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

[page 69:]

It was at Willowbrook that one of the most important events of Briggs's life took place. There, through an introduction supplied by William Page, he first met and entertained James Russell Lowell, who became his most intimate friend and correspondent. In January, 1843, Lowell was forced to leave Cambridge to seek treatment by Dr. Samuel Elliott MacKenzie, a famous eye specialist who lived and worked on Staten Island. The poet, twenty-four years old, had already published his first volume, and was becoming more widely known as his work appeared in magazines. The Staten Island interlude, while it struck Lowell as an unhappy separation from his fiancee, Maria White, and from his newly-founded magazine, The Pioneer, promised to be enlivened by visits to William Page, whom Lowell had known since 1840.(1) Page attempted to make the time of Lowell's treatment pass more pleasantly by introducing him to the artists and writers of New York. He especially wanted Lowell to meet Briggs, the critic whose New World art reviews had so loyally promoted Page's portraiture. Page and Briggs, who met through the American Art-Union, had been friends for a year or two; the artist, whose first marriage was ending unhappily, had often slept at Briggs's Brooklyn home.(2) [page 70:]

At Willowbrook, where Briggs could treat his friends to “everything that smacks of the last century,”(2a) the deep intimacy between Lowell, Briggs and Page began. Later Lowell confessed that the hours the three spent together, talking of literature, art and politics, were among the happiest of his life.(3) They were certainly delightful and useful to Briggs, who felt that his friendship with these two men constituted his best claim to posterity's remembrance.(4)

When his eye treatment was concluded in the summer of 1843, Lowell returned to Cambridge. During his stay on Staten Island he had displaced Briggs as Page's chief adviser, and persuaded the artist, whose work was not uniformly well received in New York, to seek his livelihood in Boston. By the end of 1843, then, the three men were no longer neighbors. The delicate balance of temperaments — Page, gentle, impractical Swedenborgian; Lowell, ardent, brimming with poetic ideas and lush images; Briggs, worldly, ironical, and less optimistic than his younger friends — was threatened by separation. Briggs would soon feel himself the odd man out; but at first, there were no blemishes in the three-way friendship, and Lowell consoled himself for the loss of rare companionship by turning it into a disguised blessing: “It is an advantage to friendship that the friends should be as far apart as we are. The two minds cannot then rub together till they are smooth and can cling [page 71:] no longer except from atmospheric pressure from without.”(5)

The correspondence between Briggs and Lowell that grew out of the separation is a valuable record, not only of factual details, but of the fragile relationship between men who differed in background, education, talent, outlook and fortune.

By mid-summer 1843, when he began to write to Lowell, Briggs had established a placid domestic life. He was approaching forty, and had been married for seven years to a Nantucket-born woman of his own age. Few details about Deborah Rawson Briggs have been preserved. She was born on April 2, 1805, the daughter of Abel and Lydia Rawson. Since Nantucket was sparsely populated, and nearly all nineteenth-century Islanders were intricately related by marriage, Briggs was probably a distant cousin of his wife, and surely knew her from childhood.

At the time of his marriage, Briggs was thirty-two; established in business, he needed a home and family. Quiet, capable Deborah Rawson seemed well suited to his own unromantic style. Mrs. Briggs, who had gained only infrequent glimpses of the sailor-merchant during her youthful twenties, must have been relieved at her escape from New England spinsterhood. She had been keeping house for her retired father, an old sea-captain whose friendship Briggs relished. He later portrayed Abel Rawson as the salty, shrewd grandfather of Fidelia Clearman, in The Haunted Merchant. [page 72:] If Mrs. Briggs resembled any of her husband's heroines, it was surely Fidelia, whose detachment from worldly fashions was reflected in her pure and simple behavior. It is clear that the Briggses’ marriage had an element of convenience, yet it was based on congeniality and mutual understanding. If it was less than an ecstatic union, sexually and romantically, symbolized by its long period of childlessness, it had staying power, blooming at last in the birth of a daughter.

Mrs. Briggs gave no evidence of ambition to enter the world beyond her fruit and vegetable garden, her neighbors’ tea parties, and periodic returns to New England; she was a capable homemaker, who kept from dwelling on her disappointing childlessness by engaging in scrupulous house-cleaning. She had little in common with Maria Lowell, reputed her husband's intellectual equal and spiritual superior. Briggs confessed that his wife was “never given to poetical dreaming and in truth [knew] little of what poets have written.”(6) However, she showed a tender, loving nature in her deep suffering at the loss of a long-awaited infant, and despite the strains of her husband's career, inspired lasting devotion on his part.(7) Deborah Briggs may not have entered the intellectual world in which her husband moved, but she provided a warmly hospitable home and welcomed his literary friends; morally [page 73:] and religiously conventional herself, she was capable of generous friendship and admiration for one as talented and wayward as Sarah Dougherty Page.(8)

