Chapter 37

The cemetery--Its beauties--The "Potter's Field"--The graves of children-- Monumental eccentricities--Arrival of emigrants--Their reception--Poor dwellings--The dangerous class--The elections--The riots--Characteristics of the streets--Journey to Boston--The sights of Boston--Longfellow-- Cambridge university.

It may seem a sudden transition from society to a cemetery, and yet it is not an unnatural one, for many of the citizens of New York carry their magnificence as far as possible to the grave with them, and pile their wealth above their heads in superb mausoleums or costly statues. The _Père la Chaise_ of the city is the Greenwood Cemetery, near Brooklyn on Long Island. I saw it on the finest and coldest of November days, when a piercing east wind was denuding the trees of their last scarlet honours. After encountering more than the usual crush in Broadway, for we were rather more than an hour in driving three miles in a stage, we crossed the Brooklyn Ferry in one of those palace ferry-boats, where the spacious rooms for passengers are heated by steam-pipes, and the charge is only one cent, or a fraction less than a halfpenny. It was a beautiful day; there was not a cloud upon the sky; the waves of the Sound and of the North River were crisped and foam-tipped, and dashed noisily upon the white pebbly beach. Brooklyn, Jersey, and Hoboken rose from the water, with their green fields and avenues of villas; white, smokeless steamers were passing and repassing; large anchored ships tossed upon the waves; and New York, that compound of trees, buildings, masts, and spires, rose in the rear, without so much as a single cloud of smoke hovering over it.

A railway runs from Brooklyn to the cemetery, with the cars drawn by horses, and the dead of New York are conveniently carried to this last resting-place. The entrance is handsome, and the numerous walls and carriage-drives are laid with fine gravel, and beautifully swept. We drove to see the most interesting objects, and the coachman seemed to take a peculiar pride in pointing them out. This noble burying-ground has some prettily diversified hill and dale scenery, and is six miles round. The timber is very fine, and throughout art has only been required as an assistance to nature. To this cemetery most of the dead of New York are carried, and after "life's fitful fever," in its most exaggerated form, sleep in appropriate silence. Already several thousand dead have been placed here in places of sepulture varying in appearance from the most splendid and ornate to the simplest and most obscure. There are family mausoleums, gloomy and sepulchral looking, in the Grecian style; family burying-grounds neatly enclosed by iron or bronze railings, where white marble crosses mark the graves; there are tombs with epitaphs, and tombs with statues; there are simple cenotaphs and monumental slabs, and nameless graves marked by numbers only.

One very remarkable feature of this cemetery is the "Potter's Field," a plot containing several acres of ground, where strangers are buried. This is already occupied to a great extent. The graves are placed in rows close together, with numbers on a small iron plate to denote each. Here the shipwrecked, the pestilence-stricken, the penniless, and friendless are buried; and though such a spot cannot fail to provoke sad musings, the people of New York do not suffer any appearances of neglect to accumulate round the last resting-place of those who died unfriended and alone. Another feature, not to be met with in England, strikes the stranger at first with ludicrous images, though in reality it has more of the pathetic. In one part of this cemetery there are several hundred graves of children, and these, with most others of children of the poorer class, have toys in glass cases placed upon them. There are playthings of many kinds, woolly dogs and lambs, and little wooden houses, toys which must be associated in the parents' minds with those who made their homes glad, but who have gone into the grave before them. One cannot but think of the bright eyes dim, the merry laugh and infantine prattle silent, the little hands, once so active in playful mischief, stiff and cold; all brought so to mind by the sight of those toys. There is a fearful amount of mortality among children at New York, and in several instances four or five buried in one grave told with mournful suggestiveness of the silence and desolation of once happy hearths.

There are a few very remarkable and somewhat fantastic monuments. There is a beautiful one in white marble to the memory of a sea-captain's wife, with an exact likeness of himself, in the attitude of taking an observation, on the top. An inscription to himself is likewise upon it, leaving only the date of his death to be added. It is said that, when this poor man returns from a voyage, he spends one whole day in the tomb, lamenting his bereavement.

There is a superb monument, erected by a fireman's company to the memory of one of their brethren, who lost his life while nobly rescuing an infant from a burning dwelling. His statue is on the top, with an infant in his arms, and the implements of his profession lie below. But by far the most extraordinary, and certainly one of the lions of New York, is to a young lady who was killed in coming home from a ball. The carriage-horses ran away, she jumped out, and was crushed under the wheels. She stands under a marble canopy supported by angels, and is represented in her ball-dress, with a mantle thrown over it. This monument has numerous pillars and representations of celestial beings, and is said to have cost about 6000_l._ Several of the marble mausoleums cost from 4000_l._ to 5000_l._ Yet all the powerful, the wealthy, and the poor have descended to the dust from whence they sprung; and here, as everywhere else, nothing can disguise the fact that man, the feeble sport of passion and infirmity, can only claim for his inheritance at last the gloom of a silent grave, where he must sleep with the dust of his fathers. I observed only one verse of Scripture on a tombstone, and it contained the appropriate prayer, "_So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom_."

