USA > New York > Cayuga County > History of Cayuga County, New York : with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers > Part 28
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A rapid decline in property followed from the fabulous values of the ten years of inflation, and many fortunes were thus blotted out, or largely diminished. The general effect has been to amass the wealth of the city and country in fewer hands, in those of the cautious and conservative class, who, familiar with the laws of business and the reactions inseparably following excessive overtrading, kept themselves aloof from the haz- ardous and speculating ventures in which were engulfed the fortunes of the less cautious and dis- criminating.
Auburn suffered much less from the reaction of 1873 than from that of 1837, mainly for the reasons of the greatly increased wealth of her citizens, their less relative liabilities for works of public or private improvements and the generally sound condition of the banking institutions of the country. Hitherto the banks of the country, being on a specie basis, felt, and generally gave way from the effects of commercial distress among the first, and withheld from the manufac- turing and commercial classes their usual accom- modations at just the times when those accommo- dations were indispensable to them. The banks in 1873 were non-specie paying and by carrying their customers over the tidal wave of reaction, saved very many of them from commercial ruin.
THE MERCHANTS' UNION EXPRESS CO .- This enterprise originated in Auburn. It was based
[Photo by Ernsberger & Ray.]
Lewis Grant
JUSTUS LEWIS GRANT was descended from New England an- cestors. His father. Justus Fales Grant, was born at Wrentham, Mass., July 4th, 1799. The maiden name of his mother was Hannah Hale, and they were married at Dunstable, now Nash- na, New Hampshire, about 1816. Mr. Grant's father was an edge tool manufacturer, and a superior mechanic. Justus Lewis was born at Nashua, N. H., November 4th, 1818. When he was eleven years of age. in 1829. his father located in Auburn, and engaged in the establishment of Joseph Wadsworth, in the manu- facture of scythes, hoes, &c., with whom, and his son Samuel, he continued until his death, in 1845. He died suddenly of paralysis. The writer of this sketch has often heard Mr. Grant, when re- ferring to the sudden death of his father, express the fear that he too might die suddenly and of a similar disease. J. Lewis Grant was twice married. His first wife was Miss Betsey Allen, whom he married Dec. 5th, 1835. They settled in Michigan where, in the fall of 1838, his wife died, and the same year he returned to Auburn. On Oct. 27th, 1839, he married Abbey Janette Mills.
Mr. Grant was systematic and methodical in his habits. He kept a diary, from which we take the following extract :
" During the four years succeeding our arrival in Auburn, I passed most of my time at school, under the kind and intelligent teaching of Mr. Jonah J. Underhill. At the age of fourteen, my father desired me to assist him in the support of his family. With assurances from him that I might choose any other trade or profession in the spring, I entered the trip hammer shop under his instruction. My proficiency was even greater than I had dared to hope. I was well pleased with the business, and was satisfied to adopt that trade in preference to any other."
Here he continued until he was twenty-three years of age.
Mr. Grant was a natural mechanic, and rapidly became an ex- pert worker in metals. His subsequent successes as a railroad man are largely due to the practical knowledge thus obtained, which supplemented and perfected his natural genius. His first railroad experience was on the Auburn and Syracuse Railroad, in September, 1841, under the superintendency of E. P. Williams, as freight conductor. His capabilities as a mechanic were soon so manifest that he was appointed locomotive engineer of that road, and was afterwards entrusted with the charge of its entire motive power, a very responsible trust, hut one which he dis- charged with singular acceptance and success.
In August, 1850, he was appointed "Superintendent of motive power " of the Rome and Watertown Railroad aud took up his residence in Rome, where he remained some six years ; when, in February, 1856, he was called to Toronto, Canada, to take charge, as General Superintendent, of the Northern Railway of Canada. Here he remained and successfully discharged his duties until December 31st, 1862, when the bitterness of feeling which grew
out of our civil war led to the demand that he should take the oath of allegiance to the British Crown. This he refused to do, and resigned his position and returned to Auburn, purchasing the Van Tuyl farm, intending to devote his life to rural quiet.
