Bru-Buf: Bruce through Buffum

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


BRUCE, Robert, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, abolitionist.  Vice president, 1833-1835, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), December 1833.

(Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833)


BRUNE, Frederick W., Baltimore, Maryland.  Leader, Maryland State Colonization Society. 

(Campbell, Penelope. Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831-1857. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press,1971, p. 192)


BRYAN, George, 1731-1791, Dublin, Ireland, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, abolitionist leader, legislator, businessman, statesman, jurist.  Introduced abolition bills.  In 1778, Bryan introduced a bill in the Pennsylvania legislature for the gradual abolition of slavery.  Of this, he said, “In divesting the state of slaves, you will equally serve the cause of humanity and policy, and offer to God one of the most proper and best returns of gratitude for his great deliverance of us and our posterity from thraldom.”   Elected the first Vice President of Pennsylvania (Lieutenant Governor), 1777-1779, Second President (Governor), 1778.
 
(Basker, James G., gen. ed. Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings, 1760-1820. New York: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2005, pp. 76, 82-83; Bruns, Roger, ed. Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688-1788. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977, pp. 445-446; Locke, Mary Stoughton. Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619-1808). Boston: Ginn & Co., 1901, p. 78; Nash, 1991, pp. 100-105, 107, 110, 113-114, 121, 157, 201; Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp. 125, 126, 128, 129, 131; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, p. 421; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume II, Pt. 1, p. 189)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume II, Pt. 1, p. 189:

BRYAN, GEORGE (August 11, 1731-January 27, 1791), jurist, politician, was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Samuel Bryan, a merchant, and his wife, Sarah Dennis. He came to America in 1752, settling in Philadelphia and entering a partnership with one James Wallace in the importing business. In 1755 the partnership was dissolved and Bryan continued in business alone; two years later, on April 21, 1757, he married Elizabeth, daughter of Samuel Smith. As a Presbyterian he early became associated with the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of Philadelphia, who were a distinct political faction, and gradually rose to prominence in their ranks. He was fined five pounds, in 1758, for refusing to serve a s constable (Passages from the Remembrance of Christopher Marshall, 1839, App., p. v) but in 1762 he accepted office as member of a commission to apply receipts from tonnage dues to the improvement of Philadelphia harbor. In 1764, Bryan and Thomas Willing were elected by the conservative party to represent Philadelphia in the Assembly. They defeated Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Galloway, the leaders of the party desirous of substituting Royal for Proprietary government, although the Anti-Proprietary-forces carried the rest of the provinces. In the same year Governor John Penn reorganized the judiciary, appointing new judges from among the conservatives, and Bryan was made judge of the orphans' court and the court of common pleas. He continued at the same time to serve in the Assembly, and in 1765 was a member of the committee which drafted instructions for Pennsylvania's delegates to the Stamp Act Congress to meet in New York on October 1 of that year. On September 11, Bryan, Dickinson, and John Morton were chosen as delegates to the congress. During their absence in New York the Philadelphia elections took place, Franklin's party won, and Bryan was defeated. He returned from the congress, signed the non-importation agreements, and resumed his judicial service. He was recommissioned judge in 1770 and again in 1772, by which time he had retired from a failing business. He was appointed naval officer of the port of Philadelphia in 1776. After the adoption in that year of the new Pennsylvania constitution, with a share in the framing of which-though not a member of the convention- he had been credited (Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of a Life, etc., 1811, p. 266), he was elected to the Supreme Executive Council and by it chosen vice-president. In this capacity he served from March 8, 1777 until October 11, 1779, acting as president between the death of Wharton and the election of Joseph Reed (May 23-December 1, 1778). In 1779 he was a member of a commission to settle the boundary dispute with Virginia.

Elected to the Assembly on October 12, 1779, he was given the chairmanship of several committees on special bills, notably those which framed the "Divesting Act," transferring title in the proprietary estates to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the act revoking the charter of the College of Philadelphia and vesting its property in a new institution, the University of the State of  Pennsylvania, and the act for the gradual abolition of slavery. The authorship of the last-named law is usually attributed to Bryan as his major claim to remembrance. He was commissioned a judge of the supreme court of Pennsylvania on April 3, 1780, and held the office until his death. For some years he acted as trustee of the University of the State of Pennsylvania. In 1784 he was elected to the septennial Council of Censors. A stout (state) constitutionalist, he opposed every tendency toward nationalism, even attacking the Bank of North America. When the Federal Constitution was submitted to the states in 1787 he fought it earnestly, and after its ratification by Pennsylvania was a member of the Harrisburg convention of irreconcilables which met September 3, 1788 to urge a revision of the Constitution by a new federal convention. But resistance, however stubborn, was of no avail against the inevitable; the old order passed, and Bryan outlived it only a little time, dying in 1791, two years after the inauguration of the federal government and five months after the adoption of a new state constitution by Pennsylvania. [The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has five boxes of Bryan MSS., and the Library of Congress has several of his letters to Justice Atlee and a "memorandum of events" of the years 1758-64 entered in the back of an almanac. There are letters to and from Bryan in Wm. B. Reed, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed (1847), and official communications in the Pennsylvania Archives. Burton Alva Konkle, Geo. Bryan and the Constitution of Pennsylvania (1922) contains previously unpublished biographical material but overestimates Bryan's importance. An obituary in Dunlap's American Daily Advertiser, January 31, 1791, was copied by other Philadelphia papers.]

E. R. D.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, p. 421;

BRYAN, George, jurist, b in Dublin, Ireland, in 1731; died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 27 January, 1791. He came to this country in early life, and was engaged some years in commercial pursuits in Philadelphia. He was a member of the state assembly, and in 1765 was a delegate to the stamp-act congress, in which, and in the subsequent struggle, he took an active part. He was vice-president of the supreme executive council of Pennsylvania from the period of the Declaration of Independence, and in May, 1778, was advanced to the presidency. In November of that year he sent a message to the assembly, pressing upon their attention a bill proposed by the council in 1777 for the gradual abolition of slavery in the state. “In divesting the state of slaves,” said he, “you will equally serve the cause of humanity and policy, and offer to God one of the most proper and best returns of gratitude for his great deliverance of us and our posterity from thraldom.” In 1779 Bryan was elected to the legislature. On his motion the subject was referred to a committee, of which he himself was a member, and he prepared the draft of a law for gradual emancipation. He was appointed a judge of the state supreme court in 1780, and remained in that office until his death. In 1784 he was elected one of the council of censors. He strenuously opposed the adoption of the federal constitution. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I. pp. 421.


BRYANT, Joseph, Ohio, abolitionist. Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1838-39.


BRYANT, William Cullen, 1794-1874, author, poet, editor, abolitionist.  Wrote antislavery poetry.  Free Soil Party.  Editor of the Evening Post, which supported Congressman John Quincy Adams’ advocacy for the right to petition Congress against slavery, and was against the annexation of Texas.  After 1848, the Evening Post took a strong anti-slavery editorial policy and supported the Free Soil Party, supporting Martin Van Buren.  It opposed the Compromise of 1850.  Bryant and the Post opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854.  In 1856, the Post broke with the Democratic Party, endorsing the new Republican Party and its anti-slavery faction.  They supported John C. Frémont as the presidential candidate.  Bryant opposed the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court.  He endorsed John Brown’s raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in1859.  He strongly supported the nomination of Lincoln as the Republican candidate for president in 1860.

(Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, p. 326; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, pp. 422-426; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume II, Pt. 1, p. 200; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 3) A complete edition of his poetical and prose works (4 volumes, 8vo) was published in 1883-'4. See “Homes of American Authors” (New York, 1853); “The Bryant Homestead Book” (1870); “Presentation to Bryant at Eighty Years” (1876); “Bryant Memorial Meeting of the Goethe Club” (1878); Symington's “Biographical Sketch of Bryant” (1880); Godwin's “Life of Bryant” (1883); Wilson's “Bryant and his Friends” (1886, two editions, one on large paper and illustrated). A new life of Bryant, by John Bigelow, is now (1886) in preparation.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume II, Pt. 1, p. 200:

BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN (November 3, 1794-June 12, 1878), poet, editor, was descended from Stephen Bryant, who settled in the Plymouth colony in 1632 and became a town officer of Duxbury, Massachusetts. For several generations the Bryants were farmers, but the poet's grandfather, Philip Bryant, and his father, Peter Bryant, were physicians. The latter settled at Cummington, in western Massachusetts, married Sarah Snell, who traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower, and carried on a laborious and ill paid practise. He was a skilful surgeon, who had been trained under the French refugee, Leprilete; he had traveled widely as a surgeon in a merchant vessel; he had musical taste, playing much on the violin; and he was a lover of poetry, possessing a well-stocked library and writing light verse in both Latin and English. His strength was such that he could easily lift a barrel of cider over a cartwheel. The poet's mother was tall, strong, known for her common sense and stern moral qualities, and with certain literary habits; she kept a diary in which she concisely noted the occurrences in the neighborhood. Bryant's health in early childhood was delicate, his head seemed excessively large, and he was of a painfully nervous temperament, but by a stern regimen, including daily cold baths, his father made him a sturdy boy. The mother took pride in his precocity, teaching him the alphabet at sixteen months. The future poet was fortunate in his natural surroundings. His birthplace was a farmhouse surrounded with apple-trees, standing amid fields which sloped steeply down to the north fork of the Westfield River. In his fifth year the family removed to a place of still greater attractiveness, the homestead of his maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Snell, also of Cummington. The boy delighted in the brooks, the river, the rocky hillsides, and the deep forests, as yet only partly invaded by settlement, and enjoyed nutting, gathering spearmint, fishing, and other outdoor pastimes. He was fortunate also in the fact that his father's political interests-Dr. Bryant represented Cummington first in the lower and later the upper branch of the legislature kept the door of the farmhouse partly open upon the wider world of Boston.

Measured in years of formal tuition, Bryant's education was limited. The district schools gave him a training in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and the Westminster Catechism. At the age of twelve, his parents having decided that he deserved a college education, he was sent to live with the Reverend Thomas Snell, an uncle in North Brookfield, to learn Latin, and the following year was transferred to the care of the Reverend Moses Hallock, to acquire Greek. Both were men of great dignity, elevated moral standards, and austere influence. In the eight months with his uncle, Bryant showed a remarkably acquisitive mind, reading Virgil, the select orations of Cicero, and the colloquies of Corderius, while after two months with the Reverend Mr. Hallock "I knew the Greek New Testament from end to end almost as if it had been English" (Godwin, Bryant, I, 33). Meanwhile poetical ambitions had awakened in the boy. He owed much to his early and ingrained familiarity with the Scriptures, and when he was ten or eleven his grandfather Snell gave him the whole book of Job to turn into verse. A more important incentive came from his father's library, a collection ultimately numbering about 700 volumes. "In the long winter evenings and stormy winter days," Bryant wrote later, "I read with my elder brother . . . . I remember well the delight with which we welcomed the translation of the Iliad by Pope when it was brought into the house. I had met with passages from it before, and thought them the finest verses ever written" (Ibid., I, 24). In childhood he often prayed "that I might receive the gift of poetic genius, and write verses that might endure" (Ibid., I, 26). Before he was in his teens he had scribbled on many subjects, with the encouragement and also the sharp criticism of his father. Taken to Williamstown in September 1810, Bryant passed an easy examination for entrance to the sophomore class of Williams College. The institution was small and poverty-stricken, with a faculty of four who taught a meager curriculum for ill-prepared country lads. Bryant's chief amusements were woodland rambles, participation in the meetings of the Philotechnian literary society, and a course of miscellaneous reading, in which he profited particularly by his study of the Greek poets. Classmates remembered him later as modest, unobtrusive, studious, inclined to choose sober and bookish friends, and competent but not brilliant in the classroom. But his college career was brief. Withdrawing from Williams to prepare himself to enter the junior class at Yale, he worked at his books all summer (1811), only to have his father declare that his means were insufficient for the step.

Already Bryant had appeared, in a way which he later regretted, in print. In 1808, catching the indignant spirit of the Federalists about him, he had written a satire called "The Embargo," which in five hundred lines or more assailed President Jefferson as unpatriotic, a cowardly truckler to the French, an eccentric dabbler in science, and a man of low personal morals. Dr. Bryant unwisely carried this production up to Boston and had it published under the title of The Embargo: or Sketches of the Times, a Satire; by a Youth of Thirteen. It sold well, was praised by some reviewers, and attracted so much attention that in 1809 Dr. Bryant had it republished with several other pieces taken from the Hampshire Gazette, and placed his son's name on the title page. Not a line of the volume was ever included by Bryant in his later writings, and he spoke of the pamphlet with testy disgust as "stuff." But it proved the precursor of a really great poem. The autumn after he left Williamstown witnessed the composition of the first form of "Thanatopsis," a work written under several clearly traceable influences. His father had brought home the melancholy poetry of Henry Kirke White, and Bryant, hanging over it eagerly, read also Blair's Grave, and Bishop Porteus's poem upon Death. Simultaneously he was captivated by the fine blank verse of Cowper's Task. Under these circumstances-imbued with the mortuary meditations of Blair and Kirke White, watching the onset of the dark Berkshire winter, and supplied by Cowper with a superior and fascinating metrical form-he began the poem which was to make him famous; a great Puritan dirge, the first fine poetic expression of the stern New England mind. But after completing the poem he was content to stuff it into a corner of his desk. It was necessary for him to turn seriously to a career, and guided largely by his father, he determined to study for the bar. In December 1811 he entered the office of a Mr. Howe of Worthington, four or five miles distant, and there remained until June 1814, an unhappy period. He had no liking for legal study, and was troubled by the fear that his sensitive nature was unfitted for the controversies of the law courts. Meanwhile he made the acquaintance, momentous for his future work, of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. For the first time he understood the true character of the impulses which had caused him to pray to be a poet, and realized that they were inextricably bound up with his intense love of natural beauty. As yet, however, he was still groping for an authentic poetic expression. An unfortunate and obscure love affair was reflected in conventional verse, much of it callow in thought and hackneyed in imagery. In the late spring of 1814 he transferred his legal studies to the office of William Baylies in Bridgewater, and there completed them, passing his preliminary examination for the bar in August. These were the years of the second war with England, which awakened no enthusiasm in Bryant. His letters attack the conflict vehemently, and show that he, like other New England Federalists, was thinking seriously of the possibility of secession from the Union and of conflict with the Southern States.

Bryant was fully admitted to the bar in August 1815. While the young lawyer would have liked to embark upon practise in Boston, his purse was too thin to support him in a large city, and he somewhat hastily decided to hang out his sign in Plainfield, a village seven miles from his Cummington home. In December 1815 he walked over to make some preliminary inquiries. While striding along the highway he saw in the afterglow of sunset, flooding the western sky with gold and opal, a solitary bird winging along the horizon; his mind was filled with the beauty of the scene, and at his lodgings that night he wrote the finest of his lyrics, "To a Waterfowl." This also went into his drawer. After eight months in Plainfield, he found a larger opening in Great Barrington, in partnership with a young established lawyer whose practise was worth $1,200 a year. Bryant's experience as a lawyer in Great Barrington endured till the beginning of 1825. There were then three grades of lawyers in the state, entitled respectively to plead in the lower courts, to manage cases in the supreme court, and to argue before the supreme court bench; and Bryant by the fall of 1819 had been admitted to the third category. His name appears four or five times in the supreme court reports, indicating a practise larger than that of most young lawyers. But he found the contentious life of the bar uncongenial, while the frequent miscarriages of justice offended him. Tradition ascribes his final decision to relinquish practise to a decision of the state supreme court in 1824 reversing upon a flimsy technical quibble a judgment for $500 which Bryant had obtained for a plaintiff in a libel suit. But the basic reason was financial. On June 11, 1821, Bryant married Frances Fairchild, daughter of a neighboring farmer-the beginning of a union of singular harmony and devotion; and shortly afterward a daughter was born. As head of a family he required a larger income, and fortunately his pen enabled him to find it.

