by H. W. Brands
After the trees were fully adorned, a procession began. “People go round with or without their children to see them, and frequently knock at the door to be admitted to a closer inspection, which is readily granted. I heard of one house where 75 were admitted in about two hours. Riding through the better class streets on the cars”—the horse-drawn trolleys—“the effect is novel and very fine.” Lewis noted that though the decorations and ornaments often featured the names of the children of the households, the whole business was directed by the adults. “It appears to be got up more for the gratification of the older than the young ones.” The youngsters preferred candy, to which the Americans were addicted. “The candy stores are among the gayest and most prosperous, and the consumption of their wares by women and children all the year round is enormous and is often spoken of by writers as a great national failing. If a woman goes out she must not forget a pound or at least half a pound of candy for baby—and herself.”1
In an ordinary year the holiday season would have wound down after New Year’s Day, but 1876 was no ordinary year, being the centennial of American independence. Philadelphia would lead the festivities, as the nation’s birthplace and still its second-largest city. Lewis had to work in New York the week after Christmas, but on New Year’s Eve he closed the shop and boarded an afternoon train back to Philadelphia. He met his son there, and together they went to a friend’s house. The principal entertainment of the evening was an elaborate spoof on lawyers and judges. “The host in wig and gown (also specs) was mounted on a well constructed ‘bench’ and was engaged in trying a disreputable looking ‘blaggard’ ”—blackguard—“Mr. Terence O’Sullivan (my son), for jilting a very prim old maid, and as nearly all the audience were called as witnesses the fun was uproarious. The prosecuting lawyer did not amount to much, but defendant’s counsel John Moffitt, assistant clerk and a prospective relative, was a hit in his examining of the witnesses, especially when Mrs. Bridget O’Halloran, the widdy”—widow—“of a husband, was called as an expert in matrimonial matters. I never enjoyed anything so much before. The trial lasted nearly three hours, concluding with an elaborate address for the defense, counsel quoting from decisions in Buckwheat versus Muffins and other celebrated cases in support of his argument.” After the prisoner was found guilty and the judge ordered “some ridiculous sentence which I forget,” the entire court adjourned. “We then went down stairs to refresh on great moulds of ice cream of several flavours, jellies, cakes, and fruits of various kinds &c &c.”
At the stroke of midnight the city erupted in what Lewis called “the most extraordinary noise ever heard. It had been arranged that at that hour every bell, whistle, or other instrument that would make a noise should be put into requisition. Philadelphia is a great railroad place and has many thousands of workshops—also churches.” Everything heralded the centennial year. “The effect was wonderful, not loud, being scattered—rather melancholy, seeming as if some terrible disaster was occurring, such as the sacking of a great city, and the sound of a vast multitude wailing and shrieking at a distance.”
The celebration continued for Lewis that night till half past three and resumed the following day for another banquet, featuring “two turkeys, at least twenty-pounders, with all the trimmings.” The party segregated after dinner. “Gentlemen upstairs, ladies to the parlour. We smoked and played cards, but hearing a great row downstairs I left as soon as I could, went down, and found that I had missed part of the fun—charades and other games. After that we had nigger minstrelsy &c by my son, Moffitt, and another young man in black faces and appropriate costumes. Black Sal also appeared and danced a jig; she puzzled me, but I afterwards learnt that she was the doctor’s wife next door, a romp—nearer fifty than any other age.… After that we had a variety of choruses and some good piano playing. Nobody waited to be asked to sing.”2
THE NEXT DAY was Sunday and Lewis stayed over. But he had to return to New York to open the store on Monday. He didn’t get back to Philadelphia till August, by which time the Centennial Exposition—commonly called “the Centennial”—had established itself as what Lewis called “the great event of the year if not of the Century.” The grounds of the exposition at Fairmount Park were packed with the high and the humble; the former included, on Lewis’s first day, the governors of several American states and Dom Pedro, the emperor of Brazil. The entrance fee was fifty cents; additional fees—“some of them pretty stiff”—were charged at exhibits inside the gates. The different sections of the country and diverse parts of the world were on display. “A great feature of the grounds were the ‘state’ houses. These were of various sizes, and some of them curiosities in style and ornament, but all built with the same object, to be a sort of headquarters to the people from the various states of the Union, mostly with handsome parlours, piano &c, and where they could register their names, meet friends or receive letters.” The western states particularly strove to make a favorable impression. Kansas and Colorado joined forces to display “wonderful specimens of minerals and agricultural produce, corn twenty feet high, wheat and other grains of a wonderful growth. But the principal attraction was a collection of wild animals arranged on rocks, from the buffalo down to prairie dogs &c—all or nearly all the wild animals found in those states and all shot by a little woman, a Mrs. Maxwell who attended a photograph stand selling pictures of herself and animals.”
