Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

The few newspapers and magazines that reviewed books took favorable notice: “The meager annals of this short-lived Dutch colony have afforded the ground work for this amusing book, which is certainly the wittiest our press has ever produced,” hailed an anonymous reviewer in the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, adding that, “if anything can be hoped from ridicule, the rash imbecility of those ignorant plagiarists, who have been for some years past carrying on war by proclamations and resolutions, might by this work be shamed into a retreat and concealment.” Seconding the Review’s accolades, a Baltimore newspaper correspondent wrote, “If it be true, as Sterne says, that a man draws a nail out of his coffin every time he laughs, after reading Irving's book your coffin will certainly fall to pieces.”46

  History earned Irving considerable reputation and celebrity abroad. Sir Walter Scott, Irving's idol who would later become a close friend, compared him to Jonathan Swift—high praise indeed—and said his sides had been “absolutely sore with laughing” as he read it aloud to his friends and family. Both Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were fans, and Charles Dickens later told Irving that he had worn his copy out from carrying it around with him.47

  Not everyone was so amused, however. Some Dutch readers—including Judge Hoffman's own mother—didn't appreciate the digs at their ancestors. “Your good friend, the old lady, came home in a great stew this evening,” Mrs. Hoffman teased Irving as she related the incident: “Such a scandalous story had got about town—a book had come out, called a History of New York; nothing but a satire and ridicule of the old Dutch people—and they said you was the author; but from this foul slander, I'll venture to say, she has defended you. She was in quite a heat about it.”48

  One particularly offended Dutch frau even declared that, had she been a man, she would horsewhip Irving within an inch of his life. Delighted, Irving sought an introduction and, naturally, quickly won over his critic. For the most part, it was impossible for offended parties to stay angry once they fell under Irving's considerable charm. Visiting Dutch neighborhoods in Albany in early 1810, he reported that he had “somehow or another formed acquaintance with some of the good people… and have even made my way and intrenched myself strongly in the parlors of several genuine Dutch families, who had declared utter hostility to me.” Looking back, Irving could only smile at all the fuss. “It was a confounded, impudent thing in such a youngster as I was to be meddling in this way with old family names,” he said, “but I did not dream of offense.”49

  It wasn't long before New Yorkers embraced the name “Knickerbocker” as their own. With his flamboyant history, Irving had provided for New Yorkers not only a sense of their own heritage—New York was, until then, the only state in the Union that didn't have its own written history50—but also a sense of their own unique identity. Knickerbocker became emblematic of the city and the people; with his unshakable, unimpressed, irreverent attitude, he personified New York's very identity. To be a Knickerbocker, then as now, was to be a New Yorker.

  In his introduction to the 1848 author's revised edition, Irving wrote of his delight not only at finding that people had embraced this “haphazard production” of his youth, but also at learning “its very name become a ‘household word,’ and used to give the home stamp to every thing recommended for popular acceptation, such as… Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker bread and Knickerbocker ice.”51 Today the name is used by the city's professional basketball team, the New York Knicks.

  Writing to Van Ness twelve days after unleashing Knickerbocker, Irving was relaxed and at ease, more concerned about what was playing at the local theaters than his own reviews. He was also flush with cash; the book earned him about $3,000, a tidy sum in 1809.

  Basking in the glow of his newfound success, he had no immediate plans to follow up on it. Instead, in early 1810, he traveled to Albany where, at the urging of friends, he hoped to secure a political appointment to one of the clerkships available in the New York state courts. A year earlier, he had hoped to earn enough repute with his writing that he would be a shoo-in for a political appointment; now, he had not only published a phenomenally successful book, he also had the help of the well-connected Hoffman and his brother-in-law Daniel Paris, a member of the Council of Appointments.

