Text: Bette Statsky Weidman, “Chapter Nine,” Charles Frederick Briggs, dissertation, 1968 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 281:]

“So you are editing the Times,” wrote Lowell on September 18, 1856. “Do you do all the foreign correspondence yourself?” Perplexed at his friend's apparent disavowal of a literary career, Lowell prodded Briggs to supply the public with “some more artistic letters from Rome by Mr. Pinto.” But Ferdinand Pinto was not revived in the Times, nor did Briggs submit any libelous novels during the period in which he assisted Henry J. Raymond.

Raymond founded the New-York Daily Times in September, 1851, when the half-million New Yorkers whose city was bounded by the Battery and Thirty-Fourth Street had several ambitious and widely-circulated dailies. James Gordon Bennett's Herald, like today's tabloids, emphasized stories of domestic and political scandal. Another major paper, Horace Greeley's Tribune, was scrupulously moral, but its editor espoused the ideals of Fourier and wholeheartedly supported abolition. Raymond's Times was conceived as an alternative to Greeley's radicalism as well as Bennett's scandal-mongering. Its prospectus explained the Times's purpose and outlook:

The Times was devoted to upholding the Union and the Constitution, and to the values of Christianity; it respected obedience to the law and it wished to be conservative “in such a way as to promote needful reform.”(1)

It was not an abolitionist paper, though it entirely opposed slavery. Like Godwin, Briggs and Lincoln (during the Douglas debates), Raymond thought that slavery would be eradicated by industrial advancement as part of a long, gradual process; in the meantime, he felt that arousing the hostility of the South by taking a militant moral stand would only exacerbate the situation. However, the issue of advancement of slavery into the territories made Briggs and Raymond realize that, despite the compromises engineered by Henry Clay, their hope for orderly change was futile. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened a new region to slavery, and violence began to erupt in the Middle West, the Northern anti-slavery elements of the Whig and Democratic parties merged. In the crucial election of 1856, Briggs was able, finally, to join with Lowell and the abolitionists to vote for the Republican candidate, John C. Fremont, against the South-appeasing Democrat, James Buchanan. From then on, [page 283:] events quickly closed the gap between abolitionists and Republicans; whether they fought the Civil War, like Lincoln, to preserve the Union, or like the abolitionists, to emancipate the slaves, they were at last united in action.

In the years from 1856 to 1860, when so much was at stake in the nation, Briggs, identifying his views with those of the new Republican party, devoted himself to gathering good articles for the Times, and writing book reviews and editorials. He worked closely with the newspaper's city editor, Augustus Maverick, on a story entirely unrelated to the political or literary scene: the laying of the Atlantic Cable. Briggs and Maverick later collaborated in the production of a book called The Story of the Telegraph,(2) based on their Times dispatches. In this thoroughly serious work, the two journalists reflected the great surge of joy and optimism that New Yorkers felt at the linking of the Old World and the New. It was a great example to Briggs of his theory that scientific enlightenment would give men great opportunities for mutual understanding and moral perfection.

In his later years, Briggs told a young friend that he had assumed complete editorial control of the Times during a period in which Raymond was absent in Europe; indeed, his correspondence with Edmund Quincy shows that he received contributions in Raymond's stead. Briggs also [page 284:] admitted with pride that on one day the Times “received its every editorial from his pen,”(3) a circumstance regarded as unique in journalism. However, as the editorial writers of the Jubilee issue of the Times, themselves anonymous, wrote, “Nothing is quite so evanescent as the record of the men who do the work of a daily.” Although it is impossible to recover the date on which Briggs represented the Times's viewpoint in its entirety, it is possible to see traces of his thinking and expression in many places.

Briggs may have written a review of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (March 24, I860), in which the novelist is praised generously, especially for his outstanding prefaces. Although he had always found Hawthorne's work superb, Briggs censured him for his latest production, writing, “he has not waited for the golden drop to form before shaking it from his pen.” Less happily, Briggs was probably responsible for the Times's review of the third edition of Leaves of Grass, in which Whitman is characterized as “uncultured, rude, defiant, arrogant . . . a rough diamond” (May 19, 1860); if Briggs did write the review, he overcame enough of his animus toward Whitman's politics to give grudging recognition to the possible fertilizing influence of the new edition of Leaves of Grass, calling it evidence of “premature and unwholesome decay.” His characterization of Whitman as a rough diamond seems torn from Briggs almost against his will, as [page 285:] if the tremendous vitality and sonority of Leaves of Grass. with its ringing catalogues, its celebration of Americans, could not be denied, however much the reviewer longed for the more traditionally romantic “Prometheus” of Lowell. Here at last was the poet Briggs had called for in Putnam's, whose “nature was veined with the aspects, customs and instincts of his country,” who had no need to trade on the vigor of classical mythology. The unsparing critic in Briggs must have seen, to the dismay of the loyally committed friend, that Whitman, less finely critical, less aristocratically nurtured, than Lowell, was the Coming Man.

