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A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

The reputation of Clement Clarke Moore, of “The Night Before Christmas” fame, has been dimming with each passing holiday season. A rival claimant to authorship of the classic poem, first published anonymously 198 years ago this week as “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” has attracted increasing attention and support. Also attracting increasing attention is the belief that Moore, a lifelong New Yorker, enslaved four people, refused to free them until forced to by state law in 1827, and opposed the abolition of slavery in the South.

There may, however, be something in the stocking for Clement this Christmas. Not confirmation that he wrote the poem, but a debunking of the story that has been told about his ownership of slaves.

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I devoted most of my free time this fall and too many of my working hours to examining the authorship of “The Night Before Christmas” and Moore’s relationship to slavery. I have a few things to say about the former. I have a lot to say about the latter.

Before I get into it, let me introduce you to Clement Clarke Moore. If it weren’t for his association with one of the best-known poems in the English language, he would likely be remembered (if he were remembered much at all) as father of the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea. It was his maternal grandfather, a British Army officer, who bought some farmland along the Hudson River in 1750 and named the house he built there Chelsea, after the army hospital in that London neighborhood. But it was Clement who supplemented his inherited holdings to fit the city-imposed street grid and steered their development starting in the 1830s into lovely blocks of townhouses, many of which survive.

Moore was also a scholar, a professor of Greek and Hebrew at New York’s Episcopal theological seminary — located still on the Chelsea block he donated to it — and for 44 years a trustee of his alma mater, Columbia College, which changed its name late in his tenure to Columbia University. His father, who served simultaneously as president of Columbia and as Episcopal bishop of New York, is best known as the priest who at first refused last rites to the dying Alexander Hamilton in 1804 because Hamilton had incurred his wounds in a “barbarous” duel with Aaron Burr, then relented. Clement had connections on the other side of the duel too: Theodosia Burr, Aaron’s daughter and subject of the song “Dear Theodosia” from the musical “Hamilton,” was his second cousin (that is, their maternal grandmothers were siblings).

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

In short, Clement Clarke Moore was a member of New York’s elite in interesting times. He was born in British-occupied Manhattan during the Revolutionary War in 1779, and died at his summer place in Newport, Rhode Island, midway through the Civil War in 1863. During the first half of Moore’s life, slavery went from widespread to nonexistent in New York, with the city’s elite helping drive the change. During the second half, freed Black people were pushed to the periphery of city life and subjected to increasing harassment and outright violence, with those in Moore’s circle barely lifting a finger.

The lens that Clement Moore and his family provide onto that larger story of slavery and race relations in New York is the main subject of this essay. An important subtheme is that something is wrong on the internet. Having one’s views and actions misrepresented is the fate of nearly everyone remembered by posterity, but there is a more-than-typical amount of nonsense floating around about Moore. A careless biographer is one explanation. The authorship dispute is another.

Moore, who wrote poems for amusement and occasional publication throughout his life, laid claim to “A Visit From St. Nicholas” in 1837, 14 years after its first appearance in the upstate Troy Sentinel newspaper. His authorship was universally accepted during his lifetime. Around the time of Moore’s death in 1863, though, some descendants of Henry Livingston Jr., a Revolutionary War veteran, farmer and local official from Poughkeepsie who died in 1828, began arguing that their forebear had written the poem. They could offer no hard evidence to back this up, just family lore (which included a story about some hard evidence going up in flames in a Wisconsin house fire) and the contrast between Livingston’s jaunty literary oeuvre and Moore’s more ponderous one.

For more than a century these efforts gained only modest traction outside Poughkeepsie, a city on the Hudson River about midway between New York and Troy. Then came the rise of computer-aided literary scholarship that assigns authorship based on patterns of language usage. Two English professors — one based at Poughkeepsie’s Vassar College — have now pored over the word choices of Livingston and Moore and published separate books in which they conclude that Livingston was the likelier author of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.”

The reliability of such methods remains far from assured, and they run up against the inconvenient truth that Moore said he wrote the poem. Making the case for Livingston thus requires asserting that Moore was a liar. The pro-Livingston account that has gotten the most attention, the final chapter of Vassar professor Don Foster’s 2000 book “Author Unknown,” goes well beyond that to paint Moore as a dull, sneaky, intolerant, kid-hating reactionary — as well as, of course, an enslaver and champion of slavery.

Most of this is bunk. After all the time I’ve spent with him, Clement Clarke Moore remains something of a puzzle to me, and I would not go so far as to assert that he was incapable of telling a lie. But he was a complex, conflicted human being living in complicated times, kind of like most of us, and rescuing him from the fog of misinformation and caricature became a sort of Christmas mitzvah for me.

Rebutting Jefferson’s racism

My quest had its beginnings about a year ago when a friend at St. Michael’s, an Episcopal church on West 99th Street in Manhattan where I am a member, wrote (and performed for the congregation via Zoom) a short Christmas play about Clement Clarke Moore that highlighted his retrograde racial views.

Two Christmases ago, I wrote a Bloomberg Opinion column about the transformation of skinny Greek bishop St. Nicholas into jolly, tubby Santa Claus and of how Christmas went from being a raucous public celebration to a family holiday of gift-giving. In the account introduced by Cornell University English scholar Charles W. Jones in his 1954 article “Knickerbocker Santa Claus” and elaborated by University of Massachusetts at Amherst historian Stephen Nissenbaum in his Pulitzer Prize-finalist 1996 book, “The Battle for Christmas,” these changes played out largely in New York in the early 1800s, with writer Washington Irving and civic leader John Pintard in leading roles and Moore and “A Visit From St. Nicholas” providing the capstone. Also, I give occasional historical tours of St. Michael’s, which was consecrated as a small country church in 1807 by none other than Clement’s father, Bishop Benjamin Moore (no relation to the paint guy, an Irish immigrant who founded his business in Brooklyn in 1883).

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

So I knew a little about the Moore family, and the depiction in my friend’s play puzzled me. I did the thing that puzzled people often do and Googled “Clement Clarke Moore slavery.” Before long I landed on a 2006 essay in the New York Times Book Review that pointed me to Moore’s 1804 critique of Thomas Jefferson’s famous “Notes on Virginia.”

At least, we’re pretty sure it was Moore’s: The pamphlet, like so many writings from the era, was published anonymously. It was attributed to Moore by 19th-century bibliographer Joseph Sabin, and to my knowledge the authorship has never been disputed. It is chiefly a critique of Jefferson’s theories of evolution, which even in that pre-Charles Darwin era had its expositors. Moore’s main complaints are that Jefferson’s ideas (1) contradict the Bible and (2) mostly amount to parroting Voltaire, the Comte de Buffon and other French philosophes. When he arrives at Jefferson’s contention that Black people are less evolved than White people, the criticisms sharpen.

Jefferson had written of Black people’s “own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by the preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan [sic] for the black women over those of his own species.” (Yes, the guy behind “all men are created equal” wrote that.) Moore wonders how Jefferson could possibly know of orangutans’ preferences, then mockingly answers, “No doubt, from some French traveller.” He continues, “If it be true that the negroes entertain so great an affection for us, the swarms of West-Indian mulattos testify that the regard is mutual.”

Moore then offers several stories to rebut Jefferson’s contention that Black people are inferior in virtue or dignity to White people, and takes on Jefferson’s (inaccurate even then) dig that they have produced “no poetry.”

One would have thought that modern philosophy herself could not have the face to declare that the wretch who is driven out to labour at the dawn of day, and who toils until evening with the whip flourishing over his head, ought to be a poet.

There’s no outright call for emancipation of slaves in the essay, but the arguments are a response to Jefferson’s claim that Black people’s inferiority made emancipation impractical. They certainly don’t sound like the words of a gung-ho supporter of the institution of slavery.

A biographer gets it wrong

So why do people think Moore was? Because his biographer, Samuel White Patterson, said so in 1956.

Patterson’s “The Poet of Christmas Eve: A Life of Clement Clarke Moore” opens with an “imaginative look” at what might have transpired on Christmas Eve in Moore’s Chelsea mansion in 1822 when he supposedly first recited his famous poem. “Every one was on his best behavior,” Patterson writes. “Thomas and Charles, slaves, had brought in the logs for the large fireplace, and Ann or Hester, slaves, had prepared the kitchen for the turkey.” In this telling the “kindly Moores” share the feast with their slaves, but elsewhere in the book Patterson asserts that Moore did not free them until the state forced him in 1827. He cites an episode in 1835, when the priest at the Chelsea church where Moore was a lay leader and major benefactor was forced to resign after an anti-slavery sermon, as further evidence that Moore had “no qualms of conscience” over slavery.

