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CIVIC WARS
WARS
Democracy and Public Life
in the American City during the
Nineteenth Century
M A R Y P. R Y A N
©1997 by
The Regents of the University of California
Ryan, Mary P.
Civic wars : democracy and public life in the American city during
the nineteenth century / Mary P. Ryan,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-520-20441-7 (alk. paper)
1. Political participation—United States—History—19th century.
2. Political culture—United States—History—19th century.
3. Democracy—United States—History—19th century. 4. City and
town life—United States—History— 19th century. 5. United States-
Politics and government—19th century. 6. New York (N.Y.)—
Politics and government—To 1898. 7. New Orleans (La.)—Politics
and government. 8. San Francisco (Calif) —Politics and government.
I. Title.
JKI764-R9 1997
320.973—dc20 96-25630
CIP
List of Illustrations / ix
Acknowledgments / xi
PART ONE
Heterogeneous Compounds and Kaleidoscopic
Varieties: Creating a Democratic Public, 1825-1849
CHAPTER 1
People's Places / 21
CHAPTER 2
The Performance of People in Association / s8
CHAPTEB 3
PART TWO
The Interregnum, 1850-1865
CHAPTER 4
Civil Wars in the Cities / 13s
viii Contents
PART THREE
"The Huge Conglomerate Mass":
Democracy Contained and Continued, 1866-1880
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
Epilogue / 30s
Notes / 317
Index / 363
ILLUSTRATIONS
ix
X Illustrations
26. Chinatown alley, ca. 1 8 8 0 192
2 7 . Stewart's mansion 194
28. Five Points, 1 8 7 5 m
2 9 . Canal Street, Clay statue, 1 8 8 4 199
3 0 . Shelter, Golden Gate Park, ca. 1 8 7 4 208
3i- Map of Golden Gate Park 210
32. Lincoln funeral procession, 1 8 6 5 22s
33- Attack on the Orange Societies' parade, 1 8 7 1 232
3 + . Mardi Gras, 1 8 7 2 241
35- Missing Links 243
3 6 . St. Patrick's Day, Union Square, 1 8 7 0 247
I
have practiced the historian's craft too long to pretend that I am the
solitary author of the following pages. In creating this book I have
transcribed, transmitted, and lifted out of context the work of
countless chroniclers and historians, most of whom I will never meet.
Because this investigation took me far from the fields of my training or
expertise, I was dependent on a vast and rich secondary literature that
deserves far more recognition than the simple citations in the bibliogra-
phy. It would not diminish my debt to all these strangers by naming my
personal and specific benefactors. My special thanks go to those very
generous and tolerant colleagues who read messy early drafts of this
book and tendered invaluable advice and criticism. In thanking them I
also assure them that I have left: abundant grounds for continuing de-
bate and disagreement among us. I am most indebted to Thomas Ben-
der, Robin Einhorn, Philip Ethington, Eric Foner, Michael Kazin,
Suzanne Lebsock, Joseph Logsdon, Timothy Gilfoyle, Terence Mac-
Donald, Christine Stansell, and Dell Upton.
Several institutions have generously supported this project with their
funds, their facilities, and their staffs. My research commenced long ago
at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stan-
ford University; it was sustained while I was a member of the faculty at
the University of California at Berkeley; and it was rejuvenated for one
ecstatic year when the French American Foundation sent me to the Cen-
ter for North American Studies, École des Hautes Etudes en Science So-
ciales in Paris. I send special thanks to Jean Heffer, François Weil, and
xi
xii Acknowledgments
T hose awaiting the turn of the millennium can easily find evidence
for the gloomy forecasts often associated with such an ominous
date. The approach of the year 2000 finds many observers of
American civic life, including historians, in a curmudgeonly frame of
mind, their pessimism fed by more than the usual references to rising
crime, debased morals, and irresponsible youth. Complaints first heard
in the mid-1980s about how the American citizenry was fragmenting
into narrow circles of interest and identity had given way by 1995 to far
more alarming and widespread signs of the disintegration of the na-
tional consensus. Those earlier squabbles about what was alternately la-
beled multiculturalism and political correctness paled next to the clash-
ing cultures of the 1990s—urban riots, rural militia companies, and
bombed-out federal buildings—while the new political identities that
emerged in the 1960s might seem paper tigers compared to the insur-
gents of the 1994 congressional election who not only asserted them-
selves but also set out to dismantle the basic social programs that had, at
least since the New Deal, linked Americans together in the recognition
of basic public needs. Historians' alarm about the rumored demise of a
unified national narrative might seem inconsequential in a popular cul-
ture that shunned the printed word as it sated itself on talk shows, MTV,
and cyberspace. The end of the twentieth century threatened to bring
not just the contest and rivalry to be expected in a democracy but a
whole other order of change, a withdrawal from the civic project as we
had known it.
