THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.
1765-1815.
It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between
the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine
colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second
war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period.
This half-century was the formative era of the American nation.
Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the
years of construction. But the men who led the movement for
independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping
the Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of
the whole period is one and the same. The character of the age was as
distinctly political as that of the colonial era--in New England at
least--was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow
its interest from history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a
better term, we call _belles lettres_, was not born in America until
the nineteenth century was well under way. It is true that the
Revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these
were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the
consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the
contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and
Burke. Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than
literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due
course in the present chapter. It is also true that one or two of
Irving's early books fall within the last years of the period now under
consideration. But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges,
and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter.
Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that
preceded and accompanied the Revolutionary movement were the speeches
of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy,
in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of
a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome and
in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and
congresses of Revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished
naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a
rhetorical, age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the
declamatory _Letters of Junius_, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox,
Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early
Congresses. The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is
largely traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page
loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is
good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is
sought. But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional,
rather than universal and permanent, explains why so few speeches are
really literature. If this is true, even where the words of an orator
are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we
have only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the
oration produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were
either not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that
posterity can judge of them only at second-hand. Patrick Henry has
fared better, many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not
in the letter, in Wirt's biography. Of these the most famous was the
defiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, throwing
down the gauge of battle to the British ministry. The ringing
sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by school-boys, and
many of them remain as familiar as household words. "I have but one
lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. . . .
Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. . . . Is life
so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains
and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others
may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" The
eloquence of Patrick Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich. But
if such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as have come
down to us fail to account for the wonderful impression that their
words are said to have produced upon their fellow-countrymen, we should
remember that they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard.
The imagination should supply all those accessories which gave them
vitality when first pronounced--the living presence and voice of the
speaker; the listening Senate; the grave excitement of the hour and of
the impending conflict. The wordiness and exaggeration; the highly
Latinized diction; the rhapsodies about freedom which hundreds of
Fourth-of-July addresses have since turned into platitudes--all these
coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in the field confirmed
the earnestness of their speech--were effective in the crisis and for
the purpose to which they were addressed.
The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less potent than the
platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Hancock
wrote constantly, for the newspapers, essays and letters on the public
questions of the time signed "Vindex," "Hyperion," "Independent,"
"Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in language which to the
taste of to-day seems rather over-rhetorical. Among the most important
of these political essays were the _Circular Letter to each Colonial
Legislature_, published by Adams and Otis in 1768; Quincy's
_Observations on the Boston Port Bill_, 1774, and Otis's _Rights of the
British Colonies_, a pamphlet of one hundred and twenty pages, printed
in 1764. No collection of Otis's writings has ever been made. The
life of Quincy, published by his son, preserves for posterity his
journals and correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his speeches at
the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law reports.
Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the
American people are such State documents as the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the messages,
inaugural addresses, and other writings of our early presidents.
Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, and the
father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of
Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the
memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a
shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all
shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all
men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern readers is the
following, which an English historian of our literature calls "the most
eloquent clause of that great document," and "the most interesting
suppressed passage in American literature." Jefferson was a
Southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on
the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George for
promoting the "peculiar institution" was left out from the final draft
of the Declaration in deference to Southern members.
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most
sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people
who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in
another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation
thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is
the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep
open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted
his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this
execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no
fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise
in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them
by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off
former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes
which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other Southern
statesman afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by
the men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous Virginian, John
Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slave-holder, in his speech on the
militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said:
"I speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire
in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her
bosom." This was said _apropos_ of the danger of a servile
insurrection in the event of a war with England--a war which actually
broke out in the year following, but was not attended with the
slave-rising which Randolph predicted. Randolph was a thorough-going
"State rights" man, and, though opposed to slavery on principle, he
cried "Hands off!" to any interference by the general government with
the domestic institutions of the States. His speeches read better than
most of his contemporaries'. They are interesting in their exhibit of
a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in
a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the
diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional
oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always at
arm's-length.
Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his Inaugural Address of
March 4, 1801, with its programme of "equal and exact justice to all
men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace,
commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances
with none; the support of the State governments in all their
rights; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the
majority; . . . the supremacy of the civil over the military authority;
economy in the public expense; freedom of religion, freedom of the
press, and freedom of person under the protection of the _habeas
corpus_, and trial by juries impartially selected."
