“I SHALL NEVER FORGET THIS AS LONG AS I LIVE”:
ABRAHAM LINCOLN VISITS FIVE POINTS
IN FEBRUARY 1860, Abraham Lincoln was invited to visit to New York. The Young Men’s Central Republican Union, a group organized to expose prominent New Yorkers to the views of leading Republicans from around the nation, had asked him to deliver an address to its members, and Lincoln jumped at the chance. He was already well known in the Midwest, but if he was going to satisfy his steadily growing presidential ambitions, he would need to win support in the East as well. Lincoln spent weeks preparing the speech, working harder on it than on any he gave before or after.1
Lincoln was scheduled to appear at the Cooper Union auditorium on Monday evening, the twenty-seventh, and he arrived in New York on Saturday. The wide-eyed tourist strolled down Broadway, had his portrait taken at Mathew Brady’s photography studio, and on Sunday morning attended services at the Brooklyn church of Henry Ward Beecher, renowned as “the greatest orator since St. Paul.” But that afternoon, Lincoln chose to pass the time at a more unusual tourist attraction—the charitable institution known as the Five Points House of Industry.2
Living conditions in Five Points had improved markedly by the eve of the Civil War, but Lincoln nonetheless found the neighborhood’s abject poverty shocking. When he arrived at the House of Industry, Lincoln was undoubtedly given a full tour of the organization’s new six-story brick headquarters, which towered over the surrounding wooden hovels on the north side of Paradise Square just west of the Five Points intersection. It had spacious dormitories where dozens of abused, neglected, or homeless boys and girls lived until they found adoptive parents. His hosts would also have shown him the large chapel where religious services were held and the workshops where neighborhood teens and adults learned a variety of trades.
As Lincoln peeked in on one of the Sunday school classes, a teacher asked the tall, skinny lawyer to say a few words to his students. Lincoln at first declined, insisting that he could offer no words of advice to such destitute children. But his companion, Illinois congressman Elihu B. Washburne, insisted that Lincoln speak, suggesting that he describe the hard times of his own youth. Lincoln reluctantly consented, telling the students, as Washburne later recalled, that “I had been poor; that I remembered when my toes stuck out through my broken shoes in winter; when my arms were out at the elbows; when I shivered with the cold. And I told them there was only one rule. That was, always do the very best you can. I told them that I had always tried to do the very best I could; and that, if they would follow that rule, they would get along somehow.” By now, Lincoln’s eyes had filled with tears and he could not continue. When Washburne later told Lincoln that his little speech had inspired the children, Lincoln replied, “No, they are the ones who have inspired me—given me courage. . . . I am glad we came—I shall never forget this as long as I live.”3
It is tempting to attribute Washburne’s moving description of this poignant scene to the reverence for Lincoln that developed after his assassination. Yet even before Lincoln’s death, a House of Industry teacher reported that his words were “strikingly beautiful, and his tones musical with intensest feeling.” The children’s faces “would droop into sad conviction as he uttered sentences of warning, and would brighten into sunshine as he spoke cheerful words of promise.”4
That Lincoln chose to visit Five Points reflects the neighborhood’s continuing notoriety on the eve of the Civil War. But his decision to tour the House of Industry, rather than the dives and dance halls as Dickens had done two decades earlier, shows that Americans’ perception of the district had begun to change. The innovative efforts of the House of Industry to improve the lives of Five Pointers had become, by the end of the 1850s, as well known as the neighborhood itself.