1
2 Introduction
backward. At a time when the connecting tissue of civic life seems as in-
substantial as the airwaves of mass media, I have set up my historical lab-
oratory in concrete places, in three nineteenth-century cities. In New
York, New Orleans, and San Francisco I have found some solid ground
on which to confront these civic fears and hopes. In the last century
these cities were arguably as full of cultural differences and as fractured
by social and economic changes as any metropolis today, and they pro-
vided equally challenging conditions under which to create civic com-
munication and identity. My years of foraging through these corners of
the American past have not yielded reassuring portraits of virtuous and
harmonious communities that can serve as models or admonitions for
the present. What I found instead is a trail of contestation that goes back
well beyond a century. What I learned, slowly and reluctandy, still in-
completely, is the necessity of facing these recurrent cultural and political
collisions, of embracing these civic wars as an essential feature of mod-
ern democracy. But before I report on this exercise of retrospective citi-
zenship, a brief comment on some of the personal concerns and more
abstract cogitation that informed and preceded it is in order.
Undertaken as both a historian's project and a citizen's mission, my
exploration began in the early 1980s amid growing unease with the frag-
mentation of the historical record that had accompanied the success of
the new social history. The elaboration and diversification of our history
that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s left a larger, infinitely improved,
but more splintered picture of the past. The disarray among historians,
the cracks in old syntheses, and the refuse of an untenable consensus
were more than by-products of a quantitative expansion of the popula-
tion included in the official historical record. A skilled and patient histo-
rian could fashion a social history from the studies of different races,
classes, ethnic groups, gender cultures, sexual orientations, ages, and so
forth. (My colleagues do it every day in survey courses and textbooks.)
But to be a usable and living history rather than a sociological portrait,
we are told that the parts of this enlarged picture need to be stitched to-
gether into a moving narrative. It needed a focal point, some major
characters, a plot. In the past the focal point had been politics on the na-
tional level. The central characters had been political leaders, and the
plot ended in the uniformity of a common culture or at the apex of intel-
lectual hegemony or political power.1
These ways of giving narrative coherence to history certainly re-
mained available to painstaking historians willing to draw the links be-
tween the social and the political, the local and the national, the social
4 Introduction
and the cultural, the everyday and the election day. Yet a rush to synthe-
sis often traveled the same well-worn paths, sacrificing the rich record
compiled by social historians, finding the easiest point of unity among
the powerful and prominent, and in the end giving starring roles to the
white, male, educated, and affluent. Still searching for some way of
bringing America's diverse peoples together on one plane of analysis,
but without subjecting them to the brute authority of a central govern-
ment or the cultural tyranny of national character, I came upon the idea
of the public, a symbol of the possibility of unification without homoge-
nization, of integration without assimilation. In my first musings it
evoked a broad and visible political space where a society's members
might come together without forfeiting their multiple social identities,
where they mounted debates rather than established consensus. In the
first instance the public was no more than an invitation to imagine a his-
torical plane of commonalty and connection that did not pulverize
differences, where power was recognized without erasing the less pow-
erful.2
From the first the word public had a second and especially seductive
reference point as well. This attraction was as much personal and aes-
thetic as scholarly and political, and it was rooted in my own niche in
American history. For someone growing up female after World War II,
in a small town where my lower-class Roman Catholic parentage was
still a mark of marginalization, the public gleamed as an object to covet,
a kind of brass ring. As a female child of a small town in the 1950s I also
saw the public as a liberation from stultifying privacy. It was a way out of
the house. It summoned images of a gregarious, open, cosmopolitan,
new, heterogeneous, anonymous world free of the constrictions of fam-
ily and the straitjacket of gender identity. To my parents' generation the
coveted public signaled the aspirations of the "little guy" for a public
voice that was heard only as recendy as the New Deal. In my adoles-
cence the public prize was the election of the first president who shared
my family's religious affiliation. My own political consciousness would
take form within those social movements of the 1960s that made the
dreams and protests of millions of once-silenced Americans a public
matter. To this very day, when my gender remains drastically underrepre-
sented in positions of state power and legislative deliberation, the public
still glows with the aura of a brass ring. For a feminist the public remains
an object of not fully requited desire. The turns in my own life and the
jolts of American politics since the 1970s have not dimmed the Utopian
imaginings of the word; they have only made them seem more precious
Introduction 5
as they receded from the political horizon. In sum the word that set the
course of this book is bloated with social, personal, as well as political
promises. In its first incarnation the subject of this book was impossibly
broad, simply a study of American public life in the nineteenth century.