In addition to these reviews, Briggs almost certainly wrote the October 20, 1862, review of the display in Broadway of Matthew Brady's daguerreotypes of Antietam; “The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the dead at Antietam, but we fancy that they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement.” Here, employing the same image as he had in Bildad Hardhed's diatribe against General Delablueblazes, Briggs contemptuously referred to Whitman (“Haunter less at their ease”) to indicate his disgust with those who accepted the official version of the War, who glamorized the cause of Union without dwelling on the cost. Perhaps he did not know that, as Newton Arvin wrote, Whitman had “earned the right, so far as it could be earned, to ignore All the less ideal [page 286:] aspects of the Civil War”(4) during the months in Washington when he helped to sustain wounded veterans. Briggs would probably have denied that there was such a right.

Despite the strains of war, the Times's interest in other subjects did not flag. In 1863, its reviewer admired the new edition of Dickens’ work, in terms Briggs had often employed; in the same year, Thoreau's posthumously-issued pieces, published under the title Excursions, were highly praised. Finally, in notes on art exhibits, Briggs's voice sounds as clear as it did twenty years before, in the New World. In a report on the work of sculptor, John Quincy Adams Ward, he highly praised the artist's “fidelity to the actual”; no “plagiarisms from Apollo” would be found in the artist who studied nature.(5)

Of course, all of these characteristic attitudes of Briggs were shared by others, and even his manner of expression was often imitated by younger journalists. It is not important to know for a certainty which reviews and articles Briggs wrote; it is more significant to see that, in the years after 1856, he was able to support the principles of a majority party and contribute, without a conflict of conscience, to an important paper.

On the eve of the Civil War, Briggs must have felt that the familiar objects of his satire were either presently irrelevant, or transformed into subjects more suitable to [page 287:] tragedy. It was no longer possible to laugh at the corruption of a Southern orator, like Sylvanus Spliteer (Harry Franco) or at the naivete of an escaped slave girl (Tom Pepper). The selfish and the swindlers in the New York business world still practiced their arts, but their classic victims, the young men from the provinces, were about to die at Antietam. Brutal draft riots would soon rock the city; ravening mobs hanging Negroes to lamp posts and setting fire to the editorial rooms of the Times and Tribune were scarcely appropriate in a comic novel. Among Briggs's other subjects, Transcendentalists were no longer funny for their lack of touch with reality, for they marshalled themselves behind the Northern cause with a determination, eloquence and self-sacrifice that more than matched that of New Yorkers. And finally, the literary world of 1847 that had proven so fertile a ground for comedy in Tom Pepper no longer existed: Poe was dead, Margaret Fuller drowned, Lewis Gaylord Clark retired, Duyckinck reviewing for the Times. Mathews was still editing failure after failure, but he was a lone figure; Simms was the impoverished victim of war; Hiram Fuller had become so pro-Southern that he left the country to raise money for the Confederacy in England.(6) Though he must certainly have admired it, Briggs did not have the resources to produce a work like Melville's Confidence-Man. Ill-equipped for metaphysical speculation, [page 288:] he was scarcely on firmer ground with Whitman, who, although another “clod of earth,” was developing an unique form of self-transcendence in which Briggs could not participate.

Because he saw the contradictions between enormous materialism and democratic ideals so clearly, through the difficult, but still hopeful 1840's and 50's, Briggs's position as skeptical outsider gave him scope for criticism and perspective for satire. But the Civil War was such a rending catastrophe, far beyond the skirmish of the Mexican affair, that Briggs, acutely sensitive to its human consequences, found himself paralyzed into silence. He could neither abandon his misery by throwing himself into the Union cause, with Whitman, nor could he remain aloof enough from the intense suffering to mock the rhetoric of North and South. If he had hoped, after abandoning the care of Putnam's “literary bantlings,” to return, in the years after 1855, to his own fiction, he was at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong sensibility. Just as his Broadway Journal venture had been politically ill-timed, so was this planned return to fiction. The Civil War and its aftermath of political corruption had so massively depressing an effect on his creative vitality, that it was not until 1877, the year, ironically, of his death, that Briggs began to experience a rebirth. Leaving his early drive toward realism in fiction to be fulfilled by younger men, like Howells, Garland, Crane, he now tried to maintain a tenuous connection with the development of American literature by re-entering the world of magazine editing. [page 289:]

The Irving Magazine of April 14, 1860, a publication filled with sentimental stories, poems, gossip, fashion and even popular sheet music, announced that “hereafter” Briggs would assume its editorial management. In the issues that followed, the weekly Irving did gain some stature; discussions of Irving, Paulding, Sam Slick appeared. Briggs improved the reviews, inserted discussions of the fine arts, and even printed an appeal for funds for the maintenance of Poe's mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. Though he valiantly tried to justify his new magazine's Grace Greenwood style of fiction, on the grounds that light literature “stays afloat” on the surface of Time, while more serious matter sinks into oblivion, his argument was unconvincing. His own contributions to “light literature” were not wearing well, and Lowell, who was editing the three-year-old Atlantic Monthly, showed no sign of turning to his New York friend for assistance.

