Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [331]
Toward the end of August 1808, Federalists from eight states gathered secretly in New York to hold what has been called the first national political convention in the country’s history. The delegates chose Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina for president and Rufus King of New York for vice-president (the same ticket Jefferson and Governor George Clinton had clobbered four years earlier). A caucus of congressional Republicans then nominated Jefferson’s Virginia neighbor, James Madison.
Madison won the election handily, a blow to the Federalists that was partly offset by the continuing good news from New York. In the 1809 elections, notwithstanding repeal of the embargo, the Federalists captured the Common Council, the state legislature, and the Council of Appointment and broke the Democratic-Republican hammerlock on the city’s congressional delegation. Their revival as a party was celebrated on July fourth of that year when the Washington Benevolents marched through town, two thousand strong in thirteen divisions, to the corner of Broadway and Reade Street, where the cornerstone was laid for the society’s new headquarters, Washington Hall.
DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER
Since the Revolution, writers and editors from all over the country had been trickling into New York City, drawn by its energy, its wealth, its clubs and theaters, its expanding book and newspaper markets, its contentious public life. Noah Webster arrived in the late eighties, Philip Freneau in the early nineties, Charles Brockden Brown later in the decade. Following them, soon after the turn of the century, came James Kirke Paulding, Samuel Woodworth, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and John Howard Payne, among others—including one southern newspaperman who explained in 1806 that he moved to New York in order to work “at the confluence of the greatest number of the streams of knowledge.”
None of these out-of-towners, however, held the promise of an easygoing, blueeyed, twenty-year-old native named Washington Irving. The fifth son of an Englishwoman and a Scots hardware merchant who had settled in the city before the Revolution, Washington was born the year the British evacuated New York and was named by his mother in honor of the general. The prosperous William Street household was Federalist and strictly Calvinist, and young Washington began a legal apprenticeship in 1802 with Josiah Hoffman, a prominent Federalist judge. Hoffman introduced him to the cream of city society and affectionately indulged his obvious passions for convivial company, for the theater, and for literature. Irving was still with Hoffman when he wrote the Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1802), a series of high-spirited if callow forays into dramatic criticism that initially appeared in the Morning Chronicle, edited by his older brother Peter. In 1804 his brothers William and Ebenezer, worried about Washington’s health, sent him off on a lengthy grand tour of Europe.
On his return to New York in 1806, Irving resumed his man-about-town life and emerged as ringleader of the Lads of Kilkenny, a loosely knit pack of literary-minded young blades out for a good time. They haunted the Park Theater, Dyde’s London Hotel (which stood next to the theater and advertised hospitality “in the true Old English Style”), and Thomas Hodgkinson’s Shakespeare Tavern, which opened in 1808 at the corner of Nassau and Fulton