Briggs revealed little to Lowell of his courtship and married life, though his friend's superlatives about Maria White gave him ample opportunity. Although he professed cynicism about the institution of marriage, he emphatically recommended such bondage to Lowell. While he looked upon the ceremonial aspects of Lowell's approaching wedding with mock horror (“Are you going to suffer the infliction of white satin, and a parade of Bride's maids, and cake and wine?”), he urged the couple to cast aside financial worries;(9) describing the honeymoon of a pair of hummingbirds in his garden, Briggs reproached the poet for requiring a set amount of money for marriage: “Why the blasts and the birds, the creeping things of the earth, are the privileged classes, and we, who vaunt our superiority, are the slaves and reptiles.”(10) In a later article on house-building, Briggs remarked that he would as soon allow another to plan his home, as he would allow him to choose his wife. He chose Deborah Rawson with deliberation, after the impulsiveness of youth, and was content in his choice. Mrs. Briggs, an obscure figure, never exuberantly healthy or vital, amazingly endured until the age of ninety-four. In [page 74:] one of the few surviving mentions of her, her daughter reported her great pleasure, as an aged woman, in hearing those portions of Lowell's letters and biographer that concerned her husband, read aloud.

Charlotte, the Briggses’ only child to survive, was not born until 1847, and the changes caused by her birth belong to a later period in her father's career. In 1844, however, after eight years of marriage, Mrs. Briggs gave birth to a boy. On August 18, her husband watched through the night, reading over Lord Byron “to keep [his] thoughts engaged.” In a moment of distress he turned to critical reading and writing for relief. But after calmly discussing the vanity of Scott and Byron with Lowell, he had to confess: “I fear that our nine month's solicitude will come to seeming naught.” The baby did not survive his first week. Details of the death are few, only that he was “killed by the merest accident.”(11)

The effect of the infant's death on Briggs was profound. “O God,” he wrote, “the earth and the air are full of life and living things, but my little boy is lifeless... . I did not think a few hours ago that my heart could be so severely bruised by the dreaded event.” In his weariness and disappointment, he patiently read the Bible and Swedenborg's chapter on “Infants in Heaven,” but somehow drew more comfort from gazing at the scarlet tops of his pepperidge trees. He planned to take Mrs. Briggs to New Bedford to visit relatives in mid-September, and gratefully [page 75:] read Lowell's verses in the October Democratic Review. Lowell was inspired to write “On the Death of a Friend's Child,” by Briggs's expression of pain at the loss of his boy. Briggs had written:

Lowell replied that he could not restrain tears when he read “of the living things all around the cast mantle of your child.”(13) In his poem, the emotion is expressed this way:

If the poetry was less than perfect, the mood had been captured accurately. Briggs admitted that for a long time his wife was inexpressibly pained by the chirruping of birds outside her window.(15)

At the start of his friendship with Lowell, then, Briggs revealed himself as a tender, sensitive, loving man [page 76:] whose happiness was often dashed by circumstance; he ruefully explained this quality of his life to Lowell in terms of “luck”; the poet, young, talented, beloved, educated, relatively well-off financially, accepted as a member of Brahmin society, had received a bit of financial good news. Briggs wrote: “you come from a lucky stock. My accidents have all been of a different kind.” As a symbolic example, he noted that Lowell, married in December, had spring-like weather for his wedding trip. Briggs wryly reported, “I was married in June and the weather was so cold the next week that we had to kindle fires in the parlor. I am not grumbling; but I believe in luck.”(16) Submerged beneath this half-joking talk of a cold aftermath to his wedding was a real sense of being cut off from the full-hearted joy of life, both by temperament and circumstance. Briggs's awareness that he lived outside of a charmed circle led him actively to create a milieu in which he could be content. He once confessed to Lowell that only the variety and urgency of his employments and his responsibility to his family kept him from allowing periodic depression to drive him to suicide or insanity. More than other men who were less sensitive to cruelty or more self-satisfied, Briggs depended on the refreshing, restoring qualities of a serene home.

Discovering that Staten Island suited him better than Brooklyn, Briggs contemplated moving to a larger, more [page 77:] permanent home during the last half of 1843. The Staten Island of his day was quite different from his native Nantucket, although it fulfilled the same function for Briggs. No barren ground that turned its dwellers to farming the sea, Staten Island was lush farming country. Green and fertile, its aspect changed with the seasons. It was never harsh, or any more isolated than a man of the world could wish. For proof of this one need only glance at a list of eminent physicians, writers and merchants who made it their home. Staten Island provided magnificent sea-views, but always from the vantage point of nearness to safe harbor. Lacking Nantucket's grand isolation, it was, nonetheless, a stabilizing base for a man who daily entered the metropolis to support himself by his wits.

