Hewitt desperately wanted to be accepted in these social circles and so, after spending only a year in Augusta, in 1824 he moved to Columbia, South Carolina, to study law. Scandal involving a music student cut short his stay. Hewitt claimed he had been out riding with one of his female pupils when a storm suddenly came up. The two had found shelter in a deserted cottage, and though they wanted to leave as soon as the storm subsided, a prowling bear made that impossible. It wasn’t until the next day that a search party found them in the cottage. Hewitt’s explanation was unconvincing, and he was soon on his way out of town. He took a job in Greenville, South Carolina, as a music teacher at the Baptist Female Academy and moonlighted giving private music lessons and editing a literary journal.

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In 1825, while Hewitt was still in Greenville, he wrote what would become America’s first international song hit, ‘The Minstrel’s Return’d from the War.’ Later that year, he traveled to Boston, where his brother James had kept up the family music-publishing business. James wasn’t very impressed with the song, but published it anyway, albeit without copyrighting it. It was a costly mistake. ‘The Minstrel’s Return’d’ became a worldwide hit and earned Hewitt the title ‘father of the American ballad.’ His brother later confessed that by not copyrighting the song, they had lost at least $10,000 in royalties, which in today’s money, would have been at least $1 million. (Interestingly, in the 1940s, the ‘Minstrel’s Return’d’ was the mystery tune on a radio quiz show called Stop the Music. The contestant who correctly identified it won $30,000.)

‘The Minstrel’s Return’d’ was what is now called a ‘parlor song’ — a tune that required only a limited vocal range, could be played on the parlor piano by anyone with a little training, and dealt with a theme that was becoming universal in the first half of the 19th century — the separation of families due to emigration, military service, or death. Hewitt would continue to write successful songs on this model during the 1830s and 1840s.

Hewitt returned to Boston in 1827 after his father’s death, and took up residence. There, he met and married his first wife, Estelle Mangin, with whom he eventually had seven children. In 1828, the newspaper he was working for went out of business, and the jobless songwriter headed south with his wife. He soon found a job in Baltimore as a newspaper and magazine editor, and began writing plays, poems, and songs on the side. But once again he ran into trouble — this time with another writer who lived in Baltimore at the time, one Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1833 both Hewitt and Poe entered a literary contest held by The Visitor, one of the newspapers Hewitt was editing. Hewitt entered a poem under a nom de plume. Poe entered a prose piece called ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ and a poem titled ‘The Coliseum.’ The judges awarded Poe the $100 first prize for his short story, and Hewitt the $50 first prize for poetry, but only because they felt the two first prizes should not go to the same contestant. Because Hewitt had previously criticized Poe’s abilities, Poe believed he had rigged the poetry award. When the two met by chance on the street, tempers flared and they began throwing punches.

Intensely competitive by nature, Hewitt seemed to resent success in others. Years later he wrote that Poe’s reputation was undeserved. He accused Poe of plagiarizing The Raven from an old English poem. And still smarting over being bested in the short story contest, he accused Poe of adapting ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Hewitt was equally uncharitable toward other successful performers. Of matinee idol Henry Russell, who in the 1840s toured America and held audiences spellbound with his songs, Hewitt said his act was little more than a ‘bombast,’ and dismissed Russell as nothing more than ‘an expert at wheedling applause from an audience.’ He was particularly vicious toward Harry Macarthy — whose song ‘The Bonnie Blue Flag’ rivaled ‘Dixie’ as the Confederacy’s unofficial national anthem — calling him a plagiarist and a coward.

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