The Daily Dispatch: November 14, 1860., [Electronic resource]

The Prince of Wales in New York.

There was no pomp or pageantry attempted of any kind, no grand liveries or gilded coaches. There was a military procession, but that was only an item in the great feature of the day, which was the welcome of the people. It was such a welcome as only a whole people and a free people could ever give, and in the details of its enthusiasm and its good order there was much, strange as it may seem, that made such a reception possible only in New York. In Paris it would have been a governmental affair of soldiers and gendarmes; in London it would have been a mob with an immense police force to control it. Here it was simply the people turning out in hundreds of thousands. A huge sea of decorous, but most enthusiastic spectators, who even at the spots where they were densest were yet so quiet, so impressive in their majesty of good order, that at no one place did they seem to have a single element in common with what we call a mob.

It seemed more a gigantic meeting of the citizens of New York, convened for some great and solemn rejoicing along the whole length of the city, than the mere chance mustering of its busy, restless, and excitable population. It was such a grand display of popular enthusiasm, there was such a dignity in the calm reliance felt by every one in the preservation of order, such a perfect warmth and geniality of kindness evinced from highest to lowest towards the young visitor, as made the whole demonstration, perhaps, one of the most remarkable of its kind that has ever taken place. Quiet and demure as are the English people, there are yet few Englishmen who can realize the fact of the whole inhabitants of an immense city turning out to witness a spectacle and give a cordial welcome, intrusted at the same time with the duty of keeping order among themselves. Yet this was actually the case at New York; and along three miles of road, thronged with half a million or more of spectators there were not fifty policemen, and even these were only stationed at intersecting streets to stop carts and vehicles from entering the line of the route. Yet description does not easily convey the idea of such a multitude — the strict, the rigid good order and good humor that prevailed. This, too, was not for an hour, or only while the Prince was passing. It was the unvarying demeanor of the whole concourse from ten in the day till past six at night.

The public of New York had been so schooled and abused by all their journals as to the necessity for a quiet, yet kindly welcome, that one would almost have thought, from the tone of the articles, that the populace of this great city were a mere horde of untutored miscreants, people to whom it was necessary to point out the most ordinary rules of civilized intercourse. In fact, throughout the whole course of this tour, with few exceptions, the New York journals have never ceased to heap dirt upon the manners and customs of their own countrymen. A little crowding at the country towns, the mere harmless curiosity of villagers, en route, has been transformed in the columns of certain newspapers into studied outrages, and visited, in the columns of the New York Herald particularly, with such a downpour of maudlin "Billingsgate," as if any sensible American ever minded how that journal raved, must have made the poor country people regret the hour they ever saw his Royal Highness at all.

A long, deep, tremendous, sustained cheer greeted the Prince, whose appearance astonished every one. Slight and almost boyish in his appearance in morning dress, in uniform and on horseback he looks a young nobleman, of whom, apart from his exalted position, any Englishman might be proud to see acknowledged as a representative of his nation. He sits a horse as only young Englishmen can, and receives his homage of welcome with the easy grace of one to the manor born. Certainly, as he cantered down to the Battery, his horse rearing and prancing with timidity at the tumult of cheers around, he looked even worthy of the great welcome that awaited him, and more than this it would be difficult to say.--In the Battery were drawn up in successive lines five brigades of the New York militia--mustering in all some 6,000 or 7,000 men.--Taken as a type of the volunteers of this country, they certainly were splendid specimens. In the 3d brigade were the 7th regiment, the pride and admiration of New York. They are undoubtedly, a most perfect body of soldiers, equal in all the minute technicalities of discipline to our very best line regiments.

I must own, however, I cannot share in the feeling here which awards all praise to the 7th, and I cannot pay the militia of New York a higher compliment than to say that, to my unprejudiced eye, there were several other regiments there almost, if not quite, as good as the famous 7th. The 4th Brigade, to use Lord John Russell's simile, was "conspicuous for the absence of the 69th Regiment. Colonel Corcoran and his officers and men refused to turn out to welcome the Prince. The inspection of the militia merely consisted of riding slowly along the front of each corps. Every regiment drooped colors and presented arms as the Prince approached them surveying with open admiration the handsome uniforms, the erect, steady, military aspect of every company, regiment, and brigade on the ground. As a volunteer militia, they certainly formed a body of men of whom any nation might feel proud.