In early 1844, Briggs moved from the small Willowbrook cottage to an old Dutch house, surrounded by trees and flowering plants, that he named “Bishop's Terrace.” Opposed to “horrid affectation” in naming a home, he combined two visual facts in choosing his: the sight of his wife's bishop, or bustle, hanging on a line to dry, and the terraced slope of the land.(17) If naming a home was an act of aristocratic pretension, Briggs ironically undercut it by choosing the homely image. It was a private joke, designed to remind him never to forget the evidence of his senses. [page 78:]

Briggs clearly felt that his life centered in his home. In a later review of a volume about rural architecture, he wrote that “a man's house and garden should possess some of the idiosyncracies of his character.” Calling men's homes the “theatres of their hospitalities, the comfortablest part of their whole lives, nay, the epitome to them of the whole world,”(18) he revealed some details of Bishop's Terrace. It was no “gingerbread, crocketed, turreted cottage,” but rather a solid Dutch home with the mansard roof Briggs thought so well adapted to the climate. In the garden he had his favorite pepperidge trees; red maples and dwarf cedars skirted the orchard, in which he cultivated seckle pears. Cherries and strawberries were abundant in season. Staten Island was a delight to Briggs in every season of the year, and called forth some of the best passages in his letters to Lowell:

Again, when Lowell urged him to “pitch his tent” closer to Elmwood, he wrote, [page 79:]

From Bishop's Terrace, satisfactorily located between heaven and earth, Briggs surveyed the literary world, in which he had come to play an increasingly large role since 1839. One of his major concerns, as the 1843 Knickerbocker article showed, was the issue of international copyright legislation. The pro-copyright position, though it was more or less supported by most American writers, had its most vociferous proponent in Cornelius Mathews. Mathews, a short stocky man who considered himself a native genius, indulged in elaborate apostrophes to the physical greatness of the United States, and demanded the creation of a literature of equal breadth. Regrettably, his own productions fell short of his ideal. Mathews’ manner and his personal touchiness, combined with the unreadability of his prose, caused him to be ridiculed under the pseudonyms of Puffer Hopkins, one of his heroes, and the Centurion. At first Briggs found him unwittingly funny, but a good fellow who worked like a cart horse. Soon, however, Mathews’ antics began to annoy him, as they vitiated the effectiveness of the pro-copyright movement.

In 1844, Briggs invited several literary friends to [page 80:] a meeting at the Athenaeum Hotel, where he proposed that they form the nucleus of a Copyright Club, the purpose of which would be to persuade members of Congress to enact protective legislation. He described the Club's sessions to Lowell:

When Mathews claimed credit for starting the Club, and depressed attendance by his long speeches and fulsome rhetoric, Briggs lost patience with the venture. He reported to Lowell that Mathews wanted to be sent to Washington as the Club's representative; however, his fellow writers feared that he would make them ridiculous in the eyes of the legislators. They found William Cullen Bryant suitable, but he declined, and the choice finally fell on Rufus Griswold, not only not a member of the Club, but a man engaged in pirating English works himself!(22) Divided among themselves, the New York literati had little chance of presenting a united front in Washington. Briggs blamed Mathews for the group's failure; when the “Centurion” published a volume of poems, Briggs could not retrain from quoting a verse to Lowell, and thereafter referred depreciatingly to Mathews as a “piping curlew.”(23) [page 81:]

Mathews was supported, despite his eccentricity, by his friend, the critic and editor, Evert Duyckinck, whose admiration for “Puffer” was the source of endless amusement to the literati. Duyckinck, a highly respected scholar and bookman who was editor for the firm of Wiley and Putnam, maintained his loyalty to Mathews though it eventually deprived him of support from magazine publishers and fellow writers. Briggs observed the situation with amusement, writing to Lowell, “The Centurion is a curious specimen of humanity, but Duyckinck's veneration of him is one of the strangest hallucinations that I have ever heard of. They remind me of Mr. Slyme and his parasite Tigg.”(24) Briggs caricatured Duyckinck and Mathews unmercifully in 1847, yet in 1843 and 1844, Duyckinck recognized that Briggs's sensitivity to the experiences of poverty and exploitation, his stand on conditions of slum life, on flogging, on slavery, and on the need for international copyright, made him a useful ally. Duyckinck, who later encouraged young Melville, was attempting to become Clark's opposite number in the literary world; a Democrat, politically, he was a founder of “Young America,” a group that supported the development of a truly original American literature.(25) Its platform disavowed imitators, asserted the need for treatment of American themes and scenes, and sought copyright legislation. The “Young [page 82:] Americans,” among whose literary organs were, at times, the U. S. Democratic Review, Arctutus, and The Literary World, included, besides the ebullient Mathews, the critic and Columbia University librarian, William Alfred Jones, and the Southern novelist and magazinist, ‘William Gilmore Simms; the cause later enlisted Poe and Melville. In 1844, Duyckinck did not have a magazine of his own, but he made overtures to Briggs, hoping to include him among the adherents of “Young America.” However, Briggs's hostility to Duyckinck's clique, primarily aroused by an overdose of Mathews’ bombast, was reinforced by his suspicion of their Southern ally, Simms; Briggs was offended by the Southerner's public denigration of American humor, and thought Simms a fool. Thus, although he was closer in principle to Mathews and Duyckinck than he was to Clark, Briggs remained aloof.

Though Mathews was, at best, a curious fellow, he at least had the merit of being serious in his intentions. Briggs had far less respect for Nathaniel Parker Willis, whose letters for the National Intelligencer concerned ladies’ bonnets and gossip in fashionable oyster houses. When reprinted in the Mirror, these trifling letters earned Willis an additional twenty dollars weekly.(26) At a time when most of his fellow writers were poorly paid, if at all, Willis earned a very comfortable sum, [page 83:] an ability for which Briggs frankly envied him. In 1845, Briggs told Lowell how a light-handed and clever sketch-writer would be much in demand among editors: “If Willis had half an ounce of honesty, he were just the man to please the public. He is the most shiny nothing that I have ever seen.”(27) Later Briggs would model one of his most successful satiric characters, Ferdinand Mendes Pinto, on Willis.

