Liberty, with a pole and a liberty-cap, holding a shield with the
Pennsylvania arms. On the right of the figure is a mortar inscribed "The
Congress." In the foreground is a plan of fortifications with cannon
balls. In the background are cannon with battle-axes and pikes. A gorget
with "Liberty" upon it is hanging on a tree, and beneath it the motto
"Juvat in Sylvis habitare."
The magazine had numerous illustrations: a portrait of Goldsmith, plans
of a threshing machine, an electrical machine, Donaldson's dredging
machine, etc., etc.
Francis Hopkinson and Witherspoon were among the earliest contributors.
William Smith and Provost Ewing assisted in later numbers. Benjamin Rush
and Sergeant and Hutchinson imparted to Paine, in their walks in State
House yard the suggestions of "Common Sense," the pamphlet which "had a
greater run than any other ever published in our country," and which, as
Elkanah Watson said, "passed through the continent like an electric
spark. It everywhere flashed conviction, and aroused a determined
spirit, which resulted in the Declaration of Independence, upon the 4th
of July ensuing. The name of Paine was precious to every Whig heart, and
had resounded throughout Europe."
A department of the _Pennsylvania Magazine_, called "Monthly
Intelligence," reported the progress of the war, and furnished
engravings of the battles, and of General Gage's lines. It was the first
illustrated magazine published in the city. It was also the first that
made more than one volume. The second volume began in January, 1776,
and ended in July, 1776. The last number contained the Declaration of
Independence.
Phillis Wheatley, negro servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, and
daughter of an African slave, published her only volume of poems,
dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon, in 1773. The best, if the word
may be applied to such performances, of her occasional poems, published
after 1773, and which have never been collected into a volume, was a
poem "To his Excellency Gen. Washington," in the _Pennsylvania Magazine_
of April, 1776:
"Celestial choir! enthron'd in realms of light,
Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write."
The poem was dated October 26, 1775, and sent with a letter to
Washington, who replied (Feb. 2, 1776):
"However undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style
and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetical talents; in honor
of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the
poem had I not been apprehensive that while I only meant to give the
world this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the
imputation of vanity. This, and nothing less, determined me not to give
it place in the public prints."
Another President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, with less
urbanity, but more acumen, said of these verses that they were beneath
criticism.[5]
[5] "It is true that Mr. Jefferson has pronounced the poems of Phillis
Wheatley below the dignity of criticism, and it is seldom safe to differ
in judgment from the author of 'Notes on Virginia,' but her conceptions
are often lofty, and her versification often surprises with unexpected
refinement. Ladd, the Carolina poet, in enumerating the laurels of his
country, dwells with encomium on 'Wheatley's polished verse;' nor is his
praise undeserved, for often it will be found to glide in the stream of
melody. Her lines on imagination have been quoted with rapture by Imlay,
of Kentucky, and Steadman, the Guiana traveller, but I have ever thought
her happiest production the 'Goliah of Gath'" (John Davis, p. 87).
Paine himself printed some virile verses in the magazine, notably the
lines "On the Death of Wolfe" (though not published for the first time),
signed "Atlanticus," "Reflections on the Death of Clive," and "The
Liberty Tree."
Bradford's magazines had failed because of the imperfect communication
between the colonies. Aitken's magazine, throughout its life of
eighteen months, is overshadowed by the war, and the grave news
successively reported from both sides of the ocean.
The next Philadelphia editor was the eccentric social wit, Hugh Henry
Brackenridge, the author of the capital political satire, "Modern
Chivalry" (1792), the first satirical novel written in America. He was a
native of Scotland, born in 1748, but was only five years of age when
his father settled in York County, Pennsylvania. He was graduated from
Princeton College in 1771, in the same class with Philip Freneau, in
conjunction with whom he delivered, at the commencement, a poem in
dialogue upon "The Rising Glory of America," which was published by
Robert Aitken in 1772.
