Charles Carleton Coffin: War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman

by William Elliot Griffis

Yet two men, each of the name of Coffin, and each of that superb Nantucket stock which has enriched our nation and carried the American flag to every sea, were working in the West and the East, for the abolition of legalized slaughter. Lorenzo Coffin, of Iowa, a distant cousin of Carleton's, whom so many railway men always salute as "father," had been for years trying to throttle the two twin enemies of the railway man, alcohol, and the freight-car equipment of link-and-pin coupler and hand-brake. It was he who agitated unceasingly for national protection to railway men, and to the brakeman especially. He and his fellow reformers asked for a law compelling the use of a brake which would relieve the crew from such awful exposure and foolhardy risk of life on the icy roofs of the cars in winter, and for couplers which, by abolishing the iron link and pin, would save the constant and almost certain crushing of the hands which the shifting of the cars compelled when coupled in the old way.

For a long time Lorenzo Coffin's efforts seemed utterly useless. This was simply because human life was cheaper than machinery, and because public opinion on this particular subject had not yet become Christian. It was Jesus Christ who raised the value of both the human body and the human soul, abolished gladiatorial shows, raised up hospitals, created cemeteries, even for the poorest, made life insurance companies possible, and put even such value on human life as could be recovered in action by law from corporations which murder men through sordid economy or criminal carelessness. Lorenzo Coffin wrought for the application of Christianity to railway men. When finally the law was passed, compelling safety-couplers and air-brakes, and when, in the constitution of New York State, the limit of five thousand dollars replevin for a human life destroyed by a corporation was abolished, and no limit set, there were two new triumphs of Christianity. In these phenomena, we see only further illustrations of that Kingdom of Heaven proclaimed by Christ, and illustrated both in the hidden leaven and the phenomenal mustard-seed.

A sermon by the pastor of Shawmut Church, on "Lions that devour," depicted the great American slaughter-field. It set forth the array of figures as given him in the reports of the Inter-State Commerce Commission, sent by his friend, the Hon. Augustus Schoonmaker, of Kingston, New York, and then in Washington, one of the Commissioners. There was considerable surprise and criticism from among his auditors, and the facts as set forth were doubted. There were present, as usual on Sunday mornings in Shawmut Church, men of public affairs, presidents of banks, the collector of the port of Boston, a general in the regular army, a veteran colonel of volunteers, several officers of railway companies, and, most of all, Mr. Charles Carleton Coffin. He and they thought the statements given of the slaughter of young men on railroads in the United States must be incredible. Even Carleton had not then informed himself concerning that great field of blood extending from ocean to ocean, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, which every year was strewn with the corpses or mangled limbs of twenty-five thousand people. He thought his friend in the pulpit must be mistaken, and frankly told him so.

On the following Sunday, having received the figures for the current year, from the best authority in Washington, the preacher was able to say that his statements of last Sunday had been below reality, and that, instead of exaggerating, he had underestimated the facts. This gave Mr. Coffin, as he afterwards confessed, fresh impetus in his determination to get grade crossings abolished in Massachusetts.

Having first personally interviewed the presidents of several great railroads leading out from Boston, and finding one or two heartily in favor of the idea, two or three more not in opposition, and scarcely a majority opposed, he persevered. He pressed the matter, and the bill was carried and signed by the governor. It provided that within a term of years all grade crossings in Massachusetts should be abolished. This will require the expenditure of many millions of dollars, the sinking or elevating of tracks, and the making of tunnels and bridges. The work was nobly begun. At this moment, in May, 1898, the progress is steadily forward to the great consummation.

Though his measure for the protection of human life received very little popular notice, Carleton counted it one of the best things that God had allowed him to do. And certainly, among the noble and truly Christian measures for the good of society, in this last decade of the century, the work done by Lorenzo Coffin in Iowa, as well as in the country at large, and by Senator Charles Carleton Coffin in Massachusetts,—a State whose example will be followed by others,—must ever be remembered by the grateful student of social progress. Surely, Carleton proved himself not merely a politician, but a statesman.

The welfare of the city of Boston was ever dear to Carleton's heart. He gave a great deal of time and thought to thinking out problems affecting its welfare, and hence was often a welcome speaker at club meetings, which are so numerous, so delightful, and, certainly, in their number, peculiar to Boston. He wrote for the press, giving his views freely, whenever any vital question was before the people. This often entailed severe labor and the sacrifice of time to one who could never boast very much of this world's goods.

When the writer first, in 1886, came to Boston to live, he found the horse everywhere in the city; when he left it in 1893 there was only the trolley. The motor power was carried through the air from a central source. It is even yet, however, a test of one's knowledge of Boston—a city not laid out by William Penn, but by cows and admirers of crookedness—to understand the street-car system of the city. Most of the street passenger lines fell gradually into the hands of one great corporation, which vastly improved the service, enlarging and making more comfortable, not to say luxurious, the accommodations, and by unification enabling one to ride astonishing distances for a nickel coin.

From the peculiar shape of the city and the converging of the thoroughfares on Tremont Street, fronting the Common and the old burying grounds, the space between Boylston Street and Cornhill was, at certain hours of the day, in a painful state of congestion. Then the stoppage of the cars, the loss of time, and the waste of temper was something which no nineteenth century man could stand with equanimity. How to relieve the congestion was the difficulty. Should there be an elevated railway, or a new avenue opened through the midst of the city? This was the question.

To this subject, Carleton gave his earnest attention. He remembered the day when the now elegant region of the Back Bay was marsh and water, when schooners discharged coal and lumber in that Public Garden, which in June looks like a day of heaven on earth, and when Tremont Street stopped at the crossing of the Boston and Albany railway. Even as late as 1850 the population included within the ten-mile radius of the city hall was but 267,861; in 1890, the increase was to 841,617; and the same ratio of increase will give, in 1930, 2,700,000 souls. In 1871, seventeen million people were moved into Boston by steam; in 1891, fifty-one millions. At the same ratio of increase, on the opening of the twentieth century, there will be 100,000,000 persons riding in from the suburbs, and of travellers in the street-cars, in A. D. 1910, nearly half a billion.