But Brown fell into a happier situation with a publication called the Carpet-Bag. He was taken on as an apprentice there in 1851, the year the Boston-based magazine was launched. It was one of America’s first comic publications, edited by a man with the wonderful name of Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber. Shillaber was a stout, jolly man akin to Mr. Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol. “To promote cheerfulness” was the official mandate of the Carpet-Bag. The magazine very quickly achieved a national reputation. Soon it was publishing the efforts of talented writers such as George Derby and Mathew Whittier, the poet’s younger brother. Because many of the Carpet-Bag’s contributors were otherwise serious writers, they often hid their identities behind pen names such as Enoch Fitzwhistle, Peter Snooks, and John P. Squibob. As a printer’s devil, Brown’s job was to arrange letters in trays, preparing pages of the magazine to be run off on the press. For apprentice Brown, constructing works of comedy word by painstaking word proved an illuminating exercise.
During Brown’s Carpet-Bag stint, a young man named Samuel Langhorne Clemens published a short item entitled “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter.” To this point, Clemens’s efforts had appeared exclusively in the Hannibal (MO) Western Union, edited by his older brother, Orion Clemens. This then represented his first published piece outside the family venture. It ran in the May 1, 1852, issue of the Carpet-Bag; Clemens was then sixteen years old. It’s quite likely that Brown typeset Clemens’s item, though it wouldn’t have particularly stood out. “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter” is very short and failed to garner much attention. The byline was simply initials, S. L. C. (Clemens and Brown were destined to meet in the future, under vastly different circumstances—different names, too.)
Brown also managed to place his own first published effort in the Carpet-Bag. After writing a comic piece he thought suitably promising, Brown recopied it, disguising his handwriting. Then he surreptitiously placed it on Shillaber’s desk. The editor acquired it at once. Only after he’d had the pleasure of typesetting his own creation did Brown reveal that he was in fact the author. The piece was about a drunken George Washington, commanding the Continental army at Yorktown. For a pseudonym, Brown chose “Lieutenant Chubb.” (Chubb was a kind of mashing up of Charlie and Brown as well as an ironic reference to the gangly author, who was anything but chubby.) Brown went on to write about a half-dozen Lieutenant Chubb items.
In 1853, the Carpet-Bag folded. Brown headed West by rail and stage, looking for work. He carried with him the tool of his trade—a compositor’s stick—and he took whatever jobs he could find, often lasting a matter of weeks or days. Once, Brown simply walked along the banks of the Sandusky River until he arrived at tiny Tiffin, Ohio, where he got a job at the Seneca Advertiser. From there, he moved up to the larger Toledo Commercial. In Toledo, Brown once again got the chance to write, this time as a newspaper reporter. Soon, he graduated to one of the most esteemed papers in the West, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
By now, Brown was twenty-three and already a publishing veteran. He was hired as the Plain Dealer’s local editor, charged with writing the “City Facts and Fancies” column. Each day, he had to fill his column with reports on arrests, fires, civic board meetings, and the arrival and departures of trains. The job was a monotonous grind. Once, on an especially slow news day, Brown slipped an imaginary letter into his Plain Dealer column from a man named “Artemus Ward.” It was an instant hit with Cleveland readers. So Brown began producing Ward letters on a regular basis.
The fictional Ward was a traveling entertainer who promised moral betterment to his audiences. Writing as Ward, Brown employed idiosyncratic spellings: “noncents,” “puncktooaly,” and “Decleration of Inderpendunse.” Many of these fractured spellings were quite expressive, such as “glowrius” (shouldn’t the word include glow?) or “confisticate” (doesn’t seizing property seem like it should involve a fist?). While Ward’s traveling show was forever going disastrously wrong, he still managed—in a satisfyingly ridiculous and roundabout way—to deliver the moral enlightenment he promised. It was quite a winning comedy formula.
As for the name “Artemus Ward,” there are many stories about its origins. The most convincing is probably the simplest: one of Brown’s Maine forebears was named Artemas. Brown simply changed the spelling to “Artemus” and then paired this colorful first name with “Ward,” a plain-vanilla last name, and—voilà—a character was born.