Francis Bailey was the publisher who had the courage to undertake
another monthly magazine in the midst of the war, and with Brackenridge
as editor, which insured some pungent writing, he issued in January,
1779, the first number of "_The United States Magazine_; a Repository of
History, Politics and Literature." "Our attempt," said the editor, "is
to paint the graces on the front of war, and _invite the muses to our
country_." This, it will be noticed, is the second express invitation to
the Maids of Parnassus to "migrate from Greece and Ionia," and to "cross
out those immensely overpaid accounts." The first was extended during
the French and Indian war, and the second in the very aim and flash of
the Revolution. That the muses did not immediately accept the
invitation, and "placard 'Removed' and 'To Let' on the rocks of their
snowy Parnassus," we are reminded by the opening lines of the "Epistle
to W. Gifford," written by another Philadelphia poet, William Cliffton,
at the very close of the century.[6]
[6] William Cliffton (1772-1799) was the son of a blacksmith in
Southwark. His poem "The Group" (1793) was written in ridicule of the
Commissioners of Southwark.
"In these cold shades, beneath these shifting skies,
Where fancy sickens, and where genius dies;
Where few and feeble are the muse's strains,
And no fine frenzy riots in the veins."
The editor, in his preface to the reader, asks the very pertinent
question, "For what is man without taste, and the acquirements of
genius? An ourang-outang with the human shape and the soul of a beast."
His excuse for the magazine is that it is started to refute the British
scoff, that when separated from England, the colonies would become mere
"illiterate ourang-outangs," and proceeds to the axioms that "We are
able to cultivate the belles-lettres, even disconnected with Great
Britain;" and that "Liberty is of so noble and energetic a quality, as
even from the bosom of a war to call forth the powers of human genius in
every course of literary fame and improvement."
The vignette for the magazine was made by Pierre E. Du Simitiere
(P. E. D.), who also made the one that adorned the _Pennsylvania
Magazine_. It represented a triumphal arch with a corridor of thirteen
columns, the arch decorated with thirteen stars, symbolizing the States,
Pennsylvania being the Keystone. Under the arch is the figure of Fame,
with cap of liberty and trumpet.
The artist was a native of Switzerland, who arrived in Philadelphia in
1766. His collection of curiosities he opened to the public under the
name of "The American Museum."
The first number of this magazine contained certain verses in
explanation of the emblematic vignette:
"The arch high bending doth convey,
In a hieroglyphic way,
What in noble style like this
Our united empire is!
The pillars, which support the weight,
Are, each of them, a mighty State;
Thirteen and more the vista shows,
As to vaster length it grows;
For new States shall added be,
To the great confederacy,
And the mighty arch shall rise
From the cold Canadian skies,
And shall bend through heaven's broad way
To the noble Mexic Bay!
In the lofty arch are seen
Stars of lucid ray--thirteen!
When other States shall rise,
Other stars shall deck these skies,
There, in wakeful light to burn
O'er the hemisphere of morn."
As might be expected from Brackenridge's management, the magazine was
full of wit and scurrility. The January (1779) number contained
Witherspoon's delightful satire upon James Rivington, the Royal Printer,
of New York. It was a parody of Rivington's "Petition to Congress," and
was called "The Humble Representation and Earnest Supplication of J. R.,
Printer and Bookseller in New York--To his Excellency Henry Laurens,
Esq." And Dr. Witherspoon, who was President of Princeton College when
Brackenridge was a student there, supplied his former pupil during his
year's editorship with many a sly sarcasm and bit of grave philosophy.
"The Cornwalliad, an Heroic Comic Poem," was begun in March, 1779, and
was continued through several numbers. It described various incidents in
the British retreat to New York after the battles of Trenton and
Princeton.
