Chapter 22: Rings and Friends
Supplement to Endnotes
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Endnote 4) In political debates within New York, the ring was thought to be upstate politicians who had joined forces against regional powers along the Hudson River, especially New York City. The takings could be significant. In January 1867 a Schenectady paper reported that one contractor paid some sixty thousand dollars of which much went to the ring’s treasurer to pay off the contract board and hire legal protection. The paper pointed to the kind of money the contractor must have been bilking taxpayers if he was willing to bid such a fortune. The Daily Evening Star, January 4, 1867; Noble E. Whitford, History of the Canal System of the State of New York: Together with Brief Histories of the Canals of the United States and Canada, volume I (Brandow Printing Company: Albany, 1906) pp. 270-273. Report of the Select Committee Appointed by the Senate to Investigate into the Management of the Canals of the State of New York, and the Official Conduct of Persons Now or Heretofore Connected Therewith; and the Conduct of Persons Comprising the Canal Contracting Board (Albany, NY: C. Van Benthuysen and Sons, 1868), passim.
Endnote 6) Spirited debate erupted in the first days of the convention--several days after the murder--over whether or not canal matters would be reviewed by one committee or divided between several. Multiple committees, anti-corruption reformers argued, would make it harder for a ring to exert control. Many of the delegates from along the canal line, particularly from Hiscock’s Onondaga County, fought for the single committee. Charles Andrews -- one of Hiscock’s pallbearers -- rose and gave a speech supporting the single committee. Thomas “Old Salt” Alvord -- Hiscock’s closest mentor who helped secure Cole’s final brevet promotion -- was reported to be “one of the chief engineers” of the single committee strategy. See, for example: Syracuse Journal, June 15, 1867. see here Alvord is generally understood to have been an ally to the ring. See: Thomas J. Archdeacon, The Erie Canal Ring, Samuel J. Tilden, and the Democratic Party," New York History Vol. 59, Iss. 4, (Oct 1, 1978): 408–429, esp. p. 413.
Endnote 8) The worst deeds, according to the report, were perpetrated by lawyers in league with public officers who secured “relief bills” from the Albany legislature. The “relief” money was supposed to cover damages and losses suffered by locals along the canal. These claimants were represented by lawyers who pressed for “special” legislation that called for particular damage claims to be considered by appraisers. Lawyers took their substantial cut from the winnings, a cut of which they returned to the collaborating legislators and to compliant canal appraisers who made sure the case was reviewed in the ring’s favor. This appears to be the area of corruption that Frank and Luther participated in.
Endnote 12) Cornelius had started The Daily Times with James McClatchy, whom Cornelius had written the letter stuffed with news clippings. The newspaper once charged its Republican readers to rally around John Frémont, the legendary land speculator, soldier and the first Republican candidate to run for the U.S. presidency: “Let the friends of the Pacific Railroad, Freedom and Frémont be up and doing,” the paper proclaimed. The party’s state banner carried the words: “Freedom, Frémont and the Railroad” though not necessarily valued in that order. See: Catherine Coffin Phillips, Cornelius Cole, California Pioneer and United States Senator: A Study in Personality and Achievements Bearing upon the Growth of a Commonwealth (San Francisco: J. H. Nash, 1929), pp. 81-84, 86-87.
Endnote 14) The paths to corruption were endless, and never distant or disconnected from one’s own way. The primary investigator and author of the canal report was Charles Stanford, an upstate New York politician and newspaperman who a decade earlier had chased gold in California alongside his brother Leland (who, during the war, had used his one term as governor to further his designs to become one of the wealthiest railroad tycoons in the West).
Cornelius too would be accused by political opponents of operating under the thumb of a whiskey ring. Olive Cole wrote an angry letter to her husband once for wasting his time exposing rings in the republic. Self-made men saw them everywhere as a threat to their deserving path to success.
George’s trial showed how tangled the webs could be. This was not only because his lawyers had been promised tainted railroad money in exchange for Cornelius’s pledge to introduce friendly legislation in the US Senate. (Cornelius, of course, would have seen such promises to railroad friends as reciprocity, not a bribe.) There was more. Henry Smith, the District Attorney prosecuting Cole, who had served on the Judiciary Committee with Hiscock with whom he reportedly shared a “warm personal friendship,” also served alongside Charles Stanford during the canal investigation. And after the first trial, George’s lawyer, William A. Beach, would be retained to represent Robert Dorn, the canal commissioner who would be impeached for his crimes. See: See: Syracuse Journal, January 24, 1868 and June 11, 1868.
Endnote 18) About the “wheel within a wheel" (from page 264): The report compared the rings of friends to Masonic fraternities. Masonry divided Americans deeply because it seemed to both encourage horizontal bonds, but also create circles of privilege and secrecy. The writer said that the political ring “had a sort of Masonic mutual understanding, which the outer circle can see, but not destroy.” Like the vastly powerful Masons, ordinary ring members protected the members of inner rings. George Cole, in the last season of his life would become a Mason. Ben Butler was a mason. So had been George Washington and a long list of American notables. Masonry was paradoxically the boogeymen of Americans who feared the death of merit, and provided an equal space for countless other Americans who found lodges to be temples of merit and equality.
