Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

In China, Lucy said, any wandering tramp can claim to be a doctor, and the best professionals were hardly better. “There is no knowledge of surgery deserving of the name. As, for example, students are practiced at thrusting long needles at draped images of the human form, and when they have proved able to hit all the parts with great precision, they are considered to be qualified surgeons. Thus, in the province of Quang Tung, a woman with a severe headache was treated by having a needle thrust into the interior of her ear. Of course the tympanum was destroyed. Another patient, in the province of Chili, was treated for a pain in the back. It was plain to the native surgeon that a counter-irritant was necessary in front, so he thrust a needle through one of her eyes. In Shantung a cholera patient had six long needles stuck deep into each arm and leg, and into the abdomen, and two into each side of the face.”⁴²²

Unimpressed by acupuncture, Lucy was equally critical of Chinese pharmaceuticals. “One commonly supposed efficacious treatment is to burn incense before some special medicine idol, to tickle his ears so as to waken him to the emergency of the case, and then to take some of the ashes of the burnt incense-sticks home to the sick-room. In the temples I have seen luck-boxes shaken, and the stick which falls out of their inclosed bundle tells which kind of medicine to take. In a Chinese apothecary’s shop we will find dried caterpillars and worms, shavings of deer and goat horn, pieces of the skin of the elephant and the rhinoceros, tiger’s bones, dried centipedes and snake-skins.”⁴²³ The millions of degraded and subjugated women of Asia could be saved by Christianity, if American women thoroughly trained in medical science brought it to them.

Lucy’s daughter, Helen, did not show much aptitude for medicine, but the seed of a medical career had been planted in her son’s mind. Although Willie could not continue his chicken experiments in Brooklyn, he set out on botanical expeditions through the park, collecting plant specimens he would later try to identify.⁴²⁴ Like many city boys he entered the newspaper business. The wholesale price of a copy of the New York Post was two cents, while the sales price was three, so a boy who minded his accounts could earn a penny apiece. He carefully analyzed the figures for ten different weekday evening papers, gave the morning papers less attention, and decided to stay out of the Sabbath-breaking and costly Sunday trade. The last week of January 1885 he earned $10.36 and carried on at this lucrative rate through the spring.⁴²⁵ With great care, Willie printed formal calling cards on his own printing press, “Wm. S. Bainbridge,” their ornate letters prophesying a successful professional career of one kind or another.⁴²⁶

Willie enlisted in the Cadet Company of the Thirteenth Regiment of the New York National Guard. This was serious business, both because it marked a long step toward the masculine dream of military achievement, and because the Regiment was an important part of Brooklyn’s social life. On Washington’s birthday, men and boys staged a mock battle in Prospect Park, and Willie proudly helped capture a prisoner.⁴²⁷ At age fifteen with the rank of private, he served on the reception committee for a cadet drill presided over by mayor Seth Low.⁴²⁸

Willie’s parents liked to see their delicate son in command, and they pushed him toward the trappings of war. His father was especially fond of guns and claimed to be the inventor of a superior automatic pistol.⁴²⁹ To his distress, the long-barreled, muzzle-loading Revolutionary War shotgun that Samuel Bainbridge had inherited went to his sister Frances, eventually to hang over the fire place of her son-in-law, dramatist Augustus Thomas.⁴³⁰

Willie rose to the rank of corporal and marched with his fellows down to Plymouth Church to hear a sermon on the text “be strong and of good courage, fervent in spirit serving the Lord,”⁴³¹ preached by Henry Ward Beecher, the regiment’s chaplain.⁴³² Regarded by many as the greatest American orator of the era, Beecher was a womanizer who was able to preach about morality despite the publicity given one of his adulterous affairs. He had become so identified with the ambitions of his upwardly mobile middle class parishioners, and his gospel of love so successfully wrapped the naked sexuality of the era in the robes of piety, that he was invulnerable to scandal.⁴³³

