The life and public services of Andrew Haswell Green

Prefatory Note

THIS memoir has been compiled from the diaries, letters, and pubHc papers of its subject, supplemented by the copious references to his public career contained in the newspaper press. The original material has been supplied by the executors of Mr. Green's will, and the work has been done under their sanction and supervision, and in its completed form bears the stamp of their acceptance and approval. Special acknowledgment for well-digested summaries of Mr. Green's work in the creation of Central Park and its adjuncts, and his administration of the Comptroller's Office, is due to Mr. Henry Mann, and free use has been made of an appreciative monograph on Mr. Green's career prepared by Dr. Edward Hagaman Hall. With the events that belong to the most stirring period of Mr. Green's public life, the writer of this Memoir had intimate personal association, and he may claim to have a certain special fitness for dealing with the tangled history of affairs related to the rise and fall of the Tweed Ring. For the rest, he has been guided by the counsel of those more familiar than himself with the later activities herein recorded, and he ventures to express the hope that the narrative of a life so largely devoted to the service of the City of New York may not be found unworthy of its theme by those who knew and appreciated the exceptional work and the unique capacity for public usefulness of Andrew H. Green.

Contents

PAGE

Ancestry and Place of Birth — Home Surroundings and Influence — Early Education and Habits of Study — Arrival in New York and Introduction to Business — Self-Analysis of His Diaries — Friendship with Samuel G. Arnold.

Life in New York — A Sojourn at the Farm — Voyage to Barbadoes — Sunday School Work Among the Plantation Negroes — Return to New York and the Beginning of the Study of Law — Assumes the Responsibilities of Head of the Family — Admission to the Bar.

Chapter I Ancestry And Place Of Birth — Home Surroundings And

INFLUENCE EARLY EDUCATION AND HABITS OF STUDY

ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK AND INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS

SELF-ANALYSIS OF HIS DIARIES FRIENDSHIP WITH

SAMUEL G. ARNOLD

THE Greens of Massachusetts are a numerous family, with several stems and many branches. The branch with which this memoir is immediately concerned begins with Thomas Green, who came from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, being then about thirty years old. He brought with him a wife and five children, the eldest of them eight years old, and five other children were born of this union on his farm in the town of Maiden. The force of character which has been steadily characteristic of this branch of the Green family through all its history in the new world was a well marked attribute of Thomas Green. He was frequently summoned by his fellow-citizens to act as selectman of the town and grand juror for the county. The connections by marriage formed by the five sons and three of the five daughters of Thomas Green identified them with the best blood of the colony. Thomas, the eldest son, married the daughter of Joseph Hills, one of the great lawyers of his time, who was distinguished as "a man active in bringing the laws of the country into order," and whose wife, Rose Dunster, was the sister of Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College. Five children were born to Thomas Green, the second, and Rebecca Hills, his wife, of whom the fifth, Samuel Green, was reckoned by his neighbors as a man of light and leading. He was called "Captain," and when the General Court granted the township of Leicester in February, 1713-14, he was appointed, with Colonel William Dudley of Roxbury and others, to settle it. He moved his family from Maiden about 1717, to the new town, in which he owned 180 acres, and in the direction of whose affairs he exercised great influence. His wife was Elizabeth Upham, who bore him eight children, of whom only one, the fourth, was a son, who received the favorite family name of Thomas.

