Paragraph Prompted by the History of the Week.
General Grant's is the greatest military name which rises out of our civil war and destines to the most enduring memory. Probably no citizen of the United States Twenty-five years ago had less expectation than he of becoming a conquering hero, and being twice elected Chief Magistrate. It is not likely that he was at the time conscious of his equality to the great duties which were to devolve upon him. He found in himself as the need for them rose new faculties and powers of which he had no surmise. At any rate he had given no previous sign that he was aware of their possession.
Wasburne, who first brought Captain Grant to the attention General Yates, then deluged with a flood of raw levies, much in need of disciplinary attention and with few available hands competent for that work, speaks of his modest self estimate at that as in all after times, and contrasts with it the extra ordinary promptitude and energy with which he entered upon his work. He found chaos out of which he speedily evolved order; a mob which he swiftly organized into a disciplined command. He could not then have dreamed of Donelson and Shiloh, yet it may have been that, once feeling in his hand the tools which destiny had appointed to his use, the consciousness dawned upon him that he was no longer a square peg in a round hole, as he had almost always hitherto been. After his girdle was buckled on it could not by any discriminating questioner have been asked of him as Cicero asked of his son in law: "Who tied Dolabella to that sword?" That now obsolete and merely emblematic instrument, which in point of fact I believe the General rarely wore, has not in modern ages fallen into a hand, nor cut a deeper name in the adamant of history.
Grant took command of the Army of the Potomac, April 10, 1864. Immediately thereafter President Lincoln began to experience a feeling of relief and confidence with which none of his previous commanders had been able to inspire him. He did not make a fuss and demand this, that and the other impossible thing, but went to work with the materials confided to him with a result which is now known to mankind. He is one of the quietest little fellows you ever saw, Mr. Lincoln said to a visitor. 'Sometimes he is in the room ma minute or two before I know he is here. The only evidence you have that he's in any place is the (here the print is illegible), things "git". Grant, he said was the only general he had had. He made no complaints, and no impossible requisitions, paraded no plans ('I don't know what his plans are and don't want to,' Lincoln said), but his presence seemed to have fired the sluggish bluff of the armies of the East as it had heretofore done those of Shiloh, Murfreesboro and Vicsburg. It is no wonder that the sore laden President felt a sense of relief, that at last some one had appeared who could case his bent shoulders of a part of their crushing load.
After Shiloh Grant was for a time under the cloud of Halleck's displeasure and was about to leave the army which he had led to victory, and for that purpose had sought and obtained leave of absence. Sherman heard of this from General Halleck and rode over to his camp, 'a short distance off the Monterey road,' where he found Major Rawlins, Logan and Hillyer, of his staff, in the midst of packed camp equipage, all ready to move in the morning. He inquired for Grant and was shown his tent, where he found him seated on a camp stool with papers of a rude table before him which he was assorting and tying up into bundles with red tape. Sherman asked him if it was true that he was going away. He said it was. 'You know how it is Sherman,' he said. 'I am in the way here. I have stood it as long as I can and can endure it no longer.; He was going, he said to St. Louis; had no business there, but was only eager to escape the embarrassment and mortification of the anomalous position in which the stupid and unselfish antagonism of Halleck his ranking officer, placed him. Sherman protested loudly and earnestly against this move. 'Stay, he said; 'something good will turn up and you will be restored to your true place; but if you go away events will right on and you will be left out.' He told Grant how it was with himself before the battle of Shiloh. Some of the Northern correspondents had spread on all the winds the report that he was crazy, inflicting on him the bitterest misery and mortification. He was so much cast down by these publications that he was almost on the point of resigning his command and abandoning the army; but the battle and the victory had given him new life and he was now in high favor. He urged Grant to surrender his leave of absence and remain around, that some change in affairs would restore him again to his command, which, indeed, speedily turned out to be true. Grant took the advice and in the light of after events, it would seem as if his career thenceforward was shaped by that timely and friendly and loyal consul. This was early in June. About mid July Halleck was summoned back to Washington and Grant reinstated in his own command.