Even more lacking in the moral sense than Willis, however, was Lewis Gaylord Clark. By 1844, Briggs saw the faults of the Knickerbocker's editor clearly. Clark paid for contributions, but did not hesitate to mold them to his liking without consulting the author. When Briggs sent a review of Lowell's poems to the Knickerbocker, he wrote to his friends “It was at the particular request of Clark that I did it, but if there were a respectable literary journal published in the city, I would try my hand in a decent review for your sake.”(28) He was confirmed in his fear that Clark would not permit his review to stand as it was submitted:

The editor had not scrupled to combine Briggs's remarks with those of another critic, to make his own curious amalgam. By April, 1844, enraged by Clark's literary and political chicanery,(30) Briggs was already thinking of starting a competing journal of his own.

These three men, Mathews, Willis and Clark, were but a few of those with whom Briggs dealt daily; even in the variety of their inadequacy, however, they were representative of the New York literary world. Briggs often reported to Lowell on the doings of Gotham's literati; he wrote slightingly of John O'Sullivan and William Cullen Bryant, who seemed to him mere political hacks; he sharply criticized a number of other figures, including Joshua Reynolds, Orestes Brownson, Emerson, Carlyle and the controversial Anglican clergyman, Dr. Edward Pusey. Full of strong opinions about others, Briggs declared his unconcern for their regard for him; he maintained a strictly private standard, remarking of his work: “It pleased Page and my wife and sister, and if it pleased you and Maria, I do not care who else were displeased.”(31)

While he could be a relentless critic, Briggs at first had nothing but admiration for his young friend, Lowell.(32) [page 85:] He called the poet's Prometheus “the best sustained effort of the American Muse,” and was certain that his new friend deserved a position high above “mere word-mongers of Parnassus.” Although Lowell's work is less highly regarded today, in 1844, he was one of the most promising young literary men in America; Briggs's belief in Lowell's genius and the boost in self-esteem that Lowell's flattering friendship gave him would later play a critical part in the affair of the Broadway Journal. Never a lackey, however, Briggs soon abandoned mere praise, and took to giving Lowell honest and free criticism. Considering failure of “truthfulness” to be an occasional blemish in the poet's work, he wrote:

Lowell neglected to take the hint, and did not explain to Briggs that such criticism failed to take into account the possibility of different kinds of perception. Briggs measured Lowell's work in the only way possible — by testing it against his own experience. As varied and considered as this was, it was lacking in some respects. Briggs confessed as much when he complained that Lowell's “A Legend of Brittany” was too romantic for his taste; it was “too warm, rich, and full of sweet sounds and sights, [page 86:] the incense overpowers me, the music bewilders me, and the love and crime and prayers and monks and glimpses of spirits oppress me. I am too much a clod of earth to mingle well in such elements.”(34) While this is a fair critique of Lowell's rather derivative lushness, Briggs's self-confessed inability to imaginatively transcend description of literal fact would later strain his appreciation of Melville's work.

As his friendship with Lowell deepened, Briggs accepted guidance in return for what he gave. While he encouraged Lowell to write satiric verse and to take up the full challenge of native themes and scenes, the eventual results of which were A Fable for Critics and the Biglow Papers, Lowell turned him away from exclusive association with Whigs and toward publication in the Democratic Review and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. His regard for Lowell forced Briggs to examine and articulately defend his political and social attitudes; it served to accentuate the fatal difficulty of his ambiguous position concerning abolition.

In 1844, Briggs's major political difference with Lowell was his support of the Whig Presidential candidate, Henry Clay. Lowell could understand, as Briggs could not, the rationale behind the fact that some abolitionists, through their support of a third candidate, preferred to allow the pro-slavery Democrat, Polk, to win over the Whig [page 87:] slave-holder, Henry Clay. Briggs took this stand:

But the abolitionists (as distinguished from those who were merely vaguely anti-slavery) could brook no compromise with an avowed slave-holder; they took the issue to be one of principle, rather than of practical politics. It was on this rock that Briggs and Lowell would split again and again.

On other grounds, however, the friends stood together. They opposed annexation of Texas, capital punishment, imprisonment for debt, and efforts of the military to thrust the nation into war. Both men were sickened by the probability that an unholy alliance between slaveowners and [page 88:] military men would push the country into war with Britain over Cuba. Briggs bitterly stated the issue:

Unlike his abolitionist friend, Briggs never failed to see the connection between slavery and other evils in the social system. On March 10, 1844, he described an incident to Lowell(37) that is a good example of his social awareness. During the dedication ceremony aboard a new warship in New York Harbor, one of the highly efficient guns exploded, killing soldiers and socialites alike:

Here Briggs connected black slavery with the servitude [page 89:] imposed on sailors, who automatically forfeited their civil rights when they shipped aboard an American vessel, Briggs reminded Lowell that the same military mind that perpetrated abuses in the Navy was responsible for encouraging war against Mexico, too: “It is to the keeping of such people that the nation is supposed to trust its defense and its honor; and it is to gratify their murderous and mercenary passions that we propose to steal Texas.”(39) Annexing Texas would be of benefit to two classes, the military, who would profit by the expense of war, and Southern political leaders, who coveted an extension of their political base. Briggs thought that annexation of Texas would destroy the Union; unlike Whitman, he began to feel, cynically, that such a result was preferable to suffering the drag on progress inflicted by Southern states.