Plymouth Church lacked a pulpit, and Beecher acted out his drama on a theatrical stage. His doctrines connected with themes that would be important in Willie’s own life. Beecher preached the harmony of science and religion, the nobility of striving for economic success, reliance upon intuition rather than upon church authority or theological argument to settle moral questions, and a hierarchical model of humanity in which a few great souls could elevate themselves far above the masses.⁴³⁴

Life seemed splendid in the summer of 1886, as one hundred and fifty people, including the governor of Rhode Island, converged on the little cottage in Warwick, to celebrate the twentieth wedding anniversary of Lucy and William.⁴³⁵ The one problem facing the family was what to do with their faithful servant, Maggie the Irish girl, and her frail baby. Helen and Willie would go to boarding schools, while Lucy and William were in Brooklyn. Maggie would have to find work in Providence, but she could not do so with the baby. As they were preparing to close the cottage, Lucy hunted high and low for a willing orphanage or nursery, to no success. At the last possible moment, during a terrible thunderstorm, Lucy and Maggie knelt on the cottage floor and prayed for divine aid. Suddenly there was a terrible flash of lightening! Maggie ran terrified to her baby and found him lifeless. Willie rushed in search of a doctor. When the physician had finished his examination, he said, “The little fellow has gone away on the storm.”⁴³⁶

Days after the lightening flash, Willie arrived at Mohegan Lake School, four miles east of the village of Peekskill, New York, on a mile-long lake, certified free of malaria and enjoying “a salubrious and bracing mountain atmosphere.” In warm weather, the boys could swim or row around the lake in three boats, for much of the year the banks seemed made for fishing, and in winter they could ice skate. In this rural setting “free from the distracting and pernicious influences of large towns and railroad centres,” the school intended “to give a thorough, Christian, preparatory education to boys from ten to eighteen years of age.”⁴³⁷ The catalogue proclaimed, “We do not aim to reform bad boys, but to train the young and inexperienced, so that they may become good men.”⁴³⁸

Mohegan’s four instructors prepared boys for Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, West Point and Annapolis. For $450 per year, the school taught reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, oratory, composition, penmanship, government and double-entry book-keeping. Modern languages and piano, accomplishments that Willie never mastered, cost extra. Much of his time was spent drilling with muskets on the four-acre parade ground, where he was expected to acquire erect carriage and elastic step, and working out in the gymnasium. His first year, Willie just barely made the honor roll, but he won awards for greatest improvement in penmanship and greatest effort to do well in deportment. He was quickly promoted to second sergeant, alongside five other lads who constituted the officer corps of the forty-two-boy student body, with important responsibilities such as marching at the head of their squads and organizing the dances for the annual reception.⁴³⁹ William wrote the Yale-educated principal, “Mrs. Bainbridge and myself are more than satisfied with the opportunities our son has enjoyed at your school. We are fully persuaded that his intellectual, physical and moral advantages could not have been better at any school in this land.”⁴⁴⁰

Every Sunday, the boys received Presbyterian or Episcopal services, under the watchful eye of Major Henry Waters, instructor in mathematics, Latin and tactics. Although he always sat in the front, where he could set a good example of rapt attention to the sermons, the Major could watch the boys with a mirror he kept concealed in his hymnal.⁴⁴¹ In December, Willie was baptized, by full immersion as his father’s denomination demanded, and he treasured the congratulatory letter the Major wrote him.⁴⁴² The school’s catalogue maintained that “a profound regard for truth, combined with a reverent love for the Divine Being, is justly regarded as the only solid and lasting foundation for an exalted character. Every member of the school is taught to regard the Bible as God’s revealed will, and to govern his life by its precepts. A portion of every Lord’s Day is devoted to the study of the Scriptures, and class instruction is given in them as faithfully as in any other study.”⁴⁴³

The Dreadful Catastrophe
William delved ever deeper into his own studies, and began ignoring his pastoral duties. His old classmate and rival, Adolphus Behrends, was then pastor of Brooklyn’s Central Congregational Church and a chief supporter of the Mission Society. Behrends had just published Socialism and Christianity, arguing that Christianity was the best source of social justice.⁴⁴⁴ William began a new book out of the wreckage of From Eden to Patmos. Drawing upon his graduate training in ancient languages, and his archaeological experiences in the Middle East, he would write a great volume that explained the meaning and etymology of every place name in the Bible. If successful, this would be the masterpiece of sacred toponymy that would establish William as a great scholar.

