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.
[Illustration: The Collect]
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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: The British Prison-Ship]
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.
New York, in this time that the poet Freneau lay a prisoner, was not
as it had been in his college days. The battle of Long Island had been
fought, and Washington and his army had been driven from New York. And
on the night of the British entry a great fire had started in the
lower part of the city, swept away the house where Bradford's press
had been, leaped across Broadway and laid Trinity Church a mass of
ruins scattered over the churchyard where Freneau's father lay buried.
The British soldiers were quartered in the public buildings; the
British officers had taken possession of the houses deserted by
wealthy patriots; the Middle Dutch Church, which had been the
architectural pride of the city, had become a riding school for
troopers.
[Illustration: The Middle Dutch Church]
There was a red-painted wooden building in John Street, a few feet
from Broadway, the only theatre in the city. The actors had closed it,
and fled at the coming of the British. But the house was open again
now, and the British officers played at mimic war between the
intervals of real battles.
No one threw himself more heartily into these performances than Major
John Andre, who was so soon to give up his life for his country. He
even wrote some of the speeches used by the actors, and one of the
poems he wrote for Rivington's _Gazetteer_ was printed while he was
away on his last mission, conferring with Benedict Arnold on the banks
of the Hudson.
After the treason was discovered, Arnold sought a safe retreat within
the British lines at New York, and lived for a time in a solid,
picturesque little house by the Bowling Green. It stood on a grassy
slope that stretched down to the water's edge a few boat lengths from
where the _Scorpion_ lay with the poet prisoner on board.
There was a picket fence, painted white, on one side of the green
slope, and Sergeant John Champe once hid his men behind it to carry
off Arnold when he should take his nightly walk by the waterside, an
attempt that failed through Arnold's changing his quarters on the
selfsame day.
When the Revolution was over, Freneau was again in New York, which
slowly recovered from the ravages of war. Hanover Square was a
favorite haunt of his. He has left the record that he loved to linger
in that open space, where might be seen a mingling of business and
home life. Freneau liked it, for there books were printed and sold,
and, too, it was the "Newspaper Row" of the town. This open space had
been at first Van Brugh Street, taking its name from Johannes
Pietersen Van Brugh, a wealthy Hollander whose home faced the square
for close upon half a century. It bore his name until in 1714, when
with the accession of George I. of Hanover it took the name of Hanover
Square.
In a house facing this square, Bradford printed the first newspaper,
and though in Freneau's time it was still standing, a more stately
building was to take its place and bear a tablet telling of the old
one. It was here that the other early newspapers came into existence:
Parker's _Weekly Post-Boy_, in 1742; Weyman's _New York Gazette_, in
1759; Holt's _New York Journal_, in 1766. It was here, too, that was
prominently displayed the "Sign of the Bible and Crown," before the
house of Hugh Gaine. Freneau had flayed this man in his verse many a
time.
Gaine was an Irishman who published the _New York Mercury_, and
changed his politics to whichever side was uppermost--Whig to-day,
Tory to-morrow. He printed Freneau's satires against Great Britain as
a Whig, and then as a Tory fell under the power of Freneau's pen, for
Freneau hated inconstancy quite as much as he did Tory principles.
Then there was close at hand the home of Rivington's _New York
Gazetteer_. This Rivington, failing as a bookseller in London,
planted his sign in Hanover Square and proudly proclaimed himself as
the only London bookseller in America. He established his Tory
newspaper, the _New York Gazetteer_, and had it wrecked by patriots,
who threw the furniture out into Hanover Square and moulded the type
into bullets. It was he who printed the poems of Andre; who after the
war gave up a Tory paper and was strong for the cause of the new
nation and was in consequence denounced by Freneau.
Freneau smiled to see the signs of Gaine and Rivington changed to suit
the views of the new republic and rivalling one another in their show
of patriotism. Tempted into Gaine's bookstore by the display of
volumes, he chanced upon a friend who called him by name. And old Hugh
Gaine, turning slowly about at the sound of a name he knew so well,
stared at the enemy he had never seen:
"Is your name Freneau?" he asked. And the poet answered:
"Yes, Philip Freneau."