During his six years' residence in France, as American minister,
Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the principles of French
democracy. His main service and that of his party--the Democratic, or,
as it was then called, the Republican party--to the young republic was
in its insistence upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom
of the individual from all forms of governmental restraint. Jefferson
has some claims to rank as an author in general literature. Educated
at William and Mary College in the old Virginia capital, Williamsburg,
he became the founder of the University of Virginia, in which he made
special provision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which the
liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed, in theory,
at least, to the "university idea." His _Notes on Virginia_ are not
without literary quality, and one description, in particular, has been
often quoted--the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge--in
which is this poetically imaginative touch: "The mountain being cloven
asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of
smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country,
inviting you, as it were, from the riot and ytumult roaring around, to
pass through the breach and participate of the calm below."
After the conclusion of peace with England, in 1783, political
discussion centered about the Constitution, which in 1788 took the
place of the looser Articles of Confederation adopted in 1778. The
Constitution as finally ratified was a compromise between two
parties--the Federalists, who wanted a strong central government, and
the Anti-Federals (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), who
wished to preserve State sovereignty. The debates on the adoption of
the Constitution, both in the General Convention of the States, which
met at Philadelphia in 1787, and in the separate State conventions
called to ratify its action, form a valuable body of comment and
illustration upon the instrument itself. One of the most notable of
the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's address before the
Virginia Convention. "That this is a consolidated government," he
said, "is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is,
to my mind, very striking." The leader of the Federal party was
Alexander Hamilton, the ablest constructive intellect among the
statesmen of our Revolutionary era, of whom Talleyrand said that he
"had never known his equal," whom Guizot classed with "the men who have
best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a
government worthy of its name and mission." Hamilton's speech _On the
Expediency of Adopting the Federal Constitution_, delivered in the
Convention of New York, June 24, 1788, was a masterly statement of the
necessity and advantages of the Union. But the most complete
exposition of the constitutional philosophy of the Federal party was
the series of eighty-five papers entitled the _Federalist_, printed
during the years 1787-88, and mostly in the _Independent Journal_ of
New York, over the signature "Publius." These were the work of
Hamilton, of John Jay, afterward, chief-justice, and of James Madison,
afterward president of the United States. The _Federalist_ papers,
though written in a somewhat ponderous diction, are among the great
landmarks of American history, and were in themselves a political
education to the generation that read them. Hamilton was a brilliant
and versatile figure, a persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and as
secretary of the treasury under Washington the foremost of American
financiers. He was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr, at Weehawken, in
1804.
The Federalists were victorious, and under the provisions of the new
Constitution George Washington was inaugurated first President of the
United States, on March 4, 1789. Washington's writings have been
collected by Jared Sparks. They consist of journals, letters,
messages, addresses, and public documents, for the most part plain and
business-like in manner, and without any literary pretensions. The
most elaborate and the best known of them is his _Farewell Address_,
issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In the
composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It
is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in
expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the
United States, and his _Diary_, kept from 1755-85, should also be
mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of this period.
In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain against the French
Republic and its successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in
this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian
Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping
abstractions of the French Revolution and clung to the conservative
notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English
precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On
their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French
atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural
order of things, the strength of the Federalist party was in New
England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the
Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure--owing to the
system of slavery--was intensely aristocratic. The War of 1812 with
England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which
it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention
of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the
secession of New England from the Union. A good deal of oratory was
called out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain
negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and
by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the downfall of
that party and the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800.
The best of the Federalist orators during those years was Fisher Ames,
of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech
on the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 18, 1796.
The speech was, in great measure, a protest against American chauvinism
and the violation of international obligations. "It has been said the
world ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea; if where there
are now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no more than a
sand-bank for sea-monsters to fatten on; space for the storms of the
ocean to mingle in conflict. . . . What is patriotism? Is it a narrow
affection for the spot where a man was born? Are the very clods where
we tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are
greener? . . . I see no exception to the respect that is paid among
nations to the law of good faith. . . . It is observed by
barbarians--a whiff of tobacco-smoke or a string of beads gives not
merely binding force but sanctity to treaties. Even in Algiers a truce
may be bought for money, but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise
or too just to disown and annul its obligation." Ames was a scholar,
and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful, more _literary_, in
a way, than those of his contemporaries. His eulogiums on Washington
and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather excessive, perhaps, in
laudation and in classical allusions. In all the oratory of the
Revolutionary period there is nothing equal in deep and condensed
energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,
"that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain."