His second cousin, William Watts Folwell, had studied philology, and was now a respected senior professor at the University of Minnesota, having served as its president for fifteen years.⁴⁴⁵ Thomas R. Lounsbury, Folwell's brother-in-law, was on the faculty at Yale. William had established a science of missions, but a decade before the first sociology courses at any American university the demand for sociology of religion was nonexistent. Now he would turn to a better established science, linguistics, and employ it to understand God’s words in a new way.

There were dangers in this course, however. A tablet unearthed in Ashur-bani-pal’s library at Nineveh told of a great deluge similar to Noah’s flood, complete with an animal-filled ark and birds sent in search of land, but lacking the Lord of the Israelites. Other records proved that the deluge tale was among the most widely known legends of Mesopotamia, raising the alarming possibility that the Biblical version was but one myth among many, perhaps an adaptation by the Hebrews from the lore of the greater civilization that overshadowed them from the east. Thus there was a risk that rooting the Bible in scientific archaeology might drain the scriptures of their supernatural character.⁴⁴⁶

As her husband faltered, Lucy threw herself into mission work to make his career a success. She created a Women’s Auxiliary for the Brooklyn City Mission Society, attracting donations of money and time from thousands of ladies.⁴⁴⁷ Lucy explained, “The women’s auxiliary work was home work; house to house visitation. That meant the sending of an intelligent godly woman into the tenement house who had time to talk to the mother, get her interested in the Bible and finally get her into the Church.”⁴⁴⁸ They also distributed food and clothing, some of it through charity diet dispensaries that tried to feed poor people suffering from illness.⁴⁴⁹ “This work has a religious side to it,” Lucy asserted. “When the body is sick the heart is peculiarly inaccessible. You cannot preach Christ to an empty stomach.”⁴⁵⁰

Ladies of every station in life, from the mayor’s wife on down, gathered in the Church of the Pilgrims on October 13, 1887 to celebrate the growth of the Woman’s Auxiliary and its liquidation of the Mission Society’s debt under Lucy’s presidency. Reverend R. S. Storrs prayed for their success, and a newspaper reporter jotted down his words: “He said that woman was a blessing as she was an opponent of sin, and was made to do good. Women were blamed for causing the trouble in the Garden of Eden, but he thought that if Adam blamed Eve for what was done there on that memorable occasion he was no gentleman.”⁴⁵¹

Another reporter noted, “There were at least five hundred women present, and, to their shame be it said, but five or six men, and when they were mentioned by Dr. Storrs they blushed to the roots of their hair for their recalcitrant sex. Even the ushers, who conducted the strangers to seats, were smiling-faced maidens fashionably attired and wearing orange badges on their breasts as an evidence of their official capacity and of their interest in the good work of providing for the wants of the poor and the necessities of those suffering from sickness.”⁴⁵²

Then Lucy spoke. “When I was at the front at Petersburg during the war it was not the lint and bandages that I furnished to the suffering ones that healed the wounds so much as the evidence furnished the sufferers that there were millions of sacrificing and sympathizing friends at home who were willing to aid them. It is not so much the $3,000 which the women of Brooklyn have raised during the year but the fact that there were 8,000 sacrificing and sympathizing sisters and mothers who have bound themselves together to continue the work. They will meet their reward in heaven and their acts are on record in the big book. One page is devoted to the acts of the Home Visiting Committee; another to the meetings in private parlors and in out-of-the-way places where their acts are not recorded by the reporters of the daily press. Still another page is devoted to the good work done among the poor working girls.” Here Lucy’s voice trembled. “Girls who have the same instincts as you or I, sisters, but not the same comfortable homes and who are forced to dwell in crowded tenements and boarding-houses.” The ladies of Brooklyn had opened homes for their reclamation. “They have also wrought in the penal institutions, the jails, the penitentiaries and in the hospitals and asylums, and this, too, has been recorded above in figures not to be written by human fingers. They have entered the slimy swamps of sin everywhere and have done good, and I thank God that their efforts have been crowned with success!”⁴⁵³

