X a Place in the Country

X A Place in the Country 1843-1844 (LETTERS 446 TO 517) BRYANT's JUBILANT ANNOUNCEMENT to his brother John in February 1843 that he had bought land and planned to build a house on the Long Island shore reflected an overmastering urge to find a permanent home, for, during their eighteen years in New York City, he and Frances had lived at almost an equal number of addresses-not to speak of all the hotels and lodgings they had passed through on their travels. In their impatience to get settled at Hempstead Harbor, renamed Roslyn in 1844, they were occupying before the summer was over an old Quaker farmhouse on the property, and in September Sarah Bryant visited them for several weeks during her first trip to the East since her removal to Illinois in 1835. Having at last acquired their place in the country, Cullen and Frances traveled southward early in 1843, visiting William Gilmore Simms at his plantation, "Woodlands," in the interior of South Carolina, and becoming acquainted with the literary society of Charleston and Savannah, as well as the Spanish-Minorcan culture of St. Augustine, Florida. In July Cullen took his mother to visit his Aunt Charity Bryant at Weybridge, Vermont, and in October escorted her as far as Buffalo on her return to Illinois. For two weeks at the end of November he took a trip to Washington, the purpose of which, though unspecified in his correspondence, was apparently to arrange more effective coverage for his newspaper at the capital. After nearly six years during which such little time as he could spare from the Evening Post's affairs went to writing verse, Bryant had begun to take a renewed interest in community activities. In 1841 he made more evident his earlier commitment to the medical theories of homoeopathy by accepting the presidency of the New York Homoeopathic Society, which he had joined soon after its organization five years earlier, and by publishing an inaugural address he made to the society. In December he joined the executive com mittee of the Apollo Association, formed in 1839 on the plan of British and German art unions, which encouraged American art by buying pictures from painters for distribution by lot among its members. Within two years Bryant and his fellow-officers, drawn chiefly from the Sketch Club, brought this faltering enterprise to a position of powerful patronage. In December 1843 he assumed the presidency of what was at once rechristened the American Art Union-a position to which he was re-elected in 1844 and 1845. Meanwhile, by the summer of 1843, Bryant's long advocacy of an international copyright agreement had won support from most American authors and some publishers who, distressed by the prevailing "literary piracy," or republication of foreign books without the payment of royalty, organized an American Copyright Club 190 LETTERs OF WILLIAM CuLLEN BRYANT and made Bryant its president. In October the club published An Address to the People of the United States, appealing on behalf of American writers for a just law "equalizing all copyrights, native and foreign." Early in 1844 the reform of prison conditions and opposition to capital punishment were dis cussed in several Evening Post articles, and in May a general convention of those opposed to the death penalty was presided over by Bryant. Taking the name of the New York Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death, this group elected Bryant its president. Bryant composed little poetry in 1843-1844, but toward the end of the period he published a pamphlet, The White Footed Deer, of only ten poems, most of which he had written for Graham's Magazine. This was the first title in the Home Library, a series of inexpensive paper books which Bryant and Evert Duyckinck, secretary of the American Copyright Club, projected to provide a vehicle for new books by American authors, and which, in an early metamorphosis, as Wiley & Putnam's Library of American Books, published significant writings by Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Simms, and others. ln the summer of 1844 the reputable Philadelphia firm of Carey & Hart suggested publication of an elegant illustrated collection of Bryant's poems, a project they realized two years later, uniformly with the poems of Halleck and Long fellow. The Evening Post prospered during this period. Announcing a steady growth in circulation and advertising throughout "all the commercial diffi culties" of 1842, Bryant attributed this to a "more sober state of public opin ion, which, chastened by the misfortunes of the times, has been brought to adopt, at last, the views we haYe constantly maintained." Early in 1844 a new, somewhat smaller type was acquired, and a ninth column added to the news paper's page. Bryant had engaged correspondents in 'Vashington and London, and their letters appeared frequently. One exception to the Evening Post's well-being, however, was the more than $6,000 loss it suffered in supporting an