Solomon’s Wisdom: A Portrait of Albany, New York Original "Self made" Man
For Solomon Southwick’s biographers, the vast and asymmetrical mind of one of Albany’s most fascinating characters was typically seen through his harrowing countenance. In his day, after all, the emerging science of physiognomy could tell a lot about the man.
Yet from a distance of nearly two hundred years physiognomy appears to be a remarkably elastic science, and its practitioners leave us conflicting evidence for the contradictory character traits they found revealed in the face of the Albany Renaissance man.
In Joel Munsell’s Annals of Albany, for example, Southwick is described as “somewhat below average height, with a countenance beaming with benignity and expressive of an enthusiastic, fiery, and sanguine temperament, a countenance, indeed, indicative of the many active virtues of his heart”.
In Worth’s Albany Recollections, on the other hand, he is remembered as having “the most beautiful eye and brow that ever belonged to a mortal man, but every other feature of his face was indifferent or defective. His countenance , therefore, was an index of the character of his mind: incongruous, mixed, and full of contradictions.”
Southwick, born in Rhode Island on Christmas Day 1773, was, virtuous or not, considered the classic self-made man of this town for much of the 19th century. He arrived in Albany in 1792, bringing with him little more than a peculiar pedigree and a great measure of talent, drive, and imagination, though, as is the case with many “self-made men,” a few more advantages came to him from outside sources. . sources that the stories tend to emphasize. In any case, in the span of only fifteen years he became one of the city’s most prominent citizens, both as a major force in the newspaper business here and as a shrewd political operator.
At various points in his career, he served as publisher and editor of the Record (“the political bible of the western region”); the Plow Boy (under the unlikely pseudonym Henry Homespun); the National Democrat (a body that served largely to advance his unsuccessful bid for state governor as a Maverick Democrat); the Christian Visitor (a religious newspaper); and the National Observer (a rabidly partisan publication devoted to the anti-Masonic political party). At the same time, he served the political and business interests of the area in such capacities as State Printer, Assembly Clerk, Albany County Sheriff, City Postmaster, State University Regent, and President of the Mechanic’s and Farmer’s Bank. . .
Indeed, for the first forty years of the century, Solomon Southwick was a ubiquitous presence in Albany, writing, politicking, giving out charity, and, perhaps his favorite pastime, lecturing on the virtues of self-education and self-reliance. (Other favorite lecture topics of the popular and busy speaker included temperance, a hot topic in Southwick’s day and in which he shared a passionate engagement with the first of several Erastus Cornings, and the Bible, a hot topic in the day of any).
It was as a speaker that Southwick made what would be his most enduring mark on the community, touching and inspiring countless young men – that is, men, white men – through eloquence and living testimony.
“Himself, emphatically a self-made man, one of nature’s nobles…”, wrote one admirer, “owing all knowledge, mental and moral culture, success in life, honor, fame, distinction, and utility, to his effort and perseverance, was the prevailing desire–the chief passion, so to speak, of his mind–to communicate with others, and especially with the working classes–the destitute, the obscure, and without. friends, and in general to the youth in all conditions of life, that knowledge of their powers and faculties which should make them independent of strange circumstances and accidental help, in the development of their minds and the advancement of their personal and pecuniary interests.
Yet Gorham Worth, who was, under the pseudonym Ignatius Jones, Albany’s most sardonic and perhaps most entertaining scribe, viewed his old friend’s passion for self-education somewhat differently. Southwick’s writing style, Worth reported, was “redundant on epithet, inflated and declamatory”, his language, “on the whole loose and inelegant”.
Without the finishing touches of a formal education, Worth thought, Southwick was “excessively gullible, and even superstitious… He was extremely fluent and even eloquent in conversation. But he had very little knowledge of the world, [leaving] his judgment fails too often.”
Then, too, despite his emphasis on education, “I read very little, and only out of necessity,” Worth said.
Perhaps the classically educated Mr. Worth was right about Solomon Southwick and the inescapable gaps in a homeschooling. Or perhaps Southwick was simply way ahead of both his own time and Worth’s imagination. In 1839, just a few months before his death at the age of 66, Southwick unveiled a proposal for the creation of a “literary and scientific institute” in the city of Albany. The institute, to be run by Southwick himself, would be designed, he said, to provide “necessary facilities for young people desiring to pursue a course of self-education.”
