Let the Firemen Stand to their Guns!
And Never Surrender their Glorious Volunteer System to the Corrupt Politicians, and with it their Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund.
We wrote and published the following document in the New York Herald one year before we opened our batteries against George W. Matsell’s alienage. But it is more appropriate now than in 1854, as the enthusiastic champions of a Paid Fire Department are inclosing and about to overwhelm the adversaries of that fatal system, like the allied armies the great Napoleon at Waterloo. Although we had written the Annual and Special Fire Reports of Alfred Carson in 1851, ‘2, and ‘3, yet we wrote and published this document without his consultation, as he was in Troy, New York, when it appeared in the Herald; but when he read it in the cars between Albany and New York, he was delighted with it, as he informed us on his arrival in this city. The Firemen will perceive that it was written soon after the destruction of Jenning’s Clothing Store in Broadway, and the loss of human life; and that we hurl back the ungenerous charges of almost the universal press of New York, that the firemen were a gang of thieves, because some cheap and scorched and wet clothing was placed over the chilly and mangled and dying firemen by their weeping comrades on that mournful occasion, and found on their dead bodies in the City Hospital.
But read, Firemen, read, and unite to a man against all who would destroy the Volunteer Fire System of New York, which is the best ever devised since the forests and Indians yielded to civilization and freedom.
From the New York Herald of May 14, 1854.
Firemen of New York:—The columns of almost every public journal are closed against you. The hand of almost every editor is uplifted to strike you down. The scurvy politicians, to a man, are against you, and the insurance corporations are spending their money freely to distract and subvert your organization, for the first time since the Indians transmitted their fire department to the pale faces. And why this unhallowed alliance of the press, politicians, and insurance corporations, for your demolition? I will tell you. The press would blot out Alfred Carson, because he dared attack them, and silence their base libels on his good name; the corrupt politicians would bury yourselves and Carson in one common ruin, because you have driven their Aldermanic cronies back to their dreary abodes of reflection and remorse, and the biting neglect of meritorious citizens; and the insurance companies have secretly united to destroy you, because you and your predecessors have been so kind and true to them and their ancestors for one or two centuries. Ingratitude is of rare occurrence among honorable men, but from soulless corporations it is to be expected, although they are composed of creatures who profess to have souls.
A paid fire department is the ostensible cry of the press; but your chastisement is their leading motive, because you have clung like brothers to your Chief, against their maledictions. Their first object is to render you obnoxious with the people. And how would they effect this? Not by honorable means, but by branding you indiscriminately as thieves, even while some of you are imploring, in the name of a humane God, to be extricated from burning ruins, and when the thrilling cries of your deceased comrades could be heard in their editorial closets; and, when extricated, (some dead, and others apparently in their last gasp,) these editors send you, editorially, to the hospital or to Greenwood, as a gang of worthless thieves. They thus degrade and lacerate the bleeding hearts of your distracted kindred; and, to make sure of their victims, living and dead, they devise a hellish plot to entrap your noble Chief Engineer to testify against your departed companions, whose testimony before the Coroner’s Jury, was most shamefully perverted by almost every press in the city. And these editors do all this to operate on the people, and in favor of a paid fire department.
Firemen, you do not merit this degradation and this cruel persecution from the press, (the safety of whose costly establishments you watch with such sleepless vigilance,) simply because you have conscientiously testified your undeviating devotion to your Chief, who has shared your perils for so many years, while those who would degrade and destroy you, are sweetly reposing on feather beds, and making glorious dividends from your gratuitous and perilous labors.
The editors prate about the thievish propensities of firemen, as though there were no thieves among the editors; but these editors must be a most infernal set of scamps from their glowing accounts of each other. And the editors prognosticate no more thefts if the firemen are only paid good fat salaries, and are called brigadiers, or brigade firemen. These brigadiers must come direct from Heaven, if there be not, here and there, a devil among them. Louis Napoleon elected himself Emperor through his fire brigades, and other similar organizations; and Matsell, backed by a large portion of the press and the politicians, may have some mischievous game in view, for he is in his shirt sleeves for a fire brigade.—Brigadier Matsell! How that would sound! And a Brigadier of two Departments, viz.: the fire and the police. O, there’s much in that. Did not Matsell once attempt to wear a white fireman’s cap? and did not Anderson make him take it off? And did not Matsell order a general alarm at the fire in Forsyth street the other day? Oh, firemen, why will you repose on a volcano?
Much is said by the press of the independence of the police, under its present organization. But does not Matsell report the trembling policemen for misdemeanor to the Mayor, Recorder, and City Judge, whose action is final in their removal? This power, in the hands of Matsell, is a lash, and enables him, in connection with his captains and lieutenants, to control the city. How easy for a police captain, under instructions from Matsell, to silence the clamors of their political opponents at the polls, and to incarcerate, (in the Tombs or station houses, until the election is over, and the votes are “satisfactorily” counted,) under the pretext of disturbance, all those who dared oppose Matsell’s candidates, and the candidates of Matsell’s friends among the press and the politicians. And if we had another powerful political organization, in the form of a paid fire department, or Napoleonic Fire Brigade, that would harmonize in its action with the police department, and with the leading politicians, and with the press, and with the insurance and other corporations, what would become of the right of practical suffrage in the city of New York? It would exist only in name.
