Struggles and Triumphs, P. T. Barnum [good books to read in english .txt] 📗

of this paper went South, and connected himself with a journal in Augusta, Georgia; the remaining proprietor shortly afterwards reissued the Farmer, but the peace meetings which had been advertised for different towns were never held; the gathering at Stepney was the last of the kind.

Elias Howe, Jr., although he was a man of wealth and well advanced in years, enlisted as a private in the Seventeenth regiment of Connecticut volunteers and served in the Army of the Potomac. Once when his fellow-soldiers, not having been paid off, were in need of money, he advanced $13,000 due them, and when his regiment was disbanded and discharged from service, he chartered, at his own expense, a special train to bring them from New Haven to Bridgeport, where they had a public reception.

Mr. Howe, like all men of his reputed wealth and liberality, was constantly besieged by solicitors for all sorts of charities, nor was he free from such applications when he was serving as a common soldier in Virginia. On one occasion a worthy priest came to him and asked for a subscription to a church which was then building. “Who is it,” exclaimed Howe, “that talks of building churches in this time of war?” The priest ventured to say that he was trying to build in his parish a church which was to be known as St. Peter’s.

“St. Peter’s is it?” asked Howe; “well, St. Peter was, in his way, a fighting man; he drew a sword once and cut off a man’s ear; on the whole, I think,” he added, as he gave a handsome sum of money to the priest, “I must do something for St. Peter, though about these days I am devoting my attention and money mainly to saltpetre.”

After the draft riots in New York and in other cities, in July, 1863, myself and other members of the “Prudential Committee” which had been formed in Bridgeport were frequently threatened with personal violence, and rumors were especially rife that Lindencroft would some night be mobbed and destroyed. On several occasions, soldiers volunteered as a guard and came and stayed at my house, sometimes for several nights in succession, and I was also provided with rockets, so that in case of an attempted attack I could signal to my friends in the city and especially to the night watchman at the arsenal, who would see my rockets at Lindencroft and give the alarm. Happily these signals were never needed, but the rockets came in play, long afterwards, in another way.

My house was provided with a magnetic burglar-alarm and one night the faithful bell sounded. I was instantly on my feet and summoning my servants, one ran and rung the large bell on the lawn which served in the day time to call my coachman from the stable, another turned on the gas, while I fired a gun out of the window and I then went to the top of the house and set off several rockets. The whole region round about was instantly aroused; dogs barked, neighbors half-dressed, but armed, flocked over to my grounds, every time a rocket went up, and I was by no means sparing of my supply; the whole place was as light as day, and in the general glare and confusion we caught sight of two retreating burglars, one running one way, the other another way, and both as fast as their legs could carry them; nor do I believe that the panic-stricken would-be plunderers stopped running till they reached New York.

It always seemed to me that a man who “takes no interest in politics” is unfit to live in a land where the government rests in the hands of the people. Consequently, whether I expressed them or not, I always had pronounced opinions upon all the leading political questions of the day, and no frivolous reason ever kept me from the polls. Indeed, on one occasion, I even hastened my return from Europe, so that I could take part in a presidential election. I was a party man, but not a partisan, nor a wire-puller, and I had never sought or desired office, though it had often been tendered to me. This was notoriously true, among all who knew me, up to the year 1865, when I accepted from the Republican party a nomination to the Connecticut legislature from the town of Fairfield, and I did this because I felt that it would be an honor to be permitted to vote for the then proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States to abolish slavery forever from the land.

I was elected, and on arriving at Hartford the night before the session began, I found the wire-pullers at work laying their plans for the election of a Speaker of the House. Watching the movements closely, I saw that the railroad interests had combined in support of one of the candidates, and this naturally excited my suspicion. I never believed in making State legislation a mere power to support monopolies. I do not need to declare my full appreciation of the great blessings which railroad interests and enterprises have brought upon this country and the world. But the vaster the enterprise and its power for good, the greater its opportunity for mischief if its power is perverted. The time was when a whole community was tied to the track of one or two railway companies, and it was too truthful to be looked upon as satire to call New Jersey the “State of Camden and Amboy.” A great railroad company, like fire, is a good servant, but a bad master; and when it is considered that such a company, with its vast number of men dependent upon it for their daily bread, can sometimes elect State officers and legislatures, the danger to our free institutions from such a force may well be feared.

Thinking of these things, and seeing in the combination of railroad interests to elect a speaker, no promise of good to the community