abortive Morning Post which Bryant established for his son-in-law soon after Parke Godwin's marriage to Fanny Bryant in 1842. It was apparently this loss which impelled Bryant later that year to hesitate over buying the property at Hempstead Harbor. Three political issues preoccupied Bryant in 1844. His unceasing opposi tion to the high tariff law passed in 1842-the "Black Tariff," as many called it-was evident in his first editorial of the year: "This huge and massive custom house, under the shadow of which we are writing, ... is not main tained for the purpose of taxing the owners of factories. They are privileged persons. It is maintained in order to tax the farmer at his plough, the black smith at his forge, and the laundress at her wash tub. It is this hard working class, who pay the millions that are annually collected in our national treas ury, while the manufacturer goes free." Three weeks later he addressed the same subject with fury: "There never was a more foul combination of selfish cunning on the one hand, and corrupt connivance on the other, than that which produced the oppressive revenue law under which we live." The tables of duties, he said, showed "how between the knaves of the mills on the one hand and the knaves of the Halls of Congress on the other, we are fleeced and peeled as mercilessly as if we had a conquering army in the land laying us A Place in the Country 191 under forced contribution." Firing away at the tariff throughout March and April, Bryant became involved in a long exchange with Henry Longfellow's father-in-law, the Massachusetts textile manufacturer and former congressman Nathan Appleton, whose letters, in reply to each of a series of editorials, Bryant published in the Evening Post. The controversy was touched off by Bryant's charge that industrialists such as Appleton made a 30% return on invested capital, while farmers realized less than 3%. In reply, Appleton com plained that, having "always understood that the Evening Post was conducted by men claiming the character of gentlemen," he was disturbed by Bryant's personal remarks. It is hard at this distance to determine who had the better of the argument, which seems to have ended with Appleton's calling Bryant "indelicate" in his remarks, and Bryant's ironic concession, "Our readers will understand that there are things which it is delicate to do, yet not delicate to speak of. It is a very delicate proceeding, in a person who holds a public trust, to pervert it to his own private interest, but it is shockingly indelicate in any person to call him to account for it." The second issue of great concern to Bryant in 1844 was the rapid growth of "Native Americanism" in both major political parties. A rising anti Catholic agitation in eastern cities, reflected in the formation of the American Protestant Union in 1841 and the American Protestant Association in 1842, was followed in 1843 by the appearance in New York City political wards of nativist associations, and their capture of the public school board. In August of that year an American Republican Party emerged; in the November elec tion its candidates for state office, promising to pass a law requiring twenty-one years' residence in this country before voting, and the barring of foreigners from all public office, cut heavily into the vote for both Democratic and Whig parties. The following April this nativist party elected book publisher James Harper mayor of New York City, and gained control of the city council. Bryant, whose advocacy of equal rights for foreign minorities and un popular religious groups had been a consistent editorial policy ever since he had deplored the criticism of Catholics at the Columbia College commence ment in 1829, was aroused to strong protest by anti-Catholic riots in New York and Brooklyn during the spring election campaign, and what he termed a "proscriptive war on persons." In May, after a more violent disorder in Phila delphia, he was indignant at its "disgraceful barbarities," which made him "sick at heart," and which he called the "first fruits of the attempt to establish a party on the ruins of the rights of an immense portion of the inhabitants of the United States." Throughout the balance of 1844 his editorials continued to deplore such a "fanaticism" which would "exterminate a man because he happens to have been born in Europe, or to entertain a religious creed differ ent from that of his neighbors." And when, in April 1845, on the eve of his departure for Europe, the Democratic Party regained control of the city's major offices, Bryant exulted in the Evening Post, "The odious principle of exclusion from political rights on account of the accident of birth in a foreign land is solemnly disowned, rejected, flung to the ground and trampled on with scorn by the vast population of our city." Bryant's most strenuous political effort in 1844 was made in opposition to the at1nexation of Texas.

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