#How a rich layabout became an activist and founded the ASPCA

Henry Bergh was born in 1813, the son of a wealthy shipbuilder with a thriving business on the East River. He inherited a substantial fortune the year he turned 30, and for much of his life, there was little to indicate that he would amount to much of anything. He went to Columbia, but never graduated. He married an Englishwoman, then spent years traveling around Europe with her.

When he came back to New York, Bergh attempted to make a name for himself as an author and a playwright, failing miserably. “I wondered at his persistence,” said one theater manager, who found “positively no merit” in his writing. Even a close friend admitted that he had no sense of humor.

Then, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln sent Bergh to Russia as part of the diplomatic corps, and his life changed forever.

There, he saw a peasant whipping his horse in a St. Petersburg street and ordered his driver to stop the carriage. Confronted, the peasant dropped his whip in terror, Bergh said — and it was then, he realized, that gentle persuasion would not convince men to abandon cruelty — they had to be cowed into submission.

This moment gave Bergh the spark to eventually found the ASPCA, writes Ernest Freeberg in “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement” (Basic Books), out now — and finally create the legacy he yearned for.

Bergh returned to Manhattan inspired. By 1866, he’d convinced state legislators in Albany to grant him a charter for an “American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” and served as the nonprofit organization’s first head, taking no salary.

He plunged into the role with enthusiasm, whether he was stopping streetcars pulled by tired horses (ignoring any traffic that backed up behind him), or demanding that master showman P.T. Barnum stop feeding live rabbits to snakes in his downtown Manhattan museum.

Bergh said he found “supreme joy” in his work, which helped make him one of the city’s biggest celebrities in the decades after the war. Whispers followed him as he stalked the streets, and parents would point out the “tall, elegant” crusader to their children.

Eventually his fame spread beyond the city, as he began accepting invitations to give lectures to animal-welfare groups across the United States. Five years after the ASPCA’s founding, French-born New Yorker Louis Bonard helped secure the organization’s future for good.

Bonard was known to his neighbors on Wooster Street as a miser who spent his days holed up in his rundown apartment. It turned out, though, that he was sitting on a fortune he’d made as a fur trader before coming to the city — and, on his deathbed, he sought Bergh out, offering the ASPCA his entire estate of roughly $100,000, just shy of $2 million in 2020 dollars.

Bonard’s family, who hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years, challenged the will, claiming he was insane. They said Bonard wanted to be reincarnated as an animal and hoped his bequest would give him absolution from the violence of his past career. But the courts sided with the ASPCA, and Bergh used the inheritance to expand the foundation’s offices.

And yet, Bergh showed little joy in success. His “melancholy air” and “sad expression” was observed by reporters throughout his life. Convinced that animal rights would only be achieved through brutal repercussions, he openly fantasized about seeing men who beat horses stripped of their shirts, bound and flogged until they bled, describing the notion as “charming.”

As the years passed, his entire life became wrapped up in the ASPCA. His wife, suffering from a brain disease, moved to a sanitarium outside the city, leaving him on his own except for two adult nephews who occasionally stayed with him at the family’s home on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village and helped manage the foundation.

In the end, the physical exertion of constantly confronting animal abusers on the streets of Manhattan took its toll on Bergh, who died in the middle of a blizzard in early 1888, his heart weakened by bronchitis. Though the press revelled one last time in the image they had created of the 74-year-old activist as a “crank” and “the oddest of men,” his longtime adversary P.T. Barnum pushed through the snow to attend the funeral for the “kind, noble-hearted man” he considered — despite their many public feuds — as one of his “oldest and most valued friends.”