At the beginning of March, 1888, Lucy staged an international cradle song musicale to raise money for her husband,⁴⁵⁴ and when the Great Bloizzard came she was on the road once more. On Sunday, March 10, she addressed the Deckerstown Presbyterian Sunday school in the morning and the Ladies Missionary Society in the evening. Brandishing pagan idols she had collected on her world tour, she stunned her audiences with incidents of heathen life and heroic stories of Christianity in Asia. When the deep snow and blinding wind prevented her from leaving, she set up headquarters in the minister’s home and continued her extravaganza for another week. The storm began to lift on Wednesday, so the ladies of the missionary society swarmed to hear a sequel. On Thursday Lucy staged a “Heathen Frolic” at the parsonage, acting out exotic customs in alien costumes, and on Friday a large audience trudged through the hip-deep snow to the prayer meeting hall for an animated lecture on the life and superstitions of the heathen world. From Brooklyn, where fifty-mile-per-hour winds had blown two feet of snow into drifts high enough to hide an occasional horse or human corpse, William wired that neither the ferries nor the street cars were running.⁴⁵⁵

To the great pride of his parents, Willie graduated from Mohegan in June as senior officer of cadets. He bravely gave two speeches in the long ceremony, “The Chinese in America” and “The New South.” The Peekskill Cornet Band played its heart out for the competitive drill between two companies of cadets, the battalion drill in which they marched as a unit, and the inspiring dress parade.⁴⁵⁶

That summer was a watershead for Willie. Fever laid him low, and Lucy rejoiced when he recovered despite the ravenous appetite she needed to gratify with six meals a day plus four or five lunches.⁴⁵⁷ His interest in biology had matured into a desire to become a surgeon. Among his happiest moments were spent dissecting with Lucy’s friend Dr. Eliza Mosher, and he took apart seven cats collected from the streets of Brooklyn.⁴⁵⁸

Medical role models included not only Dr. Mosher and Lucy’s memories of her mother, but also Louis Livingston Seaman, a distant cousin of Lucy and descended from Doctor Valentine Seaman who had first brought the family to Ballston Spa, where Lucy’s father was born, to try the curative waters in 1792.⁴⁵⁹ Louis attended Cornell, graduated from Jefferson Medical College in 1876 with the gold medal, and earned a law degree from New York University in 1884. In 1886, just when the Bainbridges were settling in Brooklyn, he toured the hospitals of China and India to study contagious and epidemic diseases, then returned to private practice in New York City.⁴⁶⁰

Dr. Mosher took Willie to Chautauqua, the summer religious center in upstate New York, where he soon became inspired by Dr. Jay W. Seaver. He was a pioneer of anthropometry , the science of measuring the human body, and his laboratory contained every possible device to survey Willie’s dimensions. As a systematic form of examination, coupled with scientific gymnastics, anthropometry promised physical excellence.⁴⁶¹

Chautauqua was founded in 1874 by two Methodists, clergyman John Heyl Vincent and businessman-inventor Lewis Miller. Initially they intended only to create a summer training institute for Sunday school teachers, but soon it was a complex mix of correspondence courses, branch Chautauquas, and a summer center that presented every manner of cultural uplift. The Chautauqua movement asserted that the whole of life should be a school and that the true basis of education was religion. Miller wrote, “Chautauqua was founded for an enlarged recognition of the Word.” There, inquiring people of every denomiantion could “with square and plumb, with compass and sun-dial, with telescope and microscope, with steam-engine and telegraph, with laboratory and blackboard, with hammer and spade, search out the deep and hidden mysteries of the Book.”⁴⁶²

For Vincent, “All knowledge becomes glorified in the man whose heart is consecrated to God.”⁴⁶³ “Away with this dividing up of things! All things that are legitimate are of God. The human intellect belongs to God, and it is to be cultivated for him.”⁴⁶⁴ “Look through microscopes, but find God. Look through telescopes, but find God. Look for him revealed in the throbbing life about you, in the palpitating stars above, in the marvelous records of the earth beneath you, and in your own souls.”⁴⁶⁵ This gospel suited the Bainbridges precisely, and after they sold the Warwick cottage, Chautauqua became their summer home.

