Henry Bergh was a softy. A
sentimental fool who could not abide to witness the sufferings
of animals and small, helpless creatures. And
that made him a damned annoyance, and worse, a meddlesome nuisance to honest
men who were simply trying to get the most out of livestock that God had
clearly given them dominion over. It said so right
in the Bible, didn’t it? To make matters
worse he was richer than Croesus and had money to burn and
spread around courts and newspapers to persecute men
for doing as they saw fit with their own damned property! And
he was slavishly followed by legions of swooning ladies and lily-livered
do-gooders abetting his outrages.
Or so a good slice of public
opinion would have it. Just who was the fancy gentleman
in a fashionable high hat, and elegant clothes running
about the streets wresting whips from the hands of masters?
Henry Bergh was born
in New York City on August 29, 1813 with a literal silver
spoon in his mouth. His father, Christian Bergh was
a ship builder who laid the keels of
several ships for the U.S. Navy as well as many
a merchant vessel. Like many sons of self-made
men, he seemed a bit spoiled and unmotivated to seek
a career. He was enrolled at Columbia but
was an indifferent student and failed to graduate.
Instead of taking a
degree the young man left for the Grand Tour of Europe in
1831. He liked what he saw there and lingered. Bergh tried his hand
as a man of letters and penned unproduced plays,
sentimental melodramas with pointed moral lessons.
In 1836 his father
announced his intention to retire and wrote his wayward son that it was
time to stop playing and come home to manage the family firm with his older
brother Christian, Jr. However
reluctantly—probably facing the cutoff of support if he did not comply—Bergh
came home.
Back in New York the
same year he wooed and wed a lovely society belle with
her own fortune, Catherine Matilda Taylor.
However a
reluctant tycoon, Bergh proved to be a capable administrator. The
firm thrived and expanded especially as he helped transition to
the age of steam power. His active career in
business was not a long one. His father died in 1843 and he felt
under no more obligation to continue his business. He sold
out his portion of the firm which brought him a large sum of
cash. He invested wisely for the long term rather than play
dangerous games on the market and was able to retire to a
comfortable life of leisure on a dependable income at the
age of only 32.
He and Catherine
returned to Europe where they traveled and took up residence. He
resumed his aborted career as a playwright.
Bergh’s story might
have ended there with him idling away his years as a comfortable expatriate had
not fate intervened. The Confederacy was stepping up diplomatic activity
in Europe. One of their primary targets was Imperial Russia,
a society whose dependence on virtually enslaved serfs drew
the same moral condemnation in the West as Southern Black
chattel slavery. It was also an emerging power with
ambition to challenge Britain’s supremacy in international trade,
including cotton. Confederate agents had high hopes of
gaining Russian recognition of their independence and
even possible intervention in the war.
Secretary of State
William Seward, a pre-war political
powerhouse in New York State was familiar with the Bergh
family, who were loyal Republicans and Unionists. Bergh
was already in Europe and would not be delayed in a mission to St.
Petersburg by an ocean voyage. President Abraham
Lincoln appointed him as Secretary to the American
Legation to the Court of Tsar Alexander II and Acting
Vice Consul in 1863.
In less than two years
of service as a diplomat, Bergh learned two things—that he
hated the miserable cold of a Russian winter, and that the Russians treated
their animals with abominable cruelty. On the streets of St.
Petersburg he could observe almost every day animals being savagely beaten,
starving horses worked until they dropped dead in their traces, and
worse.
After resigning in
post in 1865, Bergh stopped in London on the way home to America to
consult with the Earl of Harrowby, President of the
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals which had
become famous for its defense of draft and coach horses
in London.
Bergh, with the
support of his wife, determined to do something similar at home. In
late 1866 he began lecturing widely and circulating tracts
against animal cruelty. Then he found an important ally, his
minister the Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows of the First
Congregational Church of New York City, the city’s leading Unitarian clergyman
and one of the most influential Protestant ministers and reformers in
the city. Bellows was also something of an organizational genius. During
the war he founded and organized the United States Sanitary Commission,
America’s first great nationwide charity which raised money
and collected medical supplies for the Army, organized distribution,
established hospitals, and trained and supervised most
of the nurses on the Union side. It was
a massive job that required the creation and coordination of local
units in towns and cities across the Union as well as close logistical
cooperation with the huge armies in the field. After the
war Bellows had re-invigorated Unitarianism with the formation of the National
Conference of Unitarian Churches.
