The Select Letters of Major Jack Downing Pseud. of the Downingvill Militia, Away Down East, in the State of Maine
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Seba Smith was an American political satirist, who worked under the pseudonym of Major Jack Downing.
Background
Seba was born on September 14, 1792 in a log cabin in Buckfield, Maine, United States, the son of Seba and Aphia (Stevens) Smith, and a descendant of Francis Smith, who emigrated to America in the seventeenth century and settled in Massachusetts. In 1799 his father moved with his family to Bridgton, some thirty-five miles north of Portland, and was for a time post-rider from Portland to Waterford. The toil of pioneer life left the boy Seba little time for book-learning.
Education
In 1815 he finally entered Bowdoin College as a sophomore, graduating in 1818 with honors.
Career
Smith worked in a grocery store, in a brick yard, and in a foundry for casting iron, but he managed to learn enough to teach school in Bridgton at eighteen. After teaching for a year in Portland he made a journey as far south as the Carolinas and across the Atlantic from Portland to Liverpool, in all probability working his passage as he went. Upon his return to Maine he assumed the assistant-editorship of the Eastern Argus, an important Democratic paper in Portland, and continued his connection with it until 1826.
In the fall of 1829 he launched the Portland Courier, a newspaper of his own with no political affiliation, and the first daily to be issued in Maine. This paper was the vehicle for his Downing letters, which first appeared in January 1830, written by a Yankee adventurer who had left his native village of Downingville and turned to politics, wandered into the legislature, and, finding proceedings blocked by party animosities, wrote humorous accounts of the situation to the Downings at home. These letters were reprinted in Boston, and their wider circulation through New England led to a more ambitious program. Smith's freedom from party hostility sets him apart from his only serious rival among his imitators, Charles Augustus Davis, and from such later satirists of the Jackson period as Nathaniel Beverly Tucker in The Partisan Leader (1836) and John Pendleton Kennedy, in Quodlibet (1840).
The popularity of the Davis letters, however, and the confusion of the public as to their true author hastened Smith's publication of his letters in 1833 as a book entitled The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing of Downingville. Smith was one of the victims of the land boom that began in 1834. After a desperate and unsuccessful attempt in 1839 to retrieve his losses by going to South Carolina, where he hoped to sell cotton planters a machine for cleaning cotton, he returned from Charleston to New York with his wife and their four sons. There his wife joined him in supplying articles for the Southern Literary Messenger and other periodicals of the day.
By 1843, however, he had resumed his role as editor, having connections first with the Rover, a weekly magazine of some dignity, 1843-45, and later for a long period of time, though intermittently, 1854-59, with Emerson's United States Magazine. In 1859 he established a monthly, the Great Republic, which lasted only a year. Of his published books, which ranged from a metrical romance, Powhatan (1841), to an original dissertation on geometry, New Elements of Geometry (1850), the one most widely circulated was a collection of quaint tales on Yankee customs and characters called 'Way Down East (1854).
In 1847 he had begun his second series of Downing letters, which were published in the Daily National Intelligencer, and in 1859 these appeared in book form with the best of the earlier letters under the title My Thirty Years Out of the Senate, a parody on Thomas Hart Benton's Thirty Years' View (1854 - 56). In 1860 Smith retired from active life to spend his last years in Patchogue, Long Island.
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Politics
He was essentially conservative, regarding with apprehension extreme measures which might endanger the solidarity of the Union.
Views
Quotations:
"There is more than one way to skin a cat".
Personality
He was shy.
Connections
On March 6, 1823, he married Elizabeth Oakes Prince, a promising young woman of Portland who as Elizabeth Oakes Smith was later to win distinction both as a writer and as a lecturer on the lyceum platform. He was the father of Appleton Oaksmith.