This third Thomas Green was born in Maiden in 1699, ^^^ was eighteen years of age when his parents took him to the new town of Leicester. He acquired a knowledge of medicine from two English surgeons who had abandoned the positions they held on piratical craft on the Spanish Main in response to the offer of amnesty made to reformed pirates by the home government, and who had in some way drifted to the domestic shelter of the house of Captain Samuel Green. In addition to being a successful physician — a profession which has existed in the family for five generations — Thomas Green was the pastor of a Baptist Church which he founded in South Leicester. It was he who first acquired the large estate named Green Hill in the present city of Worcester, which remained in possession of the family for a century and a half. Dr. Thomas Green's wife was a daughter of Captain John Lynde, and seven children were born of their union. The fifth child, John Green, was born in Leicester in 1736, and lived most of his life in Worcester, where he died in 1799. He also was a medical practitioner, and one of his best remembered traits was the vigilance with which he personally watched his patients, like a nurse, by day and night, if the occasion demanded. During the Revolutionary War he was a member of the Committee of Safety and Correspondence, and he served as representative in the General Court in 1777, and selectman of the town in 1780. By his first wife Dr. John Green had three children, and by his second wife, Mary Ruggles, he had ten. The second Mrs. Green was the daughter of Gen. Timothy Ruggles, one of the bravest and ablest military leaders during the French and Indian War. She was a descendant of John Tilley, his daughter Elizabeth, and her husband John Howland, all passengers on the Mayflower in 1620, the line of descent being from them through Hope Howland Chipman, Desire Chipman Bourne, and Bathsheba Bourne, who was the wife of Gen. Timothy Ruggles.

The seventh child of John Green and Mary Ruggles was William Elijah, who was born in 1777 and died in 1865, and was the father of the subject of this memoir. He was graduated from

Brown University in 1798; studied law with Judge Bangs of Worcester; began practice in Grafton; and later pursued his profession in Worcester. He was married four times, and reared a family of eleven children, all of whom but one reached years of maturity. The mother of nine of these children was his third wife, Julia Plimpton, who was a daughter of Oliver Plimpton, a soldier of the Revolution, and of Lydia Fiske, who was a daughter of Daniel Fiske, member of the Massachusetts General Court during the Revolution. Her fifth child was Andrew Haswell Green, born at Green Hill on October 6, 1820.

It will be perceived that in the direct male line Andrew H. Green came of vigorous Massachusetts stock, through which there ran a well marked vein of distinction. His female lineage reveals an ancestry equally honorable. He was eighth in descent from Thomas Ruggles, who came from Nasing, Essex, England, in 1637; sixth from Martha Woodbridge, daughter of the Rev. John Woodbridge and niece of Benjamin Woodbridge, the first graduate of Harvard College; eighth from Thomas Dudley, who came over in 1630 and was Governor of the colony of Massachusetts Bay; seventh from Joseph Dudley, President of the Council of Massachusetts Bay, Governor of the Province of New England, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Chief Justice of New York, Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Wight, and Member of Parliament; sixth from Paul Dudley, Chief Justice of Massachusetts and founder of the Dudleian Lectures at Harvard University; seventh from Thomas Nelson, who came to this country in 1638, and whose son Philip was the only graduate from Harvard College in 1654; and fifth from Shearjashub Bourne of Scituate, Mass., whose grand-daughter, Bathsheba, married Gen. Timothy Ruggles.

The family circle at Green Hill must have been an unusually interesting one. The father was a man of fine personal presence, had a constitutional geniality of disposition and exercised a liberal hospitality. With his boys, he was a comrade and companion, a participant in their pleasures and a helper in their studies. His literary tastes were exceptionally comprehensive, and he had a breadth of culture not commonly found in a country lawyer of that time, even in Massachusetts. The Puritan ideals of faith and of life seem to have sat somewhat loosely on William E. Green, and the mere joy of living possessed him in a way that would have brought him reproof from the spiritual fathers of the community in sterner times. Boys brought up under the influence of such a man were likely to have all the faculties of mind and body well developed, to detest falsehood and to scorn pretentious selfimportance. Three girls of the family were Andrew's seniors by from four to ten years, and all three grew up with habits of studious application associated with a deep and fervent religious feeling. There was no lack of seriousness in the household at Green Hill, but there was also no lack of outlets for the healthy, spontaneous flow of animal spirits. There were no near neighbors, and after a winter storm the house was pretty thoroughly isolated from the outside world. The family was necessarily thrown a good deal on its own resources, and probably no family of individually stronger, but also individually diverse, character ever assembled around a New England hearth. One child, the first Lydia, died in infancy, and another, the second Lydia, died at the age of forty-five. All of them, men and women alike, stood for something out of the common in their respective walks of life and spheres of action.

