Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty Years Ago [pp. 200-208]

I887.] WORKINGMAN'S PARTY FIFTY YEARS AGO.
party called Dr. Brownson to deliver the lectures above mentioned. But my brothers and I had long been playing men's
parts in politics. I remember when eleven years of age, or a year
or two older, being tall for my years, proposing and carrying
through a series of resolutions on the currency question at our
ward meeting. As our name indicates-" Workingman's De.
mocracy"-we were a kind of Democrats. As to the Whig
party, it received no great attention from us. At that time its
chances of getting control of this State or of the United States
were remote. Our biggest fight was against the " usages of the
party" as in vogue in the so-called regular Democracy embodied
in the Tammany Hall party. This organization undertook to
absorb us when we had grown too powerful to be ignored. They
nominated a legislative ticket made up half of their men and
half of ours. This move was to a great extent successful; but
many of us who were purists refused to compromise, and ran a
stump ticket, or, as it was then called, a rump ticket. I was too
young to vote, but I remember my brother George and I posting political handbills at three o'clock in the morning; this hour
was not so inconvenient for us, for we were bakers. We also
worked hard on election-day, keeping up and supplying the
ticket-booths, especially in our own ward, the old Seventh. I
remember that one of our leaders was a shoemaker named John
Ryker, and that we used to meet in Science Hall, Broome Street.
If this was the high state of my enthusiasm, so was it that of
us all. Our political faith was ardent and active. But if wve had
been tested on our religious faith we should not have come off
creditably; many of us had not any religion at all. I remember
saying once to my brother John that the only difference between
a believer and an infidel is a few ounces of brains. What a wonderful triumph of the truth! The man who said those words
not only became a most firm believer in the mysteries of the
Christian religion, but a priest and a religious, and hopes thus
to die.
But we were a queer set of cranks when Dr. Brownson
brought to us his powerful and eloquent advocacy, his contribution of mingled truth and error. He delivered his first course
of lectures in the old Stuyvesant Institute in Broadway, facing
Bond Street-the same hall used a little afterwards by the Unitarian Society while they were building a church for Dr. Dewey
in Broadway opposite Eighth Street, the very same society now
established in Lexington Avenue with Mr. Collyer as minister.
The subsequent courses were delivered by Dr. Brownson in
203