His fame as a poet dates from the almost accidental publication of "Thanatopsis" in the North American Review in 1817. One of the editors, Willard Phillips, had told Dr. Bryant that he wished William Cullen to contribute; Dr. Bryant found in his son's desk the manuscript of "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," and a briefer piece; and Phillips excitedly carried them at once to his Cambridge associates. "Ah, Phillips, you have been imposed upon," said R. H. Dana; "no one on this side of the Atlantic is capable of writing such verses." When in September the first abbreviated version of "Thanatopsis" was published, its effect was somewhat blunted by four weak stanzas on death which were accidentally prefaced to it; but thereafter Bryant's position in the narrow American literary world was secure. He contributed several other poems and three prose essays, one on American poetry, to the Review. Four years later, in 1821, he was invited to read the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the Harvard Commencement to a distinguished audience, and wrote "The Ages," one of his longest productions, which contains many fine passages but is deplorably uneven. His Boston acquaintances prevailed upon him to publish it and some of his other verse, and the result was a pamphlet of forty-four pages, containing twelve pieces in all (Poems: Cambridge, 1821). Besides the final version of "Thanatopsis," to which he had added a stately exordium and conclusion, it contained three lyrics of unmistakable genius-"Green River," "To a Waterfowl," and "The Yellow Violet"; and it was warmly praised not merely by American reviewers, but by Blackwood' s.

Among the fruits of this literary success were a visit to New York (1824) at the invitation of Henry Sedgwick of Stockbridge, and an engagement to furnish an average of one hundred lines a month to the United States Literary Gazette of Boston for $200 a year. This ushered in a period of unexampled productivity in Bryant's career, for in about eighteen months (1824-25) he wrote between twenty and thirty poems for the Gazette, including some of his finest work-"Rizpah," "An Indian at the Burial Place of his Fathers," "Monument Mountain," "Autumn Woods," and the "Forest Hymn." By 1825 he had clearly emerged as America's one great poet. The result was an invitation (January 1825) to assume the co-editorship with Henry J. Anderson of the monthly called the New York Review and Athen12um Magazine, at $1,000 a year. Bryant accepted, left his wife and baby in Great Barrington, and for a little more than a year was exclusively employed upon a magazine of precarious and declining fortunes. He made the acquaintance of the literary circle of New York-Halleck, S. F. B. Morse, Verplanck, Chancellor Kent, and others; he wrote for the Review a few fine poems, notably "The Death of the Flowers," as well as much hack work. But he was increasingly worried by poverty and had obtained a license to practise law in the city courts when he was rescued by an offer from the Evening Post. Its editor, William Coleman [q.v.], had been injured in an accident, and Bryant stepped in (June 1826) as assistant.

For the next three years Bryant was sub-editor of the Evening Post, and upon the death of Coleman in July 1829 he assumed the editorial chair which he was to hold for almost a half-century. He quickly acquired a one-eighth share in the journal, which in 1830 became one-fourth, and in 1833 one-third. From the standpoint of material gain the step was fortunate. For the first time it lifted Bryant above financial anxiety, giving him an annual income during the first four years of between $3,300 and $4,000, sums then counted large in New York. He became at one step a public figure of prominence and influence, for the Evening Post, founded under the auspices of Alexander Hamilton, had long been one of the country's leading newspapers. But as a poet he unquestionably suffered by the new demands upon his time. Of the whole quantity of verse which he wrote during his long life, about one-third had been composed before 1829. During 1830 he wrote but thirty lines, during 1831 but sixty, and in 1833 apparently none at all. Newspaper staffs were small, and for the first fifteen years of his control Bryant had but one permanent editorial assistant. He wrote editorials, clipped exchanges, reviewed books, and sometimes gathered news. Usually he was at his desk soon after seven in the morning and remained till nearly five. This confining labor irked him, he cared little at the outset for journalism as a career, bracketing it with the law as "a wrangling profession," and his letters show that at first he meant to escape from it to find "leisure for literary occupations that I love better." Meanwhile he gave the Evening Post increased strength as a Jacksonian and free trade organ, enlarged its news, and improved its format. But he relied more and more heavily upon his able, aggressive, and highly radical assistant, William Leggett, and after 1830 spent much time out of the office. He enjoyed excursions to the Catskills, Berkshires, and Alleghanies; in 1832 he made a journey to Illinois, where the prairies delighted him, and where he is said to have met Abraham Lincoln; and in 1833 he went on a Canadian tour. In June 1834 he sailed for Europe with his wife and children, intending to leave the Post forever and live upon his one-third share. He was absent during the whole of 1835 and was spending the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg when news reached him that Leggett was dangerously ill and the Evening Post in financial difficulties. He arrived in New York in March 1836, to find the journal without an editor, its business manager just dead, and its circulation, advertising revenue, and influence disastrously injured by the ill-temper and lack of judgment with which Leggett had asserted a Locofoco Democracy, attacked monopoly and inflation, and harried the Whigs. It was necessary to plunge in and labor with unwearying assiduity to rescue the paper. Leggett's connection with it was severed, and Bryant became half-owner. During 1837 and 1838 he worked again from dawn until dark, alarming his wife by his neglect of his health. As editor he had been taught a sharp lesson, and for three decades thereafter his primary allegiance-at times his sole allegiance was to the Evening Post.

 By 1840 he had become one of the leading Democratic editors of the nation, and had begun to take advanced ground against slavery. He supported Jackson and Van Buren, demanded a low tariff, opposed the use of public money for internal improvements, and advocated a complete separation between government and banking. He vigorously championed the workingman against judges who held that labor unions were a conspiracy to obstruct trade. When J. Q. Adams defended the right of petition against Calhoun and the South, the Evening Post stood with him; it opposed the annexation of Texas; and it assailed Van Buren for pledging himself to maintain slavery in the District of Columbia. Bryant was able in 1840 to wage a whole-hearted campaign against Harrison, and four years later still kept the Evening Post on the Democratic side, though in his revulsion against Polk and the annexation of Texas he considered bolting the ticket. His chief aid during these years was Parke Godwin [q.v.], later his son-in-law, who assisted in a steady expansion of the news features. To the editorial page Bryant gave dignity and moderation; in vivacity, cleverness, and force it was not equal to the Tribune or Springfield Republican, but in occasional bursts of noble eloquence it was far superior, and his stately elevated style was a model for American journalism.

In 1832 he had brought out a collection called Poems containing eighty-nine pieces in all; the most notable additions to his previous work being "To the Fringed Gentian" and "The Song of Marion's Men." It was a slender sheaf to represent the entire production of a man who had written "Thanatopsis" twenty-one years earlier, but the North American Review rightly pronounced it "the best volume of American verse that has ever appeared." So marked was the American success of his work that Bryant sent a copy to Irving, who was then abroad, asking him to find an English publisher. The English edition came out (London, 1832), with a dedication to Samuel Rogers and an introduction by Irving which made in too unqualified terms the,., generally valid claim that "the descriptive writings of Mr. Bryant are essentially American a claim which some reviewers at once challenged. Irving also slightly displeased Bryant by altering a line of "The Song of Marion's Men" from "The British foeman trembles" to "The foeman trembles in his camp." The English reception of the poems was friendly, and John Wilson wrote an extended and for the most part eulogistic review for Blackwood's. This same year Bryant edited a prose collection called Tales of the Glauber Spa, which was published anonymously, and which contained several stories, creditable but by no means distinguished, from his own pen. This line of endeavor, a fruit of his contacts with Robert Sands and others, he wisely abandoned.

