Chapter IX: More Encouraging Views of Man

On October 22 of 1855 an angry letter to the editor exploded from the pages of the Syracuse Daily Standard. A 10-year-old girl had received from her teacher an "infliction on the hand" severe enough to call for doctor's services, declared the writer, and a boy of Mr. H. "had 100 blows administered to him by Miss Slocum." The letter proved spark to tinder; controversy flamed over flogging in the public schools. School board officers maintained there was no real flogging; opponents countered by wondering ominously whether a "German boy" had not been so severely punished in the schoolroom as to cause his death.(1)

From a purely legal standpoint, Syracuse teachers who trounced their pupils were perfectly within their rights. As one of its first official acts, the Syracuse Board of Education in 1848 had taken a forthright stand and endorsed the necessity of “judicious corporal punishment in the preservation of Order, Authority, and proper discipline . . . .”(2)

As a matter of fact, most prudent teachers of the era accumulated for themselves a whole arsenal of punishment devices; a fool’s cap, a ferule, a switch, and—in some country schools—a bundle of ox gads five or six feet long.(3) In many a schoolroom, from a nail up near the ceiling hung a heavy leather whip, the rawhide. Rarely used, the ominous blacksnake nonetheless remained omnipresent to terrorize the timid and threaten the recalcitrant. No one tampered with this fellow. Of him the whole school stood in awe.(4)

The child who tasted the rod at school could rarely look for sympathy at home; every lash in the schoolroom was proverbially followed by two in the woodshed. Children had few rights. The most brutal treatment at home or in school was commonly considered nobody's business but that of the parent or teacher involved.(5)

In Syracuse of the mid-fifties, however, with liberal sentiments in ferment on every hand, some parents had begun to doubt the wisdom and openly to question the value of the daily whippings common in the schools.(6) School officials grew uncomfortable.” Corporal punishment is of much less frequent appearance than formerly," the clerk of the board insisted defensively in 1857.(7) In 1858 the board, itself suddenly required teachers to keep a record of every thrashing given.(8)

Teachers complied, but under protest. At teachers' meetings they passed resolutions staunchly endorsing the teachers' right to keep order by whatever method he chose.

In such an atmosphere of tension and dissent, Samuel J. May was elected to the school board in 1864.(9) In 1865 his fellow commissioners named him president.(10) For the first time May now held a position of actual administrative power. He could not only urge and cajole from the sidelines; he could act.

For such action, he quickly found ample reason. Obedient to the behest of 1858, Syracuse teachers reported they had administered 2,862 whippings to their children during the school year of 1865 and 1866. Despite this "liberal use of the rod," teachers still were forced to suspend innumerable numbers of children from school because of their distracting influence.(11) May talked to teachers, conferred with parents, prodded his fellow board members. Rising public opinion gave him support. At last on March 28, 1867, he had his way. The board voted to prohibit the use of corporal punishment of any kind in the Syracuse schools.(12)

This break with hoary schoolroom tradition did not take place without protest. Superintendent of Schools Edward Smith entertained dire misgivings. Some of the teachers threatened to give up their schools.(13) All means of maintaining order had been taken from them, they protested, and they envisioned calamity for the school system as a whole.(14)

As the months went by, however, and the predicted disasters did not materialize, Smith became increasingly optimistic about the changed regulation. By the time he issued his report in 1868. He had become an out-and-out convert to the new order. The ruling had originally concerned him gravely. He confessed in the 1868 report, but now he had "no hesitation in saying that in my opinion the schools of Syracuse are better disciplined today than they have ever been before.”(15) The number of suspensions for misconduct had actually dropped, he found, and "the atmosphere of almost every room became brighter.”(16)

May did not bog down in complacency. Still concerned over the teachers' views, he went down to the high school in May of 1870 to an elementary teachers' meeting, and "endeavored to draw from them a full and frank avowal . . . respecting the effect of our prohibition of corporal punishment. None expressed a wish to have that mode of governing restored to our Schools—But there was more unanimity and warmth than I expected."(17) On June 4, the junior and senior high school teachers voted against the restoration of corporal punishment, 66 to 4,(18) making May's victory complete.

