Ignatius Jones’s “Random Recollections of Albany” included strong and yet confusing praise for a figure I hadn’t heard of before, one Solomon Southwick. Southwick was born into a Newport, Rhode Island publishing family, but circumstances led him to serve on fishing boats before apprenticing to a New York City printer. As a journeyman in 1792 he came to Albany where his brothers-in-law published the Albany Register. He led a very successful life, reared nine children, became clerk of the Assembly and then the Senate, sheriff of Albany County, the state printer, a state Regent, president of the Mechanics’ and Farmers’ Bank, and postmaster. These describe what he did, but Jones describes who he was:
“I can not in courtesy, however, pass over my old friend Southwick, without some other notice than that of a mere casual glance of recognition.
“Southwick was a man of genius, with all the peculiarities that belong to that temperament — its strength and its weakness, its excellencies and its errors: its delusive dreams and visions, its improvidence and its instability. He had great fertility of mind, united with great enthusiasm. This was the source of his eloquence and his power. His writings were rather outpourings than compositions. Yet he imbued them with so much life and animation, that he seldom failed to carry his readers with them. His style, though well adapted to the popular ear, was redundant in epithet, inflated and declamatory, and his language, though often strong and impressive, was yet in the main, loose and inelegant. He read but little, and only from necessity. He referred to books for particular facts, rather than for general information.
“He was by nature, honest, warm-hearted, and generous to a fault, but seemed to have no fixed or settled principles. In ethics, as well as in politics, he travelled from pole to pole. Yet, the kindness of his nature went with him and never forsook him. His heart and his hand were always open, and as he was credulous to excess, and even superstitious, he was, as a matter of course, swindled by every knave, and duped by every impostor, he met with upon the road.
“He was extremely fluent and even eloquent in conversation. But he had little knowledge of the world, and the predominance of interest or of passion, left his judgment too often at fault. He had the finest eye and forehead that ever belonged to mortal man, but every other feature of his face, was either indifferent or defective. His countenance, therefore, was a correct index to the character of his mind — incongruous, mixed, and full of contradictions . . .
“. . . Even in the cloudy days of his latter years, when friends, fame and fortune, had forsaken him, when every objectionable act of his life was spread upon the record, and all his faults and weaknesses blazoned to the public eye; even then he received over Thirty Thousand votes for governor of the State.”
More can be found about Solomon Southwick here.