Having seen the emigrants bid adieu to the Old World, in the flurry of grief, hope, and excitement, I was curious to see what difference a five- weeks' voyage would have produced in them, and in what condition they would land upon the shores of America. In a city where emigrants land at the rate of a thousand a-day, I was not long of finding an opportunity. I witnessed the debarkation upon the shore of the New World of between 600 and 700 English emigrants, who had just arrived from Liverpool. If they looked tearful, flurried, and anxious when they left Liverpool, they looked tearful, pallid, dirty, and squalid when they reached New York. The necessary discomforts which such a number of persons must experience when huddled together in a close, damp, and ill-ventilated steerage, with very little change of clothing, and an allowance of water insufficient for the purposes of cleanliness, had been increased in this instance by the presence of cholera on board of the ship.

The wharfs at New York are necessarily dirty, and are a scene of indescribable bustle from morning to night, with ships arriving and sailing, ships loading and unloading, and emigrants pouring into the town in an almost incessant stream. They look as if no existing power could bring order out of such a chaos. In this crowd, on the shores of a strange land, the emigrants found themselves. Many were deplorably emaciated, others looked vacant and stupified. Some were ill, and some were penniless; but poverty and sickness are among the best recommendations which an emigrant can bring with him, for they place him under the immediate notice of those estimable and overworked men, the Emigration Commissioners, whose humanity is above all praise. These find him an asylum in the Emigrants' Hospital, on Ward's Island, and despatch him from thence in health, with advice and assistance for his future career. If he be in health, and have a few dollars in his pocket, he becomes the instantaneous prey of emigrant runners, sharpers, and keepers of groggeries; but of this more will be said hereafter.

A great many of these immigrants were evidently from country districts, and some from Ireland; there were a few Germans among them, and these appeared the least affected by the discomforts of the voyage, and by the novel and rather bewildering position in which they found themselves. They probably would feel more at home on first landing at New York than any of the others, for the lower part of the city is to a great extent inhabited by Germans, and at that time there were about 2000 houses where their favourite beverage, _lager-beer_, could be procured.

The goods and chattels of the Irish appeared to consist principally of numerous red-haired, unruly children, and ragged-looking bundles tied round with rope. The Germans were generally ruddy and stout, and took as much care of their substantial-looking, well-corded, heavy chests as though they contained gold. The English appeared pale and debilitated, and sat helpless and weary-looking on their large blue boxes. Here they found themselves in the chaotic confusion of this million-peopled city, not knowing whither to betake themselves, and bewildered by cries of "Cheap hacks!" "All aboard!" "Come to the cheapest house in all the world!" and invitations of a similar description. There were lodging-touters of every grade of dishonesty, and men with large placards were hurrying among the crowd, offering "palace" steamboats and "lightning express" trains, to whirl them at nominal rates to the Elysian Fields of the Far West. It is stated that six-tenths of these emigrants are attacked by fever soon after their arrival in the New World, but the provision for the sick is commensurate with the wealth and benevolence of New York.

Before leaving the city I was desirous to see some of the dwellings of the poor; I was therefore taken to what was termed a poor quarter. One house which I visited was approached from an entry, and contained ten rooms, which were let to different individuals and families. On the lowest floor was an old Irish widow, who had a cataract in one eye, and, being without any means of supporting herself, subsisted upon a small allowance made to her by her son, who was a carter. She was clean, but poorly dressed, and the room was scantily furnished. Except those who are rendered poor by their idleness and vices, it might have been difficult to find a poorer person in the city, I was told. Much sympathy was expressed for her, and for those who, like her, lived in this poor quarter. Yet the room was tolerably large, lofty, and airy, and had a window of the ordinary size of those in English dwelling-houses. For this room she paid four dollars or 16_s._ per month, a very high rent. It was such a room as in London many a respectable clerk, with an income of 150_l._ a year, would think himself fortunate in possessing.

