Parke Godwin

• Parke Godwin
• Born: February 25, 1816
• Died: January 7, 1904

Antislavery editor, was born to a comfortable middle-class family in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Abraham Godwin and Martha (Parke) Godwin. Godwin’s paternal ancestors were early settlers in the area; a great-grandfather, Abraham Godwin, had owned a tavern and fought with his sons in the Revolution. His father served as a lieutenant in the War of 1812. After graduating from Princeton in 1834, Godwin studied law in Paterson. He then moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he was admitted into practice, but soon left the profession and returned to New York City.

In 1836, at the boardinghouse where he lived, Godwin met the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant, who offered him a position as editorial assistant on The New York Evening Post. Godwin was to maintain an intermittent association with that paper until 1881. At the time that Godwin joined the Post, its profits were low and three men—Bryant, the editor-in-chief; a general reporter; and Godwin, who clipped exchange papers for reprint in the Post, provided drama criticism, and wrote short editorial pieces—handled all the journalistic duties.

On May 12, 1842, Godwin married Bryant’s eldest daughter, Fanny. The next year he published the short-lived Pathfinder, a weekly literary and political magazine that lasted only fifteen issues. While working at the Post, Godwin frequently contributed articles on current issues to The United States Democratic Review.

During this period, Godwin became interested in some of the political and social movements of the time. He supported the Utopian community of Brook Farm in Massachusetts and came to believe in many of the socialistic theories of the French economist Charles Fourier. For a time he edited Harbinger, the organ of the followers of Fourier in this country. In 1844 he published his first two books, A Popular View of the Doctrines of Fourier, and Democracy, Constructive and Pacific. Literary topics vied with political ones for his interest. He translated the first part of Goethe’s autobiography and some of the tales of the German writer J. H. D. Zschokke. In 1851 he published Vala: A Mythological Tale, and in 1852 a Hand-Book of Universal Biography, revised and issued as The Cyclopaedia of Biography in 1866 and 1878. In 1856 he published Political Essays, a collection of his pieces.

Godwin left the Post in 1853 to join C. S. Briggs and George William Curtis in editing the new Putnam’s Monthly magazine. As associate editor, Godwin brought the periodical a national reputation through his strong attacks on slavery. A collection of his essays, mostly from Putnam’s, was published in 1870 as Out of the Past.

In 1860 Godwin published the first volume of a projected The History of France, but the work progressed no further. He also rejoined the Post in 1860 after the demise of Putnam’s. He was unhappy about his salary, complaining that the paper had never paid him more than fifty dollars a week. That year, however, he bought shares of the Post at a bargain price, and as its fortunes rose, its Civil War profits made him rich.

Godwin’s editorials, while not in an eloquent prose style, showed an understanding of economic problems and political principles that appealed to educated audiences. During the Civil War, it was Godwin who wrote the strongest statements printed in the Post, and it was said of him that “he was a lion in a den of Daniels.” Although he was at first a Free-Soil Democrat, he later became a Republican who actively wrote and spoke during the campaign of 1860. He always remained a staunch supporter of Abraham Lincoln. After a once famous interview with the president, he reported back to doubting New York party members about Lincoln’s personal assurance that an emancipation proclamation was waiting only for a propitious moment to be issued.

Godwin left the Post again briefly in 1871, but returned to close association with his father-in-law. When Bryant died in 1878, after forty-nine years as editor, Godwin became editor-in-chief, recognized at the time as one of the most competent and experienced journalists in New York. A patron of the arts and a member of many civic organizations, he also enjoyed parties and social gatherings; on some days he would rest at home, writing his editorials in bed and sending them by messenger to the paper.

Before his father-in-law’s death, there had been muted disagreements over the paper’s management between Godwin (with Bryant on his side) and members of the Henderson family, which owned half of the Post stock. The struggle emerged openly in 1878, and for the next three years, the Hendersons actively fought for control of the newspaper’s editorial policy.

In 1881 Godwin was sixty-five years old and deeply involved in editing Bryant’s complete works, as well as writing a biography of him. He also wanted to complete his history of France and decided that it would be better to have his money in a safer investment than a newspaper. Learning that the Henderson family was trying to sell the paper, Godwin also sought interested buyers. That year the Post was sold to the Villard interests, and Godwin left. For a brief period, until his retirement, he was editor of The Commercial Advertiser. His two- volume Biography of William Cullen Bryant appeared in 1883, followed by his four-volume edition of Bryant’s works in 1883-84. In 1900, at the age of eighty-four, Godwin published A New Study of the Sonnets of Shakespeare.

He died in New York City when eighty-seven years old.

There is no full-length biography of Godwin. Some manuscripts, letters, and travel diaries are available on microfilm at the New York Public Library. Biographical information on Godwin and Bryant is to be found in A. Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (1922). See also E. Benson. “Parke Godwin of the Evening Post,” Galaxy, February 1869; and The Dictionary of American Biography (1931). An obituary appeared in The New York Evening Post on January 7, 1904.