CCB

Part One
AS THE TWIG IS BENT ...
1
A Boy's View of the Civil War
"I WAS BORN CHEAP," Burlingham would reply when asked how he, New York's First Citizen, came to be born in Plainfield, New Jersey. At the time, 31 August 1858, his father, the Reverend Aaron Hale Burlingham, was pastor at the South Baptist Church on New York's West Twenty-seventh Street, and his parents lived in a small brick house nearby. Yet "I was taken in my mother's womb to Plainfield to be born cheap in the house of my aunt, with the aid of my medical uncle, and I returned to New York City as speedily as practicable."1 He always regretted the circumstance. When, in 1933, Columbia University gave him an honorary degree and President Nicholas Murray Butler referred to him as a "Son of New Jersey," he squirmed and later told Butler he was "not entitled" to that honor: Plainfield had been a quirk of finance, without loyalty entailed on either side.2
In his naming, however, he escaped a discomfort. His father proposed "Theophilus Culp," to honor a close friend of Dutch ancestry. But another friend warned, as CCB told the story, that "all the boys would call me 'teacup.'" So in place of "Theophilus" the name of CCB's paternal grandfather, Charles, was substituted, and he was christened "Charles Culp."3
According to CCB, his grandfather Charles Burlingham (1776-1852) "was a weak man," and in old age, which on the frontier could come early, perhaps he was. Born in Smithfield, Rhode Island, as a young man he went west to Saratoga County, New York, and in 1818 farther west to the upper Genesee Valley, to what later became the town of Pike, in Wyoming County. The place was then a wilderness, and he, with his wife and family, followed blazed roads and Indian trails until, at what seemed a likely place, they stopped and began to hack a home from the woods and to farm. His eldest son, Benjamin, eighteen at the time, recalled, "[We]"had plenty of axe and handspike work."4 The family grew, and the children ultimately numbered seven boys and three girls--another girl dying in infancy.
After fifteen years of combating nature, the grandfather's energies began to fail, and at age fifty-seven he gave his farm to a son, Prentice, who soon turned it over to his brother John. Upon each transfer there was a condition: the holder of the father's farm must maintain the parents as well as the youngest child, the eleven-year-old Aaron (1822-1905).
The combined farms now had ninety acres and two small houses, and because John, with his wife and baby, lived in the larger, he took in with him his brother, Aaron, an arrangement that for Aaron was not wholly satisfactory. Except for the three and a half months of winter when he went to the local district or common school, he was expected to work full-time on the farm, and John was not an easy man. Years later Aaron wrote of him, "John was not flush with money, nor free from littleness in the administration of the double home and in his treatment of the boy. And his wife sympathized with him. Still, they were good people and on the whole meant well."5 But as a boy and young man, bound by his father's agreement with John, Aaron frequently felt like an indentured servant.
The school was both his refuge and means of escape. Common schools of the time in western New York were an early form of public school, organized locally but, if meeting certain standards, receiving some aid from the state. In the rural counties most children of both sexes, at least until the age of sixteen, attended the brief winter sessions except when needed at home or at work, which was often. Instruction was basic: reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography, and sometimes a little history. Because of the suspicions and prejudices among the many Protestant sects, religion as such was not taught, but the Bible was used as a reader, and pastors of most persuasions visited the schools to conduct prayer meetings and distribute tracts and magazines.6
The people of western New York in the forty years before the Civil War were notably alive to religion. The area, then and later, was known as "the burned-over district"--the analogy being, as one writer put it, "between the fires of the forest and those of the spirit." In the intense revivalism of the 1820s and 1830s, everyone read the Bible and was eager to dispute its meaning. New sects formed and after a time were abandoned (Mormonism being the exception). Among those that failed, superstition and credulity often mixed with moral intensity. Thousands, persuaded the world would end on 22 October 1844, had to face the unexpected dawn. Yet by and large the "Yorker Yankees," as they were called, "were extraordinarily wide-awake, well-informed, and ambitious for greater knowledge. Beyond the routine of formal education they were more alert than most other Americans."7
Aaron shared in the ferment of this Second Great Awakening and continued in his local common school past sixteen. When eighteen, apparently with John's approval, he went for six weeks to a private school in nearby Castile, a town larger than Pike, and for the remainder of the winter he taught in a village common school there, boarding with local people and giving John the balance of his earnings. For summer, he returned to John's farm, to work without pay. And he did this for two years.