Although my search for the "public" was singular, personal, and a
mite eccentric, it was hardly solitary. The word public has one of the
longest and most distinguished lineages in the Western dictionary of
keywords. From the perspective of the history of ideas my musings
about the public are a dilute and base remnant of the classic vocabulary
of polis, politeia, and res publico.. The word public was present at the re-
puted origins of Western political culture, in its Renaissance, and at the
moments of greatest trial. The public was a conceptual life raft for politi-
cal thinkers, most notably Hannah Arendt, trying to set a humanistic
political course in the wake of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Yet I
have kin much closer than these in my association with the public. The
public is very much in the American grain. The word had a particularly
prominent place in the vocabulary of the Progressives and appeared in
the tides of books by Walter Lippman, Robert Park, and John Dewey in
the 1920s. And in the 1990s the chorus of concern for the public is full of
historians, social scientists, literary critics, and veterans of the social
movements of my generation, including most especially feminists.
My original fealty to the word public inspired a conversation with po-
litical theorists that became a long, rambling section of this book's
penultimate draft. The empirical historical study that followed, however,
broke the bounds of this theory and became a meandering story of how
Americans came together, for better and for worse, to share and shape a
conjoined life. That account, which will begin with chapter 1, is not a
paean to the public but a story I will call "civic wars." Before that story
begins, however, I offer the reader the briefest report on my foray into
the body of political philosophy to which I remain indebted.
The classic formulation of the public, especially as interpreted by
Hannah Arendt, offers the loftiest inspiration for the study and practice
of public life. Brought down from the Acropolis, this tradition heralds
the public realm, as Arendt names it, as the place where citizens surren-
der their private concerns and come together as equals to deliberate
about the common good. It is in the public realm, set aside from petty
material interests and devoted to mutual respect and rational discourse,
that humans express their highest natures and achieve a semblance of
immortality. Yet as many critics, most notably Hannah Pitkin, have
pointed out, whether it be ancient Greece or the Italian Renaissance re-
6 Introduction
publics, the public realm was as narrow in its membership as it was lofty
in its idealism. It was a gathering place of elite males, many of them
slavemasters.3
For a more democratic social base, contemporary political philoso-
phers turn more often to the work of Jiirgen Habermas. By locating his
"public sphere" in the eighteenth-century West, Habermas opened up
civic life to a much broader citizenry and wider realm of rights and free-
doms. His public sphere was a "realm of our social life in which some-
thing approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is quarantined
to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every
conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public
body?' Habermas brought the public sphere not only into modern times
but into a broad historical plane of analysis. By locating public life out-
side the state, finding it in the press and the cafes and clubs of eighteenth-
century European capitals, wherever public opinion could be formed,
Habermas placed the humanistic political ideals on the grounds of social
practice and in the reach of many. His public sphere has been adapted by
many historians and literary scholars and is an indispensable guide
through the research for this book.4
Yet Habermas himself was circumspect in his own historical mapping
of the public sphere. Clinging to high standards of "rational-critical dis-
course," Habermas was wary of finding a genuine public sphere outside
the bourgeoisie and after the eighteenth century. To open a flank of the
public sphere in the nineteenth century, I next turned to the American
tradition of political philosophy and to John Dewey's The Public and Its
Problems. Conceived as a pragmatic human creation, not as an a priori ra-
tional norm, Dewey's public was an act of human discovery and organi-
zation that could, or could not, be found in any historical circumstance.