It is on this basis that all subsequent discussion of Moore’s slaveholding and opposition to emancipation rests. Nissenbaum cites it in his “Battle for Christmas.” Wikipedia cites it as the reference for its assertion (at the time of this writing) that “Moore owned several slaves during his lifetime, as was customary of many in his class. He opposed the abolition of slavery.” Vassar’s Foster doesn’t cite it for his unreferenced claim that Moore “unrepentantly defends human slavery as an institution ordained by God for the health and prosperity of American society,” but I haven’t been able to figure out where else he might have gotten that impression.

Patterson notes that his information about the Moores’ slaves and their names comes from the will of Clement Moore’s maternal grandmother, Mary Stillwell Clarke, who died in 1802. In that will, which you can examine as well if you register with the free Family Search genealogy site, Mary Clarke bequeathed to Benjamin and Charity Moore the house at what is now the south side of 23rd Street just west of Ninth Avenue that her late husband had dubbed Chelsea, much of the surrounding land, and “all my Slaves to wit Thomas and Ann his wife Charles and Hester.” The one other piece of documentary evidence he cites is an 1809 deed in which Clement’s parents conveyed all their property to him. I found a document dated 1813 that does this, although there is no mention of slaves in it.

An English professor at New York’s Hunter College who grew up in Chelsea and attended St. Peter’s, the Episcopal church there that Clement Moore helped found, Patterson had been looking into Moore’s past since the early 1930s, when he gave a couple of sermons about him at the church. He was not a historian, and he didn’t use footnotes, but he spent a fair amount of time in archives, and the references he makes to specific documents tend to check out. Because pandemic closures have left some archives unavailable and others with a backlog of researchers waiting for appointments, and because I haven’t had infinite time to work on this, I rely on some of these representations.

But Patterson also had a habit of making surmises that don’t check out. In the biography, he locates the fateful meeting of Clement Moore and opera legend Lorenzo Da Ponte at a bookstore founded after Da Ponte’s death. He says Clement Moore “never became a member of the high-toned Union Club,” while the club’s centennial history, published in 1936, lists him as an original member. His descriptions of where the Moores lived at various points from the 1810s through 1830s are mostly contradicted by city directories, newspaper notices, property records and letters.

In the case of Ann, Hester, Charles and Thomas, Patterson surmised that all four remained enslaved by the Moores until 1827. This most definitely does not check out. Here’s what I found:

  • Benjamin and Charity Moore manumitted, or freed, 32-year-old Charles Smith on July 30, 1803. (Freed slaves in New York seldom took on their former owners’ surnames, usually opting for something generically Anglo-Saxon.) This is recorded in Manumission Society records on file at the New York Historical Society that I was not able to examine myself but a summary of which was published in the (paywalled, sorry) July 1978 issue of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. That covers Charles.
  • On an 1810 U.S. Census form (again, behind the Family Search registration wall, as are most of the Census and property records I will link to), Benjamin Moore of the Third Ward — which included the block of Vesey Street between Broadway and Church where the Moores lived at the time — is listed as owning two male slaves, and having no other Black household members. That excludes Ann and Hester.
  • New York City records then show Benjamin Moore manumitting Benjamin B. Dunbar in October 1811 and John Betson in November 1813. More precisely, they show Clement C. Moore attesting to Mayor DeWitt Clinton on Dunbar’s and Betson’s behalf that his father had done so. Benjamin Moore had been incapacitated since suffering a stroke in early 1811, and his only child had taken over management of the family’s affairs. This seemingly knocks Thomas out of the picture, and also seemingly leaves the Moore household slaveless as of the end of 1813.
  • Benjamin Moore died in 1816. By then the Moores had moved out of the rectory on Vesey Street to the Chelsea estate, which they had used previously as a summer retreat, and Clement had gotten married, to Catherine “Eliza” Taylor. In the 1820 U.S. Census, his first as a head of household, “Clem’t Clark [sic] Moore” of the city’s Ninth Ward, which at the time covered the whole island north of 14th Street, is listed as sharing his dwelling with five White males, eight White females, two “foreigners not naturalized” and two “free colored females.” Seven of those were family members — his wife, four children and his mother — meaning he had a live-in household staff of 11! But according to the Census taker, no slaves.
A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

Looking up old Census forms and wills was a lot more work in 1956 than it is now, when all it takes is a few keystrokes at a genealogy website (I mostly used the Mormon church’s Family Search, although eventually I also sprang for a membership in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society). Other resources at my disposal and not Patterson’s included countless old books digitized by Google, the Internet Archive and Hathi Trust, articles in historical journals on JSTOR, city directories scanned and placed online by the New York Public Library, searchable online newspaper databases, the growing trove of Manumission Society records posted online by the New-York Historical Society, the Northeast Slavery Reference Index hosted by the City University of New York, and the Columbia University & Slavery Project, in which students under the supervision of Eric Foner and other historians have been digging into the past behavior of families with deep Columbia connections such as the Moores.

The evidence I found does not prove that Clement Clarke Moore never owned a slave. He could have acquired slaves after 1820, and there’s a chance that the two “free” Black women reported as being part of his household in that year’s Census weren’t entirely free to go.

Also, I haven’t been able to figure out what happened to three of the four enslaved people Clement’s parents inherited. It does seem odd that the Moores would have freed Charles Smith and not Ann, Hester and Thomas. One possibility is that they were older than he, and the law discouraged freeing slaves over 45 for fear they would end up wards of the state. Another has to do with the details of Smith’s manumission record, which according to the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record article is an 1812 restatement of an 1803 transaction.

In 1811 the state of New York enacted a law requiring Black people to prove that they weren’t slaves in order to vote, so Smith may have needed the document to go to the polls. There were property requirements to vote, but in the 1811/1812 city directory there’s a Charles Smith listed as an oysterman, a trade welcoming to Black people, with a place on Wall Street, so you never know. Ann and Hester couldn’t vote in any case, and Thomas may not have met the property threshold, giving them less reason to seek reaffirmation of their status.

They might also have been sold, or kidnapped, or run away. Or died, something people — especially Black people — did at alarming rates in unsanitary, disease-ridden early-19th-century New York City, with mortality especially high during the yellow fever epidemics of 1803 and 1805. There’s a list of epidemic victims in the Nov. 5, 1803, Commercial Advertiser newspaper that has 21 Thomases, five Anns and one Hester on it. None of them is labeled as Black, though, while some of the other listed victims are.

Black New Yorkers often died in those days without leaving a trace in the historical record. The city’s main Black cemetery in the 1700s was covered over with dirt and platted for development at the end of the century, only to be rediscovered during excavation for a new federal office building in 1991.

The discovery of the burial ground more or less coincided with the beginning of a wave of new research into slavery in New York, its gradual abolition, and the experiences of Black New Yorkers during and after. University of Sydney historian Shane White’s “Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810” came out in 1991, and has been followed by an ever-growing stack of books and articles on the topic. They represent another resource not at Samuel Patterson’s disposal in 1956, and while they don’t answer all the questions about Clement Clarke Moore’s relationship to slavery, they do allow for better-informed conjectures.

Slavery’s beginning and end in New York

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

Slavery had been part of New York City life from its European beginnings, with Africans enslaved by the Dutch West India Company building much of Nieuw Amsterdam’s infrastructure. At first the arrangements bore some resemblance to indentured servitude, with slaves owning property and in a few cases earning their way to freedom. But under British rule, slavery hardened into a hereditary condition, with laws that made it hard for owners to free slaves even if they wanted to. Before the Revolution, in 1771, 14% of the residents of New York County (aka Manhattan, at the time a mostly rural island with a small city at the southern tip) were Black. It isn’t recorded how many were enslaved, but the overwhelming majority were.

War brought changes, with both sides offering freedom to the slaves of their opponents and the Redcoats doing the most to deliver. As they left New York in 1783, the British transported 3,000 Black Americans to freedom in Nova Scotia. Most had come to occupied New York from elsewhere, but the number of Black Manhattan residents fell slightly between 1771 and the first U.S. Census in 1790. Black people’s share of the island’s population slipped to just over 10%, of whom about a third were free.

The 2,180 enslaved people who according to the Census lived in New York City proper in 1790 still represented the second-largest total for any U.S. city after Charleston, South Carolina, and New York had by far the largest slave population of any Northern state. Agricultural areas near the city had the highest concentrations of slaves. In Kings County (Brooklyn), slaves made up 32% of the population, a higher percentage than in North Carolina. Slaves were 24% of the population in Manhattan north of the city proper, 20% in Richmond County (Staten Island), 18% in New Jersey’s Bergen County (which included most of what is now Hudson County) and 14% in Queens County. Some communities along the Hudson River between New York and Albany had double-digit slave percentages too, but the counties didn’t because they also encompassed low-slavery regions away from the river.