Each new Artemus Ward letter in the Plain Dealer was met with great anticipation. Thanks to the same postal exchange system that had benefited the Saturday Press, Brown’s comic stylings were soon being reprinted in papers all over the country.
Presently, Vanity Fair came calling, signing up Brown to contribute a series of original Artemus Ward letters. Vanity Fair (no relation to the modern title) was a short-lived but pioneering humor journal, following on the heels of the failed Carpet-Bag. While the Carpet-Bag specialized in gentle whimsy, Vanity Fair was far edgier. It was more akin to Punch, the British magazine. Vanity Fair was based in Manhattan and had close ties to Pfaff’s; many of the Bohemians were regular contributors, including O’Brien and Ada Clare. From Cleveland, Brown published several Artemus Ward letters in Vanity Fair. He was paid $10 per piece, then a small but respectable sum.
J. W. Gray, editor of the Plain Dealer, was livid when he learned that his star humor columnist was freelancing. He demanded that Brown publish all future Artemus Ward letters first in the Plain Dealer, his employer, after all. Brown’s response went something like this: I’ll happily give my entire output to the paper, but you need to give me a raise. Brown, who was earning a very modest $800 a year, asked for $1,200. Gray refused. So Brown started corresponding with Charles Leland, editor of Vanity Fair. Leland offered him a job as an associate editor at a salary of $1,000. The arrangement called on him to contribute Artemus Ward columns and also to edit pieces by other writers. Brown quit the Plain Dealer. When he arrived in Manhattan on January 1, 1861, it was to start this new job.
Brown quickly found his niche in the conversational whirl at Clapp’s long table. He possessed a unique brand of humor, which he doled out in small doses, judiciously. Sometimes, he’d sit for long minutes in silence with the most mournful look on his face. (Like so many funny people, Brown was deeply sad at core.) Suddenly, he’d brighten and say something that had the crowd in stitches, before retreating back into silence.
Brown was crafty, very crafty. He was a man of immense ambition as well as a remarkably fast study. For years, he had worked as an itinerant newspaperman, forever wandering into fresh situations, so he knew how to adapt in an instant. “Quiet as he seemed, in three weeks he had found out everything in New York,” Leland, the Vanity Fair editor, would recall.
Brown also was quick to make friends at Pfaff’s. One night, around three, he and William Winter staggered home after a night of hard drinking. They arrived at Brown’s rooming house on Great Jones Street. All their rattling roused one of the landlord’s servants. Brown asked the man to deliver a message to the landlord.
“It is late, sir,” said the servant.
“I know it is late,” replied Brown, “but I have a message for him, of the utmost importance. It is urgent, and I am sure he will be glad to receive it. Do you think you could wake him?”
The servant asked what it was.
For some minutes, Brown worked to earn the man’s assurances that he would deliver the message with perfect accuracy. Brown seemed so earnest and intent. The servant promised that he would relay every word. Then Brown delivered his message for the landlord: “Tell him, with my very kindest regards, that—the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
The servant stalked off, shaking his head in puzzled disgust. But the episode really stuck with Winter. It captured something essential about Brown. “He possessed, in an extraordinary degree, the faculty of maintaining a solemn composure of countenance while making comic or ridiculous statements,” Win
ter would recall.
Drunken nights were followed by work-filled days at Vanity Fair. Brown’s hours were explicitly spelled out; he was allowed to arrive at the magazine’s Spruce Street offices at the leisurely hour of ten. He wrote regular Artemus Ward letters. He also edited the work of many of the Bohemians, including Ludlow. To this point, Ludlow had failed to follow up the audacious promise of The Hasheesh Eater. Instead, he was making an increasingly precarious living as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. Something was clearly holding him back, and his beautiful wife, Rosalie, was growing more resentful by the day. With Brown as editor, Ludlow managed one of his more successful efforts, a serial comic tale for Vanity Fair entitled “The Primpenny Family.”
