Writers of Knickerbocker New York

by Hamilton Wright Mabie

That light-handed, urbane, and successful editor and poet, Nathaniel Parker Willis, long an active and entertaining figure in the New York of the Thirties and Forties, barely touches the Knickerbocker town of the Twenties. In the spring of 1829 he started the “American Monthly Magazine” in Boston—a periodical described at a later day by that well-known wit, “Tom” Appleton, as “a slim monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.” Willis had been less than two years out of college and was without means or experience, and his enterprise had a fine air of audacity. Events showed that as a venture it was magnificent, but it was not war! At the end of two years the magazine was moved to New York and merged in “The Mirror,” a journal founded in 1823 by George P. Morris and Samuel Woodworth; was published every Saturday; and had a long and vigorous life under a succession of names. Woodworth, who wrote a song which was sung at supper-tables many years afterward—“The Old Oaken Bucket”—inspired, it is said, by a eulogy on spring water pronounced at a wine party at Mallory’s, a popular hotel of the time,—had withdrawn from “The Mirror” before Willis joined its editorial staff; but Willis and Morris remained partners and devoted friends to the end. They both became immensely popular—Willis through his versatility and sentiment, Morris through a series of songs which went to the hearts of a host of people: “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” “Near the Lake where droops the Lily,” and “My Mother’s Bible.” He was one of the earliest collators of literature for general reading, and his “Song Writers of America” and “The Prose and Poetry of America”—the latter edited in collaboration with Willis—were eminently useful compilations. He had the rare good luck to write a successful play founded on Revolutionary events, and a libretto for an opera; but his talent and fortune lay in his skill in giving popular sentiment expression in songs. General Wilson records, as the most impressive evidence of his popularity, that he could at any time exchange an unread song for a check for fifty dollars. Genial in manner and with an agreeable address, Morris was also a shrewd man of affairs.

A vigorous, burly man, often met on the streets in the second decade, was on his way to become one of the most widely known Americans, whose name is now familiar throughout Europe. “The Spy” appeared in 1821, and a few months later passed into a second edition and was dramatized. In the following year it was published in England, and the English newspapers began to speak of its author as a “distinguished American novelist.” The story speedily became the foundation for a world-wide literary reputation which has suffered little at the hands of time; the boys in small German towns still organize themselves into tribes of “Cooper Indians” and perform heroic feats after the manner of the “Leather-Stocking Tales,” which confirmed and broadened the fame established by “The Spy.”

James Fenimore Cooper was not born in New York and did not share the Knickerbocker tradition, but between 1822, when he became a resident of the metropolis, and 1826, when he went to Europe for a stay of seven years, he wrote three of the most notable of his novels. “The Pioneers” was published in 1823, “The Pilot” in 1824, “The Last of the Mohicans” in 1826. “Lionel Lincoln,” which saw the light in 1825, is negligible, from the point of view of literature. In 1823 Cooper was living in Beach Street; after his return from Europe in 1833, he spent a few winters in the city, but his home was in Cooperstown.

Cooper’s reputation, vigorous intellect, and courage of speech made for him warm friends as well as bitter enemies, though the latter were of the period after his return from Europe, when his sharp criticism of American manners and his impatience with provincial standards involved him in long-continued and unhappy controversy. “The Bread and Cheese Club,” of which he was the founder, included in its membership men of more than local reputation: Kent, Bryant, Morse, Halleck.

A few days before he sailed for Europe in 1826, the Club gave Cooper a dinner at the City Hotel, at which Chancellor Kent presided, and speeches were made by Governor Clinton, General Scott, and other well-known men, who spoke in enthusiastic terms of the distinction he had brought to the country and the city. Chancellor Kent hailed his “genius, which has rendered our native soil classic ground, and given to our early history the enchantment of fiction.”

The high regard in which Cooper was held by the men of Letters in New York, and the relative positions of the American poets of the day in the order of merit, are reflected in Halleck’s remark to General Wilson: “Cooper is colonel of the literary regiment; Irving, lieutenant-colonel; Bryant, the major; while Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Dana, and myself may be considered captains.” In popular reputation the place assigned to Cooper was not too high, although Halleck put himself too complacently in the rank of Holmes and Whittier. After his return from Europe in 1833, Cooper spent only a few winters in New York; but the city in which his reputation was born, so to speak, and in which his literary friendships were formed was the scene of the most impressive commemoration of his life and fame. A few months after his death a memorial meeting brought together probably the most distinguished group of men who had appeared at one time in the history of the city. Webster presided with his accustomed dignity, but spoke without his occasional inspiration; while Bryant rose easily to the highest reach of his theme in an address of great beauty and feeling.