Dr. Edward Hagaman Hall, to whose short biography of Andrew H. Green I am indebted for most of the genealogical details which precede, makes this very just remark on the domestic circle at Green Hill: "Certain it is that the family was closely knit together. They were all of strong intellectuality, highprincipled and courageous of convictions, and the exchange of views between them was frank and vigorous. This intellectual attrition was always wholesome in its effects, tempered as it was by the kindliness of sincere affection and by the deeply religious sentiment which pervaded the family life." To this may be added the testimony of Dr. Samuel Fiske Green, Andrew's younger brother: "The life of a family so remote from the village and from neighbors would seem to have been, inevitably, rather monotonous; but it was not without important compensations. The professional life of the head of each of its generations attracted visitors of high cultivation, broad views, and instructive and stimulating conversation. There was always at the homestead a library, rather scant, it is true, of standard works, elevating, refining and well read. The necessity of relying so much upon themselves for social pleasure and culture may account in part for the remarkable development of their affection for one another." By common consent, the primacy of the new generation was early accorded to Andrew, and it seemed a perfectly natural thing that he should, even before he reached man's estate, assume a large share of its responsibilities.

In the formation of the tastes and character of Andrew H. Green the situation of Green Hill had a considerable share. It is one of remarkable beauty, and ninety years ago it must have had a setting of woods and fields which the growth of the city of Worcester gradually impaired. The highest point of the farm, some five or six hundred feet above the surrounding country, commands a superb view. In the outspread panorama may be seen the towns of Auburn, Leicester, Paxton, Holden, Rutland, Princeton, Harvard, Boylston, West Boylston, Shrewsbury, South Shrewsbury, and Grafton. In the near distance may be seen the rocky summit of Mount Wachusett, and far away Mount Monadnock sentinels the horizon. It was a place around which the affections of a boy might readily grow, and Andrew Green loved his parent home and its surroundings with an affection only excelled by that which he felt for the members of his family. In youth and in manhood he knew of no pleasure so exquisite as a return to Green Hill, and the sentiment which he records in his diary at the age of eighteen was one that he carried with him all through life: "It is delightful once more to be at a place that I can call home; everything that I see reminds me of my childhood which has passed away and taken with it many of the pleasures of life." To quote the words of Doctor Hall: "The first fifteen years of Mr. Green's life were spent on the old homestead at Green Hill. He was familiar with every nook and cranny of the old estate, knew every tree by name, and loved every feature of its varying landscape. In these large and picturesque acres, over which he roamed free and unrestrained as a boy, and in which, after he removed to New York, he found refuge yearly from the cares and confinement of the great city, we find the school in which was cultivated his love of nature and landscape art which flowered later in the beautiful Central Park of the metropolis."

There is abundant evidence that it was to the influence of his home that Andrew H. Green owed his intense desire to improve his mind and enlarge the sphere of his knowledge. Such book education as he had at his start in life he received partly at the hands of his family, partly from the schools in Worcester, and partly under the tuition of Charles Thurber. In addition to the common school branches, he studied grammar, mathematics, Latin and Greek, and apparently acquired some knowledge of German. When about thirteen, he spent a winter in Roxbury with Jacob Abbott, father of the Rev. Lyman Abbott. But it was also greatly to his advantage, not less in character than in physique, that as a boy he did his share of the work of the farm. How thoroughly he liked this work his later diaries fully attest. In his yearly visits to the farm, in youth and early manhood, he takes up the familiar work with evident zest; now building with his brother John a hencoop, "finished in superior style"; now taking his turn at the plough, cutting corn, mowing and raking hay, picking and storing apples, and preparing loads of farm produce for market. From his gunning, fishing, nut-gathering, with his brothers, to the serious work of the farm, Andrew Green bore from his earliest years the stamp of a country-bred boy.