With power equally distributed among the nations of Europe, there would be no cause for war. Nicholas thinks he can resist all Europe in arms: hence the present war. What mainly preserves the union of the States is the equality of representation of States in the American Senate, through which the reserved rights of the States are chiefly protected. And what will preserve the city of New York from conflagration, and best protect the ballot-box, and promote the best interests of the city, will be for the press to be far less grasping in its desires for universal power, through its advocation of, and its subsequent intimate connection with, the leading officers of dangerous political organizations, which must ultimately result in their absorption of the right of suffrage, and perhaps in the destruction of the city itself. Let the press and the public organizations studiously move in their respective spheres, like the States and the General Government,—a serious collision, or too friendly intimacy, being equally fatal to both, and to all concerned.
The Press has power enough, and quite as much as the people can safely allow them. The public corporations have more power than is consistent with the public safety, and the purity and exercise of the elective franchise. But I repeat, that with a police department, and paid fire department, and other public corporations, and the press, all united in a specified object, God have mercy on the city of New York. Farewell, then, to the right of suffrage in this city. The paid firemen and the paid policemen, openly or tacitly sustained by the press, would utterly block up and control the passages leading to the ballot-boxes, permitting (as many of the police do now) only those to vote who could give the countersign. This fearful consolidation of power in the first American city might lead to the most deplorable results to the whole country. We have not existed eighty years as a Republic, which is a very brief period in the silent and trackless footsteps of centuries. The American eagle might fall to-morrow from his projecting cliff, never to rise. Rome ruled, and finally destroyed the Roman Empire. So with Athens and Alexandria, and other ancient cities. Paris, through political organizations, rules France. These associations, controlled by a bold, reckless, and accomplished leader, can make France a republic to-day, and a despotism to-morrow. London, through her public corporations, which were gradually stolen from the people, controls the British empire, on whose vast possessions the sun never sets. And why should not New York, with similar organizations, and controlled by a crafty, irresponsible, unscrupulous, and unbridled press, ultimately reduce the Whole country to despotism and degrading vassalage? Some of our leading and most honorable statesmen will tell you that the city of New York controls the national conventions of either party, and the national politics, through half a dozen bloated political scamps, located in this city and Albany.
Firemen of New York, and other citizens, are you prepared to incur these perils? If not, arise and resist the superhuman efforts to disgrace and destroy you! Grasp and hold with giant strength the little you have left of the right of suffrage;—cling, with undying firmness and affection, to your noble organization; resist the attempts to saddle this tax-ridden city with an additional tax of nearly one million of dollars, for the support of a paid fire department, and avert the possible contingency that some mushroom scoundrel may, at no remote day, haughtily dispense the curses of monarchy or unlimited despotism on the ruins of your country!
A paid fire department, composed of a limited number of hired mercenaries, could not protect this city so effectually as a voluntary system. It could be done in the cities of Europe, where the habitations are composed of bricks, granite, marble, and other substances impervious to fire, but not in New York, where almost every edifice is a pile of shavings, or combustible matter. Moreover, hired civilians are the same as hired soldiers. Both work for pay, and not for public utility and renown. But the volunteer firemen of New York are as zealous and courageous as the soldiers of the Revolution, while paid firemen would evince the slothfulness and cowardice of the British in that memorable contest. Any man contending for liberty, and his wife and children, can easily rend to fragments three cowardly mercenary combatants, and a volunteer fireman of New York, panting for deeds of valor, and the love and respect of his fellow men, can effect more than half a dozen paid lazzaroni, who go to their perilous task as slaves go to the field.
For years the press of New York has disgusted and insulted the firemen, by striving to make the people believe that the police were more efficient at fires than the firemen; and most of these puffs are written at Matsell’s and the Captains’ offices. We now begin to see the motive of this, which was two-fold. First, to make the police system popular with the people—and it has required an immense deal of puffing to make it even tolerable with the people. And, secondly, to prepare the people for another police organization in the form of a paid fire department. We shall not recur to the past, but will recur to the future files of the press, and we will venture the prediction that, ere many days, it will be publicly announced that poor Matsell has either broken his thigh at a fire, or had his coat burned entirely from his back, or that he has saved the lives of seventy-five policemen, by ordering them down stairs just as the fatal crash was about to come; or, fancying himself Chief Engineer, he has actually struck a general alarm, as in Forsyth street. Or it may be announced that Captains Brennan, Leonard, or some other daring policemen, have quenched a tolerably large conflagration before the firemen arrived; and that, at the same terrific fire, they saved the lives of several men, women, and children, at the imminent risk of losing their own valuable lives.
This base stuff, and these monstrous lies, which daily fill the columns of the Press, concocted by the Police Department as early and valuable news, may have rendered the Police Department a little more tolerable with the people, but, at the same time, it has created a breach and a deadly hatred between the policemen and the firemen that will not be effaced while the present race of editors shall exist. And if they would atone for the mischief they have thus created, and would have more friendly relations subsist between the Police and Fire Departments, the sooner they stop such disgusting nonsense the better for them, and for the city at large.
Stephen H. Branch.
May 14, 1854.
And now, firemen, be vigilant, or you are lost. You are surrounded by spies and internal foes, who talk in favor of the Volunteer System, and yet in ambush are toiling unceasingly against it. The Fire Department swarms with these hypocrites, who are mostly politicians, and employed to stab your Volunteer System by the chief robbers of the politicians, who desire to strangle the rights of the people, and rob and oppress them with taxation, through two such overshadowing political organizations as the Fire and Police Departments.