Meanwhile, in 1840, when another religious revival swept western New York, both Aaron and his eldest brother, Benjamin, declared their allegiance to Christ and were baptized by the Reverend James Reid, "uniting" with Reid in the Castile Baptist Church. "I was never a dishonest or immoral young man," Aaron wrote later, "but I came to feel that I was a great sinner, inasmuch as my life was away from God; and I decided to turn over a new leaf and live for the Lord Jesus and for the good of my fellow men." He would be a Baptist preacher.8
After a third winter of teaching at a local school, and soon after his twenty-first birthday, on 18 February 1843, Aaron left farm and family at Pike for the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution at Hamilton, New York, a town of 1,300 people twenty-eight miles south of Utica and 180 east of Castile. He started by horse and wagon, driven by John to the Genesse River Canal, where he boarded a canal boat for Rochester; from there, he went on to Utica by horse-drawn barge on the Erie Canal, built less than two decades earlier. The horses, he noted, "only walked," and the fee was one cent a mile, bunk and board included. Finally, from Utica he rode the stage to Hamilton, where, to save a quarter, he carried his trunk on his back up the long hill to the "university."9
The Hamilton Institution then had four buildings, housing a preparatory school for the college (called the Academic Department), the college itself, and the theological school. This collection of schools (which in the spring of 1846 changed its name to Madison, now Colgate, University) had been founded by Baptists in 1819 to train ministers, and by 1843, when Aaron entered, the three schools altogether had a faculty of ten and a student body of 213, most of the latter four or five years younger than Aaron. Nevertheless, he enrolled for the full course--a year of preparatory work, four of college, and two of divinity school.10 He had seventy-two dollars, earnings from the winter's teaching, which John had allowed him to keep. Years later he recalled:
I ought to have bolted three or four years earlier, yes, five years. I was without money, only the $72, nor had I the promise of any from any sourcefor the undertaking. My brothers, Ben and John, had no conception of the need of an education for the ministry. They discouraged my going to Hamilton as a Utopian scheme--to take an eight [sic] years' course of study with $72! They did not give one cent for my education. My church did not offer to help me. My pastor, one of the best of men, a royal preacher and kindly disposed, appreciated my mission and need, but was too timid to press the case upon the church ... But something impelled me; I was impressed that God in some way would see me through. So gathering together what few little things I could with the ready aid of my dear mother who loved her boy and helped him in whatever his judgement and sense of duty approved, I started out.11
Aaron was the first in his family to break away from what he later called "the narrow and unpromising limitations of that backwoods neighborhood." And he did not look back. Somehow, in seven years, taking odd jobs here and there, he put himself through Hamilton's three schools, though "I was prepared for nothing in the course of study ... I had never seen a Greek or Latin book before. I was too old to commence these studies, but I tugged along as best I could."
On graduating from the divinity school in 1850, his first post as pastor was at the Grant Street Baptist Church, Pittsburgh, from which he soon moved to a church in Oswego, New York, where he stayed two years, during which he married a woman as religious in spirit as he, Emma Lanphear Starr, the daughter of a tanner in Hamilton. She became his companion for life and the mother of his sons, Albert and Charles. And though her family loved and honored her, the better-educated father set its tone and pattern.12
He seems never to have returned to Pike or to have introduced his boys to their Burlingham relatives. Some of what he had escaped there is suggested in an obituary of his eldest brother Benjamin, the only family member whose memory Aaron preserved in a family album:
He held fast to what he believed to be right with a grip of iron. Justice and right were words often upon his tongue and he believed that he thoroughly understood their meaning. A different education in youth might have softened some of the asperities of his character which was admired rather for its rugged boldness than for its quiet beauty. He was a man of strongly marked characteristics, having opinions of his own and not loath to defend in any presence and to any extremity that which he believed to be the right.13
Aaron had much of Benjamin's contentious steel, but tempered by education and a wider experience of the world. Yet even in late middle age he could preach with a fiery moral certainty that recalled the frontier Protestantism of his youth.
