["Leaves of Grass," 1855]

Joseph Alfred Scoville (rhymes with shovel)[1], born in 1815, was one of the poor boys of Connecticut who came to New York to get rich in business. The secret of their success, Scoville later wrote, was the perfect willingness to be useful and to do what they are required to do, cheerfully.

His is a real-life Horatio Alger story, but with brainy harlots and dirty politics. Young Joe Scoville plunged into young Manhattan. He was variously a political organizer in his ward, a theater publicist, a frequenter of rum-holes, a temperance lecturer. He was personal secretary to John C. Calhoun when the majestic old man contemplated the end of the union. His first-person narrative of the New York race riot of 1863 is horrific and still quoted today. He introduced Lola Montez to Walt Whitman. He threw one of the city s most memorable mass picnics.

Scoville himself failed as a merchant, cheerful willingness or not. But from 1839 until his death he lived by his wits and his pen. John Gordon Bennett, one of the towering newspaper editors in the city and in America, liked the way the unliterary yankee told a story. Bennett taught Scoville how to write for a city daily paper, and he took the young eccentric under his wing.

As a correspondent, over the next quarter century, Joe Scoville filled hundreds of columns of close print in Bennett s New York Herald, and dozens of other newspapers in America and England. He wrote anything that might make points as news, and seldom used his real name. His ears always seemed open, his pen always in motion.

His one novel was titled Vigor in its first appearance. (It was at once withdrawn by the publisher as scandalous.) It is largely autobiographical. In Vigor, Scoville tells of his character frequenting low places to drink and watch people and pick up news tips:

In these places he saw life. He listened to the conversation of others without mixing in it, and whether these conversations related to a dog fight or a rise in cotton, he gleaned information.

When he had a few spare dollars he would go to a new spot, where poor broken-down drunkards congregated, men who had not a copper towards paying for a three cent drink. Here he would pick up and stow away in his iron memory any quantity of useful information. He would treat, and treat, the strange crew until his funds were exhausted, and the men themselves wondered at such folly and extravagance. But he gained his point. He was deeper into the mysteries of life after all such night expeditions.

Doing so also indulged his habits; he enjoyed a hot whiskey and a cigar, the former to excess. It was like Joe Scoville to have more than one motive.

"Scoville has seen the world in all its phases, 'high life below stairs,' and 'low life above stairs;' " reads a testimonial for his comic weekly newspaper, "The Pick," from 1853, "and if any man is capable of making up a paper of interest, he is the man."[2] . The testimonial may have been written by Scoville himself.

When the Civil War broke out, Scoville became the anonymous U.S. correspondent of a British newspaper, writing as Manhattan. Scoville was among the Northern minority who were loyal to the Union but opposed to Lincoln. His columns slammed the administration and the carnage and corruption of the war. He wrote with caustic vigor. In one letter, "Manhattan" lamented the entire North s having to defend Washington, D.C., a darned hole that ought to have been burned years ago. The British did once burn it. We were such fools to build it up again. [3]

The English public licked up such writing. They began to echo it in their own opinions. Lincoln s ambassadors wrote home from Europe lamenting Manhattan s influence. The U.S. government first tried to intimidate him, then, after constant harassment, a military commander began proceedings to jail or deport him. Scoville had to face the U.S. authorities on his own, a lone correspondent with no powerful U.S. newspaper willing to back his defense, and with a Southern-born wife and a young child.

The pieces of Joe Scoville are scattered and nameless now. Even academics who touch on newspapers or Lola Montez, or business history, or comic books, or the Civil War don t recognize him in all his guises. Often they misspell his name. After a month of doing little but looking for him, I am now certain that I have not seen half of what he wrote. This can only be an introduction to the man. A proper biography awaits.

His is an acquaintance worth making. I think this is Joe Scoville (above), the stage manager in the Lola Montez caricature (but it is from Boston), standing casually in the wing, pulling on kid gloves and dreaming of pocketing half the house. In one of his columns Scoville describes the typical young Yankee such as he was, on the make in Manhattan: long legs, hatchet face, skin and bones, slight, pokey, and keen as a briar.

MISSING IN ACTION

Scoville s gathered writings would be a trove of New York history and American politics from roughly 1840-1865, written on the fly by an active player. Yet his name is missing even from the roll of First Amendment martyrs, where it belongs. Who hid this man from us? Why is Joe Scoville a secret?

He was disreputable. Scoville could be dismissed as a drunkard, a freeloader, a purely political creature. His memory may have been iron, but it leaked. He couldn t keep a secret. He had perhaps contributed material to every major newspaper in New York, but the editors in their own columns treated him as a figure of fun or scorn. James G. Bennett had Scoville under his wing, everyone knew, but even the Herald had to keep him at arm s length.

He is unreliable. His style is vigorous and slangy, but his political allegiances and grudges flow into every piece he wrote. His natural vein is sensation and scandal. His hundreds become thousands. He often gets the details wrong, even as he sees to the heart of a topic. A century later at most major newspapers he would be unhirable. In the internet age, he could have been viral.

He wrote anonymously or under pseudonyms, as all but the celebrity journalists did in those years. His literary trail is uncertain or unmarked. He published his novel, twice, on two continents, under two different names, neither of them his. People accused the second fake name of plagiarizing the first. The first version was published under "Walter Barrett." On the title page of my copy a modern librarian has attempted to pencil the correct name but has written "Walter Scoville.

BREAKING IN

Scoville writes that he came to New York at 14 and served as a clerk to learn business. As soon as he could after he turned 21 he quit, found a partner, and went into overseas trade. Scoville & Britton traded with ports in Asia and especially East Africa, which had been opened to Americans by a treaty with the imam of Muscat. Lloyd L. Britton went to Europe to arrange connections and Scoville & Britton sent valuable gifts to the imam. Scoville himself apparently travelled overseas, either with the firm or after it. All of this is recounted in Scoville s own book, Old Merchants of New York City.

Misfortune followed. One of their ships hit an iceberg sailing from Liverpool to New York, "and sank in half an hour, with many passengers. Scoville & Britton never received a dollar of insurance." Another foundered on the bar at Galveston. The British confiscated the third off the Cape of Good Hope "under the frivolous charge that she was suspected of being about to engage in the slave trade." The fourth hurried home with cargo from her voyage but arrived too late to save Scoville & Britton. The firm itself had sunk by the time the imam's own ship arrived in Manhattan in 1839 with a present of Arabian horses for President Andrew Jackson and rare gifts for the Scoville & Britton partners, whose creditors seized them.[4]

Broken in business, after 1839 Scoville seems to have plunged into drink and politics. He ran for alderman in 1839 in his ward and lost. Then he found notoriety in print. In March 1842 his (real) name emerged in a national row over a massive Whig voter-fraud operation in Philadelphia. Scoville, a Democrat, was no part of the fraud, but he seems to have come into unauthorized possession of certain damning documents from one of the conspirators, who had been jailed in New York.

Perhaps that incident caught the eagle eye of cast-iron Calhoun.

John C. Calhoun, c. 1845.

CALHOUN S YANKEE

By the end of 1842, Scoville had pitched himself into national politics, working to put former vice president John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in the White House.

The Southern titan was seeking the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 1844. But the nation was changing and Calhoun was becoming a merely sectional politician. To win he would have to build a national organization. His friends in the South sought Democratic allies in each Northern state.

In New York, after his supporters had gathered and organized, Calhoun found, "Scoville is by far the most active and full of resources."[5] Scoville might expect a lucrative government post if Calhoun succeeded. So in early 1843 Joseph A. Scoville is noted as editing "The Spectator," a newspaper in Washington, D.C., devoted to the cause of electing John C. Calhoun.

It didn't last. In January one Calhoun organizer wrote that Scoville was "extremely active and useful, but a most confounded grumbler." In April, Calhoun s letter to Scoville seems to warn him to rein his personal attacks: The Spectator is doing Well. The last number is excellent. It ought never to attack, but in self defence; and then with moderation, dignity and power."[6]

That would not be the Joe Scoville way. Finally in May, Calhoun's lieutenant Robert M.T. Hunter, a U.S. representative from Virginia, wrote that he had been "suddenly summoned to a meeting of some of our friends" in Washington "in order to rescue the management of our affairs from poor Scoville, whose indiscretion was doing us much mischief."[7]

Calhoun's candidacy never got momentum and he withdrew in the summer of 1843. James K. Polk of Tennessee, a surprise nominee for the Democrats, went on to win the general election.

But Calhoun was called back to government unexpectedly in 1844 when the U.S. secretary of state was killed with 5 others in the bursting of a gun being demonstrated for the public aboard the warship USS Princeton. Calhoun inherited a busy State Department: The Tyler administration already was deep into the machinations to annex Texas, and relations with Britain were delicate over the Oregon boundary. One of the people Calhoun called in to help him with paperwork was Scoville, who is noted as working in the department by November 1844 as temporary efficient clerk, not as a regular employee.[8]

TEMPERANCE, THEATER

The Harper brothers.

Calhoun s stint as secretary ended in March 1845 and he went home to prepare for a return to the Senate. By 1846, Scoville was back in New York, and he appears to have caught the temperance bug. As usual, nothing is simple.

When Scoville worked to elect Calhoun in 1842, he had overseen the printing of Calhoun s biography and collected speeches. This brought him into daily contact with Harper & Brothers, the large printing house on Pearl Street.

The Harpers were noted temperance advocates, who paid lecturers handsomely to speak to crowds and meetings. Scoville s drinking was said to have worsened after the failure of the Calhoun candidacy. He also might have sensed the amount of money the Harpers were willing to spend.

At the end of 1846 Scoville launched a prospectus for "Spirit of the Age," a weekly paper that debuted in January 1847, "strictly devoted to the spread of temperance throughout the nation." Scoville was to be editor (with Thaddeus Hyatt). In 1847 he was secretary of a temperance advocacy society and spoke at its meetings.

Scoville was fond of the working-class Bowery theaters and, according to his novel, knew the actors well. One of the managers of the most popular theaters, William Dinneford, had gone temperance in 1845. Dinneford bought an old theater on Broadway, determined to stage "Temperance Dramatic Sketches and musical entertainments, to aid in the great cause of Moral Reform. Mr. D. has become a tee-totaller, and is sustained in his laudable undertaking by some of the first families in the city."[9]

The Harper money seemed bottomless. And there is this advertisement, from a Massachusetts newspaper in March 1847. Dinneford and Scoville perhaps were trying out their material off Broadway:

It reads like an attempt to marry temperance and racy sensationalism. It reads like Joe Scoville in his glory. Vice to be abhorred must be seen! Pay at the door. The temperance chapter in "Vigor" has "Marion" writing speeches for hard-drinking actors to recite earnestly in front of temperance audiences. The actors then use their pay to go on a spree.

BENNETT S MAN FRIDAY

During his push for Calhoun, in August 1842, Scoville wrote to Calhoun s ally Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, describing his own wire-pulling in the newspapers to embarrass former president Martin Van Buren, a native New Yorker and a powerhouse in the city. It also shows Scoville's energy level and the workings of the mind.

"Bryant" is William Cullen Bryant, remembered in modern times as an American poet. Then, he was the influential editor-in-chief of the New York Post."

 The New York daily newspapers were the lungs of American politics. The biggest in the 1840s and '50s were run by and for the political elite, and they hewed to the lines of a party or were openly the mouthpieces of a candidate. The New York papers circulated nationwide in the mails, and they were meant to keep the national parties unified and focused. Articles were written anonymously, and drew no line between reporting and party work.

One wily veteran of the old newsrooms (David G. Croly of the World ) put it as tactfully as he could, in a magazine interview: "the very best party papers have not been truth-telling papers. If they do not actually tell falsehoods, they are bound to suppress the truth when it is calculated to do a little mischief to those on their side."

Follow the party and bash the opposition. Lure the masses with scandal and sensation. Let truth catch up. The result in print is a heady racket of tin-horn-tooting, literary satire, and naked calumny.

James Gordon Bennett Sr.

Herald Square was years in the future, after the Bennetts built new offices on the site of Barnum s museum. Until the end of the Civil War, the Herald was a block east at Fulton and Nassau streets, and it was the creature of the elder James Gordon Bennett, a Scottish immigrant. He was independent-minded, fierce, and irascible. His politics tended Democratic, but it was easier to know what he was against than what he was for. But his circulation was large enough to put him above pure party or the need to knuckle under to anyone.

It seems Bennett appreciated Scoville s stock of inside information, access to all levels of society, and ability to tell a sprightly story in slangy phrases. Bennett might have seen some of his young self in the yankee.

Scoville became Bennett s pet correspondent. Scoville's natural specialty was racy prose and sensationalism of any sort, but he was a political creature at heart and ready to do any service for any party that kept him fed.

Scoville and Bennett s relationship, as revealed in the columns they wrote, looks like love-hate. If Bennett had discovered Joe Scoville as a writer, he often seemed in a hurry to undiscover him. When they clashed in politics, they scorned each other in bitter words. And probably laughed at it later. The hate is only seeming. What looks like scorching contempt to us is just the usual prose of old-time political newspapers. A rival paper in 1856 correctly, if dismissively, summed up Scoville as Bennett s man Friday.

Scoville dedicated "Vigor," to Bennett, "Who has carved for himself a record in Journalism that will last as long as newspapers are published. Bennett appears in the book as himself.

The DEATHBED of CALHOUN

In April, 1849, Scoville and another city Democratic politician launched the New York "Examiner," a Saturday weekly journal advertised as "dignified." Bennett s "Herald" dutifully touted it in advance as possessing "many marks of ability, and great liveliness, vivacity, and piquancy. Mr. Scoville is well known to many of the newspapers here, to which he has contributed much interesting matter, for some time past."[10]

But soon Scoville was in South Carolina, writing letters from the South to the Herald and working daily for John C. Calhoun, who had returned to the Senate after his secretaryship ended.

The Southern political men were in an uproar early in 1849 over the Compromise of 1850, then being hammered out in Congress. For Calhoun and others, accepting it would leave the South in subjugation to the North. Through that spring and summer, Calhoun joined the cry for a convention of all the Southern states to discuss states rights and the ongoing relations of the two sections.

Congress had adjourned in March, and Calhoun was at home in Fort Hill, South Carolina, mustering his political philosophy for the final battle.

Calhoun also was coming to feel the want of a large-circulation press in the South to spread his message. He saw the Northern politicians skill in using newspapers to drive party movements. Watching Joe Scoville in action in 1843 could have opened Calhoun s eyes to what was possible with daily journals, and how, from a small print shop in Manhattan, a few men could blow up a candidate or make a cause ripple across the nation.

Scoville would have been able to do as much for Calhoun, in the South. If only he were reliable. He seems to have gone south at Calhoun's request, to take dictation from the senator and get his papers published. As Scoville told the story, Bennett asked him also to be a Southern correspondent for the "Herald" while he was there.

Scoville writes that Bennett, after talking to Southern politicians in D.C., had discovered the ignorance of the North about what was going on in the South. He asked Scoville to "go to the South, and spend the season until Congress meets," and report what people down there were saying and doing. The Herald would cover expenses.

Scoville traveled from Charleston up to Calhoun's estate at Fort Hill and spent the next 2 or 3 months there, taking dictation from Calhoun of his work on the constitution. Scoville was "writing for the Herald, but devoting my time to writing for Mr. Calhoun." Scoville writes Calhoun approved of the double arrangement, for the sake of getting Southern realities into Northern papers, and that Calhoun suggested some of the letters' topics. Scoville then visited the state's summer resorts and talked with planters generally.

He wrote, he claims, 40-plus letters to the "Herald" under pseudonyms "Northerner," "Commissioner," "&c." The letters begin to appear in the "Herald" by June 19, under "Notes on the South," or "Our Southern Correspondence." "These letters made a sensation at the time," Marion boasts, and were printed as far off as London.

While there, Scoville also wrote letters to Southern papers, which reprinted them. He mentions having been published under pseudonyms in the Charleston Mercury, Columbian Telegraph, North Carolina Standard, and Macon Telegraph. In the years when the sections were pulling apart, probably few journalists were as widely read North and South as Joe Scoville.

Letters in private correspondences in South Carolina that summer suggest the tippling, indiscrete Yankee did not endear himself to the planter gentry.

THE GREAT SPEECH

In October, Scoville returned to New York briefly, then Bennett asked him to go to Washington, D.C., at the start of the Congressional session. Scoville had checked into the National Hotel in D.C. by Nov. 12, 1849. Congress returned in December, and John C. Calhoun moved back to the boarding house that was his home in the capital.

The debate over the compromise culminated in early March 1850, with speeches scheduled by the three great veteran orators, Calhoun, Clay, Webster. But Calhoun was 67, ravaged by tuberculosis, and he realized he was too weak to write out his sentences or speak them before the Senate.

He wanted Joe Scoville to get it done. In February, editor Bennett was in Washington. He received a note from Calhoun, who "would thank him, if Mr. Scoville has returned from Richmond and he should meet with him, to say to him that Mr. C. would be glad to see him. Mr. Calhoun would not trouble Mr. Bennett, but he is not certain where Mr. S. is to be found."

Bennett got word to Scoville who connected with Calhoun. Scoville spent the next few weeks in the senator's boarding house and "devoted my personal services to Mr. Calhoun," through the speech and until the senator s death.

Reconstructing from Scoville s articles, Calhoun s dictation of the speech began by Feb. 15 and probably was finished by the 28th. On March 4, Calhoun s friend and disciple, Sen. James Mason of Virginia, read the message to the convention while Calhoun sat watching. It would become Calhoun s most famous speech, and one of the most memorable ever made in the Senate.

If you [North] who represent the stronger portion, cannot agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.

The words sent a shiver through the union. They were John Caldwell Calhoun s condensed philosophy of government, but the pen that put them on paper was held by Joe Scoville. The manuscript is in the Library of Congress, Scoville s hand, Calhoun s edits:

Scoville also arranged to have the text set in print for Mason to read more easily. In the weeks after the speech, Scoville continued to take dictation, as the declining Calhoun finished what became the "Disquisition on Government," which follows much the same argument as the convention speech.

Calhoun died March 31, 1850. Scoville wrote a detailed description of the great man's final hours and sent it to the Herald. It was widely reprinted, north and south. It remains the base account of the timeline of Calhoun's decline and the key to understanding the composition of his last and greatest works [e.g.: Eugene E. White s use of it in "The Context of Human Discourse," 1992]. The story of Calhoun on his deathbed refusing to see any minister of the gospel scandalized many among the pious, but Scoville stuck to it.

From his earliest days in the U.S. House, Calhoun had been famously an elegant speaker. "His gestures are easy and graceful, his manner forcible, and language elegant; but above all, he confines himself closely to the subject, which he always understands, and enlightens everyone within hearing."[11]

Scoville, a disreputable yankee of yankees who wrote in a vulgar, shambling, unliterary voice, seems an unlikely scribe for the strict Southern partisan. But after 1843, Calhoun would have remembered Scoville s focused energy and ability to pull wires and get things done. These were qualities uncommon in the South, and in 1849, Calhoun had short time and much to say.

Scoville for his part seems to have adored Calhoun s character. He also could see himself in the older man s life. Scoville wrote of how the aristocratic families of South Carolina had never admitted John C. Calhoun, son of a Scots-Irish frontiersman, into their set or treated him as a social equal. Yet, like Bennett, Calhoun was undaunted and fearlessly independent in his politics. Both men made politics bend to their wills. Scorned by elites, they had made themselves superior to elites by their force of mind and will. Both had been born the generation before him. Scoville s reverence for both seemed deep and sincere.

Mason, the Virginia senator who read the speech, excluded the mere newspaperman Scoville from the party of notables accompanying Calhoun s body back to South Carolina. The move was prudent and unjust. Scoville never forgave Mason, who already was in Scoville s black books for claiming to be unable to read his handwriting of the speech. This had forced Scoville to run over D.C. after dark to wake up a printer to set the speech in type.

