|
During the Revolution, the regular jails of the city not sufficing to contain the American prisoners, churches and sugar houses were converted into prisons. Crowded into these, the patriot prisoners were subjected by their British jailers to such cruelties and privations that thousands died of disease and starvation; and day by day the dead were carried out and thrown into trenches. Tradition has it that many were so buried here; and the monument was erected at a time when the city proposed to cut a street through the Trinity Church yard at this point.
On the left, as we enter at the lower Broadway gate, is the monument, "In memory of Captain James Lawrence, of the United States Navy, who fell on the 1st day of June, 1813, in the 32d year of his age, in the action between the frigates Chesapeake and Shannon. " The tribute on the pedestal reads:
The heroic commander of the frigate Chesapeake, whose remains are here deposited, expressed with his expiring breath his devotion to his country. Neither the fury of battle, the anguish of a mortal wound, nor the horrors of approaching death could subdue his gallant spirit. His dying words were,
"DON'T GIVE THE SHIP."
The wife of Captain Lawrence, who survived her husband for more than fifty years, lies beside him. Just beyond is the bronze statue of Judge John Watts, who was Recorder of the City in Colonial days.
Alexander Hamilton's tomb is marked by the conspicuous white marble monument in the south grounds near the Rector street railing. On the pedestal is inscribed:
To the memory of Alexander Hamilton the Corporation of Trinity Church has erected this monument in testimony of their respect for the Patriot of Incorruptible Integrity, the Soldier of Approved Valor, the Statesman of Consummate Wisdom, whose talents and virtues will be admired by grateful posterity long after this marble shall have moldered into dust. He died July 12, 1804, aged 47.
Here, too, is the grave of his wife, who died in 1854, after a widow-hood of fifty years.
But we cannot begin to catalogue the names of the distinguished dead who repose here—Livingston and Lewis, signers of the Declaration of Independence; Albert Gallatin, who succeeded Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury; Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat.
If we were to tell them all, whose monuments and headstones are legible to-day, there would yet remain the host whose names have been eaten from the stones by the tooth of time, and the yet greater host whose resting places are unmarked' and whose names are unknown. Trinity's dead number many tens of thousands.
From various points in the churchyard we get glimpses through the trees of the great office buildings on Broadway, chief among them the American Surety Building, with its gilded cornice shining against the blue of the sky. On the south the stupendous facade of the Empire Building extends from Broadway to Church street; on the west is the United States Express Company's Building, and on the other side of Broadway are the Manhattan Life and the Union Trust. On the north rises the twenty-one-story Trinity Building, its facade stretching from Broadway to Church street and rising 280 feet in the air.
Trinity Church, established in 1697, is the richest church society in America. From its income of $775,000 a year it supports the parent church and eight chapels (St. Paul's among them), contributes regularly to twenty-four congregations, and maintains schools, a dispensary, a hospital and a long list of charitable enterprises. The two plots of real estate occupied by Trinity and St. Paul's would bring a fabulous price.
|