Friendship -- for some found inside of Masonic lodges -- promised to secure merit as the republic's guiding measure of worth and station. But friendships never had as much to do within saving the republic as they did helping young men navigate a society transformed by market competition. Lacking fathers who could guide them toward new middle-class careers, bosom friends formed tender relationships, often while away from home at academies, college, or on the frontier, to help initially establish themselves in their occupations.
Unlike the lifelong passionate bonds of Victorian women, most ties between intimate male friends eventually slackened. Considered a childish or feminine attachment, the bonds weakened once men gave themselves more fully to the real business of manhood -- of providing for dependents, of sacrificing pleasure for future reward, and keeping pace in their quest for success. See: Anthony Rotundo, “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800–1900,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 1–25; Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-century America," Signs Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 1-29.
Endnote 19) There is no record of George and Luther meeting before late 1857 -- the year the Coles moved to Syracuse -- when both were fathers in their early thirties. Hiscock was settled in his legal practice, though George was casting about for a career. It would have been peculiar for the two, given their ages, to have formed an intensely emotional friendship. The private letters of the prisoner, along with other testimony, suggests instead that George nursed deep suspicions about Hiscock. Perhaps, though, this fits my larger point that men in this era often used terms like friendship to paper over relationships fraught with tension, competition and duplicity.
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Endnote 23) Richard White, whose work originally led me to take the language of friendship seriously, claims that loyalty, not affection, was important to these friendships. I am not so sure. Affection was the best hope and surest sign that true loyalty when a “friend” could do great damage in closed congressional meetings, in private correspondence and in business transactions that might exploit information gained in such a friendship. When mutual interest was certain then perhaps affection was not necessary, as many railroad associates despised one another. But because it was so difficult to know the true interests of an acquaintance, affective friendship was paramount. See Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), pp. 99-100.
Endnote 24) With mocking incredulity the Syracuse Journal reported that during the jury selection a “remarkable man was discovered” who knew almost nothing about the murder and the first trial. He admitted that he had stopped taking the papers some time before the tragedy. When the judge--understandably desperate to secure qualified jurymen--declared the man “within the legal rule of competency” an outburst of laughter echoed throughout the courtroom. See: Syracuse Journal, November 16, 1868 (See loose clippings in OHA).
Endnote 25) How his attorney’s pulled this off is unclear to me. It is also possible that they themselves initiated the challenge to Trull’s selection to the jury, as it gave them the chance to have Cole's sentimental poetry read in court.
Endnote 29) Just as Olive Cole had shrewdly warned, dwelling on the war opened up deep, if rarely spoken, doubts about what the war had done to its soldiers. George's lawyer, Hadley, leaned harder and harder into the war narrative. The soldier's honorable service made spineless crime impossible. In his opening for the second trial, Hadley asked the rhetorical question of what motive could drive a soldier to kill his “best friend.” “Where did this defendant,” he asked, learn the art of the “cowardly assassin” portrayed by the prosecution? ​
Did he learn it when fighting in the defense of his country, with his faced turned openly toward the foe? What could he have learned, in that school of valor and of honor, that was inconsistent with his character as a gentleman, or his honor as a soldier?
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Lincoln’s soldiers, Hadley insisted, learned to “meet the enemy in deadly conflict, face to face” when duty required. Then, knowing that he had to staunch the flow of doubts that might follow, Hadley said that “the very nobleness of that calling should, of itself, be sufficient to check the suspicion, that he could ever become an assassin.” Then, betraying perhaps his own suspicions, Hadley continued: “[The war] may have given him exalted notions of the laws of personal honor which prevail amongst military men, but most assuredly it never taught him to work the death of an unarmed friend, so long as he retained his reason, or could control his own will of judgment.” Hadley recognized the dangers warned of by Olive; but he simply could not go soft on the war narrative. See: Albany Oyer and Terminer: The People vs Geo. W. Cole, Indictment--Murder: Opening Argument of Wm. J. Hadley, Esq., of the Second Trial of Maj. Gen. George W. Cole for the Murder of L. Harris Hiscock (Albany: Printing House of Charles Van Benthuysen & Sons, 1868), p. 8, 15.
Endnote 33) Because in politics and courtrooms, triumph largely eclipses ideological consistency, it was Cole’s attorneys who questioned mankind’s ability to guide and control their passions and instincts. Trying to dissuade the jurymen from voting for Cole’s execution, they waxed philosophical about the mysterious origins of life and the uncertainty of what follows. More than not, especially in the closing of the second trial, Cole’s defense undermined the story of self-made manhood. Also see: Albany Oyer and Terminer: The People vs Geo. W. Cole, Indictment, pp. 22-23.
Endnote 36) Bad blood emerged within the first moments of the second trial. When it was determined that the fifth juror, a man named Richard Betts, had also been a frequent visitor to the jail cell, Cole’s attorney, William Beach, accused Henry Smith, the lead prosecutor, of telling a Mr. “Brown” and “Van Alstyne” that he would like to see Cole hang. Smith denied it, telling his challengers to “hunt up your Mr. Brown or Mr. Van Alstyne.” Beach snapped back, “Ill hunt you pretty close.” See: Remarkable Trials, pp. 369-370.