Syracuse citizens eventually came to regard the prohibition of corporal punishment as a striking example of civic pioneering. They plumed themselves on this achievement, but gave May almost sole credit. Syracuse was one of the first cities in the country to abolish corporal punishment, wrote a county historian proudly in 1891, and the moral tone of the schools was now "infinitely better than when whipping was in vogue.”(19)

" Rochester never had a Samuel J. May," editorialized the Syracuse Daily Standard in that same year, "so corporal punishment is still a part of her public school system.”(20)

This victory over brutality, the citizens felt affectionately, was a kind of crowning triumph to good Mr. May's years of battling for educational reform. Having helped create the Syracuse schools free and open equally to all, he had now delivered them from the senseless brutality that was once a hallmark of the system. When May resigned as chairman of the board at the age of 73, his fellow commissioners wrote a rousing tribute into the board minutes.(21) May's frequent inspection trips had given him a thorough knowledge of teachers, methods, equipment, and problems in the Syracuse schools, they knew. During his six years in office he had dealt personally with refractory children and their parents, had hired teachers, recommended textbooks, signed hundreds of checks, appeared at countless exhibitions and attended to every detail of school administration. But his most important contribution, Syracusans thought, was the tone he set for the schoolroom. “To no man in the country may greater credit be awarded," wrote a biographer on May's death in 1871, "for the gentler modes of correction which have nearly banished the fool's cap and the birch from systems of education.”(22)

* * *

May's opposition to corporal punishment undoubtedly owed much to his searing memory of the cruelty of Master Cole in the Marblehead Academy at the turn of the century, as well as to Andrews Norton's strictures against brutality. But May's repugnance to physical punishment and indeed the entire controversy over the use of the rod were founded on something more fundamental. May’s old opponent from New York City, Mr. McElligott, defined the problem precisely in' 1847.

Corporal punishment was no mere matter of' school policy, McElligott warned his fellow teachers, but involved rather a "deep, dark and delicate" religious doctrine. When we enter on this topic, he said, "we get instantly upon the line of demarcation between two exactly opposite classes of religionists—The thing involves the whole question of the natural purity of human nature.”(23)

Human nature was essentially depraved, held the Calvinists who had dominated colonial schooling. Every son of Adam was inevitably damned by his first ancestor's sin, in their view, unless personally redeemed by divine grace. Because every child was inherently sinful, only threat of punishment—to be dispensed both immediately and in the hereafter—could deter the evil behavior otherwise bound to result. Children were "infinitely more hateful than vipers" in the sight of God, the Rev. Jonathan Edwards had thundered in the eighteenth century.(24) His congregations nodded assent.

By the nineteenth century this harsh Calvinism had been moderated somewhat, but as late as 1830 infant Calvinists in Boston were still piping a "hymn for children" including a dire warning that "his wrath may strike my guilty head, his fire from heaven may lay me dead, and send my careless soul to dwell, low in the gloomy flames of hell."(25)

In breaking from orthodox trinitarian and. Calvinistic theology, American Unitarians had espoused what May liked to call "more delightful views of God, and more encouraging views of man than those held up by the evangelical churches . . . .”(26).

As one of his encouraging views, May believed that children are born with the "capacity of holiness.” Most sin he attributed to the incompetency or negligence of parents. With the proper examples set before them and with a proper environment surrounding them, he held, human children could be perfect as Christ was perfect.(27) To foster this perfection, May put his faith in the power of love rather than in physical force. From this commitment stemmed his aversion to violence of all kinds, corporal punishment, capital punishment and war.(28)

"Let it be remembered, we are called to be as holy as Christ was holy . . . ," May reminded the Harvard theological students of 1847 in one of his most winsome statements of belief, "not conformed to this world but transformed into the likeness of the beloved son of God. We are called to be followers of God as dear children,—perfect in our limited and finite sphere as the Deity is perfect in his unlimited and infinite.”(29)

A good many working teachers who spent: their days in the classroom differed sharply. If the teacher is simply to preserve children in a state of innocence and allure them to virtue by its beauty, queried the Teachers Advocate in 1845, why is it that children learn to do evil more readily than good?(30)

The great error in the perfectionist position, asserted the Advocate, is the belief that children are "naturally innocent, pure and morally perfect, and would continue so if circumstances did not draw them into folly and vice.” The teacher, said the Advocate, must use remedies as well as antidotes, corrections as well as safeguards.

