Volume Iii Part 11 (1/2)
As part of the same general stir we may perhaps register the anti-masonic movement. One William Morgan, a Mason residing in Western New York, was reported about to expose in a publication the secrets of that order. The Masons were desirous of preventing this and made several forcible efforts to that end. Morgan was soon missing, and the exciting a.s.sumption was almost universally made that the Masons had taken him off. There was much evidence of this; but conviction was found impossible because, as was alleged, judges, juries, and witnesses were nearly all Masons. An intense and widespread feeling was developed that Masonry held itself superior to the laws, was therefore a foe to the Government and must be destroyed. The Anti-Masons became a mighty political party. Masons were driven from office. In 1832 anti-masonic nominations were made for President and Vice-President, which had much to do with the small vote of Clay in that year. It was this party that brought to the front politically William H. Seward, Millard Fillmore, and Thurlow Weed.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
Thurlow Weed. From an unpublished Photograph by Disderi, Paris, in 1861.
In the possession of Thurlow Weed Barnes.
In 1833 Ma.s.sachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania pa.s.sed laws suppressing lotteries, but the gambling mania seemed to transform itself into a craze for banks. In many parts this was such that actual riots took place when subscriptions to the stock of banks were opened, the earliest comers subscribing the whole with the purpose of selling to others at an advance. To make a bank was thought the great panacea for every ill that could befall. In this we see that the American people, bright as they were, could be duped.
Less wonder, then, at the success of the Moon Hoax, perpetrated in 1835.
It was generally known that Sir John Herschel had gone to the Cape of Good Hope to erect an observatory. One day the New York Sun came out with what purported to be part of a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, giving an account of Herschel's remarkable discoveries. The moon, so the bogus relation ran, had been found to be inhabited by human beings with wings. Herschel had seen flocks of them flying about. Their houses were triangular in form. The telescope had also revealed beavers in the moon, exhibiting most remarkable intelligence. Pictures of some of these and of moon scenery accompanied the article. The fraud was so clever as to deceive learned and unlearned alike. The sham story was continued through several issues of the Sun, and gave the paper an enormous sale. As it arrived in the different places, crowds scrambled for it, nor would those who failed to secure copies disperse until some one more fortunate had read to them all that the paper said upon the subject. Several colleges sent professorial deputations to the Sun office to see the article, and particularly the appendices, which, it was alleged, had been kept back. Richard Adams Locke was the author of this ingenious deception, which was not exploded until the arrival of authentic intelligence from Edinburgh.
Party spirit sometimes ran terribly high. A New York City election in 1834 was the occasion of a riot between men of the two parties, disturbances continuing several days. Political meetings were broken up, and the militia had to be called out to enforce order. Citizens armed themselves, fearing attacks upon banks and business houses. When it was found that the Whigs were triumphant in the city, deafening salutes were fired. Philadelphia Whigs celebrated this victory with a grand barbecue, attended, it was estimated, by fifty thousand people. The death of Harrison was malignantly ascribed to overeating in Was.h.i.+ngton, after his long experience with insufficient diet in the West. Whigs exulted over Jackson's cabinet difficulties. Jackson's ”Kitchen Cabinet,” the power behind the throne, gave umbrage to his official advisers. Duff Green, editor of the United States Telegraph, the President's ”organ,” was one member; Isaac Hill, of New Hamps.h.i.+re, and Amos Kendall, first of Ma.s.sachusetts, then of Kentucky, were others, these three the most influential. All had long worked, written, and cheered for Old Hickory.
In return he gave them good places at Was.h.i.+ngton, and now they enjoyed dropping in at the White House to take a smoke with the grizzly hero and help him curse the opposition as foes of ”the people.”
Major Eaton, Old Hickory's first Secretary of War, had married a beautiful widow, maiden name Peggy O'Neil, of common birth, and much gossipped about. The female members of other cabinet families refused to a.s.sociate with her, the Vice-President's wife leading. Jackson took up Mrs. Eaton's cause with all knightly zeal. He berated her traducers and persecutors in long and fierce personal letters. His niece and housekeeper, Mrs. Donelson, one of the anti-Eatonites, he turned out of the White House, with her husband, his private secretary. The breach was serious anyway, and might have been far more so but for the healing offices of Van Buren, who used all his courtliness and power of place to help the President bring about the social recognition of Mrs. Eaton. He called upon her, made parties in her honor, and secured her entree to the families of the greatest foreign ministers. Mrs. Eaton triumphed, but the scandal would not down.
When Jackson wrote his foreign message upon the French spoliation claims, his cabinet were aghast and begged him to soften its tone. Upon his refusal, it is said, they stole to the printing-office and did it themselves. But the proofs came back for Jackson's perusal. The lad who brought them was the late Mr. J. S. Ham, of Providence, R. I. He used to say that he had never known what profane swearing was till he listened to General Jackson's comments as those proofs were read.
