Recollections of an Alienist, Personal and Professional (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: cup, was built by a syndicate composed of his nephew, George L. Schuyler, and eleven others, he sailed the yacht in many of her trying-out cruises in this country. His later life was a quiet one, and his career at the bar quite without event, his only celebrated case being the trial and conviction of Gibbs, the pirate, who was hung at Bedloe's Island in New York Harbour. Upon several occasions he acted as Judge-Advocate before the several Naval Retiring Boards at the end of the Civil War, and represented his many Navy friends, such as Commodores Stringham and Storrow, and various brave old salts who had served their time with honour and distinction. Shortly before the Civil War the escape of negro slaves from the Southern states had assumed great proportions, and the so-called "underground railroad," an organisation established to facilitate their safe transit to Canada, and to supply them with funds on their way, was established, with headquarters at Chester, and sub-agencies in neighbouring counties in Pennsylvania. It is reported by popular tradition that one Thomas Garret, an old Quaker who, according to my friend, General James H. Wilson, was "a prudent and secretive man who did his best to conceal his operations for helping runaway slaves, which was a dangerous business," was the director of a particular centre at Wilmington, Delaware, through which many were cleared. In the North, the so-called Abolitionists are too well known to need extended mention, but that celebrated band of free thinkers which was established at Concord, Massachusetts, and known as "Brook Farm," contained several members who encouraged the actual smuggling of black men to places of safety. Among these was the late Charles A. Dana, the Editor of the New York Sun. My father, while a mild Abolition...