But after the Embargo and the war the skies slowly brightened, not so much because of the growing circulation as because of the more remunerative advertisements. It was not the $40-a-year advertising that paid, but the single “ads” inserted at the new rate of 75 cents a “square.” There were now many more of these. Because of the rapid growth of the city a brisk trade had sprung up in Brooklyn and Manhattan real estate, which by 1820 often engrossed from one-eighth to one-fourth the whole paper. Steamboats had come, and from Capt. Vanderbilt’s little Nautilus, which left Whitehall daily for Staten Island at 10, 3, and 6:30, charging twenty-five cents a trip, to the big Chancellor Livingston running to Albany, and the boat Franklin, which offered excursions to Sandy Hook, with a green turtle dinner, for $2, all were advertising. Competing stage-coach lines were eager to impress the public with their speedy schedules; advertising that you could leave the City Hotel at 2 p. m., packed six inside and eight outside a gaudily painted vehicle, and be at Judd’s Tavern in Philadelphia at 5 a. m. the next day.
Competition continued keen, for while weak newspapers died, new journals were constantly being established. The most important of these were Charles Holt’s Columbian, established in 1808 as a Clintonian sheet; the National Advocate, founded in 1813 and edited for a time by Henry Wheaton, later known as a diplomat, who supported Madison; and the American, an evening journal first published in the spring of 1819, and edited by Charles King, later president of Columbia College. But the Evening Post kept well to the front, as is shown by a table of comparative circulations in May, 1816:
Mercantile Advertiser, 2000
Daily Gazette, 1750
Evening Post, 1600
Gardiner’s Courier, 980
Columbian, 825
National Advocate, 875
Commercial Advertiser, 1200
The circulation of the Mercantile Advertiser, we are told by Thurlow Weed, who was then working on the Courier, was considered enormous. It seldom had more than one and a half or two columns of news, while Lang’s Gazette frequently carried only a half column; so that the Evening Post was clearly the leading newspaper. People in the early twenties regarded it as a well established institution. Its editor had become one of the lesser notables of the city, like Dr. Hosack and Dr. Mitchill; and we are informed by a contemporary that he “was pronounced by his advocates a field-marshal in literature, as well as politics.” Poor as the newspapers of that time seem by modern standards, the Evening Post when compared with the London Times or the London Morning Post (for which Lamb and Coleridge wrote) was not discreditable to New York; it was not so well written, but it was as large and as energetic in news-gathering and editorial utterance.
CHAPTER FOUR
LITERATURE AND DRAMA IN THE EARLY “EVENING POST”
The infancy of the Evening Post coincided with the rise of the Knickerbocker school of letters, with which its relations were always intimate. Its first editor delighted in his old age to speak of his friendship with Irving, Halleck, Drake, and Paulding; while the second editor, Bryant, escaped inclusion with the Knickerbockers only by the fact that his poetry is too individual and independent to fit into any school at all.
A mellow atmosphere hangs over the literary annals of New York early in the last century. We think of young Irving wandering past the stoops of quaint gabled houses, where the last representatives of the old Dutch burghers puffed their long clay pipes; or taking country walks within view of the broad Tappan Zee and the summer-flushed Catskills, halting whenever he could get a good wife to favor him with her version of the legends of the countryside. We think of that brilliant rainbow which Halleck stopped to admire one summer evening in front of a coffee-house near Columbia College, exclaiming: “If I could have my wish, it should be to lie in the lap of that rainbow and read Tom Campbell”; of Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and others of the “nine worthies” holding high revel in “Cockloft Hall” on the outskirts of Newark; and of Drake, the handsomest young man in town, like Keats studying medicine and poetry, and like Keats dying of consumption. We think of how the young men of the city were less interested in the news of Jena and Trafalgar than that Moore and Jeffrey had been arrested for fighting a duel, that Mr. Campbell had improved the leisure given him by a government pension by writing “Gertrude of Wyoming,” and that “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” was the work of a Scotch border sheriff.
When the first Evening Post was laid on six hundred doorsteps and counters, New York was almost ready to assert her temporary primacy in literature. Irving was studying law downtown in the office of Brockholst Livingston; Paulding, four and a half years older, was living with his sister, Mrs. William Irving; Cooper was at school with an Englishman in Albany; Halleck was a child of eleven playing about the Guilford Green. Bryant at Cummington had not yet begun his juvenile scribblings, but would soon do so. Charles Brockden Brown had just returned to the city from a summer excursion, and was watching the sale of the second part of “Arthur Mervyn.” Coleman sometimes met him at the homes of John Wells and Anthony Bleecker. The few Americans who paid any attention to letters had till now kept their gaze chiefly upon New England and Philadelphia. Dwight, the president of Yale, had just finished revising Watts’s Psalms, Joel Barlow, after shining abroad as a diplomat and making a fortune in speculation, was living in state in Paris, and Trumbull, another of the Hartford Wits, had just become a Connecticut judge. Nothing better than the unreadable “Columbiad” of Barlow and Dwight’s “Travels” was now to be expected from this trio. But in New York by 1805, though there was as yet little pure literature, there was an intellectual and semi-literary atmosphere. In addition to the young Knickerbockers, mention should be made of Tom Paine, dividing his last days, in debt, dirt, and dissipation, between New York and New Rochelle; and Philip Freneau, who frequently came over from his New Jersey seat.
Washington Irving made his first appearance in the Morning Chronicle, his brother’s journal, where at nineteen he published his “Jonathan Oldstyle” papers. Nearly five years later he, his brother William, and his brother-in-law, Paulding, collaborated upon the “Salmagundi Papers,” issued in leaflet form “upon hot-pressed vellum paper, as that is held in highest estimation for buckling up young ladies’ hair.” The twenty numbers, full of whimsy, mock seriousness, and light satire, delighted Coleman not as literature but as journalism. He saw that his long editorials attacking Jefferson’s measures for coast defense were flimsy weapons compared with the humorous “Plans for Defending Our Harbor,” which he copied in full, saying that it “hits off admirably some of the late philosophical, economical plans which our philosophical, economical administration seems to be intent on our adopting.” The Evening Post termed the whole series “the pleasant observations of one who is a legitimate descendant of Rabelais, and a true member of the Butler, Swift, and Sterne family.” Irving perhaps recalled this praise when the time came to announce his next work.