Here the Advocate was only echoing the Boston schoolmasters whose controversy with Horace Mann in those years of 1844 and 1845 was at its height. Having no immediate war of his own to wage, May suffered vicariously with Mann and proffered considerable advice, sympathy, and philosophic consolation.

"Your notions respecting the true method of encouraging the young children of Adam are in direct conflict with the cherished, the fundamental of the orthodox doctrines [sic] respecting the imps of fallen man," May wrote Mann in 1844. "They cannot admit the principle, you advocate, into the government of children. without conceding that there is more of the angelic than of the devilish in them; and rather than admit what they have so long, so stoutly denied, they would see the Hon. Secretary and the board, and Normal Schools annihilated—and subject the youth of our country to more of that treatment which is adapted to make friends of them and would make them so, if the good principle in human nature were not stronger than the evil."(31)

* * *

The issue of the basic moral nature of the child dominated the educational battleground in an era when inculcation of moral virtue held sway as a primary objective of the entire educational process. New York's children, prescribed the School Law of 1812, "are to be prepared for the reception of great moral and religious truth.”(32) Only the village atheists could be expected to object. From the colonial period on, dominant educators in most parts of the country had simply assumed education in morality, preferably Protestant Christian morality, to be the sine qua non of any educational effort. For the colonialists whose schools were dominated by churchmen with fixed notions on the proper way to impart religious and moral truth, the matter proved comparatively uncomplicated. The appropriate version of the catechism took its place in the curriculum beside the ABC's, and sectarianism was taught without question in the schools. By the 1830's and 1840's, however, many states had embarked on the grand experiment of providing a secular education for all the children who would come. How could children learn morality in such a nonsectarian setting?

To the native Protestants who dominated legislatures, town meetings, and the educational hierarchy, the answer appeared simple: read the Bible in the classroom.

“The prime object of all education is, or ought to be, the cultivation of our moral nature." reported J. N. McElligott to the State Teachers' Association in 1846 from his vantage point as chairman of the association's committee on the Bible in the schools.

Since the Bible is "the only infallible guide in morals—the unquestioned and the unquestionable rule of right," it should be used everywhere young people are educated.

The delegates puzzled over the best ways of "teaching highest principles without teaching sectish doctrine. They agreed on Mr. McElligott's method, one that came to be common throughout the country: reading Bible passages without comment at the beginning of each school day.(33)

The little group of men on the first Syracuse school board in 1848 gave the same answer: let the children listen to the Bible daily. This seemingly unexceptionable injunction was written into the board minutes on May 9, 1848; any board complacency on the subject, however, proved short-lived. Almost immediately, angry Catholic parents remonstrated, protesting the reading of the Bible in the schools and threatening to withdraw their children from the fledgling system if the practice persisted.

Obviously taken aback, the little board hemmed and hawed, postponed decision, proposed and scuttled various solutions. The lone Catholic on the board, County Treasurer Cornelius M. Brosnan,(35) urged immediate rescinding of the requirement, but the others demurred.

Finally, on October 4 they resolved unanimously that "Whereas we are desirous to remove every obstacle, supposed or real, in the way of a full attendance of the young," that Catholic children would not be disciplined for tardiness if they stayed out of the schoolroom for the first two minutes in the morning. Apparently two minutes of the sacred scriptures conveyed enough morality to last all day.(36) By this time Pandora's box was open for good, however; the dictum of 1848 did not settle the matter. The problem persisted though no new solution appeared. In 1858 the formal regulations of the board prescribed a morning reading from the Old or New Testament without note or comment. No pupil whose parents objected was required to be present.(37) The whole thing seemed so simple to the Protestants who dominated the social system: what harm could come from reading the Bible if no comment were made?

To Catholics, however, not only did reading of the King James, instead of the Douay version prove repugnant, but reading without comment and leaving interpretation to individual discretion directly violated the Roman Catholic practice of reading scriptures only when accompanied by authoritative interpretation.(38) Strongly Protestant in its persuasion, the board persisted, however, in its belief that a daily dose of Scripture was the best medicine against moral ills; if the Roman Catholics did not wish to avail themselves of this preventive, that was their affair.

As a tinier and less vocal minority, the Jews of Syracuse received even shorter shrift. In 1859, recounted the board's historian, the "Hebrews sent in a petition asking to have their children dismissed at half past three that they might study their own language and another asking for the use of a room in Putnam School for a debating club. Both were denied.”(39).

