The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

The school to which I was sent was one of those founded by the Public School Society, a voluntary association of well-to-do citizens, who, in the absence of any municipal initiative, had organized themselves for the encouragement and support of primary education. As they were originally excluded from the management of the schools, the politicians, finding this a new field of operations and partisan activity, presently established the rival system of the municipal schools called "ward schools." At that time the political intrigues of the Catholic Church for the control of the public school system had just begun. The Public School Society had been organized for the free and non-sectarian education of all children unable to meet the expense of education in the private schools, and received subsidies from the municipality. Not only were all children under sixteen admitted to these schools without any fees, but the books, stationery, and all other material necessary were furnished gratuitously, and those who were shoeless were even provided with shoes, the only requisites being cleanliness and regular attendance. The direction was rigidly non-sectarian. The trustees were unpaid, and they comprised many of the leading citizens interested in popular education. They had built for their service sixteen schoolhouses in New York, and in each of these there were on an average a thousand children. The schoolhouses, of three stories, had a primary department for such children as were too young to be taught their letters or were not yet able to read and write, and to them the basement was given, the second story to the older girls, and the upper to the boys. The teaching for the boys' department was limited to the elements of arithmetic, elementary algebra, astronomy, and geometry, but within these limits the education was thorough, and all who went through it were qualified for places in offices or counting-rooms. The day was always opened by the reading of Scripture and prayer by the principal or one of the assistants, and this practice was made the ground of attack by the Catholic politicians, who objected to the Protestant Bible, all the school-books being already expurgated of every passage to which the bishops objected.

As our assistant principal was a Catholic, and often had to read the chapter, there could have been little harm done even to a Catholic pupil, but the political pressure was sufficient to induce the corporation of the city to adopt the political or "ward school" system, controlled by the politicians, and the new schools, one of which was or was to be established in each ward of the city, began to run an active opposition to the society schools, which they eventually drove out of existence.

At the time I was in the school, the interference of politics had just begun to make itself felt in the schools, but the corporation had not the courage to introduce its system on a large scale by supplanting en bloc the society schools, which might have made a political revolt; the Irish Catholic influence was still a feeble one, and the population at large was hardly aware of its tendency, but as the ward schools were gradually brought into active competition with the society schools the children were drawn off from the latter by various inducements and pressure on the parents. Each of our schools had four paid teachers—the principal, an assistant, and a junior and a senior monitor; and the elder pupils were employed in the instruction of the younger and in the preservation of order in school and in the school yard during the intermissions in which the gymnastics were enforced. My mental apathy must have been still very profound, for I remember that it often happened that when a question which had passed other pupils came to me in the class, the senior monitor used to address me, "Well, stupid, what do you say?" I evidently was the most stupid boy in the class—nothing seemed to penetrate my mental dullness, but, having grown tall and strong for my age, I was often made "yard monitor," to keep order during the physical training.

There was a gang of young ruffians, street boys, who used to hang around the school gates and maltreat the stragglers and even the boys in the yard, if the gate was left open, and I remember one day three or four of them invading the school-yard after I had dismissed the boys to go upstairs at the end of the intermission, thinking that they would have a fine game with the monitor. One made a pretext to quarrel with me, and, gripping me round the body, called to his companions to go and get some stones to pound me on the head with, this being the approved manner of the young roughs of New York. Finding that I could not extricate myself from his grip, I dragged him to the wall, and, catching him by the ears, beat his head against the rough stones until he dropped insensible, when, to the astonishment of his comrades, instead of stamping on him and finishing him at once, I ran upstairs as fast as my legs could carry me, so that when they came with their stones they had only their champion to carry out.

On the holidays there were generally stone-fights between the boys of our quarter and one of the adjoining quarters, and I shall carry to my grave the scars on my head of cuts received in one of these field combats, in which I refused to follow my party in flight, and took the onslaught of the whole vanguard of the enemy, armed with stones, and had my head pounded yellow, being only saved from worse by the intervention of the men of the vicinity. This fight gave me the unmerited reputation of courage and fighting power, and I was thereafter unmolested by the young roughs, though, in fact, I was timid to a degree and only stood my ground from nervous obstinacy; I never provoked a quarrel, and only revolted against a bully when the position became intolerable. I can remember the amazement of a companion older than myself, who had been in the habit of bullying me freely, until one day he went too far and I took him by the collar and shook and swung him till he was dizzy and begged for mercy, for of downright pugilistics I knew nothing, and a deliberate blow in the face with my fist in cold blood was a measure too brutal to enter into my mind.

The dreariness of this portion of my life was beyond description. The oppression of my sister-in-law at home, the severities of the teachers at school, and the exclusion from the influences of nature, in which I had so long lived without restraint, resulted in an attack of nostalgia which, when the coming of the first wildflowers brought it to a crisis, induced my brother to send me home.

