Sociability, Civil War, and a Diverted Renaissance

Bullard, Melissa Meriam

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-50176-5_6

Melissa Meriam Bullard²

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Abstract

Montague Street around the Academy of Music marked the physical center of Brooklyn’s renaissance. The Academy promoted sociability in a public space and became Brooklyn’s meeting house during the Civil War. As Brooklyn’s monument to civic as well as cultural pride, it helped smooth over political divisiveness among Republicans and Democrats over slavery. However, programming and seating remained flashpoints of local contention. The introduction of Italian opera and controversy over prose theater broadened polite tastes. Civil War and the Draft transformed the Academy into Brooklyn’s center for war relief activities. Luther Wyman took under his wing the 48th Regiment of New York Volunteers at Fort Hamilton. Brooklyn’s elite attempted to balance war relief, social reality, and their continued commitment to the civilizing potential of the arts.

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Notes

1.
Cezar Del Valle, The Brooklyn Theatre Index (Brooklyn, NY: Theatre Talks, LLC, 2010), 1: 274–81. The Park Theater was built in 1863 with private funds following a controversy regarding “legitimate” theater at the Academy of Music, discussed later in the chapter.
2.
City Hall had been constructed on land donated by two prominent landowning early Brooklyn families, the Pierreponts and Remsens, shortly after Brooklyn had been consolidated into a city in 1834. The Greek revival building, however, was not completed until 1849.
3.
NYT, 12 November 1869, 2, “they have made Brooklyn a great centre of art, and a home of artists.”
4.
In the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, prize collectibles were kept in their owners’ private studies, or studioli, and in wonder cabinets. These marvels were for private enjoyment, not public display. See my “Possessing Antiquity: Agency and Sociablity in Building Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Gem Collection,” in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance. Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, Ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2006), 85–111; Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (London: British Museum Press, 2001); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). On the American Museum’s move to Brooklyn, http://www.barnum-museum.org/manmythlegend.htm [accessed 2 October 2016].
5.
George Thomas Shaw and W. Forshaw Wilson, History of the Athenæum, Liverpool, 1798–1898 (Liverpool: Printed for the Committee of the Athenæum by Rockliff Bros., 1898), 1–64.
6.
Joshua Bates’ Diary, Baring Archive, Baring Ms. (B) DEP 74 Copy,” n.d., 4: 45–46.
7.
Brooklyn and Long Island Fair in Aid of the United States Sanitary Commission (1864). Executive Committee, History of the Brooklyn and Long Island Fair [electronic Resource]: 22 February 1864 (Brooklyn, NY: “The Union” Steam Presses, 1864), 32–34.
8.
John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 1978).
9.
BE, 16 April 1864, 2.
10.
Brooklyn Savings Bank, Old Brooklyn Heights, 1827–1927: To Commemorate the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of the Brooklyn Savings Bank. ([Place of publication not identified]: J.C. Powers, 1927), 48.
11.
The New York Herald gave extensive, front page coverage of the steamer’s safe return to New York Harbor, NYH, 14 January 1861, 1.
12.
Ibid., 5. The article also gives a lengthy description of the building. See also NYT, 15 January 1861, 2.
13.
BE, 25 January 1861, 2
14.
Ibid., 19 January 1861, 3.
15.
Ibid., 21 January 1861, 3.
16.
Ibid., 8 February 1861, 3.
17.