But that was not to be. He was too thorough an expert in railroad affairs and the value of his services as such too widely known. to permit his retirement. Ou the importunity of the late Dean Richmond, he consented to take the Superintendency of the Buffalo & Erie Railroad, on May 6th, 1864. That position he was induced to resign in August of that year, to assume the General Superintendency of the Merchants' Union Express Com- pany, whose business was then widely extended. This position, chiefly office work, and very different from his previous expe- rience, was not congenial to him, and he resigned to enter again his chosen field, as President of the Southern Central Railroad, an enterprise which had engaged, from: its inception, his live- liest interest, and to the success of which he had devoted his time and means. His next and last railroad experience was as Superintendent of the Cayuga Lake Shore Road. He was at the time of his death, and for some time previously had been, Su- perintendent of the Auburn Water Works Company.
The death of Mr. Grant was sudden and sad. He was return- ing from the west accompanied by his wife and daughter. Mrs. Parish. He was apparently in his usual health and geniality of spirits. The train had passed Rochester, and, expecting his son Herbert, and son-in-law, Mr. Parish, to pass them, was standing in the rear doorway to greet them. He was there stricken with apoplexy, and immediately expired, Oct. 19th, 1878, aged 60 years.
Mr. Grant left a widow, three sons, Julius Herbert, J. Lewis and Albert Edward and one daughter, Ivola Janette, Mrs. Par- ish. He had lost by death one son and two daughters.
It was in his social relations in his home and the commu- nity, that the beauty and excellence of his character conspicu- ously shone. He was eminently social, kind and generous. No one could know him intimately, who had a mind to perceive and a heart to feel. and not be impressed with his kind and genial spirits. Blessed with a peculiarly happy temperament himself. it was his delight to make others happy, and few if auy of our citizens had more or warmer friends. For oue who through life had been engrossed with other pursuits, he possessed and cultivated in an unusual degree a literary taste. He was fond of poetry and has written and published many pieces of merit. To the interests of the Universalist Church, of which he was a member, he devoted all the activities of his generous nature, and there his loss will he more deeply felt than anywhere else outside of his own family. It is rare indeed that we find united in one person the same business capacity, and the same genial and hap- py social temperament that distinguished J. Lewis Grant.
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MERCHANTS' UNION EXPRESS COMPANY.
upon the conviction that the merchants of the country, being the principal patrons and sup- porters of the express business could, by a con- cert of action, establish and successfully maintain an express company in their own interests and greatly lessen the exorbitant charges which had hitherto been exacted by the old express com- panies controlled by few men whose profits had been very large.
At a conference of Elmore P. Ross, William C. Beardsley, John N. Knapp, and Elliot G. Storke, a prospectus was adopted, in which the necessity, plans, purposes and benefits of the pro- posed organization were fully set forth, and the proposal made to form a joint stock association, under the laws of New York, of the merchants and business men of the country. The plan was received with great favor and was carried into effect in the spring of 1866 by the following or- ganization : Elmore P. Ross, President ; William H. Seward, Jr., Vice-President ; John N. Knapp, Secretary ; William C. Beardsley, Treasurer ; Theodore M. Pomeroy, Attorney ; the Executive Committee comprised the following gentlemen : H. W. Slocum, Elmore P. Ross, Elliot G. Storke, William C. Beardsley, Clinton T. Backus, William H. Seward, Jr., John N. Knapp and John A. Green, with sixteen prominent merchants, located at the principal commercial cities of the country as local trustees of the company.
The nominal capital was fixed at $20,000,000, on which such assessments only were to be made as might be necessary to meet the demands of the business as it developed.
The plan was submitted to the business men of the country and the subscriptions were so liberal as to compel the limiting of the amount of indi- vidual subscriptions and to the speedy closing of the books. The stock was widely distributed, and the number thus interested in making the enterprise successful was very large.
Equipments were speedily supplied and con- tracts for transportation upon the railroads made. Agents, messengers, superintendents and other necessary officials were procured, largely from the experienced men of the old companies, and the business of shipping goods by express began in the autumn of 1866.