William Cullen Bryant came to the city in 1825 still thinking of himself as a lawyer with a strong bent toward literature, but not yet fully committed to a change of profession. A year earlier he had made a flying visit to the city and been warmly welcomed by Cooper, Halleck, the Sedgwicks, and other well-known people. The appearance of “Thanatopsis” in 1817, and of the memorable “Lines to a Waterfowl” a year later, had put his reputation as a poet on a basis so solid that, while it was greatly broadened as time went on, it did not need to be strengthened. In June, 1825, his name appeared as editor on the title-page of the “New York Review and Athenæum Magazine.” Later in the year he read four lectures before the Athenæum Society; and two years later, under the auspices of the recently established National Academy of Design, he talked so well about certain phases of Mythology that he was asked to repeat the course several successive years. In 1826 he became the New York editor of a periodical which bore the portentous name of “The New York Literary Gazette or American Athenæum,” at a salary of five hundred dollars a year. His financial position was precarious and had become desperate when he was invited to join the editorial staff of the “New York Evening Post,” a journal always intimately connected with the literary history of the city. As a by-product of his industry, Bryant contributed editorial suggestion and writing to the “Talisman,” one of those old-fashioned annuals which grew like mushrooms during the decade which ended in 1830. In the closing year of that decade, having acquired an interest in the “Evening Post,” he wrote to R. H. Dana that he had made sure of a comfortable livelihood: “I do not like politics any better than you do; but they get only my mornings, and you know politics and a bellyful are better than poetry and starvation.” Long after the Knickerbocker era had become a tradition, Bryant was reaping the double reward of the poet and journalist, and enjoying well-earned prosperity of hand and heart.

Among the men who found a convenient meeting-place in the shop of Charles Wiley, a well-known publisher of the Knickerbocker period, at the corner of Wall and New Streets, was Richard Henry Dana, whose “Two Years Before the Mast” has been thumbed by many generations of American boys. A Cambridge man, with a Harvard education, Dana breathed another air than that of the metropolis; but for many years his was a familiar figure in the places where men of literary habit gathered in New York. In the back room of Wiley’s shop, familiarly known as the “Den,” Dana met Cooper, Halleck, Brevoort, and a genial company who found pleasure in Cooper’s somewhat pessimistic talk. It was on Broadway, General Wilson tells us, that the modest author of “The Idle Man” was almost assaulted by an enthusiastic admirer who cried, “Are you the immortal Dana?” lifted the astonished man in his arms, rushed across the street with him, and placed him triumphantly on his own threshold; the author meantime calling out, “Release me from this maniac!” Such lively demonstrations of admiration for men of Letters are no longer seen on Broadway!

Local self-consciousness was already pronounced in the foremost towns of the country in the third decade of the Nineteenth Century. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, were in the race for the intellectual primacy of the New World, and Richmond and Charleston were not unmindful of their claims upon the homage of the nation. Nearly every State cherished the belief that it contained within its borders a modern Athens which could bravely invite comparison with the ancient capital of Attica. In 1824 Boston was spoken of as “The Literary Emporium,” a description which had, unhappily, a suggestion of trade associations. Three years later, Philadelphia, according to a magazine prospectus, had “within herself a larger fund of talent, erudition, and science—larger perhaps than any other city can boast.” New York was not lacking in the audacity which is born of self-confidence. In 1820 an attempt was made to establish in the Knickerbocker town an “American Academy of Languages and Belles-Lettres,” which boldly set out to protect the language from “local and foreign corruptions,” and to establish a “standard of writing and pronunciation, correct, fixed, and uniform, throughout our extensive territory.” To allay the apprehensions of the Old World, it was announced that no effort would be made “to form an American language.” It is painful to record the fact that this modest effort to guard the mother tongue aroused local jealousy and perished at birth. Boston derided it!

But if New York failed to make itself the seat of an academy, it did not fail to foster the infant industry of journalism. Professor Cairns enumerates no less than thirty periodicals of various kinds established in the city between 1816 and 1833. These were all modest enterprises, and of brief and varied careers. The scale of expenditure must fill the editors of magazines to-day with bitter regret for the conditions of the good old times. In 1822 the publishers of the “Atlantic Magazine,” issued in New York, paid its editor five hundred dollars a year, and authorized an expenditure of the same amount for the conduct of the magazine!