At the season’s end, Willie entered Columbia University to study science and medicine, and his vast resolve to excel made it seem right thenceforth to call him Will. Following in the footsteps of his father and his father’s father, he joined Delta Upsilon fraternity.⁴⁶⁶ Sometimes he was not equal to the heavy family demand for excellence, and he found that he could not concentrate on his studies without taking time for physical exercise, such as tennis.⁴⁶⁷

As Will advanced toward a career, his father retreated. William’s linguistic project stole time from the mission work, and despite all of Lucy’s best efforts, things were beginning to go very badly. Their home at 160 Prospect Place was the scene of frightful arguments, and Will would always remember the shouting and recriminations. Lucy pushed the Women’s Auxiliary for all it was worth, but her husband gave little help. Will began to suspect that his father was going insane. William’s scholarly obsession had grown into delusions of intellectual grandeur, and his venomous criticism of churchmen had deepened into feelings of persecution by vile enemies. In the spring of 1889, William resigned his position as superintendent of the Brooklyn City Mission Society.

Disoriented and apprehensive, Lucy prepared for her last meeting with the Woman’s Auxiliary. Uncharacteristically finding it difficult to speak, she reminisced to the assembly about her three years of city mission work. She mentioned her effort to “shed the light of grace on the factory girls,” how she had “rented a ground floor of a building that was a cross between a Chinese laundry and a Dutch grocery store,” but now a “nice little church” stood on that spot. Overcome by emotion, she referred to the fact she was about to leave the society, and she introduced William’s successor, Dr. Le Lacheure.

Unaware of the full magnitude of Lucy’s sorrow, a newspaper reporter speculated about her future. “When Mrs. Bainbridge was asked where she was going from this city she answered that the destination of herself and husband would not be determined for three weeks, but it was learned afterward that Mr. Bainbridge expected to be appointed to a foreign consulship.”⁴⁶⁸ In William’s dreams of glory, nothing could be more plausible than that he would be offered an important diplomatic position, but in truth everyone had lost confidence in him.

William eventually stumbled into another job. Down in Wilmington, his relative George W. Folwell had been the first pastor of the Delaware Avenue Baptist from 1866 until 1874.⁴⁶⁹ Now, the church was deeply in debt and hungry for a pastor who might rescue it. William’s family connection and his knowledge of world missions overcame all doubts. To restore her damaged pride, Lucy went to Brown’s photographic parlor in Wilmington for a formal portrait, dressed in a dark suit with high, pointed shoulders, a brooch pinned at the front of her collar, her hair pulled severely back and coiled in a flat bun behind her head.⁴⁷⁰

Sensing that the family crisis was reaching its crescendo, Lucy pulled out all the stops when she staged tableaux for an audience of four hundred to pay down the Delaware Avenue Church debt. Sixteen young people stood stock still in exotic costumes, like figures from romantic oil paintings. Druids prepared a human sacrifice. A Japanese mother and boy prayed, “Oh Buddha, we take refuge in thee.” Simulated Chinese demonstrated Confucian worship. Other tableaux illustrated a Burmese wedding and the religious devotions of India, Egypt, Turkey and Russia. Lucy made her listeners gasp at Chinese foot binding, as she waved a pair of tiny shoes and described the pain, and she made them chuckle over her ride in a Chinese wheelbarrow, counterbalanced by a dead hog.⁴⁷¹

Lucy’s bravura performance gave William’s pastorship some momentum, but it did little to resolve the family’s crisis. William said that a church should not love its pastor too much, because “he is made out of common dust, and has his full share of all the frailties of human nature. He also is sure to make his mistakes, and they are very conspicuous because of his conspicuous position.”⁴⁷² Working for a fraction of a full pastor’s wage, he felt free to devote much of his time to his great manuscript, and give no time at all to the family.