Lowell increasingly came to think that Briggs's hesitancy to join the abolitionists was a matter of temporizing; on the other hand, his friend insisted that it grew out of a genuine reluctance to affiliate himself with a party. Briggs was a man whose loyalties were always personal, rather than programmatic; he often repeated the phrase that he refused to “give up to a party what was meant for mankind.” Because he saw some hope in organized political action, he wanted to pick his role independently, in the light of momentary situations. In 1844, he regarded slavery as doomed to extinction through progressive [page 90:] industrialization of Southern states; it would prove unprofitable, and would be abandoned for that reason alone. Briggs lacked William Lloyd Garrison's reforming zeal, and feared that unquestioned allegiance to such a leader might cause excesses.

Unlike Garrison, whose concentration on blotting out black slavery in the South led to self-righteousness, Briggs was deeply aware that he himself was enslaved by the same forces that demanded conformity to the “peculiar institution” of the South. Never content to accept official pieties, he reminded Lowell that slavery only existed with the tacit consent of Northern business interests: “Nothing can be more evident than the existence of a slavery principle in the whole body of our people. We agree to keep slaves only in certain parts of the Union, but Mass, keeps her slaves in So. Carolina and Georgia.”(40) Moreover, he did not admire the abolitionists’ style or manner of expression; he said they and the slaveholders often reminded him of housewives arguing in the street, each anxious to call the other “whore” first.

If Briggs and Lowell were to be increasingly at odds over abolition in succeeding years, they were agreed on the need for another social reform, the elimination of capital punishment. Enclosed in Briggs's first letter to Lowell [page 91:] were verses, evidently for use in the Pioneer, entitled “Hanging Rhymes.” Identified as extracts from an unpublished drama, the lines are a dialogue between two allegorical characters; one represents the incredulous past, Now, and the other, the experienced past, Then. Standing at a gallows, Then describes the crime of stealing for which a prisoner was executed, Now asking, “were his wants a part of his crime?” In conclusion, the representative of the enlightened present requests:

Emerging from the doggerel lines (Lowell seems to have liked them, inexplicably) is an indication that Briggs had some confidence in a future amelioration of social ills.

A few months later, in a less sanguine mood, he ironically suggested that poets eventually would teach men morality. He told Lowell of a murder case that rocked Staten Island; Polly Bodine, the destitute, pregnant mother of a young son, had robbed the home of her wealthy brother and murdered his wife. Briggs, unlike most of his contemporaries, found her no more guilty than the judge who condemned her to be hanged for the sake of his fees. “I must confess myself to be so barbarous,” he wrote Lowell, “that I cannot see any difference between the hanged and the hangers.”(42) Noting that Polly, like the upholders of [page 92:] the law, used her gains to provide necessities for her children, he found her a victim of want, rather than a “fiend in human shape.” Most typical of Briggs, however, was the story he appended to the woeful tale of Polly Bodine; Bishop's Terrace was located next door to the Black Horse Tavern, owned by Polly's uncle. Briggs attempted to console the man tactfully for the tragic fate of his niece. The tavern keeper, indifferent to Polly's approaching execution, proved indignant only at the fact that the magistrate was to examine her on the north side of Staten Island, doing his tavern out of five hundred customers 1 Even Briggs's sophisticated awareness of avarice boggled at such callousness. Amusement mingling with bitterness, he remarked to Lowell, who believed in the spiritual uplift of poetry: “I trust that when a few more editions of your poems have been sold, [men] will begin to grow better, yet while their animal wants are so positive, I cannot hope for that golden change which will be effected when the ecliptic gets to be perpendicular to the earth's axis, and good things become so abundant that there will be no need of hoarding them.”(43)

All of Briggs's literary efforts grew out of his basic pessimism; a sense of the ludicrous disparity between the “way of the world” and the way of a humane society prevailed in his vision, turning him into a satiric humorist, rather than a preacher. Besides Dickens, the writers he [page 93:] admired most shared this point of view; they included Fielding, whose Tom Jones Briggs called the “iliad of prose fictions, and Jonathan Swift. Briggs planned a biography of Swift, and quoted him frequently in order to defend his own unique position among the political conservatives of his time. By nature Briggs was closer to Swift's caustic wit, bordering on misanthropy, than he was to Fielding's hearty, good-natured exposure of rough-and-tumble morality.