I could not enter into the feelings of the benevolent people of New York when they sympathised with the denizens of this locality. I only wished that these generous people could have seen the dens in which thousands of our English poor live, with little light and less water, huddled together, without respect to sex or numbers, in small, ill-ventilated rooms. Yet New York has a district called the Five Points, fertile in crime, fever, and misery, which would scarcely yield the palm for vice and squalor to St. Giles's in London, or the Saltmarket in Glasgow. A collection of dwellings called the Mud Huts, where many coloured people reside, is also an unpleasing feature connected with the city. But with abundant employment, high wages, and charities on a princely scale for those who from accidental circumstances may occasionally require assistance, there is no excuse for the squalid wretchedness in which a considerable number of persons have chosen to sink themselves.

It is a fact that no Golden Age exists on the other side of the water; that vice and crime have their penalties in America as well as in Europe; and that some of the worst features of the Old World are reproduced in the New. With all the desire that we may possess to take a sanguine view of things, there is something peculiarly hopeless about the condition of this class at New York, which in such a favourable state of society, and at such an early period of American history, has sunk so very low. The existence of a "dangerous class" at New York is now no longer denied. One person in seven of the whole population came under the notice of the authorities, either in the ranks of criminals or paupers, in 1852; and it is stated that last year the numbers reached an alarming magnitude, threatening danger to the peace of society. This is scarcely surprising when we take into consideration the numbers of persons who land in this city who have been expatriated for their vices, who are flying from the vengeance of outraged law, or who expect in the New World to be able to do evil without fear of punishment.

There are the idle and the visionary, who expect to eat without working; penniless demagogues, unprincipled adventurers, and the renegade outpourings of all Christendom; together with those who are enervated and demoralised by sickness and evil associates on board ship. I could not help thinking, as I saw many of the newly-arrived emigrants saunter helplessly into the groggeries, that, after spending their money, they would remain at New York, and help to swell the numbers of this class. These people live by their wits, and lose the little they have in drink. This life is worth very little to them; and in spite of Bible and Tract societies, and church missions, they know very little of the life to come; consequently they are ready for any mischief, and will imperil their existence for a small bribe. Many or most of them are Irish Roman Catholics, who, having obtained the franchise in many instances by making false affidavits, consider themselves at liberty to use the club also.

I was at New York at the time of the elections, and those of 1854 were attended with unusual excitement, owing to the red-hot strife between the Irish Roman Catholics and the "Know-nothings." This society, established with the object of changing the naturalisation laws, and curbing the power of popery, had at this period obtained a very large share of the public attention, as much from the mystery which attended it as from the principles which it avowed. To the minds of all there was something attractive in a secret organisation, unknown oaths, and nocturnal meetings; and the success which had attended the efforts of the Know- nothings in Massachusetts, and others of the States, led many to watch with deep interest the result of the elections for the Empire State. Their candidates were not elected, but the avowed contest between Protestantism and Popery led to considerable loss of life. Very little notice of the riots on this occasion has been taken by the English journalists, though the local papers varied in their accounts of the numbers of killed and wounded from 45 to 700! It was known that an _émeute_ was expected, therefore I was not surprised, one evening early in November, to hear the alarm-bells ringing in all directions throughout the city. It was stated that a Know-nothing assemblage of about 10,000 persons had been held in the Park, and that, in dispersing, they had been fired upon by some Irishmen called the Brigade. This was the commencement of a sanguinary struggle for the preservation of order. For three days a dropping fire of musketry was continually to be heard in New York and Williamsburgh, and reports of great loss of life on both sides were circulated. It was stated that the hospital received 170 wounded men, and that many more were carried off by their friends. The military were called out, and, as it was five days before quiet was restored, it is to be supposed that many lives were lost. I saw two dead bodies myself; and in one street or alley by the Five Points, both the side walks and the roadway were slippery with blood. Yet very little sensation was excited in the upper part of the town; people went out and came in as usual; business was not interrupted; and to questions upon the subject the reply was frequently made, "Oh, it's only an election riot," showing how painfully common such disturbances had become.

There are many objects of interest in New York and its neighbourhood, among others, the Croton aqueduct, a work worthy of a great people. It cost about 5,000,000_l._ sterling, and by it about 60,000,000 gallons of water are daily conveyed into the city. Then there are the prisons on Blackwell's Island, the lunatic asylums, the orphan asylums, the docks, and many other things; but I willingly leave these untouched, as they have been described by other writers. In concluding this brief and incomplete account of New York, I may be allowed to refer to the preface of this work, and repeat that any descriptions which I have given of things or society are merely "sketches," and, as such, are liable to the errors which always attend upon hasty observation.

New York, with its novel, varied, and ever-changing features, is calculated to leave a very marked impression on a stranger's mind. In one