Perhaps understandably, then, New York was slower to end slavery than most other Northern states. Newly created Vermont came first, abolishing slavery outright in 1777. Pennsylvania followed in 1780 with a gradual abolition law that became the model, with children born into slavery after the law’s passage to be freed at the ripe age of 28.

The delegates at the New York state constitutional convention in 1777 voted to endorse such an approach, but they failed to include the endorsement in the actual constitution. In 1785 the state legislature approved gradual abolition, but the bill was vetoed by the three members of the state’s Council of Revision because it denied political rights to freed Black people. After that came several years of backsliding, including the ratification of a U.S. Constitution that entrenched slavery in the South. The New York Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery finally passed in 1799, guaranteeing freedom to the children of slaves born on or after July 4 of that year, albeit not until age 25 for women and 28 for men.

Crucial to the law’s passage was a 1796 reapportionment and expansion of the state legislature that gave more clout to western New York, which even in those pre-Erie Canal days was beginning to fill with settlers, many from New England, hardly any of whom owned slaves. The opposition came mainly from farmers of Dutch descent in the Hudson River Valley and what later became the outer boroughs of New York City. “The slaveholders at that time were chiefly Dutch,” Erastus Root, a Connecticut-born state lawmaker representing a district west of the Catskills, recalled decades later. “They raved and swore by dunder and blixen that we were robbing them of their property. We told them they had none, and could hold none in human flesh, while yet alive, and we passed the law.”

Enslavers against slavery

Oddly enough, the governor who happily signed the legislation into law held human flesh as property at the time and kept doing so for years afterward. John Jay, a wealthy lawyer with residences in both New York City and Westchester County who had quit his job as first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to take over in Albany, reported owning five slaves in the 1790 Census, five in 1800 and one in 1810.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

Jay said he saw slavery as incompatible with the ideals of the Revolution. “Till America comes into this measure, her prayers to Heaven for liberty will be impious,” he wrote after Pennsylvania passed its gradual abolition law in 1780. In 1785 he became the first president of New York’s Society for the Manumission of Slaves and the Protection of Such of Them as Have Been or May Be Liberated (I’ve adjusted the haphazard capitalization of the original to comply with modern style dictates).

How did Jay reconcile this with slave ownership? One argument was that New York’s version of slavery wasn’t so bad. A 1786 Manumission Society petition, with Jay’s the first signature under it, urged a ban on the exportation of slaves from New York to the Caribbean and Southern states in part because “it is well known that the condition of slaves in this state is far more tolerable and easy” than in those places. Another was that slaves shouldn’t be freed without some preparation. “I purchase slaves and manumit them at proper ages and when their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable retribution,” Jay wrote.

This notion of “reasonable retribution” was key. Consider the advertisement that a prominent Poughkeepsie lawyer placed in a local newspaper in 1804, offering $10 for the capture of a 19-year-old slave named Sam who had run away. “This dereliction is most base,” the slave owner wrote, “because he was bought by me, at his own solicitation, at 225 dollars price, on an express contract to work out his freedom, as he knew I was principled against slavery and had manumitted several.”

The name at the bottom of the ad: Gilbert Livingston, older brother of would-be “Night Before Christmas” poet Henry Livingston Jr. The various branches of the Livingston family owned 170 slaves as of the 1790 Census, according to the Columbia University & Slavery Project. Henry Livingston Sr. of Poughkeepsie accounted for four, Gilbert one and Henry Jr. one. Yet Gilbert probably really was “principled against slavery.” Henry Jr., who did not own slaves in any Census after 1790, seems to have been too.

As wealthy property owners, they also happened to believe that, as the author of Federalist Paper No. 54 wrote in 1788, “Government is instituted no less for protection of the property, than of the persons of individuals.” Those were most likely James Madison’s words, although they have also been attributed over the years to Jay and to Alexander Hamilton, who succeeded Jay as president of the New York Manumission Society and, as has recently been discovered, also owned slaves. Holding other human beings as property is wrong, the reasoning went, but so is taking property without compensation.

To modern eyes this comes across as hypocritical and self-serving, not to mention logically inconsistent. (Why didn’t slaves also merit compensation for having their labor stolen from them?) It still seems preferable, and deserving of different treatment by posterity, to arguing that holding other human beings as property is right, as Southern enslavers and their Northern apologists increasingly did in the decades that followed, or acknowledging that it is wrong and then not doing much about it, as Founding Fathers Jefferson, Madison and George Washington did. The anti-slavery activists among New York’s elite were deeply conflicted, and they couldn’t get abolition legislation passed without help from non-elite, non-enslaving upstaters. But they participated in a movement that ultimately took away their property.

It wasn’t until 1817 that the New York State Legislature abolished slavery outright, and even then the ban didn’t take effect for 10 more years. But in New York City, slavery went into rapid decline long before then. The percentage of Black residents who were enslaved fell from 67% in 1790 to 43% in 1800 to 16% in 1810 to 5% in 1820. Of the 516 people still enslaved in the city in 1820, three-quarters were 25 and younger, meaning they were due to be freed soon.

By ending hereditary slavery, the 1799 law made slavery itself hard to maintain. Slaves again became something like indentured servants, albeit on far worse terms than most White indentured servants in North America ever endured. Some enslavers tried to escape this new reality by exporting slaves to the South or the Caribbean in violation of New York law, and the minutes of Manumission Society meetings tell of effort after effort to prevent this. But most seem to have negotiated deals that guaranteed freedom in exchange for a few more years of service.

The most famous of these negotiations took place in Ulster County, across the Hudson from Poughkeepsie. Isabella Baumfree made a deal to be freed in 1826, a year before state law required it. When her enslaver reneged, she ran away, sued for custody of her still-enslaved son and won, then reinvented herself as the great anti-slavery crusader Sojourner Truth.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

In New York City, where enslaved people could call on legal help from the Manumission Society, the deals were made earlier and seem to have been mostly adhered to. Historian Shane White conjectured that some who made these arrangements or were guaranteed eventual freedom in the 1799 legislation were counted as free by Census takers, which is why I’ve cautioned that the two “free” Black women in Clement Clarke Moore’s household in 1820 might not have been entirely free. But my surmise — and we all know the limitations of those — is that they were paid help. Slavery had been omnipresent in New York City at the beginning of the century, but by the 1820s owning slaves there represented something of a political statement. It was a statement that Clement Moore was unlikely to have wanted to make.

Where the Moores fit in

Clement Clarke Moore was born at his grandmother’s Chelsea estate in 1779, three years into the British occupation of New York City. That his parents had stayed in Manhattan after the British took over is not necessarily evidence of strong pro-Tory sympathies. Benjamin Moore had grown up in the farming community of Newtown, Queens — now the neighborhood of Elmhurst — and accounts of Newtown during the Revolution suggest that at least some of the Moores there favored independence. Charity Clarke, whom Benjamin was to marry in 1778, wrote a series of letters to a London cousin before the conflict that are frequently cited for their pro-independence sentiment.

As a young Church of England priest starting his career at New York’s Trinity Church, Moore didn’t have a lot of options. The only Anglican priest in New York to support the Revolution openly, Samuel Provoost, was independently wealthy, rode out the conflict on a Hudson Valley farm next door to some Livingstons, and even then struggled to get by. Charity was an unmarried woman living with her recently widowed mother, who had been advised by an American officer early in the conflict to “stick to her property.”

So they stayed. Benjamin kept working at Trinity, and was rewarded with a side gig as interim president of his alma mater King’s College, later renamed Columbia, although that didn’t amount to much as it was closed for the duration of the war. The rector (pastor) of Trinity was an Englishman and outspoken opponent of the Revolution whom state authorities condemned to death in absentia late in the war. After the British surrender at Yorktown, he got on one of the first boats back to England, and Benjamin Moore was quickly appointed in his place.

There’s a possibly apocryphal story of Alexander Hamilton encountering Moore in the street soon after returning to New York, taking him by the arm and escorting him “through the most public places, and the Coffee-house in Wall Street,” to make the point that there were no hard feelings. But as others who had fought for independence returned to the city and to their pews at Trinity, a committee of them informed Benjamin Moore in February 1784 that he would have to step back in favor of Provoost. After some protestation, he agreed to stay on as assistant rector. The Church of England in the U.S. reconstituted itself as the Episcopal Church; Provoost became its first bishop of New York, while remaining rector of Trinity; and Moore worked at his side for the next 17 years, succeeding him as rector in 1800 and bishop in 1801. The man was a conciliator and a diplomat, and he was patient.