He avenged himself in print. Scoville wrote that he as a newspaper writer had done more for the South, in his articles from there, ay, told more in this crisis than anything Mr. Mason ever wrote, or ever will write but that is not his fault. He is not accountable for brains that a wise God never gave him. [12] In 1863 Scoville hoped that Mason had learned the lesson, "viz., that he nor any other big dog in politics or position can afford to turn up his nose at the humblest quill-driver."[13]

Four years later Scoville ran lengthy glowing reminiscences of Calhoun in his own magazine, The Pick, and some in the Herald. [14]

Yet Joe also was, as ever, indiscrete and alert to the main chance. In 1852 advertisements ran in newspapers across the South for "Fisk's Patent Burial Metallic Cases" (below) a new and ornamental method of preserving a dead body. The ad included a letter testimonial, signed by Scoville as "Mr. Calhoun's Private Secretary," thanking the firm for "the satisfaction you have given, by the manner in which you have inclosed the remains of the late Mr. Calhoun ...."

LOLA, BARNUM, and MR. PICK

By 1852, The Rev. began to be affixed humorously to Joseph A. Scoville s name in the Herald and other newspapers. It was a newsroom in-joke worth keeping up, too well known to be explained. At least once they appended an A.M. and D.D. to it as well, and further biblicized his name as Josephus.

Scoville seems to have earned the Rev. via another of Calhoun s inner circle, Richard K. Cralle, Calhoun s chief clerk, who was deeply religious and a clergyman in the Swedenborgian New Church in Washington, D.C. "Marion" in "Vigor" has the knack for imitating styles of lecturing. Scoville seems to have liked Craille, but his love of fun, apparently, led him to develop an impersonation of Cralle preaching that so impressed Calhoun that the statesman himself was the one who started referring to reverend Joe Scoville.

At the start of January 1852, the Rev. Joseph A. Scoville emerged as the manager of entertainer Lola Montez, at the peak of her scandalous fame, in her American debut. He also sets up a weekly newspaper for himself. The timing likely is not coincidental: Scoville has the top celebrity in the U.S. all to himself, and he has his own press to promote them both.

The PICK

Scoville had come home from Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1850 and immediately gone to work as the editor of a comic weekly newspaper.

Richard B. Hutchings, "a very modest, unassuming tailor," had invented "Hutchings' Dyspepsia Bitters" ( the most popular family medicine of the age, used by physicians of high standing ) and had gone into business with a partner, selling the stuff. About 1847, the partners started printing a humor sheet to promote the drug. "They started the Picayune as a quack advertising sheet, Scoville wrote, ... and they had no more idea of a newspaper when I went with them than a couple of donkeys would naturally have of regulating St. Paul's clock."

I commenced with them, sir, at $10 a week, and it was with difficulty they could pay that, and live. Soon after the circulation increased rapidly, and they began to realize money.[15]

Scoville wrote a regular column on every front page, as Mr. Pick, sharing his thoughts in his sanctum. Scoville wrote a great deal more of it, uncredited; the only other writer the owners paid was the contributor of the negro sermon parody. Before Scoville this seemed to be the paper s chief attraction. It was an American comedic trope, the learned, ignorant darkey preacher, as the Picayune lovingly described the character, and they are as dead unfunny as such pieces are, however they were regarded in the past.

When Scoville went to work for them, he later wrote, the Picayune partners "did not own a type, or didn't know a column rule from a yard-stick." The sheet was run off at a nearby job printing shop. Scoville convinced them to print it themselves, then he set up a press for them and hired the pressmen. Some seem to have been his drinking buddies.

And he flushed out talent to write and draw for it. One of his first contributors was Thomas Butler Gunn, a gloomy, bohemian Englishman in his 20s with skills both in illustration and writing who had come to America in 1849 to start a career. He ended up in Manhattan the next year, hobnobbing with the finest minds among the high-minded and short-of-cash. By October 1851 Scoville had Gunn doing commissions for the "Picayune," then under Scoville's editorship (while Gunn was writing attacks on it, anonymously, in rival weeklies).

Gunn made only a dollar or two from his illustrations, but it helped keep him alive and he was weaving business and social connections. Even if it involved working with scoundrels. As a fellow expat he struck up conversations with one of Hutchings writers at the Picayune, named Alcock, who told Gunn gleefully that the place was "nothing better than a brothel."

Alcock was an Irishman who had been at Gibraltar, a well-intentioned old boy; an ass, I'm afraid, who wrote poorly enough and whom Joe Scoville professed to have discovered in a garret in Antony Street, near the Five Points. I fear the old boy [Alcock] rather chuckled over and was a sort of left-handed Sir Pandarus of Troy to Dick Hutchings' promiscuous copulations.[16]

Modest, unassuming tailor indeed. Scoville had scandalous dirt on Hutchings, he hinted in their later feud. Gunn wrote, "I think that the people who have been connected with the "Picayune" in the way of proprietorship, editorializing &c, have... been the vilest, most dirty souled knaves conceivable."

Scoville knew the key to the paper was that column anchored atop the left column of the front page, purporting to be observations and ruminations of a fictional Mr. Pick. He made Mr. Pick a megaphone for Joe Scoville.

By the fall, "Mr. Pick" had caught on; he was a celebrity, a known name, read across the city and across the nation. The negro sermons were pushed off the pedestal. Scoville had revamped the whole operation to suit himself. But he was working himself ragged doing the whole paper, anonymously, for two bosses who knew little and paid less.

After building up public awareness of "Mr. Pick," along with the paper s circulation, Scoville quit the "Picayune" at the end of December and rented space upstairs at 24 and 26 Ann Street, a few doors from Barnum and next to a rowdy firehouse. There he set up a weekly comic paper of his own. It was called "The Pick."

The first thing it did was pick a fight. Scoville levelled complaints about his former employers (in Bennett s Herald, of course), claiming that "Hutchings' Bitters agents were travelling the country passing on railroads and steamboats free, as Mr. Pick!" and he added that "Mr. Pick did not leave New York City during the whole time except to go to Hoboken or Staten Island."

In Scoville s Pick prospectus in the "Herald," the "editor and proprietor" of the new paper respectfully informed his loyal readers and the public at large that he "now finds himself in a condition to lay down the old article and produce a Pick of his own bright as unsullied honor and sharp as a Toledo blade." He advertised against the "Picayune": "Now the public can choose for itself, that is to say they can take their Pick." He promised humorous illustrations and "a great variety of spicy and witty reading matter"[17]

I have a good foreman, of the name of Perry, and have all my type and fixtures, and have insured them for $500, at the Firemen's Company, of which my democratic friend, Niel Gray, is president. He looked at me with astonishment when I applied, as he never dreamed that I had 600 cents to insure. I have bought a pickaxe for a dollar, and stuck it up for a sign over my door, No. 26 Ann street.[18]

His paper hit the streets and the mails on Feb. 18, 1852.

The owners of the old "Picayune" kicked up a fuss, and sued for libel. But Scoville blew past them in court and on the streets with a paper that seems to please everyone. Once people learned that the real Mr. Pick had gone solo, readers followed him to the new masthead. "The Pick" was the talk of the town. Gunn, the illustrator, wrote in November 1852 that when he visited Bunnell & Price's bookstore on Fulton Street, he found "All there talking anent the vicious faced & dirty shirted Scoville who had been pitching into 'em in his paper. My name in 't, incidentally."[19]

Scoville also wrote most of The Pick. The print parts of it are a grab-bag of his personal wit, his clunky and salacious fiction, and his lengthy reminiscences of the life and death of that noble man Calhoun. Those last often were reprinted by other newspapers nationwide. Calhoun seems an awkward guest among the vulgar cartoons and bareknuckle satire. Nobody then seemed to mind.

Scoville s home turf, in his heyday, was this stretch of Ann Street. Basrnum s museum is marked on Broadway. The Herald office is marked, center, at Nassau and Fulton streets in this 1851 map. The office of The Pick at 24-26 Ann was in the double address on the south side of the block with the carriageway, just to the left of the double fire station marked Southwark Engine Co.

ANN STREET

Scoville in the 1850s generally did business from the block of Ann Street just east of Broadway. Ann Street had been "improved" in the 1830s; rows of little wooden houses were pulled down and replaced by brick buildings with shops on the street and roomy, lighted spaces on the upper floors that made ideal offices for printers, bookbinders, and engravers. The block was on the edge of the island s busiest, noisiest neighborhood and near city hall, the police, the big hotels, and the newspaper offices.

"Barnum's American Museum," full of freaks and frauds, mermaids and mobs of tourists, was around the corner. Around the other, at Nassau and Fulton, stood the offices of the New York "Herald."

In the 1850's Ann Street was a gathering place for many sharpers and gamblers, who came from all over the country to fleece the unwary countryman. A small band of Chinamen operated a number of gambling houses where "fake" games were run night and day. These were scattered over the block from Park Row to Nassau Street. ...

The street was a "hang-out" in this period for the volunteer fireladdies, who also took a turn at the cards and "the wheel." The famous "Honey-Bee" fire-engine and Company were quartered at 61 Ann Street, as well as Southwark Engine Co. No. 38 and Humane Hose Co. No. 20, both at 28 Ann Street. Many races were held between the rival fire companies ... and Ann Street, Broadway, and the adjacent thoroughfares resounded with their good natured banterings. These days are gone for ever never to return.[20]

The Pick went to press Friday nights, but often it was Saturday morning before the types were all set and ready. If there was no need for more copy to fill the pages, the editor was free while the type-setters finished work. About 10 p.m. on such nights, Mr. Pick wrote, he "sallies forth to breathe pure air, and if any of his haunts are open he steers in that direction and there holds out with any chance acquaintance until midnight arrives, and he returns to his own printing office to read proofs."

A favorite stop was Wilde's Confectionary Store, 451 Broadway. "Mr. Wilde is a gentleman, a pleasant companion, chatty, and is generally posted in reference to the passing events of the town."

That is not all; either his conversation or sweetables induce lots of literary chaps to go there, and it has become a sort of Literary Exchange, from 10 P.M. to midnight, when he shuts up, and the L.L.C. (Loafing Literary Club) adjourn.[21]

The men and women who wrote copy for New York's newspapers and weekly magazines were a pack of sharp-elbowed frenemies. They devoted their days and nights to attempting to scoop and embarrass one another. They seldom wrote under their real names, and thus spent hours trying to tease out who was behind which name. They cheated and tricked and taunted one another. There were almost duels. And they had more in common with one another than with anyone else.

To Scoville, who had no particular pride as a writer, this was all just business, and there were no hard feelings among equals. Public feuds between editors sold more papers than peaceful coexistence, and the point of being a writer, or anything else, Joe Scoville knew, was to make money at it.

Scoville was at Wilde's on Broadway one Friday night when another editor, John Brougham, walked in. When Scoville was at the "Picayune," he and Hutchings had planned and designed a comic weekly to be called "The Lantern." But then Scoville struck out on his own with "The Pick," so Hutchings went ahead with "The Lantern" and he hired Brougham to run it.

The two weeklies were feuding in print. The two editors greeted each other warmly. "As Mr. B., actor, writer, &c. we rather like him," Scoville would write in "The Pick." "As Editor of the Lantern, we don't like him, for in that light we regard him as having poached upon our literary meadow .... But when the Lantern is blown out, we and Brougham shall be good friends again."[22]

Scoville, with his practical shrewdness, saw that the press never would be a power until the writers and the editors felt their community of interest, and learned that an offense to one was an offense to all.

After enduring Sen. Mason's slight at Calhoun's funeral, Scoville fumed, "There are as honorable, high minded and talented men in Washington, connected with the press, as there are in either house of Congress, and they only lack and organized espirit du corps [sic], to let members feel and appreciate it."[23]

Lola Montez, 1851

LOLA MONTEZ

The Pick flourished. Scoville boasted his paper was winning subscribers from his former employers. In Scoville s Picayune days a Picayune Club had been got up by fans of Mr. Pick. They had planned a grand fancy dress ball in his honor at Gothic Hall in Brooklyn, and sent invitations to Mr. Pick care of the Picayune. But in February when The Pick appeared alongside the Picayune, confusion abounded. It soon emerged that Scoville was the real Mr. Pick, by rights, and the fans re-scheduled the ball in his honor and cancelled the tickets they had sent to the Picayune.

At the start of January 1852, Scoville also became the manager of Lola Montez, adventuress and Spanish dancer (born Eliza Rosanna Gilbert in Ireland), then freshly arrived in New York and making her American debut after abandoning Europe, where she had scandalized generally.

In New York Lola s best behavior won over many who were put off by her reputation. Her interactions could be awkward, and she wasn t much of a dancer, but she seemed polite and willing to win Americans over, even if she didn t understand them. But scandal, and suitors, followed her across the Atlantic.

She was lodged in a suite on Broadway at the Howard Hotel (some called it Howard s Hotel ), one of the places large enough, even in New York, to accommodate Lola s river of callers. These included the imposing grand chamberlain of the emperor of Haiti, who invited her to visit his majesty s court.

Lola Montez (Americans often spelled it Montes ) had had a well-connected New York agent when she arrived, but she fired him, not understanding his attempts at publicity and mistrusting his handling of her money. To temper sensationalism and keep money secure, she turned to the Rev. Joseph A. Scoville, who had little ability at either. The Rev. title did give some people a start when the hiring was announced.

For one, Lola did not understand why her former manager had let the public think that she had been run out of Bavaria by the Jesuits. It wasn t true. Scoville convinced her that didn t matter. American audiences were nativist, anti-Catholic. Being run out of Bavaria by Jesuits was a good thing. She understood, and she started claiming to see Jesuit agents everywhere.

The shabby Pick editor moved, tom-cat and all, into the Howard as a sort of agent-slash-journalistic bodyguard. He would steer Lola Montez s career through the reef of American audiences, and with his pen and connections he would push back at her critics in the press. For his part Scoville, a Montez biographer writes, "found her a wonderful foil for his wit, adored her beauty and enjoyed her company, and continues:

He also introduced her to many people who were later to become famous: Walt Whitman, then merely a journalist who wrote poetry; William Dean Howells, who was working in a printing office and had ambitions to become an author ; and the fascinating actress, Adah Isaacs. With the latter, Lola established a friendship which was to last throughout her life.[24]

Another visitor was T.L. Nichols, the radical journalist and reformer, who had known Scoville since his D.C. days in Calhoun s State Department. Nichols was an advocate of the water cure, which Scoville may have taken for his health or drinking. In Nichols s best-selling autobiography, written years later, he remembers walking down Broadway in 1852 and meeting Joe Scoville, whom he hasn t seen since Washington. Scoville greets him warmly and invites him in.

In a first-floor drawing room I found a monkey, three dogs, a parrot, a mocking-bird, a Polish Prince, a Hungarian Count, a bundle of cigarettes, a box of cigars, a decanter of brandy, and Lola Montes, ... who, between puffs of her cigarette, conversed with her visitors in three or four languages, caressed her dogs, scolded her monkey, and was as lively, sparkling, amiable and rattle-headed as she knew how to be.[25]

On May 2, 1852, a Sunday, Lola s reputation took a hit and so did a couple of her unwanted suitors. In the hotel suite that night were, among others, a Polish father and son, the elder a count, and an Italian prince who had been Montez s lover in Paris. She picked an argument with the prince, he slandered her, and she flew at him with her fists then had him thrown out. He came back later with a friend; they got inside, and the prince charged Lola. The Polish nobles attempted a defense of the countess.

Scoville elbowed through the crowd of night-gowned hotel guests at the door. The aristocrats from abroad had merely shielded the lady. Scoville attacked the attackers. He knocked down both the Italians with his fists, and threw them out. The scene was gleefully covered in the city papers as the Battle of Howard s Hotel. Scoville pitched in to pump up the story. It was reprinted as far off as Liverpool.

The dramatis persona on that occasion consisted of the counts and barons and princes of her train, the Reverend Mr. Pick and his cat, the maid and dog of the countess, and a few outsiders to show fair play- the scene was enacted in Mr. Pick's sanctum.[26]

Montez then took her act on the road. Scoville was tied down in New York by the success of the Pick, and couldn t manage her as she played in Albany, Philadelphia, and Boston in May. Her mediocre dancing and worse acting were becoming difficult to disguise. Explosive outbursts over small slights alienated her audiences.

BARNUM OUT-BARNUMED

Lola Montez returned to Manhattan at the end of May. Over the summer she performed at a Bowery theater in a play written for her, and sued the New York Times for slander for $65,000. The other papers had said as much about her. If she won, and she might, the Herald and the rest would be on her hook next.

It fell to Joe Scoville and Phineas Taylor Barnum to try to make peace. Barnum tried first. He arranged a fete, featuring "the New York editors, actors, and wits of the day," at his Moorish revival mansion Iranistan, a gaudy pile in Bridgeport, Connecticut. One purpose was to lure Lola out and reconcile her to the newspapermen. The other was to promote Barnum. The great showman had coveted Montez for her celebrity and notoriety. He could make something of that. Scoville stood between, but so did Lola s instincts.

In a sense they were three of a kind, wary but eager minds with a knack for sensation and the money to be made off it. Their negotiations must have crackled. Scoville published (his version of) some of them.

PICK. Oh! Barnum don't talk. Lola told me all about that. She says that you and Bateman have got up this new dodge, and that you will make $100,000 by it.

BARNUM. Keep quiet. Lola is shrewd.

PICK. She is, and she reads you. Do you know what she says she will do, if she don't make money in this country?

BARNUM. No; what is it?

PICK. She says she will give you $100,000 if you will go to Europe for one year, and let her show you through France and Germany as the great American humbug, and she is sure that she will clear $400,000 more by the operation.

BARNUM. Go away.[27]

Barnum invited her to the big bash. The day of the event arrived. Early that morning, Scoville was "seated on a fire hydrant in front of No. 26 Ann street, when a shoeless individual approached from the American Museum, and in great apparent haste handed Mr. Pick the following letter, saying, "Mr. B said there was no answer." Pick opened and read the note. It was evidently written in a hurry:

MUSEUM CORNER.

DEAR PICK Go up. We start at 7 A.M. Bring Lola. Greeley ["Tribune" editor] and Raymond ["New York Times" editor] will be along, and so will Bennett. Forget and forgive. D--n the fire annihilator business. Lola got the monkey, of course? She will be welcome. Boy will tell you all. Yours, in haste, P.T.B.

He brings the news and the invitation to Lola.

LOLA. Go up where, Pick?

PICK. Up to Barnum's. He gives a large party; has invited all the editors, and wants you to go.

LOLA. I'll see him hanged first.

PICK. Oh, tut, tut; you are unkind. You know he has treated you very kindly of late, and then you have been over so many times to the Museum to see him; and don't forget he sent you a little monkey.

LOLA. Oh, Pick. What a fibber you are! I never went to see Barnum ; it was the dear old orang-outang, a much more respectable and honest man than Barnum, and you know it.

PICK. But you accepted the monkey which Barnum sent you, to make up for all the injury he has done you, because you would not put yourself in his hands; and now you might honor him with a visit.[28]

But no luck.The fete went on and was considered a grand time. Lola Montez stayed home, Now it was Scoville s turn to try to make peace between the prima donna and the papers.

The Pick Club dutifully took a vote and resolved to hold "a grand Pick-nick" in honor of "Joseph A. Scoville, the Mr. Pick, editor of The Pick," and furthermore "That the Pick-nick take place at the beautiful and romantic woods and groves of Yonkers."

After heavy rain at dawn, skies cleared and the day was perfect. His celebrity list of guests included all the newspaper editors. The event was, they said, immortal. Under the heading "A Convention of Notabilities," the "Herald" led its edition the next day with a write-up of the affair.

A large number of the most extraordinary celebrities of this, or any other city, had a reunion yesterday in one of the beautiful groves contiguous to Yonkers. Perhaps, in point of eccentricity, of every variety of hue, there never was congregated before in that part of the country any assemblage which could at all bear comparison with this.