  The anticipated appointment never came, “mainly through the counterworking of some candidates for other offices,” Pierre Irving later explained. Washington dismissed it with a shrug; he had been uncomfortable playing the patronage game—he compared himself and his fellow office seekers to “a cloud of locusts, [who] have descended upon the city to devour every plant and herb, and every ‘green thing.’”52 Besides, there was no need to look for a job: the family business had not only recovered, but was finally booming, and with his fame he remained a highly sought-after dinner guest and evening companion.

  With financial pressures gone, Irving had no impulsion to keep writing. He was famous. Surely, if he couldn't find work, work would find him. Yet when publisher John Hall approached him about participating in a literary journal, Irving balked. “I do not wish to meddle with my pen for a long while,” he wrote Hall. “The affectionate solicitude and extreme liberality of my brothers (who are engaged in commerce) have placed me beyond the necessity of using my pen as a means of support—and while they have admitted me to a share in the profits of regular business, I am left to the free indulgence of my own tastes & habits. Not being pressed therefore and hurrying into a random exercise of my talents, such as they are, I wish to proceed as cautiously as possible; and if my caution does not enable me to write better, it will at least preserve me from the hazardous error of writing a great deal.”53 The new American celebrity was determined, for now, to enjoy his fame and remain a man of leisure. The pen lay dormant for another nine years.

  5

  Adrift

  1810–1815

  My literary notoriety had made me an object of attention, I was continually drawn into Society, my time & thoughts dissipated and my spirits jaded. I became weary of every thing and of myself.

  —Washington Irving to Mrs. Amelia Foster, 1823

  I HAVE NOW NO PROSPECT AHEAD, nor scheme, nor air castle to engage my mind withal,” Irving sighed in a letter to Mrs. Hoffman in early 1810, “so that it matters but little where I am, and perhaps I cannot be more agreeably or profitably employed than in Van Ness’ library.”1

  He should have been so lucky. Such thoughts were attractive but, he knew, unrealistic. His book was a success and he enjoyed a national reputation, but Irving clearly did not believe his future lay in his pen. As he struggled to come to terms with what his “real” occupation would be, he also struggled to come to terms with himself. He was approaching thirty years old, and while he was by no means having a midlife crisis, even by nineteenth-century lifespans, he was fully aware that he was floundering.

  Once again his brothers, who were always looking out for him, rallied to his side. Peter and Ebenezer—who together had recently set up a shipping business with offices in New York and Liverpool specializing in “whitehead, glassware, Epaulets, Sword Knots, Sashes, Hardware, &c”2—approached Washington about joining their firm as a silent partner. By providing Washington with a fifth of their company's profits, the brothers hoped to provide their youngest with a regular source of income that would allow him to pursue his writing. Irving agreed, becoming the “and Company” of P. & E. Irving and Company in New York, and P. Irving and Company in Liverpool. Such financial security, however, only served to silence, rather than stimulate, Irving's literary muse. While Peter purchased and shipped in Liverpool, and Ebenezer made sales in New York, Washington simply killed time. “I cared nothing for money,” he wrote later, “it seemed to come too late to do me good. I read a good deal at times, but I could not bring myself to write, I had grown indifferent to literary reputation.”3

  An opportunity found him in late June, when he was approached by Archibald Campbell, brother of Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, about publishing two of Thomas'
s poems, “O'Connor's Child” and “Gertrude of Wyoming,” in the United States. Irving appealed to Ann Hoffman's new husband, bookseller Charles Nicholas, about underwriting publication of Campbell's poetry. Nicholas agreed, but on one condition: that Irving write an introductory biography of the poet.