Sig.^ri Brignoli and Ferri, Mme. Colson, Miss Phillips, and Miss Isabella Hinkley, the newest American sensation, who made her debut in Donizetti’s popular Lucia di Lammermoor, ibid., 25 January 1861, 3.
18.
Ibid., 26 January 1861, 3.
19.
Ibid., 18 January 1861, 3.
20.
Ibid., 23 January 1861, 3.
21.
Ibid.
22.
Reprinted, ibid., 26 January 1861, 3.
23.
Ibid., 31 January 1861, 3.
24.
Ibid., 8 February 1861, 3.
25.
Ibid., 22 January 1861, 2.
26.
Ibid., 5 April 1861, 3.
27.
Ibid., 18 January 1861, 3.
28.
Ibid., 22 January 1861, 2. He had delivered this same talk on 12 January, ibid., 14 January 1861, 2. Because of indisposition he had not had time to ready a new lecture for the Academy audience.
29.
Rev. Dr. E. H. Chapin, ibid., 28 January 1861, 2; 8 February 1861, 2. Tickets could be purchased in local bookstores for twenty-five cents.
30.
B. P. Worchester, ibid., 29 January 1861, 3.
31.
Ibid., 21 January1861, 2; 24 January 1861, 2; 14 December 1861, 2.
32.
Ibid., 18 January 1861, 3; 5 February 1861, 3.
33.
Ibid., 4 February 1861, 3; 18 February 1861, 2.
34.
Ibid., 19 February 1861, 2.
35.
Ibid., 18 January 1861, 3; 31 January 1861, 3.
36.
Ibid., 19 January 1861, 3.
37.
Ibid., 9 March 1861, 3; 15 March 1861, 3.
38.
Ibid.; ibid., 22 March 1861, 3. He had first delivered “The Uses of Astronomy” in history and science in Boston.
39.
Formally, the Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable, Aged, Indigent Females, the home had been founded in 1851 with land and building costs donated by John B. Graham, “brother” of better known Augustus Graham. It was located on Washington Street in the then fashionable Clinton Hill section of old Brooklyn. Its annual reports, subscription lists etc. are in BHS 1985.114.
40.
BE, 15 March 1861, 3. The full statement read: “Unlike an opera, for the success of which so much is done by theatrical adjuncts and contrivances, and in which the histrionic ability of the artists aids so largely in the due interpretation of the composer’s meaning, an Oratorio has to stand, simple and pure, on its musical merits alone—its melodic ideas—its proportion—balance—entirely unaided by stage effects. Somehow, we are among those who believe that the really grand things in sacred music were written years ago, and the like, in all probability, will never be written again.”
41.
Ibid., 7 February 1861; 8 February 1861, 3.
42.
Ibid., 23 February 1861, 2.
43.
Ibid., 15 April 1861, 3.
44.
Ibid., 16 April 1861, 2.
45.
John B. Gough, ibid., 15 February 1861, 3; 15 April 1861, 3.
46.
Dr. George B. Windship, ibid., 13 April 1861, 3.
47.
William F. Brough (1798–1867) had made his New York debut in 1835, singing the part of Dandini in Rossini’s Cinderella. The evening’s testimonial concert featured Bishop’s English opera troupe, ibid., 19 April 1861, 1.
48.
Staged by Mr. J. M. Hager, BE, 13 April 1861, 3.
49.
Samuel L. Leiter, “The Legitimate Theatre in Brooklyn, 1861–1898” (PhD thesis, New York Univ. 1968), 47–53; Barbara Parisi and Robert Singer, The History of Brooklyn’s Three Major Performing Arts Institutions (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 9. More generally, nineteenth-century drama existed under a cloud with the sort of criticisms that William Archer (1856–1924), influential drama critic later expressed. He used contrasts of dark and light ages in reference to nineteenth-century drama, which in his view had fallen into darkness since the time of Shakespeare. See Richard Farr Dietrich, British Drama: 1890 to 1950: A Critical History (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1989), ch. 1.
50.
BE, 21 January 1861, 2, letter dated 19 January.
51.
Ibid., 16 January 1861, 3.
52.
They quipped: “Or can we attribute this deviation from ‘set rules’ to the same influence Mr. Rarey exercises over vicious horses as having been applied to vicious horses—Mr. Chittenden in particular,” ibid., 21 January 1861, 2.