And Mr. Pick wrote it up in memorable, if mortal, style. The editors and the danseuse seemed to reach an understanding that in the future her character and morals would be kept out of their columns. From the Herald article:

Lola Montez s New York celebrity had all but run its course. She moved on to New Orleans and then San Francisco, in shorter dresses, and she held them spellbound with her quickly notorious Spider Dance, a tarantella in which she kicked and flounced as though trying to shake the spiders from her petticoats and at the same time gave evidence of what she did or didn t wear under them.

DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY

After the Lola Montez experience, Joe Scoville seems ready to settle down. He has been through temperance reform. He is past 35, old enough to look back on life. Soon he begins writing the reflective Old Merchant columns. He seems to have begun his autobiographical novel at this time. He also wrote serial romance stories for the Picayune and Pick, one of which he published as a book, Adventures of Clarence Bolton or Clarence Bolton: A New York Story. The Library of Congress seems to know it not as his, but in 1852 the title is in advertisements listing "cheap books" for sale, along with "Lady Godiva, or Peeping Tom of Coventry" and "B'hoys of New York."

And he marries. In "Vigor" he writes of a young girl, "Cara," whom "Marion" gets to know while visiting John C. Calhoun (appearing as himself) in South Carolina. She is the teenage daughter of a distant relative of Calhoun's. "She would ride with ease the most skittish horse on Mr. Calhoun's plantation .... When she rode about the place, or visited any of the neighbors, she rarely troubled the negroes to open gates for her, but made her horse leap the various fences."

Calhoun's wife tut-tutted on one occasion, as 'Cara' came full tilt with her horse over the fence of the door yard." But Calhoun himself was in favor. "There is no weak, sickly effeminacy about her, engendered by being shut up in a parlor, without pure air or healthy exercise. I like to see a girl educated in that manner." He is thinking in the Spartan way (as did Whitman), of women as fit mothers of free men. He adds (in Scoville's telling), "It is an education worth more to her and to society than it is even to be able to read and write, if she could not have both physical and mental education."

That was the real-life Caroline, or Carolina, Schaub, daughter of a landowner in St. John s Berkley, north of Charleston.[29] She was 17 when she married Joseph A. Scoville on April 26, 1853, in St. George's Chapel on Beekman Street. Their only child, Mary Von Hagen Scoville, was born the next year.

Bennett professed to marvel at the transformation in his "man Friday." At the success of The Pick, he wrote,

Joseph A. Scoville, once a most shocking genius of intemperance and grog, has, some time since, reformed, and is now the very apostle of temperance, wit, genius, fun, philosophy, and common sense. He is a signal example of the power of cold water, in improving intellect and imagination.

We once knew him as a young merchant of high character, visiting the family of President King, of Columbia College ; then a common drunkard in the gutters ; then a foreign traveller of great observation ; then a drunkard again, knocking about in Broadway ; then the elegant and intelligent secretary of the late John C. Calhoun ; then a rollicking boy in the rum holes. He is now, and has been, permanently reformed for some time, and bids fair to establish one of the most popular, witty, and amusing weekly papers in the city. He has talent for it, and he is now sober and serious.[30]

The past is never gone, however. In August 1853, Gunn, the illustrator, picked up a bit of boarding-house gossip on Beach Street where the newlyweds were living: "there'd been a row 'twixt him and mother-in-law touching his former intimacy with Lola Montez."[31]

He "liked to write in an elegant dressing gown. [32] In a digression in the "Old Merchants" columns Scoville s columns often mention his old tom cat, Hokee-Pokee, asleep by the stove or atop his desk. He was a bird fancier, too, and kept canaries and a "whistling Java sparrow" in cages by the window. In the 1850s he wrote an interesting account of the New York bird market for Southern newspapers.

Early in 1854 Scoville inherited a large sum of money from his mother's uncle, Nathan Preston of Litchfield, Connecticut, an old bachelor, "very quiet and economical in his habits." Preston left no will, Caroline Preston Scoville had died in 1837, and her son, poor Scoville, seems to have been the only heir.

The Herald congratulated him on his luck on March 25, and on June 15 it quoted a New Jersey newspaper s notice that Joseph A. Scoville "has just purchased the romantic farm of Mr. James Johnson, about three miles southeast of Newton. It contains about 200 acres, and includes a beautiful lake ...."

Over the next few months the Herald ran brief updates on Scoville s model farm in New Jersey, but, given all the in-joke interplay between Scoville and Bennett, it is difficult to know whether the farm reports are real or a disguised tease at Scoville's politics.

The Pick commenced its fourth year in 1855, but in June Scoville sold out to the new owner of the "Picayune," who merged it into his weekly paper.

STRANGER BEDFELLOWS

Meanwhile Scoville had his own journalistic irons in the fire.

Scoville, like his mentors Bennett and Calhoun, identified with the Democratic Party. In his novel, "Marion" became a Democrat as a young clerk in reflexive opposition to his conservative master. Scoville himself seems never to have had high principles in politics or anything else. But in Manhattan in his time, the Democrats were the powerful faction and controlled the city government. Naturally, he would choose there to climb.

In New York the party had power; nationwide, in the 1850s, it wobbled. The northern and southern wings found less and less in common. Meanwhile, every other movement and faction in America attempted to stitch together a single party that could compete with the Democrats nationwide.

Affiliations and alliances formed and fell in dizzying array. Scoville, however serious he had been about farming, dove into the 1856 presidential campaign. He first backed, or fronted, the longshot candidacy of an anti-immigrant businessman named George Law. He was a long-shot in a fading third party. But at least he wasn t a moribund dough-face or a radical Republican. The "Herald" also backed Law, then reversed itself and doomed Law's hopes, if he had any. By the time it was over, Scoville found himself in ranks with the abolitionists.

In the thick of the contest, he helmed a political newspaper. At the start of August 1856 Scoville bought the Albany "State Register" newspaper and by the end of the month he had transferred it to New York City and set it up again at 81 Franklin St. It made a mighty noise and lasted less than 10 months.

Scoville's "Register" was "slashing right and left as an independent, saucy evening Fremont paper. Its flag flies with these names blazoned forth: For president John C. Fremont; for governor Horace Greeley of New York;" etc.[33]

Scoville's one-time illustrator, the Englishman T.B. Gunn, visited him that August, at the newspaper, which apparently was put out from a home converted for the purpose.

 I found Scoville in a back room, fitted up as an office, and looking out on a bit of a garden. The two parlors of the house he had converted into a printing office and filled with printers. He talked on after his usual rambling, boring egotistic manner, being occasionally interrupted by men whose half defiant manner outmatched the relation on which he stood to them.[34]

In September 1856, Scoville, put his name up as a candidate for U.S. senator in New Jersey. At that point Democratic Gov. Rodman Price was considered front-runner for the office. "We go for the Governor," wrote the "Monmouth Democrat," in a Pick-worthy response. "Editors have no business to disgrace themselves by accepting seats in Congress."

On Oct. 26, 1856, as the Law campaign imploded, the "Herald" noted Scoville's dismissal from it. It seems some in the clique blamed him for the "Herald's" stab in the back. The "State Register" went quiet after the November election. All Scoville got out of it was debts and frustration.

And he seems to have lost the farm along the way. On Nov. 25, 1856, the Herald wrote that it was so. "For all these exertions Law loaned Scoville about a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars on the security of a house and small farm in New Jersey. This mortgage he is now about to foreclose ...." Bennett then teased Scoville to "give us a full, minute and graphical sketch" of the short-lived campaign in his Register, as it would "increase his circulation to an extent which would soon enable him to pay off this paltry obligation."

In late June 1857, less than 10 months after buying the "Register," Scoville noted the paper's demise.

To keep it up, we have parted with $9,500 in good cash, which we wish was in our pocket again. We have labored day after day, from six o'clock in the morning until ten at night.[35]

Since February 1857, Scoville also has been publishing "Scoville's Family Gazette," an independent weekly journal, "the cheapest and best News and Literary Family Periodical in the world." Advertisements for it run in Maine, Indiana, Kentucky, Ontario, South Carolina, and California, including one in a Spanish-language newspaper.

It was published from the same address as the "Register." The ads cease after September. Likely that is when the lease was up.

A TURN IN THE SOUTH

Scoville kept a low profile in 1858, at least under his own name. Steamship passenger lists in New York and Charleston show him back and forth and spending much time with his wife at her family's place near Charleston.

Cara and Mary sailed for Charleston at the end of November 1857, and Joe joined them in time for Christmas. He was back to New York in early February 1858, and back in Charleston six weeks later. He stayed until early August when he and the family returned to New York. But he was back to South Carolina in mid-December. They spent the winter of early 1859 in and around Charleston.

If there had never been a Civil War, the family might have stayed in the South. While he was there, Joe Scoville did for the South what he had done so well for Manhattan: Stir up trouble.

From 1859 through 1860 Scoville sent regular columns to the "Mobile Register," then run by John Forsyth, which was one of the few Southern newspapers with reach across the region. A notice in the Charleston "Daily Courier" early in 1860 suggests the reason for their popularity:

The letters written from this city to the Mobile Register, have caused considerable sensation. They are read with avidity, because everyone at all prominent in public life, expects that his time for a "roasting" must come sooner or later. [Charleston "Daily Courier" Jan. 17, 1860]

That notice, however, might have been written by Scoville himself. Lounging under the palms in South Carolina, he still was grinding axes in New York. The writer to the "Daily Courier" went on to speculate that these vigorous letters were the work of another of Bennett's men:

Great are the surmises and conjectures as to the author of these letters. I have heard a number of names mentioned in this connection. There can be but little doubt, however, that they are written by Ex-Senator Westcott, formerly of Florida, and for a long while connected with the Herald. Mr. Bennett has dispensed with his services, and it is, perhaps, owing to this fact that "Harmony" is so bitter on that journal and its proprietor. [Charleston "Daily Courier," Jan. 17, 1860]

Meanwhile, Scoville, in the "Mobile Register" pieces, had accused another Bennett staffer of writing a bombshell book on race in America.

Hinton Rowan Helper was an erratic abolitionist and what even his own era might call a white supremacist. In 1857, he wrote a book, published in the North but dedicated to the "non-slaveholding whites" of the South. The Impending Crisis of the South argued that slavery was a curse to non-slaveholders in the South and a drag on the region's economy. It was fuel thrown on the sectional fires.

The "Mobile Register" columnist had written:

The Herald has some very extraordinary men engaged upon it. The principal editorial writer is the celebrated Doctor Jones, who is the real author of the "Impending Crisis of the South," by Helper. [Charleston "Daily Courier," Jan. 13, 1860]

"If any deviltry is to be concocted, Scoville wrote, [Bennett] can do it, and beat Satan ten points in the game."

Dr. Alexander Jones had been at the "Herald" since 1851 as a commercial reporter. He was a respected medical doctor as well, and continued to practice while he wrote for Bennett. On Jan. 26, some of Jones's relations took out a letter to the editor in the "Herald," exposing, on irrefutable evidence, "the notorious Joseph A. Scoville" as the author of "the scurrillous and libellous letters written to the Mobile Register." ["New York Herald," Jan. 26, 1860]

The letters continued into December 1860, when South Carolina became the first state to secede.

The correspondent name Scoville used for them was "Harmony."

OLD MERCHANTS

Scoville s most durable work, one still cited by a wide range of historians, is a shaggy beast. In 1860 Scoville, as Old Merchant (he was 45) began writing brief anecdotal histories of the city's merchants and their varying fortunes for a weekly New York newspaper. In 1862 he collected and published these (by the nom de plume  Walter Barrett, clerk. ) in book form as "Old Merchants of New York City." It is full of rich and lurid details, some of them probably accurate, none of them found elsewhere. Academics have been tormented by it for more than a century. Old Merchants, one historian wrote, is "The principle source of information, and misinformation" on its topic.

He adds that Scoville was "apt to be more accurate in some of his generalizations than in his specific facts."[36] That was in the 1930s. He was not the first to notice.

"Walter Barrett's" columns on old merchants were advertised from early 1860 by the New York "Leader," which was published for a while from 113 Nassau Street. The Leader was a weekly political publication with literary sparkle. It was a mouthpiece of Tammany Hall and the city s Democratic machine, and the editor in charge was John Clancy, a Democratic politician.

But his co-editor, Charles G. Halpine, was an Anglo-Irish immigrant and dynamic writer who had come to New York to report for the "Herald" and jumped to the "Leader" in 1857. It was Halpine who developed the "Leader's" extensive arts and literature section, which published Gunn and his friends. It ran fiction, poetry, and essays, and was popular with working-class New Yorkers as well as the city's bohemia.

If scholars are right about the identity of "Velsor Brush," who wrote the "Leader's" series of "City Photographs" word-sketches in 1862, Walt Whitman was contributing similar material at the same time Scoville was writing Old Merchants.

The Old Merchants of New York City columns are written in good spirits and even Scoville s scandal-mongering is almost discrete. Old Merchants was recommended (later, in book form) in Godey s Lady s Book as presenting names of country-wide notoriety, and as so often showing how industry, perseverance, and honesty or it may be, sometimes, the reverse of these qualities have led from obscurity and poverty to opulence .

The few paragraphs on the brief commercial career of the house of Scoville & Britton, cited above, are in the first volume of Old Merchants of New York City. In them Walter Barrett alludes to rumors of the death of the senior partner, Joseph A. Scoville. But he says he has good reason to doubt them.[37]

Scoville never intended them to be a book, even when he made them a book in 1862. He was trying to cash in on the popularity of the column after 2 years, and so he gathered the clippings and had them set in type as a book. It ran to four massy volumes, utterly unorganized. Even the "New York Times" was charmed.

They abound with anecdote and reminiscence, and are written in that plain, unpretentious, business-like style that an old merchant would be very likely to employ himself and to admire in others.[38]

Perhaps the Times reviewer would have been less pleased with the voice if he had known it also was that of the naughty Mr. Pick and the execrated "Manhattan." For their part, the vexed historians who have had to sift through "Old Merchants of New York City" might have requested less charm and more coherence.

Robert G. Albion, quoted above ( principle source of information, and misinformation") was hardly alone. Other historians vent or warn on Old Merchants in their bibliographies and footnotes: "This quaint, gossipy miscellany ..." "... rambles along without any co-ordination or logical arrangement" (Albion again), "... notoriously inaccurate but sometimes interesting ..." "... chatty and inaccurate but useful for suggestions ..." "... quirky opus ..." "... colorful but unreliable ..." "... not entirely free from inaccuracies" (from a scholarly book that identifies the author as "John A. Scoville"). Some historians of the period (Pessen) have written it off entirely as a source. Yet Old Merchants is too pithy, granular, and quotable to ignore.

The Leader s literary editor, Halpine, went off to war when hostilities began in 1861 and served as a staff officer. He wrote poems, satirical and serious, on the war, in the mock persona of an Irish private, "Miles O'Reilly." The "Herald" published many of them and they were enormously popular.

MANHATTAN GOES to WAR

When the Civil War loomed, Scoville got himself a berth as the New York correspondent of a London newspaper. The English dailies, no matter their politics, vied to cover the dissolution of America. The biggest sent their own reporters, such as the Times s William Howard Russell, who had covered the Crimean War. Or they could hire a New York journalist, such as Joe Scoville. There were risks to that.

Scoville s dispatches ran in the London Standard, a Tory paper (and the allied London Herald ), whose editors and subscribers were reflexively anti-American, reflexively racist, and especially hostile to the sort of social radicalism represented by Republicans. In Scoville they got a correspondent who, twice or thrice a week, could fill half a page with detailed American news from the military front and the home front. Almost all of it would be framed as grim for the cause of the North, which matched the expectations of the Standard.

The Standard columns ran by Nov. 3, 1860, under the head "The United States" and bylined as "from a correspondent" but unsigned and undated. Manhattan quickly became Scoville s name for this mask. His letters ran in the Standard once or twice a week, as they arrived across the Atlantic by steamer. The column head shifted to America, then, as the shooting began, North and South.

And amid the overstuffed prose of English journals, Scoville s brash voice rang out. The Standard boasted to its English readers that its correspondent behind the nom de plume told the truth about life in the North during the secession crisis. "[H]is opportunities of observing and ability to generalise cannot be gainsaid. Mingling freely among all classes of his countrymen, passionately fond of his country as a whole, he would be observing and generalising, not for expression in the trammelled and regulated press of the Northern States, but in the free press of this country ...."

Manhattan s reports must be true, the English seemed to feel, for they show us America as we already know it to be, and headed where we expect it will go. "It is American, and probable, the Standard editor concluded; and the inferences which it warrants are numerous and grave."[39] But if they thought the pseudonym hid their correspondent, or that foreign publications would shield him from the U.S. government, they were naive.

Manhattan s typical letter includes U.S. government war reports and his own remark on their likely inaccuracy. He writes caustic commentary on Republican politicians and newspapers, and warns the English to doubt every report of a Northern victory or a Southern atrocity. He also picks at old Scoville grudges, complains about the temperature outside that day, gives the price of gold, or the price of lemons, and grouses that there ought to be more streetcars when you need one.

Gunn, the bohemian English writer and illustrator, between stints at the war front would visit the Scovilles in New York. It was difficult for him to reconcile the doting family man in front of him with the voice of "Manhattan." And moreso to reconcile English newspapers and Joe Scoville, as Gunn knew both of them.

Altogether the evening was a pleasant one. It's a queer turn of fortune that my host, of all men, should be writing letters to a high Tory English newspaper some two or three a week, printed in editorial type and duly headed with important-looking type! He is a perfect free-lance, doesn't care what extravagance or falsity he puts in rather enjoys doing audacious absurdities in fact! yet the sober English Markey seems appreciative of the reckless balderdash, for [Scoville] has applications from other English papers and now writes what he denominates "high Calhounism," weekly, for a Liverpool one.

He says the London Herald people sent for his photograph and exposed [it] in the window of their publishing office. It might be a much better portrait, the real face looking altogether coarser. Yet he was hearty and hospitable and his wife kind.[40] 

Nine months earlier, after another visit, Gunn likewise had marvelled at the situation. This was absurd.

He writes letters to the London Herald and Standard in his old, audacious, scurrilous style, denouncing Scott as "an old granny," pitching into Mc Lellan [sic] and the President and, in short, indulging in anything that he considers high-spiced and acceptable.

He told me he considered a war with England inevitable, talked familiarly of this and that public man, was loud, hospitable, shrewd, violent in conversation in short, the old Joe Scoville of the "Pick" and "Herald."[41]

And so is Manhattan. The acid tone in the Standard letters is Mr. Pick wading into Hutchings of the Picayune. It is Joe diving into the melee of aristocrats at the Howard, fists flailing. He is leveling fire in all directions as in the 1856 political brawl when he ran the Register out of the front parlors on Franklin Street, slashing right and left as an independent, saucy evening Fremont paper. [42]

In "Manhattan's" dourest moments the rebels are unbeatable, Lincoln's Washington is a sea of corruption, and all the North's reasonable men and military men affirm the union is broken beyond saving. His love of writing roughshod blinded him to how unwise some of it was.

I hope the British Ministry will send over a fleet, and anchor off the foot of Fulton-street, and bring their guns to bear upon the doors. I hope they will shoot us like dogs, take our money out of the banks, and do whatever they see fit with a mean, cowardly, degraded race, such as we shall be if the President gives up Mason and Slidell.[43]

How the Tory revanchists who dreamed of reversing the American Revolution must have grinned. How U.S. Ambassador Charles F. Adams, grandson of the Founder, must have gritted his teeth in London.

Manhattan s letters from the North slant negative, but it was generally true that Union generals were incompetent and the war effort riddled with corruption. Further, Scoville s news-hound skepticism of any administration made him savvy at picking apart the official reports, which were overly sanguine. And Scoville knew on sight or by scent every political trick. He had played many himself, after all. Manhattan often seems prescient, as informed pessimists often do, but he also proved right again and again about just how the thing would go wrong.