About his taste for reading there appears to have been room for some difference of opinion. His eldest sister, Lucy, who was the only child of the second Mrs. Green, Lucy Merriam of Grafton, and who became one of the best known educators of her time, did not find young Andrew coming up to her standard of literary culture. At the age of seventeen, he records in his diary having seen a letter written home by Lucy in which she says that "Andrew would never become an elegant man on account of his distaste for reading." The effect was characteristic. "I resolve," he adds, "to apply myself to it both night and day that I might not merit what she has said." By way of practical application of his resolution, on that loth of July, 1837, he procured Russell's " Modern History." But before this we find him reading the "Life of Frederick the Great," and later, after setting himself twenty-five pages of Russell for his daily reading, he records that he is preparing in his mind a definite course of study. Of his lighter reading, there are occasional hints, such as having finished Bulwer's "Rienzi" and having taken up a book on the "Life and Times of Rienzi." He apparently finishes the latter work, of which he conceived a poor opinion, in four days, and proceeds to the reading of "The Last Days of Pompeii." He retains his taste for history, and plunges into the compendious work of Abbe Millott, meanwhile borrowing a copy of "Virgil," which, to the credit of his early tutors, he obviously reads with ease and appreciation.

The influence of studies more recondite, which come as he grows into manhood, will be dealt with in its proper place. My purpose in tracing the course of his earlier reading is to throw some light on the development of the character of the boy who at the age of fifteen left home to earn his living in New York. The broad facts of the case are simple enough: Andrew H. Green made his first visit in New York in the company of his sister Lucy, by stage coach to Providence and thence by steamboat to the city, on April 30, 1835. His first employment was as an errand boy in the store of Hinsdale & Atkins, by whom he was paid ^50 a year and board. His next, which began on February 24, 1836, was as a clerk in the employ of Lee, Savage & Co., wholesale cloth merchants and importers, whose store was at No. 77 William Street, corner of Liberty. Inheriting the sturdy frame and fine physical presence of his family, young Andrew had, nevertheless, intermittently bad health. He spent the Fourth of July, 1836, at Green Hill, but had a severe illness after his return, from which it took him two months to recover. His place was kept for him and he resumed work in October. He appears to have been accustomed to go to bed about ten o'clock, or earlier. He occasionally records his arrival at the store at six o'clock, and even when he takes breakfast before going he is never later at business than eight o'clock, a habit which was apparently not shared by the rest of the staff. The work, unless on the books and accounts, he always found interesting, and there are casual entries in his diary like the following of May i, 1837: "I found how to calculate duties on square yard goods, which I think Is quite an acquisition to my little stock of knowledge.

Happy and contented, I retired to rest and thanked my Maker for my preservation." He has to keep track of the arrival and departure of the packet ships, and later is intrusted with the Custom House business. Altogether, his commercial training appears to have been thorough, and that he fully utilized his opportunities may be Inferred from Mr. Savage's statement to him of November 9, 1837, that he had attained a place in the counting-house, which not one in five thousand had an opportunity of doing.