The man, woman or child who violates the sanctity of the household and brings scandal and shame to the domestic hearth, making the cheek of virtue to blush and filling the air with a moral nausea that sickens and disgusts, is a foul fungus growth on the body of society. Let it be cut off. Aye, not alone does religion and does the church of God say that he who, professing Godliness, so far forgets himself as to be guilty of wanton infidelity to his family, should fall under the censure of his brethren, but also social authority which has its primal seat in the family says that such a sinner should suffer and wither under the scourge of social ostracism as well. The Lord is served by the maintenance of domestic integrity, because the family is of His own founding, and because in the conservation of its purity is involved the weal of humanity in general.14
On the other hand, in a lecture he titled "Atmospheres," he revealed a different side of his personality. After stating that he did not intend to talk of oxygen or nitrogen but of men and women, he began to describe how "Individuals and communities create atmospheres of their own, and live in them ... One snarling man may change the whole air of the shop or field, and make it intolerable. In the presence of some rich men you feel a fullness of blessing coming to you; in the presence of other rich men you feel yourself in a blighting atmosphere."15
True riches, for Aaron, lay not in material wealth. He lamented that boys were taken out of school at fourteen or fifteen and put to work, because "in nine cases out of ten" it was the end of any "intellectual growth." And the "esthetic" was equally important to a full Christian life; everything "pertaining to a love of the beautiful ... is a real thing in our nature." As an example he mentioned the lift in spirit he felt one day when visiting London's grimy tenements and seeing window boxes filled with flowers. Moreover, people needed a good social atmosphere: "When not social we lose enjoyment, virtue, tone and power to do good. Home without the social element is a prison." He extolled families who conversed together, where "the very atmosphere is charged with the sweet breath of congenial spirits." Work, the aim of life, was better done when approached in this spirit, the spirit of "Him in whose glory we hope to find complete and eternal blessedness."
Toward the end of his life, The Gospel Age (a Baptist journal) judged Aaron Burlingham to have been a good preacher with "a sharp, incisive style of speech," "originality of thought," and a willingness to deal "with the present truth rather than effete speculations and doctrines." He was not a philosopher; but his thoughts suggest that his home was one in which traditional standards of morality were believed with fervor, yet where people were unafraid of beauty, change, or adventure, a home in which the classical learning of the past was revered even as the new ideas of science were examined and sometimes accepted. Aaron continually admonished his sons to preserve inward integrity but also to look outward, with optimism, to gaze on the world in all its variety, and to find it, for the most part, good.16


CCB's earliest recorded memories are of the draft riots that shook New York City for four days during the Civil War. Because volunteers no longer met the needs of the Union army, President Lincoln in the winter of 1863 requested, and Congress passed, a conscription act under which men, beginning in July of that year, would be drafted. The act declared all "able-bodied male citizens" between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five liable for military duty, the order of call-up to be decided by a lottery. Those called, however, could escape service by presenting an "acceptable substitute" who would enlist for three years, or by paying three hundred dollars. Because these provisions favored the rich, they angered the poor, who also saw in the act's application to "citizens"--construed as only white men--a discrimination against white labor to the advantage of black, left free to take the white workers' jobs. More than any other Civil War legislation, the Conscription Act brought the federal government into the common citizen's home and workplace.
