James R. Whiting is a man whose head commands our profoundest respect, and his heart our warmest attachment. This is no age for him. He is like a cat in a strange garret among the Busteeds, and Connollys, and Pursers, and Devlins, and Smiths, and Erbens, and other perjured aliens and plunderers that prowl around the City Treasury. But James R. Whiting would have been adored in the halcyon or tumultuous days of the Persian, Egyptian, Grecian, or Roman Empires. But neither the press nor the people will ever appreciate his wisdom, patriotism, and sacrifice in these degenerate times. God bless James R. Whiting! and when he dies, the honest people will weep over his departure, as the Athenians did over the bones of Socrates, whom they kicked, and cuffed, and taunted with insanity, and accused of corrupting the youth of his country, and thrust poison down his throat, but they deeply regretted their folly and cruelty, and the Grecians of every age have mourned his melancholy fate, and cursed their ancestors for their neglect and persecution of the scholar and patriot, and unrivalled Father of Philosophers, since the globe was launched into the atmospheric waves.
Peter Cooper’s Avarice and Infernal Antecedents.
We all know how John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard got their first thousand dollars. And now let us see how Peter Cooper obtained his first fifteen hundred dollars. When quite young and penniless, the American Government owed Peter Cooper’s aunt fifteen hundred dollars, as pension money, which Peter long besought his aunt to let him strive to obtain, and she invested him with the power to collect it, and he soon obtained it without much difficulty through some of the vagabond politicians of those days, for whom he had done some dirty work in securing their election to Congress and other civil trusts. On obtaining the money, Peter requested the parties who got it for him never to disclose it, and they promised they would not. After he got it, Peter would often visit his sick and needy and aged aunt, and assure her that he had not obtained it, nor would he ever be able to force the Government to pay her. One evening a friend called on Peter’s aunt, (who had been absent in a foreign land,) and found her very ill, and in the last stages of poverty, having sold or pawned nearly all she had. On perceiving this sad state of her affairs, he exclaimed: “Why, my good lady, how could you so rapidly squander the fifteen hundred dollars, with interest, that Peter Cooper obtained for you from our Government, as the pension due you for the patriotic services of your illustrious kindred?” She slowly raised her skeleton form from the bed, and reclining on her hands and side, she said in a husky and feeble tone: “My dear nephew, Peter Cooper, has often told me that my claim is invalid, and that I can never obtain a cent.” Her friend then started from his chair, and shook her hand, and kissed it, and told her to be of good cheer, and rushed from the house, and was on his way to Washington in one hour, and soon returned to New York with a letter from the President of the United States, (who knew her husband in his early years,) affectionately assuring her that her claim was paid to Peter Cooper, as her accredited agent and nephew. Great mental excitement and a protracted and dangerous illness followed these painful disclosures, during which Peter did not visit her. After she partially recovered, she instituted a suit against Peter, which he resisted through all the Courts for sixteen years, when the Court of Appeals directed Peter to pay his aunt four thousand and five hundred dollars. The instant Peter heard of the Court’s fatal decision, he mounted a fleet horse and reached his aunt’s at midnight, and approached her with these sweet words: “O, my dear aunt, how do you do? I am so glad to see you. I declare, how well and young you look for one so old as you. Well, my dear aunt, I have come to pay you the money I owe you, which I have kept all this time, and opposed you for sixteen years in the Courts, simply because I feared if I let you have it, somebody would get it away from you, and you would then be poor and penniless in your declining years.—Now, my dear aunt, I do assure you that I always intended to let you have the money; but your memory was so very bad, and you were always so charitable and easily influenced, that I thought I could take care of your money much better than you, and so I have always kept it against my will, and solely for your good. And now, dear aunt, I have written a receipt for you to sign, and if you will just take this pen, and sign it, you can have all this money in gold that you see in my handkerchief, which will keep you comfortable all your days.” And the poor old infirm creature tottered to the table, and put on her spectacles, and signed a receipt with her skeleton and trembling hand, for two thousand dollars, in full of all demands against Peter Cooper, which the unparalleled villain had thus cunningly written to defraud her of the balance of two thousand and five hundred dollars, which the Court of Appeals had directed him to pay her, after sixteen years of obstinate and wicked litigation on his part. He then gave her two thousand dollars, and left her as a robber darts from a habitation when its tenant is after him with a dagger or revolver. She threatened to prosecute him for obtaining $2,500 through false pretences, and he dared her to do it. But she descended from patriotic blood, and was so excited and exasperated at his wrongs, and disgusted with her species and modern kindred, and being superannuated and broken-hearted, and literally worn out, that, while sitting in her bed dictating a letter to the President of the United States respecting the monstrous robberies of Peter Cooper, she fell back and expired, with her withering execrations of her nephew on her lips. And it was the belief of the most eminent jurists of those days, that her sudden demise saved Peter Cooper from a residence of ten years in the dungeons of the State.