The lapse of communication between Briggs and Lowell is poignantly shown in Briggs's correspondence with Quincy concerning the Atlantic. Briggs saw the debt that the new magazine's format owed to Putnam's; like a jockey without a mount, his fingers itched for the reins. With an edge of concealed envy for those who now held the field, he criticized and advised the editors of the Atlantic through his Massachusetts friend, Quincy. He was so out of touch with Lowell that he had to ask Quincy indirectly if the poet were writing for the Atlantic, by saying that he had “not yet seen James's [page 290:] hand” in the magazine, and supposed he was waiting “to make what nine pin players call a ten strike.”(7)

Between the end of the Irving Magazine, which could never have been more than a side employment, in 1861, and the publication of a new series of Putnam's in 1868, Briggs's activities are incompletely exposed. “How is it that you alone have the genius among men of absolute disappearance,” wrote George Curtis, comparing Briggs to the river Alpheus, “lost in one country, reappearing in another.”(8) Although he would probably have welcomed an opportunity to contribute to the Atlantic, Briggs refused, for the sake of money, to become a “literary hireling” for a publisher like Harper. He wrote to Quincy: “I am not very squeamish, and my necessities have compelled me to perform a good deal of unpleasant drudgery; but I have never seen the time when I felt as though I could be bribed to labor for the advancement of such men as the Harpers.” During the 1860's Briggs began to fear increasing poverty, but he held back from outright compromise of the principles for which he had always stood. When Quincy had decided, a few years earlier, to work for Harper's despite Briggs's warnings, the editor bitterly remarked, “But the money, O, my prophetic soul! How money puts us saints and sinners all on a level.”(9) Resisting its levelling power, [page 291:] Briggs remained proud and self-sufficient, spending these seven years largely apart from his more successful friends. He kept pp his work for the Times until Raymond died in 1869; but for a man who spent even the day of his death writing at his desk, the Times position could hardly have been full-time employment. Only once, in the mid-1860's, did Briggs emerge from obscurity to write two articles for the New American Cyclopedia, A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, compiled by George Ripley and Charles Dana; predictably, he wrote the articles on William Page and Henry Fielding.(10) It is probable that he began his association with the Brooklyn Union during this period, for Edward Carey, its editor from 1864 to 1870, later wrote that he knew Briggs pleasantly, if not intimately, during these years.

Briggs's desire to re-enter the literary world was demonstrated again in January, 1868, when George Putnam decided to finance a second series of Putnam's Magazine. Briggs, despite his skepticism and history of failure, was splendid at writing ringing, optimistic “Introductory” remarks to new magazines; he retold the story of the first Putnam's with great satisfactions in an essay called “The Old and the New.” The piece demonstrated that at least one of his activities, during the war years and those immediately following, was keeping track of the writers that Putnam's had gathered together. Now he regretfully listed the dead, and re-called [page 292:] the vanished living — especially Herman Melville — back to the work of creating a national literature:

At the age of 64, Briggs was still looking into the future; he claimed that the new Putnam's would never choose articles on the basis of their authors’ well-known names, but would always prefer to develop new talents. As if in proof of this, his own writing is not distinguishable in the second series. There is a question as to whether Briggs assumed full editorial chores on the new monthly; it is more probable that he was [page 293:] regarded, as Curtis jocularly suggested, as an ancient.(12) If he did not have final decision-making powers, Briggs served as an experienced adviser, to whom the younger editors listened in respect, if not agreement. Putnam's new series had some interesting work to review: Dr. Holmes's The Guardian Angel. Emerson's English Traits. Hawthorne's Our Old Home, Howells’ Venetian Life. However, it did not have contributions of equal brilliance to those of the first series, and in December, 1870, merged into Scribner's Monthly.

By then, Briggs had established himself among a new group of friends and colleagues. Just as he found that his political stand was represented by the Republican party, and well expressed in the New-York Daily Times, he finally experienced an increasing identification with one branch of organized Christianity. Briggs had always subscribed to Christian principles, but never found them simply and directly expressed in a church, without a patina of hypocrisy and flaunting False piety nauseated Briggs; in 1845, when four Brooklyn churches of differing persuasions had erected identical costly Gothic edifices, he laughed scornfully and damned them all. For Briggs, church attendance and participation in ritual were not essential parts of religious experience. When he commented that he would only be a regular churchgoer of Sidney Smith or Dean Swift were in the pulpit, he indicated that he [page 294:] respected a minister for his qualities as teacher and witty speaker, rather than as the instrument of ritual.