Among his own countrymen, Briggs was beginning to find ideas and language to admire in the work of an optimistic radical. William Emerson, a neighbor on Staten Island had given a copy of his brother's essays to Briggs. Relying on his own perception, rather than on the stereotyped prejudices of New York journalists, Briggs reported that he saw new value in the work:

Briggs must have recognized that Emerson provided the philosophical backing for his own insistence on truth to nature in art. However, he gleefully mocked Emerson's [page 94:] “Compensation,” referring Lowell to the essay instead of paying him for contributions to the Broadway Journal; he left no doubt about which side of the Plotinus-Montaigne he preferred. Briggs's re-examination of Emerson provided him with a sense of the inter-connectedness of all knowledge; what he had discovered about art, relying on his own perceptions, could be extended into a coherent world-view. It was an example of the way his protracted self-education proceeded, with moments of great intensity that often elude the school-educated, like answering bonfires lighting up, in succession, a group of dark, encircling mountains. After an experience like this, Briggs wrote of the aims of his criticism: “I hope to be instrumental in leading people to respect individual integrity of opinion, rather than suffer their thoughts to be tinged by the complexion of the times,”(45)

Along with an account of his continuing education, Briggs sent Lowell a running description of his writing and editing plans. Thinking of his inability to equal his ambitions, he sighed, “What a happiness it must be to be able to throw off from the soup basin of one's imagination such bright bubbles as the Christmas Carol, which will touch a thousand hearts in one day, like an electric spark.”(46) The Haunted Merchant had shown how deeply Dickens’ popularity influenced Briggs; it accounted for [page 95:] that book's warm reception as well as for the blurring of its theme. But even as he admired Dickens, Briggs turned away from his example to return to first-person fictional autobiography.

In his accustomed self-depreciatory manner, Briggs described his new book to Lowell:

The intention was not so much better than the deed, as it was different! In simple truthful prose,” Working a Passage. or Life on a Liner describes the first sailing experience of another genteel young man whose family, like Briggs's and Franco's, had fallen on hard times. The book was conceived, as Melville's White-Jacket was, against the background of the Somers outrage, in which-an American ship's captain executed three sailors without giving them the right to civil trial. On November 26, 1842, the United States brig was en route from the African coast [page 96:] to New York harbor, when Captain Slidell MacKenzie seized three men he alleged had been planning a mutiny, and hanged them from the ship's mast. His action shocked his countrymen, to many of whom naval abuses had been a vague problem, and confirmed the worst fears of such ex-sailors as Briggs and Melville. The purpose of the books both men wrote was partly didactic; they hoped to influence Congress to pass on naval reform.

In Working a Passage, the self-reliant hero is identified only by Briggs's transposed initials. His parents’ genteel manners and pretensions to aristocracy fail B. C. P., as they did Franco. However, he earns a measure of self-respect, not through inherited wealth, but by “the industry that causes the sweat to start from the brow.”

The clash of democratic ideals and military methods in the navy is the major theme of Working a Passage. Briggs sets aside the opening humorous description of B. C. F.'s competence as a sailor in order to describe the conditions on board American naval vessels. As he indicated in his description of the Paixham affair, the exploitation of sailors should be linked to that of slaves: “The authority [page 97:] of a ship-master, like that of a slave-owner is too great not to be abused.”(49) The unchecked authority of military commanders had undermined sailors’ civil rights, depriving them of the ordinary recourse of American citizens. Moreover, military officers were not chosen by merit and service, but through political patronage and social standing. The sailors themselves, brutalized by their officers, became debased as their human dignity was repeatedly violated. Briggs, who apparently absorbed more Quaker pacifism than he admitted, concluded that the travesty of justice committed by Captain MacKenzie was the “inevitable effect of a system, miscalled of defense, which has reared in the midst of our boasted democracy, an absurd aristocracy, at variance with our beautiful system.” While the national goal of a democracy should be practice of the “arts of peace,” corrupt military aristocracy hastened war by advocating armed ships and fortifications.

Briggs attributed the Corruption of the American military to the “leaven of aristocracy which was left in our laws at the time of our dissolution with England.(50) Moreover, the English contagion of valuing wealth and social standing over natural merit continued to infect American society through the agency of “our daily reading.” Pirated British literature promoted undemocratic and irrelevant values, Briggs wrote, taking a thoroughly environmental approach to problems of good and evil. [page 98:]

In Working a Passage, Briggs treats rough sailors with compassion. Like Melville's Ishmael, who turns to the sea whenever his “hypos get ... an upper hand,” Briggs's “genuine sailor ... must have strong and powerful excitements such as only dallying with death produces.” Despite attraction to danger, however, sailors possess human feelings, and are not the “odd fish” wondered at by landlubbers. At the mercy of ignorant, quirky commanders, inadequately fed and sheltered, they are understandably demoralized; their condition illustrates “the inequalities of civilized life, where one portion of the people are privileged to live without work, and the other portion are doomed to work without living.” Beginning with his observation of destitution in Harry Franco's Five Points, Briggs Unfailingly commented on the condition of the deprived. Like Melville, he saw the shipboard world as a microcosm of society:

Briggs's directness and the clarity of his descriptions make the short volume memorable for the quality of its prose. At its best, his writing is realistic, thick with detail, as in the description of Liverpool, which reminds the reader of Melville's Ishmael, who set out on the Pequod to escape the “damp, drizzly November in [his] soul.” It was evidently a state of mind and weather familiar to both writers:

Throughout the short novel, food is used to distinguish “soft hands” from “hard hands.” While the captain and his guests eat a breakfast of mutton chops, fried ham, hot rolls, buckwheat cakes, omelets and coffee, the sailors survive on scrapings from mahogany-like salt beef. When [page 100:] Briggs gives us a glimpse of the Liverpool poor, we see them at Sunday dinner, serving their reminiscences for dessert. The continuing use of food as a symbol is brought to a skillful climax at the book's end.

