Chapter 3

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 André, 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 André; 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.