For just a moment the bookseller hesitated, then said:
"I want to shake your hand; you have given me and my friend Rivington
a lasting reputation."
It was in one of these very bookstores that Freneau met Lindley Murray
in the year after the peace was declared. From their first meeting the
two were friends. Murray had accumulated a fortune as a salt merchant
on Long Island during the British occupation. Strong patriot as
Freneau was, he was attracted to the son at first through the memory
of the parent, for it was Lindley Murray's mother, living on Murray
Hill, who had saved Putnam's troops from being trapped by the British.
The friendship of Freneau and Lindley Murray might have ripened,
but that in the year after their meeting Murray went to England, where
he was to devote himself, for his own amusement, to horticulture, in a
pretty little garden beside his home near York, and where he wrote his
famous grammar for a young ladies' school.
[Illustration:
1. WILLIAM SMITH.
2. PETER STUYVESANT.
3. PHILIP FRENEAU.
4. THOMAS PAINE.
5. JOEL BARLOW.]
Even in the lifetime of Freneau, changes came to Hanover Square. For
more than half a century it was the "Newspaper Row," then it gradually
became the dry-goods district, then settled down to a general centre
for wholesale houses. At one corner of the square lived for a time
Jean Victor Moreau, the French General, after he had been banished for
supposed participation in the plot of Cadoudal and Pichegru against
the life of the First Consul.
[Illustration: Fraunces' Tavern]
In the years that followed the Revolution, Freneau spent much of his
time in sea trips, but he was in the city again when George Washington
took the oath of office as the first President of the United States at
the Federal Hall in Wall Street; and was in the quaint St. Paul's
Chapel, then quite a new structure, when Washington went there on the
day of his inauguration. In the same year, Freneau lived for a time in
Wall Street, close by the house where Alexander Hamilton lived, who in
those days was a figure in literary New York by reason of his writing
of the _Federalist_ papers. That was thirteen years before Hamilton
occupied his country house, "The Grange," far up the island, which
was to be still standing a hundred years later, when the city had
crept up to and beyond it, and left it where One Hundred and
Forty-first Street crosses Convent Avenue. Close by, in narrow Nassau
Street, when Freneau lived in Wall, was the home of a man who had been
his classmate in college. This was Aaron Burr. He, too, in a few
years, was to leave the humble house in Nassau Street, to live in the
Richmond Hill house, where the British Commissary Mortier had lived,
and from which Burr walked forth on an eventful morning in 1804 to
fight a mortal combat with Hamilton on the Jersey shore.
[Illustration: Broad St. and Federal Hall]
In 1791 Philip Freneau was in Philadelphia editing the _National
Gazette_, the strongest political paper of his day, memorable for
partisan abuse and for such bitter attacks on the administration that
Washington alluded to its editor as "that rascal Freneau." The paper
continued under Freneau until 1793, when he returned to New York for a
time.
[Illustration: Richmond Hill]
In those days of 1793 there were three or four detached houses in
Cedar Street close by Nassau. In the one nearest the corner, on any
day of the week a man, slender and tall, with eyes that were keen and
gray, with dress always in perfect taste, with broad-brimmed hat and
queue, could be seen. He came from this house and walked over to
Broadway, and his neighbors watched regularly for his going and his
coming. He was Noah Webster, editor of _The Minerva_, a paper at that
time devoted to the support of President Washington's administration.
His name was to become a household word, for his paper became the
_Commercial Advertiser_ (that lived and throve even in the twentieth
century), and after he had left the city he wrote a world-famed
dictionary.
The poetic muse hovered closest about Philip Freneau in the days of
stirring scenes and momentous events. The Poet of the Revolution was
less active when quieter days came. Still he continued to pass a life
of restless energy, and lived far into another century and long after
many another writer had arisen to eclipse him in the literary life of
New York.