In New York, on Monday, 13 July 1863, two days after a blindfolded official had drawn from a revolving drum the names of the first 1,200 men to be called, mobs sacked the draft offices. They destroyed the lists of names, smashed the furniture, poured turpentine on the floor, and burned the buildings. One office on Third Avenue near Forty-sixth Street, a block not yet fully built, was attacked at noon, and by evening the building and five or six houses nearby had been destroyed. Another draft office, at Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street and closer to the Burlinghams, by 5 p.m. was in flames along with neighboring buildings. And many houses north of Fourteenth Street were looted.17
Initially, the mobs may have been organized and instructed by "Copperheads," members of the Democratic Party who opposed the war, despisedLincoln, and saw in the Conscription Act a chance to embarrass him and aid the Confederacy. Outside the first draft office to burn, for instance, a well-known Confederate sympathizer, John U. Andrews, addressed the mob. And the timing of the insurrection was well chosen, for much of the state's militia was then in Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, where the bloody battle had been fought only the week before. Also, the prompt destruction of the tools of war--telegraph lines, shipyards, and railroads--suggested planning. More tenuously, the state's Democratic governor, Horatio Seymour, was characteristically slow to respond, as was also the city's moderate Republican mayor, George Opdyke. But no conspirators have ever been named.18
At first, the leaders of the mobs were factory workers, many of them German immigrants who held good jobs and who directed their protests primarily against the draft offices. These men seemed to have intended a one- or two-day strike, but they soon lost any control they had, and by the end of the first day leadership shifted to Irish immigrant longshoremen and day laborers, the least skilled of the city's workforce. These men, miserably paid, housed, and educated, hated abolitionists and the Republican Party and feared that an influx of recently emancipated slaves would take what jobs they had. By late afternoon, increasingly drunk and urged to excess by their women, they were dominated by those with a lust for violence. One such mob attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum on the northern edge of the city, at Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street, a land-mark four-story building housing some 250 children. As the mob in front howled "Burn the niggers' nest," the children were hurried out the back, the large carrying the small, and led to a police station. The mob plundered the building and, despite the efforts of firemen, burned it to the ground; a few hours later, on the city's west side, a waterfront mob hanged a Negro, William Jones, the first of many racial beatings and lynchings.19
With many buildings in flames and his own house looted, Mayor Opdyke sought aid for his police from the few units of state militia remaining in the city (mostly staffing armories) and from federal units at the harbor forts guarding the Narrows. The few militia were too ill trained and fear-ful to be of much help, but the federal troops, though numbering barely a hundred, brought two cannons, bayonets, some sharpshooters, and the discipline to maneuver while under fire. Even so, the police and soldiers were not always able to contain the mobs.
On the second day, Tuesday, despite strong police and troop opposition, a mob broke into the Union Steam Works, an arms factory at Twenty-first Street and Second Avenue, seizing muskets and bullets. As a mob pursued a detachment of soldiers, the troops, alternating ranks and firing directly intothe mass of people, retreated in good order. By midnight, buildings in all the northern wards were burning, and the mobs began to build barricades.20 For four days they controlled many blocks and whole sections of the city, beating, hanging, and shooting all whom they judged responsible for the war or who opposed them. Besides Negroes, abolitionists, and Republicans, their chief victims were the city police, many of whom were Irish. Estimates of the dead ranged from seventy-four to several hundred, with about 125 later identified and probably more not counted because their bodies had been thrown into the Hudson and East Rivers. Not until late Thursday, when federal regiments, with guns and artillery, began to return from Gettysburg, did the mobs start to disperse. In all, the four days of rioting was the most violent civil disorder in the United States of the nineteenth century.21
Charley Burlingham, not yet five, could not have understood much of what was happening throughout the four days he was kept indoors. Still, he noticed that guests, common enough in a pastor's home, stayed on, and they, too, never went out. He watched his mother lift a floorboard before the hearth and hide her jewelry. He heard his father, who had gone out early one morning to buy food, report the sight of a Negro hanging from a lamppost. He saw a wounded man carried into the house and later taken out across the roof. In recording his memories CCB added nothing beyond what he had seen. Characteristically, he reported facts, not his feelings.22
An exception to this rule was the fire two years later at Barnum's American Museum, "which my brother and I had the great delight of seeing ... burned to the ground."23 Neither Albert nor Charley, then eleven and going on seven, had anything against Phineas T. Barnum: CCB meant only to confirm that Barnum once again had presented "the greatest show on earth" as firemen led from the building a collection of animals, sideshow freaks, and a corps de ballet. The museum, five stories high and a half block long, at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street and close to City Hall, was then at the center of the city's civic and cultural life. Broadway, as Edgar Allan Poe had proclaimed in 1845, was "the finest street in the first city of the New World," a sunbathed boulevard of bustle and trade.
