Is it not possible that we can have a personal and confidential interview with our friend “Croaker,” at some time and place he will name? If he declines, will he inform me how he may be addressed by letter? In the meantime, whatever may happen (he, at least, will, before long, understand me), I expect from him discretion.
Succeeding issues showed that the connection between Croaker and the Evening Post had become fixed and that the city was in for whole series of skits on men, manners, and events. On March 12 was printed the poem called “The Secret Mine Sprung at a Late Supper,” dealing with a recent political episode; next day it was followed by verses, “To Mr. Potter, the Ventriloquist,” then a popular performer; on the 15th there appeared “To Mr. Simpson,” addressed to the manager of the city’s chief theater; and on the 16th two poems were printed at once.
Most of the Knickerbocker art was imitative, and the Croaker poems were in a vein which had been much exploited in England. “Peter Pindar,” George Colman the younger, whose humorous poems entitled “Broad Grins” had run through edition after edition, Tom Moore, and those kings of parody, Horatio and James Smith, were the models whom Croaker and Co. consciously or unconsciously followed. The moment was a happy one for such bold and witty thrusts. Had they appeared when party feeling was running high before or during the war, they would have given mortal offense; but the tolerance accompanying the political era of good feeling robbed them of any sting. From Coleman’s efforts to arrange an interview with the authors, we may surmise that he feared some other editor would share the prize, and that he had suggestions for further squibs. His literary discernment was never better evinced than by his enthusiastic reception of the first Croaker contribution. A dull editor would have passed over the lines to ennui—which were only a facile expression of weariness with the new books by Lady Morgan and Mordecai M. Noah, the Edinburgh Review, Gen. Jackson’s reception, Clinton’s political prospects, and the Erie Canal plans—without perceiving their unusual qualities; a careless editor would have printed them without asking for more. Coleman saw the possibility of indefinitely extending the satires.
William Coleman
Editor-in-Chief 1801–1829.
The origin of the poems had been purely casual. Halleck and Drake, the former now a prosperous and trusted aid of old Jacob Barker’s, the latter a full-fledged physician recently returned from Europe, happened in their romantic attachment to spend a leisurely Sunday morning with a mutual acquaintance. As a diversion, Drake wrote several stanzas upon ennui, and Halleck capped them. They decided to send them to Coleman, and, if he would not publish them, to Mordecai N. Noah, the Jewish journalist who had recently become editor of the Democratic National Advocate. Drake, returning to his home, also sent Coleman the two additional “crackers” which he acknowledged. The name “Croaker” then carried as distinct a meaning as would Dick Deadeye or Sherlock Holmes to-day, being that of the confirmed old grumbler in Goldsmith’s “Good-Natured Man.” Coleman’s request for a meeting was granted by the poets, who, as Halleck told his biographer, James Grant Wilson, one evening knocked at the editor’s door on Hudson Street:
They were ushered into the parlor, the editor soon entered, the young poets expressed a desire for a few minutes’ strictly private conversation with him, and the door being closed and locked, Dr. Drake said—“I am Croaker, and this gentleman, sir, is Croaker, Jr.” Coleman stared at the young men with indescribable and unaffected astonishment,—at length exclaiming: “My God, I had no idea that we had such talents in America!” Halleck, with his characteristic modesty, was disposed to give Drake all the credit; but as it chanced that Coleman alluded in particularly glowing terms to one of the Croakers that was wholly his, he was forced to be silent, and the delighted editor continued in a strain of compliment and eulogy that put them both to the blush. Before taking their leave, the poets bound Coleman over to the most profound secrecy, and arranged a plan of sending him the MS., and of receiving the proofs, in a manner that would avoid the least possibility of the secret of their connection with the Evening Post being discovered. The poems were copied from the originals by Langstaff [an apothecary friend], that their handwriting should not divulge the secret, and were either sent through the mails, or taken to the Evening Post office by Benjamin R. Winthrop.
The poems now followed in quick succession. On March 17 there was a sly skit upon the surgeon-general, Samuel Mitchill, the best-known—and most self-important—physician and scientist in the city, and a man noted in the history of Columbia College; the next day an address to John Minshull, a prominent merchant; on March 19 a poem of general theme, “The Man Who Frets”; on March 20 and 25, verses upon Manager Simpson of the Park Theater again; and on March 23 lines “To John Lang, Esq.,” the sturdy old editor of the Gazette. An apostrophe “To Domestic Peace” and “A Lament for Great Ones Departed” also appeared in March, as did two complimentary epistles in verse to the authors, selected by Coleman from “the multitude of imitators that the popularity of Croaker has produced.” One writer spoke of Croaker and Co. as “the wits of the day and the pride of the age,” while the other credited them with making “all Gotham at thy dashes stare.” There was a pause early in April while Drake was out of town, and Coleman confessed that “on account of the public, we begin to be a little impatient.” But the series recommenced on April 8, and by May 1, when a poem to William Cobbett, the eminent English journalist, then sojourning on Long Island, appeared, twenty-one had been printed. One Croaker contribution had meanwhile come out in Noah’s National Advocate. After another pause, on May 29 the Evening Post published the gem of the whole collection, Drake’s “The American Flag,” with the final quatrain written by Halleck. Coleman prefaced this famous patriotic lyric with the remark that it was one of those poems which, as Sir Philip Sidney said of the old ballad of Chevy Chase, stir the heart like a trumpet. It might more truly be said that, with its blare of sound and pomp of imagery, it stirs the bearer like a full brass band. Probably not even Coleman realized how many generations of schoolboys would declaim:
When freedom from her mountain height,
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there!