A prominent figure during and after the War of the Revolution was
Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disrespectfully called, "Tom
Paine." He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving himself
ill-treated by the British government, came to Philadelphia in 1774 and
threw himself heart and soul into the colonial cause. His pamphlet,
_Common Sense_, issued in 1776, began with the famous words, "These are
the times that try men's souls." This was followed by the _Crisis_, a
series of political essays advocating independence and the
establishment of a republic, published in periodical form, though at
irregular intervals. Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy was of great
service to the American patriots. His writings were popular and his
arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people, addressing
themselves to the common sense, the prejudices and passions of
unlettered readers. He afterward went to France and took an active
part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke in his
_Rights of Man_, 1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution.
He was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but falling
under suspicion during the days of the Terror, he was committed to the
prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre
July 27, 1794. While in prison he wrote a portion of his best-known
work, the _Age of Reason_. This appeared in two parts in 1794 and
1795, the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted to Joel
Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was
sent to prison.
The _Age of Reason_ damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the
name of "Tom Paine" became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a
synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book was denounced from a
hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the
sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine. It
was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the deistic argument
against Christianity. What the cutting logic and persiflage--the
_sourire hideux_--of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser
materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations. Deism
was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel
Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly
deistic. Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions,
and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. Paine was a man
without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He was no
scholar, and he was not troubled by any perception of the deeper and
subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. In his examination
of the Old and New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an
imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities.
Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, was a
fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and churches were
instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This way of
accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most
"advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and revelation has
long since shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the
temper of the _Age of Reason_ belong to the eighteenth century. But
Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with
shrewd, half-educated doubters; and in America well-thumbed copies of
his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store,
where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the
schoolmaster. Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the
familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, the falsity of
prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old
Testament worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their
gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his competence as a critic
are illustrated by his saying of the New Testament: "Any person who
could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's walking, could have
made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told. The sum total
of a parson's learning is _a-b_, _ab_, and _hic_, _hoec_, _hoc_, and
this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at
the time, to have written all the books of the New Testament."
When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the
Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that
would deserve mention in a more crowded period. The few things in this
kind that have kept afloat on the current of time--_rari nantes in
gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness
than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth
century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes
of taste in the old country. The so-called classical or Augustan
writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style; the
_Spectator_ set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from
Franklin's _Busybody_ down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the
Addisonian tradition later than any English writer. The influence of
Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the parliamentary orators has already
been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we
find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New
Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem
on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the tricks of Pope's
antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and
the didactic morality of the _Imitations from Horace_ and the _Moral
Essays_:
"Let ardent heroes seek renown to arms,
Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms;
To shining palaces let fools resort,
And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court.
Mine be the pleasure of a rural life,
From noise remote and ignorant of strife,
Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau,
The lawless masquerade and midnight show;
From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars,
Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars."
The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's
_McFingal_, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and incomplete
shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more than thirty editions
in America, and was several times reprinted in England. _McFingal_ was
a satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyalists, and
modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_. As
Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so
the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bonfires of
the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated,
and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The
poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery
and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains one of the best of American
political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many
imitations of _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some
of its lines, which have passed into currency as proverbs, are
generally attributed to Butler. For example:
"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."
Or this:
"For any man with half an eye
What stands before him may espy;
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen."
Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own
countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the
newly adopted flag of the Confederation:
"Inscribed with inconsistent types
Of Liberty and thirteen stripes."
Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made such
noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the
group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith,
Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow
had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale,
where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight.