May disagreed sharply with his fellow citizens in their treatment of such religious minority groups. In 1853 he wrote to Henry J. Randall, superintendent of the state's common schools:

. . . there are a great many of our Protestant brethren who seem never to have conceived the idea, or else were very careful to ignore the fact that our Roman Catholic, Jewish and Infidel fellow citizens have rights as well as themselves—and that if they be in error, the true way to convert them is not to set at naught their conscientious scruples—perhaps outrage their religious feelings—but to show a scrupulous regard to them."(40)

May had taken this position publicly almost the moment he set foot in Syracuse. Leaving Mrs. May to do the unpacking, he had hurried off to a meeting of New York's town and county superintendents held in his new village on April 22, 1845.(41) Jumping, in his usual uninhibited fashion, into the discussion. May insisted that Protestants had no right to prescribe Bible reading in the schools if Catholics objected to it. Furthermore, he admonished his new fellow citizens, the moral and religious character of a school depended not on any book in it, but rather on the character of the teacher.

If we are careful to get for instructors of the young, men and women of pure elevated character, we shall be sure to have all that is best in the Bible infused into our children, though the book be not opened in their presence. But if the instructors . . . be low-minded, artful, hypocritical, selfish, sensual, though they may read the Scriptures solemnly every day . . . the spirit of true religion will not probably be found in their schools.”(42)

Furthermore, the common schools were "schools for the whole people. Without distinction of party or sect,” he told the superintendents, and everything of a sectarian or partisan nature should be kept out of them.(43) This strongly worded statement on separation of church and state characterized May’s entire approach to the problem.

Most of his hearers in that convention would have agreed with the statement on the surface of it. The question remained: was the Bible a sectarian book?

Once admit any sectarian aspect to the Scriptures, warned New York County Superintendent David Reese, once admit "that it is unfit to be read in our schools and listened to by our children, and what kind of moral education can you confer . . . ?”(44) The Rev. Thomas Castleton, a Presbyterian divine of Syracuse, agreed. Every teacher, no matter how moral his example, needs some authority for the truths he argues, asserted the Rev. Mr. Castleton. The Rev. Mr. May, as usual, continued hotly in the minority.

* * *

Whether or not abstract moral instruction could actually influence a child's behavior after he left the schoolroom did not appear to trouble educators of the day. May preferred to rely for the most part on religion by osmosis, but there were times when some new teaching gadget so delighted him that he abandoned his usual detachment in the matter. His good friend, Orson Barnes, Onondaga County superintendent of schools, once turned up with a large chart depicting the cardinal virtues and vices and their happy or miserable results in after life, as the case might be. May loved it. With an old promoter’s zeal, he wrote immediately to a publisher friend back in Boston. Just add a few Hogarthian [satirical narrative] illustrations, he urged, and the chart might give children a very graphic idea of what happened to drunkards and liars and thieves.(45) Shortly thereafter "Barnes Pictorial Moral Instructor" blossomed forth from the wall of many a school, and a little rakish progress enlivened the day for scores of innocent young upstaters. Hopefully, the various awful fates of the vicious and the appended scriptural quotations, presumably King James version, were enough to "impress on the child the cardinal rules of morality." At least 20 prominent Onondaga doctors, lawyers, teachers and preachers including Samuel J. May who signed a testimonial advertisement were convinced it could be true.(46)

Despite such an occasional passing fancy, May clung through his lifetime to a principle he had enunciated formally in 1839, that the best moral education comes via training the young in self-reliance and self-government rather than depending entirely on their submission to outside authority no matter how enlightened.

"Children, no less than adult men, should be governed only by the power of inward principle, not by the fear of outward penalty," May urged in his dedicatory address of the Hanover schoolhouse in 1839. "No firm enduring basis of character is laid," he continued, "until a youth . . . has come to do right and avoid wrong, from choice." Many had begun to doubt whether the "momentous experiment" of the new American republic would succeed. "If our great experiment fails," he warned, "it will be for the want of moral principle. And the experiment will fail, if far greater pains be not taken to train up our youth in the art of self-government.”(47)

This was indeed a singular view, espoused only by such rare spirits as Bronson Alcott.(48) May seemed not to have heard it from anybody else; he apparently evolved this original and striking concept alone. "I wish some far abler hand than mine," said he, "would set forth this view of our system of public instruction.”(49) Most educators on the contrary believed firmly that the major objective of moral training was the inculcation of respect for authority. They based their hopes for the republic on such learned submission.