His formula for creating a public specified only this: "We take as our
point of departure from the objective fact that human acts have conse-
quences upon others, that some of these consequences are perceived,
and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action so
as to secure some consequences and avoid others." Dewey then con-
strues a public that, theoretically, could exist anywhere, even in the most
unseemly civic spaces of America in the 1990s.5
Writing in 1927, Dewey rarely gave specific social or political content
to the public. His major historical reference was to the New England
community of face-to-face public assembly. Reconvening a town meet-
ing is not a strategy likely to revive the public in the late twentieth cen-
tury. An update to Dewey's public can be found, however, in a number
Introduction 7
policies. At this final plane of analysis the discrepancy between the public
and the people will appear once again and in boldest relief, inscribed in
the limited number of issues, interests, and public goods that culmi-
nated in government actions.
In fact the range of municipal actions in the nineteenth century was
relatively small, and extremely hesitant: from partial responsibility for
street improvements, to private contracting of major services such as the
water supply, and occasionally a major investment in civic improvement
such as a municipal hall or grand park. Although a number of historians
have shown how antebellum cities were busy staging grounds of differ-
ent public interests, they had a very small set of public programs and ser-
vices to show for themselves. There is still little reason to expect that
these three cities managed to disprove Sam Bass Warner's interpretation
of nineteenth-century urban history as the domain of the private city.
Too often the machinations of the capitalist market, rather than demo-
cratic deliberations, were left to determine the public good. During and
after the Civil War, furthermore, military force, governmental bureau-
cracy, and corporate franchises became larger forces in municipal life,
posing a potential threat to democratic freedoms, without necessarily
promising to distribute the beneficence of government to all the people.
One should not expect a simple story of triumphant public democracy in
the pages ahead.
The meaning of civic life in these three cities almost 170 years ago, as
today, was confusing and contradictory. Was it possible for so diverse a
people, with such different beliefs and competing interests, to mold
themselves into one public, even a harmonious circle of publics? Would
the decentralized practices of democratic associations create pandemo-
nium or a working coalition? Can a public composed of men and
women separated by their different resources and flagrant inequities op-
erate in a truly democratic manner? Can (must) democracy attempt to
moderate inequality? Could democratic politics meet the needs of so
many people living so closely together and yet often so culturally and
politically apart? Can government administer to public needs without
jeopardizing individual freedoms?
To address these basic questions I adopted a mundane empirical strat-
egy that can be quickly recapitulated. After parting with the lofty aspira-
tions of political philosophers who sought an Apollonian public realm, I
come down to earth to explore the associated democratic practices of
specific places. My research plan then takes on a tidy trinitarian shape.
To explore a full range of civic possibilities, I set my story in three differ-
18 Introduction
ent cities, each chosen to test the fiber of democracy under the most ri-
otously heterogeneous social conditions. Convinced that the quality of
civic life could not be measured or explained within the narrow com-
partments of historical specializations, I proceed on three planes of in-
vestigation—the social, the cultural, and the political. I have plotted the
history of the democratic public in an old-fashioned, linear narrative,
told from a single but hardly omniscient vantage point. Eschewing a
more fashionable posture, such as telling multiple or open-ended sto-
ries, I have indulged an irrepressible urge to make my own sense of
things and thereby give the reader a firm and fallible position to contest
against. (Such straightforward contention can be a useful mode of dis-
course in a democracy.) The narrative is divided just as predictably into
three parts. Part one describes the creation of a robust democratic politi-
cal culture between the approximate dates of 1825 and 1850: It builds up
from the first chapter on city space, to a second describing civic cere-
monies, to a third addressing politics in the conventional sense but as
conducted both inside and outside the electoral and legislative arenas.