Perhaps the most notable trait of character which appears in the brief self-revelations of his diaries is that of extreme conscientiousness. The earliest of these records which has come into my possession begins with April, 1837, two years after his arrival in New York. But it may be fairly assumed that the lad of seventeen did not have a sense of duty materially different from the boy of fifteen. It might have been a trifle more austere, as where he was invited to play whist, but declined, thinking he was getting too fond of the game, though he candidly adds another reason, that there was a man in the party whose acquaintance he did not care to cultivate. A little later, he fears he is getting to be too much of a flirt, but being twitted by his landlady with excess of pride, he says: "She thinks I am very proud; I am, I admit, but not any more than I ought to be. If my pride shows itself in any manner disagreeable to any one, I must try to check it, but if my pride is to fear to do wrong (as I don't think it is in all cases), I may well be proud." The candor of his self-analysis is quite as naive as some of the comments he makes on the social conventions of his time. He is already in his eighteenth year when it oppresses him with sadness to think "that the moral and religious state of feeling had got to so low an ebb that two persons of different sexes cannot walk the street without exciting remark." Again, he is at Cousin Martha's, a boarding-school for young ladies, and finds her going to Niblo's with a party of her pupils, and he relates this experience: "She asked me if I would go 'with her.' That is, you are neither to look at, speak to, nor think of the ladies. Said I, 'No, I don't go.'" His habit of business exactness is well illustrated in an entry of July 10, 1838, in which he records the fact that after taking account of stock he corrected an error of ten cents made hy him in the cash of May 9th : "The first one I have ever made, and it shall be the last, if I can prevent it, although I have always been exceedingly careful." The same trait appears in his regret that he had sent his friend Samuel G. Arnold a letter without paying the postage, "which is vexatious, as it is a debt that can't be paid." His habitual abstinence finds evidence in his statement of December 29, 1838: "Drank a glass or two of wine — a thing so unusual with me that I deem it worthy of note here. I don't probably drink more than one or two a year." Some depreciatory comments on his manners come to his ears, and he philosophically remarks that when one's manners are disagreeable it is desirable to be informed of it, that the necessary correction may be applied. This, too, although he regards the reports as "palpably and clearly unjust."

Underlying all this there is a very deep and sincere religious feeling. In matters of doctrine he has, at least, a liberal toleration. At the age of seventeen he participates at his boarding-house in an argument on Unitarianism, and he advocates the cause of the Unitarians. But the fundamental principles of Evangelican Puritanism are strong in him — among them a scrupulous regard for the sanctity of Sunday. While he was diligently applying himself to the study of French, it was his habit to attend service at the French church by way of assisting him to acquire a familiarity with the spoken language. But, after due deliberation, he comes to the conclusion that "it is not exactly right to appropriate Sunday to my own purposes," and he goes to Mr. Mason's church instead. Shortly after this, in his nineteenth year, there ensues a brief but intense period of spiritual conflict. It begins by his Cousin Cornelia plainly asking him, after they had attended prayer-meeting together, why he did not become a sincere Christian, and proposing to him to go to see Mr. Williams next Wednesday. The appeal evidently touched a sensitive chord, for, in the interval, he can think of nothing else, and in his diary next day he says: "My thoughts still are turned upward ... I will become a Christian. It is not an excitement that will easily die away, for I have long thought on this subject and am now resolved, through God's mercy, to attain that name 'Christian' in its fullest sense." But

II he feels that he must be born again, because without the second birth no man can see God, and he endures the anguish of the devout soul struggling under a sense of its own unworthiness. His spiritual adviser was the Rev. William R. Williams, pastor of the Amity Street Baptist Church, whose main counsel seems to have consisted in cautions against the possibility of mistaking a passing emotion for a genuine call to grace. After many visits to this sympathetic counselor, he finally reaches a restful conclusion: "I intend, with God's grace, to go on with the work I have commenced, and may I be a true Christian; this is all I want, all I ask for."

Any biographical record of the boyhood and youth of Andrew H. Green would be incomplete which failed to take account of the friendship which he formed very early with Samuel G. Arnold of Providence, the future Lieutenant-Governor, United States Senator, and historian of Rhode Island. The two families appear to have had many ties, and Arnold's sister was the wife of Timothy R. Green, one of Andrew's New York cousins. The love between these two was as that of David and Jonathan, and was never interrupted by either misunderstanding or estrangement. How lasting it was is amply attested by the message sent by Senator Arnold on his deathbed, on January 31, 1880: "Tell Andrew H. Green that I would like to have seen him once more on this earth, but that it will not be long, even measured by mortal years, before we shall renew in a better world a friendship that has been so lasting and so true in this."