Consistence is absent and sense often wanting. Sensationalism abounds. In 1862 Manhattan reported seriously that the United States was meditating "the annexation of Canada." In 1863 he assured the English that war between America and France was a certainty. When Lee pushed North in 1862 "Manhattan" predicted, "If they march on Philadelphia, that city will surrender without firing a gun, notwithstanding all the noise and talk. The mayor and the principal citizens want the Southern trade. They are jealous of New York, and would rather be captured than not."[44]

Other times he wrote that the South wanted, not independence, but rather to take Washington, install Jeff Davis as U.S. president, and restore the union, and that all states but New England were likely to join.

In reporting Northern casualties, his hundreds again become thousands. In 1864 the enlistment of the first Northern regiments expired. Manhattan wrote of the return of the New York volunteers of 1861. "All those regiments went forth proudly from this very city, and they numbered from 1000 to 1580 men. No one has returned with over 150, or at most 200 men. Where are the rest? Manuring the tobacco fields of Virginia or in the hospitals. Nearly all gone."[45]

Manhattan s Northern Democrat stance allowed the English to read him and indulge the pleasure of seeing America belittled without involving themselves in sympathy for the rebel slaveholders. And they also could look down on the American voice informing them.

In October 1861 Scoville showed a letter to Gunn the illustrator, John A. Kennedy the city police commissioner, and apparently anyone he met on Broadway. The letter indicated the publishers of the "Standard" had agreed to give Scoville 2 for each of the Manhattan letters they had run and promised 3 each for all in the future, a handsome sum.[46]

In addition to his income from the Manhattan columns, Scoville got a patronage job from the Democratic machine. The council head appointed him as reader to the Common Council" on Jan. 19, 1863. The salary was reported to be $1,000 per year. Now he could write full-time. He continued to make little attempt to disguise himself at home. Gunn, the illustrator, met Scoville on Canal Street in September 1862, and Scoville showed me his card, with Correspondent of the London Morning Herald upon it and bragged about his "Manhattan" letters. [47]

The Scovilles had lived by December 1860 in a rented house on Houston Street near the North River. They still lived there when Gunn, the illustrator, visited them in early 1862. But that October Gunn found Scoville in a district of new, three-story brownstones on 27th street just west of Broadway, "in possession of a handsome house which, he says, is his own."

He has grown fat and almost respectable, presenting a great contrast to the uncleanly, brassy-voiced, haggard Joe Scoville of the Pick and Picayune times. He showed quite hospitably and talked extensively of his letters to the London Herald and Standard. This "Manhattan" correspondence is an extraordinary one, thoroughly Scovillian, that is to say sensational, reckless, extravagant and abusive of all parties I don't wonder it finds readers.

A few weeks earlier Gunn had written that dirty-shirt Scoville writing for a high Tory English newspaper was a queer turn of fortune. But now he saw the formula.

If any man could have been singled out, especially, for the purpose of rendering the Disunited States odious and ridiculous in the eyes of England, I don't think a more admirable one, by nature and instincts, than Joe Scoville.[48]

Withal, Gunn added immediately after, the man appears not unamiable in his home relations.

Fat and almost respectable. Joe Scoville, c. 1862, pasted in T.B. Gunn s diary.

JOE AT HOME

As the union began to totter, Gunn, the English-born illustrator, persuaded the New York "Post" to send him to Charleston as an artist-reporter. A Northern newspaperman would not get much in Charleston then, but an English one would. Gunn used a British passport, said he was reporting for a London paper, and the "Post" published his letters under the pseudonym "Edgar Bolton." He stayed until February 1861.

He visited the Scovilles before heading south, but wisely also withheld the truth of the assignment from the indiscrete Joe Scoville. Told him of my intended journey, not its object, stating that I'd got a roving sketching commission, through [Frank] Bellew, from an illustrated London paper and Scoville, not knowing Gunn was to be disguised and writing for the Post, wrote him two letters of endorsement to the editors of a Charleston and Mobile paper!

After Fort Sumter in April, Gunn sought work as a war correspondent. Eventually Charles A. Dana, Greeley's editorial partner at the "Tribune," hired him. In March 1862, Gunn left for the peninsula and reported on the battles there through the spring. In one Virginia town he noted the miller "looked like Joe Scoville."[49]

Gunn returned to New York in June, and the "Tribune" almost at once sent him to Port Royal, South Carolina, to cover a Northern attack on Charleston that never happened. He returned to New York in September 1862.

Between assignments to the South in 1861 and 1862, Gunn wrote at length of visits with the Scovilles. Joe he knew well, too well, but his exposure to Americans in the South gave him a fresh appreciation for Cara Scoville.

Scoville s personal views of the secession and the war seem to be also Manhattan s. In December 1861 Gunn, returned from his second assignment to South Carolina, visited the Scovilles at home on Houston Street and found him holding positions similar to Manhattan s, in argument against his fire-eating wife. Each suggested the other ought to be locked up.

She and her husband antagonize about Secession curiously, threatening one another with Fort Lafayette. He, once one of the most ultra of pro-slavery men is now characteristically extreme I might say brassy-voiced for the Union a despotism, anything.

After that Sunday dinner visit, the Englishman wrote:

Scoville's wife is thoroughly Southern in manner and speech, local, clannish, frank, wilful, demonstrative: I noticed in her expressions of partisanship took a defiant form even, to those whose cause she espoused, as thus, she thought that the Charlestonians themselves ought to be drowned, hanged, if they did not burn their city rather than let "the Yankees" get it!

She repeated this once or twice. I liked her pluck and good-looks and, wearied with the eternal onesidedness of the question and vilification of England, could in some measure sympathize with her.[50]

And he discovered that Cara Scoville had guessed (incorrectly) that, while he had been south, Gunn was the correspondent who had been writing from Charleston to the "Tribune," "on the strength of certain English colloquialisms, which appeared in his letters." After another visit, in October 1862, he described his conversation with Scoville, and added,

I like that tall, womanly, handsome wife of his. She is thoroughly unreasonable, a South Carolinian by birth and nature, talks "Secesh" and anti-abolition, professes an earnest desire to get down South, even at the cost of leaving her husband, but there is a muliebrity about her ways and speech, an absence of the hardness characteristic of northern women decidedly lovable.[51]

He wrote that he was making social calls around town "out of sheer lonelyness. I feel dull, disappointed in New York, and dispirited. I must get off to Port Royal or elsewhere again. There's not a soul who cares for me here."

The next month, they had Gunn over again for Thanksgiving dinner.

[A]bout 4 o'clock, I strolled uptown to Joe Scoville's whom I found in the parlor, listening to little Mary, playing upon the piano. Mrs. Scoville appearing, nicely dressed, we all went down stairs to supper. It appeared that they had entertained "a surprise party" over-night, of about fifty persons. After supping we went up-stairs and played whist, Scoville having his daughter for partner, while opposite me sat his handsome wife, who enjoyed herself heartily, especially as she and I proved triumphant.[52]

In December the "Tribune" sent Gunn south again, with Banks's forces, headed to New Orleans. But Gunn had had news from England that his father was gravely ill, and he returned to New York in March 1863 and sailed home to England. He married his sweetheart there and settled down, contributing letters from England to the "Tribune" through the war.

Thomas B. Gunn, caricature

PUSHBACK IN ENGLAND

His voice always was an uneasy fit in the staid "Standard," and on any other subject, at any other time, Joe Scoville would have been too much for English tastes. Responding to highbrow criticism in the Saturday Review, the Standard summarized the Saturday Review s objections: " Manhattan's faults are two-fold. He is a vulgar American, and he is the correspondent of a cheap newspaper. [53]

Even while defending Manhattan the Standard felt a need to stand at a safe distance. On Feb. 9, 1861, the Standard prominently published this disclaimer: "We do not hold ourselves responsible for any views or opinions expressed in the communications of our correspondents." No doubt that was done with Manhattan in mind. On Jan. 8, 1862, the Standard began to attach a one-paragraph warning at the head of all Scoville s columns: "We continue to publish Manhattan's letters, not withstanding much that is offensive in them to English ears ...." It ran through March.

But they kept him. By the fall of 1861 "Manhattan," brash, coarse, and full of bad grammar and illiterate slang, is a hit in Britain. The letters are not written so much as dashed off, sometimes at a white heat. Thoughts stream out of him, he jumps topics. Sometimes he writes in haste to make the last mail packet to Liverpool before it sails. Sometimes he rambles simply to fill space. In the middle of one column appears:

Twelve o'clock A.M.

P.S. As I have overrun my 48c. postage, and have to pay 96c., I may as well use it up by adding a few sheets to my letter of this morning, and some items of general news.[54]

And he rambles on for another full column. And a conservative middle-class English newspaper let that run, penny-pinching P.S., postage rates, and all. One can imagine sober Englishman T.B. Gunn reading this with wide eyes. The editors knew "Manhattan" was uncuttable. He was doubling their sales and raising their profile, by doing everything they as editors never would do.

Manhattan called one Republican politician "a fearful scalliwag," thus introducing that word to the English. "Now can any person in Huddersfield or any other place tell me what "a scalliwag" is?" asks the writer of the "London Letter" column in the Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, "Examiner." "The word ... has excited not a little curiosity in London during the present week, and I have not yet met anyone capable of explaining it."[55]

 Compare Scoville to the New York war-time correspondent whose letters ran under A.F.D. in the Gloucester Journal. A.F.D., plainly is an Englishman writing in America who doesn't care for it. His account of July 4 celebrations tells little about them except that A.F.D. did not like the firecrackers, and he complains of "a party of school-boys, who I could not help thinking would have been better engaged at a game of cricket or foot-ball."[56]

Scoville loved a noisy Fourth and was a firecracker himself. Evidently some readers of Manhattan suspected he might be a Yankee parody, done up a little too well by some clever English writer in the Sam Slick genre. But doubts about the "authenticity of the letters of our New York correspondent were easily refuted, the Standard editors wrote: Just read him. We fear, however, that if the internal evidence they afford has not satisfied his readers, no asseveration of ours will affect their judgement."[57]

The "Standard" often ran "Manhattan's" full letters on its inside pages, but on its front page plucked such passages from them as suited its own views and editorialized around them. Scoville shot back that he knew and didn't care.

I endeavour in my letters to give you the great facts that are occurring on this side, and the motives. That you are friendly to the Confederate States, and that your editorials are clearly and cleverly in their favour and against the North, does not alter my letters.[58]

His identity remained a mystery in England, though it would have been known to most New York newspapermen. Some men in England also knew: T.L. Nichols, for one, who had visited Lola and her monkeys with Scoville on Broadway in 1852. Nichols and his wife, ardent pacifists, had fled to England on the outbreak of the Civil War. There Nichols wrote his autobiography early in 1864 and published it as Forty Years in American Life.

Manhattan was at his peak of popularity. Nichols writes teasingly that he knows the man, writes a brief biography of him for the benefit of the English, but wisely and artfully never reveals Scoville s name. The autobiography was popular in England and only whetted the public's curiosity and added to the mystery of who is Manhattan?

Manhattan s letters were scorned in America. An explainer-article on "The Press of Great Britain" during the war, written by the London correspondent of the New York Post (pro-Lincoln) laid out the views of the chief British newspapers:

The Morning Herald and Standard are the organs of the conservative middle classes, and what their opinion is may be shown from the fact that they publish constantly the mad ravings of some correspondent who dates his letters from New York, and signs himself "Manhattan," with the avowed object of discrediting the North by such advocacy as his.[59]

The London correspondent of Greeley s Tribune, looking back on the Manhattan columns, confirmed their popularity, and the damage they did to the Lincoln government.

He was quoted and talked of everywhere, and though people affected to discredit his influence, it was as unmistakable as pestilent. The second question put to every New Yorker arriving in this country was sure to be 'Did you know Manhattan?' To have done so was a reflected glory.[60]

The London correspondent would know; it was T.B. Gunn. "Manhattan" is even mentioned in "Punch," who probably did not know he had been a rival humor character himself as Mr. Pick ten years before.[61]

The picture of the war came clear in Scoville s head in mid-1862, as it did for many in the North. This was a long war. The old America was over. And slavery must die. After Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, Scoville wrote in the "Standard."

There is no going back of the document. It is cutting the knot. As well attempt to turn the water that has gone over Niagara Falls back again, as to undo the declaration of the President. It is the most important as well as most humane document, that has ever issued from a President. The contest is between slavery and freedom. For a long time the President did not see it his Cabinet did not see it our Congress did not see it. They thought tampering would save the patient's life, and hesitated to apply the knife to the great cancer of this nation.[62]

And immediately Scoville s article veers off into the anecdote of the wife of the man wrestling the grizzly, the sort of story he claimed to loathe in Lincoln. He veers some more and the letter never quite gets back to that moment of illumination.

But this burst is from John C. Calhoun s amanuensis, the pen that had put to paper Calhoun s states-rights slavery manifesto, taken it from the dying lips of the man who was, as someone wiser said best, the most majestic advocate in a bad cause since Milton s Satan. The paragraph is astonishing.

Not that he ever dropped his adulation for his political mentor. Less than a year later Scoville invokes him in a sort of hallucination:

How I wish grand old Calhoun could come back upon the stage, if only for six weeks. He could dictate terms to the North, for he could combine the now impotent, but vast peace army of Northern Democrats with the small but efficient armed forces of the South, and, as I said before, be master of the situation.[63]

Late in the war, Manhattan sometimes asserted that the South was about to march north with an army of freed slaves to pillage New York and all in their path. He often predicted New York burned by mobs of some sort: at the start of the war it was to be the mobs of Northern working men called to arms to fight the South. Toward the end it was Southern slaves. As it happened, the mob that torched it was made of native New Yorkers.

DRAFT RIOT COVERAGE

The anti-draft riots broke out in the city in July 1863. Political commentator "Manhattan" one day awoke as a front-line reporter. The "North and South" columns he jotted down during the riots (published in the "Standard" of July 28 and July 31) are gripping, almost cinematic descriptions of carnage and destruction:

In the lower part of the city every one seemed to be chasing negroes. In Frankfort-street I saw three with their heads split open chased by a mob ; those near the flying negroes were lads of 10 and 12 years of age, carrying sticks, and looking as innocent as young tiger cubs. I suppose I saw a dozen chased in this way in half an hour, even in the Park fronting City Hall. ...

No cars. I ran up home. On my way home I saw a negro hanging. I had two miles to go, and as I reached my home in Twenty-seventh-street I saw in the rear of Twenty-eighth-street dense volumes of smoke pouring over it. No firemen were at work. The mob was yelling and breaking up the adjoining stores.

I placed some deeds in my pocket. My wife was ill in bed. I made her dress quickly. My little daughter had placed a robin, two Java sparrows, four canaries in one little cage, a little puppy and an old pet tom cat and a fan in a basket, and she was ready for what might happen. The rest of our treasures we decided to abandon, merely locking up the house.[64]

Their house survived, but the rioting lasted for days. As in all Scoville's wartime pieces, any numbers he reports are unreliable, hearsay, or exaggeration. But his blunt prose tracks his movement through the burning city hour by hour, trying to protect his home and family while working to get news out of bewildered city and military officials. It is prize-worthy descriptive reporting, noting what he sees as well as what he hears told. He ventures out, comes home, takes the pen and writes it. Then goes out again and dates the next description several hours later.

For hours these scared negroes poured up Twenty-seventh street, passing by my house. My wife, who is Southern, and consequently does not believe in ill-treating negroes, whether slave or free, was crying as if her heart would break at some of the scenes. One old negro, 70 years old, blind as a bat, and such a cripple that he could hardly move, was led along by his equally aged wife with a few rags they had saved, trembling with fright, and not knowing where to go. I went out with a dollar bill in hand to give it. A friend stopped me and said, "Do not, for God's sake, unless you wish to be killed, and have your house burned over your head. The cry of Abolitionist will be raised on you." I let the old couple meet their fate, and Heaven grant it may have been a mild one. Every now and then the shrieks of the negroes some of them raving mad with affright would make our blood run cold.[65]

The visual descriptions are excruciating to read. Some I can't even bring myself to print them here. Any other newspaper writer of the day might have risen to a literary style, or shunned graphic details. That never was Joe Scoville. For once he was just right.

VIGOR / MARION

In 1863, the New York publisher George W. Carleton released Scoville s autobiographical novel, as "Vigor," by Walter Barrett. And almost at once repressed it. Carleton the year before had published Walter Barrett s chaotic and cheerful Old Merchants of New York. The publisher seems to have taken Scoville on his own recognition in publishing Vigor, expecting the sort of thing that would come from a writer for the Leader. Likely they never read the entire novel before printing it.

The novel was not disowned for its prose, though it ought to have been. Scoville s rough-hewn newspaper style is unfit for fiction. He can tell a good yarn in a paragraph or two. But when he attempts dialogue or steps back to describe, his writing is, as Twain would say, execrable.

Purchasing on his own account. Scoville s Yankee shrewdness never leaves him. The novel, however, "was suppressed in America for palpable reasons it was too bad to be true, his portraits of female society in this quarter of the globe being so over-drawn and coarse that even the sensationalist of the present day could not believe them," the correspondent A.F.D. reported home from New York in the Gloucester Journal.

A sub-plot in Vigor involves a high-class prostitute whose life goes well, and it is set partly in the house where she works. Scoville, again, views the thing from a businessman s perspective, unqualmed by virtue and vice. He simply but sensibly recommends a better system of saving the money.

The 19th century wasn t ready for that.

The next year, riding his success in England as a correspondent, Scoville had Vigor republished in London, as "Marion," and as written by "Manhattan."

Scoville s friend Nichols, then an ex-pat in England, had to temper his praise of Manhattan after learning that his Marion, published in London, had been plagiarized from an earlier novel Vigor, published a year earlier in New York by someone named Walter Barrett. [66]

The sensible British ought to have recoiled from Marion, but, as the novel was set in America, they too often delighted in its grossness while puffing their own superiority.

The "Standard" gushed over its pet correspondent. " 'Marion' is a romance of no common order of excellence. No one who takes the book will, if he can help it, put it down unfinished. There may be in it some things that the reader wishes omitted, some that might have been differently told ; but the main, broad, strong characteristics of sparkling romance are all there, ... told in strong, nervous English, dashed here and there with a full-flavored Americanism. [67]

The Times of London read it rather otherwise. Its reviewer acknowledges "Manhattan" as "an amusing letterwriter," and admits his book has amusing stories in it. But he rejects "Marion" as a novel, as being disorganized and ghastly in its enthusiasm for vice.

Seduction, adultery, drunkenness, gambling, swindling, murdering, fighting in all their varieties are the staple of the new novel. We are introduced to a heap of blackguards, and are given to understand that these are the gentlemen of New York. ... Manhattan is one of those geniuses who have a strong feeling as to the advantage of "seeing life," but who imagine that "seeing life" consists in seeing all the villany of which it is capable.[68]

Yet he goes on to find that the book's "hideous picture of American ladies" to some extent "coincides with what we in this country should imagine to be the natural result of the freedom from restraint under which American girls live."

The Times reviewer added that, "whereas Marion, if it came from the pen of an English novelist, would be pronounced very bad, it will, coming from a Yankee and such a Yankee as Manhattan, escape the fire, and may be pronounced pretty considerable. "

"The Reader," a London-based weekly review that prided itself as "a first-class literary newspaper," ran its negative "Marion" review on May 21. On July 16 it printed a response by "a gentleman of New York, well known to us by name and reputation," firing his abuse at a closer range to the target.

"Marion" is, in fact, nothing but a series of New York police reports, actual or potential, connected together by the adventures of the "hero" and Clara Norris. But there is added that which, in this country, is not "heard in" but left out of, "a police report," except in the New York Herald.

The American writer also pointed out to his British readers, who held up the characters in "Marion" as fair examples of Americans' morality, that the immoral malefactors in the book are, almost all of them, Europeans.

The novel tracks Scoville s life closely. In one scene the Democrats are planning a torchlight procession. At the meeting in Tammany Hall to organize the parade, Marion serves as secretary, as Scoville usually did. Distinguished local military men had agreed to act as marshals, but only if the other marshals also were military men. They weren t.

"That matter can be easily arranged," the chairman said. "There are to be three marshals from each ward make 'em all military men ;" and as each name of a marshal was proposed and accepted, the chairman observed, "Make 'Bill Gage' a general."