As a native of England, Lewis took special interest in observing the customs of New England. “I may explain,” he told his brother, “that by ‘New England’ is meant the present states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, the real and only Yankee land, peopled from the colony of ‘pilgrims’ who landed in 1620.” The centerpiece of the New England exhibit was “an old ‘New England’ log house with inmates to match—all old—and mostly historical furniture—veritable old spinning wheels at work and numberless old nic-nacs, real affair—also the cradle that Peregrine White was rocked in—the first white child born in ‘New England.’ … In the kitchen a crowd was feasting (at fifty cents a head) on real Yankee pork and beans (you ought to try them).”
Near the New England house stood “the Japanese bazaar, curiously built, and a little garden with Japanese plants … surrounded by a very neat bamboo fence, all very ingeniously made. There was also several of those dwarf trees that you may have read about—fifty or one hundred or more years old. Oaks and others, little, crooked, gnarled and yet all healthy, and mostly about eighteen to twenty-four inches each way. In the bazaar, natives in our clothes were busy selling all kinds of small wares at good prices. They have a residence on the ground—a large house of wood, all brought from Japan, and whilst it was being erected they were the centre of attraction, from their excellent work and curious tools.”
The smaller Turkish pavilion also housed a bazaar, or souvenir shop. “But the pavilion is mostly used as a smoking saloon, and it was an amusing sight to see it full of fellows, mostly young, either smoking the long flexible tubed water pipes, or the long chiboucks, both fifteen cents, five feet long, and which they did not know how to handle, and trying to make believe that they were enjoying themselves, while Turkish waiters in costume were bringing eastern drinks (fifteen cents) and poking up the pipes.” Next to the smoking saloon was another Ottoman curiosity: “a small Jerusalem tent, with olive wood work, all Catholic beads, crosses &c &c sold by sons of the prophet.”
Though the American past had inspired the Centennial, the American future provided its theme. Machinery large and small revealed the power of industry to transform ordinary lives in extraordinary ways. Lewis was unimpressed by what was supposed to be the centerpiece of the industrial exhibits: a Corliss steam engine. “That’s a fraud,” he told his brother. “There are plenty of larger engines than that. It is imposing on account of its position and its having double beams and a large fly wheel. This last is certainly all that is said of it, being I think of 70 tons (our ton is 2000 lbs.).” Yet though the main attraction di
sappointed Lewis, the auxiliary exhibits delighted him. “If you can think of any kind of machine for any purpose, it was pretty sure to be there and numbers of them at work. I saw one large machine making paper, and another printing wall paper. Curious—just as easy to print in twenty colours as in one.” Steam-driven fans like those employed in the mining industry to ventilate shafts made cyclones of the warm summer air. “The force of their wind was tremendous, and hats &c were in danger anywhere near them.” While steam multiplied force, electricity conquered distance. “The ‘London Graphic’ was printed here, and so was the ‘New York Times.’ For the latter electrotype plates left here”—Lewis was writing from his home in New York—“at 4 a.m., and papers were ready when the doors opened at 8. An eight page paper.” The importance of newspapers to Americans could not be overstated. A newspaper advertising agency—“This is a large business here”—had built a house where visitors could relax and catch up on the news. “In this house was a reading room, free, and any paper asked for was brought by attendants. There is probably 20,000 papers published in the U.S.”
The fair included a “Women’s Hall” displaying the products of women’s work from America and around the world. “This is a failure,” Lewis wrote, at least as it regarded America. “By far the most valuable and interesting of women’s work is principally shown in Machinery Hall and in the Main Hall, for instance in watch-making, for which there are several large factories in this country, where every part, even the most delicate, are made by fine machines, mostly attended by girls, and turning out beautiful work.”
American ingenuity had been applied to creature comforts as well. Lewis and other visitors appreciated ice water that gushed from a fountain and piqued his curiosity even as it quenched his thirst. “I could not make it out where it came from with so much force,” Lewis said, “but next day I came there just as they were filling the tank with ice. In the ground, where the iron pipe from the water works came, there was sunk a giant iron tank which held several tons of ice (I saw five or six go in). The water pipe ran into this and from another side a pipe led to the fountain. The ice being all in, the air tight cover was put on, and the stopcock being turned, the full force of water passed through the ice to the fountain.” In case his brother wondered why the Americans went to all that bother, Lewis added, “Ice water is a very important and necessary article during the hot weather, and was in fair supply in all parts of the grounds.” Yet many visitors preferred other drinks. “The numerous soda water stands in all the buildings did a roaring trade, and so did the German ‘lager bier’ sellers. Lager bier is German, a pleasant refreshing real beer, but it is still an unsettled question whether or not it will intoxicate. Plenty of Germans can be found who would swear to drinking all the way up to 50 or 60 glasses a day—five cents a glass. Of late years, Americans are large consumers.”
