Strong’s pet squirrel

Of all the people who know something about George Templeton Strong, I wonder how many know he had a pet squirrel when he was a young man? It was a black squirrel, and he first mentioned it on January 31, 1847, when he was 27 years old:

Going to be sick, I think, so specially wretched have I been today with every sort of horrid dyspeptic sensation. My little black friend Teufelchen—or whatever is his proper style and title—I mean my black squirrel, is an invalid too, and has been sitting grunting on my lap all the afternoon in great affliction.

The next thing we hear of him is on October 10 of the same year, when Teufelchen has passed away.

My poor little black squirrel expired after a tedious illness Friday night, poor little thing; he was so weak and unable to move that he couldn’t have enjoyed life much. Wonder what the matter with him could have been. It’s very unpleasant to see a pet animal sick, especially when he’s quite tame and gentle and seems to appeal to one for help and comfort.

I seem to see more black or melanistic squirrels in New York City than I used to in Cambridge, and I imagined that the griminess of New York, especially in the past, might have favored darker squirrels, just as soot in England led to the development of the peppered moth.* But there seems to be no basis to this theory.

*Quick digression: Margaret Drabble is one of my favorite authors, but her novel The Peppered Moth, based on the life of her mother, is excruciatingly depressing. If you haven’t read Drabble before, don’t start with The Peppered Moth. Start with The Realms of Gold, The Ice Age, or The Radiant Way, the first volume of a trilogy that continues with A Natural Curiosity and concludes with The Gates of Ivory.

Strong reviews a fire

George Templeton Strong was known as a fine music reviewer, and his writings on music have been collected and published. But as the editors of his diary noted in 1952, he was also an accomplished reviewer of the fires that broke out frequently in 19th century Manhattan.

Though they found the 15-year-old Strong’s description of the Great Fire of 1835 (pictured) disappointing, they went to say, “He soon became an enthusiastic fire-goer and in time developed a real connoisseurship, disdaining mean and uninteresting fires and taking a great interest in the really spectacular ones.” As later entries show, he would get irritated when members of the “loaferage” blocked his view of a good fire.

This is the best of Strong’s fire reviews I’ve found so far, from December 29, 1842:

It was snowing when I got out at eleven and there was a great fire burning downtown, and never was anything more splendid than the effect it produced. The whole sky was lit up with a bright soft crimson glow, almost of uniform brilliancy. The snow reflected it back—streets and roofs were all tinted with the same color. It had a most magnificent and unearthly appearance. I was told the fire was in Wall Street, and started off on a run, expecting to find the office on fire and the old gentleman wringing his hands in front of it. The snow was deep and my run soon subsided into a trot, and then I took the first cab I could find and came downtown. Found that the fire was on Water Street, five or six stores blazing, and a fine sight it was. It was the worst fire we’ve had for a long time. The wind was very strong at N.E. The engines were retarded by the snow—the hydrants were many of them frozen—and at one time the fire crossed both Maiden Lane and Water Street, but it was checked in that direction. The walls kept each other up for some time but at last one gave way, and then four or five large stores came thundering down with a prolonged roar that seemed to shake the ground, and the change from the blaze and brightness of active conflagration to smothering smoke and comparative darkness, only lit up by a perfect hailstorm of sparks and cinders, and then to see great masses of thick smoke light up as the flames rose again among the ruins and eddy round and sweep off before the northeast wind till the glare of the burning buildings was fully displayed again, was very fine....

Strong on the panic of 1837

The more things change… Here is George Templeton Strong on the Wall Street panic of 1837, when he was 17 years old. He is writing on May 4.

Terrible news in Wall Street. [John] Fleming, late president of the Mechanics Bank, found dead in his bed this morning. Some say prussic acid; others (and the coroner’s jury) say “mental excitement” and apoplexy. Anyhow there’s a run on the bank—street crowded—more feeling of alarm and despondency in Wall Street than has appeared yet. The bank is to be kept open till five o’clock; politic move, that. Fears entertained that tomorrow the attack will be general on all the banks; if so they’ll go down and then all the banks from Maine to Louisiana must follow—universal ruin. People talk ominously about rebellions and revolutions on this side of the Atlantic, and if they come on this side, political disturbances will soon break out on the other.

There are matters of no little weight depending on the doings of Wall Street for the next four or five days. I wish I were ten or fifteen years older.

The Diary of George Templeton Strong

After reading a novel set in 1893, I’ve stayed in old New York for the first volume of The Diary of George Templeton Strong. Strong was the son of a lawyer, and a graduate of Columbia University (class of 1838). He was just a little younger than Thoreau, who graduated from Harvard in 1837, and in some ways he was the anti-Thoreau. Both men wrote enormous diaries, but Strong’s was all about politics, his legal career, and the turmoil of life in Manhattan, while Thoreau’s was largely about taking walks in the countryside around Concord, Massachusetts.

Strong’s diary is very entertaining to read, and it’s unfortunate that it’s almost unobtainable. Only the first volume can be checked out of the New York Public Library system. He is probably best known, to those who know him at all, through the entries he made in the Civil War years that were used in Ken Burns’ documentary, and read in the best upper-crust Manhattan tones by George Plimpton. But those excerpts didn’t give a sense of how funny he could be. Here he is griping about the Transcendentalists, on September 25, 1840. (His comments would apply more to characters like William Ellery Channing than they would to Thoreau.)

Tried to read Kent this morning, but his pages, which never were remarkable for order and perspicuity, seemed even more hazy than ever. It was a toss-up between the ex-Chancellor and the Boston transcendentalists. The latter gentry have rather the advantage, by the way, for whereas the Chancellor merely contradicts himself on alternate pages and writes a book as his wife would make a pudding, by taking care to mix the ingredients—eggs, butter, and all—into undistinguishable homogeneity, the Eastern Magi take care to write so that it’s impracticable to know what any one sentence means and no one can therefore safely assert that any two passages are irreconcilable or unconnected, which is very delightful to behold and shows a true Yankee ingenuity in dodging the shafts of criticism. They’re safe behind the thick cotton of the infinite and The Incomprehensible.

As to their enunciation of the fact that “Matter is orbed and spirit is sphered” (or vice versa -- I forget which and it don’t much matter), I do not entirely agree with the pundits aforesaid. The thoughtful mind can never forget that in the polarization of the universal dual the essential idea is first individually evolved, and that from this purely spiritual genesis, extending as it does upwards into the profound and downwards into the exalted (and not according to Locke, vice versa), or in other words from the intensely spirituous, is first seen to emanate the dawnings of the Exotic. Strange, then, that any should be so utterly blind as not to deduce from these self-evident propositions the identity of the Ideal and the truncatedo-conical of the material and the right angulo-hexagonal triangular!