Part two is but one chapter that recounts how, around the time of the
Civil War, the municipal public exploded into quite uncivil warfare. Part
three also contains three uneasy chapters that detail a sequence of critical
alterations in the organization of city space, culture, and politics. By its
termination, in the year 1880, civic life had quieted down significandy
and had been reshaped in some fundamental (not always democratic)
ways.
But in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco the tidy plan ran
amuck and created some major disorder. Writing urban history, much
like touching down in a busy city street, can be a delightfully disorient-
ing experience. Early in the story the civic center splinters into a kaleido-
scope of urban associations. Soon thereafter, and even before the out-
break of the Civil War, segments of the public went to war with one
another. By the end of part three, which reaches the year 1880, this ac-
count of municipal life will have earned and maintained its new tide,
"Civic Wars." Running through the whole story of democracy in the city
is a spirit of public contention, which I will first report and then, in the
conclusion, attempt to come to terms with, if not explain. For now I
will only say that I have come to believe that the often uncivil history
that I am about to describe betokens something of a civic accomplish-
ment. An indelicate balance between civility and belligerence may, in the
last analysis, be a precious contribution of the nineteenth-century city to
American democracy.
CHAPTER 1
People's Places
V
isiting New York City in 1849, Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley
fumbled for words to capture a place "unlike every city ever be-
held before." That a tourist was bewildered by "the cosmopoli-
tanism" of Gotham and "the extraordinary stir and bustle and tumult of
business going on perpetually" will surprise no one familiar with the
place and its people. But Lady Stuart Wortley did provide one more
original observation about civic life in the second quarter of the nine-
teenth century: In antebellum New York she saw "heterogeneous com-
pounds and kaleidescopical varieties presented at every turn." With these
two awkward pairs of words Lady Stuart Wordey compressed the life of
the city into an image of variety and cohesion—a "heterogeneous com-
pound"—and drew an unstable alliance between diversity and symme-
try—those "kaleidescopical varieties."1
Part one of this book will describe how, in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, American cities indeed held the complexity and con-
stant movement of urban populations together in an intricate but com-
prehensible and even pleasing whole. Before 1850 those who walked the
busy streets of New York, as well as the lively promenades of New Or-
leans or the rugged pathways of San Francisco, were less likely to express
anxious disorientation, so common in latter-day urban chronicles.
Surely the antebellum city had its detractors, and historians properly
point to growing apprehension of urban danger, especially as midcen-
tury approached.2 But the antiurban bias that has pervaded American
thought for the last century has cast a teleological shadow over a time of
21
22 Heterogeneous Compounds and Kaleidoscopic Varieties
Figure 1. Plan of New Orleans, Louisiana, 1815. Courtesy The Historic New
Orleans Collection, Museum/Research Center.
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which I have labeled centers, sectors, and arteries, that made the city in-
telligible to its inhabitants. After mapping these elements of the antebel-
lum urban plan (all of which are visible in contemporary maps), this
chapter will populate city space with some of the ordinary people who
lived and created a public there.5
“Done! Two cans of ale, it shall be.” And the [13]company betook
themselves to the yard in front of the hut.
It was a frosty autumn evening. The wind chased the clouds over the
sky, and the half moon cast fitful reflections through the breaks over
the neighborhood. In a few minutes a something was seen moving
rapidly along the edge of a thicket on the farther side of a little glade.
The watchman threw his gun carelessly to his shoulder and fired. A
derisive laugh was echo to the report. No mortal, thought they, in
such uncertain light and at such a distance, could shoot a deer in
flight.
What unseen power has brought this poor animal from Halland’s
Mountains in a bare half hour? Such were the thoughts of the
watchman’s companions as they retired in silence to the hut.
The watchman received his two cans of ale, but no one seemed
inclined to join him in disposing of them. They now understood with
what sort of a man they were having to do. It was evident to them that
the [14]watchman was in league with the Evil One himself, and they
henceforth guarded themselves carefully against companionship with
him after dark. [15]
It happened one day, that a Goatherd came that way, driving his
goats before him, up the hill.
“Who comes there?” demanded the Giant, rushing out of the hill, with
a large flint stone in his fist, when he discovered the Goatherd.
“It is I, if you will know,” responded the Herder, continuing his way up
the hill with his flock.