He was also an anti-slavery activist, for a little while at least. Benjamin Moore had grown up in a slave-owning household in Newtown, with his father reporting owning one slave in a 1755 census and eldest brother Jacob owning four in 1790. He spent his summers being served by his mother-in-law’s slaves in Chelsea. That he owned no slaves in 1790 or 1800 may say more about the modest income of an assistant rector of Trinity Church than his views on slavery. But he joined the Manumission Society — whose president, John Jay, was a lay leader at Trinity — soon after its founding, and his was one of the first signatures under its 1786 petition against slave exportation. Manumission Society minutes show that in 1787 he was appointed to committees to craft another anti-exportation petition and to raise money for the African Free School the society was founding.

After that, though, his name disappears from the minutes. His only other public statement on slavery seems to have been a July 1798 letter to the editor of the New York Advertiser first unearthed by Shane White. New York merchant Monson Hayt had taken out an ad in the paper offering for sale a “negro woman with her male child” who had been worth $500 “but from the officiousness of the Rev. Mr. Benjamin Moore will now be sold for one third that amount.” The next day a letter from Moore explained: He had married a Black couple, John Kane and Mary Cooly, whom he had thought were both free. Now he was apologizing to Hayt for having “inadvertently been the occasion of disturbing his quiet, and, perhaps, of injuring the value of his property.”

This was a quandary Anglican clerics had faced since their arrival in New York. Most taught that all people were equal in the Lord’s eyes, and equally entitled to the church’s sacraments. But their dependence on wealthy locals to pay the bills meant they had to work around those wealthy locals’ property rights. After a Trinity member started offering religious instruction to slaves with the church’s support in 1704, he felt compelled to get a law passed in 1706 assuring slave owners that, no, baptism didn’t make slaves free. Perhaps Moore got word in 1787 that some at Trinity didn’t want him making noise about slavery.

Or maybe he made the decision on his own — not making noise seems to have been something of a specialty for him. He got the job of president of Columbia, which had begun as a Trinity offshoot but was officially nonsectarian, as a compromise between the Episcopal members of the board of trustees and the rest. Moore was as Episcopal as could be, but also unlikely to impose his views on anybody. His insistence that he wouldn’t have time for more than ceremonial duties, since he planned to stay on as bishop and rector, may have sealed the deal.

Benjamin Moore was elected Columbia’s president on the last day of 1801. He had become Trinity’s rector in December 1800, moving the family from a house owned by Charity’s mother at 180 Broadway to the rectory on Vesey Street, and bishop in September 1801. His mother-in-law died in July 1802, leaving a major inheritance. In less than two years Moore’s financial and social position had been transformed, and slaves who had been laboring on the Chelsea farm may not have been the kind of household help that a bishop and college president was looking for. At least, that’s the simplest explanation I can offer for how the Moores ended up owning slaves for the first time in the 1810 Census, and those weren’t the same slaves they inherited in 1802.

As for why Benjamin Dunbar and John Betson were freed in 1811 and 1813, one possible explanation is that, having stepped back from his duties after his stroke, Moore simply no longer needed their services. Another is that they had been engaged on term-limited contracts to begin with, or that Clement, now that he was calling the shots, insisted on freeing them. In any case, manumitting slaves is something lots of people in the Moores’ circle were doing at that time. The Manumission Society finally adopted a rule in 1809 barring members from owning slaves, and at least according to the (far from complete) records published in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record over several issues from 1977 to 1979, the period that followed was Peak Manumission in New York. By 1820 even John Jay had gotten out of the enslavement racket.

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Young Clement’s adventures

Where did young Clement Clarke Moore stand on slavery and race relations? His name was on the manumission documents for Dunbar and Betson. His critique of Thomas Jefferson’s racism came out in 1804. In a letter to his mother in 1796, he wrote of attending a service at Philadelphia’s African Church, now the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, the country’s first Black Episcopal congregation.

That’s all I’ve been able to find, and it’s not much. The visit to the African Church was to see one of his father’s Trinity colleagues preach, and his strong words on the intrinsic equality of Black and White people in 1804 were not accompanied by calls to action. I have come across no evidence that he ever joined the Manumission Society or any other anti-slavery organization.

Clement also didn’t join the Episcopal priesthood, which seems to have been widely expected of him. “Few if any young men of his age in this Country, are so well qualified to adorn the Profession,” a Pennsylvania priest wrote in 1803, after Clement had graduated first in his class at Columbia in 1798 and received a master’s degree in 1801.

Instead, he embarked on a program of travel, scholarly pursuits and non-scholarly writing enabled by his newfound wealth. It wasn’t only that he would eventually inherit all the things his parents did in 1802, plus some Chelsea-adjacent acres they had acquired earlier. Before she died, his grandmother had given him and his mother the family’s former home at 180 Broadway, which they appear to have rented out for commercial use. She also willed him 1,200 upstate acres near Saratoga and the rights to some Chelsea-adjacent lands inherited by a couple of his cousins if they failed to produce legitimate heirs.

Clement’s travels, which we know of thanks to some surviving letters to his mother that stand out for their excellent penmanship, included visits to Shaker villages and “meeting-house” sects in New England and upstate New York. He paid his first visit to Washington in 1812, where he listened to speeches in Congress and met President James Madison at the White House. While in New York he worked on deepening his already impressive knowledge of ancient languages, publishing a massive two-volume “Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language” in 1809.

He also wrote poems, such as the one published in the New York Evening Post at the end of the 1805 yellow fever epidemic (“Dread pestilence hath now fled far away;/And life and health, once more around us play”). There was a critique of the pointlessness of most modern poetry, published as the introduction to a friend’s 1806 translation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. There were more political pamphlets: an 1806 treatise on political economy and an 1813 refutation of the arguments for U.S. entry into the War of 1812.

Biographer Patterson attributed to Moore the 1811 translation of a French agronomist’s “Complete treatise on merinos and other sheep,” even though it has the author’s name on the title page and the translator’s on the last page. He did so because there’s a copy of the book at the New-York Historical Society that also has “by Clement C. Moore A.M.” handwritten on the title page. Don Foster wielded this as a smoking gun in his account: “Professor Moore does not just recycle a few borrowed phrases — he lays claim to an entire book that was the work of another man.” This seems nonsensical on its face, given that the author’s and translator’s names are in the book. But also, as manuscript dealer and authentication expert Seth Kaller pointed out not long afterward, the handwriting on the “by Clement C. Moore A.M.” looks nothing like Moore’s.

Still, Moore did donate the book to his friend John Pintard in 1813 for the collection of the Historical Society that Pintard had co-founded, and someone saw fit to write his name in it. Why? It was printed by the Economical School, founded in New York in 1808 by the French Baron and Baroness Hyde de Neuville to educate the children of indigent foreigners. The baron and baroness also raised merino sheep on a farm in New Jersey (there was a “merino mania” going on) and, as I discovered while looking for newspaper mentions of Clement Moore, he was on the Economical School’s board of trustees. Perhaps he had a role in shepherding the treatise through publication, or in cleaning up the translation.

One thing clear from the letters and pamphlets Moore did write is that he was a committed Federalist — the political party of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and John Adams — and a foe of most things Jeffersonian and Madisonian. Another is that he could be quick to judgment and dismissive of others’ views. In his account of the Shakers he praises their “gardens, barns and manufactories” while ridiculing their theology. After conversing with Madison his verdict is: “He is a little old dried up politician.”

In person, Moore compensated for these know-it-all tendencies with charm and goodwill. One day in 1807, while perusing the wares at the Riley & Co. bookstore on Broadway, he overheard a man asking the proprietor if he had any books in Italian. Clement cracked that he could count the great Italian writers on one hand, and the man took offense. He was Lorenzo Da Ponte, the former priest from Venice who had written the librettos for Mozart’s operas “Le nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi fan tutte” but had fallen on hard times in the U.S., most recently running a grocery store in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The two struck up a conversation, and before long Clement and his father had arranged a new career for Da Ponte as an Italian tutor to wealthy New Yorkers. Later Da Ponte became an instructor at Columbia and introduced Italian opera to New York, frequently aided and advised by the man he described in his memoirs as “my guardian angel.”

The last of Clement Moore’s anonymous pamphlets, and probably the most famous piece of writing attributed to him other than “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” came out in 1818. Titled “A Plain statement, addressed to the proprietors of real estate, in the city and county of New-York,” it gets extended treatment in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s modern classic “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.”

Burrows and Wallace depict it as an anti-development screed, but it isn’t really that. The city had begun laying down the street grid decided on by a commission in 1811, and Moore was objecting to (1) its practice of requiring landowners to pay a big part of street construction costs upfront and (2) the flat sameness of the grid plan. “These are men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome,” he complained, pointing out that even John Randel, creator of the famous 1817 map that defined the grid, warned that the plan posed drainage risks to Chelsea. “Where nature has provided a water-course, let it not be destroyed without the most absolute necessity,” advised Moore. His arguments hold up reasonably well, given that (1) financing of street construction soon shifted to the model he endorsed, in which property owners paid after the fact by way of increased taxes on their more valuable land, (2) the relentlessness of Manhattan’s grid has attracted critics ever since and (3) the city’s flooding problems are bad and getting worse.