After the first heavy labor of restoring the Evening Post was accomplished Bryant resumed his pen, and the half-dozen years following 1838 evinced a partial renewal of his poetic energy. He wrote some fifteen poems in this period, and the fresh material enabled him to issue The Fountain, and Other Poems (1842) and The White Footed Doe, and Other Poems (1844), the former containing fourteen pieces, and the latter ten. A prefatory remark in the first volume shows that he had in contemplation a long reflective and descriptive poem somewhat resembling Wordsworth's Excursion and Cowper's Task; for he says that some of the poems are presented "merely as parts of a longer one planned by the author, which may possibly be finish ed hereafter." His friend R.H. Dana, Sr., had for years been insistently urging him to compose an extended poem; but it is probable that Bryant found when he attempted it that he did not have a sufficiently fertile and broad imagination, and that his art lacked flexibility and variety. The real value of the project was in furnishing him a much-needed incentive to write the brief lyrics which he hoped to fit into a larger scheme. The reason usually assigned for the slenderness of his output, his preoccupation with the conduct of the Evening Post, has partial, but only partial, validity. After the early forties he was free to take long vacations from the office, and did take them. The journal prospered, its annual average dividends during the forties being almost$10,ooo, while in the fifties it rapidly became a veritable gold-mine. From beginning to end of his life the poet-editor lived with a simplicity that was in some respects almost Spartan. But Bryant's growing wealth enabled him to buy in 1843 an old farmhouse and forty acres of land at Roslyn, Long Island, on the shores of an inlet of the Sound. Here, following the outdoor pursuits he always loved, he was able to spend week-ends and even whole weeks together in summer and fall. He delighted to work in his garden, to take long walks, to swim, and to botanize. He collected a large library, in which he spent much time. He could continue, moreover, those extensive travels which he loved, and which he partially described in correspondence to the Evening Post collected under the title of Letters of a Traveller (1850)-a wide tour of the South, four trips in close succession to Europe, and a jaunt to Cuba. Had it been only leisure and peace that were lacking, Bryant might have written as much in these years as Longfellow; and his keen professional interest in current events might, had he possessed a different temperament, have inspired his pen as passing history inspired Whittier's.

Yet despite increased leisure and frequent absences, Bryant devoted much hard labor to the Evening Post and after 1848 gave it a leading place in the national discussion of the slavery question. It broke sharply with the Democratic party in 1848, supporting the Free-Soil candidacy of Van Buren against Zachary Taylor with such ardor as to be the most efficient advocate of the new party. Two years later it opposed Clay's compromise bill, urging the free states not to give up a single principle. In 1852 it reluctantly indorsed the Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce, but the following year its utterances against slavery were so radical that the Richmond Enquirer called it "abolitionist in fact." Bryant's disgust with the subserviency of Pierce to the South, and his resentment at the Kansas-Nebraska bill, made him quickly and completely dissever the Post from the Democratic party. In 1856 he enthusiastically allied the paper with the new Republican organization, while his assistant editor, John Bigelow [q.v.], was one of the men instrumental in bringing Fremont forward as its candidate. In the four heated years which ensued Bryant made the Evening Post one of the most vigorous of the "Black Republican" organs. He encouraged the despatch of settlers and rifles to Kansas, denounced the Dred Scott decision as an unallowable perversion of the Constitution, and called John Brown a martyr and hero. When Lincoln made his Cooper Union speech in 1860, Bryant introduced him, and the poet-editor was heartily glad to see him defeat Seward for the nomination. After secession began, Bryant never wavered in denouncing all plans for compromise, and in demanding that rebellion be put down by the sword. Many of his editorial utterances for these years display a grandeur of style, and a force and eloquence not to be matched elsewhere in the press of the period, and they produced an effect out of all proportion to the slender circulation of the Evening Post.

Throughout the Civil War Bryant belonged to the radical faction which demanded greater energy in its prosecution and assailed Lincoln for his moderation and his reluctance to emancipate the slaves. He was indignant at the modification of Fremont's proclamation. The Evening Post repeatedly urged the President to act, and pointed out that Antietam furnished a favorable opportunity. In his criticism of many administration policies Bryant was in close contact with Salmon P. Chase, whose appointment to a cabinet position he had urged upon Lincoln; but the editor objected warmly to some of Chase's own fiscal policies, notably the inflation of the currency by the issue of treasury notes as legal tender. For a time in 1864 the Evening Post hesitated to advocate the renomination of Lincoln, but in midsummer Bryant fell into line, and thereafter his praise of the Chief Executive lacked nothing in fervor. After the close of the war he broke from his former radical associates upon the issue of reconstruction in the South, the Evening Post maintaining an unflinching advocacy of President Johnson's mild policy, and attacking the harsh measures of Congress. Bryant regretted the impeachment of Johnson, and rejoiced when the Senate failed to convict him. After Grant's inauguration his active interest in the management of the Evening Post materially relaxed. The death of Mrs. Bryant on July 27, 1865, had been a heavy blow. In 1866 he tried to escape from his depression of mind by beginning a translation of the whole of Homer, completed in 1871, and showing a fine mastery of blank verse; and in 1866-67 he made a dispirited tour, his sixth and last, of Europe. He had been everywhere regarded for many years as the first citizen of New York, and he was unweariedly at the service of all good causes. In civic, social, and charitable movements his name took precedence of all others. But he was never in any sense popular; austere, chill, precise, and dignified, his demeanor made familiarity impossible, and even in small gatherings he was not a clubbable man. Though he was a polished and impressive orator, and spoke often, his immense influence as a public leader was almost wholly an indirect influence; he reached the minds of those who in turn could reach the masses. His volume of original writing in this period was not large, but it maintained the even merit which had usually marked his production since the appearance of "Thanatopsis." In 1876 he harked back to the subject of mortality in the noble poem "The Flood of Years," and followed it by his retrospective meditation, "A Lifetime," the last of all his works. To the end of his life, always athletic and active, he continued to give several hours daily when in town to the Evening Post, walking to and from his home. He was estranged from the Grant Administration by its blunders, its tariff policy, its course at the South, and its low moral tone, and he regarded the Liberal Republican movement with guarded approbation. Had the Liberal Republican convention in 1872 nominated Charles Francis Adams he might have supported him, but he regarded Greeley's candidacy as preposterous. Four years later, associates urged him to side with Tilden (an old personal friend) against Hayes, but he kept the Evening Post Republican. He labored as usual in the office on the day (April 29, 1878) when he delivered an oration under a hot sun at the unveiling of the Mazzini statue in Central Park. Returning after the ceremonies to the home of James Grant Wilson, he fell on the steps, sustained a concussion of the brain, and shortly lapsed from partial consciousness into coma. His death in June was followed by a funeral in All Souls' Unitarian Church and burial in Roslyn Cemetery.

Bryant holds a double place in American history. He brought to his editorial chair some qualities which no editor of his time possessed in equal degree. In culture and scholarship he surpassed Raymond, Bowles, and Greeley, while in dignity and adherence to moral principle he was far in advance of Bennett and Dana. Few men of his time did half so much to lift journalism from a vulgar calling to a place of high honor and national influence. The literary correctness of the Evening Post, controlled by Bryant's fastidious taste-his index expurgatorius is still quoted was famous. But, preoccupied with the great aims of his editorial page, he lacked the faculty of Bowles and Greeley for creating a broad newspaper which would appeal by enterprise in newsgathering and by special features to a great popular audience. He was responsible for few innovations in journalism, and they were not of high importance. His journalistic vein had something of the narrowness which marked his poetic genius, and though the Post's editorials, political news, literary articles, and foreign correspondence were of the highest merit, they were for the few and not the many. As a poet he holds a position in American letters akin to that of Wordsworth in English. He is our great poet of nature, with which more than one hundred of his total of about one hundred and sixty poems deal. He had certain clear limitations:  he lacked warmth of emotion, and especially human emotion, while his imagination was restricted in range, and he seldom revealed intellectual profundity. But he possessed a sensitively artistic perception of what was lovely in nature, and a capacity for its imaginative interpretation, which are not equaled by any other American writer. It is not nature in general, but the untouched nature of the New World, and of New England in particular, which his verse pictures with definiteness and accuracy. With this descriptive power are joined an elemental piety, a pervading sense of the transiency of all earthly things, and a meditative philosophy which, while melancholy, is also peaceful and consoling; qualities which give too much of his work a religious depth, and make his poetry as cool and restful as the deep forests he loved. His range was not wide nor high, but within that range he wrought with a classical love of restraint, purity, and objectivity, chiseling his work as out of marble; and he produced a small body of poetry which may be called imperishable.