The old express companies, the Adams, American and United States, had long held the monopoly of express transportation. They had
worked in harmony, each company having par- ticular routes, the goods received by either com- pany were, when necessary, forwarded to their destination by transferrence to the others.
The new company had, therefore, to meet the competition of three thoroughly organized and wealthy companies, entirely familiar with the busi- ness, and determined to retain it by crushing out the proposed competition. The competition was therefore sharp from the beginning. That com- petition was manifested in the extremely low rates at which the old companies offered to transport goods, so low indeed that before the struggle ceased goods were transported by ex- press on passenger trains, at about the rates of ordinary freight carriage, and the mass of goods thus thrown upon the express lines was so enor- mous as greatly to embarrass and delay the pas- senger trains, by overloading them and by the delays at stations in discharging and loading goods. The number of coaches loaded with ex- press goods often exceeded those occupied by passengers.
The managers of the principal railroad lines soon saw that they could not long sustain the draft thus made upon them for freiglit carriage and that they must adopt some method to close the fight. They shrewdly adopted a method of doing so and at the same time one that, while it lasted, paid them well. They advanced the rates of transportation of express goods from three to six hundred per cent., the effect of which in- creased enormously the losses of the several com- panies and made it a question of time only, when ruin or a compromise must ensue. After a plucky and resolute contest of over two years during which the Merchants' Union had covered with .its express lines nearly all the Northern States, and had drawn from the stockholders and expended some five millions of dollars, and the re- sources of the competing companies were also greatly depleted, a compromise and final union was effected, by which the Merchants' Union and American Express Companies were merged under the name of the American Merchants' Union, and a satisfactory division of assets and shares in the profits were mutually arranged. The combined companies are now operated under the old title of the American Express Company.
The plan of the Merchants' Union was at once bold in conception and vigorous in execution. It
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CITY OF AUBURN.
was a very strong organization, composed as it was of some ten thousand of the principal mer- chants and shippers of the country ; men of means, whose patronage was regarded as a surety of success. It would clearly have been so but for the difficulty not fully anticipated, of trans- portation. That difficulty was fatal, and ren- dered the contest a hopeless one from the time of the imposition of such enormous freight charges.
No organization which has originated in Au- burn, has ever given to the city a wider public reputation, or, while it lasted, engaged more gen- erally the interest of our citizens. It was an ear- nest and zealous effort to break up the control of powerful and exacting monopolies, and has effec- tually demonstrated the dangers of their exist- ence and the difficulties of their eradication.
THE AUBURN PRISON.
The prison system of this State was first in- stituted eighty-two years ago, by the erection, in the city of New York, of the Newgate Prison, first brought into use in 1797. Previously thereto various severe punishments had been in- flicted upon the criminals of the State, the stocks, public whippings and brandings, and the death penalty were inflicted for some sixteen enumerated offenses. This extremely rigorous and cruel code, an inheritance from the barbarous statutes of England, was offensive to the enlarging humane spirit of the age and the suggestion to substitute for it confinement in the State Prison was re- ceived with satisfaction. Such confinement, it was believed, would accomplish a three-fold ob- ject : the humane treatment of felons, the relief to society from their depredations, and, in many cases, their reformation.
But the plan of organization first adopted, ow- ing to inexperience, was by no means perfect. It included the employment of the convicts at hard labor during the day, and their confinement at night in squads of from ten to twenty in one apartment. It was soon found that the great leniency with which the convicts were treated and the abundant comforts with which they were supplied, rendered their confinement of no par- ticular terror to evil doers. The social inter- course of their lodgings, in which were mingled old and hardened offenders with tyros in crime,
had the effect to deprave the latter, becoming to them schools of vice, with expert teachers, who gloried in instructing them in the arts and de- vices of criminal practice. Such prison disci- pline did not deter from crime nor reform the convicts.
The contrast between the sanguinary code which had recently existed and the freedom and comforts of a prison home as then supplied, made the latter utterly ineffectual. Convictions were greatly increased, and within ten years, Newgate Prison was filled, and the necessity existed of pardoning the less, notorious criminals to make room for the newly convicted, and to such an extent was this necessary that the reports show the pardons and convictions in 1809 to be equal.