"Enoch Camp."

"Make him a major."

"Nick Diamond, first ward."

"Make Nick a general."

"Bill Dennis," said the secretary. "Make Bill a major," said the chairman.

"Joe Sweet," called out the secretary.

"Make Joe Sweet a colonel," dictated the chairman.

"Thomas McSpeddon," said the secretary.

"Put general to Tom's name."

"William Shaler, sixth ward."

"Make Bill Shaler a colonel--he has been in the wars ;" and in this ludicrous way the list, which was to be published, was made out amidst the screams and shouts of the Tammany Hall Committee. When the list was fairly completed word was sent to the real generals ... that the committee had placed none but military men on the list of marshals from the different wards.

Marion then took the ad to the "Herald" office to have it printed. He stopped to talk with Bennett, and told him the story of the Bowery ward-heelers re-minted as generals. Bennett, "who knew the name and character of every man," shook with laughter and offered to pay for an account of it.

It was not fiction. Sure enough, just such an ad is in the files of Bennett's "Herald" in October 1848:

Even the names are mostly the same. Dan Sickles as Honorable in the second column is the only one to escape generalization. He was in the New York Assembly and kept his proper title. Yet Sickles actually became a general, in the Civil War, and left a leg at Gettysburg.[69]

It is not a novel so much as a collection of sketches by Scoville, loosely attached to the character Marion. The Sunday Dispatch wrote that Marion "must be stamped a failure, inasmuch as it wants the first essential of a work of this description; namely, centralisation of interest."

Events are allowed to run their course very much as they do in real life; there seems little attempt to mould them in accordance with orthodox and transpontine notions of mundane punishment and reward of vice and virtue. Success is shown to follow not so much rectitude as prudence.[70]

The Times reviewer touched on why Scoville s novel strikes him as both American and detestable: Money. The characters in Marion :

are all engaged in the most sordid pursuit of money working for money, gambling for money, swindling for money, making love for money, marrying for money, murdering for money. It is a cold heartless society, in which the only standard of value is the dollar, and in which every kiss has its price.[71]

 Joseph A. Scoville never read that. He already was dead.

Printing House Square during the Civil War. The New York Times building dominates (center); the World office is behind it, also flying a flag. Greeley s Tribune at left-center.

PUSHBACK IN WASHINGTON

Manhattan had been in the Lincoln Administration s sights from the start. On Sept. 24, 1861, Secretary of State, William H. Seward (a New Yorker), wrote a note to John A. Kennedy, the New York superintendent of police:

I think it would be well for you to give notice to Mr. Joseph Scoville (not as coming from this department but on your own authority) that a continuance in sending such letters as that which appeared in the London Standard would be likely to subject him to surveillance.[72]

"Manhattan's" commentary was just reaching celebrity in England then. He was becoming the voice of America to a swath of the English nation. Ambassador Adams might have complained from London. (Gunn, the illustrator, had heard Scoville was arrested for libeling Mrs. Lincoln [73]).

Kennedy, the city police superintendent, smoothed over the matter with political tact. He replied not to Seward but to his son. Francis Seward had been a newspaperman in Albany ("Evening Journal") in the 1850s and would have known Scoville well (they were editorial allies in the 1856 campaign). In 1861 Frank Seward was assistant secretary of state under his father.

Kennedy wrote that he had only that day, Oct. 6, sat down to talk to Scoville, "to let him have the benefit of the explanation in the letter of your father."

He also enclosed a copy of a "Standard" from July 20, containing a "Manhattan" column "which has a dialogue in it that may amuse you if you have any time just now for a quiet smile." It featured Frank Seward.

"[T]he article is not calculated to do harm," Kennedy continued. In it, Scoville also had said the only way to win the war was to end slavery. He was ahead of Lincoln in that. And he had warned against giving a military command to John C. Fr mont, who, when he got one, quickly proved Manhattan right. Kennedy wrote to Seward:

On the contrary, in reference to the slavery question it is very well calculated to inform the world in advance what this war is coming to. His reference to Fr mont is prophetic, especially so when you look at the date of his letter.

And there the matter seems to have died for a time.

The Secretary of State of the United States wishes to intimidate and silence a lone journalist for publishing abroad. The big-city police commissioner is more pragmatic and un-despotic. Instead of gagging Scoville, Kennedy wrote to the government, give him competition. Scoville had told Kennedy how the "Standard" had asked him to "furnish them with leaders on American affairs, for which they are ready to pay liberally."

Is it not worth while for him to have help in preparing leaders? At any rate would it not be well to take some trouble and assume some expense in order to have control of such articles in two London papers?[74]

 That was in 1861, when the administration had to move carefully. By 1864 things had changed.

It was an age of hoaxes. Sometimes the newspapers played them, sometimes they were the victims. In the spring of 1864 it was the "miscegenation" pamphlet. The word was invented in an elaborate and futile plot. But it brought the topic of mixed race marriages into public discussions and electoral politics.

"Manhattan" noted it briefly several times. On the issue itself Scoville found his way through by following the light. The light of the money, which, in his practical Yankee view of human nature, melted all obstacles. If the wealthy and fashionable people start to do it, soon it will be normal. Perhaps the war would hasten it..

Let the coloured regiments behave gallantly, and come home heroes, and eight or ten of our leading belles and heiresses will marry negroes, and it will become so common that it will cease to be talked about.[75]

He might have been simply bidding to shock the British again. The miscegenation hoax had been engineered from the office of the New York World, it was later revealed. But that was not the hoax that brought down the government s wrath on that newspaper.

On the morning of May 18, 1864, a forged proclamation purporting to be from Lincoln was published in the World and the smaller Journal of Commerce. The proclamation called for an enormous 400,000 fresh troops, and said the government would draft as many as would not volunteer to fill the number.

It had been artfully planted by a reporter associated with the New York Times, speculating on his own in stocks or gold. The news would jolt the markets. He had the skill to write a proclamation that sounded presidential, and to disguise it in the form of an Associated Press news release, down to the envelope. The only other person in on the conspiracy was the one who took the messages to the various newspaper offices just before their press deadline. The next day, the Tribune wrote that each of the hoax messages was delivered:

no doubt, when it was presumed that it would be seen by none of the editors but would be taken by the printers and hurried into a part of the morning edition of each paper, the printer having no time to examine it, even if they were disposed to take the responsibility of rejecting what seemed to be an important document, and to have come by an authorized channel.[76] 

A few editors or printers smelled something wrong about the document. They sent messages to one another s offices. Through some accident the "Tribune" never got its copy of the fake report, perhaps because the editorial office was closed at the time and the fake messenger didn't know how to find the printing office, in a different part of the building. When the Herald had doubts on the document it reached out to the "Tribune" and learned that no such AP message had been received there. The Herald stopped printing in time and pulled the news of the proclamation, or else the Herald, too, would have been shut down the next day. The Associated Press had no knowledge of the document. The hoax was blown.

But the World, a top Democratic newspaper, had a large edition and an out-of-date printing process, and it had to go to press before the rest. Those on duty at the World scanned the important message, quickly cut it up and passed the clips to the typesetters, who got to work. They squared up their sections and got it on the page in time to make the morning edition. They probably went home congratulating themselves on tight deadline work on a big story.

The blow-up that followed caused mass indignation against the press. The federal government cracked down at once, ordering seizures and arrests, presuming the papers had been part of the scheme. Uniformed federal troops with guns showed up that evening at the World office. A revolver was drawn. A crowd gathered. Dave Croly, at the helm for the World as usual, and sent word to the publishers. (Croly also was the mastermind behind the miscegenation hoax, but that still was a secret.) The order was unclear and Croly tried to buy time to get the next day s edition out, but Gen. John A. Dix sent word and ordered the whole place cleared and locked.

The editors of the offending papers quickly took their explanation to Dix, the old soldier and veteran politician who had been put in command of the Department of the East, a U.S. Army administrative district, after the 1863 draft riots. Dix had been ordered to make the arrests by the president. The editors presented their evidence. Dix found it compelling and tried to slow-walk the government's arrest order until the evidence was known to Lincoln. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, deciding innocence or guilt from the War Department, blustered against the old soldier.

A great national crime has been committed. The editors, proprietors, and publishers, responsible and irresponsible, are in law guilty of that crime. You were not directed to make any investigation, but to execute the President's order; the investigation was to be made by a military commission. How you can excuse or justify delay in executing the president's order until you make an investigation is not for me to determine.

That was sent at 6:30 p.m. on May 18. Two hours later, Stanton wrote from D.C. to Dix:

The officer in charge of the investigation, respecting the forged proclamation, reports that he is led to believe it originated in this city, and that the New York publishers were not privy to it. If your conclusions are the same you may suspend action against them until developments are made.

The next day, Stanton relayed, to Dix, Lincoln's grudging consent.

[The President] directs me to say that while, in his opinion, the editors, proprietors, and publishers of The World and Journal of Commerce are responsible for what appears in their papers injurious to the public service, and have no right to shield themselves behind a plea of ignorance or want of criminal intent, yet he is not disposed to visit them with vindictive punishment; and hoping they will exercise more caution and regard for the public welfare in future, he authorizes you to restore to them their respective establishments.[77]

Publicly, the other big newspapers did not object outright to the outrage on the World. Manhattan wrote, The papers generally show no pluck in reference to the seizure of the two papers. They all seem to be afraid except the News. That journal comes out fearlessly in reference to this great act of tyranny, and brands it as the destruction of a sacred principle. [78] The News was also a Democratic paper.

Earlier in May, Bennett s New York Herald itself had noted that the British correspondent of the London "Times" (Russell s successor), in his speculations, wrote as though he knew too well what the rebels were plotting against the North. One could say the same of Scoville. The Herald named him, called for his arrest, and told the authorities where to find him.

It is certainly the duty of General Dix to arrest this [Charles] Mackay at once, and cause him to divulge the names of the leaders in the threatened revolutionary movement. In times like these every precaution should be taken to insure the public safety. Mackay may be found either at the New York Hotel in this city or at his residence on Staten Island.[79]

But the day after the seizure of the World, privately, representatives of the un-seized Herald, Tribune, Sun, and Express wrote to Lincoln asking him to rescind the order that suppressed the two papers. And they vowed to be dutiful and loyal if he did.

[I]n the judgment of the undersigned, the editors and proprietors of the Journal of Commerce and The World were innocent of any knowledge of wrong in the publication of the fraudulent document, and also in view of the fact that the suspension by Your Excellency's orders of the two papers last evening has had the effect to awaken editors and publishers and news agents, telegraph companies, &c., to the propriety of increased vigilance in their several duties ....

Manhattan wrote, in a letter to the Standard dated May 20, that he had been fooled by the proclamation in the World. He imagined James G. Bennett s chagrin when he learned the World had beat him on a big story. Characteristically, too, Scoville saw the bright side to the seizure, as bright as the coin that outweighed the principles.

The World wishes the arrest would happen every week, so far as its pecuniary interests are concerned. It was damaged 10,000 dollars one way. It has profited 100,000 in another. Crowds pour into its business office, asking the paper to be sent to their homes. It will get redress, and there will be no more newspaper seizures in this city.[80]

Sure enough, after the newspapers were restored to their owners, Manton Marble, the power at the World, sued Dix for illegal seizure.

In his report to London about the shutdown of the offices, Joe Scoville also thought of something other writers overlooked: "the employ s of the two papers were turned adrift, and they will get no pay on Saturday night and their families will lack bread perhaps."[81]

Meanwhile, Scoville was the subject of ongoing unwanted attention. Stephen R. Fisk during the war was an editor and also wrote theater criticism at both the "Herald" and the "Leader." He wrote later of the constant harassment visited on Scoville by the authorities, such as Justice Joseph Dowling, the rough, coarse police magistrate who oversaw hard cases at the Tombs city jail.

Scoville's life was made a burden to him by practical jokers, like Judge Dowling, who gave him secret warnings that the government was about to arrest him for treason, and pretended to consult with him in a friendly spirit as to how he could escape from Fort Lafayette. Occasionally a bogus warrant was issued for Scoville, and entrusted to an officer, with instructions to inquire for him everywhere, but never to find him. Then Scoville would go into hiding, and copy for "The Old Merchants of New York" would reach me in a roundabout way as if it had been a message from Jeff Davis. Judge Dowling was fond of issuing such warrants.[82]

SCOVILLE S TURN

But soon the real military authorities paid a call to Joseph A. Scoville, aka Manhattan. The Standard columns still were having an effect on public opinion in England and France, and Lincoln s re-election loomed. The proclamation hoax had the government on edge. Scoville was sent for by Gen. Dix.

Manhattan s three-paragraph dispatch to the Standard, dated 9 a.m. Saturday June 11, reports "no news this morning," and ends ominously:

I am ordered to appear before Major General Dix, commander of the eastern division, at his head-quarters at eleven o'clock.

There seems to be no paperwork about this in the Official Records. Perhaps Dix was acting on his own. Manhattan wrote again on June 14, describing the interview. Dix had brought up Scoville s Calhoun connection. "The general labored under the impression that I was the incarnation of all that was bad in the Southern Confederacy. It was no use my telling him that I was for the Union."

He honored me by saying that both ambassadors (Dayton and Adams) thought I did more injury to the cause of America than any other man could do. He said he was in favor of arbitrary arrest in my case that he would stop these letters in future that the past he would leave to the President that he would send those papers (file of the Standards) to the President, and await his decision whether to send me to Fort Lafayette or Richmond.[83]

In other words, banishment across the Potomac to the Southern Confederacy. Or imprisonment in the old coastal fortification off the shore of Brooklyn, where the government impounded without due process civilians and politicians it viewed as disloyal, including the entire city council of Baltimore and Francis Scott Key's grandson. It called them political prisoners.

Dix then sent Scoville home to await Lincoln's ruling on his fate.

If he agrees with General Dix, this is the last letter you will get from me, unless I am sent to Richmond. ... If the President does this, I will continue my letters. I believe at Fort Lafayette there is no writing paper.

After some war news, he concludes the letter with:

I believe your readers are aware that I hold an official position in the city of New York. My health has been so poor that I have not been in the City Hall for over a month, but yesterday I went there and communicated to James Hayes, President of the Board of Councilmen, the decision of General Dix.

I must say that I was flattered by the expressed opinion of President Hayes, that if your correspondent was arrested there would be more noise about it than General Dix imagines.

Though he was in hot water as a newspaper man, Scoville went first for cover to the political power in the city. None of the editors was going to stand up for him now.

The arrest was reported in detail in dozens of British newspapers. But in the North the major New York newspapers showed little sympathy for Scoville, and less First Amendment solidarity. The "New York Times" gave the arrest a single paragraph, reporting that Scoville/"Manhattan" had been summoned by Dix. "After being warned of the consequences which would follow any further mendacious and malicious representations of the affairs of the country, he was leniently allowed to depart on parole."[84]

The "Tribune" wrote a dismissive paragraph noting that Scoville "was recently brought before General Dix and favored with some wholesome advice."

THE END

Two weeks later, Joe Scoville died, suddenly, on June 25, 1864, at age 50, in the Brandreth House, a large hotel at Canal Street and Broadway. He left Cara and Mary, then about 9, as survivors.

He was known to be in bad health, a result of overwork and drink. In 1859 Scoville put his name to an advertising endorsement for a "medicated essence" used for "acute indigestion, loss of appetite and general debility." Shortly before his death he wrote of a visit to the New Jersey country around the headwaters of the Delaware "to get 48 hours of pure air," on the advice of his physician.[85] It was the sort of item that padded his Manhattan columns.

Nobody but one English newspaper seems to have even hinted at foul play. Newspaper men were notoriously hard-living and short-lived in those years. Charles G. Halpine, the literary editor of the "Leader" who had published "Old Merchants," overworked himself into insomnia and excessive drinking. Suffering from both, he took chloroform to induce sleep but overdosed on it and died at 38.

At his death, the Rev. Joe Scoville was dismissed in America as an embarrassment, while Manhattan was mourned as a martyr and truth-teller in Britain. The Standard gave him a glowing tribute on July 11 that is more a tribute to the Standard s own low view of Americans.

The Gloucester Journal correspondent, the Englishman in New York who didn t care for the fireworks, could satisfy the British in short order about whether Manhattan was as beloved at home as abroad. His answer is diplomatic: "though 'Manhattan' was known in England by his racy correspondence, Mr. Scoville did not make much figure lately in his naive country."[86]

How little figure Scoville made is suggested by adjectives used in the single paragraphs Northern newspapers devoted to noting his death.

"His style was that of a common blackguard, and his letters were filled with the most malignant falsehoods that it was possible for a corrupt writer to invent," continued the editor of the Hartford Courant, perhaps defensive because Scoville was a Connecticut boy.

"All good men who love the Union and hate the rebellion will cheerfully acquiesce in the Lord's will concerning him," the pro-administration National Republican wrote from Washington, D.C.

Manhattan is dead. But in August letters from America resume in the Standard. A North and South letter runs Aug. 5 with the byline "A New York Democrat." It is dated Aug. 3, so it likely was sent to London by transatlantic cable, which would have been far more expensive than Joe Scoville s postage stamps.

The letters continue pessimistic about the North, and anti-Lincoln, carefully loyal. Internal evidence suggests a writer or writers for the World, the Democratic newspaper, had taken over the column. It was in the post-Scoville North and South that the great miscegenation hoax finally was revealed that fall, in details only the perpetrators could know.

From the first paragraphs, the new columnist reads like someone striving for the effect of a stage Yankee, a performance in words designed to tickle known expectations. It opens:

I know that it has been reiterated a thousand times, and is brought into use upon every occasion in which an Englishman questions the good sense of any movement political, military, financial, or otherwise on the part of citizens of the American republic; yet I am constrained to employ the threadbare dictum once again, in touching upon the question of peace: "You English people will never understand Americans."[87]

The prose is stuffy and the humor stiff. Whoever wrote that was no Manhattan.

Some of the rising editors of those big city newspapers, regardless of politics, had known Scoville, had perhaps written for him. The New York Express handled him fairly: "Scoville was what is sometimes called a 'sloppy' writer. He wrote a great deal of anything on everything, but nothing powerful, though much that was quite strong, and impertinently personal."

Bennett s Herald was quiet. Perhaps Scoville s brush with Dix discouraged Bennett from owning his acolyte

That was all the Herald felt it could say on the topic the day after Joseph A. Scoville died. They got his initial wrong. To read Bennett s columns over the next days, one would not guess he knew the name under any spelling. More than two years later, Bennett, thinking of someone else, wrote in the Herald, "As we once said of poor Scoville, ... he has imagination enough for a first-rate novelist."[88]

Imagination he did not have. He took glee in sensationalism. He was a newspaper writer, and to him that was no art. It was a craft, done with a bag full of tricks and effective tools. He had learned to work it well enough to be an able craftsman, a shrewd Yankee carving words into wooden nutmegs.

Scoville s humor fits patterns and templates. That style of writing had been honed by newspaper writers, and "Mr. Pick" showed ability at it. The humor depends on timing more than wit, but his timing is excellent. It depends more on the skill of turning the joke than the content of the punchline. America in the 1850s loved it, Bowery and Broadway, North and South. So did England in the 1860s. The next generation of newspaper writers after Scoville included Mark Twain, who kneaded a humanity into that journalistic style, and breathed real life into Huck and Jim.

Nichols compared Scoville to Poe. But Scoville has not a drop of poetry in him and Poe is drunk with it. Poe also had a vast imagination, along with perfect pitch for the tune of the language.

Scoville was six years younger than Poe, four years older than Whitman. He and Whitman walked the same streets. Each, in his way, had the city and its people for a first love. Both men embraced, and embodied, the city s pungent reality. Both were observers, intensely so. Walt would have read The Pick. Scoville certainly read Whitman (Walt's poems were parodied in the comic papers).

And "Manhattan s" stream of prose, at his most wired and tired perhaps, can gather and swell, briefly, into plain-spoken grandeur. Such were his emancipation visions. Whitman would have stood still in that thought and breathed it, luxuriated in it. Joe Scoville is instantly off to the next joke, his eye on the postal scale. But both have been there.

