NEW YORK AND THE UNITED STATES.
New York, January 8th, 1864. THE New York correspondent of the London Times, in a letter which most of the readers of the Spectator will have read four weeks before they see this mention of it, has described New York—the city— with an approach to absolute fidelity which we all heartily wish had characterized his previous correspondence. I desire to bear witness—the witness of a man born and bred in the great city— to the general faithfulness of the portrait which he has drawn, although he paints a " sensation " portrait, and exaggerates every bad feature. But not on this account only do I turn back atten- tion to that letter. Before it reached us here I intended to write to you this week about two or three recent occurrences which have a bearing upon the fact which he over-states in these words :— " I have heard of European travellers in whose opinion Now York is a representative city- the pattern and summary of all Americanism. The city, however, is in bad odour with the natives themselves, even with the dwellers therein, who look upon it as the sink of all alien misery and corruption—the asylum of lawless Irish and godless Ger-
mans, of all the worst set of adventurers from the Old World." •
It is, perhaps, the greatest of our misfortunes in our relations with the Old World that we are judged in Europe by what Europe knows of New York. With that forgetfulness of the new con- ditions of things political, social, and even material in this Republic, to which I have heretofore directed attention as a fruitful source of your misunderstanding and consequent condemnation of its people, you continually look to New York as an exponent of "America and the Americans," just as you look to Paris, and would have London looked to as the representative cities of the French and British empires. The mistake, natural enough, could not be greater or more fatal to the right understanding of us Yankees. This country has no city which so represents its people or its social and political character. It has no capital, as London, and Paris, and Vienna are capitals ; no city in which are united the political, social, commercial, literary, and artistic eminence which must unite to produce what you mean by the word capital or metropolis. Washington is as far from it as can be. Wash-
ash- ington
ington is the mere place in which the political business of the country is done and its archives are kept. It has no attractions to those who have not political duties to discharge, or some political " axe to grind ;" and although people while they remain there to do their duties or to grind their axes make their stay as festive as possible, their ends attained, they remain no longer, especially if they are from the Free States. New York is altogether without political tone, and as bare of the importance and interest given by the presence of political functionaries, home or foreign, as the merest country village. It is not even the political capital of the great State to which it has given its name, and which does its political business at Albany, a third-rate place one hundred and fifty miles up the Hudson river. New York has no other political importance than that which it derives from the number of voters who live in it ; and they, as exhibited in majorities, instead of re- presenting, flagrantly and outrageously misrepresent, the character of the people of the country, and even of the State. In fact, we Yankees are on thankful knees day and night that New York is not a representative city ; and yet by New York, and New York in its very worst and most distasteful features, which are those public transactions with which foreigners are necessarily most familiar, we are gauged, and measured, and condemned.
I have endeavoured to give you heretofore in this correspondence some notion of the sway of the rampant Irishry in this city—a sway which they hold solely by possession of enough votes to make them important at elections, national, state, and municipal. But I might preach by the column and not produce so clear and deep an impres- sion as that conveyed by one characteristic and significant fact; and of such facts three have just occurred. First was the funeral of General Corcoran, who was thrown from his horse and killed a fortnight or so ago. This General Corcoran four or five years back kept a common groggery in a part of the city well suited to his business. He made a little money, and became colonel of the 69th Militia Regiment, which was composed entirely of Irishmen. You may remember that on the occasion of the visit of the Prince of Wales to New York, an occasion to which we look back with a curious and not altogether pleasant mixture of emotions, he and his regiment flatly refused to obey the orders of his superior officer to parade. He was con- demned without measure (such was our folly then), court mar - tialled, and would have been broke ; bat, pending his dilatory trial, Fort Sumter was bombarded. His regiment, being most of them out of employment, were ready to take the field, and he became an important person. His trial was suspended, and he entered the national service. At Bull Run he was brave, though incompetent, and there he was taken prisoner. In prison I must, I do gladly, admit that he behaved very well, though I grieve that his long and severe confinement made him of such importance in the eyes of his countrymen here that nothing would do, when he was released, but he must be made a Brigadier-General. Now, he was about as fit to be a general as to write a commentary on the Talmud ; but to conciliate the Irish interest he was awarded the epaulettes ; thereby becoming a constant trouble to the Government, for what to do with him they knew not. Well, this man, who was of the class which supplies us with our day-labourers and housemaids, was buried with a civic and military pomp, and an outpouring of people which were suited to the obsequies of one who united the distinctions of a great general and a great states- man. His body lay in state with a guard of honour, and his funeral procession, which passed in sight of my house, through a throng of people which choked the street throughout its course, was filled with municipal, and State, and national, officials, and was nearly, if not quite, a mile in length. This man a few years ago might have been the coachman of men who marched as privates in the ranks of some of the regiments which escorted his body to the grave, and with some of them his chances of social intercourse were, at any time, about as good as those of Tom King with the Duke of Cambridge.
