'Night Before Christmas' Author Clement C. Moore's Shot at Rehabilitation - Bloomberg

The reputation of Clement Clarke Moore, of “The Night Before Christmas” fame, has been dimming with each passing holiday season. A rival claimant to authorship of the classic poem, first published anonymously 198 years ago this week as “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” has attracted increasing attention and support. Also attracting increasing attention is the belief that Moore, a lifelong New Yorker, enslaved four people, refused to free them until forced to by state law in 1827, and opposed the abolition of slavery in the South.

There may, however, be something in the stocking for Clement this Christmas. Not confirmation that he wrote the poem, but a debunking of the story that has been told about his ownership of slaves. 1

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I devoted most of my free time this fall and too many of my working hours to examining the authorship of “The Night Before Christmas” and Moore’s relationship to slavery. I have a few things to say about the former. I have a lot to say about the latter.

Before I get into it, let me introduce you to Clement Clarke Moore. If it weren’t for his association with one of the best-known poems in the English language, he would likely be remembered (if he were remembered much at all) as father of the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea. It was his maternal grandfather, a British Army officer, who bought some farmland along the Hudson River in 1750 and named the house he built there Chelsea, after the army hospital in that...

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