Complaining aside, Clement Moore was also preparing himself for a future in which Chelsea had been flattened and crisscrossed with streets. “He saw what was coming and maximized his profit from development,” says Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia. In the 1810s and 1820s Moore entered into an array of transactions with the apparent goal of putting him in complete control of all property from 19th Street to 24th Street west of Eighth Avenue. He bought out neighbors. He worked with his cousin Clement Clarke to get legislation passed allowing Clarke to turn his inherited lands over to Moore in exchange for Moore paying his debts. He successfully petitioned the City Council to grant him rights to lands he could reclaim from the Hudson River where 10th Avenue now runs and westward.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

He also went to lots of board meetings. In 1811 he became a trustee of both the Economical School and the New York Society Library, a still-extant lending library that in those pre-New York Public Library days was among the city’s most important cultural institutions. He served on the vestry, or board of directors, of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, the closest Episcopal church to his Chelsea house. Then, in 1820, he co-founded and served as senior warden of closer-by St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village, the builder of which, James Wells, was to become his partner in developing Chelsea. A musician since childhood, he played the organ at St. Luke, and was on the organizing committee for a couple of Handel and Haydn oratorios downtown.

Moore’s long tenure on Columbia’s board of trustees began in 1813, followed two years later by his appointment as clerk of the board. His great handwriting was a major qualification for the job, but it seems to have entailed far more than just taking notes, with Moore managing property negotiations and other business matters for the college. It’s not a post he would have kept for 35 years if his fellow board members had considered him less than trustworthy.

Finally, in 1821, Moore started teaching at the new seminary, which for the first few years used rooms provided by Trinity Church and in 1827 moved into its first building on the full block of land he donated for it in Chelsea. He was, of course, responsible for taking notes at faculty meetings.

The overconfident young man was becoming a quietly influential pillar of the community. He had also become a husband and father. Eliza Taylor was a much younger woman of good family (her mother was one of the Van Cortlandt Park Van Cortlandts) whom Clement seems to have wooed with over-the-top ardor. “You ask me why I love him?” Eliza wrote in a poem.

I’ll tell the reason true:

Because he said so often

With fervour ‘I love you.’

They had their first child in 1815, and eight more followed. “Where could Clement have got another woman so well calculated to make him happy?” his mother wrote.

The dashed aspirations of Black New Yorkers

This same period, the 1810s and 1820s, was a troubled time for Black New Yorkers, whose new freedoms were accompanied by growing fears. Slavery was ending and there were prominent Black success stories, such as hairdresser and philanthropist Pierre Toussaint and society caterer Simon Thomas (“Dear Simon! Prince of pastry cooks!” began an ode to him published in the Evening Post in 1819). The African Free School was churning out brilliant graduates, among them actor Ira Aldridge, who performed Shakespeare at the pioneering African Theatre. But White New Yorkers were also coming up with new ways to thwart Black aspirations.

There were frictions with the patrician leaders of the Manumission Society, who objected to the exuberance of Black New Yorkers’ celebrations of Congress’s 1807 ban on the importation of slaves into the U.S., and were slow to give Black people a voice in the management of the African Free School. But the biggest threats came from elsewhere. The African Theatre closed in the face of vandalism, neighbor complaints, police shutdowns and media vilification, leading Aldridge to abandon New York for Europe. Black New Yorkers who were on the streets after dark or otherwise stood out were increasingly subjected to harassment and even beatings.

Along with rising hostility, Black New Yorkers faced fading political clout. The Federalists with whom they had mostly sided collapsed as a political force, and upstate Democratic-Republicans who had been all for abolition proved to be less amenable to Black persons having political say. The 1811 law requiring Black voters to prove they were free was the start. In 1821 came a new state constitution, of which future U.S. President Martin Van Buren was the chief architect, that vastly expanded the franchise for White men but used Jim Crow techniques (some proposed by the very Erastus Root whose pro-abolition words I quoted earlier) to keep all but the most affluent Black people away from the polls. Wave after wave of European immigration also sent the share of the city’s Black population plummeting from 10.2% in 1810 to 1.5% by 1860. It didn’t reach double digits again until 1960.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

At the same time, New York City’s economic fortunes became increasingly tied to trade in cotton, which depended on slave labor in the South. With slavery abolished at home, city business leaders saw it as yesterday’s problem, and those who pushed for emancipation in the South as unrealistic meddlers. As Charlie Schuyler, fictional narrator of Gore Vidal’s historical novel “Burr,” summed up: “It is not that New Yorkers so much like the institution of slavery as they dislike the sort of righteous people who want to abolish it.”

“Burr” is set in the 1830s, which is when things came to a head. In July 1834, leaders of a new, non-gradualist national abolitionist group, the Anti-Slavery League, gathered in New York City to celebrate the seventh anniversary of slavery’s end in the state. In response, White rioters rampaged for nearly a week, targeting White abolitionist leaders and Black homes, businesses and churches. At St. Philip’s Church, home to the city’s lone Black Episcopal congregation, they smashed the stained-glass windows, hauled the pews into the street and set them aflame.

We don’t really know what Clement Clarke Moore thought of all this, but we know in some detail what his mother thought. “The peace of new York has been disturbed by shameful riotous mobing,” Charity Moore, by this point in her late 80s, wrote to her sister in London that July:

The people of color was the subject. A Jealousy has taken place from the Idea that some would treat them as equals, admitting them on equal terms into their family — great indignation is shown on this Idea. An immediate abolition of slavery was talked of which is strongly opposed. I wish they were all free & had some part of the world where they might live together, but I suspect that would not quite suit them. They would rather be with us and of us.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

A month later, after she had time to collect her thoughts, she had this to say:

Some of our very good Christians in New York had taken into their heads that people of color should be on a par with their colorless inhabitants, to intermarry & be received on a footing with those they choose to associate with. This idea was received with great indignation. The poor blacks were ill used and much mischief done, however now all is quiet again & things are going in the old way.

It would not be right to attribute these precise views to Charity’s son. But they do illustrate some problems with Patterson’s assertion that Moore had “no qualms of conscience” about slavery — which, again, seems to be the only evidence for the oft-repeated claim that he opposed emancipation. His mother was oozing with qualms (“Unhappy day that brought slavery on this land,” she had written a few years earlier, after Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia ), even if the answers they led her toward aren’t exactly what we today would consider enlightened. Abolitionist leaders at the time also said they were opposed to “amalgamation by marriage,” so it wasn’t just her.

A resignation in Chelsea

The full quote from Patterson’s biography is that “Moore had no qualms of conscience on either slavery or liquor.” Moore had written a poem that began, “I'll drink my glass of generous wine;/And what concern is it of thine,” so the liquor comment was not without justification. But it was still apparently wrong. According to a report in the Christian Intelligencer newspaper, Moore was elected first vice president of the new 16th Ward Temperance Society in June 1839, at a meeting in Chelsea where 97 pledges of “total abstinence” were made. I doubt Moore made the pledge, but he must have had some, well, qualms about public drunkenness and rowdiness.

As for slavery, the event that occasioned Patterson’s “no qualms” remark came in December 1835 at St. Peter’s, the new Episcopal church in Chelsea that Moore had helped found. Rector Thomas Pyne, originally from England but recently hired from a church in Brooklyn, gave a Thanksgiving sermon (delivered on Dec. 10 because the country hadn’t settled on the fourth Thursday in November yet) in which he spoke of the “common guilt” that Britain and the U.S. shared for their treatment of American Indians and enslavement of Africans. “The whole of the civilized world, I believe I may say, now expects of America that she should cherish the savage, and that she should liberate the slave,” he concluded.

At a testy vestry meeting a few weeks later, Pyne was charged with having damaged “the temporal interests of St. Peter’s Church,” which at that point was meeting in a simple chapel on 20th Street and raising money for a larger sanctuary next door. At least, that’s how he described it in a letter to the vestry the next day:

The consideration of how far it is right for a Vestry to give up a just principle (for some of the members allowed me to be not wrong in theory) for the supposed temporal benefits to a Church … I shall not offer an opinion.

But, he continued, “I prefer a renunciation of my charge to the imputation of injuring its interests.” So he resigned — although he wasn’t so concerned about the imputation as to stop him from publishing his sermon soon after.