This large number of criminals regularly let loose upon society created alarm and led to the adoption of measures for the erection of a new prison, the site of which was fixed at the village of Auburn. It was commenced in 1816 and completed in 1820. The main building and cells and apartments were, however, so far com- pleted in 1817 as to admit of the reception of convicts, but the work-shops were yet incom- plete.
The convicts first received were employed in the erection of the prison and when that was finished, in job work of various kinds, the same as that done by the jobbing shops of the village, and under the supervision and in behalf of the State. The contract system had not then been instituted.
Defective as the first experiment at Newgate had proved it was; nevertheless, continued in Auburn, and was followed by the same results, the insubordination and demoralization of the convicts. The prisons of the State were not re- alizing the public expectation, and a change was demanded. The trouble, it was believed, arose mainly from the laxness of discipline and the promiscuous mingling of convicts in their lodg- ing rooms. These were the convictions of those most thoroughly conversant with the practical workings of the system then existing. There was, nevertheless, in the public mind a morbid sensitiveness upon the subject of rigid convict discipline and much controversy over the ques- tion. As to the seclusion of the convicts in separate cells at night there was great unanimity
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THE AUBURN PRISON.
and the north wing of the prison was, therefore, constructed on this plan, and each convict com- pletely isolated from his fellows at night. In the day time he was kept at work by the careful sur- veillance of his keepers, and enforced silence maintained. The rules of silence, diligence and order were enforced by the thorough use of the " cat."
The " cat-o'-nine-tails" was the instrument chiefly used in flogging convicts. That em- ployed in the prison had, however, but six tails, lashes or strands. These were distributed along the broad edge of a triangular piece of flexible leather, which, at its point, was fastened to a handle about two feet long. The lashes were about eighteen inches long and were formed of hard waxed shoe thread and would cut the flesh like " whips of stcel." In the hands of a mus- cular officer, anxious to subdue refractory con- victs, they were cruel instruments, but effectual in securing obedience. A bath of brine, applied to the lacerated skin after flogging, was not, at first, a very soothing anodyne, though its ultimate effects might be beneficial.
This arrangement of cells and change of dis- cipline was made by William Britton, the first agent, who died in 1821. He was succeeded by Captain Elam Lynds, by whom the most rigor- ous discipline was enforced. Under his adminis- tration the whip was not spared and the " ways of the transgressors were emphatically hard." He abolished the table system, compelling the con- victs to take their meals in their cells, and the manner of marching to and from the shops now in use was of his introduction. Under his ad- ministration the experiment was made of classi- fying the prisoners into three divisions-those who were serving second, or more terms, formed the first class, and were doomed to solitary con- finement ; the second class, the next in hardi- hood, were alternately confined and permitted to labor ; and the least hardened were regularly employed. It was a very dangerous experiment to make, and one, the result of which, led to its speedy abandonment. Of the eighty-three men of the first class. who were immured in solitary cells, five had died in less than a year, and an- other, in a fit of delirium, had leaped from the upper gallery to the floor of the wing.
Such a system, so destructive of the mental and physical powers, could not long be maintain-
ed, and the law authorizing it was repealed in 1825.
The outside public, influenced by distorted and exaggerated accounts of the cruelties prac- ticed in the Auburn Prison, became much excited and the influence of the popular sentiment pene- trated the thick walls of the prison itself, and led to the positive refusal of some of the officers to inflict upon certain convicts the punishment de . manded of them. This humanity was, however, exceptional ; the rule being a ready compliance, on the part of subordinates, with the exactions of their superiors. In December, 1825, a female convict died, as was alleged, from the effects of brutal whipping, leading to the appointment of a Legislative Committee of Investigation and to a change in the agency of the prison. Gershom Powers became the agent.
