Author: SMITH, Seba
Biography:
SMITH, Seba (1792-1868: WBIS)
pseudonym Jack Downing
The creator of a publishing phenomenon of the 1830s, Seba Smith was the son of Maine farmers, Apphia (Stevens) and Seba Smith. He graduated at the head of his class from Bowdoin in 1818, taught school briefly, then embarked on a career in journalism as writer, editor, and publisher in Portland ME. In 1823 he married Elizabeth Oakes Prince (1806-93) who became a prominent writer herself, especially in feminist causes. They had four sons. Starting in 1830, for his own paper, the Portland Courier, he created a fictional correspondent who commented as a redneck outsider on the workings of government in the state and in the country: this was Major Jack Downing. The columns proved very popular and were widely reprinted, so that it was partly to stake his claims as creator against imitators and pirates that Smith went on to publish not only collections and selections of Downing's letters but also The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing of Downingsville: away down east in the State of Maine (1833). In 1836 he wrote Downing's obituary but after 1839 when the family moved to New York and Smith began working for papers there, he resurrected him. The final series of Downing letters appeared in the Washington DC National Intelligencer from 1847 to 1856. Smith's only notable verse publication was a long poem on the Pocahontas story, Powhatan, a Metrical Romance (1841). Suffering increasingly from deafness, Smith retired to Patchogue, Long Island, in 1860, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is buried in Lakeview Cemetery. (ANBO 28 Sept. 2020; Appleton; ancestry.com 28 Sept. 2020)