In the January number was begun a series of articles under the title of
"The Cave of Vanhest," concerning which the following letter was written
October 2, 1779, by Mrs. Sarah Bache to Benjamin Franklin: "The
publisher of _The United States Magazine_ wrote to you some time ago to
desire you would send him some newspapers, and sent you some of his
first numbers. I suppose you never received them. I now send six, not
that I think you will find much entertainment in them, but you may have
heard that there was such a performance, and may like to see what it
is; besides, its want of entertainment may induce you to send something
that may make the poor man's magazine more useful and pleasing. Tell
Temple 'The Cave of Vanhest' is a very romantic description of Mr. and
Mrs. Blair's house and family; the young ladies that the traveller
describes and is in love with are children, one seven months younger
than our Benjamin, and the Venus just turned of five."
The most amusing episode in the history of the magazine was the quarrel
that arose between its editor and General Charles Lee. Brackenridge
published in full, in Vol. I, p. 141, a letter written by "an officer of
high rank in the American service to Miss F----s (Franks), a young lady
of this city." The letter contained a humorous challenge growing out of
a merry war in which Miss F. had said that "he wore green breeches
patched with leather," and the writer declared that he wore "true sherry
vallies," that is, trousers reaching to the ankle with strips of leather
on the inside of the thigh. Lee immediately published in the
_Pennsylvania Advertiser_ an angry letter upon "the impertinence and
stupidity of the compiler of that wretched performance with the pompous
title of the magazine of the United States." In reply, Brackenridge
compared Lee, as usual, to his favorite ourang-outang, and added: "You
are neither Christian, Jew, Turk nor Infidel, but a _metempsychosist_!
You have been heard to say that you expect when you die to transmigrate
to a Siberian fox-hound, and to be messmate to Spado." Upon this Lee, in
a rage, called at the office with the intention of assaulting the
editor. Brackenridge's son cleverly relates what followed. General Lee
"knocked at the door, while Mr. Brackenridge, looking out of the
upper-story window, inquired what was wanting. 'Come down,' said he,
'and I'll give you as good a horse-whipping as any rascal ever
received.' 'Excuse me, General,' said the other, 'I would not go down
for two such favors.'"
Besides the publication of the State Constitution and a windy war over
female head-dress and hard money, there is little else to say of _The
United States Magazine_. But near the close of the volume the appearance
of an imitation of Psalm 137, with the foot-note, "by a young gentleman
to whom, in the course of this work, we are greatly indebted," brings
for the first time into notice, if not into prominence, a writer
destined to display the finest sense of poetic form and the nicest
delicacy of poetic sentiment to be found among his contemporaries in
America, and who, through his opposition to Hamilton and the
Federalists, should win from Washington the epithet of "that rascal
FRENEAU."
Philip Freneau was born in New York in 1752; he had been a classmate at
Princeton of James Madison and Brackenridge, and on his return from the
Bermudas in 1779, he assisted the latter in his editorial work in
Philadelphia. The first edition of his poems was prepared in
Philadelphia by Francis Bailey, the publisher of _The United States
Magazine_, in 1786.
Freneau was one of the first American poets to be read and appreciated
in England. At the time when Byron was making merry with the notion of
an American poet bearing the name of Timothy (Dwight), Campbell was
appropriating a line, "The hunter and the deer--a shade" from Freneau's
"Indian Burying Ground," and knitting it into "O'Connor's Child," and
Sir Walter Scott in "Marmion," by altering a single word, was
transparently concealing his theft from "The Heroes of Eutaw."
In December, 1779, the suspension of the magazine was announced, the
editor declaring in explanation that the publication was "undertaken at
a time when it was hoped the war would be of short continuance, and the
money, which had continued to depreciate, would become of proper value.
But these evils having continued to exist through the whole year, it has
been greatly difficult to carry on the publication; and we shall now be
under the necessity of suspending it for some time--until an established
peace and a fixed value of the money shall render it convenient or
possible to take it up again."
For seven years no one attempted another magazine, and then in
September, 1786, by a combination of publishers, _The Columbian
Magazine, or Monthly Miscellany_, modelled upon the _Gentleman's
Magazine_ and the _London Magazine_, began its career. It was the most
ambitious enterprise of the kind that had yet been undertaken in
America. The printing facilities were still very limited, and the
subscription lists for all publications small. In 1786 there was one
daily paper printed in Philadelphia, and but three or four weekly ones.