“If you come up here I will squeeze you into fragments as I do this
stone,” shrieked the Giant, and crushed the stone between his
fingers into fine sand.
“All right,” responded the Goatherd, “but let us first taunt each other
so that we will become right angry, for taunting will beget anger and
anger will give us cause to fight.”
“Very well, and I will begin,” said the Giant.
“Go ahead, and I will follow you,” said the Herder. [16]
“You shall become a flying devil,” retorted the Herder, and from his
bow shot a sharp arrow into the body of the Giant.
“What is that?” inquired the Giant, endeavoring to pull the arrow from
his flesh.
“In order that it may fly straight and rapidly,” answered the Herder.
“There, you have another,” said the Herder, and shot another arrow
into the Giant’s body.
“Aj! aj!” shrieked Stompe Pilt; “are you not angry enough to fight?”
“No, I have not yet taunted you enough,” replied the Herder, setting
an arrow to his bowstring.
“Drive your goats where you will. I can’t endure your taunting, much
less your blows,” shrieked Stompe Pilt, and sprang into the hill again.
Thus the Herder was saved by means of his bravery and ingenuity.
[17]
[Contents]
The Giant Finn and Lund’s Cathedral. 1
While Laurentius, such was the holy man’s name, was selecting his
site and laying out the plans for the temple, there stood at his side,
one day, none other than Finn, the giant of Helgonabacken, who
thus addressed him: “Truly the White Christ is a God worthy of such
a temple, and I will build it for you, if, when it is finished, you will tell
me what my name is; but, mark well my condition, oh, wise man, if
you can not tell me, you must give to my little ones the two small
torches—the sun and the moon—that travel yonder over heaven’s
expanse.”
Foaming with rage, the Giant rushed from the tower to the ground,
and laying hold of one of the pillars tried to pull the church down. At
this instant his wife with her child joined him. She, too, [19]grasped a
pillar and would help her husband in the work of destruction, but just
as the building was tottering to the point of falling, they were both
turned to stones, and there they lie to-day, each embracing a pillar.
[20]
1 Similar legends are connected with a number of our churches, as the cathedral
of Trondhjem, where the Troll is called “Skalle.” Also with Eskellsätter’s church
in the department of Näs in Vermland, where the giant architect is called Kinn, who
fell from the tower when the priest Eskil called, “Kinn, set the point right!” Again,
with a church in Norrland, where the Troll is called “Wind and Weather,” and
concerning whom the legend relates “that just as the giant was putting up the
cross, St. Olof said ‘Wind and Weather you have set the spire awry.’” Of the church
at Kallundborg in Själland, whose designer, Ebern Snare, it is said, entered into a
contract much the same as that made with the Giant Finn by the holy Laurentius. ↑
[Contents]
The Lord of Rosendal. 1
One day Bille’s intended made a visit to Rosendal. Upon entering the
court-yard almost the first object that attracted her attention was a
peasant tethered like a horse. She inquiring as to the cause of such
treatment, Bille informed her that the servant had come late to work,
and was now suffering only well-merited punishment. The young
woman begged Bille to set the man at liberty, but this he refused to
do, and told her, emphatically, that she must not interpose in his
affairs.
“When the intended wife,” said the young lady, as she returned to
her carriage, “is refused a boon so small, what will be the fate of the
wife?” and thereupon she commanded her coachman to drive her
home at once, and resolved to come no more to Rosendal.
“It is, indeed, I,” replied the priest, “and it is true that in my boyhood I
stole a goose, but with the money received for the goose I bought a
Bible, and with that Bible I will send you to hell, you evil spirit.”
Whereupon he struck the specter such a blow on the forehead with
the Bible that it sank again into purgatory.
Herr Arild, Alex Ugerup’s son, and Thale, Tage Thott’s fair daughter,
had, it may be said, grown up together, and even in childhood, had
conceived a strong love for each other.
Not long thereafter war broke out between Sweden and Denmark.
With anxiety and distress the lovers heard the call to arms. The
flower of Danish knighthood hastened to place themselves under the
ensign of their country, where even for Arild Ugerup a place was
prepared. At leave taking the lovers promised each other eternal
fidelity, and Arild was soon in Copenhagen, where he was given a
position in the navy.