This account is taken chiefly from an earlier book by Patterson, a 1935 history of St. Peter’s. Interestingly, it makes no mention of Moore’s role in Pyne’s departure. That’s because it can only be conjectured. Moore was one of the church’s wardens and thus present for the discussions, but there’s no record of who said what.

In any case, such decisions in an Episcopal church ultimately rest with the bishop (Episcopal means “of a bishop or bishops”). Pyne met with New York Bishop Benjamin Onderdonk before offering his resignation, and we can get a pretty good idea of what Onderdonk must have told him. In 1834, after St. Philip’s Church was ransacked by rioters, the bishop had ordered its rector, Peter Williams Jr., to resign from the Anti-Slavery Society. In 1836, he told the first student of color at the church’s General Theological Seminary that he had to depart.

A mixed-race graduate of the African Free School and Delaware’s Newark College, Isaiah De Grasse had been examined by the faculty and admitted to the seminary, where he said he was “kindly treated” by the other students. But Bishop Onderdonk, who taught part time there and informally called the shots, decided he couldn’t stay. The institution depended on support from Southern Episcopals, De Grasse said Onderdonk told him, and “if they admit coloured men to equal privileges with the whites in the Institution, the South will refuse to aid (it).” The bishop was willing to support De Grasse’s candidacy for the priesthood, but he would have to do his studying outside the seminary. Alexander Crummell, a Black student who applied for admission soon after, said he got the same message from Onderdonk, albeit delivered less politely.

Clement Moore was on the faculty that had admitted De Grasse, and a colleague who spoke to Crummell said they would be happy to admit him but for the bishop’s objections. So he doesn’t seem to have opposed integration of the seminary, and I suspect he was one of those at the St. Peter’s vestry meeting who “allowed” Pyne “to be not wrong in theory” about the evils of slavery. But in the mid-1830s, Moore’s Chelsea plans were finally beginning to come to fruition, so I also suspect he was wary of the neighborhood Episcopal church becoming the target of anti-abolitionist mobs.

It had been a trying decade for him. Living in Chelsea must have gotten less and less pleasant as the 1820s progressed and the city claimed land for streets while sometimes taking years to render them usable. A 1904 New York Times article claimed that “annoyed by adolescent hoodlums, who came out from ‘the city’ to depredate his vines and fig trees,” the “unworldly” Moore almost sold the entire Chelsea property for $40,000, which I have trouble believing. But the New-York Enquirer did run an auction notice in July 1828 offering “that elegant country seat belonging to Clement C. Moore” for sale on the condition that it be removed from the premises. There must not have been any takers because the house and the slight hill it stood on — which Moore is said to have opened to neighborhood kids for sledding every winter — remained in place until both were flattened in the 1850s. The Moores did, however, abandon Chelsea for several years for a house farther downtown on Charlton Street.

Another reason for the move may have been the desire to be closer to city doctors. Six-year-old Emily died in 1828. Eliza, Moore’s wife, then began suffering from what her mother-in-law called “a disordered frame,” and after what the newspapers said was a “long illness” died in the Charlton Street house in April 1830. Next up was 14-year-old Charity Elizabeth with a case of what sounds like tuberculosis. “If it should please the almighty to take her,” her grandmother wrote a couple of months before her death, “I think Clement will sink under such accumulated sorrow.”

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

Sink and mope he did. In 1832 Clement ran into Washington Irving during one of the globetrotting author’s visits home, and the only thing he seems to have reported back to his mother was that Irving hadn’t heard about Eliza’s death. Clement had already resigned all but his Columbia board membership by the mid-1820s, as his growing family and professorship took up more of his time, and in the late 1820s and early 1830s his name mostly disappeared from the newspapers but for the regular notices of Columbia trustee meetings he posted.

Moore never remarried, but in 1833 he moved the family back up to Chelsea full time, initially to the old mansion and later to modern houses on 22nd Street and then Ninth Avenue, and got very busy converting his holdings from farmland to city. According to city records, there were at least 16 Chelsea lot transactions in 1833, 20 in 1834 and 46 in 1835, with hundreds more to come over the next two decades. Those I’ve looked at were ground leases under which long-term control remained with Moore and his descendants, and came with detailed rules on house size, yard size, tree planting and acceptable activities (no stables, foundries or turpentine factories allowed) that he and James Wells had devised to maximize property values.

So yes, it’s conceivable Moore was worried that having a controversial priest at Chelsea’s Episcopal church might endanger not only the church but also his private interests. Then again, he wasn’t the only one at the meeting whose interests were at stake — Wells was the other church warden.

The cost of silence

The reluctance of civic and religious leaders who may have privately deplored slavery to be associated with the abolitionist cause for fear of mobs at home and lost business connections with the South was one of the tragedies of pre-Civil War New York. Another was that a city that should have been the model for a successful transition to freedom for former slaves instead became a place where Black people no longer felt safe.

Beset by mob violence and a city legal system that enabled kidnappings into slavery in the South, Black people began to leave New York for New England, the Midwest, even Africa. The city’s Black population fell outright from 16,358 in 1840 to just 12,574 in 1860, even as its overall population more than doubled. The response of some in the old New York White elite was to help them go. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 with the aim of repatriating Black Americans to Africa, became a new home for do-gooders who in a previous generation might have joined the Manumission Society.

Clement Clarke Moore does not appear to have joined — James Madison’s presidency of the Colonization Society in the early 1830s was probably more than enough to dissuade him. He also stayed on good terms with some outspoken abolitionists. One of his sons studied law in the mid-1840s in the offices of John Jay II (grandson of the original), who was a member of the Anti-Slavery Society and outspoken critic of the Episcopal Church’s racial policies, and Moore was enough of a helicopter parent that his son wouldn’t have done this without Dad’s approval. He was a pallbearer when the casket of John Quincy Adams, the leading voice for emancipation of slaves in the U.S. House of Representatives after his presidency, passed through New York in 1848.

While it’s tempting to use these associations to paint Moore as a closet abolitionist, it’s probably more accurate to say that, like his father before him, he tried to stay on good terms with lots of people. He mostly avoided conflict, and even when he couldn’t he tried to keep a low profile. 

The most public conflict on Columbia’s board during Moore’s tenure was over whether to award a chemistry professorship to a Unitarian, a denomination seen as a little edgy in those days (the early 1850s). Moore remained silent during the debates, and a younger colleague considered him one of the “fogies” sure to vote no, but in the end he was among the minority to vote yes.

At the seminary the great conflict came in the 1840s over the “Oxford movement” that aimed to move Anglicanism closer to Roman Catholicism (or all the way there, as with Oxford-tutor-turned-Catholic-cardinal John Henry Newman). That wasn’t Moore’s preference at all, but when bishops outside New York targeted Oxford-friendly Bishop Onderdonk and several other faculty members in 1844, he brushed back their inquiries. When a few seminary students actually on the path to Catholicism were dragged before the faculty, he was the least willing to find them guilty of expellable offenses. Years later, one of the Episcopal-seminarians-turned-Catholic-priests remembered him with great fondness:

He was very particular in his ways; but one great feature of his peculiarity was, that he was utterly unartificial. He was droll, but unconsciously so. He never joked in the class, but always something made the classroom seem merry when he was in it.

Outside the classroom and the boardroom Moore kept building his net worth, to the point where he was quite wealthy but not staggeringly so. Biographer Patterson estimated his wealth at $600,000 as of 1855, which seems reasonable given that an 1845 Weekly Herald ranking of New York’s wealthiest citizens estimated it at $250,000. In 1845 that didn’t even put him in the top 150, with John Jacob Astor No. 1 at $25 million.

The development of Chelsea didn’t quite live up to expectations. The 1837 depression sent real estate prices crashing everywhere, and hopes that the neighborhood would become the new home of New York’s elite were subsequently dashed by the city’s decision to allow the construction of a street-level freight railroad through it. After the trains started running up 10th Avenue in 1851, it became known as “Death Avenue” for the many pedestrian fatalities, a sobriquet that held until the 1930s when the High Line was constructed to remove the trains from the street. Now the High Line is a world-renowned linear park and Moore’s house on 22nd Street is valued by Zillow at $8.7 million, but it took a while.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

In the 1850s Moore bought a house in the resort community of Newport, Rhode Island, for one of his daughters, and began spending his summers there. In 1856 he started “A Diary which ought to have begun at least sixty years ago,” as he wrote on the first page. It did not live up to that tantalizing promise. After a couple of tentative stabs at discussing things he had read, Moore settled into recording the weather and sometimes briefly summarizing the day’s activities, which when deemed worth recording usually involved visits with his children and grandchildren. Biographer Patterson faults the diary for ignoring “the stern political drama of the 1850s and 1860s,” and he has a point: The entry for April 13, 1861, the day after the Civil War began, reads, in its entirety: “Rain, therm. 52° at 8 a.m.”