Power of another sort formed a conspicuous part of the display. The Krupp works of Germany had sent one of its great guns, an artillery piece with a long barrel—“mounted like a monster telescope, wrong end up,” it seemed to Lewis—and a rifled bore. Less sophisticated but larger were the American weapons: “all sorts of guns of all sizes up to the twenty-inch ‘Dahlgren’ with a heap of its 1080 lb. shot. Also a monitor turret, with two fifteen-inch guns mounted, but I cannot conceive how they can work in so small a space.” Inside the federal government’s building was “every conceivable instrument for scientific murder: fire arms, old and new; shot and shell, whole and sawed in two to show the interior; edged weapons; pikes; torpedoes; models of vessels and other things; cordage; figures with all kinds of uniforms from 1800 to the present time.” The signal corps contributed its latest lighthouse apparatus. “I had often wished to see a Fresnel lens and could never understand why they should be so complicated and expensive. But I can see it now. The lens is a great lantern (of course this goes inside the real lantern) which a man can—and has to—climb into, composed of a very great number of prisms of various sizes and curves of the finest glass and very heavy, and when the light is burning must multiply it many hundred times.” The military exhibit also included “what I had hitherto thought a myth—the stump of a tree about five feet high and fifteen to eighteen inches thick that had been cut off by musket balls, at (I think) the battle of the Wilderness. This is authentic.”3
THE CENTENNIAL YEAR was also a presidential election year, which added to the excitement. The election of 1868 had been a snooze, and that of 1872, when Ulysses Grant easily defeated Horace Greeley, still more somnolent. The Democratic victories in the congressional races in 1874 promised that 1876 would be the most competitive presidential contest since the war and challenged the Republicans to find a worthy candidate to succeed Grant.
Few initially suspected that the candidate would be Rutherford Hayes, and those few didn’t include Hayes himself. “We are living happily—never more so,” the Ohio governor wrote in his diary in March 1875. “Lucy is healthy, and as she grows older preserves her beauty. She is large but not unwieldy.”4
Hayes had never expected to get as far in life as he had. His father died before he was born, and he entered the world so frail his mother braced for his early death. When he survived infancy, she clung to him tightly, the more so after his brother drowned ice-skating. She schooled him at home before sending him to a private academy; even after he attended college (Kenyon) and law school (Harvard), she kept close watch over him. With much of his generation he contracted the fever of Manifest Destiny and in 1847 attempted to enlist in the army that was invading Mexico. But his mother arranged for the local doctor to find that the young man’s health couldn’t stand the rigors of the campaign, and he was rejected.
In 1860 he was a lukewarm Unionist. “Let them go,” he said of the seceding states. Yet the attack on Fort Sumter rekindled his patriotism, and he took a commission in Ohio’s volunteers. He served with distinction, receiving four wounds and the grateful respect of his comrades and neighbors, who elected him to Congress and three times to the governorship of Ohio. The last time—in 1875—he won impressively enough that many Republicans looked to him to succeed that other Ohioan, Grant, in the White House.5
There was some question whether Grant wanted to be succeeded. No president had served three terms, although the Constitution didn’t forbid it. After his thumping victory over Greeley in 1872, Grant thought he might be the one to break the tacit embargo. He and his wife, Julia, liked living in the White House, and he had no particular prospects after leaving office and no pension. Besides, he hated the thought of departing under the cloud of scandal. But precisely that cloud caused the Republican professionals to push him to the door.
The identity of his replacement evoked no such agreement. Benjamin Bristow believed the scandals favored the fearless sweeper of the Augean stables, namely him. But others argued that a Bristow nomination would play directly to the Democrats’ strength: voters’ distaste at what passed for politics as usual. Besides, Grant couldn’t stand Bristow, and the president retained enough support among the party faithful to derail the Kentuckian’s candidacy.
The mantle of favorite fell on James G. Blaine. Elected to Congress from Maine in 1862, Blaine had quickly earned a reputation for eloquence and charm. Some elder statesmen of the House compared him favorably with the young Henry Clay. Like Clay, he was elevated to speaker while still junior by years, and he deftly managed the affairs of the House. He spoke with a voice of moderate reason during Reconstruction and aided in efforts to bring the South back into the Union without excessive recrimination. Yet he drew the line where amnesty met amnesia. In January 1876, in the spirit of centennial reconciliation, House Democrats sponsored a bill to waive the civil disabilities imposed on Confederate office-holders by the Fourteenth Amendment; Blaine accepted the principle but offered a single amendment: that the waiver not include Jefferson Davis. Blaine’s amendment itself spoiled the centennial spirit; his explanation drove the wedge deeper.
I do not place his exclusion on the ground
that Mr. Davis was, as he has been commonly called, the head and front of the Rebellion.… Mr. Davis was in that respect as guilty, no more so, no less so, than thousands of others who have already received the benefit and grace of amnesty.… It is not because of any particular and special damage that he above others did to the Union, or because he was personally or especially of consequence, that I except him.… I except him on this ground: that he was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville.