  It seemed the ideal setup, but Irving fliply regarded it as “uphill work.” Archibald provided sparse biographical information about his brother, and it was all Irving could do to polish the rough notes he scribbled in his notebook into something readable. The result was a clunky, uninspired biographical sketch. While the piece was well received by the public, Irving groused that it had been “most horribly misprinted, with outrages on grammar & good language that made my blood run cold to look at them.”4

  He frittered away the rest of the summer with side trips to Philadelphia with the Hoffmans, sailing excursions with Brevoort, and parties at his favorite new hangout, Highland Grange, home of the boisterous Captain Frederick Philipse, “a true Lad of Kilkenny,” Irving remarked approvingly.5 Sitting 150 feet above the Hudson, Highland Grange offered a spectacular view of West Point directly across the river, and Irving spent countless mornings lounging on the lawn scribbling descriptions of the surrounding landscapes in his notebooks. Despite—or perhaps because of—his annoyance with his work on the Campbell biography, Irving continued to privately fine-tune his writing, searching for just the right turn of phrase:

  Morning—5 o clock—sky perfectly clear—Sun not up yet—a Soft mellow yellowish light over the landscape—perfectly calm—river like a glass. In some places almost black from the dark shadows of the mountains—in others the colour of the heavens—long sheets of mist suspended in mid air half way up the mountains—One large mass entirely shrowds the upper part of the mountain above buttermilk falls, and seem to droop into the water like a veil. Sound of the cattle bells from opposite shore—cocks crowing—roll of a drum from West point—Grass white with dew drops.6

  The devotion to his craft didn't last long, however. With his brothers continuing to support him, there was little reason to take up the pen in earnest.

  As it turns out, politics were about to occupy his time. That winter, stress was running high in the financial district over the direction the U.S. Congress was taking as it considered two pieces of legislation in which the merchant class had a vested interest.

  The first bill was the Non-Importation Act, an act of legislative revenge against the British and French for their seizure of American ships, and for barriers the two nations had erected to impede American trade. A major cog in the machinery that would eventually propel the United States into the War of 1812, the legislation had been enacted by Congress in March 1809 to prohibit trade with France and England. But bungled diplomacy and crossed signals had resulted in trade being reopened, then closed again over the course of 1809 and 1810, much to the frustration of merchants, Congress, and President James Madison.

  New legislation had been introduced, stating that trade would be resumed with both France and Britain until one of the two nations withdrew its offensive decrees—at which point the United States would cease trading with the other. No fool, Napoleon leaped at the offer, repealing a few offensive decrees, but hiding in the details of the agreement a trapdoor that allowed for the continued confiscation of American ships in all harbors of the French Empire. On November 10, 1810, Madison cluelessly issued a proclamation lauding France for removing its edicts, and demanded that Britain repeal its barriers to American trade by February 1811. With that deadline approaching, Madison fussed, Congress argued, and nervous merchants fretted in agony.

  Compounding the problem was the expiring charter for the First Bank of the United States. The brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, the bank had been chartered by Congress in 1791, with responsibility for unifying national currency and shoring up debt from the Revolutionary War. A bank in name only, the First Bank was actually a private corporation whose profits passed to its stockholders. While New Yorkers watched the bank with an eye toward profit, it was viewed warily by western members of Congress who rightly believed it was interested only in granting favors to the privileged.

  Worse, the congressional elections of 1810 and 1811 had not been kind to the mercantile class. The Jefferson administration's banner of agrarian reform was being waved by powerful new southern Republicans, including a remarkably committed delegation of South Carolinians, including freshman representatives John C. Calhoun, Langdon Cheves, and William Lowndes. The merchant class was on the defensive.

  Given all this, Ebenezer and William thought it wise to send a representative to the nation's capital to keep tabs on Congress and act as a lobbyist for the family's business interests. The brothers hoped that Washington, with his natural social skills, would be an ideal lobbyist. They would be disappointed.

  Irving arrived in Washington, D.C., on a cold January night, just in time to learn that First Lady Dolley Madison was hosting one of her famous “Wednesday Drawing Rooms” that evening at the White House. Mrs. Madison's Wednesday-night sessions provided a regular opportunity for guests of different political parties—a new phenomenon in D.C. and the nation—to mix and press the flesh. It also gave chief executive and First Wallflower James Madison the opportunity to be seen and to make his case for the Non-Importation Act with congressmen and senators in a more relaxed setting. If there was ever an ideal opportunity for Irving to get inside information from both political parties, this was it. Unfortunately for the ever-patient Ebenezer and William in New York, the only party their youngest brother was interested in involved drinking, food, dancing, and conversation. “I swore by all my gods, I would be there—,” Irving told Brevoort. “But how? was the question.”7