Peter Cooper has long bamboozled this city and country with his bogus philanthropy. He has not, and never will surrender his right, nor that of his heirs, to the building bearing the imposing inscription of “Union” and “To Science and Art.” He will let the first four stories, and pocket the rent, but the fifth story being (like the upper story of the Wall street buildings,) almost valueless, and which he could hardly let at all, he designs devoting to human learning, by letting it to itinerating lecturers for as much as he can squeeze out of them, and put that in his pocket also. And from my knowledge of his narrow mind, (he having been my Grammar pupil in his old age,) I do not believe that he will ever let the fifth story of his bogus scientific edifice to any lecturer who differs with his political or religious views. The penurious old rascal has furnished the immortal “Union” and “Science” and “Art” fifth story with the dilapidated and wormy benches of the old Wash Tub Tabernacle, and of Dr. Spring’s old brick church, which were too much decayed for a wholesome and patriotic or political bonfire. By all his noise and imposture about devoting his building to “Union, Science, and Art,” he has succeeded in prohibiting the construction of an edifice (on the vacant square at the junction of the Third and Fourth Avenues) far more beautiful than his, and by foiling that project, he greatly enhanced the value of his own property. And through his stupendous “Union,” and “Science” and “Art” imposition, he has cheated the New York Common Council into voting him a reduction of $8,000 worth of taxes on his building. There never was such a cunning wretch as Peter Cooper, whose craft would make the devil himself blush. Through his pretended love of his species, and his spurious earnest regard for the culture of the youth of the present and of coming generations, he has foisted the merest old granny that ever existed on the noble Metropolis as Mayor; and, not content with the Mayoralty and nearly all of the Executive Departments in his grasp, this cunning old rat directs the Mayor (who married his adopted daughter) to appoint his (Peter’s) own son Edward as Street Commissioner, which is worth millions in the hands of such cunning old thieves as Peter Cooper and Daniel F. Tieman, who have been stealing the public money through their enormous speculations and gigantic suburban operations, ever since they entered the Common Council in 1828. I have got the data to write a hundred pages on Peter Cooper’s indictment, while he had a glue factory on the old Boston road, and his niggardly meanness to his nieces and nephews, and other kindred, and to the poor Irishmen at present in his glue factory in the vicinity of New York. He screws down all in his employ to such low wages, that he barely permits them to subsist, although their employment of skinning diseased cows feet and making glue is the most offensive labor under Heaven. For his cruelty towards an inoffensive apple-woman, (whom he seized by the throat, and dragged from his store, and threw into the gutter,) he should be horsewhipped from the Battery to Harlem. And through his artifice and eternal excuse, (to the poor starving wretches who have solicited aid since he began his bogus intellectual edifice,) that he could not contribute a dollar to any charity except his building, he has saved thousands that other equally affluent citizens have contributed to relieve the sick and hungry and naked during the several winters of famine through which we have passed, since Peter Cooper began the construction of his sham literary institution. And these reprobates now strive to starve the sick old fathers and mothers and grandmothers and dear little brothers and sisters of the noble newsboys who sell their papers amid the rain and sleet and freezing cold, while these leprous and chronic-pile old scamps are sweetly reposing in feather beds they stole from the tax-payers, under the garb of City Reform. Peter Cooper must soon meet his plundered aunt in the realms of shadows, whose contemplation makes him tremble like a murderer going to execution.