Still, Brown quickly came to the conclusion that Vanity Fair wasn’t a long-term employment prospect. The Saturday Press had recently died; the climate that killed it was only growing worse during the first months of 1861. In the likely event that Vanity Fair failed, Brown knew he needed a fallback. He decided to work up a comic lecture in the guise of his wildly popular fictional creation, Artemus Ward. Of course, this would require making certain adjustments. There were many aspects of the character that simply wouldn’t translate from the written page to a performance. For example, it’s not possible verbally to deliver a fractured spelling such as “vishus beest.” Yet Brown recognized that there was a way to capitalize on Artemus Ward’s renown, while at the same time reimagining the character.
Sometimes, Brown tested his work in progress at Clapp’s table. It was extremely well received. “He came with about half his effort, and for three-quarters of an hour the party was, literally, in a roar,” recalled J. W. Watson, a sometime Pfaffian.
To play the role of Artemus Ward, Brown also recognized that he needed to alter his appearance. He needed a costume. Ward, as Brown conceived him, would be a kind of send-up of popular lecturers of the day such as John Gough, Wendell Phillips, and even Ralph Waldo Emerson. These deeply serious men played packed houses, delivering bromides about self-improvement and moral betterment—or at least that was Brown’s comic view.
With the help of the Pfaff’s crowd, he began to assemble the costume. He sought input from some of the members with theater experience, such as Ada Clare and Winter, who coupled poetry with drama criticism for newspapers. Brown bought a fittingly somber dark suit, a too-fancy bow tie, and a pair of patent-leather slippers. Taking the transformation still further, he visited a coiffeur, who dyed his yellow hair jet black and curled it into a ridiculous frizzy mane.
Brown was preparing to embark on a “lecture tour” the likes of which the country had never seen. Soon, nobody who knew him—neither old friends in Cleveland nor new friends at Pfaff’s—would call him Charlie Brown. He was about to become Artemus Ward.
10: “The Heather Is on Fire”
LATE IN THE EVENING of April 12, 1861, Whitman was walking along Broadway on his way home to Brooklyn. He had just attended a performance of Verdi’s opera A Masked Ball, at the Academy of Music. Lincoln, ever a devotee of the arts, had attended the same production during his recent visit to the city.
Suddenly, a group of newsboys came tearing up the street toward Whitman. They were hawking extra editions with an intensity way beyond their usual ardor. From their cries, the poet quickly learned the news. Though hardly unexpected, it was shocking just the same.
Whitman bought a paper. He walked to the nearby Metropolitan hotel, planning to read by the light of a gas lamp. Several dozen people had already gathered when he arrived. One of them began to read from a paper out loud. The details started to emerge.
Southern soldiers had fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. This was the culmination of a tense standoff that had been going on all through the first months of 1861. Francis Pickens, governor of first-to-secede South Carolina, had provided the crisis’s original spark, demanding that the federal government renounce claim to any and all property in his state. That included Sumter. Major Robert Anderson and a garrison of soldiers had then holed up in the fort, maintaining it for the United States. Over time, they began to run low on food and supplies. Anderson and his men soon faced the prospect of being starved out of Sumter.
Throughout its initial weeks, the Lincoln administration had been consumed by this emergency. Finally, the president and his cabinet hit upon a plan: dispatch a fleet of boats to Sumter, bearing only food and provisions (no weapons or ordnance). Lincoln took the additional step of informing Governor Pickens ahead of time. This was a tactical masterstroke, Lincoln’s first brilliant move as president. It promised a dilemma for the newly formed Confederacy. If the relief boats were allowed to sail across Charleston Harbor to Sumter unmenaced, it would be a moral victory for the federal government and for the concept of national unity. But if ships carrying food were fired upon, it would be viewed as an act of Southern aggression. Jefferson Davis, president of the fledgling Confederacy, didn’t bother waiting for the relief flotilla. He gave the order to take Sumter. The first shots were fired on April 12 at four thirty in the morning. Word reached New York City that evening.
