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| J. C. Welling via Library of Congress |
Herein I am pleased to give the complete text of the 1860 editorial by William Winston Seaton (1785-1866), officially making James Clarke Welling (1825-1894) co-editor of the Washington, D. C. National Intelligencer after the death of Joseph Gales, Jr. (1786-1860), Seaton's brother-in-law and business partner. The National Intelligencer was an influential Whig newspaper that embraced conservative, pro-Union values up to and through the American Civil War. Issued only months before the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States, amid the intense and growing secession crisis, Seaton's "Editorial Announcement" on August 30, 1860 affirmed the newspaper's guiding principles and determination "to hold the Union of the States as the basis of their peace and happiness" and "to support the Constitution, which is the cement of the Union, as well in its limitations as in its authorities." Welling, already an accomplished educator and journalist, would go on to have a distinguished career after the war as president of the Columbian College, now George Washington University. As amply attested by friends and colleagues at the memorial service held after his death, James Clarke Welling became a leading member of numerous organizations devoted to supporting the arts and sciences, including the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic Society.
Seaton's formal statement of Welling's well-deserved promotion first appeared on page 3 of the Daily National Intelligencer for Thursday, August 30, 1860. Abridged versions circulated widely thereafter in American newspapers North and South.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83026172/1860-08-30/ed-1/?sp=3&r=-0.053,0.039,0.387,0.161,0
Of particular importance for Melville studies is the disclosure of Welling's employment history as literary editor of the National Intelligencer. With gratifying specificity, Welling is credited with writing the highly regarded "Notes on New Books" column since the departure (no later than March 1851) of Edward William Johnston (1799-1867).
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| Washington City Southern Press - March 15, 1851 via genealogybank.com |
As announced in the Southern Press of March 15, 1851, "Edward W. Johnston, esq., of Washington, formerly of Virginia, has become one of the proprietors of the Richmond Whig, and will in a few weeks take charge of the editorial department of the paper." Having served for a decade as literary editor before Welling replaced him, Edward W. Johnston (an older brother of Joseph Eggleston Johnston, the Confederate general) most likely wrote the generous notice of Melville's first two books that appeared in the National Intelligencer on May 27, 1847; reprinted in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995) at pages 72-75 (Typee) and 114-115; 118-119 (Omoo).
According to the timeline "for the last ten years" provided by Seaton in August 1860, Welling's tenure as literary editor and author of "Notes on New Books" must have begun seven or eight months before the long and laudatory review of Moby-Dick appeared on December 16, 1851 in the "Notes on New Books" column of the Daily National Intelligencer. Seaton's announcement thus provides strong evidence for Welling's authorship of this mostly positive and impressively erudite American notice of Moby-Dick, mistakenly attributed in previous Melville scholarship to William Allan Butler.
The notably "imposing" review of Moby-Dick in the National Intelligencer was first ascribed to William A. Butler, cautiously and carefully, by Hugh W. Hetherington in his chapter on "Early Reviews of Moby-Dick" for the collection of Moby-Dick Centennial Essays, edited by Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield (Southern Methodist University Press, 1953) at page 106. However, after Perry Miller endorsed the suggestion in his brilliant Raven and the Whale, Hetherington reiterated his erroneous guess in Melville's Reviewers: British and American (University of North Carolina Press, 1961) at pages 214-215, presenting the formerly tentative ascription to Butler as "very likely."
Hetherington's mistake, later amplified by Hershel Parker, apparently resulted from confusion about the title and content of pseudonymous contributions to the National Intelligencer in 1850 and 1851 by the genial lawyer-poet William Allen Butler. Hetherington, Perry Miller, and Parker after them wrongly conflated Butler's light and breezy "Notices of New Books," serially published in the National Intelligencer over the pen-name "Jacques du Monde," with the weightier reviews in the "Notes on New Books" column that James C. Welling began furnishing in June 1851 at the latest, a month or two after the previous literary editor, Edward W. Johnston, left to conduct the Richmond Whig. Butler, the good friend of Evert and George Duyckinck, was by his own admission only ever an "occasional correspondent" of the Washington National Intelligencer; as revealed in William Allen Butler, A Retrospect of Forty Years, 1825-1865, edited by his daughter Harriet Allen Butler (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911) page 234.
As Welling himself recalled near the end of his life:
"I was the Literary Editor of the old National Intelligencer before I assumed its political conduct in the year 1858."