[The standard life is Parke Godwin's A Biography of Wm. Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence (1883), in two large volumes. Godwin also edited Bryant's Poetical Works and Complete Prose Writings (1883, 1884). The latter includes a selection of articles from the Evening Post, but the paper's editorial pages contain additional material of value which has never been collected. Godwin also made a selection from Bryant's travel writings, but these are found more fully in Bryant's own Letters of a Traveller (1850), dealing with his European, Western, and Southern wanderings. John Bigelow's brief volume in the American Men of Letters series, Wm. Cullen Bryant (1890), reflects the author's intimacy with the poet, as does also Jas. Grant Wilson's Bryant and His Friends (1886). The aim of Wm. Aspenwall Bradley's Bryant (1905) in the English Men of Letters series is critical rather than biographical. A note by Carl Van Doren on the origin of "Thanatopsis" may be found in the Nation, CI, 432-33. Some light is thrown upon Bryant's work as editor by Geo. Cary Eggleston, Recollections of a Varied Life (1910), and by Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (1922), while a sharply critical sidelight is furnished by a manuscript volume of memoirs by J. Ranken Towse, in the possession of the Evening Post. The best brief critical studies are by E. C. Stedman in Poets of America (1885), and Wm. Ellery Leonard in the Cambridge History of American Lit. (1917), I, 260 ff. The last-named volume contains a full bibliography.]

A.N.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, pp. 422-426:

BRYANT, William Cullen, poet and editor, born in Cummington, Massachusetts, 3 November, 1794; died in New York, 12 June, 1878. His ancestry might have been inferred from the character of his writings, which reflect whatever is best and noblest in the life and thought of New England. The first Bryant of whom there is any account in the annals of the New World, Stephen, came over from England, and was at Plymouth, Massachusetts, as early as 1632, of which town he was chosen constable in 1663. He married Abigail Shaw, who had emigrated with her father, and who bore him several children between 1650 and 1665. Stephen Bryant had a son Ichabod, who was the father of Philip Bryant, born in 1732. Philip married Silence Howard, daughter of Dr. Abiel Howard, of West Bridgewater, whose profession he adopted, practising in North, Bridgewater. He was the father of nine children, one of whom, Peter, born in 1767, succeeded him in his profession. Young Dr. Bryant married in 1792 Miss Sarah Snell, daughter of Ebenezer Snell, of Bridgewater, who removed his family to Cummington, where the subject of this sketch was born. Dr. Bryant was proud of his profession; and in the hope, no doubt, that his son would become a shining light therein, he perpetuated at his christening the name of a great medical authority, who had died four years before, William Cullen. The lad was exceedingly frail, and had a head the immensity of which troubled his anxious father. How to reduce it to the normal size was a puzzle that Dr. Bryant solved in a spring of clear, cold water, into which the child was immersed every morning, head and all, by two of Dr. Bryant's students. William Cullen Bryant's mother was a descendant of John Alden; and the characteristics of his family included some of the sterner qualities of the Puritans. His grandfather Snell was a magistrate, and without doubt a severe one, for the period was not one that favored leniency to criminals. The whipping-post was still extant in Massachusetts, and the poet remembered that one stood about a mile from his early home at Cummington, and that he once saw a young fellow of eighteen who had received forty lashes as a punishment for theft. It was, he thought, the last example of corporal punishment inflicted by law in that neighborhood, though the whipping-post remained in its place for several years. 
Magistrate Snell was a disciplinarian of the stricter sort; and as he and his wife resided with Dr. Bryant and his family, the latter stood in awe of him, so much so that William Cullen was prevented from feeling anything like affection for him. It was an age of repression, not to say oppression, for children, who had few rights that their elders were bound to respect. To the terrors of the secular arm were added the deeper terrors of the spiritual law, for the people of that primitive period were nothing if not religious. The minister was the great man, and his bodily presence was a restraint upon the unruly, and the ruly too, for that matter. The lines of our ancestors did not fall in pleasant places as far as recreations were concerned; for they were few and far between, consisting, for the most part, of militia musters, “raisings,” corn-huskings, and singing-schools, diversified with the making of maple sugar and cider. Education was confined to the three R's, though the children of wealthy parents were sent to colleges as they now are. It was not a genial social condition, it must be confessed, to which William Cullen Bryant was born, though it might have been worse but for his good father, who was in many respects superior to his rustic neighbors. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, proud of his strength, but his manners were gentle and reserved, his disposition serene, and he was fond of society. He was elected to the Massachusetts house of representatives several times, afterward to the state senate, and associated with the cultivated circles of Boston both as legislator and physician. 
We have the authority of the poet himself that his father taught his youth the art of verse. His first efforts were several clever “Enigmas,” in imitation of the Latin writers, a translation from Horace, and a copy of verses written in his twelfth year, to be recited at the close of the winter school, “in the presence of the master, the minister of the parish, and a number of private gentlemen.” They were printed on 18 March, 1807, in the “Hampshire Gazette,” from which these particulars are derived, and which was favored with other contributions from the pen of “C. B.” The juvenile poems of William Cullen Bryant are as clever as those of Chatterton, Pope, and Cowley; but they are in no sense original, and it would have been strange if they had been. There was no original writing in America at the time they were written; and if there had been, it would hardly have commended itself to the old-fashioned taste of Dr. Bryant, to whom Pope was still a power in poetry. It was natural, therefore, that he should offer his boy to the strait-laced muses of Queen Anne's time; that the precocious boy should lisp in heroic couplets; and that he should endeavor to be satirical. Politics were running high in the first decade of the present century, and the favorite bugbear in New England was President Jefferson, who, in 1807, had laid an embargo on American shipping, in consequence of the decrees of Napoleon, and the British orders in council in relation thereto. This act was denounced, and by no one more warmly than by Master Bryant, who made it the subject of a satire: “The Embargo; or, Sketches of the Times” (Boston, 1808). The first edition was sold, and it is said to have been well received; but doubts were expressed as to whether the author was really a youth of thirteen. His friends came to his rescue in an “Advertisement,” prefixed to a second edition (1809), certifying to his age from their personal knowledge. They also certified to his extraordinary talents, though they preferred to have him judged by his works, without favor or affection, and concluded by saying that the printer was authorized to disclose their addresses. 

The early poetical exercises of William Cullen Bryant, like those of all young poets, were colored by the books he read. Among these were the works of Pope, and, no doubt, the works of Cowper and Thomson. The latter, if they were in the library of Dr. Bryant, do not appear to have impressed his son at this time; nor, indeed, does any English poet except Pope, so far as we can judge from his contributions to the “Hampshire Gazette.” They were bookish and patriotic; one, written at Cummington, 8 January, 1810, being “The Genius of Columbia”; and another, “An Ode for the Fourth of July, 1812,” to the tune of “Ye Gentlemen of England.” These productions are undeniably clever, but they are not characteristic of their writer, nor of the nature that surrounded his birthplace, with which he was familiar, and of which he was a close observer. 

He entered Williams college in his sixteenth year, and remained there one winter, distinguishing himself for aptness and industry in classical learning and polite literature. At the end of two years he withdrew, and began the study of law, first with Judge Howe, of Worthington, and afterward with William Baylies, of Bridgewater. So far he had written nothing but clever amateur verse; but now, in his eighteenth year, he wrote an imperishable poem. The circumstances under which it was composed have been variously related, but they agree in the main particulars, and are thus given in “The Bryant Homestead Book”: “It was here at Cummington, while wandering in the primeval forests, over the floor of which were scattered the gigantic trunks of fallen trees, mouldering for long years, and suggesting an indefinitely remote antiquity, and where silent rivulets crept along through the carpet of dead leaves, the spoil of thousands of summers, that the poem entitled ‘Thanatopsis’ was composed. The young poet had read the poems of Kirke White, which, edited by Southey, were published about that time, and a small volume of Southey's miscellaneous poems; and some lines of those authors had kindled his imagination, which, going forth over the face of the inhabitants of the globe, sought to bring under one broad and comprehensive view the destinies of the human race in the present life, and the perpetual rising and passing away of generation after generation who are nourished by the fruits of its soil, and find a resting-place in its bosom.” We should like to know what lines in Southey and Kirke White suggested “Thanatopsis,” that they might be printed in letters of gold hereafter. 