53.
Ibid., 22 January 1861, 1. The writer cited the perennial problem of more than two hours travel time required to take his wife and daughters uptown to the theater in Manhattan.
54.
Parisi and Singer, The History of Brooklyn’s Three Major Performing Arts Institutions, 9.
55.
Samuel Leiter interpreted the theatre controversy solely through the lens of moral aversion among conservative residents and preachers of old New England Puritan stock, notably Brooklyn’s Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, though Beecher’s dislike of drama gradually softened in his old age, “The Legitimate Theatre,” 15–20.
56.
BE, 23 January 1861, 2.
57.
Ibid., 24 January 1861, 2.
58.
A lawyer and early supporter of BAM, John N. Taylor, wrote to “absolve the mangers of the Philharmonic concert from all participation or censure” for the “disgraceful rush” for the best seats that had occurred once the crowd pushed in, ibid., 25 January 1861, 1. His name does not appear among the original BAM stockholders.
59.
BMA, Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences Records, “Charter and By-Laws of the Brooklyn Academy of Music” (Brooklyn, NY: The Union Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1874), 5.
60.
In her dissertation Marlyn Baum studied BAM’S revival in the 1960s under Harry Lichtenstein as an exercise in survival in a context where art was an “instrument of cultural goals, as well as a tool for the achievement of other goals, not the least of which is urban redevelopment,” in “The Brooklyn Academy of Music: A Case Study of the Rebirth of an Urban Cultural Center” (PhD dissertation, CUNY, 1986), 1.
61.
BE, 23 January 1861, 2.
62.
Ibid., 23 January 1861, 1.
63.
Ibid., 23 January 1861, 2.
64.
Ibid., 26 January 1861, 2.
65.
Ibid, 18 February 1861, 3.
66.
He added that the Philharmonic Society had become such a Brooklyn institution that “if they still continue to cater for the public in as efficient manner as formerly, there will be a society so large that a new building much larger than the said Academy of Music will have to be erected in order to contain only the subscribers,” ibid., 27 February 1861, 2.
67.
Gabriel Harrison, ibid., 2 April 1864, 2.
68.
Ibid., 4 December 1861, 2.
69.
Ibid., 15 February 1861, 3.
70.
Ibid.
71.
Ibid., 7 March 1861, 2.
72.
Ibid. In fact, in 1863 the new Brooklyn Park Theater, a dedicated space for drama on Fulton at Montague Street was leased to actor/manager Gabriel Harrison. It struggled under various mangers until it closed in 1905, condemned as a fire hazard, Del Valle, The Brooklyn Theatre Index, 1: 274–81.
73.
Ibid., 16 November 1861, 3.
74.
Ibid., 30 November 1861, 2.
75.
Ibid., 2 December 1861, 2; 4 December 1861, 2.
76.
Ibid., 2 December 1861, 2.
77.
This “Stockholder” hoped the Academy would offer good drama, for the “good people of Brooklyn have yet to learn that in the works of Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Addison, Sheridan, Bulwer, Knowles, and other bright and good men…there is anything but high literature and art, and most rational and instructive entertainment,” ibid., 4 December 1861, 2.
78.
Ibid., 6 December 1861, 3.
79.
Ibid.
80.
Ibid., 28 December 1861. The first offering on 27 December had been Boucicault’s comedy, London Assurance, starring James W. Wallack, Jr. in the role of “Dazzle.” Perhaps in response to the vitriol in the controversy over allowing drama at the Academy of Music, two years later, in 1863 the Brooklyn Park Theatre was built using private funds and dedicated to “legitimate” theater. Its façade in Nova Scotia stone was purposefully classicizing, perhaps to lend it extra dignity.
81.
Ibid., 30 December 1861, 3; 2 January 1862, 2.
82.
NYT, 12 January 1862, 8.
83.