On the 31st of December, a day or two after Corcoran's funeral, Governor Seymour removed, as far as he could do so by simple writ of supersedeas, the Police Commissioners of New York. You may, perhaps, remember that his very first official act, a year ago, was to take the first step towards the removal of these Commis- sioners, on the ground that they had been guilty of malfeasance in aiding the National Government in its arrests of secessionists in New York. Before he could, or did, bring about a removal in a regular way the riots occurred, and the conduct of the police force, from the Commissioners down to the patrol men, was so admirable, both for gallantry and good judgment, that their removal would have been an affront to the whole community except the rioters, and the diminishing party of which those rioters were the rude and lawless representatives. But at the end of the year the Police Commissioners, in preferring their annual report, gave the Governor what he thought was a good opportunity of ridding him- self of these men, getting the force under his own control, and making much " political capital." In reporting upon the mob the Commissioners said, " These violent proceedings had a political origin, motive, and direction, and received sym- pathy and encouragement from newspapers and partizans of influence and intelligence.. . . . . A large portion of the force were of the same nationality and political and religious faith with the riotous mob. Under these new and extraordinary circumstances there was apprehension that the force might fail in united action, or be embarrassed by sympathy with the rioters and be over- powered and beaten." This passage, though it asserted only that which was notoriously true, the Governor chose to regard as partizan and indecorous, and a sufficient reason for the removal of the Commissioners. More and chiefly he set it forth, or allowed it to be set forth, as the ground of their removal, which took place within twelve hours of the receipt of the report. You will see, of course, what his tactics were. He hoped to build up his popularity, tottering even among the Pro-slavery Democrats, by this champion- ship of the Irish, who in a body belong to that party. But he failed most miserably. For it was found that, in quoting from the report, to justify his course and please the Irish, the Governor or his agent had been guilty of a suppression of the truth. The Com- missioners went on to say in the sentence immediately after that given above :- " The Board are most happy to report that the apprehension proved to be groundless. The force acted as a unit, and with an energy, courage, and devotion rarely exhibited. The keenest observation failed to discover that either political, religious, or national feeling had any influence adverse to the efficient action of the force."
The publication of the suppressed paasnge has covered the Governor with shame. The Commissioners have determined to retain their offices, subject to the decision of the Supreme Court of the State ; and the Legislature has already taken steps towards the retention of the Commissioners by special Act, Democrats and Republicans working together to this end. The fact is that Governor Seymour, who but a year ago, just after his election, was looked upon by his supporters as the most important man in the country (one of the most influential of them so spoke of him to me), is coming out of the little end of the horn into the great end of which he entered with a flourish that attracted the attention even of Europe. The Police Commissioners are sustained entirely in their position by public opinion, and Governor Seymour has failed to take anything by his motion. One result of his conduct and of the course of events in this war will be, it is to be hoped, the diminution of the pretensions of the governors of the States, leaving them in the position of honourable, useful, but entirely subordinate officers, stripped of all of that petty import- ance as the representatives of " sovereign States " which has had such a pernicious influence upon our national welfare.
While the bruit of Governor Seymour's act was yet in the public ears, Archbishop Hughes, of the Roman Catholic Church in New York, died. You may remember that he addressed the rioters in July, they being of his countrymen and his ecclesiastical subjects. His death was made the occasion of unusual public de- monstrations. All the newspapers contained long and particular biographical notices of him. The Mayor sent a special message to the Common Council. That body passed resolutions in the Bishop's honour, and took steps to have the city represented in his obsequies. The Irish Bishop's body, like the Irish General's, " lay in state," the flags were at half-mast, and there was very great ado. It was confined, however, outside the Papist pale, to public places and public bodies. The funeral was more like that of a sovereign prince than that of a minister of Christ. Now, if all the bishops of the Church of England here, or, as it is named, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, if all its bishops had died and been buried in a row, although it is the Church of a large wealthy and highly cultivated part of the com- munity, the event would have passed without the slightest public— that is, political or municipal notice. Or if a similar calamity had befallen the Methodists, or the Baptists, which are our most numerous religious sects, there would have been none of this public and official demonstration of respect and sorrow. The explanation of all these incidents is that there are 50,000 Irish votes in this city, which are, or thus far have been, all cast in a solid body, and that every man who has public aspirations of any kind has this fact constantly in his mind, and is always ready to flatter and placate these Hibernian political make-weights, who
are fully conscious that in New York they hold the balance of power, and set a high price upon their merchandise. This kowtowing to the Irishry, too, is performed by men who, individually, would like to speak out after another fashion. But they feel that should they do so their own party would abandon them as imprudent, impolitic men, who would ruin their associates. For this reason- s reason avowed to me in terms—it was that our papers hesitated so long in saying that the July riots were Irish riots, although every one knew that they were as much so as if they took place in Donnybrook or Dublin. In fact, the desire to please the Irish and, in a measure, the German population of New York, who, especially the former, are of the uninstructed classes, gives a certain tone to the journalism of the city (particularly to those journals by which it is known abroad), and influences in a certain measure the con- duct of all public occasions in the city. Then, you will say, and not very unreasonably, you are becoming Hibernianized and. Ger- manized. Not a whit ; for the Irish and the Germans, whom we, I regret to say, treat with such consideration, are only the native Irish and the native Germans. In the second generation, as I have told you before, their affinities and traits of race all vanish, and they become Yankees. And upon the society, and the litera- ture, and language of the country their influence is absolutely nothing Mr. Anthony Trollope says somewhere in his clever book upon this country that in New York he found the received (British) ideal Yankee type in much greater perfection than anywhere else. He is right, as he did not go to North Carolina, which is the habitat of your Yankees. But I commend to your consideration the fact that this honest and intelligent, though sometimes wrong. headed, observer, found your theatrical and pictorial " American " in the highest perfection, and in the greatest numbers in that city, from which statistics and public opinion here give you the least right to take either your moral, your intellectual, or your physical
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