Mr. Powers took the middle ground between the extremes of lenity and severity, and the pru- dence and wisdom of his administration won the popular approval, while the discipline and effi- ciency of the prison was fully maintained. In order that the officers and the public might at any time and unobserved by those in the shops, see what was going on within them, he caused pas- sages to be constructed around them with narrow slots, through which those in the passages could see the convicts and the officers while they were themselves unseen. Through these passages only the visiting public were admitted. Two benefits were claimed for this, a satisfaction of the public suspicion, and a secret scrutiny of the interior affairs of the prison, the latter leading to a more faithful discharge, by subordinates, of their duties.
The prison for the ten years from 1828 to 1838 was very satisfactorily managed by the agents, Levi Lewis and John Garrow. At this latter date Elam Lynds, to the great surprise and indigna- tion of the people, was again appointed agent. He at once signalized his advent by the introduc- tion of very obnoxious changes ; he again abol- ished the table system of feeding the convicts, took from them knives and forks, and compelled them to adopt the Turkish mode of eating with their fingers. This unnecessary and barbarous exercise of tyranny aroused anew public indigna- tion. Public meetings were held and denuncia- tory resolutions passed ; a serial publication, en- titled the Chronicles, was anonymously issued, in
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CITY OF AUBURN.
which the barbarities practiced in the prison were severely rebuked.
Agent Lynds was indicted by the grand jury and strenuous efforts were made for his removal. About this time a convict was choked to death by a piece of meat lodging in his throat, attribu- ted to eagerness to eat, impelled by extreme hunger, and hence that the convicts were not properly supplied with food ; or, that not having a knife and fork to properly divide his food, the accident arose from that cause.
The public clamor now rose louder than ever and was so decided and emphatic in its tone as to compel the resignation of Captain Lynds and those of the inspectors who had been his special advocates and supporters. He was succeeded by Dr. Noyes Palmer, by whom the old order of things was restored, and the public agitation quieted.
The use of the " cat "* in our prisons was abol- ished in consequence of the death, from whipping, of a convict, who, it was claimed, had feigned sickness to avoid labor. The excitement which grew out of it led to the substitution of the show- er-bath, yoke, paddling,t and other forms of pun- ishment.
GOVERNMENT OF THE PRISONS .- For twenty- eight years, from 1818 to 1846, the control and management of the prisons was invested in a Board of five local inspectors, appointed for two years by the Senate, on the nomination of the Gover- nor. Those inspectors appointed all the subor- dinate officers of the prisons, and directed their general management. By the Constitution of 1846 this plan of government was changed, and the prisons of the State, were placed in charge of three State inspectors, holding their offices for three years, one of whom annually retired and a successor was chosen. In practice this change was really no improvement over the pre- vious system. The prisons that had hitherto been self-sustaining and had often shown balances in favor of the State, were, from year to year exhib- iting increasing deficiences, and large annual ap-
·
* Under the present prisun system the Superintendent of Prisons can employ any method or degree of punishment which he may deem necessary. The existence of this power is, of itself, a check upon disobedience
+ Spanking with a paddle, or flat piece of wood, three feet long, two feet of which is used as a handle. The blade part of the paddle is about three and a halfinches wide and one foot long, covered with leather, with which the convicts were punished upon their naked bodies by blows of from twelve to eighteen in number.
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propriations were required to meet them. These deficiences at length attained alarming magni- tude and so clearly indicated dishonesty and fraud, that a very capable committee of investigation was appointed by the Legislature with full power to probe to the bottom the prison affairs of the State. That committee consisted of Louis D. Pillsbury, George R. Babcock, Sinclair Tousey and Archibald Niven. They commenced their investigations in June, 1876, and made their re- port to the Legislature in December following. Their report embraced over eight hundred pages, containing the questions propounded and the answers given by the various officers and con- tractors in the different prisons, and corroborat- ing testimony of convicts.
They summarize the sources of the pecuniary losses of the State as follows :
"First-In the great lack of discipline among the convicts, which put it in their power to do much or little of the labor required of them in a given time.
"Second-This state of things prevented the agent and warden, or other authorized officials, from making contracts for convict labor on terms as favorable to the State as if the convicts were under proper discipline.
"Third-Contractors of doubtful pecuniary re- sponsibility were thus enabled to contract labor because a lack of discipline lessened the compe- · tition for such labor.
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