioned the enlargement of their own library, their librarian, Mr. Spofford, induced them to purchase the whole mass, just as it stood, for one hundred thousand dollars, and the collection now forms part of the Congressional library.
Colonel Force lived to the year 1868, when he died at Washington, universally beloved and lamented, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, enjoying almost to the last two of the things he loved best—his books and his flowers.