However, whenever he established his home in a community, Briggs became an Emersonian celebrator of the local. He had lived in the area now called Brooklyn Heights for the twenty years since Charlotte's birth, and had seen it change from pear orchard and farm land to a fashionable, prosperous community. As Brooklyn became a suburban neighborhood for wealthy businessmen, it supported many churches, the most prominent of which were Plymouth Church, whose eloquent pastor was Henry Ward Beecher, and the Church of the Pilgrims, whose minister was the intelligent, scholarly Richard Storrs. Both churches were part of the growing liberal evangelical wing of Congregationalism. As a man to whom self-determination was dear, Briggs must have found appealing the doctrine that a minister is responsible only to the congregation that called him; moreover, Congregationalists were not required to submit to orthodox dogma, but only to those beliefs held by their individual groups and expressed by their choice of a minister. Since the Brooklyn Congregationalists were anti-slavery liberals, and their ministers were intelligent, vivid writers and speakers, Briggs had little trouble accommodating his wife and daughter by affiliating himself with them. It is worthy of note, however, that he chose to attend the church of Dr. Storrs, a scholar who was president of the Long Island Historical Society, rather than that of [page 295:] flamboyant Henry Ward Beecher, whose theatrical performances in behalf of an emotional “gospel of love” drew thousands to his Sunday services.

A nearby neighbor of the Briggses on Livingston Street was Theodore Tilton, now editor of the daily Brooklyn Union and the weekly Independent. Both papers were owned by Henry Bowen, the wealthy merchant who had founded Plymouth Church and induced Beecher to become its pastor. Both papers supported the liberal Republican party but neither of them were sectarian organs of the church in any way, except that they published columns by Beecher and fully reported the activities and controversies of the Congregational Church in Brooklyn.

In 1870, Tilton engaged Briggs to assist him in the editorial management of the Brooklyn Union.(13) The daily prided itself on being the “best local journal in the United States”; in addition to its thorough coverage of the history of Brooklyn, from neighborhood wife beatings to local political machinations, the Union served as a general newspaper and contained a brief book and magazine review section. It had room for many fillers, in which a wise and observant editor could make pungent comment on many topics. Tilton, who needed the [page 296:] assistance of an able staff, since he was simultaneously editing the weekly Independent.(14) was no doubt pleased to have the assistance of an experienced journalist like Briggs.

Briggs had responsibility for the financial news, a position for which the business activities he conducted thirty years earlier, gave him some background.(15) He was probably less than content with making a living reporting on the activity of what he once called “that thieving street,” for he took the first opportunity to extend his editorial control of the paper, even if the opportunity sprang from a sorry affair. Henry Bowen had become increasingly dissatisfied with Tilton's handling of his papers; the editor had refused to support the corrupt Grant administration, and would not countenance the local candidates Bowen backed. Tilton was a radical, not only in politics, but in his support of feminism and liberalized divorce laws. Moreover, he sustained a personal blow during 1870 that not only staggered him, but disrupted Plymouth Church and blasted several lives, as well as provided scandal enough for an entire country.

Fifteen years earlier, Tilton, as a young journalist on the Tribune, had visited Beecher's church to report on the great orator; he remained to become a loyal friend and follower of the preacher and to marry his Sunday School teacher, Elizabeth Richards. In 1870 he learned that Beecher, [page 297:] in the process of consoling Elizabeth Tilton on the death of her child, had committed adultery with her. Tilton, at his wife's behest, agreed to keep the scandal a secret between them, but when Bowen reproached him for not attending Plymouth Church and reporting sufficiently on its doings, he confessed the reason for his new aloofness from Beecher. The complicated story does not end here, for Bowen himself had been the victim of similar cuckoldry at the hands of Beecher. The merchant, however, chose to take his revenge in an expedient way; he incited Tilton to attack the minister, promising the editor his support. After the charge was made public, Bowen, seemingly inexplicably, sided with Beecher. His motive was profit-making: Tilton's radicalism had cost his subscribers, while Beecher's tremendous appeal sold newspapers. Bowen dismissed Tilton from the editorship of the Union; in 1873, Benjamin Tracy, a Brooklyn lawyer who also moved in Bowen's group, and who testified in Beecher's behalf at the church trials, bought the Union, and made Briggs editor-in-chief.