During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at
its close they found themselves again together for a few years at
Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and
literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of _éclat_ to the little
provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an
intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New
York. The Hartford Wits were stanch Federalists, and used their pens
freely in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and
in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 1786-87 Trumbull,
Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the _New Haven Gazette_ a
series of satirical papers entitled the _Anarchiad_, suggested by the
English _Rolliad_, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic
on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." The papers were
an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things
which preceded the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. It
was a time of great confusion and discontent, when, in parts of the
country, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five
years' pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American
army. The _Anarchiad_ was followed by the _Echo_ and the _Political
Green House_, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar
in character and tendency to the earlier series. Time has greatly
blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their
day, and are an important part of the literature of the old Federalist
party.
Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service, and
was, successively, embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he
introduced into America the breed of merino sheep. He had been on
Washington's staff during the war, and was several times an inmate of
his house at Mount Vernon, where he produced, in 1785, the best-known
of his writings, _Mount Vernon_, an ode of a rather mild description,
which once had admirers. Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in
contemporary letters. After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to
France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in
speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song
in praise of the guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old
friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America and built a fine
residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary
fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the
_Columbiad_. The first form of this was the _Vision of Columbus_,
published at Hartford in 1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged
into the _Columbiad_, issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to
Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steam-boat. This was by far the
most sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in
America, and was embellished with plates executed by the best London
engravers.
The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of
much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being
dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder
and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in the last
fifty years had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its
ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the
age which was patriotically determined to create, by _tour de force_, a
national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American
nature and the destinies of the republic. As America was bigger than
Argos and Troy we ought to have a bigger epic than the _Iliad_.
Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a
"hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the
history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it,
Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and
fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the
English colonies in North America; the old French and Indian wars; the
Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the
new-born nation. The machinery of the _Vision_ was borrowed from the
11th and 12th books of _Paradise Lost_. Barlow's verse was the
ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style was
distinguished by the vague, glittering imagery and the false sublimity
which marked the epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though Barlow
was but a masquerader in true heroic he showed himself a true poet in
mock heroic. His _Hasty Pudding_, written in Savoy in 1793, and
dedicated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly American, in subject at
least, and its humor, though over-elaborate, is good. One couplet in
particular has prevailed against oblivion:
"E'en in thy native regions how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee _Mush_!"
Another Connecticut poet--one of the seven who were fondly named "The
Pleiads of Connecticut"--was Timothy Dwight, whose _Conquest of
Canaan_, written shortly after his graduation from college, but not
published till 1785, was, like the _Columbiad_, an experiment toward
the domestication of the epic muse in America. It was written like
Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the
time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary War, by way
of episode, among the wars of Israel. _Greenfield Hill_, 1794, was an
idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in
Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor. It is not
quite without merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson,
and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious and tame. Byron was amused that
there should have been an American poet christened Timothy, and it is
to be feared that amusement would have been the chief emotion kindled
in the breast of the wicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the
stern dedication to himself of the same poet's _Triumph of Infidelity_,
1788. Much more important than Dwight's poetry was his able _Theology
Explained and Defended_, 1794, a restatement, with modifications, of
the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, which was accepted by the
Congregational churches of New England as an authoritative exponent of
the orthodoxy of the time. His _Travels in New England and New York_,
including descriptions of Niagara, the White Mountains, Lake George,
the Catskills, and other passages of natural scenery, not so familiar
then as now, was published posthumously in 1821, was praised by
Southey, and is still readable. As President of Yale College from 1795
to 1817 Dwight, by his learning and ability, his sympathy with young
men, and the force and dignity of his character, exerted a great
influence in the community.
The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the
miscellaneous literature that was produced. A number of ballads,
serious and comic, whig and tory, dealing with the battles and other
incidents of the long war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers
or were hawked about in printed broadsides. Most of these have no
literary merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities. A favorite
piece on the tory side was the _Cow Chase_, a cleverish parody on
_Chevy Chase_, written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre, at
the expense of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. The national song _Yankee Doodle_
was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the case with _John
Brown's Body_ and many other popular melodies, some obscurity hangs
about its origin. The air was an old one, and the words of the chorus
seem to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, and applied
in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British army as
early as 1755. Like many another nickname, the term Yankee Doodle was
taken up by the nicknamed and proudly made their own. The stanza,
"Yankee Doodle came to town," etc.,
antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the tune was
the _Yankee's Return from Camp_, which is apparently of the year 1775.