When the young poet quitted Cummington to begin his law studies, he left the manuscript of this incomparable poem among his papers in the house of his father, who found it after his departure, “Here are some lines that our Cullen has been writing,” he said to a lady to whom he showed them. She read them, and, raising her eyes to the face of Dr. Bryant, burst into tears—a tribute to the genius of his son in which he was not ashamed to join. Blackstone bade his Muse a long adieu before he turned to wrangling courts and stubborn law; and our young lawyer intended to do the same (for poetry was starvation in America fourscore years ago), but habit and nature were too strong for him. There is no difficulty in tracing the succession of his poems, and in a few instances the places where they were written, or with which they concerned themselves. “Thanatopsis,” for example, was followed by “The Yellow Violet,” which was followed by the “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood,” and the song beginning “Soon as the glazed and gleaming snow.” The exquisite lines “To a Waterfowl” were written at Bridgewater, in his twentieth year, where he was still pursuing the study of law, which appears to have been distasteful to him. The concluding stanza sank deeply into a heart that needed its pious lesson: 

“He who, from zone to zone, 
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,  
In the long way that I must tread alone,   
Will lead my steps aright.” 

The lawyer-poet had a long way before him, but he did not tread it alone; for, after being admitted to the bar in Plymouth, and practising for a time in Plainfield, near Cummington, he removed to Great Barrington, in Berkshire, where he saw the dwelling of the Genevieve of his chilly little “Song,” his Genevieve being Miss Frances Fairchild of that beautiful town, whom he married in his twenty-seventh year, and who was the light of his household for nearly half a century. It was to her, the reader may like to know, that he addressed the ideal poem beginning “O fairest of the rural maids” (circa 1825), “The Future Life” (1837), and “The Life that Is” (1858); and her memory and her loss are tenderly embalmed in one of the most touching of his later poems, “October, 1866.” 

“Thanatopsis” was sent to the “North American Review” (whether by its author or his father is uncertain), and with such a modest, not to say enigmatical, note of introduction, that its authorship was left in doubt. The “Review” was managed by a club of young literary gentlemen, who styled themselves “The North American Club,” two of whose members, Richard Henry Dana and Edward Tyrrel Channing, were considered its editors. Mr. Dana read the poem carefully, and was so surprised at its excellence that he doubted whether it was the production of an American, an opinion in which his associates are understood to have concurred. While they were hesitating about its acceptance, he was told that the writer was a member of the Massachusetts senate; and, the senate being then in session, he started immediately from Cambridge for Boston. He reached the statehouse, and inquired for Senator Bryant. A tall, middle-aged man, with a business-like look, was pointed out to him. He was satisfied that he could not be the poet he sought, so he posted back to Cambridge without an introduction. The story ends here, and rather tamely; for the original narrator forgot, or perhaps never knew, that Dr. Bryant was a member of the senate, and that it was among the possibilities that he was the senator with a similar name. American poetry may be said to have begun in 1817 with the September number of the “North American Review,’ which contained “Thanatopsis” and the “Inscription for the Entrance of a Wood,” the last being printed as a “Fragment.” In March, 1818, the impression that “Thanatopsis” created was strengthened by the appearance of the lines “To a Waterfowl,” and the “Version of a Fragment of Simonides.” 

Mr. Bryant's literary life may now be said to have begun, though he depended upon his profession for his daily bread. He continued his contributions to the “North American Review” in prose papers on literary topics, and maintained the most friendly relations with its conductors; notably so with Mr. Dana, who was seven years his elder, and who possessed, like himself, the accomplishment of verse. At the suggestion of this poetical and critical brother, he was invited to deliver a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard college—an honor which is offered only to those who have already made a reputation, and are likely to reflect credit on the society as well as on themselves. He accepted, and in 1821 wrote his first poem of any length, “The Ages,” which still remains the best poem of the kind that was ever recited before a college society either in this country or in England; grave, stately, thoughtful, presenting in animated picturesque stanzas a compact summary of the history of mankind. A young Englishman of twenty-one, Thomas Babington Macaulay, delivered in the same year a poem on “Evening,” before the students of Trinity college, Cambridge; and it is instructive to compare his conventional heroics with the spirited Spenserian stanzas of Bryant. The lines “To a Waterfowl,” written at Bridgewater in 1815, were followed by “Green River,” “A Winter Piece,” “The West Wind,” “The Burial-Place,” “Blessed are they that mourn,” “No man knoweth his Sepulchre,” “A Walk at Sunset,” and the “Hymn to Death.” These poems, which cover a period of six busy years, are interesting to the poetic student as examples of the different styles of their writer, and of the changing elements of his thoughts and feelings. “Green River,” for example, is a momentary revealment of his shy temperament and his daily pursuits. Its glimpses of nature are charming, and his wish to be beside its waters is the most natural one in the world. The young lawyer is not complimentary to his clients, whom he styles “the dregs of men,” while his pen, which does its best to serve them, becomes “a barbarous pen.” He is dejected, but a visit to the river will restore his spirits; for, as he gazes upon its lonely and lovely stream,

 “An image of that calm life appears   
  That won my heart in my greener years.” 

