Gulian C. Verplanck was an American writer and congressman.
Background
Gulian Crommelin Verplanck was born on August 6, 1786, in New York City. He was the son of Daniel Crommelin and Elizabeth (Johnson) Verplanck. He was a descendant of Abraham Verplanck who settled in New Amsterdam about 1635; his uncle, for whom he was named, his father, a judge, and congressman, and his grandfather, William Samuel Johnson, were all Federalists of note in New York. His mother died when he was three years old and his grandmothers directed his early education.
Education
Verplanck was graduated at Columbia in 1801 and then read law under Josiah Ogden Hoffman; in 1807 he was admitted to the bar.
Career
Verplanck was a Federalist, but by 1808 Federalism in New York was at a low ebb. Imitating the Democratic-Republicans, who had sometime before organized their Tammany Society, Verplanck, with Isaac Sebring and Richard Varick, founded in New York the Washington Benevolent Society to Perpetuate Federalism, and this society became the model of others formed elsewhere. It was of service in restoring the prestige of the Federalists in 1809, but it was soon deprived of Verplanck's presence and aid. While defending a student threatened with loss of his diploma, Verplanck became a principal with Hugh Maxwell in the Columbia College commencement riot of 1811.
De Witt Clinton presided over the resulting trial and, seeking Federalist support, he fined Verplanck $200. This event resulted in a pamphlet and press war that lasted nearly a decade. Among the pamphlets was one by Verplanck, A Fable for Statesmen and Politicians (1815), to which Clinton replied in An Account of Abimelech Coody (1815), which was bitterly personal. In 1815, Verplanck went to Europe and spent two years in travel, vainly trying to save his wife's life.
During the trip, he acutely observed political matters and the English judicial system. On his return, he and Charles King founded the New York American, in which appeared seven poetical satires by Verplanck aimed at Clinton and his administration. These have a caustic erudition that class them among the best ever written in English; later they were published as The State Triumvirate, A Political Tale, and the Epistles of Brevet-Major Pindar Puff (1819).
From 1821 to 1824, he was a professor in the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, in New York, and published Essays on the Nature and Uses of the Various Evidences of Revealed Religion (1824), a work comprised chiefly of philosophical considerations and only secondarily of textual criticism. It condemns the a priori method and is based upon inductive reasoning and legal principles of evidence, which Verplanck, the lawyer, applied to revelation. It is one of the earliest works in America influenced by the Scottish school of common-sense philosophy and it represents a conservative deistic approach.
Verplanck was elected to the New York Assembly in 1820, 1821, and 1822, where educational measures were his chief interest. In 1824, he was elected, largely because of his opposition to the high tariff, to the House of Representatives, of which he remained a member. He was placed upon the Ways and Means Committee and was its chairman from 1831 to 1833. It was the Verplanck tariff bill that was under consideration when Clay introduced his famous tariff compromise. Verplanck was chiefly instrumental in 1831 in obtaining a law improving the copyrights of authors; for this achievement, he was tendered a dinner by the literati of New York, at which he delivered an address on "The Law of Literary Property".
He supported Jackson in 1828, but would not follow him in his opposition to the Bank, and he was not renominated. Now estranged from the Democrats, he headed the assembly nominations and though defeated, he ran as Whig candidate for mayor of New York in 1834. He lost in a close contest, but it was New York's first direct mayoralty election and the earliest in which the name Whig was prominent. The same year, he refused to consider the nomination for governor because he was opposed to any association with the anti-Masonic group.
He passed most of his remaining life on the family estate in Fishkill, though he served in the New York Senate from 1838 to 1841.
The Senate was then the court for the correction of errors, which reviewed the decisions of the court of chancery, and Verplanck wrote many elaborate opinions, frequently carrying the court with him when he differed with the Chancellor. Some of the most valuable changes in the state constitution made by the conventions of 1846 and 1868 are said to have been suggested by Verplanck's speech in the Senate in 1839.
In 1847, he published Shakespeare's Plays: with His Life, in three volumes, with woodcuts by H. W. Hewet, an edition important as an illustration of the development of wood engraving, and as the second serious attempt of American Shakespearean scholarship to use the latest English researches, especially those of J. P. Collier, in connection with the original editions.
With Robert C. Sands and William Cullen Bryant, he edited the Talisman, an annual, 1828-30. Some of his essays are collected in Discourses and Addresses on Subjects of American History, Arts, and Literature (1833). He belonged to many societies and was a member of the board of regents of the University of the State of New York, 1826-1870, and president of the Board of the Commissioners of Emigration, 1848-70.
Achievements
Membership
a member of the American Antiquarian Society, a member of the Century Club
Connections
On October 2, 1811, Verplanck married Mary Elizabeth Fenno, a sister of Hoffman's wife and the granddaughter of John Fenno; two sons were born to them.