In the next-to-last chapter,(53) the sailors’ spokesman, Jack Flasket, who resembles Harry Franco's handsome generous friend, Jerry Bowhorn, is revolted by the mishandling of the men's poor supper. He opposes the captain by tossing the filthy meat overboard; Flasket prefers hunger to being “fed as a dog.” The sailors grumble briefly at the loss of their supper, but they bear their privation in the manner of those accustomed to it, and with a sense of their own dignity. The book's final chapter describes a parallel incident, a loss sustained by the privileged class, and one borne with far less aplomb.

Officers aboard the liner, a few days before their arrival in port, decide to kill the green turtle they have been fattening, and banquet on turtle and champagne. Briggs indicates their anticipation and excitement; he describes at length the odors emanating from the galley, the jovial attitude of usually grim passengers, and the exaggerated politeness of the group as they walk into dinner. As the cook, properly impressed with his importance, carries the precious tureen across the deck, the fascinated sailor at the wheel (B. C. F. ) forgets his job. The ship lurches, the tureen slips, and the soup is lost, to the unbearable [page 101:] chagrin of the self-indulged privileged class.(54) In Working a Passage, Briggs's democrat may go hungry, but he wins a moral victory over the plutocrats of American society.

The two frustrated banquets, like the incidents of postponed satisfaction in Harry Franco, play a key part in Briggs's comedie humaine; descriptions of similar incidents recur in his later work. They are apt metaphors for the writer's own lack of a sense of fulfilling achievement. That this was partly due to a failure of his own ability is unquestionable; nonetheless, even writers of genius, like Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, found a meager repast awaiting them in the contemporary American literary world. They all suffered from lack of a supporting audience, from lack of rich and accessible material, from pseudo-critical backbiting of their contemporaries. In one of his later elaborations of this theme, Briggs described his vision of a great dinner for the literati; suddenly the dream vanished.(55) The first course, he ruefully reported, soupe a la concorde, had not yet been invented.

If it was impossible to establish harmony among the literati, Briggs found it possible, and indeed necessary, to maintain genuine friendship. Although Deborah Briggs's domestic nature suited her husband well in 1836, by the time his literary ambitions were aroused in the early [page 102:] 1840's, Briggs found his wife a less satisfying partner.(56) He turned to young Lowell, not only to compensate for lack of intellectual companionship, but to get as close as friendship would allow to one, who, unlike himself, seemed singled out from birth for literary distinction.

In the course of their friendship, Briggs learned that the poet's protected Cambridge childhood was not as idyllic as it seemed, but had a discordant element in the instability of his mother and the disgrace of a brother. This confidence, combined with Briggs's confession of the horror of his father's imprisonment, only served to link the two men more closely. If Briggs found Lowell attractive for his bright promise and his ardent, optimistic nature, Lowell responded to the older man's worldliness, and to his self-confident judgements. Moreover, in his need for reassurance and encouragement, the young poet was grateful to find a tender sentiment and profound admiration for himself under Briggs's brusque, ironic, self-reliant demeanor. The pattern of friendship with a gifted younger man was repeated in Briggs's life on a less intense scale with William Page, George William Curtis and others;(57) it had a fictional prototype in the sailor friendships between Harry Franco and Jerry Bowhorn, B. C. F. and Jack Plasket, in Briggs's novels, which were possibly based on the novelist's early experience of ship-board [page 103:] camaraderie.

Of all these friendships, though, the one with Lowell was by far the most important and lasting. In spite of the fact that Lowell thought little of Briggs's novels, and continued to engage in harsh disagreement with his friend about abolition, Briggs's loyalty to him was unwavering. After a particularly sharp exchange of views, he wrote a lyric invitation to his friend:

Briggs cast himself as Caliban to Lowell's Prospero, and though he maintained his individual viewpoint, he fell increasingly under the poet's spell, emotionally, Their friendship would endure despite conflicts, Briggs seemed to say, for it was not founded on political agreement, but on an affinity based on the needs of each man's personality. The fifteen-year gap in age, the differences in background and expectations — none of this was of more than passing significance, at least for the ten years after 1843. In a letter of September, 1844, Lowell expressed the quality of his feeling for Briggs this way:

However, Lowell's love for Briggs had shallower roots than his friend supposed, and another irritant, besides abolition, threatened to expose them. His letters to Lowell reveal that Briggs had become a strong partisan of New York; he exclaimed about Boston's provincialism, and reminded Lowell that “the hard-hearted villain who took our census did give a few more inhabitants to New York than to Boston.”(60) Sarcastically praising the taste of Bostonians, he criticised “your gem of a brick and wood Capitol, your granite gimcrack of an Exchange, and your unparalleled wooden entrance to your dandy metropolis.” While this attitude was partially a reflection of real cultural antagonism between the two cities, it was given added sharpness by the adopted New Yorker's need to place himself more on a level with Lowell, whose advantages were so much more concrete. Moreover, the two men were rivals for greater influence over William Page. Briggs repeatedly clashed with Lowell on the desirability of Page's residing in Boston, He emphasized the better possibilities of selling Page's painting in New York, [page 105:] writing, “it is a sad thing that he should bury himself in a provincial town.”(61)

Although he never admitted it openly, Briggs regarded Lowell's greater power over Page with resentment, since he felt himself a more qualified and useful adviser.(62) Briggs wrote frequent letters to Page, urging him to leave the stifling atmosphere of Boston. He used every kind of argument, from humor to outright, harsh advice, to persuade the artist: “Mount Auburn, I am willing to acknowledge, is a pleasant enough enclosure to lie in, but Boston is not the spot for a man like you to die in, even for the sake of being entombed in its dandy burying ground.”(63) Enumerating possible sitters for Page, he reported that New Yorkers had more money to spend on portraits; further, he warned that Page's absence would eclipse his reputation.

Neither did Briggs scruple to move Page by means of exciting nostalgia for the sights of his old home. Staten Island in winter was “just covered with a crust of snow that made the hills with their dwarf cedars look like bride cakes ornamented with sprigs of Wintergreen.”(64) Game was plentiful, festivities frequent, and the Briggses anticipated a joyous Christmas season amid the comfort of roaring hickory fires. Page must have longed to escape [page 106:] Boston's east wind, when he read his friend's letters:

Briggs filled his letters to Page with encouragement and admiration, along with detailed news of the art world. When he started publication of the Broadway Journal, he solicited a series of articles from Page on the use of color. The admiration of many contemporaries for Page was not wholly misplaced; the portraitist's place in American art history has suffered because many of his paintings no longer physically exist as they did when he first painted them. Page's relentless experimentation with pigments led to his use of unreliable colors; many paintings have faded beyond recognition. None of this was apparent to Briggs, however, and he wrote to Page, “I would rather be the painter of your worst portrait than the inventor of the steam engine. The Marquis of Worcester, it is said, was inspired by a tea-kettle, but there is evidence on your canvas that your inspiration comes from God.”(66)

For Briggs, portraiture was the “highest department of art”; in direct confrontation with a human model, he thought, the artist could record a truth unavailable to those who rely on imaginative reconstructions of the past. [page 107:] He was immensely satisfied with portraits Page painted of Lowell and himself. Briggs considered Page's painting of Lowell his finest; when it was harshly criticized by a reviewer, he was moved to express his standards of realism in painting:

Besides their agreement on the importance of accurately representing the everyday world in art, Page and Briggs had a personal characteristic in common that helped to support their friendship. Both men dared to do and think unconventionally and unprofitably. Although Briggs always urged Page to put himself in the way of commissions that would gain him material wealth, neither he nor the artist took such advice. Briggs's admired Page's independence of the world's judgement, and followed his [page 108:] example: “I like your idea of retreating behind the high fence of your personal ambition. It is the only way of living acceptably to your Maker. Men are too apt to forget their obligations to themselves.”(68)

One of their private pleasures was to think up satiric subjects for historical paintings, presumably to be sponsored by the government. Of course, the Congress of the United States repeatedly overlooked the unconventional Page, in favor of lesser painters who knew how to turn out what influential patrons expected. Briggs turned their political and artistic alienation to fun when he suggested that Page's old unfinished painting of Jephtha and his daughter be redone to create an “emblematical group of Brother Jonathan refusing to accept the boundary of ‘49”:

Page's work was an important influence on Briggs's realism; his gentle friendship was equally valuable as a safety-valve for the tension rising between Briggs add Lowell in late 1844. The outcome of the Presidential election had been a bitter disappointment to Briggs, who blamed the intransigence of the abolitionists. He expressed his shock to Page: [page 109:]

Unable to make Lowell understand him, Briggs turned to Page, who, as a native New Yorker, had little in common with Boston's radicals. The artist sympathized when Briggs railed at Lowell's friends, but Page also understood him when he mocked the abolitionists in a lighter mood; “I am very zealous in the abolition cause,” Briggs wrote, “ and I go and talk to Sidney Gay on the wickedness of smoking cigars as he thereby encourages slave labor.”(71)

In 1844, neither the Whig, Democratic nor abolitionist periodicals could subscribe fully to the spirit and reasoning behind the bitterness Briggs expressed to Page, Of course, he could find an outlet for his witty anti-romantic verse in the Knickerbocker, or print a mild satire on political parties in the Democratic Review; he would soon place his work in an extremely diverse group of periodicals, ranging [page 110:] from the American Whig Review, Boston Miscellany, New York Mirror and Cincinnati Gazette, to the National Anti-Slavery Standard. However, in none of these could Briggs freely express the serious political and artistic views that emerged from his talks with Lowell and Page. To find an appropriate forum for hid independent viewpoint, he would have to invest all of his resources in a journal of his own.

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