-- Quoted from a letter dated February 12, 1894 and partially printed in The Nation on September 13, 1894.
Given that his tenure as literary editor extended well past 1856, James C. Welling also can reasonably be credited with writing the review of Leaves of Grass that appeared in the "Notes on New Books" section of the National Intelligencer on February 18, 1856. This gently mocking response to Walt Whitman, as pointed out by Hershel Parker in the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (footnote 4, page 607), employed the same arresting phrase "sinuosities of thought" previously used in the more favorable review of Moby-Dick (National Intelligencer, December 16, 1851). While praising Whitman's "wonderful powers of description and of word-painting" Welling could not follow the airier "transcendental sinuosities of thought" he encountered in Leaves of Grass. Similarly elusive, Melville's "sinuosities of a thought" in Moby-Dick reach "depths of pathos that few can fathom." As Welling has it, Melville's winding ways of thinking and writing bring the reader somewhere worth getting to; Whitman's thought-trails (like Emerson's philosophy according to Longfellow) disappointingly "dwindle to a squirrel path and run up a tree."
Here is the formal statement in which William W. Seaton positively identified his co-editor James C. Welling as the literary editor and author of "Notes on New Books" since the departure of Edward William Johnston ten years before; transcribed below from the Daily National Intelligencer of August 30, 1860.
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| Washington Daily National Intelligencer - August 30, 1860 via genealogybank.com |
EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
As the surviving Editor of the National Intelligencer, I have to announce that Mr. JAMES C. WELLING will hereafter be associated with me in the editorial conduct of this journal. In making this announcement it is proper to state that Mr. WELLING is no stranger to the columns of the Intelligencer, having been, in different capacities, connected with it for the last ten years, during the first five of which, after the retirement of the accomplished EDWARD WILLIAM JOHNSTON from the Literary department of the paper, Mr. WELLING had charge of it, and was the author of those "Notes on New Books," which, by the scholarship and ability evinced in their composition, would, of themselves, be a sufficient evidence of the qualifications he brings to the tasks of journalism. But it is just to add that during the last five years he has participated in all the duties incident to the editorship of this journal, and has thus served a noviciate quite long enough to give full proof of his vocation to the exacting career upon which he has entered. Enjoying during this period, in the fullest degree, the confidence of my late lamented colleague, Mr. GALES, he has equally, by his high moral and conscientious character, no less than by his rare attainments, merited my own; and I avail myself of his temporary absence from Washington to make this announcement to the patrons whom it is the honor of the Intelligencer to address.
It is hardly necessary, either in view of this announcement, or of the irreparable bereavement which the paper has recently sustained, for me to state that the principles and aims of the National Intelligencer will undergo no change whatever; on the contrary, it will, in all respects, continue to pursue the path which it has undeviatingly trod throughout its previous course. If indeed the occasion required of me a renewed declaration of the principles by which the journal will be guided, I could but repeat what it was deemed fitting, some years ago, at an epoch in its history, to avow, and in which revolving years have made no change, viz: That in Politics the paper would continue to be Constitutional and Conservative; to hold the true objects of a just administration of this Government to be, to cherish peace and friendly intercourse with all foreign nations having correspondent dispositions; to scrupulously avoid all interference with the domestic or internal affairs of other nations; to maintain sincere neutrality towards belligerent Powers; to prefer in all cases amicable discussion and reasonable accommodation of differences to a decision of them by appeals to arms; to hold the Union of the States as the basis of their peace and happiness; to support the Constitution, which is the cement of the Union, as well in its limitations as in its authorities; to respect the rights and authorities reserved to the States and to the People as equally incorporated with, and essential to the success of the general system; to avoid the slightest interference with the rights of conscience or the functions of religion, so wisely exempted from civil jurisdiction; to preserve, in their full energy, the other salutary provisions in behalf of private and personal rights, and of the freedom of the press; to provide and maintain an adequate regular military force, and a respectable and efficient navy; to promote, by authorized means, improvements friendly to agriculture, to manufactures, and to external and internal commerce; and to favor, in like manner, the advancement of science and the diffusion of information as the best aliment to true liberty.
Such have been the objects which, for near fifty years, the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER has endeavored to promote, in every proper way, and will continue steadily to advocate.
WM. W. SEATON.
Related posts
- James C. Welling, his Notes on New Books
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/james-c-welling-his-notes-on-new-books.html
- Unabridged review of MOBY-DICK by James C. Welling in the Washington National Intelligencer
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html