My brother was attached to me, but the jealousy of his wife towards anybody who seemed to have any influence over him made it impossible for him to show any feeling even to me, for it brought on furious attacks of hysteria, to appease which he had sometimes to resort to humiliating devices. One day she became so excited that she fell into an extreme prostration and declared that she was dying. She had every indication, indeed, of approaching dissolution, and made her last dispositions, when my brother Charles, who was the family physician, seeing that the danger was real, assured her husband that unless some diversion of her humor was effected she would die. He advised exciting her jealousy, and her husband, accordingly, as if taking her dispositions for his conduct after her death, asked her what she thought of his marrying, in that contingency, a certain lady, whose name he mentioned, whereupon she rose in her bed in such a rage at the suggestion (the woman being her especial detestation) that she threw off all the symptoms of illness, and the next day went about the house as usual. This cure proved a grave misfortune to the whole family.

In spite of my aversion I was sent back to New York the next autumn for another winter's schooling. I landed from the steamer at the foot of Cortlandt Street two or three days after a great fire in New York, and I saw the ruins still smoking and the firemen playing on them. My baggage—a biscuit box, with my scanty wardrobe and a bag of hickory-nuts for my city cousins—I carried on my shoulders and walked the length of the city, my brother living in what was then farther New York, in Seventh Street, near the East River. At that time Fourteenth Street was the extreme limit of the city's growth, except for a few scattering residences. Beyond, and, on the East River side, even most of what lay beyond Seventh Street, was unreclaimed land. I sailed my toy boats on the salt marshes where Tompkins Square now is, and I used to shoot, botanize, and hunt for crystals all over the island beyond Thirty-Second Street, the land being sparsely inhabited. I discovered a little wild cactus growing freely amongst the rocks, and carried a handkerchief full of it home, getting myself well pricked by the spines, but to my botanical enthusiasm this was nothing in view of the discovery. Only here and there patches of arable land maintained small farmhouses, but the greater part of the surface of Manhattan Island was composed of a poor grazing land, interspersed with rolling ledges of bare granite, on which were visible what were then known as "diluvial scratches," which my brother Charles, who was an ardent naturalist, explained to me as the grooves made by the irruption of the deluge, which carried masses of stone across the broad ledges and left these scratches, then held widely as testimony to the actuality of the great deluge of Genesis. I think that we had to wait for Agassiz to show us that the "diluvial scratches" were really glacial abrasions, caused by the great glacier which came down the valley of the Hudson and went to sea off Sandy Hook. At this time my brother was making conchology his special study, and many holidays we spent on the harbor, dredging for shells, and great was our joy when he discovered a new species, which was named after him by the Lyceum of Natural History of New York.

The following year my fifth brother, Jacob, on leaving college, took charge of a school in the centre of New York State, built by the Sabbatarian community at large, in De Ruyter, a village of which many of the inhabitants were Sabbatarians, and it was decided that I should go there to follow my studies in preparation for college. I was to "board out" a debt which an uncle owed to my eldest brother, and which was uncollectible in any other way, and there I made my first acquaintance with semi-independent life, exchanging a home for a dormitory and a boarding-house. My uncle was to supply also my bedding, the academy being provided with bedsteads; but he was a heedless man, and I remember that I had to sleep six weeks on the bed-cords, with my wearing apparel as my only covering, before he awoke to the fact that I had a prepaid claim on him for mattress and bedding. But we were on the edge of a great forest, and in the almost primeval woodland I found compensation for many discomforts, and what time my tasks spared me was spent wandering there. The persistent apathy which had oppressed me for so many years still refused to lift, and my stupidity in learning was such that my brother threatened to send me home as a disgrace to the family. I had taken up Latin again, algebra, and geometry, and, though I was up by candlelight in the morning, and rarely put my books away till after ten at night except for meals, it was impossible for me to construe half of the lesson in Virgil, and the geometry was learned by rote. I at length gave up exercise to gain time for study, and my despairing struggles were misery. I was then fourteen, and in the seventh year of this darkness, and it seemed to me hopeless.

What happened I know not, but about the middle of the first term the mental fog broke away suddenly, and before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy story. My memory came back so completely that I could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than I. At the end of the second term I could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end, without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. I have never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon, which I record only as of possible interest to some one interested in psychology. Unfortunately, the academy failed to meet the expenses, and at the end of my second term the students dispersed to their homes, I going with great regret, for I enjoyed intensely this life on the edge of a large natural forest, through which ran a trout brook, and in which such wild woodland creatures as still survived our civilization were tolerably abundant. Amongst my fellow-students at De Ruyter was Charles Dudley Warner, with whom I contracted a friendship which survives in activity, though our paths in life have been since widely separated. I recall him as a sensitive, poetical boy,—almost girlish in his delicacy of temperament,—and showing the fine esprit which has made him one of the first of our humorists. His "Being a Boy" is a delightful and faithful record of the existence of a genuine New England boy, which will remain to future generations as a paleontological record when the race of them is extinct, if indeed it be not so already.