Before he left the Western armies for Washington, after the bill reviving the office of lieutenant general had become a law and he had been appointed to that post, he wrote to Sherman, setting forth the great obligations he was under to the officers who had occupied subordinate positions under him, particularly to himself (Sherman) and McPherson, to whom he desired that a copy of the letter might be sent. 'How far, ' he said, 'your advice and suggestions have been of assistance you know. How far your execution of whatever has been given you to do entitles you to a share in the reward I am receiving you cannot know as well as I do. I feel all the gratitude my letter would express, giving it the most flattering construction.; Sherman replied in a generous, impulsive manner, saying that he was now Washington's legitimate successor and occupied a position of almost dangerous elevation. he urged him not to stay in Washington; said that Halleck was better qualified than he to, 'attend the buffets of intrigue and policy.' 'Come out West,; he said, 'and take to yourself the whole Mississippi Valley; let us make it dead sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and pacific shores will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with its main trunk. But grant took command of the Potomac armies instead, hammered his way through the Wilderness, and wound up the great war under the apple tree of Appomatox.
John Russell Young, who accompanied General Grant in his journey round the world and was its historian, told me that of the endless procession of Kings, high mightiness and great ministers of state whom he met in the memorable progress he was most impressed with Bismark and Lt. Hung Chang, the illustrious Chinese statesman, deeming, indeed, the latter the greater man. His stature and proportions corresponded with the amplitude and vigor of his understanding, and he would have stood a head and shoulders above the iron chancellor, as the great prince and statesman would tower above the assembled occidental magnates of his time. Lt. Hung was in fact the tallest minister of state on record, and, though he has since then gone into retirement accompanied by the reproaches and opprobrium which are wont to accompany retiring Oriental ministers, he still remains a personage of interest in his own and other lands, remembered in this, however, mainly because of the eulogiums of his illustrious American visitor.
As a rule, the mandarins imagined that Grant was emperor of the United States and was for some reason in exile. It was not considered delicate to inquire too closely into particulars, lest they might find, as is sometimes found in the case of high Chinese's panjandrums, that he had robbed the till, but they thought he had been disgraced or deposed of some reason, and was traveling about the world, 'waiting for the storm to blow over.' Mr. Young also informed me that the Paris General Grant would not go to the Hospital des Invalids to see the tomb of Napoleon. He regarded that terrible dead islander as a monster or murderer, and had no more interesting the cenotaph of him with its imperial emblazonments than he would have had in the sepulchral adornments and memorials of any coffined knave who had sacrificed to his lust of ambition and dominion the lives of his fellow men. He was not dazzled by the splendor of the meteoric arch of conquest through which the little Corsican was shot, out of the arbalist of revolution and which yet trails fire, caring, indeed, no more for him or the deeds of him than if he had been some bloodstained brigand from the mountains of his native island, his victims reckoned in scores instead of myriad's. I wonder if any other great soldier who has visited Paris since the dust of the mighty Emperor was there inurned has had the fortitude to stay away from the Invalides?
During his Presidential terms General Grant acquired an intonation reputation for reticence. But, in point of fact, amoung his friends and those whom be trusted, he was not more silent than other men. He never talked for display; never fought his battle over again; never in the faintest degree sought to extol himself, but entered readily into the spirit of any discourse which the time and the occasion inspired, bringing to it in all cases simplicity, sincerity, directness and common sense. He had no wit and little appreciation of it in others. His conversation was yes, yes, nay, any, as if he deemed that whatsoever was more than these come of evil. Nobody ever heard him swear, though the provocations of soldiers to that form of discourse are sometimes extreme, and nobody ever heard from his lips an indelicate or equivocal expression. I spent a long afternoon with him at his seaside villa at Long Branch a dozen years ago in company with two of his friends, and his conversation was full of variety and interest. I had just returned from a journey to the Red River regions of the Northwest, carrying me through the frontier military posts where he had been stationed just after his graduation of West Point, and he had many inquiries to make concerning the state of things in that territory, as well as many reminiscences of his own earlier experiences there. He was then President, in the meridian of fame and place his strength seemingly at its maximum, a square, solid and noble fabric of manhood, crowned with the laurel of achievement, to me s impressive and memorable as any compatriot of my generation. Who could then have guessed, so clear and sunny the skies over him, that around his head should yet gather the vanward clouds of evil days and on him at the last spend their malice and unloose their chained thunders?