In the beginning the Danes met with some success, but soon the
tables were turned. At Öland Klas Kristenson Horn defeated the
united Danish and Leibich flotillas, capturing three ships, with their
crews and belongings. Among the captured was Arild Ugerup, who
was carried, a prisoner, to Stockholm, where three short years
before he was an honored visitor and won his knightly spurs.
The friends of Arild entertained little hope that they would ever see
him again, and his rivals for the hand of Thale persistently renewed
their suits. Tage Thott, who saw his daughter decline the attentions
of one lover after another, decided, finally, that this conduct must not
continue, and made known to his daughter that she must choose a
husband from among the many available and desirable young men
seeking [25]her hand. Thale took this announcement very much to
heart, but her prayers and tears were without avail. Spring
succeeded winter and no Arild came. Meanwhile, the unrelenting
father had made a choice and fixed upon a day when the union
should take place.
During this time Arild, languishing in his prison, busied his brain in
the effort to find some means of escape, but plan after plan was
rejected as impracticable, until it occurred to him to make use of his
rank and acquaintance with the King. So, not long thereafter, he sent
to King Erik a petition, asking permission to go home on parole, for
the purpose of solemnizing his wedding, also to be permitted to
remain long enough in Ugerup to sow and gather his crops. The King
readily granted his petition, since Arild promised, on his knightly
honor, to return to his confinement as soon as his harvest was ripe.
Arild now had time to think about his promise to the King, and how
he might, at the same time, keep it and not be separated from his
wife. It would now profit to sow seeds that would not mature soon, so
the fields that had heretofore been devoted to corn were planted with
the seeds of the pine tree.
When the autumn had passed, and the King thought the harvest
must, by this time, have been gathered, he sent Arild a request to
come to Stockholm. But Arild convinced the messenger that his
seeds had not yet sprouted, much less ripened.
When King Erik was made acquainted with the state of affairs, he
could do no less than approve the ingenious method adopted by
Arild to obtain his freedom without breaking his word, and allowed
the matter to rest.
Many other stories are told in Skåne about Arild Ugerup and his wife.
Among others, it is related of the former that he was endowed with
marvelous strength, and that in the arch of the gateway opening into
the estate was a pair of iron hooks, which, when coming home from
Helsingborg, Arild was wont to catch hold of, and lift himself and
horse together some distance off the ground, after which little
exercise he would ride on.
His wife, Thale, was, like her husband, very strong, very good and
benevolent, likewise very generous [27]toward her dependents. A
story is told of her, that one mid-summer evening, when the servants
of the estate were gathered on the green for a dance, she requested
her husband to give the people as much food and drink as she could
carry at one load, and her request being, of course, granted, she
piled up two great heaps of beef, pork and bread, which, with two
barrels of ale, one under each arm, she carried out onto the green,
with ease. [28]
1 Arild Ugerup, the character in chief of this legend, was born in the year 1528 in
the castle of Sölversborg, where his father, Axel Ugerup, was master. When the
son had passed through the parochial school of Herrevad, and had attained to the
age of manhood, he marched, with others, to guard the old Kristian Tyrann in
Kallundborg castle. Some years later he was sent as Danish embassador, to be
present at the crowning of King Erik XIV., when he was made Knight of the Order
of St. Salvador. Later he was sent as envoy to the Russian court, and in 1587 was
raised to Lord of Helsingborg, where he died in 1587, and was buried in Ugerup
(now Köpinge) church.
Another legend, in which the seeds of the pine tree were sown, comes from
Östergötland. A lady of the nobility, living in Sölberga, had a son, who, in the battle
of Stångebro took sides with King Sigismund, and when the battle was lost had to
fly the country. The aged mother mourned deeply over her son’s absence, and
besieged Duke Karl with prayers to allow her misguided son to return home, to
make her a visit, at least.
At last he was granted permission to return and visit his mother until—the order
read, “The next harvest.” Whereupon the mother sowed pine seeds on the fields of
Sölberg, which accounts for the uncommonly fine forests of pine even now existing
on the estate. ↑
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