May's unflinching opposition to such popular ideas of the day brought him far more criticism than praise. May had "left religion and morality out of his theory," charged his detractors.(50) He netted even more blame when he tried to couple actual involvement in the great moral issues of the day with schoolroom instruction, as in his ill-fated attempt to take the Lexington young ladies to the abolition rally in 1843. Neither Mann nor Henry Barnard nor any of the leading educators of the day could afford to have their experiments jeopardized by connection with any controversial enterprise. May's practical idea of teaching moral theory by involvement in direct moral action was unthinkable. Moral instruction was to be preserved, a cold and bloodless thing, entirely within schoolroom walls.(51)

Opposition to May in the matter of corporal punishment was outspoken enough; his critics were even more shrill when he voiced his opposition to other forms of physical violence as aids to moral virtue. In 1851 after he wrote a long letter for the New York Tribune(52) denouncing capital punishment, critical reaction was swift.

"The Rev. Samuel J. May, who has already become as much the subject of notoriety as an excessively mean and diminutive man ought to expect, has made another grasp at mad immorality by advocating . . . practical impunity for murder," said the Detroit Daily Advertiser. "We trust his constituency, the assassins, keep him in good pay!(53)

Nobody bothered to reply in May's behalf at the moment, though agitated friends kept him well supplied with clippings.

His defenders later became more eloquent, "Some said he left religion and morality out of his theory," recalled Andrew D. White in 1875, four years after May's death. "He had these in his heart; he taught them by his example.”(54)

It was to be left to an anonymous editorialist writing for the Syracuse Daily Standard on the occasion of the May centennial in 1897, to produce May's most eloquent defense and fitting epitaph.

"Of all the people who will join by thought or word or act of love in the observance of the 100^th anniversary of Samuel J. May" said the Standard. "the school children of New York stare and particularly those of our own county, should be foremost . . . . What Mr. May did for the children in his long life would amount to as much as all his other achievements united, and it is by reason of his crusade for the emancipation of children that he is most revered and will be longest remembered.”(55)

Footnotes

(1) Syracuse Daily Standard, October 22, 1855.

(2) Minutes, Syracuse Board of Education, October 18, 1848.

(3) James Hooper, Fifty Years in School (Syracuse: C. W. Bardeen, 1900), pp. 71-73. [Note: Although the spelling is gad, the author may have meant goad. An ox goad is traditionally a wooden stick or pole with a pointed tip.]

(4) Lead editorial discussing the history of corporal punishment in area schools, Syracuse Daily Standard, September 26, 1897.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Twelfth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Syracuse March 15 1860 ( Syracuse: J. G. K. Truair and Co., 1860, pp. 13, 14.

(7) Annual Report of the Clerk of the Board of Education of the City of Syracuse for the year ending March 14th, 1857 (Syracuse: Daily Journal Office, 1857), p. 9. The man was an incurable optimist. He also reported that communication between pupils by whispering had nearly ceased.

(8) Regulation of the Board of Education of the City of Syracuse as revised March 4, 1858 (Syracuse: F. L. Hagadorn, 1858), p 22.

(9) Smith, History of Syracuse Schools, p. 253.

(10) May Diary, March 28, 1865. Next morning he was presented with 120 checks to be signed, first inkling of the extent of the detail work of his new position!

(11) Emma Smith Burdick, Edward Smith, Syracuse Schoolmaster (unpublished Master’s thesis, Department of Education, Syracuse University, 1940), p. 72.

(12) Smith, History of Syracuse School, p. 131.

(13) Twentieth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Syracuse for the year ending March 3, 1868. ( Syracuse: B. Herman Smith, 1868), p. 29

(14) Smith, History of Syracuse Schools, p. 131.

(15) .Twentieth Annual Report, p. 31.

(16) Smith, History of Syracuse Schools, p. 131.

(17) May Diary, May 21, 1870.

(18) May Diary, June 4, 1870.

(19) Dwight H. Bruce, Memorial History of the City of Syracuse. ( Syracuse: H. P. Smith and Co., 1891), p. 536.