Still, Moore offered some hints of where he stood. He gave small sums to two different Episcopal priests who stopped by the house asking for money for the Colonization Society, indicating that he was not outright opposed to its anti-slavery but also anti-integration approach. He voted for winning candidate Daniel Tiemann in the 1857 mayoral election, significant because Tiemann’s incumbent opponent, Fernando Wood, was a pro-Southern Democrat who after returning to office in 1860 proposed that the city secede from the Union. An accounting of his Newport expenses for the summer of 1861 includes what appears to be $3.06 for a subscription to the New York Times, which espoused a tepid pro-Union Republicanism, endorsing Abraham Lincoln for the presidency but assuring readers that he wouldn’t risk open conflict with the South.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

Moore died in Newport in June 1863. His will goes on for pages and pages, dividing Chelsea among his offspring and providing for various other relations, including the continued upkeep of a sister-in-law at the Bloomingdale mental hospital, on the grounds of which Columbia University now stands.

In August 1864, grandson Clement Clarke Moore, a few weeks short of his 21st birthday, entered the 20th Massachusetts Infantry as a first lieutenant. “Clem,” as his grandfather called him, appears to have left the Army as a major 11 months later, having been present for the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.

Joining the Union Army was not a common choice for rich kids from New York City and environs (Clem grew up in the Westchester County town of Ossining). It is compatible, though, with what I’ve learned about the Moore family’s views on slavery. They wanted it to end, albeit gradually and very much on affluent White people’s terms. For Bishop Benjamin Moore’s generation of New Yorkers, this desire was not deemed incompatible with owning slaves. By the time his son Clement Clarke Moore came of age, slavery was on its way out in New York, and I have found nothing to indicate that he bucked this trend, but activism on behalf of free Black New Yorkers and Southern slaves was mostly frowned on too. There’s nothing admirable about Clement Clarke Moore’s silence on these issues, but also nothing that would justify labeling him a champion of slavery or opponent of abolition.

Origins of ‘The Night Before Christmas’

But did he write the poem?!? I have much less to say about that. Moore’s biography and relationship with slavery have been under-researched, leaving easy pickings for me. The authorship question has if anything been the subject of too much research.

The Livingston claims were first presented to a national audience in 1920 with sympathetic articles in the Christian Science Monitor and literary journal the Bookman. Articles followed every few years after that. There was a flurry of activity in the 1950s, with Patterson’s biography, Jones’s “Knickerbocker Santa Claus” article, and a presentation of Livingston’s claim by former Vassar College President Henry Noble MacCracken that pioneered the tactic of casting aspersions on Moore’s character: “He feels he should be a greater man than he is, a greater poet. The public did not agree with him, even about his poetry.”

The publication of Foster’s book in 2000 ushered in a new, even more active era of authorship debate. Along with lots of positive media coverage, his account inspired three substantive rebuttals, by manuscript dealer Kaller, historian Nissenbaum and hoax investigator Joe Nickell. It also inspired another English professor, MacDonald Jackson, to look into the matter. Jackson’s 2016 book “Who Wrote ‘The Night Before Christmas’?” has in turn inspired a lengthy rebuttal and an avalanche of new documentation by independent English scholar Scott Norsworthy. Through it all Mary Van Deusen, the Livingston descendant who persuaded Foster to look into the case, has been posting useful information about Livingston and writings by both Livingston and Moore on her website.

In brief, the evidence on the poem’s origins is this: “A Visit From St. Nicholas” appeared in print in the Troy Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823. In January 1829, after it had been reprinted in many newspapers — including, a few months before Henry Livingston Jr. died, the Poughkeepsie Journal — Troy Sentinel editor Orville Holley wrote that:

The lines were first published in this paper. They came to us from a manuscript copy in possession of lady in this city. We have been given to understand that the author of them belongs, by birth and residence, to the city of New York, and that he is a gentleman of more merit as a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy pretensions.

The italicized more gives away that he knew exactly who it was — later Holley wrote that he had learned the author’s identity “not many months” after the initial publication.

There’s also a copy of “Visit From St. Nicholas” in the handwriting of Moore family friend Mary Odell on a piece of paper watermarked 1824, meaning that’s when it was manufactured. So it could have been written anytime between 1824 and Odell’s death in 1848, but given how fast people used up writing paper in those days sometime in the 1820s seems most likely.

By the early 1830s, in any case, word was out. A student at the theological seminary wrote in his diary in 1833 of encountering a St. Nicholas at a Christmas fair “dressed according to the description of Prof. Moore in his poem.” In 1837 the poem appeared under Moore’s name for the first time in the “New-York Book of Poetry” compiled by novelist, poet and editor Charles Fenno Hoffman, and Moore wrote later that he had provided it to Hoffman.

In 1844, Moore publicly embraced his authorship. He published a book of his poems that included “The Night Before Christmas.” He wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper saying he had composed it “many years ago, I think somewhere between 1823 and 1824, not for publication, but to amuse my children.” He also asked the former owner of the Troy Sentinel how the heck his work had ended up in that newspaper. The story that emerged over time was that a family friend who lived in Troy had heard the poem in Chelsea, copied it down and brought it home, and a friend of hers had copied it again and brought it to the newspaper.

Except for the intermediaries, this was not an unusual path for poems in those days. They were often published anonymously or pseudonymously in newspapers or literary journals. If they were popular enough, identifying the author became a public pursuit. Finally, often feigning reluctance, the author would fess up. Because this happened so often, people in literary circles got to be pretty good at figuring out who wrote what, and were quick to correct misattributions — as happened when a newspaper in Washington said in 1843 that “Visit From St. Nicholas” was by artist Joseph Wood, and someone wrote in immediately to point out the error.

The Livingston account is that, sure, all of the above happened, but the poem Moore read to his children in the early 1820s had been written and recited by Henry Livingston Jr. more than a decade earlier and somehow found its way to Chelsea. One of Henry’s granddaughters saw a printing of the poem attributed to Moore in the late 1850s or early 1860s, and cried foul. She checked with her mother, born in 1798, who said she remembered Henry Jr. reciting the poem when she was a child. Over the next few decades, various Livingston descendants compared notes and concurred that they remembered the poem, or remembered hearing about it from their parents, but none was able to turn up written evidence. One son was said (by his grandson, in 1900) to have had the original manuscript, then given it to another brother who lost it in a fire.

This is all compatible with Henry Livingston Jr. having written the poem, but it’s equally compatible with him reciting some other holiday poem and his descendants conflating it over the many intervening decades with the frequently republished “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” It’s not really evidence of anything.

The origin stories offered by Moore over the years admittedly don’t add up to a lot either. The statement that he wrote the poem to “amuse my children” is reasonable enough — the eldest were 7 and 6 as of December 1822, and thus old enough to appreciate it — but anodyne. Slightly more compelling is the tale he reportedly told one of his wife’s relatives of heading out on Christmas Eve to buy a turkey because Eliza was preparing food baskets for poor families in the neighborhood and had noticed she was one short: On the way home he was, according to an account related third-hand nearly a century after the fact, “struck with the beauty of the moonlight on the snow and the brightness of the starlit sky.”

Then there’s the explanation Moore gave antiquarian and relative-by-marriage T.W.C. Moore, who asked him at the request of the New-York Historical Society in 1862 to write out the copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” that illustrates the top of this essay. In the letter accompanying the gift, T.W.C. said Clement had told him that “a portly, rubicund Dutchman, living in the neighbourhood of his fathers [sic] country seat, Chelsea, suggested to him the idea of making St. Nicholas the hero of this ‘Christmas piece’ for his children.”

According to the Census, there was in fact a man living near Moore in 1820 with a surname that appears to be the very Dutch “Van Ranst” (the first name is illegible apart from a “Jr.”). The Census also reports that he was 25 or younger, but perhaps he was already portly and rubicund, or was frequently visited by a relative who was, such as the Cornelius and John Van Ranst who were listed in the city directory.

“The History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty,” the enormously popular mock history by Moore’s friend Washington Irving, offers another possible inspiration. The first edition in 1809 introduced a pipe-smoking St. Nicholas as patron saint of New Amsterdam. This portrayal was partly the doing of John Pintard, who was looking for non-English symbols for the new nation to rally around and had already glommed onto St. Nick (Irving and Pintard also collaborated on making Christopher Columbus a national icon). In a revised edition of the “History” published in 1812, Irving took things up a notch, depicting St. Nicholas “riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same waggon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children” and “laying his finger beside his nose” before disappearing over the treetops and disappearing.

A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation.