It is the great artery through which flows the best blood of our system ... The most elegant shops in the City line its sides; the finest buildings are found there, and all fashions exhibit their first gloss upon its sidewalks ... Wall Street passes its wealth into its broad channel, and all the dealers in intellectual works are here centered, every exhibition of art is found here, and the largest caravansaries in the world border upon it. Its pavement has been trod upon by every distinguished man that has visited our continent.24
Set in the midst of this excitement, and a major part of it, Barnum's American Museum partially fulfilled the functions of museums of art and natural history. In addition to the sideshows of curiosities and freaks for which he was most famous, Barnum offered a picture gallery, zoo, aquarium, restaurants, and several large "Lecture Halls," so called not to offend those who from religious scruples would not enter a "Theatre."25 Everyone knew the museum--admission in 1865 was $.30 for adults, $.15 for children under ten--and when word of the fire passed round the city, a crowd of 40,000 gathered to watch it. Happily for the Burlingham boys, one of their father's parishioners was an official at the Astor House on Broadway, a hotel that was catty-cornered to the museum and close enough to have to drape itself in wet blankets for protection. From a balcony Charley and Albert could see and hear everything: monkeys jabbered, dogs barked, and parrots screeched. The crowd, happy to see the curiosities free of charge, cheered the giantess, the fat lady, the albino girl, and the corps de ballet who, having lost their street clothes to the fire, emerged in costume. Fortunately, the boys could not see the charred bodies of the animals that did not escape, such as the two white whales which had cooked in their tanks.26 The next day newspapers estimated Barnum's loss at $400,000 and his insurance at $40,000. Within four months he reopened.27


On 15 April 1865, Albert's eleventh birthday, the Burlingham family was visiting friends in Brooklyn, and in the early morning the boys, waiting for their mother and father to come down to breakfast, went out on the sidewalk to play. A newsboy delivered the morning paper, which had heavy black borders and a headline LINCOLN ASSASSINATED. The boys were shocked, for theirs was a Republican family--their father had voted for Lincoln and served as an inspector for the U.S. Sanitary Commission--and they ran inside to tell their parents.28
The news stunned the city. Shops did not open, and people gathered in crowds awaiting bulletins. As one New Yorker, George Templeton Strong, wrote that night in his diary: "Above all, there is a profound, awe-stricken feeling that we are, as it were, in immediate presence of a fearful, gigantic crime, such as has not been committed in our day and can hardly be matched in history." Soon a plan emerged: Lincoln would be buried in Springfield, Illinois, transported there in his coffin by a train passing slowly through seven of the Northern states, halting for ceremonies in twelve of the larger cities, including New York.29
In Philadelphia the coffin was placed in Independence Hall and an estimated 330,000 people passed on either side to gaze on Lincoln. That daya local Episcopal minister, Phillips Brooks, soon to be one of the country's greatest preachers and one with a direct impact on CCB's development, delivered an address on Lincoln that in the coming years became possibly the best known. Characterizing the president as "the Shepherd of the People," Brooks talked of the issues that had shaped his life and views, chiefly the conflict between freedom and slavery. Stressing the inevitability that some slave-holder would want to kill the representative of freedom, he concluded: "I charge this murder where it belongs, on slavery."30
From Philadelphia, the funeral train and coffin proceeded to Jersey City, the railroad's terminal on the western bank of the Hudson River. There, in a solemn changing of the guard, dignitaries of New Jersey consigned the closed coffin to their counterparts of New York, who, with soldiers carrying it shoulder-high through silent crowds, accompanied it aboard the ferry Jersey City. Thousands then, on either shore, watched the ferry draped in black, with flags at half-mast, cross the Hudson to Manhattan, docking at the foot of Desbrosses Street. New York's Seventh Regiment was waiting, having formed a hollow square to contain the funeral cortege for the march to City Hall. Along the route, a crowd waited, but again, thanks to his father's friend at the Astor House, Charley was at a window overlooking Broadway as the cortege passed by.31
