One of Moore's earliest known works was an anonymous pro-
Federalist pamphlet published prior to the
1804 presidential election, attacking the
religious and racial views of
Thomas Jefferson (the incumbent president and
Democratic-Republican candidate). His polemic, titled in full "Observations upon Certain Passages in Mr. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, which Appear to Have a Tendency to Subvert Religion, and Establish a False Philosophy," depicted Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) as an "instrument of infidelity" that "debases the negro to an order of creatures lower than those who have a fairer skin and thinner lips." In 1820, Moore helped
Trinity Church organize a new parish church,
St. Luke in the Fields, on
Hudson Street. He later gave 66 tracts of land – the apple orchard from his inherited Chelsea estate – to the
Episcopal Diocese of New York to be the site of the
General Theological Seminary. Moore was appointed as professor of
Biblical learning at the Seminary. He held this post until 1850. After the seminary was built, Moore began the residential development of his Chelsea estate in the 1820s with the help of
James N. Wells, dividing it into lots along Ninth Avenue and selling them to well-heeled New Yorkers. Stables, manufacturing and commercial uses were forbidden in the development. Moore was appointed to the Columbia College board of trustees in 1813 and served until 1857. He was clerk of the board from 1815 to 1850. From 1840 to 1850, Moore also served as a board member of the
New York Institution for the Blind at
34th Street and
Ninth Avenue (now the
New York Institute for Special Education). He published a collection of poems (1844).
A Visit from St. Nicholas '' (1855) This poem, "arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American," was first published anonymously in the Troy, New York
Sentinel on December 23, 1823. It had been given to the paper's editor by Sarah Sackett of Troy, who probably got it from Harriet Butler of Troy, a family friend of the Moores. Anonymous or pseudonymous publication of poetry was customary at the time, but as the poem's popularity grew so did curiosity about its author. In response to a query in 1829,
Sentinel editor Orville Holley wrote that "We have been given to understand that the author ... belongs by birth and residence to the city of New York, and that he is a gentleman of
more merit as a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy pretensions." (Italics his.) In 1837 Moore was finally publicly identified as the author in journalist
Charles Fenno Hoffman's
The New-York Book of Poetry, to which Moore had submitted several poems. In 1844, he included "Visit" in
Poems, an anthology of his works. His children, for whom he had originally written the piece, encouraged this publication. In 1855, Mary C. Moore Ogden, one of the Moores' married daughters, painted "illuminations" to go with the first color edition of the poem.
Authorship controversy Scholars have debated whether Moore was the author of this poem. Professor
Donald Foster used textual
content analysis and external evidence to argue that Moore could not have been the author. Foster proposed that Major
Henry Livingston, Jr., a New Yorker with Dutch and Scottish roots, should be considered the chief candidate for authorship. This view was long espoused by the Livingston family. Livingston was distantly related to Moore's wife. In his article, "There Arose Such a Clatter: Who Really Wrote 'The Night before Christmas'? (And Why Does It Matter?)", Nissenbaum confirmed Moore's authorship, "I believe he did, and I think I have marshaled an array of good evidence to prove [it]". Foster's claim has also been countered by document dealer and historian Seth Kaller, who once owned one of Moore's original manuscripts of the poem. Kaller has offered a point-by-point rebuttal of both Foster's linguistic analysis and external findings, buttressed by the work of autograph expert James Lowe and Dr.
Joe Nickell, author of
Pen, Ink and Evidence. There is no evidence that Livingston ever claimed authorship, nor has any record ever been found of any printing of the poem with Livingston's name attached to it. As first published in
The Sentinel, the names of Santa's last two reindeer in the poem were Dunder and Blixem, and Foster argued the change to Donder and Blitzen in later versions was evidence of tampering by Moore with the "perfectly correct Dutch" of Livingston. But donder is the correct Dutch word for thunder, and the phrase was used by multiple English and American authors with a variety of different spellings in the late 1700s and early 1800s. In 2016, the matter was discussed by
MacDonald P. Jackson, an emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Auckland, a fellow of the
Royal Society of New Zealand and an expert in authorship attribution using statistical techniques. He evaluated every argument using modern computational stylistics, including one never used before – statistical analysis of phonemes – and found, in his opinion, that in every test that Livingston was the more likely author. Subsequent analyses using forensic linguistics techniques developed by computer scientists have come to the opposite conclusion. In his 2023 book
The Fight for "The Night": Resolving the Authorship Dispute over "The Night Before Christmas," retired litigator Tom A. Jerman reported using
Duquesne University computer scientist
Patrick Juola's Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program to compare the poem to the works of Moore and Livingston, with 16 of 17 tests pointing to Moore as the likelier author. That year, computer scientist
Shlomo Argamon, then of the
Illinois Institute of Technology, also analyzed the poem alongside texts from Moore, Livingston and five other authors of the era and concluded that “Moore is much more likely to be the author than Livingston,” and “it’s more likely authored by either Moore or Livingston than any of the other guys.”
Developing Chelsea neighborhood, most of which was originally part of Moore's country estate Moore's estate, named Chelsea, was on the west side of the island of Manhattan north of
Greenwich Village. It was mostly open countryside before the 1820s. Moore's parents inherited the estate in 1802, and several years later they deeded it to him. When the government of New York City decided on a street grid in Manhattan, based on the
Commissioner's Plan of 1811, the new
Ninth Avenue was projected to go through the middle of the Chelsea estate. In 1818, Moore wrote and published a pamphlet calling on other "Proprietors of Real Estate" to oppose the manner in which the city was being developed. He thought it was a conspiracy designed to increase political patronage and appease the city's working class, and argued that making landowners bear the costs of the streets laid through their property was "a tyranny no monarch in Europe would dare to exercise." He also criticized the grid plan and the flattening of hills as ill-advised. Despite his protests, Moore was already preparing to develop Chelsea, acquiring adjacent plots of land from relatives and neighbors until he owned everything from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River between 19th and 24th Streets. Together with carpenter-builder James N. Wells he divided the neighborhood into lots and marketed them to well-heeled New Yorkers. He donated a large block of land to the Episcopal diocese for construction of a seminary, giving them an apple orchard consisting of 66 tracts. Construction began in 1827 for the
General Theological Seminary. Based on his knowledge of Hebrew, Moore was appointed as its first professor of Oriental Languages, serving until 1850. The seminary continues to operate on the same site, taking up most of the block between
20th and
21st streets and Ninth and
Tenth avenues. Ten years later, Moore gave land at 20th Street and Ninth, east of the avenue, to the diocese for construction of
St. Peter's Episcopal Church. The contemporary Manhattan neighborhood is known as
Chelsea after his estate. ==Personal life==