“A Winter Piece” is a gallery of woodland pictures, which surpasses anything of the kind in the language. “A Walk at Sunset” is notable in that it is the first poem in which we see (faintly, it must be confessed) the aboriginal element, which was soon to become prominent in Bryant's poetry. It was inseparable from the primeval forests of the New World, but he was the first to perceive its poetic value. The “Hymn to Death”—stately, majestic, consolatory—concludes with a touching tribute to the worth of his good father, who died while he was writing it, at the age of fifty-four. The year 1821 was important to Bryant, for it witnessed the publication of his first collection of verse, his marriage, and the death of his father.  The next four years of his life were more productive than any that had preceded them, for he wrote more than thirty poems during that time. The aboriginal element was creative in “The Indian Girl's Lament” “An Indian Story” “An Indian at the Burial-Place of his Fathers,” and, noblest of all, “Monument Mountain”; the Hellenic element predominated in “The Massacre at Scio” and “The Song of the Greek Amazon”; the Hebraic element touched him lightly in “Rizpah” and the “Song of the Stars”; and the pure poetic element was manifest in “March,” “The Rivulet” (which, by the way, ran through the grounds of the old homestead at Cummington), “After a Tempest,” “The Murdered Traveller,” “Hymn to the North Star,” “A Forest Hymn,” “O Fairest of the Rural Maids,” and the exquisite and now most pathetic poem, “June.” These poems and others not specified here, if read continuously and in the order in which they were composed, show a wide range of sympathies, a perfect acquaintance with many measures, and a clear, capacious, ever-growing intellect. They are all distinctive of the genius of their author, but neither exhibits the full measure of his powers. The publication of Bryant's little volume of verse was indirectly the cause of his adopting literature as a profession. It was warmly commended, and by no one more so than by Gulian C. Verplanck in the columns of the New York “American.” He was something of a literary authority at the time, a man of fortune and college-bred. Among his friends was Henry D. Sedgwick, a summer neighbor, so to speak, of Bryant's, having a country-house at Stockbridge, a few miles from Great Barrington, and a house in town, which was frequented by the literati of the day, such as Cooper, Halleck, Percival, Verplanck, and others of less note. An admirer of Bryant, Mr. Sedgwick set to work, with the assistance of Mr. Verplanck, to procure him literary employment in New York in order to enable him to escape his bondage to the law; and he was appointed assistant editor of a projected periodical called the, “New York Review and Athenæum Magazine.” The at last enfranchised lawyer dropped his barbarous pen, closed his law-books, and in the winter or spring of 1825 removed with his household to New York. The projected periodical was begun, as these sanguine ventures always are, with fair hopes of success. It was well edited, and its contributors were men of acknowledged ability. The June number contained two poems that ought to have made a great hit. One was “A Song of Pitcairn's Island”; the other was “Marco Bozzaris.” There was no flourish of trumpets over them, as there would be now; the writers merely prefixed their initials, “B.” and “H.” The reading public of New York were not ready for the “Review,” so after about a year's struggle it was merged in the “New York Literary Gazette,” which had begun its mission about four years earlier. This magazine shared the fate of its companion in a few months, when it was consolidated with the “United States Literary Gazette,” which in two months was swallowed up in the “United States Review.” The honor of publishing and finishing the last was shared by Boston and New York. Profit in these publications there was none, though Bryant, Halleck, Willis, Dana, Bancroft, and Longfellow wrote for them. Too good, or not good enough, they lived and died prematurely. 
Mr. Bryant's success as a metropolitan man of letters was not brilliant so far; but other walks than those of pure literature were open to him as to others, and into one of the most bustling of these he entered in his thirty-second year. In other words, he became one of the editors of the “Evening Post.” Henceforth he was to live by journalism. Journalism, though an exacting pursuit, leaves its skilful followers a little leisure in which to cultivate literature. It was the heyday of those ephemeral trifles, “Annuals,” and Mr. Bryant found time to edit one, with the assistance of his friend Mr. Verplanck and his acquaintance Robert C. Sands; and a very creditable work it was. His contributions to “The Talisman” included some of his best poems. Poetry was the natural expression of his genius, a fact he could never understand, for it always seemed to him that prose was the natural expression of all mankind. His prose was masterly. Its earliest examples, outside of his critical papers in the “North American Review” and other periodicals (and outside of the “Evening Post,” of course), are two stories entitled “Medfield” and “The Skeleton's Cave,” contributed to “Tales of the Glauber Spa” (1832), a collection of original stories by Paulding, Verplanck, Sands, William Leggett, and Catharine Sedgwick. Three years before (1828) he had become the chief editor of the “Evening Post.” Associated with him was Mr. Leggett, who had shown some talent as a writer of sketches and stories, and who had failed, like himself, in conducting a critical publication for which his countrymen were not ready. He made a second collection of his poems at this time (1832), a copy of which was sent by Mr. Verplanck to Washington Irving, who was then, what he had been for years, the idol of English readers, and not without weight with the trade. Would he see if some English house would not reprint it? No leading publisher nibbled at it, not even Murray, who was Irving's publisher; but an obscure bookseller named Andrews finally agreed to undertake it if Irving would put his valuable name on the title-page as editor. He was not acquainted with Bryant, but he was a kind-hearted, large-souled gentleman, who knew good poetry when he saw it, and he consented to “edit” the book. It was not a success in the estimation of Andrews, who came to him one day, by no means a merry Andrew, and declared that the book would ruin him unless one or more changes were made in the text. What was amiss in it? He turned to the “Song of Marion's Men,” and stumbled over an obnoxious couplet in the first stanza: 

“The British soldier trembles   
  When Marion's name is told.” 
“That won't do at all, you know.”

The absurdity of the objection must have struck the humorist comically; but, as he wanted the volume republished, he good-naturedly saved the proverbial valor of the British soldier by changing the first line to 

“The foeman trembles in his camp,” 

and the tempest in a teapot was over, as far as England was concerned. Not as far as the United States was concerned, however, for when the circumstance became known to Mr. Leggett he excoriated Irving for his subserviency to a bloated aristocracy, and so forth. Prof. Wilson reviewed the book in “Blackwood's” in a half-hearted way, patronizing the writer with his praise. 

The poems that Bryant wrote during the first seven years of his residence in New York (about forty, not including translations) exhibited the qualities that distinguished his genius from the beginning, and were marked by characteristics rather acquired than inherited; in other words, they were somewhat different from those written at Great Barrington. The Hellenic element was still visible in “The Greek Partisan” and “The Greek Boy,” and the aboriginal element in “The Disinterred Warrior.” The large imagination of “The Hymn to the North Star” was radiant in “The Firmament” and in “The Past.” Ardent love of nature found expressive utterance in “Lines on Revisiting the Country,” “The Gladness of Nature” “A Summer Ramble” “A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson,” and “The Evening Wind.” The little book of immortal dirges had a fresh leaf added to it in “The Death of the Flowers,” which was at once a pastoral of autumn and a monody over a beloved sister. A new element appeared in “The Summer Wind,” and was always present afterward in Mr. Bryant's meditative poetry—the association of humanity with nature—a calm but sympathetic recognition of the ways of man and his presence on the earth. The power of suggestion and of rapid generalization, which was the key-note of “The Ages,” lived anew in every line of “The Prairies,” in which a series of poems present themselves to the imagination as a series of pictures in a gallery—pictures in which breadth and vigor of treatment and exquisite delicacy of detail are everywhere harmoniously blended and the unity of pure art is attained. It was worth going to the ends of the world to be able to write “The Prairies.”  

Confiding in the discretion of his associate, Mr. Leggett, and anxious to escape from his daily editorial labors, Bryant sailed for Europe with his family in the summer of 1834. It was his intention to perfect his literary studies while abroad, and devote himself to the education of his children; but his intention was frustrated, after a short course of travel in France, Germany, and Italy, by the illness of Mr. Leggett, whose mistaken zeal in the advocacy of unpopular measures had seriously injured the “Evening Post.” He returned in haste early in 1836, and devoted his time and energies to restoring the prosperity of his paper. Nine years passed before he ventured to return to Europe, though he visited certain portions of his own country. His readers tracked his journeys through the letters that he wrote to the “Evening Post,” which were noticeable for justness of observation and clearness of expression. A selection from his foreign and home letters was published in 1852, under the title of “Letters of a Traveller.” 

The last thirty years of Bryant's life were devoid of incident, though one of them (1865) was not without the supreme sorrow, death. He devoted himself to journalism as conscientiously as if he still had his spurs to win, discussing all public questions with independence and fearlessness; and from time to time, as the spirit moved him, he added to our treasures of song, contributing to the popular magazines of the period, and occasionally issuing these contributions in separate volumes. He published “The Fountain and Other Poems” in 1842; “The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems” in 1844; a collected edition of his poems, with illustrations by Leutze, in 1846; an edition in two volumes in 1855; “Thirty Poems” in 1864; and in 1876 a complete illustrated edition of his poetical writings. To the honors that these volumes brought him he added fresh laurels in 1870 and 1871 by his translation of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”—a translation which was highly praised both at home and abroad, and which, if not the best that the English language is capable of, is, in many respects, the best that any English-writing poet has yet produced. 

There comes a day in the intellectual lives of most poets when their powers cease to be progressive and productive, or are productive only in the forms to which they have accustomed themselves, and which have become mannerisms. It was not so with Mr. Bryant. He enjoyed the dangerous distinction of proving himself a great poet at an early age; he preserved this distinction to the last, for the sixty-four years that elapsed between the writing of “Thanatopsis” and the writing of “The Flood of Years” witnessed no decay of his poetic capacities, but rather the growth and development of trains of thought and forms of verse of which there was no evidence in his early writings. His sympathies were enlarged as the years went on, and the crystal clearness of his mind was colored with human emotions. To Bryant the earth was a theatre upon which the great drama of life was everlastingly played. The remembrance of this fact is his inspiration in “The Fountain,” “An Evening Revery,” “The Antiquity of Freedom,” “The Crowded Street,” “The Planting of the Apple-Tree,” “The Night Journey of a River,” “The Sower,” and “The Flood of Years.” The most poetical of Mr. Bryant's poems are, perhaps, “The Land of Dreams,” “The Burial of Love,” “The May Sun sheds an Amber Light,” and “The Voice of Autumn”; and they were written in a succession of happy hours, and in the order named. Next to these pieces, as examples of pure poetry, should be placed “Sella” and “The Little People of the Snow,” which are exquisite fairy fantasies. The qualities by which Bryant's poetry are chiefly distinguished are serenity and gravity of thought; an intense, though repressed, recognition of the mortality of mankind; an ardent love for human freedom; and unrivalled skill in painting the scenery of his native land. He had no superior in this walk of poetic art—it might almost be said no equal, for his descriptions of nature are never inaccurate or redundant. “The Excursion” is a tiresome poem, which contains several exquisite episodes. Bryant knew how to write exquisite episodes and omit the platitudes through which we reach them in other poets. 