Down Broadway came the ranks of officials, dignitaries, and generals, followed by the honor guard, with Colonel Emmons Clark on horseback and his troops surrounding the cortege. The hearse of plate glass, topped by eight plumes of black and white feathers, was draped with the American flag and drawn by six gray horses, each covered with black cloth and led by a groom dressed in mourning. Years later, in describing the procession to his grandson, CCB stressed its silence: "No sound except the drum, the clop of hooves, the women sobbing."32
The coffin was put in the rotunda of City Hall, on the second floor, in the space before the door to the Governor's Room and reached by flanking stairways. By noon on that Monday, 24 April 1865, the people began to file past. In two lines they ascended one stairway to the open coffin, paused, and descended the opposite stair. One who that day looked on Lincoln was CCB.33
The next afternoon, a grander procession formed at City Hall to accompany the coffin to the Hudson River Railroad terminal at Ninth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, where it would be put on a train for Albany and cities farther west. For this march there were seven divisions of troops and dignitaries, with the honor guard again New York's Seventh Regiment, led by Colonel Clark, marching with arms reversed, gun muzzles tothe ground. The funeral cart now was more ornate, a big platform with a dais for the coffin and a canopy of black cloth above. At the foot of each column were three national flags festooned and creped, and at the top, at the canopy's corners, four huge sable plumes, nodding and quivering at every movement. Like a crown atop the canopy's raised center was a small circular Temple of Liberty, unwalled, open, empty. Sixteen gray horses pulled the cart, each led by a groom, horses, and men in black. This procession Charley watched from a sidewalk along the route.34
Sometime in the 1930s, he described it to a friend's son, a young boy amazed to discover a man who had been at Lincoln's funeral procession; and sixty years later that boy attempted to recall the account. "Somehow, CCB got himself a place on the curbstone, and then: 'Here comes the soand-so regiment, led by Col. Somebody-or-other, on his horse, Flibbertigibbet. But this is no ordinary horse. Oh, no. Let me tell you. This is a very special horse. At the battle of Cedar Creek ...' My God! The old man knew it all. We were in the mid-1930s, yet there he was, a child of the Civil War!"35
As a preacher's son Charles Burlingham was raised on ideas of public duty and sacrifice, and in his earliest memories Lincoln and others who gave their lives in the Civil War represented an ideal of manhood. When grown, he knew if not the men themselves their survivors; for instance, the family of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, among whom he was to have many friends.36 And in middle age, in his summer cottage at Black Point, Connecticut, CCB hung on his main study wall, over his desk, a large sepia photograph of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's bronze monument to Shaw. The bas-relief shows the colonel, on horseback, leading his Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment of Negro volunteers down Beacon Street in Boston. The moment represented is 28 May 1863, the day the regiment embarked for South Carolina. On 18 July it took part in the attack on Fort Wagner, where Shaw and many of his men were killed. They were buried together. For many in the North Shaw personified the call to duty and sacrifice articulated by Julia Ward Howe in her immensely popular "Battle Hymn of the Republic":
In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.37
For CCB, the example of living and dying offered by such men as Lincoln and Shaw never staled. Driven deep into his spirit when a boy, it was with him always.
Copyright © 2005 by The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation