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.