General Grant's judgment of the military capacities of men was almost unerring, but in other respects it was so faulty as at times to almost resemble faluity. Himself of the most transparent and single hearted integrity in all things, little or great, he had the fortune to be often surrounded by rascals who traded on his name, made it the cover of theft and all manner of iniquity, and whom he could never see through. Even after some of them were convicted and sent to jail, and others found out and publicly shunned and dishonored, it seemed as if he could not yet realize that they were other than the honest, good hearted fellows they pretended to be. It is indeed to this extraordinary simplicity and credulity, this inability to recognize a scoundrel, even with all the flags and ensigns of scoundrelism hoisted at high mast, that all the calamities of his last years were due. It would seem as if anybody ought to have been able to see through so shallow a man as Ferdinand Ward, yet up to the last hour, when all his fortune was gone and his name hopelessly involved, and even his personal integrity fiercely challenged, the General continued to repose a blind confindence in him and to treat him with as much kindness and affection as he would have treated a son. It was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar answered it. But for the poisonous reptile who crept so insidiously into his confidence and stung him to death, piercing the shield which embattled armies clad in iron had found invulneralbe, it is porbable that the General might have lived many years, surrounded with all that should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, the most illustrious and beloved citizen of the nation and the greatest soldier of his age.
The life and Work of the Children's Aid Society's Superintendent.
In the death of Richard D. Douglass, general superintendent of the work of the Brooklyn children's Aid Society, which occurred on Thursday afternoon at the Poplar street home, the helpless poor of the city, young and old alike, lose a friend whose place will be hard to fill. Born in 1837, Mr. Douglass was yet in the fullness of his strength and usefulness at his decease and was stricken down at his post. He graduated from Amherst College only to enter the Bangor, (Me.) Theological Seminary where he acquired the education needful in taking up the work of the pulpit. At the period of his graduation, in 1863, the War of the Rebellion was raging in all its fury, and the young clergyman, looking about for some field wherein he might accomplish the most good possible entered the services of the Christian Commission, to be delegated to the Army of the Potomac. The next season found him at Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, in charge of the commission's work in that quarter, and when the scene of war shifted he followed Grant's Army before Richmond, working actively all the while among the soldiers, until the long war ended. A short period of respite from her labor followed. Finally on the first of June, 1867, he entered the service of the Brooklyn Children's aid Society, then under the superintendence of Mr. Lawrence, being given charge of the special relief work, a new department. The place was one calling for incessant labor and the caring for the most trying cases, but all this he accomplished in a manner hard to be excelled. He continued at the head of this department until 1881, alone seeking out homeless and destitute children, to find them homes and labor the country over. During the first year, 382 boys and girls were thus provided for, and last year the number aggregated 925, the total for eighteen years being more then 13,000.
In 1874 Mr. Douglass received the appointment of general superintendent of the society, the place held at his death, and at once commenced the enlargement of the scope of its work. He had a few theories and no sharply defined, arbitrary rules. It was his earnest endeavor to lead one and all of the waifs coming under his care into the path of right doing by kindness alone. He found children who had been neglected and abused until they had lost all faith in human words or conduct, and sought to replace the confidence lost. It was a most difficult and trying task, but the grand number of wayward, outcast children whose lives had been fraught with little else but misery, when they came to him, who were made to become good men and women, tells better than words how admirably he succeeded. In 1876 Mr. Douglass suggested the founding of the Seaside Sanitarium at Coney Island. Its success was great and immediate. Children who had always lived in noisome cellars and filthy tenements were taken out into the sunlight, where their pallid cheeks were painted red and brown by the ocean breeze, and not a little of the sunlight went back with them and illumined a myriad of wretched homes as nothing else could have done. Nor did the work stop here. The example set was so notable that charitable societies laboring in other cities followed it, until seaside homes, country sanitariums and fresh air funds have come the rule with all and brighten the lives of countless children annually.
He kept the multifarious matters managed by the society under his immediate supervision, and during the long period of his authority each was made to profit at his hands. The Newsboys' home, at No. 61 Poplar street, where he lived, was the object of his special attention. It received within its walls the most turbulent small boys in the city's complement. They earned their living, or most of it, and this gave them a sort of independence lacking in other waifes and made them correspondingly hard to manage, much less improve. Yet by patient, earnest labor, by the study of each boy's characteristics and the utilization of the knowledge gained in taming the youngster, wonderful results were accomplished and the home put on a footing for good work too strong to be overthrown. When the old quarter became to limited Mr. Douglass' efforts did much to bring about the building of the new, and to his forethought is to be credited the admirable plan upon which it is constructed and the system under which it now successfully operates. The Children's home Industrial School, at No. 139 Van Brunt street, near Hamilton Ferry, embracing, as it does, an industrial school, Kindergarten, a sewing school and a day nursery for children under five years old, profited much through his genius for contriving useful adjuncts to charitable work. In this, as in the Newsboy's Home, the system of teaching the scholar what he or she could best master, and of treating each one as in independent individual whom special provision should be made, prevailed. As the epitaph on his monument there stand this inscription to do honor to his memory, according to the last report of the s9ociety, covering a period of eighteen years and two months of labors:
2,338 children sent to good homes in the country. 7,481 children sent to good homes in the city. 7,827 girls taught on the sewing machine. 10,687 boys taken in from the streets. 30,749 mothers and children sent to Sea Side Home. 41,921 articles of clothing distributed to children. 592,467 lodgings furnished to street boys. 1,783,208 meals furnished to the hungry. $63,459,12 received from the boys, in part payment for their food and shelter.