Bellows help introduce
Bergh to a network of influential reformers and help him
develop a strategy of getting an animal protection law passed
in New York State that could be a model of the nation. A
little later, at Catherine Bergh’s suggestion, Bellows helped recruit women
reformers, many of the veterans of the abolitionist movement, the
Sanitary Commission, temperance and other reform
movements. Energetic women were soon the shock troops of a growing
movement.
A public lecture at
New York’s Clinton Hall in early 1866 was the beginning of a
push for legislation in the state. He was victorious in an
astonishingly short period of time—probably faster than any reform movement
ever attained its first legislative goals. In early April the
state legislature passed bills drafted by Bergh that prohibited
cruelty to animals and granted a charter to the American
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Four
days later on April 11, 1866 the Society was formally organized in New
York City with Bergh as its President—a job he would keep the rest of his life.
Bergh was more than
just an administrator and advocate. Under the terms of the state
law, he and other ASPCA officers were deputized to enforce the
anti-cruelty laws on the street. Among his first targets were the
widespread abuse of horses and draft animals; dangerous but popular public
entertainments like bull and bear baiting and dog and cock
fighting; and the starvation of many domestic
animals. Bergh would personally arrest offenders on the street
and haul them before police magistrates. The press
ate up these colorful confrontations and Bergh popularity grew in some
quarters as did attacks on him from outraged masters and animal owners who
dubbed him the Great Meddler.
The ASPCA was at first
funded out of the personal purse of the Berghs. But it soon
attracted additional support including a huge $150,000 bequest from Frenchman
Louis Bonard in 1871 which enabled the organization to move into more
spacious quarters at the corner of 4th Avenue and 22nd Street. In
the city the ASPCA was able to fund heavy duty animal ambulances and
even a crane to rescue horses who fell into open excavations with
surprising regularity.
When Bergh turned his
attention to the treatment of animals in circuses and menageries he
clashed with P.T. Barnum, but Barnum, a noted humanitarian and Universalist
lay leader was won over to the cause. He conformed
treatment of animals in his circuses and other holdings to the standards of the
ASPCA and campaigned with Bergh to get other exhibitors to follow suit.
Bergh was appalled to
learn that tens of thousands of pigeons were slaughtered each
year in sport shooting competitions. Bergh
personally invented one of the first devices to launch faux
pigeons as substitute targets, eventually leading the modern sports
of trap and skeet shooting and the
abandonment of live targets.
He continued to travel
and speak widely, the influence of his ideas and organization growing
steadily. One important 1873 speech was given to the Evangelical
Alliance and Episcopal Convention which led directly to a new
Episcopal cannon requiring the church’s priests to
preach annually on animal cruelty.
New societies spread
across the country, many of the spearheaded by the women reformers Bergh had
gone out of his way to cultivate. One by one other state adopted laws modeled
on those Bergh wrote for New York. By 1886 36 states had adopted
anti-cruelty laws. With the help of ASPCA legal counsel
Elbridge Gerry, Bergh got the Federal Government to
ban cruelty to animals used for interstate transportation.
But Bergh’s work was
not confined to animals. In 1874 Methodist mission worker, Etta
Angell Wheeler brought the sad case of Mary Ellen Wilson an
11 year old girl abused by her foster mother, Mary
McCormack who daily whipped her with rawhide, used her as a domestic
slave, starved her, and kept her locked in a closet. Together
Wilson and Burgh rescued the child and the ASPCA brought charges against Mary
McCormack. At the time children were considered the chattel of
their parents or guardians with no rights of their own and
no protections from assault or abuse. Elbridge Gerry cleverly argued
that at very least the child was an animal an entitled to protection
under those anti-cruelty laws. Mrs. McCormack was convicted
and sentenced to a year in jail. Etta eventually became a
ward of Mary Wilson and lived happily and safely.
The incident spurred a
new round of New York legislation and the charter of a new organization, New
York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children also headed by
Burgh. Similar societies spread to other states starting with Massachusetts.
Bergh continued
meddling until he died on March 12, 1888 and was buried in Greenwood
Cemetery in Brooklyn.
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