That sounds an awful lot like the St. Nicholas from “A Visit,” and Clement Moore’s accounts of the poem’s inspiration would be more convincing if he mentioned it. Then again, Henry Livingston Jr.’s descendants date his initial recitation of the poem to the first decade of the 19th century, most likely 1808 — that is, before Irving’s flying St. Nick. Livingston had many Dutch ancestors and was presumably aware of the Dutch St. Nicholas tradition. Written evidence of that tradition is awfully sparse in New York state before Irving and Pintard began their revival of it, though, which led scholars Jones and Nissenbaum to conclude that they had effectively invented it. (Also, in the Netherlands, St. Nicholas travels by boat and arrives before his feast day on Dec. 6.) If the poem was written in 1808 or earlier, that would upend current thinking on how Santa Claus came to be, which doesn’t prove it didn’t happen but does make it seem unlikelier.

A twist to the story recently discovered by Scott Norsworthy is that the T.W.C. Moore who delivered the handwritten poem to the Historical Society and wrote down Clement Moore’s account of its origins was the son of Judith Livingston Moore, who was not only Henry Jr.’s first cousin but lived next to his Locust Grove farm in Poughkeepsie for years. Vassar’s MacCracken had even proposed in 1958 that “from Locust Grove to Judith Livingston Moore's children is the first step” in the poem’s voyage to Chelsea. Yet here was one of Judith Livingston Moore’s children attesting to Clement Clarke Moore’s authorship.

Assessing the internal evidence

Based on the above evidence, plus the fact that Clement Clarke Moore does not appear to have made a habit of deceiving people or claiming others’ writings as his own, one would have to say that Moore is far likelier to have written “The Night Before Christmas” than Henry Livingston Jr. is. Which leaves the internal evidence — the words of the poem and how they compare to other work by the same authors.

Livingston wrote short, fun, not very ambitious poems, most in an anapestic tetrameter in which two unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed one. As in, you know:

 ’Twas/the/NIGHT/be/fore/CHRIST/mas,

when/ALL/through/the/HOUSE

Moore wrote mostly longer poems in a variety of meters that have their lovely moments but also a tendency to meander or veer into didacticism.

To make attributions based on internal evidence, modern scholars usually try to attack the problem systematically by measuring word frequencies and other patterns. Among the best-known examples is the analysis of the Federalist Papers conducted in the early 1960s and redone in the 1980s by statistics professors Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace. They counted how frequently Alexander Hamilton and James Madison used certain non-contextual words (“by,” “to,” “upon”) in their writings, compared that to the usage rates in 12 disputed papers, and after a bunch of statistical tests concluded with varying degrees of confidence that Madison had probably written all of them — including No. 54, which I quoted from earlier.

Don Foster started out doing attribution research in similar if less statistics-professor-like fashion. By the time he took on “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” though, he had become a world-famous literary detective using a grab bag of techniques to arrive at bold conclusions. He made the front page of the New York Times in January 1996 for the claim (based on a more tentative attribution in his 1985 Ph.D. dissertation) that William Shakespeare was the author of an obscure 1612 funeral elegy. That led to a request from New York magazine to compare the text of the anonymously published bestseller “Primary Colors” to the work of a list of rumored authors. Foster correctly fingered political journalist Joe Klein. Soon he was weighing in on the Unabomber case, the JonBenet Ramsey murder, Monica Lewinsky’s “talking points memo” and so on.

This did not end well. In 2002, Foster retracted his Shakespeare attribution after new research pointed to another, likelier author. Then he settled on the wrong person as the sender of the anthrax letters of 2001, writing an article for Vanity Fair in 2003 that resulted in a libel settlement and an apparent end to his days as a literary detective and media personality (my attempts to contact him have not met with success). As Foster himself put it in 1998: “All I need to do is get one attribution wrong ever, and it will discredit me not just as an expert witness in civil and criminal suits but also in the academy.”

Add to this the many errors and misrepresentations I have found in Foster’s depiction of Moore’s biography and character, and it’s hard for me to take his conclusions seriously. He does make a nice case for Livingston being “the spirit of Christmas itself,” but that’s not enough.

MacDonald Jackson is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who has done a lot of work on Shakespeare attribution (and criticized aspects of Foster’s Shakespeare work in the early 1990s). In his book he engages in no character assassination of Clement Clarke Moore and allows that the external evidence of authorship favors Moore. But after presenting a lot of data tables on word frequencies and phoneme pairs, he concludes that Livingston probably wrote the poem.

Jackson, following Foster’s lead, does engage in what I think is an overwrought analysis of the significance of two reindeer names changing from “Dunder and Blixem” in the Troy Sentinel in 1823 to “Donner and Blitzen” in Moore’s 1844 version. The words mean “thunder” and “lightning,” with the first pair more or less in Dutch (the modern spellings are “donder” and “bliksem”) and the second in German, so the imputation is that Livingston, who knew some Dutch, used the former and Moore, who knew only German, changed it to the latter. But as hinted by the quote from Erastus Root about angry Dutch slave owners (you knew that “dunder and blixem” would come up again, right?), the phrase was in pretty wide usage, showing up in New York newspapers in the early 19th century under a variety of different spellings (“donder” and “bliksum” were both popular). So it could have been Moore using Dunder and Blixem to start with, or having it transcribed that way by his family friend, then deciding decades later that he preferred Donner and Blitzen.

Still, it’s impossible to read Jackson’s book — or even a few of Moore’s poems — and not wonder whether he really was the one to come up with the magical lines about St. Nick and his eight tiny reindeer. Moore’s writings generally do not sing. Perhaps he emerged from his deep funk of the early 1830s to discover that a poem he had found and read to his daughters a decade and a half earlier was now being attributed to him. He didn’t say anything at first, but came to like the warm glow that came with the association, and seeing no one else claim credit finally decided to go along with it. That still seems highly unlikely. Just not impossible.

Given the lack of hard evidence for Henry Livingston Jr.’s authorship, and the fact that “Night Before Christmas” feels like quite a stretch for him too, the search for an author perhaps shouldn’t end with him. Norsworthy has (jokingly, I think) suggested Jonathan Odell, father of the Mary Odell who copied down the poem. Odell’s biography is subtitled “The Loyalist Poet of the American Revolution,” he was Clement Moore’s godfather and he conveniently died in 1818. My nominee is Joseph Rodman Drake, whose “The Culprit Fay” features a miniature hero flying through the heavens (“And his courser follows the cloudy wain/Till the hoof-strokes fall like pattering rain”) and was one of the most popular American poems of the 19th century even after Edgar Allan Poe inaccurately deemed the bulk of it “utterly destitute of any evidence of imagination whatever.”

Drake, who also co-authored the 1819 Evening Post ode to caterer Simon Thomas that I cited earlier, died young in 1821. In 1846, Moore gave a signed copy of his book of poems to Drake’s daughter. Seriously, what more evidence do you need?

There’s an emerging convention of writing “enslaved person” and “enslaver” in place of “slave” and “slave owner” or “slaveholder.” It’s a clever and welcome way of shifting perspective (slavery goes from defining the slave to defining the enslaver) but can be jarring for those unaccustomed to it, and in the case of “enslaved person” means swapping out one syllable for four, which is tough on readers and writers. So I’ve opted to use the new terms on occasion but not as the default.

Two of the most substantial are Leslie M. Harris's "In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863" and David N. Gellman's "Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827."

Manuscripts and Ephemera Collection. Source: Museum of the City of New York.

Shaker letter, Aug. 29, 1802; Madison letter, June 4, 1812. Manuscripts and Ephemera Collection. Source: Museum of the City of New York.

Letter to Lady Affleck, April 14, 1830. Source: Charity Clarke Moore and Clement Clarke Moore papers, 1767-1863, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.

Letter to Lady Affleck, July 24, 1834. Source: Charity Clarke Moore and Clement Clarke Moore papers, 1767-1863, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.

Letter to Lady Affleck, August 28, 1834. Charity Clarke Moore and Clement Clarke Moore papers, Columbia.

Letter to Lady Affleck, Sept. 20, 1831. Source: Charity Clarke Moore and Clement Clarke Moore papers, Columbia.

Letter to Lady Affleck, Oct. 30, 1830. Source: Charity Clarke Moore and Clement Clarke Moore papers, Columbia.

Letter to Lady Affleck, May 29, 1832. Charity Clarke Moore and Clement Clarke Moore papers, Columbia.

I know about this because Moore wrote two letters to Jay saying his son wouldn't be able to "continue the attempt to practise law" because of a nervous breakdown. Letters from Clement Clarke Moore dated Jan. 8, 1848 and Jan. 26, 1848. Jay Family Papers,1828-1943, Columbia.

Diary. Charity Clarke Moore and Clement Clarke Moore papers, Columbia.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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