An unselfish, large hearted, sympathetic gentleman, he loved the children and his chose work with a love that nothing could diminish, and literally gave his life for others. Living a constant witness of wretchedness and hardship, he was ever cheerful, and a vein of inborn humor illumined his life and lightened the burden of his work. In 1864 he married Miss Mary Lawrence, who became an earnest helpmate in his work. His widow and three children, two sons and a daughter, survive him. Mr. Douglass was an active member of Plymouth Church, where the funeral services will be held on Monday morning, at ten o'clock. From two o'clock until four on Sunday afternoon opportunity will be given to view the remains to such of the friends and beneficiaries of the deceased as may call at the Poplar street home.
April 11, 1885. The Discovery made at the Hall of Records Site.
Coroner Meninger was notified this morning that some human bones had been found by the workmen who are digging out the ground next to the Court House for a foundation for the Hall of Records which is to be erected. The coroner went there this morning and examined the portions of the skeletons found. he states that they are parts of the bones of an adult woman and a child. The woman's skull is in a good state of preservation , and the upper jaw contains a set of well preserved teeth. The skull of the child is in fragments. An Eagle reporter asked the Coroner if the remains might have been the property of some physician or medical student. 'No, he said,' I fancy that there may have been a graveyard there at one time, and that these bones are portions of bodies which were interred there.' 'An old Brooklynite said to the reporter: 'During the revolutionary period there was a fort and fortifications about where the corner of Boernum street and Atlantic avenue now is. The fort was called Fort Swift, and there were several houses in the vicinity. there was at that time a burying ground, which was located about where the Court House stands, and I should not be surprised if these workmen do not come across many more skeletons.' Coroner Menninger ordered the bones found to be sent to the Morgue and an inquest will probably be held. the spot where the skeletons were found is just about where the old livery stable of Ephraim Snedeker formerly stood. The structure was demolished ten or twelve years ago. Contiguous to the stable was a barroom, which was the rendezvous of many old Brooklynites with sporting proclivities. Gambling to a considerable extent was reported to be carried on in a rear part of the building, and the place did not enjoy the best of reputations among the respectable people of the vicinity.
April 17, 1885. ANOTHER OF RUGG'S VICTIMS
Amelia W. Townsend died at her home in this village(Oyster Bay) yesterday afternoon, aged 65. She was the wife of James C. Townsend. her father was the late Commodore Winder, of the United States navy, and General Winder, of Libby Prison infamy, was her brother. She was a radical Secessionist. On the 7th of January, 1884 during a snow storm in the evening, a colored man rapped on the kitchen door of the Townsend residence, who said he was Simon Rapelye, and he had called for the family washing. This was Rapelye's custom, and supposing the man to be Rapelye, Mrs. Townsend admitted him. The caller was Chareles H. Rugg, who, less than two months before, had murdered Mrs. and Miss Baybee at Brookville. The door was barely open, when Rugg dealt Mrs. Townsend a crushing blow on the head with a stone mason's hammer, and repeating the blow several times, left the lady for dead in the kitchen. Passing into the sitting room Rugg found Mr. Townsend sick on a lounge near the stove, and gave him several desperate blows with the hammer, leaving him, as be thought dead. After this Rugg plundered the house of money and jewelry, and fled to New York, where he pawned the jewelry, and spent the money in Thompson street dens. Mr. and Mrs. Townsend lay in their gore until late on the morning of January 8, when the tragedy was discovered by an old family servant. Mrs. Townsend rallied sooner than her husband, but neither recovered fully, and the lady's death is mainly due to the injuries inflicted by Rugg. Mr. Townsend, is descended from Richard Townsend, who settled in Oyster Bay in 1660. His residence is part of the ancestral farm. His death cannot be long delayed.
Mrs. Townsend's Funeral
The funeral of Mrs. Aurelia Townsend,who died of the injuries inflicted upon her by Rugg, took place this afternoon. There was a very large attendance of people from Brooklyn and Queens County villages. the Rev. Charles Wightman, of the Baptist Church, officiated. The interment will be at Glen Cove.