Whitman and the crowd at the Metropolitan listened as the newspaper account was read aloud. Afterward, people stood around for a minute or two, saying little, mostly absorbing the news. “I can almost see them there now, under the lamps at midnight,” Whitman wrote many years later. Then this impromptu group of strangers dissolved, slipping back into the city.
Hard to believe: a fractured nation was taking up arms against itself. Now that civil war had broken out, the Pfaff’s set would be forced to make sense of a new reality. Some such as Whitman would struggle mightily to find their way. Others would adjust with startling speed. Over time, most of these artists would manage to carve out their own unique places in a nation at war.
To do so would require leaving New York City and the cloistered safety of Pfaff’s, though the group’s members would return to their favorite haunt whenever they passed back through Manhattan. They would also manage to reconnect in other parts of the country, meeting up in some vivid new settings. The Civil War would have a profound effect on Clapp’s circle, pushing its members in unexpected directions. Along the way, they would carry the Bohemianism forged in that underground saloon out across the land.
During the war’s very first days, a surprising mood prevailed. There was a curiously festive, almost giddy feeling in the air. For years, the threat of civil war had been hanging over the nation. A string of presidents, most recently “dung-eating” Pierce and “dough-faced” Buchanan, had offered tepid compromises to maintain an uneasy peace. Whitman’s 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass had been filled with dark presentiments of strife between the states, yet with the arrival of war, it was as though a long pent-up tension had broken.
“The heather is on fire,” said a Harvard professor. “I never knew what a popular excitement can be.” Thayer, the recently bankrupted publisher, wrote to Whitman from Boston: “My soul swells as I contemplate the mighty issues involved in this contest.” The time had come, at last, to put to rest a conflict that had been dogging the nation since its very inception. There was also a sense that this would be a short war. Both sides, North and South, were certain that it would require only a single battle to demonstrate their military—and moral—superiority. William Seward, Lincoln’s newly appointed secretary of state, predicted that the war would last sixty days.
New York, especially, became caught up in war fever. This was something that no one would have expected. Because the city maintained a vast network of trade relationships with the South, it had always struck a posture of ambivalence toward the region, bordering on amorality. The business of New York was business. But now that war had been declared, the city’s loyalties were instantly clarified: New York was a Northern city staunchly in the Union camp. American flags went up everywhere: raised on rooftops, hanging from tenement windows, flying on carts and coaches. A flag was even added to Manhattan’s
tallest building, the Trinity Church. It was hoisted to the very tip of the spire, 284 feet up in the air for everyone to see. Shopkeepers did a brisk business in Union-color neckties and portraits of Major Anderson, hero of Sumter. “The excitement caused by recent events . . . is most intense—it is indescribable,” noted the Brooklyn Eagle. “Every one, old and young, man and boy, and even women and children, are fired with a military enthusiasm such as no one alive has ever before witnessed in this country.”
When Lincoln requested seventy-five thousand volunteers for ninety-day terms of service, New York was especially fervent in answering the call. The city’s residents moved quickly to form companies of soldiers. These tended to mirror Manhattan’s polyglot makeup: The 8th New York Volunteer Regiment, known as Blenker’s Rifles, was composed almost entirely of German immigrants. There were also regiments consisting mostly of Italians, Poles, and Dutchmen. During these earliest days, there wasn’t yet any kind of standardized dress for the Union army. Only later, as a mighty war machine cranked up, would the Union troops come to be identified by signature blue uniforms. At the outset, however, the Cameron Highlanders, a regiment of Scottish immigrants, wore tartan trousers (no kilts, at least) and had its own bagpipe band. The 55th New York Volunteer Infantry, a French regiment also known as the Garde de Lafayette, were stylishly outfitted in red pants, dark-blue frock coats, and caps. Upon being mustered into service, soldiers outfitted in wildly un-uniform uniforms marched down Broadway on their way out of town. Huge crowds saw them off, applauding and tossing flowers. One soldier described Broadway as a “tempest of cheers, two miles long.”
Rebel Souls Page 15