“Gath” and Gilded Age Washington
Few Gilded Age journalists wielded their pen with greater effect than the correspondent known as “Gath.”
Born in Delaware in 1841, George Alfred Townsend came to prominence as a correspondent for the New York Herald and New York World during the war and the hunt for Abraham Lincoln’s assassin that followed. In the introduction to a volume based on his memoirs of covering the Civil War, Lida Mayo writes that Townsend “loved the life of a correspondent”– a passion that comes through in his writing, whether the subject was the war or the scandal-filled years that followed.
[image error]
George Alfred Townsend, a k a “Gath.” Library of Congress photo.
He was a journalist and novelist. His western Maryland estate is now a state park that features a monument to the “Bohemian Brigade” of Civil War correspondents.
Townsend had a writer’s eye for detail and a penchant for pointed observation. Describing Richmond, which he entered shortly after its fall to Union forces in 1865, he noted the absence of churches or factories along the James – “only here and there a pleasant mansion, flanked by Negro cabins” – to make a broader point about the stagnation of the slave economy.
A bronze equestrian statue of George Washington, located near the fallen rebel capitol, offered an opportunity to comment on the folly of secession. “Gazing beyond at the capitol itself, and back again at the figure which overlooks the building, it is not hard to imagine that, while the noisy debates of a congress of traitors to the Union that he founded were in progress, those bronze lips sometimes smiled in scorn.”
In the years after the war, Townsend wrote for the Chicago Tribune, where he assumed a pen name made up of his initials – G-A-T with an “h” at the end for good measure. The resulting non de plume reflected Townsend’s religious upbringing (he was the son of a minister) and his capacity for whimsy. Gath was a Philistine city whose inhabitants were afflicted with illness when the captured Ark of the Covenant was brought into town (1 Samuel 5: 9) — and it was the home of Goliath (1 Samuel 17:4).
Like the rest of the country, Townsend grappled with the legacy of the war. His contempt for the rebels was never in doubt – he rolled his eyes at the worship of Stonewall Jackson by Lost Cause romantics – but he had little sympathy for Reconstruction. A tour of the South in 1872 for the Chicago Tribune detailed corruption in Arkansas and South Carolina while discounting or ignoring the plight of former slaves. His reporting from below the Mason-Dixon Line helped crystallize emerging Northern impatience with post-war efforts to rebuild the South.
Townsend traveled widely for the Tribune – not only down south but to Boston as well. He wrote about Louis Napoleon and the actor Edwin Forrest. His columns from Washington described the dueling grounds at Bladensburg, Md., as well as political events. His expansive reporting led, in 1874, to the publication of Washington and Inside, perhaps the best of the “guide-to-your-nation’s-capitol” books that appeared in the years after Appomattox.
[image error]
But it was as a chronicler of the sleazy politics of the Gilded Age that Gath excelled. Few if any correspondents of the day could write more vividly about the personalities that dominated the Capitol.
That became evident in one of Gath’s first pieces in the Tribune, in which he compared two prominent congressional Republicans — smooth, oily Ohio Sen. John Sherman and Rep. Elihu Washburne of Illinois.
Sherman “displays a deferential modulation, a soft gesture of the head and flowing motions of the palms,” Townsend wrote. Sherman was skilled at the art of persuasion but perhaps less attuned to the ethics of the issues about which he speaks. “[N]o man in the United States knows right from wrong so well as John Sherman,” Townsend told his readers, “or makes the distinction so infrequently.”
Washburne, on the other hand, exhibited a refreshing economy of language as he spoke on an appropriations bill. Where Townsend found Sherman unctuous and oily, Washburne presented a “large, broad, ‘square-footed’ bearing’” that projected a combative honesty.
[image error]
Rep. Elihu Washburne. Library of Congress.
“I thought,” Townsend wrote, “that if all this Congress could imbibe his spirit, to say ‘no’ to office beggars and lobbyists, to permit no easy nature to yield up each member’s personal custody of the Treasury but hold in fierce and unrelenting vigilance every dollar and every officer, how worthily this year might be made to appear among the recent years of physical courage – a year of moral courage, of sacrifice, and of honesty.”
Although vivid, Townsend’s description of Washburne reveals what was his greatest weakness as a writer. Even allowing for the stylistic differences of nineteenth-century writing, his literary toolkit did not come equipped with brevity or declarative sentences.
Nevertheless, Townsend – and a handful of others, notably Henry Van Ness Boynton of the Cincinnati Gazette – represented something new and important as journalism began to become a profession rather than an extension of partisan politics.
That became evident in the early weeks of the Credit Mobilier sensation in 1872. Shortly after the New York Sun published its expose of the stock sales to members of Congress, the Tribune sent Townsend to Philadelphia to get to the bottom of the scandal.
Why Philadelphia? That’s where disgruntled Credit Mobilier investor Henry S. McComb had filed suit against Republican Rep. Oakes Ames of Massachusetts to obtain more shares of the profitable Union Pacific construction subsidiary with the strange name. In the course of deposition testimony, McComb produced letters from Ames in which the lawmaker explained that he had no more shares to provide because he was placing it with members of Congress to promote the interests of the Union Pacific.
In chasing down the story, Townsend accomplished something remarkable. His piece for the Tribune, published Sept. 17, 1872, focused on the story behind the story and represents an early example of the press reporting on itself. He retraced the steps of New York Sun correspondent Albert M. Gibson, who broke the story, and concluded that the scoop was the result of careful scheming by McComb’s attorney, Jeremiah Black.
Recalling the sensation of hitting pay dirt as he investigated what would become the biggest story of his career, Gibson in later years wrote that “To say that I was startled at my ‘find’ would inadequately explain my mental state.” Townsend, writing for the Tribune, concluded the discovery was somewhat less miraculous — it “had first met the eye of Jerry Black.”
Townsend’s investigation of the story would lead him to McComb, toward whom he seemed to take a liking. The Delaware-born railroad speculator displayed a “semi-Southern tone and spirit of genial address, magnanimous personal impulses, the touch of honor, and the carriage of a man of the world, yet heedful of his reputation.”
But Townsend was nothing if not intellectually honest. In the years to come, he would revise his generous assessment of McComb, who died in 1881 after reckless speculation in Mississippi railroads. The man he once saw an aspiring Cavalier had revealed himself to be “jealous of money and belligerent when deprived of his share of it.”
The work of Townsend, Boynton, Gibson and other Gilded Age scribblers is chronicled in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, available at amazon.com
[image error]