Although the only person to benefit from the sordid Beecher-Tilton affair, Briggs surely took no pleasure in the cause of his elevation. Throughout the years in which the scandal raged, the Independent and the Union urged that Beecher's guilt or innocence be decided by the congregation to which he was responsible (both papers did neglect to mention that the church council had been packed), and not [page 298:] be bandied about in the public press. However unjustly, the community rallied behind its minister; Tilton, crushed by the affair and the ignominy brought upon him by his radical supporter, Victoria Woodhull, eventually left the country to die, years later, in Paris. Dr. Storrs did question the white-washing given Beecher's conduct, and it is certain, too, that Briggs doubted Beecher's candor. If Briggs's sympathies were alienated from Tilton by the latter's alliance with Victoria Woodhull's position on free love and woman's rights, he probably agreed with his friend, Charles A. Dana, who wrote that Beecher was an “adulterer, a perjurer and a fraud.” Whatever his opinions may have been, Briggs kept his family and himself scrupulously out of the sordid affair, a feat made even more difficult by the fact that his home was just a few doors from the one tempestuously occupied by the unhappy Tiltons.(16)

Briggs settled down to the demanding job of preparing a daily in October, 1873. Six months after he assumed control of the paper, he printed an editorial describing its progress. The Union, he wrote, was so successful that it was bursting the confines of its allotted four pages. Advertisers, responding to its vitality, sought to place so many notices that columns of news and comment were forced out. In announcing a supplement, Briggs admitted that out [page 299:] of fifty-four columns, thirty-three were monopolized by advertisements. He attributed the success of the paper to the fact that Brooklyn had become a self-reliant city, prepared to support “minute and thorough local journalism.” In the edition of April 11, 1874, he wrote:

During Briggs's tenure in 1874, the Union took many stands consistent with the attitudes of its editor. He came out against the temperance movement, not out of sympathy with drunkenness, but out of devotion to personal liberty. In quoting Beecher, Briggs echoed his thirty-year-old comments on abolition to Lowell; “All paroxysms of reform are ill-timed,” the embattled preacher had said. Refusing to “drift into bigotry,” he claimed that “liberty is better than sobriety.”

On the subject of art and ornamentation, Briggs came out against the “prettyisms and oddities” so favored by Victorians At seventy, Briggs still sounded like the Knickerbocker's Harry Franco, when he wrote that the “Master of the house [page 300:] wants children to play with and not child dolls to dress and look at.”

The Union's editorial comment was varied and intelligent. In one issue it contained reports on state finance, city railroads, compulsory education, astronomy lectures at the Lyceum; it defended the capabilities of local sculptors and printed as acute an article on “The Black Man's Rights” as one could read today, as an aware observer during the critical period of Reconstruction;-the Union's editor asked a crucial question:

A portrait of Briggs during the period in which he worked on the Union has been preserved by George Cary Eggleson, who was an inexperienced reporter in the early 1870's. Young Eggleston enjoyed listening to Briggs talk familiarly of literary men who were “cloud-haloed demigods” [page 301:] to him, for the old man “made men of them to his apprehension.” He reported that Briggs had, in large measure, conquered his bitterness at Poe's treatment of him, writing, “I never knew him to say an unjust thing about any of the men he had known, or to withhold a just measure of appreciation from the works of those with whom he had most bitterly quarreled.” His young admirer admitted, however, that Briggs's fairness did not stem from a forgiving nature, but rather from a “love of truth and justice,” which he considered the “dominant quality of his character.” Eggleston added some very convincing testimony to the other reports that Briggs's manner could be extremely brusque and unpleasant.

One morning Briggs had entered the editorial room the two men shared in the Union's offices, and for no apparent reason, turned on the younger man “with some bitter stinging utterance.” Later, by way of a backhanded apology, Briggs explained his fit of temper by telling Eggleston how disturbed he had been by a domestic problem; a servant had stolen the demijohns of fine imported wines and brandies that his job in the Custom House had enabled him to buy cheaply, and sold them “to a miserable, disreputable gin mill” proprietor. Briggs explained to Eggleston that he had “rejoiced in the certainty that however poor he might become, he should always be able to offer a friend a glass of something really worthy of a gentleman's attention.” Charlotte discovered the unhappy loss, and when her father learned the facts, he lost his temper, which, he apologized to Eggleston, was a [page 302:] very unprofitable thing to do.” In any event, Briggs maintained the reputation Lowell had made for him in A Fable for Critics, when he wrote that Franco's “manner's as hard as his feelings are tender.”