Southwick’s unexpected death put an end to that plan, but it is interesting to note that his spirit returned to Albany in the latter half of the 20th century and now lives, one imagines quite comfortably, in the offices of Empire State College and Excelsior College. , two state-created universities based on a commitment to “lifelong learning.”
Who made the self-made man?
Solomon Southwick was born into an old and prominent Rhode Island family, at least the third Solomon in the lineage. And though his legend highlights his single-handed rise to the top, he clearly started life with more advantages than most. Like our Solomon, his father, also Solomon, was a newspaper editor (The Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury), and as politically active as his son would be, in his case in the patriot cause during the Revolutionary War and as member of the Rhode Island general assembly. Then, too, when the young Southwick came to Albany in 1792, he went to work for his brother-in-law, John Barber, the original owner of the Albany Register. Before long, he became a partner in the firm, then sole owner when Barber died in 1808. In an interesting harbinger of the son’s commitment to self-education, University of Pennsylvania archives show that the elder Southwick was enrolled in that prestigious institution for several years, but left before graduating.
“Despite this early departure, the minutes of the trustees of Penn record the awarding of an honorary bachelor of arts degree to ‘Solomon Southwick of Rhode Island, who without the usual foundation of critical learning and languages discovered an aptitude worthy of encouragement in Mathematics and some Branches of Philosophy.’ Since he had been actively enrolled in the university program, this degree was an AB ‘gratiae causa’, making Southwick eligible for the AM ad eundem degree awarded to him by Yale in 1780,” according to a website entry. which explores “Penn in the Eighteenth Century”.
in their own words
We can sample Solomon Southwick’s oratory and get a glimpse of how successful, or not, he was in his self-education course from the extensive writings he left behind, including a famous 4th of July speech excerpted here. His mixture of politics and piety might be seen as belonging to his time, if the politics of our day had not revived that way of thinking (though nothing like eloquence). To Worth’s charge that Southwick had “very little knowledge of the world”, well, score one for Worth for Solomon’s attribution of the printing press to “Faust”; On the other side of the coin though, how many contemporary college grads can cite, or identify, Salmacius and Filmer? “Thus we see that the MONARCHY flowed at the beginning of the wrath of God: And therefore we are not surprised, despite all the sophistry of its defenders, from the foolish sons of Samuel, to wise men like Filmer and Salmasius, that although it has inflicted innumerable curses, seldom, if ever, has bestowed a solitary boon upon mankind: it has been, remains, and always will be, no matter what form it is given, the bane of the earth, until the mercy of Returning God, who has already fallen upon the United States, free the human race from its cruelties and oppressions, and banish it back to its native regions of darkness.For a period of two to three thousand years, MAN Worked under this curse of the Monarchy, when GOD… saw fit to lay the foundations of their liberation. HE inspired FAUST with the sublime idea of the invention of the printing press, and COLUMBUS, soon after, with the even more sublime conception, if that be so. possible, of the existence and discovery of a new world; a new and vast theater of action for the human race: And in that vast theater, of which ‘our own, our native land,’ forms so fair a portion, . . . . Here, in due time, came our pilgrim fathers, fleeing from their monarchical and hierarchical tyrants and persecutors. And here they found time, not only to make “the desert bloom like the rose”, but to seriously reflect on creation, the nature and destiny of MAN, his relationship with God, his duty to that Supreme Being and to himself. . the government that best suited him in this world, and the means by which he should find his way to a better one. Here, independent of vain, pompous and arrogant Hierarchs, tyrannical and despotic Kings and Princes. . they breathed and fully enjoyed the pure atmosphere of freedom. Here, without impediment or impediment, they opened, read and understood for themselves, the Sacred Volume; and from that one true source of spiritual, moral, historical and political light, they found themselves more and more confirmed in their preconceived opinions, that Liberty was the original gift of Heaven – that Monarchy was afterwards inflicted as a curse – and that by Therefore, rebellion against tyrants was obedience to God.”