In the same year four printers after much deliberation agreed to print a
small edition of the New Testament. "Before the Revolution a
spelling-book, impressed upon brown paper, with the interesting figure
of Master Dilworth as a frontispiece, was the extent of American skill
in printing and engraving." Improvements came very rapidly, and before
the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century Barlow's
_Columbiad_ was magnificently printed in Philadelphia, and the great
undertakings of Rees' "Cyclopædia" and Wilson's "Ornithology" entered
upon. The monthly expense of printing the _Columbian_ was said to be
£100, which was paid to mechanics and manufacturers of the United
States. The magazine was inaugurated by Matthew Carey, T. Siddons, C.
Talbot, W. Spotswood and J. Trenchard.
Carey published, in the first number, "The Life of General Greene,"
whose portrait was the first in the volume. He also contributed "The
Shipwreck," "A Philosophical Dream" (a vision of 1850), and "Hard
Times." In the "Philosophical Dream" Carey made the first suggestion of
a canal to unite the waters of the Delaware and Ohio. He withdrew from
the _Columbian Magazine_ in December, 1786, finding that the quintuple
team could not work well together.
Charles Cist, another of the combination, was born at St. Petersburg,
August 15, 1738, was graduated at Halle, and, upon coming to
Philadelphia in 1773, entered into partnership with Melchior Steiner,
with whom he published Paine's "Crisis"--"These are the times that try
men's souls." He died in Philadelphia, December 2, 1805.
John Trenchard became sole proprietor of the publication in January,
1789. He was an engraver by profession, having studied under James
Smithers, and engraved most of the plates for the magazine. His son,
Edward Trenchard, entered the navy, visited England and induced Gilbert
Fox, then a 'graver's apprentice, to return with him to America. In this
country Fox became an actor, and for him Joseph Hopkinson wrote "Hail
Columbia."
"The Foresters, an American Tale," was written for the _Columbian_ by
Jeremy Belknap, who sought to portray humorously in it the history of
the country and the formation of the Constitution.
The _Columbian_ of May, 1789, gave an elaborate account of Washington's
progress to New York, with the notable receptions at Gray's Ferry and at
Trenton.
In July, 1790, the name of the magazine was changed to "The Universal
Asylum and Columbian Magazine, by a Society of Gentlemen." Benjamin Rush
was one of its most faithful contributors. A number of the engravings
and several of the articles illustrated the agricultural improvements of
the times. John Penington contributed in 1790 "Chemical and Economical
Essays to Illustrate the Connection between Chemistry and the Arts." The
editor of the _Columbian Magazine_ for nearly three years was Alexander
James Dallas, a sketch of whose life is to be found in a later magazine,
the _Port Folio_, of March, 1817. Dallas was born in Jamaica, but
received his earliest education near London from James Elphinstone,
through whom he became acquainted with Dr. Johnson and Dr. Franklin. He
became a citizen of Philadelphia in 1785, studied law, edited the
_Columbian_, held various offices of trust in the State, and became
successively Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of War for the
United States. Robert Charles Dallas, brother of the editor, author of
the "History of the Maroons" and a score of other works, is best known
as the friend and counsellor of Lord Byron. His last work was his
"Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron from 1808 to 1814." It was at
his request that Byron published "Childe Harold," and to him Byron gave
the profits arising from that and four other of his poems. Dallas was
related to Lord Byron through the marriage of his sister with the poet's
uncle. George Mifflin Dallas, son of the editor of the _Columbian_,
became Vice-President of the United States under President Polk. His
commencement oration at Princeton, in 1809, on the "Moral Influence of
Memory," is printed in the _Port Folio_ of that year (Vol. II, p.
396[7]). Two members of the family, Rev. A. R. C. Dallas, son of Robert
Charles, and his cousin, Rev. Charles Dallas, served at Waterloo, and
were afterward prominent in philanthropic work.
