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By Root 8351 0

civic and self-improvement was the Friendly Club, creation of Elihu Hubbard Smith, a twenty-two-year-old, Yale-educated physician who came down to New York from Connecticut in 1793 to join the staff of the New York Hospital. Smith soon became acquainted with a handful of other ambitious men just embarking on what would prove to be distinguished careers. Among them were William Woolsey, future financier and corporate president; James Kent, soon to be one of America’s leading legal scholars and chancellor of New York State; and William Dunlap, who as playwright, theater manager, and drama critic would help establish the professional stage in the city.

In addition, Dr. Smith linked up with Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, Manhattan’s closest approximation to a native renaissance man. In 1797 Smith and Mitchill collaborated on launching the Medical Repository—the country’s first professional journal of medicine, and a source of original scientific essays, book reviews, and reports on scholarly work in Europe. The versatile, Hempstead-born Mitchill had attended King’s College, received his medical degree from Edinburgh in 1786, then served as surgeon general of the state militia. After the Revolution he became “Professor of Natural History, Chemistry, Agriculture, and other Arts Depending Thereon” at Columbia; cofounded, with his good friend Robert R. Livingston, the New York Society for Promoting Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures (1791); carried out the first geological survey of the Hudson River Valley; promoted sanitary reforms in the city; helped found the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1807; and served, as an ardent Jeffersonian Republican, three terms in the state assembly and thirteen years as U.S. congressman and senator.

Sometime near the end of 1793, Smith’s formidable coterie formed themselves into the Friendly Club and embarked on a program of intellectual improvement. Once a week for the next five years, members assembled in one another’s private lodgings or in taverns to discuss literature, science, philosophy, and politics. As inhabitants of what Smith liked to call the “republic of intellect,” they avidly explored the most progressive ideas of the age. They pored excitedly over William Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), an electrifying attack on monarchy and property. They rejected the “vulgar superstitions” of Christianity, according to James Kent, and cast their lot with deists.

One of the most popular subjects to occupy the all-male membership of the Friendly Club was the rights of women. The works of European feminists were readily available in the United States by the mid-nineties. Many Manhattanites thrilled to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), her generation’s most articulate statement of what women deserved and what they might become with equality. Only a year or two after its initial publication, pamphlets for and against Wollstonecraft were standard fare in New York bookshops. Newspaper and magazine editors openly competed for readers of “the fair sex” by reprinting excerpts from the Vindication and running lengthy exchanges between its critics and defenders. Articulate and well-informed women sent in essays to local newspapers and magazines, disputing offensive characterizations of female intelligence, attacking the sexual double standard, challenging legal and political discrimination, and questioning the institution of marriage. In 1796 Wollstonecraft’s partisans got their own periodical, the Lady and Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine of Literature and Polite Amusement, which promoted women’s rights with zeal, though not profitably enough to keep it from going out of business after a few issues.

In 1798 the Friendly Club persuaded Charles Brockden Brown to move up from Philadelphia. Described sometimes as the first American to make a profession of literature, Brown was a catch—an authentic man of letters, widely read as well as sociable, whose views owed much to both Wollstonecraft and Godwin. During his three-year residence in the city, besides