Text: James B. Reece, “George B. Cheever,” Poe's Poe and the New York Literati Story, dissertation, 1954 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 314, continued:]

George Barrell Cheever (1807-1890) was the son of a printer and. bookseller of Hallowell, Maine. A classmate of Hawthorne and Longfellow, he graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825. After attending a theological seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, he preached for two years at Newburyport and Boston and in 1833 became pastor of a Congregational church in Salem. Here began a series of public controversies in which he became involved. His attacks on Unitarian liberalism culminated in his “Inquire at Deacon Giles’ Distillery,” a satirical poem which appeared in a Salem newspaper in 1835. The poem, which contained a recognizable caricature of an actual Unitarian deacon, created a sensation; a mob destroyed the press of the newspaper, and Cheever was assaulted on the street. The deacon sued for libel, and Cheever was fined a thousand dollars and Imprisoned for a month.

After living in Europe for more than two years, Cheever served as pastor of a Presbyterian church in New York (1839-1844). [page 315:] In November, 1845, he married. Elizabeth Wetmore of New York. In 1846 his admirers organized the Church of the Puritans, which he headed until 1867. Cheever frequently attracted notice by his participation in disputes over public questions. He gave his support to capital punishment, taking the unpopular side of the issue in a series of debates with John L. O'Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review. He opposed an attempt by Catholic clergymen to abolish the reading of the Bible in the public schools. He proposed that trains be forbidden to run on Sundays. An abolitionist, he on several occasions spoke before Congress on the rights of Negroes. Following his retirement from the pulpit in 1867, he lived near Englewood, New Jersey.

Cheever wrote often for religious journals and edited the New York Evangelist (1845-1846). He compiled two anthologies, The American Common-Place Book of Prose ... (1828) and The American Common-Place Book of Poetry ... (1831). Early religious works include God's Hand in America (1841), Wanderings of a Pilgrim under the Shadow of Jungfrau and Wanderings of a Pilgrim under the Shadow of Mont Blanc, both of which appeared in 1845. In 1846 he published A. Defence of Capital Punishment .... Among his many later works are Lectures on the Life, Genius and Insanity of Cowper (1856), The Fire and Hammer of God's Word Against the Sin of Slavery (1858), and Faith, Doubt and Evidence (1881).(1) [page 316:]

Poe's few critical observations on Cheever are almost entirely unfavorable. In reviewing Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America in 1842, he remarked that Cheever's The American Common-Place Book of Poetry, not belying its title, was excessively commonplace.(2) He repeated the pun in his observations on Cheever in a “Marginalia” paper published in the Democratic Review for April, 1846,(3) adding that a judge of poetry must have poetic power or poetic sentiment but that Cheever, “very evidently, has neither.” Here also Poe, while admitting that the work is “well reasoned,” objected to A Defence of Capital Punishment on the ground that its premises were mere assumptions: “Authority is obstinately insisted upon, which nine-tenths of the thinking portion of the civilized world deny, either openly or at heart, to be any authority at all.” The unflattering “Literati” sketch(4) is based largely upon the “Marginalia” comments.

Evidence of personal acquaintance between Poe and Cheever is lacking.

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[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 315, running to the bottom of page 316:]