[7] John Quincy Adams' commencement oration "On the Importance and
Necessity of Public Faith to the Well-being of a Government," was
inserted in the _Columbian Magazine_ (1787) by Jeremy Belknap.
A. J. Dallas reported for the _Herald_ and for the _Columbian_ the
debates of the State Convention until the Federalists, annoyed by the
publications, withdrew their subscriptions from the _Columbian_, which
led Benjamin Rush to write to Noah Webster (February 13, 1788): "From
the impudent conduct of Mr. Dallas in misrepresenting the proceedings
and speeches in the Pennsylvania Convention, as well as from his
deficiency of matter, the _Columbian Magazine_, of which he is editor,
is in the decline."
Nevertheless the _Columbian_ continued to prosper. The circulation at
times made necessary a second edition, which was reset at considerable
expense, and often contained additional articles.
The final number appeared in December, 1792. The principal motive for
the suspension, the editors declared, "is to be found in the present law
respecting the establishment of the post-office, which totally prohibits
the circulation of monthly publications through that channel on any
other terms than that of paying the highest postage on private letters
or packages." A futile attempt was made to continue the magazine in
January, 1793, under the title, "_The Columbian Museum, or Universal
Asylum_: John Parker, Phila." The only number that I have seen contains
sixty pages.
In January, 1787, or one month after withdrawing from the management of
_The Columbian Magazine_, Matthew Carey published the first number of
_The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive
Pieces, etc., Prose and Poetical_, which proved to be the first really
successful literary undertaking of the kind in America. General
Washington said of it in a letter dated June 25, 1788: "No more useful
literary plan has ever been undertaken in America." John Dickinson in
the same year also commended it. Governor Wm. Livingstone wrote: "It far
exceeds in my opinion every attempt of the kind which from any other
American press ever came into my hands." Among others who swelled the
chorus of praise were Governor Randolph of Virginia, Ezra Stiles of
Yale, Timothy Dwight, Francis Hopkinson and Provost Ewing. "Citizen"
Brissot, in his "New Travels in the United States" (1788), considered
Carey's _Museum_ to be "equal to the best periodical published in
Europe." The first number attracted great attention; Franklin furnished
the first article, "Consolation for America;" Benjamin Rush followed
with an "Address to the People of the United States",[8] the burden of
which was that the "Revolution is not over;" already the cry was going
up for civil service reform to deliver the country from the oppression
of politics. The edition--one thousand copies--was soon exhausted. "I
had not means," said Carey, "to reprint it. This was a very serious
injury, many persons who intended to subscribe declining because I could
not furnish them the whole of the numbers."
[8] Benjamin Rush's papers in the _Museum_ and in the _Columbian_ were
printed in book form, "Essays--Literary, Moral and Philosophical," 1798.
The work of editorship was no novelty to Matthew Carey. He had had full
and fiery experience in both Ireland and America. He was born in Ireland
in 1760, and became acquainted with Dr. Franklin in Paris while living
there to avoid prosecution at home. He was imprisoned for the
publication of the _Volunteer's Journal_ in Dublin. He arrived in
Philadelphia, November 15, 1784, and in the following January began to
publish the _Pennsylvania Evening Herald_, the first newspaper in the
United States to furnish accurate reports of legislative debates. He was
wretchedly poor, but Lafayette laid the foundation of his fortune by a
generous gift of four hundred dollars in notes of the Bank of North
America. The first pamphlet that Carey published in Ireland was a
treatise on duelling. Soon after his arrival in America he gave a
practical illustration of the text by engaging in a duel with Colonel
Oswald, in which he received a wound that stayed him at home for more
than a year.
_The American Museum_ was the first magazine in Philadelphia to reflect
faithfully the internal state of America. Bradford's magazines,
intensely loyal, looked across the ocean and saw little at home worthy
of record. Paine and Brackenridge expended their erratic genius in
abusive satire upon the Tories; the _Columbian Magazine_ avoided the
serious political problems of the times, and granted much of its space
to agricultural improvements and the beginnings of manufactures.