NYT, 29 March 1888, 5. He and Luther Wyman also associated as members of the Brooklyn and Long Island Historical Society, the Brooklyn Club, the American Geographical Society of New York, and in working together to organize Brooklyn’s 1864 Sanitary Fair. The Pierrepont family papers are in the Brooklyn Historical Society archives.
84.
BE, 11 January 1862, 2; 22 January 1862, 3.
85.
Ibid., 14 December 1861, 2.
86.
Mary Ryan used “hard” and “soft” to describe the split, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 151. Edward Spann preferred to call those soft on war the “peace” wing of the party, to indicate those Democrats who opposed New England abolitionism and rallied under the slogans of “the Union as it was; the Constitution as it is,” Gotham at War: New York City, 1860–1865 (Wilmington, DL: SR Books, 2002), 90. Brooklyn’s divisions described in the local paper as “National” and “Union” factions, while certainly reflecting the divisions characterized by Ryan and Spann, did not appear as mutually hostile as in Manhattan, which was split over the mayoralty of Fernando Wood, a stanch Union Democrat, whose almost paranoiac anti-abolitionism embraced racist rhetoric.
87.
BE, 16 February 1861, 3.
88.
Ibid., 18 April 1861, 2. Similar demonstrations had taken place in Manhattan.
89.
The Eagle’s long editorial and opinion piece appeared 19 April 1861, 2.
90.
Ibid., 19 April 1861, 2. The Eagle stressed that the organizers were “among the most prominent conservatives in the city, while some of the others are among the most ultra on the other side.”
91.
Ibid.
92.
Luther Wyman, elected first vice-president, took an active part, ibid., 24 April 1861, 3; also see NYT, 5 May 1861, 9, listing Luther Wyman as second vice-president.
93.
Ibid., 26 February 1861, 3. The sponsors included such familiar names among Brooklyn’s key cultural patrons as S. B. Chittenden, Edward A. Lambert, Isaac H. Frothingham, Henry E. Pierrepont, Luther Wyman, Arthur W. Benson, George S. Stephenson, and Abraham B. Baylis.
94.
Ibid., 4 February 1861, 3.
95.
They divided into executive, finance, distributing, and communication committees. Members included such familiar Brooklyn patrons as James H. Frothingham, Robert R. Raymond, Samuel Sloan, Edward A. Lambert, James S.T. Stranahan, Simeon B. Chittenden, Abraham Baylis, Jonathan Schenck, James How, George Hall, Alexander Moss White, Peter Cornell, Nicholas Luqueer, Robert H. Burdell, and Charles Christmas, ibid., 3 May 1861, 1.
96.
Ibid.; also NYT, 5 May 1861. Between city and county, an estimated $100,000 was to be designated for relief.
97.
Ibid., 2 May 1861, 3.
98.
Luther Wyman sat among the dignitaries on stage, BE, 13 May 1861, 2. The Eagle published an extensive report of Henry Ward Beecher’s sermon of 28 April, which also built upon the story of Moses from the Book of Hebrews and in which he urged war to be “fought not for the sake of conquest, not for ambition, or anger, or revenge, but to defend the principles of justice, religion and liberty,” ibid., 29 April 1861, 2.
99.
Singers included Miss Hinkley, Miss Kellogg, the Comtesse De Ferussac, and Signori Brignoli, Susini, and Centemeri.
100.
BE, 14, 16, 20 May 1861. Once again, committee members included such familiar names and Wyman associates as Charles A. Townsend, Dr. A. Cooke Hull, Judge John Greenwood, Lyman S. Burnham, and Prof. Robert R. Raymond. The committee on arrangements, headed by Wyman, made tickets available for advance purchase at their places of business in Brooklyn and Manhattan, at the box office, and in several music stores. Admission to the dress circle cost one dollar with twenty-five cents extra for a reserved seat; places in the Family Circle and balcony cost fifty cents.
101.
Ibid.
102.