Jackson and Quincy Adams were personal as well as political foes. When the President visited Boston, Harvard College bestowed on him the degree of Doctor of Laws. Adams, one of the overseers, opposed this with all his might. As ”an affectionate child of our Alma Mater, he would not be present to witness her disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian.” Subsequently he would refer, with a sneer, to ”Dr. Andrew Jackson.” The President's illness at Boston Adams declared ”four-fifths trickery” and the rest mere fatigue. He was like John Randolph, said Adams, who for forty years was always dying. ”He is now alternately giving out his chronic diarrhoea and making Warren bleed him for a pleurisy, and posting to Cambridge for a doctorate of laws, mounting the monument of Bunker's Hill to hear a fulsome address and receive two cannon-b.a.l.l.s from Edward Everett.”
To be sure, manifestations of a contrary spirit between the political parties were not wanting. The entire nation mourned for Madison after his death in 1836, as it had on the decease of Jefferson and John Adams both on the same day, July 4, 1826.
A note or two upon costume may not uninterestingly close this chapter.
Enormous bonnets were fas.h.i.+onable about 1830. Ladies also wore Leghorn hats, with very broad brims rolled up behind, tricked out profusely with ribbons and artificial flowers. Dress-waists were short and high. Skirts were short, too, hardly reaching the ankles. Sleeves were of the leg-of-mutton fas.h.i.+on, very full above the elbows but tightening toward the wrist. Gentlemen still dressed for the street not so differently from the revolutionary style. Walking-coats were of broadcloth, blue, brown, or green, to suit the taste, with gilt b.u.t.tons. Bottle-green was a very stylish color for evening coats. Blue and the gilt b.u.t.tons for street wear were, however, beginning to be discarded, Daniel Webster being one of the last to walk abroad in them. The buff waistcoat, white cambric cravat, and ruffled s.h.i.+rt still held their own. Collars for full dress were worn high, covering half the cheek, a fas.h.i.+on which persisted in parts of the country till 1850 or later.
CHAPTER VIII.
INDUSTRIAL ADVANCE BY 1840
[1840]
During the War of 1812 we had in England an industrial spy, whose campaign there has perhaps accomplished more for the country than all our armies did. It was Francis C. Lowell, of Boston. Great Britain was just introducing the power loom. The secret of structure was guarded with all vigilance, yet Lowell, pa.s.sing from cotton factory to cotton factory with Yankee eyes, ears, and wit, came home in 1814, believing, with good reason, as it proved, that he could set up one of the machines on American soil. Broad Street in Boston was the scene of his initial experiments, but the factory to the building of which they led was at Waltham. It was owned by a company, one of whose members was Nathan Appleton. Water furnished the motive power. By the autumn of 1814 Lowell had perfected his looms and placed them in the factory. Spinning machinery was also built, mounting seventeen hundred spindles. English cotton-workers did not as yet spin and weave under the same roof, so that the Lowell Mill at Waltham may, with great probability, be p.r.o.nounced the first in the world to carry cloth manufacture harmoniously through all its several successive steps from the raw stuff to the finished ware.
From this earliest establishment of the power-loom here, the cotton-cloth business strode rapidly forward. Fall River, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, and scores of other thriving towns sprung into being.
Every year new mills were built. In 1831 there were 801; in 1840, 1,240; in 1850, 1,074. Henceforth, through consolidation, the number of factories decreased, but the number of spindles grew steadily larger.
This rise of great manufacturing concerns was facilitated by a new order of corporation laws. There had been corporations in the country before 1830, as the Waltham case shows; but the system had had little evolution, as incorporation had in each case to proceed from a special legislative act. In 1837 Connecticut pa.s.sed a statute making this unnecessary and enabling a group of persons to become a corporation on complying with certain simple requirements. New York placed a similar provision in its const.i.tution of 1846. The Dartmouth College decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1819, interpreting an act of incorporation as a contract, which, by the Const.i.tution, no State can violate, still further humored and aided the corporation system.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Train schedule.]
From an Old Time-table. (Furnished by the ABC Pathfinder Railway Guide.)
In 1816 the streets of Baltimore were lighted with gas. A gas-light company was incorporated in New York in 1823. Not till 1836, however, did the Philadelphia streets have gas lights. The first savings-banks were established in Philadelphia and Boston in 1816. Baltimore had one two years later. Portable fire-proof safes were used in 1820. The Lehigh coal trade flourished this year, and also the manufacture of iron with coal. The whale fishery, too, was now beginning. The first factory in Lowell started in 1821. In 1822 there was a copper rolling mill in Baltimore, the only one then in America, and Paterson, N. J., began the manufacture of cotton duck. Patent leather was made in the United States by 1819. In 1824 Amesbury, Ma.s.s., had a water-power manufactory of flannel. The next year the practice of h.o.m.oeopathy began in America, and matches of a rude sort were displacing the old tinder-box. The next year after this Hartford produced axes and other edged tools.
Lithography, of which there had been specimens so early as 1818, was a Boston business in 1827. Pittsburgh manufactured damask table linen in 1828. The same year saw paper made from straw, and planing machinery in operation. The insuring of lives began in this country in 1812.