  A good question indeed, but Irving was never one to let lack of an invitation stand in the way of attending a good bash. He dressed for the evening in his most dandified manner—“pease blossoms & silk stockings, gird up my loins,” he wrote Brevoort—then, utilizing the charm that had secured him invitations to the most fashionable drawing rooms of Europe, managed to attach himself to a group of guests invited to the evening's event, including a fellow New Yorker who offered to introduce him to Mrs. Madison. In no time at all, Irving “emerged from dirt & darkness into the blazing splendour of Mrs. Madison's Drawing room.”8

  Blazing it must have been. During Thomas Jefferson's administration, the room into which Irving now emerged had been used as the president's private sitting room. The use of such central rooms for this purpose was understandable, since the chief executive was known to greet guests in his slippers, but Dolley Madison would have none of that. She had converted the space into an elegant parlor and painted it a warm sunflower yellow, with drapes and furniture of the same hue. Here Irving shook off the cold D.C. evening and was “most graciously received” by Mrs. Madison and her sisters.

  That evening's gathering—comprised largely of lonely congressmen and senators stranded in the city as the current congressional session stretched into the winter—had packed the suite with nearly two hundred guests. Irving happily dove into the throng—“a crowded collection of great & little men of ugly old women and beautiful young ones”—as piano and guitar music encouraged guests to dance. Within minutes he “was hand and glove with half the people in the assemblage.”9

  Irving was enchanted by his hostess, and equally captivated by her two sisters. “Mrs. Madison is a fine, portly, buxom dame—who has a smile & a pleasant word for every body,” he told Brevoort. “Her sisters, Mrs. Cutts & Mrs. Washington are like the two Merry Wives of Windsor.” Compared with his outgoing hostess and her flamboyant sisters, the small, timid president paled in comparison. “As to Jemmy Madison—,” Irving noted, unimpressed, “ah! Poor Jemmy! He is but a withered little apple-John—But of this no more—perish the thought that would militate against sacred things—Mortals avaunt! Touch not the lords anointed!”10

  After his successful infiltration of the White House, Irving settled into respectable quarters for the rest
of his stay in Washington, leaving behind his room in Georgetown for the home of John Peter Van Ness, a former New York congressman and the brother of his friend from Kinderhook, William P. Van Ness. John Peter, currently serving as major of militia in the District of Columbia, had opened his river-view home to several guests. Irving found the living arrangements quite agreeable, given that the boarders included two young ladies who delighted in gossip and gregarious conversation. “You see I am in clover—happy dog!—close Jacob!—& all that,” Irving wrote with a wink.11

  More relevant to the task at hand, the Senate had received a petition from the directors of the Bank of New York, “praying the renewal of the Charter of the Bank of the United States.” But with both houses working in closed session late in the week, Irving could get his hands on very little information. Not that he was interested. “I am much too occupied & indeed distracted here, by the multiplicity of objects before me, to write with any degree of coherency,” he wrote to Brevoort in early February. “I have become acquainted with almost every body here, and find the most complete medley of character I ever mingled amongst.”12

  The “medley of character” included a thirty-one-year-old Federalist congressman from Schaghticoke, New York, named Herman Knickerbocker, whom Irving delightedly referred to as “my cousin.” Knickerbocker had not stood for reelection in 1810, and was serving as a lame-duck congressman as the current session of Congress sputtered to a close. Irving reported to Brevoort that they had become “two most loving friends” and that Knickerbocker was “overjoyed at the happy commencement of our family compact.” Whether Irving had used Herman as inspiration for his own Knickerbocker is debatable. It seems unlikely that a young congressman would have served as the model for the crusty old historian, and Irving's report to Brevoort of his meeting with Knickerbocker makes it doubtful the two had been previously acquainted.