He was buried from his home at 58 Twenty-Seventh Street, interred in Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. In August the New York Board of Councilmen voted to pay $337.30 to a church sexton in the city, "being the amount of funeral expenses of Joseph A. Scoville, Esq., late Reader of the Board of Councilmen."

Shortly after Scoville s death, the New York Tribune London correspondent who signed his work T.B.G. defended Scoville, cautiously in that pro-Lincoln newspaper, "for I knew the man, and privately he was not an unkind person."

T.B.G. was Thomas B. Gunn, the writer and illustrator who had worked for and with Scoville at The Pick and remained a friend. In his Manhattan days, Scoville excepted T.B.G. from his blanket criticisms of English correspondents, remembering who he was.

Gunn writes that he is reading the fulsome editorial tribute to Manhattan that ran in the July 11 Standard ("a splendid instance of lofty virtue," etc.), and, he says, "I could not but think how the subject of it would have chuckled could he have enjoyed the same privilege. 'I stir 'em up every mail,' he said to me in New York once; 'give 'em something strong.' And he did!"[89]

POSTSCRIPT

Scoville lingered in the national memory long enough to have a paragraph in Appletons' Cyclop dia of American Biography in 1888, subsequently reprinted. Most of it is about the "Manhattan" columns, and there is a list of his novels and a sentence about Calhoun. The birth-date appears to be wrong. No "Pick," no Lola. Opposite him on the page is a picture of the statue of Winfield Scott, whom Scoville lacerated in print.

Scoville would have had something sharp to say about that today. He would say it in the "Herald," no doubt, if there was a Herald. In 1924 Munsey merged it with the "Tribune" to make a two-mastheaded monster that died in 1966. Its beloved international edition lasted longer. After Barnum's Museum burned down in 1868 for the second time in three years, he gave it up, and the "Herald" built its new building there. It, too, is long gone.

In the late 1850s, having seen life, Lola Montez turned to moral lectures. She died in January 1861 and was buried in Green Wood under a stone carved with Mrs. Eliza Gilbert and the wrong age.

------

[1] He seems to have been in business at first as "Scovill" and sometimes to have spelled it so, and once or twice it is spelled by others phonetically as "Scovell," but from about 1840 he is usually "Scoville."

[2] New Orleans Crescent, May 18, 1853

[3]  London Standard, Sept. 19, 1862

[4] "Old Merchants of New York City," vol. I, p.131, edition of 1885

[5] Calhoun to R.M.T. Hunter, Sept. 30, 1842

[6] Calhoun to Scoville, April 28, 1843

[7] J. Francis Hutton to R.M.T. Hunter, Jan. 25, 1843; Hunter to Calhoun, May 23, 1843

[8]  New York Herald, Nov. 27, 1844

[9]  Brooklyn Evening Star," June 27, 1846

[10] "New York Herald," April 16, 1849

[11]  James C. Jewett, letter Feb. 5, 1817

[12]  New York Herald, May 3, 1850

[13] "London Standard," July 27, 1863

[14]  New York Herald, Jan. 22, 1854, Jan. 26, 1854, etc.

[15]  Herald, Feb. 16, 1852

[16] Gunn diaries, June 8, 1861, vol. xvi, p. 232

[17]   New York Herald, Feb. 15, 1853

[18] advertisements in New York Herald, Feb. 7, Feb. 16, 1852

[19] Gunn diaries, Nov. 17-18, 1852, vol. v, p. 91

[20] "Valentine's Manual of Old New York," no. 4, 1920

[21] from "New York Pick," reprinted Lancaster, S.C., "News," April 13, 1853

[22] ibid

[23]  New York Herald, May 3, 1850

[24]  Holdredge, Helen, Lola Montez, A Biography, London: Alvin Redman: 1957

[25]  Thomas L. Nichols, "Forty Years of American Life," London, 1864

[26]   New York Herald, May 5, 1852. Mr. Pick in his Sanctum was the standing head on Scoville s front-page columns in the Picayune and The Pick .

[27]  Herald, Aug. 19, 1852

[28]  ibid

[29] In the newspaper marriage notice she is Caroline. T.B. Gunn writes, "Her maiden name was a queer one Carolina Uniana Schaub! Her father, a German pilot of Charleston, or of Teuton descent, detested Nullification and femininised the word Union for a second name of his daughter while he adopted that of the 'sovereign' state for the first." (diaries, Dec. 15, 1861, vol. xviii, page 97-99)

[30]  New York Herald, Feb. 7, 1852

[31] Gunn diaries, Aug. 2, 1853, vol. vi, p. 37

[32]  Holdredge

[33] Springfield Daily Republican," Aug. 28, 1856

[34] Gunn diaries, Aug. 19, 1856, vol. viii, p. 41

[35] quoted in "Evening Star," June 22, 1857

[36] Robert Greenhalgh Albion, "The Rise of New York Port," 1939

[37] It is likely a political nod-and-wink to those who did write of his political death, in 1857 after Scoville s failed George Law effort.

[38]  New York Times, Nov. 7, 1862

[39]  London Standard, Sept. 24, 1861

[40] Gunn diaries, Nov. 27, 1862, vol. xxi, p. 73-74

[41] Ibid, Dec. 15, 1861, vol. xviii, pp. 97-99

[42]  Springfield Daily Republican, Aug. 28, 1856

[43]   London Standard, Jan. 4, 1862

[44]   Standard, Sept. 23, 1862

[45]   Standard, March 2, 1864. From New York, roughly a quarter of the men who had gone out in the first rush of volunteers had died of battle wounds or disease by spring 1864, by the statistics in the Official Records. But not the four-fifths "Manhattan" suggests; in addition to those he saw mustered out and returning through New York, many more still living had received routine discharges, or had re-enlisted for hefty bonuses and were consolidated into other regiments still in service.

[46] "Official Records," Ser. II, vol. II, 1897

[47] Gunn diaries, Sept. 16, 1862, vol. xx, p. 170

[48] ibid, Oct. 12, 1862, vol. xxi, p. 27

[49] Ibid, May 26, 1862, vol. xx, p. 20

[50] ibid. Dec. 15, 1861, vol. xviii, pp. 97-99

[51] ibid, Oct. 12, 1862, vol. xxi, p. 27

[52] Ibid, Nov. 27, 1862, vol. xxi, p. 73-.74

[53]   London Standard, Sept. 14, 1861

[54] "Standard," Sept. 3, 1861

[55]  Huddersfield Weekly Examiner, June 18, 1864

[56]   Gloucester Journal, "American Notes," July 23, 1864

[57]  London Standard, Jan. 20, 1863

[58]   Standard, Sept. 18, 1863

[59]  Attributed to Stephen R. Fisk in Harpers , June 1868, quoted from Marvin T. Wheat, The Progress and Intelligence of Americans, 1863.

[60]  Boston Evening Transcript, July 29, 1864, quoting "London correspondent of the New York Tribune."

[61]  Punch, Jan. 16, 1864

[62]  London Standard, Oct. 7, 1862, emphasis added

[63] "Standard," Aug. 28, 1863

[64]  Standard, July 28, 1863; paragraph breaks added

[65]  Standard, July 31, 1863

[66] Nichols, op. cit.

[67]  London Standard, May 17, 1864

[68]  London Times, June 3, 1864

[69] He donated the leg, and the cannonball that took it, to the Army Medical Museum, where he visited it.

[70] "Sunday Dispatch," May 15, 1864

[71] "London Times," June 3, 1864

[72]  Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Ser. II, vol II, Section 1, pp. 77-78

[73]  Gunn diaries, Oct, 14, 1861, vol. xviii, p. 12

[74] Op. cit.

[75] "London Standard," April 20, 1864

[76] New York Tribune, May 19, 1864

[77] "Official Records," Ser. III, vol. IV, "Additions and corrections," 1902

[78]   London Standard, June 6, 1864

[79] "New York Herald," May 10, 1864

[80]  London Standard, June 8, 1864

[81]  Standard, June 6, 1864

[82] "Stephen Fisk's Reminiscences," in "Albany Law Journal," June 29, 1889

[83]  London Standard, June 28, 1864

[84] "New York Times," June 16, 1864

[85]  London Standard, June 21, 1864

[86]   Gloucester Journal, July 23, 1864

[87]  London Standard, Aug. 13, 1864

[88]  New York Herald, Oct. 16, 1866

[89]  New York Tribune,  July 28, 1864

I started looking on Newspapers.com for some indication that A.1. Sauce was really that old. Almost immediately I turned up an advertisement from 1881 where the company s own product description said it was invented in 1862 for the International Exhibition, and that the Chief Royal Commissioner was the person who called it A.1. 

So where did all this stuff about George IV and the sauce being from the 1830s come from? Well the rest of my day got spent trying to untangle that. Short version is: none of that Prinny stuff is correct; but because Wikipedia got hold of it, it s hopelessly all over the place now, and all your AI answers will say it s true. It looks to have resulted from perhaps legitimate confusion (or perhaps deliberate exaggeration) of certain facts.

Henderson William Brand was born circa 1805 in Durham, England. In 1834 he edited an updated version of Simpson s Cookery, on the title page of which he offers his credentials:

By HENDERSON WILLIAM BRAND 

OF THE KITCHEN OF HIS LATE MAJESTY GEORGE THE FOURTH; 

CHIEF COOK TO T.W. COKE, ESQ.; EARL MANVERS; HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF NORFOLK; THE MARQUIS OF AILSA; AND LORD ROLLE.

Note he does not say he was the chef to the king, and given Brand s age of around 25 in 1830, his advancement to such a position would have been very remarkable. He worked a kitchen job that apparently gave him the training needed for later employment as a cook in upperclass houses.

In 1826 he married Jane Mason, apparently with a Special License according to the records book. In 1835 Brand appears to have created and then immediately sold a business selling preserved beef products such as beef essence, bouillon cubes, and packaged broths. The company went on under the name Brand and Co. even though Brand was no longer part of it.

Brand published also The Modern Process for the Preservation of all Alimentary Substances (1838). In 1843 he declared bankruptcy. There is not much public mention of him for some time thereafter, though another H.W. Brand or H.B.W. Brand who appears to be a politician sometimes adds confusion to things. In the later 1860s our H.W. Brand seems to have been doing what we would now think of as catering. An article of 1865 mentions him at a party that was thrown for the occasion of presenting a portrait to Lord Hastings:

In the vestibule a luncheon of a very elegant character was provided, the directing genius of the feast being Mr. H.W. Brand, one of that mysterious white-capped fraternity who are seen on state occasions about the lower regions of great houses; in plainer language, a professional cook, who has officiated in that capacity at Holkham entertainments, even in the now remote days of the great Thomas William. [The Morning Post, November 11, 1865]

Perhaps it is also what he had been doing in 1862 for the International Exhibition (pictured above) when his famous sauce was invented. His company gives this account:

The celebrated SAUCE was invented by Mr. H.W. BRAND (formerly of the Royal Household) in 1862, when he was Cook and Co-Manager of the cuisine at the International Exhibition in Hyde-Park. It was submitted by him (among other sauces) to the Royal Commissioners for approval for use at the restaurants in the Exhibition, and pronounced by the Chief Commissioner to be A1 a designation which was immediately adopted, and by which it has been known ever since. This is an incontestable proof of its excellence and superiority.

[Advertisement in The Times, London, July 15, 1881]

(Note that most sources say the International Exhibition was in South Kensington; but one of the entrances was at Hyde Park Corner and another required crossing Hyde Park. Maps of the exhibition show the refreshment rooms were near the entrances by the park.)

By 1872, Brand was advertising his International A-1 Sauce. The ad mentions it was being used in royal households among other quality establishments.

In 1874 his name turns up in the midst of a lawsuit between men who appear to be his nephews John James Mason and Frederick Mason. They were apparently attached to the Brand and Co. which H. W. Brand had founded but long since ceased to own.

In 1879 Brand sought a patent for a method of hermetically sealing food containers. Then he began to offer more products for sale including Zisnosakouska (apparently it s Russian) and anchovy sauce. In 1881 he got into some legal trouble when his new company began selling beef essences; Brand and Co. claimed this was an infringement on their trademark. After appealing the initial verdict, H.W. Brand was given the right to sell products as The Original Brand and his advertisements would subsequently be very particular to describe his product labels versus those of competitors. 

In 1886 there was a winding up notice published for H.W. Brand Ltd., which implies that he retired around this time. No obituary appears to have been published for him, but there s a burial record for a Henderson William Brand at Nunhead Cemetery in London, with a death date of August 8, 1893. 

Since the sauce still lives on, Brand must have sold the recipe or the company including the recipe before his death. His nephew Frederick Mason began manufacturing P. and O. Sauce and beef essences, advertising his relationship to the late original H.W. Brand.

Tales of Brand inventing his sauce for George IV appear in print in the 20th century, well after his death. Perhaps there was legitimate confusion from claims of the sauce being served in royal households or perhaps it was thought a direct connection to the king just made better advertising. To this day, the bottles of A.1. Sauce you buy have the actual date 1862 printed right on them. 

Thanks to digital archives, used intelligently by humans, the data on soccer is deep enough to root through in quest of an answer. You won t come back with a clean date, of course. Such a word spreads in subcultures before it blossoms in the head of that fictional but essential person, "everybody." That can take a generation or longer.

The American Everybody s awareness of "soccer," the game and the word, seems to have blinked to life fairly rapidly in 1905. Attempts to organize the game in the U.S. in the 1890s under an American Football Association had fizzled. After 1905, enthusiasm for the game, and the use of the word, rose and fell over time but never vanished.

At its birth, American soccer got off to a wobbly start. Americans unacquainted with British sporting jargon heard the word and wrote it socker. That spelling appears very frequently in American headlines, despite being excoriated by New York Times editors and others who cared how the British spelled it. The misspelling amused Americans, because it suggested flying fists, and soccer was being sold to them as a gentler version of football. 

The English also had sometimes spelled it socker during the 1890s, and some attempted to explain that the name was taken from the fact that the players wore heavy woolen socks."

By either spelling it seems to have been an adjective at first, and a typical name for the game in the U.S. then was soccer (or socker) football.

The word soccer had been an English university term in the 1890s; it is the word Association run through a popular slang-minting process that also made brekkers out of breakfast and so forth. English newspapers in the early 1900s still routinely printed the word in quotation marks, as non-standard.

Roughly, "soccer" in England described the artful kicking-only game, played by rules set by the Football Association. It was distinguished from older rugby ("rugger"). Together, in Britain, they were the two forms of football ("footer").

A word such as soccer first would become known in America among athletics enthusiasts and the elites who kept up with British culture. In the 1905 revival the word turns up early in accounts of teams organized by amateurs at Ivy League colleges and old-money bastions such as Merion Cricket Club on Philadelphia's Main Line.

FOOTBALL CRISIS

Current events converged to make 1905 the year the game and the word also reached the average American s eye, and got into print in places like Salt Lake City, Utah.

In 1905, American football was in crisis. Football was the king of college athletics. But this was an old, brutal form of football, with mass scrums and without the forward pass and the NCAA, much like rugby but deliberately more brutal.

There were deaths. More than a dozen of them that year. President Roosevelt's son, Ted Jr., though undersized at 5-foot-7 and 145 pounds, played on the Harvard freshman squad that fall and was mauled by Yale players. He suffered a concussion, a broken nose, and a neck injury. The president was livid and let it be known the sport had to reform in the name of safety or be banned.

Outrage over football violence hit the U.S. headlines in late summer 1905, just as England made a fresh attempt to convert Americans to its new game. A team of English amateur all-stars, playing as the Pilgrims, crossed the Atlantic for a tour of major U.S. cities in the north and Midwest.

The sporting gentry in England had been persistent in promoting soccer there, and they sensed the Association-rules game would be welcomed by at least the better-bred Americans. The Pilgrims sailed with the mission of converting Americans to the new game. They played 12 stadium matches against local teams in the US and five in Canada. They triumphed by lopsided scores (a squad of all-stars from Chicago gave them their one loss). In St. Louis, almost 16,000 watched.

English soccer enthusiasts patiently explained to one American reporter after another that soccer was more than "just a kicking game."

"You would be surprised to see the men pass the ball across the field with their feet. There is genuine science in the manner in which the ball is passed around by the man, and the beauty of it is you can see every play." [quoted in Boston Globe, Sept. 29, 1905] 

Having seen the Pilgrims play, U.S. sports commentators split. Some pointed out soccer did not much resemble American football, but it had all the qualities of basketball, then a new North American game. Some found it just plain dull. Those enraged by the violence of U.S. football were most likely to be glamoured by soccer.

THE GAME FAILS ABSOLUTELY

The New York American had a fine stable of literate sports writers; among them was Boseman Bulger, who was among those who found soccer dull.

The game fails absolutely in getting the spectators worked up to an exciting fit of expectancy. You just have to wait and see what happens.

In U.S. football and baseball, set plays allow the audience to stand ready to see the action, he wrote. But in soccer, the players "simply run helter skelter over the field, chasing the ball up and down and the lucky man kicks it through."

An English-born professor at Columbia lined up on the other side: "It is my firm opinion that the English game of soccer, which has been recently introduced into American sport, might very well and very properly supersede the other form and hold its place permanently." [New York Herald, Dec. 4, 1905]

But the professor (William A. Nielson) identified the problem in an evil that still plagues U.S. college sports: money. "The commercial feature of American sports must also be eliminated before we can expect to have true amateur athletics." He suggested free admission to all intercollegiate contests.

Another writer ("T.N.E.") to the Herald, on Nov. 26, also noted a cultural obstacle:

[T]he difference between English and American college athletics is the difference between Englishmen and Americans. Even in adopting the English game we adapt it also to American ideas by planning intercollegiate contests. The spirit of competition is to us the breath of life--whether it be in business or in play. We are not satisfied with doing a thing well half so much as in knowing that we can do it better than somebody else. And this spirit is good in athletics--in moderation; its excess is the source of nine-tenths of the objectionable features in our games.

The most punishing verdict on America s love of football was given by another of the American s sportsman-writers, Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel):

We like our brand of football because it is brutal and stupid, and because only a small fraction of the onlookers understand anything of what they see except the teeth-kicking and bone-breaking part ; and we dislike 'soccer' football because it is a real game, full of action, grace, agility, courage and cleverness .... 

We miss, in 'soccer' football, that delightful smashing and bashing of flesh against flesh which so fascinates and thrills us in our own game ....

'Socker' football is nothing but football, there is not so much as a whiff of the abattoir or the railroad accident about it. Could anything, then, be more preposterous than the effort to introduce it to the American public and to the favorable consideration of our institutions of learning?

This used to be the season of the year when one would get the agreeable odor of new mown hay when he went on a trip to the country. But since the auto has crowded out the horse the odor of the hot dog and the ketchup has succeeded that of the hay.

The American classic is the hot dog. Cheap, contains meat (which means, to a certain generation, that it s healthy) easy to grill, and easy to eat without a formal table setting. Very much the food of outdoor sports and being in places where there s nowhere to sit. 

The hot dog seems to have acquired the name in the late 19th century. The name is implied but not directly attested in this 1872 joke:

A certain organist in this city went into a music store the other day, and when one of the youths who act as salesmen appeared, the following conversation ensued:

Organist I want to get Martini's Ecole d Orgue.  

Salesman (looking half mad and half scared and staring at the visitor for a minute or two in utter bewilderment) Wh-wh-what did you say?

Organist I say I want you to give me Martini's Ecole d Orgue ; and I want it quick, too.

Salesman (still nervous and yet looking as if he thought there must be a joke some where) Just ask for that again, will you please? I don t exactly get the hang, as it were, of

Organist (angrily) I called to get Martini's Ecole d Orgue I see it advertised, and I want it. Now have you got that Ecole d Orgue or not? 

Salesman You must take me for a fool, don t you? This is no sausage shop. This is a music store. What do you suppose we knew about Martini's cold dog, or his hot dog, or his lukewarm dog, or any other dog belonging to any other man? You must be crazy. Martini never left his dog around here.