Evidently his reconciliation with young Eggleston was complete, for soon after, he praised the young writer for a brief editorial he had written. When Eggleston protested that it was only a paragraph, Briggs gave him some advice on editorial writing, in his best crusty manner:

Though his vigorous criticism did not show it, Briggs was no longer a young man. Although the work on the Union must have been interesting, Briggs was probably eager to transfer to an assisting position on Bowen's Independent. The owner himself was editing the weekly, a task for which his opportunism and ugly double-dealing in the Beecher scandal proved him unfit. Bowen relied on a capable staff to keep up the reputation Tilton had made for the weekly. The Independent had a distinctly literary tone; a highly influential family paper, it had ample room for the fiction, commentary and full-length reviews that the Union could not handle. Among its varied and talented contributors were [page 303:] Henry James, Jr., Joaquin Miller, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edward Everett Hale, Rose Terry Cooke, Louisa May Alcott, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Una Hawthorne, Rose Hawthorne and George Parsons Lathrop, Richard Henry Stoddard, Moses Coit Tyler, Edmund Quincy and Horace Scudder. At the start of 1875, when Briggs first became affiliated with it, the Independent characterized itself as “unsectarian evangelical, liberal, radical, and bold . . . for family, children, businessmen, farmers, both sexes, all classes.” Geroge Cary Eggleston later wrote that

In his affiliation with the Independent, then, Briggs demonstrated that, even as a septuagenarian, he had not lost touch with important periodicals and the group of young writers through whose work American literature would enter the twentieth century. How many reviews and commentaries were his is unknown, but Briggs did fulfill one vital function for the younger staffers. He was their link with writers of the previous generation. One of these young [page 304:] admirers later wrote, “To share his editorial room was an education in the history of the nineteenth century; and in gentle courtesy and a singular uniformity of manner as well. . . . Nothing could be more touching than to see the way writers in their twenties would turn to this gray-haired old man in loyal enthusiasm.”(22)

In this congenial atmosphere, then, Briggs made his final contributions to American periodical literature. His long familiarity with a multitude of literary figures made him a superior conductor of the column called “Personalities,” which was his responsibility from its inception to the day of his death. Filled with thumbnail obituaries and witty characterizations, “Personalities” presents a useful record of the last years of Briggs's contemporaries, from John Neal to Dr. Holmes. On the last day of 1874, Briggs also contributed a retrospect called “The Good Old Times: New York Fifty Years Ago.”(23) Chronicling the social history of the city from the time he had first glimpsed it, Briggs told of the lacks of old New York. Suitably, he began with the grocery department (there had been no Spanish mackerel nor tomatoes in 1824), but quickly progressed through the political lacks (there had been no Boss Tweed, but plenty of corruption), the social omissions (no Astor House or Delmonico's no hoop skirts, no paper shirt-collars, no monthly magazines), and the scholarly hiatuses (no Astor nor Mercantile Library). [page 305:] Typically, Briggs predicted a brilliant future for the city with the fortunes of which he had so completely identified himself. If anything endeared him to the young writers on the Independent, it must have been his way of allying himself with the future, while relishing memories of the past.

In 1876, Briggs wrote the Independent's traditional Christmas story, a genre defined by Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” thirty-four years earlier. “The Widow's Wish” was the first sign that in the last year of his life Briggs would experience a spurt of creativity he had not known for thirty years.(24) The story demonstrated that he had neither lost his satiric touch nor modified his scathing vision of the corruption, generated by greed and false piety, that penetrated American society.

The Widow Van Dusenberg, possessor of an elegant Fifth Avenue home, old furniture, and a high-priced pew, has sent her only son, Balthazar, to travel in the Holy -Band, On New Year's Day, she remains at home alone, awaiting the visitors who will present compliments of the season. Her first caller is a beggar-boy asking for something to eat. She has her maid drive him away summarily. The second caller represents her grocer, and presents a gift flask of chartreuse. After a few sips, the Widow finds herself in conversation with a mysterious stranger who claims to hate monks, but is dressed in the style of a “ritualistic High Churchman.” [page 306:] Offering her anything she wishes, the stranger answers her ever-increasing requests for money by producing bundle after bundle of green bills. The Widow, who claims she wants the money only for the indulgence of her soil, clutches the bundles more and more eagerly, until she seizes on them “like a hungry cur.” Finally, when she is sated, the stranger makes his condition: she may possess the treasure only if she consents to commit an indiscriminate murder, to throw a dart at random. When she demurs, the stranger's growing contempt for her is summed up in his stern rebuke:

Widow Van Dusenberg learns the lesson of consistency, and throws the dart. Suddenly the walls of her apartment fall away like a mist, and she sees her son, felled by the dart, prostrate beneath a palm tree.

Of course, the result of her Faustian dream is her conversion; Widow Van Dusenberg calls in the turned-away beggar, and subsequently becomes renowned for her charity. Though Bathazar is a worthless youth, interested only in billiards, Briggs allows him the last word, in order to undercut the sentimentality of his mother's conversion. On his return from the Holy land, the Reverend Brown Stout, [page 307:] whose dress and mien the Devil had ingeniously adopted, asks Balthazar what impressed him most in the Holy Land. “To which he replied, ‘Fleas.’”

