Chapter III
The Poet of the Revolution
IN the far down-town business section of New York, there is a street so short that you can walk its entire length in ten minutes or less time. It leads from the park where the City Hall is, straight to the river. Beginning at the tall buildings where the newspapers have their homes, it continues along between the warehouses of leather merchants and the solid stonework of the bridge that crosses from the Manhattan to the Brooklyn shore; leads to the open space at the top of Cherry Hill, then makes a steep descent as though about to plunge deep into the river. For much of its length it is a constant scene of noise and bustle and disorder—that is, in the daylight hours. At night, when it is silent and deserted, it suggests the time, far back in the year 1678, when it was a country lane some distance from the city, a by-path leading from the house of Jacob Leisler to the river. It was Frankfort Lane then, Leisler calling it so as a reminder of the German town of his birth. Now it has become Frankfort Street. Leisler's garden was close upon the spot where the street touches the parkside, and here Leisler was executed in 1691, a martyr to the cause of constitutional liberty.
The lane was beginning to assume the proportions of a street in the year 1752, when there lived in one of the dainty houses that fronted it the family of Pierre Freneau, the last of a long line of Huguenots. There were Freneaus who fought with the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and there were Freneaus still living in that ancient city when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced so many to strange lands. The Freneau family, refugees from their native land, prospered in America, and a son born in the Frankfort Street house in this year 1752 gave historic interest to the name. The boy was christened Philip, and came to be called the Poet of the Revolution.
Philip Freneau struggled through babyhood in Frankfort Street, and just as he was able to walk was whisked away to a farm in New Jersey, where his father had built a house, calling it Mount Pleasant after the old homestead in La Rochelle.
Quite within the throw of a stone of Frankfort Street, and in the very year of Philip Freneau's birth, was born Eliza Schuyler, who with the passing of years was to marry and bear the name of Eliza Bleecker and the title of the first poetess of New York.
In her childhood, the future poetess had a favorite walk over the bit of rolling ground to the south of Frankfort Street, the spot called Golden Hill, which a few years later was to be trampled by many soldiers, where the tall grass was to be reddened by the blood of patriots—the first blood shed in the Revolution. She strolled hand in hand with her father over the green Common, which was to become the City Hall Park. Sometimes, in the mid-summer, she was taken on excursions to the shores of a pleasant lake, called the Collect, quite a journey from the city. It was there that John Fitch's boat sailed years before Fulton's successful boat was launched into the Hudson. When the city outgrew its early bounds, the lake was drained and solid ground made, and the Tombs Prison rose in gloomy majesty where the deep waters had been.