It is not given to many poets to possess as many residences as Bryant, for he had three—a town-house in New York, a country-house, called “Cedarmere,” at Roslyn, Long Island, and the old homestead of the family at Cummington, Massachusetts. The engraving on page 424 represents the house in Cummington; that on this page is a view of his home in Roslyn. He passed the winter months in New York, and the summer and early autumn at his country-houses. No distinguished man in America was better known by sight than he. 

“O good gray head that all men knew”

rose unbidden to one's lips as he passed his fellow-pedestrians in the streets of the great city, active, alert, with a springing step and a buoyant gait. He was seen in all weathers, walking down to his office in the morning, and back to his house in the afternoon—an observant antiquity, with a majestic white beard, a pair of sharp eyes, and a face that, when observed closely, recalled the line of the poet: 

“A million wrinkles carved his skin.” 

Bryant had a peculiar talent, in which the French excel—the talent of delivering discourses upon the lives and writings of eminent men; and he was always in request after the death of his contemporaries. Beginning with a eulogy on his friend Cole, the painter, who died in 1848, he paid his well-considered tributes to the memory of Cooper, Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and Verplanck, and assisted at the dedication in the Central park of the Morse, Shakespeare, Scott, and Halleck statues. His addresses on these and other occasions were models of justice of appreciation and felicity of expression. His last public appearance was at the Central park, on the afternoon of 29 May, 1878, at the unveiling of a bust of Mazzini. It was an unusually hot day, and after delivering his address, which was remarkable for its eloquence, he accompanied General Jas. Grant Wilson, a friend of many years' standing, to his residence, No. 15 East Seventy-fourth street. General Wilson reached his door with Mr. Bryant leaning on his arm; he took a step in advance to open the inner door, and while his back was turned the poet fell, his head striking on the stone platform of the front steps. It was his death-blow; for, though he recovered his consciousness sufficiently to converse a little, and was able to ride to his own house with General Wilson, his fate was sealed. He lingered until the morning of 12 June, when his spirit passed out into the unknown. Two days later all that was mortal of him was buried at Roslyn, L. I., beside his wife, who died 27 July, 1865. 

Since the poet's death the name of one of the city pleasure-grounds has been changed (in 1884) to Bryant park, where there will be soon unveiled a noble bronze statue of the poet, to be erected by his many friends and admirers. In the Metropolitan museum of art may be seen a beautiful silver vase, presented to Bryant in 1876, and an admirable bronze bust of heroic size, executed from life by Launt Thompson. Among the many portraits of Bryant, painted by prominent American artists, the poet preferred Inman's and Durand's; but these were supplanted in his estimation by photographs of later days, from one of which was taken the fine steel portrait that accompanies this article. A complete edition of his poetical and prose works (4 vols., 8vo) was published in 1883-'4. See “Homes of American Authors” (New York, 1853); “The Bryant Homestead Book” (1870); “Presentation to Bryant at Eighty Years” (1876); “Bryant Memorial Meeting of the Goethe Club” (1878); Symington's “Biographical Sketch of Bryant” (1880); Godwin's “Life of Bryant” (1883); Wilson's “Bryant and his Friends” (1886, two editions, one on large paper and illustrated). A new life of Bryant, by John Bigelow, is now (1886) in preparation. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I. pp. 422-426.


BUCHANAN, George, orator, spoke out against slavery, wrote: An Oration on the Moral and Political Evil of Slavery (Locke, 1901, pp. 93, 93n5)


BUCHANAN, James M., Illinois, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1837-1840.


BUCHANAN, Thomas.  American Colonization Society, Executive Committee, 1839-1840.  First Governor of the Commonwealth of Liberia.  (Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 241)


BUCKINGHAM, Goodsell, Richland County, Ohio, abolitionist.  Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-37, Vice-President, 1837-38.


BUFFUM, Arnold, 1782-1859, Smithfield, Rhode Island, Indiana, New York, New York, Society of Friends, Quaker, radical abolitionist, temperance reformer, philanthropist.  Co-founder (with William Lloyd Garrison) and first president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, in 1832.  Manager and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society in December 1833.  Manager, Massachusetts, 1833-1837; Manager, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1835-1837; Vice President, 1834-1836.  Executive Committee, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1846-1855.  Lectured extensively against slavery.  Visited England to promote abolitionism.  Was influenced by English anti-slavery leaders Clarkson and Wilberforce.

(Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, pp. 137, 157-158, 162-163, 178; Pease, William H., & Pease, Jane H. The Antislavery Argument. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965, pp. 418-427; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 218, 401, 433; Van Broekhoven, 2002, pp. 18, 20, 22, 58, 62, 66, 67; Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833; Buffum, Arnold, Lectures Showing the Necessity for a Liberty Party, and Setting Forth its Principles, Measures and Object, 1844; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume II, Pt. 1, p. 241; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 320)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume II, Pt. 1, p. 241:

BUFFUM, ARNOLD (December 13, 1782-March 13, 1859), Quaker, anti-slavery lecturer, was the grandson of Joseph Buffum, of the second or third generation of his family in America, who moved from Massachusetts to Smithfield, Rhode Island, in 1715. There Arnold, second son among eight children of William and Lydia (Arnold) Buffum, was born. William Buffum was a farmer and merchant, a Quaker, and a member of the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Fugitive slaves sheltered in his household enlisted his son's sympathies for anti-slavery. Without extensive education, Arnold became a hatter; but having an inventive mind, he conceived and patented various mechanical contrivances. Until he was fifty he was but partially successful at his trade, residing now at Smithfield or Providence, now in Massachusetts or Connecticut. Between 1825 and 1831 business led him twice to Europe, where he met Thomas Clarkson, Amelia Opie, and Lafayette. Returning, he established in Fall River certain "infant schools," based on some foreign educational theory.

As president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society from its organization in January 1832, Buffum was commissioned as its lecturing agent, thereafter devoting what time he could to forwarding emancipation. This meant personal danger and sacrifice of friends and business interests, but his moral courage, eloquence, and telling appeals for the negro's freedom made a deep impression. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1833. Thither he moved about 1834, establishing himself in the hatting industry. In 1840-41 he aroused serious reflection, ripening into antislavery sentiment, throughout Ohio and Indiana by lecturing and by editing at New Garden (now Fountain City), Ind., the Protectionist. Rejecting Garrison's and Phillips's radical principles, Buffum, by voice and vote, supported successively the Liberty, Free-Soil, and Republican parties. He also exerted himself in behalf of temperance.

Buffum married (1803) Rebecca Gould, from near Newport, Rhode Island. His daughter, Elizabeth (Buffum) Chace [q.v.], became a Garrisonian anti-slavery worker, his younger son, Edward Gould Buffum, Paris correspondent of the New York Herald. Muhlenberg, Arnold Buffum's fellow passenger on a European trip (1843), thus describes him: "An Old Hickory Abolitionist ... a tall, gray-headed, gold-spectacled patriarch . . . a very sharp old fellow [who] has all his facts ready, . . . abuses his country outrageously" as being pro-slavery, but still a "genuine democratic American." Buffum was of religious nature, and had high literary tastes. In 1854 he entered the Raritan Bay Union, Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he died.

[Lillie B. C. Wyman and Arthur C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1914); W. P. and F. J. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (1889); Anne Ayres, The Life and Work of Wm. A. Muhlenberg (1880); information from Mrs. L. B. C. Wyman, Buffum's grand-daughter.]

R.S.B.


BUFFUM, James M., Lynn, Massachusetts, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1845-53


BUFFUM, James Needham, 1807-1887, Mayor of Lynn, Massachusetts, abolitionist, supporter of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.  Vice President, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1845-1848. 

(Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 114, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 210, 211, 221, 225, 250, 342; New York Times obituary: June 13, 1888)


BUFFUM, William, Providence, Rhode Island, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1837-40, Executive Committee, 1840-41



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.