But Barnum had many friends as well as detractors. Individuals, corporations, hotels, actors, actresses and singers, financiers and leading citizens, offered him loans, gifts, benefit performances, and other forms of aid. A letter signed by more than one thousand business organizations and citizens, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, James W. Gerard, Simeon Draper and Robert Stuyvesant, was published in the New York newspapers. It urged Barnum to accept a series of public benefit performances that his wife and children might have security. Barnum answered, declining, “because I have ever made it a point to ask nothing of the public on personal grounds, and should prefer, while I can possibly avoid that contingency, to accept nothing from it without the honest conviction that I had individually given it in return a full equivalent.” He added that he still had his health and felt competent, while that remained with him, to earn a livelihood for himself and his family. Bridgeport congregated in a mass meeting, headed by the Mayor, and resolved its utmost sympathy for its distinguished citizen. Mr. Dwight Morris said that “it was principally to him [Barnum] that they owed their present beautiful resting-place for the dead. (Applause.)”[15] Some citizens of Bridgeport offered him $50,000. Barnum thanked them for their kind resolutions and declined their generosity. He wrote to his townsfolk in part: “No man who has not passed through similar scenes can fully comprehend the misery which has been crowded into the last few months of my life; but I have endeavored to preserve my integrity, and I humbly hope and believe that I am being taught humility and reliance upon Providence, which will yet afford a thousand times more peace and true happiness than can be acquired in the din, strife, and turmoil, excitements and struggles of this money-worshiping age. The man who coins his brain and blood into gold, who wastes all of his time and thought upon the almighty dollar, who looks no higher than blocks of houses and tracts of land, and whose iron chest is crammed with stocks and mortgages tied up with his own heart-strings, may console himself with the idea of safe investments, but he misses a pleasure which I firmly believe this lesson was intended to secure to me, and which it will secure if I can fully bring my mind to realize its wisdom. I think I hear you say-- “‘When the devil was sick, The devil a saint would be. But when the devil got well, The devil a saint was he.’