The well-handled tale, with its implication of venality in the church as well as the market-place, with its pointed satire of self-delusion, and its final earthy deflation, is vintage Briggs. His theme, as timely as it had ever been, was particularly appropriate in the New York of Jim Fisk, Jay Gould and Boss Tweed. In his connection of piety, wealth, and murder, Briggs recalled the “City Article” he had written thirty years before for the Knickerbocker, in which he had asked: “Is everything spotless in those costly pews?”(25)

At the outset of 1877, the Independent promised a new feature to its growing readership; along with a new serial by Petroleum Nasby, it would run a series of “rich, racy, and truthful communications from Elder Brewster, Jr., of Brewsterville, Mass., on men and things, religion and politics, and every ‘top topic,’ as it comes up.”

Art imitating life, the senior staffer of the Independent launched his new set of fictional letters on January 11, 1877. [page 308:] In spite of his “straight” billing, Elder Brewster, like Harry Franco, is an ironic persona, rather than a direct representative of his creator's thinking. Like Briggs's first hero, too, his plain speaking reveals more than he intends. The shrewd Brewster has a son, Amzi, through whom Briggs cleverly expressed prejudices incompatible with the dignity of Brewster's patriarchal position. Just as Ferdinand Pinto's opinions were the exaggerated reflection of those held by a majority of the Mirror's readers, Brewster is a liberal Republican, like those to whom his letters are addressed. Always the skeptical outsider, Briggs was still trying to teach Americans that a genuine moral stand was a more complex matter than the simple choice of the “right” political party.

Despite his position as a responsible and pious senior in his community, Brewster reveals himself to be an ordinary man, subject, to a degree, to the same instincts of greed, sensationalism, and proneness to violence that characterize his fellow citizens. In one pre-election letter, for instance, Brewster reports that sentiment in his community runs high for Rutherford Hayes for President. Although the Elder counsels prayer, he reports that Amzi, a fellow of little faith, plans to lead a march inaugurating Hayes by force, whatever the outcome of the electoral vote. With ill-concealed approval, the father reports his son's reasoning: prayer will be of little use if there is a Democratic majority.(27) [page 309:]

In a second letter, Brewster deflates a Christian principle. He remonstrates with Hezediah Goodspeed, the town's Croesus, who denies the godliness of charity. “That's all trumpery,” snorts Hezediah, “If God has entrusted money to my keeping, it is because he knows I’ll keep it.” Although Brewster is at first shocked, he shows the flexibility of his morals by soon confessing, with amazing equanimity, that Goodspeed's attitude contains a substantial degree of truth.(28)

In these letters from Brewsterville, Briggs continued to employ one technique that had succeeded in the Pinto letters He never labored a point, but turned from contemporary politics to social comment freely, trusting lightness of touch to keep his satire viable. Now, for instance, in the third letter, Brewster turned from his previous interests, to report on a festive occasion. The winter of 1877, Briggs's last, must have descended on New York with at least one marvelous snowstorm of the kind he celebrated in his Staten Island days. He devoted the Brewsterville letter of February 8, 1877, to a description of “The Great Sleigh Ride of Brewsterville,” probably based on a memory of his Nantucket youth. In spite of the Scrooge-like displeasure of Goodspeed, the townspeople raise enough money to build a huge sleigh, with great bells; they plan their outing well, and there is great merriment and dancing at its destination. The piece is a perfect bit of local color, as Briggs realistically [page 310:] described the scene through Elder Brewster's eyes, but in language that recalls his early letters to William Page:

The promise of bloom in winter is a sentimental, but particularly apt symbol, for through Briggs's next five letters, his last writing, is scattered some of his best satire.

Although Hayes was elected without incident, his inauguration does spark a violent crisis in Brewsterville. The town's single Democrat, a shoemaker, displays his flag at half mast, angering the righteous Republican voters. The fiery Amzi joins the crowd stirring up hate against the dissenter, and Elder Brewster takes it upon himself to quell the growing conflict. “Hateful as his opinions are,” he intones about the shoemaker, “he has a right to them.” And again, “let no one throw a stone at the windows of that house because it sits in darkness and its inhabitants defy the sentiments of the people. Let them alone in their stubborn and darkened defiance.” In each exhortation to peace, Brewster manages to give the mob a violent suggestion, doing as much damage as a deliberate rabble-rouser. Briggs [page 311:] clearly indicated here how easily the mechanism of democracy is subverted; through this demonstration of mob rule on the part of supposed upholders of democracy, he reminded his fellow Republicans that even they were not exempt from the impulse to tyranny. But the achievement was that he did it so quietly, through his mastery of the ingenuous style. As Briggs had written long ago to James and Maria Lowell, “I always endeavor to avoid the appearance of pointedness in everything that I do, because it appears more natural to me. There is a point, of course, to all things, but it should not be too obvious.”(30)

