Chapter VI
With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck
IN the summer of 1797, a tall, well-built lad with a face showing just a suggestion of melancholy, landed from the weekly market sloop and walked along the streets of New York for the first time. He was a country boy, well versed in trees and brooks and used to pathless hills and rough country roads, and his first impression of New York was that the dwellers there were great lumpkins. He could not imagine why they pointed at him and nodded at him and laughed as he walked in the middle of the street, quite disregarding the paved walk. He stopped, from time to time, to ask his way, until he came to a little square brick house in Vesey Street, below Church, bearing the number 43, the home of William Irving. There he went in and was given a good hug by Mrs. Irving. The boy was James Kirke Paulding, and she who welcomed him was his sister, with whom he was to live until he should get a start in the ways and work of the city.
William Irving lived in a house delightfully situated, though no one would think so now when the spot is jammed with merchants' warehouses, and sounds of trade fill the air. When Paulding came to town, it was beyond the ken of the business section, and there were not so many houses about but that he could enjoy an inviting view. From the front door he looked straight before him over the grounds of Columbia College, and to the left across green gardens to the river. From his little window in the upper story he saw the city to the south, and to the east St. Paul's Chapel, with the steeple that came to be so gray with age looking then so new, for it had just been added to the church. Beyond the graveyard and across Broadway, he had a good view of the park with its three buildings—the Bridewell, the Almshouse, and the Prison,—and across the park could see the Park Theatre and the Brick Church. He could catch a glimpse of Broadway winding over a hill toward the Stone Bridge at Canal Street, and other roads leading into the country towards the north, where level stretches led past rude farmhouses and quaint inns.
The first few years of Paulding in the city, when he was clerk in the United States Loan Office, were years of hard work. But there were relaxations, too, for his relationship to William Irving brought him in contact with the other members of the family—young Washington Irving and Dr. Peter Irving. When, in a few years, Dr. Irving published his newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, Paulding wrote bits of prose and verse for it. So his first writings appeared in the same publication and at the same time as the first writings of Washington Irving, and it was the interchange of thought in the Vesey Street house and the opportunities afforded by the Morning Chronicle that led Paulding's thoughts towards writing as a profession.
Meantime there was much going on in the way of improvement. The new City Hall was erected in the park; the first free schoolhouse was opened; and Fulton's Clermont sailed up the Hudson, the first successful steamboat. A commission had been appointed, too, with the object of directing the course of the streets, which up to that time had grown out of the paths left by the cows in their wanderings to pasture. The commissioners did their work so that, as time went on, the highways were laid out to form a city of strict right angles. The cows certainly did their part in a manner that left far more picturesque twists and turns than were to be found in the upper part laid out by the commissioners in such a scientifically uninteresting way.
Paulding lived with William Irving in the Vesey Street house for nine years, and then the Irvings moved a few blocks the other side of Columbia College, to 287 Greenwich Street, and Paulding went with them. Here began the meetings of a literary set, which in a few months developed into the "Ancient Club of New York," with Washington, Peter, and William Irving, Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and Gouverneur Kemble leading members. Kemble owned some land in New Jersey, on which was located Salmagundi's Cockloft Hall, and on this account was called "The Patroon." From one of the informal meetings of the Ancient Club, Washington Irving, his brother William, and Paulding went secretly to Irving's house in Ann Street to discuss details of Salmagundi. Paulding wrote his share of Salmagundi on the upper floor of the Greenwich Street house, while the lower floor was the mill of Pindar Cockloft, conducted by William Irving.
From this house on many an evening the friends went to dine at Dyde's, the fascinating eating-house near the Park Theatre, then beginning a long career with the founders of Salmagundi as a foundation for the memories that were to cluster around its doors, to be passed over, years later, to Windust's still more famous resort on almost the same spot.
Paulding was still living with the Irving family when, in 1807, they went to live at No. 17 in aristocratic State Street, at the corner of Pearl, facing the Battery Park. Here, overlooking the blue waters of the bay dotted with sailboats and rowboats, and beyond to the stretches of Jersey shore, Paulding wrote his contributions to the Analectic Magazine, edited by Washington Irving from his home little more than a stone's throw away across the Bowling Green; also, The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan. Here, too, replying to an attack on his country, he wrote, The United States and England, a pamphlet that attracted the notice of President Madison, who summoned Paulding to Washington for eight years as Secretary of the Board of Navy Commissioners. During those eight years he wrote The Backwoodsman his longest poem and the one which he liked best of all, a liking not generally shared by his readers; the second series of Salmagundi; and Koningsmarke.
Having married Gertrude, the sister of his friend and companion Gouverneur Kemble, his days were moving smoothly along when the death of his wife's father took him again to New York and he went to live in what had long been the home of "The Patroon." This was a mansion of solid type in Whitehall Street, corner of Stone, set in the midst of a wide-spreading garden, a site blurred out in later days by the Produce Exchange. Here he lived during the fourteen years he acted as Navy Agent at New York, devoting his evenings to literary work, writing his most successful book, The Dutchman's Fireside, also John Bull in America, Tales of the Good Woman, and Westward Ho! In the evening he went often to the Park Theatre, and came to know James H. Hackett, the greatest Falstaff America had seen, writing for him The Lion of the West, which Hackett acted for many years. And then after fifteen years in this house he left it, and with his family went to Washington as Secretary of the Navy.
Once more, in 1841, he returned to New York, to live in Beach Street, then the fashionable St. John's Park neighborhood. But, his wife dying before he was really settled, he soon left New York and passed the last days of his life in Dutchess County, the region of his birth.