Ibid., 21 May 1861, 3. They included Edward Whitehouse, John Greenwood, Robert R. Raymond, A. Cooke Hull, Lyman S. Burnham, Charles A. Townsend, Alexander V. Blake, Willard M. Newell, Charles Congdon, Samuel Sloan, Henry F. Vail, Edwin D. Plimpton, William Poole, George S. Stephenson, Henry K. Sheldon, J. J. Ryan, James H. Frothingham, Henry R. Worthington, Henry H. Dickinson, J. Charles Berard, Gordon L. Ford, John Bullard, Julius Ives, and A. B. Vandyke.
103.
Ibid., 30 July 1861, 2.
104.
Ibid., 13 May 1861, 2.
105.
Ibid., 30 July 1861, 2. Luther Wyman was among the signatories.
106.
Reprised from 17 March 1862 in ibid., 24 March 1889, 10.
107.
Luther Wyman and friends organized the event. Stringham had captured the rebel forts in August 1861, ibid., 28 February 1862, 2.
108.
James Moses Nichols, Perry’s Saints, Or, The Fighting Parson’s Regiment in the War of the Rebellion (Boston, MA: D. Lothrop, 1886), 31.
109.
Ibid., 26–28. Nichols called Luther Wyman “the most prominent and most constant” of the friends of the regiment.
110.
BE, 7 August 1861, 3. The Forty-Eighth had been so successful in recruiting an overflow that Col. Perry received permission to raise a second regiment, ibid., 12 September 1861, 3. Many of its new recruits flooded to Brooklyn from New Jersey and Connecticut.
111.
Ibid., 7 August 1861, 3.
112.
Ibid., 30 July 1861, 2.
113.
NYT, 14 August 1861, 5.
114.
BE, 10 September 1861, 3; 12 September 1861, 3.
115.
Nichols, Perry’s Saints, 113–14.
116.
He was writing at his camp desk. Nichols described him as “a man to respect, to trust, to obey,” ibid., 113.
117.
Nichols, Perry’s Saints, 114. Luther Wyman was later reimbursed by the War Fund Committee of the Home Trust of Volunteers, BHS, Frank J. Bramhall Civil War collection, 1977.006, 1: 5, 52.
118.
BE, 9 August 1862, 3.
119.
BHS, Frank J. Bramhall Civil War collection, undated newspaper clipping.
120.
Bell Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union, updated ed. with a foreword by James I. Robertson, Jr. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 176.
121.
BE, 3 June 1863, 3, under the headline, “Presentation to a Citizen.”
122.
Ibid., 6 September 1865, 2 and 3. In its years of fighting up and down the Atlantic coast, the regiment had lost more than 850 men and engaged the enemy close to forty times, Livingston, Brooklyn and the Civil War, 84.
123.
The Eagle was noticeably ashamed at the paltry welcome given the Forty-Eighth, which it attributed to their arrival at dusk with little advance notice. The editor also made the snide suggestion that perhaps Mr. Wyman, one of the few who knew about it, had desired to have “all the glory of singly and alone representing the people of Brooklyn,” ibid., 6 September 1865, 2.
124.
Ibid., 20 September 1861, 1.
125.
Luther Wyman was one of the plan’s supporters. Since its founding in Cleveland in 1852 seven other Bryant and Stratton schools had been established in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis, ibid., 30 November 1861.
126.
Ibid., 30 November 1861, 3.
127.
NYT, 11 December 1861, 12; BE, 11 December 1861, 2.
128.
Ibid., 6 February 1862, 1.
129.
Ibid., 11 January 1862, 3; 27 January 1862, 3.
130.
NYT, 15 February 1862, 3.
131.
New York Evangelist, 6 March 1862, 10.
132.
NYT, 20 December 1864, 7.
133.
BE, 18 February 1861, 2.
134.
Ibid., 24 February 1862, 2.
135.
BMA, BPS Minutes, May 1857–May 1876, 1: 100–5.

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University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Melissa Meriam Bullard

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Bullard, M.M. (2017). Sociability, Civil War, and a Diverted Renaissance. In: Brooklyn’s Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50176-5_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50176-5_6
Published: 11 April 2017
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