The mention of the sausage shop confirms the hot dog as food reference, although the confused salesman seems to think the cold dog being requested could also be an animal.

Earlier hot dog is a heated iron bolt, with uncertain connection to the food. (It seems possible the red hot bolt resembled the cooked sausage to someone, but the relationship is not confirmed.) 

The hot dog was originally the sausage alone; but by around 1900 the inclusion of a bun was customary. Toppings were also common by this time: onion and mustard. Mentions of other sauces come later: sauerkraut by 1906, ketchup by 1913, relish by 1920, chili by 1925. 

In the early 20th century hot dogs were often the subject of health crusaders ire. The limited regulation of the meat industry and the composite nature of the sausage filling meant spoiled meat and toxic dyes were common inclusions that often caused illness. Newspapers often talk of hot dogs as something that will destroy your stomach or at least give bad dreams (and the spicy, vinegary sauces were felt to exacerbate the matter.) A 1910 newspaper article mentions several Coney Island vendors being cited by the health inspector for selling weather beaten hot dogs that weren t kept covered. A year earlier an article from Maine tells of a hot dog man selling them out of a basket (which someone mischievously kicked over). The food was decidedly low-class it made the paper when a man in his opera clothes was seen eating one on the bus home in 1910. In the 19th century there were investigations into whether people were making them from actual dogs. Find out more at the entry for hot dog.

Spelling bees are rooted in the old America. Their name grew out of a custom of shared work for the common wealth. Their form grew out of a holiday tradition in rural New England. Later, spelling bees were a great fad that swept the English-speaking world (and yielded commercial products such as the knick-knack party favors advertised above).

But the name is curious. A "spelling bee" ought to be in a class with a talking horse or a flying pig. A British writer could find no reasonable explanation for the Americanism spelling bee other than, "there is a confusion between the bees and their hive; that in strictness the performers are the bees, and the name has been transferred from the performers to the performance." [ Pall Mall Gazette, Feb. 29, 1876]

It is as good a guess as any. However, spelling bees were not the original human bees, and the modern orthography knockout bouts do not quite fit the original notion of that word in colonial America.

BEE SEASON

Most Americans before the Civil War lived scattered in woods or spread over the countryside. Social contact took effort. There were few gangs of laborers, yet much hard work was to be done. "Bees" solved both problems.

A family could spend weeks in fall husking the corn it raised that summer. Or all the neighboring farmers could gather at the family s corn-crib and clean the crop with them in a day, while the family fed them and they all socialized with each other. That event was a bee. A few days later that family might join a gathering at the next farm over, or one across the township, for a work-frolic there.

The image is the hive. Your farm becomes a hive of activity; for one day you host the social hub of the community, which swarms you. Ideally, every man, woman, and child in the barn or kitchen has a purpose and knows what to do. A bee is necessarily a test of competence and speed. The goal is to get the work done by sundown. Then the fiddle comes out and the dancing begins. Frolic was another common name for such a work-gathering. Whiskey was a regular feature, and the heavier the work, the heavier the drinking.

This (absent the whiskey) is how my neighbors the Amish still erect a barn. Two centuries ago, in the same place, such an affair might have been called a "raising bee." An English farmer who settled on the Illinois prairie in the early 1820s described such frolics in a book published in England.

[Corn] is gathered in October and November, when they only take off the ears; but as the ears are covered with a large husk, they carry them as they are to the corn-crib, and then all the neighbours collect together to help to husk it, and put it into the corn-crib. This is a high day with the Americans, and is called a Husking Frolic; plenty of whiskey. [John Woods, Two Years Residence in the Settlement on the English Prairie in the Illinois Country, United States"]

He writes that "the Americans seldom do any thing without having one."

Thus, they have husking, reaping, rolling frolics, &c. &c. Among the females, they have picking, sewing, and quilting frolics. Reaping frolics, are parties to reap the whole growth of wheat, &c. in one day. Rolling frolics, are clearing wood-land, when many trees are cut down, and into lengths, to roll them up together, so as to burn them, and to pile up the brushwood and roots on the trees. I think this one is useful, as one man or his family can do but little in moving a large quantity of heavy timber. Picking cotton, sewing, and quilting frolics, are meetings to pick cotton from the seeds, make clothes, or quilt quilts; in the latter, the American women pride themselves. Whiskey is here too in request, and they generally conclude with a dance.

The OLD-TIME SCHOOL SPELLING BEE

The raising-frolic is one strand of the spelling bee s origin. Another is in the schoolhouses of the long New England winters. Winter mud made travel impossible for many and increased the isolation of rural life. But a good, deep snowfall allowed sleighing, and a horse-drawn sleigh could go fast and far. When the snows came, adults planned social visits and entertainments.

And students began to pester their teacher for a spelling match, or a spelling contest. A challenge would be issued to a neighboring school, a date would be set. The visitors arrived. Students had their moment of victory or defeat, the adults socialized, the young people courted, and it all was inarguably for the advancement of education.

In the early 1800s, bee seems not to have been the usual name for it. Perhaps the association with frolics and drinking discouraged the connection. But by the time of the Civil War, school spelling socials and husking frolics both were fading memories in the East. The spelling contests were, however, a feature of Freedman s school in the post-war South, where Northern teachers taught the children of former slaves. 

BEE MANIA

Then from about 1872 to 1876, spelling bees revived as a fad. It started in American cities, where it was noted as the "old-fashioned" country event shifted to a modern footing. And they were called bees. Often the sponsor was a local newspaper or library. Sometimes they were fundraisers for the community poor, which echoed the benefit to all theme.

The spelling bee of the 1870s was an evening of food, music, socializing, and flirting. An Englishman described one as an "orthographic soiree." Admission was a few pennies. Anyone could join as a contestant. At least one event had all the spellers in "masks and other articles of disguise," chosen by the parties themselves.

The English observer in 1875 also compared one to a steeplechase. It seemed half the town was lined up at the start, and the first few rounds were full of hilarious spills. A speller often never got to finish; the crowd would hoot him offstage at the first error, especially if it was a howler.

The words rolled on. Pseudonym cacophony cafe paraphernalia yacht asthma. They weeded out the clowners and self-overraters and those who had signed up after a few drinks. The real match began when none but serious spellers remained. Generally these were the local schoolmasters (who had reputations to protect), literate lawyers, or men who simply prided themselves on spelling. The judges emptied Webster s at them.

Contests could last past midnight. They were competitive: town against town, school against school. If everyone was from the same place, they would pick captains and choose up sides, or pit parents against children. A sort of league formed. Poems were written about the spelling bee. People greeted friends on the street playfully with How do you spell ____? The nation was in the grip of "logomania" ( Pennsylvania School Journal, June 1875), you could lay a bet on Spelling Bee the race-horse (in 1878 as a 4-year-old). And it was all, nominally, educational.

"Here amusement would go hand in hand with improvement," London's "Belgravia" magazine wrote in April 1876, "and the sternest moralist might acquit himself of wasting time. It would also have the desirable effect of bringing the sexes together."

BEE GIRLS

Women's spelling might have been a joke, then, among some hyper-literate men. But observers noted that when it came time to assert their superiority in a spelling match, the men often blanched. Partly because, as "Belgravia" noted, the men "have a general idea that when ladies show any decided eagerness for a contest it is because they are assured of a victory." 

And here was a chance to put certain pompous men, or all of them, in their place, in public. The men might note in their own defense that girls schools crammed long lists of words into the heads of students (in place of learning considered out of their sphere). But it had been noted from the old schoolhouse days that, when open to all, a spelling match drew more girls than boys and generally they were better at it.

The learned men had never been taught to spell. The pattern was what made the spelling bees such fun: schoolmasters versed in etymologies sailed through polysyllables out of Greek and Latin. But they went to pieces over "the little Saxon terms, which are derived from nothing and consequently afford no clue." The housewife could spell those.

Before it ran its course, the spelling bee craze also spawned the musical bee in which the company assembled to compete at singing or playing music at sight, the rhyming bee and like activities.

BEE-BONNETS

And it sparked a backlash, which awakened new interest in that old pipe-dream, fonetik spelling in English. The backlash was inevitable. As the bees swarmed they left a growing list of literate soreheads who had been stung hooted off stage in front of the whole town for spelling duellist with one -l- or judgment with an -e-.

Some years ago a dreadful game, called the "Spelling Bee," became very popular of winter evenings; and educated people were put to shame because they could not remember what silent letter stands at the head of certain words--"mnemonics," for example, or "pneumatic." It was hoped that this pastime would reconcile the popular mind to the official orthography; but it left a rankling grievance which is now blazing in the bosoms of professors. ["The Speaker," Dec. 21, 1895]

Such men were ripe for reaping by the zealots of phonetic spelling. In 1877, the author of "Simplification of English Spelling" (George Harley) wrote:

The ephemeral Spelling Bee unwittingly did a service (for which we cannot be too grateful) in successfully pointing out to reflecting minds very many inconsistencies; aye, it might even be said, many palpable absurdities in English orthography, while it had at the same time the advantage of conclusively proving that it is not necessarily the best educated persons who are the most proficient spellers.

Other phonetic cranks (such as Isaac Pitman, caricatured below in Punch in 1879) also pointed to the spelling bee mania as having awakened awareness of the problem they would fix. 

They were tireless, confident souls, and, fortunately for the rest of us, they could make nothing of the opportunity. English orthography remains a navigable maze, and a spelling bee is still educational fun. Fonetik English would be orthographic apicide.

We have an A-list, checklist, blacklist, backlist, waitlist, wish-list, existentialist (kidding), bucket-list, playlist, shopping list, enemies list, mailing list yo-ho-ho, the listing life for us.

And they become figures in our speech. We use shopping list in a general way for any set of things sought that must be paid for.

Why, out of all of these, does laundry list puff up into the big, broad sense of "a large, bewildering list of disparate items"? Any of them might be that.

In the early 20th century laundry lists were a fact of hotel travel. The better hotels all would clean your clothes for you in-house. For the well-heeled traveler, such care mattered a great deal; this was not lost on the hotel managers, who boasted of their meticulous laundry departments.

In that competitive atmosphere, each strove to be "full-service." Which meant, theoretically, they would clean anything dropped down the chute.

Laundry lists were pre-printed forms, ordered from suppliers along with the hotel letterhead and other standard documents.

There never was an incentive to remove an item from a laundry list. The last person in America to wear that particular article, if there was one, might be your next guest. The very appearance of obscure terms on the list would impress on every guest the notion of "full-service."

By the late 1920s (after a decade of fashion revolution) people began to remark in print on the old-fashioned garment words on hotel laundry lists, such as "bloomers" and "corselets" and detachable cuffs.

It began in New York. Soon newspaper reporters anywhere looking for something to do could pick up a laundry list from a hotel and write a column spotting the anachronisms on it.

The hotels defended. Old-fashioned did not mean obsolete. In 1933 the Cleveland Press quoted the laundry master at the Statler, "who said a corset appeared in the laundry two weeks ago 'stays and all' " though he noted that it "so disrupted his staff that he had to figure out a way to wash it himself." 

By 1950s the laundry-list was a cliche. "Most laundry lists appear to have been composed at about the turn of the century, and their purity has not been tampered with since," the Atlanta Journal concluded in 1957. "Not only does nobody seem to send some of the listed articles to the laundry, they aren't even MADE anymore."

And by the end of that year "laundry list" was appearing in print in the broad sense of "long list of bewildering things." Prominently so, by Jacob Bronowski, the great scientific humanist. He used it to describe what had been found in the ancient Minoan tablets of Crete, written in a script which recently had been translated after tantalizing scholars for generations.

In England in an address to the annual conference of the Library Association in September, Bronowski admitted the material had turned out to be "very disappointing," mundane lists of palace slaves and property.

Yet here, Bronowski reminded them, we saw the first spark of all our written language. The ancient "laundry-list" was "exactly the sort of list that men could not (and still cannot) carry in their heads." That is why it had to be written down at all. It is the sort of mental matter that forced writing on the human mind. It is the work we invented writing to do.

The humble laundry list, Minoan or modern, the humanist told the librarians, "is as important, and in the end as powerful, an advance on the spoken word as the symbolism of algebra is an advance on the verbal mathematics of the Middle Ages."

barbecue

The first to hit English. Originally a native (probably Haitian) word for the grill structure used for cooking meat. Because a fresh-killed animal is larger than most families can consume in one sitting, barbecue parties were common from the very beginning. The 1732 diary of Judge Benjamin Lynde is where we have the earliest evidence in English of barbecue meaning an outdoor feast:

[August] 31st: Came home this afternoon; and Coz. S. Brown from a barbacue at Browne's farm with my sons Wm and Benjamin, coming home in the evening, his coachman was thrown off the coach box, and Coz. S. Browne leapt out, but over him, and his coachman hurt. [Diary of Benjamin Lynde, 1732, published 1880]

picnic

The origin of this term is in a satirical poem from 17th century France about a man named Pique-Nique (translates something like "Insult Starter" though that is far from exact. The nique would be kind of like Shakespeare's biting the thumb at someone.) The actual poem was soon forgotten, but the dining style described within it, in which all the guests shared expenses for their luxurious meal, became a standing fashion in France. By 1748 in the letters of the Earl of Chesterfield, he remarks on his son's attending a picnic:

I like the description of your PIC-NIC; where I take it for granted, that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle, and your SYMPOSION intended more to promote conversation than drinking. Such an AMICABLE COLLISION, as Lord Shaftesbury very prettily calls it, rubs off and smooths those rough corners which mere nature has given to the smoothest of us. [Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, LETTER LV, October 29, 1748.]

cookout

Barbecue and picnic satisfied the linguistic outdoor eating needs through the 19th century, but in the 20th century came the cookout. This was presumably for those who intended to cook something outdoors under conditions which wouldn't qualify for the expected rules of barbecue. The first instance I've located comes up in a youth clubhouse context, as do most of the early uses (often Girl Scouts):

The L.W. club held their regular meeting Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 o'clock. It was voted that the club should have a social hour every week at a member's house. [...] The club will probably have a cook-out every Saturday morning. ["L.W. Club to Meet Once Every Week," The Junior Journal (Beaumont Daily Journal), March 28, 1924.]

tail-gate

Once car-culture took off postwar, you of course brought your car to the cookout. The word tail-gating (originally tail-gate picnicking) is used in reference to the open tail-gate of a parked car as a setting for a party or picnic.

Have you ever thought of a tail gate picnic?

During these late summer weekends when bench-type tables in wayside picnic sites are full to overflowing, take heart! In your station wagon tail-gate, you have a ready-made, built-in picnic buffet table, away from sand and insects, and as free and mobile as the family and their friends. [Virginia Baird, "Tail-Gate Picnicking Takes Over," The State Journal (Lansing, Mich.), August 14, 1958.]

But wait there's more! Some other foods traditionally cooked outdoors can include:

chowder - traditionally made just off the beach for seaside picnics.

kettle of fish - Scottish picnic tradition to boil a pot of these.

clambake - more specific about what has to be served.

Now, one of the things that Rocket 88 has going on in it, is the use of electric guitar. I started thinking, maybe guitar is the key to a song being rock? I recall Courtney Love once saying as much in an interview, not that she s a historian. At first it seems like a good rule even Little Richard has guitars in his backing band but Daft Punk Get Lucky is absolutely not rock, despite a guitar (and despite being a sex song) so there s obviously something else in the music defining it.

Already here it started to seem like we might have a situation that happens a lot with the food entries: where the word gets applied to something that then evolves into a form very unlike its old self. If you presented someone with the original version of ketchup, they d be mad that you gave them fermented fish juice instead of what they requested. Maybe, I thought, rock has the same thing happening. 

From listening to Little Steven s Underground Garage, I have learned that Bo Diddley singing Bo Diddley was the first nationally televised rock song. Had you told me that it was the first rock song ever, I d believe it: that one sounds like what came after. The sequence all makes sense if Bo Diddley was what founded rock; the Rocket 88 style doesn t. But notice in that Bo Diddley clip: Ed Sullivan actually calls it rhythm and roll, rhythm and color, rhythm and blues and then Dr. Jive calls it folk blues. Doesn t say rock and roll anywhere. It might be that rock and roll was too risqu to say on mid-50s TV, especially if Sullivan was on thin enough ice just playing it; but also might be that that genuinely isn t the genre they believed it was, even if it s retroactively been classed that way. 

So I turned to my mom, who was a little young for first wave rock but at least was alive during the time. She lived in Hermosa Beach and her culture was surf culture, so the first record she remembers trying to buy was Jan and Dean s Surf City, but she wasn t able to get it despite numerous attempts because it was always sold out. She often laughs at the music from the teen-oriented movies of the time because it was weird jazz stuff written by old men, and it didn t sound anything like what the teens really listened to. Please refer to this example of old man jazz rock from the movie Beach Party (which sounds more like the Rocket 88 than it does like Dick Dale.*) Somehow this music style never becomes called surf rock during the time when it s popular, even though it seems to be one of the earliest rock subgenres. (1963 was the year when all the well known surf songs came out, though the style was apparently around before that.) She recalled a little about 50s rock as understood by a child/preteen in a beach town that had about every ethnicity except Black; but ultimately she admitted she, too, was baffled to explain what the rock genre has going on which unifies Beach Boys, Nirvana, Bella Morte, Question Mark and the Mysterians, AC/DC and Elvis under the same label. In opera, Monteverdi, Mozart and Puccini are all very different music, but the performance method of sung drama with classical rather than folk instruments keeps them under one label, plus it took over a hundred years between each of those examples for the music to change so much. Rock is mutating at jet-age speed.

To deduce a definition, clearly I would have to figure this out like a dictionarian, where the word is all we care about, not the thing. If someone s calling Sal Mineo rock and roll then that s how it gets used no matter what purists say.

The word rock and roll becomes much more common beginning in 1955. That is the year Rock Around the Clock was featured in the movie Blackboard Jungle, and the genre went mainstream. Bo Diddley s Ed Sullivan performance (which again, wasn t actually called rock) happened the same year. 

Douglas Harper pointed out that when a word goes commercial like this, it doesn t evolve naturally anymore: it gets steered by marketing and applied to whatever makes money with that term. So, after a little more digging around and listening to a lot of random music from the 50s that has been (usually retroactively) called rock, my conclusion is this:

The actual rock and roll is that jazzy stuff, but the genre didn t last very long. When it went commercial, the music companies started to pitch, under the label of rock and roll, whatever music they thought superficially resembled it. Apparently DJ Alan Moondog Freed was part of this; he had a radio show from the early 1950s where he played records by Black artists (scandalous at the time) but he felt the term R&B had too much racial stigma, and so on his show he began to term any music he played rock and roll whether it actually met the genre requirements or not.

It indicates the real rock and roll genre died almost as soon as people started to talk about it. The term rockabilly was already necessary by 1956 to differentiate that from the other rock. Most of the rock music we know now probably is of delta blues lineage, rather than the jazzy R&B that started it all. The jazzy type was killed for good with the British Invasion and its decided music hall influence. (And you know it jumped the shark once Bollywood got it.)

Some pre-1955 rockers who were actually performing what was called rock and roll in their own time are Erline Newsome and The Treniers. There were also many others who are named in concert advertisements but don t appear to have left any recordings of what they did. 

There evolved many subgenres of rock: folk rock (1964), pop rock (1965), psychedelic rock (1966), punk rock (1971), southern rock (1971), hard rock and soft rock (both 1967), Christian rock (1972), glam rock (1972), gothic rock (1977), alternative rock (1979), and J-rock (2003.) Despite its large variety, rock now is effectively a dead genre the only major bands still doing it are the same ones who were doing it in the 90s. 

In the end I had to write up the rock and roll entry like the ketchup entry: give a big story explaining it instead of trying to define it, because too many things have been the word. The ultimate rock might be Yoko Kanno s honkadori of the old time blues, from Cowboy Bebop, with its rock and blues vibes even as it uses for its theme a jazz tune. 

