Seba Smith

“ Congressman Crockett had taken for lodgings two rooms on the first floor of a boarding-house, where he expected to pass the winter and to have for a fellow-lodger Major Jack Downing, the only person in whom he had any confidence for information of what the Government was doing.”—Congressman and former U. S. President John Quincy Adams, diary entry November 26, 1833.

Smith endowed his “most consequential literary creation” with a sharp satirical wit that lampooned national political figures, delivering “astute and humorous” social observations in a simple Yankee dialect of rural New England.

Among these were congressmen Henry Clay, and Stephen A. Douglas, novelist Washington Irving and U. S. President Abraham Lincoln[6] Smith penned his last Jack Downing letter in 1856 in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the rise of the anti-slavery Republican Party.

[7] In one of Major Jack Downing’s final incarnations, Smith provided a burlesque that mocked the efforts of pro-slavery filibusters planning the extra-legal conquest of Cuba, then possessed by Spain and inhabited by hundreds of thousands of slaves.

[8] A fictional filibuster, 'Captain Robb", rationalizes his actions in a piece of doggerel sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle: Aye Cobb, but something whispers me— A sort of inspiration— That I’ve a right to every farm Not under cultivation.