The most popular humorous ballad on the whig side was the _Battle of
the Kegs_, founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at
Philadelphia. This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian,
and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hopkinson
has some title to rank as one of the earliest American humorists.
Without the keen wit of _McFingal_, some of his _Miscellaneous Essays
and Occasional Writings_, published in 1792, have more geniality and
heartiness than Trumbull's satire. His _Letter on Whitewashing_ is a
bit of domestic humor that foretokens the _Danbury News_ man; and his
_Modern Learning_, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in which
a salt-box is described from the point of view of metaphysics, logic,
natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry, long
kept its place in school-readers and other collections. His son,
Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of _Hail Columbia_, which is saved
from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, the then
popular air of "The President's March." The words were written in
1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a time when
party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by crowds in the streets,
and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater; for by this
time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and even in
puritanic Boston. Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the
_Star-Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis
Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort
McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the
once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_,
recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society.
The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it
is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was a young
Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the Old Federal
Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794. His
name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the
Massachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded
with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile
in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for
liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or remembered only
by some phrase which has become a current quotation. Here and there a
line has, by accident, survived to do duty as a motto or inscription,
while all its context is buried in oblivion. Few have read any thing
more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than the couplet,
"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours,"
taken from his _Epilogue to Cato_, written in 1778.
Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau--"that rascal Freneau,"
as Washington called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his
administration in Freneau's _National Gazette_. He was of Huguenot
descent, was a class-mate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken
prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over
engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the
Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now
unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by
virtue of his _Wild Honeysuckle_, _Indian Burying Ground_, _Indian
Student_, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and
delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood,
Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto mentioned were
nothing but rhymers; but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty
and artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh. In
his treatment of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first
time a sense of the picturesque and poetic elements in the character
and wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which the
fading away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of
their retreating footsteps. In this Freneau anticipates Cooper and
Longfellow, though his work is slight compared with the
_Leatherstocking Tales_ or _Hiawatha_. At the time when the
Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over
three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the
frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The
Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau
fetches his _Indian Student_ not from the outskirts of the settlement
but from the remote backwoods of the State:
"From Susquehanna's farthest springs,
Where savage tribes pursue their game
(His blanket tied with yellow strings),
A shepherd of the forest came."
Campbell "lifted"--in his poem _O'Conor's Child_--the last line of the
following stanza from Freneau's _Indian Burying Ground_:
"By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In vestments for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues--
The hunter and the deer, a shade."
And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in _Marmion_, the
final line of one of the stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw
Springs:
"They saw their injured country's woe,
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe,
They took the spear, but left the shield."
Scott inquired of an American gentleman who visited him the authorship
of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing
of the kind as there was in the language.
The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginning
during the period now under review. A company of English players came
to this country in 1762 and made the tour of many of the principal
towns. The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage
was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at
Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building was at
Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among
other pieces, Farquhar's _Beaux' Stratagem_. In 1753 a theater was
built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The Quakers of
Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the
acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times
arrested during the performances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding
dramatic performances. At Newport, R.I., on the other hand, which was
a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West
Indies, and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors were
hospitably received. The first play known to have been written by an
American was the _Prince of Parthia_, 1765, a closet drama, by Thomas
Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play by an American writer, acted
by professionals in a public theater, was Royall Tyler's _Contrast_,
performed in New York, in 1786. The former of these was very high
tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them is
otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of
indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature
worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank,
unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's
_Elevator_ and _Sleeping-Car_. Royall Tyler, the author of _The
Contrast_, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and
eventually became chief-justice of Vermont. His comedy, _The Georgia
Spec_, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his _Algerine Captive_,
published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels.
It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan
of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war
between the United States and Algiers in 1815.
Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of any note, was
also the first professional man of letters in this country who
supported himself entirely by his pen. He was born in Philadelphia in
1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in his native city,
where he started, in 1803, the _Literary Magazine and American
Register_. During the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid succession
six romances, _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Edgar Huntley_,
_Clara Howard_, and _Jane Talbot_. Brown was an invalid and something
of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in incident and the morbid
in character. He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne,
though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost infinitely so
to Hawthorne's. His books belong more properly to the contemporary
school of fiction in England which preceded the "Waverley Novels"--to
the class that includes Beckford's _Vathek_, Godwin's _Caleb Williams_
and _St. Leon_, Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_, and such "Gothic"
romances as Lewis's _Monk_, Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and Mrs.
Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. A distinguishing characteristic of
this whole school is what we may call the clumsy-horrible. Brown's
romances are not wanting in inventive power, in occasional situations
that are intensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of character; but
they are fatally defective in art. The narrative is by turns abrupt
and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not so much by dialogue as by
elaborate dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind,
interspersed with the author's reflections. The wild improbabilities
of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous developments of character
are in startling contrast with the old-fashioned preciseness of the
language; the conversations, when there are any, being conducted in
that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an "elegant
female." The following is a sample description of one of Brown's
heroines, and is taken from his novel of _Ormond_, the leading
character in which--a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish
wickedness--is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr: "Helena
Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality. Her
features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the
seat of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching. All those
graces of symmetry, smoothness, and luster, which assemble in the
imagination of the painter when he calls from the bosom of her natal
deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfections in the shade,
complexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Helena's intellectual
deficiencies could not be concealed. She was proficient in the
elements of no science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as
disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird.
She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined
the structure of society. . . . She could not commune in their native
dialect with the sages of Rome and Athens. . . . The constitution of
nature, the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of
the external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, and
ultimate destiny of human intelligence were enigmas unsolved and
insoluble by her."
Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis
ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, _Wieland_ (whose
father anticipates "Old Krook," in Dickens's _Bleak House_, by dying of
spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual
voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be
produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story.
Similarly in Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena of
sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his
romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have
now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in
_Edgar Huntley_, and his graphic account in _Arthur Mervyn_ of the
yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Shelley was an admirer
of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as _Zastrozzi_ and
_St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian_, are of the same abnormal and speculative
type.
Another book which falls within this period was the _Journal_, 1774, of
John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, which has received the highest
praise from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others. "Get the writings
of John Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers."
The charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and
innocence of feeling, the "deep inward stillness" peculiar to the
people called Quakers. Apart from his constant use of certain phrases
peculiar to the Friends Woolman's English is also remarkably graceful
and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and
tender and humble in its sincerity. When not working at his trade as a
tailor Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the
monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on
horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia
and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far as Boston and
Nantucket. He was under a "concern" and a "heavy exercise" touching
the keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did much to
influence the Quakers against slavery. His love went out, indeed, to
all the wretched and oppressed; to sailors, and to the Indians in
particular. One of his most perilous journeys was made to the
settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of western
Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna.
Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint _naïveté_ with
which he expresses them, may make the modern reader smile, but it is a
smile which is very close to a tear. Thus, when in England--where he
died in 1772--he would not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach,
because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter
nights, and were sometimes frozen to death. "So great is the hurry in
the spirit of this world that, in aiming to do business quickly and to
gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again,
having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress, etc., the use
of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the
natural color of the fur. "In attending meetings this singularity was
a trial to me, . . . and some Friends, who knew not from what motives I
wore it, grew shy of me. . . . Those who spoke with me I generally
informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my
own will."
1. _Representative American Orations_. Edited by Alexander Johnston.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884.
2. _The Federalist_. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863.
3. _Notes on Virginia_. By Thomas Jefferson. Boston. 1829.
4. _Travels in New England and New York_. By Timothy Dwight. New
Haven. 1821.
5. _McFingal_: in Trumbull's Poetical Works. Hartford. 1820.
6. Joel Barlow's _Hasty Pudding_. Francis Hopkinson's _Modern
Learning_. Philip Freneau's _Indian Student_, _Indian Burying-Ground_,
and _White Honeysuckle_: in Vol. I of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia of
American Literature_. New York: Charles Scribner. 1866.
7. _Arthur Mervyn_. By Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: S. G.
Goodrich. 1827.
8. _The Journal of John Woolman_. With an Introduction by John G.
Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1871.
9. _American Literature_. By Charles F. Richardson. New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons. 1887.
10. _American Literature_. By John Nichol. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles
Black. 1882.