THE DEBTORS’ PRISON.
Eliza Schuyler preserved a lively memory of playing about a little square frame building on the Common, and though she never spoke of it by name it was the first Poor House of the city. She wrote, too, of a certain day when she went to the Common with her father—he was an important man that day and served on a committee—to see laid the first stone of another building. It was only a Debtors' Prison, but it was looked upon as the most beautiful structure in the city for many a day. For it was in the main patterned after the temple of Diana of Ephesus. The townsmen of those early days admired the building, and would have grieved if they could have foreseen that the day would come when city officials would forget that the old prison had been copied from so perfect a model; would forget that it had been a military prison when the British held possession of the city; would forget that many a brave officer of the Continental Army and many a true patriot soldier had passed bitter days there, and dying had left memories of sentiment and poetry and historic interest hovering about the old place.
Still, though it could not be foretold, the day did come when it was no longer a prison but had become the Hall of Records, when it was called an ugly and unsightly structure which obstructed the view of newer and taller ones—buildings that Tammany architects considered the perfection of beauty perhaps on account of their costliness. So it must be torn down.
At the age between girlhood and womanhood, Eliza Schuyler left New York to live in the village of Tomhannock, and when news of her again reached her friends in the city she was the wife of John J. Bleecker. Only twice after that did she revisit the scenes of her early life, and it was not until her death that the writings of this first poetess of New York became well known and popular.
The short and peaceful life of Eliza Bleecker was nearing an end before—his college days being over—Philip Freneau again trod the streets of New York. Already his tireless pen was at work, the pen that was to aid the cause of the Revolution. But when it looked to him as though his country would not be able to throw off the kingly yoke, he decided on a journey. He passed two years in the West Indies writing of the Beauties of Santa Cruz and the House of Night. Then a longing for the home from which he received scant word came upon him. He started homeward, only to be lured from his course by the beauties of Bermuda, where he fell in love with the Governor's daughter, remembered in his verse as the "Fair Amanda." He was still writing, lolling his time away beneath tropical skies, when tardy news came that the colonies had declared themselves free. Swiftly he threw off the languor of repose, of love, of romance, and returned home. The charm of the sea life was on him then, so taking out letters of reprisal from the Continental Congress, Freneau the poet sailed over the sea, actively aiding his country's cause by capturing British merchantmen and sinking British ships for a year, until in 1780 he had a ship of his own built. But on her first voyage disaster befell her, and almost within sight of land the Aurora was captured. When Philip Freneau next saw New York it was as a prisoner on the hulk Scorpion, as she lay anchored alongside another notorious prison-ship, the Jersey, close by the Battery shore.
There never was such an energetic prisoner. Each moment was employed for his country, if not with his sword at least with his pen, which was quite as powerful a weapon.
In those days of wretched misery and suffering, within view of the city by day, in the noisome ship's hold by night, Freneau thought out his best-remembered poem, The British Prison-Ship and many another line which in the later days of the Revolution was to rouse American feeling; verse that was to be distributed to the American soldiers, to be read by them on the march and by the light of the camp-fires; lines that were to commemorate the victories and the heroism of the soldiers of the Revolution; lines ridiculing each separate act of the British.