* I used Misirlou Twist because it s Dick Dale s most famous song, but it s actually a bad example because it is an adaptation of a Greek folk tune (the title means Egyptian girl. ) The oldest recording is here. I was surprised a few months ago to stumble upon the information that, despite his WASPy stage name, Dick Dale s family was Lebanese, and he knowingly used traditional Middle Eastern music in his take on surf rock. Which might be the reason surf rock sounds like it does: reports are that Dick Dale was the first of the genre.

Now, I may be famously a fan of fortune telling, but I don t think all methods of performing it are equal, and moreover I conceive that supernatural/spiritual practices are supposed to stay in their own lane and not get used outside of deliberate acts of fortune telling. Consequently, one fortune telling method that I especially detest is word magic. This is where bad etymology and absence of historical knowledge converge, and it is used to inspire fear and hatred by convincing people that they (sometimes it s a named they like the liberals or the aliens or Greta Thunberg ) are using these secret meanings to do something unpleasant to you (yes YOU) this act being very often mind control or curses. When you find this in the wild, you might notice it can be treated as more than mere fortune telling by it proponents, often rising to the rank of pseduo-science. 

Very often, when introducing people to the idea, the one the scammers start with is Government is govern plus ment, meaning they want to control your mind! Since when is ment a word? Doesn t matter. I wrote its own post about the level of stupid this one has behind it, but the trick is nevertheless well demonstrated here. 

To perform this simple art, just pick any word, divide up the syllables, and seize upon anything that sounds like a negative word. If the word has only one syllable, you have to use homophones. Sometimes you can t use sounds and have to resort to mucking with the spelling, like showing how, if you flip the word or add or subtract letters, it shows the true meaning when it becomes another (spooky) word. This is key. Most of all, more than anything, you want to make sure the real meaning becomes something spooky; this inspires fear and makes people stop thinking rationally. Doesn t matter that the same logic ought to likewise determine the spooky is word s real meaning is something harmless; an aim for spookiness is the destination. Sometimes if you re really struggling, you can just declare a random word offensive and give it a wholly made up backstory for why.

Once you have your spooky elements picked out, build a story around why they gain from using that word to oppress people. Sometimes it might be obvious from the spooky word. 

Now you can actually finish there if you want. It ll make you sound smart just for claiming to have cracked a secret code in the language, and if you make up stories about powerful people using them you can get internet maddos to panic, and probably even misbehave if you wish it so. These people might even start giving you money if you promise to show them more great secrets you ve uncovered. 

The other thing you can do, is use some kind of text and start demonstrating what it really means through these hidden words. This is especially popular to do with something like the Bible, which is especially stupid since it wasn t written in English and there s about 90 different English translations that will yield various truths ; but again, be spooky enough and no one will notice. 

Let s make up some examples! Let s start with the lyrics of the song Happy Birthday and demonstrate how it s really a horrifying chant meant to lead to your demise.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday dear ___, happy birthday to you!

Happy, with the mere change of only one letter, becomes Harpy. Harpies were ancient Greek monsters who kidnapped people and stole from them. We now see that these wicked forces are being invoked against anyone who hears this song. Now, let s examine this word birthday. When you pronounce it, it almost sounds like Earth Day. That might initially invoke notions of helping nature and environmental friendliness, but you d be wrong, because when you look closer, you realize that the EARTH is where they bury dead bodies. What a wish to make against a person! And then, after all that, they make these wishes to You. Well what s wrong with that? Plenty! You see, a Ewe is a sheep. Sheep are notoriously stupid and easily led animals, which is why we say that an ignorant person is a sheep. So now the real message of the song becomes perfectly clear: the harpies will snatch you and take you to the grave where you ll be slaughtered like an animal. Good thing you know who your real enemies are now that you ve heard this lesson: beware of those who sing such treacherous wishes at you each year!

Now I would consider tales of secret codes and magic words to not be etymonline material, except that we actually get people emailing us to demand we correct the etymologies to match these true meanings. Refusal to do so is seen as complacency with or even participation in whatever conspiracy theory they re into (because they think someone controls the words. ) 

Much of the idea that these are true meanings assumes that there was some kind of wordmaker who chose these words to exist, in their modern forms and standard pronunciations, and also that English is the only language in the world. A claim like WORDS are dangerous because they re a SWORD if you move a letter around doesn t hold up well with the spellings used in Middle English (the form of English used from around 1100 to 1500) which might be swurt and worde or some other spellings that had to do with regional pronunciation (spelling wasn t standardized until more recently, another issue with the idea that word scrambling reveals anything substantial about what it s supposed to mean though the crackpots might insist that that s why it was standardized by the nefarious THEM to be imbedded with the sigils THEY wanted.) Also these claims fail as any universal truth once you choose a different language like say, Uzbek, where sword (qilich) and word (so z) don t appear similar anymore. 

Ah, but of course, Etymonline just used a whole WALL OF EVIL TEXT to control everyone and distract from the real thing that s happening: Ety, sounds like Eddie. And Mon, that s like in Monster. And Line, showing they want to keep you in line. That s right, Etymonline is where Eddie Munster will control your every move. Food for thought, ewe people!

Some genuinely sinister words that have misfortune baked into their etymologies include chopstick, dismal, widdershins, dys-, hazy, schlemazel, Davy Jones, and thirteen.

It can be a positive quality, involving civility, diplomacy, and discretion. It does not necessarily imply coddling of those who would be better spanked.

And it has nothing to do with children.

Kid as "child" is the old Scandinavian word for a young goat, in use in the viking-accented part of England. It came to mean also a young person by 1700 (especially in kidnap). So did lamb, colt, and later pup, but that young child meaning of kid wasn't prevalent in the mid-19th century, when handle with kid gloves hoves into view.

Kid then, in reference to persons, usually had recent, slangy, specialized senses: "young criminal" or "young prizefighter."

The use of kid generically for "a young child" is not common in print until about the turn of the 20th century, about the same time the mass mind starts to coin related phrases: Kid brother 1890; kid sister 1892. Kid stuff 1913. If you want to pin rough dates on the child-senses of kid, take those of the diminutive kiddy or kiddie: at first "a young goat;" by 1780 as "a flash thief," from 1889 as "a little child."

Handle with kid gloves was set in its figurative sense by the mid-1830s. Then, the rod was not spared. There was a verb every child knew, birch, to flog, from the noun birch in the sense bunch of birch twigs used for flogging. A schoolboy wouldn't have been the first object to come to mind in the 1830s when picturing what ought to be handled with soft hands and minimal violence.

Or any decade before, back to at least Horace. As for the verb kid "tease playfully," it also emerges in that window of years. Early it had a sharper sense, of luring a victim into a deception, and probably it sprang from the "young thief" sense of kid, shifting in the 20th century toward "treat as an innocent child."

KID GLOVES

Kid gloves mean gloves made of the skin of a young goat, a kid. Kydskynnes are a commodity of trade in England by 1469. The soft, thin skin or fell of kids was used especially in making gloves, slippers, and boots. The exact phrase kid glove "a glove made of kid-skin leather" is attested by the 1670s.

Over time the manufacture of them was perfected in France and Italy, and by the late 1700s imported kid gloves, were part of a British or American woman's fashionable wardrobe.

Below, a Broadway wit discovers that "pipson" would be an amusing word to rhyme on, and so he goes a-courting, in verse, the "elegant Miss Pipson. The result is old-fashioned newspaper humor, a string of groaners done up in feminine-rhymed fifteen-syllable lines.

Et cetera.

Kid gloves were tight-fitting but notoriously delicate and getting them on and off one's hand was a learned skill. Gloves had their own rules of etiquette in polite society.

What can be learned can be mastered. Donning and doffing a kid glove offered opportunities to exhibit one's skill at it. Miss Pipson's way of slipping her pretty hand into the snow-white glove is itself a facet of her allure. 

MEN S WEAR

When kid gloves also became a standard item of upper-class men s dress, the word shifted. It was a peacock era, and by the 1820s the most stylish men were wearing a masculine version of the glove, which their elders would consider effeminate. But the gloves suited the costume, and kid gloves, especially spotless white ones, became part of the clich outfit of the aristocrat. The etiquette of them reached to the highest authority among the beau set.

Which popular fashion, and clothing marketers, soon popularized. By 1838 a theater-goer notes "more young men with white kid gloves, scented pocket handkerchiefs, and hair on the upper lip."

When a noun becomes a pure adjective it attains a rite of passage; kid-glove acquired its adjectival sense of "dainty, elegant" by the 1830s.

A cross-country race was the delight of daring horse-riders, an ultimate equestrian thrill. The better the horses, the sharper the riders, the better the race. There is a region in Buckinghamshire, usually now spelled Aylesbury, with the Chiltern Hills on one end and Milton Keynes at the other and a perfect steeplechase ground between them.

Let a rider of the day explain it to you:

The trick was to keep the dull and unskilled among the gentry out of the way so the resolute riders of whatever class and their cattle (slangy, horses ) could charge the course. Polite, and dismissive.

It was commonly paired with silk-stocking in such passages, and followed by gentry or aristocrat. Kid-gloved "characterized by wearing kid gloves" (hence "aristocratic") is in print by 1836.

Here, in 1838, an actor is praised for his skill, on stage, in handling the kid gloves like a man unfamiliar with them. The audience knows what it is looking at, and laughs.

The comedy is The Love Chase, by James Sheridan Knowles, then in vogue, playing at the National Theater, "corner of Leonard and Church streets, ten doors from Broadway." The characters have the old-style names, names like "Sir William Findlove." The actor is James S. Browne, who also played the part in the South and West later. He was British, fresh to American audiences that year.

Meanwhile, in the same theater columns, an actress is criticized for keeping hers on (perhaps with a touch of vanity) in a scene where they had been better left off.

In the popular literary mind, then, by the 1830s kid gloves came (with silk stockings) to symbolize the fastidiousness, concern for appearances, and artful delicacy of the gentry, especially the male part of it, and those who set their standards by them.

But they also were the mark of that dread thing, the dandy.

Kid-gloves for men also always seem to figure in descriptions of the French equivalent, the exquisite. Conservative voices were shocked, or wrote as if they were, by the look of the young men on the fashionable streets of London or Philadelphia. 

Kid gloves and other such clich s of affectation were ripe for mockery, and both countries were full of it in the 1830s. Americans (and the British) had a taste for humor pieces written as a U.S. yokel s letters to the folks back on the farm explaining in homely terms life in high society or politics in Washington, D.C.

This, by Jonathan Slick had run earlier in the N.Y. Express. Jonathan, fresh from the sticks of Connecticut, is mingling with the elite of New York, at a "swarry."

Jonathan Slick is a little less sharp-tongued than "Sam Slick" or "Major Jack Downing," but writes in interesting detail about the dress and decoration at the soiree. The newspaper columns later were gathered and published as a book, "High Life in New York."

The author of all of them, behind the pseudonym, was Ann Sophia Stephens (1810 1886), above, who was a busy writer and editor in that decade. Some credit her with inventing dime novels.

Across the ocean, kid gloves came to symbolize especially the high-bred uselessness that anti-aristocrats saw in England s gentry during the era when the Reform Act of 1832 broke the old power-order. 

In an 1856 play such a character describes himself in despair:

[Mrs. Sidney F. Bateman, "Self: An Original Comedy"] 

As far off as Australia, an allusion to kid gloves could be understood as indicating the sort of gentry the country didn t need. 

The sharpest distillation of the insult in the 1830s was folded into the pithy dismissal of a dead king, himself an intimate of the beaux and dandies of his day, quoted in American papers but credited to the English press:

"George the Fourth was not a gentleman in any sense of the word, except that he was born to wear white kid gloves and do nothing."

Kid gloves also meant extravagance. Even when cheaper versions (rumor was that the skins for them were supplied by Paris rat-catchers) became available to average people in the late 1800s, kid gloves had a reputation for costliness.

A magazine joke from 1894 has a wealthy young Texan accused of extravagance for buying his wife a $250 diamond ring. He retorts, "Why, man alive, I'll save $500 on kid gloves" (which she couldn t wear with a diamond ring).

Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad has an anecdote of an American in Gibraltar trying to impress a shopgirl with his savvy at kid gloves and making a fool of himself in the process.

Outside afterward, his friends pounce, mimicking her words.

TO HANDLE WITH

To handle with kid gloves is to handle in the manner of an aristocrat. With some or all of the above comprehended in that. Here is a view of a British political star in 1834:

You can see the image in place but not the exact phrase. Lord Durham himself is being handled kid-glovedly here: clear views as far as he can see and so forth. The lord, John George Lambton (below), known as "Radical Jack," was a wealthy liberal and prominent Whig of the era. He had led in the movement which resulted in the Reform Act, but his ego and temper hobbled his career. 

By 1839, in America, you have the expression coming into focus: "... they will handle him in kid gloves, nothing harsher" is written of a certain Swartwout, who has got himself in hot water for defalcation. A U.S. House committee is investigating him, staying at the posh hotels, and the writer here smells politics under it all: 

Andrew Jackson came to the presidency furious at his predecessors and determined to clean house and fill federal offices with his own loyal backers. The federal government was ridiculously small by modern standards. The most lucrative post under presidential control was Collector of the Port of New York.

The office of the collector also was the main source of the U.S. government s income (from tariffs, and most overseas trade came through New York port). Jackson jettisoned the long-time port collector, a scrupulously honest official, and installed Samuel Swartwout, his personal choice, a frontier crony and former Aaron Burr co-conspirator. Swartwout went to Europe in 1839 at the end of his term, and soon a discrepancy was discovered in the port accounts of more than $1.2 million.

Jackson is out of office by now, his vice-president Martin Van Buren is in the White House, and the writer above suspects the opposition party is going to try to use the scandal to undermine Van Buren (who in fact had vigorously opposed Swartwout s appointment in private and told Jackson he was a crook). He doesn t call the opposition the Whigs, but uses the old dismissive feds, as though they were no more than the defunct Federalists.

It was a stunning scandal; the House investigation exposed widespread embezzlement of federal funds. Swartwout wasn't the only one, but he was the face of it:

Later in 1839, with the banks crashing for the second time in two years, the financiers were hit with a major inside swindle perpetrated by the clerk of the Schuylkill Bank in Philadelphia. The scandal closed the bank and the financiers closed ranks and responded by focusing attention on the alleged embezzler, not the system that allowed him.

Here the Whigs reaction to that case is contrasted to the Swartwout defalcation. White kid gloves again are invoked. 

In the U.S., through the 19th century, the kid-gloved aristocrat image had more bite than it did in England. England had an aristocracy, still widely respected and felt as part of the national constitution. America never did. A kid-gloved aristocrat in the U.S. suggested not only fastidious uselessness but something open to downright contempt as fundamentally un-American.

Here is the Winston-Salem (N.C.) People's Press, on July 4, 1856, exhorting the opposition faithful to support a son of the soil from Guilford in the upcoming race for governor, against the Democratic incumbent: The fact is, Mr. Bragg knows that he is a perfectly used-up man, and the people know it too ; and we know that Guilford's noble and talented son, is just the man to handle white kid glove gentlemen, who go about defaming and slandering the honest sons of the soil.  

But Thomas Bragg won. He was a lawyer from a middle-class family, and elder brother of CSA's Gen. Braxton Bragg, formerly of Fort Bragg fame.

In the 1830s, in the U.S., the kid-gloved aristocrat stigma seemed to adhere most often to Martin Van Buren himself (below). 

Jackson s VP and successor was a modern politician out of time. Van Buren was the first president from the generation that never heard a shot fired or freedom debated during the American Revolution. He was a wealthy, savvy New Yorker and a skilled political manipulator.

The White kid glove label haunted his campaign in 1836 against a divided opposition led by Sen. William Henry Harrison of Ohio. Here a Democratic leader in New England tries to align the local party behind Van Buren and meets opposition from "Workey." 

A clergyman s son (Unitarian) named George Bancroft was heavily involved in Democratic politics that year. He was a true son of New England, educated at Harvard and the finest European universities, and two years earlier had begun to publish his massive History of the United States.

He was making a name for himself as a public intellectual. A populist, idealist, and probably well to the left of Van Buren, Bancroft argued for empowerment of the whole American people rather than just the elite.

And was dismissed as a white kid gloves aristocrat.

Meanwhile descriptions of Harrison, though nothing like those of the bloviated Tippecanoe and Tyler Too 1840 sequel election, emphasize the Ohioan's (soi-disant) down-hominess, his military record, and his want of white kid gloves.

... a thing which he is not fit for, and if he were fit for it he can t afford it. The common-man boast, and the implied insult, must have stung. Van Buren s friends took pains to refute the notion that the candidate always wore kid gloves.

[bear handed, sic]

One of the great uses of the handle with kid gloves image is in the writings of the robust Christian fundamentalist C.H. Spurgeon. In 1856 he carefully reviews a book of new hymns and finds them patently deistic, yet in line with the times. He deplores all this in a much-quoted passage

"As long as the fight is thought to be concerning a man, or a book, the issue is doubtful, but let it be for God and for His truth, and the battle is the Lord's. The time is come for sterner men than the willows of the stream can afford; we shall soon have to handle truth, not with kid gloves, but with gauntlets the gauntlets of holy courage and integrity."

[Spurgeon, from his tomb]

As American politics harden and crumble in the 1850s, handle with kid gloves begins to feel still more ominous. When it is invoked in political or national life, It becomes something you vow to not do, that only a fool would do.

In Utah Territory the Mormons were battling the elements but growing and establishing themselves as a separate community within the nation. The Protestant majority in America watched in some dismay as Utah knocked at the door of statehood. But certainly that would put actual Mormons in the U.S. Senate and their wives in Washington social circles. In place of kid gloves, this writer recommends tongs.

The coming of the American Civil War tightens the image still further. To not treat the rebels with kid gloves becomes a Northern clich or battle cry in 1862. Hope of a quick victory is gone. The volunteer army to Save the Union will have to be recruited afresh. There is an active "Peace Party" in many states. The rhetoric intensifies, in town meetings and the pro-administration press.

Here a soldier from the ranks of an Illinois cavalry regiment that has just re-enlisted rallies his comrades and the hometown ladies who have just presented them their battle flag.

[From the regimental history published in 1868]

The 8th served the entire war in the Army of the Potomac and helped hunt down Booth after the assassination and stood as honor guard while Lincoln s body lay in state. It was noted for the abolitionist sentiments of its officers.

But also in 1862 the government was urged to strip off the kid gloves when handling dissent politicians ("traitors in our midst") at home. 

And in the speech below, from early in the year, an Indiana senator pegs the entire rebellion and war its cause and the path to victory on slavery. George W. Julian accuses the government of treating slavery with kid gloves. Some Union generals took in runaway slaves as the armies moved south. Lincoln, pre-emancipation and trying to hold the Border States, had countermanded this. 

The speech by Julian (pictured below) was reprinted and noted in the Southern papers. Within two years much of the North caught up with his insight.

Here, later in the war, the Charleston Mercury, arguably the flagship paper of the Secession, mimics the Northern attitude toward Southern complaints of Maj. Gen. Ben Butler, then leading an army in Virginia. 

Butler had been among the Northern officers who had refused to return runaway slaves in 1862, setting off the controversy that inspired Sen. Julian s warning speech.

The negative phrase not to be handled with kid gloves appears in Roget by 1879 as an adjective under "Conditional Antagonism," along with laborious, troublesome, hard to deal with, more easily said than done.

The 1862 Marysville Tribune clip above pairs handling (the rebels) with kid gloves and a rose-water policy. Rose-water, a skin-toner and aromatic, also formed part of the common person s view of aristocratic softness. Through the 1870s kid-gloves and rose-water combined as a mocking aphorism in anti-pacifist speeches and writings, or rebuttals to attempts to mitigate war's suffering.

In both the United States and Britain, the militarists reminded the masses, "you can not make war with kid gloves and rose-water."

That from a British politician s speech, a reference back to the Crimean War. Their leaders spared Odessa, the beautiful city then in Russia, and their troops on the ground suffered for it. Modern empires seem no longer to own such kid gloves.