The story of Lincoln’s visit to the Five Points House of Industry also speaks volumes about how the institution had achieved its fame. One of Lincoln’s guides that morning was Rev. Samuel B. Halliday, who had worked with the poor in Five Points for more than two decades. By the late 1850s, Halliday headed the American Female Guardian Society and Home for the Friendless, an uptown charity that sought to prevent destitute girls and women from becoming prostitutes, but he also continued to work closely with the House of Industry. Before Lincoln left Five Points, Halliday presented him with a copy of his recently published book The Lost and Found; or Life Among the Poor. Many of the work’s heartrending accounts of poverty in Five Points and the House of Industry’s efforts to alleviate it had already appeared in the Times and other city newspapers, as well as in the charity’s own magazine. In fact, reporters often turned to Halliday for guided tours of the famous slum. He was known far and wide as “a gentleman having a speciality for the exploration, night and day, of the purlieus of city life.”5
Of all the moving stories Halliday had collected during these explorations, the one that most touched New Yorkers’ hearts was that of nine-year-old Mary Mullen. After her parents died, Mary was taken in by a Five Points couple who operated a small saloon. Their circumstances were relatively comfortable, especially by Five Points standards, yet they did not allow Mary to attend school. Instead, they forced her to work as a street sweeper at the intersection of Park Row and Beekman Street, clearing the mud and puddles from the crosswalks in exchange for tips from pedestrians. The worse the weather, the more Mary’s guardians insisted that she must sweep, because on days of driving rain or windblown snow, passersby would especially pity the inadequately clothed girl and more readily reward her with their pocket change. Alerted to Mary’s pitiful plight, Halliday found her at her intersection, with her dress “fastened up about the waist, after the fashion of the ‘Emerald Isle’; short petticoat; legs, feet, face, and arms spattered with mud.” Though it was late in the afternoon, all she had eaten that day was “hard bread and buttermilk.” Mary informed Halliday that she had already collected “six shillings” (seventy-five cents) in tips that day, and that her income could vary from two shillings to as much as two dollars daily depending on the weather and the pedestrian traffic.
When Halliday told Mary that he would take her off the streets and find her a new home, she resisted on the grounds that her guardians would beat her if she did not return with her earnings. Despite her protests, Halliday dragged her to City Hall, where the mayor gave him official custody of the young girl. Mary’s guardians attempted to win her return, but according to Halliday, the mayor “was inexorable.” After Mary had stayed at Halliday’s uptown institution for a few months, the minister found her a “country home” with a new set of adoptive parents. By the time of Lincoln’s visit, charitable organizations such as the House of Industry wielded virtually unchecked power over the fate of Five Points children.6
Halliday was a true innovator in his field. He made extensive use of the relatively new medium of photography, recording the appearance of children he found begging on the street and then using these images to persuade judges that he should be awarded custody of the kids. Halliday also gave copies of these photos to wealthy New Yorkers to inspire donations to organizations such as the House of Industry. In fact, historians of photography cite Halliday’s photos as the first known use of the medium for charitable fund-raising. Halliday reported in 1859 that as a result of such efforts, his photograph of Mary Mullen was “becoming distributed somewhat extensively. Entering the parlor of a wealthy family a few days since, in a conspicuous place among most elegant paintings and engravings was the form in photograph of my little street-sweeper.” Another of his most heart-wrenching photos was that of a girl he called “Tattered Maggie.” Halliday had found this six-year-old barefoot orphan wandering the streets after her mother, an alcoholic, had died in jail following her arrest for public drunkenness.7
Mary Mullen, the street sweeper, c. 1859. Thomas Walther Collection, New York (original image rephotographed by D. James Dee).
Tattered Maggie, the orphan, c. 1859. Thomas Walther Collection, New York (original image rephotographed by D. James Dee).
Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech helped his campaign enormously. He did not initially make a good impression with his high-pitched voice and ill-fitting suit, but he soon won over his audience with his careful arguments, homespun humor, and elegant prose. At the conclusion of the address, he received a thunderous standing ovation. “Mr. Lincoln is one of Nature’s orators,” said the Tribune approvingly the next day. Reprinted in newspapers across the nation, the Cooper Union speech helped make Lincoln a legitimate presidential contender. At the Republican National Convention in Chicago three months later, Tom Hyer led the cheering in the gallery for Lincoln’s principal rival, New York senator William H. Seward, but the Illinois rail-splitter prevailed, and was soon headed for the White House.8
After Lincoln’s victory in the general election, Halliday sent the first family an album filled with “before” and “after” photographs of children aided by the House of Industry. The president’s album contains the only extant set of these arresting images.