Samuel G. Arnold was the younger by one year, and while he is still at school at Flushing, his friend is already at work in New York. As he passes through college, the other is getting his training in commerce. When Samuel is traveling in Europe, Andrew is facing, with undaunted resolution, the problem of earning a living. But in thought or sympathy they never drift apart. Their confidence in each other was absolute; their reciprocal affection was of a kind that no one else shared. At the age of eighteen Andrew writes to Samuel: "I have no one except yourself in the world that I can call an intimate friend (except always my father, brothers, and sisters, but these are different entirely)." This was elicited by the following declaration in a letter from his friend, then a student at Brown: "I have very few here whom I call my friends — in all the students at this college there are but two or three with whom I am particularly intimate, and but one of those with whom I like to walk and talk, and even he has many others among the students with whom he is almost as intimate as he is with me. Among the city fellows, there is not more than one or two with whom I go much, and with them only when I feel like having a scrape or going on a bust, or such kind of things with which you do not sympathize. You, Andrew, are almost the only standby and effectual friend which I have, and our situations are not very dissimilar, for you know no one and go with no one in New York, and I, as you see above, have scarce any here whom I can call my friend."

The letters which pass between them are the frank outpourings of two rather exceptional natures, with healthy tastes and kindred enthusiasms. Here and there one strikes a vein of youthful extravagance, as when Andrew writes on February 14, 1838: "With what inexpressible, unbounded, unheard of, inconceivable emotions of joy and delight did I receive your letter of February II. . . . This much for a commencement. I must now rest a while and cogitate and get my feelings a little subdued, which have been aroused to a very extensive degree by your beautiful, delightful, exquisite, intense, sublime, handsome, well-written, well-composed epistle." This badinage calling for explanation, he replies to his friend's responsive banter in a way that fairly indicates the feeling with which Andrew H. Green regarded Samuel G. Arnold: "I meant to say that your letters suited me exactly, and I want you to let him come out of you. You have enough of him in you. . . . By * him ' I mean the devil himself. Do you understand.'' I am obliged to tell you in these words, though some word expressive of playfulness and vivacity, life, happiness, good sense, and everything that makes man happy might be better." In the following year, when Arnold, after nine months' travel in Europe, broke in on his friend at breakfast in his New York boarding-house, the latter commits to his diary the following characteristic piece of appreciation: "He looks very well, and is, as he was, as fine a fellow as ever walked."

The gravity of demeanor which distinguished Andrew H. Green

In youth, as it did in manhood, always had its sunny side, and the labor of his early life in New York was relieved by a fair share of simple pleasures. For one thing he was on visiting terms with a wide circle of relatives, and was very much at home in the house of his cousin Timothy R. Green. Neither his own religious training nor that of his Immediate connections appears to have Interfered with an occasional visit to the theatre, Niblo's Garden for the most part, an occasional dancing party, or a casual game of cards. His attendance at church was rigidly regular, and he was a fairly constant attendant at the weekly prayer meetings. He made a brief trial of a Sunday class of rather unpromising urchins, held at Jefferson Market, but had to retire from the experiment discouraged. His intimate relation to the political activity of his time did not begin until he had reached man's estate, and, considering the robust quality of his Democracy In later life, it is curious to find him, as a youth, gleefully recording Whig victories at the polls. On the eve of the great Whig triumph of November 8, 1837, he writes: "It Is reported that there will be a great majority for the Whigs. I hope It may turn out so; the party in power at present are misguided, and have done a great deal of injury since they commenced." It is Interesting to compare this with the comment of the great New York Whig protagonist, Philip Hone: "The battle has been fought and won. The election closed this evening at sundown and the Whigs have succeeded in their whole ticket. New York has broken her chains and stands erect, regenerated. The moral and political effect of this victory will be prodigious. The eyes of the whole United States were turned to us. The measures of the administration stand condemned before the nation, and Mr. Van Buren must alter his course or sink to rise no more." Once again, a year later, but only once again, were these two in perfect accord as to the results of a New York election.