The year 1877 marked the end of Reconstruction; Hayes withdrew Federal troops from the South, and appointed both Union supporters and ex-Confederates to patronage positions, in a spirit of reconciliation. However, reconciliation is not the mood of Brewsterville, Briggs's paradigm of the North, and there is particular resentment that a large share of patronage did not come the way of its citizens. Elder Brewster himself, admits to having been startled by the appointment of the ex-slave, Frederick Douglass, as Marshal of the District of Columbia. Before the War, the Elder recalled, Douglass passed through Brewsterville on a lecture tour and could find no home to accept him; he spent the day in the local cemetery. Soon, however, the residents of Brewsterville forget the furor over patronage when a local scandal breaks. [page 312:] Deacon Upton, who has been forced into the extravagance of an elaborate Gothic cottage by his ambitious wife, confesses to Brewster that he used his position as President of Brewsterville's bank to embezzle funds to pay his personal bills. He enjoins the town's on the grounds that a scandal would patriarch to secrecy, blacken the name of the community, and requests subscriptions from church members to make good his theft. The whole situation bears a curious analogy to the Beecher-Tilton affair. In this case, as in that, the parties’ initial attempts at secrecy fail; Brewster, playing the role of Henry Bowen, refuses to be particeps criminis, for reasons of his own self-importance.(31)

In his May letter, the heartsick Brewster reveals the supposed causes of Upton's fault. “The canker of luxury has eaten into our vitals,” he admits. “We have left the sunshine and sweetness of the plains behind us and have entered a belt of cloudland.” Brewster attributes the trouble to the new custom of lunch parties; Upton's wife strained her husband's income in trying to match her neighbors in the acquisition of the fanciest groceries. In the same way, Mrs. Tilton's downfall had been attributed by some to her husband's approval of Susan B. Anthony, and by others, to Beecher's sentimental, over-emotional style of religion. In Briggs's laughable anti-climax, Brewster reports to the Independent's readers that he will end the practice of [page 313:] lunch parties. In the era of the immense peculations of railroad tycoons and concomitant corruption of state and federal legislatures, Brewster's panacea had a hollow ring; its promulgator was either a hopeless innocent, or more likely, blind to the pervasiveness of corruption because of his own participation in it.

In the final Brewsterville letter, Elder Brewster once again takes a self-righteous Yankee stand.(32) He had read of a wealthy Jewish banker being excluded from a Saratoga Hotel; deploring the provinciality of the hotelkeeper, he writes indignantly:

So much for Brewster's sophistication. He goes on, in admirable style, to invite the banker and his family to the more salubrious vacation spot of Brewsterville, where their money would not be found distasteful. In his conclusion, however, he helplessly reverts to form, remarking, “As to Jews, I should be glad to see some of them here, and I can promise them the best seats for Rearing in our church. Nobody here will be offended by any display they make of diamonds, [page 314:] rubies or pearls.”

It is appropriate that, in his last writing as in his first, Briggs satirized an American lacking in self-knowledge. Ingenuous Harry Franco never understood the gap between ideals and practice in America. Similarly, Elder Brewster cuts the ground from beneath his best attempt at a truly liberal attitude, by his display of submerged bigotry. Unlike these figures, Briggs lived a life singularly free of Self-deception. He saw his own lacks with relentless clarity, and viewed the events around him in the same direct manner. He always had an individual grasp of men and situations that he could trust. In the late 1870's, he saw American society in the grip of the same contradictions that plagued it during the expanding 1840's, and asked, in his last Brewsterville letter, a troubling question: “Are we so well persuaded that anything has happened down south since Abraham Lincoln was elected for the first time?” Briggs was finding new subjects for satire in the post-war social scene susceptible to his style of satire. On June 20, the day he completed the Saratoga Hotel letter, he must have felt again, after a thirty-year lapse, the creative vitality of the author of Ferdinand Pinto's letters.

That evening Briggs jovially entertained guests. On retiring, he called to Charlotte to bring him a glass of water. When she entered the room, she found her father dead, [page 315:] the victim of a sudden stroke. Two weeks later, after the black-bordered Independent had printed a page of obituaries, and Richard Storrs had pronounced a fitting eulogy, Briggs's young protege, Charles Richardson, wrote a personal tribute.(34) In a burst of youthful loyalty, unwilling to foresee that Briggs himself would soon be as unremembered as his novels already were, Richardson concluded with words that seem now a final irony in the history of Briggs's reputation: “It is difficult to forget the author; it is impossible to forget the man.”

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