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A
Brief Biography
William
Duane was born in 1760. According to his own account, the
birth occurred in New York State, though there is evidence
that he was in fact born in Newfoundland, a region which was
in regular contact with Southeast Ireland during the
eighteenth century (Little 2003).
[1] Born to Irish Catholic
parents, Duane left North America before the Revolution. He
was to spend almost three decades outside of North America;
first in Ireland, followed by a brief residence in England,
and a spell in India. When he returned to the United States,
approaching middle age, he faced continual questioning from
his political opponents of his right to reside in the country.
Duane’s
family returned to Ireland when he was aged about eleven, and
settled in Clonmel in County Tipperary. His family appear to
have been quite prosperous, but as a young man Duane was
disinherited because he married an Anglican woman in
Tipperary. Faced with the need to earn a living, he entered
the printing trade. Some time later he left Ireland, first for
England and thence in 1785 to Calcutta, India. Initially a
member of the East India Company’s paramilitary force, he
became disenchanted with this employ by the cruelties he
witnessed in England’s colonial regime. His opposition to the Raj government led to his deportation back to England. Duane
then renounced all ties to the British Empire, and in 1795
returned to the US.
Once in
America he quickly became part of the radical political scene
in Philadelphia, a setting in which Irishmen were very
prominent. Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Ben Franklin,
owned the radical newspaper
Aurora,
the organ of the Democratic Party, and Bache gave Duane his
start in newspaper publishing in the US. Bache died in
September 1798, in the great yellow fever epidemic which swept
the city in that summer, leaving a wife and four children.
Duane, whose own wife Catherine Duane had died in the same
Philadelphia epidemic, married Bache’s widow. He took full
control of the
Aurora
and was to be associated with the newspaper for decades
afterwards (Rosenfeld 1997).
Under Duane’s guidance the
Aurora
took part in the fierce polemic between Jeffersonians and
conservatives that characterised the turn of the eighteenth
century. Indeed Thomas Jefferson attributed his election to
the presidency in 1800 to Duane’s vigorous support. Duane had
been arrested under the Sedition Act for taking part in a
violent affray outside
Philadelphia’s St. Mary’s Church, but was spared any
unpleasant consequences when charges against him were
dismissed upon
Jefferson’s accession to office. He remained a hate figure to many,
and was satirised
as a cross between a prototypical Irish-American corrupt
politician and an Irish Sancho Panza-type figure, Teague
O’Regan, in the serialised novel Modern Chivalry
written by Hugh Henry Brackenbridge in the early 1800s.
[2]
Aside from
the newspaper business, Duane derived income from book-selling
and publishing. He served for a number of years in the United
States Army, attaining promotion to the rank of
Adjutant-General during the War of 1812. Afterwards, with the
centre of gravity of US politics moving ever more decisively
to Washington rather than Philadelphia, and with the decline
in the influence of the radical wing of the Democratic party,
Duane left the main stage of public life.
Duane and Latin America
Duane
spoke what he described as
'rather imperfect Castilian'. It is probable that he
was taught by one of the many Latin Americans living in
Philadelphia at this time, perhaps by someone like Manuel
Torres, who represented the state of Colombia in Philadelphia
for many years.
An
intriguing possibility is that he learnt Spanish from a fellow
Irishman, Matthias O’Conway, who was an eminent language
teacher in Philadelphia for many years, as well as being
Official Interpreter in French and Spanish for the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. O’Conway wrote the first Spanish
grammar published in the United States (O'Conway 1810) and one
of his sons had died fighting for the Republican forces in
Venezuela. There is much evidence to suggest that Duane had
been acquainted with O’Conway for several decades, therefore
it is not entirely speculative to presume that Duane may have
sought his help in learning Spanish. It is perhaps worth
remarking that Duane, like several Irish-Americans of the
time, had an interest in languages, for example in India he
had designed different printing types to print the languages
of the subcontinent. Apart from Spanish he had a certain
command of French, which he utilised to translate documents
concerning the Napoleonic Army.
The
Aurora
had provided unflinching support to the campaigns of South
American nations for independence from Spain. As Duane puts
it:
Thirty years ago I became acquainted with some of the men of
virtue and intellect who were preparing the way for that
revolution in South America which is now realized. Those
intimacies had, by exciting my sympathies, led me to bestow
more earnest attention on the history, geography, and the
eventual destiny of those countries.
Duane
applied for the position of United States ambassador to the
new Colombian republic, but his application was unsuccessful.
There is no doubt that radical circles in South America were
conscious of the debt they owed to him for his support. Indeed
the Congreso General de la Gran Colombia held in 1821
expressed gratitude to William Duane.
The
Trip To Colombia
In 1822 Duane
closed down the
Aurora
and embarked on a journey through what is now
Colombia
and Venezuela. In the company of his daughter Elizabeth and
stepson Richard Bache, he set sail from
Philadelphia
on 2 October 1822 and arrived in
Venezuela
sixteen days later. He was to remain in
South America until late May 1823.
The product
of the trip was A Visit to Colombia.
[3]
The book details Duane’s
rather leisurely trip from
Caracas to
Cartagena de Indias, via Bogotá. It appears that he had been
sent to
South America
to recoup a business debt,
'on behalf of persons in
the United States having claims against the government, of
which other agents had not procured the liquidation.' He managed to conclude the business successfully, but on his return to
Philadelphia those who had employed him
'contrived to cheat me out of
my commissions, a transaction of transcendent knavery,
meanness and ingratitude.' The business purpose of the
trip is never alluded to in the body of Duane’s book, instead
A Visit to
Colombia
concentrates
on observations on the places Duane passed through and the
people he encountered. The book also contains verbose
descriptions of the flora of
Colombia,
though rarely of the fauna except the mules. Duane provides
some interesting observations about contemporary social
conditions and politics in Gran Colombia. Comprising a number
of extended digressions such as a
disquisition on trees, or a quite prolix examination of the Colombian
economy and constitution, this quite weighty tome clocks in at
some 600 pages in all.
The book does
require some editing, at least for the modern taste, but even
as it stands it offers a variety of interesting aspects to the
patient reader.
By the
time of writing, the 1820s, knowledge of Latin America was
still quite sketchy among its northern neighbours, and Duane
saw one of his tasks as drawing up descriptions and taxonomies
of what he had seen. Hence for example a long description of
the banana, a fruit hitherto rarely encountered North America:
The banana is a sweet luscious fruit, and when ripe is
superior in richness to the fig. It is of the consistency of a
soft butter pear, but without acid. The fruit is not produced
single like the apple, flowering on detached branches or
single stalks, but in bunches, side by side.
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