T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him

by T. De Witt Talmage; Eleanor McCutcheon Collier Talmage

In Brooklyn the highest local offices in 1877, those of the Collector, Police Commissioners, Fire Commission, Treasurer, and the City Works Commissioners, were under the control of one Patrick Shannon, owner of two gin mills. Wearing the mask of reformers the most astute and villainous politicians piloted themselves into power. They were all elected, and it was necessary. It was necessary that New York should elect the foremost gambler of the United States for State Senator, before the people of New York could realise the depths of degradation to which the politics of that time could sink. If Tweed had stolen only half as much as he did, investigation and discovery and reform would have been impossible. The re-election of Morrisey was necessary. He was elected not by the vote of his old partisans alone, but by Republicans. Hamilton Fish, General Grant's secretary, voted for him. Peter Cooper, the friend of education and the founder of a great institute, voted for him. The brown-stone-fronts voted for him. The Fifth Avenue equipage voted for him. Murray Hill voted for him. Meanwhile gambling was made honourable. And so the law-breaker became the law-maker.

Among a large and genteel community in Brooklyn there was a feeling that they were independent of politics. No one can be so. It was felt in the home and in the business offices. It was an influence that poisoned all the foundations of public and private virtue in Brooklyn and New York. The conditions of municipal immorality and wickedness were the worst at this time that ever confronted the pulpits of the City of Churches, as Brooklyn was called.

There was one bright spot in the dark horizon of life around me then, however, which I greeted with much pleasure and amusement.

In the early part of November, 1877, President Hayes offered to Colonel Robert Ingersoll the appointment of Minister to Germany. The President was a Methodist, and perhaps he thought that was a grand solution of Ingersollism. It was a mirthful event of the hour—the joke of the administration. Germany was the birthplace of what was then modern infidelity, Colonel Ingersoll had been filling the land with belated infidelism.

On the stage of the Academy of Music in Brooklyn he had attacked the memory of Tom Paine, assaulted the character of Rev. Dr. Prime, one of my neighbours, the Nestor of religious journalism, and on that same stage expressed his opinion that God was a great Ghost. This action of President Hayes kept me smiling for a week—I appreciated the joke among others.

During this month the American Stage suffered the loss of three celebrities: Edwin Adams, George L. Fox, and E.L. Davenport. While the Theatre never interested me, and I never entered one, I cannot criticise the dead. Four years before in the Tabernacle I preached a sermon against the Theatre. I saw there these men, sitting in pews in front of me, and that was the only time. They were taking notes of my discourse, to which they made public replies on the stage of the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, and on other stages at the close of their performances. Whatever they may have said of me, I stood uncovered in the presence of the dead, while the curtain of the great future went up on them. My sympathy was with the destitute households left behind. Public benefits relieved this. I would to God clergymen were as liberal to the families of deceased clergymen as play-actors to the families of dead play-actors. What a toilsome life, the play-actor's! On the 25th of March, 1833, Edmund Kean, sick and exhausted, trembled on to the English stage for the last time, when he acted in the character of Othello. The audience rose and cheered, and the waving of hats and handkerchiefs was bewildering, and when he came to the expression, "Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone!" his chin fell on his breast, and he turned to his son and said: "O God, I am dying! speak to them Charles," and the audience in sympathy cried, "Take him off! take him off!" and he was carried away to die. Poor Edmund Kean! When Schiller, the famous comedian, was tormented with toothache, some one offered to draw the tooth. "No," said he, "but on the 10th of June, when the house closes, you may draw the tooth, for then I shall have nothing to eat with it." The impersonation of character is often the means of destroying health. Molière, the comedian, acted the sick man until it proved fatal to him. Madame Clarion accounts for her premature old age by the fact that she had been obliged so often on the stage to enact the griefs and distresses of others. Mr. Bond threw so much earnestness into the tragedy of "Zarah," that he fainted and died. The life of the actor and actress is wearing and full of privation and annoyance, as is any life that depends upon the whims of the public for success.

One of the events in Church matters, towards the close of this year, was a pastoral letter of the Episcopal Bishops against Church fairs. So many churches were holding fairs then, they were a recognised social attribute of the Church family. This letter aroused the question as to whether it was right or wrong to have Church fairs, and the newspapers became very fretful about it. I defended the Church fairs, because I felt that if they were conducted on Christian principles they were the means of an universal sociality and spiritual strength. So far as I had been acquainted with them, they had made the Church purer, better. Some fairs may end in a fight; they are badly managed, perhaps. A Church fair, officered by Christian women, held within Christian hours, conducted on Christian plans, I approved, the pastoral letter of the Episcopal Bishops notwithstanding.

Just when we were in the midst of this religious tempest of small finances, the will of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt came up in the court for discussion. The whole world was anxious then to know if the Vanderbilt will could be broken. After battling half a century with diseases enough to kill ten men, Mr. Vanderbilt died, an octogenarian, leaving over $100,000,000—$95,000,000 to his eldest son—$5,000,000 to his wife, and the remainder to his other children and relations, with here and there a slight recognition of some humane or religious institution. I said then that the will could not be broken, because $95,000,000 in this country seemed too mighty for $5,000,000. It was a strange will, and if Mr. Vanderbilt had been his own executor of it, without lawyers' interference, I believe it would have been different. It suggests a comparison with George Peabody, who executed the distribution of his property without legal talent. Peabody gave $250,000 for a library in his own town in Massachusetts, and in his will left $10,000 to the Baltimore Institute, $20,000 to the poor of London, $10,000 to Harvard, $150,000 to Yale, $50,000 to Salem, Massachusetts, and $3,000,000 to the education of the people of the South in this country. No wonder he refused a baronetcy which the Queen of England offered him, he was a king—the king of human benefaction. That Vanderbilt will was the seven days wonder of its time.

It made way only for the President's message issued the first week in December, 1877. It was, in fact, Mr. Hayes's repudiation of a dishonest measure prepared by members of Congress to pay off our national debt in silver instead of in gold as had been promised.

The newspapers received the President's message with indifferent opinion. "It is disappointing," said one. "As a piece of composition it is terse and well written," said another. "The President used a good many big words to say very little," said another. "President Hayes will secure a respectful hearing by the ability and character of this document," said another. "Leaving out his bragging over his policy of pacification and concerning things he claims to have done, the space remaining will be very small," said another.