(20) Syracuse Daily Standard, November 18, 1891.

(21) Smith, History of Syracuse Schools, p. 142.

(22) In Memoriam, Samuel Joseph May, p. 30. The best accounts of detail in May’s administration come from daily entries in his diary.

(23) Teachers’ Advocate, II (August 13, 1847), p. 569.

(24) Shepard, Pedlar’s Progress, p. 81.

(25) Christian Register, IX (June 19, 1830), p. 1.

(26) “Dedicatory Sermon, Church of the Messiah, Preached by Samuel J. May, April 14, 1853,” A Backward Glance O’er Traveled Roads . . . ., Elizabeth C. Walsh and Helen Saddington (eds.), (Syracuse: Central Printing Co., 1938), p. 42.

(27) What Do Unitarians Believe? ( Albany: Parsons and Co., 1860), p. 9.

(28) Having made a commitment to non-violence, May inevitably faced the classic dilemma of the pacifist reformer: what course should be taken when force appears to be the only way to achieve a good end? This dilemma tortured him particularly in the matter of abolition. Was he justified in using force to rescue a run-away slave from federal marshals seeking to return property to southern owners? Was the North justified in using force to win the Civil War so that slavery might be ended? May found a solution, but it did not seem to satisfy him thoroughly. He would not use force to attain a good objective, he decided, but neither would he prevent anyone else from using force whose conscience did not prohibit it. This left May free to support war and violence from a respectable distance without actually dirtying his own hands, or taking action that would violate his own personal convictions. See May to Ralph Waldo Emerson, August 13, 1856, Harvard University.

(29) Samuel J. May, Jesus, the Best Teacher of His Religion, A Discourse Delivered Before the Graduating Class of the Cambridge Theological Scholl (Boston: William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1847), p. 4.

(30) Teachers' Advocate, I (November 26, 1845), p. 184.

(31) May to Mann, October 10, 1844, Mann Papers.

(32) Randall, Common School System, p. 17.

(33) Teachers’ Advocate, II (September 10, 1846), p. 21.

(34) Minutes, Syracuse Board of Education, May 9 and July 31, 1848

(35) Mr. Brosnan appeared only once afterwards in Syracuse history when a serious shortage of county funds was discovered in 1850. Mr. Brosnan may or may not have been at fault; at any rate he left the city under a cloud, and repaired to Virginia City where he recouped his lost dignity by rising to a supreme court justiceship in the new state of Nevada.

(36) Minutes, Syracuse Board of Education, October 4, 1848.

(37) 1858 Regulations of the Board of Election, p. 19.

(38) Butts, History of Education in American Culture, p. 273.

(39) Smith, History of Syracuse Schools, p. 112.

(40) May to Honorable Henry J. Randall, November 16, 1853, Library of Congress.

(41) District School Journal, VI, (April 22, 1845), pp. 41-51.

(42) This particular quotation is what May recalled he had said in 1845, contained in his letter to Randall of 1853.

(43) District School Journal, VI (April 22. 1845).

(44) Ibid., p. 47.

(45) May to William B. Fowle, June 12, 1845, Massachusetts Historical Society.

(46) Teacher’s Advocate, I (November 12, 1845), p. 154.

(47) May, “Opening of a Schoolhouse," Common School Journal, p. 224.

(48) Curti, Social Ideals of American Educators, p. 60.

(49) May, “Opening of a Schoolhouse," Common School Journal, p. 224.

(50) Andrew D. White, "Speech on Dedication of May Bust," Syracuse Daily Journal, September 18, 1875.

(51) For an excellent discussion of Mann's and Barnard's plight in this regard see Curti, Social Ideals of American Educators, pp. 125, 126, 141. May’s hassle with Barnard arose over a biography of Cyrus Peirce May wrote for Barnard's Journal of American Education. May took special pains to include one of Peirce's expeditions into abolition agitation; Barnard struck it out and kept it out, despite May’s protests. Even in an education journal, no whiff of such controversy could be allowed. May to Barnard, September 10, 1857, Barnard Papers; also see Thursfield, Barnard's Journal of American Education, p. 128.

(52) New York Tribune, July 25, 1851.

(53) Detroit Daily Advertiser, July 29, 1851.

(54) Syracuse Daily Journal, September 18, 1875.

(55) Syracuse Daily Journal, September 26, 1897.